47
Ed Eagle was pushed in a wheelchair to the door of the hospital, and a cop held the car door open for him. Susannah got behind the wheel, then the cop got into the unmarked car behind them and followed them home.
Ed walked into the house and looked around. “God, but I’ve missed this place,” he said.
Susannah helped him off with his coat. “And you’ve been missed here, too.” The first couple of nights after he was hospitalized, she had slept on a cot near him, but when he was better she had gone home nights.
“Do you want to lie down?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “I want to call the office and tell them I’m still alive.” He went into his study, called his secretary, got a few phone messages and told her he’d be back at work the following Monday.
Susannah made them lunch and sent sandwiches out to the two cops, who sat in their car, the motor running, the heater turned up.
“Do you feel safe?” Susannah asked.
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
“She’s still out there somewhere,” Eagle said. “I wonder where Vittorio and Cupie are.”
“I had a call from Cupie yesterday. He said they were making a quick trip to L.A. He didn’t say why.”
CUPIE AND VITTORIO DROVE up the winding mountain road to Los Alamos, drove through the town and out the other side.
“Next right,” Vittorio said, looking at the map. After Cupie had turned, Vittorio said, “Check the odometer for the mileage. We want to drive twelve-point-twenty-eight miles.”
They wound down the road into the broad valley, Big Bowl, and as they came up on the house number, Vittorio pointed to a large stone with the name “Holroyd” etched into it.
“Now what?” Cupie asked. “We can’t just drive down the driveway.”
“There was a dirt road forty or fifty yards up the hill,” Vittorio said. “Turn around and let’s take a look in there.”
Cupie did as he was instructed, then stopped. “I think we ought to go on foot from here,” he said. “If Barbara is at the end of this track we don’t want her to see the car.”
The two men got out of the car and began walking down the road. After a hundred yards they passed a copse of pinon trees and the view down the hill opened up. They could see the Holroyd house and what appeared to be a guesthouse.
Vittorio stopped and took a small pair of binoculars from his coat pocket. He scanned the house carefully, then handed the lenses to Cupie. “Look at the corner of the guesthouse,” he said.
Cupie got the binoculars focused, then panned from the main house to the guesthouse and stopped.
“What does that look like behind the corner of the guesthouse?” Vittorio asked.
Cupie grinned. “The rear of a tan station wagon,” he said.
“Okay,” Vittorio said. “Now we have to go talk to Ed Eagle.”
LATE IN THE DAY the phone rang, and Eagle picked it up. “Hello?”
“Mr. Eagle,” a cop said, “I’ve got Vittorio and Cupie out here, and they want to see you.”
“Send them in,” Eagle said. He hung up and walked to the front door to meet them.
“Good to see you looking well, Ed,” Cupie said.
“It’s good to feel well,” Eagle replied.
“We want to apologize again for letting that guy get at you,” Vittorio said.
“Apology unnecessary,” Eagle said. “You probably saved my life by getting an ambulance here so fast.” He took them into his study and sat them down.
“Here’s what we know so far, Ed,” Cupie said. “When Barbara got away from the jail-and we still don’t know how she did that-she was met by James Long in Acapulco and flown back to the States by a pilot who worked for Long named Bart Cross. They dropped Barbara off in Yuma. Somewhere between Yuma and Santa Fe she met some people called Holroyd, from Los Alamos.
“Barbara rented a guesthouse at Las Campanas and was apparently in Santa Fe for a few days, at least. Then she went back to L.A. and hired the pilot, Cross, to kill you. After he attacked you he went back to L.A., probably thinking you were dead. Then Barbara, having heard that you were still alive, went to his house in Burbank and shot him. We were able to get hold of some pages from his aircraft logbook that confirms some of this.
“Yesterday, we went to L.A. and watched Cross’s funeral at Forest Lawn, from a distance, and after that we followed James Long to a gas station and questioned him. He talked to us, because he’s afraid he’ll be implicated both in the attack on you and the murder of Cross.”
“The son of a bitch,” Eagle said. “And we’re actually in business with him on this film Susannah is making.”
“Right. Long gave it up that he drove to LAX, and that Barbara might look up the Holroyds in Los Alamos, and this morning we drove up there and confirmed that a car like hers is parked at their guesthouse.”
“So, she’s in Los Alamos?”
“A few miles the other side,” Vittorio said. “What we need to know now is what you want to do about her. We can call the police, but the problem is, she’s not currently wanted for anything in this country. We could tell the Burbank cops that she killed Bart Cross, but there’s only the aircraft logbook to tie her to him at all, and we have no evidence that she hired Cross to kill you.”
“I see the problem,” Eagle said. “She’ll be wanted in Mexico for breaking prison, I assume.”
“There’s a problem there, too,” Cupie said, “because nobody seems to know she’s out of prison except the warden and a cop I know in Tijuana, who got the warden to tell him.”
“How could nobody know about a prison break?” Eagle asked.
“We believe that the warden had been screwing Barbara, or vice versa, and that she probably found an opportunity to get out through his office or his attached apartment, and that when he found her gone, he simply didn’t tell anybody. When you think about it, the only way she could be proved missing would be for the government to send some people down there and count noses. But that hasn’t happened.”
“So, getting her arrested in Mexico, the way we did before, isn’t an option?”
“Not really. And she entered the country legally, at Yuma, so right now nobody can lay a hand on her.”
“So, I’m supposed to sit around and wait for her to try to kill me again?”
Cupie and Vittorio exchanged a meaningful glance.
“What?” Eagle asked.
“The next step is entirely up to you, Ed,” Cupie said.
Eagle looked at them both. “You have a recommendation?”
“No,” Cupie said. “We don’t, and I think we should be careful what we discuss.”
Eagle gazed out the window at the landscape for a long moment. “I’m going to have to think about this and talk with Susannah about it.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Ed,” Cupie said.
48
Eagle looked up a number in his address book. “Hang on,” he said to Cupie and Vittorio. “I need to make a call to a guy I went to law school with, who works in the State Department now.”
Eagle dialed the number, a direct line that was picked up by a secretary.
“Mr. Abbott’s office,” she said.
“This is Ed Eagle speaking. I’m an old friend of Mr. Abbott’s, and I’d like to speak to him, please.”
“One moment, Mr. Eagle,” the woman said. “I’ll see if I can locate him.” Eagle pressed the speaker button so the two P.I.s could hear.
“Ed?”
