The By-Pass Control (17 page)

“Not at all.”

“Unless you’d like to talk about it.”

“I’ve said it all, Captain.”

“Let’s go then,” he said and got up with a sigh to move to the door and wait on me.

It was the driver of the other squad car who recognized me. Before I could get in beside Hardecker, he came over and leaned on the window and tapped my shoulder. “You were with Mr. Boster when somebody shot at him, weren’t you?”

There wasn’t any sense denying it. “That’s right.”

“I think you got a live one, Captain.”

Hardecker looked at me slowly, his mouth twisting into a small smile. “That true, mister?”

“I was there.”

“Maybe we got plenty to talk about after all, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not especially.”

The Captain looked across me and said, “Follow us, Pete, then go pick up Boster. Maybe together they’ll have something to say. You find anything in this guy’s room?”

“Nope. Just clothes. He’s clean.”

Hardecker gave me another one of those funny smiles. “You don’t happen to have a weapon on you, do you?”

“It’s a hell of a time to ask, but I don’t.”

His voice rumbled in a deep chuckle. “Don’t worry, I could have told if you had. I can smell ’em.”

Just so he wouldn’t feel too sure of himself I chuckled back and said, “I don’t really need them.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, but he gave me a peculiar look as though he were seeing me for the first time and his smile faded completely away. He switched the key on, pulled the lever into gear and dug out into the street.

I let them put me through the entire procedure, mugging me for their files, printing me, taking me into the office that served as an interrogation room, then being offered a chair and cigarettes across the table from Hardecker. The patrolman he had called Pete came in to report that Claude Boster was not at home, nor did he say where he was going. Hardecker told him to make periodic checks until he found him and get him down as soon as possible.

Only then did he sit back comfortably, his hands resting in his lap. After a minute of steady watching he said, “Now I know something is screwy here, Mr. er ...”

“Mann is my right name.” I grinned at him.

“By now,” he told me, “most people would be screaming for a lawyer or wanting to make a phone call or yelling that we were violating their rights. That sort of thing, you know?”

“I know.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“What for?”

“You might have something to hide.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“It’s more than that, isn’t it?”

“Possibly.”

“You know,” he said, “you could have squawked and we never would’ve been able to print you.” He leaned on his elbows and cupped his chin in his hands. “That isn’t natural, is it?”

“I’ve been printed before.”

“No doubt. So you’re playing for time. I’d like to know why.”

“It’s easier this way than explaining,” I said.

“Would it be easier if I locked you up until I found out what this was all about?”

“It wouldn’t matter,” I said easily. “Do what you like.”

“Let’s give it a try,” he said.

The jail was clean and modern, the cell he gave me freshly scrubbed with a window facing the south that let in a fat rectangle of striped sunlight. “Any time you want to talk,” Hardecker reminded me, “I’ll be upstairs. I’m looking forward to some interesting conversation, Mr. Mann. The reporters are too. There hasn’t been this much excitement around here in a long time. All kinds of speculation going on.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said and sat down on the cot and lit up a butt. The door clanged shut and they left.

I had to wait it out. It was all I could do. One thing going for me was that they couldn’t locate Claude Boster. If he got picked up before I got to him and brought Louis Agrounsky’s name into the deal, then everything could go to hell all at once. I looked at my watch. It was about two o’clock and I was hungry.

Maybe Agrounsky was hungry too. Not for food. For something more potent. For something he had to shoot into his veins to give him that thing he needed so badly. The pattern was beginning to make sense now. Dr. Carlson had nailed it down without knowing it, putting the lid on the kind of temperament Louis Agrounsky really had. Agrounsky was an addict. He couldn’t stay away from the stuff, even after he was thought to be cured, and found himself a source of supply to take care of his needs.

That was as much as it took. Under the influence of the big H all his fears and frustrations came out of the shadows and he thought he was big enough to wipe them out by himself. But somewhere along the line he talked to somebody, or was recognized, and his addiction was stored away in the memory bank of a Soviet dossier until it was needed. To satisfy his need for the stuff he wiped himself out financially, selling everything, until he had nothing left to sell ... except one thing.

