He tossed them on the table: “Fifteen, count ’em.”
Blaney and Sullivan watched me count the money as if it were edible and they were starving. I put it in my wallet.
“Not so fast,” Dowser said. “I want a look at the stuff, that’s natural.”
“You can roll in the stuff. It’s in the glove compartment of my car. Shall I go and get it?”
“I’ll do that.” He held out his hand for my keys.
I sat some more, with Blaney and Sullivan looking down at me. To indicate my general carefreeness, I laid out a hand of solitaire on the tablet op. When I tried to play it, though, the numbers on the cards didn’t make sense. Blaney and Sullivan were perfectly silent. I could hear the tiny lapping of the swimming pool, then Dowser’s footsteps coming back through the house. The wallet in my hip pocket felt heavy as lead.
Dowser was smiling his canine smile. Gold-capped molars gleamed in the corners of his mouth. Blaney and Sullivan stepped apart so that he could come between and ahead of them.
“It’s the McCoy,” he said. “Now tell us where you got it. That’s included.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Think again.” His voice had softened, and he was still smiling. His lower lip stuck out far enough to stand on. “You got about ten seconds.”
“Then what?”
He clicked his teeth with a sound like a pistol hammer. “Then we start over again. Only this time you got nothing to sell me. Just information is all. You were up in Frisco last night. There’s a tag from the Union Square parking lot on your windshield. Who did you meet in Frisco?”
“I’m the detective, Danny. You’re stealing my stuff.”
“I’ll tell you who it was,” he said. “Gilbert the Mosquito, am I right?”
“Gilbert the who?”
“Brighten up. You’re dumb, but not that dumb. Mosquito worked for me till he set up for himself. He was peddling in Frisco.”
“Was?” I said.
“I said was. They found him on the road near Half Moon Bay this morning. Killed. A hit-run ran him down.”
“It couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.”
“And what do you know, I find his knife in your car.” He brought the spring-knife out of his jacket pocket. “Recognize it? It’s got his initials on the handle.” He handed it to Blaney, who nodded his head.
“I took it away from him when he tried to knife me.”
Dowser grinned. “Sure, it was self-defense. You laid him out in the road and ran over him in self-defense. Don’t get me wrong, he got what was coming to him, and you did me a favor when you did it. But I’m in business, baby, you got to realize that.”
“Selling old knives?” I said.
“Maybe you’re not so dumb. You catch on pretty fast.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Pass the lettuce, huh?”
Blaney and Sullivan showed their guns. I stood up, raising my hands. This was the moment I had been living over and over for the past half-hour. Now that it was happening, it seemed hackneyed.
“You dirty double-crossers,” I said from the script I had written in my head.
“Come on now, don’t be like that. You sold me something valuable of mine, I sell you something valuable of yours. It’s just that I’m smarter than you are.” He said it with deep sincerity. “I’ll mail you the knife some time, if you’re sweet about things. Make trouble, though, and I’ll deliver it in person.” He dropped it hack in his pocket, and reached around me. My wallet was lighter when he replaced it on my hip.
“Double-crossing dip,” I counterfeited anger, but I was inwardly relieved. If Dowser hadn’t dreamed up something to pin on me, he might have thought it necessary to kill me. It was the chance I had to face from the beginning.
Dowser’s pleasure was more obvious than mine. His face was shining with it.
“Where would Mosquito get thirty grand? The sprout was strictly smalltime for my money. Or maybe that was just part of the spiel. Maybe he used the knife on Joe, huh, and didn’t need thirty grand?”
“That would be nice,” I said.
“You still around?” He pantomimed surprise, and his gun-men smiled dutifully over their guns. “You can go now. Remember, you go quiet and stay sweet. I’m holding on to the knife for you.”
Blaney and Sullivan escorted me to the car. In order to keep their minds occupied, I swore continuously without repeating myself. The guns were missing from the glove compartment. The guard at the gate held his shotgun on me until I was out of sight. Dowser was careful.
A quarter mile south of the private road, two black sedans, unmarked, were parked on the left side of the highway. Peter Colton was beside the driver of the lead car. The other eleven men were strangers to me.
I U-turned illegally under the eyes of twelve policemen, local and Federal, and stopped by the lead car.
“He has the can,” I told Colton, “probably in his safe. Do you want me to go in with you?”
“Dangerous and unnecessary,” he snapped. “By the way, they found Tarantine’s body. He was drowned all right.”
I wanted to ask him questions, but the black cars started to roll. Two cars coming from the other direction joined them at the entrances to the private road. All four turned up toward the hilltop where Dowser lived, not forever.
Chapter 31
The Pacific Point morgue was in the rear of the mortuary two blocks from the courthouse. I avoided the front entrance – white pseudo-Colonial columns lit by a pink neon sign – and went up the driveway at the side. It curved around the back, past the closed doors of the garage, and led me to the rear door. Callahan was smoking a cigarette just outside the door, his big hat brushing the edge of the brown canvas canopy. A pungent odor drifted through the open door and disinfected the twilight.
He showed me the palm of his hand in salutation. “Well, we found your man. He’s not much good to anybody, in his condition.”
“Drowned?”
“Sure looks like it. Doc McCutcheon’s coming over to do an autopsy on him soon as he can. Right now he’s delivering a baby. So we don’t lose any population after all.” A smile cracked his weathered face as dry heat cracks the earth. “Want to take a look at the corpus?”
“I might as well. Where did you find him?”
“On the beach, down south of Sanctuary. There’s a southerly current along here, about a mile an hour. The wind blew the boat in fast, but Tarantine was floating low in the water and the current drifted him further south before the tide brought him in. That’s how I figure it.” His butt pinwheeled into the gathering darkness, and he turned toward the door.
I followed him into a low deep room walled with bare concrete blocks. Five or six wheeled tables with old-fashioned marble tops stood against the walls. All but one were empty. Callahan switched on a green-shaded lamp that hung above the occupied table. A pair of men’s feet, one of them shoeless, protruded from under the white cotton cover. Callahan pulled the cover off with a sweeping showman’s gesture.
Joe Tarantine had been roughly used by the sea. It was hard to believe that the battered, swollen face had once been handsome, as people said. There was white sand in the curled black hair and white sand on the eyeballs. I peered into the gaping mouth. It was packed with wet brown sand.
“No foam,” I said to Callahan. “Are you sure he drowned?”