The road curved and Archer was now running parallel to the lake. It was long and majestic, and there was only one boat on it. And it was the boat he was chasing right now; it was ahead of him. But not that far ahead of him.

  However, the boat was moving like a rocket, and Archer could just make out the man at the wheel. Paley was a daredevil, for sure. He had that boat moving at its absolute limit of speed. The lake surface wasn’t all that smooth, because the wind was creating some chop. The boat’s bow was a battering ram, lifting into the air and coming down hard. Paley seemed unfazed.

  Archer felt a grudging admiration for the man and he could understand how so many Nazi pilots had fallen victim to his skill and fearlessness. But that was where the admiration ended. He was the reason Willie Dash had almost died. He had put Jake Nichols in a wheelchair. Archer was not going to let him get away a third time.

  He pushed the Packard even harder, but its horsepower just couldn’t match that of modern vehicles.

  If only I had the Delahaye.

  When he looked back over at the lake he could no longer see the boat. But Archer knew where Paley was going. He just had to get there in time.

  He reached the turnoff and took it on maybe two wheels, he wasn’t entirely sure. What he was certain about was that when that part of the Packard slammed back to earth, the rear axle cracked.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  He leaped out of the car and took off at a dead sprint, but feeling he had lost the battle.

  No. No excuses, Archer. You finish this right now.

  He redoubled his efforts, running faster than he had since the war. After a half mile he saw his destination up ahead. A private airstrip that Green and some other Lake Tahoe wealthy families had probably put in so they wouldn’t have to make the long journey from LA by car, or fly into Reno with the plebeians. It had one small wooden shack, a set of fuel pumps, but no employees that he could see. It was basically just a long strip of asphalt; that was his Mecca right now.

  When he reached the runway, he was sucking in cold air so hard his lungs couldn’t process it, and his head started to pound and he felt nauseous.

  Then he saw the plane was on the tarmac and the props were already spinning at a high velocity. Despite running flat-out, he had arrived perhaps too late.

  Archer looked frantically around and saw which way the windsock was blowing.

  Thank you, God. Because you gotta come straight at me, Paley.

  He took up position in the middle of the runway strip about halfway down, a gun in each hand as the big Beechcraft pivoted, made its turn, and lined up squarely in the middle of the tarmac as it prepared to take off into the wind gusts coming in behind Archer. He eyed the right prop and then the left. Man versus machine, David versus Goliath.

  The plane rocketed down the runway toward him, its engines shrieking with rising thrust. Through the cockpit windscreen, Archer could see Paley, but there was no sign of Bonham.

  Paley only had one chance—to lift off before he came within range of Archer’s weapons.

  Archer knew this, and so he started sprinting right toward the aircraft. He couldn’t see Paley’s expression at this tactic, but he didn’t imagine it would be a happy one.

  He was within two hundred feet of the plane. He was aiming for two things with each weapon: the tires and the props. He opened fire with the .32 he’d taken from Lamb. When he tried to fire it again, it banged empty. He tossed it down and aimed his .38. As he ran ever closer and fired again, one of his shots hit a blade on the right propeller. It sheared off, and destroyed the exact synchronicity that propeller engines required. The plane started to zigzag wildly as Paley struggled to control the aircraft. Another chunk of the damaged prop soared across the runway. Luckily, Archer ducked and it passed over him.

  Archer knelt, took careful aim, and shot out the left front tire of the gyrating plane. The rubber ripped apart and sprayed across the tarmac. Archer wasn’t lucky or fast enough this time, and a piece of the rubber whipsawed into his left calf. He fell flat to the asphalt, groaning in pain.

  This was actually a good thing, because the Beechcraft came back around like a lame-winged duck, and hopped over him at that point. It soared a bare twenty feet into the air before coming back down far too hard on the runway. The struts on the landing gear collapsed, and the plane pitched to the right. The right-side wing struck the tarmac and cracked in half. The engines died and the props stopped spinning. Fuel started leaking onto the tarmac, creating an ever-growing pool of highly flammable liquid.

