The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise

by Philip Wylie

  “Of course.” This was one of Oddie’s small items for pride. “I knew Axe would, someday, put in an inquiry just to test me. So I had our people tag the old boy, four-five times, for a day or so, some time after we made that first check.”

  “And Arthur Xavier did ask?”

  Oddie smiled thinly. “As I’d anticipated. And he was pleased to know I’d been on the ball. Grove is exactly what we first decided: a nut about privacy and all Waimanalo’s Big Daddy. In fact—he’s a nice old buzzard-considering there was a time when he was anything but nice. He is sold on Hawaii and may never return to western New York. His plant’s well managed. He enjoys his little game of hiding out. But the notion of Grove getting into his old harness—is—well, ridiculous.”

  “I said so from the first.” Davies grinned.

  “I thought the same.” Oddie’s statement was not true; but, by now, he believed it—for the very sound reason that his subsequent checking had substantiated the original findings. And that one, final little gambit had, also, surprised Eaper, who thought he might catch Oddie in a lapse and was satisfied when he found he was not correct.

  Davies left. Oddie locked up the files and followed.

  Perhaps, he thought as he pushed an elevator button, he should have gone beyond having strangers ask around Waimanalo about Grove. But why? The more his men heard the plainer it became that a man who once had been sharp was now a soft-headed old futz. “Futz” was Oddie’s second most disparaging term.

  11

  Golf

  After the latest election the Secret Service had worried about its task of guarding the victor when he reached the White House: he was a golfer and a good one. He had played on his university team and kept his game up during his years at law school. As a corporation lawyer, then as a candidate for the Senate, a senator and finally a governor, he had played at convenient courses frequently. He would be not only the best golfer ever to occupy the White House but, it was believed, one who golfed as often as Eisenhower.

  Since the late Ike’s incumbency, however, presidential security had changed. Assassination and other dire circumstances were responsible. So there was a great deal of anxious planning for the safety of the elected man on whatever courses he would play; but the planners had misjudged the new Chief Executive.

  The inauguration came and went. No golf was played by the President in that month and those following until April. One April afternoon, however, the President called in the head of the White House Secret Service detail and announced he planned to play eighteen on the following Saturday.

  “I suppose,” he said, with a twinkle in his greenish-brown eyes, “you boys have been sweating.”

  “Well,” Melville responded, “we’ve given it a good bit of thought. I wouldn’t say—sweat.”

  “It takes a lot of men, though, to cover an eighteen-hole course—and a lot of time to hit eighteen.”

  “Part of the job, sir.”

  “Max, I don’t expect to enjoy very many games—too busy. And I don’t intend to play where you’ll have to post an army on a weekend, or at any other time.”

  “I’m afraid—”

  “You ever heard of John Boyer Wald?”

  “The name is familiar, Mr. President, but—”

  “He’s president of AmcontAfro—a holding company.”

  Max clicked: that tycoon.

  The President went on. “Jack took up golf some years back. He’s one of those fireball types—which is why he got where he did. But he has a temper like lit dynamite—and he’s vain in some ways. Who isn’t? He couldn’t play well enough, alone, to satisfy himself—even with the best pros for teachers. When he played with friends, he’d fall apart. Some do. But it made Jack Wald furious. He decided there were too many spectators for his blowups—they were funny to see. I should know! So—he built himself his own course. Called it Duffer’s—ever hear of it?”

  “Not that I can recall, sir.”

  “It’s in Chesapeake Bay, on an island—most of which was fill to make the course and room for a residence and a clubhouse. Dandy layout. When Jack wants to play by himself, he can, since it’s his. It’s kept in perfect shape and twenty-thirty friends of his at most play there in a given week. I’m playing Duffer’s—when I can, and no other links.”

  Max understood; he expressed his appreciation and departed. To make such an island secure required only a check of the people who worked and lived on it and a rundown of players and others visiting it on any day the President would be among them. Aside from that, a watch on an island was, relatively, a cinch. Max checked out “Duffer’s Country Club” the next day, with colleagues, and came home happy.

