4
After a silent and unsociable drive, with darkness falling, I spotted a chain motel that looked adequate. At this chilly time of year, accommodations were no problem, and I got us adjoining rooms, both doubles but to hell with it, Uncle Sam was footing the bill. I wasn’t going to have her on the far side of the building from me; on the other hand I wasn’t going to spoil her first night of freedom and privacy in eight years by forcing her to share a room, even platonically, with a strange man to whom she’d taken a dislike, for whatever reason.
“Dinner in half an hour?” I said, carrying her little suitcase inside for her.
“Whatever you say, Mr. Helm.” There was no warmth in her voice.
“I have a bottle, if you’d care for a drink beforehand. I seem to recall that you used to like a cocktail before dinner. The motel restaurant doesn’t serve booze, and that bar up the road looks like a real dive.” When she didn’t speak at once, I went on; “If it’s just that you prefer not to associate with me unnecessarily, I’ll pass it through the connecting door. Give me a minute or two to scrounge up some ice.”
She shook her head quickly. “No, we might as well be civilized about this. I’ll come as soon as I’ve changed out of these laddered panty hose and cleaned up a bit.” But when she knocked on the door between our rooms a few minutes later—actually two doors, for soundproofing, and so either party could lock the other out—I could see that she regretted her sociable impulse. When I moved a chair into a better, position for her, and brought her drink to her before sitting down myself, she said irritably, “Why do you keep it up, that solicitous-gentleman act? Now we both know what I am, and we both know what you are. Whom are you trying to impress?”
I liked that super-correct, grammatical “whom”; she’d never have used that in prison. I said, “Why don’t you come out with it, Mrs. Ellershaw? What turned you off all of a sudden? Was it the fact that we set a trap for that hit man and killed him? I realize it wasn’t pretty, and I won’t claim we’re great humanitarians, but in this particular case his death was the last thing we wanted. We wanted to catch him alive so he could tell us who wants you dead. And, if possible, why.”
She shook her head quickly. “Once I’d have been terribly shocked and revolted by seeing a man shot to death for any reason, but I guess they knocked a lot of tender-hearted humanitarianism out of me in that p-place. No, it was not the shooting, Mr. Helm.”
“Then what?”
“Are you really so insensitive? Can’t you really understand how I feel about the way you… used me to bait your trap?”
I regarded her with some surprise. “You’re a bright lady. I didn’t think I had to spell it out for you. I told you you were in danger. I told you we wanted your cooperation. What else could you do for us but act as bait?”
“You lied to me. You said we weren’t being followed.”
I nodded. “Yes. And that was the only lie I told you. I didn’t think you were a good enough actress to keep from looking over your shoulder and tipping him off to the fact that we knew he was there. As it turns out, I probably underestimated you. Sorry about that. But I don’t feel I deceived you in any other way, Mrs. Ellershaw. And you might consider the fact that if it hadn’t been for us you’d probably, right now, be lying in a morgue somewhere full of buckshot—wherever he got a crack at you along the route of the bus you would have taken.”
She said coldly, “Yes. I should be grateful, shouldn’t I? But my life doesn’t really mean that much to me any longer, Mr. Helm. Maybe… maybe I’m even a little sorry that you interfered. It would have been one solution, and I wouldn’t have to look at that slob-woman in the mirror any longer and wonder what kind of a slob-life…” She shook her head irritably. “Sorry, please ignore the self-pity. But you really are pretty obtuse, aren’t you? You don’t understand at all. It wasn’t the fact that you used me, it was how you used me.”
I looked at her for a moment, frowning. “All right, I’m stupid. You’re going to have to explain it to me.”
