Death of a Citizen (16 page)

The whole affair seemed, in retrospect, like a remarkably stupid business; and my part in it had certainly been no less stupid—to put it very charitably— than anybody else’s. Well, you can’t be smart all the time, but I had to admit that some people seemed to maintain a slightly higher average than others.

There was a knock on the door, and Mac came in without waiting for my response, followed by another man, who closed the door and made certain it was locked before coming forward. He gave the impression of being a man who’d spent his life locking doors carefully before discussing matters of vast importance. Since Mac had said there was a mike in the room, and I had no reason to believe it had been removed, I wasn’t too impressed by this concern for locks and doors.

The man was, I judged, a well-preserved fifty, with the rangy, powerful build of a college football star who’d put on a little middle-aged weight and would have put on more if it hadn’t been for the rowing machine and the handball court. His face had a hint of Lincolnesque angularity, of which he was aware. It was the only angularity about him. In all other respects he was a real smoothie.

I was interested to see that he was carrying Tina’s handsome fur piece carefully folded. He held it gingerly, with a hint of dramatized embarrassment, the way some men handle anything recognizably feminine, as if they want to make damn sure you understand they’re not in the habit of fondling items of this kind and get no kick from it. You see them in the dress shops around December, putting on an act as if they thought the black lace Christmas lingerie would bite them.

I glanced at the mink stole as he laid it on the foot of the bed. It was a clue, no doubt, but I didn’t try to interpret it. It could have been taken off her body—alive or dead—or she could have dropped it as she made good her escape. And why had it been brought here and planted conspicuously on my bedclothes? That too, would become clear in due time. It was nothing worth wasting cerebral energy on until I knew more about it.

I looked at Mac and said, “How many keys are there to this trap, anyway? I might as well have put up a cot in a public john.”

Mac said, “I brought Mr. Denison to see you. Show him your credentials, Denison, to make it official.”

The latter-day Lincoln showed me some credentials that had impressive words on them, although I suppose he could have got them with a box of Cracker-Jacks.

I said, “Fine. He’s seen me and I’ve seen him. What do we do now?”

“He wants to ask you some questions,” Mac said. “Answer to the best of your ability, Eric. There’s full cooperation between Mr. Denison’s organization and ours.”

I liked that little word “ours.” It meant I was back in the fold, at least for the time being.

“Full?” I asked.

“Full.”

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want to know, Mr. Denison?”

As might have teen expected, he wanted the whole story, and I gave it to him. He didn’t believe a word of it. Oh, I don’t mean he thought I was lying. But he didn’t think I was telling the truth, either. He didn’t think anything about it, one way or the other. He was just collecting spoken words from one M. Helm, as a doctor might have collected specimens of my blood and urine.

“Ah, well, it looks like we’ve got most of it,” he said at last. “You say—” He referred to some notes he’d taken. “—you say this woman at one point showed you a membership card in a certain subversive organization?”

“Yes. She claimed to have found it among the dead girl’s effects.”

“It was probably her own. You don’t happen to recall the number of the card?”

“No,” I said. “The code name was Dolores.”

“If you’d examined the physical description of the holder with reasonable care, Mr. Helm, I think you’d have discovered it couldn’t very well have applied to Miss Herrera.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “They were both dark-haired girls of about the same height. The eyes were different, of course.” I found myself wondering, quite irrelevantly, just how some hardboiled party official had gone about describing the color of Tina’s eyes.

“And you say the body is hidden in the old Santander mine?”

“That’s right. Check with Carlos Juhan in Cerrillos, he’ll tell you how to get in there. You’ll have an easier job if you take a jeep or four-wheel-drive pickup.”

“It seems to me...” Denison hesitated.

“Yes?”

“It seems to me you lent yourself to this scheme without much thought. I can’t quite understand how a reputable citizen, with a wife and three small children, could allow himself to be persuaded—”

Mac spoke up abruptly. “I’ll take it from here, Denison. Thanks a lot for coming up.”

“Yes,” Denison said. “Ah, yes. Of course.”

He went out, rather stiffly. Mac followed him to the door, and locked it behind him; then strode to a picture on the nearby wall, took a microphone out from behind it, and pulled out the cord by the roots. He tossed the mike into the wastebasket, and turned to look at me.

