Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  “In?” That would truly be exposing herself to sunlight, with no protection at all. Water was no protection. “I didn’t bring my suit,” she said.

  He laughed, as he peeled off his own clothing. “You don’t need a suit,” he told her.

  That was so strange, to watch him disappear like that, to watch a complete human being turn into nothing more than a pile of clothing on the deck. Then there was a giant splash as he cannonballed into the water, and there it was, the ghost dolphin again, coursing through the pool.

  “Come on in, Peg!”

  It was along the lines of a last request, after all, she told herself, so she decided to go along with it, stepping out of her clothing, leaving it all more nearly on a chair than he had on the deck, and then stepping gingerly into the pool to find it not cold at all, the water first warmed by the pool heater and then by the sun. She descended into the sparkling water, and the giant dolphin swept toward her through the pool, and put his warm wet arms around her, and kissed her on the mouth.

  “Mmmmm,” she said.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “Mmmmm,” she said.

  Sex in the swimming pool, in the buoyant warm water, languorous and slow. This was the first time since Freddie’s transformation they’d been together like this when it wasn’t pitch black, and it was kind of terrific. Very sexy, very loving that was, to be turned and stroked by a giant ghost dolphin in the water, someone you couldn’t really see, but almost, and finally, when all was said and done, it didn’t matter. Peg and Freddie and the warm moving water flowed together into one being, loving and content.

  Well, after that she couldn’t just put her clothes on and go home. They spent the afternoon together, for a while with Freddie in a terry-cloth robe—one size fits all, as Martin had pointed out—and espadrilles, with a white towel tossed over his head. That wasn’t so bad, seeing the spaces where there ought to be a person. Maybe, if she had small doses of it like this, particularly with pleasant interludes like the one in the swimming pool as part of the arrangement, maybe eventually she could begin to get used to this new Freddie. In small doses.

  It was Peg’s idea they try a candlelight dinner at home, with only two candles. That made it a bit hard to find the food, but Freddie was now in a short-sleeved polo shirt and slacks, no gloves or head, and in the dimness she hardly minded the fork as it moved in and out of the candle glow, or the lack of anything at all above the shirt’s soft collar. They had wine with dinner, and it was impossible for Peg to leave after that, and in any case the pool experience and the romantic dinner, and the protected solitude of their hideaway house here in the country, suggested a different ending for the evening, so that was what they did.

  But now it was Sunday afternoon, and they could stall no longer. Peg could not bring herself to kiss Frankenstein’s monster’s cheek, but she patted the cheek, and that was no good either: cold, and not at all lifelike. “Freddie,” she said. “I’m going to close my eyes now, and I want you to kiss me good-bye.”

  “Hell and damn,” he said, but she closed her eyes, and she heard the rustle of latex, and then he kissed her for a long time. Then she opened her eyes, and the morose monster was back. “I’ll call you tonight,” she told it, and got into the van quickly, before she would start to cry in front of him.

  Which was another advantage he had, she told herself, as she tried to be hard and cold. If he cried, who would know?

  The monster stayed in her rearview mirror, waving its Playtex hand. She honked as she went around the curve that put him out of sight.

  Driving south, she thought furiously but profitlessly about herself and Freddie and their problems and their options, and nothing seemed to make sense, nothing at all. She drove much faster than usual, because she was upset, and it was lucky she didn’t get a ticket. At one point, on the southern part of the Taconic, she zipped past a red Ford Taurus poking along moodily in the right lane, with two long-faced guys in white yachting caps inside it, illuminated like a stage set because of their sunroof, but she didn’t even give them a glance. She had troubles of her own.

  The apartment was hot and stuffy and dusty and empty. There was a window air conditioner in the bedroom closet, which she lugged out and installed in a bedroom window, sweating gallons along the way. After she showered, the bedroom was a little cooler, but the rest of the apartment was still hot.

  She called Freddie from the bedroom phone, but it turned out they had very little to say to one another. Both felt extremely awkward, and both were happy to end the call, with, “Talk to you tomorrow.” Then Peg went out to a deli to get some necessities, went home, called a Chinese take-out place, carried the TV set into the cool bedroom, and spent the evening eating anonymous foods in front of anonymous reruns.