  The Beechcraft was officially no longer airworthy.

  Hobbled by the strike from the tire remnant, Archer limped slowly over and approached the plane on the pilot’s side. He pointed his gun at the glass.

  Paley straightened, and looked at him through the side window.

  “Out, now,” Archer ordered. “Before that fuel ignites.”

  The man slowly opened the door and stepped out, holding his right arm stiffly against his body. His left shoulder was set at an odd angle and there was blood on his shirt. There were also twin gashes in his head and the blood was trickling down his face. Lacquered in this crimson, his scars seemed to pulsate with hate.

  “Where’s Bernadette?” Archer asked.

  Paley chuckled. “In the lake.”

  Archer glanced in the direction of one of the deepest lakes in the world, where the current temperature would kill a person in a few minutes.

  Bernadette Bonham was no more. He looked back at the still-grinning Paley.

  Archer didn’t even bother to ask him why he’d done it. He knew the answer.

  It was just in the man’s nature.

  Chapter 74

  ARCHER SAT IN A CHAIR AND STARED across at the two women. More than a week had passed where everyone involved had grabbed a collective breath, and the rest of the world had managed to run smoothly along on its axis, despite the little hiccups in LA and Tahoe.

  Mallory Green sat stiffly with her surgically repaired arm in a sling. She stared at the concrete floor with seemingly abject fascination. Eleanor Lamb’s hand was wrapped with gauze, her eyes opaque. Her blond tresses burned auburn in the garish light from overhead. Police stations seemed to have no other kind of illumination, Archer thought. They were designed to drain most of the life and fight right out of you, while the barred doors sopped up the rest.

  The LAPD, with an assist from the county cops led by Phil Oldham, had raided the Jade Lion. They had come away with crates of heroin, a dozen enslaved workers, and an assortment of Hollywood’s landed gentry of both sexes who were in various stages of undress, as well as bondage. And drugged up.

  Archer had spoken with Alice Jacoby and told the woman that her only chance to stay out of jail was to spill everything she knew about Paley, the Jade, and Lamb. And she had sung like nobody’s business. But he had learned that when her role in all this had come to Warners’ attention, they had fired her. Maybe she should go back to West Virginia, thought Archer. Compared to Hollywood, the hollers might make for a decent change. In any event, Alice had gone down her last rabbit hole.

  They had recovered Bonham’s body from the lake. The Frenchwoman looked startled in death, as though she had never seen it coming with Paley next to her.

  Now the epiphany Archer had had back at Green’s chalet was going to be tested, in the form of Eleanor Lamb.

  Green looked at him defiantly. “I’m not sorry. I did what I had to do in order to survive.”

  “Well, you may not survive this.”

  This seemed to surprise her. “I have an excellent lawyer.”

  “You’re going to need it. And what about the people they were smuggling?”

  Green shook her head. “We knew nothing about that. I would never be engaged in that.”

  “Good to know you have a speed bump on your moral boundary line.” He looked at Lamb. “Up until the showdown with Paley, I thought your role was limited to blackmailing Peter Bonham over the little matter of bigamy. But then how would Mallory know about the drug dealing going on at the Jade? But Alice Jacoby found out lots of things about the Jade so you could write the script. And then you took advantage of that for personal gain.

  “So, how’d you get hooked up with Lamb? Just because she worked for you?”

  Lamb answered. “We’re kindred spirts. We’re men trapped in women’s bodies in a man’s world.” The little, edgy face sharpened even more. “And if we were actually men, we wouldn’t be here. Men lie, cheat, and steal all the time and get away with it.”

  “I think Darren Paley and Peter Bonham would beg to differ. So, how did Alice Jacoby get hired to redo the Jade?”

  Green said, “Bart owed money from an old gambling debt that Paley covered for him. Paley wanted to spiff the place up. Bart recommended her for the job. Alice gave him a good price, and he cut Bart some slack. It was the only time he ever did.”

