The Vanishers (5 page)

Her close-fitting white cotton trousers terminated above the ankles, displaying sheer nylons and high-heeled white shoes. Above, there was a short white zipper jacket over a neat white shirt, or blouse, with a round collar. Although carefully casual, the costume wasn’t inexpensive; it had a smart but slightly foreign look. Judging by the magazine covers I’d seen along the road, American ladies were still, that year, being stylish in baggy pants. I put her purse into her hands.

“I’m keeping your gun and ammo,” I said. “If you want to take another crack at me, you’ll have to find yourself another weapon. Incidentally, when you acquire a gun right out of the box, it’s customary to take it out somewhere and fire it to see where it shoots.”

She disregarded the expert advice. “You have no right to rob me of my gun! It cost… It cost me a hundred and sixty dollars!”

Her momentary hesitation told me that, whatever she’d paid for the little pistol, it wasn’t the list price she’d mentioned. Either she’d got it free from an accomplice, or she’d given a premium price for it on the black market.

I said, “It almost cost you your life, Miss Segerby. I could have shot it out with you instead of taking the chance of just walking away from you.”

“How do you know my name? Oh, you sneaked a look in my purse and saw my passport.”

I said, “You speak English very well for… for having been born in Uppsala.” I’d almost made a mistake; I’d almost told her she spoke English very well for a
Svenska flicka.
Male chauvinist linguistic pride. There was no need to show off and inform her that I knew even two words of Swedish, any more than there had been any reason to let Astrid Watrous know that I could pronounce a certain Finnish name perfectly well if I cared to. In the business, we try not to pass out any more information about our capabilities than we have to. I said, “While we’re on the subject of names, mine is Matthew Helm.”

“Yes, I know. Astrid told me you were coming here, when I saw her in the hospital early this afternoon. Astrid Watrous.”

“I know Mrs. Watrous. That’s her suitcase; she asked me to take care of it for her. That’s why I’m here, to help her.”

“Yes, that is what she said. She told me many things about you.”

I said dryly, “She told me things about you, too, Miss Segerby.”

“Yes, I can imagine what she said!” Curiosity got the better of the blonde girt before me. “What did she say?”

“Among other things,” I said, “that you were a sneaky poisoner, slipping deadly heart stimulants into people’s lunches.”

Karin Segerby grimaced. “Yes, she made that accusation to me, too. It is perfectly ridiculous, of course.”

“Is it?” I asked. “Considering what seems to have happened to your husband, if I’ve got the story right, and the way I almost wound up with a couple of twenty-two Magnum slugs in the back, it doesn’t seem too unlikely you’d put something into somebody’s soup. Of course murderers, and murderesses, do tend to stick to the same modus operandi, but it’s not an ironclad rule.”

“I’m not a murderess!” Her face was pale. “I didn’t shoot my husband, and I had no intention of shooting you!”

I said, “It’s a little hard to read minds from the wrong end of a gun, Miss Segerby, particularly when your back is turned.”

She ignored that. “And I didn’t poison Astrid; that is crazy! Where would I find a dangerous medicine like that?”

I patted my pocket. “Where would you find a dangerous weapon like this, an innocent girl like you?”

She hesitated, and shrugged. “I couldn’t have bought anything in Washington, of course; they’re totally against the law there. Here in Hagerstown the sporting goods store had some, but the man wouldn’t sell it to me without impossible red tape and waiting. But there was another man listening; a rather unpleasant-looking little man. I was disturbed when he followed me out of the store; but what he wanted was to tell me that if I really wanted it, if I really needed it and was willing to pay… I gave him five hundred dollars. I made him throw in the bullets for that price.”

Her firearms terminology was lousy, but it was no time for semantics. “You paid five C’s for a gun you weren’t going to shoot, and made sure you had ammo not to shoot in it?” I said cynically.

“I… I needed some protection!” the girl said angrily. “Astrid told me you were coming to fix me. She said you would find out just how I had managed to make her so sick. And even if you could not discover the proof, you would arrange for me to be punished anyway, since nobody else had had the opportunity to poison her, so my guilt was clear. You represented a ruthless government organization that was helping her find Alan, that’s her husband who’s disappeared…”

“I know who Alan is.”

