“About what I expected. He’s a big shot in the Mob. Now get on that transmitter.”
He watched her activate the transmitter to Charlotte Thoren’s phone, then went into the study and sat down behind the desk without turning on the light. He leaned back in the big swivel chair until it was tilted at its most acute angle and put his feet up on the desk. After a long while he heard the squeak of the bedroom door and saw Elinor silhouetted against the light from the bedroom. “Jake?” she whispered.
“I’m not asleep. You can turn on the light.”
She switched on the desk lamp. “It’s almost half past eleven. Can I cut out on Mrs. Thoren now?”
“Not yet. Did you get anything from her end so far?”
“Nothing worth marking on the tape. Around ten o’clock the cook was up there, and Mrs. Thoren gave her a lot of instructions about what to buy at the market and such. Then she watched TV for a couple of minutes, then turned it off. It’s been pretty quiet since. Just some moving around.”
“No late news? No Johnny Carson show?”
“No. Maybe she thought this was a good night to catch up on her reading.”
Jake said: “If she did, it’ll be the first time since we’ve been listening in. That’s a break in the pattern all right.”
“Except it’s not much of a pattern, is it? I’ve only been listening in on her a few days.”
“It’s still a pattern.” Jake swung his feet to the floor with a thud and let the chair tilt him upright. “Jesus, what is it with you and Magnes? Anything I say, you two seem to think is some kind of challenge to a debate.”
Elinor said indignantly: “Jake, that’s not so.” Then she looked at him with narrow-eyed speculation. “And that’s not what you’re really bugged about right now, is it? It’s something else.”
“I suppose it is. It’s what that miserable Caldwell told me today. He really scrambled the picture.”
“How?”
“He said in effect that Thoren was identified by the kind of swamp character who always sticks close to home. Some alligator-wrestler from the boondocks who could just about make it from there to Miami and back. In that case, if that guy witnessed whatever Thoren did thirty years ago that was worth blackmailing him for, it was done somewhere around this area.”
“So what?”
“So it knocks the hell out of the theory I’ve been going on. From what I put together, I assumed Thoren was a refugee or immigrant who landed in the States between 1935 and 1940 and settled down in the Midwest. The Midwest, because he showed such familiarity with it in that cooked-up background of his. Then he committed a crime there, made a big haul—at least the sixty thousand dollars he paid for his partnership in the Sprague Company—and ran down here to hide out permanently under a new identity. That way it makes sense. This way it doesn’t. Let’s say he committed the crime in this area. Then why stay around here afterward?”
Elinor considered this. “You still think he was a foreigner?”
“What he wrote in his policy application and how he wrote it says he was. And nothing has turned up to prove otherwise.”
“Well then, maybe this is the only part of the country he knew. Maybe he was afraid to go some place else where he wouldn’t know his way around.”
Jake said impatiently: “For a man with that amount of brain power—” He stopped short and looked at Elinor blankly. “Brain power. A highly educated Dane who could have spoken fluent English even before he landed here. He didn’t need a couple of years to master it so he could pass as an American. All he needed was enough time—a month or so—to rig up that phony identity. He bought into Sprague’s company in September, 1942. Put everything together, and he could have hit town here around that summer, right in the middle of the war.”
“Could have,” Elinor said doubtfully.
“I know, but it’s a probability that explains why nobody around here knew him in his real identity. Another good probability is that he wasn’t a refugee at all, where he’d be under the supervision of some organization. He came here for his own good reasons.”
“What reasons?”
Jake said: “Your guess is as good as mine, baby.” He picked up a pencil and scratched the nape of his neck with its eraser. “Wartime. A man with a real good scientific and mechanical head on him. Somebody sent here on military research? Hell, no, he’d be under even tighter supervision that way. Leadership qualities. A natural leader. A military instructor? Still the same thing.” He aimed the pencil at Elinor. “What else can you think about him that might fill the bill?”
She gnawed her lip as she considered this. “Well, he had to be great on detail, didn’t he? I mean, the way he planned every little thing when it came to changing his identity and all.”
“I know. That’s what made me think of the military mind at work. From the first time I went through his dossier, I had a picture of him somehow being the real colonel-of-the-regiment type. But a combat man. Maybe Air Force.”
“But you just said he couldn’t have been in the service.”
“I still say it. But he sure as hell should have been, from the picture I have of him. Take the way he was about boats. A natural-born naval officer. Big man on a—”
Elinor waited for him to finish that. At last she said: “What is it, Jake? You think he was a navy officer?”
“I can’t help thinking it, it’s so damn perfect. But the same thing still holds true. If he was in the service, he would never have hung around here after changing identities. Any branch of the service is too tight to allow for that. You’d always be bumping into people who knew you if you stayed around. And down here was very big with the military during that war.”
Elinor said: “But why did it have to be the navy? There’s all kinds of boats, aren’t there?”
Jake stared at her. “All kinds of boats.”
Elinor said defensively: “Yes. I mean, well, like freighters. And he liked sailing more than anything. It was his bag.”
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“So if it makes sense, why sit and look at me like I’m some kind of kook?”