  “But did you really understand what you were getting into?” he asked Green.

  “Yes. But to make amends I can use some of the money I made for charitable purposes.”

  Archer’s jaw dropped on that line. “Amends? People have been killed.”

  “I didn’t kill Cedric Bender or Peter Bonham.”

  “What about Steve Everett, your pilot?”

  “Oh, that,” she said, as though Archer was merely referring to an odd smell in the room.

  “He found out and wanted money.” This came from Lamb.

  “How’d he find out?”

  Green said, “Apparently on his last flight here the cargo broke free and shifted while he was trying to take off. He had to go back there and reorient it. One of the crates had cracked open.”

  Archer said, “And there it all was for him to see—his little pot of gold.”

  “It was our pot of gold, not his,” said Lamb.

  “So you shot him,” said Archer.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, I did. You fired a total of four times in the house with your six-shooter. But there were five cylinders empty in the wheel. I fired one round from it before there were no bullets left. The slug they dug out of Everett matched your gun.”

  Lamb apparently had nothing to say to this, so she kept silent.

  “How did it go down and what were you going to do with the body?”

  Green said, “I met him at the little airstrip. Ellie hid in the floorboard and then did what needed to be done. We were later going to dump his body in the lake.”

  He turned to Lamb. “You must have been delighted when you found your missing husband on the other end of a dope pipeline.”

  Lamb’s eyes seemed to electrify with the memory. “I knew even before then. Mallory and Bart had been to a dinner party at their place in Malibu. They’d taken photos. Mallory later showed me the pictures. And there was Nathaniel. He’d barely changed. Still handsome, still insufferably arrogant.”

  “So how did you figure him to be in the dope business? When you went out to Malibu?”

  “No, years before, when I went to South America to look for him. I discovered some ‘business associates’ of his down there. They were, how shall I say, not of the lawful mind. So when I learned he had this new wife and big house in Malibu, I started spying on him. That’s when I found out what he was doing. I wasn’t surprised. Then I moved out to Malibu, right next door to him. I threatened to tell his wife and the cops.”

  “This was after you blackmailed Gloria Mars for the purchase price of the house.”

  “She has more money than she knows what to do with.”

  “She also has a heart. That you broke.”

  “What are hearts for?” said Lamb pointedly. “Except to break?”

  Archer looked at Green. “And Lamb told you about her opportunity?”

  “Bart’s gambling losses were bleeding me dry. I saw we needed a way to transport the drugs in a way that absolutely wouldn’t be detected. We had the Tahoe place as a base, so I borrowed money from Gloria Mars for a down payment on the plane.”

  “Yeah, she alluded to her helping you out.”

  “I put it in my name for, as I told Bart, tax purposes. He knew nothing about things like that. We flew the shipments there and then they went onward by truck. With my documentary work, I had met people in both high and low places. Those contacts proved invaluable.”

  “And then it was off to the races, I guess.”

  She nodded, looking a little startled by it all. “Within six months I had paid Gloria back and bought the plane outright. I finished the Tahoe chalet and took care of Bart’s debts. I started socking money away in my own secret accounts. Within another year or two I was going to pull a vanishing act and leave my husband holding the proverbial bag.”

  He glanced at Lamb. “And Cedric Bender?”

  “I found him dead in my house after I came back from running an errand.”

  “And then you found out I was having dinner with Liberty and you showed up with your bag of lies to build a plausible reason for your upcoming disappearance.”

  Lamb nodded. “It was the best I could do given the timing.”

  “It was actually pretty good. But why didn’t you just get rid of the body?” asked Archer.

  “He was too heavy to move. Even with Mallory’s help. And we didn’t want to be seen carrying a body somewhere.”

  “Did you take his wallet and ID?”

