The Demolishers

by Donald Hamilton

  “Yes, of course. It’s hard to remember that we’re at war. Thanks for letting me look at it. We… we were very happy there.” After a moment Sandra cleared her throat. “I’ll have to get somebody to tie down that boat cover and clean up the lawn.”

  Just before dinner time we checked into a large frame hostelry overlooking Newport Harbor. We’d had to cross a couple of bridges, one quite high, to get there, since Rhode Island is cut up by a lot of water and Newport is on a large island—bearing the same name as the state, incidentally. There was a small marina on the seaward side of the hotel and a large parking lot to landward. Our rooms were on the second floor looking down on the parked cars.

  While Sandra did whatever girls do before going out to eat, I made a reservation for dinner; then I called the control number. I got hold of Trask for a change—usually I did my daily talking to the phone watch—and learned that we’d picked up a flea when we drove past the house in Old Saybrook; a human flea, as yet unidentified, in a green Toyota two-door. Smart people. Scared off by Tallman in Savannah, they’d figured out where we were going, as I’d thought they might. They’d waited for us to come to them rather than chase us along hundreds of miles of freeway.

  I said, “That’s fine. I was hoping they’d reestablish contact. Observe but don’t disturb. That won’t leave you much manpower for us, so concentrate on keeping the Porsche free of loud presents. I’ll try to survive without a chaperone, away from the car. Anything else?”

  “Yes. Have you read any Florida papers recently?”

  “No, why?”

  “Vicious drug wars. Two pushers executed gangland style in Pompano Beach for trespassing on the wrong territory. At least that’s the public version. Actually, the cops have pretty well established that the victims were the two men involved in the Mariposa bombing. They’re not pursuing the murder investigation too energetically, on advice from Washington.”

  “So Varek’s people got the men; what about the Angela girl?”

  “It didn’t work out quite the way it had been planned. The Delgado woman in our office came up with some new information; that gal wields a mean computer. She had the two men pinpointed. Varek was supposed to hold off to give their female accomplice a chance to join them; but I guess he’s the impatient type. He moved too soon and all he got were the men. He’s still looking for the blonde. However, Louis reports that, with help from Washington, his team has located Arthur Galvez and Howard Koenig; the boys are waiting for the word to close in.”

  “Good enough. We do seem to be gaining on it a little… Just a minute, somebody’s at the door.”

  “That’s the report. Watch your ass, hero. Trask out.”

  Replacing the phone, I heard the knock again and realized it was Sandra at the connecting door. “Come in, I’m respectable,” I said. “Well as respectable as… Hey, what’s the matter?”

  I jumped to my feet and hurried to her, where she stood in the doorway a little uncertainly. She was wearing high-heeled white sandals and clean white slacks, a change from the scuffed jogging shoes and grubby jeans in which she’d been traveling today. She was wearing nothing else except the Colt .380 automatic.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know if I’m making a big fuss about nothing.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Maybe I’m overreacting, but when I came out of the bathroom a maid was putting some flowers on the dresser. The crazy thing is, she looked just like… I’m almost sure she was the girl outside the Mariposa… Matt!”

  I guess I’d grabbed her hard enough to hurt a little. I kicked the door closed behind her. I hauled her across the room and shoved her down behind the farthest of the two beds, and held her there, lying flat beside her. Nothing happened.

  Sandra started to raise her head. “I guess I did overreact. Sorry to be so chicken…”

  I pushed her down again as the room she’d just left exploded with a flat, hard bang that blew the connecting door open again and shook a picture off the common wall. A little whitish smoke drifted in through the open doorway. I held Sandra long enough to make sure she wasn’t going to break down; but Matthew had picked a good unhysterical type.

  “We’d better find you a shirt,” I said. “It looks as if we might have company.”

  16

  He was moderately tall, a lean, sandy man in tweeds with a thin, sandy moustache that he liked to stroke with the middle knuckle of his right forefinger. He was doing it now.

  “Beautiful!” he said. “Simply beautiful!”

  Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. I’ve seen a number of wrecked rooms and I found nothing in this mess that made it lovelier than any of the others. But the local blast genius, whose name was Colonel Farnham, was studying the holes in the walls and ceiling with admiration.

  “Note the even distribution,” he said. “A really fine little antipersonnel device employing number four buckshot.”

  “Yes, well, what do you think, Colonel?”

  This question came from the uniformed gent who’d brought us the tweedy bomb specialist. He was standing by the splintered hall door. High-ranking policemen have the same look of bulletproof perfection as high-ranking military men; you can’t imagine them bleeding on those immaculate, snug-fitting cop suits, or soldier suits, even assuming there’s human blood inside them. This one carried all the right cop hardware in all the right places and you knew you’d never find a speck of rust or dust on it anywhere. He was a stocky character with a square brown face and thick, glossy, black hair—not a strand out of place, of course.

  He spoke again, when the man addressed didn’t answer immediately: “Just a preliminary opinion, Colonel?”

  Farnham turned to face him. “I can tell you nothing with certainty, of course, until I’ve had time to examine all the evidence. But the signature is the same, if you know what I mean.”

  “The signature?”

  “The technique. The approach. What we sometimes call the handwriting. Yes, the people who constructed this device could very well be those responsible for the bomb employed at the Silver Conch Restaurant a few months ago. That was a different type, of course, designed to be effective over a larger area; but like this one it was no bigger than necessary. Economical. Usually they go for overkill in a big way. They have fifty-megaton dreams even when it’s merely a question of blowing up a small hotel room.”

  Waiting beside Sandra for the top cop to get around to us, I put in my dime’s worth. “There have been two other bombings that might interest you, Colonel. The restaurant La Mariposa in West Palm Beach, Florida; and the Howard Johnson Restaurant in San Juan, Puerto Rico. If you’d like to compare some more signatures.”

  The uniformed man by the door gave a short bark of laughter. “Who’d blow up a Howard Johnson? That’s kind of like staging a full-scale SWAT operation to shoot Smokey the Bear.”

  I said, “Nevertheless, five people died, three of them children.”

  Colonel Farnham said, “I’ll check the incidents you mentioned. Thank you.”

  The shiny policeman said, “While the colonel looks around in here, maybe we can move into the other room and be comfortable while I go over the young lady’s evidence with her.”

  It was the usual cop interrogation; they don’t know how to ask a simple question without sounding as if they’re accusing you of murder. Sandra had to describe the maid again: a smallish girl with shoulder-length blonde hair, wearing a gray cotton uniform, dark stockings, and gray canvas shoes. She’d brought a vase of flowers. She said it was courtesy of the management. She put it on the dresser and fussed with it a little. Sandra’d had an uneasy sense of recognition, but it wasn’t until the door was closing that she realized where she’d seen this maid before…

  The cop took her through it repeatedly, the way they do; then he worked me over a bit, mostly to indicate that he didn’t really like having wolves from other lairs, even from that big wolf-hole in Washington, prowling around his territory—we had, of course,
gone through the ID routine with the first officers on the scene. Finally we got the usual cop lectures on “Firearms, the Local Legal Aspects Thereof,” and “Interagency Cooperation, a Two-Way Street.” He hoped. He put away the notebook at last, picked up his cap, and departed, name and rank still unknown, after assuring us that the damaged doors of the next room, particularly the connecting doors, were being secured properly, and that there would be a man on duty there all night.

  Sandra made a face after him. “That makes me feel warm all over,” she said as the door closed. “Having a pig watching over her is just what it takes to make a girl sleep soundly. Particularly if she’s a girl born with the name of Varek.”

  “Now you sound just like a gangster brat,” I said. I studied her for a moment. “We’ve got a problem with the arrangements. You can’t sleep in that room, and they have no other connecting rooms available; the only vacancy on this floor is way down the corridor.”

  She grinned. “Could you be leading up to the fact that there are two big beds right there? Are you being shy about it? Your virtue will be safe with me, honest.”

  “It wasn’t my virtue I was worrying about.”

