Whisper Death Read online

  The thought was too absurd to pursue. And yet too credible to ignore.

  The phone rang as he passed it.

  “You sitting on this damn thing?” Ollie demanded when McGuire answered on the first ring.

  “Practically.” McGuire collapsed on the bed, wedged the receiver against his ear and picked up his notebook from the night table. “What’ve you got?”

  “Something that could be a coincidence but probably isn’t,” Ollie answered. “Matt Kennedy tried a different route on this Amos character, through archive records instead of active files. Still couldn’t track anything down for the past twenty years, but he learned Amos had a military career. Where’d you say this Crawford guy was stationed when he was in the army?”

  McGuire leaned across the bed and retrieved Bunker Crawford’s file, which had been under his notebook. “Nevada,” he said as he flipped through copies of official documents. “Yeah, here it is. Twenty-third Division . . .”

  “Mercury, Nevada.” The two men said the words in unison, each an echo of the other.

  “Son of a bitch.” McGuire slapped the folder closed. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t go feeling for your fly before the lady says yes, Joseph,” Ollie cautioned. “This Amos character, he might still have been postal security. Even the archive files don’t go past 1970. All we know is he and Crawford were stationed in the same unit in the same area of the same state at the same time. So maybe he decided to drop in and see his old buddy, since they’re still working for Uncle Sam.”

  “What was Amos’s rank back then?”

  McGuire heard Ollie query his wife and Ronnie reply. He pictured them together in the house at Revere Beach, Ollie speculating about possibilities and connections, Ronnie operating the computer at the desk in the corner.

  “Colonel,” Ollie Schantz finally replied. “He was a full colonel at the time.”

  “And Crawford was a two-bit corporal. Since when does an army colonel call on a guy he probably never ate with, drank beer with or slept in the same room with, after twenty years?”

  “Possible, Joseph, possible. Anyway, we lose Amos after he transferred from Mercury.”

  “To where?”

  “Some place in California named Twentynine Palms. That anywhere near you right now?”

  Highway 62 led north from Palm Springs into the Little San Bernardino Mountains and through a strip of fast-food restaurants, gas stations, mobile-home parks and stretches of barren, high desert. Within a mile or two of the interstate, McGuire had driven out of the dry heat and wealth of the valley into the coolness and poverty of the mountains.

  Through Morongo Valley, Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree, McGuire passed dusty trails leading into apparently empty desert coulees whose only clues to human settlement were battered mailboxes comforting each other in small groups along the shoulders of the highway.

  Just beyond Coyote Wells, a large sign announced the entrance to Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, and McGuire swung off the highway down a paved narrow road. Within a mile he reached a security gate.

  “Afternoon sir,” the young MP greeted McGuire, his eyes scanning the interior of the car. Two other MPs, pearl-handled Colt .45 automatic pistols strapped on their hips, watched from the armoured guardhouse. McGuire wanted to tell them to drop the macho nonsense with the pearl-handled pistols. The Colts were overly heavy, notoriously inaccurate and prone to jamming, favoured only for the he-man presence they suggested. “May I ask your destination please, sir?” the MP said with pronounced politeness.

  “I’m looking for a Colonel Amos,” McGuire replied. “Ross Amos.”

  “And may I ask to see any papers authorizing entrance onto the base, sir?”

  McGuire removed his ID folder and showed it to the young soldier. “I’m here on a civilian matter on behalf of the Boston Police Department,” McGuire replied.

  The MP scribbled McGuire’s name and badge number on a sheet of paper fastened to his clipboard. “One moment please, sir,” he replied crisply, and returned to the guardhouse, where he spoke briefly on a telephone. The other MPs watched McGuire with moderately hostile expressions.

  “I have no record of a Colonel Amos on the base, sir,” the MP stated when he returned. “Is there someone else you might care to see?”

  “How about your director of intelligence?” McGuire asked.

  The phone in the guardhouse rang. One of the MPs answered it.

  “That would be Major Vander Hagen, sir. One moment, please.”

