Three to Be Read

by Philip Wylie

  Peculiar dame, but handsome. Graduated two years before. Lived with another gal in a bungalow near the campus. Liked older guys, even as a student; very tall and helpfully man-crazy.

  The trouble with old Duff, Scotty reflected fondly, was that you had to get to know him to appreciate him. He gave the first impression of an absent-minded Leaning Tower of Pisa, and it took time to find out that he was as human as anybody and far brighter than most.

  When the object of such meditations reached the Yates home, his feet were cold both literally and figuratively. He called to Mrs. Yates and then backed away from telling her. He dallied in his room and heard Eleanor come home, and finally went downstairs, where he found the two women together. In a kind of panic, he considered trying to tell Scotty by phone that he couldn’t make it, but, instead, he blurted, “Won’t be here for supper. Sorry, folks.”

  Both women stared. It was true that he was occasionally absent, but always after giving long notice.

  Eleanor said, rather crossly, “You might have told us!”

  “Date,” he answered uncomfortably. “Just made it.”

  “A date”—Eleanor was sarcastic—“with some little group, I bet, that does calculus for party games!”

  “Dame,” he said coldly. “Who?”

  “That would be telling.” He was rather pleased by the half-angry, half-startled look on Eleanor’s face, but mystified by the smile Mrs. Yates gave him behind Eleanor’s back.

  Duff dressed. He put on his topcoat. He caught a bus at seven-fifteen. He got out nervously a half block from the Palm Paradise, and walked uneasily toward its glittering, one-story-high electric sign. He went in.

  What happened after that, he never clearly understood. Scotty was sitting at a ringside table, under revolving rainbow-hued lights, with two young ladies, one a girl with brown bangs who satisfied every detail of the “cute-college-type” description, and the other a stately, almost regal brunette with black hair, a heavy chignon at the nape of her neck, dazzling dark eyes and a smile, as Duff was introduced, which shocked him by its warmth and intimacy. He sat down, and there were cocktails. Scotty and his girl danced, but the tall brunette expressed herself as delighted not to do so, and she listened to Duff’s words, which flowed with increasing ease—as if every one were a jewel of remarkable brightness.

  There was dinner, a very gay meal with a bottle of red wine. There was coffee with brandy in it. There was a floor show. Duff was further startled and pleased when Scotty, in a moment during which their ladies were absent, said, “You know, old-timer, when I called Indigo, she’d heard of you and seen you around, and said she was dying to meet you and already planning how to do it.”

  “Wonderful girl,” Duff said. “Why me?”

  “She goes for serious types, I guess,” Scotty answered. “Only girl I ever heard of named Indigo.”

  “Suits her, though.”

  “Deep purple? You bet! Well. Have fun, Archimedes.”

  “I’m having a wonderful time.”

  He was. The wonderful time continued. There was a long drive in the convertible, windows wound up “against the chill, and Indigo Stacey snuggled close as a further thermal measure. A Miami Beach night club and another floor show. A still longer ride back to Coral Gables—a ride on which Indigo said, “You can start kissing me good night about here, Duff.”

  “Here” was some miles from her bungalow.

  When the two young ladies had been deposited at their homes, Scotty suggested a nightcap.

  And it was in a small bar not far from the campus where Duff, far removed from normal reticence and warmed by the fellowship of Scotty Smythe, shared his problem.

  “You know, Duff,” Scotty had said, turning his nightcap highball in his fingers and not tasting it, “I can’t figure you out. On a party, you’re tops. You have fun. At school the work doesn’t seem to bother you—you breeze through it. And yet you act like a man carrying a mountain on his back all the time. Why?”

  “Because I happen to be one,” Duff answered. And suddenly, without planning it, he told his story, beginning with the day, which now seemed long ago, when an old hobby had led him to pick the fairly new lock of a closet door.

  Excepting for an occasional quiet expletive, Scotty listened to the account without interruption. At its end, his expletives were many and vehement. But they wound up mildly.

  “Ye gods,” he murmured. “I’ll say you carry a mountain around. But you’ve got to do something.”

