Assassins Have Starry Eyes (9 page)

She nodded. “Yes.”

I said, “If he’s really a good kid, as you say, once he gets over feeling scared and sorry for himself, he may realize that it could have been worse. He could have waked up a murderer. Maybe the thought will help me persuade him to talk to me; particularly when he learns I’m not going to have him arrested. How about it?”

She hesitated; then she said, “All right. I’ve pretty well got to trust you, haven’t I? And if we can learn what’s behind all this, maybe… maybe we can help him.”

Driving was kind of tricky; it was the first time I had really appreciated all those power gadgets that let me control the car without exerting enough force to push me back against the seat. I pulled up in front of the house; she let us in with her key. I saw her pause; then she was running across the living room, leaving me standing there looking at the pieces of the black San Ildefonso bowl that I had noticed the evening before, now shattered on the floor.

THIRTEEN

TEN MINUTES LATER we had been all over the house, and had also checked the patio and the garage out back. There were no dead bodies on the property. There were a few spots of gore in the bathroom, but it was old gore that she had overlooked while cleaning up last night. Clothes were missing, she said, the boy’s jalopy was missing, and sixty-three bucks that had been in the black bowl—household money, she said—was also missing. We decided that the bowl must have slipped out of his weakened hand while he was emptying it; there was no other sign of violence. We decided that there was really nothing to get excited about after all, and went into the kitchen to make coffee, and came out into the living room to drink it.

“Cream and sugar, Dr. Gregory?” she asked.

“Thanks,” I said, seating myself on the sofa and accepting the cup she passed across the low table, a heavily constructed piece of smoky-looking old wood that undoubtedly started its career as something other than a cocktail table. She poured her own coffee, and stood there for a moment sipping it black, as if checking whether it was fit to drink. The straight, tailored blue dress, open at the throat, caused me to revise some of my previous doubtful estimates of her figure; and the heels and stockings improved my already favorable opinion of her legs. In civilized clothes she was a very nice-looking girl.

I said, “Okay, Spanish. Where’s he gone?”

She spilled some coffee down her chin and had to grab for a napkin to mop herself off. She did not look at me. “What do you mean? I suppose he’s just gone back to Albuquerque… to the University. Where else would he go?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And he suddenly remembered he was late for class and dashed out grabbing a handful of bills, in too much of a hurry to sweep up the pieces of the bowl he dropped.” I shook my head. “It won’t wash.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “All right; I don’t know where he’s gone.”

I said, “You’re a pretty liar, Spanish, but not a very good one.”

She looked at me angrily. “I wish you wouldn’t call me—”

“What’s the matter, are you sensitive about it?”

“No, but—”

I got up and walked around the table to face her. “Where’s he gone?”

“I don’t know.”

I said, “When you first came in, and found him missing, you almost fainted. After all, he’d promised not to run out if you went over and talked to me, hadn’t he? You told me that yourself. Then we looked around a little; then you relaxed and became all smiles and hospitality and treated me to the longest and slowest cup of coffee in the history of the bean… He left a message, didn’t he? And you found it. And it seemed like a good idea to keep me here as long as possible to give him a head start. Well, are you going to tell me where he’s headed, or would you rather tell the police?”

“The police!”

“You’re damn right, the police,” I said crudely.

“But you said—”

“I said I wasn’t going to. That was before he disappeared. Now I’m going to. Where’s the phone?”

She cried, “But you can’t… What are you going to tell them?”

“That your brother’s running amok with a knife and had better be taken into custody before he hurts somebody else.”

She stared at me. “But that’s perfectly ridiculous! Just because he—” She checked herself.

“Merely because he tried to murder me last night?” I asked dryly. “No, Spanish, I am trying to overlook that insignificant incident. Despite the fact that he tried to murder me last night, I’m trying to save his life.”

