It's What Up Front That Counts

by Troy Conway

  I also knew why Christopher Smythe had committed suicide. Weak though he had been in some respects, he had been damned strong in others. And he had been damned loyal to the anti-Communist cause, so loyal that he blew his brains out rather than let the Commies have a chance at picking them for info about the B-bomb.

  I still didn’t know who had killed Andi Gleason, or why. And I still hadn’t come up with a satisfactory explanation for the earlier involvement of the Friends of Decency, or for Lord Brice-Bennington’s confidence that Smythe and Whelan would lose the upcoming election. But I had a hunch that I’d be able to answer these questions soon—damned soon. Now if only I could find Peter Blaine and Diane Dionne!

  I packed all Blaine’s pornographic photos and negatives into a cardboard box, along with the Smythe-Whelan clips and everything else that had been in the strongbox. Then, giving the apartment a last once-over to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, I taxied back to the Eros. I had the desk clerk store my cardboard box in the hotel safe, and gave him a twenty-pound tip to make sure that nobody else found out about it. Then I phoned the number of Peter Blaine’s business card and told his answering service to give the following message: “Blaine, I’m the only man in London who can save your skin. Contact me immediately at the Hotel Eros. Rod Damon.”

  I was pretty sure that Blaine would contact me as soon as he received the message. Unfortunately I couldn’t be sure he’d receive it. If my new theory was correct, and I now was positive that it was, Blaine was presently holed up somewhere frightened out of his wits—so frightened that he’d never think of checking with his answering service.

  Confucius say: If mountain won’t come to man, man must go to mountain—or words to that effect. I couldn’t be sure that Blaine would look me up, so I’d have to try looking him up.

  The first place I tried was The Safari Club. It took me a while to get there because while I’d been phoning Blaine’s answering service my old pal, Rumpled Suit, picked up on me again. This time another tail was working with him, a chunky Neanderthal type with a crew cut, and I had to play the taxi switch game four times, as well as do some fancy footwork through the Picadilly Circus subway station, before I could shake both of them.

  Blaine wasn’t at the Safari, but, of course, my money-hungry pal, the doorman, was. In exchange for a tenner he revealed that he hadn’t seen Blaine since the night before. He also revealed that he hadn’t seen Diane Dionne for better than a week. However, when I promised a hundred-pound reward for whoever sent Blaine or Diane to me first, he said that he’d try like a bastard to get in touch with them. I believed that he would.

  From the Safari I went on to a discotheque called Chantilly Lace, which had been number one on the list of places where The Coxe Foundation had told me to look for Diane. Not surprisingly, she wasn’t around. But a few bartenders and waitresses, inspired by fivers from my unlimited expense account, said that they knew both her and Blaine.

  Everybody told the same story: Diane used to visit the disco often, but had stopped coming about a week ago and hadn’t been seen since; Biaine was a less frequent visitor, and hadn’t been seen in the past two weeks. Nobody knew where either of them could be reached, but when I announced my hundred-pound reward, everyone agreed to keep an eye out for them.

  Over the next three hours I covered two more discos, a cofeehouse and two all-night restaurants. The story was the same in each place: Blaine and Diane were well-known but hadn’t been around recently, and nobody knew where they could be found. By this time it was nearly seven a.m. All told I’d gone through more than a hundred pounds and had left my calling card with a couple dozen people. One thing was certain: If Blaine or Diane ever returned to their old haunts, they’d find out damned quick that I was looking for them.

  There still were a few more places on The Coxe Foundation list where I might have looked, but they’d all closed, and even if they hadn’t been I was too damned tired to do any more looking. Resolving to check them out the following night, I taxied back to the Eros. My second tail, Crew Cut, was at Rumpled Suit’s usual post in the lobby, and he looked as tired as I was.

  “Get a good night’s sleep, you poor bastard,” I said silently. “I’m going to.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The next two days passed uneventfully.

