The Revengers (13 page)

“I’m satisfied,” I said. It wasn’t the best possible way to put it, you could hardly call it satisfactory, but I knew what he meant.

“You can get the police on it now,” Brent said to Marco, and to me, “Let’s go.”

Try that on your J. Edgar Hoover some time, or whoever’s taking his place over there this week. A priority mission laid on just to let an agent say a final goodbye to a lady with whom he’d spent the night. So he keeps his people and they don’t wander off to the big glamor agencies where they’d be docked just for taking time off to attend the funeral. Of course there was more to it than that. There had been a small debt. I’d just kept his daughter from getting herself, and maybe him and us, into trouble.

And then, of course, there was the simple fact that he runs us direct from Washington without any intermediate field representatives, case officers, controls, or whatever the jargon is; and he knows us. He would have known that without this, I wouldn’t have been much use to him for a while. I wouldn’t have accepted suicide if I hadn’t been allowed to see it. I’d have had to get to work and dispel all doubts; and it would have taken time and might have caused trouble. Because—and he would have known this, too—there was guilt involved here as well as sentiment. After all, right or wrong, justified or unjustified, I was the one who had driven her into exile as she’d called it; and I was probably the one who’d brought this last trouble to her, or at least activated a trouble she’d already had.

1 don’t want to . . . help, she’d said when I told her what I needed to know, I don’t want to make anybody mad.

But driven by her own stiff pride she had helped, and I had let her, and somebody had got mad, or scared. Somebody who’d known her well enough to know how she’d react to that letter. Somebody who had just made a serious error. Killing her would have been bad, but it’s a commodity in which I deal myself upon occasion, so I don’t feel entitled to take a high moral stand on the subject. But breaking her with the one threat she really feared, forcing her to do it to herself, that was not acceptable. I wondered if the man who had done it to her now considered himself safe, having done it so cleverly without getting, as he thought, any blood on his hands. But he would have been much better off with the straightforward murder, if he felt she had to die. Now he would never be safe again, because when you do it like that, unacceptably, there will always be somebody coming after you.

Somebody like me.

But first there was an obligation to be discharged and a job to be done. The fact that Mac had gone to considerable trouble and expense to bring me here and let me see it for myself and satisfy myself that it was genuine, meant that I was now obliged to concentrate on the mission at hand, briefly interrupted for morale and information purposes. I could play Nemesis on my own time, later. Anyway, I wouldn’t help a dead woman much by letting a live one get killed; and there was even a possibility that the job of keeping Eleanor Brand unharmed would lead me, in the line of duty, straight to the man I wanted, which would certainly be the most convenient way of doing it.

“Have I still got a plane?” I asked Brent as we cruised easily back down the coast in the sharp-nosed speedster.

“Standing by. You want to get back to the Bahamas right away?”

He sounded, not exactly surprised, but a little relieved. I realized that Mac must have discussed with him over the phone my possible reactions to Harriet’s suicide; this was obviously the preferred one. I wondered what Brent’s instructions had called upon him to do if I’d announced my intention of staying here and, for instance, beating hell out of a guy named Benny to learn from whom he’d gotten the envelope he’d delivered to
Queenfisher
the previous afternoon. But that would have been a waste of effort. If the man I wanted was stupid enough to be traced so easily, I’d have no trouble catching up with him later, when I had time to put my mind to it. I didn’t think it was going to be that simple.

I said, “I asked Fred to mind the store while I was gone, but I don’t like leaving him alone too long.”

“Fred’s a good man,” Brent said. I liked him for saying it, knowing as he must that Fred and I hadn’t always gotten along as well as we might. It showed he wasn’t intimidated by my stratospheric seniority.

“I know,” I said, “he’s competent enough, but this isn’t really his line of work. And that blond pistol-packing gofer Brand has with her, Peterson, is strictly nothing.” I glanced aft, but Queenfisher was no longer visible astern. “You’ll see that. . . everything is taken care of, won’t you?”

He nodded. “What about family?”

I said, “Maybe. They’ve been thinking she drowned years ago, but if that letter is made public they may want to do something. Or maybe not. Just so it’s done right by somebody.” I seemed to be involved with a lot of funerals lately. Well, just two, but that’s a lot when the people being buried are people you’d liked.