  “Oh, goody, the man finds me irresistible!” She laughed, and shook her head. “If it’s my reputation that concerns you, Sonny Varek’s daughter never had one, so forget it.” She shivered suddenly. “I don’t want to be at the far end of any corridor tonight, Matt. I don’t even want to be next door. I want to be right in here with you watching over me, not some lousy cop. And if you don’t take me out and pour some drinks into me, double-quick, you’re going to have a basket case on your hands. That blast reminded me of too many ugly things. How long does a girl have to be brave and sober around here, anyway?”

  We walked to the restaurant. Newport isn’t a big city, and most of the action takes place in a fairly limited area around the waterfront. In years gone by there was a lot of glamorous social life in the big mansions out along the shore where the millionaires spent the summer—as opposed to the big mansions in Palm Beach where they spent the winter. It must have been nice work when you could get it. But that glittering world is gone and nowadays the dock area is the big attraction, with its marinas and boat yards and America’s Cup yachts and ship chandleries, not to mention its quaint little shops and picturesque eating places, all housed in colorful frame buildings that reminded me of the restored section of Savannah’s riverfront, except that the style here was Olde New England instead of Olde South.

  “Kind of cute” was Sandra’s verdict. “Matthew and I… we were always going to visit Newport, it was so close, but we never got around to it.” She was silent for a moment as we walked; then she spoke in forced, bright tones. “Where are you feeding me? Could it be the Silver Conch?”

  “I hate smart-ass broads,” I said. “How did you ever guess?”

  “If it got blown up only a few months ago, like the man said, they must have done a fast job of patching it up.”

  I said, “Only half of it got blown up. They haven’t quite finished repairing that part yet; but the other half is still in business. All we have to do is find it.”

  It was only a couple of blocks by the direct route; but we’d slipped out a back entrance of the hotel to avoid any reporters who might be lurking around the lobby. That threw my bearings off, so we did a little more hiking than necessary in that maze of narrow streets and alleys before we found our way to the right pier. The restaurant was a long, low, unpretentious gray building perched over the water. It had recently been repainted, presumably so the new construction, or reconstruction, at the seaward end would match the rest.

  There was a sign displaying a shiny, spiraling seashell on a black background; pretty, but I couldn’t help wondering what a conch was doing up here in New England. In my experience, it’s a Florida shellfish, and it’s so tough you have to beat it with a club to make it edible, and even then it’s never going to run clams and oysters out of business. At least not out of my business. A movement nearby made me throw out my right arm to shove Sandra behind me, while the little .25 sleevegun—well, I’d shifted it from ankle to forearm for daytime wear—slipped into the palm of my left hand.

  “Mr. Helm?” It was a woman’s voice. “Mr. Matthew Helm? And Mrs. Cassandra Helm?”

  She stepped out of the shadows, a tall, trousered female with short dark hair and large spectacles. A miniature camera with a motor drive hung around her neck. I think they still call them miniatures although they’ve grown considerably since my photographic days. The camera had a flash attachment on top. Those have shrunk; some of the ones we used when I was a kid working for a newspaper were the size of searchlights. Well, as they say, what you lose in the curves you gain on the straightaways.

  “Bennington,” she said, “Laurel Bennington, of the Newport Free Press.”

  Sandra took my arm and started to pull me away. “Please, we don’t want…”

  I said, “Hold everything. I guess a little publicity won’t hurt, if you can stand it, Sandy.”

  She said, “Oh, I suppose so, but I got so sick of having those things go off in my face, last time; and every time I’d jump a foot thinking I was being blown up again.”

  I’d turned aside so I could slip the little automatic back into its clip without attracting attention to it.

  I said, “I’m sure Miss Bennington won’t fire hers without warning. You do want pictures, Miss Bennington?”

  The tall woman grinned. Nothing was going to make her craggy face beautiful, but the grin made her look like a nice, bright person who might be fun to know.

  “We call it visual enhancement nowadays,” she said. “Yes, I’d like some visual enhancement for my story on your daughter-in-law’s narrow escape from death, Mr. Helm. Her second narrow escape from death, if the police had it right.”

