Alonzo Zercher got to his feet gracefully, like a big cat, stretching and appraising the space around him. He walked across the room, opened a file drawer, removed a large brown envelope and held it up for me to see. "Do you know what's in this, Mr. Wages?"
"How the hell would I know?"
"This, Mr. Wages, is a photocopy of Manfred Kohler's pathetic little diary, the one my foolish and former associate, Bearing Schuster, paid so dearly for and mobilized your laughable little crew of would-be retrievers."
"How'd you get it?" Hannah chirped.
"Linda… oh excuse me, you know her as Maggie, don't you, Ms. Holbrook? Linda obtained this document for me." Zercher rifled through the pages. "She is very efficient, but then I pride myself on having that kind of an organization." He threw his leg over the chair and sat down again. "Efficiency is the key, right, Mr. Wages?"
"Why should I be impressed, Zercher? It looks to me like both Chauncey Packer and Marshal Schuster screwed up their assignments pretty well."
A frown furrowed into Zercher's ruggedly handsome face. "Pawns… mere pawns in the scheme of things. I'm afraid that my assignments taxed their limited mental resources, but I like to think that we all learn from our mistakes. Take our man Chauncey, for example. His assignment was quite simple — make sure Poqulay kept everyone out of the Deechapal complex until we could get it cleaned up and gear our operation again. But Poqulay was an error in Packer's judgment. He not only trusted a man to do a job that he wasn't capable of doing, but he let you and your amateur team actually get into our compound and poke around. I consider both situations to be intolerable. That's why I had him disposed of."
"You had him disposed of? But I thought…"
"Of course, Mr. Wages, we know what you thought. It was exactly what we wanted you to think. You believed Chauncey Packer died as the result of the beating you administered in his room at the Ciel."
"But…"
Zercher dismissed my aborted protest with a wave of his hand. "Don't flatter yourself, Mr. Wages. You didn't rough up Mr. Packer enough to cause any permanent damage. Bluebell had to wait until you were asleep and sneak back over there in the middle of the night to finish him off."
"Bluebell?" I sputtered.
Zercher shook his head like a displeased parent. "Come, come, Mr. Wages, certainly you must have questioned how it just happened that she and Mr. Packer were so conveniently located in the same hotel."
I blinked a couple of times, hoping my face didn't betray just how foolish I actually felt. Zercher was right; I'd bought Bluebell's story hook, line and sinker.
He was smiling again, pleased with himself. "It's really quite simple. The lady appealed to your conventional value system and played on your 'all gentlemen protect ladies' ethic. She waited until you fell asleep, slipped back over to her love nest, covered Mr. Packer's head with a plastic bag and made it look for all the world like he had suffocated in his own bile."
Alonzo took a long thoughtful drag on the green Havana and smiled. "There is something else you should know. Bluebell is a very innovative young lady. She managed also to slip a couple of items out of your room and plant them in Packer's for our esteemed police force. Our Jamaican police are not noted for their alacrity, but they are very thorough and eventually put two and two together. When they do, Mr. Wages, you will be wanted for murder."
Alonzo Zercher had just demonstrated that somewhere beneath the million dollar smile and the gold chains, there beat the heart of a pure son-of-a-bitch. Mookie had warned me. I glanced over at Hannah who was staring at the man in disbelief.
Zercher still wasn't through. Among his many faults was a monumental ego that fostered a good old-fashioned case of oral diarrhea. "As for Marshal, I'm afraid that's my fault. I should have known he wasn't equal to the task after his rather sophomoric efforts to scare you out of this mission back in Clearwater." He shook his head in theatrical dismay. "But it was the debacle out at the reef that was finally his undoing. I told him to destroy the cylinders, and he didn't do so. In his greedy little mind he somehow thought he could capitalize on his new possessions."
"So you killed him," Hannah said.
''My credo goes something like this, Ms. Holbrook. Once failed, once disobeyed — at once dismissed. But, of course, in our line of business, one simply can't afford to merely dismiss someone. In our business we are forced into a decidedly more permanent type of severance."
"Which brings us back to the cylinders," I said. Zercher was obviously becoming irritated with the subject of the cylinders. His smile was beginning to erode again. "Ah yes, Mr. Wages, the cylinders. The way I see it, I have any number of options, wouldn't you agree?" The next thing I knew the smile had completely disappeared. "I shall have to find an innovative way to dispose of them."
I had already warned him once, but it was obvious he didn't believe me.
Zercher stood up and pushed the chair away. "Perhaps I'll give your little metal containers to my former colleague. Wouldn't that be rich? I mean, after all the time and trouble and inconvenience… to just hand them over to him. There would be a certain amount of poetic panache in that. They cost him a son, a business partner, the lives of his entire group of inept and amateur sleuths and his connection with a venture that has been far more profitable than anything his ridiculous research center has ever developed. I appeal to your sense of logic, Mr. Wages. Is the concept of life everlasting worth all of that?"
Zercher barked out a couple of orders at his pet gorilla slouching at the door and departed.
"You sure have a way with people," Hannah hissed.
The gargoyle on the other side of the room was far enough away that he couldn't hear what we were saying.
"Did they get your revolver?" Hannah asked.
I nodded. "The first thing the big ape did was frisk me."
"He must not like girls," Hannah confided, "because he didn't even check me."
"You still got it?"
The lady nodded.
"Where?"
"I can't get to it the way my hands are tied, but with a little maneuvering around, I think you could."
"Now?"
"Not now. Moose Face over there would think you're trying to rape me."
"Where the hell did you put it?"
Hannah's face was creased in a pained expression. "I slipped it inside the elastic waistband of my jumpsuit when Maggie came upon us down at the dock — and it slipped down."
"Slipped down? You mean inside your… your…?"
"Yes, damn it, that's exactly what I mean. It slipped down inside my pants." I could tell by the sound of her voice that the admission was galling.
"They teach you that in spy school?" I grinned.
Hannah leaned her pretty head close to mine. Her voice was barely a whisper. "The way I have it figured, your new found friend, Zercher, has us booked on a one-way flight to nowhere with this guy Posnick. Somewhere along the way we'll get our chance."
"Does this mean I've got an invitation to get in your pants?"
The lady's voice was pure ice. "That's exactly what it means, Mr. Wages, but let me warn you… If your hand strays one millimeter in either direction from that gun, you're going to wish that lummox standing over there by the door had played handball with your brain."
Travell Posnick made an instant impression. He was the kind of man that projected "no nonsense." Even without an introduction, I knew who he was and what his mission was the moment he walked into the room. He was a casting director's dream — pure villain. He was tall, built like a bear with a face that looked like it had been hammered into shape with a chisel. Most of the damage, however, was covered by a shaggy black moustache and equally bushy eyebrows. He had the social demeanor of a jockstrap.