"Bulls.h.i.t. You"re the chauffeur."
"They didn"t move him by car."
"How?"
"Ambulance."
"That"s a lie. The last thing that Baglio wants is a public record of that man"s injuries. The police come nosing around a hospital, our man might find it to his advantage to spill the beans about Tuesday"s caper. Baglio doesn"t want anyone to know about those biweekly shipments of cash."
"It was a private ambulance," the turkey squawked. He looked, just a little, as if he were beginning to be afraid, a patently manufactured fear.
"What"s that got to do with anything?"
"They didn"t necessarily take him to a hospital."
"Where, then?"
"I don"t know."
"The whole story"s a lie," Harris said. He had entered the room without Tucker hearing him, and he stood beside Tucker"s chair, the machine gun pointed directly at Deffer.
Deffer swallowed hard. Maybe he really did respect something as heavy as the Thompson. It was impossible to be certain.
"You questioned the Halversons?" Tucker asked.
"Not yet." Harris jabbed the gun toward Deffer. "But, friend, this old crock would lie to G.o.d and the angels. A whole life working for the organization, for Baglio? He"d have long ago forgot what truth is."
"I think you"re right," Tucker said. "Our man"s still in the house-or dead."
"I want to talk to you about that possibility," Harris said. He was still red-faced, still sweating.
"In a minute," Tucker said. "First, I have to make Grandpa secure."
"Takes much less than a minute," Harris said. He stepped forward, shifting his grip on the Thompson, and slammed the heavy metal hip rest of the gun into the underside of Deffer"s chin. The old man gagged, flopped once and lay still. A light foam of blood frosted his wrinkled lips, and a spreading bruise the color of grape juice seeped out from his chin, sent stains down his thin neck.
"That wasn"t necessary," Tucker said.
"He didn"t have any teeth to lose, friend," Harris said. He was using the "friend" much too often, further on the edge than he had ever been before.
"I was going to tie and gag him."
Harris looked at the old man, prodded him with the barrel of the machine gun and said, "He"s only unconscious. He"ll stay completely out of the way and this saved us time."
Tucker got out of his chair and felt the quivering weakness behind his knees again. "You said you wanted to talk."
"I do," Harris said. He crossed to the window, looked out, turned, sidestepped and leaned against the wall. Still in a whisper, he said, "What if Bachman talked? What if they killed him?"
"Then we get out of here and go to ground for a while, until they"ve given up on us."
Harris shook his head violently. "No. I can"t afford that. I"ve got nothing to show for this job, and I needed the cash. I have another idea altogether."
Tucker knew what it was, but he asked anyway.
"If they got it out of Bachman, got anything at all out of him, we"ll have to kill Baglio, maybe Deffer-maybe the guard downstairs."
"What about the girl, Miss Loraine?"
Harris looked genuinely perplexed. "What about her?"
"Baglio"s sleeping with her," Tucker explained patiently. "He"s a fifty-year-old man, and she isn"t half that. She"s one h.e.l.l of a looker, the kind of chick who sometimes engenders grat.i.tude in a man that old. It"s possible that he could think of her as more than just another lay-that he might be telling her more about his affairs than he should. Other men have been known to make fools of themselves in the same manner."
Harris thought about it a moment, his deep-set eyes sinking even deeper. He said, "I don"t like it-but we kill her too if we have to."
"The Halversons?"
"They wouldn"t know anything," Harris said confidently. "A man like Baglio wouldn"t be blabbing his business to the maid and butler."
"Handyman."
"Whatever."
Tucker shook his head sadly and went to the bed, took Deffer"s pulse and checked his breathing. He began to tear the pillowcase apart to make strips of binding. He said, "Pete, you"re in a bad way. I recommend retirement as soon as possible."
"You do, huh?"
Tucker nodded, not bothering to look at him, hoping to avoid a show of temper that way. He began to tie Deffer"s ankles together. "If you kill Baglio and the others, this becomes a police affair. This greasepaint doesn"t make us invisible. It would have been enough to thwart any search that Baglio might be able to mount; but the police, when they get the descriptions from the Halversons and from Keesey, are going to be able to match those to your photograph where it appears in about a million" mug books. That"s a small chance of discovery, admittedly, but large enough to worry about. You want to kill everyone in the house, then, even the maid and the handyman?"
Harris softly cleared his throat and stood away from the wall, though he couldn"t think of anything to say. He had made a fool of himself in front of Tucker. He couldn"t afford that.
Tucker flopped Deffer onto his stomach, got his hands behind him and tied them in place, rolled him onto his back again. Even if the old man"s throat permitted him to speak in more than a whisper when he regained consciousness, there did not seem to be any need to gag him. By the time he came to, everyone in the house would already know the place had been breached.
"Still" Harris said at last, trying to break the silence.