And the Soviets had the payoff means. One kilo of H properly cut could serve an addict for a long, long time. It was a very tempting arrangement. Now the big question—was it planned or did it happen accidentally?

They brought the evening paper with my supper and I had a chance to see pictures of the devastation at the motel and my name in the papers as T. Marvin, the one I had registered with. I grinned at that, because whatever Hardecker thought, he was too wary to play with something that didn’t smell right. There was always time later to correct a mistake like that ... unless some reporter didn’t take it at face value and checked the police blotter. The story was descriptive rather than informative and gave out few pertinent details. The identity of the dead man hadn’t been established yet, nor his motive, and I was mentioned as simply being held for questioning.

At ten P.M. the guard came down the hall, turned the key in the lock and opened the door. “You got a visitor, Mann.”

“Who?”

“Says he’s a friend of yours. Dave Elroy.”

“Sure.” I got up and followed him down the corridor and up into the main building where I was waved into a room where Dave was sitting, a fat grin on his face. The guard left the door open and stood there unconcernedly, but taking it all in.

“Hi, Dave.”

“Wait till the boys at the plant hear about this. How you doing?”

“Great. Nice suite facing the water.” I looked around the room and spotted the two bugs without any trouble, letting my eyes deliberately point out the microphones. Dave nodded, having already seen them himself, and offered me a cigarette. I said, “What’re you doing here?”

“What’s a friend for? Want out?”

“Nope. I could have put up bail myself.”

“Only you’re the stubborn type. Who blew the car?”

“Beats me. Some nut.”

“World’s full of ’em. Anything you need?”

“Not a thing.”

“No sense sticking around then.”

“How you making out, Dave?” I asked casually.

“Fine. My old customers came through with some new contacts and it’s paid off. This is virgin territory for a good salesman. Half the time you don’t even have to sell ... they look for you to buy from you. One guy was such a good customer he wiped out a stockpile in no time at all. Had to move on because he couldn’t get goods any more. Business squeeze that was ... one of the big companies put the pressure on the little guys so he was cut off and had to deal with them, only they cut their own throats because he skipped and got his material from someplace else. Business is rough, sometimes. Even with the anti-trust and monopoly laws they still pull that stuff.”

I nodded. “Well, it doesn’t pay to grow too big,” I said.

Dave got up and stretched. “I’ll stop around again if you need anything. Give me a call sometime. I’ll speak to the Captain on the way out. He doesn’t seem too unfriendly.”

“Nice guy. Very patient.”

“He can afford to be,” Dave told me.

“So can I.”

When Dave left, the guard took me back to the cell, locked me in and ten minutes later the lights went out automatically. An hour later a couple of boisterous drunks were brought in, locked up several cells down, and before dawn a pair of bearded teenagers staging some kind of a demonstration outside the project area were hustled in and tossed half crying into the can. What those guys needed was a tour of duty in some damn jungle.

Breakfast came at six and Hardecker at eight. He came down alone, opened the cell himself and nodded me out. I picked up my coat and hat, automatically went to the desk to collect my belongings that were held in a brown manila envelope and signed the receipt for them.

Hardecker let me put everything back in my pocket before saying, “Let’s go into the office a minute.”

“Sure.”

He closed the door and sat down, his face tight and a wariness in his eyes. “You could have told me, Mann.”

“Told you what?”

“Just who you were. I could have checked instead of sticking my neck into a goddamn noose.”

“So?”

“There was a delay in getting a report back on your prints. Then the teletype started and I had to get on the phone to Washington. I had people crawling up my back wanting to know what the hell was going on and all I could give them was the details and that was enough. I got orders to lay off you and keep my big mouth shut and to play this your way no matter how you wanted it played.” He paused and pursed his lips. “Who the hell are you, buddy?”

