Chapter Eight
It was May in the Los Angeles basin, and the weather was perfect, warm gentle winds, clear skies, the water around Anacapa Island a startlingly clear blue. After three days of luxuriating with enough sleep, dry weather, and no sea duty, we set out for Catalina seventy miles to the southeast. We were under way at dawn and caught a gentle wind which took us around Anacapa and stayed with us all day, blowing stronger out of clear skies in the afternoon. We were flying all sail, the big main flattened drum-taut by the vang, our red spinnaker billowing out in front to pull us along. A school of dolphins flashed by, darting under the bows, racing along to parallel us with ease, then laughing at us and zooming far ahead, turning a great circle and flashing back directly at us, seemingly determined to ram and only changing course to miss by inches at the last second.
In the afternoon a great black fluke pounded the water a hundred yards off the bow, followed by a lazy rolling shape that seemed to go on forever before vanishing with another wave of the fluked tail. I'd never seen a whale, and I stood on the cabin, staring out where he'd been, but he never surfaced in our sight again. Catalina Island came into view in the early afternoon, a big brown shape looming up out of haze so thin that until we saw the island we'd thought the visibility perfect. We rushed along its northern shore, past the isthmus where a great wind funneled out of the gap, heeling us way over and making us laugh like schoolboys. Steen perched in the bows, one hand in the rigging and the other shading his eyes or waving as he shouted at the sea.
Close to the island the wind died away completely, and we cursed and sweated Witch out a few hundred yards. I was about to start the motor but Steen halted me, determined not to shatter this perfect sailing with the ugly sound of the motor, and finally we came to a thin line of riffled water, a line so sharp it might have been drawn with a brush. Witch heeled over, and seconds later we were out among whitecapped waves in ten knots of wind, the contrast with the still water a hundred yards away unimaginable. Catalina was a springtime splash of browns and greens rising from blue water, and it might have been Samothrace seen by the Greek warriors bound to the Trojan War. The only life in sight was sails white against the sea.
It was an hour before sundown when we sighted Casino Point which guards Avalon harbor. At first we thought it a small pavilion close up, but when we sailed on and on and it was still far away we realized that the Casino was a monstrous building, shaped like a backyard gazebo but five stories high, capped with an immense brick-red round dome. It was half an hour before we could make out the small figures of people walking around, dwarfed, at its base. There was a forest of small boats outside the point, and in Avalon harbor itself hundreds more, sailboats, power boats, little open decked catamarans that must have been sailed over from the mainland by more daring souls than I, big steam yachts a hundred feet long, and world-cruising schooners with high buff-colored masts tall above teak decks and white topsides.
We dropped the anchor just at sundown in St. Catherine's Bay, a quiet protected cove well away from the bustle of Avalon harbor, and put in the evening cooking, drinking the last of the beer from Carmel and smoking endless pipefuls of tobacco, the perfect picture of peace and contentment which couldn't last.
Mid-morning was Saturday, and I hailed the shore-boat, leaving Steen aboard. Avalon was a long street of shops and bars and restaurants, open-air hot dog stands and artists displaying their paintings on the low wall separating the beach from the streets. No cars were allowed along the beach area, but people walked on the sidewalks anyway, conditioned to the mechanical tyranny of the true masters of our civilization. It was hard to shake the idyllic mood, but I found a telephone booth and dialed the number I'd carefully carried with me all the way from Seattle.
"Airport marina," it answered from the mainland twenty miles away.
"Miss Carruthers, Ann Carruthers, please." After a moment there was another ring, a second, a long moment of doubt.
"Yes."
"It's D-day all over again. The marines have landed," I told Janie.
"Darling—are you all right?"
"Of course I'm all right. What could happen to me? You can tell your friends that all's well, home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill." The last was an identification code. Corny or not I'd chosen it myself, and it didn't seem out of place.
She wanted to ask me where I was, but she was too well trained for that. "I've got a couple of days before I'm due at the next place. Where can we meet?"
I thought about that for a second. Without prior arrangements there aren't too many places to put a sailboat in Los Angeles, or at least so I'd been told. I'd need Janie's help, and it seemed a long way from the back roads near Carnation. "Take the steamer to Avalon harbor. I'll meet you in a place called The Attic for dinner tonight. Bring some overnight things . . . bring your swimsuit too. Only I'd rather we didn't tell the man where, if you can get away with that."
"Ha. I know you, trying to get me back in your clutches again . . . It sounds wonderful, I'll be there. We won't be noticed?"
"No." The whole beach was covered with couples, not many wedding rings in sight. I was more conspicuous without a girl, although with her legs Janie certainly wouldn't vanish in the crowd. "I'll be waiting for you, sweetheart. Nothing says we can't have a couple of days' vacation before we get back in the grind."
"I'll be there." She blew me a kiss over the telephone, and I went off to buy groceries and beer.
Our vacation lasted two days. We swam in the surf, rowed around Avalon harbor in the dinghy, sat on deck and watched the tides churn the rocky beach out where we were anchored, each wave lifting the gravel and making a rushing sound as it ground the rocks together. In a thousand years it would all be sand. We didn't have a thousand years.
