The Revengers Page 10

  We got into Brent’s car—at least I assumed it was his, since it looked like private transportation—one of the sporty Datsuns designated by a number ending in Z. He drove us along the island and over to a house, mostly glass, on a man-made inlet on the ocean side, one of the concrete-lined canals that have taken over most of coastal Florida. You dig a ditch and use what you get out of it to fill in the sea marsh on either side, carefully ignoring the screams of the ecologists. Instant waterfront property. In the canal was a dock and at the dock was a boat that was more like it. The movies would have loved it, a long and rakish speedster with a small padded cockpit and an endless deck aft with big hatches hinting at monstrous power plants lurking underneath.

  “Anybody’d think we were in a hurry,” Brent said. “They tell me it’ll do over sixty, which is moving for a boat. I’ll take their word for it.”

  I didn’t offer to help with the docklines. He knew what he was doing and I didn’t, really. I can handle simple powerboats in an amateurish fashion, but I don’t know the stylish way of doing the nautical bit, so mostly I just leave it alone if I can manage without seeming pointedly unhelpful. I just parked myself in the cockpit, knowing enough to stand up and get a good grip on the bar they give you to hang onto. At speed, those things will break your back coming off a wave if they catch you sitting, and I didn’t have too much faith in Brent’s leisurely attitude. Horsepower is almost always addictive. But he took her out very gently, down the canal and out the channel between the mangrove islands beyond. Reaching open water he just put her up on plane and let her run easily, setting no records. I

  got myself oriented. We were heading back up the Keys with the sun behind us, still well up in the sky; and it had already been one of the longer days of my life.

  It wasn’t too long before Brent spun the wheel and we cut through some pretty shallow water past the end of a sandy key and there was the boat I’d been hoping not to see. It told me that my subconscious had been right all along, but that was no help at all, being right.

  “Bonefish Harbor,” Brent said. “One of the better anchorages along this coast.”

  Queenfisher was anchored in the little bay, lying very still with the anchor rope showing no strain and the tail tuna tower casting broken reflections in the slightly rippled water. A man sat in the cockpit, fishing. At least he was holding a fishing rod and dangling something in the water. He reeled in his line and laid the rod aside and fended us off as we slid alongside. We climbed aboard the larger boat and left him to secure the smaller one.

  “Where?” I asked. It was a silly question. A forty-footer isn’t all that big.

  “Up forward,” Brent said. “Go on. I’ll wait out here.”

  I entered the familiar deckhouse. It was spotless and tidy except for a sheet of paper on the table on which I’d served us breakfast yesterday morning, apparently a letter, held down by a small green box of cartridges—.22 Long Rifle Hollowpoint. Remington, if it matters. Winchester-Western uses yellow. Federal uses red. I didn’t stop to read the letter. It could wait.

  She was in the double berth forward. She’d done it nicely, as nicely as such a thing can be done. She’d fixed her hair and colored her lips discreetly and even done something to her eyes, although even as a fashionable lady up north she’d never been one for a lot of eye makeup. She’d put on her pretty nightgown, the one I’d seen; and she’d gotten into the big bunk and done it from the far side, using a quick-expanding little hollowpoint bullet so there would be no chance of total penetration, an ugly exit wound and a big mess in her boat. Or maybe that was just the ammunition she’d happened to have handy, but I didn’t think so. She’d never been one to leave things to chance. At first glance she seemed to be just lying there peacefully asleep with the .22 Colt Woodsman on the pillow beside her. There was very little blood.

  One of the longest days of my life and one of the worst; I should have sensed how terribly vulnerable she was and taken much greater precautions. But there were a few things to be done before I could stop and think—feel—just how bad it really was. I examined the gun as carefully as I could without disturbing it, and there was nothing wrong that I could see. She was right-handed, I remembered; and she had used her right hand here. And it was right for her, as right as such a thing can ever be. Nobody setting it up could possibly have gotten it so right: gown, makeup, hair, everything. There were no jarring discrepancies, there were no psychological impossibilities, there was nothing out of character here. It was her goddamned life. She would live it as long as it was worth living, and then she would put an end to it cleanly, and to hell with you and your moral or religious scruples, which she’d thank you to keep to yourself.

