Man on a leash

by Charles Williams

  “I guess Jeri didn’t think that night she knew how to break into a house, but another thirty hours of withdrawal symptoms and she didn’t have any doubt of it at all. She could break into Fort Knox with a banana. So she went out there sometime after two o’clock Wednesday morning, as soon as Bonner was asleep. And in the meantime, apparently Debra’d been worked over till she broke down and told the man about it, so he was waiting. Obviously he didn’t guess about the letter, though.

  “The San Francisco police got the name and address from the phone company. J. L. Stacey, probably an alias, in a furnished apartment out near North Beach, but when they got there, the birds were gone without a trace. Bonner, of course, couldn’t have got the information, so I guess he was just going it blind, trying to run down somebody who knew who Debra was.

  “And, incidentally, while we’re on the subject of phone calls, both of those your father made”— Brubaker picked up another sheet of paper from the litter on his desk—” to Winegaard at seven A.M. July sixth and to Richter at ten fifteen A.M. July tenth, were from his home phone. So whatever he was doing out there at the Van Sickle place, he came home on Monday to phone and then left again, for God knows where until he showed up at the bank on the morning of the twelfth.”

  “He didn’t go anywhere, from beginning to end,” Romstead said. “He was taken. He was kidnapped.”

  Brubaker got up and began to pace the office. “Jesus Christ, when I think that I could’ve been a pimp or a geek in a sideshow, biting the heads off chickens! Look, Romstead, kidnap is a federal offense, and if we had one single damned shred of evidence to hang a kidnap case on, we could call in the FBI. We’d have a whole army of special agents working on it. As a matter of fact, I’ve talked to them, but after they talked to Richter, they said forget it. They must have thought I was nuts. And Richter, believe me, is getting plenty pissed about it. He says he’s going to make a recording. First there was Sam Bolling, and then the San Francisco police, and then you, and then the FBI, and then me.

  “So maybe I was wrong about the heroin theory, so I don’t have the faintest damned idea what he was doing out there at the old Van Sickle place or what he did with that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, there is no evidence whatever he was there, or anywhere else, against his will, and how in hell” —Brubaker dropped into his chair again and slammed a hand down on his desk among the papers— “how in hell—you tell me—could he have been kidnapped if he came into that bank himself—alone—to get the money?”

  “I don’t know,” Romstead replied. “But I’m going to find out.” He got up.

  “Well, there’s no way I can stop you from trying. But did you ever hear the old story about the man tracking the tiger through the jungle?”

  Romstead nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

  “Well, if I were you I’d keep a good lookout behind. That second set of tiger tracks may be closer than you think.”

  He went back to the motel and called Mayo. She grabbed up the phone on the first ring, and he gave a sigh of relief as he heard her voice.

  “I’ve been worried all day,” she said.

  “Not too worried to go out with another man. I tried to call you around eleven.”

  “Oh, hell, of all the rotten luck. That’s when I ducked downstairs to get the mail. And I wasn’t gone five minutes. Did you find the place?”

  “Yes. But there’s nobody there now and nothing to prove who they were.” He had no intention of saying anything about Bonner. “I’ll tell you about it when I get there. I’m not sure yet what flight I’ll be on, so don’t figure on meeting me at the airport. Just stay near the phone, and I’ll call as soon as I’m in town. Should be before ten.”

  “Are you leaving for Reno now?”

  “Very shortly. Just as soon as I talk to Mrs. Carmody.”

  “Hah! Maybe she’s the reason I couldn’t come with you.”

  “You’re obsessed with sex. You ought to see somebody about it.”

  “Maybe I would, if you ever got home. But while you’re visiting your father’s sexpot, keep reminding yourself of the Oedipal overtones.”

  “Hell, just thinking of the comparisons would do it.”

  “That’ll be the day.”

  After he’d hung up, he debated whether to put through a call to Murdock. No, that could wait till he’d talked to Paulette Carmody; he’d call after he was back in San Francisco. He showered and put on a fresh shirt and a tie and the suit he’d worn coming up. As he was putting the dusty and sweat-stained shirt in the bag, he remembered the fragment of brown plastic or cardboard he’d found out in the flat -by the dead burro. He removed it from the pocket.

  What could fd mean? Mfd for manufactured? No, there’d have to be something after it. Mfd by, or Mfd in— He frowned. Solder. Radio officer. Check out the simalizer and put a new frammistat in his KLH. Jeri Bonner had worked for an electronics supply company, probably where she’d met Tallant. He grabbed up the telephone directory and flipped through the thin section of yellow pages. RADIO AND TV, REPAIRS. There were three, one of them on West Third Street. Well, they couldn’t lock you up for asking stupid questions. He dropped it in the pocket of his jacket and finished packing.

  He carried the bag out to the car and stopped at the office to pay for the toll calls and the extra day. The sour-faced man was behind the desk.

  “Have to pay for an extra day,” he said. “Checkout time’s two P.M. Same’s it has been for years.”

  “Right.” Romstead put down the Amex card.

  “You’d think someday people’d learn—”

  Romstead picked up the card and put down two twenty-dollar bills. It’d be quicker, and he wouldn’t have to listen to the old fart.

