“What girl? Another one?”
“This one was very cute,” I said. “Silver-blond, slinky, a tall, slim, Hollywood-starlet type. You wouldn’t think she’d be much good in bed, no more hips than she had, but you’d be wrong. Now that you’re mad, can you pour the whiskey, or do you want me to?”
She looked at me for a moment. “Why should I be mad because you slept with a starlet?” But she managed to pour the drinks and handed me one. “You’re crazy, you know that,” she said softly after taking a good swallow from hers. “You’re just. . . well, crazy. How do you keep living, doing things like that?"
“By knowing when to quit,” I said. “That’s it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can get away with that sort of dumb thing once or twice at the beginning of a game; but now we start playing for keeps.”
“Why didn’t that man shoot, the one by the bed?” When I explained it to her, she said, “And you staked your life on a thin theory like that? Crazy! What happened to the platinum Hollywood type?”
“She wasn’t really,” I said. “She was a very serious girl, really. Too serious. She decided I should be reformed, led into gentle paths of nonviolence. I decided I shouldn’t be. I haven’t seen her since. How did you come to decide to do a story on us, Elly, or series of stories?”
Her eyes wavered. “I can’t tell you that. Professional secret.”
“Sure,” I said. “Do you mind if I make a phone call? You’re welcome to listen. In fact, I recommend it.”
“Why should I mind? I’ll just take the bottle over to that chair and get quietly drunk while you chat. Don’t bother to pour me into bed. Just let me sleep it off right there.”
I sat down on the bed, got the phone and got the Washington number. It took a little while to get through to Mac, but he’s never too hard to reach, even at night. Suddenly he was on the line.
“Eric here,” I said. “We have some reconsidering to do, sir. I’m afraid I’ve been a little stupid; I should have caught on sooner.”
“Caught onto what, Eric?”
“Do you know the whereabouts of Roberta Prince?”
“I don’t recall the name. . . oh. Yes, of course.”
“Five-ten, slender, silver-blond hair, blue eyes, last seen in Mexico heading north for the U.S.A. Anyway, that’s where she was last seen by me. Like with Harriet Robinson, we erased a few dubious items from Miss Prince’s record, as well as we could, in return for services rendered; but that was several years back. Do we have any recent information?”
“I’ll check—”
“Just a minute, sir. While you’re checking, please get hold of Martha and find out the name of the man who was living across the street from her; and where he can be reached now, if she knows.”
“The man who shot Amos? That information I have. Some of it at least. His name is Elliot, Roger Elliot. He’s out on bail awaiting trial. I should think there would be a good chance of catching him at home.”
I said, “Bail? For murder? He must have a good lawyer.”
“He does. But I don’t have his telephone number here.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “It was Navajo Drive, Casa Glorieta, wasn’t it? I’ll get it from Information. I’ll call you back.”
Eleanor was smoking one of her cigarettes; the girl was a human chimney and the Cancer Society would take a dim view of her. She was curled up in the big chair and I thought she looked kind of pretty like that; but I guess any girl looks pretty who’s willing to tackle a couple of armed men with nothing but a high-heeled shoe, in your behalf. She raised an eyebrow when she saw me looking her way, but she asked no questions. It took me a while to get Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the line; then a male voice I remembered spoke in my ear. It occurred to me that I still didn’t know the face that went with the voice. I only knew his shoulders and his shotgun and his blond, unhappy, unfaithful lush of a wife.
“Mr. Elliot?”
“Yes?”
“We met a while back, in a manner of speaking.”
There was a brief silence. “Yes, I thought you sounded vaguely familiar. What do you want?”
“The answer to a question. What gave you the idea?”
“What do you mean?” But there was more defiance in his tone than there should have been.
I said, “Did you catch them in flagrante delicto, if that’s the way to pronounce it? Or did she boast of her infidelity and tell you she’d found a better man? What sent you on the warpath with a loaded twelve-gauge?”
After another pause, he said, “I don’t think I want to answer that.”
