You could see that Mac might be curious about why a top agent like Martell would play at being a cheap hood for seven years, but his curiosity could get expensive in human lives. Maybe it already had.
I said, "All right. Say I'll call back when I have something to report."
"Yes, sir."
She had a nice voice, but it wasn't any time to be thinking about nice voices or the girls who went with them. I hung up and drove back to the motel. I could have saved myself the trouble of arranging for a doctor. He was lying in the bushes, all right, but there was nothing any doctor could do for him. He'd been beaten to death, or as close to it as made no difference in the long run. Even in the dark, it wasn't a very pleasant sight. It never is.
I squatted beside the body for a little while. As far as I could make out, he'd been a blond boy in his twenties, and he could have been one of those I'd trained with the previous year. They hadn't been assigned code names yet, when I left. I thought I recognized him, but somebody had done a very thorough job, and it was hard to be sure. Well, it didn't make much difference now.
I waited until the premises were clear of people for a moment, carried him out of there, and loaded him into the truck. I took him to Dr. Ditsinger, anyway. I acted surprised and terribly shocked when I was informed that my friend was dead. Controlling myself with a manly effort, I told Ditsinger to call Washington for further instructions, and got the hell out of there with my grief.
Chapter Eight
DRIVING BACK, I slowed as I crossed the bridge over the Truckee River. There wasn't much doubt about how Paul had reached the motel: his clothes had been soaking wet. They must have tossed him into the river somewhere upstream. How he'd managed to make it from there, in his condition-crawling, wading, swimming where the water was deep enough-only God or a dying man could tell you.
Why he'd done it was another interesting question. It was possible, of course, that he'd been bringing me information of tremendous importance. It was just as possible that he'd just been looking for somebody to hold his hand.
I shivered slightly, and drove on, and turned into the motel area, and parked where I had before. I went inside and poured myself a drink from the plastic flask I carry in my suitcase. I kept hearing a voice saying, For God's sake… I'm hurt… Well, that was all right. I'd beard voices before. I could live with one more. But I drank the whiskey anyway. Then I got out of my clothes and went into the bathroom to take a shower. Just as I was about to turn on the water, the doorbell rang.
I sighed. I went to the closet and got my dressing gown. I dropped the gun into the pocket, after belting the garment about me. Then I went to the door and yanked it open. So maybe they'd traced Paul here somehow and now it was my turn. I was tired of being careful. I'd been careful enough for one night. To hell with them. I'd get at least one before they burned me down, I would.
The traumatic shock of seeing the door fly open before his eyes sent the Afghan hound into a tizzy; he lunged away and almost yanked the Fredericks girl over backwards. He was really a specimen.
"Oh, Sheik!" she said impatiently, and to me: "Just a minute while I tie him."
I was having a little trouble getting used to the idea that I didn't have to sell my life dearly, at least not yet.
"What he needs," I said sourly, "is a mooring mast, like a dirigible."
"Mister," she said, "I can make cracks like that, but don't you go criticizing other people's dogs. Hell, you can't even keep a wife." She straightened up to look at rue. "Well, aren't you going to ask me in?"
"Do I have to?"
She made a face at me, and stepped inside. I followed her, and pulled the door closed behind us. She was no longer wearing the green beach costume, if that was what it was. Now she was done up in a simple white dress that could have cost ten bucks or a hundred, probably the latter, and white kid pumps with high, slim heels. Her hair was smooth and shining about her head, every pin doing its assigned duty. She even had little white gloves on, very formal for Reno.
I can itemize the assets of a girl in pants without becoming emotionally involved in any way. I have to see her in a dress before I can add up the column and become personally involved in the total. This was a good dress for the purpose, straight, smart, and sleeveless, with a square neck. The material was some textured cotton stuff
– piquй is the word that comes back from my rare forays into fashion photography. She wasn't wearing any jewelry. There weren't any distractions tonight in the way of fancy style, color, or decoration. You could concentrate on the girl, and any man would.