“Yes, of course. And you would make me pay for what I had done to her and find out why I’d done it. I think she actually suspects me of kidnapping her husband on top of everything else. Or wants me to think so. I think her sickness must have affected her mind. She sounded quite crazy. Paranoid crazy. She frightened me.”

“So you got yourself a cute little black-market pistol and came here to my motel room to deal with me before I could make trouble for you.”

She licked her lips. “When one has been harassed for months, when one is lonely and afraid, one does foolish things. I just couldn’t sit quietly waiting for you to… to frame me. ‘Frame,’ isn’t that what you say? I had to learn, at least, what kind of a man you were.”

“What did you find out?”

She was silent for a little, studying me; then she spoke quietly: “I discovered that you were a brave man who would risk being shot in the back by a stupid girl rather than create a situation in which you might have to kill her. A gentle man who couldn’t even bring himself to strike her afterwards.” Karin Segerby drew a long breath. “Keep my silly little gun, Mr. Helm. It is better with you, and it has served its purpose. I have learned enough. I think I can trust you to find the truth, which is that if that woman was really poisoned, and did not simply bite herself and contract hydrophobia, it was not done by me. And I did not kill my husband.”

After a moment, she walked to the door. The set of her shoulders under the little white jacket let me know she was waiting for me to try to stop her. Perhaps she was even hoping that I would, but I didn’t. Without looking back, she disappeared into the night, and the door closed behind her.

Well, it was nice to meet somebody who considered me a brave and gentle man. The opinion is not universal.

When I called the regular office number to make my evening report on the Hagerstown situation, after putting certain information onto the tape at the special phone, I got through to Mac immediately. I was aware of being relieved, which disturbed me. After all, I wasn’t really a kid agent dependent on Big Daddy in Washington; I’d been tying my own shoes and zipping my own pants for a good many years now, professionally speaking. I should have been disappointed that the hypothetical vanishers we’d been discussing hadn’t grabbed him yet. That would have proved that he’d been theorizing along the right lines. It would also have put the operation on the rails and running. As it was, we still had to wait for the other side, whoever they were, to demonstrate that Mac had read their tricky little minds correctly.

Nevertheless, I was glad we remained in contact. After all the years, I’d feel odd reporting to anybody else. I brought him up to date on the most recent developments, as I’d be expected to do by anybody who’d seen Karin Segerby leave my motel unit. Somebody driving a white Honda, for instance, assuming it wasn’t hers. I also reported my earlier hospital-room conversation with Astrid Watrous, pretty much as I’d read it into the recorder at the special number but with certain critical details missing, like the name Lysaniemi. A very complicated operation, and I was having a hard time remembering who was supposed to hear what on which phone.

“Mrs. Watrous’ reaction to her medicine is most unfortunate,” Mac said, sixty miles away in the nation’s capital. “You say it appears to have been quite a violent one.”

“She was a sick lady when I saw her an hour ago, and apparently she had been a lot sicker,” I said. What with one thing and another, it seemed longer than an hour, but that’s what my watch said. “I was told by the doctor that she’s coming out of it and beginning to manufacture her own blood platelets again, whatever the hell they may be. The last count was encouraging, well up in the thousands. And they do seem to have the cardiac arrhythmia under control. She’s had no episodes since the night she was admitted. Let’s just hope she tolerates this new medicine, Procan, better than she did the quinine.”

“Yes, well, keep me informed,” Mac said, showing nothing but normal interest in the subject under discussion, but I knew he’d caught the key word I’d thrown him in the middle of all the medical jargon. He would run the stuff on the tape and get me the information I’d asked for there. And if he disappeared as expected, Doug Barnett would take over and do it for him.

I ate my lonely dinner in the motel dining room, wishing I’d thought to invite my pretty, pistol-packing visitor to join me, for company and because I needed to know more about her. But she was probably stuffy about accepting invitations from strange men she’d pointed guns at. Amateurs tend to make these big distinctions between friends and enemies, never understanding that in this business whom you eat with or sleep with has absolutely no bearing on whom you shoot.

