I grinned and took her arm. “You’re a big help,” I said. “Besides, what makes you think God wants to be bothered? After all, it’s not much of a planet. He’s got lots bigger ones.”
EIGHT
I AWOKE WITH a slight headache in a bed that seemed momentarily unfamiliar to me; and the ceiling above me was white stucco instead of the blue I was accustomed to seeing in the mornings. I don’t care for stucco walls and ceilings, but when you’ve got them there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do about them. While I was orienting myself and recalling the events of the night, the door opened and Natalie came in, bearing a tray.
“Are you awake, darling?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” I said, sitting up in the big double bed that had no head or foot. “What time is it, anyway?”
“Almost eleven. Thursday.”
She set the tray on the dresser and came over. She was fully dressed in her favorite around-the-house costume, which consisted of gray flannel Bermuda shorts, a man’s striped shirt, knee-length wool socks, and nicely polished loafers. The logic of baring your legs with shorts only to cover them again with long socks escapes me. Her dark hair was smooth and shining, and her face had a scrubbed and glowing look. If I had remembered nothing at all about what had happened after we got home, I would have known by looking at her: sex always seemed to agree with her.
She bent down to kiss me lightly, and grinned. “Well,” she said, “we had a hard time getting you to sleep last night, but you certainly made up for it this morning. How do you feel?”
“Who had a hard time doing what?” I asked. She looked pretty but somewhat too fashionable and proper. I reached out and grabbed the leg of her shorts, threw her off balance, set her down hard on the bed, and caught her as she bounced. I kissed her vigorously to the detriment of her neatly applied lipstick. “I feel fine,” I said.
“Relax, Buster,” she said, pushing at me. “Your breakfast is getting cold.” Her voice sounded a little odd, and her efforts to escape did not carry conviction. We wrestled briefly, I kissed her again, and from there we proceeded to more adult occupations. “I should have known better than to marry a genius,” she breathed at last. “Six months of the year he doesn’t know I exist, and the rest of the time it isn’t safe to go near him.” She rubbed her chin. “Darling, if I might make a suggestion, it would be nice if you shaved before you let passion get the better of you.”
I grinned. She sat up and pulled up her socks, put her feet back into her loafers, and got up to retrieve the other discarded portions of her attire. She went to the dresser for a fresh shirt to replace the one that had got rumpled, and disappeared into the bathroom. I got up and brought the tray back to the bed and began to eat. Presently she returned, looking serene and untouched and radiant. She poured herself some coffee and sat on the edge of the bed to drink it.
“I think I’m going to do this room over,” she said abruptly.
I looked around judiciously. It was a black-and-white room, very, very severe and modern and not my idea of a lady’s boudoir, but what the hell? When I was in here my mind was generally not on interior decoration; the rest of the time I had my own room.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“I think… Darling, how’s your stomach?”
I glanced at her. “My stomach’s swell. Why do you ask?”
“I shouldn’t have let you have those drinks last night. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
I said, “I’m fine, Princess. You’ve been asking me if I’m all right for the past five months.”
“I know,” she said. “I guess. I just feel… kind of responsible for you. Greg?”
“Yes?”
“Please be careful.”
“What are you driving at?”
She said, “I’m driving at that I love you and don’t want anything to happen to you. That’s what I’m driving at.”
We were not in the habit of throwing the word “love” around very much, perhaps because it gets such a thorough workout from other people.
I cleared my throat and said, “I’m healthy as a pup, Natalie. Stop worrying about me. I’ve got it made. Honest.”
She shook her head quickly. “That isn’t what I mean—”
The sound of the doorbell interrupted her. We’ve got a refined one that plays four musical notes, but it still won’t open the door and tell the man we don’t want any. Natalie drained her cup and set it on the tray.
“I’ll see who it is. Finish your breakfast.”