She sipped her drink, and looked into her glass, avoiding my gaze. “Can’t you see how… how foolish you made me feel, how naive and trusting? I thought… I thought after eight years in Ames I was pretty tough. I thought I knew how to keep my guard up and my mouth shut. And then, after all those years of being a nothing, an animal in a cage, I’m free again and I meet a kindly gentleman who helps me with my coat and carries my bag and holds the car door for me, treating the unattractive female ex-convict in her bargain-basement suit as if she were a lovely lady in mink. Slowing down the car so considerately at her stupid whim. And those damn pink doughnuts… And all my defenses crumbling before the first courtesy, the first kindness I’ve met in so many years! You must feel very proud of yourself. It was really a beautiful con job, even if the subject was fairly vulnerable. You are one slick operator, Matthew Helm!”
I tried to protest: “It wasn’t like that—”
“It was exactly like that!” she said harshly. “The way you got it all pouring out of me, all the things I’d kept to myself all these years, all the misery and shame of the arrest and trial, and the ghastly journey to the prison that, with the reception I got there, completed my total degradation… My God, I was even telling you how innocent I was, how cruelly I’d been framed. Jesus! There are two hundred and seventy-seven inmates in Ames—well, two hundred and seventy-six now—and every damn one of them is innocent, every damn one of them was framed, and it’s a crying shame. I learned very early in there not to bore anybody with my lousy innocence; there wasn’t a guilty woman in the joint, to hear them talk. But you had me babbling tearfully about how I’d been the victim of a sinister conspiracy to destroy God, how did you keep from laughing in my face? But you listened so sympathetically, you were so kind and understanding. No wonder they picked you to deal with the poor beaten dame who’d served her time; you are very, very good. You had me”—she swallowed hard—“you had me feeling… almost like a real person again, after all the years of being a number. And all the time you were just encouraging me to prattle on and on so I’d make a nice harmless-seeming target for the man sneaking up on me you were trying to trap! All that lovely sympathy and understanding that I fell for so completely was merely a psych routine to keep me playing my part convincingly!” She drained her glass abruptly, and shook her head when I tried to speak. “No, please don’t play any more smoothie games with me. I don’t want to hear any sincere explanations; I’m sure you’ve got a million of them. Just take the dumb sucker bitch out and feed her. You want a nice plump target for the next marksman, don’t you?”
There was nothing to say. Perhaps I had laid on the politeness more heavily than I otherwise might; but I’d thought I was doing it mainly to conceal my shock at what prison had done to her. And perhaps I had led her on to talk, deliberately; but I’d wanted to hear her story so I could make up my mind about her. But there was no doubt that I’d been conscious of the necessity for putting on a convincing act for the man sneaking up on us with a gun. In any case, in the conflict between the trusting girl she’d been and the wary ex-convict she’d become, the prison paranoia was once more ascendant; and I made no attempt to overcome it as I escorted her to the restaurant on the far side of the motel parking lot.
An hour later, she gave her empty plate a little push away from her and sat back with a satisfied sigh. “My God, real food instead of that institutional grease and cardboard!”
The meal hadn’t been all that great, as far as I was concerned, but then I hadn’t spent eight years being fed by the numbers in a penitentiary mess hall.
“Coffee? Dessert?”
She nodded. The pleasant experience of eating again in moderately civilized surroundings—even just a run-of-the-mill motel restaurant—seemed to have diminished her hostility.
“Might as well be fat,” she said with a wry little grin. “What the hell difference does it make now, anyway? It’s too late for me to influence the jury with my sexy figure and dazz
ling smile, and I was found guilty even when I had them, wasn’t I?” Then her assurance faltered, and her eyes grew shiny. “Oh, God, look what they’ve made of me, Helm! I really was… kind of good-looking once, remember?” Before I could respond, she said sharply, “Christ, the broad is getting maudlin on one little Scotch!”
I signaled the waitress, who brought coffee and took our dessert orders. When the woman had gone, I said in a challenging way, “If you really were innocent, Madeleine—”
“No!” she said sharply. When I looked at her, startled, she went on: “Call me Mrs. E, or Mrs. Ellershaw. Call me ex-inmate number 210934, Fort Ames. Or Elly, as the other women did in there. But not Madeleine. I haven’t been Madeleine to anybody for a very long time, and I don’t think I want to start again with you.” For a moment dislike was naked in her eyes once more; then she looked away and said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to overreact like that. What the hell difference does it make what you call me? But really, all you have to do is just blow the whistle. Number 210934 will come running like a good little felon. What was that about my being innocent?”
