The Consummata Read online

  “In other words, two to tango.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking out loud, “she had the same kind of yen and you didn’t know about it. Some women who were abused as young girls develop their own weird kinks.”

  The madam didn’t argue that point—she knew all too well how many weird sexual byways there were for human beings to go down.

  “Maybe,” Bunny said, “Tango had a thing for Halaquez, at least enough to hang onto his picture.”

  “Do you know if she ever saw Halaquez outside of the club?”

  “I don’t,” she admitted.

  “But we do know she sometimes dated her clients outside the Mandor’s doors. Dick Best a case in point.”

  Bunny nodded, but then contradicted it with a head shake. “If Tango did date Halaquez, she never mentioned it. Nobody asks too many questions around here. And Dick Best is the only one I know of that she dated away from the club.”

  I stuck the photo in my pocket and put the handbag back on the shelf. “Think I can beat Gaita out of her room tonight? She can stay here in Tango’s room instead.”

  “I’m not crazy about you staying around, Morgan. You’re trouble.”

  “You’re telling me? That’s why I want that handy back exit out of her room. Look, I can’t risk a hotel and the cops might spot me on a park bench.”

  She sighed, a world-weary one, but then she gave me a little smile that said all was forgiven. Or most, anyway. “All right, Morg, I’ll arrange it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Although Gaita may prefer sharing her room with you, to giving it up.”

  “She and I can negotiate that. Just make sure she knows I’m coming.”

  “Somehow,” Bunny said archly, “I think she’ll know when you’re coming. Morgan...what about Tango? How much heat is this liable to raise here at the Mandor?”

  “And here I thought you were concerned about Tango as a friend.”

  She whapped me on the arm—sort of a friendly whap, but a whap. “Bastard,” she said.

  I grinned at her, shrugged. “My bet is that the cops will call it an attack by a sadist that was interrupted by someone who heard her yell. What happened is obvious enough—somebody tortured her. Whether to get information out of her, or just for the jollies, that’s in the eye of the beholder. It’ll be easy enough to understand why her rescuer would call the cops but get the hell out.”

  But I was wrong. The cops didn’t call it anything at all. The next morning there would be no mention of it in the papers, nor any of the guy who had fallen on his knife in the lobby of Bunny’s apartment house.

  Right now, of course, I didn’t know that. We went to Bunny’s office to wait for the doctor. We sat on her handsome leather couch, plumped up with big plush pillows, over which loomed that paisley wall hanging.

  Her half-lidded eyes regarded me. “You think I’m a cold-hearted bitch, don’t you?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I think you’re a decent enough dame. I understand why you don’t want to risk what you’ve got going here. I know you care about your girls.”

  Her expression softened. There was real warmth in those dark blue eyes.

  When she kissed me, it came as a surprise. Not a bad one, either, but a surprise.

  “You know,” she said, “I don’t mind that you’re married. Not at all. A lot of married men do business here.”

  “Yeah, you do know I make a policy of not paying?”

  “I didn’t say anything about charging you, Morg. Anyway, I kind of owe you one...I did try to have you killed, once or twice.”

  I kissed her and it was starting to get somewhere when a knock came at her door, and a muffled voice said, “It’s Doc Wilson, Bunny! You in there?”

  I took my tongue out of her mouth and my hand off her right breast and said, “Maybe I should get my busted rib taped up before we take this any farther....”

  A thundering rain had driven everybody indoors and was beginning to turn the streets into sluiceways. The cabbie who had picked me up reluctantly let me out a block from where I asked to be dropped, clearly wondering what kind of nut would want to wade through a night like this one in a ramshackle neighborhood slated for rebuilding when the city got tired of looking at it.