I said, "Okay, so you're beautiful. Now can I go take my shower?"
She said, "You're a liar. I'm not beautiful and I never will be. I'm just sexy as hell."
I said, "You're drunk as hell, too."
She shook her head. She was pulling off her gloves, making herself at home. She said, "No, I'm not drunk. I just had one when I got home-you did, too, by the looks of that flask-and then I started thinking about that damn hamburger and it made me kind of sick. And then I started thinking about going out to eat alone, and that made me kind of sick, too. So here I am. Make yourself respectable. You're taking me to dinner."
I studied her for a moment. If she was acting, she was very, very good.
I said, "You forgot a word, didn't you?"
She frowned briefly. "What do you mean?"
"It begins," I said, "with a 'P'."
She looked at me. Something happened in those odd, green eyes. She licked her lips. "Please?" Then she said breathlessly, "Please! I'm going nuts in that damn big. house with nothing but a damn dog to talk to. I'll pay for-"
"Cut," I said. "End of take, as they say in Hollywood. Sit down and smoke something somewhere, if you can find it. I'll be with you in a minute."
I got a pair of slacks and a jacket out of the closet, a shirt from my suitcase, gathered up the necessary accessories, and went into the bathroom.
"Help yourself, if you want a drink," I called, hanging up my dressing gown. "You'll have to get ice from the machine outside."
Her voice came from directly behind me. "My God, what happened to you?"
I was just pulling on my shorts. I managed to control the outraged-modesty reaction to the point where I merely finished what I was doing and turned to look at her. She was standing in the opening, one hand on the bathroom door, which she had pushed back silently.
"Happened?" I asked. "What do you mean?" She gestured towards various marks on the still exposed portions of my anatomy. I said, "Oh, those. I was blown up in a jeep during the war and had to have various hunks of old iron taken out of me."
"Old iron?" she said. "Old lead, you mean! I know bullet-scars when I see them. Duke Logan has a couple that show when he takes off his shirt."
"Good for old Duke."
"Who are you, Helm?" she whispered. "What are you doing here? What do you want?"
I went up to her, and put my hand out, and pushed her back a step. "I want you to get the hell out of here so I can get dressed," I said, and then I knew I had made a serious mistake.
It had been a long day. I was in a susceptible mood, I guess, after that incident with Beth in the mountains. I was wound up with various emotions and tensions that needed an outlet. I shouldn't have got that close to the kid. I shouldn't have touched her.
Everything had changed suddenly, the way it does. We both knew it. She stood quite still in the doorway, looking up at me.
"Are you sure that's what you want?" she murmured, and now her green eyes were laughing at me as I stood there in my shorts with, no doubt, naked desire in my eyes.
I said, "Honey, if you don't look out, you're going to get that nice dress all mussed."
"It doesn't muss very easily," she said calmly. "That's why I wore it here. But if it worries you, take it off."
She was smiling as she turned slowly around to let me unzip and undress her, if I dared. It was a kid's game and I was damned if I was going to play it with her. I just picked her
up and carried her over to the nearest bed and dumped her upon it so hard that she bounced. She looked up at me indignantly from beneath the bright hair that had suddenly tumbled into her face.
I said, "If you were just playing, say so. I'm too old to play games with sex."
She licked her lips childishly. Then she smiled. "Nobody's that old," she murmured.
She was right, of course.
Chapter Nine
IT WAS A big dining room high up in some Reno hotel, but you couldn't really tell by looking. You only knew it because you'd used an elevator to get there.
In Europe, they'd have had a little roof garden where you could sip your cocktail, aperitif, or aquavit outdoors, and look at the lights of the town, and the mountains beyond, while you conversed intelligently about matters that had nothing to do with love-at least the words didn't. Then you'd go inside to a nice big table with a white tablecloth and plenty of room around it and be served an exquisite dinner by waiters who took pride in their work… I don't want to sound subversive or unpatriotic. They do some things worse over there and some things better. Eating is one of the things they do very well.
