“Yes, sir.”
I held the receiver chin to shoulder and fumbled all the coins in my pocket into the slot; I kept my .38 glued to the woman’s face. When a shitload of pesos were swallowed up, I said, “Ferderal Bureau of Investigation, San Diego field office. It’s an emergency.”
The operator muttered, “Yes, sir.” I heard the call going through. The woman’s teeth chattered against my gun barrel. Vasquez tried bribery: “Blanchard was very rich, my friend. We could find his money. You could live very well here. You–”
“FBI, Special Agent Rice.”
I stared daggers at Vasquez. “This is Officer Dwight Bleichert, Los Angeles Police Department. I’m in Ensenada, and I screwed up with some Rurales. They’re getting ready to kill me for nothing, and I thought you could talk Captain Vasquez here out of it.”
“What the ”
“Sir, I’m a legit LA policemen and you had better do this fast.”
“You jerking my chain, son?”
“Goddamn it, you want proof? I worked Central Homicide with Russ Millard and Harry Sears. I worked DA’s Warrants, I worked–”
“Put the spic fellow on, son.”
I handed the receiver to Vasquez. He took it and leveled his automatic at me; I kept my .38 on the woman. Seconds ticked; the standoff held as the Rurale boss listened to the fed, getting paler and paler. Finally he dropped the phone and lowered his piece. “Go home, puta. Get out of my city and get out of my country.”
I holstered my gun and squeezed out of the booth; the woman shrieked. Vasquez stood back and waved his men away. I got in my car and peeled out of Ensenada on fear overdrive. It was only when I was back in America that I started obeying speed laws–and that was when it got bad with Lee.
o o o
Dawn was pushing up over the Hollywood Hills when I knocked on Kay’s door. I stood on the porch shivering, storm clouds and streaks of sunlight looming as strange things I didn’t want to see. I heard “Dwight?” inside, followed by the sound of bolts being unlatched. Then the other remaining partner in the Blanchard/Bleichert/Lake triad was there, saying, “And all that.”
It was an epitaph I didn’t want to hear.
I walked inside, stunned at how strange and pretty the living room was. Kay said, “Lee’s dead?”
I sat down in his favorite chair for the first time. “The Rurales or some Mexican woman or her friends killed him. Oh, babe, I–”
Using Lee’s endearment jarred me. I looked at Kay, standing by the door, backlighted by the weird sunstreaks. “He hired the Rurales to kill DeWitt, but that doesn’t mean shit. We’ve got to get Russ Millard and some decent Mexican cops on it . .
I stopped, noticing the phone on the coffee table. I started dialing the padre’s home number. Kay’s hand halted me. “No. I want to talk to you first.”
I moved from the chair to the couch; Kay sat beside me. She said, “You’ll hurt Lee if you go crazy with this.”
That was when I knew she’d been expecting it; that was when I knew she knew more than I did. “You can’t hurt something dead.”
“Oh, yes you can, babe.”
“Don’t call me that! That’s his!”
Kay moved closer and touched my cheek. “You can hurt him and you can hurt us.”
I pulled away from the caress. “You tell me why, _babe_.”
Kay cinched the belt on her robe and fixed me with a cold look. “I didn’t meet Lee at Bobby’s trial,” she said. “I met him before. We became friends, and I lied about where I was staying so Lee wouldn’t know about Bobby. Then he found out on his own, and I told him how bad it was, and he told me about a business opportunity he had coming up. He wouldn’t tell me the details, and then Bobby was arrested for bank robbery and everything was chaos.
“Lee planned the robbery and got three men to help him. He’d bought his way out of his contract with Ben Siegel, and it cost him every cent he’d made as a boxer. Two of the men were killed during the robbery, one escaped to Canada, and Lee was the fourth. Lee framed Bobby because he hated him for what he did to me. Bobby didn’t know we were seeing each other, and we made it look like we met at the trial. Bobby knew it was a frame, but he didn’t suspect Lee, just the LAPD in general.