  I went back up into the deckhouse and read the letter. It was very short. Actually it was a carbon copy of a letter— to the States Attorney of the State of Maryland, Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Be advised that the fugitive Mrs. Robin Rosten wanted for conspiracy to commit etc., etc., is presently residing in Marathon, Florida, under the name Harriet Robinson. Signed, Concerned Citizen. Across the top had been written blackly with a felt-tipped pen: ORIGINAL MAILED THIS DATE. And yesterday’s date.

  I wondered how many times she had read it before making the decision, but that was stupid. She would have made that decision long ago. Probably she had made up her mind from the start that she would never submit to the indignity of being dragged in handcuffs back to her former home and friends for a lurid trial even if, particularly now after so many years, there might be some question about the outcome. Once in the hands of the law, she would have lost her freedom of choice; and it was a risk she could not take.

  I don’t intend to go to prison, my dear, she had told me, I couldn’t endure that. She had visualized clearly the grimy humiliations and degradations to which she would be subjected there. She had known that, the privileged kind of person she had once been, the protected way she had been brought up—accustomed to receiving respect and consideration and courtesy from everyone—she could not possibly survive intact the treatment that would be visited upon her in such a place. The exile years had tempered her to some extent, but not, she knew, enough. Prison would either kill her—in which case why not do it decently now and get it over with?—or, worse, it would simply break her, finally and completely. One day she would wander out of there fully, at liberty again but uncaring, a gray shell of a woman, beaten and prideless; and that could not be allowed.

  I went back down and stood by her for a while. She had, of course, been bom out of her time as the saying goes. She should have been up on the ramparts in velvet gown and wimple, or whatever they wore back then, calmly supervising the preparation of the boiling oil with which she would greet the attacking miscreants when the dumb gents in the iron pants failed to keep them off the castle walls. The fierce, undisciplined pride that had driven her to her ruinous rebellion against authority in this century would have done her no great harm back then; it was expected of people like her in those days. Some gesture was needed, and I touched her hair lightly—goodbye, Milady—and got the hell out of there.

  “Tell me,” I said to Brent, in the cockpit.

  Brent gestured to the other man. “This is Marco. He’ll tell you.”

  Marco was dark-faced and black-haired, with a big nose. “I kept an eye on her as ordered. She had a visitor in the afternoon. Not a visitor, just Benny with a letter or something for her. Maybe that one in there.”

  “Benny?”

  Brent said, “Benjamin Crowe. Works around the marinas. Not too bright. I have the details.”

  “Go on,” I said to Marco.

  “After Benny had gone, about half an hour after, she took her boat out. I had my own boat ready with the boy aboard—he’s waiting around the point to pick me up now. Didn’t want too many boats cluttering up this anchorage, attracting attention. Anyway, she took this one out. No customers. Alone. Way out into the Stream, no land in sight. Stopped and watched a school of dolphins. Seemed to be just playing ar
ound out there with the boat. Run a little and drift, just sitting up there on the bridge, looking around. Came back in and anchored here about sunset. Had a drink in the cockpit, just the one that I could see, ate, worked on the boat. Engines, too. Looked like she wanted to get it all in good shape for something. Took a short swim in the dark, showered; calm night, I could hear it running across the water. Then sat in the cockpit, just sat there. All night, what was left of it. Sunrise, she watched the birds a little, they fly good here in the early morning. Went below. Half an hour. Small noise, like a stick breaking; but I know a .22 when I hear it. Went aboard, saw her, made my report. That’s it.” He looked at me for a moment and made a defeated gesture. “Sorry. Don’t know what I could have done to stop it.”

  “There’s no blame,” I said. That wasn’t quite true, of course; but any blame there was, was mine.

