“Yes.”
“You’re very persuasive.” She sounded as though she were trying to understand why she was allowing herself to be influenced. “How could the kidnappers know enough about Hazel to decide upon her as the one able to pay the ransom?”
“If I knew the answer to that, I’d be a lot closer to putting my hands on the bastards.” I didn’t mention the possibility of Melissa’s involvement.
“Why was the explosion directed at you?”
“You ask better questions than a D.A. I’d just had my first call from the kidnappers. I was told to get into the car and drive to a public phone where the actual kidnap message would be delivered. Instead, a kid came along the street looking for a car to steal, and he hot-wired that one. Scratch one kid.”
“But why? Why should—”
“I’m not clear about motive,” I admitted. This woman might not wear her intelligence on her sleeve, but she got right to the heart of things. “I think it was because they wanted to deal with Hazel rather than me. They might be luckier than they know. Hazel would unravel a bunch of damn thugs like that before breakfast.”
Valerie Cooper smiled for the first time since she’d entered my rental car. “She did give me the feeling of competence,” she agreed.
“In a very special way.” I thought of a few of the places Hazel and I had found ourselves in during the past few years. Performance under pressure was a trait that made the big girl special.
Val Cooper’s initially suspicious manner and standoffish attitude had eased during our conversation. “What do you want me to do? Specifically?” she asked, signifying without saying so that she was ready to provide some backup.
“I’ve already told you.”
“I know,” she said. “Keep an eye on Hazel. But isn’t there something else I can assist with in what you’re trying to do?”
“I’ll let you know,” I said. “Right now I’ll take you within walking distance of the Viking Motel so you can get your clothes. And mine, if possible. Don’t forget your new name when you come to the Miramar. It’s Catherine Vernon.”
No one had emerged from the frowzy-looking rear exit of the Palace Hotel while we had been talking.
I couldn’t understand why the police weren’t taking an interest in Val Cooper’s movements, even though her former husband had been a member of the prosecutor’s staff.
But I couldn’t take time to worry about that right now.
I started the Cutlass and drove away from the area of the Palace Hotel.
When I returned to the Miramar, I found that my subconscious had made a decision I’d consciously avoided to that point. I needed cash to ransom Melissa, and I knew where there was almost enough.
I couldn’t afford to confront anyone in the brokerage office in an attempt to recover my own money, even if Hazel had left matters in a way that tied it to me, which I doubted.
I couldn’t risk providing the identification that would be necessary to recover my money legitimately.
That left recovering it illegitimately, and it was time I got at it.
But there was another diversion when I reached my room. The red signal light on the telephone was flashing. My first thought was that Val Cooper had changed her mind and decided not to help. I picked up the phone. “You have a message for me?”
“Yes, sir.” The operator read me a number complete with area code. I recognized it as the number of Northeastern University in Boston, which I had called previously. “Ask for George Foley, sir.”
“Thanks.”
I started to walk out to the lobby pay phone, then stopped. As long as I was receiving messages from the school which the motel operator was logging, using the pay phone to return the calls didn’t make much sense. Also, since I was calling another switchboard, no record at my end would show whom I was calling.
I went back to the room phone. “You can place that call for me now,” I told the operator when she came back on the line.
“Yes, sir.”
I waited for the connection to be completed.
“Northeastern University,” a female voice said.
“I’d like to speak to George Foley.”
“He’s right here. George!”
There was a click. “George Foley,” a young voice said.
“This is Dewey Elliott, George.”
“Oh, yes, sir.”
“What did the operator mean when she said you were right there?”
“On the switchboard. I’m one of the part-time operators. Women’s lib in reverse. You asked about Melissa Andrews’s telephone calls.”
“Yes. Do you know something about them?”
“I handled three or four during the past week.”
“To the same person?”
“The same place. Carleton Hall. It’s a co-ed dormitory.”
“You don’t know who she called?”
“No, sir. There are no phones in the rooms. Students have to be summoned to a hall phone by a monitor.”