  She went to bed early, but it was very hard to get to sleep. On the other hand, she had no trouble at all waking up when Barney Beuler kicked the leg of the bed and snarled, “Rise and shine, Sleeping Fucking Beauty.”

  49

  Like the valet in Sullivan’s Travels, Mordon Leethe viewed the entire proceedings with a sense of gloomy foreboding. It was not his desire to be here, aiding and abetting the commission of any number of felonies not normally associated with the partners of corporate law firms, but on balance his situation was so impossible in every direction that it was probably best, all in all, that he be here, present and culpable in these acts of breaking and entering, kidnapping, coercion, and possibly even battery upon persons, because if he weren’t physically in this place he’d still be a coconspirator, still just as guilty in the eyes of the law—and in his own eyes as well—and without even the hope that he might somehow influence events, blunt the worst excesses of Barney Beuler, this associate in crime to whom he found himself so inextricably lashed, or that he might help steer the fragile ship of his own good name through these felonious reefs toward the barely visible shore of early retirement, a beaching that was coming to seem more and more advisable with every passing moment. Or, as Henry James might have put it, he was in it now, up to his neck.

  At six on Monday morning, they had let themselves into Peg Briscoe’s apartment, Mordon and Barney and the three cigarette-company thugs, Creeping, silent, they had observed the woman asleep in her air-conditioned bedroom, with no second body shape mounded beside her and with no male clothing to be seen anywhere. Nevertheless, reclosing her bedroom door, they had swept the apartment just as they’d done last time, to be absolutely sure the invisible man was not here. Only then did all five invade the bedroom once more and Barney wake the Briscoe woman with his patented charm.

  Her eyes popped open. She sat bolt upright, staring at the five men in her room. Under a sheet, she seemed to be wearing some sort of long T-shirt. Instead of aroused, Mordon felt embarrassed. Before Barney could do or say anything else crude, he stepped forward, saying, “Miss Briscoe, it’s Freddie we want.”

  “Oh, Christ!” she cried, in apparently genuine exasperation. “It’s you guys again. For a second there, you had me terrified. Hold on while I use the bathroom,” she said, sliding out of bed. Yes, a long white T-shirt, not quite opaque enough. “Make some coffee, will you?” she said, and sloped out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

  Now it was Barney who looked embarrassed. His fearsome authority had just been deflected as though it didn’t exist. “Well, whaddaya thinka that?” he said.

  “I think she’s right,” Mordon said, and told one of the thugs, “Why don’t you make us all some coffee? You remember where the kitchen is, don’t you?”

  “Sure.” The thug looked around. “Everybody want?”

  Everybody wanted. He went away, and the toilet flushed. Then the shower ran.

  Barney and Mordon and the other two thugs wandered out to the living room, which was hotter and stuffier than the bedroom. They left the bedroom door open. “This is ridiculous,” Barney said. “What we gotta do is lean on this bitch, not make her coffee.”

  �
��Freddie Noon isn’t here,” Mordon pointed out. “Peg Briscoe will know where he is.”

  “Damn right she will.”

  “We want her cooperation,” Mordon reminded him. “It seems to me we should at least begin on a calm and civilized plane.”

  “That’s fine,” Barney agreed. “You be Good Cop. I’ll jump in a little later.”

   

  * * *

   

  It was after seven before they were all gathered in the living room, with toast and coffee. The only air conditioner was in the bedroom, but with it turned on full and the door open, it did help in the living room a bit. It seemed to Mordon that the fruits of Freddie Noon’s crimes should have been juicier than this, but Mordon wasn’t here—none of them were here—to enquire into the economics of burglary. They were here to find the burglar.

  Mordon said, “Miss Briscoe, where is he?”

  “No idea,” she said. She was dressed now in jeans and a polo shirt and tennis shoes, and didn’t look intimidated at all by this hostile mob in her house.

  Mordon said, “Miss Briscoe, would you look at Barney here?”

