"He rode?"
"S¡, mi Teniente."
Jesus Christ, his wounds are still bleeding!
"I just came from there. El Coronel is safely inside the church."
The man nodded.
"I wish to see Enrico when he comes," Clete said.
And then I will take the stupid sonofabitch back to the hospital, where, with a little luck, they'll be able to fix the damage he did to himself by getting on a horse in his condition. Jesus, I hope I can get him out again for the funeral!
As he walked to the interior stairs that led to the kitchen, he saw where the stocky men had been sitting, in armchairs obviously moved to the garage from somewhere upstairs, and that beside the armchairs were two double-barreled shotguns.
Three women were in the kitchen when he pushed open the door. One of them was middle-aged, and the other two were younger. The two younger ones were in maid's uniforms.
Christ, with nobody living here, why do we need two maids and a house-keeper?
Oh, yeah, El Coronel told me he used this place as a guest house before I showed up. It's probably full of people here for the funeral.
The kitchen was clean and cheerful, and the tiles on the floor were spotless.
Clete had a sudden, sickeningly clear mental image of the tiles by the kitchen table, thick and slippery with the blood of Enrico's sister, Se¤ora Marianna Maria Dolores Rodriguez de Pellano, who had been the housekeeper.
"Her murder was unnecessary," el Teniente Coronel Alejandro Bernardo Mart¡n explained at the time. (He'd come to the murder scene to see how it af-fected Argentine security, not to investigate the crime.)
"'But on the other hand," Mart¡n added, "from the viewpoint of the would-be assassins, it was the correct thing to do. The dead make terrible witnesses, and the government can only execute murderers once."
A voice interrupted these thoughts.
"I am Se¤ora Lopez, Se¤or Frade. The housekeeper. Can I get you anything?"
"No, thank you. I'm going to go upstairs for a minute, and then I'm going to wait for Enrico in the sitting."
"I have laid out some things in the sitting for our guest, Se¤or Frade. If there is something else you would like, just ring. And there is whiskey and ice and soda."
"Thank you," Clete said, and smiled at her.
Did she say "our guest," singular? That's surprising. I would have thought this place would be full of people for the funeral.
He rode the elevator to Uncle Willy's apartment on the top floor. There was evidence that somebody was staying in the room, and it made him a little un-comfortable to be an intruder.
Screw it. All I'm going to do is check the secret compartment in the desk.
>
He walked across the room to the massive desk, and opened the secret com-partment without difficulty. There was nothing in it at all.
Not even Uncle Willy's naughty pictures.
Somebody's been in there. Who? When? And did they find just the dirty slides? Or, presuming it was here, Peter's father's letter?
Damn!
He got back on the elevator and rode it back to the foyer. When he entered the sitting, he saw that a plate of sandwiches and other finger food had been laid out on a table beside a coffee service and half a dozen bottles of hard liquor.
He made himself a scotch and soda, looked for and found a cigar in a hu-midor, and then slipped into an armchair. He looked around the room. There was a change since he had left: The oil portrait of a Thoroughbred was no longer hanging over the fireplace. (Granduncle Guillermo had raised the horse from a colt, and had won a great deal of money on it.) In its place hung a large oil portrait of a beautiful young woman in an evening dress with an infant in her arms. The woman was Se¤ora Elizabeth Ann Howell de Frade, and the infant was her firstborn, Cletus Howell Frade.