Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  “You got it in one.”

  “I hired you,” Leethe pointed out, “and all at once you’re my partner. Now you’re suggesting we should hire somebody else.”

  “I see your problem,” Barney agreed, “but let me reassure you.”

  “I find it very unlikely, Barney,” Leethe said, “that you could ever reassure me, on any subject, at any time.”

  “Let me try, anyway. There’s a bunch of private detective agencies—”

  “My God. You’re going to bring in Mike Hammer?”

  “Not like in the movies,” Barney told him. Now he was getting impatient. “In real life,” he explained, “licensed private detectives do guard duty at small museums or private estates, they do industrial espionage to find out who’s stealing the lawn mowers or the secrets or whatever, they repossess cars and boats and stuff that people don’t make their payments on, but what they mostly do is find deadbeats. Skip-tracing is their real art, and they do it all on the phone, and they never ask why the customer wants to find so-and-so, they just do it. Mostly, they’re little shops with three or four or five people, and that many phones, and the boss has the license, and he’s a retired cop. They’re all over the country, and they all have WATS lines so they don’t care if they have to call Alaska or Florida or whatever, and in a situation like this I wouldn’t even use a New York outfit. New York City, I mean. I’d use one from Boston, or maybe Albany or Syracuse, and all they know is they’re looking for Margaret Briscoe, formerly of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and we believe for the summer she’s somewhere in this area. So they’ll charge me for the time—overcharge me, that’s how they are—and a bonus when they find her, and in the meantime we sit back and wait.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe a week, maybe less, maybe more.”

  “Precision,” Leethe said, with another brief faux smile. “How much will all this cost?”

  “Under a grand.”

  Leethe considered. He finished his Perrier. He said, “And how much of that will be paid by my partner?”

  Barney stared at him. He couldn’t believe this guy. “Are you feelin all right?” he demanded. “Maybe it’s past your bedtime. Lemme make it easy on you. Just nod your head if I got the okay to spend the grand.”

  28

  Sunday evening, they had a fire. They didn’t need a fire, the Sunday of the last week in June, but if you’re going to rent a house in the country, and if that house has a fireplace, and if it has a stack of firewood outside under a black plastic sheet against the back wall, it doesn’t much matter if it’s August, you’ve got to have a fire.

  Also, as Freddie pointed out, “You need more warmth in a room when you’re naked.”

  “You could put some clothes on, Freddie.”

  “If I put on a shirt and pants,” he answered, accurately, “you’ll get upset unless I put on one of the heads and a pair of rubber gloves and then some socks and shoes and—”

  “Okay, okay. We’ll have a fire. Let me do it!” she cried, as a log started to fly all by itself across the room toward the fireplace.

  This was long enough after dinner for Freddie to be completely invisible again, and there was still bluish-pink light to be seen through the windows in the sky outside, above the black soft masses of the trees. In the country, their patterns were changing, they were going to sleep earlier, waking up earlier, living an entirely different life. Call Me Tom had given them a list of nearby—if fifteen miles could be considered nearby—shops and stores, and they’d done their exploring, taking life easy, Freddie not even shoplifting, though in these country shops you hardly had to be invisible to walk out with half their stock. There were places in the little towns to rent videotapes, and the house had a big television set and a working VCR—even the clock in it worked, to show the advantage of renting from a scientist—so in the evenings they could watch movies, except tonight they were having a fire.

  A nice one, too, if Peg did say so herself, having done the whole thing and then come back across the room to admire her handiwork. Sitting there on the deep sofa, lights out, rich sky colors in black-framed rectangles at the windows, snuggled against Freddie (it was okay if she didn’t look), she gazed into the twisting flames and said, “Freddie, this is pretty okay.”

  “I kind of like it,” Freddie agreed.

  “The only question—”

  “I know.”

  “What do you—”

  “The cop.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Here’s the way I see it,” Freddie told her, adjusting his arm more comfortably around her (she didn’t look). “This cop, that you say his name is Barney something—”

  “That’s what the lawyer called him.”

