The Poisoners (7 page)

I waited. He was silent. The girl known locally as Charlie spoke a soft command and he stepped back into the doorway. I addressed myself to the telephone once more, watching Beverly as I talked.

“The Blaine girl clinched it, of course,” I said. “They kept hinting at some mysterious female Annette had been mistaken for, but she was supposed to be a great big secret. I had a hunch, however, that if the whole performance was as phony as I’d begun to suspect, and if I gave them half a chance, they’d actually be happy to drop their red-haired mystery woman into my lap to support their fairy tale—which was exactly what they did, with melodramatic trimmings. Just how many times have we used the ancient gag of roughing up an agent to make him, or her, look good to the other side, sir? And how many times have we had it used on us? Well, chalk up one more occasion, for the record.”

I looked at the girl and saw that she was tense, waiting for something. I could guess what it was. She was waiting for the humiliation of having me describe, in front of everybody, her abortive attempt at seduction.

I grinned at her, and went on: “Five will get you twenty, sir, that if we check back on her carefully, we’ll find she was a ravishing blonde, or a sultry brunette, who couldn’t possibly have been mistaken for our redhead or vice versa, until sometime this morning, many hours after the shooting… What about it, Miss Blaine?”

She hesitated. Then she nodded minutely. It was her way of thanking me for sparing her embarrassment, not that I really needed confirmation. Her hairdo had been just too pretty—too bright and soft and beautiful—for a girl who was supposed to have spent the past twenty-four hours on the run; her clothes too, if you discounted the minor damage incurred in the struggle staged for my benefit. For instance, nobody keeps a white turtleneck immaculate, particularly around the collar, for a hectic day and night in the City of Smog.

It had been a good idea, but Warfel or whoever had thought it up had been careless about the details. Maybe he’d counted on the fact that when people confess to being involved with murder, the tendency is to accept their stories without too much skepticism.

I looked from the girl, silent, to McConnell, whose expression said he wasn’t talking either. I said into the phone: “No, sir, they’re not volunteering any information. Warfel’s got them in his pocket. Anyway, there’s not much chance he told them anything important. They probably don’t know enough to make it worth offering asylum or protection or any other kind of a deal. They’re just a couple of expendable red herrings… Yes, sir, I’ll turn them loose as soon as I’m through here. Warfel may not like them very much, now that his elaborate scheme has flopped, but they’ll just have to take their chances. As you say, it’s not worth tangling with the mob for nothing. Organized crime is the F.B.I.’s business, not ours.”

It didn’t work. At least it didn’t work immediately. The threat of being turned out on the street, unprotected against syndicate vengeance, didn’t bring either of them rushing forward to trade valuable information in exchange for a safe place to stay. I nodded to Charlie Devlin, and she led them away. When the door had closed, I turned back to the phone.

“Okay, sir, I’m alone,” I said. “I just wanted them to hear that much of the conversation. I hoped it might persuade them to give us a little help, but either they actually don’t know anything worth telling, or Warfel scares them more than I do.”

“So I gathered.” Mac hesitated, far away on the other side of the continent, and asked with professional caution: “What is the status of your telephone?”

“Our friends assure me that the room and phone are safe as Fort Knox.”

“Indeed? Such confidence is touching. But they do seem to be giving you adequate cooperation.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Reluctant but adequate.”

“This Mr. Warfel apparently put on quite a show for you. Can you suggest a motive?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “but first I’d like to drop a few names and descriptions into the hopper. I presume you’re already digging up what’s known on Warfel himself—there should be plenty-—but he had two tough gents in his immediate ménage when I saw him, one called Jake and the other nameless. There was also a lousy driver he called Willy, and a guy sitting in the lounge in my motel reading a paper. Then there’s a slinky blonde called Roberta Prince, Warfel’s current house pet. She’s either a dancer or an acrobat or both. Also Lionel McConnell, known as Arthur Brown, known as The Basher; and of course the imitation redhead. And you might as well check out my lady colleague while you’re at it, the girl they seem to have assigned to me here, Miss Charlotte Devlin, called Charlie for short…”

He pounced on that. “Do you suspect this Miss Devlin? Of what?”

