The Poisoners (9 page)

“Look at her left arm. Warfel gave her a little taste of acid, and I don’t mean LSD. He told her, if a couple of drops will do that to your arm, just think what a pint of it will do to your pretty face… McConnell’s voice trailed off. He was silent, breathing shallowly. “You’d better beat it, Helm,” he whispered at last. “Don’t hang around on my account. Doesn’t feel like I’ll be around much longer, myself.”

I looked down at him for a moment longer. It still seemed like a peculiar thing to do to your hair, for peculiar reasons. I mean, I’ve never felt any particular urge to assume the shoulder-length locks, horned helmet, chain mail shirt, and battle ax of my Viking ancestors. Well, it was his hair, and his business.

“Okay,” I said. “Sorry I wasn’t more help.”

“So long, secret-agent-man. Don’t forget about Lorraine and the boys.”

“I won’t forget.”

There were sirens in the distance now. Apparently, some Los Angeleno had overcome his distaste for involvement long enough to pick up a telephone. Well, it saved me from having to call the police and ambulance, not that I thought an ambulance would do much good. Buckshot is generally for keeps.

I hurried back to the rental car and drove off, passing the wreck and the man with the shotgun lying face up beside it. He was, I saw, the nameless man who’d been standing guard in the room with McConnell up in Warfel’s apartment, one of those I’d asked Mac to check on. Well, it still wouldn’t hurt to identify him, as well as the one behind the wheel. You hate to get so casual you go around shooting people without bothering to learn their names.

I made it out of sight before the police arrived, and kept going until I was well away from the area. Then I ditched the car and walked half a dozen blocks until I found a phone booth near a filling station that was closed for the night—well, booth is too strong a word for it. The phone company no longer provides its clientele with shelter and privacy. You stand out in the smog and fog and tell your business to anybody hanging around. There’s a little plastic box to protect the instrument; the customers can damn well protect themselves.

As you will gather, the weather had closed in once more. The heavy, damp air had a nasty, chemical, ozony tang to it that made my nose run and my eyes water. I called the number Charlie Devlin had given me and asked to be put in touch with her, if possible. This led to all kinds of security-oriented complications, but finally I got a guy who seemed to know something. At least he seemed to know who I was and who Miss Devlin was. He was even willing to stick his neck way out and admit it.

I said, “I just lost my subject, permanently. Two men in a hopped-up Camaro. Twelve-gauge auto-loading shotgun stuffed full of buck, very effective.”

“What color car? Did you get the license number? Can you describe either of the men?”

I said, “Cut it out. I’m slow but not that slow. Check with the cops. They were heading that way as I pulled out. I’m sure they’ll let you look at the wreck and view the remains in the morgue and make up your own descriptions. One of the men was taking orders from Frank Warfel when I saw him previously, if it matters. I set it up more or less to look as if the black man avenged himself before he keeled over. If you’ve got any local influence, you might pass a hint to the authorities to let it stand that way, officially, and save us all a lot of trouble. And I made the guy a kind of promise, so would you please put a guard on his family, or take them into protective custody, or something, until the smoke clears. Mrs. Lorraine McConnell…”

“I’m afraid we’re not authorized… Oh, to hell with it. Have you got the address?”

I gave it to him. “But first you’d better get in touch with Charlie Devlin, if you can, and tell her what’s happened. I don’t see what Warfel’s so worried about, sending his boys rushing out to silence them, but if he was after McConnell he’s almost bound to be after Blaine. At least we’d better operate on that assumption. Charlie’d better keep her eyes open wider than I did, if she wants to keep our phony redhead alive a little longer.” The man at the other end of the line didn’t respond immediately. I asked, “What’s the matter? Don’t tell me they’ve already taken care of Blaine.”

“No,” he said slowly, “not as far as we know, but we just got a call from Charlie. She’s at an all-night garage south of town. A guy in a jeep ran her off the freeway about half an hour ago, while she was tailing Miss Blaine. It must have been just about the time you were having your troubles. I would say their timing was pretty good, wouldn’t you, Mr. Helm?”

Tall, tailored Charlie Devlin had got some mud on her shoes. Otherwise she seemed undamaged by her accident, except that her nose was kind of pink around the edges. She kept dabbing at it with a wad of tissue clutched in her fist.

