Eddie, his cheek red, looked up as a tear ran down his cheek. “I didn’t want to get greedy,” he said.
“So you got the stuff out of the car before it went to auction, cut a deal behind Bullock’s back, figured you’d pocket the cash yourself. So we’ve got about six, seven thousand in the room here. Where’s the rest of it?”
“I mailed it.”
Now Trimble’s face was red, without being slapped. He went very quiet. “Eddie, you what?”
“I mailed it, to Rio. Some of it I mailed, some of it I FedExed, to different hotels, to be held in care of. You know, in care of me. When I get there, I ask at the front desk, they got any mail for me, I pick it up.”
“You put more than $140,000 in the mail?”
“I didn’t want them to find all that on me if they did a search when I was getting on the plane.”
I had a sinking feeling. We were going to be returning to Bullock’s place with very bad news.
“Can’t you tell Mr. Bullock I’m sorry? I’ll make this right. I’ll go to Rio, go to all the hotels where I sent the money, and I’ll send it all back. I can put all the cash in a bank, then send him a certified check.”
Trimble looked at me, shook his head, then tossed a pair of pants at Eddie’s face. “You’re going to have to explain this to Mr. Bullock yourself. Get dressed.”
Eddie eased himself off the bed, winced when he put his foot on the carpet. “I really do think all my toes are broken,” he said. “Could we stop at the hospital on the way, get somebody to look at this? Or, I know, I know. Listen, couldn’t you tell him you couldn’t find me? You do that, and I’ll send you the money. You can have it all. Mr. Bullock doesn’t ever have to know. You could come to Rio with me, I’ll take you to the hotels. They’re all five-star, we could hang out awhile, at each one. Get ourselves some girls, have a party. But it’s all yours, you don’t want to pay for my room, that’s cool, that’s okay, I understand. I mean, if you could spare me a couple thou, that’d be great, but the rest, it would be yours.” To me, he said, “You can have some, too, I mean, if that’s okay with Detective Trimble.”
And back to Trimble: “You know what Bullock is going to do to me. You can’t just let that happen. You can’t take me back there. You know what he’ll do to me. He won’t be at all understanding. You know he’ll kill me.”
Trimble closed his eyes a moment in frustration. “Get dressed, Eddie. We’re going for a ride.”
He turned away from Eddie, pulled me aside. “This is gonna be ugly. We’ve got no drugs, we’ve got no money, and he—”
Eddie was running for the sliding glass door to the balcony. He hobbled a bit, trying to keep the weight off his bad foot, flung the door open, and in a second his hands were on the railing, and he was over it like it was a vaulting horse.
And I thought, for a moment, how odd it was, that a guy, knowing his life was going to be over in a few seconds, would still favor his bad foot so it wouldn’t hurt him too much.
34
WE BOTH RAN TO THE BALCONY, but Trimble edged in front of me to get out there first. I noticed he was careful not to touch the railing as he peered over, so I followed his lead. Ten floors down, the lower half of Eddie Mayhew was sprawled across the short hood of a minivan, and the rest of him had gone through the windshield. The van’s alarm system had kicked in and was whooping.
“Terrific,” said Trimble, going back into the room. He took the case off a pillow and wiped down the back of the chair he’d grabbed, the handles of the over-the-shoulder bag. “Did you touch anything?” he asked me.
“We didn’t kill him,” I said. “You didn’t kill him. He jumped.”
“Yeah, well, I had every reason to have tossed him off the balcony, so I might as well have. Did you touch anything?”
“No. I don’t think so.” I honestly wasn’t certain, shaken as I was by what I’d just seen.
To be sure, Trimble used the pillowcase to wipe down the doorknobs, and the last thing he did was open the door with it, then tossed the case back into the room. “Put it back on the pillow,” he told me, and I did.
And then we were in the hall, heading for the elevator. But Trimble shouldered open a door under an Exit sign and we were in the stairwell. “I don’t want anyone downstairs seeing an elevator come up to ten,” he said. He was running down the steps, taking two at a time. We did about a flight every five seconds, and about a minute later, we were back on the first floor, going down a hallway and out a side entrance that wasn’t locked from the inside.
I had thought we’d be hearing sirens by the time we went outside, but there was only the distant wailing of the van’s alarm from around the other side of the building. As if reading my mind, Trimble said, “No one pays any attention to those things.”