  “Posted right there on the wall, plain as anything.”

  Romstead picked up the change, his face suffused with wonder. “Well, I be dawg; so that’s what that writin’ said? I thought it meant I could take the towels for keepsakes.”

  He went up Aspen and made the turn into Third. The TV repair shop was near the end of the block with a parking space a few doors away. It was after five now, and he hoped it wasn’t closed. It wasn’t, quite. At the counter in front a girl was putting on lipstick and appraising her hair in a small mirror. In back of her was an open doorway into the shop.

  “Are any of your service men still here?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Raymond’s back there. We’re about to close, though.”

  “This’ll only take a minute.” He went around the end of the counter. There were two service benches in the back room with long fluorescent lights above them, littered with tools and parts and the denuded carcasses of TV sets and radios. Raymond was a pleasant long-haired youth wearing a University of Nevada T-shirt. He glanced up inquiringly from the writhing green snakes he was watching on the screen of some kind of test equipment.

  “I just wanted to ask you what may be a very dumb question.” Romstead set the fragment of plastic on the bench. “Is this part of anything electronic?”

  Raymond glanced at it, turned it slightly to look at the markings. “Sure,” he said. He reached into a bin and brought out a cylindrical object that reminded Romstead vaguely of a shotgun shell except that it had a short piece of wire attached to each end. He set it on the bench. It was imprinted with the manufacturer’s name, but what instantly caught Romstead’s eye was the legend, “100 Mfd,” in the center of it. There was a minus sign at one end and a plus at the other.

  “Electrolytic capacitor,” Raymond said. “‘Mfd’ is the abbreviation for microfarad. They’re used in a number of different circuits for high capacity at a low-voltage rating. Have to be installed with the right polarity, though; that’s the reason for the plus and minus on the case.”

  Romstead understood little or nothing of this except that his stab in the dark had paid off. He smiled at Raymond and put five dollars on the bench. “Thanks a million,” he said. “I won the bet.”

  He drove on out West Third S
treet in the sunset, wondering if he hadn’t merely made the whole thing worse; certainly you could go crazy trying to figure out what all these different parts had to do with each other or with his father’s inexplicable trip to the bank. Lost in thought, he almost went past Paulette Carmody’s drive and had to slam on his brakes to make the turn. He parked in front of the walk on the circular blacktop drive and went up to ring the bell, thinking now that it was too late, that he should have called first. She’d probably heard about Bonner by now and might not feel like talking to anybody. She came to the door herself, and he suspected she’d been crying, though she’d done a good job of covering the effects with makeup. He started to apologize, but she interrupted.

  “No,” she said. “I’m glad you came; I wanted to talk to you.” She led the way down the short vestibule into the living room. “Come on into the kitchen,” she said, “while I fix the drinks. It’s Carmelita’s day off.”

  The kitchen was in front, on the opposite side of the living room, with a separate dining room in back of it. There was a door at the far end of it, probably to the garage. She opened the refrigerator for ice cubes. “Martini, vodka and tonic, scotch?”

  “Vodka and tonic would be fine,” he said.

  She began assembling the drinks, the old ebullience and blatant sexiness subdued now, though the simple sheath she wore was still overpowered by the figure that nothing would ever quite restrain. Her legs were bare, as usual.

  “I’m sorry about Bonner,” he said.

  “He made a lot of enemies,” she replied, “but I liked him. He was hard-nosed, bullheaded, and horny, and always in a brawl or trouble of some kind, but in most ways he was a simplehearted and generous kind of guy and a good friend. And lousy husband, naturally.”

  “Then he’d been married?”

  “Oh, yes, for about six years. But his wife finally gave up. Poker, and cheating on her all the time. Men. I’ll swear to Christ.”

  They carried their drinks into the living room. Dusk was thickening in the patio beyond the wall of glass, and the pool was a shimmering blue with its underwater lights. She had heard very little of how it had happened, so he told her, playing down the gory aspects of it as much as possible.

  “Then Brubaker thinks Jeri was killed, too?” she asked. “And Lew had an idea who did it?”

  “Or at least they were afraid he did.”

  “You realize you could have been shot, too?”

  “I guess he wasn’t worried about me,” Romstead replied. That was no answer, he knew, but he didn’t have any better. “But about that radio officer on the Fairisle, was his name Tallant?”

  “No,” she said. “Kessler. Harry Kessler.”

  That wasn’t conclusive, Romstead thought; he could have changed it, unless he was on parole. “You knew him about four years ago?”

  “That’s right. Actually, it was five years ago, of course, when your father picked us up out there, but I hardly noticed him then. Jeri did, though. She thought he was cute.”

  “He’d have been in his late twenties? Medium height, slender, dark complexion, brown eyes, black hair?”

  “Oh, no. The age and the build would be about right, but he was as blond as you are. Blue eyes.”

  Romstead glumly shook his head. So much for that brainstorm. But then how did Tallant get into the picture?

  “Anyway,” Paulette went on, “it seems to me he’d still be in prison. I don’t know how long a sentence he got, but it’s only been a little over three years.”

