Silencer (13 page)

Who was the guy? Her lover?

On the one hand that might be problematic, on the other it might be nothing. It depended on the woman. Everything depended on her.

They were embracing now, repairing whatever was damaged between them. Dansk watched the guy's hand drop to the woman's ass. An easy intimacy. Dansk wondered how her laugh would sound. He imagined smoky and sincere, something you might hear at a crowded party and it would take your attention for a moment because of its hearty, good-natured quality.

Dansk never went to parties, never received invitations.

He watched the man slip an arm round the woman's shoulders and then they kissed, which involved an awkward craning movement downwards for the guy. They went inside the house – heading for the bedroom, he imagined. He zoomed in on an image of clothes cast aside, a clasp of bodies, the hot damp flesh of love, and the smells.

He drove out of the cul-de-sac. He went through downtown Scottsdale, took a turn off the main drag and found himself in a street of art galleries. Overpriced canvasses in windows, Native American Indian influence everywhere, Navaho and Hopi art, beads and goodies plundered from the reservations.

He kept driving. The early evening sky was leaking light.

Eventually he found the place he was looking for. It was a bar called Floozies that advertized topless girls. Inside, he found a big gloomy room doing nothing in the way of business – it was too early for the topless crew. The place smelled of spilled beer and the floor wasn't clean. Typical.

McTell and Pasquale occupied a table close to the stage, which was concealed behind a silver curtain decorated with naked women. Dansk sat down near a set of spangled red drums and a Yamaha keyboard.

McTell stroked his beard and said, ‘She was at Florence for three quarters of an hour, I timed it. She drove down there on her own. I didn't see any sign of this Drumm character. She went straight inside the slammer unaccompanied.'

Dansk looked round for the bartender and couldn't find him. There was no decent service in this country any more, everything was bad manners and have-a-nice-day insincerity. He said, ‘She saw Sanchez.'

‘That a question?' McTell asked.

‘She goes down to Florence. Who else is she going to see?' He thought of the woman visiting Sanchez. So she was working up an interest. She was pursuing something she should leave alone. Too much persistence. Probably engrained in her. Her world hung by a thread and she didn't even know it. Drumm hadn't gone with her, so maybe she was just poking around on her own.

Pasquale fiddled with a paper napkin. He folded it once, then a second time, and suddenly he had a little paper animal which he set on the table. It might have been a horse or a tiger, you couldn't tell. Whatever, it was sturdy, well-made. Dansk observed Pasquale's dark suit and white open-necked shirt. He had a thick lower lip and was overweight by about 15 pounds. He had long elegant fingers and his hair was grey-yellow, with sideburns. He wore a gold pendant round his neck.

Dansk watched a guy come in and sit down behind the drums. He tapped the cymbals then cracked his knuckles one at a time. Dansk closed his eyes. Here he was in this tit and ass joint in the company of killers and a guy was cracking his knuckles, which was a sound that affected him like chalk squealing on a blackboard. Here he was sitting in a goddam drain with a sleazy curtain tattooed with nudes. He thought, This is what I do. This is how I make my nut.

McTell said, ‘Why don't we blow the whole thing off and split? Why are we hanging here anyhow? You said we had other work.'

Dansk's patience was approaching meltdown. ‘We need to know what she does, who she sees. How her behaviour might affect us. Information, Eddie. Know who you're dealing with. The more you know, the less likely an error of judgement. Suppose we split right now. Suppose we just get the fuck out. We don't have a clue what she and the cop might get up to behind our backs, do we? You see the problem?'

McTell nodded. He had a flat, almost concave forehead. He said, ‘So she saw Sanchez. What's he gonna tell her? He's gonna laugh right in her fucking face.'

Dansk, hugely irritated by the world in a general way, turned to the guy at the drums and said, ‘You intend to sit there tugging on your bones all night, fella?'

The knuckle-cracker had a weak lopsided smile. ‘What's that?'

‘That knuckle business,' Dansk said. ‘It's frankly irritating.'

‘Yeah? You got a problem with it?'

‘I won't, soon as you get out of my sight.'