  Duff shrugged miserably. “What can I do?”

  Scotty drummed on the table, his drink forgotten. “Not much, here. Ellings—and whoever else is involved—that super-jerk you saw, no doubt—will certainly be careful not to act suspiciously for a while. But I bet they are using that truck company to ship the parts!

  What I’d do, if I were you, is take that list of customers and go north for the Christmas holidays! I’d look into as many places those trucks serve regularly as I could. Because if you found even one that was a drop—”

  “What,” Duff asked disconsolately, “would you use for money?”

  Scotty smiled sympathetically and thought a moment. “I was going to fly up home for the holidays,” he said. “Come back after, with the family, as far as Palm Beach. But I could drive. We could. We could stop off at the various cities.”

  The Yates family was surprised and disappointed by Duff’s sudden announcement that he was going home for the holidays. It was a very hard thing to do, and he almost hated himself for his decision. Eleanor took the news especially badly. She accused him of deserting. She reminded him that he wouldn’t see her as Orange Bowl Queen. And she burst into tears. But he stuck to his story that he was going to Indiana to visit his family.

  Even Indigo Stacey, at whose home he spent an evening playing bridge—the one game in which he was expert—expressed disappointment. She told him that she had developed a “large passion” for him and that the approaching holidays would be the “longest and dullest in years” without him.

  He felt, therefore, very much like a fugitive when, carrying a big, beat-up cheap suitcase, he took the bus, ostensibly to the train. Actually, at the station, he was picked up furtively by Scotty Smythe.

  In Washington they put up at a second-class hotel, donned old clothes and began “job hunting” at the regular delivery places of the Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company.

  These were stores, markets, wholesale houses and other trucking firms. There seemed to be nothing suspicious about any.

  “Trouble is,” Scotty said at supper that night, “we don’t know what we’re looking for.

  We do know it wouldn’t be anything conspicuous. To locate a receiver of the freight we believe is moving, evidently might take fifty guys a month. And I’ve got to show up at home pretty soon. I got one idea.”

  “What?” Duff was leg-weary, insult-weary, discouraged.

  “General Baines. Three stars. Friend of my old man. Has something to do with Military Intelligence. Maybe the FBI didn’t see your tale as anything but hallucination. The Army boys might be different.”

  “We could try,” Duff agreed.

  They tried the next morning. The general was located by phone in his office in the Pentagon Building. He told Scotty that he was “right busy.” He agreed, however, that, since the matter “involved national security;” he could spare a few minutes.

  So Duff and Scotty wound their way through the Pentagon labyrinths, found the outer office, waited half an hour, and at length stood face to face with a uniformed, silver-haired, paternal-looking officer who worked in an atmosphere of maps, papers, flags and autographed portraits of great men. He was cordial and quiet.

  The general’s reaction to the narrative was familiar to Duff; it angered Scotty. When the interview was ended, when the two young men were out in the winding, sloping corridors again, Scotty said enragedly, “He thought it was a gag! Tried to be polite! Tried to shoo us out, like a couple of flies at a picnic! Got positively humiliated
when we kept talking!

  Annoyed too.”

  Duff shrugged. “That’s how the G-men felt about it!”

  “What a country! Easy pickings for an enemy!”

  Neither Duff nor Scotty had any way of knowing that that the moment after they had left General Baines’ office, he had picked up his phone, switched to a special line, and said,

  “Chief of Staff. It’s an emergency call.”

  The two self-appointed investigators reached Manhattan in an aggrieved mood.

  Ordinarily, the elegance of the modernistic, duplex Smythe penthouse would have awed Duff. The warmth with which he was received by Scotty’s white-haired, aristocratic-looking mother would only partially have put him at ease. The amiability of Scotty’s father would have helped. On the other hand, the cool though well-mannered greeting of Scotty’s sisters—Adelaide, home from Sweet Briar, and Melinda, back from Vassar— would have frightened him. As things were, however, he was so downcast about the journey that the skyline view from the picture window had no impact for him. Even the palatial surroundings, the silver and damask at dinner, the dressed and dated, orchid-wearing sisters scratched only the surface of his mind. Inner suffering enabled him to appear more poised than he would otherwise have been.

