by Jack Lynch
“But he’s just a boy.”
“He’s old enough. To sleep around with other men’s wives, and to go off to war and kill people, if need be, like a lot of other kids have done. I just tried to warn him by phone that some war might be coming his way, but he hung up on me.”
I zippered shut the kit, gave Allison a quick kiss and headed for the door. “Can’t talk more right now. I’m going back to the Sommers home and try to get in touch with him again. If anybody else should call here, don’t tell them where I’m at. I’ll phone you later.”
“Okay, boss,” she told me on my way out.
Ten minutes later I was parked up the street from the Sommers home. I sat for a few minutes observing the house and the street. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I got out of the car and closed the door quietly, then went around and opened the trunk. I got out the other traveling case, the one with the .45 automatic pistol inside. The .38 revolver I’d been carrying since Big Sur was a fairly companionable little weapon, but if the hand grenade man came in my direction again, I wanted the .45. More bang for the buck.
I moved briskly on down the street, went up the front stairs of the Sommers place two at a time and let myself inside. I squeezed shut the door and stood quietly listening. I didn’t hear or sense any other presence, but I took out the .45 and went through the house quickly. It was empty. I went into the doctor’s den and used the phone there to dial the Duck’s Quack again. A cocktail waitress answered. I asked for the bartender.
“I’m the guy who wanted to talk to Alex a little earlier,” I told him. “I need another little favor. I’ll stop by tomorrow and leave an envelope with a little something more in it for you. What’s your name?”
“Johnny, but that’s not necessary. What’s the favor?”
“I’d like you to call Alex again and give him a brief message. We were talking earlier, but got disconnected.”
“Okay. What’s the message?”
“Tell him somebody tried to kill Jo Sommers tonight.”
Johnny whistled in my ear. “Is this serious?”
“Indeed it is.”
“Okay, pal. Let me write that name down. Jo who?”
“Sommers.” I spelled it for him. “Can you do that right away? It’s important that he get the message.”
“I’ll see to it,” he told me.
We hung up. I took off my sports jacket and folded it over a chair, then sat down and waited for Alex Kilduff to phone. I just hoped that this time I’d be able to keep him on the line.
After ten minutes it began to look as if keeping him on the line wasn’t going to be a problem. I went out into the kitchen and stuck my nose into the refrigerator. There was a lot of diet cola but no leftovers. I went back into the den and fixed myself another bourbon and water. Maybe instead of phoning, young Alex would come on out to visit with the widow Sommers. Or maybe he was just going to fold up his tent and leave town. It would be the smart thing to do.
I crossed to the fireplace mantel and stood looking at the little models there. Machine gun, plane, ship, ambulance and what might have been a prison camp diorama. They made me think of old wars.
A few minutes later I shook myself out of the past and realized my drink was empty. I put the glass back over by the wet bar and went across the room to the doctor’s rolltop desk. It wasn’t locked. In fact it didn’t have any locks on it. I went through it but didn’t find anything that needed locking away anyhow. Two of the drawers were empty. The others held bills and receipts and material to do with his lecturing here and there. I realized then I’d forgotten all about getting the book manuscript from Jo before I sent her into the night. Since it wasn’t in his desk, there must have been somewhere else he kept his professional papers. I went scouting around. While on my way down the hall I went into Jo’s bedroom to turn on a table lamp and switch on a small, color television set mounted from the ceiling in one corner. I tuned in a late movie and left the sound on low. The lady of the house was supposed to be tucking herself in for the night.
The doctor’s bedroom was pretty utilitarian. The dresser drawers held shirts fresh from the laundry and handkerchiefs, stockings and underwear and sweaters. In the closet were shoes and slacks and jackets. A bedside stand had a box of tissues and a pair of earplugs. Until the grenade had gone off in the back patio, I wondered why anybody in that neighborhood would need a pair of earplugs. Maybe he didn’t like the sound of foghorns.
Phones jangled around the house. I trotted back up to the doctor’s den.
“Hello?”
I was greeted by what I took to be a startled silence. At least, nobody answered, and I had the feeling that a man’s voice must have surprised whoever it was. I also had the feeling that I’d out-clevered myself. I had that feeling when the line went dead. It could have been Alex. Or it could have been the man in the cammies. I dialed the Duck’s Quack and Johnny the bartender answered. He was able to recognize my voice by now.
“Were you able to get the message to Alex?” I asked him.
“No, he didn’t answer. But the message seemed important enough for me to send one of the guys at the bar over to his place to tell him in person. The guy just got back. He said Alex wasn’t at home, and the place was dark. I’ll keep trying to call him until closing time.”
“I appreciate the effort, but would you mind telling me something else?”
“What’s that?”
“Why is it house policy not to give out addresses and phone numbers of the bartenders? Cocktail waitresses, I could understand, but a bunch of bartenders?”
“Well, we had this married guy working here a while back. He used to play around a little. Other women he’d meet here. He didn’t want any of them calling his home. You can understand.”