“Of nothing, really,” I said. “But the Blaine girl was kind of surprised to see her. Maybe she was just surprised at seeing a woman—that’s what I figured at first—but maybe she had some reason for being surprised to see that particular woman. If so, I’d like to know why. Anyway, if I’m going to be working with Devlin, I’d kind of like to know what her record looks like. I mean, what can I count on her for and what can’t I? And has she been doing any work recently that brought her in contact with the Warfel ménage? I mean, maybe her people had some reason for assigning her to me other than pure friendship and cooperation. Could they have an interest in Warfel that might conflict with ours?”

“That would be difficult to determine at this point, since we don’t know exactly what our interest is,” Mac said slowly. “Very well, I’ll try to investigate, although it will be ticklish business. Give me what you have on the rest and I’ll set the machinery in motion…” It took a little while for me to describe all the individuals concerned for the tape recorder some three thousand miles away. When I was through, Mac said, “Now what, exactly, are your ideas about Warfel?”

I said, “I figure he must have been trying to cover for the real murderer, who must be somebody important enough to give him orders or rich enough to hire him. I’m no expert on the operations of the syndicate, but I gather it’s willing to cater to just about any human weakness. That presumably includes murder. If you happened to shoot somebody, and knew the right people in the right underworld circles, they might just furnish you with a fall guy or two if the price was right.”

Mac said thoughtfully, “Of course, there’s also the possibility that Warfel himself killed Ruby, or had her killed, and then offered up these sacrificial goats to protect himself.”

“Maybe, but why would he kill her?”

“A man like that has many secrets. She could have stumbled onto one of them.”

“A man like that keeps his secrets well hidden, sir, and they’re generally secrets that wouldn’t have interested our girl very much. If she’d stumbled onto one, she’d have minded her own business like a good little government girl, and refused to get involved unless… Is there any indication that Warfel might have political connections overseas? And I don’t mean in Sicily or wherever it is so many of these rackets characters seem to originate.”

“I see what you have in mind,” Mac said slowly. “No, Mr. Warfel plays ball with the local politicians, of course, or they play ball with him, but there’s been no hint of any other type of political activity. He’s been investigated frequently and thoroughly by competent people who’d have been happy to pin something—anything—on him. No, the idea of Mr. Warfel as the agent of an unfriendly foreign power, or the accomplice of such an agent, is intriguing, Eric, but I’m afraid it’s improbable.”

“I disagree, sir,” I said. “If he’s not one, then he’s covering up for one, although he may not know it. Our murderer’s contact may be somebody higher in the organization. Warfel may simply have got a phone call telling him what to do, and maybe how to do it. He may not even know the name or business of the man he’s shielding. If that’s the case, I’ve got a very tough job ahead of me, tracking the guy I want through a forest of high-echelon racketeers.”

Mac said, “This is highly theoretical, Eric. You have absolutely no proof—”

“Annette was killed, wasn’t she? And a great effort was made to sell us a couple of phony murderers, presumably to take the heat off the real one. You’re not thinking, sir. You’re not thinking about our girl O’Leary, and what kind of a girl she was, and where she’d been before she came to us, and what frame of mind she was in when she landed in Los Angeles yesterday—well, I guess it’s the day before yesterday by now. Of course, you didn’t know her as well as I did, sir. All you’ve got to go on is a couple of interviews and some dry personnel records. I worked against her on one job down in Mexico, and with her on another, remember?”

We’re not a buddy-buddy, call-me-Mac kind of outfit. He likes a certain amount of formality and protocol. I guess I’d let myself get carried away, a bit disrespectfully, because his voice was cool when he spoke again.

“And just what do you deduce from your superior knowledge of Ruby’s character, Eric?”

I said, “What I’m remembering right now is three things. First of all, the girl was a pro—”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.” Mac’s voice was still rather stiff and severe. “Promising, yes, but she had by no means achieved true professionalism.”