  The soldier in the guardhouse spoke in monosyllables into the telephone and grew noticeably more alert with each response, his eyes on McGuire. He replaced the receiver just as the first MP entered and spoke to the two other men. The MP who had been on the telephone joined the first soldier and both approached McGuire’s car; one remained several paces away and unbuttoned his hip holster to rest a hand on the Colt’s pistol grip, his thumb on the safety release.

  “I regret that Major Vander Hagen is not available at the moment, sir,” the MP said at McGuire’s window. He was positioned a step or two further away than he had been before, and his voice had acquired the hard edge of an impatient traffic cop. “If you care to leave a number where you can be contacted, the major will make an appointment at a later date, sir.”

  “No Colonel Amos?” McGuire asked.

  “No sir,” the MP barked.

  “And no record that he ever served here?”

  “I have no information to that effect, sir.”

  McGuire stared back at the soldier, trying to read anything beyond aloofness and veiled aggression in the MP’s eyes.

  “You can turn around in this area to the right, sir,” the first MP advised. His partner remained alert; the third MP, McGuire noticed, was speaking on the telephone.

  McGuire made a U-turn and headed back to the highway. In his rearview mirror he watched one of the soldiers write the car’s licence number on a pad of paper.

  “Cover the ground,” Ollie Schantz would tell McGuire in the first stages of a homicide investigation. “Walk where the victim walked and you’ll be walking with the murderer. Just keep your eyes open, your mind clear and your ass low.”

  McGuire didn’t know what he might have found at Twentynine Palms. Nor what he would have said to an intelligence officer had he gained entry. He just wanted to cover the ground. But he had touched some kind of nerve with his inquiry about Colonel Ross Amos.

  “I don’t know what the hell they have in there,” McGuire muttered to himself an hour later as he began again the long descent to the floor of the Coachella Valley, “but it sure isn’t postal inspectors.”

  Back in his motel room, McGuire called the hospital and was told that there was no change in Ralph’s condition.

  He walked out of his room into the velvety southern California evening, descended the stairs, turned to his left to check the room numbers, then doubled back until he found a door displaying several Palm Springs Police Department business cards stuck on with tape.

  He knocked, and the door opened far enough to reveal a suspicious white eye in a startling black face watching McGuire.

  “What do you want?” The man’s voice sounded like he was speaking from the bottom of a dry well.

  McGuire introduced himself. “That was my partner who got it last night. I just want to know how you’re doing.”

  The door opened wider, revealing a man several inches taller than McGuire dressed in an immaculate silvery suit with white shirt and striped tie. “You’re the guy,” the detective said, looking McGuire up and down.

  “I’m what guy?” McGuire asked in an annoyed tone.

  Without replying, the detective swung the door all the way open and gestured for McGuire to step inside.

  The room had been cleared of furniture. Two police officers in short-sleeved shirts worked at telephones on portable table
s in the centre of the worn carpeting; a computer terminal glowed from the far corner where an overweight woman clattered at its keyboard and a laser printer murmured obediently from an adjoining stand. Two large easels, one depicting a layout of the murder scene, the other filled with indecipherable scribbles, stood against one wall. The room smelled of cigar smoke, fried onions and stale pizza, in spite of the best efforts of a tired air conditioner.

  “How’re we doing?” the detective repeated McGuire’s question when he closed the door behind him. “We’re doing shit. Nothing. In fact,” he added, his voice dropping an octave in tone and several decibels in volume, “right now you’re our prime suspect.”

  McGuire looked at him blankly.

  “Relax,” the detective said, and his face broke into a broad, cold smile. “A joke. I made a joke.” He thrust a hand toward McGuire. “Art Lumsden, Palm Springs Homicide. I’m here for the duration, sleeping and working. A vacation from my wife. Knocked on your door a couple of times this afternoon to introduce myself but you were out.”

  McGuire seized Lumsden’s hand and shook it. “You don’t have much, then,” he said.