  “Nobody came near her,” he said. “I would have moved in, on that.”

  “I know,” I said. “She had her mind made up. She was just saying goodbye to her friends out here on the water. To everything out here.”

  Brent looked at me. “You’re satisfied?”

  “I’m satisfied,” I said. It wasn’t the best possible way to put it, you could hardly call it satisfactory, but I knew what he meant.

  “You can get the police on it now,” Brent said to Marco, and to me, “Let’s go.”

  Try that on your J. Edgar Hoover some time, or whoever’s taking his place over there this week. A priority mission laid on just to let an agent say a final goodbye to a lady with whom he’d spent the night. So he keeps his people and they don’t wander off to the big glamor agencies where they’d be docked just for taking time off to attend the funeral. Of course there was more to it than that. There had been a small debt. I’d just kept his daughter from getting herself, and maybe him and us, into trouble.

  And then, of course, there was the simple fact that he runs us direct from Washington without any intermediate field representatives, case officers, controls, or whatever the jargon is; and he knows us. He would have known that without this, I wouldn’t have been much use to him for a while. I wouldn’t have accepted suicide if I hadn’t been allowed to see it. I’d have had to get to work and dispel all doubts; and it would have taken time and might have caused trouble. Because—and he would have known this, too—there was guilt involved here as well as sentiment. After all, right or wrong, justified or unjustified, I was the one who had driven her into exile as she’d called it; and I was probably the one who’d brought this last trouble to her, or at least activated a trouble she’d already had.

  1 don’t want to . . . help, she’d said when I told her what I needed to know, I don’t want to make anybody mad.

  But driven by her own stiff pride she had helped, and I had let her, and somebody had got mad, or scared. Somebody who’d known her well enough to know how she’d react to that letter. Somebody who had just made a serious error. Killing her would have been bad, but it’s a commodity in which I deal myself upon occasion, so I don’t feel entitled to take a high moral stand on the subject. But breaking her with the one threat she really feared, forcing her to do it to herself, that was not acceptable. I wondered if the man who had done it to her now considered himself safe, having done it so cleverly without getting, as he thought, any blood on his hands. But he would have been much better off with the straightforward murder, if he felt she had to die. Now he would never be safe again, because when you do it like that, unacceptably, there will always be somebody coming after you.

  Somebody like me.

  Chapter 10

  But first there was an obligation to be discharged and a job to be done. The fact that Mac had gone to considerable trouble and expense to bring me here and let me see it for myself and satisfy myself that it was genuine, meant that I was now obliged to concentrate on the mission at hand, briefly interrupted for morale and information purposes. I could play Nemesis on my own time, later. Anyway, I wouldn’t help a dead woman much by letting a live one get killed; and there was even a possibility that the job of keeping Eleanor Brand unharmed would lead me, in the line of duty, straight to the man I wanted, which would certainly be the most convenient way of doing it.

  “Have I still got a plane?” I asked Brent as we cruised easily back down the coast in the sharp-nosed speedster.

  “Standing by. You want to get back to the Bahamas right away?”

  He sounded, not exactly surprised, but a little relieved. I realized that Mac must have discussed with him over the phone my possible reactions to Harriet’s suicide; this was obviously the preferred one. I wondered what Brent’s instructions had called upon him to do if I’d announced my intention of staying here and, for instance, beating hell out of a guy named Benny to learn from whom he’d gotten the envelope he’d delivered to Queenfisher the previous afternoon. But that would have been a waste of effort. If the man I wanted was stupid enough to be traced so easily, I’d have no trouble catching up with him later, when I had time to put my mind to it. I didn’t think it was going to be that simple.

  I said, “I asked Fred to mind the store while I was gone, but I don’t like leaving him alone too long.”

  “Fred’s a good man,” Brent said. I liked him for saying it, knowing as he must that Fred and I hadn’t always gotten along as well as we might. It showed he wasn’t intimidated by my stratospheric seniority.

