The Poisoners

by Donald Hamilton

  “Which brings up the question,” Tillery interrupted, “after the failure of the original charade she and Warfel had set up to fool him, why should Miss Beverly Blaine still have been trying to gain the confidence of this government man? Why did she stay behind and put on an elaborate act for his benefit? She even had Frankie send the rub-out men after The Basher just to make it look as if she were in real danger! Why?” Jake didn’t answer, and after a moment, Tillery went on thoughtfully: “The three of them. Warfel and the girl, using Warfel’s corporation contacts to set up something big—maybe on instructions from that fat Chinaman you saw—with Hansen to supply the muscle and do the driving. But just what the hell are they after besides dope, Jake?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Tillery. I never heard anything that would help. Frankie always had something for me to do somewhere else when they started talking real seriously.”

  “Warfel heads south towards Baja California in his boat,” Tillery said in the same musing voice. “Hansen heads south in a jeep. The girl heads south in her convertible—but she wrecks it deliberately, with Hansen’s help, and stays behind to be rescued by this employee of Uncle Sam. Why? It looks as if they were afraid of Mr. Matthew Helm and wanted to have one person keeping an eye on him—or a gun on him—while the others carried out the operation, whatever it is. Which in turn kind of indicates that our so-unconscious friend here must know something about what they’re planning, enough to worry them. What about it, Mr. Helm?” There was a sharp little laugh. “Come on, Mr. Helm. I’ve been letting you lie there and listen to save explanations, but that’s enough of a nap. You can catch up on the rest of your sleep tonight Wake up now and join us.”

  I opened my eyes obediently. I’d figured him for a small man, with his squeaky voice, and I was right in a way. He wasn’t very tall. However, he was pudgy enough to outweigh a lot of taller men, a pink-faced butterball character with a little round head on a little round body. He was dressed in the informal West Coast fashion: slacks, sports coat, sports shirt, and a natty little cocoa-straw hat with a brim too small to keep the sun off anything, but maybe he wasn’t planning to spend much time out in the sun. He looked like a pink, plump cherub except for his eyes, which were small and mean.

  I looked at him, and I looked at big Jake watching me hopefully, obviously wishing I’d be foolish enough to make trouble, and I glanced over at the limber blonde in the loudly checked pants outfit, sprawled bonelessly across the armchair in the corner. Then I looked at the fourth person in the room, whose presence I hadn’t even suspected until now, because he’d made no sound.

  I should have guessed there was somebody else present, of course, somebody important, from the way they’d all seemed to be making speeches to the gallery instead of to each other, bringing each other up to date on stuff they should all have known without telling. He stood by the door, a solid, dark-haired man with a meaty, dark face. He was dressed like a big-city character from the east, complete with a big-city shirt and tie, a gabardine topcoat, a small felt hat, and big dark glasses to shield his eyes from our dangerous western sun. I knew at once that this was a different and tougher breed of predator from Butterball Tillery.

  This man, I knew instinctively, represented the “corporation” to which Tillery had referred, the giant underworld organization to which Frank Warfel also belonged, which he now seemed to have embarrassed by his extracurricular activities. Apparently, it was the job of Tillery, the local troubleshooter, to terminate the embarrassment and, probably, the man who had caused it; but an eastern representative had been sent along as official observer for the board of directors, to make certain the corporation’s interests were properly safeguarded.

  “Mr. Helm.” Tillery’s voice drew my attention from the silent figure in the corner. “My apologies for the violent greeting, Mr. Helm, but we knew you to be armed and we didn’t know how you’d react. Allow me to return your belongings. Please place the revolver, and the cartridges I have removed from it, in different pockets. You can reload when you leave here.”

  “And when,” I asked, “will that be, Mr. Tillery?”

  “That depends on you, Mr. Helm,” he said smoothly. “All you have to do is answer a question and you’re free to go. As you’ll have gathered from what we let you overhear, we know all we need to about Frank Warfel’s proposed heroin operation. We can take care of that, and will. But the corporation that employs me—you may know it by other names—cannot afford to become involved in treason, for exactly the same reason it no longer deals in drugs. When an activity becomes too unpopular, it also becomes unprofitable.”

