The Revengers Page 5

  That wasn’t quite true, of course. The buildup given Bob in the magazine story had apparently intrigued the bored„ and unhappy, temporarily ex-alcoholic, Mrs. Lorelei, making easy the seduction from which everything else had come, but I saw no reason to split hairs at this point.

  Martha nodded. “All right, Matt. I guess I’m glad in a way. It was something I felt I had to . . . just a kind of compulsion, I guess. But if it wasn’t her fault, or mine, that he was killed, I guess I can forgive her for the rest.” She was silent for a moment, and went on a little stiffly, “So you’ve done your job here, the job Daddy assigned you. You’ve very skillfully prevented me from causing any trouble. Where do you go next, Mr. Troubleshooter?”

  I started to answer, and stopped. A siren was wailing in the distance, coming closer. I went into the living room and watched through the curtains as a car with a flashing light-bar on top pulled up across the street. I wondered if the wife had gotten to the phone over there without the husband’s knowledge and turned him in, as part of her destructive vengeance, but I didn’t think so. It was unlikely that she’d been in any condition to telephone after being so deathly ill; but he would have known that his position was no longer tenable. He’d tried to do what was best for her, but some of what he’d done had gone very badly wrong, disqualifying him from further efforts on her behalf. It was time for him to leave her to others who might be able to give her the assistance she so badly required.

  I doubted that, even at her sober best, she’d ever been a woman who- could have aroused a great tender passion in me; but my tastes and preferences were beside the point. He had loved her, a little too much for his own good; he still did. So he would have helped her gently out of her bedraggled clothes over there, and cleaned her up and made her look as nice as he could. He would have put her carefully to bed and maybe even kissed her goodbye if he thought it would not upset her too much the way she felt about him now. Then he would have gone to the phone himself and looked up the police number and made that call and another to a friend or neighbor whose wife could come over and look after her, after he’d been taken away. It occurred to me that I’d never seen his face, or heard his name.

  “Here’s your coffee,” Martha said, behind me. “You didn’t answer my question. . . .”

  Chapter 5

  In many ways Florida is about as distant from New Mexico as you can get. There’s a two-thousand-mile geographical separation, for one thing, and a seven-thousand-foot difference in altitude. There’s also close to a hundred percent difference in humidity: nothing ever rusts in New Mexico, nothing ever stops rusting in Florida. They are both popular resort and retirement areas, but the people who gravitate to the high Southwest are not the same type of people as those who gravitate to the low Southeast. The artists and intellectuals and screwballs who tend to choose Santa Fe have very little in common with the conventional businessmen who generally vacation or retire around Miami.

  But the biggest difference is perhaps in the field of recreational transportation. In New Mexico it’s horses and off-road vehicles. In Florida it’s boats, boats, boats. Unfortunately, the nautical scene, although I’ve been exposed to it fairly often in the line of duty, is still something of a mystery to me. After considering the situation carefully myself, and having some checking done by others, I decided to consult a professional nautical expert before deciding what to do next—more specifically, how to approach the problem that concerned me next. The problem and the person.

  The fact that the person in question was known to have consulted the same nautical expert—not just once but twice—was, of course, a factor in my decision.

  From Albuquerque, where I gave the red-clad Avis lady back her car, I got a flight to Dallas that connected after a fashion with one to Miami, where a courier met me with some materials I’d requested. Then I picked up the DC-3 that flutters uncertainly down the Florida Keys to Key West with one stop at Marathon. Another rental car awaited me at the little Marathon airport.

  The Faro Blanco Marine Resort hadn’t changed much in the years since I’d last been down there. It was still a palmy refuge from the hot-dog-and-hamburger atmosphere of the nearby Overseas Highway, as it’s called—the crazy string of bridges and causeways, linked by stretches of beatup pavement, flanked by motels and filling stations, that connects the Keys with each other and the mainland, replacing the long-ago railroad built by a guy named Flagler that blew away in a hurricane. I drove past the office and down through the park-like grounds with their scattered little resort cabins, to the waterfront. The marina hadn’t changed much, either. Even many of the boats seemed to be the same. The Queenfisher still had the same slip among the charter-fishing boats along the sea wall. Harriet Robinson—Cap’n Hattie as she was known locally—was down in her engine room as usual. I might never have been away.

