Mac said thoughtfully, “Of course, there’s also the possibility that Warfel himself killed Ruby, or had her killed, and then offered up these sacrificial goats to protect himself.”
“Maybe, but why would he kill her?”
“A man like that has many secrets. She could have stumbled onto one of them.”
“A man like that keeps his secrets well hidden, sir, and they’re generally secrets that wouldn’t have interested our girl very much. If she’d stumbled onto one, she’d have minded her own business like a good little government girl, and refused to get involved unless… Is there any indication that Warfel might have political connections overseas? And I don’t mean in Sicily or wherever it is so many of these rackets characters seem to originate.”
“I see what you have in mind,” Mac said slowly. “No, Mr. Warfel plays ball with the local politicians, of course, or they play ball with him, but there’s been no hint of any other type of political activity. He’s been investigated frequently and thoroughly by competent people who’d have been happy to pin something—anything—on him. No, the idea of Mr. Warfel as the agent of an unfriendly foreign power, or the accomplice of such an agent, is intriguing, Eric, but I’m afraid it’s improbable.”
“I disagree, sir,” I said. “If he’s not one, then he’s covering up for one, although he may not know it. Our murderer’s contact may be somebody higher in the organization. Warfel may simply have got a phone call telling him what to do, and maybe how to do it. He may not even know the name or business of the man he’s shielding. If that’s the case, I’ve got a very tough job ahead of me, tracking the guy I want through a forest of high-echelon racketeers.”
Mac said, “This is highly theoretical, Eric. You have absolutely no proof—”
“Annette was killed, wasn’t she? And a great effort was made to sell us a couple of phony murderers, presumably to take the heat off the real one. You’re not thinking, sir. You’re not thinking about our girl O’Leary, and what kind of a girl she was, and where she’d been before she came to us, and what frame of mind she was in when she landed in Los Angeles yesterday—well, I guess it’s the day before yesterday by now. Of course, you didn’t know her as well as I did, sir. All you’ve got to go on is a couple of interviews and some dry personnel records. I worked against her on one job down in Mexico, and with her on another, remember?”
We’re not a buddy-buddy, call-me-Mac kind of outfit. He likes a certain amount of formality and protocol. I guess I’d let myself get carried away, a bit disrespectfully, because his voice was cool when he spoke again.
“And just what do you deduce from your superior knowledge of Ruby’s character, Eric?”
I said, “What I’m remembering right now is three things. First of all, the girl was a pro—”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.” Mac’s voice was still rather stiff and severe. “Promising, yes, but she had by no means achieved true professionalism.”
I said, “Okay, so she hadn’t quite learned how to control her temper, if that’s what you mean. But on the whole, when I worked with her, her reactions were pretty sound. She certainly wasn’t afflicted with any overpowering, irresistible do-good impulses. Even if I hadn’t already figured out that Beverly Blaine had to be lying, I’d have known it when she claimed to have sold Annette a sob story of some kind. The kid would never have fallen for anything like that. She was a pretty tough little cookie, and she wouldn’t have stuck her neck out an inch…”
Mac interrupted. “That’s more fine-sounding theory, Eric, but the fact is that she obviously did stick her neck out, somehow.”
“You didn’t let me finish, sir,” I said. “I was going to say that she wouldn’t have stuck her neck out an inch—for anything that wasn’t in the line of business. Our business. She wouldn’t have got herself involved with any weeping cuties with husband trouble, and if she’d seen a murder being committed, or a suitcase full of dope being smuggled—by Warfel or anybody else—she’d have looked the other way, like any of us would, like the rules require. She would have remembered the standing orders not to risk her effectiveness as an agent, by attracting attention either as the good Samaritan or the public-spirited citizen. To that extent, sir, I say she was a pro.”
“Perhaps you’re right. But there’s still the possibility I suggested earlier, that she was a pro selling out.”