“His life!” For a moment she looked frightened; then she drew herself up. “Isn’t that just a little hypocritical, Dr. Gregory? I suppose you have a right to have him arrested, but you don’t really have to pretend you’re doing it for his own good! There isn’t the slightest indication that his life’s in any danger—except from you! Everything shows that he left this house of his own free will—”

“Sure,” I said. “And do you know how many other people mixed up in this have left their houses of their own free wills in the past eight months, and never come back?”

“What do you mean?”

“About eight months ago,” I said, “early last summer, an old guy named Fischer who worked in Washington—you’ve never heard of him, but he was pretty well known in his field—went sailing on Chesapeake Bay of his own free will. He was never seen again. The boat was found drifting, empty. Last fall, an unsavory scientific character named Gregory, whom you’ve met, went hunting of his own free will. He almost didn’t make it back home either. A month or so later a guy named Justin from over at Alamos went skiing up in the Sangre de Cristos of his own free will. He vanished. They didn’t even find the skis. A week or so ago an associate of mine named Bates down in Albuquerque got fed up, resigned, and drove up into the mountains to commune with nature. He was found the next morning shot to death with his own gun. A day later my wife decided she’d had enough of one thing and another; she headed for Reno, of her own free will. She never got there. They found the car wrecked but she wasn’t around. She still isn’t.” I paused. “That’s just the ones I know. There may be others that security has kept me from hearing about. So when a kid who’s obviously involved in the same mess suddenly takes off for parts unknown, I can’t take the responsibility of keeping quiet. I’ve got to get him back to where somebody can keep an eye on him, for his own sake if nothing else.”

She studied my face for several seconds after I had finished; then she looked down, seemed to be surprised to discover that she was still holding her cup and saucer, and turned to set them on the tray.

“You’re trying to frighten me,” she said quietly.

“Sure.”

“What… what is this thing that you think Tony’s got himself involved in? Tony and Paul both.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever it is, it’s big. So big that when somebody told them to go out and kill for it, they went. Would they kill for money, Spanish?”

She started to speak angrily, checked herself, and shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, they wouldn’t kill for money, Dr. Gregory.”

“There are people who would say that communism is a pretty big thing, to those who believe in it.”

“My brother isn’t a communist, and neither was Paul Hagen!”

“Six months ago you’d have said just as firmly that they weren’t murderers… Pass it, Spanish. Don’t get mad. I’d say the same about my wife. She’s a screwball in many respects, but she’s not a communist or a traitor to her country. Yet she’s messed up in this too. I want to find her. Tony’s my only lead. Even if he knows nothing else, he’ll at least be able to tell me why he and Hagen tried to kill me. There’s a chance he knows more. Because it’s very unlikely that he came up here accidentally this weekend, or even that he just happened to learn somehow that I was coming. It’s much more likely that somebody who’s been keeping track of my movements saw where I was heading, got hold of Tony, and gave him his orders and a knife. And the reason Tony tried to talk you into not seeing me—I gather that he did from the way both of you were acting last night—is that he didn’t really want to kill anybody, and if I didn’t come the plan would have to be called off or postponed. But I did come, and he had to make his try, and he missed—maybe he even wanted to miss. That’s a pretty shallow groove in my back. Your brother’s no better at murder than Hagen was, which I guess isn’t really anything against either of them. But now these people, whoever they are, have a failure on their hands; a scared kid, running away, who probably knows too much. All I can say, Spanish, is that if I were running their show, I’d have him wiped out. And if I were you I would let me call the police. They can do more to protect him than we can.”

I stopped talking and waited. She looked down at her hands, which were locked tightly in front of her. “I… I can’t do that. After all that investigation last fall, if he were arrested now he’d never live it down. It would ruin him.”

“Sure,” I said. “A friend of mine was ruined last week. You should have seen what the buckshot did to him.”

She winced. “I’ll take you to Tony,” she said. “If you’ll promise… No. If I can’t trust you, you’d break a promise anyway, wouldn’t you? Just give me time to change my clothes.”

I said, “If we’re going out of town, you’d better bring along a sleeping bag or a couple of blankets. I don’t like the looks of the weather. And if you’ve got shells for that thirty-thirty on the wall, we might find room for that, too.”