“No, I didn’t hit my nose!” she said irritably. “It’s just this damn smog; I’ve got some kind of an allergy… And don’t stand there looking so damn superior, damn you! You haven’t done so well, either, from what I hear over the phone. At least my subject wasn’t shot down in the street right in front of me.”

She started to rest her hand on a nearby workbench, but changed her mind when she saw how greasy it was. The garage was a shabby, unpainted, badly lighted cinder-block building on the small service road that ran parallel to the freeway. From outside came the steady roar of fast night traffic heading from Los Angeles to San Diego and vice versa. At the other side of the garage, an elderly mechanic in greasy coveralls was investigating the beat-up front suspension of the big, dark blue, Ford station wagon on the hoist, with the reproving attitude of a surgeon examining a compound fracture: people really shouldn’t do such things to themselves, or their cars.

“You’ve got a point,” I said to the girl beside me, “but I wouldn’t lean on it too hard if I were you. Not until we find the ersatz redhead. Alive.”

Charlie sighed. “I know. I didn’t really mean…”

“What happened?”

“Oh, I just goofed, that’s all,” she said wryly. “The visibility was terrible—well, you just came down the freeway yourself, you know how it is up there. I guess I was so busy trying to keep track of the girl’s car in the mist, in all that traffic, without tipping her off that she was being followed, that I didn’t check my mirrors the way I should have. All of a sudden, there he was with his damn jeep, cutting right in on me. I was out in the mud and rocks of the construction zone before I knew it. I thought I’d torn the whole car to pieces, the way it handled when I finally got it backed out of there, but the old man says it looks as if I just bent up the front end a bit.” She hesitated, and glanced at me. “Did McConnell tell you anything useful before he died?”

I shook my head. “He said he didn’t know anything.”

“Then why would Warfel have him killed?”

“That,” I said, “is a damn good question. Of course, he may have known more than he knew he knew, if you know what I mean, but he’s not going to remember it for us now, whatever it was. Which makes the girl fairly important. She had even more opportunities for observation than the hired help. She admitted she’d seen and heard a few things as Warfel’s girlfriend, if that part of her story was straight…

“It was. He’s been paying the rent on her apartment for a couple of years.”

“Then she’s even more likely than McConnell to have been exposed to some significant piece of information, whether she knows what it is or not… Hell,
somewhere
there’s got to be a connection between that two-bit hoodlum and somebody really dangerous!” I went on, making the question very casual, like an afterthought: “How did you know Warfel had been paying the Blaine girl’s rent?”

She glanced at me, and said smoothly, “After all, this is our territory, Mr. Helm. We try to keep track of the people in it, particularly those with whom we may someday be professionally concerned…”

I said, “Cut it out, Charlie-girl.”

“What’s the matter?” She tried to make her tone very innocent, but she didn’t succeed very well.

“Not someday,” I said. “You’re professionally concerned with Warfel and company right now.”

“Well,” she said, “well, of course, since we’re working with you on this business…”

I shook my head. “You were working on Warfel before I ever came on the scene, sweetheart. It’s the only answer that makes sense. His girl did a double take when she saw you; she knew who you were. And we were very careful to shake our shadow when we went out to that pistol range of yours, but we were picked up again immediately when we got back to your office…”

“What makes you think so?” She was stubbornly ignoring the obvious because she didn’t want to confess to the truth.

I said patiently, “Because, doll, there was a driver and shotgunner waiting for me outside, and a jeep jockey waiting for you. Remember? Now, how did all those people of Warfel’s know where to find us again after we’d given them the slip? They knew—they had to know—because they knew you, Miss Devlin; and they figured you’d bring us all back to your home base, as you did.
And
they knew where it was. And why did they know all that? Because people like Frank Warfel make a point of knowing who’s trying to get something on them. They can’t keep track of every agent employed by the U.S. government, but they can sure spot the ones who are currently snooping around, like you’ve apparently been doing. Haven’t you?” She didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. I said, “That’s why you were chosen to ‘help’ me when my boss asked your outfit to give me a hand; and why you weren’t very happy about it. Wasn’t it? I was poaching on your Warfel territory and you were afraid I might louse things up for you. Am I right?”

She drew a long breath. “Maybe. If so, do you mind?”