  The President didn’t play much after that; but when he played, it was there as he’d promised. His game suffered; expectably and from lack of practice, people said. It suffered, however, in another fashion: he golfed now in a manner that was opposite to his earlier game and to his way of behavior in all other activities. He hit every tee shot, if the distance warranted, with all his might, not with a controlled limit to gain the accuracy attained by restraint. He took every chance possible, even when a dub would have chosen more cautious routes to the pin. His long putts were dispatched with the intention of sinking them and not that professional purpose of merely getting close to the hole. A once-conservative master, he turned into a reckless gambler.

  From a customary score in the middle seventies, the Chief Executive dropped to the high eighties, and even the nineties.

  He seemed not to mind but, on the contrary, to enjoy the abandon which caused such deterioration of his score. It was as if he used golf, when he played, to let off pent-up steam. And that was the truth.

  In his first year he got in just six rounds.

  The game on which he embarked, in this next April, was his second for the season. He teed off in a foursome made up of a cousin, Oliver Wendham, a friend of the cousin, Mark Smith, and the Assistant Secretary of State, Jason Beekman. They used four carts but the Chief ruled out caddies. His cousin and the Assistant Secretary were excellent golfers. Smith, a redheaded, thick-chested man “in steel” who came from Bucyrus, Ohio, told the others he hadn’t played in a long while and that fact was evident after two holes.

  He was the only man unknown to the Secret Service guards on duty in boats and at shore points which enabled them to see any and every water approach to the island. Players already on the course, along with the permanent residents—grounds-keepers, caddies, a cook, houseboys and the rest—had long been cleared.

  Max Melville had not checked Mark Smith. The President had saved him that by saying, “Old friend of my cousin Oliver, Smith is. They went to school together and see each other often. Mark’s a keen coin collector—like Cousin Oliver—I never could see that hobby. Anyhow—”

  More than enough, Max thought; any long-time friend of a cousin had to be okay, and besides, the Chief knew Mark Smith. That warm afternoon the air was still and damp but no showers were predicted till night. The few players on the links were well ahead when the presidential party teed off. No others came up to start, for an hour.

  By the time the VIP foursome had holed out on the third green, the Assistant Secretary was miffed. The President had hooked a Number Three wood deep into a stand of high grass and insisted on hunting till the ball was found. Mr. Smith had sent a drive into a blind water hole at an amazing distance from the tee but he’d persisted in believing it was short of that and in the rough at one side—which caused another prolonged search.

  That sort of thing happened several more times in the first six. Smith’s long iron shot on the third had been straight but aimed so it entered a woods at the left side of the green where it was found after long effort. One presidential putt was so strong it had taken three more strokes to hole out; and all were made with great and now novel deliberation. So when the President suggested, apparently as a matter of courtesy both to the impatient pair and his cousin’s guest, that the other two play ahead and he follow with Smi
th, the Assistant Secretary had been only too glad to accept; and Oliver Wendham hadn’t debated longer than manners required.

  The first twosome soon moved far ahead of the second. When they had done so, the President said to “Mark Smith,” “Well, Ring. What’s the emergency?”

  “There isn’t any, in a sense. That’s the problem.”

  The President teed up, glanced down the fairway, took his stance, made several short fiddles with his driver and then, absent-mindedly using his original form, sent a straight ball two hundred and sixty-five yards down the middle. “You better explain that.”

  Grove stepped up to the markers. “You have nearly everything I got, of any importance. There’s been no trace of Solentor since that visit.”

  “Which must have been something!”

  “It was.” Grove studied the fairway, got set and hit his ball within ten feet of the other’s. “That,” he said, “is what I was trying to do.” He referred to the shot. They boarded their carts but sat awhile before pursuing the drives. “It was something,” Grove repeated, grinning. “And it’s something to think Solentor, in person, was on Oahu and may be still.”

