Death of the Falcon Read online

  “Another inch and you’ll never be able to talk again,” I warned him. “Now, let’s try again. Is there anyone else up—”

  The sound of Sherima’s balcony door sliding open halted the interrogation abruptly. Keeping my stiletto at my prisoner’s neck, I turned slightly, my Luger swinging to cover the figure emerging from the doorway. It was Candy. For a moment, she was rooted in her steps as she took in the macabre scene. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she recognized me; then she stared with expressionless horror at the bloody man almost impaled on the blade in my hand.

  “Nick, what’s going on?” she asked softly, tentatively inching to my side.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I told her, “so I came out on the balcony to get some air and relax a bit. I spotted this fellow standing outside Sherima’s door, so I jumped over the wall and collared him.”

  “What are you going to do with him?” she asked. “Is he a robber?”

  “That’s just what we’ve been talking about,” I said. “But I’ve been doing all the talking.”

  “What happened to his face?”

  “I think he had an accident getting onto the balcony,”

  I lied.

  My prisoner hadn’t moved, except for his eyes which had swept back and forth over our faces during the conversation. However, when I mentioned his “accident,” a tight smile pulled at the corners of his mouth.

  “He looks Arabian,” Candy whispered. “Could he have been trying to hurt Sherima?”

  “I think we’re going to go next door to my room and have a little talk about that,” I said, and was pleased to see a trace of fear finally appear in the night prowler’s eyes.

  “Shouldn’t we call the police, Nick?” Candy said, not taking her eyes from the Arab. “After all, if somebody is trying to harm Sherima, we should get some protection. Maybe I should call the embassy and get Abdul.”

  At her mention of the bodyguard’s name, the big Arab’s nostrils pinched as he sucked in air. The name obviously meant something to him; as I watched him, beads of perspiration began to break out on his forehead, and I had the impression he feared the wrath of the former Queen’s devoted guardian. His eyes rolled around the balcony, then flicked upward as if he were looking for some means of escape.

  “That might be a good idea to call Abdul,” I agreed. “Maybe he can get some answers out of our friend here.”

  Again, the Arab’s eyes flicked upward, but he said nothing.

  “I’ll go do it now,” Candy said, tinning away. “Sherima’s sound asleep, the pills worked, so I’ll tell Abdul to— Nick, look out!”

  Her scream wasn’t loud, but she had grabbed my arm at the same time and its completely unexpected force thrust my hand forward, plunging the knife deep in my captive’s throat. His eyes opened in disbelief for a moment, then snapped shut almost at the same time. I jerked back the stiletto. Blood welled out after it and I knew immediately that he never would talk to anyone again. He was dead. I wasn’t worrying about him right then, though, because I was swinging around to see what had caused Candy’s gasp of terror.

  Still clutching my arm, she pointed upward, apparently not yet realizing the consequence of her sudden jolt to my arm. “Something’s moving up there,” she whispered. “It looks like a snake.”

  “It’s a rope,” I said, checking the rise of my anger. I turned back to bend over the Arab, who had slipped down to the corner of the’ terrace. “That’s how he got here.”

  “What happened to him?” she asked, staring down at the dark hulk at my feet.

  I couldn’t let her know that she had been the cause of his death. She had enough troubles without having to be faced with another burden to carry around with her. “He tried to get away when you screamed, and slipped and fell forward on my knife,” I explained. “He’s dead.”

  “Nick, what are we going to do?” Fear was rising in her voice again, and I didn’t want an hysterical woman on my hands at that moment. Bending swiftly, I wiped the blood from my knife on the dead man’s jacket, then sheathed the blade up my sleeve and returned the Luger to its holster.

  “First,” I said, “I’m going to get the body over this wall and into my room. We can’t stay here talking, we might waken Sherima, and it’s better if she knows nothing about this after what she’s already gone through tonight. Then, I’m going to help you over the wall, and you and I are going to have a little talk. Now, while I take care of him, you duck back inside and make certain Sherima still is asleep. And get a robe or something on, then come back out here.”

