The By-Pass Control (7 page)

When I put the phone back I was grinning. Someday I’d have to show him the four pages from the book I had taken from Marcus Pietri’s pocket after I killed him. Virgil didn’t know it, but he was on the “A” list too. Down near the bottom, but on it nevertheless.

Up in the room I dropped the stats in my bag, sealed the originals in the envelope for mailing back to Belt-Aire and put in the call to Don Lavois. He picked up the phone, took my recognition signal, answered it, and said, “Something a little odd on Salvi, Tiger.”

“Like what?”

“The Feds swarmed over the neighborhood where he was holed up and took that building apart. They got nothing at all out of it but a lot of trouble. I dogged them for a while, but as long as they were doing the work there was no use butting in. I went in after they left just for a look around but didn’t turn anything up until I reached the bathroom. One of the cops must have used the john and didn’t check it after he flushed. It had backed up a little.”

“Lousy toilet training.”

“Habit,” he said. “Whoever looks back? Anyway, I got a coat hanger and probed down the well. There was a cute little gimmick there—a thin spring wire across the toilet trap out of sight under the water level with a six-foot length of nylon cord tied to its middle and on the other end, flushed partly down the drain, a rubber prophylactic with a quarter pound of heroin in it. A neat trick, but not exactly an old one. It never would have been noticed if somebody hadn’t been pretty constipated.”

“Hell, Salvi couldn’t have been a hophead.”

“It was there, buddy. It adds some interesting sidelines.”

“Good enough. I’ll get a look at the autopsy report on his body. Think it could have been left there by an earlier tenant?”

“Nope. The spring was simple steel and the surface rust indicated recent installation.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Left it right where it was.”

“Good enough. How you going to play it from here?”

“As far as anyone knows in the neighborhood, Salvi never even existed. His cover was beautiful. He rented that place by phone, paid by cash in advance, probably bought everything in scattered places and transported it himself. But he did have to buy that H from some source. It’s the only lead we have.”

I said, “Then get Ernie to give you the latest list on narcotics suppliers he has. Keep in touch through Newark Control.”

“Roger. Any direct contact with you?”

“As little as possible. And watch yourself. The Reds have a new man in on the play.”

“So I heard... only it’s not me they’re after.”

When I cradled the receiver I walked over and sat on the window sill and looked at the city at night. There was a funny light feeling in my stomach that I never had before. I had been in on the chase and been in on the kill. Often, I had been the rabbit and felt the hot breath of the dogs on my back and smelled the saliva they oozed in the fury of the pursuit, but this rabbit had gotten away every time.

So far.

It wasn’t the dogs that gave me the feeling. It was the thought of the lights of the city going out all at once in the wild terror of an even greater light that would hang in the air like a gigantic mushroom in a field of mushrooms that would all blossom simultaneously if given the opportunity.

I double-locked the door, chained it, stretched out on the bed with the Belt-Aire employee list and ran over each page, detail by detail. Most of the information was a one-or-two-word answer to specific questions, but the end of each page contained a short summary, a personal observation that included notations of “occasional drinker” and “periodic low stake card games.” One even suggested a rather full sex life. Apparently none of these affected the employable qualities of the person because they were all on the payroll now. Evidently Hamilton had done most of his investigative work during the first half of the year because each page had a month typed in the lower lefthand corner. Except for one, it didn’t match the date of the report, so probably marked the date the investigation began.

After an hour of it I put the sheets down, the .45 on half cock beside my hand and fell asleep.

behind I.A.T.S. had done their work well. They were far from inefficient. Hamstrung by directives and stymied by bureaucra- tic precedents perhaps, but not inefficient. Hal Randolph and his retinue were there personally a half hour after I requested a look at the autopsy report on Vito Salvi, their expressions bland... waiting. They had come in shortly after I entered the request and had a mild little man tell me I would have to wait a few minutes. The mild little man had gotten to a phone as he had been told to while I cooled my heels in a drab office that had the antiseptic smell of a dead room and when Randolph saw me he said, “Let’s have it, Tiger.” The other two were the same ones who had come with him when I shot Salvi and they waited with the same professional interest they had shown before.

I said, “Routine check. I killed the guy, didn’t I?”

“No comedy. Just say it.”

“There’s nothing to say until I see the report. Now you quit playing games and clear the air.”

Randolph nodded and the mild little man didn’t have to go any further than the desk drawer that had been in front of him all the time. He took out two sheets stapled together and handed them to me.

Vito Salvi had died of a gunshot wound from a calibre .45 bullet and at the time of death had multiple lacerations and abrasions not directly responsible for his demise. Three other bullet wounds and several knife scars were found, a small stomach ulcer, a possible cured syphilitic condition and the early stages of a cataract beginning to form in the right eye. His last meal had been chili, creamed corn and bread which matched the garbage remains in his apartment.

I handed the sheets back to the mild little man who took them impassively and stored them back in the drawer. When he shut it he looked at me quizzically and asked, “Is that all?”

“That’s all,” I told him.

“Come off it, Tiger,” Randolph said. “Don’t hide one damn thing. This isn’t a schoolyard.” His face was tight and somehow his eyes seemed buried in the flesh around them. I think for the first time I liked the guy. He was big, mean and nasty, but he was being pushed and knew what it felt like to have a rock hanging over his head. “What are you looking for?”