  “It could still be true, though. Okay, Barney’s a real cop, with all that power, and that was probably a real warrant he showed you, but what I think is, I think he isn’t working as a cop. I think he’s rented himself out to that lawyer—”

  “The lawyer was the guy in charge,” Peg agreed, “when they were at our place.”

  “Right. And the lawyer’s working for the doctors.”

  “Do doctors have that kind of clout?” Peg asked. “That they can get a lawyer that bosses cops around?”

  “These aren’t regular doctors,” Freddie pointed out. “These are research doctors. Who knows who they got behind them? The CIA, maybe, or the Republican National Committee, or some oil sheik.”

  “Scary people.”

  “Which is why we want to stay away from them. Keep out of their sight.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “The question is,” Freddie said, ignoring that, “what’s gonna happen next with this cop and this lawyer?”

  “They know we’re up here someplace,” Peg reminded him. “Someplace around the Rhinebeck railroad station.”

  “Which I’m not worried about,” Freddie said, “if the cop’s working on his own. If he can send out a flyer on us, that’s different. Then we might actually have to leave here.”

  “Oh, Freddie! Don’t even say it!”

  “We still have to think it, Peg. We don’t wanna be sitting here like this, cozy and romantic in front of the fire, and outside a SWAT team’s surrounding the house.”

  Peg stared at the darkening shapes of the windows, her eyes wide in the firelight. “Oh, my God, Freddie, do you think it’s possible?”

  “Not this quick. Maybe not at all.”

  “But—what are we gonna do?”

  “I tell you what,” Freddie said. “Tomorrow’s Monday. If this Barney the cop is on official business, if he’s after me because there’s a warrant out on me or something, those doctors swore out something against me, though I doubt it, but if that’s the case—”

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “By tomorrow,” Freddie said, “they’ll have the bulletin with my name on it at all the police stations around here, and the state trooper barracks, and all the rest of it. So I’ll go to one of those places and have a look.”

  “Freddie!” Peg said, and forgot, and looked at him—at the sofa, that is—then quickly looked at the fire again. “Could you do that?”

  “Peg, I can do anything. That’s the upside of this business. I know there’s problems and all that with this invisibility thing, but Peg, you know, when it comes right down to it, I can do anything I want.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “So if my name isn’t there, on the be-on-the-lookout-for list, then everything’s fine. Barney’ll never find us here on his own.”

  “So we’re safe.”

  “Yes.” Freddie squeezed her more tightly. “Peg,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Close your eyes now, Peg.”

  “What? Oh, sure.”

  29

  When folks around Dudley said that Geoff Wheedabyx wore a whole lot of different hats, they meant it literally. Geoff lived in the old Wheedabyx place that had been built by his great-great-grandfather along the Albany-Boston road ba
ck in the 1850s, when there was still iron under this land (great-great-grandpa was the mine owner) and when all this countryside around here was farms and woods. Some members of the Wheedabyx clan—particularly the ones who had moved away to California—were still sore that the town that had grown up around great-great-grandpa’s place was called Dudley and not Wheedabyx, but the fact was the Dudley farm had comprised over seven hundred acres, while Great-great-grandpa never had more than eleven acres around his house, a parcel which in any case he’d bought from the Dudleys.

  The Albany–Boston road was now Market Street, the only east–west thoroughfare in the village of Dudley. The iron under the ground was long gone, turned into hard round balls and fired southward in the 1860s, and the farms were recently gone, turned into suburban developments and weekend homes and back into woods, but the Dudley descendants were still here, in and around their namesake town, and the Wheedabyx descendants were represented mainly these days by Geoff, who wore all those hats.

