Assassins Have Starry Eyes (5 page)

SEVEN

IT WAS ONE of those brilliantly clear nights they often have out here, particularly in winter. You could see more stars than an easterner ever dreamed of. It was cold, and I was glad Natalie had handed me my big, fur-collared, down-insulated hunting jacket instead of some more refined garment. Herself she had wrapped in the usual minks. The heater of the Pontiac had barely time to start functioning properly before we reached our destination.

“Should I wait out here?” Natalie asked.

I looked at the lighted windows. “It looks as if everybody’s up. You can come on in and talk to Ruth.”

She grimaced. “That’ll be a real treat,” she said and got out of the car. I closed the door after her. As we moved up the walk, she took my arm, saying, “I’m sorry. I’ll be good. I’ve been very good lately, haven’t I?”

“Is that what it is?” I asked. “I noticed you hadn’t been acting at all natural.”

She laughed, squeezing my arm. “Darling, that’s what I love about you. You’re such a
rewarding
person to do things for.”

The house looked about like ours, except that it was peach-colored and somewhat smaller. It gave out a sound of organ music, which seemed a little odd under the circumstances; but Larry was a hi-fi bug and needed very little excuse to turn on the system. I saw the chunky shape of Jack Bates’s station wagon in the driveway; it was a red Willys with high-altitude head, oversized radiator and clutch, and four-wheel drive. I knew all about it because I had been invited to come along some Sunday and make my fortune—prospecting was his most recent enthusiasm—but I get enough of uranium and its by-products at work without spending my spare time looking for more.

Ruth met us at the door. She was wearing what seemed to be one of Larry’s old shirts and a pair of faded blue jeans—the western substitute for slacks, shorts, housedresses, riding pants, and just about any other practical garment you can think of. They’d use them for bathing suits if they had any water to swim in. Ruth’s were rolled to just below the knees, and had a good deal of paint on them, as did the shirt.

“You’re going to have to forgive the way I look,” she said. “Everything’s been so… so hectic tonight I knew I couldn’t sleep so I’ve been in the studio working like mad.”

We were shedding our coats. I asked, “Where are they?”

She gestured toward the sound of music. “They’re waiting for you in the living room, Greg. I’ll take Natalie into my private sanctum if she doesn’t mind an awful mess. I never do seem to get things organized… Oh, dear, don’t treat that lovely coat like that; let me hang it up in the closet!”

I left them being sweet to each other. When I opened the living-room door, the organ music almost knocked me down. I could feel the bass vibrations through the soles of my feet. The DeVry living room had an unbalanced look; no arrangement of furniture could shift the center of gravity far from the big, homemade corner enclosure that housed Larry’s loud-speaker system. At the other end of the room from the monstrosity, Larry and Jack were sitting side by side on the maple sofa without speaking. They had empty glasses on the low maple table in front of them—neatly set on coasters. As far as I’m concerned, there are two kinds of hospitality. One lets you set your drink down where you damn well please, trusting you to use a little judgment; the other keeps running after you with coasters. Strangely, this never used to bother me back in Chicago; but like many things about the DeVrys, it had started to get on my nerves lately.

I had the illusion that Larry and Jack looked small and far away, dwarfed by the giant sounds emanating from the contraption in the corner. The reproduction was really very good, as a matter of fact; if you closed your eyes you could almost imagine that you had the organ in your lap. Larry must have felt the jar as I closed the door. He certainly couldn’t have heard the sound, but he looked up, jumped up, and came over.

“Greg!” he shouted, shaking my hand as if he hadn’t seen me for months. “Glad you’re here! Come over and talk some sense into this guy.” I think that’s what he said; it was hard to make out over the noise. I made some gesture toward the roaring and screaming speakers. Larry walked over and cut the thing off. The silence was tremendous. “Just showing Jack the effect of my new dividing network,” he said. “Sit down, Greg. I’ll get some more beer.”

“None for me,” I said. “Coffee if you’ve got it.”

He nodded, and left the room. I walked across the rug in the unearthly silence and sat down in a chair not far from Jack. He was making a thing of lighting a cigarette. I leaned back and waited. There were some of Ruth’s paintings on the walls. Back east she had done all right with her landscapes, but out here she couldn’t seem to get the size of the country. The dunes at White Sands looked like Jackson Park Beach in Chicago. She did better with flowers. There was a cholla cactus in bloom—the red, not the yellow—that I hadn’t seen before. I reminded myself to say something nice about it as an exercise in diplomacy, before we left.

