Blake took a deep breath. “It seems to me that I was out. As long as I sat in that jail back there, I wasn’t much threat to you.”
“You never were much threat to me, Blake,” Arrenhower said. “I do not care whether you live or die, return to that jail or go free. I’m sorry you lost your wife. I’ve heard that she was young and quite lovely. That makes it wasteful and sad indeed.”
“Somebody thought that getting her out of the way would get me out of the way,” Blake said evenly.
He felt Harrison’s leg nudge him sharply.
Arrenhower was silent a long time. “A variation of the hit-and-run theme, is that it, Blake? Is that why you called my secretary, Edwards? Is that why you wanted to talk to me today?”
“Somebody killed her,” Blake said softly.
“My business,” Arrenhower said in a strangely taut voice, “is manufacturing. That is my only business. So far, God has been kind to me. I have been able to protect my interests without stooping to inhuman violence.”
“I think,” Blake told him quietly, “somebody ought to tell you what goes on in the lower levels of this giant business of yours.”
“I would like that, Blake,” Arrenhower replied coldly. “Perhaps you will be so kind.”
“It’s none of my business. Unless I found that one of your goons killed Stella. Then I wouldn’t wait to see you about it.”
“My goons?”
“All right. Your private police. Your plant guards. Whatever it pleases you to call them.”
“Well. It might have pleased me to call them goons,” Arrenhower answered. “It’s just that I never thought of that particular word.”
“Mr. Blake is bitter. And young,” Harrison interposed.
“Why should I be bitter?” Blake said sardonically. “You people drag me out of my nice, warm jail bed and bring me over here. I’m a citizen. I’m a taxpayer. I’m a human being. But I could yell my brains out and I’d still be right here with you. My life would still be worth exactly what it’s worth to you right now. A very plugged nickel.”
“Inflation,” Arrenhower said mildly, “has set in everywhere, Blake. But you wrong me. I want only to have a chance to listen to you talk. No one is going to lay a hand on you, except as I order it. I consider you a human being. I see that you have been caused suffering and loss. It is not my wish either to add to your suffering or to deprive you of your rights. But as a matter of fact, you would be reclining in a filthy jail at this moment if I had not come forward. Isn’t that correct?”
“You’re right.”
“So. I’m right. Then why scream that you’re being deprived of your constitutional rights? You had none a few hours ago — even a few minutes ago. What happens to you tonight, Blake, depends entirely upon your own choice. This much I will tell you now. If any man in my employ had any part in the brutal murder of your wife, I’m as anxious to know it as you are. You needn’t worry about swift retribution if you can show me the man who did it and say that the orders came anywhere along the line from me down to him!”
“If I find him,” Blake said, “don’t worry. I’ll take care of him.”
“That being true,” Arrenhower said. “It appears to me that you would be more tolerant of me. Your wife has been slain. You want revenge, right?”
“All right.”
“My wife — my life — my mistress — the business that I built alone, with my own heart and hands and mind — mine and nobody else’s — is threatened. Threatened by men like you — often, like you, hired to do a job without even knowing what lies behind it. I want to protect what is mine. What happens to you, Blake, will happen only because I am trying to protect my own love. Is that clear?”
“If you know all about me, what more can I tell you?”
“That is why we brought you from the jail, Blake. That is what we will find out. That is what we will see.”
No one spoke again. The big car swung north long the bayshore, and then was whipped west along a tree-lined, macadam road. The car lights swung across gate posts. A gate was opened and the car moved along a gravel drive and stopped before a vaguely lighted portico. White columns, two stories tall, stood like sentinels before the closed white door.
Al White killed the engine, sprinted around the car and opened the rear door. Harrison stepped out, Blake followed and then Al White got in the car and helped Arrenhower out. For the first time, Blake saw that Arrenhower suffered from a mild form of paralysis of the legs. Moving was a slow and painful business for the manufacturer.