  They were hung usually on pegs in his office, that being the big room at the left when you came in the front door. Originally that room had been the best parlor, unused except for holidays and family reunions and visits from the pastor, and at later times it had been a sickroom, whenever there was a Wheedabyx in residence too far gone to make it up the stairs, or sometimes a formal dining room, though too far from the kitchen, but now it was Geoff’s office, where, on pegs high on the side wall opposite the entrance doorway, hung his many hats.

  Here are the hats, from the left: volunteer fireman’s helmet, with CHIEF emblazoned on the front, and goggles and mask and straps dangling from it; yellow construction hard hat, with WHEEDABYX BUILDERS in blue letters on the right side, being the small construction company Geoff ran and spent most of his time at, hammer in hand; white helmet with built-in walkie-talkie and AMBULANCE in red letters across the front, which he wore when driving for the Roe-Jan Volunteer Ambulance Service; dark blue graduation-type cap with tassel, worn when singing with the Unitarian choir (he wasn’t a Unitarian, but it was a good place to meet girls); serious black fedora for use at weddings and funerals and outdoor speech-making (by others); and dark blue military officer-style police chief’s hat, with silver badge and black hard brim, which is why we’re here.

  Monday morning, June 26 of this year, Geoff Wheedabyx awoke alone and happy, leaped out of bed, and went off to shower. He didn’t always awake alone, but he didn’t mind it. At forty-seven, he’d been married twice and divorced twice and, while still friends with both ex-wives, he saw no reason to marry a third time. He essentially agreed with the philosophy of W. C. Fields, who once said, “Women to me are like elephants. I like to look at them, but I wouldn’t want to own one.”

  Geoff liked to look at women, and more, hence the choirsinging cap and the black fedora, but to an even greater extent he liked to go on being an overgrown boy, hence the fireman hat and the policeman hat and the hard-hat hat. For a cheerful grown-up boy, who can actually legitimately wear all those hats, life is a pretty sweet proposition, all in all.

  Geoff had a bachelor’s kitchen skills: he threw food at the stove, then ate it, then cleaned up. By 7:40 A.M., he was done with all that, and carrying his second cup of coffee into the office, ready to go to work.

  Geoff’s office, a large room, was nevertheless crowded. His police-department file cabinet stood next to his fire-department file cabinet stood next to his construction-company file cabinet. His firematic books and police manuals and building codes bulletins and lumber brochures were all tumbled together into rough bookcases he’d made himself, evenings. On the walls, wherever there was space among the calendars, safety posters, work schedules, and area maps, Geoff had pinned up FBI wanted posters, not because he ever expected to see any of those hard-looking fellows here in Dudley, but because their pitiless faces helped to remind him that, small as all his operations might be, he was still engaged in serious business here.

  As a police department, his operation was about as small as you could get: himself and two part-timers, who were mostly employed for traffic control when things like the circus or the horse show or the bluegrass festival were in the neighborhood. The rest of the time, the Dudley, New York, police department was just him, as backup to the state police, who handled all the real criminal work: burglary, DWI, possession of a controlled substance. (Once, there’d been a small Ziploc bag of some sort of white powdery controlled substance actually here in this office, locked in the bottom drawer of his grandfather’s old oak desk over there between the two front windows, locked in there for two days, waiting for State CID up in Albany to send somebody down and pick it up. Oh, how Geoff had wanted to open that bag, just take a sniff, maybe a tiny taste; but he’d been good, and left that evidence alone, and regretted it ever since.)

  This morning, as usual, he phoned the state-police barracks down toward Pawling to find out if anything he should know about had happened during the night—like more escapees from the boys’ reformatory over by the Connecticut state line—but this morning, happily, there was nothing. Next he called the firehouse out at Futterman—Dudley was just backup to their fire department—and they’d also had a quiet night. So then he made some lumberyard and hardware-store calls, put on his hard hat, and went out, locking both the office door and the front door behind him, because there were just too many things in the office, like guns and flares and radios, that kids might take too intense an interest in, and he didn’t want to be responsible for some dumb kid blowing his fingers off or something.