I said, “I suggest that it didn’t happen that way at all. I suggest that you got an anonymous letter or phone call.”
More silence, then his voice came again, “If you know, why ask?” When I didn’t speak, he went on softly, reminiscently, “I didn’t know. I had no idea. I didn’t believe it, at first. I didn’t want to believe it. Everything had been going so well, I thought. And then, when it became quite obvious. . . . Well, I just flipped, I guess.”
I asked, “Letter or call?”
“Call.”
“Anything that might identify the person at the other end?”
“Nothing. Except that it was a woman.”
That surprised me a little. “You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. The voice was kind of deep and husky—I guess you’d call it a contralto—but it was definitely a woman’s voice.”
“Thanks,” I said. “It’s none of my business, of course, but how are things going now?”
“She’s . . . in a place. She lets me come visit her. It’s funny, she hated me so much until the police. . . . Now, I don’t really think she wants to see me convicted. We’ll see how it works out.”
“Well, good luck,” I said.
“You said that once before,” he said. “Keep trying.” When I’d hung up, I glanced toward Eleanor, but she just gave me the quizzical-eyebrow treatment and remained silent. I got Washington again, after a minor struggle with the Bahamian telephone organization; but nothing serious, nothing like trying to get a call out of, for instance, Mexico. “It’s not good,” Mac said.
“I didn’t think it would be,” I said. I cleared my throat, remembering certain things. “Dead?”
“She got married four years ago,” Mac said. “Somebody she met in Hollywood. One child, a boy. Recently they went sailing out of Marina del Rey; they had a small sailboat there. A speedboat ran them down. The man survived. He claimed the speedboat turned back and made another pass—the girl was pretty badly mangled by the propellers—but nobody really believed him; he’d taken a bad blow on the head. The child was never found.”
I'd seen, once, what a fast boat’s whirling props could do to a human body; it wasn’t nice to think about. I thought of a pretty, bright, and rather brave young woman who’d wanted peace and nonviolence and had almost made it when the past, in which I’d played a part, caught up with her. Mac was speaking.
“What did you say, sir?” I asked.
“How did you know?”
“It was logical,” I said. “Once you considered it all as a single calculated program instead of a number of unrelated events. I just talked with Elliot, the man who killed Bob Devine. He was triggered by an anonymous phone call. And Harriet Robinson killed herself as a result of an anonymous letter. And I just had a couple of anonymous visitors with guns. And a certain lady journalist did a series of damaging exposes on us and won’t say what gave her the notion. Somehow I get the idea that somebody doesn’t like us very much. He’s doing everything in his power to embarrass and destroy us, from sicking a jealous husband onto a retired agent of ours who happened to be married to your daughter, to setting a muckraking female journalist on our trail.” I winked at Eleanor, who maintained a careful poker face. I went on, “It’s too much, sir. I should have seen it sooner. It’s got to be a deliberate campaign, not just a run of bad luck.”
Mac said carefull
y, a thousand miles away in a different country, “We must watch out for paranoia, Eric; it’s an occupational disease. And Roberta Prince, Roberta Hendrickson as she became, was not one of ours.”
“No, but she was involved in a certain operation of ours down in Mexico; and at the time I carefully warned a certain gent to lay off her. He’d want to deal with her, not only because he felt she’d double-crossed him by helping me, but to show me clearly what he thought of my warning. In a way you could say I bestowed the kiss of death on her by standing up for her like that.”
“I see,” Mac said softly. He was silent for a moment. “He calls himself Lorca nowadays, doesn’t he? I would very much prefer not to have to deal with him, if it’s at all possible. He’s in a position of considerable power these days.”
“You have no choice, sir,” I said. “We have no choice. He’s obviously involving himself with us as a matter of revenge, very systematically.”
“Very well. Do what you consider necessary.”
I said, “It was a woman with a contralto voice who informed Roger Elliot of his wife’s infidelity.”
Mac said, “That’s very interesting. Roberta Hendrickson’s husband thought the driver of the speedboat was a dark-haired woman, but he was not quite certain, since there is no longer a strong correlation between length of hair and sex. I’ll see what the possibilities are. Eric.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Be discreet. What with Miss Brand’s recent article on Amos and other articles forthcoming, we are not in a very strong strategic position at the moment.”
“Discreet,” I said. “Yes, sir. Discreet.”
I hung up and sat there for a while. Eleanor Brand lit another cigarette from the butt of the first, and waved the smoke aside.
“So that’s how the death sentence is passed,” she said. “Discreetly.”
Chapter 14
She said she’d done an election piece on Lorca while the recent campaign was still news.
“I used a number of sources,” she said. “They weren’t all reliable, of course. In a situation like that there are always people with axes to grind. You’ve got his PR people trying to build the guy up, and you’ve got the other guys’ PR people, plus his natural enemies, trying to tear him down. You’ve got to evaluate the information you get very carefully; that’s part of the job, maybe the most important part of the job. But even a doubtful source will often give you a useful quote, or lead you to a nugget of real information you might otherwise have overlooked. And sometimes other lines of inquiry open up as you dig, and suggest ideas for new articles. . . . Well, I don’t have to tell you. You’ve been there and done it, although more with a camera than with a notebook and tape recorder.” She gave me a quick, almost embarrassed glance. “It’s funny. When I wrote that story on you, it didn’t seem likely we’d ever be sitting like this having a friendly drink. . . . Ooops, sorry! I forgot; friendship has no place here, the man said. It’s all strictly business, right? Where was I?”
“You were evaluating sources,” I said.
Eleanor stubbed out her cigarette in the hotel’s ashtray. “Yes, well, one day a man who’d been feeding me some tidbits of Lorca dope told me he had something that was totally irrelevant to the election story I was working on, but maybe I could use it anyway. He’d been looking for somebody to tell it to and he’d decided I could be trusted to keep him out of it no matter what. That was all he wanted, protection. He had this material and it scared him and if certain people knew he had it his life would be in terrible danger. He gave it a big buildup.”
I grinned. “I suppose those certain ferocious people were us.”
She nodded. “He claimed he was a former government employee discharged under a cloud—strictly a frame-up, of course; he was really quite innocent; they always are— who’d once stumbled across this information that had been on his conscience ever since: information about a terrible secret government organization that really should be exposed for the good of the country. He had quite a bit of material and he was able to tell me where to look for more. When he mentioned that the chief of this deadly agency had a daughter named Martha, who was married to a retired agent named Devine, I knew where I could find still more. After the Lorca piece was wrapped up, I went to work on it.” She glanced at me sharply. “And please don’t lecture me on my sneaky low-down methods, Mr. Helm. You used that Hollywood blonde for your own purposes, didn’t you, even after sleeping with her; and in the end she died of it. I don’t think that leaves you much room to criticize.”
“I didn’t say a word,” I said mildly. “But didn’t it occur to you that your timid source might have hidden motives for setting you on our trail? Or that somebody might?”
Eleanor laughed. “Don’t be naive, little boy,” she said. “Of course it occurred to me. They always claim to be snitching for the sakes of their pure, patriotic, public-spirited consciences; and deep down they’re always trying to get even with somebody who’s been mean to them. So what? A leak is a leak is a leak. I cross-checked the information and it was all solid. So maybe the guy was avenging himself on the government that had fired him, or one particular branch of it. Or maybe he had other motives. What was that to me, as long as he handed me valid data? And now it turns out that maybe somebody else was using him, and me too, to get even with you, and to hell with that, too. Show me where they sneaked one false item past me and I’ll apologize all over the place; but I was pretty damned careful and I don’t think you can do it. And as long as my story is accurate, as the old saying goes, chuck you, Farley. If you don’t want stuff written about you, don’t do stuff worth writing about.”
I thought maybe she was protesting a little too much; but on the other hand, they always do get carried away when they get on any subject relating to the freedom of the press.
“Down, Lady, down,” I said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, so let’s not have all that defensive growling and snarling, there’s a good doggie.”