“I’m quitting, Greg,” Jack said.

I looked at him for a moment. I had noticed that he had been looking kind of worn and preoccupied Christmas Eve; he looked worse now. He was wearing boots, jeans, and a red wool shirt—they run those tests off in pretty rough country. There was nothing to be gained by taking it big. I said, “This is a hell of a time of night for it.”

“I wrote up my report on the plane coming back,” he said. “I stopped by at the Project on the way. Van Horn was there; I turned it over to him. You can read it in the morning. I’ve had it, Greg.”

“Okay,” I said. “’By, kid.”

“I mean it,” he said. “I’m not kidding.”

“I’m not arguing with you,” I said.

“Is that the way you feel about it?”

“Do my feelings enter into the equation?”

“Well,” he said, “a little. You brought me out here. I appreciate that. It was a big opportunity, and I’ve tried to do my best by it. Also, you’re a… oh, hell, you’re a pretty good guy, and we’ve had a lot of fun together. I hate to run off and leave you in a spot just when everybody’s going to be wanting results. But I’ve got to do it, Greg.” He got up and walked to the picture window and parted the drapes and looked out at nothing in particular. “I’ve just come from there,” he said quietly. “You don’t know what it’s like. It’s… it’s a hundred square miles of… of nothing. Nothing but glass.”

“Glass?”

“Volcanic glass. Stuff like obsidian. What you get when molten rock cools too quickly to crystallize.” He had been reading up on geology since he caught the uranium fever.

“A hundred miles of glass,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“How thick?”

“Several feet, at least.”

“But not more than several feet?”

He glanced at me. “No. It followed the surface, all right, just as you figured it would.”

“Hot?”

“Temperature or radioactivity?”

“Both.”

“We couldn’t get on it. It was still smoking. Radioactivity wasn’t enough to worry about, except for the usual high readings near ground zero, from the trigger explosion. They sent a ’copter in to check; also to look for any signs of Northrop and his team. They didn’t find anything. No block house, no observation posts, nothing. Just glass.” He drew a long breath. “Looks like you had it figured about right. It ought to make quite a weapon—if you can learn how to control it.”

“But you aren’t going to help?”

He shook his head. “I’ve had it, Greg. I don’t want any part of it from now on. To be honest with you, I’m scared stiff.”

I looked at him, and shifted my gaze to Ruth’s cactus. She had not got the red quite right after all. The real flower had a tinge of purple.

“Jack,” I said, “what stopped it?”

He shook his head again. “I don’t know. What stops a chain reaction in an unlimited mass of material? God, maybe.”

“That doesn’t help much,” I said. “We can’t draft Him. Besides, Washington would probably turn Him down as a security risk. After all, isn’t He related to that well-known radical Jesus Christ?”

Jack said, “It doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? A hundred square miles of the face of the earth fused to nothing… What if it
hadn’t
stopped, Greg? Have you thought of that?”

I said, “It had occurred to me.”

“One of the aerial observers said it looked as if somebody had dropped a coal on a piece of brown paper. You know how paper will sometimes char and glow for a while, a kind of hole growing away from the central point. And sometimes it will go out of its own accord. And sometimes… sometimes, if a breath of air strikes it just right, maybe, it will burst into flames—”

“Jack,” I said, “you’re playing games with words. You’re trying to equate a simple reaction involving cellulose and oxygen with a very complex reaction involving—”

“Involving the earth itself.” He swung around to face me. “You don’t know why it stopped this time, do you? Or what it’s going to do next time?”

I said, “All I know is that we need to know more about it.”

“All I know,” he said, “is that we know too much about it already. So I’m quitting. Mrs. Bates didn’t bring up her boy to set the world on fire… Greg, fly out there. Go take a look at it. It’s hard and kind of slick and brown, except for places that have bubbles like that Mexican glass. Nothing else as far as you can see: no trees, no grass, not even any rocks. Just this hard, shiny, smoking stuff, clear to the horizon. You can stand there and think about what might have happened if it hadn’t stopped. Just a dead glass ball, spinning through space like a damn Christmas ornament.”

I said, “Jack, if a thing is in the realm of possible human knowledge, it’s going to get itself discovered sooner or later, whether the human race is ready for it or not.”

He said, “I’ve heard that argument. And the one about do we want the Russians to get it first. I don’t want anybody to get it. But one guy is not going to get it for sure, and that’s me. I can’t stop your going ahead with it, or the Russians going ahead with it, or anybody else who likes to tinker with the celestial works. But
I
don’t have to be the one to discover it. I don’t have to have it on
my
conscience.”

