Killing Time td-50

by Warren Murphy

  With a brief shake of his head, Remo refused a mar­tini thrust into his field of vision. Chiun refused also, by shattering the glass in midair so quickly that the wait­er's brain didn't register the old man's discontent-he continued to peddle the drink, which was no longer a drink in his fingers, but an olive.

  The canapes were as bad. "White man's food,"

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  Chiun sneered. "A chicken's liver surrounded by pig fat and set atop a lump of green cheese on a cracker. No wonder you are all slothful and mindless. Look at what you eat."

  "This is just a snack," Remo explained. "Dinner hasn't been served yet."

  "I see. One eats before eating so as to be prepared for eating. The labyrinthine processes of the white mind."

  "We'll skip the canapes," Remo told the waiter.

  And then there was the blonde. One minute she was slinking through the crowd in her red-sequined spray-on gown, demurely eyeballing Remo, and the next minute they were upstairs in bed together, with the blonde purring and stroking and doing the knock-your-socks-off thing that she did. And Remo forgot all about the 52 idiot steps to a woman's ecstasy, since this one was ecstatic enough for an army, during the first bout of hand holding.

  And then she dropped the bomb about being sev­enty freaking years old.

  "What'd you have to say that for?" Remo asked miserably, sure in his secret heart that he would never enjoy himself in bed again.

  "Quit acting so naive," she said. Then she stopped and looked at him with something like amusement. "Or is this your first time?"

  "First time for what?"

  "Let me see your arms."

  "What?" He struggled, but she was on him again, and was holding the inside of his left arm up to the pink bedside lamp. "Not a mark," she said, appar­ently amazed. "Why, you're a virgin."

  "To what?"

  "The injections," she said. "Dr. Foxx's injections."

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  She took his hands in hers. "I don't want to scare you or anything, but I hope you know what you're getting into here."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Remo said. "I don't know anything that's going on in this screwball place."

  She held out her own arms. "This, for one thing." Beneath the pink spill of light, the inside of her arms looked like antique wood, tracked with so many holes you could sift flour through them.

  "I know, the tracks are ugly, I have plastic surgery done to cover the marks every five years. But that's the least of it." Her voice was soft and faraway.

  "Jesus," Remo said, aghast. "How long have you been shooting up that happy juice?"

  "A long time," she said, looking levelly at Remo. "An awfully long time. I told you, I'm seventy years old. I've had the injections for most of those seventy years."

  "Oh, knock it off," Remo said. "Whatever those marks mean, they don't mean you're an old lady."

  "But I am. We're all old here."

  "Look. Bobby Jay might look younger than fifty-five. Mrs. Spangler could pass for less than the fifty-eight her daughter claims. But if you're seventy, I'm Methu­selah. Now, why are you handing me a line like that?"

  "it's no line," she said. "What's your name?"

  "Remo."

  "I'm Posie Ponselle." Remo started. "You've heard of me?"

  "I've heard the name," Remo said. "Some movie star in the thirties or something."

  "They compared me with Garbo," she said wist­fully. "The Love Goddess."

  Remo looked at her askance. "Lady, if you ex-

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  pect me to believe that you're Posie Ponseile-"

  "You don't have to believe anything. I just want you to know what you're walking into if you take that first injection tomorrow."

  "Okay," he sighed. She, not Remo, had broken the spell. But it was just as well, he thought. It was time to get back to business. "When did you meet Foxx?"

  "Forty years ago," Posie said without a blink.

  "Come on."

  "You asked."

  "All right," Remo waffled, if he had to listen to an­other crock from another nutcase before he could get a scrap of information, well, that was how it went in this assignment. There wasn't a sane person in the place. "Go ahead."

  "It was in Geneva. You see, just before the war broke out, my movies weren't doing too well. I was getting too old, they said. I was twenty-eight." She took a cigarette from her beaded bag and lit it. "So I went to Switzerland for a series of age-retardant treat­ments at a new clinic I'd heard about. Foxx was there."

