“Go crumple your hanky,” I said. He swung at me with a wild roundhouse right. I snapped my head back and felt the breeze of it across my lips. The miss spun him off balance so that he sat on my lap. I pushed him up and away. He yelped something that I couldn’t understand and went storming out, slamming the door behind him. I looked at E. J. He looked shamed and apologetic.
“Eddie is very upset,” he said.
“So am I.”
“They were very close,” he said.
“Past tense?” I asked.
He pinched a trout lip and pulled on it and let go. “I keep doing that,” he said. “Edith becomes hysterical when I do it. I do it without thinking. It’s a kind of instinct, I guess. Something tells me she’s dead. And logic doesn’t do any good. Last night I dreamed about her and she was dead.”
“I’ll bet she’s dead,” I said. “Dead drunk. She’s probably baking it out beside a swimming pool out in Palm Springs.” I got up. “Okay, I’ll take a leave of absence. With pay.”
“With pay, Jerry. No hard feelings.”
“There are hard feelings. But before it becomes official I’ll go out on the job and wind up a couple of details. With your permission.”
“Of course, of course.”
I left him sitting there. I did not glance toward Liz Addams as I left. There was no break or hesitation in the rippling staccato of her typing. It followed me until the street door closed behind me and cut it off.
I sat behind the wheel of the wagon for a few minutes before starting it up. In E. J.’s office I had been big and brave and bold. But I’d left a trail of sawdust all the way to the car. I felt meager and shrunken. I didn’t like him dreaming she was dead. I had not dreamed at all since … it had happened. I hoped I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to do any more dreaming, not so long as I lived. I felt that should I dream, they’d both come after me. Vince and Lorraine. And I might not wake up.
It seemed a very bad thing that E. J. had dreamed her dead. When Irene had served me my breakfast, she had told me about all the questions the man asked her. I remembered Paul Heissen’s thick thumb prodding the baled money. I remembered the long tumbling sound of Vince’s fall, with three leaden pellets in his head. I remembered that the hole was too narrow for her, that she lay on her side in the bottom of it. She always slept the best on her side, but not cold and straight in a tarp—curled and warm and tousled, with the high mound of hip that dipped down into the indentation of her slim waist, and then the long straight line from waist to shoulder. But they didn’t bury people the way they liked to sleep. There had been air trapped in the Porsche. A little air. Probably enough to turn it again under water so that it would be resting on its wheels. So that Vince slept sitting up. In the water.
I shook myself like a weary horse in fly season and turned the ignition key and drove out to the job.
I was nearly through explaining to Red Olin what I wanted done when they showed up. They got me aside. There were two of them. They drove a rental sedan, a red and white thing with towering tail fins like a rocket to Mars. They looked like Yankees during the off season, when ballplayers sell bonds and insurance and real estate. They were neatly and carefully dressed, and they had that curious air of courtesy plus arrogance that you would expect from any Yankee on or off the diamond. The big brown-haired one with all the shoulders was named Barnstock. He would be an outfielder, a power hitter. Give him a reasonable piece of the ball and he’s hammer it out of the park, even hitting to the wrong field. Quellan, the other one, black-haired, limber, rangy—six three, with big knobby hands—was obviously a pitcher. When he was right he would whistle them in. Nobody would dig in and get comfortable batting because of that tendency toward wildness.
I asked to see identification and Quellan showed me his. I said I had never heard of the agency. “We don’t spend a dime on public relations,” Barnstock said.
I asked for another fifteen minutes on the job, and then they could have me for the rest of the day, if they wanted that much time. They waited.
Barnstock rode with me in the wagon. I followed the big tail fins. We put both cars in the lot across from the side entrance to the Hotel Vernon. We said it was a hot day, and it looked like a long hot summer, but of course that was what you had to expect in this neck of the woods. Long hot summers. They had a small suite on the eighth floor. We got all comfy in the sitting room. Barnstock broke out the tape recorder, put a big new reel on, set a table mike in the middle of the coffee table. I sat on the couch. Quellan sat beside me with a stenographer’s notebook open on his knee, a fat green pen in hand. Barnstock pulled a chair over so that he sat on the other side of the coffee table, facing me.