“If you were innocent,” I said, with deliberate lack of conviction, “then somebody certainly must have worked hard to make you look guilty. I’ve studied your history and read up on your trial, and the evidence against you was pretty damning. I think you’ll admit that.”
She sighed. “Here we go again! I keep telling you, you don’t have to pretend to all this sympathy and interest. You don’t have to pretend you find me attractive and fascinating. I know what I look like now, what I am now.” She moved her shoulders in an ugly shrug. “But all right, if you want another installment in the sad, sad Ellershaw story, why the hell not? What else have we got to talk about? What do you want to know? About the trial? Have you read the transcript?”
I nodded. “Well, not all of it. It was pretty long. But somebody boiled it down for us.”
“Then you know they had only four pieces of evidence, if you want to call them that. First, the fact that Roy had disappeared on the day the warrants were issued for our arrest, apparently because he’d been tipped off by a mysterious telephone call. They tried to use his flight, as they called it, as evidence of his guilt and, by implication, of mine as his accomplice. Second, the fact that we were both acquainted with a woman named Bella Kravecki who disappeared at the same time. Actually, we’d only had her to the house a few times on the strength of a letter of introduction she’d brought from a former colleague of Roy’s in the East. But it was proved that she had definite Communist connections, and they claimed she was a courier waiting to take delivery when the… the shipment was complete. Roy was supposed to have been collecting the stuff for her, and I was supposed to have been holding it in my bank box as it accumulated…” She stopped.
“Yes,” I said. “That was the kicker, wasn’t it? Actually, as far as I’m concerned, the Kravecki woman is a mark in your favor. I find it a bit hard to believe in a Commie courier who associates openly with the spies from whom she’s supposed to pick up the stolen secret formulas. But that’s kind of beside the point, isn’t it? The cold fact is that super-classified materials were stolen from your husband’s lab, presumably by him, since very few others had access. They were recovered from a safe-deposit box rented by you. You never denied renting it. You never denied putting the stuff into it. You did deny knowing what it was, but that denial didn’t carry much weight—”
“It was true!” she protested.
“You couldn’t convince the jurors of that. They felt that if you’d really been an innocent uninvolved young wife tricked by a sneaky spy husband into hiding stolen national secrets unknowingly, which was what you were saying, you’d just naturally have been mad as hell at him—why, the creep had even slipped away to safety that last night without warning you that the cops were on their way! How could you help hating a treacherous louse like that, running off with another attractive woman and leaving you, the scapegoat, to stand trial for his crimes?”
“That’s ridiculous!” she protested. “Bella wasn’t particularly attractive, and Roy detested her. He’d never in the world have—”
“There you are,” I said. “I hand you your defense on a platter and you kick it across the room. As you did at your trial. You refused to admit on the stand that there could have been anything between your husband and this Communist mystery woman. You refused to put on a convincing act of hating the deceitful louse; in fact you tried to stand up for him. For a while you even tried to present him as a totally innocent victim who’d been murdered by unspecified villains, which you’d learned through extrasensory perception. Pretty farfetched, wouldn’t you say, the wild defense of a guilty woman struggling against the net of evidence in which she was caught? And let’s consider the fourth item of evidence you mentioned.”
She licked her lips. “That was the real frame-up. I did rent one bank box; and I did use it for some rather fat envelopes Roy gave me. But I knew nothing whatsoever about a second box—”
“A second box under your name in a different bank in a different town,” I said. “Las Vegas, New Mexico, to be exact. A second box that contained fifty-five thousand dollars in used bills that you couldn’t explain away and that hadn’t been declared on the joint income tax return of the Ellershaw family.”