  "The same Foxx?"

  She nodded. "He never ages. And his patients don't either, as long as they keep up the treatments. But if they can't. . ." Her voice trailed off to a mumble.

  "If they can't, what?"

  She exhaled and ground out the fresh cigarette with trembling fingers. "Never mind. But you have to keep them up. You have to get the injections every day. That's what I want you to understand before you ac­cept the first treatment."

  "I thought you folks came here once a month," Remo said.

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  "For a new supply. Foxx gives us exactly thirty days' worth of the formula. Every thirty days we have to show up with cash-no checks, no credit-or else he stops the treatments on the spot."

  Her voice quavered. Dizzy dame, Remo thought. Most women, he supposed, worried about their looks. But this one acted like getting to be thirty days older was the end of the world.

  "Okay," he said. "But the thing I can't understand is why Foxx keeps this place such a secret. If he really does have some kind of magic formula for keeping people young forever, he could make a fortune."

  "He does," Posie said. "But not from us. The in­come from the thirty guests at Shangri-la would barely pay for the upkeep of the place."

  "What else has he got going?"

  "I don't know exactly. Not now, anyway. But some funny things were going on years ago, when I worked for him."

  "When was that?"

  "in the forties and fifties. I ran out of money for the treatments after a few years in Switzerland. I tried to get my agent in Hollywood to find me another picture, but nobody in the business wanted to take a chance on me. Commercial flights to Europe were practically nonexistent during the war, so I couldn't get back to talk to them myself. Besides, I didn't have enough cash to take a supply of the formula with me back to America. So I stayed."

  "What kind of job did Foxx offer you?"

  "The usual," she said. "At first I was his mistress. He was rough, really bad. He liked to hurt. I hated him, but I needed the injections. In time, though, he got tired of me. I was glad about that. But he'd grown to

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  trust me. By the time he was ready to move his opera­tion here to Shangri-la, I was keeping some of his books."

  "Oh?" Remo said, interested. "What was in them?"

  "Different things. The income from the Geneva clinic, mostly. That's where he produced the formula. In those days, he was gone quite a bit, and I'd run the clinic for him. There weren't any guests there by then, of course. Foxx wanted to get back to America, so he had cut all his patients off. . . ."

  She started to tremble. "What's wrong?" Remo asked.

  "Nothing. I was just remembering. . . ." She shrugged it off. "Anyway, sometimes he'd leave for months at a stretch. During those times, while I was at the clinic in Switzerland, he'd give me instructions over the phone. Sometimes he wanted me to pick up these packages that were left in weird places- alleys, old warehouses, places like that. They were always wrapped in brown paper, those pack­ages."

  "What was in them?"

  She looked up. "Gold," she said softly. "That's what was strange. Millions came in that way. Always brown packages dropped somewhere with bricks of gold inside."

  "Did you know who left them?"

  "How could I? They were just dumped. But that's not all of it. Something else began happening around that time, too. Foxx started calling and telling me to ship out huge quanties of the formula to the States."

&
nbsp; "Here?"

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  "No. It was odd. He wanted me to send them all to South Dakota."

  "South Dakota?"

  "Don't ask me why South Dakota. The post office boxes where ! was supposed to send them were all over the Black Hills region."

  "Is this still going on?"

  "I don't know. The clinic in Geneva was sold. He keeps the supplies for the guests in the base­ment here, but I don't know where he produces the formula these days. I don't work for him any more."

  She spoke as if she were in a daze. "He was going to cut me off when he left Switzerland. He said that if I couldn't pay for the drug in one way or another, I could do without it."

  "It might have been the kindest thing he ever did for you," Remo said.

  She smiled ruefully. "Maybe. In a way, it might have been. I married a Swiss industrialist I'd met while Foxx was on one of his long visits to America. Fortunately, he was quite wealthy. Before Foxx left Geneva for good, he sold us a quantity of the formula, enough for several months. My husband wanted to try it, so I be­gan giving him the injections, too."

