Assassins Have Starry Eyes (14 page)

Mr. Walsh said, “Sit down, boy. Where the hell have you been hiding? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you ever since I got your wire.”

“So you said over the phone,” I said, sitting down facing him.

“What’ll it be?”

“A martini, I guess.” As I said, I’ve nothing against them; I just prefer to drink them, out here, in tequila-and-pulque surroundings.

Mr. Walsh caught the eye of the waitress and she came right over, which indicated that he must have done some tipping during his short stay. Usually they’re almost as hard to catch as desert antelope.

“Another of the same for me,” he said, pushing a tall glass in her direction. “And a martini for my son-in-law; and none of that tired old bar mix, sister. Have him make it up fresh: Noilly Prat vermouth and Gordon’s gin, one to five—is that about right, Greg?”

“One to five is fine,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “And none of those damn olives, sister. Just a twist of lemon. Got it?”

Now, I like the olive in a martini; you can’t eat a lemon peel. But I wouldn’t have spoiled his act for the world. I looked around the place. It was scantily filled with the usual bunches of men. In Albuquerque they have an odd custom: they leave the women home and the men go out to dinner together. I suppose there’s nothing actually wrong with this, but it looks queer to the transplanted easterner, besides making the scenery very dull: who wants to look at tables full of men?

“Well,” Mr. Walsh said, “they haven’t found her yet, they tell me.”

“No,” I said.

“They seem to think she may be mixed up in a murder. Not to mention a lot of other things.”

“So I’ve been told,” I said.

“Do you believe it?”

I looked at him. “I don’t believe anything, or disbelieve it, either. It’s not my job to prove my wife guilty; and I’ll wait to prove her innocent until I’ve heard some specific charges. Right now all I want is to find her.”

“Are you working on it? Is that where you’ve been?”

I nodded. “And I have a clue, for what it’s worth,” I said, and told him about it.

“Ararat Number Three,” he said thoughtfully. “Hell, you should have got in touch with me yesterday, instead of ringing in this yokel up in Santa Fe. I’ve got the boys who can track it down and never let anybody know they’re looking. You’d better get on the phone and call him off; this has got to be handled right—”

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s got to be handled wrong,” I said. “As wrong and as obviously as it can be done without looking phony. I
want
these people to know I’m on their track. They’ll find out by watching young Montoya.”

“It looks to me,” he said, “as if you were asking for trouble, boy.”

I said, “Any trouble I get on top of what I’ve already got, I wouldn’t even notice, Pop.” I never could call him “Dad” because that’s what I had called my own father while he was alive; and “Mr. Walsh” sounded too formal. Besides, I guess I always felt the need to show I wasn’t really impressed by all that money.

He studied me across the table. “Has it occurred to you—” He paused and drank from his glass. “Has it occurred to you that the kid may have good reason for not wanting to be found? She always did have a lot of screwball ideas. Not that I think she—” He let the sentence die. I did not say anything. He took another swallow. “What’s the matter with kids these days, anyway? They get themselves in the damnedest jams!”

I watched him for a while longer, until he looked away. I got up. “Thanks for the drink, Pop,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

When I pulled up in the drive, the house was dark. There was no reason it shouldn’t be, of course, since I had left no light on. I started along the concrete walk toward the front door, and something broke out of the ornamental shrubbery by the garage and came for me. There was no time to dig through topcoat, suitcoat, and shirt for the gun; I simply threw myself down and back, into it, hitting it low, bringing it down as neatly as if I’d played football for dear old Chicago, which hasn’t got a team.

Then I rolled over and came to my hands and knees facing Ruth DeVry who was sitting on the lawn with one shoe off and her hair in her face, gasping for the breath I had knocked out of her.

NINETEEN

I GOT UP and brushed myself off—painfully, since I had taken a heavy blow across the back. Ruth did not move except to hug herself, gasping. There were no knives or pistols on the grass around her, and her hands were empty. I went over and picked her up by the armpits and set her on her feet. For all her narrow look, she was no feather. I found her missing shoe, one of those ballet-slipper things, and held it so she could put her foot in it.