Brent nodded. After a moment he said, “I’ll check out Benjamin Crowe, but I doubt that’ll get us very far. Our man’s probably too smart to trip himself up that way; and the police will grill Benny about the letter anyway.”

“That’s my feeling.” I drew a long breath and glanced at him, patting the instrument cowling in front of me. “Look, can we thrash this thing a bit?”

He grinned. “I thought you’d never ask. Buckle up or she’ll toss you in the drink.” When we had fastened the straps, he said, “Okay, you’re the throttle man, go for it.”

I reached for the knobbed levers and eased them forward. He’d been handling them with one hand, steering with the other, but you don’t work wheel and throttles simultaneously when one of those things really starts to go; each is a full-time job. Soon the big mills aft were talking loudly, then roaring, then screaming. Brent cut out of the coastal channel known as Hawk Channel and over the reef out into the violet-blue Gulf Stream, where a southeast wind was kicking up a chop. I had to watch the seas coming at us and play the throttles accordingly; and there was no more time for regret or guilt. Finally I missed one badly, she came off the wave flying and landed with a crash that would certainly have cracked a vertebra or two if anybody’d been sitting down, unable to cushion the shock with the knees.

She stuck her nose right through the next one and a tidal wave sluiced down the foredeck and exploded against the rudimentary windshield, half-drowning us both. I pulled the levers back hastily and we stood there laughing. It had been a release of sorts and, having gotten rid of something black and violent, I probably wouldn’t kill the next clumsy sonofabitch who jostled me on the street.

“Can you keep after it?” I asked Brent later as we were driving away from the glass house with the dock, leaving the boat as we’d found it. When he glanced at me questioningly I said, “After all, this is supposed to be just sparetime stuff for you, isn’t it? You’ve got other things to do.”

He grinned. “Actually, to answer the question you were so careful not to ask, I’m a lawyer. Low man in the office, bucking for a partnership; but they know I have a mysterious sideline connected with law-enforcement that takes me away occasionally. They don’t mind. A little practical experience is good for the image, and police and government connections don’t hurt the office, either.” He glanced at me, and grinned again. “And to answer another question you didn’t ask, like how did a nice girl like you etc., etc., well, the way it happened was, I did some work "for a guy when I was just out of law school. Legal work, but it led me into some rougher places than it was supposed to. He really should have got some rent-a-cops on it, but he wanted it kept very quiet, just between the two of us; and I guess he was satisfied with the way I finally worked it out by myself. Apparently he mentioned me to somebody he knew in Washington and one evening I got a phone call. . . . Well, you know how it goes.”

As a matter of fact, I didn’t know how it went. I’d never had the standby experience; I’d come up by a different route, full-time all the way. But on our agency budget we can’t afford to keep permanent employees stationed all over the world like those well-heeled people out in Langley; and I suppose it brings a little excitement and money into the lives of the conventional citizens, carefully screened, who contract to keep themselves available to help the mysterious stranger in black with the tied-down guns when he moves in to clean up the town.

Brent seemed to be a pretty high-class specimen of the standby breed, I reflected; more than just an underground switchboard operator. He’d handled a boat for us at least once that I knew of, when the navigation had been very tricky. Anyway, I always have more faith in those who are clearly in it just for the kicks with maybe some thought for the fact that they could be helping their country, than in those who do it strictly for the cash.

“As for your original question,” Brent said. “I knew the lady too, remember? I don’t like what was done to her, either. What do you want me to work on?”

“First, I want you to check the pay phone on the sea wall near her boat, just opposite the marina restaurant,” I said. “Get somebody to look for bugs who knows how; let’s hope there hasn’t been time enough for it to be removed. I doubt she went out of her way to tell anybody she’d spilled the beans, so how did they know? She had a plug-in phone on her boat, but I was careful to use the booth when I called you—at least I thought I was being careful. But maybe somebody was even more careful and bugged both instruments, just to know what she was up to. And her stupid goddamned guests.”

Brent said, “I think I know a local man who can handle that. What else?”