  “Queenfisher, ahoy!” I called.

  She surfaced in the cockpit with a smudge of grease on the side of her nose, a tall handsome woman in oil-stained khakis, about whom I knew more than probably anybody else around. She had once lived considerably farther north and had a lot more money and an ineffectual husband she didn’t think much of. Her name hadn’t been Robinson then, or Harriet, either, but never mind that. A forceful person with very strong opinions, she’d gotten herself mixed up in something violent and moderately unpatriotic she shouldn’t have, something that concerned us. She’d been obliged to disappear in the end as an alternative to going to prison; and now she was down here in the Keys without wealth or husband, but with a boat she loved and handled very well, that made her a pretty good living.

  We’d originally played on opposing teams, but more recently, tracked down, she’d reluctantly done me a considerable favor, like saving my life. In payment—although she’d asked no payment—we’d done our best to wipe out the criminal past for her, although there are limits to what can be done along those lines by an organization such as ours. But legally, she was no longer the grand lady I’d first met. She couldn’t be, since that rich dame—wanted by the police—had officially drowned in the tail end of a Chesapeake hurricane. The woman who faced me was now, as securely as we could make her, just tough Cap’n Hattie Robinson with a new and phony but moderately serviceable past, and grease on her nose.

  “You again,” she said, as if I’d spent the past few busy years just hanging around.

  “Your face is dirty,” I said.

  “What’s my face to you?” She rubbed herself clean with a corner of the rag she was holding. “One of these days I’m going to have to put new diesels into this old bucket.”

  “How’s the fishing business?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask unless you really want to know. It’ll take about three hours for me to give you the high points. Do you know what it costs me nowadays just to fire up these mills?”

  “Buy you a drink?”

  She hesitated, obviously remembering that we’d been enemies, reluctant allies, even hasty lovers once when the situation seemed to call for it, but never exactly friends. It was a strange and uneasy progression I seemed to be making, from Martha Devine to Harriet Robinson; and I guess you could say that I was revisiting the scenes of old conquests, except that in both cases there had been considerable doubt about just who had conquered whom.

  Harriet shrugged. “Hell, come aboard. I’ve got a bottle somewhere; I think I can find it if I look real hard.”

  I said cautiously, “The last time we parted, as I recall, you told me in effect to get the hell off your goddam boat and stay there.”

  Harriet laughed, and glanced toward the marina cocktail lounge and restaurant across the road, then at her clothes. She said, “I’m too dirty to appear in public; and that was too many years ago. Come on. I don’t stay mad this long, even at you, even if you did con and blackmail me into helping you that last time. Just wait a minute while I wash my hands. . . .”

  Five minutes later we were relaxing in Queenfisher's comfortable deckhouse. On the cabin table was a bottl
e it hadn’t taken her very long to find. There were well-iced glasses in our hands. One thing about sportfishing boats, you seldom lack for ice, but if they’ve kept bait in the box you may find yourself drinking some slightly fishy whiskey.

  “I’ve missed you, you bastard,” Harriet said fondly. “When I think of all the years I spent hating you for what you’d taken away from me . . . and don’t get stuffy and tell me I did it all to myself—I had plenty of help from you! Anyway, I do miss that lovely hate. I was going to really enjoy killing you the next time I saw you; and then you tricked me into saving your lousy life instead!” She took a healthy slug of whiskey; and I reflected that it was nice to be with a lady you knew could carry her liquor like a gentleman. She asked, “What’s on your mind, Matt? Last time you were brooding about some disappearing millionaires you wanted me to find for you. Don’t you ever do any work yourself? What are you looking for this time that I’m going to have to lead you to like a helpless little boy?” “Some disappearing ships,” I said, watching her.