She said stiffly, “As I said in court, I didn’t rent that box and I had no idea where that money came from. Anybody can rent a safe-deposit box under any name, Helm.”
“Two bank employees in Las Vegas identified the renter as you. And in those days you weren’t a girl it was easy to mistake for anybody else, Mrs. E.”
Then I was sorry I’d said it, in view of her present appearance. After a moment, she said in a subdued voice, “Those tellers were lying. I don’t know why they were, but they were!”
“And then there’s clue number five,” I went on ruthlessly, “which you’ve neglected even to mention. The fact that your financial situation wasn’t quite as happy as you’ve tried to make me think. You glossed over all your debts, and your husband’s, very smoothly when you were talking earlier, but it wasn’t quite such a cheerful picture, was it? You’d gone on a spending spree like a couple of kids when you got married, and the payments on the cars and that fancy house and its fancy furnishings were bleeding you dry. You needed that fifty-five grand—”
“We weren’t that much behind!” she protested. “If things got really critical I was going to ask my folks for help whether Roy liked it or not—he didn’t—but that bonus I got would have gone a long way towards satisfying our creditors.” She grimaced. “That’s why we had to celebrate! We were off the hook at last, and it was such a wonderful relief!”
“But you didn’t know such a big bonus was coming until you got it,” I said. I shook my head. “No, Mrs. E, it was a pretty convincing case. As far as I could make out, the only thing that saved you from a much longer sentence was that you were obviously only a minor character in the spy drama concocted by your husband and this Kravecki woman. They’d used you and discarded you. So in the end the jury recommended a certain degree of clemency, whatever the legal terminology is, and you got off with eight years.”
She said angrily, “You make professional ruin and being buried in a dungeon for most of a decade sound like a slap on the wrist! Where the hell is that dessert? Fuck it, I don’t want it, I’m all out of the mood. I’m going back to my room.”
“Not alone,” I said. “Wait until I’ve signed the check, please.”
Walking her back, I took her as far as the outside door to her unit, and stopped. I said, “Make sure this door is locked when you get inside. Do you have everything you need? What about something to read?”
“Don’t do that!” The anger burst out of her stormily; she’d apparently spent the short walk reviewing her wrongs. “That phony considerateness is going to drive me right up into the rafters! You need me and I’m stuck with you unless… unless I want to be killed, and I guess I really don’t; but you don
’t give a damn about my comfort, any more than they did in… in Fort Ames, so for God’s sake forget that greasy solicitous act. Just tell me which way you want me to jump and stand aside. I’m well trained; I’ll jump. Yes, Mr. Helm, I will lock my fucking door. No, Mr. Helm, I don’t need The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to entertain me.” She hesitated, and started to speak further, and checked herself.
“What?” I asked.
“All right, since you asked, if you’ve got a sleeping pill… It’s going to be a bit strange, in a real bed with a big room all to myself.”
I said, “Well, I do have some sedatives, but why don’t you try without, first? If you really can’t sleep, knock on the connecting door and I’ll dig one out for you.”
She said contemptuously, “Nobody’s going to catch you dispensing drugs without a license, huh? I’m sorry I asked. Good night.”
“Leave the connecting door on your side unlocked, please.”
She turned to look at me with cold and hopeless eyes. “God, do you think I dare risk it, a lovely desirable slim young thing like me? Good night again!”
5
I read for a while, a hunting-and-fishing magazine I’d brought along, and wondered idly how the duck hunting had been down along the Rio Grande that fall. I’d been busy and hadn’t been able to get away during the season. I don’t go after big game much anymore after all the years of tracking the biggest—or at least the most dangerous—game in the world, but there’s still something special about wing shooting. I listened to the shower running next door, and the john flushing, as the woman who’d been put into my care prepared to retire to the soft bed that was probably well over twice the size of the hard prison cot or bunk to which she was accustomed.
The Infiltrators Page 5