“Can’t complain.”
Hand in the bag, she wrapped her fingers around the wooden handle of the hotel ice pick. “Don’t you have a hug for an old friend?”
Rollmeyer, whose job was to follow orders, and whose inclination was to cop any feel he could, seemed confused for just a moment.
Then he opened his big arms and took a step toward her. She used the forward thrust of his body to help drive the ice pick up into his chest. Holding on to the handle, she could feel his heart beating around the slender blade, pump, pump, pump, before he realized something had happened to him. By then it was too late. She stepped back, withdrawing the blade, met his dumb gaze for another three-count, watched the dark trickle spill from the tiny hole in his shirt, before he fell, face down. His eyes were still open, sugared with grains of white sand, when she left him.
Luther stayed close to her, his bulk providing a shield while she lay on her belly beside the pool and rinsed away Rollmeyer’s blood from her glove and from the ice pick. With the dog, she ducked back into the shelter of the oleander hedge to watch the meeting proceed inside.
Creatures of habit, her husband and the congressman were holding to schedule. By the time Lise arrived, they had eaten dinner in the elegant dining room and the housekeeper had cleared the table, leaving the two men alone with coffee and brandy. Genteel preliminaries over, Lise’s husband went to the silver closet and brought out a large briefcase, which he set on the table. He opened the case and, smiling like Santa, turned it to show the contents to the congressman, showed them to Lise also in the reflection in the mirror over the antique sideboard: money in bank wrappers, three-quarters of a million dollars of it, the going price for a crucial vote on the federal level — the vote in question of course having to do with permits for Vegas-style casinos on tribal land.
There was a toast with brandy snifters, handshakes, then goodbyes. Once business had been taken care of, she knew her husband would leave immediately and the congressman would stay over for his special treat.
Lise dropped low behind the hedge when her husband, smiling still, crossed the patio and headed for the garage. She had the.380
in firing position in case he came looking for Rollmeyer. But he didn’t. He went straight to the garage, started his Rolls.
As soon as he was out of sight, Lise moved quickly. Her husband would back down the drive to the road and signal the call girl who was waiting there in her own car, the call girl who always came as part of the congressman’s package. Lise knew she had to be finished within the time it would take for the whore to drive into the vacant slot in the garage, freshen her makeup, spray on new perfume, plump her cleavage, and walk up to the house.
With Luther lumbering at her side, Lise crept into the dining room through the patio door just as her husband’s lights cleared the corner of the house. The congressman had already closed his case of booty and set it on the floor, was just finishing his brandy when she stepped onto the deep carpet.
“Lise, dear,” he said, surprised but not displeased to see her. He rose and held out his arms toward her. “I had not expected the pleasure of your company.”
Lise said nothing as she walked up within a few feet of him. Her toe was touching the case full of money when she raised the.380, took aim the way her father had taught her, and fired a round into the congressman’s chest, followed it, as her father had taught her, with a shot into the center of his forehead.
Luther, startled by the noise, began to bark. The housekeeper, in the kitchen, made “ah ah” noises and dropped something on the floor. Lise tucked the gun under the congressman’s chest, picked up the case of money, and left.
Behind the hedge again, Lise waited for the call girl to walk in and help the housekeeper make her discovery. The timing was good.
Both women faced each other from their respective doorways, shocked pale, within seconds of the shooting.
Through the quiet, moonless night, Lise walked back to the hotel along the same sandy path. She stowed the case behind a planter near the pool and continued onward a block to place a call.
Rollmeyer would be a complication, but the police could explain him any way they wanted to. Lise dialled 911.
“There’s been a shooting,” she said. She gave the address, identified the congressman as the victim and her husband as the shooter.
Then she went to another phone, further down the street, and made a similar call to the press and to the local TV station.
When she heard the first siren heading up the road to the house, she was mailing an unsigned note to the detective who had investigated her father’s death five years ago, a note that explained exactly why her husband and the congressman were meeting in the desert in the middle of the summer and what her husband’s motives might be for murder — for two murders. And why the bullets taken from the congressman should be compared with the two taken from her father. And where the assets were hidden. Chapter and verse, a fitting eulogy for a man who would never again see much open sky, whose every movement would be monitored in a place where punishment came swiftly, where he would never, ever have a key to his own door or the right to make the game plans. Trapped, for the rest of his life.
When the note was out of her hand, she finally took off the surgical gloves. Lise raised her face to catch a breeze that was full of sweet, clean desert air, looked up at the extravagance of stars in the moonless sky, and yawned. It was over: agenda efficiently covered, meeting adjourned.
On her way back to the hotel, Lise stopped at an all-night drug-store and bought an ice cream bar with some of Henry LeBeau’s money. She ate it as she walked.
The manager was standing in front of the hotel, watching the police and the paramedics speed past, when Lise strolled up.
“Big fuss.” Lise stood on the sidewalk with the manager and finished her ice cream. “You told me it was dead around here this time of year.”
“It’s dead, all right.” The manager laughed her dry, lizard laugh.
“Lot of old folks out here. Bet you one just keeled over.”
Lise watched with her until the coroner’s van passed them. Then she took the manager by the arm and walked inside with her.
Lise saw the light of excitement still dancing in the manager’s dark eyes. Lise herself was too keyed up to think about sleep. So she said. “I have another bottle of wine in my room. Let’s say we have a little nightcap. Talk about crooks and the good old days.”
J. A. JANCE
Judith Ann Jance (b. 1944) was born in Watertown, South Dakota, and educated at the University of Arizona and Bryn Mawr. She now lives in Bellevue, Washington. Before taking up writing, she worked as a high school teacher, Indian school librarian, and insurance salesperson, her father’s profession. In an interview with Rylla Goldberg (
In our family, selling was everybody’s business with my mother dishing out the “leads” about new people in town over the breakfast table. Once my first book was published, I took up where my mother left off.”
Jance’s two series feature Seattle police detective J. P. Beaumont, beginning with
