The Poisoners (14 page)

A good many years of experience have taught me to view with suspicion difficult cases that conveniently and unexpectedly solve themselves, and villains—or villainesses—who are obliging enough to kill themselves after kindly confessing their guilt. Anyway, the cerebral machinery kept spinning busily, reviewing the events of the past few days.

Lying there, I had to relive the whole affair, including the final ghoulish details involved in putting back into the sea, dead, the small female body I had so recently fished out of it alive; I hadn’t enjoyed the task, but it had seemed like the logical solution. Mac had wanted it done inconspicuously, and with a little luck, this should be inconspicuous enough for anybody.

The authorities would find the wrecked car. Nearby, they’d probably find, washed up on the rocks, some scraps at least of the artistically tattered costume Beverly had thrown into the sea. They would assume that the dazed—perhaps hysterical—owner of the smashed automobile, stumbling about on the low cliffs in the early morning darkness, had managed to fall over the edge, and had then shed her hampering garments in her futile efforts to swim to safety.

A little farther down the coast, depending on the currents—I’d brought her back as near to the scene as I’d dared—they might or might not find the body. If they did, there would be no obvious signs of poison, I was fairly sure. She’d been a pro working for pros. What she’d used had been fast, effective, and undoubtedly reasonably undetectable.

A county coroner, or whoever performed the duties of that office here in Mexico, would be unlikely to spot it. I didn’t think anybody would even notice that there was less water in the lungs than usual in cases of drowning. If they did, well, she’d been through a serious crash before she hit the water; she could have died as a belated result of internal injuries. Scratch one
turista
, possibly drunk, who’d failed to negotiate a curve in her expensive Yankee convertible.

A knock on the door made me sit up and swing my stockinged feet to the floor. “Just a minute,” I called. “I’ll be right there, Miss Devlin.”

Of course, it didn’t have to be Charlie Devlin, although it was time she arrived. It could be the Mexican police, perhaps having obtained my description and license number from the pickup-truck-load of native citizens who’d seen Beverly and me by the roadside near the wreck.

I didn’t really think those citizens would volunteer information to the cops even if they heard it was wanted. Mexicans, as far as I know, have no more love for getting involved than anyone else. Nevertheless, I had to keep in mind the possibility that the local law was smarter and more suspicious than I’d hoped, and had traced me here somehow—in which case I could only act as much as possible as if the last thing in the world I was expecting to see, when I opened the door, was a policeman. The knock came again, more impatiently, as I finished tying my shoestrings.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming, Charlie!” I shouted. “Let a man put his shoes on, will…!”

Speaking, I crossed the room and yanked open the door, and stopped without completing the sentence. It wasn’t Charlie Devlin, standing there in the hall. It wasn’t the Mexican constabulary, either. It was the willowy blonde, the elongated acrobatic dancer, Frank Warfel’s current playmate. Her presence didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to me, although she was certainly preferable to a policeman. We faced each other in silence for a moment.

Then she asked, “Who’s Charlie?”

“Just a girl I know,” I said.

“Lucky you,” she said brightly, “to know a girl named Charlie.”

“I also know a girl named Bobbie,” I said, since it seemed to be that kind of a conversation. “What can I do for you, Bobbie? Excuse me. I mean, of course, Miss Prince.”

She gave me her wide, delicious, sexy, meaningless Hollywood smile. “Probably you can do lots of things for me, darling. We’ll have to talk about it some time. But right now, The Man wants to see you.”

I studied her for a moment, dubiously. She wasn’t really a bad-looking girl, and I don’t want to give the impression that I like them fat, or even pleasantly plump. I just felt she was overdoing the hipless, bustless bit. Actually, she looked better in street clothes than in the sexy satin lounging pajamas in which I’d last seen her, which had emphasized her narrowness.

Now she had on a checked black-and-white pantsuit that would have made any other woman look broad as a barge; it only made her transverse dimensions seem practically normal. There were wide, floppy trousers and a long jacket thing without sleeves—maybe it qualified as an overgrown vest—and a soft white silk blouse. Her shoes were the square-toed, square-heeled jobs dictated by current fashion; apparently Frank Warfel only demanded spike heels at home. Her face was made up so dramatically that, with the striking blonde hair—now worn seductively loose down her shoulders—you just knew she had to be a big movie star. The game was to determine which one she was being this week.

