by Brad Latham
No, there was something else. He tossed possibilities back and forth. Was it Josef Dzeloski? Those mikes planted at Barbara Wilson’s cottage were still loose ends. Could Josef be behind this theft? Still, if Manners found Mr. L.B., Dzeloski would either be implicated or be exonerated.
As he drove, Lockwood thought and thought, struggling to figure out what was bothering him, without luck. He saw that his impulse to go to Patchogue wasn’t just for an evening’s entertainment, that he had wanted some time alone to think, and he liked to think and drive the Cord at the same time.
Something was wrong, seriously wrong, and the closer he got to Myra’s house in the Moriches, the more certain he was of it and the more it bothered him. He was eager to arrive, and yet dreaded it. Once there, he knew he would be so involved entertaining Myra that he would put this aside, and he wanted it settled before he got there. Of course, Myra wasn’t dumb. He could bring this up. Myra could help him figure out what was bothering him. His sudden inner lurch of refusal—he almost hit a car in the parking lane—woke him up.
He laughed and laughed.
His nagging hidden problem was her! Lockwood dreaded coming out here to see her, and he couldn’t stay away. He laughed again as he saw it. Him, William Lockwood, in love with Myra Rodman!
Warm, tender, and rapturous feelings swept over him, making him faint and dizzy. He fought for control. In a single instant he saw the two of them as a single family, and then saw and felt the flash and caress of small chubby limbs. He wanted children by her.
He had another half-hour of driving to go, and he was tempted to pull over and think this through, but out here there was little traffic so he could both drive and think. He lit a cigarette.
This had never happened before. Up to now, Lockwood’s enjoyment of his bachelor status and its dozens of women had been simple. Settling down had only occurred to him fleetingly, and never with such a thud of certainty.
He felt both pleased and wary. He didn’t trust himself in this—but why not? Because he couldn’t decide how to play tonight, whether to say little and just watch how the evening went, to see how he was with her and she with him, or to share the news of his feelings with her.
After all, what an explosion of good feelings if she felt the same way!
And she might not. That thought sobered him. What would it be like if she was married to that joke of being Madame Curie that Greer and Dzeloski made about her? Something hard and ugly jerked in Lockwood’s stomach, a lurch that made him angry. Why did she have to be so involved with that scientific nonsense? If another man beat him out, okay—but a goddamned bombsight?
After all, Myra was no spring chicken; and pretty and charming as she was, she must have given up man after man over the years for her work, and what made him think he would win where others had failed? And even if he did snare her, would she leave her job? If she didn’t, they could have no life if she kept her job in Patchogue and he his in Manhattan.
A flood of similar concerns rose in Lockwood, and he wanted to drive back to Manhattan and sit down with a bottle of Canadian and sort them out, but he didn’t dare. He had a chance to see her, and he wasn’t passing it up. He wouldn’t bring this up tonight; he would live with it and with her and with himself a bit more and see how all this went—but God, how the possibilities excited him!
When she answered the doorbell, it was anticlimatic. He answered her big smile with his smaller grin, which he was sure gave away his feelings, but she just said the ordinary things a woman says when a man comes to take her out to dinner, and he replied with ordinary remarks in return.
Lockwood went through wooden motions in a light daze of talking, making her and him a drink, lighting cigarettes, and then helping her on with her wrap.
He put the top down on the Cord, and as they drove, he was aware of the smells of the woods and grass and maybe a dozen different flowers. He noted all this and paid no attention to it, only to notice how keyed up and alive he was. After all, in his whole life he had hardly noticed twice that flowers had nice smells, much less that each smelled differently.
He made the right noises as she talked about the work at Northstar. Josef was going down to Washington to see if he couldn’t get more appropriations so they could begin to remake the bombsight. Senator Longridge, the committee’s chairman, wanted to transfer the contract to a company in his state, and Josef would have to sell the committee on Northstar all over again. Meanwhile, she and her staff were drawing up new plans and struggling to figure out how long they could afford to work without pay. He pulled into Gurney’s parking lot.
The headwaiter remembered them from last week, and on feeling the crinkle of Lockwood’s bill in his palm certainly had their same table.
“What’s the matter, Bill?” she asked.
He jumped a bit. “Nothing. Why?”
“You seem preoccupied.”
He smiled. “We’re getting close, we think. They just barely got away—we were hours behind the thieves.”
Her mouth and eyes opened wide with excitement. “Oh Bill, you mean Baby hasn’t left the country!”
He hated and loved her excitement over this hunk of metal.
“We don’t think it has.”
“You might get it back!”
“Manners will be knocking on over two hundred doors tonight looking for your kidnapped baby.”
He filled her in, within the limits of what he felt would not upset Manners and his agency. The story made her eyes shine, but after that the meal flagged. Lockwood brought up subject after subject, and he could see she was making an effort, too, but their conversation held no flash or sparkle. It felt to him as if two mechanical dolls were chattering together. He longed to reach out for her hand, but he also wanted to sit back, for he was afraid of the consequences and didn’t trust himself. His spirits drooped. What had happened to this afternoon—all that flash of emotion and the surge of excitement in the Cord—had been some fluke of his hormones. He and Myra didn’t get along well enough to marry. If they were so bored tonight, what would it be like in twelve months or twenty years?