“Not a bit, as long as your business doesn’t interfere with my business.”

She hesitated. “What about your business interfering with mine, Mr. Helm?”

“Such as how?”

“We want to get the goods on Warfel. Legally.”

“How far have you got?”

“Not very far as yet, but sooner or later he’ll make a mistake, and we’ll catch him at it.” She paused once more. When she continued, her voice was kind of harsh and challenging: “And we don’t want some trigger-happy super-spook shooting him down for vengeance purposes so he can’t stand trial! We want to make a public example of Mr. Frankie-boy Warfel, not a martyr!”

I ignored the final half of what she’d said, and asked, “At what?”

“I… I don’t understand,” she said, disconcerted. “At what are you planning to catch Mr. Warfel?”

“At… well, at anything illegal. Just let him spit on the sidewalk in front of witnesses… Why are you shaking your head like that?”

I waited while the elderly mechanic went into a spasm of frantic hammering. When relative silence descended once more, I said, “It won’t do, Charlie. You’re not the lady gangbuster type.”

“Well,” she said, “well, I try not to be, of course. Just as you try not to look too much like—”

“Like a trigger-happy super-spook?”

She had the grace to flush slightly. “I didn’t really mean—”

“The hell you didn’t,” I said. “But don’t try to convince me you want to bust Frank Warfel just because he’s Frank Warfel. You reek of high moral purpose, sweetheart. There’s some peculiarly atrocious crime you’re concerned with, not just jailing one racketeer because he’s a racketeer.” She drew in her breath sharply. “You have no right to make fun of—”

“And you have no right to hold out on me,” I said. “You’re supposed to be helping me, not obstructing me. Okay, start helping by telling me what Frankie’s been up to that’s so naughty that you get that holy, dedicated look in your eyes when you speak of making an example of him.”

“Damn you, Helm—”

She stopped while the phone rang in the tiny corner office, and the mechanic walked past us to take the call, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. When he’d finished talking, and returned to the car on the hoist, I looked grimly at my female companion.

“All right, let’s do it the hard way,” I said. “Let’s use the old word-association technique. I’ve been reading your West Coast news the last day or so. Maybe there’s been something in the papers that relates to our problem.” I stared at her so intently that she squirmed. It was just part of the act, of course. I had a pretty good idea of the answer I wanted already; but I wanted to get it from her so we could talk about it rationally. I said, “What about mud slides, earthquakes—”

“You’re being ridiculous!”

I watched her eyes. “Smog,” I said, “drugs, missing scientists—”

“What missing scientists?” she demanded quickly.

“Actually, just one that I know of,” I said. “A Dr. Osbert Sorenson, meteorologist at UCLA, who recently turned up vanished, according to last night’s Los Angeles paper.”

“Sorenson? Isn’t he the crackpot who wants to abolish the automobile?”

“One of them. And his associates in the Anti-Internal-Combustion-League, or whatever they call it, seem to think the big car manufacturers did him in, to stop him, Would that have anything to do with your Warfel problem?”

“Why, that’s just silly!” she said. “What could Frank Warfel possibly have to do with a crazy program like that? And can you really imagine General Motors—”

“No,” I said, permitting myself a grin, “not really, and neither can I imagine you giving a damn about Dr. Osbert Sorenson, lost or found. He’s just a red herring, isn’t he? The word that made your eyelids wiggle, just a little, was the obvious one: drugs.” I sighed. “Well, I figured it would be. It had to be, to explain your semi-religious fervor. There’s something about dope that seems to arouse the fanatic in a lot of people, including some supposedly sane and objective law-enforcement characters.”

She said sharply, “How can
anybody
be objective about a traffic as filthy and degrading as…”

She stopped, realizing that I’d been needling her deliberately to get her to betray herself. Angry, she started to speak once more, but checked herself. We faced each other for a long moment.

I said, “For a dope cop, you’ve got a mighty thin skin, doll. What are you people, anyway, some special agency helping out the Customs and Treasury boys?” She remained silent. It was really none of my business, so I went on: “Well, never mind… So Frankie’s been playing around with drugs, has he? I thought the syndicate had made a big point of getting out of that racket. I thought they’d decided it brought them more trouble and adverse publicity than the profits justified.”