The commercial air lines were sold out to the last seat for the holiday season. Scotty’s father was unable to get reservations. So it was in the plane of Scotty’s friend that they left an ice-coated airfield, shortly before midnight. The plane, as Scotty had promised, was fast. They made one stop for fuel, in Savannah, and swept south over the Everglades at dawn.
A red sky at morning, Duff reflected, wasn’t a “sailor’s warning” in Miami. Just a custom of the country. And he reflected — thinking of whatever came to mind in order to wear away the interminable hours of flight — that it was an advantage to be rich, like the Smythes. To have friends with planes, who’d make an emergency hop from New York to Miami just for fun. To be able to have a convertible you were too rushed to drive put aboard a freight car by the family chauffeur. Money meant things like that. But it didn’t necessarily
“corrupt character,” as Duff’s preacher father firmly believed and as Duff himself had vaguely assumed. There was nothing corrupt about Scotty Smythe’s character.
Duff was dozing when the plane bounced, braked, turned and taxied. Its pilot looked back. “All out!”
Scotty said, “Thanks a million, Al! Go on over to my place—”
“Nope. Gotta get back. Check in here, and out.”
“Wonderful thing of you to do.”
“Rather fly than eat. Well—”
There was the slant of morning sunshine, the Florida smell of flowers and mold and warmth, the sleepy look of people around an airport at daybreak. They carried their own bags to a taxi and started for the Yates home.
When they reached the house no one appeared to be awake. Duff unlocked the front door. Scotty tiptoed in behind him.
From across the living room came the murmur of Mrs. Yates, “Who’s there?”
Duff was smiling. “Me and Scotty Smythe. A pal of his flew us down.” A hand-knit bed jacket, blue as her eyes, covered her shoulders. Her golden hair was disheveled and as she sat up she reached for a comb. “I’m a sight! I’d dropped off—”
“I’ll get you some coffee. Eleanor and the children asleep?” He waited for her nod and went to the kitchen.
When, after a few minutes, he came back with three cups of coffee on a tray, Mrs.
Yates had fixed herself up. She smiled tiredly at him. “It’s like you two boys to rush down here—”
“We were badly worried!”
“You needn’t have been. Not to this extent! I was telling Scotty about it. When Charles found Harry Ellings, we were upset, naturally. He’s been a member of the family for so long! He was so quiet — so nice! I don’t suppose we’ll ever find a boarder who will replace him.” She sighed. “He’d been ill, of course. His heart just stopped. His funeral is arranged.
Eleanor has been trying to get his friends together. There aren’t many.”
Duff couldn’t hold back the question any longer, “What about the thing Eleanor said she found? Was it another box?”
Mrs. Yates’ head shook. “The same one. That Mr. Higgins came last night. Poor Harry! He must have been a little off balance about money! He told you he’d sold his platinum, didn’t he? Well, he hadn’t. He did open a small savings account, but apparently he couldn’t bear to part with that — metal. He just moved the box.”
Duff tried to hide an enormous disappointment. “Oh.”
Her smiled was wistful. “So perhaps it was in your lily pond, Duff. Perhaps he fetched it out between the time you were taken to the hospital and the time the police and all the others searched. He’d put it up in the tree house.”
“Tree house?”
“Didn’t you ever notice it? In the woods, toward the house from that pit with water in it? Eleanor’s father built it when she was little and it’s stood all these years.”
Duff remembered the weathered platform.
“It was a very sad Christmas for us,” Mrs. Yates said. “And poor Eleanor was exhausted, anyhow.”
Duff finished his coffee and signaled to Scotty. They went out on the lawn.
“It looks,” Scotty said ruefully, “as if we’ve been hurrying ourselves and friends around without any need.”
“I’m glad I’m here, though. They can stand help.” Duff thought a moment. “Do you believe it’s possible that all the rumpus could come from Ellings’ merely moving that box around?”
“What about seeing the big man in New York?”
“Sure. That. I’ve got to tell the FBI that — and take a razz, probably. But if all the rest of it isn’t coincidence — if it was just Ellings’ platinum hoard — then two extra-tall men could be coincidence.”
“Could be,” Scotty agreed with grim sympathy.
“Only—” Duff shrugged and began again. “Only I had a feeling that there was something about that empty warehouse that meant something. I got one of those spooky impressions. Whatever it was, I can’t bring it up to view in my mind. Tried, off and on, all the way down here.”
Scotty removed his jacket; New York clothes were too warm even for the early sunshine. He sat down on the grass. “You can be certain, if what you suspected had been going on, that it would take a big organization. Brains. Imagination. Planning. Either there is a mob engaged in a very elaborate routine or else nothing was happening. Harry was a hoarder whose, heart failed, and a branch hit you, period. The thing that gets me is, if any such thing is going on, why hasn’t anybody, anywhere, got onto any of it, so the FBI or General Baines — would have some notion?”
“Maybe I’ve wasted a lot of your time, Scotty. And more than a hundred borrowed bucks.”
“Forget it!” Scotty grinned and got up; he stretched and walked down the drive to the place where the sleeping cabdriver had parked in the shade.
At ten, