by Emma Lathen
“What good is a lawyer going to do me?” Wylie asked, unanswerably. “I haven’t committed any crime. I just don’t feel like reliving every minute of those three weeks.”
Shute looked at him thoughtfully. The next specialist that came to mind was a psychiatrist, but he had no intention of washing that kind of dirty linen in front of outsiders. Instead, he resolutely steered the conversation into general channels with the able assistance of Charlie Trinkam and Engelhart. Poor Charlie was even reduced to an extended comparison of the weather in London and Houston. But, given four men vitally concerned with the acrobatics of the international oil market, it was not long before common ground was discovered to carry them through cocktails and half their dinner. Inevitably Cramer’s anecdotes about Saudi Arabia and Engelhart’s tales of Scandinavian intransigence led them into speculation about what awaited them in Scotland.
“From the map,” said Charlie cheerfully, “it looks like the most godforsaken spot in the British Isles.”
“You should see some of the places I’ve worked,” Hugo Cramer countered. “It’s not the natural site that bothers me, it’s the local unions.”
Rather ponderously, Arthur Shute interrupted to say that he understood labor problems had been resolved in advance.
“Don’t you believe it!” Cramer snorted sardonically. “I got us an agreement with the national trade-union. But from what I hear, some of these shop stewards up north are the original wildcat strike boys.”
“That is very true,” Engelhart supported him. “Certainly NDW’s first step on the pumping works will be to achieve accord with the local labor leaders.”
There were occasions when Charlie Trinkam’s genuine interest betrayed him into tactlessness. “And how much is that likely to cost you?” he asked.
Arthur Shute barely had time for one hissing intake of breath before Cramer spoke up. “That’s not what Klaus meant at all. And you can spare me your famous speech about purity in business, Arthur. It’s not a matter of greasing palms. You just have to be careful about stepping on toes. These shop stewards think they’re God Almighty, and you’ve got to play along with their act.”
“I still don’t see why our agreement with the national union wouldn’t protect us,” Shute grumbled.
Cramer’s hackles were beginning to rise. “Well, it doesn’t. That’s a fact of British life. And I got you the best deal from the labor boys that anybody’s gotten in a long time.”
“I’m sure you did, Hugo,” said Shute, retreating. “Just as I know that you got us a damn good Noss Head contract, and we’re all grateful.”
This was quite enough to pacify Cramer, who cooled as quickly as he heated. Charlie and Engelhart were both pleased to see serenity restored after a gaffe for which they were responsible. But Davidson Wylie, who had long been silent, stirred restively.
“Hold it a minute!” he commanded. “Listen, Hugo, let’s not forget that I’m the one who got that contract. I’m the one who did the planning, who made the contacts, and I’m the one who sweated blood for it.”
“Sure, sure, Dave,” said Cramer hastily. “We all know you’re the expert on Europe. You put the whole package together. All I did was tie up some loose ends.”
His meaningful glance at Wylie’s glass was not wasted on the others. When dinner had been announced, Dave had filled a tumbler with neat whisky before following the rest of the company to the table. Since then he had been sipping steadily, toying with his food. The net result was that earlier jitters had evaporated, to be replaced by Olympian arrogance.
“And now that I’m in charge again,” he said, unbuttoning his jacket and leaning back to survey his companions, “there are a few things I’ve got in mind. Klaus, you’re going to have to watch your step in Scotland. Any trouble with the locals, I’ll handle. I can do a better job.”
“You think you know more about Europeans than me, too?” Engelhart asked sarcastically.
But tonight sarcasm was bouncing off Davidson Wylie’s alcoholic armor. “Well, obviously, I understand the English better. It’s time you faced up to the fact that I won Noss Head, not you.”
If Wylie had been angry he would have been less insufferable. But his was the tolerance of an immensely wise, immensely experienced older man instructing callow youth.
In any event, Klaus Engelhart was goaded into voicing a conviction he had harbored since London. “If you had not been kidnapped, NDW would have Noss Head, not Macklin. That was your contribution, Dave—getting the English to bend over backward for Macklin. And I would not have thought they could be so stupid.”
