“Learned from the blond guy I talked with at the Farmers Market.”
“And you think he killed Mickey?”
“You talked to Felton and got beat up by Franco. Mickey talked to Felton and got shot. Wouldn’t you guess Franco?”
“Yes.”
“That would seem the handle to all of this,” I said. “Old Franco.”
“Handle?”
“Yeah. We’ve spent all this time talking to people on whom we have nothing. We’ve already got Franco for kidnapping and assault. He’s probably hired help. So he has no reason to cover up for his employers if it costs him.”
“I guess that’s so. But he’s not the one I want,” Candy said. She was starting to concentrate. The shock was receding.
“Not finally,” I said. “But to get any tangle straightened out you have to find one end of the rope. Franco’s one end.”
“Okay.” Candy was frowning with interest. “Okay. I’ll buy that. Now the problem is to find him.” She was drumming her fingers softly against her thigh. “You have any thoughts on that?”
“How did you find him?” I said.
“I didn’t. He found me.”
“And Mickey?”
“I see. He found Mickey too. I’d talked to Felton, and I’ranco showed up. Mickey talked to Felton and, we assume, Franco showed up again. Are you saying I should talk to Felton again and make a target of myself?”
“You or me.”
“It shouldn’t be you,” Candy said. “Mickey wasn’t your friend. You didn’t come out here to be a what, a-”
“Sitting duck, clay pigeon, sacrificial lamb.”
She nodded. “Any of those. No. It’s my job.”
“Okay,” I said.
“No big macho talk about ‘man’s work’?”
“Nope. In fact it makes no difference. I do it, and I have to protect me and you. You do it, and I have to protect you and me.”
She stopped drumming her fingers and looked at me without expression for a moment. “Yes,” she said. She looked at me some more. “Yes, that’s true. I may not like it, but it’s the way it is. You can protect me a lot better than I can protect myself. I want to do it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I thought you would.”
She walked to the glass doors and stared out at her blue pool. Her fingers were drumming again on her thigh.
“You know, I’ve lived in this house three years and I’ll bet I’ve been in the damn pool twice.”
“When this is over,” I said, “we’ll have a victory swim.”
“When it’s over,” she said. Her back was still to me. “Christ, I wish it were over a long time ago.”
I was quiet.
“When I first came up with this story and started on it, I was so excited. Celebrity, advancement, money.” She shook her head and stared out at the pool. “Now I wish it were done. Now I have to finish it, and all it does is scare me.”
“There’s no business like show business,” I said.
She turned from the window.
“Maybe,” she said, “I’d better learn to use that gun.”
I went out to her car and got it out of the glove compartment and brought it back into her living room. She looked at it without affection. I pressed the release button and dropped the clip out. Then I ran the receiver back and popped a shell out of the chamber.
“Had a round chambered,” I said.
“If you’re going to teach me anything,” Candy said, “you’ll have to speak a language I understand.”
“Sure. I just mean he had a bullet up in the chamber, ready to fire. Usually you would leave it in the magazine till you were ready to shoot. Safer that way.”
“Are you saying, when they trailed us into the Farmers Market, they were ready to shoot us?”
“Maybe, or maybe they were careless and stupid.”
“Is it loaded now?”
“No. Try it out.”
She snapped the empty gun several times, aiming at the far wall. “The trigger’s not hard to pull,” she said.