“Mr. Jamison,” Quellan said, “this is not a formal interrogation. It may take quite a long time. Tape is better than notes or memory. I hope you have no objection to our recording what you say?”
“Not at all.”
Quellan nodded at Barnstock. He started the tape up, counted to ten slowly, reversed the tape, played his voice back over the monitor speaker, erased the count, reset the tape and said, “Monday, May nineteen, eleven-twenty a.m. Interrogation by Quellan and Barnstock of Jerome Jamison in the matter of Vincente Biskay.”
Quellan took the first question. “Mr. Jamison, in your own words I would like you to tell me the circumstances of your first meeting with Mr. Biskay. Be as thorough as possible. When we want anything clarified, we will interrupt you and ask additional questions.”
It was certainly thorough. They took me through the entire period from when I had first reported to Vince at Galle to when I last saw him from the airplane window in Calcutta. Their questioning was polite but thorough. Under the continual pressure I was able to remember names and incidents that I had thought completely forgotten. At one o’clock we took a break and had lunch brought up to the suite. I was down to my last cigarette, and Barnstock, on the phone, ordered up two more packs along with the sandwiches and coffee. The chill and hum of the air-conditioning made the suite a small private world.
During the half hour break while the recorder was turned off, we talked baseball and bass fishing. I felt at ease. There was nothing ominous about them. I had nothing to hide that had transpired during the period we were covering. Their official curiosity about Vince seemed curiously compulsive. Habits, tastes, fragments of background.
By quarter after two we had covered the war part of it.
“When did you next see Biskay?” Quellan asked.
“Last month.”
Barnstock interrupted, saying, “Ed, I think we can save a little time here by telling Mr. Jamison that we know that Biskay arrived at the Vernon Airport at ten minutes of five on Friday, April twenty-fifth, on American flight 712 out of Chicago. He had entered the country on an Eastern flight from Mexico City to New Orleans. He was using a forged passport which identified him as a Paraguayan national named Miguel Brockman. He left Vernon Airport at one-fifteen on American flight 228 to Chicago, made connections there to New Orleans and picked up his reservation on Eastern to Mexico City.”
Barnstock had not referred to any notes. All the information had been memorized. It made me distinctly uneasy.
“Fine,” Quellan said. “We know from tracing his movements that Biskay came to this country for the sole purpose of visiting you, Mr. Jamison. Did you have prior knowledge of this visit?”
“No.”
“Then we can pick up the thread again at the time he appeared. What time did he arrive at your home, and who answered the door?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. I could see just how carefully and thoroughly I had been mousetrapped. Up until that point I had made a great effort to be completely frank and honest with them. Why not? All that war stuff couldn’t do me any harm. But for a long time I had been very detailed and explicit, and I could not show a shift of attitude, a sudden reticence. And I knew that my powers of invention were not adequate to the job. I could not continue with the exhaustive detail, even though this la
st meeting with him was much clearer in my mind.
They talk about trap questions. This was not a trap question, but a trap situation. They both looked at me. The silence grew longer. The big reel on the tape recorder turned, recording the silence. They looked at each other. Barnstock reached out and turned the recorder off. Quellan took one of my cigarettes and lighted it.
“Jamison, we’re not interested in any criminal prosecution. We’re not interested in accumulating facts that might lead to a criminal prosecution by some other legal agency.” I did not fail to note that up until that little speech it had been Mister Jamison. Now it was Jamison.
“Can you make that a little clearer?”
“Biskay came to you. He had a proposition for you. Apparently you accepted it,” Barnstock said.
“Just suppose, for the sake of argument, I can’t remember a thing about it?”
“You’ve co-operated beautifully up until now. Without coercion. But coercion is possible.”
“How?”