  There were no follow-up stories in the newspapers on Andi Gleason’s death, and there was nothing in the follow-up stories on Smythe’s suicide that indicated the newspapers had any idea of his involvement with Andi.

  I checked out the other places on The Coxe Foundation’s list of Diane Dionne’s old haunts, but without getting any closer to finding her. I also phoned Blaine’s number regularly, only to be told by his answering service that he hadn’t been in touch.

  On the two occasions when I visited Lady Brice-Bennington’s mansion, I found her very eager for me to set up the little deal I had told her about back at my hotel room— the deal I had planned to convert Lord B-B to the pro-sex team. But, until I got things straightened out with Blaine and Diane I didn’t really want to get involved in anything I couldn’t walk out on at a minute’s notice.

  I did get involved briefly in a little more love-making with Lady B-B. We knocked off a pair of quickies one afternoon in the Friends of Decency erotic library—a cute touch, I thought—and another quickie the next afternoon in the bathroom on the mansion’s third floor (in the shower, as a matter of fact, which really turned her on).

  I also almost had a shot at Robbi Randall. Almost, but not quite. I had called her aside to tell her of my progress with Lady B-B and of the deal I had cooked up to convert Lord B-B, a deal in which Robbi was to play a crucial part. She readily consented to play the part I had in mind for her. But she wouldn’t buy my suggestion that she rehearse the part with me in advance. For a moment I thought I’d be able to persuade her. Then she evidently decided to do her method-thing right to the very end and I couldn’t change her mind.

  I might have sold her if I worked a little harder at it. But I didn’t really feel like working. My mind was so occupied with the business of getting to Blaine and Diane that sex, even sex with a knockout dish like Robbi Randall, wasn’t all that important to me.

  Somewhere in London, M.P. James Whelan was walking around with information about Country X’s B-bomb—information that would be invaluable to the Communists. I was rather sure that after Christopher Smythe’s suicide they wouldn’t try to high-pressure it out of Whelan—at least not for a while.

  But with every day that passed, they were bound to grow more impatient. And even if they did resist the impulse to give Whelan the same high-pressure treatment which I was sure they had given Smythe before he blew his brains out, they’d be strongly tempted to use the evidence they had of a Smythe-Andi-Whelan-Diane liaison to set off a scandal that might possibly topple Prime Minister Wilson’s government.

  As long as I stayed on the scene, they’d be inclined to hold back. But the closer election day drew, the less inclined they’d be, because they really didn’t know why I was there; they only knew, or suspected, that my presence was an indication that something big was brewing, something bigger than the scandal they could now set off.

  Would they forget about the Something Big and settle for second best?

  If I didn’t make contact with Blaine and Diane, and damned soon, they very well might.

  By the end of the second day, I hadn’t come any closer to making contact. I’d made a second visit to each of the places on The Coxe Foundation’s list, and I’d visited the doorman of The Safari Club no fewer than four times. But none of the people on my payroll had heard anything about Blaine and Diane—or, if they had heard, they weren’t telling me, even though I had now raised my reward to five hundred pounds.

  I capped off my second day with a round of drinks at The Rusty Flange, one of the discos on The Coxe Foundation’s list. Then I headed back to the Eros. As usual, my Commie tails—by this time there were three, an arty mod type having joined Crew Cut an
d Rumpled Suit—were in the lobby. I ignored them, ambled up to my room and went to bed. My last thought before I dropped off to sleep was a prayer-like plea to the Law of Averages. “Law, old buddy,” I murmured, “if you’re ever going to throw me another bone, do it now.”

  Believe it or not, the prayer was answered. My phone rang at nine the next morning, and my friendly desk clerk informed me that there was a man waiting to see me in the lobby. The man, so the clerk informed me, said that it was a matter of life or death that he see me immediately, and offered as an inducement the cryptic message that “Peter had sent him.”

  Peter. Since I usually don’t think too clearly before noon, it took me a minute to realize just who Peter was.