  Duff spent a night at the Smythe residence, and then put up at a small, midtown hotel.

  Scotty had wanted him to remain in his home, but Duff had been too embarrassed for that, too aware that he lacked the clothes, even the temperament, and above all the funds for the round of entertainment on the Smythe holiday schedule. His hotel bill was to be paid by money which Scotty wanted to “give to the cause” and which Duff insisted he would only borrow.

  The three days remaining before Christmas Duff devoted to a survey of Miami-Dade delivery points in and near Manhattan. It was an exhausting and fruitless effort. He posed, according to the nature of each firm, as a potential buyer, shipper, customer or job seeker. He learned nothing and spent the lowest Christmas in his life—alone at his hotel, unable to engage even in his vain researches because every place in the city was closed. He thought of the Yateses all day and of the work his foolish venture had added to their slim yuletide.

  Then, on the day after Christmas, his patient checking of the list Eleanor had contrived to get for him led to a warehouse located in the downtown area of Manhattan, three blocks from Broadway, near Wall Street. There was nothing remarkable about the warehouse. In fact, it was the least provocative of any of the places he had visited, inasmuch as he was able to see, by peering through a very dirty window in the early twilight, that the mammoth interior was absolutely empty. Duff would have gone back to his hotel, then and there, tired, defeated, shamed by his absurd efforts, if he had not heard, while he was still peering, the sound of a door closing somewhere. An empty building is unsuspicious; an empty building with someone moving about inside it is different.

  Duff crossed the street and fixed his eye on the vast brick structure overtowered on both sides by taller buildings which were as grimy. He buttoned his coat under his chin. He crouched in a doorway.

  It began to rain. The rain brought quick darkness, shiny streets, spattering traffic and a glitter of light on the cobblestone pavement. At last a little door cut in the truck entrance of the warehouse opened slowly. A man came out. One of the tallest men Duff had ever seen in his life—a man proportionately broad.

  The misery, the despair, the frustrations of past weeks disappeared in the first sharp breath Duff drew. For this huge specter against the night was like an abrupt light in a long and dreadful darkness. The man looked up the street, down the street and across the street.

  He flipped up his coat collar and strode toward Broadway.

  With surging excitement, Duff followed. He was sure it would be simple to do. The man towered above the other pedestrians; he would stand out a block away, even at night.

  People, furthermore, looked up at him in sudden astonishment and made extra way for him, which added to the ease of pursuit. On a city street, furthermore, Duff felt that his own clumsiness would be no handicap; there was noise and confusion everywhere.

  But what Duff hadn’t thought of soon happened. The huge man stopped walking abruptly. Duff dived into a doorway. The man again looked up the street, down the street and across it, as he stood at the curb. He had that habit; evidently, he seemed to suspect or fear he might be followed. Quite suddenly, then, he too keys from his coat pocket, bent, opened the door of a parked car, climbed in, switched on its lights and drove into the traffic stream.

  Duff searched so wildly for a cab in which to follow that he neglected to notice the license number of the car. There wasn’t an empty cab in sight. When Duff thought of the number, the big man’s car had disappeared.

  He was ashamed of his error. But now he was no longer without resources. He would have to find a hardware store that was still open, and make certain purchases. He would have to learn, after that, the timing of the watchman’s rounds, if the empty warehouse was watched at all. It took him an hour to locate a store. He gave half an hour to watching the warehouse. No man seemed on duty there. He crossed the street in a hard, icy rain—a rain now welcome—and applied himself to the lock on the small warehouse door. It was difficult and he was forced, whenever a pedestrian passed, to exhibit a bunch of keys and pretend he was having trouble finding the right one. Nobody stopped him or questioned him, and eventually the door opened. He went in, turning on a flashlight as he did so.