“Frankie wants to see me?” I said. “What about?”

She gave me the wide, wet, irresistible movie smile once more. “Who reads minds?” she asked. “He takes me into his bed, not into his confidence, darling. I don’t know what the hell he wants to see you about. Why don’t you ask him?”

“Where?”

“In my room. Right down the hall, darling.”

It wasn’t right. I mean, her eyes weren’t right and her casual manner wasn’t right, and she was hitting me over the head with too many darlings. It was a set-up, a deadfall, a trap. I’d been around long enough to smell them, and this one had the characteristic sour stink of betrayal.

Anyway, if Frank Warfel had wanted me for casual conversation, he wouldn’t have used his special, acrobatic blonde as a messenger. He’d have sent one of his ordinary errand boys as he had before. The presence of the girl meant that, for some, reason, he felt that a little sex appeal was advisable this time to render me unsuspicious and vulnerable. On the other hand, I reflected, with all of desolate Baja California outside to choose from, it seemed unlikely that he’d pick a public hostelry to murder me in.

Anyway, as I’ve said, I wasn’t happy with the case, even though my part of it should have been at an end. If Frank Warfel was setting traps for agents of the U.S. government, it might be interesting to know why. Idle curiosity isn’t encouraged in the profession, but this seemed like a justifiable bit of research.

“Lead the way,” I told the girl cheerfully.

She didn’t move at once. She hesitated, studying my face. I had a hunch she was toying with the idea of issuing a warning. Then she moved her narrow shoulders in the minutest of shrugs, turned, and walked ahead of me down the hall. She stopped in front of a door, knocked, and turned to give me her photogenic smile once more. Still smiling, with no change of expression whatever, she kicked me hard on the shin.

The toe of her fashionable shoe must have been reinforced for just that purpose. As I bent over with the sudden pain, the door opened, and a big man reached out to chop with his hand at the back of my neck. He caught me as I fell and dragged me inside.

I lay on the bed where I’d been dumped and listened to the voices. One was familiar. I’d heard it only once before, in a Los Angeles apartment, but after a little I placed it as belonging to the man called Jake, official frisker and bodyguard to Frank Warfel. Well, that figured.

This voice said, “Here you are, sir. One snub-nosed .38, one wallet with cards identifying a Mr. Matthew Helm, one customer’s copy of a rental-car agreement paid up by credit card in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and one used one-way TWA ticket from Albuquerque to Los Angeles.”

The second voice, responding, didn’t figure at all. It was not Frank Warfel’s voice. It was higher and shriller, kind of peevish. After a rustle of paper, it said: “New Mexico. Looks like he did a lot of driving there the last few weeks. Could there be a connection? Has Frankie been doing any visiting a couple of states to the east, recently?”

“No, but his girl could have, the Blaine dame,” Jake said. “Three times in the last couple of months Frankie lent her a driver and she took off in that hopped-up little Pontiac with the fat tires. We never could manage to tail them. That Willy Hansen’s lousy in traffic, or pretends to be, but give him an open road and nothing can catch him. I mean, he flies low and fast. But they were always heading east when the boys lost them.”

“But that’s not the way Frankie was heading just now when you lost
him
.” The unknown man’s voice had a tart, sarcastic sound.

Jake was apologetic. “Hell, Mr. Tillery, it’s a big ocean, and keeping track of a boat in all that fog and mist… Anyway, there was a heavy swell running, nothing to bother a vessel the size of the
Fleetwind
, but the boys in their little power cruiser took quite a beating.”

“Extend to them my sincere sympathy,” said the man called Tillery, “and then fire them and get yourself some real sailors. And maybe some real drivers, too.” There was a little pause. “I thought you told me the
Fleetwind
was tied up for repairs.”

“That’s what I heard Frankie say. Something about needing a new generator fitting, or something. That’s why the boys weren’t quite ready to—”

“In other words, Frankie made monkeys of you.”