  Then the message came through and I leaped out of bed as fast as greased lightning, scampered into my clothes and tore down the stairs. The messenger, a scrawny kid in his early twenties who looked like a refugee from The Rolling Stones or one of the other British pop music groups, was waiting for me at the desk. I gingerly steered him past Mod Type, who was standing outside the hotel pretending to read The Morning Telegram, and into a luncheonette a few doors away.

  Blaine’s message was direct and to the point: He was scared witless and wanted me to accompany the messenger to an apartment a few blocks from the Eros, where both of us could put our heads together and work out a deal.

  My reply was equally direct and to the point “Let’s go!” I told the kid.

  Mod Type picked up on us as we left the luncheonette. I hustled the kid through the Piccadilly Circus traffic and down into the Underground—as the British like to call their subway. Mod Type stayed with us, boarding the same coach that we did and standing a discreet twenty feet away.

  I waited until the second stop, then, clutching the kid by the arm, propelled him out onto the train platform. Mod Type, using the coach’s other door, followed suit.

  Still clutching the kid, I turned a sharp right and started down the platform, as if I was heading for the escalator leading to the street. Mod Type followed us closely.

  But I didn’t head for the escalator. When the kid and I reached the dor of the next coach, I slipped inside, pulling him behind me. Mod Type made a lunge for the door closest to him, but didn’t reach it in time. The door closed in his face, leaving him standing on the platform.

  At the next stop, the kid and I got off the train and rode the elevator to the street. Then I hailed a cab for the address where the kid told me I’d find Blaine.

  The building was a sleazy, three-story walk-up that looked like a decent wind would knock it over. The apartment the kid led me to was on the third floor, and looked even rattier than Blaine’s own apartment. Blaine was there all right—and so was Diane Dionne. He looked like he hadn’t bathed or shaved in three days and smelled it too. She looked even worse than he did, although, thanks to the camouflaging effects of perfume, her odor wasn’t quite so bad.

  Blaine, who had been hunched over a kitchen table drinking a cup of tea, got up to greet me. Diane, who’d been lying on a nearby couch clad only in a see-through nightie, stayed where she was. The faraway look in her eyes told me that she’d had some tea also—only not the kind you drink in a cup.

  “I hear you’ve been looking for me, Damon,” Blaine said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute,” I replied. “First let me tell you what I can do for you.”

  “Heyyyyy,’’ murmured Diane, off on her own private cloud, “you’re groovy. You talk like Paul Newman.”

  Ignoring her, I gave Blaine my planned pitch. I told him what I knew about his scheme to exploit Smythe and Whelan’s libertine appetites. I spelled out the shakedown angle, which he had developed after learning that a certain Christopher Smythe of Kensington had inherited a twenty-seven-million-dollar diamond fortune—a certain Christopher Smythe whom Blaine had mistakenly assumed to be M.P. Christopher Smythe. I also spelled out my hunch about how the Communists had muscled in on his caper. Only I didn’t tell him it was a hunch; I pretended that Andi Gleason had told me about it that night she came to my hotel room. His unprotesting look assured me that my hunch was right on target.

  “Blaine,” I concluded, “I’m the only guy who can bail you out. You’ve got evidence on Smythe and Whelan that can set off a scandal that’d blow England sky high. The Communists don’t want that scandal, because they’re playing for bigger stakes. And they’ll do anything to keep you from lousing up their scheme—even kill you. I don’t want a scandal either. But I’m with a nicer group than the Commies. If you play ball with me, I’ll get you and Diane out of England safely. You can spend a year or so in the States at my government’s expense. Then, when things cool down here, you can come back.”

  “A rose-covered cottage in San Francisco,” Diane purred dreamily. “Andi told me about it. I always wanted to live in San Francisco.” She smiled ecstatically and raised herself slowly to a sitting position.

  Blaine paid no attention to her. To me, he said, “How do I know I can trust you?”

  I shrugged. “You don’t. You’ve got to gamble. Either you take your chances with me, or you take your chances with the Communists. It’s your choice.”