“A hall phone? There’s one on each floor?”
“Correct. After the connection is made to the dorm, the caller asks for the individual by name, and the correct floor is rung by the dorm operator through a junior switchboard.”
“And the school switchboard is cut out of the last part of the operation?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“How do you happen to recall handling telephone calls from Melissa Andrews, George?”
There was a slight pause. “She’s a very attractive girl.”
“You know her?”
“I know who she is. She doesn’t even know I’m alive.” He said it matter-of-factly. “I’m a freshman. She audits an art appreciation class of mine. That’s the only way I know her.”
“And you don’t know her boyfriend to whom she’s been making the calls?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“How would you like to try playing detective for me, George? I really do need some help.”
“Well—”
“It would help Melissa.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to—”
“And there’d be a hundred dollars for you afterward. Successful or not.”
“A hundred dollars? What would you want me to do?”
“Get in touch with the monitors on each floor of Carleton Hall and dig up the name of the person to whom Melissa was making her calls.”
“It’s an eight-story building.” George Foley sounded doubtful. “And I don’t like to seem to be interfering in the young lady’s business, sir.”
“You’ve already given me enough information so I could do it myself. I’m interested in saving time. You don’t even need to identify yourself. Just ask the monitor on each floor who he called to the phone for Melissa.”
“Are you a relative of Melissa’s, sir? Why are you asking me to do this?”
“It’s an emergency, George.” I ignored the first part of his question. “It really will be most helpful to Melissa.”
“Well, okay. If you’re sure I won’t get in trouble.”
“Not a chance. Call me here as soon as you learn anything, George. And thanks.”
I hung up before George Foley could think of any more reasons for not doing what I’d asked.
My hand wasn’t six inches from the replaced phone when it rang again. “Yes?” I said cautiously after I picked it up.
“Keep this goddamn line open!” Cottonmouth’s voice grated in my ear. “We might wanna get in touch with you any time. You keep this heah line open if you give a damn about what happens to the girl, y’hear?”
I wished I was across the hall in Val Cooper’s room so I could use the tape recorder, but there was no way I could manage it now. “What is it?” I asked.
“How you doin’ brown-baggin’ the package?”
There was the same blend of raspy-voiced aggressiveness and semililting hillbilly south in the voice. “I’m working on it.”
“You don’t need to work that hard,”
Cottonmouth stated.
“No? Why?”
“Pick it up from where the redhead left it.”
He could only have learned of the brokerage transaction from Melissa. But why was she volunteering the information? I had almost discarded the idea that she was cooperating in her own kidnapping. But suppose she hadn’t volunteered the story? Suppose it had been forced from her, along with anything else she might know that the kidnappers considered potentially helpful to them?
“I want to talk to Melissa,” I said.
Cottonmouth responded so swiftly I realized he had been expecting the demand. “You c’n talk to her in the mornin’ when we call to check on whether you got the package ready or not,” he said. “An’ you better be damn sure you do, or what you’ll hear from her won’t be her prayers.” He chuckled gratingly. “Or maybe it will. That might be all you’ll hear.”
“If I don’t speak to her, all bets are off,” I warned.
“You will when we’re ready. An’ when you’re ready. Get with it, man.”
He hung up on me, as usual insisting upon having the last word. Cottonmouth’s precise knowledge about the brokerage transaction again made me question Melissa’s part in the kidnap scheme. But I didn’t have time to sit around wondering. For the moment I had to give the girl the benefit of the doubt.
I went out to the lobby and dialed the number of the Viking Motel on the pay telephone. “Mrs. Valerie Cooper,” I said to the operator. “Hi,” I went on when Val answered on the second ring. “I’m going out for a couple of hours. Leave the things here if you’re able to get them.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any reason why I can’t,” she said.
I took it to mean there was no obvious police stakeout at the Viking. It was puzzling.
“Be careful,” she said unexpectedly.
“Careful?” I echoed.