I said, “Well, good luck, kid. I hope you and your conscience have lots and lots of fun.”

I got up and walked across the room and into the hall without looking back. I retrieved my jacket and my wife and got out of there. The cold night air hit me outside the door. I stopped to zip the jacket up, and regarded the jeep station wagon in the drive with an envious eye. That’s my idea of what a vehicle should look like, instead of a chrome-plated thunderbolt on wheels. He even had a winch on the front so that if he got stuck he could run the cable to a tree and haul himself out. The only trouble with that idea is the scarcity of trees in most parts of the country where they hunt uranium.

Natalie said, “Can you tell me what it’s all about?”

“Jack’s quitting,” I said.

“Why?”

“He’s scared, I guess,” I said. “He’s got an attack of conscience, like old man Fischer. He wants us to leave it to God.”

She hesitated; then she said, “Darling, he could be right.”

I grinned and took her arm. “You’re a big help,” I said. “Besides, what makes you think God wants to be bothered? After all, it’s not much of a planet. He’s got lots bigger ones.”

EIGHT

I AWOKE WITH a slight headache in a bed that seemed momentarily unfamiliar to me; and the ceiling above me was white stucco instead of the blue I was accustomed to seeing in the mornings. I don’t care for stucco walls and ceilings, but when you’ve got them there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do about them. While I was orienting myself and recalling the events of the night, the door opened and Natalie came in, bearing a tray.

“Are you awake, darling?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” I said, sitting up in the big double bed that had no head or foot. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Almost eleven. Thursday.”

She set the tray on the dresser and came over. She was fully dressed in her favorite around-the-house costume, which consisted of gray flannel Bermuda shorts, a man’s striped shirt, knee-length wool socks, and nicely polished loafers. The logic of baring your legs with shorts only to cover them again with long socks escapes me. Her dark hair was smooth and shining, and her face had a scrubbed and glowing look. If I had remembered nothing at all about what had happened after we got home, I would have known by looking at her: sex always seemed to agree with her.

She bent down to kiss me lightly, and grinned. “Well,” she said, “we had a hard time getting you to sleep last night, but you certainly made up for it this morning. How do you feel?”

“Who had a hard time doing what?” I asked. She looked pretty but somewhat too fashionable and proper. I reached out and grabbed the leg of her shorts, threw her off balance, set her down hard on the bed, and caught her as she bounced. I kissed her vigorously to the detriment of her neatly applied lipstick. “I feel fine,” I said.

“Relax, Buster,” she said, pushing at me. “Your breakfast is getting cold.” Her voice sounded a little odd, and her efforts to escape did not carry conviction. We wrestled briefly, I kissed her again, and from there we proceeded to more adult occupations. “I should have known better than to marry a genius,” she breathed at last. “Six months of the year he doesn’t know I exist, and the rest of the time it isn’t safe to go near him.” She rubbed her chin. “Darling, if I might make a suggestion, it would be nice if you shaved before you let passion get the better of you.”

I grinned. She sat up and pulled up her socks, put her feet back into her loafers, and got up to retrieve the other discarded portions of her attire. She went to the dresser for a fresh shirt to replace the one that had got rumpled, and disappeared into the bathroom. I got up and brought the tray back to the bed and began to eat. Presently she returned, looking serene and untouched and radiant. She poured herself some coffee and sat on the edge of the bed to drink it.

“I think I’m going to do this room over,” she said abruptly.

I looked around judiciously. It was a black-and-white room, very, very severe and modern and not my idea of a lady’s boudoir, but what the hell? When I was in here my mind was generally not on interior decoration; the rest of the time I had my own room.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“I think… Darling, how’s your stomach?”

I glanced at her. “My stomach’s swell. Why do you ask?”

“I shouldn’t have let you have those drinks last night. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

I said, “I’m fine, Princess. You’ve been asking me if I’m all right for the past five months.”

“I know,” she said. “I guess. I just feel… kind of responsible for you. Greg?”

“Yes?”

“Please be careful.”

“What are you driving at?”

She said, “I’m driving at that I love you and don’t want anything to happen to you. That’s what I’m driving at.”

We were not in the habit of throwing the word “love” around very much, perhaps because it gets such a thorough workout from other people.

I cleared my throat and said, “I’m healthy as a pup, Natalie. Stop worrying about me. I’ve got it made. Honest.”