  “You mean that old Terrible Triangle crap?” she asked casually, but I was watching her eyes and I knew I’d come to the right place. I wasn’t the first person who’d questioned her on this subject.

  “Maybe,” I said. “That is, I’m not so much concerned about the ships as about somebody who’s investigating them; and she claims to be doing research on that legendary Triangle. Our information is that she’s visited you twice, once well over a year ago and once quite recently. Here’s the girl in question.” I passed her the Eleanor Brand article. “Go ahead, read it if you like.”

  Harriet laughed. “Don’t be stupid, Matt. I’ve got a copy right over there. Why, your name is in it. Would I pass up the chance to read all about the man and the organization that stripped me of everything and turned me from a fine society lady into a lousy working girl at the mercy of a pair of broken-down diesels? Anyway, I had a special interest in that series of articles: she was working on it the first time she interviewed me. She’d learned about that old mission of yours—of ours. She wanted all the gory details. I’m afraid I wasn’t a great deal of help. Something about reporters does weird things to my memory.”

  “And the second time she was down here, just the other day? What did she want, Harriet?”

  Harriet was watching me, her eyes steady on my face. She shook her head minutely. “No, my dear. I won’t do it. I won’t help you do it.”

  “Do what?”

  She shook her head again, almost irritably. “Dammit, I know what you do, remember? I didn’t like her particularly; but she’s a professional woman doing a professional job, and I can respect that. I didn’t finger you for her. I’m not going to finger her for you, Matt.”

  I said, “You’re kind of a dumb broad, aren’t you, Hattie?”

  It was rather exciting to see her draw herself up haughtily at the insult, suddenly regal and arrogant despite the unbecoming work clothes she was wearing. She had the kind of face you don’t often see these pretty-pretty days, with a bold nose and good strong cheekbones; a dark-haired hawk of a lady—I’m told the lady hawks are bigger and tougher than the gents—lean and tanned, with little squinty sun-wrinkles at the corners of her fine dark eyes.

  “As you reminded me just now, I kicked you off my ship once,” she said softly. “Are you plugging for boot number two?”

  “Be your age,” I said. “Don’t believe everything you see on TV.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “If we wanted the woman dead, all we’d have to do is sit on our hands. The rough, nosy, inconsiderate way she operates, somebody’s bound to take her out eventually. I don’t know exactly what she was after here—I’m hoping you’ll give me a hint—and I don’t know what she’s looking for wherever she’s gone from here; but she could make those deadly creatures from outer space kind of mad at her, poking around their private goddamn Triangle the way she’s doing. And on the other hand, if she’s just using that Triangle nonsense to hide what she’s really looking for, which is my guess, she could put herself in even greater danger.”

  “And that worries you?” Harriet’s voice was dry. “According to that magazine piece, the next installment in her series is going to blow your cover sky-high.”

  I sighed. “Hattie, Hattie! Don’t talk like an I-Spy girl. I was in this business long before you and I met, and that is already quite a while ago. Do you really think my opposite numbers in other countries don’t know me by now? I’ve been blown for years, in that sense. Against real professionals with access to the dossiers, there are very few places where I can operate secretly anymore, so mostly I don’t. A young lady recently called me a troubleshooter, and she got it exactly right. And one trouble we do not need, Captain Robinson, is a girl reporter getting herself brutally murdered right after publishing a story exposing our wicked agents and their sinister plots. No matter who does a job on Miss Brand right now, you know damned well we’ll get the credit. Like you’re doing, everybody’ll assume we simply terminated her with extreme prejudice—as the boys out at Langley like to put it—because we didn’t like the nasty things she wrote about us. We’re having some trouble already because of the publicity she’s giving us, my chief tells me; but it can be kept under control, he thinks. But that kind of a violent incident we couldn’t possibly survive, so it must not be allowed to occur.”