After a moment, she drew a long breath and grinned. “I haven’t been called a bitch so nicely in a long time,” she said.
“And Harriet Robinson, how did you get onto her?” I asked.
Eleanor shrugged. “Not from that source. Her name came up in the course of my further researches on you and your fascinating operations; so I went to interview her, as I told you. She wasn’t much help as far as you were concerned. To hear her tell it, she hardly remembered your name. But that was back when the first ship sinkings were in the news and we talked about them casually. She was a mine of nautical information; she really knew her stuff. When I got the idea of going to work on that story, later, after I’d finished up with you and your outfit, I remembered the knowledgeable Captain Robinson; but when I went back to see her, she clammed up completely.
I thought at the time it was just a personal thing, you know we didn’t really get along too well; but I guess there was more to it than that.”
I said, “Yes, I guess by that time she’d managed to get herself mixed up in it somehow, so she was afraid to talk. And you know something? I have a hard time buying the idea that at just about the time you interviewed Harriet about me because you’d been given a lead to me by Lorca, she just accidentally stumbled onto a totally different branch of Mr. Lorca’s mysterious operations.” I frowned thoughtfully. “You weren’t particularly careful how you approached her, I suppose.”
“Careful? How do you mean?”
“You didn’t take any precautions to avoid being followed? Anybody interested could have learned that your investigation into my nefarious past was leading you to a certain charter-boat skipper down in the Florida Keys?”
Eleanor said rather defensively, “You’re the secret agent around here, Mister. I’m just an innocent journalist; I don’t keep looking over my shoulder to see if people are trailing me around.” After a moment, she asked, “Do you think they were? Do you think I. . . led them to her?”
I nodded. “I’m afraid so. You called her to their atte
ntion and then I paid her a visit. Between us . . .” I shrugged. “With friends like us, who needs enemies? Not Hattie Robinson.”
“You’re just guessing.”
“Not really. It’s apparently a systematic campaign to find our weak spots and take advantage of them. Hell, if they were watching Bob Devine closely enough to learn that he was playing around, and that it might stir things up a bit for us, in an embarrassing way, if they broke the news to the husband of the lady in question; why shouldn’t they keep an eye on Harriet to see if she might prove useful, once she was brought to their notice? Only it’s my hunch that in this case the strategy back-fired to a certain extent.”
“How?”
I said, “Harriet was not an innocent journalist lady like you, with nothing on her conscience. She had a past that could catch up with her at any time; she was on the alert for that, always. Also, she was a sailor; and she could spot a landlubber ten miles off on a misty day, even if he was all dressed up in Topsiders and sunglasses and nice, white slacks. It wouldn’t take her long to spot some mysterious city slickers tailing her around trying to act salty. She might put up with it for a while, but she was not a patient lady, and after a little she’d just naturally get mad. If they were cops, why didn’t they move in with the handcuffs and get it over with? If they weren’t, who the hell were they? Eventually, fed up, she’d try to backtrack the lubberly jerks to learn something about them. She could do it, too. She was in her territory and they were out of theirs. My hunch is that they got careless and led her to something or somebody they shouldn’t have. So they called the boss and confessed their sins because they were scared not to. Lorca had collected enough information about Harriet’s past by this time that he was in a position to threaten her with exposure to keep her quiet. Which he did.”
“But we still don’t know what or who she saw,” Eleanor said. “It doesn’t seem likely that she stumbled upon George Winfield Lorca himself firing torpedoes at an innocent freighter or tanker.”
I said, “It looks to me as if he’s got two separate operations running. One is a revenge mission: he blames us, particularly me, for what happened to him down there in Baja, and now that he’s the powerful and invulnerable Senator Lorca he’s exacting secret payment for that hole in the head. That’s straightforward enough; but the piratical bit still doesn’t make much sense. It certainly can’t be aimed at us, me. We’ve got no interest in any shipping lines. But there’s got to be a connection between these two different Lorca activities, because Harriet found it. It’s up to us to find it, too. Or up to me.”
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