  I said, “That’s a nice, patriotic viewpoint.”

  “Let’s not wave the flag. I believe we are both on the same side in this. Why quibble about motives? What we want from you is one single piece of information: just what kind of international monkey business has that little red-haired girl put Frankie up to, Mr. Helm?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Hit him, Jake.”

  The plump little man’s voice didn’t change as he said it. Jake yanked me off the bed and slugged me hard at diaphragm level, so I sat back down again, breathless.

  “Let me remind you, Mr. Helm,” Tillery said gently, “that being a U.S. agent gives you no privileges here, quite the contrary. You are not in the United States now. You are a sneaky gringo spy who has just committed a brutal murder on Mexican soil—”

  I said, “Hell, I didn’t kill the girl. I might have, but she saved me the trouble. She was a pro; she was also a murderess. She knew that once she was caught, she was dead, whether I did the job myself or took her back across the border for trial. She preferred to get it over quickly; or maybe she had orders not to be taken alive. They often do. Anyway, as soon as she knew for sure I was onto her, she popped the kill-me capsule into her mouth and bit down hard. All I did was get rid of the body.”

  “Nevertheless, I don’t think you’d like to have your activities called to the attention of the Mexican authorities, which is why you will not scream for help or do anything else to cause us trouble while we’re questioning you. Let me ask you something else: just what were you doing in New Mexico recently that involved a lot of driving?”

  “Fishing,” I said truthfully.

  I knew he wouldn’t believe me, but I couldn’t, at the moment, think up a lie he would believe. The truth was easier to work with.

  “Fishing, Mr. Helm?” Tillery’s tone was skeptical.

  “I was on leave,” I said. “I used to live in Santa Fe. I came back to visit some friends and catch some fish.”

  “And you covered over a thousand miles—”

  “Navajo Lake and the San Juan River are way up north in the state; Elephant Butte Reservoir is pretty far to the south. Then there are Conchos Lake, and Miami Lake, and the Chama River and the Rio Grande, and Stone Lake out on the Jicarilla Apache reservation. Look at the map. A man can log a lot of miles in New Mexico, fishing practically every day for a couple of weeks.”

  Tillery smiled thinly. “I’m sure he can, Mr. Helm. I’m not so sure you did. I’m not so sure you were not carrying out a preliminary investigation around Albuquerque, say, that later led you to Los Angeles and Frank Warfel, or the girl calling herself Beverly Blaine.”

  I said, “I was on leave. They called me up and told me one of our people had been shot in LA. and I’d better grab my secret-agent hat and get out there.”

  “And of course you’d never heard of Frank Warfel before, and therefore you can’t possibly tell us what he and the redhead were up to besides dope.” Tillery’s voice was sour.

  “That’s right.”

  “Hit him, Jake.”

  Jake went through the haul-me-up-and-knock-me-down routine once more.

  Tillery said calmly, “You must have some information. It makes no sense otherwise. The Blaine girl was obviously under the impression that you were dangerous to her and Frankie and their mission in some way, otherwise why would she have taken the risk of tr
ying to get close to you once more, as an innocent victim of gang vengeance? At the very least, we can figure that she stayed behind to find out how much you knew, which indicates that you must know something, enough to worry them all. What is it, Mr. Helm?”

  I said truthfully, “If I have any information dangerous to them, I don’t know what the hell it could be.”

  “Hit him, Jake.”

  We played variations on this theme for a while. It got a little rough, but there was nothing to do but take it. I mean, if I’d thought they were planning to kill me, or work me over hard enough to cripple me, I might have tried something violent to break it up, but that would have involved noise and, probably, dead men on the floor, and Mexican policemen all over the place. As long as it was no more serious than a bunch of hoods demonstrating their touching faith in the power of knuckles, I could ride along with it, amusing myself in the usual way—under such circumstances—by thinking about the excruciating deaths they were all going to die when I caught up with them, later…

  “Stop it!”