“Maybe so, Mr. Tillery,” said Jake doggedly, “but we did manage to find where he’s going and when he’ll be back. He’s planning to make his first dope pickup at Bernardo tonight. He’ll be back at his usual dock tomorrow night like nothing had happened, like he’s been doing ever since he got the boat. If he’s left alone, he’ll land the shipment in a day or two. If the law comes aboard, he’ll pump it out the trick seagoing john he’s got rigged. I hate to think of it, considering what the stuff is worth.”

“I hate worse to think of his being caught with it, and so do the directors of the corporation. We’ll have to make sure it doesn’t happen.” Tillery was silent briefly; then he asked: “Did you find anything else on this man?”

“Just the usual keys and change and matches and stuff. Oh, and a good-sized pocket knife, nice and sharp. I don’t figure he uses it just to trim his nails.”

“You say he’s a government man. How do you know? There’s no badge or I.D. card here.”

“Frankie had his motel room and phone bugged. The boys heard him calling Washington, D.C., checking in with the guy he works for. The name wasn’t mentioned, or the department, but Frankie seemed to think it was spy stuff, like C.I.A. or something.”

“The damn fool!” Tillery’s voice was definitely peevish now. “It’s not enough that he gets himself and the corporation mixed up in some far-out dope-smuggling deal; he’s got to get us all involved with a female foreign spook as well—
and
help her kill a U.S. agent. Don’t we have government trouble enough without getting the cloak-and-dagger boys down on us? Damn it, Jake, I wish you’d alerted me sooner!”

Jake was still on the defensive. “I called as soon as I had something definite to report, just like you told me, Mr. Tillery. I’d already warned you about the dope angle, way back when Frankie started fooling with the boat and all. And I’d told you the girl he was playing footsie with wasn’t exactly the little Hollywood tramp she pretended to be, not with the hardware she was packing and the contacts she kept slipping off to make.”

“But you never did manage to identify any of her contacts, did you?”

“Hell, the girl is… was a professional, Mr. Tillery; and you said we should be careful not to alert either her or Frankie. We did manage to catch a glimpse of her with one man, a Chinese character, kind of a Charlie Chan type, big and smooth and plump with a little mustache—”

It was the most interesting piece of information I’d received since arriving on the West Coast. It scrambled all my previous ideas about the assignment so thoroughly that, trying to sort them out once more, I missed some of what Jake was saying.

“…no, sir, we never identified him,” he finished up. “Hell, who’s going to tail a chink in that part of San Francisco? Might as well try to shadow a nigger through Harlem.”

“A black man, Jake, please. We must display no prejudice these days. What about our guest here? You’re certain it was the murder that brought him on the scene?”

“Yes, sir. He went straight to the hospital when he got to L.A. Seems like the redhead who was shot belonged to his government department or bureau or whatever they call it—the real redhead, not Frankie’s little dame with a dye job, the one who did the shooting. This guy was sent to find out who killed their girl and settle the account. It was a definite contract. The boys heard him get his orders over the phone. It shook up Frankie and his dame, they hadn’t expected anything like that from the government, I guess, at least Frankie hadn’t. They tried some fancy play-acting to throw our friend here off the scent, using Basher Brown as a patsy, but this government character was too smart to buy their script—”

Roberta Prince’s sultry voice broke in, sounding offended: “Who’re you calling Frankie’s dame? Frankie’s ex-dame,
if
you please! I’m Frankie’s dame now, and God help me if he learns I’ve sold him out.”

“Sweetheart, you’re just camouflage,” Jake said bluntly. “I heard them talking. The other chick was planning to leave, even before the shooting happened. She had important business somewhere else—”

“You couldn’t find out where, Jake?” This was Tillery. “It might give us a lead.”

“To what? We know definitely that the lab is somewhere in that crummy Bernardo trailer village up the coast. We know Frankie’s on his way there with his boat to pick up a load—”

“What I want to know is what else he’s got us mixed up in
besides
dope!”

“I wouldn’t know that, Mr. Tillery,” Jake said. “I just know Frankie picked this kid, here, out of her night club act to make it look like he’d got tired of the other one and booted her out. That way there wouldn’t be any questions asked when she turned up missing.”

“Gee, thanks a lot for the compliment!” Roberta’s voice was sharp. “Just the same, if he knew where I was and what I was doing here, he’d kill me!”