“Too late,” I said. I hung up.
I came down off the hill, heading northeast to the river. There were golfers putting on the green as I passed, and then I saw Vargas’s house. A blue Miata was in the driveway. I parked behind it.
When I rang the doorbell, I expected to hear my little friend start barking, but the sound never came. Cynthia Vargas answered the door and stood there looking at me, with no Chihuahua running around at her feet.
“What is it?” she said, holding her cigarette out just so. She squinted a little, the kind of look a smoker gives you when she’s annoyed at you and the smoke is in her eyes at the same time. She was blonde, perfectly put together, just what you’d shop for in a second wife. Vargas had already done it once, and now Swanson was apparently looking to pick up her option. It wouldn’t have bothered me a bit if I hadn’t just spent the only decent thirty minutes of the day in the company of Swanson’s wife.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Uh-huh?” She took a drag off her cigarette.
“I was wondering if I could bother you with a couple of questions.”
“Don’t tell me,” she said. She looked me up and down. “Your name is Alex McKnight.”
“I think we spoke on the phone the other night.”
“Yeah, and you were here for the poker game,” she said. “You were one of the hostages.”
“I don’t know if I’d say we were hostages. They just encouraged us to stay out of their way…”
“Come on in,” she said. “You want a beer or something?”
I very much did. But I took a pass.
She walked right through the house, out onto the back deck. I assumed I was supposed to follow her. It was my second back deck of the day, and the second time I was spending time with another man’s wife. This time felt a lot different. Mrs. Vargas still looked a little flushed and untucked, like maybe she’d spent the whole afternoon with her underwear hanging from the chandelier.
She sat down on a recliner, put her cigarette out in the ashtray on the table next to it. She was facing west, where even at seven o’clock in the evening the sun still hung high over the horizon. She put her sunglasses on. “Sit down,” she said.
I pulled another recliner over and sat down on the end of it. I wasn’t about to recline. As I looked west, I noticed the cardboard still covering the broken window on the second floor.
“I don’t see your dog anywhere,” I said. “Usually he’s so glad to see me.”
“That’s not my dog,” she said. “That’s Win’s dog. He even takes it to work with him.”
“That’s funny. He told us a few times it was your dog.”
“He tried to give me that dog the same day he bought me that stupid little car out there.”
“Mrs. Vargas, I won’t take much of your time. I just need to ask you something.”
“You’re friends with those three men who got arrested,” she said. She looked out at the river.
“Yes, how did you know?”
“I overheard Win talking about you on the phone. You’re the one they didn’t get.”
“They didn’t ‘get’ anybody, ma’am. The whole thing is a mistake.”
“These friends of yours, you know for a fact they had nothing to do with this.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“So you’re here to ask me if I did it.”
She caught me by surprise with that one. “I’m just trying to find out the truth,” I said.
“My lawyer just called me,” she said. “Right before you got here. He said you dropped in on him.”
“Is that what you call him? Your lawyer?”
She pushed her sunglasses down and looked over them at me. “Perhaps it was a mistake to let you come in,” she said. “You seemed like a gentleman, but I was obviously mistaken.”
“I apologize.”
She put her glasses back up and looked out at the river again. “He told me you might drop by. He seems to think you’d be very persistent about it. That’s why I thought I should just talk to you straight away, save us both some trouble.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Have you ever been to Bay Harbor, Alex?”
“As a matter of fact, I have.”
“Let me ask you a question. If you had a really nice six-thousand-square-foot house there, would you sell it and move up here?”
“I don’t think I can answer that. I wouldn’t be living in Bay Harbor to begin with.”
“Did he tell you about his idea of building a new development up here?”
“He did mention that.”
“Of course he did. It’s all he ever talks about. What do you think of his big idea?”
“I honestly hope he doesn’t do it.”
“He thinks people with lots of money will move up here,” she said. “Can you believe that? Actually live here instead of in Bay Harbor?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. I wasn’t sure what to say next. “The safe up in that room…” I finally said.
“Yes, I knew all about it,” she said. “What kind of an idiot doesn’t know about a safe in her own house?”
“Did you know the combination?”
She pushed her sunglasses down again. “No.”
“Did you know what was in it?”
She raised one eyebrow at me. “Please. What do you keep in a safe?”
“It could have been a lot of things.”
“With Win, it’s either money or those ridiculous artifacts,” she said. “He wouldn’t keep the artifacts in the safe, because then he couldn’t drag everybody up there to show them off.”
“You don’t seem to share his interests.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “So I hired three goons to break in and trash his precious collection, steal his money while they’re at it. Not so much because I’d get part of it, but just to take it away from him. All because I hate him so much, because I want to hurt him in any way I can. Is that what you’re getting at, Mr. McKnight? I think I’m being pretty straight with you. I wish you’d return the favor.”
“You’re telling me you had nothing to do with it.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. And you know what? The more I think of it, the more I wish I had done it. I mean, what’s he doing, keeping all that money up there in the safe? Now it’s all gone, my husband has turned psychotic, and I can’t even sleep at night because I’m waiting for those men to break in here again.”
She picked up her pack of cigarettes, shook another one out.
“God, I hate this place,” she said. “You don’t know how much I hate this place.”
I didn’t get a chance to say anything to that. The next sound I heard was a small dog barking. The sound got louder and louder. Then the back door opened and Miata was all over me. I took a cushion off the recliner and tried to use it as a shield. It only worked so well-I could still feel the dog’s teeth tearing through the skin on my fingers.
“Isn’t this cozy?” Vargas said as he stepped through the doorway. The welt on his forehead had turned every color of the rainbow. “I thought that might be your truck outside, McKnight. Who else would drive something like that?”
“You’re home early,” Mrs. Vargas said. She didn’t turn to look at him.
“Yes, the husband has come home unexpectedly,” he said. “Oldest trick in the book. But I certainly wasn’t expecting to find him here. You’re really working your way down the social ladder, Cynthia.”
She lifted one hand and showed him the back of her middle finger. Meanwhile, the dog kept dancing around me, looking for an opening. At that moment I could have drop-kicked him all the way to Canada.
“Will you please put this dog away?” I said.
“Why should I?” Vargas said. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
“Put the dog away and I’ll tell you.”