  “Much?” The detective sat on one of the few chairs left in the room. “We don’t have nothing. No cartridge shells, no witnesses, no prints. Just five slugs taken from your man and the other guy. Thirty-eights, revolver, standard load. Can’t be more than one, two hundred thousand guns in the valley they’ll fit.” He pulled a small cigar from an inside pocket, lit a match and held it in front of him as he spoke. “You know what I’m gonna ask you next, don’t you?”

  “Am I sure there’s nothing I might have overlooked?” McGuire said in imitation of a bored investigating officer.

  Lumsden’s cheeks sank inwards as he lit the cigar, the match flame flaring and dying, flaring and dying. “Nice delivery,” he said, extinguishing the match with a flamboyant gesture and flipping it several feet into a wastebasket. “So.” He studied the glowing end of the cigar. “Is there?”

  “Nothing,” McGuire replied. “I’ve run it over and over in my mind. There’s not a thing.”

  “Except somebody knew where you were going and when you’d get there. He also knew he could blast away from those bushes and disappear in the confusion.”

  McGuire leaned against the wall. “Ever seen anything this slick before?”

  “Didn’t say he was slick,” Lumsden responded. “All I meant was he was good. Or maybe just lucky.”

  One of the police officers at a folding table cursed and slammed the telephone receiver down. Lumsden turned to face him and smiled indulgently.

  “How long can you run the investigation out of here if you’re not accomplishing anything?” McGuire asked.

  “Long as it looks good for the press,” Lumsden replied, turning back to McGuire.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be coordinating it downtown where everything’s handy?”

  “Naw,” Lumsden said. He held the cigar up. “Won’t let me smoke these things down there.”

  An hour later, McGuire emerged from his room freshly showered and wearing his last clean shirt. He wasn’t hungry, didn’t want a drink and had nothing new to offer Lumsden and his crew of investigators.

  But, he remembered, he had somewhere to go.

  The Palm Springs Desert Museum was located behind the city’s largest shopping centre, as though it were just another diversion to be visited along with the Gucci shop and the Cartier boutique. McGuire left his car at the far corner of the parking lot to avoid the long line of Mercedes, Rolls-Royces, Ferraris and other exotic machinery waiting for valet service at the museum’s front entrance.

  He climbed the wide steps of the sand-coloured building, thankful that his casual summer suit was just formal enough for Palm Springs, where “evening wear” meant men wore silk sports jackets over open-collar shirts and women chose gaudy flowery pantsuits.

  The guest pass was waiting for him at the reception desk as promised. He was directed through an open orientation centre, where a few general admission visitors gathered to watch the special guests walk along a stretch of red carpet into the private reception being held in the Sculpture Court.

  At the entrance, where several celebrity-watchers peered silently from the foyer through the open doors, an elderly man in tuxedo and cummerbund inspected first McGuire’s pass, then McGuire himself, before approving his entry with a nod. Inside, music hovered over a buzz of soft chatter and polite laughter. A string quartet was performing in the far corner of the court, ignored by the hundred or so guests who stood in small groups sipping wine and nibbling at canapés presented by waiters with downcast eyes.

  McGuire declined the offers of food and drink. He found an empty corner where he could watch the crowd and marvel at the expensive jewellery and slim figures of the women and the affected boredom of the men.

  Hemingway had been wrong, McGuire decided after observing the elite residents of a community structured entirely upon wealth and status. The difference between the very rich and the rest of the world was more than money. It was attitude and confidence. It was class arrogance.

  An overweight man in a lemon-coloured jacket worn over blue slacks in a complex paisley pattern minced past McGuire’s view, holding a martini at eye-level ahead of him. It certainly isn’t taste, McGuire mused.

  A small burst of polite applause sounded from the doorway and McGuire watched, amused, as the mayor of Palm Springs, a former lounge singer and comedian, entered with a stunning blonde woman perhaps half his age. As he moved through the crowd, the mayor had something to say to each person he passed, his comments punctuated with a handshake, a back slap, a ruffling of hair or a joke.