“Just a citizen, Captain.”

“How big?”

“Big.”

“Why?” he asked me seriously.

“If I told you you’d never believe it.”

“And supposing I did?”

“Then you’d wish I had never told you so you could sleep at night without wondering when it was all going to end.”

“What end?”

I looked at the sunshine coming in the window. “That,” I said.

He waited a few seconds, tight lines drawing in around his eyes, before he said,
“Crazy!”
almost under his breath. “What do you want me to do?”

“Kill that story. As far as the press is concerned, the guy who pulled it was a mental case who had done the same thing before. He didn’t need a motive ... something like a firebug.”

Hardecker looked down into his hands and nodded. “Okay, that’s easy as long as a real ID doesn’t show and the reporters don’t get it if it does. Do you know who he was?”

“No.”

“What else?”

“Forget Claude Boster. Don’t tie us together. They were not related affairs.”

“For my own information, were they?”

“I don’t know. My guess is that they were but I’m not sure.”

“Damn it,” he said, “what kind of a lash-up is this anyway?”

“An international one, Captain. Nothing’s being taken out of your hands. We’re just requesting your help. That’s why I preferred to spend the night in the cooler rather than spread the news around. Like I said, it’s easier that way.”

“Not on my nerves, Mann. Where will you be staying? ... as long as you’re here ... and not that I expect you to be around long the way people are going after your skin.”

“The same place,” I told him. “It’s as good as any now.”

The manager at the motel wouldn’t have been a bit happy about seeing me if a TWX from Martin Grady hadn’t arrived. It covered all his damages plus a substantial overpayment that could put a new wing on his establishment. Dave Elroy had been hard at it all night, smoothing things out even to the point of having another rental car waiting for me outside the office. It was from the same company who had supplied the first, so Grady had made his point with them too.

A work crew had already cleared away most of the rubble and I walked over and watched them a minute. I stared at them idly, then strolled past them to the clump of bushes thirty feet away where I had thrown the hand. It was still there, still grasping upwards stiffly at nothing. I wondered how many people it had killed before becoming a
thing
lying there in the grass, and I walked on down to my room.

The gun was still there, dusty now from the continuous stream of air blowing over it, so I pulled it down, disassembled the piece, cleaned it thoroughly, dropped it back together and put it on where it belonged. Then I lay back on the bed and picked up the phone.

Claude Boster still hadn’t returned, though he had called his housekeeper and told her he would probably be back in the evening. Vincent Small’s phone went unanswered completely, so I quit trying and stayed there, waiting. An hour later Dave Elroy rang, told me to meet him at the Rose Bar in fifteen minutes, and hung up.

It was a small unit built to accommodate the construction crews working at the space project, a combination bar and restaurant that had been added on to several times, primitive enough to keep down the overhead, but stocking enough liquor to account for heavy payroll tastes.

Dave was at a table in the back where he could see everything going on, next to a window so he could watch outside too.
I
walked up, ordered another beer, and slid in opposite him.

“Hello, jailbird,” he said.

“Drop dead.”

He grinned at me and sipped his beer. “Tell me something, Tiger, why didn’t you nail that guy who tried to disintegrate you beforehand?”

“Because he might have been too damn smart to get caught. Once away he would have stayed away and somebody else would have been brought in. At least this way we scratched one assassin and got an ID besides.”

Dave’s eyebrows went up questioningly.

I said, “I found the hand and got prints from it. Nobody else got anything. I should be getting a report from Ernie sometime today.”

“Clever, Tiger, clever. Excuse me for asking.”

“What about you? I got the double-talk, all right, but how about the details?”

Dave finished his beer and signaled for another. “There was some H flowing in here, all right. Not much, but enough to supply a couple dozen users. One guy handled it all from a jobber in Miami. Then he turned his trade over to somebody else ... a guy they called Fish. No other name. Just Fish. He laid it on heavier than his predecessor, so he either located some new customers or built up the old ones.