The Revengers (4 page)

I said, “Everybody who matters already knew all that. I mean, we’ve got dossiers on practically everybody in the business; and everybody in the business has dossiers on us, at least those of us who’ve been around for a while. Do you think Moscow’s going to waste a good removal agent’s time on an opposition operative with a heart condition who’s obviously settled down harmlessly to spend the rest of his life working in his cactus garden and fishing for trout? Or Peking?”

“Somebody he injured in the past in the line of . . . of duty, then,” Martha said stubbornly. “Somebody vengeful who’d been looking for him but might never have found him if I hadn’t opened my big mouth and Elly hadn’t printed what I said. Somebody who read that lousy article and knew that the . . . the end of the hunt was at hand.”

“Again, maybe,” I said. “But there’s not a lot of that going around. We don’t make a practice of carrying on blood feuds, and neither does the other side, or sides. It’s the luck of the game; some live, some die. We do make a note of people outside the undercover community who interfere gratuitously. We make a point of dealing with them if and when it’s convenient. As your father once said, they have to learn not to monkey with the buzz saw when it’s busy cutting wood. But within our tight little profession, no.”

She shook her head irritably. “Pretty soon you’ll be telling me Bob didn’t die at all, I just imagined the whole thing.” She drew a long, ragged breath. “Anyway, I’m not a member of your lousy professional community; I’m just a wife wanting to get even for something awful that was done to her husband. And to her.” She grimaced. “ ‘Get even.’ It sounds so childish, doesn’t it? How can one ever get even! That would mean setting the clock back; and it doesn’t run backward. But goddamn it, Matt, she can’t go around trading on friendship and hospitality like she did and not have somebody kick her ass up between her ears.”

I said, “Hell, if all you plan to do is boot her in the tail, be my guest.

I thought you had something serious in mind.”

“You mean . . . you mean like
killing
her?” Martha laughed heartily. “Matt, you must be kidding! I mean, really, do you think I’d go around with a
gun
chasing somebody down like an
animal
even if . . .” She stopped and made a face at me. “God, I’m such a lousy actress, and I’m so damned tired. Let me go to bed and stop making a fool of myself. You can find the guest room; it’s down the hall. Second door to the left. Bathroom, first door. Leave the dishes; I’ll get them in the morning.” She rose, and I rose, and she hesitated, facing me. “If you really . . . I wouldn’t want to think of you
suffering
or anything. After all, it’s not as if we’d never done it before.”

I grinned. “Therapeutic, you mean? Thanks, I’ll survive.”

“Don’t say that so positively. I might get the idea that I’m not irresistible. Good night, Matt.”

I carried my jacket, tie, and suitcase back to the room she’d indicated. As a pro, I like to case the terrain in advance of the operation if possible, even if the operation only involves going to bed. I laid out my pajamas for future reference and got out the file Mac had given me, for immediate study. The room was small, with a small bed, and a good-sized loom set up against one wall along with some auxiliary equipment I didn’t understand; apparently Martha had taken up weaving as a hobby. It’s a recognized Santa Fe syndrome. We’re all frustrated artists or artisans here.

I checked out the little hall bathroom on the way back to the living room, and used it. The plumbing worked. As if in answer I heard her flush another, similar device elsewhere in the house. It gave me a cozy and companionable feeling. In the living room I laid down the file, picked up my coffee cup, carried it to the picture window and parted the curtains to look out. It was a quiet night in the moderately high-class development known as Casa Glorieta. No traffic at the moment. There were lights in the house across the road but the picture window was covered and no sleek blondes were visible. A sturdy, four-wheel-drive vehicle was now parked in the wide driveway in front of the double garage: the fancy Jeep station wagon called Wagoneer. Well, most two-car families out here have at least one tough vehicle for hunting, fishing, or just taking the kids to school on a snowy day. There was probably something more civilized in the garage for the lady of the house to drive to the grocery and bridge club when the weather was good.