  He hurried through an office that showed, by closed roll-top desks and gritty furnishings, long disuse. Another door led to the main floor of the place. A ramp in the rear sloped up through cavernous emptiness to a floor above. Another like the first rose to the top floor.

  Afraid that there might be a partitioned room within-a-room on the two upper floors, Duff climbed both ramps with his flashlight switched off. He found that in the whole building there was nothing—nothing but over-all grime and rubbish in the corners, nothing but spiderwebs and a scuttle of rats somewhere in the walls, nothing but gleaming specks on the ground floor of rock particles such as constitute the underlying base of Manhattan and stick to wheels of vehicles— nothing but hollow silence, the dusty odor of desertion and the dim-heard rumble of the great city outside.

  The very emptiness of the building had at first seemed meaningful. The meaning now appeared only to be that it was waiting for some new and perhaps different cargo. It had been a storage garage; more recently a warehouse. Now, perhaps, it had changed hands and was being prepared for other uses by the towering and somehow terrifying figure of the man whose face Duff had not yet clearly seen. The giant. Duff thought of him in that term.

  He left the building cautiously and hurried for the subway. No use to call Scotty now; Scotty would be at a post-Christmas party.

  And no use, Duff thought to get in touch with the New York FBI office. What would be added to his story by the report of a menacing figure lost in the night and an empty building?

  He was hungry, wet and weary as he went up the steps of his nondescript hotel.

  The desk clerk stopped him. “Mr. Bogan! A Mr. Smythe has been trying to get in touch with you. Been here twice and phone every fifteen minutes since!”

  Puzzled, Duff went into a phone booth and dialed. The ring was answered instantly by Scotty, “Duff! Thank the Lord! Look! Eleanor phoned at half past four this afternoon—”

  “Eleanor!”

  “Asked for you. Talked to me. I’ve talked again to her since.”

  “How’d she know where I was?”

  “Called your family in Indiana, first! You evidently wrote ‘em you were spending Christmas with me—gave ‘em my name—something.”

  “Oh. Yes, I did! You mean Eleanor phoned clear to Indiana?”

  “Listen, chump!” It as then that Duff got the overtones in Scotty’s voice. “Harry Ellings is dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Died in bed. The family thought he’d been up early working i
n the yard and got a ride to Miami. So they didn’t find him till afternoon. Charley.” Scotty said the name grimly.

  “Tough on the kid to find the body. Could have been heart failure—probably was, the doctor thought. But that’s not all. Eleanor said she’d found something. Can you imagine what? She said she wasn’t able, to move it.”

  “A box!” Duff all but shouted.

  “I presume so. Look, pal! We gotta get back, and fast! I’ve been frantic for you to call! My old man’s working on the air lines—they’re loaded. If he can’t chivvy space for us, I have a pal in Mineola with a sweet, fast job. War surplus plane he bought. I told Eleanor to phone Higgins or Mr. McIntosh at once.”

  “I’ll be over in fifteen minutes!” Duff said. “Whatever is happening, this time it looks as if we were going to prove something they’ll believe!”

  FOUR

  The commercial air lines were sold out to the last seat for the holiday season. Scotty’s father was unable to get reservations. So it was in the plane of Scotty’s friend that they left an ice-coated airfield, shortly before midnight. The plane, as Scotty had promised, was fast. They made one stop for fuel, in Savannah, and swept south over the Everglades at dawn.

  A red sky at morning, Duff reflected, wasn’t a “sailor’s warning” in Miami. Just a custom of the country. And he reflected—thinking of whatever came to mind in order to wear away the interminable hours of flight—that it was an advantage to be rich, like the Smythes. To have friends with planes, who’d make an emergency hop from New York to Miami just for fun. To be able to have a convertible you were too rushed to drive put aboard a freight car by the family chauffeur. Money meant things like that. But it didn’t necessarily “corrupt character,” as Duff’s preacher father firmly believed and as Duff himself had vaguely assumed. There was nothing corrupt about Scotty Smythe’s character.

  Duff was dozing when the plane bounced, braked, turned and taxied. Its pilot looked back. “All out!”