“Yeah, that fits,” Shayne said. “I don’t know if you’ll let me get away with this question. We’ve been talking about your husband’s women. Fair’s fair. Do you have any men?”
She looked at him haughtily, her lips beginning to shape a chilling answer. Then she smiled.
“She is intelligent; so are you, Mr. Michael Shayne. I have had precisely the right amount of wine. There are those who have admired me, I believe, but it is a formidable thing, you know, to admit this to the wife of the president, who rules absolutely and has a sudden temper. Those conditions are no longer present. No, I will not return to my family in the provinces. I intend to travel. I wish I had that diary you speak of, then I could travel en luxe. But I am not on that account to be pitied.”
“How soon is the funeral?”
“They have not told me. It will be decided by the politicians.”
She sat back in her chair for the first time and looked at him over her raised glass. “You are a sudden man. I was speaking of my personal desires and you ask the date of the funeral. I wish to ask you how you find me. The wife of the president will always receive flattery she perhaps does not deserve, but you come into my house now when I am the wife of a dead president who no longer holds power. I can trust your opinion. Is life over for me? Shall I sit on a veranda drinking coffee with unmarried cousins?”
He let her drink before he answered.
“No, you don’t fit that scene. I could tell better if you weren’t wearing a girdle.”
Her lips parted. “Do you think, then, that I am asking to be embraced and handled? You are not such an intelligent man, after all.”
“What’s your guess about how much money your husband managed to get away with?”
“Impossible!” she exclaimed. “Now it is money again. We were talking about the fascinating subject of how I impress you, a sophisticated man from another country, and all at once, the dull matter of money. I am indifferent to money. Men don’t feel themselves drawn to women who talk always of money. Why do you think the not wearing of a girdle is so important?”
“It’s a symbol. Did your husband drink champagne?”
“Diet-Cola.”
“It must have been a pretty rough life for you in some ways.”
“Dreary, so dreary. I don’t bother about the insults, the humiliation. That is the lot of women in this world. But the endlessness. Do women tell you that you have a way of moving that draws the eye? In a film, you would fill the screen. You are the one that the audience would watch. My head is whirling, I think you are pressing me to drink.”
“It’s your champagne.”
“You noticed that I am confused by questions, so to keep my composure I drink before answering.” She demonstrated. “And you keep coming toward me with questions.”
“Did he tell you he’d closed out his Swiss accounts?”
She drank again. “What do you want from me?” She studied him, and it was clear that she was trying to make the images hold still. “You are mentioning my girdle, and yet I know you have no erotic plans. Why do you wish to disturb me-so the wine will take command?”
“I want to look through a few bureau drawers.”
She moved a hand in a gesture of permission. “I have hidden nothing. But I will warn you, he was careful about burning papers. It was his religion. Always, in wash bowls, in waste baskets, the servants and I found ashes. Look. Why should I be afraid from you? Before you go, move the champagne within my reach.”
THIRTEEN
Shayne called the maid and told her by signs to bring more champagne. She brought two warm splits. Shayne twirled them in the ice water and opened them both to make drinking less complicated.
“Did he have a room he used as an office?”
“You must find it by yourself.”
Her glass tilted. He straightened it for her and she repaid him with a lopsided smile.
He began checking rooms, trying to get an impression of the life these people had led together. At the opposite end of the cloister he found a room with an immense desk, its surface bare except for an elaborate cradle phone. A large portrait of the ex-president leaned against one wall. Another of Lenore Dante’s geometric oils had been hung in its place.
Shayne was going through the desk drawers when he heard a faint stirring within the phone. He lifted the handset gently. A man’s voice was talking in Spanish, protesting, explaining. Senora Alvares broke in. Shayne heard his own name spoken. He listened to the exchange until it ended. The woman was by turns hot and cold, plaintive and curt. The man was sulky. Shayne thought he heard the name Frost thrown up out of the torrent of unfamiliar sounds, but it flickered by too fast for him to be sure.
When good-byes were spoken, Shayne depressed the bar, waited a moment and then dialed the operator. After surviving the usual series of misunderstandings, he was connected with a voice that could respond in English. He asked for a number in Palm Beach, Florida.
While he waited he continued to open and shut drawers, finding nothing to change the impression he already had, that Alvares had been an orderly, apparently bloodless man. A snapshot of the dead president with Lenore Dante had been slipped under the desk blotter. She was in tennis clothes, holding a racket. Alvares, beside her, seemed to be trying to outstare the camera. There was a bulge in his pocket that could have been a gun.
The operator established the connection and a man’s voice said, “Katz Protection.”
“Sam? This is Mike Shayne.”
“Hey! What’s this thing about Tim Rourke? It’s all over the morning paper. Are they kidding?”
“They don’t seem to be. I’m in Caracas now, trying to find out. There’s a Palm Beach angle I’d like you to check out, if you’re not too busy.”
“Everything’s canceled, as of now. Go ahead, Mike.”
“It’s a lady named Lenore Dante. Do you know her?”
“Lenore Dante. It rings a sort of bell. Is she year-round?”
“She runs an art gallery there, and she used to be the girl friend of this Venezuelan dictator, the guy who got blown up in the bombing. I want to know if they’ve spent time together in Palm Beach, and if so, in what kind of style. What did it cost them? Were they asked out as a couple?”
“I know somebody who can tell me,” Katz said. “How soon do you want it?”
“Right away. The other part is harder. I want everything you can find out about her business and her personal finances. How much money has been going in and out? This is important. And if you have to spend money to get it, spend it. I want rumors as well as facts. Has Alvares invested any money in Palm Beach? Does he own any property there? Stay on it right through, Sam, and keep a line open because I’ll be calling you.”
He hung up and continued with his search of the house. He encountered two maids as he proceeded, and told them in English to go on with what they were doing. He worked his way around the square, ending where he had started.
The widow was asleep on a horsehair sofa under a black lace shawl. A lock of hair had been jarred out of the tight knot at the back of her neck, and lay along her cheek. She was snoring faintly.
She had finished another split of champagne. He filled his own glass from the last remaining bottle and sipped it, thinking. He worked his way through the cigarette without reaching any conclusions. Stubbing it out, he looked more closely at the overflowing ashtray, and picked a dead cigar out of the debris. He crumbled a piece of the wrapper and sniffed it. The smell was unmistakable. It was the same kind of excellent Havana Felix Frost had been smoking that morning.
He dropped it in the ashtray. Senora Alvares hadn’t stirred.
He encountered no one on the way out. As soon as he was back in the stolen French sedan the old man trudged out to open the gate for him. It creaked open. Leaning out, Shayne threw him a coin.
Since hearing his own name tossed back and forth between the Senora and the unknown man on the phone, Shayne’s internal radar had been emitting a steady series of blips. He didn’t need a reminder that he was not only a foreigner here, he was a foreigner who was asking unpleasant questions. He started the car rolling as the old man picked up the coin and moved out of the way. Shayne came down into second and hit the accelerator hard, exploding through the gate.