  Obediently, she looked at Barney, though clearly she didn’t want to. Barney looked back at her, and smiled. Her confidence could be seen to slip a little, like a hat on a drunken song-and-dance man. Turning away from Barney’s smile, she busied herself with her coffee cup, which had been empty for a while.

  Mordon said, “I received permission from Barney, Miss Briscoe, to ask you these questions first.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. She was studying the empty interior of her cup, as though looking for tea leaves to read.

  “If you don’t answer me,” Mordon said, “Barney will ask you the questions himself, and you won’t say to him, ‘No idea.’ I’m doing my best to make it easier for you here.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. She put the cup down and crossed her legs and clasped her hands around the upper knee and looked at Mordon. He could see her willing her face to be blank.

  He shook his head. “I’ll ask you once more,” he said, “and please consider your answer very caref—”

  “No idea.”

  “Oh, Miss Briscoe, if you would only—”

  “My turn,” Barney said, getting to his feet. “You guys hold her,” he said to the thugs, and took a black handle out of his pocket. He did something, and a long knife blade popped out of the handle.

  The thugs stood, alert, but didn’t immediately approach Peg Briscoe, who sat up straight, staring at the knife. Barney turned the knife this way and that in his hands, admiring it, and then he said, “All I need from you is a mailing address, that’s all. A box number, whatever it could be. Just someplace I can send the finger.”

  Her eyes widened. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “What a waste that’s gonna be, then,” Barney told her. “See, what’s gonna happen is, every day I’m gonna cut off one of your fingers and mail it to our friend Freddie, with a note with a phone number where he could call me if he felt like it. Now, if I don’t have an address to send the finger it’s a real shame and a waste, cause you’re still gonna lose the finger. Hold her steady, guys. Better put a hand over her mouth.”

  “I don’t know where he is!”

  As the thugs closed on Briscoe, Mordon also got to his feet, saying, “Barney, we don’t have to—”

  “Sit down, Counselor,” Barney said, and looked at Mordon, and the look all by itself knocked Mordon back into his chair. “Hold her, now,” Barney said, turning again toward Briscoe.

  “Waitwaitwaitwaitwaitmmmpmmmpmmmpmmmp—”

  “Oh, all right,” Barney said, weary, the knife poised over her left hand. “Let go her mouth, let’s see what she’s trying to say.”

  “I know where he is!”

  “Well, yeah, sure you do, I know that. Hold steady, now.”

  “I’ll tell you where he is!”

  “Where I send the finger, that’s right. Otherwise, it’s a shame, right?”

  “No no no, I’ll tell you where he is right now, you don’t have to mail him any—”

  “Peg, Peg, Peg,” Barney said, “I don’t want to make you betray your best friend, you know what I mean? Let him come to me, of his own free will, after he gets a couple fingers in the mail. Hold steady now, I don’t wanna take more than one.”

  “You don’t have to!”

  Barney paused. He seemed genuinely perplexed. He said, “What do you mean, I don’t have to?”

  “I can tell you exactly where he is, exactly how to find him!”

  Barney chuckled. “And we leave here and we go to this location, and he isn’t there. And then we come back here and guess what? You didn’t wait for us. Hold the hand steady, guys.”

  “I’ll take you there!”

  Again Barney paused. He thought that one over. “I dunno,” he said. “You probably had plans for today, this’d use up hours and hours of your time—”

  “It’s all right! It’s a free day, I got a free day!”

  Barney shook his head. “The finger in the mail, you know,” he said, “it’s a pretty surefire system.”

  “I’ll take you there,” she promised. “I’ll take you right to him.”

  Barney sighed. He looked at the knife as though at an old friend, then turned to look at Mordon. “I don’t know, Counselor,” he said. “Traveling with her for hours, and then maybe she’s planning something—”

  “I’m not! I’m not!”

  “—and then we still got her on our hands at the end of the day.” Barney shook his head, troubled by the complications. “What’s your opinion, Counselor?”