"Even if you kill everyone in the house," Tucker interrupted, "how do you know Baglio hasn"t communicated what Bachman told him to others, maybe to that dandified accountant, Chaka? If he did, all your killing"s for nothing."
"A flaw in your reasoning," Harris said. "This is already a police affair. The guard you shot makes it that."
"Bulls.h.i.t, and you know it," Tucker said. "Baglio will get his own doctor to fix his boy up."
Harris knew that, but he still wouldn"t let go of it. "I can"t afford to go to ground for a year, dammit."
Because he had to get Harris off the subject, Tucker said, "Maybe by the time we leave here you"ll have a bankroll to last you for a year or even longer."
"How?"
"Wait," Tucker said, because he had no real answer.
They left Deffer"s room, turning off the lights and closing the door behind them.
Jimmy Shirillo was waiting with the Halversons. He was standing just inside their door, while they were sitting up against the bra.s.s headboard of their bed, bound and gagged, their hands tied to the bra.s.s bars behind them. She was thin and somewhat pretty, though with the sagging look about the eyes that indicated a woman wearied and almost beaten by life. Her husband, a tall, thin, sallow-faced man with bushy eyebrows and ears that looked as if they had been grafted from a hound, had been weathered even worse by the years, servile and eager to please. And terrified.
"Questions?" Shirillo asked.
Tucker looked at the Halversons again and saw exactly what Keesey had meant. "No questions. If they even know what Baglio is, I"d be amazed. I have a feeling our man could have been kept in this house for the last month without these two ever being aware of it,"
Shirillo nodded. "They were so obliging, I thought they were going to tie each other up."
"Let"s check out the rest of the rooms on this side," Tucker said. "Just to be safe."
In the last two rooms in that smaller of the mansion"s two wings, they found proof that both Keesey and Deffer had lied to them: two used bedrooms with full closets. A cursory examination of each was enough to convince Tucker that two more gunmen were up and about and currently unaccounted for.
"I wouldn"t have guessed the cook would lie to us," Harris said. He had pocketed his Luger and was using his free hand to caress the sleek lines of the machine gun.
"He did, though," Tucker said. "And when Deffer mentioned more than two guards, I thought he was lying."
"But where are they?" Harris asked. Anxiously he turned to face the unlighted stairwell, the long arm of the corridor, then the short one.
Shirillo said, "They have to be outside yet." He wasn"t ruffled at all. He had surprised himself, and Tucker, with the degree of his adaptability. If Harris became unreliable, Tucker would still be able to count on Shirillo.
"They must have seen us," Harris insisted. His voice was coa.r.s.e, unsteady. "The way we"ve been turning the lights off and on in this place, anyone outside would-"
"We haven"t, really," Shirillo said. "We"ve mostly used the flashlight, and the draperies would block that much from a man outside. The only places we used ceiling lights were the art room, storage room and the Halversons" bedroom. The first two don"t have any windows, and the third alone wouldn"t necessarily arouse suspicion. I think the guards must be behind the house; that"s why I"m eliminating what lights we turned on in the front rooms."
Good. Clean, reasoned thought. Tucker knew, if they got out of here, he"d use Shirillo again, on another job. To Harris, whom he knew he would never use again, he said, "I agree with Jimmy."
"Well, friends, even if this is true, it doesn"t change anything. Even if those two loose guards don"t know we"re in the house, they"re still down there, below us. Any time now they might go off duty or step inside for a cup of coffee, and when they do it"s over." The last couple of words came out of his throat like juice squeezed through a fine-web strainer.
"On the other hand," Tucker said, "we might get finished before they know anything at all."
"Unlikely," Harris said. He revised that opinion: "Impossible."
Tucker said, "Just the same, our best chance is to be quick, to get this done and call in the copter. Let"s go see Mr. Baglio."
They turned off the lights in the Halversons" room and closed the door, went quickly to the main stairs, where Tucker stopped and turned to Harris. "Stay here with the Thompson. You"re in a good position to guard the stairs- even the back stairs if anyone enters the corridor from those."
"Give me a walkie-talkie?"
"You won"t need one," Tucker said. "Not if there"s trouble. We"ll hear the Thompson chatter no matter where we are."
"Okay," Harris said.
He stepped back into the shadows. For such a big man he was able to conceal himself well, was all but invisible.
Quickly, then, Tucker and Shirillo split up and explored all of the remaining rooms except the one in which -according to Keesey-Baglio and Miss Loraine were sleeping. Finding nothing worthwhile in any of those rooms-certainly not a sign of Merle Bachman-they met before the last door, tried the k.n.o.b, twisted it, pushed the door inward and flicked on the beam of the flashlight.