The chimes played their little ding-dong tune again as she went out of the room. I heard her cross the living room, open the door, and speak to someone outside. Whoever it was came in, the front door closed, and I heard her say, “Just sit down somewhere. I’ll tell him.”
Then she came down the hall and into the room. “It’s Van Horn, darling. He wants to see you.”
“What about?”
“He didn’t say. Better wash your face. You’re still kind of lipsticky.”
She tossed my dressing gown at me, as I got out of the bed and found my slippers. When I came into the living room, Van Horn was sitting on one of our less comfortable chairs, looking a little like a man waiting to sell the lady of the house a new vacuum cleaner. There was a long, paper-wrapped package across his knees.
I said, “Hi, Van. What can I do for you? What have you got there?”
He said, “I want you to identify something for me, if possible.”
“Sure,” I said. I cleared a couple of ash trays and a bowl of flowers from the cocktail table. “You can make your demonstration here, Professor.”
He said reprovingly, “This is a fairly serious matter, Dr. Gregory.” In all the time I had known him, I had never heard him address any of us by our first names, although we all called him Van. I guess it’s easier to be a cop if you don’t allow yourself to be too friendly with the suspects. And don’t ever kid yourself; to a security agent, everybody is a suspect, all the time.
I said, “You’re the one who’s making a big mystery of it, not I. How about a cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks.” He rose and laid his package on the long, low table, produced a small penknife, and cut the tape that held the brown paper in place. He looked up. “I would like you to take your time and be sure before you say anything.”
I nodded. Natalie, who was standing beside me, put her hand on my arm. She looked a little scared. I could hardly blame her. After the build-up, I probably looked a little scared myself. Van Horn pulled the paper apart. It was a twelve-gauge Remington automatic shotgun with a compensator on the muzzle. The short spreader tube was in place. I’m not very fond of automatics, and I can live indefinitely without compensators, poly-chokes, or muzzlebrakes in any shape or form, but some people like them and do very well with them. It was not the gun itself that made Natalie gasp, however, but the stuff that was on it. Well, I had seen blood before; even blood with dirt and pine needles drying in it.
“Turn it over,” I said.
Van Horn put a finger under the trigger guard, and exposed the other side of the weapon.
I said, “It’s Jack Bates’s gun. You don’t have to take my word for it. All his hunting equipment is insured. The serial number will be on the policy and in the company’s files, so I’m not giving away any secrets.”
“Good enough,” said Van Horn. “Is there anything else you’d care to say about it?”
I leaned over and sniffed the slotted barrel of the compensator, where fouling is most apt to collect. The gun had been fired recently enough for the odor of burned powder to remain sharp and noticeable. I shook my head.
“Not without knowing more about the situation,” I said. “Except—”
“Except what, Dr. Gregory?”
I walked over to the telephone table in the hall, found a roll of scotch tape in the drawer, returned, and dropped it in front of him.
“Except that I don’t like your approach,” I said. “Cover it up again, Van, and stop playing cop
around here. Jack Bates is a friend of mine. Don’t come around here and shove his bloody gun under my nose without telling me what’s happened to him! I ought to wrap the damn thing around your neck!”
He asked quietly, “What makes you think something has happened to Dr. Bates?”
I said, “What am I supposed to think? That he chopped the head off a chicken, let it bleed all over his gun, and then presented the piece to you as a souvenir?”
“You have no other reason for worrying about him?”
“Such as?”
“His disturbed condition last night, for instance.” Van Horn paused, and grimaced. “I guess I am beating around the bush. After leaving the DeVrys’ house last night, Dr. Bates apparently went home, packed his station wagon with camping equipment, and drove to a public camp ground up in the Sandias, on the road to the ski-run. He had the place to himself at this time of year. This morning, however, some kids driving up to go skiing pulled into the area to put chains on—the road’s pretty slick up above. This was about eight-thirty. They saw Dr. Bates’s car, and while the boys were working, the girls kind of strolled over to look around. They found him lying behind the car, dead. He had been shot in the face. The gun was beside him.”