“Yeah, I can understand, but Alex isn’t married, is he?”
“No, but he doesn’t like his address or phone number spread around. He’s always been a little funny that way.”
“How long have you known him?”
“A year, maybe a little longer. Ever since he came to work here.”
“Has he worked anywhere else around town that you know of?”
“Don’t think so. He got on here right after he came out from back East somewhere.”
“When’s he scheduled to work again?”
“He opens up tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock. If I don’t reach him at home by the time I leave here, I’ll leave a note for him with your message.”
“Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”
I was going through the rest of the house when Jo phoned. She gave me the phone number of the motel she was staying at on the outskirts of Salinas.
“Has anything else happened?” she asked.
“Nothing special. I bobbled a telephone conversation with Alex. He hung up on me before I could learn anything useful. Since then, he’s quit answering his phone and his house is dark, according to people at the bar where he works. You wouldn’t have his address and phone number, would you?”
“I can give you the phone number. I don’t have his address, but I can tell you how to find it. I’ve been there once or twice.”
She told me he lived in a quaint wooden home just off Lighthouse Avenue near the boundary line between Pacific Grove and Monterey. “It doesn’t look like much,” she told me. “But the rent’s reasonable.”
I wrote down the directions. “Something else,” I told her. “You didn’t give me the manuscript your husband had been working on.”
“Oh, I forgot. There’s an old chest in a back corner of the study. I moved his chair up against it. The manuscript’s in there. Along with some of his tapes. At least all the ones Alex copied.”
An idea I should have had earlier gave me a little jolt. “Just hold the phone a minute, will you? I want to take a look inside that chest.”
I put down the receiver, went over to where she’d put the chair and pulled it away. The chest was an old one, made of dark wood and leather with metal straps and hinges. I l
ifted the lid. The insides were a jumble. The manuscript was in a box on top. Beneath that were cassettes and file folders and all sorts of papers and documents bound with rubber bands. There must have been thirty to forty little cassettes, all of them bearing a combination of numbers and letters. The doctor’s code. I went back to the phone.
“Okay, I found the manuscript, but suddenly I’m more interested in the tapes. Do you know which ones Alex copied?”
“No. He used Woody’s code list to pick and choose.”
“Where’s the code list?”
“I don’t know. It used to be in his desk, but when I was looking for it earlier today I couldn’t find it. He must have moved it.”
“Why were you looking for it?”
“I told you. He wanted me to send some of his material back East, after he died. It’s just one of the chores to be gotten out of the way. Why? What did you want with it?”
“It could lead me to the man who wants all of you people dead. He must be on one of the tapes. If I had the code list, I might be able to find him.”
“I wish I could help you. But I wouldn’t know where to look.”
“I thought you told me earlier that your husband’s tapes were stored in the garage.”
“Most of them are. But those dealing with patients he had most recently, just before he retired, and ones involving people now living in the Monterey area, he kept in the study. So they’d be handy, if any of those people wanted to consult him again.”
“That helps narrow it down. Maybe I’ll listen to a few of them. I’ll give you a call in the morning. Don’t check out until you hear from me. You might have to stay there another day.”
“Peter, do you really think that man will be going back there tonight?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out. Why?”
“Why do you think? It’s a perfect setup, darling, if Allison thinks you’re spending the night at my place. You could really come spend it with me. It’s only a thirty-minute drive from there. Think about it.” And then she hung up.
I stared at the phone a minute, then got up and walked back to the rolltop desk. I was going to give it a little more thorough search than I had the time before, looking for something resembling the code sheet. Then my eye was caught by a small, framed photograph of Jo hanging on the wall over the desk. She was standing on the front walk outside, wearing a riding costume—gray jodhpurs, blue jacket and riding helmet. She was putting on a glove, and staring into the camera with a little smile on her mouth, the same expression she showed you when she was about to say something of a suggestive nature to do with the bedroom…She was a lot more trouble than I needed right then, I decided. I put myself to work going through the desk.
Five minutes later the phone rang. It was Jo again. This time she was all business.
“Peter, you started me thinking about those tapes. You know, there was one of them that Alex seemed to feel was much more important than the others. He called it the ‘Big Casino.’ That was before he listened to it, even. As if the others were just a prelude to that particular one.” She paused a moment. “I should have known then that there was something more to this than he first let on.”
“How could he have known it was important even before he listened to it? Did he have your husband’s code sheet at the time?”
“He had it, but he didn’t use it to find that particular tape. He was searching through the chest for another tape he’d seen listed on the code sheet. But then he came across this other tape and told me it was the important one. He must have recognized something about Woody’s code.”
“That means your husband’s code must have a practical foundation. It wasn’t something he just made up.”
“I suppose it must.”
“Did you know who was on it?”
“No, he didn’t even listen to it just then. He just took it with the others to make copies.”
“Did you notice the code that was on it?”
“I saw it, but I don’t remember it all. It had a letter or two, then a two-digit number. It was a number in the thirties.”