“There wasn’t time. I’ll admit she might have been capable of it under the right circumstances, meaning if she was mad enough, but I think you’ll agree that she wasn’t a coldblooded traitor with her plans laid in advance. That means she came to L.A. without any prearranged contacts. It takes time to sell out, sir. You’ve got to find the right people. You’ve got to convince them of your sincerity. You’ve got to convince them you’ve got something worth buying—and then you’ve got to deliver your information, all of it. If somebody did get one of our people talking about our setup, even a novice agent, would they finish with her and dispose of her in less than a day? You know they wouldn’t. They’d want to spend at least a week on thorough debriefing, going over every detail of our training and operations arrangements again and again until they were absolutely sure they’d pumped her dry.”
Mac said, a little impatiently, “Very well. Assuming that she wasn’t killed because she’d stumbled on some syndicate secrets, or because she’d got involved in a treason scheme that backfired, what do you suggest as a cause of her death?”
“I suggest she was trying to help us. I think what she saw, either on the plane or in the airport, was somebody in whom we’re highly interested, somebody on the high-priority list perhaps…”
“Then why didn’t she get on the phone and report it before taking action, as the normal procedure requires, particularly of inexperienced young agents in her category?”
“Because, as you point out, she wasn’t quite professional enough, sir. Because she had a temper like dynamite and you’d just lit the fuse. Because she was mad at you and was going to show you up, by dealing with the situation herself in her own way. She was going to prove to you that initiative and daring were better than conformity and discipline, and to hell with normal procedure.”
Mac said, rather reluctantly, “It’s plausible. So your theory is that she spotted somebody important and tried to follow but was detected and killed.”
“Yes, sir. Her attitude was professional enough, but her experience was still pretty limited. I think the guy she was tailing set a trap for her, caught her, and took care of her with his overgrown cannon, after first knocking her around just enough to learn that she was operating alone. And then, because his presence in Los Angeles—maybe even in the U.S.—was supposed to be a very hush subject indeed, he got hold of some local underworld talent and arranged for them to make it look as if she’d been killed by mistake, so we’d have no reason to investigate her motives and movements.” There was a thoughtful silence. Presently I said, “That’s the way I figure it, sir. She was pro enough not to get sidetracked on something that was none of our business, but she was amateur enough to try to handle it alone. There’s also a third factor that might be important.”
“What’s that, Eric?”
“She’d recently been mixed up in a communist operation in this very area, remember? It could be that she ran into somebody she was in a special position to recognize, better than anybody else in our outfit. Remember the assignment on which I met her, sir. Remember the circumstances. Her husband had been killed in Vietnam. She’d blamed this country for sending him to his death, if you recall, and a fast-talking enemy agent—I never learned exactly who—had taken advantage of her resentment to persuade her to help with a fancy anti-U.S. plot they had going below the border in Mexico.”
“I remember,” Mac said. “What is your point?”
I said, “We broke up the conspiracy, all right, and got all the people immediately concerned, with the help of the Mexican authorities, but we didn’t get the ones who’d pulled the strings from u
p here, north of the border. At least, if we did, I was never told about it.”
“We didn’t,” Mac said.
“Afterwards, when I recruited Annette for that job working on our side—she was pretty disenchanted with the opposition by that time, and she had a Mexican prison staring her in the face—I didn’t ask her too many questions. I was too busy telling her things she needed to know for the mission coming up. I just kept an eye on her until I was sure she could be trusted. Actually, knowing her low boiling point, I was careful not to antagonize her by probing into her past. I needed her cheerful and cooperative, and to hell with ancient history. But I presume that after our joint assignment was finished, and she was being considered for permanent employment, she was questioned pretty thoroughly—particularly about the people she’d known during her brief career as a subversive.”
“That is correct,” Mac said. “And you think she may have come across one of those people again?”