Monday night we sat in the cabin of a big Chris-Craft anchored fifty yards from us. Sunday afternoon the pleasure boat fleet had all disappeared toward Los Angeles, leaving St. Catherine's to us, and Monday afternoon the cruiser appeared in response to Janie's telephone call. We rowed over after dark, climbed on board to find Harry Shearing sitting at the dinette, his inevitable Camels and coffee in front of him. The cabin of the boat looked like a ballroom after the cramped quarters in Witch.
Shearing nodded judiciously, studying me. "One thing to be said for your transportation, Crane. It changes the appearance. I'd never have recognized either one of you."
He was probably right. I'd kept smooth shaven, but the sun had bleached my hair almost white, burned my face to a dark tan with almost white eyebrows. Steen had kept his whiskers, now sported a short neatly trimmed beard that grew at a fantastic rate. We looked like a couple of beach bums. "OK, what's the drill?" I asked.
Shearing grinned. "Anxious to get back to work? Sit down, have a drink. I want you to meet Sam." He indicated a short swarthy man with a round almost Asiatic face a deeper bronze than even mine was. "Sam de la Torres, my senior agent in this area. Meet Paul Crane, Sam."
De la Torres looked at me critically, measuring me thoughtfully before he put out his hand. "A pleasure, señor." The accent wasn't strong, but it was there. He'd never pass for anything but a Chicano. Shearing introduced him to Janie and Steen, and we all sat around the dinette, the picture of lucky stiffs who could vacation on weekdays.
"We've looked into those people in Seattle," Shearing said. "Definitely hired talent. We let them lay and right now the Washington police are wondering if there's a gang war going on in their territory. Leaves a puzzle for whoever sent the button men. Your car has been discreetly repaired, by the way."
"Thanks. Any idea of who sent them?"
"No." Shearing lit another cigarette, offered the pack around without takers. "But that kind of interest moves your operation up to a little more prominence, which is why I've decided to work out of L.A. for a while. We've got somebody worried. Eventually we'll find out who."
I laughed. I didn't point out that I could get used up in the finding out. He knew that anyw
ay.
"The Bureau had an anonymous tip," Shearing added. "We're fairly sure of that. Crane, you have officially been in Montana helping the Air Force solve some problems with frost upheavals in their Minuteman base. The Bureau may apologize for searching your house when you get back. On the other hand, they may just forget the whole thing and hope you never find out they were in there."
"It's nice to be unwanted," I said.
"Yeah. But it wouldn't be a good idea to come to their attention just now. One of their people might remember your name. The last thing I need is to have the Bureau running around in circles in L.A., and they're mad as hell about losing Steen. None of their people are in on this so watch out. Now. We've got to get you back in circulation. Janie can't stay out of sight any longer, her friends in Information Associates might begin to wonder just who she works for. Despite your suspicions of my office, I think it safe to assume that the leak to the Bureau and whoever hired those Seattle enforcers must have come from an information salesman, which gives us a small problem. If we put Dr. Hoorne out where everybody can see him, what's to prevent this from happening again?"
"Not much," Steen muttered.
"Right," Shearing agreed. "So we won't put you out where they can see you. We'll put Crane out there."
"We will, eh?" I asked.
"Certainly. That attack was hardly directed at you. It's reasonable to assume that someone doesn't want Dr. Hoorne to sell his information, and that they don't really care how they prevent it. What interest would they have in Paul Crane?"
I nodded. "I came to the same conclusion on the way down here. It's got to be Steen they want dead or alive. But who gains from putting him out of circulation?"
Shearing shook his head. "It is a puzzle, but not our main problem at the moment. We have to put Dr. Hoorne in a safe house and establish our contacts with the information people again. It's too bad Janie can't get them to trust her with the name of the Chinese agent they deal with, but we were certain they wouldn't. I don't see any alternative but to go on with the plan despite the complications."
"It may be complex indeed, señor," de la Torres said. He was standing by the helmsman's seat, a duplicate to the flying bridge above the cabin. With his little blue yachting cap and striped pullover sweater he looked quite at home on a boat, even though you don't normally think of the Spanish as seafaring people. That's silly, of course, they were putting out of Cadiz into the ocean back when most people thought the world was flat, and although we hear more about the military exploits of the Conquistadores than we do about their navy, they weren't too bad at the exploration business. The name of the Straits of Juan de Fuca as well as the names of all the islands and cities along the California coast proved that.
"What I mean," he continued, "is this. Once it becomes known that Dr. Hoorne is in this area, we must assume that the Bureau will be informed as well. They will search for him quite vigorously, and when they learn, as it must be supposed they will, that Señor Crane is the contact with Dr. Hoorne, Crane will be watched."
"They might try to hire some more enforcers, too," Janie added. "We're putting Paul into quite a dangerous situation."