“Think you have everything figured out, don’t you?” Wylie smiled loftily. “Life may be one surprise after another for you.”
Arthur Shute believed in asserting dominion over subcontractors, but this was not the way he wanted it done. In a vain attempt to carry out his original plan for the evening, he said: “By the way, Dave, I thought you were going to bring Paul Volpe with you. Charlie, here, was hoping to have another crack at him.”
Charlie Trinkam was anything but grateful at being sucked into conversation with the table’s problem child. “That’s right,” he said with a grimace. “We were supposed to have a productive work session.”
“Sorry about that.” Wylie flapped a hand in vague apology. “Paul couldn’t make it. He was going someplace else.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” Hugo Cramer demanded. “I saw the two of you pull up here together.”
“He had to give me a lift because I let Francesca have my car,” Wylie explained. Then, turning to Engelhart with an unpleasant leer, he continued: “And you have to keep the little woman happy, or we know what will happen, don’t we, Klaus?”
Deliberately, Engelhart ignored the shaft and aimed one of his own. “You had better get your car back so you can keep your appointment with Interpol. They might take it amiss if you do not turn up.”
Wylie swept his empty glass aside so vigorously that it rolled halfway down the table. “Look, tomorrow I’m going to tell that bastard where he gets off. I’ve got more important things to do than fool around with him.” In the last hour Wylie’s speech had thickened steadily. Now his control over sentences was also slipping . . . got a whole field to build . . . contracts to let out . . . oil pipelines . . . property settlements, no, settlements.” He shook his head, stared groggily across the table, then triumphantly completed his thoughts. “But nobody’s pushing me around anymore. I’m calling the shots from now on.”
Not surprisingly, the party broke up shortly thereafter. Charlie decided that he was expecting a call from John Thatcher and had to be in his room for it. Engelhart and Cramer were quick to follow his lead. Arthur Shute sadly accepted the ruin of his evening’s program.
“We must do this again sometime,” he said automatically.
“Oh, sure,” said Charlie.
By rights, the next morning should have seen Charlie Trinkam and Klaus Engelhart, long finished with a hearty breakfast, righteously watching a haggard Dave Wylie’s belated entry to the coffee shop. Instead Wylie was on his way out when Charlie passed through the door.
“I see that the wonder boy managed to pull himself out of bed,” Charlie grumbled to Engelhart, who was just starting his orange juice.
“He is worried about the Interpol man.”
“Did he say so?”
“He did not feel like talking.” Engelhart shrugged. “But I could tell.”
Idly, Charlie gaped through the floor-to-ceiling glass that lined the side of the restaurant, observing Wylie’s progress. “Don’t let the Macklin atmosphere get to you. Wylie doesn’t look as if he’s hanging back from his appointment. Anyway, why should he be worried?”
“The police know he is withholding information,” Engelhart said with grave certainty. “He is afraid those terrorists will kill him if he talks.”
“You’ve forgotten what Wylie sounded like last night. He wasn’t afraid of anything.”
“He was drun
k.”
Charlie was beginning to be irritated by the German’s pronouncements. “He’s not drunk now. And look at him. He doesn’t look scared.”
Engelhart turned skeptically. Davidson Wylie was tossing his case into a car. Both men watched him slide into the driver’s seat. They were still watching when a flash of light was almost lost in the booming roar that followed. Instinctively they ducked as a rain of metal fragments returned to earth.
“Lord!” Charlie choked. “That was a bomb!”
Chapter 10
Boomtown!
Within minutes of the blast, firemen and an ambulance crew were struggling frantically to extricate Davidson Wylie from the smouldering wreckage of the Oldsmobile. But there was too much blood. Too many of the Tidewater’s windows had been blown out. Someone had triggered a killing explosion.
“My God!” Charlie overheard the desk clerk mutter. “A single bullet will kill a man. Hell, so will a club! Why all this?”
Most onlookers remained slack-jawed, staring numbly at the scrambling emergency crew, but there was a responsive croak:
“Call it a modern improvement. Shows how far we’ve come from the cavemen.”