Quellan stood up. He was a damn tall man. “Through a … a sister agency, Jamison, the Tampa police department has been advised not to establish any crash priority to the solution of the fatal shooting of a Mr. Zaragosa, a foreign national, at Tampa International Airport on the afternoon of the seventh of May, twelve days ago. Nor is the South American government involved eager to make a big fuss about the death of Alvaro Zaragosa. The Tampa police have little to work on. We received, indirectly, what little they have. A rental sedan was involved in the assassination. Gasoline had been used to wipe a decal from the door of the sedan. The bottle which had contained the gasoline was found in the gutter at the time the sedan was recovered. On the bottle were two clear fingerprints, the index and middle finger of the left hand. Tampa’s attempt to check them out through central records resulted in a dead end. When we learned Biskay had been here with you, we got your prints out of the military files. Your prints are on the bottle. Tampa has no way of tracing you. Unless we inform them. Then they’ll want a very complete story, Jamison. It would be simpler to give it to us.”
I looked at my left hand. When I had dropped the bottle I had expected it to break. But it didn’t. I had tried to stamp it with my heel, but I had missed because it was rolling, and I had been in a hurry.
I looked at the recorder. “Turn it on,” I told Barnstock. He did.
“What time did he arrive at your house and who answered the door?” Quellan asked.
“It was about six-thirty I think. I answered the door.”
“Now tell us the complete events of the time he was here, the proposition he made you, and your reaction to it and your reasons for accepting it.”
My mind had raced ahead, and I saw a way out. A little glimmer of light. I left out the big wad of money. I left out his detailed analysis of the political climate of the Peral government and the Melendez insurrection. I told them that I was broke at the time Biskay made the proposition, that I was having wife trouble, that I was feeling restless.
“Just what did he want you to do for him?”
“To arrive in my own car in Tampa on Tuesday, May sixth, and check in at the Tampa Terrace Hotel under the name of Robert Martin. Which I did. He had explained to me in April that it wasn’t anything particularly illegal. He said the cops wouldn’t come into it in any way. I got the impression it was more of a … a hijacking operation. All I had to do was be in my car at a certain time and a certain place in Tampa on the afternoon of the sixth. He’d come in another car and then we would get the hell out of there. I was supposed to drive him to Atlanta to the airport there.”
“What was his offer?”
“Twenty-five thousand cash.”
“Didn’t that seem like a great deal of money for just a job of driving?”
“Yes, it did. But he said he had to have somebody he could trust implicitly. And he had elected me. Understand, I didn’t jump at it. But he kept telling me nothing could go wrong.”
“He came to the hotel on the sixth?”
“Yes. And he went in my car and he showed me where I was to park, near a side entrance to the hospital. He said he would come out that entrance.”
“I thought you said he said he would come in another car.”
“Did I? That was a mistake. It turned out that he came in another car. He said he’d come out the entrance and I was to watch for him, and start the motor as soon as he arrived. We drove over the route we would take out of town a couple of times.”
“Describe what happened.”
“I parked where he told me to at quarter after three. The car was gassed up. I kept watching the hospital door. At three forty-five, maybe a couple of minutes later, a black sedan pulled up directly behind me. I didn’t know what to think. I looked back and recognized Vince. As I got out of the station wagon, a man got out of the sedan and started walking down the street rapidly. He didn’t look back, so I didn’t see his face. He was a big man in a gray suit. He wore a chauffeur’s hat. The suit could have been a uniform. He carried a small satchel. Vince was bloody. He’d been shot in the leg and the shoulder, but he could walk. He was nearly out on his feet, but anxious to get out of town. He had a big black tin suitcase in the sedan. I put it in the station wagon at his request. Our luggage, Vince’s and mine, was already there in the station wagon. We’d put it in at noon. Vince gave me a bottle of fluid and told me to go wipe the decal off the side of the sedan. I did so, and dropped the small bottle in the gutter. I drove out of town fast.”