The sight of the husky vehicle reminded me of my own personal transportation, another hefty station wagon on a Chevy 4WD half-ton-truck chassis, known as a carryall. I told myself that for the sake of the government that was paying the bills I ought to get it out of storage and turn in the expensive rental job I’d grabbed for my dash up here from Albuquerque. The airlines don’t fly to Santa Fe; you have to drive the last sixty miles or take the bus. (Not even the Santa Fe Railroad goes to Santa Fe; the town is serviced by a spur from the main line at Lamy.) I soothed my conscience by telling it that I probably wouldn’t be staying long enough for Avis to break the expense account.

I let the window drapes fall back into place, took my cup into the kitchen and refilled it. I carried it back into the living room, sat down and dumped the contents of my big envelope onto the cocktail table. The Eleanor Brand article, my copy, was on top. I’d read the piece once, hastily, on the plane, and once more here with Martha watching me; now I settled down to give it a careful study without distractions. It was a thorough job. The girl reporter had dug up a lot of stuff, more than Martha could possibly have told her about. Active or retired, well or ill, Bob would never have confided in his wife to this extent; and Mac was certainly not one to whisper state secrets into his daughter’s ear. Obviously, Martha’s information had simply been used as a springboard for further research. Well, Freedom of Information is the name of the game these days. There was even a brief description of that ancient South American safari on which I’d made the useful acquaintance of chatty, friendly, little Rafaelita. My name was mentioned with a hint that I was an interestingly murderous chap whose gory history would be presented in detail in a later installment of this startling and revealing series.

So Miss Eleanor Brand, or Ms. Eleanor Brand as she undoubtedly called herself these liberated days, was a skillful researcher, a pretty fair writer, and an indignant lady who’d grabbed, so to speak, the torch of nonviolent idealism from Martha’s faltering hand. She was also, it seemed, a fairly ruthless bitch who didn’t give a damn whom she betrayed or hurt or got killed in pursuit of her journalistic career. Well, considering the nature of my own career, I was hardly in a position to criticize.

There was a picture of her down in one comer of the first page, and a small biographical blurb. Ms. Brand was twenty-seven years old, a graduate of Smith with a master’s in journalism from Columbia. She’d worked for a number of publications I’d heard of and some I hadn’t. She’d won some kind of a prize that meant nothing to me since it wasn’t either the Nobel or the Pulitzer. Currently she was down in the near-Caribbean acquiring a suntan and doing research on a projected article on the Bermuda Triangle.

I frowned at that. It didn’t seem in character. I’d been exposed to that Triangle legend myself in the course of one assignment, and it didn’t seem like anything for this competent and cynical young woman to get her sharp little teeth into. I mean, hell, either you proclaim breathlessly that it’s all true, true, true, and there are sinister and unearthly forces at work here beyond our comprehension—and that’s been done. Or you announce coldly that careful scientific research proves conclusively that it’s all a lot of melodramatic superstitious crap—and that’s been done, too. This was a girl who obviously liked to find shocking new grist for her typewriting mill. Why was she wasting her valuable time on a bunch of old missing ships and disappearing airplanes that had already been exploited to the puking point and beyond?

Studying the photograph, I decided that the original family name could not really be Brand or even Brandt. It was not an Anglo-Saxon or Germanic face. The head was brachycephalic rather than dolichocephalic. In other words, it was wide and short from front to back rather than long and narrow like, for instance, my own Scandinavian skull. She wore her straight darkish hair quite short, parted on one side and combed across to the other. Her face was wide and flat with a long thin mouth, a short bony chin, and a low snub nose. The eyes were set well apart but the sparse brows and lashes didn’t do much for them, and she obviously didn’t take the trouble to prettify them in any way.

There was no way to describe her and make her sound particularly attractive. Her features, at a glance, were unspectacularly shaped and uninterestingly arranged. It was the pushed-in face of a clever and determined female monkey rather than the shining visage of an intelligent and lovely girl. Still, I had an uneasy feeling that if Ms. Brand ever came to the conclusion that you were worth it personally, or particularly if she thought you had something she wanted, or knew something she wanted to know, you might suddenly find yourself deciding that you had nothing against female monkeys after all—that, in fact, they were really rather charming creatures in an offbeat way. . .