  It was Roberta Prince, coming abruptly out of the chair from which she’d been watching the show. She darted across the room to grab Jake’s arm, cocked to slug me once more.

  “Oh, stop it, stop it, stop it!” she cried. “What are you trying to do, kill him? He’s a government agent, you can’t just… Mr. Tillery, you told me if I got him here there’d be no rough stuff. You promised—”

  Jake flung her off. When she started forward again, Tillery grabbed her. She fought him with sudden, hysterical desperation, kicking at him frantically and raking him with her long, silvery nails. He swore and let her go, clapping a hand to his face.

  Then the big man with the sunglasses, the silent observer, stepped forward quickly and seized her by the arm, swung her around, and sent her reeling back against the wall with a full-armed slap. He moved in and kept slapping her, right hand and left, until her knees buckled and she sank to the floor, sobbing weakly. The big man regarded her for a moment, rubbing his hands together in an absent way.

  “Tillery.”

  “Yes,” said Tillery quickly, “yes, Mr. Sapio.”

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Let’s blow.”

  “Yes, Mr. Sapio. Come on Jake. Mr. Sapio thinks we’d better leave now.”

  As they started for the door, Roberta Prince looked up quickly, pushing the tangled pale hair out of her eyes. She had stopped crying.

  “What about me?” she gasped. “Mr. Tillery, what about the protection you promised me? What about my money?”

  Tillery turned. He looked down at the blood-stained handkerchief he’d been holding to his scratched face and he looked at the kneeling girl. He laughed sharply.

  “You bitch!” he said in his high-pitched voice. “You nasty, vicious little tramp! I hope Frankie has lots of fun with you before he wrings your skinny neck! I just wish I could be there to watch.”

  As the door closed behind them, Roberta began to cry once more, softly and hopelessly.

  15

  Entering my room, I found another one on the bed. I mean, it had been a morning for beat-up females: first Beverly Blaine, then Roberta Prince—whom I’d left repairing her tear-damaged makeup—and now there was Charlotte Devlin sprawled face down on top of the bedspread with her shoes on. They were still, I noted, rimmed with dried mud. Her sheer, dark stockings were kind of loose and wrinkled about her legs, and her tailored gray suit was kind of bunched about her body. Her glasses lay on the bed beside her. She didn’t stir as I closed and locked the door behind me.

  I moved forward cautiously, expecting the worst, since a woman will almost invariably kick off her shoes before lying down on a bed unless she’s in very bad shape indeed, drunk or dying. Exactly why anybody would want to kill the girl and dump her on me I didn’t know, but then, there seemed to be a lot about the case I still didn’t know, probably enough to motivate another murder or two. Frank Warfel could simply have decided she was making a nuisance of herself, and he was a man who seemed to take homicide quite lightly, particularly if he could get it committed by someone else.

  Approaching the bed, I saw that one dangling hand retained a precarious grip on some white paper, perhaps a clue. I worked it free and found myself holding a genuine wad of damp Kleenex. I dropped it into the nearby wastebasket and studied the motionless figure before me more closely, realizing that it was breathing quite normally.

  There was no blood or other sign of violence that I could see. I decided with relief that, not only wasn’t she dead, she wasn’t even wounded, bruised, poisoned, or drugged. Shoes or no shoes, she was merely sound asleep, looking only as disheveled as any woman is apt to, caught taking a daytime nap in her clothes. The brief skirt of her suit had worked up far enough behind, I noticed, to reveal an interesting sartorial detail: the currently somewhat untidy stockings weren’t separate stockings at all, but integral parts of an all-in-one nylon garment, sheer below and only slightly more opaque above, apparently designed to render obsolete such old-fashioned undercover engineering items as garters and girdles.

  “Mr. Helm!”

  It was an embarrassed and rather indignant gasp as, waking, Charlie sat up to look at me reproachfully. After a moment, she made the standard sleeping-beauty gesture of tugging down her skirt—undoubtedly, the first conscious act of the legendary princess kissed awake by the legendary prince—then she sniffed and looked around helplessly. Guessing at what was required, I went into the bathroom, got a fresh bunch of tissues from the dispenser there, and returned to put it into her hand.