In the morning, since my own car was still parked at a sidewalk meter near the hospital, unless the cops had impounded it, I hiked over there, after breakfasting in the same booth in which I’d dined. Neither Karin Segerby nor the white Honda showed, giving me no chance to determine whether it was her car or somebody else’s. In her hospital chamber, Astrid Watrous was sitting up and taking nourishment. Her long blonde hair had been brushed back to life. In the absence of a satin ribbon, it was tied back smoothly with a neat little bow of gauze bandage. There was color in her face and a touch of lipstick on her mouth. “Well, you look a little better,” I said.

“Such outrageous flattery, I cannot stand it,” she said. “If I had looked any worse, the undertaker would have charged extra to prepare me for burial. Did you bring me something nice to wear? I am very tired of these ghastly hospital gowns.”

“It was such a pleasant morning that I walked over just to see how you were getting along,” I said. “I’ll bring your coat and suitcase next trip.”

Astrid Watrous gave me a rather intimate smile. She was obviously one of the handsome ladies who has to go to work on everything in pants that passes by. Well, as long as it’s male.

“The sooner you do, the sooner I can look pretty for you,” she said. “It’s hardly worth making an effort for a man in these laundry bags they make us wear.”

I said, unsmiling, “I’m adequately compensated for my work by the U.S. government, thank you, ma’am. Private incentives, financial or otherwise, are not required.”

She looked at me hard. “You are angry with me. Why?”

I said, “Cut it out. You know why. I had a visitor last night. With a gun.”

She started to speak quickly, perhaps to say that she couldn’t imagine what I was driving at, but she thought better of it. She frowned instead.

“A gun? Karin Segerby? I can assure you that I never dreamed… Where would a child like that get a gun?”

“Child, hell,” I said.

She was studying me shrewdly. “You sound as if you had done some research on the subject of her maturity, Mr. Helm.”

“We had a little wrestling match while I was disarming her,” I said. “I can assure you that is a fully developed, fully adult, female of the species. But next time please warn me when you sic one on me, whether it’s a puppy or a full-grown bitch. We’re supposed to be cooperating here, remember?”

She licked her lips. “I am truly sorry. I never dreamed… I think I was a little delirious yesterday when she came to see me, and so frightened by what was happening to me that I just had to blame somebody. I couldn’t bear to admit that my own body was failing me; do you understand? Much better to tell myself I had been poisoned by somebody who hated me and that, having survived, I would soon get over it and be a normal person again. So there she was, and I’d never liked her, really, and she
had
had the opportunity. I convinced myself that it was all her fault and screamed my accusations at her, although weak as I was, it was a rather feeble scream. And I heard myself telling her that a very dangerous man was coming to punish her for what she had done to me, but I never dreamed she would
attack
you… And please remember that I did give you her name and tell you to watch out for her, even though I couldn’t bring myself to confess to you what an irrational, hysterical creature I had been.”

I regarded her for a moment, frowning, wondering how much of this to believe, if any of it. “So this morning you don’t really think you were poisoned, by Karin Segerby or anybody else?”

She shrugged. “All right, I am being inconsistent, but now that I am not so sick and feverish and frightened, it does seem rather implausible. I mean, even if she did kill her husband, even if she knows I suspect her, why should she take the dreadful risk of killing me? I can prove nothing, and she can hardly expect to get away with two murders barely a year apart.”

It was hard for me to think of the pretty, healthy young woman I’d encountered last night as a murderess, although I should know they don’t come with labels on them. And the fact that Mrs. Astrid Watrous said so didn’t necessarily make it so.

I said, “Well, your heart specialist is checking it out for me, to see if it’s even a possibility. Have you got a passport?”

The change of subject startled her. “Well, yes, and your chief, or whatever you call that man in Washington, thought it would be a good idea if I kept it with me, so I got it out of the bank. It is in my purse, right over there. Do you think we will need… I am afraid that it will take a little time before I am strong enough to travel abroad.”

I said, “I wasn’t thinking of an immediate Grand Tour. I just wanted to know what country.”