“You don’t know how lucky you are, Eric,” he said.

I glanced at the door through which Denison had gone. “I can guess. He’d love to see me in jail.”

Mac shook his head. “I wasn’t referring to that, although it’s a point.” He came to the foot of the bed, and reached down to stroke the soft fur of Tina’s mink stole, without embarrassment. “She got away,” he said. “She hid in the hotel, trying to wait us out, but they caught her outside. They got her gun and made her clasp her hands at the back of her neck, but it seems there was a little throwing knife...”

“I didn’t know she had that. She must have taken it off the body when I wasn’t looking.” I grimaced. “I bet she didn’t hurt anybody much. She never was much good with a knife.”

“Well, one of Denison’s men is having some stitches taken in his face, but I suppose you could say he wasn’t seriously hurt. The other one just got this fur wrapped around his head. By the time he could see again, she was gone. So I guess you could call it a draw, this time. She got away, but at least you’re alive to tell us about it.”

I looked at him for a little. He did not speak. I asked the question he was waiting for. “What do you mean,” I said, “this time?”

“Oh,” he said, “she’s used the same technique before, pretending to be carrying out my orders. But the other suckers were dead when she left them.” He looked at me for a moment. “She’s been looking up all our old people, Eric, the ones she worked with during the war. It’s surprising how many of them seem to be ripe for a little excitement, even the settled ones with families. When I recognized the pattern, I sent operatives to warn all her likely prospects—but Herrera didn’t reach you quite in time.” After a little silence, he said, “She must be found and stopped, Eric. She has done enough harm. I want you to find her and stop her. Permanently.”

When I paid my hotel bill, the woman at the cashier’s window smiled pleasantly and said, “You come back, Mr. Helm.”

I didn’t know why she’d want me back, after last night’s ruckus, and she probably didn’t know herself, but the phrase has become almost obligatory for employees of business institutions throughout the southwest. Whether you drop in five times a day or don’t ever expect to see the place again, you’re always told to come back.

Driving north from San Antonio, there’s the usual freeway routine—at least, they called them freeways out in California when I was there. Maybe the Texans have another name for them. Driving was a cinch, and I had plenty of time to think. My thinking revolved mainly around Mac’s expression when I told him to go to hell. At that point, he’d stopped being his new, sociable, smiling, peacetime self. Well, I hadn’t put much stock in that act, anyway.

There wasn’t really much he could do about it, short of calling in Denison and having me arrested for something, which apparently didn’t appeal to him. Instead, he’d told me how to get in touch with him, if I should change my mind, and stalked out, leaving the mink stole lying on the foot of my bed. It was in the back of the pickup now, as I drove north along the four-lane highway that, as near as I could figure out, more or less followed the route of the old Shawnee Trail to Kansas. So I wasn’t rid of her entirely, and if you think that wasn’t Mac’s idea in leaving it, you don’t know Mac. He’d saddled me with something of hers he was reasonably sure I wouldn’t sell, burn, or give away. There was only one way for me to get rid of it; and while it was a long chance—after all, I had no idea where she’d gone, and he probably knew it—I was sure that if it should happen, he or some of his people wouldn’t be very far away.

Well, that was his worry, or maybe it was Tina’s. If she wanted her furs, she could come and get them. If he wanted her, he could come and get her. I wasn’t going to play delivery boy or bird dog for either of them. I’d had my little fling at reviving my old, tough, wartime self, and the experiment hadn’t been a howling success. I was going back to being a peaceful writer looking for material, a devoted father and a faithful husband—although the last might take some doing, after what had happened.

I got off the concrete and went down the little back roads from which I could see and feel the country, zigzagging northwards. I slept in the truck that night. It rained hard the next day. If anybody was following me in anything but a jeep, he had lots of fun. In places, it was all the truck could do to make it through the gluey gumbo, for all its cleated tires and four-speed transmission. I didn’t mind. The nice thing about driving a truck is, you don’t have to worry about the wheels falling off just because the road doesn’t happen to be perfectly smooth and dry.