  “I know,” I said, “he’s competent enough, but this isn’t really his line of work. And that blond pistol-packing gofer Brand has with her, Peterson, is strictly nothing.” I glanced aft, but Queenfisher was no longer visible astern. “You’ll see that. . . everything is taken care of, won’t you?”

  He nodded. “What about family?”

  I said, “Maybe. They’ve been thinking she drowned years ago, but if that letter is made public they may want to do something. Or maybe not. Just so it’s done right by somebody.” I seemed to be involved with a lot of funerals lately. Well, just two, but that’s a lot when the people being buried are people you’d liked.

  Brent nodded. After a moment he said, “I’ll check out Benjamin Crowe, but I doubt that’ll get us very far. Our man’s probably too smart to trip himself up that way; and the police will grill Benny about the letter anyway.”

  “That’s my feeling.” I drew a long breath and glanced at him, patting the instrument cowling in front of me. “Look, can we thrash this thing a bit?”

  He grinned. “I thought you’d never ask. Buckle up or she’ll toss you in the drink.” When we had fastened the straps, he said, “Okay, you’re the throttle man, go for it.”

  I reached for the knobbed levers and eased them forward. He’d been handling them with one hand, steering with the other, but you don’t work wheel and throttles simultaneously when one of those things really starts to go; each is a full-time job. Soon the big mills aft were talking loudly, then roaring, then screaming. Brent cut out of the coastal channel known as Hawk Channel and over the reef out into the violet-blue Gulf Stream, where a southeast wind was kicking up a chop. I had to watch the seas coming at us and play the throttles accordingly; and there was no more time for regret or guilt. Finally I missed one badly, she came off the wave flying and landed with a crash that would certainly have cracked a vertebra or two if anybody’d been sitting down, unable to cushion the shock with the knees.

  She stuck her nose right through the next one and a tidal wave sluiced down the foredeck and exploded against the rudimentary windshield, half-drowning us both. I pulled the levers back hastily and we stood there laughing. It had been a release of sorts and, having gotten rid of something black and violent, I probably wouldn’t kill the next clumsy sonofabitch who jostled me on the street.

  “Can you keep after it?” I asked Brent later as we were driving away from the glass house with the dock, leaving the boat as we’d found it. When he glanced at me questioningly I said, “After all, this is supposed to be just sparetime stuff for you, isn’t it? You’ve got other things
to do.”

  He grinned. “Actually, to answer the question you were so careful not to ask, I’m a lawyer. Low man in the office, bucking for a partnership; but they know I have a mysterious sideline connected with law-enforcement that takes me away occasionally. They don’t mind. A little practical experience is good for the image, and police and government connections don’t hurt the office, either.” He glanced at me, and grinned again. “And to answer another question you didn’t ask, like how did a nice girl like you etc., etc., well, the way it happened was, I did some work "for a guy when I was just out of law school. Legal work, but it led me into some rougher places than it was supposed to. He really should have got some rent-a-cops on it, but he wanted it kept very quiet, just between the two of us; and I guess he was satisfied with the way I finally worked it out by myself. Apparently he mentioned me to somebody he knew in Washington and one evening I got a phone call. . . . Well, you know how it goes.”

  As a matter of fact, I didn’t know how it went. I’d never had the standby experience; I’d come up by a different route, full-time all the way. But on our agency budget we can’t afford to keep permanent employees stationed all over the world like those well-heeled people out in Langley; and I suppose it brings a little excitement and money into the lives of the conventional citizens, carefully screened, who contract to keep themselves available to help the mysterious stranger in black with the tied-down guns when he moves in to clean up the town.

  Brent seemed to be a pretty high-class specimen of the standby breed, I reflected; more than just an underground switchboard operator. He’d handled a boat for us at least once that I knew of, when the navigation had been very tricky. Anyway, I always have more faith in those who are clearly in it just for the kicks with maybe some thought for the fact that they could be helping their country, than in those who do it strictly for the cash.