"He's in no danger until they locate Hoorne," Shearing said. "Until then he's no threat to anybody. The Bureau won't have any grounds to arrest him. However, I will fix it up with the Montana outfit to say Paul finished his assignment and is taking a well-earned vacation in southern California." He gritted his teeth. "It's always a mess dealing with a leaky outfit like that Information Associates. The hell of it is we don't even know if they've got one leak or two."
I nodded. "You mean they may have a Bureau plant in there . . ."
"And whoever it was that hired the enforcers. Or it may be the same person. Either way, I think we have to help Information Associates plug up their leaks."
"The Bureau will not care much for that," de la Torres said. He wasn't objecting, just pointing it out. "It will not be easy. I do not have very many men to work with here. Perhaps you should tell me as much as you know about this group."
Shearing nodded to Janie. "Brief him."
She put her fingers to her lips for a second, concentrating on where to begin. "The leader of the group is a very young man named Jim Vallery. He calls himself Dick when he's dealing with outsiders, and he's very bright. I understand he has almost a doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins, but he didn't finish his thesis work. Background check shows that he was drafted, chose OCS, and after he was commissioned went into the technical branches of the army. He did so well that they sent him to graduate school at Johns Hopkins, but when he got to thinking about how long he'd have to stay in the army as part of their agreement to send him to school, he flunked all his courses just before he would have to graduate, finished his hitch, and was discharged. He's quite bitter about the military, and seems to be sincere in believing in some kind of theory of absolute freedom."
Steen nodded. "That is the one we met. I can tell you he is very knowledgeable about theoretical physics, although he has little practical experience and does not know the details of the latest research. I agree with Janie, a very bright young man indeed."
"Next," Shearing prompted.
"Beverly Henderson. Graduate of the University of Oregon, majored in liberal arts. Two years younger than Vallery, twenty-three. Sort of a phony intellectual attitude about everything. She's very attached to Vallery, would marry him in an instant, but his particular theory of society has it that marriage is a form of slavery and he's having none of it. She lives with him and makes the best of what she's got, but she doesn't like it. I heard her yelling at him once, about how his theories were wonderful, but why was it that he always got what he wanted and she didn't." Janie made a face, but whether she meant this was typical of men, or something else, I couldn't tell. "She's got money, an allowance. Her old man owns about half of Oregon and a lot of California including some oil fields near Bakersfield. She claims to believe this ultra-free enterprise theory of Vallery's, but when she's away from him she doesn't come on so strong with it. I think most of it's put on, and what she mainly believes in is her boy friend. She likes excitement too, but she's getting scared—I don't think she likes his new line of work very much."
"Does she dislike it enough to be willing to save him from treason at the cost of hiring murder done?" de la Torres asked.
"I don't know, Sam. Vallery's sold some papers and things already, enough to put him in jail, but it might be hard to prove in court. This is the biggest deal they've had and they could all go away for a long time if they were caught. It's possible, but I never thought of it."
Sam nodded sleepily, leaned back against the controls. Janie looked thoughtful for a second, considering the idea for the first time. It obviously appealed to her. She chewed on it a while, then went on with the briefing. "The other scientist I've met is Dr. Prufro. He was pretty well known once but he left the atomic laboratories at Sandia after a big fight with the director and got himself a position at Cal Tech. He didn't stay more than a year, and Cal Tech doesn't want him back. He got involved with one of his students. The funny thing is that he was apparently in love with her; her parents complained when he kept after her after she was through the affair.
"Prufro's a rabbity sort of guy most of the time, but there's a stubborn streak in him. I guess falling for young girls is normal for him, because now he's nuts about Beverly Henderson. He wants her so bad he can't hide it, but all he can do is moon about it. It's so obvious that Jim Vallery once threatened to beat him to a pulp, but then Vallery's theories got in his way and he apologized for being possessive and irrational. It really upset Bev—she liked having Jim come on like a jealous lover. She's teased Prufro, led him on trying to get that reaction out of Vallery again, but no luck." Janie gave a little grin of sympathy with Bev, thought better of it, and reached across the table for Shearing's Camels, lit one although she usually likes the filtered variety. This started a chain reaction, Steen and I on our pipes, Shearing with anot
her Camel.
Those are the main people. There are a couple of secondary troops. Sharon Culver, light brown hair, five four or so, slim boyish figure, very young face. She ropes in people with information, same as me. She's pretty good with the roping, but Vallery's conscience gets in the way when it's time to put the screws in. She's hooked some guy who works out of Los Angeles but spends his time in Colorado Springs, he's panting after her and his wife would kill him if she found out. Prufro wants to tell the guy to kick through with the information or they go to the wife, but Vallery's held off. The group's all desperate for money, they spent a lot setting it up and not much has come in. A good bit of the pressure for money comes from a weasely little creep named Bert Packs who's supposed to know about airplane design. He looks more like a hood to me. I know he carries a gun. He's always after them to close this Colorado Springs deal."
"Packs," Shearing mused. "We weren't able to get anything on him. His prints are not on file with the Bureau and the photograph you were supposed to take could not be developed. He is here in Los Angeles, you say?"
She nodded. "I saw him in Seattle, but not much. I think he travels. Look, it wasn't my fault the picture didn't come out."
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