This apartment was a duplicate of Rubino’s, with the order of rooms reversed. It was only partially furnished, with no phone or kitchen equipment, no bed in the bedroom. Shayne opened the top doors in a carved sideboard against the party wall. Lenore gasped.
The back of the sideboard was cut away, and they looked into Rubino’s living room through a two-way mirror. On the shelf beneath, there was a small camera and a tape recorder. The recorder was voice-actuated, and the receiving switch was open. Shayne flicked it shut. Using the tiny screwdriver that was part of his lock-picking tools, he removed the top plate, exposing a printed circuit. He laid the screwdriver blade across the battery terminals. There was an impatient little hiss as the connection shorted out.
He put the top plate back and opened the switch.
“A nice little piece of equipment,” he said, and when the reels remained motionless: “O.K. Now we can talk.”
TEN
“How long will it take him?” Shayne said. “He’ll be driving fast because he won’t want to miss anything.”
“Twenty minutes at least, but can you be sure he’ll actually go?”
“I think so, to pick up the cash. He’s going to consider that two thousand bucks potentially his.”
He closed the doors of the sideboard and they returned to the other apartment, where Shayne rigged a simple device to let them know if anyone entered the apartment they had just left. He found a thin reel of picture wire in the kitchen, tacked one end to the inner side of the other living-room door, ran it beneath the door along the hall and under the door of Rubino’s apartment, where he anchored it to a tumbler in which he placed several coins. When the other door was pulled open, the glass would spill.
Lenore, meanwhile, was working on her appearance at the two-way mirror. She turned, and they looked at each other. The striped man’s shirt was just right for her. The nipple of her unbandaged breast pressed clearly against the cloth.
“How old was Alvares?” Shayne asked.
She moved her shoulders uncomfortably and sat on the sofa, knees together.
“Fifty-six when I met him. That was four years ago. I know what you’re really asking, and don’t think I haven’t asked myself the same thing, more than once. Well-he was a man of force, shall we say. I’d been painting and painting and painting, and getting nowhere. I literally wasn’t eating in those days except when somebody took me to dinner. I know that sounds ridiculous, in this day and age. But it’s true. I was sure I had talent. Sooner or later, I thought, someone would recognize it. And he recognized it. He really did, Mike, he bought one of my paintings before he met me. What he offered at first was a kind of scholarship, so I could concentrate on painting without worrying about bills. Of course it didn’t stop there. And after it really began with him I stopped painting, which may prove something about me. Heaven knows there’s no shortage of early Dantes.” She gestured ironically at the one on Rubino’s wall. “I am chic now. But in only two places, Palm Beach and Caracas.”
Shayne had left his cognac in the car, but he found another bottle in Rubino’s liquor cabinet.
“I think this really does help,” she said, accepting a glass.
“Twenty minutes isn’t much time,” Shayne said, moving a side chair so he could sit down facing her. “We’ve got a lot to cover. First I want to be sure you know where I stand.”
She stopped him. “I know. I thought about it on the autopista. Trading me for your friend Rourke isn’t really such a farfetched idea, is it? I have to persuade you I can be valuable in other ways, and to do that, I have to tell you the exact truth, as far as I know it. Maybe you’ll see something I’ve missed. Where do you want me to start?”
“Were you in Alvares’ plane when it crashed?”
“Yes, and I’ve got bruises to prove it. I hated to come to Caracas this time. It’s in the middle of my busy season in the gallery, but he wanted me here. He knew about the movement against him, but thought it would all blow over, somehow. It didn’t, of course. It got rapidly worse. He had his pilot on twenty-four hour notice. When he got word that troops were coming to arrest him, he phoned me. I met him at the airstrip. We took off and crashed. After I crawled out I decided there was no reason to hang around and wait for the soldiers. He didn’t make a popular move when he tied up with a gringo. I’ve appeared in political cartoons, I regret to say, the blonde temptress with a great dollar sign on my bosom.”
“How much money was he carrying?”
“Not a great deal. I took what he had, but it was barely enough to buy that boat.”
“I’ve been hearing he had a fortune in cash stashed away somewhere.”
She shook back her long hair. “Perhaps. I’m not exactly a giddy young thing, but should I be expected to know how much money he had in the bank, or in which bank?”
“People assume you do.”
“When he paid for something, he simply opened his wallet and took out some money. Is that the police theory? That I bombed him to death so that only I, in all the world, would know the location of his wealth? Mike, that’s so far from the truth-He was a real Latin male. His women were helpless creatures who couldn’t add up a checkbook.” She looked at him critically. “Are you believing this?”
“Most of it sounds pretty straight. What happened after you walked away from the wreck?”
“When I got back to the city I called my niece, a sweet girl named Paula Obregon. She found me a place to stay.”
“Frost snowed me her picture. Rourke was seeing her.”
“Then you know she’s a revolutionary, a fierce enemy of capitalist governments. But what a nice girl, all the same. She went to school in the States for a year, and she stayed with me part of the time. When she came back she plunged into the movement against my dear friend and lover, so of course I’ve seen very little of her since. I think she’s too smart not to outgrow those juvenile ideas, or that’s what I keep telling her parents. When I heard Guillermo had been taken to La Vega, I had an idea. This will sound romantic to you, but damn it, it really could have worked. These guerrillas have a fabulous organization, absolute discipline. All of a sudden, there they are. Look again, they’re gone. Several of their leaders were being held in that prison, and my idea was that if they could smuggle in some smoke bombs and tear gas, enough to confuse and incapacitate the guards, a relatively small force could walk in wearing gas masks and deliver everybody, regardless of politics.”
“In a couple of cigarette cartons,” Shayne said, scraping his chin.
“That’s the way we worked it out. They jumped at the idea. I went to Senora Alvares-”
“Just a minute. Did she know you were her husband’s girl?”
“After a while it wasn’t much of a secret. They’ve had no marital life, by which I mean sexual contact, for years. Divorce wasn’t possible. If I could visit my friend in prison there would have been no problem, but that privilege of course was reserved for the wife. It wasn’t easy for me to go to her. She was angry and suspicious but I managed to persuade her, finally. He was her husband, after all, and did she want him to spend the rest of his life behind bars? That was the sentimental side of the argument. The practical side was that if we could help him escape, he would continue to support her. She’s quite a self-centered bitch, as a matter of fact, and when she agreed to help I’m quite sure she was thinking of herself. But that’s unkind and probably unfair.”
“Did she know what was going to be in the cartons?”
“Yes, but her part in it fell through. She couldn’t get permission to visit him.”
“Which is where Tim Rourke came in.”
“Paula knew him from Miami. She was supplying material for a series on the guerrillas, and I believe she was staying with him at his hotel, so if he thought of any questions to ask in the middle of the night, she could answer them right away. He agreed to help us. He made himself such a nuisance downtown that they finally set up an interview for him. You know how the other correspondent was substituted at the last minute.”