State Department Murders

by Edward S. Aarons

  Cornell regarded her bleakly. “Are you sure you are perfectly comfortable?”

  “As comfortable as one can be during a Washington summer. Drink up.”

  He took the drink from her and put it aside, then turned and closed the shuttered door securely, shooting the bolt home. He came back across the living room toward the small girl. Her eyes belied the smile on her lips. She was frightened. Her hand holding the drink trembled slightly. He saw now that she was not as plain as he had thought her to be, remembering the moment on the trolley and the brief conversation after alighting. That had been more than a mile from here, and the fact that she had spoken to him could not have been a coincidence, any more than her presence in his rooms right now could be due to chance.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” she said. Her voice quivered ever so slightly.

  “I’m waiting for an explanation,” he told her. “Or do you take off your clothes and scream for help first?”

  She flushed. “You’re so suspicious.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  She sat down suddenly and pushed aside her drink with a grimace. “I make a swell Mata Hari, don’t I? You know something? I’m scared stiff.”

  Cornell waited. She still looked like a government girl, quiet and unassuming, with soft chestnut hair, a modest blue suit, and sensible shoes. He saw that her figure, though small, had every reasonable proportion a man could desire. He wondered at himself that he could even consider this at the moment, and then said, “Mata Hari?”

  “Johnny made me come here.”

  “Johnny?”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Johnny Acorn.”

  “The man from the FBI?”

  She brightened. “Oh, do you know him?”

  “No. I just know about him. Do you work for him?”

  “Oh, no. I’m in Treasury.” She made a face. “I’m in Accounting. It’s frightfully dull, Mr. Cornell.”

  He walked to the window and looked out through the slats of the Venetian blinds. The wide, peaceful street looked empty in the hot evening dusk. He came back and picked up his drink and frowned at it, tasted it, and found it good. His small apartment seemed to be in order. The simple furniture, his collection of photographic prints, his tiny bedroom seemed undisturbed. If a search had been made, it had been a careful one.

  The presence of this girl made no sense.

  She was saying, “Johnny—Mr. Acorn—is married. I know his wife. We came from the same town, originally. That’s back in Pennsylvania. It seems that all the men in this town are married.” She looked at him. “Well, almost all.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “My name is Sally,” She smiled.

  “Oh, fine.”

  “It’s true!”

  “Just Sally Smith?”

  “Yes.”

  “More,” he suggested.

  “I’m here simply because I wanted to help you.”

  He lifted his brows at that and waited again.

  “That’s true, too. I’m Sally Smith and I want to help you. I don’t blame you for being suspicious. I’ve read about your case in the newspapers, of course. I’ve seen your photograph, too. All the girls in my division are discussing you. You’re something of a celebrity, Mr. Cornell.”

  “I’d rather not be,” he said.

  “Well, you are. Anyway, I don’t believe any of the things they’re accusing you of.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So when Johnny told me to follow you, I did—not because I thought you’re a traitor, but because I thought I might be able to do something for you. I don’t know what I can do, of course, but I thought I’d try. Life is dull enough, you see, and you—oh, dear. I’m not making sense, am I?”

  “Keep trying,” Cornell suggested.

  “Johnny said they aren’t going to let you leave town.”

  “What makes you think I’m planning to leave town?”

  She said, “Nothing. I just thought I’d mention it.”

  “How will they stop me?”

  “They have a warrant all ready to execute.”

  “Arrest?”

  “If you leave town,” said Sally Smith. She paused. “Were you planning to do that?”

  He felt confused. It wasn’t that he believed anything she said. It was her manner. He could swear that under the bravado of her casual intrusion, she really was a little frightened of him. It hadn’t occurred to him before that he was such a public figure, thanks to Congressman Keach. The thought that he was now the subject of gossip and speculation among the hordes of government workers made him shudder slightly.

  “Am I that repulsive?” Sally Smith asked.

  “I was thinking of something else.”

  “You can trust me,” she said earnestly.

  “How far?”

  “As far as you like,” she said. “Honestly.”

  There was something childlike about her, he decided, that shook the hard core of his skepticism. It wasn’t possible. People didn’t do the sort of thing Sally Smith claimed to be doing. He sat down and finished his drink. She had disarmed his first abrupt suspicions. If she had been planted here to frame him, if she was one of Jason Stone’s people, she would have gone into her act by now. He looked at his watch, and saw it was an hour until train time. Stone’s estate at Calvert Beach on the Chesapeake seemed suddenly remote when he thought of the web surrounding Washington to prohibit his escape from town.

  He realized with a start that he was beginning to accept the girl’s statements. She was waiting quietly, almost demurely, hands folded in her lap.

  “Why?” he asked. “Why should you help me?”

  “Because I think you’re innocent,” she said.

  “But why get into trouble over me?”

  She smiled. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a government girl, of course.”

  “You mean you’re here just because you’re bored?”

  “You can put it that way, if you like.”

  He said, “Suppose I decided to leave town. Right now, this evening. What would happen?”

  “You mean what did Johnny Acorn say would happen?”

  “Yes.”

  “They will arrest you.”

  “Are they that sure I’m guilty?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then how do you propose to help me?” he asked.