“Baby, that’s not how I’m looking at you. I’m looking at you with awe because it makes so much sense. I’m thinking you just zeroed in on the biggest and best probability of all. An officer on a freighter. Maybe captain of one. Why not?”
“And then he happened to get mixed up in something, and afterward—”
“No,” Jake said, “I don’t think it happened to him. I think he made it happen. He was the kind of man who’d have everything worked out long in advance. Like that phony identity, for instance. He could have landed here from abroad with forged credentials ready in his pocket. With a good idea of what this town was like. Of how to get the money, and what to do about it afterward.”
“More probabilities?” Elinor said.
“And subject to change without notice. But that’s how I make my living, baby, betting on probabilities. Only this one you’ll be checking out.”
“Me? Jake, if you think I’m any Sherlock Holmes because I came up with one good idea, you are really ringing the wrong number. And I’m scared stiff of characters like Holuby and Frank Milan. I’d be watching for them over my shoulder all the time.”
“You don’t have to, because I’m the one they’re concentrating on. And you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to go through old newspaper files. That’s the whole job. Tomorrow morning we drive over to some big department store in Miami. From there, you head for the main library in town and work through the Herald files backward from September, 1942, to, say, May of that year. You’ll be looking for a news story—it might only be a few lines in the middle of the paper—about a ship’s officer disappearing from a boat docked here, and you’ll do it page by page, not skipping anything. Slow and steady, that’s how it’s done.”
Elinor said: “It sounds like a barrel of laughs. All the same, wouldn’t the police have records about it? Or maybe Magnes could do it? I don’t like
to be any place all day without you. Maybe they’re concentrating on you, but I’m the one Holuby tried to drown.”
“He’d have a hard time doing it in the library. And I can’t go to the police for this kind of information, because Milan probably has contacts on the force, and I wouldn’t know who to trust there.” Jake stood up and peeled off his shirt. “Now bring that monitor and recorder back in here and lock them up in the closet.”
“I thought you wanted me to listen in some more.”
“I do.”
“Just with the phone stuck to my ear?”
“Right. Just like you were making a call home to mama.”
“Ah, Jake, if you’re bugged because I call home every night—”
“No, I’m not. I think it’s very touching you’re such a devoted daughter and mother. But I’m going out now, and if anybody happens to drop in here a little later—like security men or cops—I don’t want that equipment in sight.”
Elinor said with alarm: “Why should cops come here? What are you talking about?”
“Now don’t start making a thing out of it. I want to look over Thoren’s sailboat. I still feel he might have left that last note from the blackmailer there. The records show that happens sometimes in suicide cases like this, and I can’t afford to pass up even an odds-against bet right now.”
“But security men and cops?”
“Hell, if you’re freaking out just because I try to exercise a little foresight—”
“I’m not freaking out. I’m only scared something’ll happen to you. And if you’re getting me ready to have the cops walk in and tell me they shot you—don’t.”
“I don’t have to. What might happen is that they’ll bring me in with them and ask you to identify me. And maybe ask you if I’m in the habit of taking moonlight dips in the bay. And you’ll say yes, I am. And that’s the worst that can happen.”
“Are you sure about it?”
“I’m sure. I wouldn’t even have to take that much into account if it wasn’t for that stupid Webb next door blasting off with his gun the other night and stirring up everything around here. They might have tightened security in this section because of it.”
“I see,” Elinor said. “So all I have to do is sit there with that phone stuck to my ear and wonder how much they tightened security.”
“That’s all.” He got out of his clothes, and with Elinor trailing after him, went into the bedroom and put on a pair of bathing trunks. She followed him back to the study, where he rolled a pocketknife and miniature flashlight into a plastic pouch and thrust it into the belt of his trunks. Finally she said: “Did you know that bay is all polluted? You can get all kinds of things swimming in it. Joanna told me so.”
“Considering the people I’m dealing with,” Jake said, “I’m probably immune by now.”
28
He left the house through the back door, locked the door, and planted the key on top of its frame. Standing there, he saw that Milt Webb had lately taken his own precautions against possible invaders. A drop light had been run from Webb’s house to a nail driven high up into a palm tree in the middle of his lawn, and the unshaded bulb cast a light which extended in a wide radius to the waterfront. Jake stepped off the bulkhead into the water, and using a sidestroke which allowed him to keep his eyes fixed on the boundaries of the lighted zone, tried to stay clear of it as he covered the distance to Thoren’s sailboat.
The boat turned out to be as buoyant as a cork. When he grasped the rail near the stern and pulled himself up, the rail dipped under water. Then the boat rolled back the other way, going stern down and bow up. The dock creaked loudly as the bow line jerked at it; there was a sudden splashing of wavelets against the bulkhead.
Jake froze there until the sounds had faded away, then hauled himself on to the narrow deck beside the cockpit. Flat on his belly, he took out the flashlight, cupped a hand over it to shield the beam, and examined the line tying one corner of the protective canvas cover to the handrail. The knot was a seamanlike job. He undid it, then slipped into the cockpit beneath the canvas and pulled the canvas back into position over him.
