Hopscotch (12 page)

Ilfeld gave the customs people on the pier some double-talk and the four of them went aboard before anyone was allowed to disembark. The First Officer was a ruddy squat Englishman who told them the way to James Butler's cabin.

Ross was startled by the closeness of the resemblance when James Butler opened up. It wasn't Kendig but from a distance it might have been. The eyes were too close together, the hairline was a little wrong, the mouth too thick, the real Kendig was a little taller and less full in the hips and had longer legs.

Butler didn't seem surprised. “Well come on in, gents.”

Ilfeld said, “You mind a whole lot if we search you for weapons, old buddy?”

“Go ahead. I'm not armed. But go ahead.”

The two goons spread him out in the frisk position with his hands against the top bunk and his feet splayed well out. They went over him meticulously and Ross waited until the ritual had been observed. Then he said, “I suppose you know who we are and why we're here, don't you?”

“I know why you're here. I don't know who you are.”

Ilfeld flashed an ID wallet and gave him time to read it. “I'm with the consulate staff here. This gentleman is from the State Department in Washington.”

“Sure he is.”

Ross said, “Here's my identification,” but James Butler didn't give it more than a glance and Ross put it away feeling a little foolish.

Butler said, “You gentlemen are out of your jurisdiction here.”

“A regular sea lawyer,” Ilfeld said.

Ross said, “You want to come along with us, Mr. Butler?”

“Actually I'm rather enjoying the voyage. I wasn't planning to go ashore here at all.”

“And if we insist?”

“Then I'll stand on my rights. You can't hijack me off this ship if I don't want to go. Not legally.”

Ross said, “Perhaps you three gentlemen wouldn't mind waiting outside while I talk with Mr. Butler.” In his pocket he had the recorder running.

Butler sat down patiently. Ilfeld ducked his way out behind the two goons and the bulkhead door rang when it closed. Ross walked two paces—the width of the stateroom—to the porthole and hooked his elbow in it. “Okay, let's cut the shit. What's your name?”

“James Butler.”

“Traveling on a false passport is a serious offense.”

“No. Not if I stay aboard this ship until it returns to the United States. I haven't tried to sneak into any foreign country on a false passport. And I haven't defrauded anybody out of anything. I paid for my passage in full, in cash. I'm clean—you can't touch me.”

Ross looked out through the open port. A dark rainbow rippled in the patch of oil that drifted on the water thirty feet below him. A quarter of a mile down the waterfront a tanker was pumping its cargo into tank lorries drawn up in a row along the dock. The sun was bright, fierce; when he turned inward to look at James Butler he could hardly see
him for a moment until his vision adjusted. “You're in a lot of trouble nevertheless.”

“I don't see how. I haven't done anything wrong.”

“Then you'll have no reason to refuse to cooperate with us, Mr.—Butler?”

“Go ahead, ask your questions.”

“What's your name?”

“Dwight Liddell.”

“Vital statistics, Mr. Liddell?”

“Fifty years old. Divorced. Unemployed. I was living in Bala Cynwyd for a while but my residence is in Trenton now. By profession I'm an aeronautical engineer. What else do you want to know?”

“Who gave you James Butler's papers?”

“James Butler.”

“He said that was his name, did he?”

“He had the passport to prove it.”

“Mind if I have a look at it, Mr. Liddell?”

And suddenly there was a ball of excitement in him because there had to be a photograph in that passport—and Kendig had used it to get into the States a month ago.

But Kendig had thought of it of course. The photograph was Liddell's.

“How much did he pay you to take us on this little wild goose chase, Mr. Liddell?”

“Call me Dwight,” Liddell said. “I don't think it's any of your business how much money changed hands.”

“But he did pay you.”

“Sure he did. What else would have induced me to put up with this grilling?”

“I haven't even reached for a rubber hose, Mr. Liddell.”

“You won't have to.” Liddell spread his hands and smiled. “My life's an open book.”

