Man on a leash

by Charles Williams

  He turned now and looked at her. She lay on her back, nude beside him in the faint illumination of the bedroom, totally relaxed, fluid, and pliant, a composition in chiaroscuro with the soft gleam of the thighs and the triangular wedge of velvet black at their juncture, the dark nipples of the spread and flattened breasts, pale blur of face, and the dark hair and the shadows of her eyes. This began to excite him again, and he turned and kissed her softly on the throat. It was after two in the morning now, and they had made love three times already, the last time very slowly and lingeringly, during which she had had a whole series of convulsive orgasms. Well, you could always try.

  She pushed his hand away. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve, calling your father a stud.”

  “Cut it out. I haven’t slept with another woman since I met you.”

  “Well, I should hope not. I don’t see how you could work one into your schedule.”

  “It’s just that I’ve been three weeks at sea. And I’m crazy about you.”

  She reached over on the nightstand and lighted a cigarette. The tip glowed red in the darkness. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Wait a few minutes and try again.”

  “Oh, that I know. If there’d been even the faintest doubt you’d keep trying, I’d have engulfed you like a Venus flytrap. You poor innocent, growing up in military schools.” She puffed on the cigarette. Her nipples looked purple in the glow. “I mean, what are you going to do about your father and the money he left you?”

  “Three things,” he replied. “I thought about it all the way driving down tonight. I’ll tell you the third one first, since it involves you. Instead of selling them, for a change I’m going to buy a boat. I mean, one whole hell of a lot of boat. Money will be no problem. I get about a hundred and fifty thousand from the estate, and I’ve got a little over that myself, savings and so on and the money I got for my franchise in Costa Rica—”

  “You mean from the CIA.”

  “Are you still on that? I tell you I was working for myself.”

  “All right, all right, you were just an innocent businessman. Go on about the boat.”

  “Say a thirty-five to forty-foot ketch, which is about all two people can handle without having to work too hard at it. Everything on it—self-steering vane, radiotelephone, fathometer, Kenyon log, diesel auxiliary, tanks for a cruising range of four hundred miles under power, generator, refrigerator. You can do all that with a fairly small boat if you’re just putting in cruising accommodations for two, and you can do it for sixty thousand or less.

  “We’ll take a long cruise, down the west coast as far as Panama, across to the Galapagos, back up to Hawaii, and then out through the Marianas and Carolines. How about it?”

  “Mmmmm—I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s don’t go into that now. What are the other two things you’re going to do?”

  “The first is I’m going to find that son of a bitch who murdered the old man. And then I’m going to light one of those Havana cigars and smoke it very slowly right down to the end while he’s begging me to call the police.”

  “And you wonder why I’m doubtful about marrying you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re just as arrogant and self-sufficient and ruthless as he was. Make up your own laws, and the hell with civilization.”

  “You ever hear of a place called Murmansk?” he asked.

  “Sure. It’s a Russian seaport in the Arctic. Why?”

  He tried to tell her—dispassionately, of course, since this was hardly the setting for the kind of cold rage that had kept growing in him driving down from Nevada—tried to tell her of the gales, the snow, sleet, ships solidly encased in ice, dive-bomber attacks, submarine wolf packs, and the eternal, pitiless cold that could kill a man in the water in minutes. He hadn’t known any of this at the time, of course; he was only a very young boy leading a very easy existence in an upper-class Havana suburb, but he’d learned it later through reading about those convoy runs in World War II and what it was like to carry aviation gasoline and high explosives up across the top of the world while the Germans and the merciless Barents Sea did their level best to kill you. His father had done it, for months on end, along with a lot of other men who could have found cozier backwaters to ride out the war if they’d tried.

  “He was out there taking his chances where some real hairy people were gunning for him, and then he winds up on a garbage dump, tied up and blindfolded so some chickenshit punk can shoot him in the back of the head.”

  “Well, the police are looking for them, aren’t they?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure. After a fashion, and for the wrong people for the wrong motives.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The heroin angle. I think the whole thing was a plant. And it worked, at least so far. They got just the situation they wanted: The sheriff’s department in Coleville has jurisdiction because that’s where it happened, but they’re convinced the crime was committed by professional hoodlums from San Francisco. The San Francisco police will help as much as they can, but they’re not about to run a temperature over a dead man in Nevada; they’ve got a dead man of their own—a whole morgue full of ‘em and more coming in by the hour. We’ll be in touch, fellas; how’s the weather up there? And neither police force, Coleville or San Francisco, is going to start a crusade over a rubbed-out heroin dealer: Well, that’s one son of a bitch we don’t have to contend with anymore; they ought to do it more often.”

  “Then you think he was killed for that money he drew out of the bank? Somebody knew about it.”

  “No. He was forced to draw it out of the bank; and then the same people killed him. You can futz around with it until you’re blue in the face, and you’ll never make a case for his having drawn that money out voluntarily.”

  “You mean extortion?” she asked. “A threat of some kind?”