“Don’t jump out behind me like that, Ruth,” I said. “My reflexes aren’t under very good control these days. Come on in the house.”

Inside, I closed the door behind us and turned on the hall light. She stopped at the mirror to pat her hair into place; then pulled her glasses off and set them back straight. Tonight they had big white rims set with some kind of sparkling stones. She always said that she wasn’t ashamed of having to wear them and wasn’t going to have anybody thinking she was, either. Besides the jeweled glasses, she was wearing a pair of those tight kneepants women have been inserting themselves into of late, that are undoubtedly the most unbecoming garments to be invented since the beach pajamas I barely remember as a kid. These were of black velveteen or some similar material. She was also wearing a loose and rather flimsy short-sleeved sweater, white with shiny gold threads, and some copper bracelets that clashed when she moved her arms. The whole outfit looked like a kind of arty cocktail costume that had not quite jelled. Being thrown for a ten-yard loss accounted for part of her disorganized appearance, but not all; I remembered that she was always having these bright ideas about clothes that didn’t quite pan out.

She spoke at last. “I was driving by this afternoon and saw your car outside so I knew you were back… I’ve been waiting
hours
for you to get home! Freezing slowly to death! And then you knock me down and walk all over me!” She laughed ruefully, and turned to face me. “What got into you anyway, Greg?”

I said, “I’m sorry. The last person who came at me like that had a knife.”

“A knife! Heavens, you really lead an exciting life these days!”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “What with friends hiding in the bushes and popping out at me like champagne corks.”

She laughed again. “I was just… just going to fall on your neck and sob out my tale of woe. You certainly spoiled my big moment but good, darling.” She drew a long breath. “Well, are you going to ask me into the living room and offer me a drink?”

“Sure.”

I let her go by me, and followed her in, switching on lights as I came to them. She turned to face me in the middle of the room.

“It isn’t really funny, Greg. It isn’t funny at all. Look.”

She touched the tip of a finger to her lip and held the finger out for me to examine. I couldn’t see anything on it.

She said, a little annoyed: “Well, it was bleeding earlier! Look here!”

She leaned forward, pulling at her lip to show me. It might have been slightly swollen, and there might even have been a small cut, but you know how inconspicuous those lip-cuts are, once they stop bleeding. They feel big, but you can’t see them.

“Did I do that?” I asked.

“No, he did.”

“Who?”

“Larry, of course!”

The thought of little Larry DeVry hauling off and socking his wife in the teeth didn’t make good sense; and if it had happened I wanted no part of their family row.

I said, “Well, he’s probably sorry by now. Why don’t you run along home—”

“Sorry!” she cried. “You don’t know what he’s like these days! He’s always been a surly and impossible person to live with—you’ve no idea of all the things I’ve put up with all these years, darling—but lately he’s turned positively ugly. I mean, I’m truly afraid of him, Greg. I really am. He’s not… I think he’s actually a little crazy. He imagines things!”

“Such as?”

“Just… just things. About me. Insane things—” Her face kind of crumpled and tears started running down it. She sank down on the near-by sofa and sat there, crying helplessly. You have to be very much in love with a girl to like her when she cries. I discovered that any tender feelings I might once have had—or imagined I had—for Ruth DeVry, were long since gone.

“I’ll get you that drink,” I said.

“No, don’t go. Please! Just sit down and… and be nice to me, Greg. I’ve had such an awful time. I’m so m-miserable I just want to die.”

I stood there awkwardly. I had no intention of sitting down beside her, knowing perfectly well that the minute I did she would fling her arms about me and weep on my coat; and it was perfectly possible that, since we were old friends, and since I was somewhat less innocent and idealistic these days than I had been in Chicago, one thing might lead to another, even without any tender feelings being involved… It was not a matter of being faithful to my wife, who had after all left me to go to Reno, nor was it a matter of being faithful to anybody else, or even of being loyal to my old, if somewhat tarnished, friendship with this woman’s husband. It was simply a matter of my life being complicated enough already without complicating it further with Ruth DeVry.

