Sylvie's Cowboy by Iris Chacon Page B

their long, long, long
way up.
    The elevator clunked to a stop. Its wire mesh
door creaked open. Hesitant footsteps thumped onto the girders.
    “Over here, Les,” said Harry. “Watch your
step.”
    Unsteady and disheveled, Leslye looked like
she hadn’t eaten or slept much, but she had swallowed plenty. She
crept across the girders toward Harry, hanging on to anything
within reach. There wasn’t much.
    Harry didn’t get up. “Pity Mr. Stern couldn’t
join us. I think this is a real ‘high level’ meeting, don’t
you?”
    “You don’t seriously think he believes I had
a telephone call from a dead man. More than once. Or that I agreed
to meet a corpse in the middle of the night in a place like this?
He thinks I was hallucinating. I’m not sure I’m not.”
    “I’m no hallucination, Les. I called you.”
Harry stood and walked along the girder, surveying the construction
project. “You and I both know you got real problems with this
place, Les.”
    “What did you mean on the phone—’you get what
you pay for’—what was that supposed to mean?”
    Harry picked up a length of two-by-four and
whacked it at a short metal crosspiece bolted to an angle of steel
framework. The bolts crumbled like ceramic pottery; the metal
crosspiece fell—and fell, and fell—until a distant clang indicated
it had hit bottom.
    “You pay for crooked inspectors and
substandard building materials, you get a building that falls
down—if you ever get it built in the first place.”
    “Why wouldn’t we get it built?” Leslye hung
onto the nearest upright girder, careful not to rely on any short
crosspieces for support.
    Harry’s smile was not comforting. “Because
you won’t have the money to finish it, Les. Your money is
disappearing, isn’t it? I mean, what little Danny hasn’t gambled
away already. Disappearing. And so are your buyers. And if you
can’t sell Pace Tower for a boatload of cash in a hurry, it’s
doomed—and so are you.”
    Realization crossed Leslye’s face. “It was
you! The wire transfers, the canceled insurance, someone breaking
into my office! You’re behind all this! It was you all along!”
    Harry shrugged in an aw-shucks manner.
“Surprised, Les? Well, imagine how surprised I was to find out my
empire was gone. You were slick, weren’t you? You got me. I signed
anything you put in front of me, until I figured out what was
happening.
    “By the time I realized you had stolen most
of what I had, and all that Sylvie would ever have, it was too
late. You’d done it. Very clever, Les. Almost worked.”
    “It’s all legal,” Leslye said proudly. “You
signed it over. You can sue, but you’ll never convince a court that
a sophisticated businessman like you didn’t know exactly what he
was signing.”
    Harry adopted a soothing demeanor. “I can’t
sue you, Les. I’m dead, remember?”
    “Obviously, you’re not dead,” said
Leslye.
    “Isn’t money wonderful? It can’t buy
happiness or good health, but it can buy coroners’ clerks and
funeral directors, and even the occasional policeman. I bought my
own death. Dead men can’t sue, Les.”
    “You can’t have us arrested, either,” she
snarled. “The paperwork is perfect. We made sure. Everything
absolutely lawful. We won’t go to jail.”
    “You’re right,” said Harry. “You and Dan will
not go to jail. Since I’m, dead, neither will I.”
    Leslye was so terrified by what she heard in
his voice and saw in his face, she nearly lost her handhold.
    Harry began walking toward her across the
girder. “Calm down, Les. You’re too drunk to be safe up here. You
better let me help you down.”
    “Keep your hands off me!” she shouted. “All
those years when I threw myself at you, worked with you, joined the
polo club, the yacht club, any frigging club you might go to, just
to be close to you! All those years—even after Helen died! And you
never even
saw
me, never really knew who I was. And now,
now when you’re dead and you