“Well, it would have given her a special reason for lone-wolfing it, sir. This was information only she had. This was a person only she could recognize. Even if she hadn’t been mad at you, she’d have been reluctant to call in and let somebody else get the credit for nailing the guy. If you’d check her file—”
“I am checking it,” Mac said. “I suppose I should have done it sooner, but I admit I was operating on a different theory… Here we are. She gave us two descriptions and a name. The name, she said, she’d heard only once, but she gathered it was that of the man in charge. You’ll recognize it, Eric. We’ve come up against the gentleman before. The name she heard was Nicholas.”
I grimaced. “That’s nice. So we could be dealing with old man Santa Claus himself.”
“Santa Claus?”
I said, “Just a joke, sir. He doesn’t call himself that, as far as I know, but you know how some of our people tend to make up nicknames for members of the opposition, even those they haven’t seen. Wait a minute. Nicholas is a man who likes heavy artillery, if I remember the dossier correctly. That fancy new computer should have given him to us by now, just from that angle.”
“Unfortunately,” Mac said dryly, “that fancy new computer has contracted some kind of electronic indigestion. I’m sending for Nicholas’ file but I think you’re quite right. As I recall, the lightest pistol he’s on record as having used is a Browning 9mm High Power, no Magnum but still something of a handful. In another instance he left a .45 Colt Automatic beside a victim, that’s no child’s toy, either. Yes, a .44 would suit Nicholas very well, from what we know of his shooting habits.”
“But Annette said she never saw him?”
“None of our people has seen him, or questioned anyone who has. So far, his cover has never been broken.”
I said, “Then it couldn’t have been Nicholas she spotted here in L.A. and tried to follow.” I hesitated. “What about the two guys she actually met, the ones she described for you?”
“One was shot and killed by the Mexican police while resisting arrest after that Mazatlán affair. From what she said, I gather he was the one who recruited her in the first place. The other was just a man who drove a car in which she was transported to a rendezvous. He disappeared, like Nicholas himself—we’ve had no reports on either of them since. The description Annette gave us fits a small-time European motorcycle racer named Willi Keim—Willi, with an ‘i’—who got into some trouble with the law and now specializes in driving chores for the opposition…”
“Willi!” I said. “Does he fit the description I just gave you, of the rock-jawed, potato-nosed character in the Ford wagon? Willy, with a ‘y’?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t monitor what you fed into the recorder. I planned to play it back later. Just a minute.” I heard him find the right section of tape and run it through. “Yes. It could very well be the same man.”
“My God!” I said. “I should have known nobody could drive that badly without working at it.”
“Mr. Keim is apparently an expert at handling all kinds of wheeled machinery.”
“And Annette would have recognized him. He’s hard to miss. That could be our lead. Suppose Willi-Willy was still driving for Nicholas, either with or without Warfel’s knowledge, probably with. Suppose Willy picked up Nicholas at the airport. Say Annette spotted a familiar face and watched to see who joined Willy and was caught doing it. Obviously, she had to be killed. She’d seen old Santa Claus in the flesh and she had enough of the background to know, or at least guess, what she’d seen. So Nicholas took care of the job, arranged for a syndicate cover-up, and had Willy on the spot to see how well it worked out.”
“That could be the way it happened, certainly. If it should be Nicholas… Well, you know the standing orders. He is on the high-priority list. We’ve lost enough good men—and women—to Nicholas.”
“Yes, sir.”
“However, there’s a lot of guesswork involved, Eric. Don’t rely too heavily on this one theory.”
“No, sir,” I said, “but assuming we’re on the right track, the big question now is: just what brings Nicholas back to these parts? It must be something fairly important or his superiors wouldn’t take the risk of returning him to the scene of a job that flopped as badly as that Mexican operation of his. A lot of underlings were caught and they must know that one might put a finger on their boy somehow—as Annette did. Do we know of anything big brewing down here, big enough to call for a man of Nicholas’ talents?”