  “Right.”

  “But how? They said he came into the bank alone. What was to keep him from calling the police?”

  “Richter just has to be wrong about it, that’s all. Somebody was covering him, and they missed it. What other forms of extortion are there? He was too tough to pay blackmail, even if they had something really serious on him, which I don’t believe for a minute. Kidnap? I’m the only family he had, and nobody tried to kidnap me.”

  “Maybe they’d read ‘The Ransom of Red Chief,’ “ she said.

  “Smartass.”

  “How are you going to find out?”

  “Go talk to Richter and Winegaard, to begin with.”

  “Did they teach you investigative techniques in the CIA? Or just interrogation—the iron maiden—bastinado?”

  “Will you cut it out? CIA!”

  “Didn’t you know you talk in your sleep?”

  “I do?”

  “Scared you, didn’t I? Well, you do, but it’s always in Spanish. I’ve been thinking of enrolling at Berlitz.”

  “I’m probably talking to the other drivers; Berlitz doesn’t teach that kind of Spanish. Anyway, why wouldn’t I speak it? My mother was Cuban, and I lived in Havana most of the time until I was fourteen, when she died.”

  “I know. And then you gave up a career in professional baseball to become a stodgy old businessman in Latin America—”

  “You’d be surprised how easy it is for a catcher hitting one sixty to give up a career in professional baseball.”

  “Stop interrupting me. And this was just before the Bay of Pigs. Odd, wasn’t it?”

  “If I plead guilty to all charges, can I make love to you again?”

  “Well—”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. Why didn’t I think of copping out before? Did you know I also fomented the Boxer Rebellion and started the War of Jenkins’ Ear?”

  * * *

  He arose a little before nine, showered and shaved as quietly as he could, and took a fresh suit and the rest of his clothe
s out into the living room to dress. This was accomplished with only one or two drowsy mutters from the depths of Mayo’s pillow, largely undistinguishable except for something about a goddamned rhinoceros.

  He expected to find the kitchen barren of anything edible, the way he’d left it when he had taken off for Baja California, but discovered she’d restocked it, at least for breakfast. He put on coffee, mixed some orange juice, and toasted a cinnamon roll in the broiler of the oven. It would be an hour yet before the bank opened, so he’d have time to talk to Winegaard first. He looked up the number and dialed. Yes, the secretary said, Mr. Winegaard was in and would be glad to see Mr. Romstead. In about fifteen minutes. He scribbled a note to Mayo saying he’d be back before noon and walked over to Montgomery Street. It was a sunny morning, at least downtown, but cool enough to be typical of San Francisco’s summer.

  There was a customer’s room with a number of desks and big armchairs where men were watching stock quotations on a board, with the partners’ offices at the rear of it. Edward Winegaard’s was large and expensively carpeted, with a massive desk, and a mounted Pacific sailfish on one wall. Winegaard was a man near his father’s age, trim and in good shape and tanned, with conservatively cut silvery hair. He arose to shake hands and indicated the armchair before his desk.

  “It was a very tragic thing,” he said. “And I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it at all.”

  “Neither do I,” Romstead replied. “But all I’ve had so far is secondhand information, which is why I wanted to talk to you. You’ve known him for a long time?”

  “Twenty—ah—twenty-seven years now.”

  “Then there’s no question he made that money in the stock market?”

  “None at all. Why?”

  “The police seem to have some doubt of it.”

  “I don’t see why. It was quite easy, looking at it in retrospect; anybody with a good job and a little money to invest every month could have done it. All he’d have to do is study stocks the way your father did.” He smiled faintly, like a man remembering some golden age that was gone. “And get into the market when the Dow was in the two hundred to three hundred range, good solid shares were selling at five or six times earnings, and the big glamour issues were still to come.

  “I first met him in New York in 1945. I’d just got out of the Army and was with Merrill Lynch. He had about twelve thousand dollars in savings and what I thought were very sound ideas on how he wanted to invest it. I’ve handled his business ever since. We had arguments, plenty of them—most of which he won—and I’ll have to admit that more than half the time he was right.

  “Traditionally, you think of shipmasters and seamen as shellbacks and old fogies about a century behind the times, but in the matter of investments Captain Romstead was oriented toward the future all the way. He believed in the new technology—electronics especially, computers, and aerospace. He’d been a radioman himself—”

  “I didn’t know that,” Romstead said.

  “Yes. You see, when he first got his officer’s papers, he was still sailing in Norwegian ships, before he became a U. S. citizen. And in those days it was quite common—as he explained it to me—for one of the mates of a Norwegian ship to double as wireless operator. So he had both tickets then.

  “It was more or less natural then—especially after he started sailing out of here—for him to see the potentialities of the new electronics issues like Ampex, Varian, and Hewlett-Packard. He also bought IBM and Xerox at prices—and before multiple splits—that would make strong men break down and cry if you started talking about them now. And of course, shipmasters were making very good salaries by then; he was working steadily and buying more stock all the time. His portfolio was worth a million or a little over as far back as 1965.”

