“No, goddammit!” said Drinker in an angry voice.
“You of all people should understand. Your military record shows you’re a demolitions man, I may have been seen going in and out of this apartment. If someone sees Harry’s boat blow up...”
“Good answer,” he agreed reluctantly. “It makes sense.”
“For that,” she said, sliding down in the bed while Drinker remained where he was, “you deserve a special treat.”
It was after 3:00 A.M. Saturday when Pepe finished his gig at the Roundup and drove back to his luxury hotel in downtown Reno. The snow was gone, spring was on its way.
He let himself into his room, clicked the light switch. Nothing happened. Light filtering through the curtains showed him two shadowy waiting figures.
“You’re late, sweets,” said a soft voice Falkoner would have known. Pepe just had time to make the sign of the cross.
Ferris Besner had spent the night with April in Harry Wham’s outsize bed, but was still worried about Drinker.
“April, don’t forget — mean and tricky and smart...”
“Sweetheart, when the banks open Monday morning you will do your exquisite forgeries of Harry’s signature, we will empty the boxes, and we will be gone. Free, free, free!”
“But Drinker Cope is a detective, darling.”
“He’s been well paid. Also, he’s a murderer, or soon will be. We just make an anonymous call to the police once we’re out of their reach.”
At 9:55 they were waiting at the special wireless phone Harry had installed for direct connections with the Doubloon. The Piper-Heidsieck was in the silver bucket with two paper-thin crystal champagne flutes waiting beside it.
The phone rang at 9:58.
“Hi, darling! What’s this big surprise I’m going to love?”
Sixty seconds. Fifty-five. His life was passing before her eyes. “I know all about your Spanish gold, Harry. Only it’s Mexican and it doesn’t come from any galleons.”
Harry’s voice carried respect. “So you found out.”
Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen...
“On Monday Ferris and I are clearing out all your safe-deposit boxes and going away together. I hate you. I hope—” The receiver erupted with a brutal, massive noise that made her hold it away from her ear. “I hope you’re in hell, darling.”
Ferris was twisting the wire off the champagne’s cork.
“Exit Harry Wham,” she said to him, hanging up the phone.
“Exit Harry Wham,” said the big tousle-haired man. “Not a bad last line. Harry Wham will certainly have to be dead.”
Lee Fong was at the wheel; the Doubloon was in blue water. Harry scaled the phonograph record labeled Side I EXPLOSIONS AND DETONATIONS (Exterior Reverberations) over the side into the blue-gray chop. It sank instantly.
“Where’d you get it?” he asked.
Drinker Cope said, “That little theatrical supply house near the Curran Theater. What happens now?”
He nudged Drinker’s large canvas bag with his toe. “A fishing boat will carry you and your twenty-five percent of the loot to Monterey. A car will bring you back up here.”
“And you?”
He swung an arm to indicate the breadth of the world.
“No bullshit now, Drinker. Why cl you tell me about it?”
When Cope moved the canvas bag with the toe of his shoe in turn, Wham shook his head.
“No, it had to have been more than just money. You couldn’t have been getting tired of April, and don’t tell me any crap about lives getting saved on Iwo Jima. Just for the record, I never was a marine captain on Iwo. Not anywhere, not ever.”
For once in his life, Drinker was almost speechless.
“But... but... the photos, the medals...”
“Fakes. During the war I flew supplies into China over the hump from Burma. A lot of us got moderately rich on that run. Jewels, jade, carved ivory — once all the struts and aileron wires of my plane were made of almost pure gold.”
“Some detective,” said Drinker sheepishly. The two big men were silent for a time, each with his own thoughts. Then Drinker said, “I put a mike in your bedroom and a listening post in the basement. April and Besner talked a lot, made a lot of plans.”
Harry nodded in acknowledgment. Drinker gestured.
“We’d better throw the bomb overboard. It isn’t connected to the dry-cell, but dynamite is dynamite, after all.”
“It’s not on board, it’s under my bed, or it was.” Harry looked at his watch. “It was set to go off twenty seconds ago.”
Drinker jerked upright, his eyes shocked, even frightened. “Jesus Christ! April and Besner would have been just...”
“Exit April Wham,” said Harry, stone-faced. “Besner is just a bonus. I didn’t mind her trying to blow me away, Drinker — there was money involved. But” — he motioned toward the slight, silent man at the wheel — “she hardly knew Lee Fong.”
Drinker retrieved his car from the St. Francis Yacht Club lot where he’d left it at nine that morning, after listening to April’s final bedroom session with Besner. Compared to April, Sherry would be Cream of Wheat to the rarest, bloodiest steak imaginable, but she had one huge advantage: she was still alive.
Then he laughed aloud. He had real money. He’d never have to kiss a client’s ass again, never have to sleep with Sherry again. He’d thought what he’d gotten from Kiely’s safe-deposit box in Kansas City had been a lot of money, and he’d killed two men to get it — Earl with his .45, Emmy with his Plymouth when he’d found the man comatose in the parking lot near the Barbary Coast Hotel. But this was a hell of a lot more money, and he hadn’t had to kill anyone at all to get it.
He found parking around the corner on Green, walked down Gough to his apartment with a satchel in each hand. He didn’t want to leave the bomb-making stuff in the trunk overnight.
Dunc was sitting on the front steps in a tan-colored overcoat, a dark blue navy watch cap pulled down over his ears.
Drinker unlocked the door. “You look like a fucking bum.”
“I’ve been on the road, I sort of ran out of money.”
Drinker started up the stairs, Dunc tagging along behind. Opening his apartment door, he’d half expected April’s perfume to waft out at him, but the place was cold and dreary. He tossed the satchels in a corner, turned on lights, lit the wall heater. Dunc stood looking around; it was his first time there.
“I’m making coffee, you want some? I ain’t got any tea.”
A head shake. Drinker busied himself in the kitchen; there was a strange look in the kid’s eyes, half-mad, half-sad. The scar from the crash was very vivid above his left eye.
“You okay after the concussion and all?”
“Yeah, sure, fine.”
Drinker leaned back against the counter, his arms folded.
“Are you coming back to work for me again? You’re a damned good investigator and—”
“That’s what you told me in L.A. at the Labor Day picnic, wasn’t it? If we hadn’t gotten into the shooting contest you’d have hooked me some other way.” Drinker felt a stab of unease. “Pepe the piano player hired you to keep an eye on me.”
“Pepe... Jesus Christ, kid, I met him for the first time at that Reno steakhouse. I think you ought to—”
“I’d told him I was coming up here. I’d also told him about busting up a wetback smuggling ring. You praised me for that at the picnic, but my name hadn’t turned up anywhere, not once.”
Drinker poured himself coffee. “Sure you don’t want—”
“No, I’m fine.”
He carried his steaming mug into the living room and sat in the leather easy chair, had a momentary vivid image of April in this same chair, opening her legs... He made a decision.