  Harriet studied me thoughtfully. “You’re very convincing, darling. But then, you always were.”

  I said, “Hell, as far as her story about me is concerned, she’s doing me a favor. If it says what I think, I couldn’t ask for a better PR job, could I? Once that piece is published, I won’t even have to carry a weapon. Everybody’ll know what a terrible, dangerous fellow I am; they’ll tremble in their shoes when they see me coming. They’ll all straighten up and fly right without my even having to threaten them. One piercing look from my murderous blue eyes will do the job.”

  She looked at me for a moment longer, and shrugged minutely. “If you’re not going to do anything constructive with that damned bottle, slide it this way.”

  Taking the bottle I moved within her reach, she poured some whiskey into my almost-empty glass and then gave herself a moderate refill. The boat rocked gently from the wash of a large cruiser leaving the harbor.

  I said, “As far as Miss Brand’s revelations are concerned, naturally we’d like to find out if she’s going to expose any of our people who are still unknown to the opposition, particularly any who are off on dangerous business at the moment. At least that way we can yank them home before somebody lowers the boom on them. And naturally, we’d like to persuade her nicely to soft-pedal the names of a few agents whose usefulness might actually be impaired. . . The woman beside me had stirred uneasily; now she threw me a sharp glance. I said irritably, “Damn it to hell, Harriet!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You didn’t always have such a cliche mind. When I say persuade I mean persuade; I’m not talking about the pincers and thumbscrews.”

  “Well, you can hardly blame me for—”

  “You’re reacting like a TV-crazy kid. Snap out of it,” I said harshly. “Years ago you killed one of our people, or you had a henchman do it for you. You’re still sitting here alive and healthy, aren’t you? With a shiny new past provided by us. We don’t go around casually massacring or torturing crazy ladies who just don’t happen to like us. You should know that if anyone does.”

  There was a little silence. Then, deliberately, she reached out a long, slim hand—she hadn’t gotten it entirely clean, but that was irrelevant—and turned my face toward her and leaned forward to kiss me lightly on the lips.

  “I’m sorry, my dear. When you live with corny people, you develop corny reactions. You should drop around 'more often to keep me sensible.” She grimaced, and seemed to become aware of her unromantic appearance. She retrieved her hand abruptly. “Well, tell me what you want so I can finish up my work and take a shower. Essence of Diesel Number Two s
eems to be the perfume of the day.”

  “As I said, we’d like to persuade her to cooperate a little,” I said. “My clever idea, cold-blooded, I admit, is that a gal whose life you save is likely to be grateful to you and may even be talked into getting her publisher to delete a name or two you’d rather not see in print. But that’s pretty iffy. It may not break that way at all, and even if it does, Miss Brand seems to be a girl whose gratitude—or friendship, or loyalty—you don’t want to rely on too strongly if her work is involved. So my chief concern is simply keeping the dame alive. If we can cash in on it afterward, so much the better, but we simply can’t afford the suspicions that will be aroused if somebody kills her right now. After her series on us is published, and people have had time to forget, she can he down and croak for all we care; but at the moment, her life is very precious to us.”

  Harriet laughed softly. “Well, that’s clear enough, brutally clear, but it doesn’t really tell me what you want from me.

  I said, “I want to make sure she’s not sticking her long snoopy nose—well, her short snoopy nose, judging by her picture—into anything dangerous—”

  Harriet shook her head quickly, and I stopped. She said, “You’d better not count on that, Matt.”

  “I see. Thanks. That’s one thing I needed to know. So we plug in Contingency Program Number Two; and as official troubleshooter I’ll roll up my sleeves and prepare myself to protect the inquisitive bitch from whatever trouble she manages to stir up. Can you tell me where it’s likely to come from?”

  The woman beside me hesitated. “How much do you know about what she’s doing?”