  Tango may have possessed an exotic queenly beauty, perfect for her to play Cleopatra in the movies, but she sure hadn’t been raised in pretentious surroundings. The house she grew up in was a relic of those days when the boom hit Miami, then collapsed to leave the memory of inflated money behind by way of unpainted siding and sagging verandas. The wind had blown two aged wicker rockers onto their backs on the porch, and kept the torn screen door slamming on its hinges, like the face of the house kept getting slapped. The noise didn’t seem bother anybody, though.

  I stepped across the litter of soggy newspaper and leaves plastered to the porch floor, rapped on the door, and waited. I did it again without getting an answer, said the hell with it, and tried the knob. The door swung in limply, half-loose from the frame, and—when I closed it again—sighed with creaking release.

  The smell was like a foul fog in the air. Rotted garbage was the base, somewhere a dirty toilet added its bouquet while whiskey and beer fumes gave it that certain tang. The only occupant downstairs was an unshaven, dead-to-the-world guy in his middle fifties who was sprawled out on the couch, like Lizzie Borden’s papa waiting to get the axe.

  The sleeper reeked of booze, two empty bottles on the floor beside him, his half-naked belly poking through a split shirt and his pants held together by an old army belt with the zipper wide open. A half-dozen pension check stubs were on the table at one end of the couch—the name typed on them: George L. Prosser.

  Tango’s old man.

  No great surprise there. Scratch a whore, find a no-good father.

  I tried shaking him awake, but it was no good. He didn’t even make sounds of protest or even of reflexive awareness. The bum would be out a pretty long time yet.

  I went through the downstairs rooms, kicking my way through the mess, then upstairs to what used to be the bedroom level.

  Two rooms were totally empty.

  One was as much of a mess as those downstairs. The fourth had been locked, but somebody had broken it open. This one had been neat and clean until somebody had ripped it into little pieces.

  So this was Tango’s room—the one she returned home to, once or twice a month.

  There hadn’t been much to strip out of the single dresser or the closet. Her clothes were out-of-style teenage things from school days long ago, along with some paint-spattered (though otherwise clean) dungarees and a few sweaters. The stuffing had been pulled out of the antique mohair chair, the mattress torn to shreds, and the flimsy little desk knocked to splinters with the old letters and notepaper it held scattered all over the floor.

  Two pictures had been yanked from the wall and their backs removed, one ornamental top knocked off a bedpost to make sure they were solid, and the linoleum rug ripped into hunks to see if anything had been hidden under it.

  But at least it gave me an idea of what somebody was looking for. It had to be small and it had to be flat. And it had to be important enough to kill for.

  They had looked for it here, whatever it was.

  Then they had gone after Tango herself.

  So far they hadn’t found it, and she hadn’t given it to them, probably because she had no idea what the hell her torturers were after.

  I left everything as it was and went back downstairs. George Prosser was still motionless on the couch, his breath burbling between his lips. He had pissed his pants without knowing since I last saw him, a few minutes ago. Well, it was cold in the house, on this rainy night, so maybe it would keep him warm a while.

  Not that hard to figure, why Tango left home.

  When I reached the section where the Club Mandor operated, I found the opening to the maze that led to Gaita’s room. I had the route so well sketched out in my mind,
I didn’t need a light anymore.

  I carefully went up the stairs, slid the door open, stepped inside, and closed it with a flick of my hand.

  The only illumination came from the partially opened bathroom door, a pale yellow glow that was enough to barely outline the shapely female figure on the bed.

  I felt a twinge of annoyance because as pleasant a bedroom companion as she would make, I really didn’t want Gaita to be here tonight. I was tired, I had thinking to do, and being with me right now was inherently dangerous for her.

  But what the hell, it was her room, and there was no trace of anything but affection in my voice, as I said, “You asleep, Gaita?”

  “No, Morgan, I’m not asleep....”

  But it wasn’t Gaita at all.

  It was another lovely dark-haired woman, with a revolver leveled at my gut.

  Kim Stacy.

  My wife.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The gun in Kim’s hand lowered—maybe the little automatic was meant for anyone who came in Gaita’s secret door, and not me specifically.