  It was actually the third, of course, counting the antitank gun at the high window, but I saw no need to correct her.

  I said, “Let’s do our talking inside with some drinks in front of us, and maybe even inside us; but first why don’t you shoot your visual enhancements out here, if you don’t mind. Anybody who pays the current price for a good restaurant meal should be allowed to eat it in peace, without having his digestion ruined by man-made lightning.”

  Going inside after a brief photographic session—the lady knew what she wanted and went right for it—we were seated right away although we were late for the reservation I’d made by phone when we first checked into the hotel. It was a large, pleasant, rather rustic room with wooden tables and chairs; but there were white tablecloths and napkins, the waiters were in dark suits, and there was a sign near the door to the effect that gentlemen were required to wear jackets. I was way ahead of them. I even had a tie on. The younger generation of males seems to be terribly intimidated by neckties, but they don’t scare me.

  We were seated at a table for two. The restaurant was full and there was no larger table available; but an extra chair was brought for Laurel Bennington, who said she’d already eaten, thanks, but she could probably choke down a Scotch-and-water. Sandra and I both voted for vodka martinis. Twists, no olives.

  “Let me see if I have it straight, Matt,” Laurel said after we’d talked for a while. We were on a first-name basis now. “Sandra was married to your son, who was recently killed in a terrorist atrocity down in West Palm Beach. So now the two of you have come up here to Newport to investigate our local atrocity of last spring. You’re interested because it was perpetrated by the same gang, called the Caribbean Legion of Liberty—at least they claimed the credit, if that’s the right word—and you hope it will lead you to them somehow. Apparently they agree with you, or they wouldn’t be trying to stop you. Am I right so far?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “I don’t think they’re worrying about the older Silver Conch bombing, at least not yet. They think Sandra can identify the team of terrorists that was actively involved in the more recent Mariposa bombing—that’s the one down in West Palm.”<
br />
  “Yes, I know,” Laurel said. “Can she?”

  I nodded. “She was actually kind of doubtful until a couple of hours ago; but then she found that she did recognize the phony maid who planted the loaded flowerpot in her room as one of the bomb-throwers she’d seen when her husband, my son, was killed.”

  “There were three altogether, weren’t there? The woman and two men?”

  “We don’t have to worry about the men,” I said. “They were killed down in Florida, in some kind of a drug hassle, just a day or two ago. At least the police seem to think the identification is positive.”

  There was a little silence. Sandra was looking at me in surprise; I hadn’t got around to telling her what I’d learned over the phone just before the explosion. Laurel Bennington was watching me shrewdly. A good reporter, she knew that while I might not be lying to her, I wasn’t telling her everything. She was guessing hard about the things I was keeping back.

  “‘Some kind of a drug hassle,’” she quoted dryly. “Isn’t that a bit of a coincidence, that they should die violently like that within a few weeks of the bombing?”

  “Violent people die violently.” I grinned. “Sandy and I didn’t vigilante them, if that’s what you’re thinking. We were several hundred miles away, driving north up I-95, at the time they were killed.”

  The reporter lady wasn’t satisfied. “But the idea isn’t altogether repulsive to you, is it? What do you plan to do if something you learn here leads you to the girl who’s been planting these bombs, or any of the other members of the terrorist organization responsible for your son’s death? What will you do if you get your hands on them? Shoot them?”

  I gave her a look of hurt innocence. “Do I look like Charles Bronson in one of those massacre-the-miscreants movies?”

  She didn’t smile. “As a matter of fact, Matt, you do, a little. Different physical type, of course, but the same… well, mental attitude, I’d say. I think you’re probably a mean man to meet in a dark alley. But let’s keep it simple for my sentimental readers; they just want to hear about the bereaved young wife and her desolate father-in-law, two innocents bravely tracking down the villains responsible for their grief, so dedicated to their pursuit that even bombs can’t stop them. Let me fill in the picture with a few more questions, if you don’t mind…” At last she sat back and drew a long breath. “And now, what can I do for you? You didn’t give me all this information without wanting something in return. Like information?”