  Events had been happening so fast, I hadn’t noticed until then that all Candy had on was a filmy pale yellow negligee, cut to a deep V and barely containing her generous bosom, which heaved spasmodically with each nervous breath.

  As she turned to do as I had instructed, I lifted the dead man from the floor and unceremoniously dumped him over the wall that separated the two balconies. Then I walked over to the would-be assassin’s rope, still dangling over Sherima’s terrace-front wall. I was quite certain that he hadn’t made the trip to the hotel on his own; it was likely that at least one more companion still waited on the roof one floor above us.

  And I felt sure that whoever had been there had taken j off after this one had failed to return after a reasonable amount of time. If the Arab’s accomplice was as professional as his dead friend had been, he would have realized something had gone wrong. The assassination, if successful, should have been accomplished in five to ten minutes, at the most. And a look at my watch had told me that it had been fifteen minutes since his feet first appeared coming down the rope. And although all of the conversation outside Sherima’s room had been in whispers and most of the movements had been muffled, there was still the chance that the second man or men had heard something, because the Watergate courtyard was quiet at that hour. Only the sound of an occasional car passing on the nearby highway by the Potomac had broken the nighttime silence, and that couldn’t possibly have covered the balcony scuffle.

  I decided not to make the climb up the rope to the roof; instead, I jumped up on the balcony railing and cut part way through the rope, weakening it just enough so if someone attempted to descend it again, it wouldn’t hold the intruder’s weight, dropping him into the courtyard ten floors below. Candy reappeared at the balcony door just as I jumped from the railing. She stifled a scream, then saw that it was me.

  “Nick, what—?”

  “Just making certain no one else uses that route tonight,” I said. “How’s Sherima?”

  “She’s out like a light. I think she took a couple of extra tranquilizers, Nick. I had given her two before she went to bed, but I noticed just now in my bathroom that the bottle was on the sink. I counted them, and there seem to be at least two less than I should have.”

  “You’re sure she’s all right?” I was concerned that the former Queen might have unintentionally overdosed.

  “Yes. I checked her breathing and it’s normal, maybe just a little slow. I’m sure that she’s only had four of my pills, and that’s just enough to put her out for ten or twelve hours.”

  I could tell from the looks Candy was giving me that she was full of questions. I delayed having to come up with the answers for a while, by asking her: “How about you? Why were you awake? Didn’t you take something to make you sleep, too?”

  “I guess I got so involved in getting Sherima quieted down and off to bed that I just forgot, Nick. I flopped down across my bed finally and started to read. I must have dozed off for an hour or so without having taken any tranquilizers. When I woke up, I came in to check on Sherima, and that’s when I heard a noise on her balcony . . . you know what happened after that.” She paused, then said abruptly, “Nick, who are you, really?”

  “No questions, now, Candy. They can wait until we get to my room. Wait here a minute.”

  I vaulted the divider again and carried the dead Arab into my room, stashing him in the shower and pulling the curtain across the tub, just in case Candy
should go into the bathroom. Then I returned to Sherima’s balcony and lifted Candy over the divider, following with what I hoped was my final vault of the night.

  Candy was hesitant about entering the room, and I realized she probably expected to see the dead man on the floor. I led her inside and closed the sliding door after us. I had turned on the lights when I’d been inside before to conceal the corpse. Candy looked quickly around the room, then breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t see him anywhere. She turned to me and said, “Now can you tell me, Nick?”

  She looked directly at me, her eyes wide and unblinking as she clutched the sheer peignoir over its matching gown. I put an arm around her and led her to the couch. Sitting j down beside her, I took her hands in mine. Having worked out in my mind what I hoped would be a plausible story, I started to talk.