  There was no way to tell to what extent Barney Beuler was bluffing, or to what extent Barney Beuler was insane. Mordon judged it safest to go along with the insane part of Barney, so he said, in his most sober legal-counselor manner, “There might be some advantage to it, Barney, to have her with us. If we use her van, with all the rest of us in the back . . .”

  “Hmmm,” Barney said. “Trojan horse, like.”

  “Exactly. Then we let her talk to him, let him see we have her under our control.”

  “If we have her under our control.” Barney turned back to the girl, who was following the conversation very intently. “Do we have you under our control?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  Mordon licked dry lips. He said, “If things don’t work out, Barney, we can always fall back on the finger option later.”

  “That’s true.” Deciding, Barney smiled and pressed the knife between his hands, and the blade disappeared back into the handle. Pocketing the handle, he shook his head and said, “You’re makin a softie outta me, Counselor.”

  50

  When Geoff Wheedabyx saw the van, he was on his way home from this morning’s emergency, a barn that had caught fire out on Swope Road. His was one of four fire companies that had responded and, as usual, all they’d managed to save was the foundation. You get one of these old barns, that old dry wood with all its nooks and crannies packed full of dry old straw and sawdust and crap—literally crap; the stuff they use for fuel in the Middle East—and when the fire starts, there’s really nothing to do but break out the marshmallows. Well, and make sure the fire doesn’t spread to the house or the fields or anything else. But once a flame takes hold in a barn, you can be sure that barn is gone.

  The reason for this fire, as for most of the outside-of-town fires Geoff and his people responded to, could be summed up in one word that has yet to appear under “Cause” on any insurance report form: Farmer.

  The problem is, your farmer will never call a mechanic, no matter what the job. Your farmer is his own carpenter, and he isn’t a good carpenter. He’s his own plumber, electrician, mason, roofer, auto mechanic, and midwife, and he’s pretty bad at all of them. Geoff had seen wiring in some of these old farmhouses and barns that would give you nightmares; in the one that burned down this morning, for instance. If you ever see anything that’s built to Code, you know a f
armer didn’t build it.

  The farmers will tell you the reason they do everything themselves, instead of calling in somebody who knows what the hell he’s doing, is because they’re poor, which isn’t exactly true. Oh, they’re poor, all right, but that isn’t the reason they do everything themselves. The reason is, they’re proud; and we know what pride goeth before, don’t we?

  Geoff, in his ruminations, was just at the point of brooding on pride and its aftermath when he saw the van, definitely that selfsame gray van, owned by one Margaret Briscoe of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York, and last seen zipping away down Market Street out of town with Margaret Briscoe at the wheel and an invisible man named Freddie as the passenger.

  And now the van was parked in front of Geoff’s house. Geoff, in his pickup and still wearing his smoke-permeated firefighting gear, drove on by his house and reached first for his police radio, switching it over to the frequency it shared with Cliff’s Service & Auto Repair out on County 14, Cliff being one of his two part-time deputies. “Cliff,” he said into the mike. “Tell me you’re there.”

  Geoff drove to the end of Dudley, made a U-turn, and parked behind his police cruiser. “Come on, Cliff,” he said into the mike. “Be there.”

  “I was under a car, dammit. What’s up?”

  “Cliff, get your badge and your gun and go on down to my house. Out front, you’ll see a van, gray. Do not let anybody into that van.”

  “Do I use lethal force?”

  Clearly, Cliff had been watching too many action movies on his VCR. “Only if you absolutely have to,” Geoff said.

  “Roger.”

  Geoff switched off the police radio before he could hear Cliff say over and out, and picked up his walkie-talkie. “Hi, guys,” he said into it. “Somebody turn off the damn radio and pick up.”

  The walkie-talkie connected him with his construction crew. Having finished the porch conversion here in town, they were at work now installing two rest rooms out at the Roeliff Summer Theater. The summer-theater operators having been given an anonymous grant for this purpose, their patrons would no longer have to use the Portosans out in the parking lot; at least not once Geoff and his guys got finished installing the wheelchair- and handicapped-access, water-saving, energy-conserving, unisex, washable-wall interior rest rooms.