Goodbye California - Alistair [46]
Dunne said admiringly: ‘You have a very devious mind.’
‘Set a thief to catch a thief?’ Ryder smiled. ‘Maybe. Two things, Major. When you or whoever handle those notes don’t touch the top right. Fingerprints, especially on the two-dollar bills.’
Dunne looked at the notes. He said: ‘I’d estimate there’s about two thousand bills there. You expect me to try them all for fingerprints?’
‘I said you or whoever.’
‘Well, thanks. And the second thing?’
‘Have you got a fingerprinting set here?’
‘Lots. Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Ryder was vague. ‘You never know when those things might not come in handy.’
Judge LeWinter lived in a splendidly impressive house as befitted one widely tipped to become the next chairman of the State Supreme Court. Within a few miles of the Californian coast is to be found a greater variety of home architecture than anywhere, but, even by such standards, LeWinter’s home was unusual, a faithful replica of an Alabaman ante-bellum house, gleaming white, with its two-storey colonnaded porch, balconies, a profusion of surrounding magnolias and a plethora of white oak and long-bearded Spanish moss, neither of which seemed to find the climate very congenial. Within so imposing a residence – one couldn’t call it a home – could only dwell, one would have thought, a pillar of legal rectitude. One could be wrong.
How wrong Ryder and his son found out when they opened the bedroom door without the courtesy of a prior knock and found the legal luminary in bed, but not alone: and he wasn’t being not alone with his wife, either. The judge, bronzed, white-haired and white-moustached, the absence of a white winged collar and black string neck-tie an almost jarring note, looked perfectly at home in the gilded Victorian iron bedstead. Which was more than could be said for his companion, a sadly over-painted and youthful demi-mondaine who looked as if she would have been much more at home in what could delicately be termed as the outermost fringes of society. Both wore startled and wide-eyed expressions as people tend to wear when confronted with two hooded men bearing guns, the girl’s expression shading gradually into a guilty fear, the judge’s, predictably, into outrage. His speech was equally predictable.
‘What the devil! Who the hell are you?’
‘We’re no friends, you can be sure of that,’ Ryder said. ‘We know who you are. Who’s the young lady?’ He didn’t bother to wait for the inevitable silence but turned to Jeff. ‘Bring your camera, Perkins?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Pity.’ He looked at LeWinter. ‘I’m sure you would have loved us to send a snapshot to your wife to show that you’re not pining too much in her absence.’ The judge’s outrage subsided. ‘Right, Perkins, the prints.’
Jeff was no expert, but he was not long enough out of police school to have forgotten how to make clean prints. A deflated LeWinter, who clearly found the situation beyond him, offered neither objection nor resistance. When Jeff had finished he glanced at the girl and then at Ryder, who hesitated and nodded. Ryder said to her: ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you, Miss. What’s your name?’
She compressed her lips and looked away. Ryder sighed, picked up a purse which could only be hers, opened it and emptied the contents on to a dressing table. He rifled through those, selected an envelope and said: ‘Bettina Ivanhoe, eight-eight-eight South Maple.’ He looked at the girl, frightened, flaxen-haired, with high and rather wide Slavonic cheekbones: but for her efforts to improve on nature she would have been strikingly good-looking. ‘Ivanhoe? Ivanov would be nearer it. Russian?’
‘No. I was born here.’
‘I’ll bet your parents weren’t.’ She made no reply. He looked through the scattered contents of the purse and picked up two photographs, one each of the girl and LeWinter. That made her more than a one-time visitor. There had to be a forty-year gap in their ages. ‘Darby and Joan,’ Ryder said. The contempt in his voice was matched by his gesture of flicking the cards to the floor.
‘Blackmail?’ LeWinter