She shook her head quickly. “That isn’t what I mean—”

The sound of the doorbell interrupted her. We’ve got a refined one that plays four musical notes, but it still won’t open the door and tell the man we don’t want any. Natalie drained her cup and set it on the tray.

“I’ll see who it is. Finish your breakfast.”

The chimes played their little ding-dong tune again as she went out of the room. I heard her cross the living room, open the door, and speak to someone outside. Whoever it was came in, the front door closed, and I heard her say, “Just sit down somewhere. I’ll tell him.”

Then she came down the hall and into the room. “It’s Van Horn, darling. He wants to see you.”

“What about?”

“He didn’t say. Better wash your face. You’re still kind of lipsticky.”

She tossed my dressing gown at me, as I got out of the bed and found my slippers. When I came into the living room, Van Horn was sitting on one of our less comfortable chairs, looking a little like a man waiting to sell the lady of the house a new vacuum cleaner. There was a long, paper-wrapped package across his knees.

I said, “Hi, Van. What can I do for you? What have you got there?”

He said, “I want you to identify something for me, if possible.”

“Sure,” I said. I cleared a couple of ash trays and a bowl of flowers from the cocktail table. “You can make your demonstration here, Professor.”

He said reprovingly, “This is a fairly serious matter, Dr. Gregory.” In all the time I had known him, I had never heard him address any of us by our first names, although we all called him Van. I guess it’s easier to be a cop if you don’t allow yourself to be too friendly with the suspects. And don’t ever kid yourself; to a security agent, everybody is a suspect, all the time.

I said, “You’re the one who’s making a big mystery of it, not I. How about a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks.” He rose and laid his package on the long, low table, produced a small penknife, and cut the tape that held the brown paper in place. He looked up. “I would like you to take your time and be sure before you say anything.”

I nodded. Natalie, who was standing beside me, put her hand on my arm. She looked a little scared. I could hardly blame her. After the build-up, I probably looked a little scared myself. Van Horn pulled the paper apart. It was a twelve-gauge Remington automatic shotgun with a compensator on the muzzle. The short spreader tube was in place. I’m not very fond of automatics, and I can live indefinitely without compensators, poly-chokes, or muzzlebrakes in any shape or form, but some people like them and do very well with them. It was not the gun itself that made Natalie gasp, however, but the stuff that was on it. Well, I had seen blood before; even blood with dirt and pine needles drying in it.

“Turn it over,” I said.

Van Horn put a finger under the trigger guard, and exposed the other side of the weapon.

I said, “It’s Jack Bates’s gun. You don’t have to take my word for it. All his hunting equipment is insured. The serial number will be on the policy and in the company’s files, so I’m not giving away any secrets.”

“Good enough,” said Van Horn. “Is there anything else you’d care to say about it?”

I leaned over and sniffed the slotted barrel of the compensator, where fouling is most apt to collect. The gun had been fired recently enough for the odor of burned powder to remain sharp and noticeable. I shook my head.

“Not without knowing more about the situation,” I said. “Except—”

“Except what, Dr. Gregory?”

I walked over to the telephone table in the hall, found a roll of scotch tape in the drawer, returned, and dropped it in front of him.

“Except that I don’t like your approach,” I said. “Cover it up again, Van, and stop playing cop around here. Jack Bates is a friend of mine. Don’t come around here and shove his bloody gun under my nose without telling me what’s happened to him! I ought to wrap the damn thing around your neck!”

He asked quietly, “What makes you think something has happened to Dr. Bates?”

I said, “What am I supposed to think? That he chopped the head off a chicken, let it bleed all over his gun, and then presented the piece to you as a souvenir?”

“You have no other reason for worrying about him?”

“Such as?”

“His disturbed condition last night, for instance.” Van Horn paused, and grimaced. “I guess I am beating around the bush. After leaving the DeVrys’ house last night, Dr. Bates apparently went home, packed his station wagon with camping equipment, and drove to a public camp ground up in the Sandias, on the road to the ski-run. He had the place to himself at this time of year. This morning, however, some kids driving up to go skiing pulled into the area to put chains on—the road’s pretty slick up above. This was about eight-thirty. They saw Dr. Bates’s car, and while the boys were working, the girls kind of strolled over to look around. They found him lying behind the car, dead. He had been shot in the face. The gun was beside him.”