  "Just two happy little addicts," Remo said.

  She started to shake again. "I introduced him to it," she whispered. "He was killed in an automobile acci­dent two months later. I saw him after he died. ..." A low moan issued from her throat. She looked as if she were on the verge of screaming.

  "Posie? Posie!" He shook her back into the pre­sent.

  "Remo," she said. "Oh, please don't take the treat-

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  ment. I know what it does, even after one time. I've seen it. Don't. . .don't. . . ."

  She was sobbing. "Hey, take it easy," Remo said, rocking her in his arms.

  "Get out of here as soon as you can. Before it's too !ate for you, too."

  He kissed her. And suddenly he didn't care how old she was. There was something about Posie Ponselle that made him feel like the happiest man who ever lived, something womanly and yet almost unbearably fragile, as if at any moment she would disintegrate in his arms.

  They made love again. It was even better than the last time, because there was more of Posie in it-not just Posie, the beautiful blonde who knew every imag­inable way to please a man, but another, wise, sad, in­finitely tender.

  "If you don't watch out, I'm going to fall in love with you," Remo said.

  Her smile faded. "Don't do that," she said. "For your sake, don't. Just leave."

  "I can't. Not until I've talked to Foxx."

  "What for?" she said, alarmed. "You're not a spy for him or anything, are you?"

  Remo shook his head. "Posie, I can't tell you what I am just now, but I think Dr. Foxx is more dangerous than you know. I've got to see him personally."

  She looked at him for a long moment. "If I arrange a meeting, will you promise to leave? Without taking the treatment?"

  "I won't take the treatment," Remo said.

  "Fair enough." She put on her dress and kissed him good-bye.

  She closed the door behind her. Remo sat in silence in the pool of pink light cast by the bedside lamp.

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  Her arms! If half of Posie's strange story was true he would have to get her out of here. Felix Foxx was into a lot more than the health resort busi­ness.

  He felt a strange vibration behind the bed. He searched for the source, but saw nothing except a loose telephone wire that obviously had been cut de­liberately. He held it up. The buzz vibrated through his fingers.

  That was funny. There wasn't any ringing in the rest of Shangri-la, so every other phone in the house must have been disconnected, too. He manipulated the wires into the telephone. By the fifteenth soundless ring, he made the connection.

  "Who is it?" he said into the mouthpiece.

  "Smith," came the lemony voice. "I'm using the phone in my briefcase. If there's no one with you, we should be able to talk privately."

  "Oh, it's private, all right. The telephone lines have all been cut. How'd you get the number?"

  "The computers, of course."

  "Of course," Remo said. He told Smith about the daily injections and everything he could remember about Posie Ponselle except for her sterling perfor­mance between the sheets. "She says that she's sev­enty years old, and that Foxx is even older than she is."

  "Oh. Oh. Oh." Smith sounded as if he were about to fall off a tall building.

  "What is it?"

  "Quiet, please." The phone crackled with the whirr and hum of the Folcroft Four in action. "Good God," Smith uttered, his voice shaky. "Seventy-eight per­cent."

  "Seventy-eight percent of what?"

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  Smith told him about the Foxx/Vaux theory and about the scandal involving procaine in 1938. "There's a seventy-eight percent chance that this Dr. Foxx is the same Vaux who was working on the pro­caine experiments fifty years ago. Foxx may have killed a woman for the procaine in her body. An Irma Schwartz, if that's any help." "How about Ives? And the Air Force guy?" "Their procaine levels are normal. There's still no connection."

  "Any word from the military?" "Nothing," Smith said. "If you're running after the wrong man, then whoever killed them will be running around loose forever. What have you picked up from the other guests-besides this woman? Frankly, Remo, that story about the gold drop-offs and the for­mula shipments to South Dakota doesn't make sense. Those facts don't even compute." "I think she was telling the truth," Remo said. "Until it computes, her information is inconsequen­tial," Smith said crisply. "Who else have you spoken with?"