The knuckle-cracker looked at Dansk. If he was contemplating a verbal come-back, whatever he saw in Dansk's eyes made him change tack. ‘OK, sorry, sorry, man. No sweat. I'll go sit on the other side of the room. Sorry.'

Dansk watched the guy slink away. The world was filled with nuisances, fringe disturbances, little whirlpools of agitation. All kinds of stuff he just didn't need.

He looked at Pasquale and McTell. They were watching him, waiting for instructions.

He said, ‘I'll work the woman myself. Pasquale, you stay in your motel and watch cartoons until I need you.'

McTell asked, ‘What about me?'

‘There's a guy in her life, find out about him. Who he is, what he does. Just go gentle, if you know how.'

‘Got it,' McTell said.

‘OK.' Dansk rose. He wandered outside into the heat. A mandarin moon was suspended in the sky. He walked to his car, remembering the way Amanda had sniffed the eucalyptus leaf. He wondered if he could change the direction of his life through some perfumed avenue.

Dream on. Once you were in this line of work there was no way out. You made your living out of the dead.

23

The restaurant in north Scottsdale was French. Rhees had suggested the place. He liked his meat rare, bloody juices swimming on the plate.

Amanda saw a misty reflection of herself in the mahogany panel behind Rhees's head. They'd made love earlier and she'd detected in him a certain restraint. He'd been tense, and the absence of his usual verbal passion bothered her. Rhees never made love silently. Speech, even whispered in the incoherent language of lovers, was integral to the act where he was concerned.

‘Are you still annoyed?' she asked.

‘Yeah, I'm still annoyed. You sneaked off to see Sanchez without telling me.'

She looked down at the remains of her saffron rice, bright yellow on the plate. ‘OK, I sneaked off. I knew you'd disapprove, so I didn't tell you I was going.'

‘Share things with me, that's all I ask.'

She rubbed the back of his hand. ‘I didn't ask for this situation, John.'

Rhees folded his napkin and placed it over the lamb bones and stared at her. ‘So why bother with it?'

‘Because it just fell in my lap and it's messy.'

‘But not your mess. You gave your word to Isabel, fine, admirable, honorable. But she quit being your responsibility as soon as the trial was finished. What were you supposed to do? Hold her hand for the rest of her life? Maybe she should have moved in with us and you could have kept an eye on her twenty-four hours a day. Besides, I seem to remember all you were going to do was talk to Bascombe. In and out, you said. Toot sweet.' Blood seeped through Rhees's napkin. ‘What did Sanchez tell you anyhow?'

‘Nothing,' she said. She hadn't described the meeting to Rhees because she knew he'd react with horror. She played with a spoon, turning it over and over, remembering the way Sanchez had acted, bringing back the disturbing shock of the moment, focusing on the violence of the encounter: Sanchez forcing her against the wall, the blow of the gun on his head, the rap of a night-stick.

She thought about his threat, and suddenly there was an underlying strata of vulnerability. Faces in this restaurant, for instance. How could she know they were harmless? For all she could tell, at least one of them might be a Sanchez operative, watching, waiting.

She stopped herself. She let Donald Scarfe's words play through her head as if they were a kind of balm.
He says things just to make your head spin. A pinch of salt
. But Sanchez returned unprompted.
Bad things come in threes
. What credence could she give Victor Sanchez's threat?

‘He's into games,' was all she finally said.

‘Did you expect anything else?'

‘Not really.'

Rhees caught a waiter's eye and asked for the dessert menu and chose a meringue basket of pears baked in sherry. Amanda wanted only coffee. The waiter came back and Rhees plunged his spoon into the dessert. She enjoyed watching him eat. He did it with gusto.

‘That's a mountain to get through, John.'

‘I somehow worked up an appetite earlier.'

Amanda said, ‘I don't understand why he hadn't been interviewed by anyone from the Program when I saw him.'

‘You're dealing with a bureaucracy.'

‘But this is a situation where you'd expect rapid response.'

‘Maybe they're talking to him even as we sit here.'

‘What I'd really like is to talk in person to somebody who works inside the Program,' she said. ‘Get some straight answers, if there are such things.'

‘You think that kind of access is possible?'

‘Anything's possible if you go at it the right way,' she said. She picked up her napkin and dabbed Rhees's lower lip. ‘You've got a stray morsel there.'