“I see,” I said. I looked down at the shotgun on the table and felt a little funny. After all, I had sat in quite a few blinds and pits along the river with that automatic and the man who had owned it, in the past three years. I had sworn at the muzzle-blast of that damn compensator, and griped about the gun’s habit of tossing its fired shells into the face of whoever was standing to the right of it. I had also watched it knock three mallards out of a decoying formation—like busting pipes in a shooting gallery—and reach into the sky an incredible distance and fold up a Canada goose flying far overhead. With a rifle, I could usually hold my own against Jack Bates, and maybe do a little better at long range, since he was fundamentally a snapshooter rather than a marksman; but when it came to shotgunning, he was an artist, and I didn’t even try to compete. Well, that was a good enough epitaph for a hunting man, I reflected. I said, “It’s funny nobody heard the shot. That’s a game refuge up there and they’re kind of sensitive about having guns go off.”

Van Horn said, “As a matter of fact, a forest service truck came along a little later. One of the men living a few miles below had heard the report while he was shaving, but he’d gone looking up the wrong canyon first. He puts the time as just about daybreak. Unfortunately, by the time he arrived and took charge, the kids had already flagged down a couple of other cars and people had walked all over the place.”

I frowned at the gun. “Was it buckshot?” I asked.

He hesitated. Policemen are all alike, even when you put them into gabardine suits and fancy government jobs. They never like to answer questions for fear they might accidentally give somebody a break.

“Yes,” he said. “Why?”

“Jack had a habit of loading up his shotgun at night—Number One buck, usually—and keeping it handy when he was camping out. We had arguments about it. I never like a loaded gun in camp.”

“I see. Was this habit of his well known?” I shrugged. “I may have kidded him about it with other people listening. Anybody who’d camped with him overnight would know it, of course.”

Van Horn nodded. “You talked to him last night, I understand. He was resigning his position at the Project, is that right? According to Dr. DeVry, he was upset about”—he glanced at Natalie, who was not cleared for confidential information—“about what he’d seen in Nevada. I noticed something of the sort myself; but I only saw him for a moment when he stopped by my office to leave his report. I’d like your opinion: would you say he was disturbed enough to kill himself?”

I said, “That’s a stupid damn question, Van. If I’d thought so last night, I’d have done something about it, wouldn’t I?”

“Not if you were too annoyed with him for quitting to consider the possibility.”

“Thanks,” I said, “for reminding me. Actually, he seemed pretty well under control to me. He’d made his decision to quit, and that took care of the situation.”

Van Horn touched the gun lightly. “The safety is off,” he said, “which indicates it was fired deliberately, not by accident. Everything adds up to suicide, Dr. Gregory, except for one thing. The police surgeon says that, judging by the distribution of the pellets and the lack of powder burns, Dr. Bates was shot from a distance of at least eight feet.” There was a little sound from Natalie. I may have made some similar noise myself. Van Horn went on in his deliberate and pedantic way: “Even if he had arranged an elaborate method of killing himself by remote control—and suicides will rig up some fancy devices; God only knows what goes on in their minds during the final few minutes—we can’t quite see how the gun, which would naturally recoil even further away from him, got back to be found beside his body. Furthermore, there are no fingerprints on the weapon at all, not even Dr. Bates’s. Somebody wiped it quite clean.” He cleared his throat. “Under the circumstances, the police feel that a thorough investigation is indicated. I’ve persuaded them to let me handle it as far as Project personnel is concerned, since I know the people involved, and since there are some security angles that have to be treated with discretion.” He looked up. “You understand, this is a favor the authorities are doing us. If I can’t satisfy them, they’ll put their own men on the job.”

I glanced at Natalie, still standing beside me, and patted her hand. “Well, we haven’t killed anybody, have we, Princess?” I said, and looked back to Van Horn. “Ask your questions.”

“Your talk with Dr. Bates last night,” he said, “wasn’t exactly friendly, was it?”

I said, “We didn’t fight, but I’m afraid I wasn’t as sympathetic as I might have been. I get fed up with that point of view.”

“What point of view is that?”

“Putting one man’s tender conscience ahead of… Oh, hell, let’s not get into philosophy, Van. Maybe that’s the only way to deal with these problems; just hide your head in the sand and pretend they don’t exist. Or wash your hands of them and let other people take the blame for discovering what’s inevitably going to be discovered anyway. Are you suggesting that I drove up into the mountains this morning and shot Jack because he wouldn’t work for us any longer? That would seem rather illogical, wouldn’t it? Alive, he might have changed his mind; dead, he certainly won’t be any help.”

He said, “You’re referring rather callously to a man you claim to have been your friend, Dr. Gregory.”