I said, “Okay, so she hadn’t quite learned how to control her temper, if that’s what you mean. But on the whole, when I worked with her, her reactions were pretty sound. She certainly wasn’t afflicted with any overpowering, irresistible do-good impulses. Even if I hadn’t already figured out that Beverly Blaine had to be lying, I’d have known it when she claimed to have sold Annette a sob story of some kind. The kid would never have fallen for anything like that. She was a pretty tough little cookie, and she wouldn’t have stuck her neck out an inch…”

Mac interrupted. “That’s more fine-sounding theory, Eric, but the fact is that she obviously did stick her neck out, somehow.”

“You didn’t let me finish, sir,” I said. “I was going to say that she wouldn’t have stuck her neck out an inch—
for anything that wasn’t in the line of business
. Our business. She wouldn’t have got herself involved with any weeping cuties with husband trouble, and if she’d seen a murder being committed, or a suitcase full of dope being smuggled—by Warfel or anybody else—she’d have looked the other way, like any of us would, like the rules require. She would have remembered the standing orders not to risk her effectiveness as an agent, by attracting attention either as the good Samaritan or the public-spirited citizen. To that extent, sir, I say she was a pro.”

“Perhaps you’re right. But there’s still the possibility I suggested earlier, that she was a pro selling out.”

“There wasn’t time. I’ll admit she might have been capable of it under the right circumstances, meaning if she was mad enough, but I think you’ll agree that she wasn’t a coldblooded traitor with her plans laid in advance. That means she came to L.A. without any prearranged contacts. It takes time to sell out, sir. You’ve got to find the right people. You’ve got to convince them of your sincerity. You’ve got to convince them you’ve got something worth buying—and then you’ve got to deliver your information, all of it. If somebody did get one of our people talking about our setup, even a novice agent, would they finish with her and dispose of her in less than a day? You know they wouldn’t. They’d want to spend at least a week on thorough debriefing, going over every detail of our training and operations arrangements again and again until they were absolutely sure they’d pumped her dry.”

Mac said, a little impatiently, “Very well. Assuming that she wasn’t killed because she’d stumbled on some syndicate secrets, or because she’d got involved in a treason scheme that backfired, what do you suggest as a cause of her death?”

“I suggest she was trying to help us. I think what she saw, either on the plane or in the airport, was somebody in whom we’re highly interested, somebody on the high-priority list perhaps…”

“Then why didn’t she get on the phone and report it before taking action, as the normal procedure requires, particularly of inexperienced young agents in her category?”

“Because, as you point out, she wasn’t quite professional enough, sir. Because she had a temper like dynamite and you’d just lit the fuse. Because she was mad at you and was going to show you up, by dealing with the situation herself in her own way. She was going to prove to you that initiative and daring were better than conformity and discipline, and to hell with normal procedure.”

Mac said, rather reluctantly, “It’s plausible. So your theory is that she spotted somebody important and tried to follow but was detected and killed.”

“Yes, sir. Her attitude was professional enough, but her experience was still pretty limited. I think the guy she was tailing set a trap for her, caught her, and took care of her with his overgrown cannon, after first knocking her around just enough to learn that she was operating alone. And then, because his presence in Los Angeles—maybe even in the U.S.—was supposed to be a very hush subject indeed, he got hold of some local underworld talent and arranged for them to make it look as if she’d been killed by mistake, so we’d have no reason to investigate her motives and movements.” There was a thoughtful silence. Presently I said, “That’s the way I figure it, sir. She was pro enough not to get sidetracked on something that was none of our business, but she was amateur enough to try to handle it alone. There’s also a third factor that might be important.”

“What’s that, Eric?”

“She’d recently been mixed up in a communist operation in this very area, remember? It could be that she ran into somebody she was in a special position to recognize, better than anybody else in our outfit. Remember the assignment on which I met her, sir. Remember the circumstances. Her husband had been killed in Vietnam. She’d blamed this country for sending him to his death, if you recall, and a fast-talking enemy agent—I never learned exactly who—had taken advantage of her resentment to persuade her to help with a fancy anti-U.S. plot they had going below the border in Mexico.”

“I remember,” Mac said. “What is your point?”