  "Well, I'm getting to that," Remo said, pulling on his trousers. The wires in his makeshift telephone cir­cuit were welding together. The connection was breaking fast.

  "We haven't any time to waste," Smith pressed, barely audible among the crackles and static on the line.

  "Okay, okay," Remo said. "I'll be here for another twenty-four hours or so, since tomorrow's the big day around here-Smitty?" He juggled the wires in the phone, but no sound came. The line was dead.

  Which was just as well, since at that moment the six-foot, four-inch frame of a man wearing what looked

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  to be a white toga came flying past the window out­side.

  "Wa-wa-wa," the man called as he zoomed upward toward the roof. And past the roof, toward the stars.

  Remo looked to the snow-covered garden below, al­ready sure of who would be down there.

  A crowd of onlookers near the swimming pool, simi­larly attired and shivering in the cold, gasped and shrieked piteously as a second man, smaller and with graying hair, blasted off into space. In the center of the throng stood Chiun, his arms folded triumphantly across his chest, his face serene.

  "Oh, bulldookey," Remo said. The first man, the giant, turned in an arc overhead and began his dive, nose first, like a white-sheathed warhead. He had stopped wailing, his features set rigidly in a mask of unadulterated terror, as he sped downward alongside the house. He was near enough to the walls to touch them, if he felt like skinning his palms on his way to eternity.

  "Hang on!" Remo called, throwing open the win­dow and hoisting himself up to his knees.

  The man's stone face made a slow turn. "To what?" he moaned.

  "To me." He stretched out his arms, slowly pivoting so that he was facing up, supported by the backs of his knees against the window frame. He was directly in line with the falling body.

  A woman below screamed and fainted. "This is ter­rible," another said.

  "Quite terrible," Chiun said sympathetically. "Remo is always interfering."

  "How could you do such a thing?" a muscular beach-blanket type yelled to Chiun.

  "Oh, it was nothing," he said, beaming modestly.

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  "Just a small upward thrust. It is an elementary ma­neuver. ..."

  But no one was listening. Everyone was watching the thin young man with the thick wrists trying fruit­lessly to save two men falling in space, one behind the other, as they sped toward the hard frozen ground.


  "No, no," said the man in the air who was about to meet his maker three seconds before his associate.

  "Stretch out," Remo shouted.

  "Mama!. . ."

  "Stretch out!"

  He curled into a fetal position. It was going to make it tougher for Remo. Tougher, but still no sweat. It was an easy job, almost embarrassingly easy. Chiun would laugh him all the way back to Folcroft if Remo couldn't manage to catch two falling people, while supported by his knees. By his toes, maybe. . . .

  No, not even then. During Remo's years of training, Chiun had hurled boulders toward him off steel levers thirty feet long and expected him to stop them with a three-finger bounce, while treading water-without getting wet above the waist. That was difficult. This was nothing.

  But when he caught the two men, snatching at their strange flowing garments with a manipulation of his fingers that spread the fabric out and cradled them in­side it like stork-delivered babies, the crowd below went crazy. They acted as though he'd just come back from Mars with little red men for all of them to play with. The woman who had fainted earlier looked up to Remo with a face radiant with wonder and shouted, "Bless you!" The others gave him three cheers and babbled excitedly about what a hero Remo was.

  Only Chiun saw the true insignificance of the ma­neuver, and he was looking at the weeping, shrieking

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  faces around him as if he'd been tossed into a lunatic asylum. Remo shrugged as he hauled the flailing, wild-eyed men into the house through the window.

  "Thank you, thank you," the gray-haired man bur­bled, falling to his knees and kissing Remo's still bare feet.

  "Hey, watch it," Remo said irritably. It was bad enough that he'd had to perform grade-school tricks in front of a bunch of spectators, but having some nut smear his lips all over Remo's toes was pushing the limit.

  The man raised his tear-stained face. "It's fate," he intoned.