There were a couple of inches of warm, slimy water in the cockpit. As he stretched out in it on his back, something gently nudged the sole of his foot. He shudderingly pulled the foot back, then turned the flashlight beam in its direction. It lighted up a plastic container there, shifting back and forth as the boat rolled. He jackknifed himself around to get at it and pulled open its cover. Empty. Running the flashlight beam under the overhang of the deck, he saw a smaller container dangling from a cup hook screwed beneath the stern decking. He lifted it off the hook and aimed the light into it. It was about the size of a one-pound can and half full of scraps of paper, cardboard, cellophane wrappers, and paper matchbook covers.
He probed the stuff with his finger. Damp, but not sodden. He carefully picked out a scrap of paper and others adhered to it. Holding the light close to them, he saw that the lettering on them was a little blurred, but legible.
He got the watertight pouch from his belt, and holding it between his teeth by its flap, he worked the contents of the container into it. There was a sudden, deafening explosion of sound in his ears. He almost dropped the container, managed to grab it in time, but some shreds of paper spilled from it into the water he lay in. The noise quickly receded in the distance. A big jet flying low in or out of Miami International airport. He emptied the last of the container’s contents into the pouch, then propped himself on an elbow and patiently went to work salvaging, piece by piece, the bits of paper in the water. With the pouch back under his belt he crawled from under the canvas, tied it down again, and noiselessly slipped into the bay.
Back in the house, he went into the kitchen and emptied the pouch into a large skillet. He carried the skillet into the study, set it on the desk, and turned on the desk lamp. “Jake?” Elinor called.
“In here.”
“Are you all right?” She came pattering barefoot into the study, clad in pajamas and with her hands held out before her like a sleepwalker. “You are all right, aren’t you?”
“Couldn’t be better.” He looked at her outstretched hands. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing. I was all wound up, listening in on that phone and thinking about you getting shot, so I tried to do my nails. I couldn’t even finish them, I was so shaky.” She watched him stir apart the damp pile of paper on the skillet, spreading the pieces evenly. He lowered the lamp so that the heat of the bulb was diffused over the skillet. Elinor said: “Is that stuff from the boat?”
“It is. Lucky he was one of those compulsively neat characters, not the kind to go heaving litter overboard. But that figured.”
“You really think the note from the blackmailer is there?”
“It could be. When it’s all dry we’ll fit it together and find out. One good sign is the way he tore up these pieces so small. You don’t usually take that kind of trouble with a grocery list.”
Elinor said: “I hope not. The kind of job it’ll be putting it together, I’d hate it to come out a grocery list.” She suddenly waved a hand back and forth before him. “I almost forgot. The phone.”
“You mean the transmitter was cut off? Somebody called her?”
“No, even more than that. Kermit came into her room, and she had a talk with him. Jake, she’s taking off some place, and only Kermit and Joanna are supposed to know where. Somebody did tell her who we are, I’ll bet on it. Now she probably thinks the best thing to do—”
“Slow down, baby. There’s no sense blowing a gasket about it. Did she say where she was going?”
“No.”
“Not a word about it?”
“Not while I was listening in. All she said was that when the check for the insurance money came he was to forward it to her immediately. Then he started walking out, and she called him back and said to remember he and Joanna weren’t to tell anyone at all where she’d be. She came down on that very hard. And he said
wasn’t she overdoing it a little, and she said Dr. Freeman told her absolute peace and quiet was vital for her right now, and this was the only way to get it. Jake, you don’t think the doctor really told her to go away, do you? It was somebody from Frank Milan, wasn’t it?”
Jake said: “Most likely. But she probably got the doctor to say a trip would do her good. Then she’d be covered if anybody checked with him about it. Did she say when she’d be leaving?”
Elinor shook her head. “No, but earlier in the evening she gave the cook all those instructions about going shopping tomorrow morning. That could mean she wouldn’t be here herself.”
“It could,” Jake said. “Which is why Kermit came across with that dinner invitation. He knew she’d be gone by then, so it was safe to have us over.” He looked at his watch. “Twelve-thirty. However she’s traveling, she’s not likely to leave before five or six in the morning at the earliest. Otherwise—” He picked up the phone and dialed Charlotte Thoren’s number. As soon as he heard her say in a tense whisper, “Hello. Hello. Who is it?” he hung up. “We’re that much ahead of her anyhow,” he told Elinor. “She’s still here.”
Elinor said: “But you can’t keep her here. So what happens if she’s not around when you want her to sign that release?”
“No sweat, baby. I just look her up wherever she is.” He picked up the phone again and called Magnes. While he waited for an answer he prodded apart drying scraps of paper on the skillet with his finger. “Yeah?” Magnes said sleepily.
Jake said: “Trouble. Mrs. Thoren’s getting ready to take off, maybe first thing in the morning. I want a man on her who knows how to handle surveillance work. A pro. Can you get me somebody right away?”
“In an hour. A very good boy. He even got a passport on him covers any place you don’t need a visa. Taking off, hah? You know what that means?”
“I know what it means. But it probably won’t be a passport job because the blackmailers won’t want her that far away from them. Furthest away might be some place like the Bahamas. Does Milan’s mob have any setup there?”
The Bind Page 15