  She frowned. “Do you really plan to leave Washington?”

  “For the week end, yes.”

  “You will have to take me with you,” she decided.

  “Is that Johnny Acorn’s idea?”

  She flushed. “No I was thinking that you can’t use your own car, and you can’t use the trains or buses, either. They wouldn’t let you out of Union Station. But you could use my car. Nobody would be looking for you in it.”

  “Nobody but your pal Johnny and the rest of the FBI,” Cornell said sardonically.

  She flushed again. “You still don’t believe me. I’m sorry if I have such a dishonest face. On the other hand, that’s my security, I suppose. You don’t like me, and you won’t make a pass at me, so I’ll be safe if I help you get out of town.”

  “Where is your car?” Cornell asked.

  “I parked it two blocks away. And if you’re wondering how I got in here, I’ll tell you that, too. Johnny had the keys to this place. You know how they operate; they can do anything. But he didn’t think I’d swipe the keys.”

  She grinned elfishly, and for a moment her face lost its prim wistfulness. Cornell wondered what he had to lose. Her story was too implausible to have been concocted by his watchers. If so, then he had to accept the fact that the girl was quixotic, motivated solely by reasons of her own. No, he had nothing to lose. And if the order was out to arrest him if he left town, then he might as well learn the worst as soon as possible. He stood up.

  Sally Smith put aside her glass and stood up, too. “Where did you say your car was?” he asked.

  “Two blocks away.”

 
“Let’s go,” Cornell said.

  She didn’t argue about it. She moved quickly and efficiently, gathering up her purse and hat from the foyer. She didn’t bother to primp on the way out. Cornell closed the door and locked it from the outside. The lights were on in the outer hall. The smell of cooking wove a pattern in the hot and sticky air.

  “You can’t use the front door,” the girl said.

  He looked at her. “Johnny Acorn?”

  “They’re planted in an apartment across the street. They must have seen you come in.”

  “And heard us, too?” Cornell asked.

  She looked puzzled.

  “Dictaphones,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll have to chance it,” he said. “Let’s use the back way.” He paused a moment, and added, “You don’t really have to come along. If you want to lend me your car, fine and good. But you might get into a peck of trouble, stringing along with me.”

  “Trouble would be a relief,” Sally Smith grinned.

  “You want to live dangerously—is that it?”

  “Something like that,” said the girl. “It’s better than being bored to death.”

  The service stairs at the back of the hall were steep and narrow. Cornell’s shadow slid beside him, long and angular on the yellow-painted wall. The girl’s heels made quick, light tapping sounds as she hurried after him. At the lobby level he paused and felt her hand on his shoulder as she steadied herself. There was no one in sight. The elevator was in operation, and no one loitered at the street door. Cornell moved quickly, swinging around the newel post to open the fire door in the back of the building.

  The sky was a pale pearly green over the rooftops of the houses on the back courts. The leaves of a Carolina poplar hung listlessly in the muggy heat. It would be dark in half an hour. He walked to the picket gate in the back, with the girl half a step behind him and to his left. He didn’t turn to look at her once.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  “Right.”

  The side street was a quiet backwash of brick Georgian homes surrounded by stone or iron fences. A few lights gleamed in the windows here and there. A man walked a large French poodle near the opposite curb. Cornell fastened the gate and slackened his stride on the sidewalk. The girl walked abreast of him now, and after a moment she took his arm.

  “It looks better,” she said, in explanation.

  The two long residential blocks seemed endless. He waited every moment for something to break. He wouldn’t have put it beyond Jason Stone to have planned some subtle and elaborate trap to blacken his name and clinch the evidence of his web of lies. But nothing happened. His feeling that the girl was telling the truth grew stronger.

  Her car was a small, modest blue coupé. It was parked under a tree in front of a legation house. As they approached, Sally Smith opened her purse and took out the keys.

  “You may drive, if you prefer,” she suggested.

  “I’d rather,” he said.

  There was no one in or near the car. He wondered which of the windows facing the street held a hidden watcher. He could see nothing suspicious. The girl got in, and he went around the back of the coupé and slid behind the wheel. There was no alarm. Nobody tried to stop him. The car started easily, and in a moment they were rolling east toward the center of the city on Massachusetts Avenue. The girl sat quietly relaxed beside him.

  He said, “You’re not curious about where we’re going?”

  “You’ll tell me when you want to.”

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t rather just lend me the car and stay out of this yourself?”

  “No. I want to go with you.”

  Cornell said, “You’re putting a lot of trust in me.”

  “I like you,” she said simply.

  He had no reply to that. For the first time in over an hour, he thought of Kari Stone. The two girls were totally unlike each other. He had never deluded himself that he fully understood Kari. Often he had wondered what thoughts shone behind her suggestive, Oriental eyes. That’s over, he told himself. There was a finality about things when he thought about her and the scene in the café, and he wondered that he felt no great sense of loss. He slid a sidewise glance toward little Sally Smith, beside him. She looked pale, and the only make-up she used was lipstick. She seemed to be exactly what she claimed to be—a frustrated government clerk who had desperately taken the bit between her teeth in an effort to escape the monotony and boredom of her civil-service life.