  “Good,” Romstead said. “Now, for the second part—the pruning job when he liquidated that two hundred and fifty thousand. How does that jibe with your twenty-seven years’ experience with him?”

  “It doesn’t,” Winegaard said flatly. “As my grandchildren would say—no way.”

  “It was that bad?”

  “A child with a pair of scissors could have done just as well.” Winegaard took from his desk a list consisting of three pages clipped together. “This is a copy of our latest statement to him—that is, the shares we held for him in street name. What he did was simply to sell everything on the first page, except for one minor item at the bottom of it. Without going into detail about it, this included two issues we’d bought for him only the week before and that we were very high on, and another he’d had for less than a month and that was performing even better than we’d expected. It makes no sense at all that he would sell these.

  “And on the next two pages there were three stocks we’d already more than halfway decided to unload. Approximately the same amount of money involved, around ninety thousand. I argued with him, or tried to, but he cut me off very abruptly. He didn’t want to argue about it, he said. Sell at the market opening and deposit the proceeds in his checking account as soon as possible.”

  Romstead was conscious of growing excitement. Now they were getting somewhere. “Well, look—did he specifically mention the sum two hundred and fifty thousand as the amount he needed?”

  “No, he didn’t. He’d know, of course, from the previous closing quotations within a few thousand what the list would bring—barring some upheaval in the market overnight. Actually, the proceeds after commission came to something a little over two hundred and fifty-three thousand.”

  “And what was the item at the bottom of the first page that he didn’t sell?”

  “Some warrants. Fifteen hundred dollars altogether, around that.”

  “In other words, he completely ignored everything on the other two pages. And when you tried to bring up some stocks that were listed on these pages is when he cut you off?”

  “Hmmmm, yes. That’s about it.”

  “How did he sound to you? Was there anything unusual about his voice or mode of expression?”

  “No. Not at all. Your father, let’s face it, could be quite brusque and impatient when he wanted action instead of conversation.”

  “No,” Romstead said. “I don’t think that’s the reason he cut you off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think he was being forced to liquidate those stocks, and the people who were leaning on him didn’t know—for some reason—that there were two more pages. Otherwise, they’d have got it all.”

  “Good God! Do you think a thing like that is possible?”

  “What other explanation can you think of?”

  “But how could they hope to get the money? It would be in the bank. And bankers, before they cash checks for a quarter million dollars, are apt to ask for a little identification.”

  “No. They expected to get it in cash—which is exactly the way they did get it. Before they killed him.”

  * * *

  The double glass doors of the Northern California First National Bank were at street level, and with the wide windows on each side it was possible for anyone to see the whole interior. It was high-ceilinged with ornate chandeliers and a waxed terrazzo floor. On the left, in front and extending more than halfway back, was a carpeted area behind a velvet rope which held the officers’ desks. On the right in front was more of the terrazzo lobby extending to wide carpeted stairs leading downward, no doubt to the safe-deposit vaults. Beyond these areas there were tellers’ windows on both sides, and then at the back a railing, several girls at bookkeeping machines, and the iron-grille doorway into the open vault. Down the center there were three chest-high writing stands with glass tops.

  One uniformed guard was on duty at the desk at the head of the stairs to the safe-deposit vaults, and he could see another tidying up the forms at the rearmost of the writing stands. Three of the tellers’ windows were open, and there were six or seven customers. This is where they did it, Romstead thought, in front of everybody. They had to be good. He
went in.

  Owen Richter’s desk was just inside the entrance to the carpeted area. Richter himself was a slender graying man with an air of conservatism and unflappable competence, and Romstead was forced to concede it didn’t seem likely the eyes behind those rimless glasses ever missed much that went on in the bank or were often fooled by what they saw. He introduced himself and explained why he was here. Richter shook his head.

  “There’s not a chance, Mr. Romstead. It’s exactly as I told the police, and the executor—Bolling, isn’t it? Your father, when he came in and picked up that money, was sober, entirely rational, and alone.”

  “He couldn’t have been,” Romstead said. “It was completely out of character, something he simply wouldn’t do.”

  “Oh, as for that, I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve known Captain Romstead for close to ten years. He was very sound and conservative and highly competent in managing money. And because I did know him and knew this was totally unlike him, I was suspicious myself when he first telephoned me, that Monday before the withdrawal, and said he was going to want that amount of money in cash. It’s irregular. And also foolish and highly dangerous. I tried to talk him out of it, but got nowhere. He simply said to expedite the clearance, that he wanted the money by Wednesday, and hung up.

  “As you’re probably aware, there are certain types of swindlers who prey on older people, and while I was sure the con man who’d pick your father for a victim would be making the mistake of his life, I made a note to be on the lookout when he came in, just to be sure there was no third party lurking in the background. I also alerted Mr. Wilkins, the security officer on duty in the main lobby here. He knew the captain by sight, of course.”