[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.""Then she either wanted something from you, or planned on getting somethingfrom Billy for being nice to you.Everything comes with price tags.""Tell me about her.""Not that I know a hell of a lot.Let me serve that chicken first, okay?"And it was good.She didn't get back to Millis until the bird had been reducedto bones and there were but two more glasses of Mondavi Fume Blanc left in thebottle.She looked across at me through candlelight and said, "Old Millis.If I couldtrade bodies, I'd pick hers.Absolutely flawless.All silk and ivory.Andthose strange tilty eyes of green.Perfect features.And tough clean through,Travis.There is not an ounce of mercy in there anywhere.I'll tell yousomething I probably shouldn't.I found out by accident, and I never let on Iknew.But she wangled old Billy into the sack long before Sadie died.A veryhot, very heavy affair.That's one of the reasons he took Sadie's death sohard.Pure guilt.I'd guess from what I remember of the books that Billy wouldnet out about ten to twelve million.Millis likes nice things.Millis livesfor nice things.""Background?""I do not know one damn thing for certain.This is all guesswork.And it waswell over five years ago.She hadn't been working in the office very long.Several times men stopped in the office to see her.One at a time.It made hervery angry.I had the feeling they were making demands and she was turningthem down.""What kind of men?""My old granddad would call them city slickers.Very tan men with hard eyesand Dior shirts and Gucci shoes.Men with fifty-dollar haircuts, importedconvertibles, strong aftershave, gold chains and diamond rings.Men who stayin suites and know the number to call to have girls sent up.Maybe they weremob people, labor leaders, or maybe they were important lawyers.She used toget outside phone calls too.They made her furious.""You mentioned guesswork, Annabelle.""Okay.From her clothes and her habits it was easy to guess that she had beenPage 23 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlmaking more at her previous job than she was making for working for Billy.Ithink she was involved in something that paid good money but didn't have muchof a future.So she got out of it maybe because she was scared or tired orsomething.They wanted her back, and kept after her for a little while.Butshe refused.Her office skills were rusty, but she got them back fast.Andthen she started looking around and saw Billy.A new career.""Had she been living in Lauderdale before she went to work for Ingraham?""Oh, no.Miami."About an hour later I drove her home.She had started yawning.We had agreedit had been a good evening, and we ought to try it again."Next time I'll cookDuck Annabelle," she said drowsily."Love this weird old truck of yours."She was way down the beach in one of the prehistoric condos, renting aone-bedroom job that came cheap because it was on the sixth floor and theelevators had been out of service for a year.The roof leaked badly, but that was up on the tenth floor.There were nocorridor lights, so she had to carry a flashlight in her purse.TheCondominium Association had run out of funds when the big stuff startedbreaking.The pool was full of bushes, and the landscaping was returning toits original condition of pepper bushes and palmetto.Only a third of theunits were occupied.Nobody knew who owned the empty ones, the city, thecounty, the banks or the estates of deceased retireds who'd moved into thePlaza del Rio long ago.She was anxious to get a job and move out before shegot mugged in the stairwell.It was such a sad and sorry place I was temptedto ask her to move aboard the Flush until she got her life rearranged, but Iwas not ready for complications.She was pleasant and she was fun and she wasa handsome woman, and she needed help but she wouldn't accept any.I walked her up to her door, kissed the tip of her nose and felt my way backout into the night.The book bomb kept going off in the back of my mind,ripping Horatio and Emiliano to bits.That night I dreamed I was lookingthrough a huge hole in a cement-block wall, staring in at racks and racks ofbright dresses.I heard a ticking and looked down and saw the packageaddressed to me, right in front of my bare toes.SixIF SOMEONE makes a careful and sophisticated and almost foolproof attempt tokill you and they miss, it is, as Meyer announced on Sunday, two days beforeChristmas, a reasonable assumption they will try again."Also," he said, "one can expect the next attempt to be as subtle and asdeadly as the first.You do realize, Travis, that the theft of a gift book andan explosion behind a mall may not be linked.""But I should live as though they were.""Precisely.Now let's see if we can come up with a list of people that anxiousto send you to that big marina in the sky."We discussed it for an hour and a half, and to my surprise we could come upwith but six names, and they went way back, most of them.The seventh was nota name.The seventh, in Meyer's professorial script, read: "Someone who thinksyou killed