  There was a new wave of applause from the entrance. Eyes turned from the mayor to the front of the gallery; the mayor, clearly upstaged, brought his hands together once without enthusiasm before seizing a drink from a passing waiter.

  The crowd parted to make way for Glynnis Vargas, tilting their heads to whisper to each other as she passed. Donald Mercer escorted her, her arm in his, beaming at each guest in turn.

  She was the woman in the portrait again, but her raw sexuality was diluted by the formal lines of her dress and the elegance of her carriage. Her hair had been swept up on her head; diamond earrings swayed like heavy fruit as she walked, creating fire at her neck. She wore a green satiny dress which managed to be both tasteful and alluring as it moved with and against her body. Men’s eyes lingered on her a moment or two longer than necessary as she passed; women assessed her figure, seeking flaws and finding few.

  She approached the mayor, who quickly swallowed his drink and set his glass aside. They shook hands, smiled, and brushed each other’s cheeks with their lips. Mercer grasped the mayor’s hand in his, seizing the politician’s elbow with his free hand, each man laughing in turn at the other’s greeting.

  Glynnis Vargas refused a drink from a waiter, spoke to a few guests who approached her, then turned to offer a brief, silent smile across the room to McGuire.

  McGuire realized she had known he was standing there since her arrival.

  The string quartet, which had ceased abruptly when the mayor entered, resumed playing. Mozart’s music accompanied Glynnis Vargas as she walked casually in McGuire’s direction, pausing briefly to acknowledge greetings from guests as she passed.

  “I’m pleased you decided to come, Mr. McGuire,” she said, offering her hand. “I had my doubts.”

  “So did I.”

  “You seem to be enjoying the music. Are you?”

  “Very much,” McGuire replied. The mayor had separated himself from Donald Mercer, who was looking around for Glynnis. “All I seem to hear on the radio in this town is Muzak or mariachi music.”

  “Acquiring money and acquiring taste are two quite different pursuits, Mr. McGuire.” She raised her hand in response to a greeting from an elderly couple standing near a bronze repli
ca of Don Quixote, the old Spaniard’s sad eyes focused on a distant windmill. “It’s Mozart,” she continued, her eyes still sweeping the room. “His Prussian quartets. He wrote them for the king of Prussia, who was a very good amateur cellist. It must have been wonderful when men of power took time to develop a cultural facet to their lives. Most people in this room would have trouble playing a kazoo.”

  “You’re not really one of them, are you?” McGuire said. He was watching Donald Mercer edge his way across the room toward them, a drink in his hand.

  “No. I never will be entirely. Because I’m still a newcomer. And because I have different values.”

  “They seem to respect you a great deal.”

  “They respect my money and my taste,” she said, turning to look at him directly. “That’s how they measure people in this town. Nothing else matters.”

  “Didn’t think you’d be here, McGuire.” Donald Mercer unbuttoned his raw-silk jacket, revealing a pink patterned cummerbund which managed to restrain the thrust of his stomach. He swept his arm in an arc, encompassing the room, the guests and the musicians. “Well, what do you think? I’ll tell you, McGuire, you add up all the equity in this room right now and you’d have enough money to buy your own country, I swear to God.”

  “Have you seen the paintings, Mr. McGuire?” Glynnis Vargas asked, slipping her arm through his. “They are, after all, the purpose of this evening’s event. Let me show them to you. Excuse us, will you Donald?” She leaned quickly to graze Mercer’s cheek with her lips, then touch it gently with her hand as though reassuring him. “We’ll be just a moment.”

  McGuire felt the eyes of the other guests on him as they left the room together, the celebrity-watchers at the entrance parting respectfully. In the public foyer, he hesitated. “Where are the paintings?” he asked.

  “Forget them,” she replied. “They’re hideous. I want to visit my babies instead.”

  She led him through the foyer, returning the greetings of late-arriving guests. “Through here,” she said. “Beyond the natural science wing.”