For a long moment Tucker thought that the bedroom was uninhabited and that Keesey had been lying to them again, for everything there remained in sepulchral silence. Then the mound of jumbled bedclothes, cut across with an intricate lacework of shadows, convulsed and was flung outward from the huge bed as the woman reacted to the light, rolled, bounced onto her feet, her face taut, not unlike a groggy fighter coming out of a delirium with the sudden realization that he"s on the verge of unconsciousness and may lose the match.
"What the h.e.l.l"s this?" she asked.
She was wearing a floor-length flannel nightgown, rumpled and worn and obviously comfortable. It was a sign that her relationship with Baglio was more than a temporary one. If she"d merely been a bed partner, she"d have slept nude or in a frilly bikini outfit calculated to make a man like Baglio keep her around awhile longer. The flannel nightgown was a symbol of her independence and her security within the Baglio household. She didn"t need to advertise her s.e.xuality. She was confident that Baglio was always aware of it and that something more than that was what made her interesting to him.
Her hands were out at her sides, as if she were trying to gauge her position and the chance she had of running past them.
"No chance at all," Tucker said.
Shirillo said, "Watch Baglio!"
The strongman had gotten out of bed on the far side and was reaching into the top drawer of the night stand. As he came up with a small, heavy pistol, Tucker placed a shot in the general direction of his hand. He didn"t care if he ruined Baglio"s golf grip for life; but as it happened, he didn"t hit flesh. The silenced shot snapped off the pistol case. Baglio cried out and dropped the gun.
The woman was still unconvinced and took a couple of steps toward the door. When Tucker put two more bullets in the floor a foot in front of her, she stopped cold, having more fully a.s.sessed the situation, and she satisfied herself with glaring at him.
Even in the yellow flannel she was a spectacularly lovely woman, and she reminded him of Elise Ramsey. The resemblance wasn"t really one of looks or measurements; but Miss Loraine had Elise"s way of standing, her att.i.tude of self-control, an air of confidence and competence that was undeniably attractive. It was this about her which had temporarily mesmerized him so that he hadn"t noticed Baglio going for the gun.
On the other side of the bed, Baglio, dressed in only a pair of blue shorts, was rubbing his numbed hand. He said, "You could have hit me, you idiot." He sounded like a schoolteacher reprimanding a thoughtless and irresponsible child.
"No chance," Tucker said. "I"m an excellent shot." He did not know if Baglio would believe that anyone could have planned to hit the gun in that dark room, with that much s.p.a.ce between them, with a silenced pistol, but he didn"t think it would hurt to puff himself. "Don"t get the idea I"m shy about putting one through your hand if you reach for anything else."
"I don"t know what you"re after," Baglio said, unaffected by Tucker"s bravura. "But you"ve made a mistake breaking into my house. Have you any idea who I am?" A real schoolteacher.
"The famous Rossario Baglio," Tucker said. "Now, come along with us."
Baglio was responding to the situation with admirable aplomb, not at all frightened by the hooded, greasepainted specters carrying silenced pistols and not the least humiliated at being caught in his shorts. He"d already figured out who they were, in a general sense, and knew the threat they posed wasn"t mortal. And he had less to be ashamed of about his body than most men fifteen years his junior: from his wide shoulders to his loose-skinned but relatively flat stomach he was in good shape; evidently he made use of the swimming pool, sauna and gymnasium in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Too, the Loraine woman would give him a strong motivation for staying fit. It was also the woman, Tucker decided, who helped Baglio meet the situation with so much cool: a man hated to be made a fool of in front of a woman he"d been bedding.
Baglio said, "Come along with you-where?"
"Across the hall."
"As soon as I dress," Baglio said, starting for the closet. He carried himself well, his back straight, head high. If he had had time to drag a comb through his silvery hair, he would almost have been presentable enough for a stint on nationwide television-perhaps as a Presidential candidate.
"No time for that," Tucker said.
In the study across the hall, Shirillo pulled out two st.u.r.dy straight-backed chairs and placed them side by side in the middle of the room, indicated them with the barrel of his Luger and stood out of the way as the couple sat down.
"You still haven"t explained yourselves," Baglio said. He continued to be the schoolteacher: lips tight, eyes grim, nostrils flared a bit in indignation. He was going to give them detention minutes if they didn"t shape up d.a.m.n soon.
"We"re looking for a friend," Tucker said.
"I don"t understand."
Miss Loraine laughed slightly, though Tucker couldn"t tell whether the laugh was directed at him or Baglio. Or at herself.
"He was in the car Tuesday morning," Tucker said. "The driver."
Miss Loraine looked up and smiled, not nastily, not as a friend either but as if in remembered pleasure of that collision, as if the excitement still lingered and still touched all the right pleasure centers in the brain.
"I"m sorry you came this far for so little," Baglio said.
"Oh?"