the three young people aboard the Sundowner.""Let's break that last one down," Meyer said."I say we rule out the dentist.If he thought you murdered his little girl, he might come after you with agun.But with a certain hesitation.And from what you say, the Cannon clanwould not care that much who did in their son Howard.So we have the girl fromPeru.I happen to have the clipping right here.Gigliermina Reyes y Fonseca.Adiplomat's daughter.Both those G's are pronounced as hard G's, as in'begin.'""Thank you.""But the contemporary nickname is usually with soft G's.Gigi.You'rewelcome."Page 24 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html"There were the three little men in business suits who came to Billy to findout who found his boat.Latins.Two didn't have any English, apparently.Whywould they want to know?"Meyer went into meditation for several minutes.He finally said, "We can playwith another variation, Travis.Boat owner hires man to get boat back any wayhe can, and punish those who took it.You will say that it would be out ofcharacter for Billy Ingraham to give that kind of an order, and out ofcharacter for you to follow through if he did.Yet, in certain circles, thatwould be standard operating procedure.It might be difficult for them toimagine any other response to theft.""Then Billy would be a target too.""If they assume you were following his orders.You would be a hireling, asecondary target.""Aren't we getting pretty fancy?""In testing any hypothesis, one useful method is to carry it to the ultimatelimits of absurdity and find out if it still hangs together.This scenarioassumes that Gigliermina was well connected with powerful people in Peru, andthey are not concerned with degrees of intention or degrees of guilt.The girlis dead and vengeance requires that anyone who had anything to do with herdeath be killed.""By a diplomat?!""By someone anxious to do him big favors.""Okay.But back up a little, Meyer, damn it.Somebody did kill the three ofthem.See how absurd this is, for example.They came back from Yucatan withcocaine.Free-lance.He had some kind of contact, and he phoned from the gasstation across the road from the Starfish Marina.He set up a meet, andsomebody came with the money to buy it.Cannon or the NicBride girl noticedthat it was funny money, and that turned it into a bad scene.""But from your description, Travis, it looked more as if the three aboard weretrying to buy something with that money.It was discovered and they rammed itinto his mouth [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.""Then she either wanted something from you, or planned on getting somethingfrom Billy for being nice to you.Everything comes with price tags.""Tell me about her.""Not that I know a hell of a lot.Let me serve that chicken first, okay?"And it was good.She didn't get back to Millis until the bird had been reducedto bones and there were but two more glasses of Mondavi Fume Blanc left in thebottle.She looked across at me through candlelight and said, "Old Millis.If I couldtrade bodies, I'd pick hers.Absolutely flawless.All silk and ivory.Andthose strange tilty eyes of green.Perfect features.And tough clean through,Travis.There is not an ounce of mercy in there anywhere.I'll tell yousomething I probably shouldn't.I found out by accident, and I never let on Iknew.But she wangled old Billy into the sack long before Sadie died.A veryhot, very heavy affair.That's one of the reasons he took Sadie's death sohard.Pure guilt.I'd guess from what I remember of the books that Billy wouldnet out about ten to twelve million.Millis likes nice things.Millis livesfor nice things.""Background?""I do not know one damn thing for certain.This is all guesswork.And it waswell over five years ago.She hadn't been working in the office very long.Several times men stopped in the office to see her.One at a time.It made hervery angry.I had the feeling they were making demands and she was turningthem down.""What kind of men?""My old granddad would call them city slickers.Very tan men with hard eyesand Dior shirts and Gucci shoes.Men with fifty-dollar haircuts, importedconvertibles, strong aftershave, gold chains and diamond rings.Men who stayin suites and know the number to call to have girls sent up.Maybe they weremob people, labor leaders, or maybe they were important lawyers.She used toget outside phone calls too.They made her furious.""You mentioned guesswork, Annabelle.""Okay.From her clothes and her habits it was easy to guess that she had beenPage 23 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.htmlmaking more at her previous job than she was making for working for Billy.Ithink she was involved in something that paid good money but didn't have muchof a future.So she got out of it maybe because she was scared or tired orsomething.They wanted her back, and kept after her for a little while.Butshe refused.Her office skills were rusty, but she got them back fast.Andthen she started looking around and saw Billy.A new career.""Had she been living in Lauderdale before she went to work for