  “I worry about Neptune.”

  “So do I. That’s why I asked for this meeting. Many thanks, too, for arranging it. Because I now feel we ought to call the pros in. The CIA, anyhow. It’s too big a risk to sit on, at my end, knowing what I know, alone, and what I don’t, that’s vital.”

  “You haven’t a ghost of a notion—?”

  “I have more information, yes, but what it means, I can’t guess.”

  “We better move on so nobody overtakes us.” The President grinned. “This private course has been very useful, before now.”

  They bumped out on the fairway and played steadily. Their conversation was interrupted only when the game separated them. Grove started it with his new information.

  “It occurred to me that the big show, following the finding of money and bracelets—”

  “Big show?”

  Grove realized, then, exactly how busy the President was—and the result, that he skipped news he found of no relevance, such as the account, carried world-wide, of the treasure hunt on the mountain behind Sea Life Park. He described it and the President listened with fascination.

  The intellectual ability of the man in the White House was once more made plain when Grove finished his narrative.

  “The people who threw that girl off the cliff top assumed the body would be found—and didn’t care. It would be identified as Miss Dwelling, whose real name and profession would be kept secret. That man in Honolulu, Oddie, thought the killers had been obliged to locate and conceal the body, first found by you and your new recruit—he must be quite a boy! Obliged to do that, in Oddie’s view, because of the treasure hunt. The fact was, that treasure hunt had been the killers’ purpose.”

  Grove putted and looked up. “There was that. Our opposite numbers would hardly toss away so much money and jewelry with, perhaps, unfound gems and more currency, from a mountaintop for no reason. They aren’t fools. But they couldn’t know that Jerry and I had seen the victim and hidden her. All they could learn was that the remains were reported found by Oddie and company. What the climbing mob collected and maybe some stuff they didn’t, was taken for what it had been, the girl’s belongings. By everybody except Jerry and me. The snatched bit of ylang-ylang lei told me more.”

  As tersely as he could, Grove repeated the Bangkok story of his near murder and the ylang-ylang “Mavis” who, then, had an infant daughter. He added word of the ylang-ylang lei found on the night the other body had turned up in the park’s Hawaiian Reef Tank.

  The President was quick about that too. “So our ‘Maribel,’ knowing she was about to be tossed over the rim of a near cliff, a thousand feet high, grabbed, from a woman present, the one thing that might carry a message to—our side? To Oddie or Eaper or someone. Damned bright! And brave as the devil!”

  Grove nodded solemnly. “Yes, I think so. The daughter of that Bangkok dame, a real beauty and a medium-expert fiend, too, must have followed her mother’s custom. And been up on the pali that night with some boy friends of Solentor’s. That’s probable. Though the daughter might merely have had a penchant for that flower because her mother wore it so often, when she was a tot. It could also have been sheer coincidence. Or another woman using the old ylang-ylang identifier. But since the lass snatched it, I tend to see it as a signal.”

  “So you—and this Gong wizard—began to scout around. On the theory the mob hunt on the talus and the cliffs was staged?”

  “I wasn’t very quick about figuring it that way. But in time it occurred to me that you could very neatly pull off some other operation when the whole world was busy either on the talus and cliffs, or watching. It wasn’t hard to guess, then, where such a business would happen. Upwind from the area toward which those hundred-dollar bills would be blown. At a considerable distance from where the jewelry would land, too. A stretch the mob wouldn’t consider searching. That made it easy. There’s nothing in that direction of the mountain flank but a power line, high-tension poles and wires, coming over from Honolulu.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Very. We had to scout carefully, not wanting their people to know we were getting warm, if we were. And we were, up to a point. They’d tapped the line. But,” Grove added quickly, “it didn’t tell any more. We could see that people had been up and down, from the park, usually, but sometimes from a spot on the highway nearer Makapuu Point, dozens of trips and maybe a dozen different men, by the tracks they didn’t wipe out. There had plainly been some heavy gear up above the talus, near the high-tension line, too, for a while. But everything was gone by the time we searched—except the overlooked tracks, broken weeds and so on.”

