“No, thank you, I don’t think so.” Freestone smiled too and shook his head as he reached into the back pocket of his trousers for his billfold. He extracted his American Express card and set it down on the table. “If you could just bring me the bill, please?”
A kind of relieved cheerfulness spread over the waitress’s face, suggesting he had said just the right thing—maybe desserts were a problem for her too—and she picked up the card and flounced away.
It was only as he was signing the credit slip that the obviousness of the thing dawned on him.
He sat staring down at his own signature for what felt like an eternity but probably wasn’t more than three or four seconds, wondering how it could have escaped him so long. Of course—the handwriting.
How much does something like that change between sixteen and sixty? A little, certainly, but not so much that a strong resemblance can’t be traced. Not so much that you wouldn’t recognize at once that both samples belonged to the same person.
He probably had ten or fifteen samples of Simon Faircliff’s distinctive penmanship at home in his files. The great man liked to send little handwritten notes; he understood as well as anybody the political value of that kind of small attention. Pete Freestone knew that autograph as well as his own. He would have recognized it anywhere.
And the essay, those three closely covered pages of schoolboy ingenuity, was not in the same hand. It wasn’t even close.
“That’s our latest acquisition,” said the sniffly old retired librarian who had insisted upon showing him through on his first visit. She seemed to regard Simon Faircliff’s young life as her own personal property, and she was pleased as punch about it. “Miss Garfield left that to us in her will—ninety-two she was when she passed away. Imagine.”
“Oh?” Freestone had raised his eyebrows in polite interest. “Who was Miss Garfield?”
“Only the first high school teacher in Butte Country with a full-fledged bachelor’s degree in literature,” the librarian answered with a certain asperity—how could he not have known a thing like that? “A graduate of Occidental College in Los Angeles she was, and President Faircliff’s teacher, for both French and sophomore and junior English. She’d kept that essay all these years. She knew he’d be a great man one of these days.”
Pete Freestone tore out his copy of the credit slip, stuffed it and the card back into his billfold, and handed the rest of the form to the waitress. As he sat finishing his coffee and trying to recover from the shock, he watched the gentleman seated by the exit, wondering whether he could have any idea at all what he had been sent out to protect.
. . . . .
There were all sorts of perfectly reasonable explanations. The young Simon Faircliff might simply have bought himself a term paper; the practice probably hadn’t been invented by the present generation. Except that everyone remembered him as the smartest, best-organized kid they had ever met, and wouldn’t Miss Garfield have been familiar with young Simon’s scrawl? No—it wouldn’t wash.
Or maybe his handwriting had changed. That was supposed to happen sometimes after people suffered some sort of neurological crisis. Except that there was no record that anything of the kind had ever happened to Simon Faircliff. But after all he was a public figure, and public figures had been known to be less than perfectly candid about their medical histories. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy who had written that essay and the man who sat in the Oval Office weren’t the same person.
By the next morning he had almost convinced himself that his imagination had run away with him. He would go have another look that afternoon, and doubtless he would discover that the two scripts weren’t as different as he had allowed himself to suppose.
There was a coffee shop about five blocks from his motel where it was possible to get a cup of vanilla yogurt, a slice of dry toast, a glass of tomato juice, and a cup of black coffee without anyone sneering at him. He had discovered it the first morning of his previous trip and had gone there for breakfast as a fixed routine for the whole three weeks. At seven A.M. it was a pleasant quarter-mile in each direction, and he had read somewhere that you lost weight faster if you made a point of walking as much as possible.
It was late in October, and true to the weatherman’s promise, there had been a frost the night before. The grass, where it was still darkened by the shadows of surrounding buildings, was covered with a white film of ice. The sidewalks along that particular street were lined with maple trees that had long since gone bare; here and there on the pavement you could still discover the outlines their leaves had left, looking absurdly like the footprints of giant frogs.
Like most people who had grown up in big cities, Pete Freestone tended to take rather a romantic view of rural life—rural, in his mind, being anyplace with a population of less than a quarter-million souls. As a consequence he enjoyed Oroville, even to the point of entertaining certain harmless fantasies about editing the local rag so he could spend the rest of his life writing stories about church rummage sales and the opening of the trout season.
There was a vacant lot about midway on his walk between the coffee shop and the motel, simply a bare patch of ground where the grass grew as high as your knees, right in the middle of what must have been by local standards the heart of the business district. Perhaps there had been something there once and it had been torn down. Anyway, the land was empty, without so much as a “For Sale” sign in evidence. Freestone was just passing it, amusing himself with visions of a clean, safe, uncomplicated pastoral existence, when he heard a car gunning its motor behind him.
He turned around to look and, for one horrible instant, thought he was dead already. The thing was coming directly at him, a latemodel Chevy, dark blue, and the man behind the wheel was the man whose picture he had taken, the man with the narrow eyes and the straight black moustache. There seemed plenty of time to notice all these things—and no time at all to get away.
He watched the car coming, watched it gathering speed, and glanced down at the edge of the sidewalk, just at the point where the Chevy would come up after him. If he ran, it would simply change direction a little and nail him anyway. There was nowhere to run.