They started up the wide steps. The house was old Southern Colonial. The town had grown up around it. But from the aged, solid appearance of mansion and grounds, it must have been a country estate when first built. It had been restored, refurbished, repainted without losing its dignity or its agelessness. It was a dowager with her face lifted. A grand dame given every care to preserve her beauty. But something else impressed Blake about the silent old place. There was just one way to get inside this house. By invitation only.
And I’ve been invited, he thought. He was the private eye, Roberts, just before the die casting machine blew his face off. He was a snooper about to be dealt with. He had wanted to see Arrenhower. But he had wanted to ask the questions. He was sure he was answering questions this inning. None of that ingratiating manner and steady smiling was deceiving him or reassuring him either.
They went inside. Arnoldson and White disappeared immediately. After a moment, Harrison was gone. Blake was alone with Arrenhower in the massive library.
Arrenhower let himself into a deep chair. He looked at Blake. “I hope you won’t think we’re forgotten,” he said. “Everyone here has his job.”
“I don’t think we’re forgotten,” Blake said. “I don’t even think we’re not watched.”
Arrenhower smiled deprecatingly. “Oh, it’s not quite that bad, Mr. Blake. You see, I wanted this few minutes alone with. you. I want to make you an offer. I can offer you ten thousand dollars a year and a job in a South American branch of my firm. How does that sound to you?”
“Fishy,” Blake replied honestly.
Arrenhower’s brows drew together. “You’re not a cautious young man, are you, Blake?”
“No. You see, Mr. Arrenhower, my wife has been murdered. I’m sorry. I can’t worry much whether I make friends or influence people. Now, about that South American job. I don’t speak Spanish in the first place. Oh, an Ybor City smattering of Cuban Spanish, but that’s all. I can tell you to get that knife out of my back. That’s about the extent of it. I don’t know enough about your firm to be worth ten thousand dollars a year to you.”
“You couldn’t learn?”
“How long would I have to learn? You want me out of this country, isn’t that it? You know that as Robert Cole I worked in your plant. You know that I undoubtedly have found out quite a few embarrassing truths. And you’d like me out of the country.”
Arrenhower looked pained. “That would be the simple way. The easy way. That’s what I’m offering you first, Blake. You’re a fool to refuse.”
“I’ve already told you. All I want is to find who killed my wife.”
“Your wife is dead. If I sound brutal, it’s because I’m an old man. You’ve got to go on living.”
“Well, thanks. I’ll go on living right here. I’m not taking ten grand to carry me and what I might know out of this country.”
“You might well wish you had listened to me, Blake. An older man. A wiser one. I’m willing to up my offer.”
“You couldn’t offer me enough.”
Arrenhower pulled himself painfully up from the chair. “You have your price! Every man does. Show some sense. You’d better make up your mind to name your price. We’ll come to terms, or what is ahead of you will leave you worth nothing — even to yourself.”
“I won’t haggle with you over what my life is worth to me, Arrenhower. I got into this thing knowing it was dangerous. This is a hazard of my job. Suppose we get on with it.”
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For a moment, Arrenhower just looked at him. Then he hobbled across the room and pulled a cord. Alder Harrison, the lawyer, came in immediately. Blake knew he must have been listening outside the library door.
“Will you get Dr. Lowering?” Arrenhower said quietly.
Harrison looked at Blake and then nodded at his boss. He withdrew from the room, closing the door quietly after him.
Arrenhower seemed to forget that Blake was in the room. He went over to his desk and riffled through some papers on top of it. When the door opened again, he glanced up only briefly. Two of his company police stepped inside. One of them crossed to the double windows and stood there, a big man with thick shoulders and, Blake supposed, a thick head. The other, matching him like minted coins, stood beside the door.
Two hospital orderlies came in next. Harrison, Al White and Arnoldson followed and sat silently at the end of the room.
Blake decided the whole business wasn’t real anyway. It was a nightmare out of Dali. “Joe Stalin would envy you,” he said to Arrenhower. But Arrenhower didn’t even look up from the papers on the desk.
The orderlies moved without speaking. A small white table was brought out into the center of the room, a straight chair placed beside it. “Sit down,” one of the orderlies said to Blake.