“I see,” I said. I looked down at the shotgun on the table and felt a little funny. After all, I had sat in quite a few blinds and pits along the river with that automatic and the man who had owned it, in the past three years. I had sworn at the muzzle-blast of that damn compensator, and griped about the gun’s habit of tossing its fired shells into the face of whoever was standing to the right of it. I had also watched it knock three mallards out of a decoying formation—like busting pipes in a shooting gallery—and reach into the sky an incredible distance and fold up a Canada goose flying far overhead. With a rifle, I could usually hold my own against Jack Bates, and maybe do a little better at long range, since he was fundamentally a snapshooter rather than a marksman; but when it came to shotgunning, he was an artist, and I didn’t even try to compete. Well, that was a good enough epitaph for a hunting man, I reflected. I said, “It’s funny nobody heard the shot. That’s a game refuge up there and they’re kind of sensitive about having guns go off.”
Van Horn said, “As a matter of fact, a forest service truck came along a little later. One of the men living a few miles below had heard the report while he was shaving, but he’d gone looking up the wrong canyon first. He puts the time as just about daybreak. Unfortunately, by the time he arrived and took charge, the kids had already flagged down a couple of other cars and people had walked all over the place.”
I frowned at the gun. “Was it buckshot?” I asked.
He hesitated. Policemen are all alike, even when you put them into gabardine suits and fancy government jobs. They never like to answer questions for fear they might accidentally give somebody a break.
“Yes,” he said. “Why?”
“Jack had a habit of loading up his shotgun at night—Number One buck, usually—and keeping it handy when he was camping out. We had arguments about it. I never like a loaded gun in camp.”
“I see. Was this habit of his well known?” I shrugged. “I may have kidded him about it with other people listening. Anybody who’d camped with him overnight would know it, of course.”
Van Horn nodded. “You talked to him last night, I understand. He was resigning his position at the Project, is that right? According to Dr. DeVry, he was upset about”—he glanced at Natalie, who was not cleared for confidential information—“about what he’d seen in Nevada. I noticed something of the sort myself; but I only saw him for a moment when he stopped by my office to leave his report. I’d like your opinion: would you say he was disturbed enough to kill himself?”
I said, “That’s a stupid damn question, Van. If I’d thought so last night, I’d have done something about it, wouldn’t I?”
“Not if you were too annoyed with him for quitting to consider the possibility.”
“Thanks,” I said, “for reminding me. Actually, he seemed pretty well under control to me. He’d made his decision to quit, and that took care of the situation.”
Van Horn touched the gun lightly. “The safety is off,” he said, “which indicates it was fired deliberately, not by accident. Everything adds up to suicide, Dr. Gregory, except for one thing. The police surgeon says that, judging by the distribution of the pellets and the lack of powder burns, Dr. Bates was shot from a distance of at least eight feet.” There was a little sound from Natalie. I may have made some similar noise myself. Van Horn went on in his deliberate and pedantic way: “Even if he had arranged an elaborate method of killing himself by remote control—and suicides will rig up some fancy devices; God only knows what goes on in their minds during the final few minutes—we can’t quite see how the gun, which would naturally recoil even further away from him, got back to be found beside his body. Furthermore, there are no fingerprints on the weapon at all, not even Dr. Bates’s. Somebody wiped it quite clean.” He cleared his throat. “Under the circumstances, the police feel that a thorough investigation is indicated. I’ve persuaded them to let me handle it as far as Project personnel is concerned, since I know the people involved, and since there are some security angles that have to be treated with discretion.” He looked up. “You understand, this is a favor the authorities are doing us. If I can’t satisfy them, they’ll put their own men on the job.”
I glanced at Natalie, still standing beside me, and patted her hand. “Well, we haven’t killed anybody, have we, Princess?” I said, and looked back to Van Horn. “Ask your questions.”