“How do you remember that?”
“It has to do with age, darling. Women remember that sort of thing. Will that help?”
“It’ll help.”
“Will I get a kiss for it the next time I see you?”
“At least that.”
She purred for a moment and hung up. I went back to the chest and took out the tape cassettes. I went through them quickly. Two of them had numbers in the thirties as part of their coding. I picked out another one as well. It was marked .30 B M 1919A4. Jo said the tape Alex felt was important was in the thirties but only had a couple of letters. This one had more than a couple, but it seemed to ring a bell in my own mind.
I put the first of the short thirty codes on the portable recorder but only listened to a bit of the first side of the tape. It was pretty tame stuff. The patient was a man with ulcers and insomnia. He’d spent a year in Vietnam. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Struck me it would be the normal condition for any man who had to spend a year out there. It wasn’t hardly the stuff of blackmail and extortion.
The other was a different kettle of fish. Sommers was talking to a man who was under considerable stress. The odd thing about the tape was that it didn’t begin the way Jo said they usually did. It just began with a man speaking in midsentence. It was pretty raw stuff. I had the impression it was the man’s first session with the doctor.
“We didn’t know where they were supposed to be…We didn’t know their mission. Didn’t know they were without escort—” Something like a sob shook the man’s voice. “Jesus, God—‘X-RAY VICTOR MIKE LOVE—WE HAVE BEEN HIT BY TWO TORPEDOES…X-RAY VICTOR MIKE LOVE—WE HAVE BEEN HIT BY TWO TORPEDOES—NEED IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE—X-RAY VICTOR MIKE LOVE—WE HAVE BEEN HIT BY TWO TORPEDOES…’ Oh, Jesus, God…”
The man’s voice broke completely then. He wept. Sommers cleared his throat, as if he were about to say something, but he remained silent. This went on for several minutes. The man who had been speaking slowly got a hold of himself.
“We were under orders not to break radio silence. We were under orders to deliver the recon team to a position approximately twenty miles off the coast of Hokkaido. We were to rendezvous there with the submarine Chucka, which then would take the landing party in closer to shore. We obeyed orders. We ignored the SOS. It wasn’t until ten days later we learned the CA thirty-five was at the bottom of the Pacific. And more than eight hundred sailors…Hey, Doc! You’re not taping this, are you?”
From that point on the tape was blank. I rewound it and played it again, and when it was finished, I figured I had what I’d been looking for. It wasn’t all of it in place yet. I didn’t know what CA 35 meant, and I didn’t know the name of the patient, but I was on the threshold of understanding the killings. Haywood Sommers and Nikki Scarborough, and tonight, the attempt on Jo. And before them, more than eight hundred sailors. Like the man said, Jesus, God.
FIFTEEN
The little cases that carry the handguns also carry the rods and wire brushes and solvent and cloth patches to clean them with. So I spread some newspapers atop the kitchen table and cleaned the recently fired .38 caliber Combat Masterpiece that had been built by Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson and had, along with any number of its brothers, gone off to war with the marines in Korea. And while reaming and swabbing and oiling, I thought about this and that, but the only good that came out of it all, along with a decently cleaned handgun, was remembering that I had told Allison I would call her. I hoped she wasn’t asleep. She wasn’t.
“You must have been pretty close to the phone.”
“I was. I thought you’d call before now.”
“I’ve been making some headway.”
“Who with?”
“Jo’s at a motel in Salinas. I’m still at the house in Carmel Highlands.”
“And I can’t get to sleep. Do you really have to spend the night there?”
; I thought about it for a moment. “I’m not sure any longer. Somebody telephoned here but hung up after I answered. It might have been Alex, trying to get in touch with Jo, but then again, it might have been the person I’m after, trying to learn if Jo was still here. But since nothing has happened since, maybe the bad guys have closed up shop for the night.”
“Then why not come back and hold me, mister.”
Her voice had a funny tone to it.
“Allison? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Things don’t feel right. I can’t explain it. But whenever in the past things haven’t felt right, something awful’s happened.”
“Like what?”
“A death in the family. Something like that.”
About twenty seconds went by without either of us speaking. This was brand-new. Allison and I hadn’t really spent all that much time together, if the time was measured in days, but the days we had spent together were pretty intense. And we’d spent a few hours on the telephone with each other as well. We were far more than just friends, but in that time, she’d never told me about this side of herself. I thought I was the one who had all the weird hunches.
“Okay, Blondie, sit tight and I’ll be back there within twenty minutes. I want to go through the doctor’s desk one more time to try and find something.”
“Blondie?”
“I’m trying to be funny and flippant. To cheer up my girlfriend. You know.”
“No, I don’t know. Don’t ever call me that again. You’ll be calling me Cuddles next.” She hung up on me.
I went through the doctor’s desk. It was a rush job but thorough. After all, I didn’t have to worry that the man whose desk I was rifling might come around later and discover somebody had been going through his things. But I still didn’t find the code list.
