"What? Find her?"
"Kill her."
Henry had replaced the water with another crystal glass and disappeared. No ice cubes. Vaggan sipped, looking over the rim of the glass at McNair. He was thinking of tape recordings, but he could think of nothing McNair could gain by taping this conversation. Still, it was an odd question. Vaggan answered with a shrug and put down the glass. McNair interested him more and more. But the job was suddenly less appealing. Such things should be strictly business. No pleasure mixed in.
"I would have thought you'd have a favorite method," McNair said. His expression was bland, but the greenish eyes in their deep sockets were avid.
It should be purely business, Vaggan thought. Otherwise things get too complicated. Hard to calculate, which made them needlessly risky.
Did he need this job? Did he still want to work for McNair?
"If I did your work, I'd have a favorite method," McNair repeated.
Vaggan shrugged again, took another sip of the tepid tap water. Outside, the McNair lawn sloped away toward the Pacific. The glass was like green velvet.
"I can't see how you're going to get off," Vaggan said. "From what the story in the L.A. Times had to say, you're indicted on eleven counts, witnesses tying you into the business personally, everything neat and tidy the way it sounded. Why don't you jump bail, cash in a little of this"—he gestured around him at the room—"and make a run for it?" He sipped again. "Actually, there wouldn't have to be any actual running. Just transfer some cash to wherever and get some papers and fly away. Easy. No worry. No risk."
Vaggan had been studying McNair's face. It registered irritation, then distaste. About what Vaggan had expected.
"I'm not guilty," McNair said.
"Not until the jury convicts you," Vaggan said. "Then you are, and the judge raises the bail way up there, and it's all going to be a lot tougher and more expensive."
"I have never been convicted of anything." McNair said. "No McNair has ever been in prison. Never will be." He got up and stood by the window, his hand resting on a form Vaggan presumed was a sculpture cast in steel. "Besides, if you walk away from it, you can't take this along."
He seemed to mean the sculpture and what he saw from the window. Or perhaps it meant the bagpipe and being a McNair. Vaggan could appreciate this. One of the rulers. The hard men. An interesting man, Vaggan thought. He'd be dealing with the McNairs after the missiles, the tough ones. He understood the old man better again. The avidity he'd seen was as much like greed as it was cruelty. Cruelty bothered him because it seemed beside the point, a waste of emotions that seemed strange to him. But Vaggan could understand greed perfectly.
"I have a feeling you're balking," McNair said, still looking out the window. "Why else all this impertinence? All these questions? Will you take care of it for me?"
"All right," Vaggan said. He got up and took the paper from the old man's fingers, unfolded it, and read. The address was on a street he'd never heard of. He'd get it located on his map, and wait for dark, and get it over with.
Chapter 16
Jim chee, who had always considered himself an excellent driver, drove now uneasily. The mixture of precise timing, skill, and confidence in their immortality that Los Angeles drivers brought to their freeway system moved Chee back and forth from anxious admiration to stoic resignation. But his luck had held so far, it should hold for another afternoon. He rolled his pickup truck through the endless sprawl of the city and the satellite towns that make Los Angeles County a wilderness of people. For a while he managed to keep track of just where he was in relation to where he had been, noticing direction shifts and remembering when he switched from one freeway to another. But soon it overwhelmed him. He concentrated solely on the freeway map, which Shaw had marked for him, and on not missing his turns. The land had risen a little now out of the flatness of the city basin, and there were traces of desert visible in vacant lots, which became vacant blocks, which became entire vacant hillsides, eroded and dotted with cactus and the dry, prickly brush common to land where it rarely rains. The poor side of the city. Chee examined it curiously. He no longer had a sense of where he was in relation to his motel. But there, low on the southwestern horizon, hung the sun. And eastward over those dry ridges lay the desert. And behind him, somewhere beyond the thickening smog of the city, was the cold, blue Pacific. It was enough to know.
And now just ahead of him was the exit sign Shaw had told him to watch for. He angled the truck cautiously across the freeway lanes and down the exit ramp and rolled to a stop on the parking ramp of a Savemor service station. Here tumbleweeds grew through the broken asphalt. A paunchy, middle-aged man in bib overalls leaned against the cashier's booth, eyeing him placidly. Chee spread his Los Angeles street map across the steering wheel, making sure he was in the right place. The sign said Jaripa Street, which seemed correct. Now the job was to locate Jacaranda, which intersected somewhere and led to the address that Shaw had pried, finally, from Gorman's landlady. Watching Shaw work had been impressive.
Chee recalled the interview. Two interviews, to be correct, although the first one had been brief. He had rung her doorbell, and rung, and rung until finally she had appeared, staring at him wordlessly past the barely opened door. She had re-inspected his Navajo Tribal Police credentials, still with no sign they impressed her. No, she'd said, she hadn't seen anyone like Margaret Billy Sosi. And then Chee had told her that a witness had seen the girl here.
"They lied," the woman had said, and closed the door firmly in Chee's face.
It had taken almost an hour for the dispatcher at lapd to locate Shaw, and maybe twenty minutes later Shaw had arrived—driving up alone in an unmarked white sedan. The second interview had gone much better.
They'd done this one inside, in the woman's cluttered office-sitting room, and Chee had learned something from the way Shaw had handled it.
"This man hasn't got any business here," Shaw had said, pointing a thumb at Chee. "He's an Indian policeman. Couldn't arrest anybody in LA. I don't care what you told him. You could tell him to go to hell. But now I'm here."
Shaw fished out his identification and held it in front of the woman's face. "You and I've done business before, Mrs. Day," he said. "You called me when this guy showed up asking about Gorman, just like I told you to. I appreciate that. Now I need to find this girl, Margaret Sosi. She was here yesterday. What'd she say to you?"
Chee was trying to read Mrs. Day's expression. It was closed. Hostile. Was it fearful? Call it tense, he thought.
"Trashy people are always showing up here, ringing my doorbell." She glanced at Chee. "You can't expect me to remember them."
"I can," Shaw said. "I do expect it." He stared at her, face hard. "We're going to find the girl, and I'm going to ask her if she talked to you."
Mrs. Day said nothing.
"If she did, then I'm going to get the fire marshal's boys interested in this place of yours. Wiring. Exits. Trash removal. You familiar with the fire code for rental property?"
Mrs. Day looked stubborn.
"When we find this girl, if she's got her throat cut, like maybe she will have from what we know now, and you haven't helped us, then that makes you an accessory to murder. I don't guess we could prove it, but we can get you downtown, and book you in, and then you have to deal with the bonding company, and get a lawyer hired, and show up for the grand jury, and—"
"She was looking for Gorman," Mrs. Day said.
"We know that," Shaw said. "What did she say about him?"
"Nothing much. I told her Gorman wasn't here."
"What else—" Shaw began, but the telephone cut him off.
Mrs. Day looked at Shaw. On the wall behind her, the telephone rang again.
Shaw nodded.
Mrs. Day said hello into the mouthpiece, listened, said no, said I'll call you back. "Just a sec," she said. She reached behind her and wrote a number on a calendar mounted to the wall beside the phone. "I don't know. Maybe fifteen minutes," she said, and hung up.