“I mean a lot depends upon your being careful.”
I couldn’t analyze the tone of voice in which the statement was delivered. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said.
I left the phone booth.
Careful?
I’d spent the major part of a lifetime being careful.
Up to a point.
Now I intended to see to it that Cottonmouth and his friends weren’t being careful enough.
I drove the rental car into Los Angeles, exiting from the Hollywood Freeway just short of the city limits. I hadn’t been to the side-street area beyond the ramp exit in five or six years, but it seemed essentially unchanged. I negotiated two right hand turns and pulled up in front of a low cinderblock building with a grimy sign reading SPARKY’S FROZEN FOOD LOCKERS. A green Dodge was parked in front.
A gum-chewing peroxide blonde was seated behind a desk when I went inside. The temperature in the office was twenty degrees lower than on the street. The blonde was wearing a sweater, but her face still looked pinched from the chill. “Sparky around?” I inquired.
“He’s away,” she replied.
Probably in San Quentin or Folsom, I thought. Sparky had so many irons in the fire he was always getting burned by one or another of them.
“Is he still in business here?”
I was getting the blonde’s full attention now. “That depends,” she said warily.
“I don’t know any passwords, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” I said. “I want to rent a kit from one of the lockers in the bottom row just inside the freezer door.”
She nodded slowly. “For how long?”
“Overnight.”
“Any references?”
I almost answered none that were alive. “Duke Slater,” I said. “Pancho Valdez. Digger McAllister.” The first two were buried on the outskirts of Havana, the last behind a bricked-up wall in Tangier.
The girl pulled open the center drawer of the desk and read from what appeared to be a typewritten list thumb-tacked to the bottom of the drawer. She nodded again, then slid the drawer shut. “Cash,” she said.
“What’s the tariff these days?”
“Twenty-five hundred. You get half back when you return the kit.”
Inflation has aspects the government never imagined, I reflected. I handed over twenty-five one hundred dollar bills I’d taken from Hazel’s handbag. The government is making it harder to carry a bankroll since they ordered the banks to take all bills above a hundred out of circulation. “How do I get my deposit back?”
“There’s someone here twenty-four hours a day,” the girl said. She took the bills from me and riffled them as rapidly as a dealer in Vegas. There were rows of keys on hooks on the wall behind her, but she opened another drawer in the desk and handed me a key. “Number sixty-four,” she said. She rose to her feet, removed a huge key from her bra, then unlocked the big, metal-barred door at the rear of the room. “You’ll have to open it,” she informed me. “I get runs in my pantyhose every time I try.”
I dragged back on the door. It pivoted reluctantly on unoiled hinges. I stepped inside and drew it almost closed, wedging the handle over so it couldn’t be locked with me inside. A huge thermometer suspended from the ceiling announced that the temperature was a bone-chilling four above zero.
Fog began to accumulate from the warmer air seeping in through the opened door. I waved it aside, then got down on my knees and located locker number sixty-four. I had to punch the key through a thin accumulation of ice around the keyhole. I opened the drawer, removed a forty-pound bundle wrapped in butcher’s paper, and placed it on the cement floor.
Inside the butcher’s paper was a snugly-folded canvas vest with a sophisticated array of burglar’s tools in two dozen pockets. I examined a couple to be sure I was getting what I wanted, then replaced everything in the vest. I exited from the locker, closed the big door, and threw over the bolt lever. The interior of the office felt sweltering.
“It didn’t take you long to make up your mind,” the blonde said as she relocked the door. “Some guys chicken out when they see the stuff.” She gave me a smile. “Sparky says you can always tell a pro.”
“Let’s not have any mistakes about returning my end of the deposit tonight,” I told her. “I’d hate to have to come looking for a sweet young thing like you to get it.”
“Where would you look?” she inquired archly while she redeposited the key inside her bra.
“At the address of the green Dodge parked outside.”
Her smile blossomed. “A pro,” she said admiringly. “A real pro.”