Nothing at Gurney’s helped either. The steaks arrived both overcooked and cold. Last week they had been served broccoli, tonight dour-looking peas and carrots. The mousse cloyed, and the coffee tasted watery. They were two of twelve diners tonight in a room large enough for two hundred, and the band limped through tunes that last week had been executed with dash and wit.
In silence he drove her home. He figured they had both given up. He didn’t know whether to press to stay tonight or simply to give her a passionate kiss and make excuses about not getting any sleep last night, the long drive to Manhattan, and needing to get back on the case. If he pressed her, he was sure she would turn him down, and he certainly didn’t want that on top of his other, larger disappointment. On the other hand, he felt an obligation to press her a bit. Wouldn’t her feelings be hurt if he simply said good night and left? Wouldn’t she feel that he had snubbed her?
He felt pulled in both directions—to stay and to go—when he pulled up to her house.
She said, “Come in and have a drink.”
“Gee, Myra, it’s getting late. I ought to get back. I was too tired to have—”
“Come in and have a drink,” she insisted, and she got out of the car and slammed the door angrily before he could refuse.
He watched her stride through the Cord’s headlamps at her no-nonsense speed and fought with himself. He didn’t want to go in the house, yet he turned off the car lights and got out and followed her.
He found her sitting in the middle of the sofa in the living room. Her shoulders were scrunched together and her head was bowed between her shoulders. She looked miserable.
“Sit down, Bill.”
He felt he had to drag himself through sand to get into a chair.
“I lied to you tonight,” she said. “That’s why the evening didn’t work.”
“Oh?” He looked at her sharply, with curiosity.
>
Myra nodded and threw him the barest of glances. Was she feeling as badly as he? He wondered if she had something to confess about the bombsight.
“I wanted to play this cool and sophisticated,” she went on. “After all, I am thirty-two. I know what all the magazines say. Still, I did a lousy job at it.”
“At what?”
“Maybe we better not see each other again.” It had the form of a suggestion, but he heard very little in the way of give to her tone.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She sighed and looked at him through her bowed posture. “Bill, I can’t stop myself from saying this. I know I don’t have any right to say it. But—I’m falling for you.” She looked more miserable, as if she might cry.
Within him something large and dangerous spun. He felt his finger scratch his chin, wondering how so much stubble got there. Then he wondered why he was thinking about the stubble on his chin when she had just said something so important. The room seemed full of dead objects and one dangerous vortex and unsettled all at once.
Myra continued. She didn’t look at him, and her face had withdrawn into itself. “Maybe all the women you go out with tell you this. You’re very handsome and self-assured. But I can’t go out with you and play this sophisticated game of dating. In and out of bed, as if it’s nothing. I’m just not that kind of woman.” She sat back and tossed her mane of hair. “I wish I was, in a way. But I’m not. In a big sense this has been a first for me.”
Lockwood saw tears well up behind her eyes in a stretch of time that seemed hours. Her face blackened, and he was on his feet and by her side before he was completely aware of whit he was doing. He held her to him, and she cried into the lapel of his coat. Something within him relaxed and melted. He squeezed her and felt his tension flow out of him. Finally, they pulled apart, and she gazed at him through her teary eyes.
“Bill, I’m such a fool!” she said.
“I love you, too.”
She snatched his soft handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped her eyes.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
He kissed her forehead gently. “It doesn’t feel like anything else I ever felt for another woman.”
She sniffled and laughed at the same time. “Maybe you just caught the flu.”
He took the handkerchief from her and wiped her face. She took his face in her hands and kissed him several times gently. He kissed her back.
“No, you didn’t catch the flu,” she answered herself. “It’s been such a terrible evening. I thought you didn’t love me.”
“I thought you didn’t love me.”
They smiled.
“It’s been awful,” Myra said. “I didn’t know what I’d done wrong.”
“I thought I had misjudged you, me—us.”
They smiled again, this time with little hesitancy. Myra reached out to touch Lockwood’s face as if to make sure he was really there.
“We didn’t tell each other what we were going through,” she said.
“No.”
“Let’s promise to tell each other the truth from now on. Always.”
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“Oh Bill! This is exciting!”
He agreed, and they embraced again, and Lockwood thought he had never hugged another person as hard as he now hugged Myra. He felt such a solidity and rightness to this moment that he never wanted it to end.
Still, like all moments, it passed. They told each other of the agonies each had gone through all night and laughed over them. They promised all over again never to allow misunderstandings to come between them.
Shortly afterward they were pulling at each other’s clothes, and before long their eager fingers explored the other’s smooth flanks. Feeling Myra’s strength within her feminine clothes moved Lockwood to a height of delightful frenzy. Never had he had a woman like this, and he wasn’t ever going to let her go. Every hour with her drove home the point with more force. Myra was a strong creature with the power both to be gentle and to protect herself, and nowhere was Lockwood more certain of the attractiveness of her than in their fierce and gentle love-making.