Well, that was a lot to read into a photograph hardly larger than a postage stamp; and enough of Eleanor Brand. She wasn’t the only researcher around. I found a copy of the police report on Devine, Robert, deceased. The shotgun had been fired at slightly under thirty yards. A single twelve-gauge Magnum case had been found nearby—the short two-and-three-quarter-inch Magnum, not the long three-incher, which requires a specially chambered gun and is more shell than most hunters need. It had originally been loaded with Number One buckshot, a pretty good choice for a target the size of a deer or a man, although it’s Double-Ought buck that gets all the glory. Fourteen pellets of the load of twenty had struck the body. Eleven had been found in the course of the autopsy. The other three had been peripheral or glancing hits that kept on going after leaving their marks. Well, eleven solid hits with practically anything would certainly do the job. I once knew a man, hunting quail during deer season, who jumped a good-sized buck and dropped him dead with a fairly light load of fine birdshot. I frowned at the report for a while and glanced at an accompanying photograph, taken at the scene—Mac had apparently pulled strings to get total police cooperation. But it wasn’t a picture I cared to study at any length; it had nothing to do with a guy with whom I’d once visited a Colombian cathouse.

I put all the materials back into the envelope and sipped my cooling coffee thoughtfully. Martha seemed to be asleep; I’d heard nothing from her room for half an hour. I picked up the coffee tray and carried it into the kitchen and, like a good house guest, rinsed off all the dinner dishes and loaded them into the washer while she was unavailable to lodge a protest. Besides making me feel virtuous, it killed some more time. Then I went into the guest room and, with a regretful glance at my pajamas, changed my clothes. I got into jeans, a navy-blue turtle-neck and a pair of soft, rubber-soled shoes. I dug the little five-shot Smith and Wesson out of the hidden compartment of my suitcase, checked the loads, and tucked it into my waistband, letting the shirt hang down over it. The metal was cold against my skin. I checked the little knife I always carry. I turned out the guest room, weaving room light, went back to the kitchen and started the dishwasher. The rushing and rumbling sounds of the machine apparently did not disturb Martha at the other end of the house; at least she did not come running to complain about my presumption in doing her dishes in her home. I set the latch of the kitchen door so I could get back in, and slipped outside with the noise of the washer to cover my stealthy exit.

It was a damfool notion, of course. Obviously a wild-goose chase, a blind stab in the dark. Nothing could possibly come of it. I was grasping at straws, chasing ghosts, tilting at windmills. Who the hell did I think I was; Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey? I didn’t even know for sure if the man I was after existed. I’d never seen him. I didn’t know his name. Still, there had been some odd discrepancies in the accounts I’d heard and read of Bob Devine’s death. The gun wasn’t right and the behavior of the man who’d used the gun wasn’t right, not if said murderer was the kind of professional everybody seemed to assume. It was a long-odds gamble that would cost me nothing but a little sleep to check out.

It was a clear night without a moon. The stars were much brighter than they’d been in Washington, D.C. Well, we were seven thousand feet closer to them, up here in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, the Blood-of-Christ mountains. This was not a community of walls and fences, and I slipped over the low rise behind the Devine house and found myself at the back of somebody else’s couple of acres. I sneaked on down past the lighted house that was there, to the road. So far, so good. Once on the road, I started to jog. It used to be that a running man either created a panic or was picked up by the white-coated boys with the butterfly nets. Nowadays, the best way to turn invisible is to proceed at a steady lope, just another health nut flushing the stale air from his lungs.

I had some trouble with the gun and considerable trouble with my breathing. I’d just come up from sea level and it takes a week or two to get used to the altitude. I took the first crossroad to the right. This brought me back to the road on which Martha lived, known as Navajo Drive. I crossed this and went on to the next, labeled Ute Road, turning right again. With the last of my failing breath, I made it to a spot opposite my starting point but a block over, if this elaborate countrified community dealt in such conventional urban divisions as blocks. I stole between two of the scattered houses here and followed a fold of ground back toward Navajo Drive, finding myself at last on a hillside from which I could see the house from where I’d come, across the street. The bedroom wing where Martha slept was dark; the living room and kitchen were lighted as I’d left them. Directly below me was the house with the Wagoneer in the driveway, although the vehicle was now hidden from my vantage point on the hillside behind the house, by the garage. I sat down to catch my breath by a dark desert juniper against which, I hoped, my own dark shape would be invisible if anyone should look.