Chinaman’s Chance
- Автор: Томас Росс
- Серия: Arthur Case Wu #1
- Год: 1978
- Язык: английский
- Год: Simon & Schuster
- ISBN: 978-0-671-24070-7
- Жанр: Политические детективы
Электронная книга - «Chinaman’s Chance». Краткое содержание книги:
“And that was the evening?”
“Yeah, that was it. A good time was had by all and delicious refreshments were served. I came away with the impression that I’d just been had. I think he must have studied charm the way I studied electronics — except that he’s better in his field than I am in mine, and I’m not exactly a slouch.”
“A charming recluse?”
“It’s a paradox, isn’t it?”
Durant nodded. “It would seem so. What’d your wife think?”
“Well, we weren’t married then. This was back in ’70. But she thought that if she ever needed her throat cut, she would go to him because he would not only know how to do it, he would also make her enjoy it.”
Durant lit a cigarette, his third for the morning. “You said you saw him once again.”
Piers nodded slowly and then drank some more coffee. “The end of 1970. Down in Miami. I went down to claim Ivory’s body. Neither Lace nor Silk could face it, so I went. He showed up. He and Ivory’d split by then, but he was there anyway. He wanted to see her. He also wanted me to go with him. Well, what the hell, I did. He went in and looked at her. I waited for him outside. Ivory wasn’t very pretty by then. She’d quit eating, and the dope and the horrors had finally got to her.
“Well, when he came out he was crying. He wasn’t sobbing or anything, but he was crying in this quiet, dignified manner. I don’t know. Maybe he learned how to do it in charm school. But, by God, he did it well. He told me that he wanted Ivory’s body. He wanted to take it back and bury it at his place in Bel Air. I told him that that wouldn’t be possible because the sisters had already made arrangements to bury her in the family plot in Arkansas next to her mother and father. He nodded as if that were perfectly understandable. He was still crying, but not apologizing for it or anything.
“Then he asked if I knew what the police had found out. Well, I told him that they thought Ivory had bought some bad dope off a Cuban bellhop who worked in the hotel she’d stayed at. But they didn’t have any proof. He nodded as if he found that sort of interesting, but not terribly, and then we shook hands, and that’s the last time I ever saw him. But there’s a postscript.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Two days later they fished that Cuban bellhop out of the ocean. He’d had his throat cut. Then there’s the post-postscript.”
“What?”
“Two weeks after they buried Ivory in Arkansas, somebody dug her up and made off with the body. You like it?”
Durant shook his head slowly. “Not much.”
“Neither did Silk. She wanted to raise all sorts of hell until Lace and I talked her out of it.”
“So he’s a sentimentalist.”
“Or weird.”
“Maybe both,” Durant said. “What about his Washington connections?”
The question surprised Piers, and his face showed it. His eyebrows went up and his mouth turned down at the corners. “I hadn’t heard,” he said. “Are there any?”
“There’s a rumor, but it’s pretty low-grade stuff.”
“Where’d you hear it?”
“The name wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
A new expression slid across Piers’s face, one that was both skeptical and wary, “You spend one day down in Pelican Bay and you come back talking about a mob boss and his Washington connections. Is that really possible?”
“Anything’s possible. We’re just looking for your sister-in-law, but to do that we have to poke around to find out where to look. Any objections?”
Piers rose. “None. I’m not paying you to be orthodox.” He started for the door, but paused. “By the way, when my wife was here the other day, did you make a pass at her?”
Durant examined Piers for several moments before replying. There was something in Piers’s eyes, Durant thought. A sadness perhaps. Finally, Durant said, “No.”
“I guess that’s what she was complaining about.” He grinned then, but not very merrily. “She likes to play little games like that,” he said, “I wouldn’t take her too seriously, if I were you.”
Durant kept his expression grave. “I’ll try to remember that.”
By seven o’clock that morning Randall Piers was seated behind his desk in his combination library-office-study. Before him was a three-page, single-spaced memorandum from his executive assistant, Hart Ebsworth. The memorandum was entitled RUNDOWN — DURANT AND WU. Piers picked up a blue pencil and circled one paragraph consisting of four lines. He then picked up his phone, pressed a button, and said, “Come on in.”
Ebsworth came in and took his usual seat. Piers slid the memorandum across to him. Ebsworth glanced through it and said, “The paragraph you circled?”
“Right.”
“Early ’70 until early ’72. When they came back to Bangkok from Florida and Durant got his scars.”
“Yeah,” Piers said. “It’s a little sketchy there.”
“You want more.”
Piers nodded. “I want it all.”
Ebsworth leaned back in his chair and sighed. “It’ll cost. And I don’t mean money, either.”
“Get it,” Piers said.
Chapter 16
Because it was Saturday the traffic was light, and they made it from Malibu to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in a little under thirty minutes, which may have set some kind of record. Artie Wu drove the way he always did — with what Durant usually thought of as wild abandon. When Wu drove, Durant kept his eyes closed much of the way.
He opened them once just in time to see Wu fake out a white Rolls-Royce at the corner of San Vicente and Gretna Green. Durant caught a glimpse of the Rolls’s driver, open mouthed and apoplectic, as Wu whipped the big Chrysler past with not much more than a quarter of an inch to spare.
Durant closed his eyes again and said, “I think you hit him.”
“I didn’t hit him.”
“You nicked him.”
“Never.”
His eyes still closed, Durant said, “Your driving—”
Wu interrupted. “Don’t tell me again.”
“It’s just that I’ve come up with a theory that might explain it.”
“What?”
“Somewhere in your ancestry, and not too far back, there must have been some Chinese bandits.”
Artie Wu nodded as though pleased by the suggestion. “Yeah,” he said, “I’d like to think so, anyway. You know how you drive?”
“I’m an excellent driver,” Durant said. “No, not excellent. Superb.”
“Bullshit. You toodle along like it’s always Sunday morning and you’re early for church.”
“But I get there.”
“We’ll get there. On time, too.”
“He does like promptness, doesn’t he? Probably a fetish.”
“Along with his bow ties.”
“At least he ties them himself.”
“Yeah,” Wu said. “There’s that.”
Wu covered the next four miles in a little less than seven minutes and they arrived at the Beverly Wilshire at three minutes until nine. Wu turned into the drive that separated the new section of the hotel from the old and handed the car over to an attendant.
“He’s in the old section, I bet,” Durant said.
“Where else?”
They got out of the elevator on the sixth floor and turned left, heading down the richly carpeted hall toward the suite numbered 61719.
“You know, I read somewhere that they’ve got a rating system in this hotel,” Wu said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. If you’re almost somebody, or at least make out like you are, you get fresh flowers in your room. But if you really are somebody, which means that maybe you got your name on Cronkite once, then they send up a bottle of champagne. I don’t remember whether it’s French or not.”