“Oh, please,” moaned an elderly woman. “Please.”
Next to her, Klaus Engelhart swallowed convulsively, covered his mouth with his hand, then fled.
Charlie himself turned his eyes away when the firemen finally levered open the car door and waved up the stretcher bearers. With an effort, he forced himself to concentrate on the brutal, simple essentials. Davidson Wylie had been cold-bloodedly slaughtered —and John Thatcher should be told. More slowly than Engelhart, he made his way through the growing crowd. Latecomers, he noticed inconsequentially, were excited and talkative.
“Geeze, you could feel it two blocks away ...”
“What was it? Gas? I heard the sirens ...”
“Have they got him out? Oh, there they go!”
In the lobby there was no sign of Engelhart or anybody else. Charlie found himself dialing New York from a vast, luxury cavern.
“No horsing around, Rose,” he told Miss Corsa bluntly. “This is important . . . John? I’ve got the latest wrinkle from Macklin for you ...”
“Good God,” said Thatcher, once Charlie announced his news.
“And maybe doing it this way was easier than pulling a trigger,” Charlie continued savagely, “but for my money, they’re a bunch of maniacs. Anybody could have been walking by that car.”
Trinkam was as hard-shelled as anybody John Thatcher knew. But no one is immune. Right now, what he needed was a stiff drink, not a lot of talk.
Thatcher broke in to say so, adding: “I’ll be in touch later today. And Charlie, remember there is undeniable improvement in our capacity to track down killers—no matter what their methods.”
“That remains to be seen,” Trinkam said tersely.
But seen was precisely the wrong word. By the time Charlie was crossing the lobby to the bar, and he was not alone, by the time the fire department was hosing down the Tidewater’s parking lot, a sophisticated apparatus was spinning into action. On a scale beyond the imagination of most Tidewater guests, and beyond the immediate vision of Charles Trinkam, the private tragedy of Davidson Wylie was being reduced to raw data.
The process began in Houston and continued throughout the day and night. But the results, in the opinion of the officer in charge, scarcely justified the elaborate information-retrieval system.
“Dead on arrival,” read Lieutenant Morley Nash. “For Lord’s sake, I don’t need a computer to tell me that. I was there.”
Silently, the tabulating clerk handed over another sheet. The broad outlines of Davidson Wylie’s life were all there—his birthdate and birthmarks, his marital status and credit rating, his education and work history. He had no police record, he had not served in the Army, he had never owned an airplane, applied for a gun permit, or been audited by the IRS.
“Who cares whether he was born in Pasadena and went to Stanford?” muttered Nash, reaching blindly for the next instalment.
It was as if he were proceeding through a series of maps of the same terrain, each on a more detailed scale than its predecessor. First he learned of Wylie’s arrival at Houston’s airport, his stay at Hugo Cramer’s beach cottage, his removal to the Tidewater. Then the Tidewater period was broken down into segments and Lieutenant Nash’s eyebrows rose as he encountered Francesca Wylie’s name. Finally there was a minute-by-minute chronology of the last 24 hours in Davidson Wylie’s life, supported by interviews with secretaries at Macklin, chambermaids at the Tidewater, real estate agents, and everyone present at the victim’s last dinner and breakfast.
“There isn’t anything here from the Fed who talked to Wylie.”
Almost before the complaint was voiced, the clerk was informing Nash of an appointment set up for him at ten o’clock.
But the lieutenant was already deep in another comprehensive report, this time covering the movements of a certain Oldsmobile Delta, Texas plate MK–5892. It was owned by Southeastern Motors and leased under contract to Macklin. On September 2, after a thorough inspection in the car pool, it had been placed at the disposal of Davidson Wylie. Thereafter he had driven it himself until 1:00 PM on September 4. According to the testimony of his wife, she had driven the Oldsmobile straight from the Macklin Building to the Tidewater, where she had parked it in her husband’s slot. The car had remained unmoved until 9:08 AM the next morning when it exploded. There were no witnesses to the tampering, and no suspicious loiterers had been observed by the Tidewater staff.