  He thought about it silently. Diane, meanwhile, got up from the couch and staggered toward the bathroom door. “The Communists,” she began, “killed—”

  But she didn’t complete the sentence because instead of going through the door she walked smack into the doorframe and fell to the floor.

  I helped her to her feet. She wasn’t hurt—just discombobulated. “Thanks,” she told me, rubbing her forehead where it had hit the doorframe. Then, as if her initial train of thought hadn’t been interrupted, she said, “The Communists killed Andi.”

  The Communists, I knew, didn’t kill Andi. Suddenly, thanks to Diane, I had an explanation of Andi’s death, an explanation that I kicked myself for not having come upon earlier. And with the explanation I’d pieced together the last important missing link in the Smythe-Whelan puzzle.

  There was one more missing link—Lord Brice-Bennington’s confidence that Smythe and Whelan would lose the election, coupled with the Friends of Decency’s earlier prowling in search of proof that could be used to set off a scandal. But this missing link didn’t really matter anymore, because I now had the puzzle solved.

  Yep, it was all solved—neatly boxed and tied up a little pink ribbon. Now all I had to do was deliver the package to The Coxe Foundation.

  “Well, Blaine,” I prodded, “how about it? The Communists killed Andi, Who’s next. Diane? You?”

  “They won’t kill me,” he said. “They won’t kill me until they get the negatives.”

  “The negatives of the pictures you took of Smythe and Whelan? They don’t need them. You had prints of the negative in your apartment, and the Commies got them a couple nights ago when burglarized your apartment. That’s why Christopher Smythe killed himself. The commies approached him with the prints and demanded some top security information—information that’s very important to them. Symthe knew they had him over a barrel, so he look the only way out. He shot himself.”

  “I have other negatives.”

  “What other negatives?”

  “Negatives of the Communists. When they caught on to my thing with Symthe and Whelan and the girls, they tried to pump the girls for information. They hired the girls as prostitutes and tried to get them drunk, so they’d talk. While they have in bed with the girls, I took pictures of them.”

  I gulped. This was an unexpected bonus—a very unexpected and very desirable bonus but I didn’t let Blaine know how excited I was at my discovery.

  “The negatives are useless to you,” I said. “What can you do with them? Mail them to the Kremlin?”

  He sighed. “You’re right, I guess. I showed some prints to Michaelson, the guy that’s running their show. I told him I’d give him the negatives of him and his guys with my girls if he backed out of my caper with Smythe and Whelan. He laughed in my face. I fi
gured he was just bluffing, but maybe he wasn’t.”

  “You know damned well he wasn’t. Even if he was worried about what you could do with your photos of him and his guys, he’d have nothing to worry about once you and Diane were dead. That’s why you and Diane are hiding out here—and that’s why you wanted to talk to me.”

  He left the table, walked to the window, and stood looking out at the street, his shoulders hunched forward in a posture of total defeat. “You win, Damon,” he said softly, not looking at me. “I had a nice thing going for me, but it got out of control. I want out.”

  “I’ll get you out. All you’ve got to do is play ball with me.”

  “Like how?”

  “First off, give me everything you’ve got on Smythe, Whelan and the Communists. All the negatives, all the prints, and whatever other evidence you have.”

  “Okay. The whole works is in a safe deposit box at my bank.”

  “Do you have the key with you?”

  He turned from the window, took the key out of his pocket and held it up in the air. “Will you put Diane and me on the plane for the States if I give it to you?”

  “Not immediately. Once I check the box and find out you haven’t been holding out on me I’ll put Diane on a plane. You’ll have to hang around London for a couple more days and do a few more favors for me.”

  “What kind of favors?”

  “Number one, I want you to set up an orgy. I want five of the sharpest chicks you can get your hands on—real knockouts, and all dynamite in bed. Get them lined up and have them ready for me. I’ll tell you exactly when I want them and where I want them to go. Can you handle it?”