Blake looked at them for a moment. They stood stolidly, waiting for him to sit down. One of them appeared to be the Hollywood-inspired version of the virile he-man. The other fellow could have been his wife. This little fairy simpered, moving a limp wrist. The other was the hairy-chest type, the aggressive homo, the fellow who looked like a football hero but was the most sickening type of fruit as far as Blake was concerned.
Everyone in the room was watching him. Blake turned from the pair of deuces to Arrenhower. He was looking at Blake now, passively. Blake shrugged and sat down beside the table. There was a time to act like a hero, he thought cynically, and a time to bow to superior forces. Blake was making his bow.
The pansy pair worked deftly. They removed his coat and his shirt. The big one held Blake’s right arm out rigidly. His helper set a board under it and bound it tightly in place with gauze. They told Blake to rest his arm on the table then. The bigger of the two queers swabbed at the blue vein above Blake’s elbow. Dr. Lowering came into the room.
Dr. Lowering was a small man with a large head, milk-pale flesh and spindly body. Arrenhower came forward now. There was pride in his face. “Blake, this is Dr. Lowering,” he said. “I was in his hospital. Dr. Lowering cured me. I have great respect for him. I contribute generously to his private hospital. In return, Dr. Lowering is happy to aid me with recalcitrants. Isn’t that right, Craig?”
Lowering’s voice was heavy basso. Coming from such a thin body, it was startling. “Of course, Mr. Arrenhower,” he said. But Blake saw the little man’s eyes were tortured. Lowering was scared of what he was doing, but he was more afraid of Arrenhower. The doctor looked at Blake. “Mr. Arrenhower wants to talk to you,” he said, his voice very low. “Now what’s going to happen to you won’t hurt you at all, Mr. Blake. Barbiturates don’t even cause local irritation. When I’ve given you this dosage, you’ll go into a dreamless sleep almost immediately. I hope you won’t be tense or frightened. It won’t hurt you to be tense, but it won’t lessen the effect of the sodium pentothal either. Like death and taxes, Mr. Blake, this is going to work, whether you like it or not.”
“Drugged,” Blake said with contempt. He struggled and found his left arm twisted up his back by the big queer. He was surprised at the strength in the man’s hands. Blake had the horrible feeling that the orderly could rip his arm from his shoulder.
“Don’t be contemptuous, Mr. Blake,” Lowering said evenly. “This is a little more than injecting a few cc.’s of barbiturate powder and water solution. Your respiration, circulation, metabolism and smooth muscles will remain normal. You’re going to sleep, Mr. Blake, only you’re going to be awake. You’re going to do what I tell you to do.”
“Go to hell,” Blake said.
Lowering nodded at the smaller orderly, “The solution, please.” He held the hypodermic needle upward in his hand, grimacing a little as he studied it in the light. “We could have given you this by capsule or tablet or dissolved in a hot liquid. But that is slower. Takes from ten to thirty minutes to begin to have any effect. There might be excitement, inebriation or even delirium which would cause further delay.”
As he talked, he injected the point of the needle into the blue line of Blake’s vein. “Slowly,” Lowering said. “This is accomplished slowly, Mr. Blake. No thrusting in a needle and shooting the solution in. This takes a little time. But you’ll be patient, won’t you, Mr. Blake?”
Blake was aware that someone had snapped off the overhead light. Only a bright light glowed in a reflector on the white desk cross the room. Blake decided he wouldn’t look at it. But the glare pained his eyes no matter where he turned. Defiantly, he closed his eyes.
The light was still there.
Lowering’s voice was soothing now, low, quiet, gray. Gray as gray cats, as gray shadows, as gray fog. He could no longer see the men at the far end of the room. Lowering’s voice was coming from some distant place.
Suddenly, Blake reared up in the chair. He felt restraining hands thrust him back. Then through the gray mists, he was aware of Arrenhower at Lowering’s side. “You bastard,” Blake said.