I told them about giving him crude first aid. I told them the places we had stopped, the time we made, about Vince’s infection and about bribing the doctor—at Vince’s request.
“You must have heard about the murder of Zaragosa. There were enough details in the press and on the radio so that you must have known Biskay was involved in it. Didn’t you question him? You didn’t contract for anything like that.”
“Yes, of course. Vince assured me that he had not killed Zaragosa. He said somebody else had come along with the same idea.”
“What idea?”
“Taking whatever it was Zaragosa had.”
“The black tin suitcase?”
“I guessed that was it.”
“Did he tell you what was in the suitcase?”
“No. I know it was damn heavy.”
“When did he give you your money?”
“The first night out of Tampa. In Stark, Florida.”
“Did it occur to you the suitcase might contain money?”
“I thought of it, but it seemed too heavy.”
“Did he mention any names?”
“Yes. Some woman named Carmela. I read about her in the paper. She was killed when a plane crashed that she was flying. He said it belonged to a man named Melendez, the man he had been working for.”
“No other names?”
“Maybe. But I can’t remember any.”
“How about a man named Kyodos? Did he mention that name?”
“It doesn’t ring any bell. I’m not saying he didn’t, but I just can’t remember.”
“What denomination was the money he paid you?”
“Hundreds. All in hundreds. Two hundred and fifty of them. He said the money was safe to spend, that it wasn’t marked or anything.”
“But you couldn’t drive him to Atlanta.”
“No. He was too badly hurt to catch the plane he wanted.”
“So you offered to let him come to your house again.”
I tried to look embarrassed. “It wasn’t exactly an offer. I mean I felt that he was asking me to share a risk I didn’t know enough about. So I wanted to be paid for taking that risk. So … we dickered. And finally agreed on another twenty thousand. In advance.”
“What denominations?”
“Just the same. All hundreds.”
“And still you hadn’t decided the black suitcase held money?”
“I’d become a little more certain it might be money.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Yes. Several times. He didn’t want to tell me. When he was sick I tried to look in it. It was locked. I thought about busting it open but decided against it. After all, he’d gotten hold of me because he felt he could trust me. And he could trust me. We went through a lot together. I … I thought a lot of him until … he took off with my wife.”
“We’ll get to that later, Jamison. Now let’s go through the Tampa thing again in more detail. Everything you can remember. I particularly want to know if Biskay seemed very wary, if he had any idea he might be followed.”
“He seemed a little jumpy.”
“In what way? What did he say to give you that impression? What did he do that led you to believe that?”
And so it went. I stuck to my yarn of the guy in the chauffeur’s hat. I couldn’t be certain, but I felt that I was getting it across. When I had been able to stick to the truth it had been easy to answer their questions. But with one lie added, I had to keep constantly on the alert to avoid any inconsistency. Yet I had to give the impression of being as relaxed as when I had been telling them of Central Burma. It was singularly exhausting, particularly when they gave the impression of not being entirely satisfied with my story.
At four o’clock there was another ten-minute break. They went into the bedroom and talked in low tones to each other. Then they started again. They were concerned now about what had happened after I had brought Vince back to the house. I had been over it enough times with Paul Heissen so that I felt a little more confident.
Barnstock came up with a jim dandy question. “Jamison, does it seem inconsistent to you that Biskay should take off with your wife?”
“I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“You’ve painted a picture of your wife as a lush, and a tramp. Biskay had made a big haul. He’s a clever man. An unreliable woman could be dangerous to him. Isn’t she precisely the sort of woman he wouldn’t take with him?
They were both looking at me intently. I swallowed. “I see what you mean. Of course. But he wasn’t in good physical shape. And she had transportation. I suppose he could figure that … they could go hole up somewhere until he was able to take off alone. He knew from the clipping I showed him that he had to take off. And I certainly was in no mood to help him. You can understand that. Hell, maybe he even made her an offer of money. She’s pretty … greedy.”
Soft Touch Page 14