I shook my head ruefully. “I can’t give you a good directive. I’d say boats and strangers. Did she stumble on something peculiar out on the water and was she seen doing it? Did she notice somebody hanging around who didn’t fit . and get curious? I don’t know. It doesn’t agree with her policy of minding her own business; but if she felt herself threatened in some way, maybe . . . damn it,
somehow
she got hold of the information she gave me; and the people involved knew she had it. They checked on her and learned about her hidden past and used it to keep her quiet.”

“Maybe,” Brent said, “but that’s a lot of guessing, isn’t it?”

I shook my head again, irritably. “It’s got to be like that. She was a changed woman, amigo, so what had changed her? They leaned on her and it killed her a little to go along with them, but she couldn’t bear the thought of the alternative. But it made her feel less than a woman, it destroyed things for her, everything she’d built up here, her whole new identity. The hard and competent Captain Harriet Robinson, what a phony! She lost faith in herself, learning that she could be blackmailed like that; that she wasn’t strong enough to tell them to publish and be damned. That wasn’t the proud, brave picture of herself she’d carried all her life; and then I came along—a man out of her past—and saw how much she’d been, well, damaged by yielding to their threats. She realized how she looked to me now, timid and insecure, and that was more than she could stand. So she got mad and blew the whistle on them and to hell with the consequences. But what did she see she wasn’t supposed to? Whom did she see who didn’t want to be seen?”

Brent said, “Boats and strangers. I’ll check it out as well as I can.”

I said, “Watch your back. Somebody could be prepared to fire off more than correspondence and carbon copies thereof, if you know what I mean.” I grinned. “This is kind of funny work for a legal eagle.”

“Listen to who’s talking. It’s even funnier work for an ex-camera-jockey,” Brent said. “Incidentally, I got you a basic photo outfit; it’s in the plane. Anything I forgot, you can pick up in Nassau, probably cheaper.”

I said, “You’ll make some woman a damned fine husband, or have you already? No, that’s right, you said you weren’t married.”

He shook his head. “Would I be sticking my neck out for a bunch of spooks if I had a family to think of?”

“Well, watch that neck,” I said, wishing I could send him out to the ranch in Arizona for a quick course of training. He was very good material, but there were too many things he didn’t know that could get him killed.

A couple of hours later, with darkness falling, the taciturn moustached pilot set me down on Providence Island light as a feather, and I headed for a taxi to take me in to Nassau. I was halfway there before I realized that I still didn’t know his name, but maybe he wanted it that way. They often do, in this business.

It was just as well that I was tired and preoccupied and therefore a bit slow, because when I let myself into my room with my key, the light was on and an unfamiliar black gentleman in shirt-sleeves was pouring liquor into two glasses on the dresser. An unfamiliar black lady was emerging from the bathroom wearing jeweled, glittering evening sandals with high slim heels, and dark panty hose. She was quite a handsome lady. Her naked breasts were magnificent and so was her poise as she reached calmly for a not very opaque red negligee thrown over the back of a nearby chair.

“And who might you be?” she asked, wrapping the thin bright garment about her without haste.

“Get the hell out of here,” said the man.

I glanced at the key I’d carried all day, and at the door. The numbers matched. “I was under the impression this was my room,” I said.

“Suppose you go down to the desk and get your impressions corrected,” said the handsome black lady.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I will certainly do that. My apologies.”

“Accepted,” she said. “Conditionally, contingent upon a speedy withdrawal.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

Back in the corridor, I pulled the door shut behind me and stood there for a moment breathing deeply, because it had been too damned close. If the woman hadn’t come out of the bathroom in that disarming state of undress, if the man had been off to the side instead of straight in front where I could see him clearly, and if he had made a hasty move as he might well have done, I could not have helped reacting violently to a strange and apparently hostile character coming for me in a hotel room I knew to be mine. We don’t survive by waiting for formal introductions under such circumstances. I settled the Smith and Wesson, that I’d half drawn, back where it belonged, and grinned. She certainly was a spectacular person with a fine command of the English language. As I headed back toward the elevators, Fred came hurrying toward me, breathless.