  “Do you know where he was sent?”

  She shook her head. “No, except that it must have been a federal prison. This happened at sea, so I don’t think any state would have had jurisdiction.”

  “How’d the old man get wise to him anyway?”

  She set her drink on the coffee table and lighted a cigarette. “Your father could read code, and Kessler didn’t know it. You see, when he was a young man and still sailing as mate on Norwegian ships—”

  “Yes, I know about that,” Romstead interrupted. “He used to have both licenses and doubled as radio operator sometimes. Winegaard told me about it.”

  “That’s right. And I gather that reading code is something you never entirely forget. You may get a little rusty, but you can always do it, like swimming or riding a bicycle. But I’d better start at the beginning.

  “It was in 1968, when I made the first trip as passenger on the Fairisle, that I got to know this kook. I guess from what everybody said he was close to being an authentic genius—in electronics, anyway—but he didn’t have an engineering degree for some reason; maybe he’d been too poor to go to college or he’d been kicked out or something. Otherwise, he’d probably have been drawing a big salary in one of those fur-brain outfits doing research and making Buck Rogers stuff for satellites and moon shots and so on. He was always inventing things and experimenting and lashing up nutty pieces of electronic spaghetti so he could stare into the screen of an oscilloscope like somebody watching a dirty movie, and the radio room looked like a mad scientist’s nightmare. There was no doubt he had a brilliant mind; but he could be pretty contemptuous and snotty, and he had a sadistic sense of humor. I didn’t much like him, though he could be charming when he wanted to be.

  “Anyway, at the end of the next trip, when I met your father in San Francisco, he said he was going to be tied up part of the time making depositions and affidavits and so on, and it turns out it was about this screwball Kessler. He told me what had happened. Maybe I should have told you first that for two or three trips the Customs men had really been shaking down the Fairisle when she came in from the Far East, going over her with a fine-tooth comb as if they’d had a tip there was contraband aboard, but they never found anything.

  “Well, this trip, about ten P.M. the last night out from San Francisco, your father was down in the passengers’ lounge playing bridge. There was a radio in the lounge, turned on and getting music from some station ashore, and all of a sudden the music began to be covered up with dots and dashes—code, that is. Your father explained to me why it was. It seems if a transmitter’s antenna and a receiver’s antenna are right close together, the way they’d be aboard a ship, the receiver would pick up what was being sent by the transmitter even though they might be tuned to different wavelengths. It sort of spills over into it or something.

  “It was perfectly normal, of course, and happened every time Kessler was using the ship’s transnfitting apparatus, but your father began reading it just automatically while he went on playing bridge, and in a minute he realized there was something damned screwy about what Kessler was sending. It wasn’t any message he’d given him to send, in the first place, and he wasn’t using any of the standard procedure or the ship’s call letters or identification of any kind. But it was a sort of ETA—estimated time of arrivals—only it wasn’t seven A.M., when the Fairisle was due to arrive off the Golden Gate, but four A.M., when she’d still be over fifty miles at sea. So it had to be a rendezvous with a boat of some kind.

  “Your father said nothing about it to the passengers, of course, and went ahead and finished the card game. When he went back up to his cabin, he phoned the bridge and left orders to be called at three A.M. He went up to the bridge at that time and switched on the radar. There were three or four ships showing on the screen, and in a few minutes he began to pick up another, much smaller target, which was probably a small boat. It was ahead of the Fairisle, more or less stationary, and he could see they were going to pass it less than a mile off.

  “He went down and woke up the chief officer. He wanted a witness, for one thing, and the chief officer’s cabin was in the same passageway as Kessler’s. They watched with the door on a crack, and in a few minutes Kessler looked out of his cabin to be sure the coast was clear and then started down the passageway toward the deck, carrying what looked like just a bunch of junk he wanted to heave over the side.

  “Your father stepped out and collared him. Kessler began cursing and trying to fig
ht him off, so your father slugged him. He had a fist like a twelve pound frozen ham, so Kessler’d had all the fight knocked out of him by the time he was able to stand up again. Your father had him locked up, and he and the chief officer checked over this thing he’d been carrying. It was a big jagged piece of styrofoam that’d been stained brown so it’d look like an old chunk of wood. There was a thin wire sticking up through it and the thing was ballasted on the bottom so the wire would stay upright. Inside the styrofoam was a real tiny radio transmitter—it turned out to be when the narcs got hold of it—using the wire for an antenna. And attached to the bottom with stainless-steel wire was a watertight plastic container with nearly a half kilo of heroin in it.

  “Well, Kessler never would identify the people on the boat, but he did cop out to the extent of explaining how it worked, which the narcs knew anyway. He’d built the little transmitter, of course, and on the boat there was a small radio direction-finder he’d also built. It was tuned to the same frequency as the transmitter, so all the boat people had to do was home in on the signal until they could pick up the float in their searchlight. They’d pulled it off twice before and got away with it.

  “Your father had to take part of a trip off to testify at the trial, about ten months later, I think. He left the ship in San Francisco and rejoined it in Honolulu. Kessler was convicted, but I never did know what sentence he got.”