I was saved from embarrassment by a knock at the door. Ruth came to her feet abruptly. “It’s Larry!” she gasped. “If he finds me here—”

I said, “Sit down and relax, Ruth.” I went to the door and pulled it open. It was Larry, all right. “Come in and join the party,” I said.

“Is Ruth here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know why, but she’s here.”

His face had a funny, intent look. “She mentioned seeing your car this afternoon. I thought I might find her here. Now that Jack Bates is no longer with us.”

I said, “With a little effort, that could be developed into a dirty story. Come in and work on it while I get us all something to drink.”

He hesitated, watching me through his heavy glasses. There’s always something a little sinister about a man with thick-lensed spectacles, perhaps because they’re standard equipment for every mad scientist in the movies.

“I’ll come in,” Larry said at last. “But I won’t drink your liquor, Greg.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, and let him pass me, and closed the door without turning my back to him. Everybody seemed to be acting a little cracked tonight, and there was no sense in taking unnecessary chances. Entering the living room behind him, I looked at Ruth, who had settled back on the sofa. Except that she had all her clothes on, she looked pretty much like what a jealous husband might expect to find: her face was flushed, and her hair still a little mussed from our recent collision. There was dust on her velveteen pants; and the thin, glinting sweater had slid down to show part of her shoulder. She looked rumpled and rather attractive; some women look their best with a high polish, but others do better with part of it knocked off. “Larry’s not drinking with us,” I said. “A matter of principle, I understand. What’ll it be, Ruth?”

She shook her head, watching her husband with a wary and yet defiant attitude.

Larry said, “Well, here we are. It’s very cosy, isn’t it? I suppose it was inevitable. Three years of pretending to be deaf and blind are enough, Greg.”

I said, “That remark was too subtle for me. You’d better develop it further.”

He said, “I’m just a stupid little mathematician, to quote my wife. It takes me quite a while to learn what goes on behind my back. I suppose it started back in Chicago when you used to stay at the apartment. You handled that very neatly, I must say, both of you. I never suspected a thing.”

“There was nothing to suspect.”

“No? You must take me for a complete fool, Greg! Did you think I could go forever without figuring out why you asked me to join the Project? Particularly when you made it so obvious that it wasn’t my ideas you wanted; all you really needed was a hack mathematician to make routine calculations, and that was all you ever intended for me to be here… But it was a mistake to ask Jack Bates here, wasn’t it? He was younger and better looking; he took her away from you, didn’t he? For a while, at least. Until he died.”

I looked at him for a while. At a moment like that you wonder if the guy has always been this way and you just never saw it; or whether he changed when you weren’t looking. Maybe, I reflected, I should get into the habit of taking a good hard look at the people around me, every now and then, just to check up.

I said, “That’s a very interesting thesis, Larry. It seems strange, under the circumstances, that I bothered to get married, doesn’t it?”

He laughed sharply. “Not strange at all. A rich wife is an asset to a penniless scientist, if he isn’t burdened with too many scruples. Besides making good camouflage for an illicit love affair… You must have handled Natalie badly, though; she saw through the situation and left you fast enough!”

I said, “I’m really a hell of a fellow, aren’t I? A sonofabitch like I am would be apt to get a big kick out of knocking another fellow’s teeth in, wouldn’t he?”

“I might have expected that reaction,” he said stiffly. “You always did have a muscular mentality, Greg. It was always a surprise to me that you ever managed to show signs of a genuine scientific imagination—or did you? A man who would steal other men’s wives wouldn’t be above stealing their ideas, would he?” He walked quickly to the hall door. “Never mind threatening me again, I’m going. I’ll leave the two of you alone.” He laughed harshly. “But before you relax in Ruth’s gentle company, just ask yourself one question, Greg. Ask yourself how the scarf that fell out of the pocket of Natalie’s fur coat when Ruth was hanging it up in the closet that night—you remember the scarf, don’t you?—well, just ask yourself how it got from our house to the vicinity of Jack Bates’s dead body!”

His footsteps marched down the hall. The door closed loudly. The steps went down the walk outside. A car started and drove away. Ruth was on her feet, reaching for me. There are some women who can’t ask you the time unless they’ve got a good grip on you. I side-stepped.