“Be careful!” she warned. “I’m perfectly calm.” That was untrue; the gun was shaking badly. “I won’t have it, do you hear? I won’t have you hit me. You stand there, and let me get dressed and out of your life.”
“Charley,” he said, confused.
“I had a decision to make, and I made it. I haven’t made many decisions in my life, but by God I made that one.”
The haze receded, and Ricardo saw her more clearly. “A gun,” he said softly. “Sweetheart, we’ve just been fucking. They don’t go together.”
He put out his hand, and the sight of this beautiful naked woman pointing a gun at him seemed so unlikely that he was convinced she would hand it to him.
“Don’t!” she screamed. The gun was all the way out between them, and it was pointed at his crotch, naturally. “I’ll try not to kill you. But I’ll hurt you badly if you come another step.”
He lowered his hands. “You really are scared of me, aren’t you? That’s funny, because I love you, for Christ’s sake.”
“You do not. Liar. You planned it all in advance, for the money. You told me.”
“To start with, sure. If I go across the room and sit down, will you point that at the floor or someplace? I feel tender right there.”
After a moment she brought the gun back in to her chest. “I’m not naive enough to believe-”
“Charley, I wouldn’t hurt you. Jesus, seeing that look in your eye-you were one second away from pulling that trigger.”
“One half second.” She lowered the gun the rest of the way. “And then I would have been in a real mess.”
“How much is he paying?”
She bit her lip. “The overall price is two and a half million. I know that’s not as much as-”
“Two and a half! Two and a half! It was five last week.”
He studied her. Various counters began clicking, and he said quietly, “You think I killed Max.”
Her eyes darted over the room, never fixing directly on him.
“Sure you do,” Ricardo said. “You think I racked him up and set him on fire. You see it on TV all the time. The young buck with a hard-on. The wife in menopause. The husband with all the money. And with us, it wasn’t just the savings account and the insurance. We had a real plan. We couldn’t do anything about it as long as he was alive. And now that I think of it, the night of that accident, you had the pip, such as it is these days, and stayed home to go to bed early. You don’t know where I was at two in the morning.”
“That’s true, I don’t.”
“But that wouldn’t be enough to make you sell for two and a half. What else?”
“Oh, there’s more! I’ve known all along that you did it, and I didn’t care, why the devil should I? I would have done it myself if I’d had the courage. I thought of it long before you came on the scene, my friend! It was all right as long as it was just my mind. The sex was all right tonight, wasn’t it?”
“Super.”
“It could have gone on, I think. But we’re talking about it now, and that’s always a bad idea. You still have almost a month. You can make quite a tidy sum. Keep the whole thing. Then if you ever feel like taking me to dinner you can pay the check with your own twenty dollars and feel manly! Take me to Brazil and you can buy both tickets.”
“Maybe it was a bad idea to start, but we’ve started, so finish. What did Harry say, sign or he’d turn your boyfriend in for murder?”
“And do you think I wouldn’t go too? We all know about wives and husbands and lovers. The wife and the lover do it together. Oh, Ricardo, it’s so awful.”
He shook his head. “Charley, I’m sorry to say you’ve been conned. You were already sure I did it, and Harry Zell worked on you for a few minutes and ripped off two and a half million bucks. I’d better know exactly what he told you, for my own protection.”
“He got what he wanted, my signature. He won’t do anything now.”
“But why should I trust Harry Zell? He’s as slippery as a trout, you can tell that by looking at him.”
He made a move to get up. She had begun to put on her bra. She dropped it and snatched up the pistol again.
After a moment he sat back and said, “Whatever he had, I see you believed him.”
“A deposition,” she said reluctantly. “A statement, in writing, signed and notarized. I’m not a child.”
“Who made it?”
“Dee Wynn.”
“Wynn!”
She finished fastening her bra and reached for her blouse. “I know. Invariably drunk at that time of night. An unreliable witness. But I believed it, Ricardo, and so would a jury, I think.”
“Tell me.”
“He fell asleep in Max’s car. He heard the seat-belt buzzer but he couldn’t wake up. Max kept groaning and mumbling that everybody was cheating him. He jerked getting started, and then he kept swinging in great out-of-control arcs. Dee was trying to sit up and tell him to call a taxi or let somebody else drive. Then he heard a car behind them, accelerating. He sat up finally as they went off the bank. And it was your car, Ricardo. Your license plate and your car.”
“Now if the bastard said I was driving-”
“You were driving,” she said. “He had a good glimpse through the side window. The Cuban, Ricardo Sanchez. He was thrown out when the car turned over. Nothing he could do about Max, the fire was too hot, and the next morning, to make sure he hadn’t imagined it, he checked your car. And there it was, a freshly banged fender. But he was scared of what you might do, so he didn’t say anything to anybody.”
“Scared, hell. He wanted to see what he could milk it for. Now is that all? Is there anything else you’re holding back?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
The answer to that was obvious. It was more than enough.
“Are you just going to sit there grinding your teeth?” she said after a moment. “Say something.”
Ricardo had to think. Needing help, he made himself a drink. Charlotte, too, picked up her dropped glass and used the bottle after he finished. A mixture of emotions-fear, anger, regret-had carried her this far, but now she was crying. It irritated him.
“He put his watch on the table and gave me five minutes. Darling, all I could think was that even this way, with this hanging over us, it’s better than before, when we didn’t know each other-”
“Is it?”
He bit off the words, rattled the ice cubes and drank, forcing himself to keep drinking until the glass was empty.
“God, I hate that stuff.”
He dressed quickly, went through her purse and took all the cash and the gun. Without saying anything more or looking at her again, he left the apartment.
Chapter 15
The night security man came to tell Shayne there was a phone call for him. It was already after three, and they had only planted one of the Nash cameras. Unless they could work more swiftly, they would have to settle for a less ambitious program.
“You can take it in the PR office.”
It was the Cuban detective, using Shayne’s own mobile phone.
“I haven’t figured out how to use this phone and chase at the same time,” the Cuban said. “I’ve got a tape you’re going to want to hear.”
“Where are you?”
“On the Beach, at Forty-third, a big oceanfront condo. Sanchez is inside, and he has a couple of friends with him. How do you want to do this?”
“I’ll be right over. If he leaves before I get there, stay on him.”
Shayne stopped at the kennel and told Dave, the closed-circuit technician from the Nash track, to do the VIP lounge installation next. Outside, the streets were deserted. Shayne ran the lights, and arrived less than five minutes after taking the Cuban’s call.
“I almost lost him, Mike. He was headed south, so I took a chance and cut over to the Eighth Street area. I was lucky-he passed me going the other way, two guys with him. About the same age, I’d say. They’ve been inside-oh, eight minutes. Tape’s ready to run if you want to hear it.”
“Yeah.”