  “My name is really Nick Carter, Candy, and I do work for the oil company, but I’m not so much a lobbyist as I am a private investigator. Normally, I handle security checks on personnel, or, if one of our people gets in trouble, I try to smooth out the rough spots and make sure there aren’t headlines that would make the company look bad. I have a license to carry my gun, and a couple of times overseas, I’ve had to use it. I started to carry the knife after I got into a pretty rough tangle in Cairo once— a couple of thugs took the gun away from me, and I ended up in the hospital.”

  “But why are you here now? Is it because of Sherima?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “We got word from our office in Saudi Arabia that there might be an attempt made on her life. The threat didn’t sound too serious, but the home office decided to send me here, just in case. If somebody did try something and I could save her, the company reckoned that Shah Hassan would be mighty grateful to us—our firm has been trying to get in good with him for some time. There still are a lot of potential oil reserves in Adabi that haven’t been leased to anybody for exploration and my bosses would like to have a crack at them.”

  She seemed to be trying to accept my explanation, but asked an obvious question, “Shouldn’t the American government have been told about the threat to Sherima? Isn’t it their job to protect her?”

  “For awhile, I thought so, too,” I said, trying to appear embarrassed. “But the people who pay my salary, and it’s a good one, want to come off being the good guys if anything should happen. There’s billions at stake if they can get drilling rights in Adabi. And, to be honest and fair to them, I don’t think anyone really took the threat seriously. There didn’t seem to be any reason for anyone to want to kill Sherima. Maybe if she still were married to Hassan, but it didn’t seem to us that after the divorce, she was in danger.”

  “But that man on the balcony . . . do you think he was trying to hurt Sherima?”

  “I don’t know for sure. He could have been just a robber, though the coincidence of his being an Arab has me wondering now.”

  “What about those men in Georgetown tonight? Was that coincidence, too?”

  “That was a coincidence, I’m sure. I checked with a friend of mine at District police headquarters just a little while ago and he tells me that the three men they found in the street out there all have records as muggers or petty thieves. It looks like they were prowling around looking for likely victims and spotted us leaving the restaurant, saw we had a limousine but were starting to walk, so they followed us.”

  “Did you tell him about your shooting them? Are we going to have to answer questions and go through a police investigation? Sherima will just die if she gets involved in that kind of thing. She’s trying so hard not to embarrass Hassan.”

  I explained that I hadn’t let on to my supposed police friend that I knew anything about the incident in Georgetown, other than just saying that I had been in the area at the time and saw all the police cars and wondered what had happened. “I got the feeling the police think those blacks made the mistake of trying to rip off some big drug dealers or something, and muffed it. I don’t reckon the police are going to try too hard to find out who killed them. They probably feel that it’s three less thugs they have to worry about being on the streets.”

  “Oh, Nick, it’s all so horrible,” she whispered, snuggling up against me. “What if somebody is trying to hurt Sherima? What if you’d gotten killed?” She was quiet for a moment, deep in thought. Then, suddenly, she jerked erect and turned blazing eyes on me. “Nick, what about us? Was meeting me part of your job? Were you supposed to make me fall for you just so you could stick close to Sherima?”

  I couldn’t let her believe that, so I pulled her to me almost roughly and kissed her deeply in spite of her struggling. When I released her, I said, “Lovely lady, my orders were not to even make contact with Sherima, or anyone with her, unless some threat developed. My bosses arranged for me to have this room next to hers, yes, but my meeting you was strictly an honest-to-goodness accident. A wonderful one, too, it turned out. But when the company finds out I’ve been hanging around with you and Sherima, I’m in for big trouble. Especially if they think I might have done anything that could goof them up later when they try to get those oil leases.”

  She seemed to believe me, for concern suddenly came over her face and she leaned forward to kiss me, saying softly, “Nick, I wouldn’t tell anyone. Not even Sherima. I was afraid that you were using me. I don’t think I could . . .” The sentence trailed off as she buried her face on my chest, but I knew what she had been going to say, and I wondered just who had used and hurt her so deeply. Touched, I lifted her face and pressed my lips gently over hers again. Her response was more demanding as her tongue played against my lips, and as I opened them, darted inside to become a probing, teasing demon that brought an instant reaction from me.