  The Dudley PD owned a fine black-and-gray police car, two years old, equipped with stuff you wouldn’t believe possible, but Geoff rarely used it. In fact, he mostly kept it parked just this side of the town-limit sign at the west end of Market Street, to remind eastbound drivers they weren’t on the Taconic Parkway anymore and should slow the hell down. What Geoff drove instead was his 4 × 4 pickup equipped with flashing red light, police radio, CB radio, walkie-talkie, handgun mounted under the dash, fire extinguisher, and, oh, Lord, just tons of stuff. Including at the moment, three sheets of C-D exterior plywood and some boxes of nails and a can of joint compound and some other construction-company stuff in the back.

  The pickup was parked in the drive outside to the left. Geoff boarded it and took it the two blocks to the house where he was enclosing the back porch downstairs and creating a new screened porch on the second floor above it. He arrived at three minutes to eight, to find two of his three construction-company employees already there, yawning and scratching and drinking diner coffee out of plastic cups. The third guy pulled in about ten seconds later, and then they went to work.

  The deal is, as everybody knows, construction crews cannot work, can simply not work, unless country-and-western music is playing on a crappy little portable radio under everybody’s feet. On the other hand, Geoff had to be aware of his radios in the pickup, just in case there was a fire or an ambulance emergency or some call for the police department, so an electrician friend—who should have been here this week, by the way, but of course he wasn’t—had rigged a white light on the pickup’s dashboard that would flash through the windshield if anybody tried to call. And Geoff always left one transmitter on in the office, that could be received by the police radio in the pickup, if anybody tried to make contact with him back there. A voice, a phone ringing, anything like that in the offices would transmit to the pickup and switch on that white light.

  It came on this morning a little after ten. It would come on like that once or twice a week, and was never any big deal. Today, one of the guys on the crew noticed it first, and said, “Your light’s on, Geoff,” and Geoff put down his hammer and left the porch and went around to get behind the wheel of the pickup.

  He listened. No voice, no telephone, no walkie-talkie. Nothing. So why would the light go on? Did somebody just ring once, at the office, and then hang up? Geoff was about to switch off the light and go back to work when his police-department radio began to make scratching sou
nds.

  Well, hell, so that’s what it was. When he’d put in this system, the electrician—where the hell was he, by the way?—had said it was so sensitive it could pick up a mouse eating an apple in the office, which was okay with Geoff since he had no varmints in his house at all. Except maybe now he did. Listen to that scratching—sounded like the damn thing was eating a baseball bat.

  The door opened.

  What? Geoff leaned closer to the radio. Had he heard what he’d thought he’d heard?

  The door closed. Footsteps. A file drawer opened.

  “Well, hell,” Geoff said, and reached for the handgun under the dash. Tucking it into his jeans, removing his nail apron, flipping the tail of his T-shirt over the gun butt, he got out of the pickup, called to his guys, “I’ll be right back,” and walked the two blocks back to his house, passing along the way a gray minivan with city plates and a strange woman at the wheel, who didn’t look at him as he went by. Something to do with it, whatever it was.

  Already he knew this wasn’t kids. It was a burglar, picking locks, deliberately breaking into that specific room in that specific house and going right away to the filing cabinets.

  Half a block this side of his house, Geoff turned off and walked down a driveway, then across some backyards. He’d grown up in this town, and until the age of thirteen the backyards and fields and lower tree branches and barn interiors had been his primary routes, leaving the ordinary streets and roads for the use of unimaginative grown-ups. You didn’t forget those childhood patterns: Geoff could now come at his house from eleven different unexpected directions.

  Letting himself quietly into the house through the back door, he paused to remove his work boots, then in his tube socks eased through the house to the closed office door. Leaning close to it, holding his breath, he listened at first to silence, and then to a squeak—his office chair, the son of a gun was sitting in his office chair—and then the undeniable scrape of his bottom drawer opening, the one that was always kept locked, but which this alien burglar son of a gun had picked or pried open. Goddam it!