Except that just there the sidewalk sloped down to make a driveway entrance. It was worth a try.
With a sudden twist of his body, Freestone threw himself down and started to roll back the way he had come. If he had kept to his feet, he would never have made it—as it was, the car missed him by no more than a couple of inches. He was close enough to hear the whizzing of the tires just beside his head.
The car swept up and onto the vacant lot, made a sharp turn, and shot back to the street, grazing the corner of a parked truck. In an instant it was gone, leaving nothing but the track of its path over the grass and the sounds of squealing tires and crushed metal that still rang in your ears like echoes.
Freestone picked himself up from the ground, saw that he had cut open his thumb, and wrapped it up in his handkerchief. His suit was muddy and torn open under the left armhole, but personally, he was alive. There seemed to be little enough to complain about in that.
The driveway entrance had saved his life. Those couple of inches had kept Pete Freestone alive. Because that son-of-a-bitch had been trying to murder him.
All the way back to his motel room he kept glancing over his shoulder, expecting the dark blue Chevy to come back and pin him to the side of a building. He found that he had a tendency to stumble; it was simply that his nerves had been stretched so tight that he kept putting his feet down too soon. An attempt on his life was a new experience—he wasn’t used to it.
He sat down on the edge of his bed and tried to think. He had to pull himself together, to decide what he should do. These people, whoever they were, couldn’t have any idea what he had hit upon; the mere fact of his presence in this place at this time seemed to be enough. Somehow he had tipped them that he was less than satisfied with the official version of Simon Faircliff’s youth, and that was all the
excuse they needed.
And he had only talked to two people about it—Frank Austen and, indirectly, Faircliff himself.
Could Frank have set the dogs on him? Frank doubtless had done some pretty raw things in his time, and no one had ever questioned his loyalty to his President, but Frank was also a friend. It was hard to believe that he would do something like this—try to have him murdered, for Christ’s sake—on so little provocation, without so much as a warning. The guy was a hard ass, but he wasn’t a monster.
And he wasn’t stupid, either. Frank had seen the photograph. It was perfectly possible he had been lying when he had said the face meant nothing to him, but if that goon with the slits for eyes was one of Frank’s people he would never have sent him to finish off his good friend Pete Freestone, even assuming he thought to solve his problem that way. You don’t do that when you know your man’s been spotted.
So that left Simon Faircliff, his Excellency the President of the United States.
“I wonder that you didn’t go home to Oroville to practice law, Mr. President. “
Faircliff had smiled tightly and shaken his head.
“I fell in love with San Francisco. Besides, I had a job offer.”
“And you’ve never been back?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Not even to campaign? I wonder why that is. Didn’t you have any curiosity about the place?”
“Curiosity? No, I guess. . .”
Dear God, how he had squirmed in those few minutes. If the President was protecting some guilty secret—and it would have to be a beaut if he was ready to kill people, just like that, simply as a precaution—
Freestone realized that, for the first time in his life, he was simply out of his league. Whom could he contact? Someone had to be told, in case he never made it back to his typewriter, but who? Frank Austen? Frank was Simon Faircliff’s man.
On the other hand. . .
Freestone had seen Austen’s face when he heard about Ted Boothe—they had been together that night. Frank wasn’t that good an actor; no, he hadn’t had a hand in that. And Frank had smelled something, too, both with Boothe and with Clayton Burgess. From what one heard, Faircliff was now sleeping with Burgess’s widow.
There just weren’t any other options. Frank Austen had been his friend for a long time, and that might go a little way toward making the difference.
Freestone looked through the drawers of his motel room writing table until he found the inevitable packet of stationery, extracted a sheet of paper and an envelope, and sat down. In less than a minute he had finished, and he folded the paper into thirds and put it into the envelope. They would have stamps downstairs; he would drop his note in the lobby mailbox as he left. It was time for him to try and get home.
It was odd. All his life he had been telling himself that he ate out of nerves. And finally here he was, feeling like the biggest target in the shooting gallery, and he could hardly swallow his own spit. Maybe he was finally learning.
IV
Frank Austen was just about to leave for the airport when he came down the stairs from his bedroom and found that morning’s mail scattered over the tiled floor of the entranceway. He gathered up the two magazines and the advertising circulars and set them on a table where Dottie would find them and took the handful of letters into the kitchen. Most of them were bills, and there were a few that he could tell from the size and shape were probably dinner invitations, an impression the embassy stamps on the envelope flaps tended to confirm.
There was one, however, with no return address, merely an Oroville, California postmark. Austen tore it open and read it, and then went over to the refrigerator for a bottle of ginger ale, stuffing the letter into his jacket pocket. He wasn’t surprised; he had decided some time ago that very probably nothing would ever surprise him again.
When he had finished his drink, he went back upstairs to his study and got George Timmler on the scrambler phone. “Meet me at the gate, George. I’ve got something I want to show you.”
Then he went back to his bedroom—the room next to his study; the honeymoon was over—to finish packing his bag. He found Dottie waiting for him.