  Then a lush smile blossomed on that lovely oval with the violet almond-shaped eyes.

  “Hello, husband.”

  She’d been resting on top of that bed, waiting—for me?—and curled up with a panther-like poise, a luscious doll who made a simple short-sleeve pink blouse and short black shift skirt with no nylons into something wildly sensual. Yet the only real effort to look fetching at all came from the scarlet-red painted toenails showing in the open-toed sandals that matched the red of her full, moist lips.

  “Hello, wife,” I said.

  The gun tumbled from her hands onto the bed and she came off it and into my arms and our kiss was a devouring thing, the greeting of two starving creatures too long away from the table.

  I held her to me with one arm around her waist and my other hand touching the dark tresses, cut shorter now, just to her chin, not her shoulders, and the sun streaks were gone. Her features were the same, perhaps some lines of worry around her eyes, for her husband, I hoped, and she was searching my face, studying it as one of her hands was splayed against my back and the other dug into my hair gripping, stroking, gripping, stroking.

  I glanced meaningfully at the bed, and she drew away, still in my arms but shaking her head. “Not now, my love. Not here. Not in this place.”

  I didn’t let go of her, said, “Who cares where?” and I kissed her again, and my tongue got insistent about it, and hers held its own, until the moment came when she pulled away, out of my arms now, and found her way to Gaita’s dressing table stool and sat here. Her eyes directed me to the bed, but only to sit there. Only to sit.

  And perhaps that reminder of Gaita played a part in why I didn’t just throw her down on that bed—that this room and the nearby bathroom with shower stall marked the site of my sole failing in staying true to her, over these long months....

  That, and the grave expression that had erased her look of love and pleasure at seeing me again.

  So I sat on the edge of the bed across from where she perched at the dressing table, her back to its mirror.

  “We may not have a lot of time,” she said. “I’m breaking every rule in the B-4 book just being here.”

  She was with the CIA’s B-4 Intelligence, Section A.

  “We have to talk, Morg. There’s so much you need to know. And you have things to tell me, too.”

  I gave her half a smile. “Doll, you want to go the foreplay route, that’s fine with me.”

  “Not foreplay, darling. Forewarning—you are in dangerous waters, even for you. This Halaquez inquiry...I’m breaking deep cover to warn you off of it. Let the pros handle it.”

  I grinned at her. “Back together only a few minutes, and you’re already insulting me? Reminds me of when we first met. How’d you know to find me here?”

  But she didn’t grin back or smile—her expression remained somber, and her forehead was creased with concern. “Never mind any of that now. Will you just listen? For these many months...almost a year, Morgan...I’ve been doing my own investigating within the agency. It’s risky and I’ve tossed protocol out the window. If what I’ve done is ever found out, I won’t just lose my pension, I may face treason charges.”

  I stood, and I made a crooking finger at her. “Come over here. I won’t rape you—I promise. But I need to be close to you.”

  She didn’t have to think about it. Just did trust me, however much a horny son of a bitch she knew me to be—she knew that more than anything, I loved her, and wouldn’t dishonor her.

  We arranged ourselves on the bed, with pillows propped up on the headboard behind us, and with my arm around her, so that when she spoke to me, I could feel the warmth of her breath. Curled up against me like a kid. Now and then I would interrupt her to crush those cushiony lips in the gentlest, friendliest way, never pressing to where things might get away from us. She clearly didn’t want that.

  “Let’s start,” she said, “with what you’ve been up to. I’ve tracked you, your every move. I could have been in touch with you any number of times—we were in the same city three times, once San Francisco, again in Boston, and then in New York.”

  “Why didn’t you...?”

  “I’m being watched. You must know I went to bat for you. I told my superiors I’d witnessed that old pal of yours confess to complicity in the robbery, heard with my own ears his claim to have taken possession of the entire forty-mil boodle.” Her mouth tightened bitterly. “But it was just like you warned me, in the plane, before you jumped.”