I shoved my hat back and got up off the edge of the desk where I was sitting. “Evidence of narcotics addiction.”

“Why?”

“To see whether a guy who could torture three people to death was doing it for a reason or because it was part of his makeup.”

“He didn’t use the stuff.”

“Now I know.”

The one leaning up against the cabinets said too casually, “You get off the hook too easily, Tiger.”

“I’ve had practice.”

“Not with us.”

“You too. Let’s just say I’m exploring every possibility.”

“We thought of it too. Earlier than you did. The question is why you came up with it now.”

I shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it and looked across the room at him. “Because drugs are a big item of trade, buddy. The carriers sometimes become the victims and we’re all looking for something to start with. I didn’t think it possible, but I wanted to be sure. Now... if you’re not satisfied with my explanation you can stuff it. I don’t like being run down like a two-bit private op every time I get a thought. Let me remind you that at your instigation I’m back with an official status, cooperating fully with one of your representatives, and try this stunt again and I’ll go it cold and anything I get finds its way to the papers first and you second.”

“Don’t try it, Mann,” Randolph warned.

“Mister,” I reminded him, “I did it before and I’ll do it again. Quit crowding and don’t pull any court-martial crap on me or I’ll jam it up your tail.”

It sat that way for a good ten seconds, the slight movements of their eyes recording their impressions. I let them sweat it long enough, then I said, “Shove a probe down the toilet of Salvi’s bathroom and see what you find. Don’t bother pushing on the deal because you had all the time in the world to come up with it. I would have told you only you didn’t ask politely.”

Randolph’s face started to blossom into the familiar florid hue and I grinned at him. He said, “You bastard.”

“Any number of people could have told you that.”

There wasn’t anything more to say. I knew what I wanted to know and walked out. From the corner I watched the three of them scramble into a black sedan and take off out of there in a hurry. Somebody on that Salvi searching party was going to catch hell pretty shortly.

I found a phone booth in a drugstore to call Charlie Corbinet. He still had his fingers on enough direct contacts through the local police and the Treasury Department to come up with some possible new leads in the narcotics situation and I wasn’t betting on full cooperation from Hal Randolph at all. He’d play it his own way as long as he could and would call me in only when it was expedient. That was a chance I couldn’t take.

Charlie mulled the information over, said he’d get right on it, then added, “I sent over those photographs of Louis Agrounsky to your hotel an hour ago.”

“Thanks, Charlie.”

“He was a rarely photographed person so there isn’t much to go by. One set is the official pictures used on his project admittance badge and the other lifted from a motion picture film the government authorized for a news broadcast when the last space shot was made. It wasn’t our policy to let these men be well known and they preferred the anonymity anyway, so it was the best I could do. A detailed physical description is there too in case you need it.”

“Good. I’ll pick them up right now,” I said. “Heard anything on the hot-line circuits yet?”

“Tiger, we have every available technician checking out the entire system, but it’s so damn complex it will take a long time to locate the by-pass. One team is concentrating on how it could have been done to start with. There were supposed to be a dozen positive locks that would eliminate any possibility of accidental or deliberate firing except from the final control but there are still ways it could have been done by a man like Agrounsky as long as he was in charge of the system’s installation. It’s a pretty shaky deal, friend.”

“It could be worse.”

“Another note’s been added.”

I waited, saying nothing.

Charlie said, “One of the few people close to Agrounsky told us he had a peculiar off-duty hobby he had been working on for years—miniaturization of electronic components that would make transistors as out of date as a vacuum tube. He had a sub-mini circuit no bigger than a dime that could run a twenty-one-inch TV set an hour before it blew. He never explained his experiments and if he recorded his experiments, we haven’t been able to find any notes on it.”

“Damn!” I said.

“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking of,” Charlie told me quietly. “A remote control system that can activate a unit so completely hidden it will be impossible to find.”

“The entire hot line will have to be totally disassembled.”

“Tiger, we can’t afford it. Agrounsky must be found.”

“I know. Who was the friend who knew about his hobby?”

“Claude Boster, a technician still assigned to the Cape. He lives in Eau Gallie, Florida, but he has nothing more to say than what I’ve told you. We’ll still look for Agrounsky’s notes, but he probably took them with him.”

“Okay, Charlie, thanks, I’ll keep in touch.”

Twenty minutes later I was at the hotel, picked up the envelope he had delivered and took my first look at Louis Agrounsky. He was a harried little man crowding fifty, thin, partly bald with an intense look to his eyes and a tight, withdrawn set to his mouth. I stuck the photos in my pocket and walked out of the building.

When I spotted the first cruising cab I flagged it down and gave the driver the address of the Belt-Aire Electronics Corporation and settled back to watch the city go by on the way out over the Triborough Bridge.

Where, damn it, where!

I got out of the cab and walked up to the gate where a guard met me with a nod of recognition, checked my identification, and telephoned into the main office. Henry Stanton came out to meet me, still licking his lips with a nervous gesture, and ushered me inside.

“I ... hope everything is all right. Drink?”

“No thanks. I want to see Camille Hunt.”

“Certainly. I’ll have ...”

“I know where she is.”

“But you need a pass and ...”