This stream of negatives was finally broken by experts from the bomb squad. They announced that the device had consisted of several sticks of dynamite with a blasting cap wired into the Oldsmobile’s ignition. Similar contrivances, usually with the addition of a timer, had been used in 117 bombings in the United States and over 300 in Europe. Furthermore the computer, upon being told that the dynamite was that commonly used in construction work, had replied that thirty-eight cases of pilferage at construction sites in Texas during the past week were known to it. To add to the general joy, the squad had staged a simulation in which one of its men had wired dynamite into an Oldsmobile Delta, taking exactly one and a half minutes for the task.
“God!” groaned Nash. “It would have been harder to steal that car—and we all know how hard that is.” Dispiritedly he shovelled together the mass of papers. “So all this junk adds up to a big fat nothing. It tells me everything about Wylie’s life and death except what I want to know. What happened when he got mixed up with a bunch of terrorists? Why was Interpol on his tail? Did he know something so important he was worth blowing up?”
The tabulating clerk was not going to apologize because his equipment could not solve a problem it had never been programmed for. But, being an amiable man, he proffered the only crumbs of comfort available.
“The post-mortem won’t be ready for a couple of hours.”
“You mean I should hope that Wylie died a natural death?”
The clerk abandoned the autopsy as a lost cause. “Maybe that Fed can tell you something.”
“God, I hope so.”
“Wylie was lying,” McMurtrey said flatly.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure, and so is the Turkish captain who talked to him in Ankara.”
That was good enough for Nash. When two experienced policemen, with no vested interest, said a man was lying, he did not require supporting evidence.
“In a way, it’s crazy, but in another way it makes more sense,” he said, rubbing a hand across his weary eyes as he organized his thoughts. “If Wylie was just a random victim, there’s no reason on God’s earth why his kidnappers should follow him to Houston and kill him. But once you grant a tie-in between him and Black Tuesday, he could have been a danger to them in lots of ways. I suppose those are the lines you’re thinking along.”
“That’s about it. I admit that at first I thought Wylie was pu
tting on an act about being too scared of reprisals to open up. It seemed a lot easier to think he was behind the whole thing. But the poor guy has proved he was right to be scared.”
Morley Nash had no error of judgment to haunt him. He was preoccupied with the future.
“And what the hell am I supposed to do about it? Wylie spends 15 years in Europe, he becomes involved with some new radical group over there, gets himself snatched in Turkey so a ransom can pass in Zurich. Then by sheer accident he’s murdered here, miles away from all the background. I don’t know anything about all those places, I’m a Houston cop.” He sketched an encompassing gesture at the window. “This is my turf.”
The panorama visible through the broad sheet of plate glass emphasized his statement. Great economic power has always memorialized itself in architecture—whether it be the Great Sphinx, or the Colosseum, or Trafalgar Square. But in Texas it was not pharaohs or popes or emperors who were impressing their legends into stone and marble. The names dominating the Houston skyline spoke for themselves. The sumptuous travertine of One Shell Plaza soared fifty stories high in the glistening sunlight. Close by, the eye-stopping trapezoid towers of Pennzoil Place symbolized the expanding prosperity that was tossing up freeways, suburbs, and modernistic shopping malls. By craning to the left it was just possible to see the delicate steel tracery of the Macklin Building.
If he could have seen that view, Nicholas of the Imperial Dominion Bank might have modified his opinion of Houston as a rugged tropical outpost. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Nash was inspired to different thoughts entirely.
“All that construction. There’s probably dynamite lying around on every corner,” he sighed. “Unless terrorists always carry their own brand with them.”
“They would have had to come through Customs and Immigration at the airport,” McMurtrey said, without much conviction.
“Ha! We’ve got over four million illegal Mexican immigrants. Do you think they would have noticed a couple of Arabs?”
McMurtrey nodded sympathetically. Even a four-state care-theft ring could play havoc with the jurisdictional lines of law-enforcement agencies. It was absurd to expect local police to cope with a crime spanning three continents. But before the FBI man could speak, his secretary rang through with the announcement that Lieutenant Nash’s office was on the line.