  Finally breaking off the embrace, she asked, “Nick, can I stay here with you for the rest of the night?”

  I wanted to get on the phone to AXE and arrange for another collection—the man in the bathroom—so I said lightly, “There’s not that much of the night left, I’m afraid. The sun will be up in a couple of hours. And what if Sherima wakes up and finds you gone?”

  “I told you she’d be out for hours yet.” A pout settled on her face as she said, “Don’t you want me to stay . . . now that I know all about you?” The pout had turned into a hurt expression and I knew she was thinking that she’d been used again.

  Gathering her in my arms, I rose and carried her to the bed. “Get those clothes off,” I ordered, smiling. “I’ll show you who wants you to stay.” As I began to undress myself, I picked up the phone and told the desk to waken me at seven-thirty.

  I was up and had completed my exercises when the wake-up call came. I picked it up on the first ring, thanking the operator quietly so I wouldn’t waken Candy. I wanted a few more minutes of privacy before I sent her back to Sherima’s suite.

  For one thing, I had to get dressed and slip out to the balcony to retrieve my makeshift alarm. After I dumped Candy on the bed, she had insisted on going into the bathroom before our Iovemaking started. She wanted to remove her makeup, she explained, but I felt certain that her intense curiosity made her want to check out where I had hidden the dead man.

  I had used the opportunity to take a long piece of black thread from the spool I always carried in my luggage. Tying one end of it around a glass from the kitchenette and racing out and over the wall to Sherima’s balcony door, I knotted the other end to the handle. It was invisible in the darkness. Vaulting back to my side again, I set the glass on the top of the divider. Anyone trying to open Sherima’s door would pull the glass off to shatter on the balcony floor. Since there had been no crash during the few hours before daybreak, I knew no one had attempted to reach Sherima that way. And no commotion had come from the hotel detective in the hallway.

  When I returned to the room, I saw that the demands we had made on each other during more than two hours of passion before Candy finally dropped off to sleep showed on her face, bathed in the morning sun that glowed through the balcony doorway. She had made love w
ith complete abandon and had given herself with an intensity that outdid all our previous encounters. We had come together again and again, and after each peak, she would be ready again, her caressing hands and teasing mouth almost daring me to prove my affection anew, to wipe out any thought that I was merely using her.

  I bent over and kissed her soft wet lips. “Candy, it’s time to get up.” She didn’t stir, so I moved my mouth down her slender neck, leaving a trail of quick, pecking kisses. She moaned softly and brushed a hand over her face as a childlike frown passed swiftly over her face. I slid a hand under the sheet and cupped it over her breast, massaging gently as I kissed her on the lips again.

  “Hey, gorgeous, it’s time to get up,” I repeated, raising my head.

  She let me know she was awake by reaching up and slipping both arms around my neck before I could stand up. She pulled me back to her, and this time, she was the one planting tiny kisses over my face and down my neck. We ended up in a long embrace, and I let her go, finally, to say:

  “Sherima will be waking up soon. It’s almost eight o’clock.”

  “No fair sending me away like this,” she murmured, leaning back against the pillows and blinking her eyes against the bright morning sunlight. She turned her face to me and smiled coyly, then looked down at my pants.

  “You’re dressed,” she said. “That’s not fair either.”

  “I’ve been up and dressed for hours,” I teased. “Did my exercises, wrote a book, toured the District, and had time left over to catch a short movie.”

  She sat up, filling die room with her laughter. “I suppose you’ve branded a whole herd of cattle, too,” she said between giggles.

  “Well, ma’am,” I said, “now that you mention it—”

  “Oh, Nick, even with everything that’s happened,” she sighed, her face becoming soft, “I don’t think I’ve liked a man’s company as much as I do yours—not for a long, long time.”