This was a table about the size of one of the new small tires on one of the new small cars. There were, roughly speaking, a million of these tables crammed into the room a slight exaggeration, but that was the general effect. There wasn't space enough left for the waiters to maneuver conveniently. They had to ooze through the cracks by a process of osmosis. Maybe this was what had ruined their dispositions, or maybe they'd never had any to start with.
At the end of the room was a stage, and on the stage, assisted by an orchestra of sorts, a man was singing. Well, let's call him a man, just for purposes of reference, and I suppose it went under the name of singing. I looked at the girl on the other side of the table. She was the right age, or close enough to it, to explain the phenomenon to me.
"Does he send you?" I asked. "Does he arouse anything in you?"
"Yes, sure, my maternal instinct," she said. "I've got a practically irresistible yearning to go up there and change his diapers and see if he'll stop crying."
Her resilience was fantastic. Nobody looking at her would have dreamed that less than half an hour ago she'd been lying on a rumpled bed, flushed and breathless, with her nice dress bunched immodestly about her waist and her bright hair tumbled untidily over the pillow. Now she looked cool and crisp and immaculate again, and even kind of innocent, as if a sinful thought had never crossed her mind-at least not since she'd put those fine clothes on. Only her eyes had changed, a little, and maybe that was just my imagination. You like to think it's made some difference to the girl.
She reached out abruptly and touched my arm with a white-gloved hand. "Just one thing," she said. "Don't say anything about Lolita. Promise."
"I wasn't going to-"
"That other guy, the one in New York, I was his lousy Lolita all the lousy time. I thought it was cute until I read the book. What a pill! Anyway, I'm no teen-age kid. Just because he was a few years older… Just because you are, don't start thinking… If you say one damn thing about Lolita, I'll get up and walk out."
I glanced at the loose-lipped, wailing character on the stage and said, "It might not be half a bad idea, if I get to go with you."
"Well, I just wanted to tell you. No Lolita."
"In that case," I said, "you'd better tell me your name, hadn't you?"
She looked a little startled. "Don't you know?"
"Fredericks I know. Not what goes before."
"It's Moira. Isn't that corny?"
"Not particularly," I said. "Mine's Matt."
"I know," she said. She looked around, as if seeing her surroundings for the first time. "Don't you like it here?" she asked. "We can go someplace else if you don't like it."
She'd recommended the place. I said, "I'm just spoiled, I guess. In Europe you get less noise and more atmosphere."
"It is kind of crowded," she admitted, "but the food's supposed to be good." Her green eyes touched me lightly. "What were you doing in Europe, Matt?"
"Business," I said.
"What kind of business?"
I didn't answer at once. I didn't particularly want to lie to her; besides, nobody'd supplied me with a real cover for this job, and when you start making it up as you go along, you're apt to talk yourself into a corner.
Her hand was still on my arm. "You're a government man, aren't you?" she murmured, watching me closely.
"A 0-man?" I said. "Now, do I look like one of Mr. Hoover's fine, upstanding, clean-cut young men? Why those fellows are selected for character and integrity. If I'd been one of them, you'd never have seduced me in a million years. I'd have been a rock, I tell you: solid, immovable, granite."
She smiled at me across the table. "All right, Matt, I'll try not to ask questions. Anyway, I wasn't thinking of the FBI. I had in mind-" She hesitated, and looked down at her glass, containing something that was supposed to be a martini-well, there probably was some gin in it, somewhere, judging by my own specimen. I won't answer for the vermouth. She looked up quickly. "I had in mind a certain branch of the Treasury Department."
I said, "I've never investigated an income tax in my life."
She frowned slightly, withdrawing her hand. "You're ducking awfully hard, baby."
"You're pushing hard. Why can't I just be Mrs. Logan's cast-off husband?"
"With those scars? And the way you looked when you heard the name Fredericks, and-" She looked down. "You can't blame me for wanting to know. As a matter of fact-"
"What?" I said when she hesitated.
