“So Darwin Sneed scammed a Vegas casino owner. For how much?”
She almost smiled. “Seven or eight million.”
“How long has Sneed been doing this sort of thing?”
“A while. But I didn’t know, really, until this evening. That’s when Ernesto got the call from the bank with the assay results. Apparently, they didn’t bother actually doing the assay. Someone took a pen knife to one of the bars and cut through the electroplating.” She shrugged. Having decided not to shoot me, she dropped the handgun into the flight bag. “I wouldn’t want to be in Darwin’s shoes if Ernesto finds him.”
“Or your own?”
“He’s liable to think I knew all along.”
“And you didn’t, exactly.”
She shook her head.
I thought about the doom conference downstairs. For some of the patricians, seven million would be a rounding error. Not worth thinking about, unless you took it away from them, in which case they would want to peel your skin off.
“If Sneed’s been doing this a while, he’s made a lot of money,” I said.
“If he can live to spend it. With Ernesto... he really is a Spanish aristocrat, a Hidalgo. The Vegas thing is just a hobby. His family has tons of money. But he also has this Spanish thing about honor. Probably about revenge too.”
I wondered if she’d just happened to be dancing at Ernesto Gutierrez’s place when Sneed came along, or if she’d been with Sneed longer and had prospected Ernesto for him. It didn’t matter to me. It was one of those exactly things.
I asked, “Where do you think Sneed is?”
“Probably on a plane. If the bank called me to say we had trouble, they must have called him too.”
“And he didn’t take you with him?”
“This is the big time, Mr. McCarthy. Everyone looks out for himself.”
“I’ll look out for you a little while,” I said, “as far as the airport.” I sort of liked her, and she would have made a great broker’s assistant. “You can’t take the gun on a plane.”
“I’ll worry about it at the airport.”
We went into the sitting room, and I didn’t remember leaving the hall door open. Didn’t remember seeing ten-ton trucks driving around the room, either, but that was what hit me from behind.
She still looked pretty good, with the-sea green contacts giving a sparkle to eyes that were slightly crossed. The round, pretty face was puffier than it had been when there wasn’t a cord wrapped around her neck. She was right beside me on the carpet, wearing neither her blue suit nor a sequin nor a feather, which would make things look very incriminating for me when someone arrived. And surely, somebody was going to arrive.
I sat up, felt around till I found my head, then got to my knees and finally my feet, all without throwing up. I didn’t remember touching anything in the suite. I headed for the door. No need to wipe door handles or wash drinking glasses or...
I made the fatal backward glance. Something dark brown and shiny peeked from under Ms. Blue’s hip. I went over and saw what it was and pulled it out from under her. My wallet, full of identification. Gilding the lily, I thought, electroplating the tungsten, but what policeman passed up a gift? I turned toward the door and stopped again. Jumped, actually.
There was a man sitting in a chair turned away from me, as if he’d gone over to sit and watch the markets on the big screens on the desk. Boring business. He must have fallen asleep. As I came around the desk, I saw the two big red splotches on his chest. Decided, everything considered, I should have expected that. Dead, Darwin Sneed looked more like the benign country parson than he had alive. A small black automatic pistol lay on the carpet between his feet.
It was a sure bet my prints were all over the gun.
I used Sneed’s pocket square to pick up the weapon, wiped it down, overcame squeamishness to rub the gun against Sneed’s fingers before returning it to the carpet.
Having watched a single CSI episode, I took the pocket square with me.
It was a little before ten when I reached the ground floor and retrieved my topcoat. The place was hopping, but Austria ’38 was forgotten. The violins weren’t strolling. Strawberries and cream were puddling in saucers as customers watched the spectacle of cops marching in. I stood aside as they rushed the north elevators.
The coat check lady was past seventy, but I offered a flirtatious smile that implied that ah, but for the curse of time, we could have had something. “What’s going on?” I asked.
She leaned across the counter, spoke softly. “Apparently we had a gay love nest upstairs. Three young men got naked and shot each other.”
“Three?”
She nodded. “Who’d have guessed they did that at the Plaza.”
“Who indeed.”
“Right up there on the ninth floor.” She shook her head.
I said, “The ninth floor?”
She nodded.
That was the Treasury team’s floor. Couldn’t be, I thought.
“Terrible,” I muttered, picturing Varick and his missionaries without their polished shoes. Whatever he was — drug runner, Las Vegas skimmer, Spanish gentleman — Ernesto Gutierrez was dealing swiftly with his problems. I got a cab downtown, hoping I wasn’t one of them.
My client Imre de Wohl had rented a townhouse up in the east sixties. A week into the new year, his father visited, a man with a white goatee and the manner of a Flemish burgomeister. Imre invited me to dinner. “The boy has told me a lot about you, Mr. McCarthy,” said de Wohl père. His English was better than my Flemish ever would be. If Flemish was a language; I wasn’t sure. For that matter, I wasn’t sure what a Flemish burgomeister should look like, if he didn’t wear a funny hat, but that’s how I thought of him. Old Mr. de Wohl wore a cravat but no monocle. He wagged a pate knife at my chest. “I’m impressed by Imre’s report on your firm as well.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“These are uncertain times, are they not?”
I tried a smile that implied I could handle whatever came along. That included nine-percent drops in the stock market, such as had greeted the new year.
“Families with wealth must preserve it,” the old boy said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I foresee a difficult environment ahead. What are your thoughts, Mr. McCarthy?”
I wondered if he was playing with me, the way I play with clients who don’t know any better. What were my thoughts? My main thought was that if I got his account, I would milk it like a farmer with five hands.
Before I could answer, he prodded, “What about gold? Is that a prudent investment? How would one store it?” He smiled, a sweet old fellow bent on keeping ahead of the starving masses in uncertain times.
I almost told him I never touched gold. His son, filling my wineglass, said, “McCarthy is an expert, Papa.”
If Sneed was right, the little drop in the stock market was a harbinger of bad times. Of course, Sneed hadn’t foreseen his own future too well. But that didn’t mean he was wrong about everything. I could live with starvation in the cities, though not in my own neighborhood.
Papa’s eyebrows rose, and he wore a greedy little grin.
In good times or bad, the investment game was every man for himself.
Wondering how one acquired a supply of tungsten, I told him, “I know a way to buy gold in the Cayman Islands.”