  Nothing happened when he eased into Pennsylvania Avenue and headed for Anacostia Park and the bridge across the river. He wondered if he would be stopped on Route 4, on the other side, and he drove at normal speed, careful of the traffic laws. In a few minutes he was using his headlights on the highway, bound east, with Washington far behind him. Nothing was going to happen. When he glanced at Sally Smith again, he saw that her head was resting on the back of the seat and her eyes were closed. She seemed to be asleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CALVERT BEACH was one of those sprawling little communities of no determinate size or organization, consisting of scattered summer bungalows, a handful of oyster fishermen, and a few permanent residents. There was an old inn, catering to the few tourists who wandered toward the bay shore from the highway, and Overlook, the huge old plantation manor that had been purchased in a crumbling state by Jason Stone and completely restored to its antique splendor.

  For perhaps a mile from the main highway the road clung to the shore on an intermittent causeway that crossed rambling salt-water creeks and muddy flatlands, with an occasional stretch of moonlit beach marked by a cottage or two. Cornell drove slowly, watching for the stretches of corduroy that rumbled under the tires. Here and there he glimpsed the wide expanse of the Chesapeake under the summer moon, and from all around them came the ululating song of the frogs. It had taken longer than expected, but since he had chosen a round-about route, he was not surprised. Sally Smith had suggested a stop for hamburgers, too, and he had not objected.

  The girl sat up now as lights glimmered ahead from the main street of Calvert Beach. She delved into her purse and dabbed awkwardly at her nose with a powder puff.

  “We seem to have arrived at last,” she commented. “The question is, where are we?”

  “Calvert,” he said.

  “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

  “Once or twice.”

  Her voice tightened. “A cozy little cottage?”

  He grinned. “Suppose I said yes?”

  “You’re the boss,” she shrugged.

  “Unfortunately,” Cornell said, “my intentions are honorable. For the present, that is. I’m dropping you off at the Inn. I’ll be gone for about an hour, and when I come back, we’ll head for town again.”

  The girl said lightly, “Is this where you contact enemy spies? How do you manage it? Do they run a snorkel up the bay and meet you on some lonely beach?”

  Cornell’s voice grew rough. “Don’t joke about it. My esteemed friend Congressman Keach wouldn’t think your idea was exaggerated at all.”

  “Sorry,” she said meekly. “I’m not very good at the light and casual touch. Is this where I wait for you?”

  Cornell had pulled the small coupé into the diagonal parking lot in front of the Calvert Beach Inn. It was a long, rambling structure of vine-covered brick designed in the Williamsburg style, with a huge formal garden in the back that slanted down to silver water. Gnarled old oaks made deep pools of shadow on the lawn. One or two people could be dimly seen in the porch rockers, their conversation inaudible. An aged Negro came out through the swinging doors, carrying a tray of drinks. Except for the faint sounds of a radio somewhere, the place had the atmosphere of an old peoples’ home.

  “Life and jollity,” Sally Smith murmured.

  “You asked for it,” Cornell pointed out. “There’s a fairly decent bar, however. Or you can sit here in the car while I’m gone.”

/>   “Aren’t you going to drive?”

  “I’d rather walk.”

  He got out, and Sally Smith remained in the car. Her eyes questioned him. “Well, good luck,” she said.

  “Thanks. I need it.”

  “I wish—”

  He waited.

  She said, “I really wish you’d let me help you. I don’t know what you’re planning to do in this neck of the woods, but I have a hunch you could use someone with you.”

  “Such as yourself?”

  “Has anyone else volunteered to help you?” she asked.

  Sally Smith—and Johnny Acorn, he thought. He smiled inwardly and said, “In an hour, Sally.”

  “Take care,” she said quietly.

  She remained in the car when he moved away. Overlook Plantation was more than a mile down the road, beyond the main cluster of resort cottages, and he could have used the coupé to save time, except that he wanted the extra few minutes with which to organize his thoughts for the interview with Jason Stone. It wasn’t going to be easy or pleasant.

  Most of the local stores were already closed for the night. The only sign of social activity was in a big, barn-like studio a little farther down the street, where lights streamed from tall windows and people could be seen moving about inside. Calvert Beach boasted of a small art colony, he remembered, and apparently some sort of Bohemian celebration was going on among the members. The sign over the studio read, “Yvan Rulov, Art Instruction—All Mediums.” Cornell went by without pausing, his thoughts on the coming interview.

  It wasn’t that he expected Jason Stone to listen to a plea for mercy. Cornell had no intention of making one. As a matter of fact, he thought ruefully, he wasn’t being much less quixotic in coming here than Sally Smith was in taking up arms on his side. It was simply that he was sure Jason Stone had instigated the charges against him and spurred Keach on to carry them out. The only thing he could hope to find out tonight was the why of it all. If it was because of Kari, all right. But if there was a deeper motive in the man’s enmity, he wanted to learn that, too.

  Cornell had made no secret of his long opposition to the influence Jason Stone wielded in Washington’s diplomatic circles. He walked on slowly down the shadowed road, thinking about the man and his history.