“No,” Mac said, “we don’t know, and we don’t really care, Eric. Don’t let your curiosity get the better of you. Remember that intelligence is the business of other departments. Your job is Nicholas, and whoever killed Ruby, if they are not the same person. Take care of that. If you happen to learn anything interesting in the process, by all means pass it along, but don’t let it distract you from your primary mission…”
8
As a bodyguard, I was a bust. They took out the black man right under my nose.
I’d been waiting a little ways up the street outside the office when Devlin’s people finally turned him loose with the Blaine girl, the way we’d planned it. I’d watched him say good-bye to her politely and assist her into the first to arrive of the two taxis that had been ordered at their request. He’d taken the second, which came along, with standard L.A. punctuality, some fifteen minutes later. I’d tailed him in the rental sedan Charlie herself had promoted for me—apparently her newborn spirit of cooperation didn’t extend to furnishing me with company wheels—but he’d stayed with the taxi less than half a dozen blocks.
I didn’t think he’d reached his destination, when the cab swung to the curb. I figured he knew, or suspected, that he was being followed, and was about to play some tricks. I pulled into a parking space half a block away, cut my lights, and waited. It wasn’t a subtle, high-class, invisible job of surveillance, but I had little hope of staying with him in any case, and none at all if I got cute. He knew me by sight; he probably knew I was there; and it was his city, not mine.
But it had seemed like something that should be tried, both for his sake and for mine. Watching over him, I might be able to save his life, although it wasn’t likely—as a matter of fact, I didn’t really think Warfel would be fool enough to strike at either McConnell or the girl, despite what I’d said for effect back in the office. Still, if he were attacked, and saved, McConnell might talk, if he had anything to talk about. And even if nobody made a hostile move towards him, he might lead me to something or somebody significant, although I didn’t really have much hope of it.
But it was a possible opening, and I didn’t have so many I could ignore one, and the others were being covered. I watched the cab pull away. McConnell stood for a moment at the curb, at last putting on the jacket he’d carried around with him all night. He turned and walked straight at me.
There had been, of course, a certain probability that he’d proceed in my direction rather than moving away from me, or ducking into a nearby building, or darting across the st
reet. There were only so many ways he could go. However, I saw from his manner that this had nothing to do with statistical probabilities. He knew where I was parked and he was coming to me, maybe to tell me something important, maybe just to give me hell for shadowing him, probably the latter.
Abruptly he stopped, looking beyond me. There were headlights in my mirrors, coming up fast. McConnell turned to run. I reached over, hit the door handle on the curb side, dove to the sidewalk, rolled, and came up with a gun in my hand, but it was too late.
There were two of them, in one of those fat-tired, souped-up, fast-back little sport coupes, complete with fake racing stripes, that are America’s current answer to the true European sports car. You may like them or you may not—I don’t, particularly—but you’ve got to admit that not much can beat them for sheer acceleration. Some of them even have pretty good brakes nowadays, a real innovation for Detroit.
The coupe shot past as I was picking myself off the sidewalk, and slowed sharply beyond me. I saw a short shotgun barrel thrust out the right-hand window. It flamed twice in the night and McConnell fell; then the rub-out men were getting out of there with shrieking tires and snarling exhausts, and I still hadn’t had a clear shot at them.
Punching holes in automobiles isn’t exactly what the standard short-barreled .38 Special does best. There’s something to be said for the big guns after all, and I’d pulled out the .44 I was still lugging around since nobody else seemed to want it. The coupe was receding fast. I cocked the massive revolver as I thrust it out two-handed, and I let it fire when the front sight blade steadied on the left half of the slanting rear window.
Even with two hands gripping it hard, the cannon kicked so hard you wouldn’t believe it. The coupe swerved violently across the street and plowed into the parked cars there. After a moment, the right-hand door opened and the shotgunner staggered out, still clutching his weapon, a semi-automatic job that would hold at least three shells, probably more. What I mean is, even if he hadn’t managed, to reload, he probably had ammunition left.
The Poisoners Page 6