I crossed the rivers with the great ringing names out of Western history: the Trinity, the Colorado, the Brazos, and the Red. The weather cleared, and I shot Kodachrome by the yard. I went on north through Oklahoma and into the southeast corner of Kansas. They found lead and zinc in that corner of the state around the turn of the century, and they dug up the whole country and stacked it in great gray piles behind the mine structures, now mostly abandoned and falling into decay. It makes a weird-looking landscape, and creates difficulties for a writer trying to figure out what the place looked like before the digging.

I began working my way westwards, having completed my main chore. I could have gone straight home, I suppose, but the fact is, I still wasn’t quite sure I was going home. And if I did go home, I had no idea what to say to Beth when I got there. I suppose you could say I was stalling while I tried to think up some excuses for my inexcusable behavior. Anyway, it seemed a pity to come so close to the old roaring cattle towns of Abilene, Ellsworth, Hays, and Dodge City without stopping to see what they looked like.

Abilene was a waste of time. They had no sense of their historical past; they were much prouder of President Eisenhower, it seemed, than of Wild Bill Hickok. As a writer of Western stories, I found this hard to understand. Ellsworth was just a sleepy little prairie town on a big railroad. Hays I didn’t get to because daylight was running out on me, and it would have taken me too far northwards, anyway. I kept plugging to the south and west and hit Dodge City shortly after dark. It was time for a bath and a night in a real bed, so I pulled into the first tourist court that looked passable, cleaned up, and went into town to eat. Here they’d gone to the other extreme: the whole place was a museum of the old cowboy days. I cruised back and forth along the dark streets for a while, kind of lining up the places I wanted to see when they opened in the morning.

When I got back to my room at the tourist court, the phone was ringing. I knew nobody in this town, and I’d told nobody I was coming here, but the phone was ringing. I closed the door gently behind me, and walked over and picked it up.

“Mr. Helm?” It was the voice of the motel manager. “I just happened to see you drive in. You have a longdistance call from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Just a minute.”

I sat down on the bed and waited. I heard him get the operator, and I heard the phone ring five hundred miles away, and I heard Beth answer. The sound of her voice made me feel guilty and ashamed of myself. I could at least have called her from San Antonio, as I’d promised to do. But I’d sent a couple of cards to the boys. You don’t have to say anything on a picture postcard.

“Matt?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Matt,” she said, speaking in a tight, breathless way, “Matt, Betsy’s gone! She disappeared from her playpen on the front porch an hour ago, while I was making dinner... And before I could notify the police, that man who was at the Darrels’ party, the big, mean-looking one, Loris, called up and said she would be safe if—” Beth hesitated.

“If what?”

“If you were willing to cooperate. He said to tell you… to tell you somebody was waiting to see you with a proposition. He said you’d know who he meant… Oh, Matt, what is it, what’s going on?”

After I’d hung up the phone, I sat for a little while looking at the silent instrument. I suppose I was thinking, but there wasn’t, when you came right down to it, a great deal to think about. The next move was obvious. Loris had given Beth full instructions: not only what to tell me, but also where to reach me. To know this, the way I’d been moving around the past few days, he had to have a man following me. This man would undoubtedly be standing by right now to see how I reacted to my wife’s phone call.

My orders were to head for home, where further instructions would be waiting by the time I arrived. There wasn’t much choice. They’d be waiting for their boy’s report. I couldn’t even make any useful calls; he might be listening in, somehow. I had to be seen driving off obediently in the right direction, so that he could get on the phone and let them know that the first stage had fired properly and the projectile seemed to be headed towards a satisfactory orbit.

I got up and packed my things quickly, loaded them into the rear of the pickup, and climbed into the cab. There was a certain amount of suspense as I drove through the town; I couldn’t tell whether or not I was being followed. But he was a thorough workman, and I picked him up in the rearview mirrors shortly after we left the city limits. I could hardly miss him. He was driving a new car with one of those four-lamp setups that ought to be banned. They have two beam levels; one merely blinds you temporarily, but the other’s a lulu, capable of incinerating the retina and searing the optic nerve if the guy doesn’t dim in time, which he generally doesn’t, particularly if he’s coming up from behind.