  They figured that the in-name-only marriage vows Kim and I took had turned into the real thing, working undercover together. Under covers was their assumption, and though we never consummated our marriage, we had fallen in love, hadn’t we?

  I said, “Your bosses figured that a wife would say or do anything for her husband. As simple as that.”

  She sighed and nodded, nestled against me, one full breast mashed against my chest. She smelled great—no perfume, just a freshly scrubbed scent.

  “It was all I could do,” she said, “all I could risk, to conduct an after-hours, off-the-books investigation. There are two things that I think will shock you. First, on the money-truck heist—”

  “There was an inside man. A government traitor.”

  The natural long lashes were tiny whips as she blinked at me. “What? How did you—”

  “The route the armored car took from the Washington mint to New York was top secret. Standard operating procedure would be to have at least three such routes, and alternate in a shifting, unknowable pattern. Same goes for when the truck would leave and be scheduled for arrival. Also, the knowledge that this particular shipment would be forty million in common bills, nothing over a fifty. You don’t pull down a score like that without inside information.”

  She was smiling, more admiration than love in it, and her head was shaking. “You are one smart bastard, Morgan. You’ve known this all along?”

  “Oh, only since the day I heard they were after me. But for me, it’s a theory. You sound like you’re passing along a fact.”

  The almond eyes narrowed. “I can’t say that it’s a fact of the kind that might hold up in court—not yet. And the people I talked to are unlikely to go on the record. But let me just say that you’re in the right city for us to be having this conversation.”

  I frowned. “Sounds more likely to be a Washington D.C. conversation than a Miami one.”

  “No, Miami all the way....Morg, I believe that forty mil was a very inside job. That it was a CIA black op.”

  “What?”

  Now she had surprised me.

  “That money,” she said, “was earmarked for the Cuban freedom fighters’ cause. Just a few years ago, remember, the Company was funding and shaping the efforts to take Castro down, but it was strictly sub rosa—the White House starting with Vice President Nixon and on to both JFK and his attorney general brother knew all about it, from exploding cigars designed t
o kill Castro to the secret commando training camps in the Florida Everglades...all of it top secret.”

  I was ahead of her now. “But then the Bay of Pigs came along, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and—”

  “And the president shot down in a Dallas street, and all of the plans to assassinate Castro and invade Cuba became a political embarrassment, a Cold War liability. If Castro had JFK killed, nobody wanted to say so—at best, it meant that embarrassing proof we’d been plotting to kill a foreign leader would come out, and at worst that a hailstorm of nukes would fall all over the world.”

  “Wait,” I said, and I touched her hand, squeezed it. “The money-truck heist—that was well after the Kennedy hit. All of these Cuba plans would have been shut down by then.”

  She nodded. “Yes, but there were rogue elements within the Company that still wanted those efforts to move forward. That forty-million-dollar heist was a last ditch effort by those forces to fund an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles.”

  “Actually a noble cause,” I said, then rolled my eyes. “All except for the part where Morgan the Raider gets framed for the heist.”

  “That was a genius stroke,” Kim said, with a wry half-smile. “Somebody must have enlisted your crew and either painted it as a money-making effort, or possibly brought them in as patriots. You were all highly decorated heroes of the European theater.”

  “They would have come aboard as patriots,” I said, “stand-up guys willing to re-up with Uncle Sam for one last mission...with one exception—the son of a bitch who wound up with the money. A man who had been disfigured in the war and felt his government owed him in a big way. The man you heard confess, Kim. The man I shot on a windy runway in Nuevo Cadiz.”

  Kim had nodded all through that, but now she held my eyes with so much concern in hers, I knew something bad was coming.

  She said, “I agree with your high assessment of the character of your old war buddies...with that one notable exception. But Morgan...I’m sorry to have to tell you this...your friend, Art Keefer—last surviving member of your original Army heist crew—was killed last month.”