  “Yes. I also checked the Ford outside. That matched the name in the wallet. We found out he was a PI. That’s when Mallory concocted the plan about hiring Bender to check into Bart’s affairs. She’d have time to do that because it would take the cops a while to identify the body. I was planning to lie low for a while and then come back with a plausible story.”

  “You brought all this on yourself, I’m thinking.”

  “What do you mean by that?” exclaimed Lamb.

  “I’m betting before all this happened you contacted Bonham in France and said there was a guy snooping around. So Bonham did some digging too, and finds out Bender was a PI. He naturally thinks the guy is snooping around him, not you. And he was right. So he comes back early from France, kills the guy, and then comes up with the idea to double-cross you. Then he takes the Ford and sends it off Malibu Pier. I thought he might have hidden the Ford in his garage. But it was his Bentley that leaked the oil I found. Which showed he’d come back early from France.”

  “You’re right. I did contact him over there. I should have known I could never trust him.”

  “Bonham goes off to France for months at a time. Who looked over the business then?”

  Green said, “He had associates, but I also meticulously documented every shipment and oversaw the entire operation. I did it better than he did, actually.”

  “Congratulations on being such a wonderful criminal.” Archer lit up a smoke. “By the way, Lamb, I went to your house on New Year’s Eve.”

  She looked startled. “Why?”

  “Believe it or not, I was worried about you. I called your house. A guy answered. I didn’t know then, but now I know it was Peter Bonham. I said I was your brother. He told me you didn’t have a brother, which should have clued me in that, whoever it was, he knew you well. Later, I went down to the beach and stumbled into a dope shipment coming ashore. I got in a tussle with a guy who, once more, turned out to be Bonham. It was only later I realized it was connected.”

  “Why would Nathaniel have been at my house that night?”

  “Probably to see if you had found the body and done a runner. Or maybe he was hoping you’d be there so he could kill you, too. Then he was probably going to exit stage left.”

  “Well, he was very good at vanishing. I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “Well, you two committed murder. That won’t end well for you, either.”

  Lamb said, “Don’t worry, they won’t execute us or anything.”

  Archer looked blankly at her. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Because we’re women. I mean, the men can’t have it all their own way, can they?”

  On that, Archer rose and left.

  He needed to get away from these ladies, particularly Eleanor Lamb.

  And Archer needed to drink an entire bar in the worst possible way.

  Chapter 75

  YOU DID GOOD, ARCHER. Better than good actually.”

  Willie Dash stood outside the hospital dressed in a new three-piece double-breasted suit Morrison had brought him because he’d lost weight in the hospital. She was waiting in the car for him. He was mostly healed and on his way back to Bay Town. “And Jake sends his thanks for nailing Paley. And I want to add my thanks on top of that.”

  “Couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Sure you could. And you did. You coming back to Bay Town today?”

  “No, not yet.”

  Dash eyed him keenly, understanding dawning on his features. “You ever coming back?”

  Archer couldn’t answer that, so he said nothing.

  Dash smiled knowingly. “Every baby bird has to find his own way eventually. Can’t stay in the mother’s nest forever.”

  “So I’m a baby bird, then?”

  “You were when you hit town over three years ago, Archer. You’re not anymore.” He ran his gaze over him. “Your wings look pretty strong from where I’m standing.” He gripped Archer’s hand. “But you ever need an old gumshoe to work something through, I’m your man.”

  “Thanks, Willie. Thanks for everything.”

  He watched them drive off and he headed to his Delahaye, which he’d retrieved from Bay Town.

  He reached Beverly Hills and pulled to a stop in front of the building housing Green and Ransome Productions. He took the elevator up and entered the office.

  The stories about Mallory Green and Eleanor Lamb and the Jade Lion and Darren Paley were in every proper paper and rag in town. The stories had even hit the national wire. But the story of finding movie stars in compromising situations didn’t see the light of day. Archer wondered how much that had cost the studios. And with that payoff, the rags would be throwing parties all over town, with bonuses to follow.