"As a matter of fact, I didn't come to your motel just because I was lonely. I was… well, kind of curious too."
Her face was pink. I grinned. "You were going to place, Mata Hari, is that it?"
She said, with some stiffness in her voice, "I haven' done too badly, baby. You're her ex-husband, all right I don't suppose there's any doubt about that. But you're something else, too. Something-" She hesitated.
"Something what?"
"Something kind of special, in a gruesome sort o way." She didn't smile. "I've met a lot of them, you know I've spent my whole life, it seems, falling over snooper of one kind or another trying to get something on Dad Half of them had their hands out wanting to be bough off-ninety per cent is closer, I guess-and the rest were so sincere they made you sick, saving suffering humans. manity, for God's sake. Those I can spot a mile off, both kinds. But I don't dig you, baby. You're not hungry and you're not particularly sincere. It makes me wonder just what you're after."
I hesitated, and asked, "How much do you care for your old man, Moira?"
"I hate his guts," she said readily enough. "He put my mother away in an… in a home, I guess you'd call it. Some home! She could probably have been cured, lots of alcoholics are, but he couldn't take the trouble. I guess he just didn't want her around drinking tomato juice at his parties and reminding people that Sal Fredericks' wife had been a helpless lush; anyway, she wasn't very pretty any more, and he likes his women decorative. So he had her put away, in a nice friendly place where she could drink herself to death without disturbing anybody. She hasn't quite made it yet, but she's working on it…" Her eyes were intent on my face. "That's the answer to your question. But if you're asking what I think you're asking… Don't get any wrong ideas, Matt. I didn't pick him and he didn't pick me, but there are certain things you can't do a damn thing about. He's my pop and I'm stuck with him, if you know what I mean."
"I know," I said. "I know what you mean."
"It's corny," she said. "I know, these days if your best friend turns out to be a Red or a crook or something, you're supposed to turn him in right now; it's your duty to society and to hell with friendship and personal loyalty and all that crap-people used to die for it, but nowadays it's crap. And as for family ties, I went to college, I learned all about it. I know it's perfectly all right if Junior takes an axe to ma and pa. He's just getting rid of his repressions, the dea
r little thing. But the plain lousy fact, Matt, is that I'm not one of those complex types, and I'm just a real lousy citizen; I don't give a damn about my duty to society. I'm a dumb and simple country girl, and my old man is my old man. Even if he's a sonofabitch, he's my sonofabitch." She drew a long breath. "What I'm trying to say is-"
I said, "It's all right, kid. I know what you're trying to say. Even if the situation should arise, I won't ask you for help. And I'm really not very interested in your old man. Honest Injun."
She ignored this. "What I'm trying to say is, maybe you're ~a swell guy and maybe you're saving the country, but I'm not going to be a stool pigeon or a judas goat for anybody."
"I read you loud and clear," I said. "Drink your martini; you'll never find another like it, I hope."
She hesitated. After a moment, she said, "Matt."
"Yes?"
"I was coming back from Mexico a couple of weeks ago. They stopped me at the border. You know, usually they don't pay much attention to you, coming out of Juarez. You tell them you haven't bought much of anything except some cheap liquor, and they send you over to pay that lousy hold-up tax to the state of Texas, and that's it. But this time they gave me the works. They practically took the car apart. I thought they were even going to get a matron or something and make me strip, but I guess whatever they were looking for was bigger than that. When Dad heard about it, he almost blew his safety circuits."
"So?"
She looked at me steadily and said, "Damn you! It's dope, isn't it?"
There was a little pause. The waiter picked that moment to come up and stick his elbow in my face so he could put some food in front of her. Then he stuck his elbow in her face so he could put some food in front of me. He went away, proud that he'd remembered to serve us in the right order.
"Isn't it?" she said. "He's tried every other lousy racket; he was bound to get to it sooner or later. It's dope, and they're expecting him to receive a… a shipment, perhaps, and they thought maybe I was running it across the border for him?" She waited a little. I didn't say anything. She said, "Well?"
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