“The hypnotic trance is preceded by this period of delirium and excitement,” Lowering was saying. “It will be very brief. See, the pupils of his eyes are contracted, they’re fixed and irresponsive to the brilliance of the light. It won’t be long. He’ll be ready for you.”
The need for sleep overcoming him, Blake slumped in the chair. He heard Arrenhower protest, “If he sleeps, how can we talk to him?”
“Don’t worry,” Lowering said. “He’ll want to sleep. He’ll hate us because we won’t let him sleep. But he’ll talk, Mr. Arrenhower. Ask him what you want to know and he’ll blab his little heart out, won’t you, Blake?”
10
WHO HIRED you?” Arrenhower said.
Blake looked up blurredly at the tycoon. He wanted to spit in the fat, jowled face. But he had no will, no strength to spit. He knew Arrenhower had cleared the room. Only the manufacturer, Harrison and the doctor remained in a vulture’s circle about his chair. But it no longer mattered. Blake was helpless to move. He could only nod his head and say, “Dickerson hired me, for his company. American Materials.”
“Why?”
“Sleep. Must sleep.”
“Why, Blake?”
“Find out why Roberts died. Find out why American Materials furnishes raw stuff that government never gets benefit of. Why some of your finished parts are never sold in this country. Where they go. Why? You’re credited with a lot of raw material. But government isn’t getting enough finished work. Very naughty. Very naughty man, Arrenhower.” Blake’s head slumped forward on his chest. His eyes burned, the lids felt as if they were unbearably weighted.
“What else, Blake? What else?”
“Why men afraid to join union. Sleep. Let me sleep.”
Lowering’s voice came distantly, commandingly. “Sit up straight, Blake.”
Blake craned his head around slowly. He tried to twist the muscles of his face into a sneer. But he was pushing his head up straight instead!
“Did you find out why men are afraid to join a union?” Arrenhower said. He was bending forward, his well-fed face sweated. He was peering into the contracted pupils of Blake’s dry eyes as though he hoped to read his answer there.
Blake’s head slumped. He felt he had to sleep before the need for it killed him. He said, “Yes. I found out. Company police. Watchers. Spotters. Very nasty. Man can’t call his soul his own. Very nasty. Loyalty tests. Snitches. Rats. Getting extra pay to snitch on men they work with.”
Arrenhower spoke to the other two men in the room. “This Blake was a very busy little fellow! And working right under our noses!�
� He wheeled back to Steve. “Who else, Blake? Who else works for Dickerson in my plant?”
Blake’s head went up. “I’m no snitch,” he muttered. “Not gonna ‘danger life of some working stiff.” No wonder poor Terravasi had been shadowing him! Terravasi was mortally afraid that Blake might be forced to talk to Arrenhower. Terravasi might die! Blake shook his head.
From afar, through the shadowy gloom, the doctor spoke. “Tell Mr. Arrenhower, Blake. Tell him everything you know.”
Blake was talking, powerless to remain silent. “Terravasi. Company police. He was one. He was watching. Knew all about company police. I was watching in plant. Sleep. Let me sleep.”
“Talk! You’ll sleep when I’m ready for you to sleep!” Arrenhower snarled at him. And it went on. For hours they kept at him under the glare of the white light on Arrenhower’s desk. Harrison questioned him. And then Arrenhower was back at him. They kept talking even when Lowering was supporting Blake’s head with a handful of hair caught in his fist.
From somewhere, a hundred miles removed, Blake heard Arrenhower say, “Is that it, Harrison?”
God knew they had his guts, Blake thought. There was nothing left in him — no secrets, no life, no strength. The lawyer swam into Blake’s dimmed vision.
“It should do for now,” Harrison said. “You know whom you have to deal with now. This man’s just a private dick, working for pay. Your game is with the men who hired him.”
“Yes,” Arrenhower agreed. Blake saw him swing back around. Arrenhower doubled his fist and struck Blake back-handedly across the face as hard as he could swing. “Sleep, damn you, and you’re getting off easy!”
Blake just stared up at him. The blood in his mouth was nothing. He couldn’t even taste it.
Mourn the Hangman Page 8