They were sprawled, half on, half off, the living room sofa. Myra laughed coyly. “Enough here. Carry me in the bedroom again.”
From her waist he removed the last bit of lace and kissed her stomach and breasts, which drove a shiver of delight through him. She giggled and circled her arms around his neck and held on tightly.
He carried her into the bedroom and placed her in the center of the bed.
“You look delicious,” he said.
She stretched out, showing herself off unabashedly, and said, “I’m all yours.”
Chapter 14
“Lockwood! There you are. What are you so chipper about?” Manners asked.
Lockwood had just entered the conference room at the downtown FBI headquarters. Manners looked beat, as if he had not been to bed all night, and Lockwood felt some guilt at playing while the T-man worked the night through.
“What have you got?” Lockwood asked.
“Humph! What did you get?” Manners asked. He looked annoyed. “You look like a bantam rooster after a night in the henhouse.”
Lockwood gave him a huge grin. “Shows, huh?”
“All over. Maybe that was you with Barbara Wilson last night?”
“Those microphones worked?”
To Manners’ left sat a stack of files about a foot high. He gestured vaguely in their direction. “Transcripts of a busy lady. Can’t identify all her male visitors, but Miss Wilson doesn’t seem to have any business except selling her favors.”
“Wasn’t me. Not my type. Anything in there on Josef Dzeloski?”
“He’s been back twice to see her, but he just seems to be a lonely guy.”
“It proves nothing. He could still be in this up to his ears.”
“How do you see this business, Lockwood?”
Lockwood shrugged. “I see a different angle than you, being in the insurance business.”
“And?”
“Say a guy like Dzeloski knows this contraption is going to fail the tests at Lakehurst. If it does, no money from the United States Treasury. So, he arranges a theft. Maybe this thing is at the bottom of the Sound. Better to sell the device to the insurance company than to fail to sell it to the Air Corps.”
Manners nodded in a speculative way. “Okay. Possibly. What about the others?”
“Well, could be somebody at the plant has sympathies for the old country. You remember how it was in the war.”
“Oh yeah. Don’t.I.”
“So, Greer, the guards, the engineers—hell, how do I know? Even Heatherton.”
“I told you he is a double agent—our double agent.” Manners looked around nervously. “Don’t even like to mention his name.”
A knock at the door, and one of the hard-faced young men Lockwood had seen out at Northstar the first day entered with a handful of papers.
“You know Greg Peters, don’t you, Bill?”
They shook hands. Peters looked about awkwardly as if he didn’t know what to say, but then Manners said, “You got to piss or something, Greg? Stop hopping about.”
“I’ve got a new report, sir. Could I see you alone?”
“On the L.B.s?” Manners asked.
Peters shot a sharp glance at Lockwood.
“Yes, sir.”
Manners sighed. “I guess we can trust Mr. Lockwood here. Spell it out for me, Greg.”
Despite his attempt to be coolly professional, Peters’ enthusiasm shot out. “We’ve got him, Chief!” The young man smiled triumphantly and spread out a report in front of Manners. Lockwood peered over their shoulders.
“Louis Braunschweiger,” Manners said. “West 86th Street. What makes him fit the bill?”
Peters drew himself up. “The super saw him bring in a crated refrigerator two days ago. Took four men to get it in. He heard
Braunschweiger tell them it was radio parts—fragile. Braunschweiger didn’t want to, but he had to get the super’s help. The super says it weighed a ton.”
“Nobody else fits?”
“No sir. We’ve covered 90 percent of the names on this list.”
“Does Braunschweiger know he’s been found?”
“We don’t think so.”
“Who talked to the super?”
“Higgens and Trapp.”
“Higgens knows what he’s doing.”
“Yes sir. Higgens phoned this in not ten minutes ago, and he’s got the super out of the building so there won’t be any chance of his giving away that we’re on to Braunschweiger.”
Manners looked at Lockwood and smiled in a satisfied way. “Jesus, it helps to have good men.”
“Shouldn’t we get right over?” Lockwood asked.
“I’ve sent ten guys already,” Greg said. He stopped what he saw coming from Manners. “With instructions to do nothing till you got there.”
Manners smiled and nodded at Greg and then said to Lockwood. “See? It’s terrific to have good men.”
Greg flushed slightly and murmured a thank you.
“Who do we know on the New York police force?” Manners asked.
The names Greg came up with didn’t hit Lockwood as people who would do them much good with the department.
“Let me call Jimbo Brannigan,” Lockwood said. “I think I can get cooperation out of him.”
He felt the momentum of the chase now, and his own excitement mounted. It took him the best part of ten minutes to track down Brannigan—he was in a tenement basement on the Lower East Side at the site of a gangster’s murder—but only two minutes for Lockwood to get his full cooperation.
“Meet you at the corner of 86th and Broadway,” Brannigan said.
“Okay, but no sirens,” Lockwood cautioned. “Be sure—absolutely sure—all your patrol cars are silent.”
“You got it. See you in—fifteen minutes.”
“Right.” Lockwood hung up.