Ingraham?""Oh, no.Miami."About an hour later I drove her home.She had started yawning.We had agreedit had been a good evening, and we ought to try it again."Next time I'll cookDuck Annabelle," she said drowsily."Love this weird old truck of yours."She was way down the beach in one of the prehistoric condos, renting aone-bedroom job that came cheap because it was on the sixth floor and theelevators had been out of service for a year.The roof leaked badly, but that was up on the tenth floor.There were nocorridor lights, so she had to carry a flashlight in her purse.TheCondominium Association had run out of funds when the big stuff startedbreaking.The pool was full of bushes, and the landscaping was returning toits original condition of pepper bushes and palmetto.Only a third of theunits were occupied.Nobody knew who owned the empty ones, the city, thecounty, the banks or the estates of deceased retireds who'd moved into thePlaza del Rio long ago.She was anxious to get a job and move out before shegot mugged in the stairwell.It was such a sad and sorry place I was temptedto ask her to move aboard the Flush until she got her life rearranged, but Iwas not ready for complications.She was pleasant and she was fun and she wasa handsome woman, and she needed help but she wouldn't accept any.I walked her up to her door, kissed the tip of her nose and felt my way backout into the night.The book bomb kept going off in the back of my mind,ripping Horatio and Emiliano to bits.That night I dreamed I was lookingthrough a huge hole in a cement-block wall, staring in at racks and racks ofbright dresses.I heard a ticking and looked down and saw the packageaddressed to me, right in front of my bare toes.SixIF SOMEONE makes a careful and sophisticated and almost foolproof attempt tokill you and they miss, it is, as Meyer announced on Sunday, two days beforeChristmas, a reasonable assumption they will try again."Also," he said, "one can expect the next attempt to be as subtle and asdeadly as the first.You do realize, Travis, that the theft of a gift book andan explosion behind a mall may not be linked.""But I should live as though they were.""Precisely.Now let's see if we can come up with a list of people that anxiousto send you to that big marina in the sky."We discussed it for an hour and a half, and to my surprise we could come upwith but six names, and they went way back, most of them.The seventh was nota name.The seventh, in Meyer's professorial script, read: "Someone who thinksyou killed the three young people aboard the Sundowner.""Let's break that last one down," Meyer said."I say we rule out the dentist.If he thought you murdered his little girl, he might come after you with agun.But with a certain hesitation.And from what you say, the Cannon clanwould not care that much who did in their son Howard.So we have the girl fromPeru.I happen to have the clipping right here.Gigliermina Reyes y Fonseca.Adiplomat's daughter.Both those G's are pronounced as hard G's, as in'begin.'""Thank you.""But the contemporary nickname is usually with soft G's.Gigi.You'rewelcome."Page 24 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html"There were the three little men in business suits who came to Billy to findout who found his boat.Latins.Two didn't have any English, apparently.Whywould they want to know?"Meyer went into meditation for several minutes.He finally said, "We can playwith another variation, Travis.Boat owner hires man to get boat back any wayhe can, and punish those who took it.You will say that it would be out ofcharacter for Billy Ingraham to give that kind of an order, and out ofcharacter for you to follow through if he did.Yet, in certain circles, thatwould be standard operating procedure.It might be difficult for them toimagine any other response to theft.""Then Billy would be a target too.""If they assume you were following his orders.You would be a hireling, asecondary target.""Aren't we getting pretty fancy?""In testing any hypothesis, one useful method is to carry it to the ultimatelimits of absurdity and find out if it still hangs together.This scenarioassumes that Gigliermina was well connected with powerful people in Peru, andthey are not concerned with degrees of intention or degrees of guilt.The girlis dead and vengeance requires that anyone who had anything to do with herdeath be killed.""By a diplomat?!""By someone anxious to do him big favors.""Okay.But back up a little, Meyer, damn it.Somebody did kill the three ofthem.See how absurd this is, for example.They came back from Yucatan withcocaine.Free-lance.He had some kind of contact, and he phoned from the gasstation across the road from the Starfish Marina.He set up a meet, andsomebody came with the money to buy it.Cannon or the NicBride girl noticedthat it was funny money, and that turned it into a bad scene.""But from your description, Travis, it looked more as if the three aboard weretrying to buy something with that money.It was discovered and they rammed itinto his mouth [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]