‘Yes, Mother.'

‘I can request a meeting,' she said. ‘It's not like I just drifted in off the streets and I'm sticking my nose in. I'm an interested party.'

She dropped a cube of sugar into her coffee and stirred. Rhees said, ‘Here, sample this.' He held his spoon to her lips. She tasted, found the meringue sickeningly sweet and the pears heavy on the sherry.

‘Unadulterated cholesterol,' she said.

‘Clogs the arteries. Slows the rush of blood to your head and makes you sluggish in your thinking.'

‘Which is what you want, of course.'

‘You know how I feel, Amanda.' He called for the check then went off to the men's room. He was gone a long time. When he came back they walked outside to the parking-lot. The night was filled with hot dark enclosures beyond the beacons of lamplight that streamed up into the palm trees around the restaurant. There was the illusion of an electrified oasis. She didn't care for the shadows between the lights.

Rhees said, ‘I think you're happy back in the swing again. The old pizazz. You never really wanted out of it in the first place, did you?'

‘I wouldn't be too sure,' she said.

‘You haven't forgotten that the razzmatazz comes at a price, sweetheart,' he said. ‘Just keep that in mind before you start digging deeper into this whole wretched business.'

Digging: it was what she'd been trained to do in law school. Spade and shovel, examine the debris that came out of the earth, discard what was irrelevant and store what was useful. Legal archaeology. She hooked her arm through John's and, raising her face, kissed him. She found some very slight resistance in the kiss, almost as if he were trying to distance himself from her, but then he yielded, put his arms around her and drew her against him.

24

First thing in the morning, Amanda telephoned Donald Scarfe. ‘Has Sanchez had any visitors yet?' she asked.

‘You were the last,' he replied.

‘No requests? No enquiries?'

‘None so far.'

‘That's all I wanted to know, Don. Thanks.'

‘How are you today anyway?'

‘I'm over the shock,' she said.

‘I still blame myself, Amanda.'

‘I absolve you totally, Don. I was the one that asked to go into the lion's den.'

Next, she punched in Bascombe's number.

‘I haven't had my coffee,' Bascombe told her. ‘I'm a goddam bear before that first cup.'

She was using the phone in the kitchen. The morning was rainy and humid and the long stalks of grass in the backyard buckled. A break in the weather. She liked rain.

‘Explain this, Lew,' she said. ‘Why hasn't anyone been down to see Sanchez? Has somebody at Program control overlooked the connection between Sanchez and the two allegedly “safe” witnesses?'

Bascombe said, ‘I sent the messages, Amanda. I don't have any say in the follow-up.'

‘It's not acceptable, Lew.'

‘You're speaking with your prosecutor's voice, Amanda.'

She watched Rhees, in a knee-length robe, put two slices of bread in the toaster. He poured a cup of coffee and sat at the table gazing out of the window.

‘Lew, you might be quite comfortable working away in the dark, but it isn't a situation I find conducive to my peace of mind.'

‘I'm not sure your peace of mind matters a damn to the people in Arlington,' he said.

‘Did they acknowledge your messages?'

‘We've been here before, Amanda.'

‘I understand that. I'm just not very happy. In fact, I'm pissed. I don't like the way this thing works, if it works at all.'

‘I hate it when I have to deal with shrill women first thing.'

‘I am not being shrill, Lew.'

‘Yes you are.'

‘This is like trying to get through a brick wall,' she said.

‘I can send off another message, see what happens.'

‘Make it different this time. Add this rider: the former prosecutor wants a face to face with somebody in the Witness Program admin. And I'm not kidding, Lew.'

‘You don't know what you're asking.'

‘I know exactly what I'm asking.'

‘They'll refuse.'

‘Not if you mention that I intend to raise holy hell about the whole thing.'

‘Meaning?'

She took a deep breath to ease the knot of pressure in her chest. ‘It's really simple, Lew. Galindez has already made the papers, but the story didn't say anything about how he was supposed to be in the Program, nice and safe. And Isabel hasn't made the papers at all yet. All it takes is for me to phone some avid journalist and give an in-depth, behind-the-scenes account. Big problem with the Witness Protection Program, it leaks like a goddam sieve.'