On the twentieth he flew back to Washington and Liddell went on his way aboard the
Cape of Good Hope
. Ross had been a little worried about that but Cutter set him at ease: “No point making waves when it doesn't prove anything. You did the right thing letting him go. Provided you milked him first.”

“I've got six hours of tape. He was pretty dry by the time I finished with him. He didn't hold anything back except the size of the money Kendig paid him.”

“The man doesn't want to have to pay taxes on it, does he. All right—I'll listen to the tape tonight but tell me what's significant on it in your estimation.”

“Not a hell of a lot,” Ross admitted. “Kendig dropped him off in Charleston by taxi in time to catch the boat. From what the FBI tells us Kendig turned the rental car in about an hour before the sailing. So we might get something from taxi companies or the airlines or whatever, but I'm sure the FBI's working on that.”

Cutter nodded. “When it comes to that kind of drudgery they do as good a job as anybody.”

“The taxi they took to the pier in Charleston was a Yellow Cab.”

“Naturally.”

“I just thought I'd mention it. I happened to ask Liddell and he happened to remember it. Yellow Cab, he thinks it was, and he remembers the driver was black but he couldn't tell me fat or thin, tall or short, bald or short hair or afro. He's not lying, he's just a typical witness.”

“We'll pass it on to the Bureau. But either Kendig paid off the cab right there at the pier or he got himself dropped off downtown on a street corner. Didn't you get anything at all out of Liddell?”

“Nothing that looked interesting to me. Maybe you'll find something I missed.”

“Maybe I will at that.”

Q. Then you drove from Trenton to Charleston together in Butler's car on the twenty-seventh, is that right?

A. Yes.

Q. That's a long day's drive. Did Butler make any stops on the way?

A. Well sure, we stopped for gas several times. We had lunch in a service area, one of those Hot Shoppes or Howard Johnson's, whatever they are. We had dinner in a Chinese place in a shopping center outside of Norfolk. Oh, and he bought some typing paper in a discount store there.

Q. You remember the name of the store?

A. … No, I guess I don't. But I remember the paper all right. It was Southworth Bond.

Q. How come you remember that, Mr. Liddell?

A. Well he wanted a heavy grade of paper. He really wanted twenty-four-pound paper but the heaviest they had was twenty-weight. See, the reason I noticed was that my wife writes children's books. My ex-wife. She always buys twenty-four-pound paper because it duplicates better in copying machines. You know, it feeds easier, doesn't get rumpled up. And she always buys this Southworth Bond paper, so I recognized the package when he bought it.

Q. What was it he bought, a ream of it?

A. They only had it in one-hundred-sheet packets. That's what he bought. A pack of a hundred sheets and a pad of carbon paper.

Q. And this was ordinary letter-size? Eight and a half by eleven?

A. Well yes, sure. It wasn't legal size or anything like that, if that's what you mean.

Q. Okay. Then what happened?

A. After we left the shopping center? Well it was getting dark but we went right on, all the way to Charleston. It must have been after midnight when we got there. We put up in a motel.

Q. What motel?

A. I don't remember the name of it. It wasn't one of the big chains, I'd remember that. I mean you stop in a Holiday Inn or something, you sort of recognize the surroundings. This was just a motel, you know. It was just off Interstate Ninety-five but I couldn't tell you which interchange—there's four or five along there, exits for Charleston. We just got off the highway and stopped at the first motel we came to that had a vacancy sign.

Q. You stayed in the same room with him?

A. No. We had adjoining rooms. Not connecting, adjoining.

Q. So it was late and you went right to bed?

A. I did. He didn't.

Q. What did he do?

A. Well he had his portable typewriter along, you know. I heard him typing away in there.

Q. For how long?

A. I have no idea. I went to sleep, he was still banging the damn typewriter.

Q. How about when you woke up in the morning? Was he still typing?

A. No. He called me on the room phone, that's what woke me up. He was all dressed and ready to go when I came out. We got in the car and drove in toward the city. We stopped for breakfast in one of those pancake houses. Then he went over to a drugstore next door, it was one of those places that sold school supplies and paperback books and stuff—a big drugstore, a Rexall I think. He bought a whole bunch of those big manila envelopes with metal clasps. Then we drove on a ways and he stopped in a post office and bought a bunch of stamps.