“Your talk with Dr. Bates last night,” he said, “wasn’t exactly friendly, was it?”
I said, “We didn’t fight, but I’m afraid I wasn’t as sympathetic as I might have been. I get fed up with that point of view.”
“What point of view is that?”
“Putting one man’s tender conscience ahead of… Oh, hell, let’s not get into philosophy, Van. Maybe that’s the only way to deal with these problems; just hide your head in the sand and pretend they don’t exist. Or wash your hands of them and let other people take the blame for discovering what’s inevitably going to be discovered anyway. Are you suggesting that I drove up into the mountains this morning and shot Jack because he wouldn’t work for us any longer? That would seem rather illogical, wouldn’t it? Alive, he might have changed his mind; dead, he certainly won’t be any help.”
He said, “You’re referring rather callously to a man you claim to have been your friend, Dr. Gregory.”
I said, “I’ll do my weeping in private. You let me worry about that. What else do you want to know? We left the DeVrys’ about one-thirty, drove straight home, and haven’t been out of the house since. That’s called an alibi, I think.”
“Yes,” he said. “Can you prove it?”
I said, “Only if you take Natalie’s word for it; and I suppose she would lie for me if I asked her to.”
He said, “It’s not a question of Mrs. Gregory’s veracity, but of her knowledge. My understanding is that you don’t share the same bedroom.”
I looked at him sharply. “You seem to know a lot about our private life.”
“That’s my business, Dr. Gregory.”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose it is. However, your information is slightly at fault, Van. We do share the same room occasionally, and last night was one of the occasions.”
He said to Natalie, “Is that right, Mrs. Gregory?”
She said, “Yes. Greg was home from one-thirty on; I can swear to that. He’d taken a sleeping pill about an hour and a half before Larry DeVry called him. Being waked up, and having to dress and go out, and getting upset about Jack’s quitting all combined to give him a fine case of the jitters. We finally had a couple of drinks together—this must have been around three o’clock—and went to bed in my room, with lewd intentions which you’ll be pleased to know were satisfactorily carried out. I woke up early, but Greg was still sleeping soundly hal
f an hour ago. I can vouch for the fact that he wasn’t shooting anybody up in the mountains at dawn.”
Van Horn nodded. “Yes,” he said. “But from your account it’s obvious that being sound asleep all morning, he can’t do the same for you, Mrs. Gregory.”
Natalie looked startled. “Oh,” she said, “do I need an alibi?”
“The police seem to think so,” Van Horn said. “It seems that they found this hanging in a tree near Dr. Bates’s body.” He reached into his pocket and brought out the bright silk scarf Natalie had worn out driving the day before.
No one said anything as he came forward and spread the scarf on the low table beside the gun, pushing the brown paper aside to give himself more space. The paper crackled loudly in the silent room. The scarf, although of more expensive material, closely resembled one of those multi-colored squares of thin silk all the teen-agers were wearing on their heads or around their necks; there was no reason why I should have recognized it with such certainty, but I did. I could remember the way she had pulled it off her hair as she walked across the living room yesterday to answer the phone that was Larry asking me to come to the Project immediately. Since I had last seen the scarf, somebody had punched a ragged, ugly hole near one corner of it.
Natalie took a step forward and touched the silk with the tip of her finger. “Hanging in a tree?” she asked softly. “May I ask how?”
“It was stuck on a dead stub about six feet off the ground. You can see the hole.”
She looked up. Her eyes were candid and innocent. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How does this scarf concern me, Mr. Van Horn?”
He said, “I was under the impression it was yours, Mrs. Gregory.”
“I don’t know why you should be,” she said calmly. “I’ve never seen it before in my life.”
NINE
I SAW HIM out with his package, and closed the door gently behind him—doing, I thought, a pretty good job with my face and voice. When I came back into the living room, Natalie was still standing there, awaiting me.
Assassins Have Starry Eyes Page 6