“All right, four million dollars. We’ve got a solid figure, finally. I’ve heard up to twenty, but we all know about street murderers who killed somebody for as little as forty-nine cents and a pair of shoes.” He turned to Frost, who was trying to steady himself by smoking one of his superlative cigars.
“While you’ve been sitting here have you noticed a smoky smell? I don’t mean cigar smoke.”
“No, I haven’t noticed a smoky smell.”
“Maybe it hasn’t got out here yet. Lenore took those four-million-dollar pictures out of their frames and stored them in a back room of her gallery. What else could she do with them? The whole point was to be casual about it. To take out insurance on them, to store them in a fireproof vault, she’d have to admit they were hers. Didn’t you even hear the fire sirens? The gallery just burned down. Anybody ready for another drink?”
There wasn’t much breathing going on among the principals in the room. Howie Boyle had finally become interested in what Shayne was saying.
Shayne looked at Paula. “You’ve stayed with your aunt. Did you know about these paintings?”
“No.”
“Mejia?”
“I-no.”
“Senora Alvares?”
“No, no, how should I?”
“Frost?”
“No, I did not know about these paintings.”
“Somebody’s lying,” Shayne said. He waited a tick. “And it’s you, Frost.”
NINETEEN
“For God’s sake,” Shayne burst out, “what kind of imbecile do you take me for? This whole thing turns on those cigarette cartons. I’m supposed to know my way around. I know where to buy dynamite and TNT, and I could make a pretty effective homemade bomb out of gunpowder and primer cord and a piece of pipe. But plastic? Inside a cigarette carton so nobody’d know the carton had been tampered with? And wire it to go off at exactly the right time? I’m not that good. But you’ve spent years in the black end of American intelligence. I’m sure you’ve taken a course. Not only that, you probably have access to laboratory materials. Could Lenore fake up that kind of package? Could Alvares’ wife?”
“Black intelligence,” Frost said with scorn. “Bomb laboratories. You’re a romantic.”
“You people used to brag about that cloak-and-dagger stuff,” Shayne said. “Now I’m going to make up a scenario. Scenario-that’s another one of your words. Let me know if it fits. You were probably a bright boy, Frost, all A’s in school. But in a lot of other ways you’ve always been a mess. What do you look like naked? I’m embarrassed to think about it. You never married. Until lately I think you always used whores. Whores and maids.”
Frost had gone rigid, squinting against the cigar smoke and holding his knees.
Shayne said more softly, “You served your country quietly and secretly. Whenever you managed to upset a government or buy a newspaper editor or steal some industrial secret in a brilliant way, nobody knew about it except a few of your fellow jerks in Washington. And you didn’t even earn very good money. Soon you’ll be ready to retire, and what are you going to do with yourself? Buy a four-room house on a St. Petersburg sidestreet and sit on the front porch watching the seagulls? That’s all you can afford on your government pension. I know from the way you chew those expensive cigars that you’ve been looking for a moneymaking gimmick.”
“I have not been looking for a moneymaking gimmick,” Frost said. But this denial was made with more difficulty than the others.
“It’s understandable that you’d want to find out about Alvares’ financial plans. Unlike you, he managed to put a little aside for his old age. He closed his bank accounts, and I think that must have been about the time you and the Senora started having sex.”
He waited for Frost’s sarcastic denial, but this time Frost was unable to speak. Shayne was playing him carefully, because people in Frost’s line of work tried not to make the ordinary human mistakes.
“And the Senora,” Shayne said, looking in her direction, “had exactly the same worries. After switching around for years, her husband had finally made a stable connection with an intelligent, blonde American who had the kind of figure that seldom goes with her kind of brains and talent. The Senora’s future was bleak. Alvares was sure to get kicked out of his job sooner or later, and when he could stop thinking about keeping up his political image, the son of a bitch might even divorce her. Frost might be creepy looking, and I’m sure he couldn’t be anything but mildly disgusting in bed-”
“You think you know so much-” she began.
“Augustina!” Frost snapped, glowering at her.
Shayne grinned. “Lenore thought she was hiding those purchases, but for a professional intelligence agent like Frost, with a worldwide network of sources, it must have been easy. And now Frost had one of his logical ideas. This was stolen money to begin with. Why not steal it back and retire to some suitable spot like the south of France? But time was passing, for both Frost and the Senora. They couldn’t move while Alvares was alive and in power. Now we’re coming to the murders.”
“They sabotaged the plane!” Lenore exclaimed.
“I think so, but not very well. Mejia may be able to confirm some of this. Is it true that Frost gave the new junta money and backing, and encouraged them to take over?”
Mejia said, “I am simply a policeman. But yet, it is known, he did some things.”
“That may seem like an elaborate way to commit murder, but that’s the way people like Frost work. Of course he had to sell Washington on it, and he must have been able to make out a pretty good case. The motive was simple-money. The Senora was thinking of money, too, but also of something else. At the end, her husband had the gall to bring his blonde girlfriend to Caracas and set her up more or less publicly in a rented apartment. It’s an old-fashioned situation, and she had the old-fashioned reaction-she wanted to kill them both. Frost is a professional conspirator and he was probably careful, but we’ll turn his own department loose on him, and I think they’ll be able to fill in some of these details.”
“Such as,” Frost suggested.
“Such as how much the Senora helped in the change of regime. You needed somebody on the inside, who knew his plans and when he was likely to be vulnerable. Probably you could have arranged to have him shot during the revolt, but she wanted his girl included in the same action and so she had somebody tamper with the getaway plane. You don’t need to know much about airplanes to cut an oil line.”
“You don’t know this,” Mejia pointed out to Shayne.
“Right, it’s still the scenario. When we talked this morning she asked me to tell her future. Her prospects have improved in the last couple of days. Because if Alvares had succeeded in getting off in that plane, he wouldn’t have sent her one penny from the sale of those valuable paintings. And she’s too young to stop living. If she could manage to lose a little weight she would still be an attractive woman. A fairly attractive woman. Some people don’t mind flab, when there’s money attached.”
The widow Alvares looked as though she wished she could strap Shayne into an airplane about to crash.
“Now let’s shift to the present tense,” Shayne said. “So far Frost hasn’t done anything really serious, spent some government money and handed out a few mild nudges, as he calls it. But Lenore and Alvares survived the crash, and Lenore has a scheme to get Alvares out of prison. Paula Obregon and the MIR people agree to go along with it for reasons of their own. And here the Senora gets her great idea. Why not substitute some lethal high explosive for those harmless smoke bombs and finish off what they started? Frost thinks of all the zeroes in ten or twenty million dollars. Alvares is not only still alive, he’s in prison, and Luis Mejia here is running the interrogation. Given time, Mejia might persuade him to talk about what he did with the money. He attaches electrodes to various places and wires people to a dry-cell battery, I understand, and this might have worked on Alvares. After going to all that trouble, Frost doesn’t want a crooked cop to walk off with the prizes.”
“I will not speak,” Mejia said.
“So Frost shuts himself up and makes the bombs,” Shayne went on. “Now let’s nail it down. Lenore, Paula. You’ve both been thinking. When did Frost make the switch?”