Q. But he didn't mail anything there, did he?

A. No. How did you know that?

Q. Because we know what he mailed and it wasn't postmarked until the next day. He couldn't have mailed it in a post office that early that day. All right, Mr. Liddell, what happened after he bought the stamps?

A. Well we went downtown and he parked the car at a meter and he went into a bank. He got me a cashier's check and some cash.

Q. How much was the cashier's check for?

A. I don't think I can tell you that.

Q. All right. How much cash did he give you?

A. Let's skip that one too, all right?

Q. What did you do with the money?

A. Well I put some of it in my wallet and I put some of it in various pockets. The cashier's check and some of the cash I put in separate envelopes and I mailed them somewhere. I'm not going to tell you where.

Q. Okay, okay. You don't want to talk about the money, all right. What happened then? Did he do anything else in the bank?

A. I don't know. When he got the cash and the
cashier's check he was with an officer in the back, I wasn't with him, I was waiting out front. I don't know what he said or did. Anyhow we left the bank and I mailed what I had to mail and then we got back in the car. He dropped me off at a coffee shop and I had lunch, and about a half hour later he picked me up again. He didn't have the car any more. We took a taxi down to the waterfront and I shook hands with him outside the customs door. That was the last I saw of him. He wished me good luck, I thanked him, the porter took my bags and went inside. Then I got on the boat and here I am.

Q. You didn't notice whether he hung around watching to make sure you actually sailed on the ship, did you?

A. No. I told you, I never saw him after we shook hands on the pier there. Look, how many times are we going to go over this?

Q. Well sometimes it helps to go over things several times, Mr. Liddell. Each time you tell it you remember something else you hadn't remember the previous time. I mean like him staying up in his room typing after you went to bed, that sort of thing. Now suppose we just do it one more time. Let's take it from the night you met Butler in the bar in Trenton, okay?

Ross yawned helplessly and reached for the Styrofoam coffee cup. Cutter switched the tape deck off. “You don't find anything helpful there?”

“What's the use of finding out where he bought his typing paper or what motel they stayed in? He's long gone, he won't be back to those places. It was weeks ago.”

“You're missing something then,” Cutter said. “Look, I'm not being smug, I'm not trying to show off my muscles. But you've got to pay a little attention. Now stop yawning in my face and sit up and let's talk about it.”

Ross shoved himself upright in the chair and sucked at the dregs of the coffee. “I can't handle time zones too well. I'm going to a little bit of a zombie for a day or two—I can't help it, jet planes do that to me.”

“You want more coffee?”

“I'm waterlogged already. No thanks.”

Cutter said, “He bought a hundred sheets of twenty-pound Southworth Bond paper and a pad of carbon paper.”

Ross shook his head. “You write a book, you need paper. What does it prove? It doesn't tell us where he is.”

“It may.”

“You're miles ahead of me, then.”

“It's a little bit more expensive than most. You buy it by the ream it runs seven or eight dollars for five hundred sheets.”

“So?”

“One thing about Kendig—he's meticulous, he's orderly. If he started writing this book on South-worth paper he'll probably finish it on Southworth paper. Now he bought a hundred sheets and he bought carbon paper. That's enough to write fifty originals and make fifty carbons. Not enough to finish that book of his, is it. Not unless he had more of the stuff in his luggage. But if he had more of it why make a special stop just to buy it in Norfolk?”

Ross began to see. His eyes widened a little.

“He was low on paper,” Cutter said, “so he bought a packet in Norfolk. But it wasn't enough to finish the book. So he's got to buy paper again.”

Ross made a face. “I get what you mean now. But how many places are there in this country that sell typing paper?”

“We can rule out places that don't sell South-worth, can't we. So we start with Southworth. We find out who wholesales for them. We go through the wholesalers, find out which stores they supply with bond paper.”

“That's still got to be thousands of stores.”