I carried the tightly bundled canvas vest out to the rented Cutlass and put it on the front seat.
FIVE
VAL COOPER WAS AT THE MIRAMAR WHEN I RETURNED. She glanced at the bundled vest I was carrying but made no reference to it. “Thanks,” I said when I saw the sport jacket and slacks on the bed. I refused the room key when she tried to give it back to me. “I might want you to get in here again sometime,” I explained.
She didn’t look as though she were too happy with the idea. “No one seemed to be paying any attention to your suite at the Viking,” she said after a moment. “Isn’t that odd under the circumstances?”
“Very. Unless the police think the kid who was killed trying to steal the car was me.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she answered. “Then they really wouldn’t have too much interest in an empty suite, would they?”
“No. Of course it’s not certain—”
The telephone’s ring interrupted me.
I took the key to the room across the hall out of my pocket, traversed the corridor, and opened the door. I beckoned to Val to follow me before I picked up the receiver. “Yes?” I said.
“Mr. Elliott?” a young voice inquired.
“That’s right.”
“This is George Foley. I found out a couple of things I thought you’d want to know.”
“Fine, George. Go right ahead.”
“I went over to Carleton Hall and talked to the monitors on the different floors to see if one of them remembered calls coming throug
h from Melissa Andrews to anyone on their floors. The fourth monitor I talked to remembered.”
“That’s good work, George!” I said with genuine enthusiasm. “Who was she calling?”
“A senior named Stanley Kirkman.” George Foley hesitated as though reluctant to continue. “The monitor said that Melissa was sleeping with Kirkman when she was at school, but I don’t know if I believe that or not. She doesn’t—doesn’t seem—”
“Like that kind of a girl,” I finished for him. Disillusionment comes hard to a freshman. “Do you know anything about this Kirkman?”
“No, but I can ask around.”
“You do that, but I want you to do something else for me first, George. Go back to the switchboard office and make a list of all the phone calls this Stanley Kirkman made since school vacation started. Can you do that?”
“Sure. It won’t take long.”
“Good. And then call me back. You’ve already earned a raise, George. Keep it moving.”
Val Cooper was looking at me inquiringly when I hung up the phone. “That was Melissa’s school,” I explained. “I know the name of her boyfriend now. It might not mean anything. I’ll know better when I get the next call. Do you happen to have a needle and thread in your bag?”
She blinked at the nonsequitur but rallied. “Like most women, I do.” She opened her handbag. “What—”
“Just one minute.”
I went back across the corridor and picked up the jacket Val Cooper had brought from the Viking. I carried it across the hall. “If you could move the buttons as far as they’ll go to make it fit more loosely, it would be a help,” I said.
“You don’t look as though you’re gaining weight,” she remarked, accepting the jacket from me. A spool of thread with a needle stuck through it rested on the arm of her chair. “This thread doesn’t match. Perhaps the motel housekeeper would—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I cut her off. “I’ll be right back.”
I crossed the corridor again and closed the door behind me. I unrolled the vest and spread it on the top of the bed. The pockets went all the way around it from front to back, the better to distribute the weight. One by one I took out the pocketed articles and examined them.
A two-pound lead block. A steel handle to screw into it to make it into a mallet. A small can of paint remover. A CO2 cylinder. Four twelve-inch steel lengths that screwed together to form a pry bar. Interchangeable tips for same. A small electric drill. A curved mirror with suction cups on the back. A glass cutter. Pliers. Tweezers. Electrician’s wire. Surgical gloves. Chrome-alloy lock-picks. A battery-amplified stethoscope. A pencil-thin flashlight. Flat pieces of asbestos grooved to fit together. An aerosol can filled with a highly unstable, exotic mixture of emulsified sodium methylfulminate, enriched phosphorus, and powdered magnesium, all homogenized in a basic napalm carrier. Three torch fittings to fit into the nozzle of the can. Welder’s goggles.
Operation Deathmaker Page 6