She was dressed in a plain charcoal-gray suit that contrived to be at once stylish and severe, set off by nothing except a thin gold necklace he had given her for their second anniversary. She sat on the corner of the bed, her handbag on the floor beside her, as if she had just stopped for a moment before going out.
“I could still come with you if you like,” she said. Her eyes kept flickering down to the carpet, suggesting a certain embarrassment. “He was your friend. I could be ready in just a couple of minutes.”
Austen smiled, perhaps a trifle sadly, and shook his head. “No, sweetheart. I have business on this trip. Things you’re better off not having anything to do with. But I appreciate the thought.”
“Frank, what’s happened to us? I. . .” She left the sentence unfinished as her eyes filled up with tears. Austen reached out his hand. After a moment, when he saw she wasn’t going to take it, he let it fall back to his side.
“It’s as if some curse hangs over us,” she went on, when she had regained her composure. “We’re like the House of Atreus; we just keep tearing each other to pieces. This ‘business,’ it has to do with Pete’s death, doesn’t it.”
“Yes.”
“And somehow it’s all connected, isn’t it.” She looked up at him, and there was anger in her eyes; the tears had all dried up. “I’m not an idiot, Frank—I’ve known for a long time that there was something going on between you and Daddy that you were keeping a secret. You and he, you’re still the same on the surface, but you’ve turned against him, haven’t you. And now this with Pete. . .”
“Don’t ask me about things like that, sweetheart,” he said quietly, almost pleading with her. “I can’t tell you anything. Sometimes that’s the worst part of it—not being able to tell you.”
Perhaps it was only what he wanted to believe, but for a moment, as she looked into his face, he could imagine that she might really understand. It was because he loved her that he told her nothing—at least, that was part of the reason. Suddenly she sprang up, and he took her in his arms as she shook with weeping.
“Pete. . .”
“I know—he was a nice guy,” he murmured, touching her hair lightly with his fingertips. “But it’ll be all right. Someday it’ll all be all right. The funeral is tomorrow morning; I’ll be back Monday afternoon. I’ll call.”
He was lying. He didn’t think it would ever be all right—not anything, ever. But he could feel her nodding into the shoulder of his coat, like a child who doesn’t understand the words but responds to the tone of your voice, not caring for the truth of anything. They stood together like that for a long time.
. . . . .
There were still ten or twelve minutes before boarding, and Austen was sitting in the VIP lounge at Dulles airport moodily tearing a flight schedule into long, thin strips when George Timmler dropped into the seat next to him. For several seconds they seemed to pay no attention to one another and then Austen reached into his pocket and took out a piece of paper folded into thirds. He handed it to his Associate Director.
Dear Frank,
Our friend Snake Eyes tried to run me down with a car about twenty
minutes ago. They’ve got a Faircliff museum here—take a look at the
kid’s handwriting and see if it squares with the man’s. I don’t know what
it all means, but these jokers are planning to walk away with all the
marbles.
Pete
“Then you were right,” Timmler said quietly, refolding the paper and returning it. “It was murder.”
“Of course it was murder—did they think we were morons?”
Austen glanced impatiently around the lounge as if prepared to argue the subject with anyone who had the temerity to disagree. The only other passenger, an aging actress whom he remembered having been in love
with when he was eleven, seemed to be asleep in her furs, and the ground personnel continued to smoke and stare at their shoe laces in heartless unconcern.
“Of course it was murder,” he repeated, somewhat more calmly. “They seem to be under the impression that they can run the whole human race off into ravines and nobody will notice.
“I want you to find this guy Yates; we cancel his ticket right now. And then I want you to send somebody up to Oroville to find out what Pete was talking about. If he discovers any convincing evidence that Faircliff is one of our magpies, he should photograph it and send it home. Just photographs, not the genuine article—it’s probably safer where it is. But let’s get Yates first.”
Timmler sat with his hands in his pockets, the lines in his face looking as if they had been carved with a chisel. He wasn’t happy. “Frank, consider what’s at risk here. The election is less than a week away. This isn’t the time to get mad.”
“I’m not mad.” The Director of Central Intelligence presented an expressionless, unreadable face as his hands continued the careful work of tearing the airline’s flight schedule into uniform shreds. “But we get him now.”
“Look, Frank, I know this guy Freestone was your friend—”
“We get him now.” Austen gripped George Timmler’s wrist and pulled him around to command his absolute attention, as if he were ready to break the bones over one more word.
“We’ve let this jellybean run loose for years now, just because we didn’t dare do anything about him. Well, now we dare. I’m going to kill Mr. Yates; I’m reserving that satisfaction for myself. You find him.”
. . . . .
They found him. It wasn’t even that difficult. Yates was at home in his apartment in Santa Barbara. He hadn’t stirred out of doors all afternoon. He had even contrived to be alone.
The building in which he lived was just a two-story row that pushed its way up the side of a hill. There was a walkway, and on the other side another line of apartments, the mirror image of the first. Yates rented the second floor of the last unit, so his front window commanded a view of the entire complex. There was a swimming pool down at the bottom, and a parking lot and another line of apartments that faced the street. From a strategic point of view, he was very well served.
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