  “Thanks,” she said, applying it vigorously to her nose. Finished, she put on her glasses to see me more clearly, saying, “I’m sorry, Mr. Helm. I didn’t mean to fall asleep—”

  “Ladies occupying my bed generally call me Matt,” I said. “How’s the allergy?”

  It was a casual, conversation-making question designed simply to put her at ease, but she took it seriously, hesitating over the answer as if it really mattered.

  “Well,” she said reluctantly, “well, if you must know, it’s terrible. Or was. It seems to be considerably better now, but I had some kind of an asthma attack on the way down. I really thought for a while I wasn’t going to make it here; I could hardly breathe. It was all I could do to keep the car on the road. That’s why, when I got in here and found the room empty, I just couldn’t help flopping down on the bed for a moment, but I had no intention of… My God, I look like something thrown out with the trash! If you want to be a gentleman, you can discreetly avert your eyes, just for a moment.”

  I said, “Cut it out, Charlie. A gentleman? A trigger-happy super-spook like me?”

  She flushed slightly and, rather defiantly, rose and turned her back on me and went through the contortions necessary to take the slack out of her sagging hosepants. Then, without deigning to look my way, she moved stiffly to the dresser. After making a wry face at her reflection in the mirror, she smoothed down her outer garments neatly, buttoned the collar of her blouse, and patted her short, crisp hair into place.

  “Matt.”

  “Yes, Charlie.”

  “You don’t like me very much, do you?”

  “Now, what brought that on?” I asked.

  “The way you keep throwing my words in my face. Heavens, I didn’t think you’d be so sensitive, in your line of work. If you want me to apologize, well, all right, I will. I am very sorry I called you a trigger-happy super-spook, Mr. Helm.”

  It reminded me of Lionel McConnell, dying, apologizing for calling me a honkie bastard. The memory was not a happy one, particularly now that I knew he’d been shot down just to make me believe that Beverly Blaine was also in danger.

  I said, “That’s not the point. It’s not what you call me, it’s what you are while you’re calling me that—and while you’re talking about my ‘line of work’ as if it gave you a pain in your tummy.”

  She turned slowly to look at me, frowning. “That’s a little complicated, Matt. You’re g
oing to have to explain it.” I said, “Hell, I’m just mildly allergic to cops, that’s all. Particularly dedicated cops with high-moral, law-enforcement missions. And most particularly dedicated cops with high-moral, law-enforcement missions who look down their long blue noses at me and my job.”

  “I don’t—”

  “The hell you don’t. I’m not supposed to kid you about what you do, but you’re supposed to be quite free to sneer at what I do.” I grinned. “I’m not complaining, understand. We’re used to that attitude from you badge-toters. I’m merely pointing out that if you want my respect and affection you’re picking a damn funny way to get it.”

  She didn’t smile. She said sharply, “You’re being rather stupid, aren’t you? After all, you’re kind of a cop yourself.”

  “Don’t ever think it, Charlie,” I said. “My job is defending the people and to hell with the laws. Your job is defending the laws and to hell with the people.”

  “That’s not fair! I… we…” She checked herself and drew a long, ragged breath. “I don’t know how we got into this, Matt, but I don’t think we’d better pursue the argument any further, do you? Particularly since what I really wanted was… was to ask a favor of you.”

  “A favor?” I said. “Sure. In our detestable undercover line of work we hold no grudges. Anything your little heart desires. My house is yours, as they say down here.”

  She looked at me for a moment without speaking, then she asked gravely, “Why does it amuse you to needle me, Matt? Is it because… because I have no sense of humor? Would you tease me for being half-blind if I were missing an eye? Or for being crippled if I’d lost a leg?”

  It was a hell of a thing for her to say. It made her, suddenly, a human being instead of a kind of stiff-necked female-type robot programmed to give interestingly pompous reactions to my excruciatingly clever stimuli. I regarded her for a moment, totally disarmed and disconcerted.