  “They had to have a power supply, temporarily? And the treasure hunt thing was to—what?”

  “Cover their removal of gear? Perhaps. Probably, even. But what were the instruments they had hauled up and removed? Transformers? No way to guess. And where did their cable tap go? Jerry and I made a big effort on that. No luck.”

  “No luck? Seems strange, with the other evidence so clear.”

  Grove nodded that their game should go on. They holed out, then teed up and drove again before he continued his report. “That area of Oahu is still on the windward side. Plenty of showers even in mid-spring. At the foot of the pali there’s a lot of runoff. It would wash out the main highway along the ocean if there weren’t culverts to carry it under the road to the sea. The park also has to return its salt water supply—three hundred thousand gallons an hour, constantly. We could find the place where the cable reached the road ditches, on the land side. Beyond—no chance.”

  “Rains, flooding, washed the signs out?”

  “That, and the heavy construction at the Makai Range, next to the institute, which adjoins the park. They could have run their tap to the nearest culvert or to one a half mile away in either direction, and from there, under the road in any culvert and then, buried in sand or rocks, out to sea. A person who might see it would assume it had to do with the heavy construction, or research, in the area. It could be covered on the ocean bottom, easily, with rocks, or buried in sand, to a point where the depth would make it safe to run along on bottom. It could have paralleled the road and been carried back up and even over the pali. No way to tell where it went.”

  “Hunh.” For ten minutes of play the President talked of other matters, when he talked at all; then, as they approached the fifteenth green, he said, “What happened to that girl you caught?”

  Grove smiled. “I wasn’t told, exactly. Didn’t want to be told. Jerry’s second cousin didn’t know who or what she was. Just that she needed to be hidden and guarded. No reason for me to have more dope. Regular practice of the system.” At that, and very suddenly, Grove stopped a backswing to stare at the President without seeing him.

  “Something?”

  “Good Lord! Maybe there is! I think I may
know how Ah Soo stashed her away!” He shrugged and resumed his game, saying, “Irrelevant, here. Just—a matter of interest. The guy may be cleverer than I thought—and using my own system! Golly!” He swung, topping the ball.

  They went on. The President soon put an astute question about the tap on the high-tension line.

  “Wouldn’t the drawdown show up?”

  Grove smiled a little. “I guess it did. The high-voltage lines serves a Coast Guard station, a radar installation, the whole Abbott complex, the electrically driven machinery at work there on construction, the street lighting in Waimanalo and the homes of maybe a thousand people—”

  “I see.”

  “Well, there’s this. Roy Hedges, an ex-Navy officer, incidentally, keeps tabs on costs for the Abbott holding company and it grows like—”

  “I know young Attack Abbott,” the President interrupted.

  “Of course. Well, Hedges recently put in a beef to Hawaiian Electric about the latest bill. He claimed it ran over the possible top by several hundred dollars.”

  “At a special rate, that means a lot of juice?”

  “Yes. The Coast Guard people were hit too. I don’t know about the rest. It could be, their main splice drew current only from those two leads. We—Jerry and I—haven’t made a close enough search to be sure of that. We don’t want anybody who might be watching to see us up on the poles. We have merely made certain that they had equipment up above the talus—near the line. And that they had, for a while, a heavy-duty line down to the road.”

  They played a hole in silence.

  On the next tee the President said, in a thinking-aloud tone, “You haven’t suggested a why for all that—meaning you have no idea?”

  “Right, Mr. President.”

  “Steve,” the President corrected: it was what his intimate friends called him. “Could anybody else figure out—?”

  “Figure what—Mr.—?”

  “Steve.”

  “Steve,” Grove said, dutifully.

  “Figure out, say, the possibilities?”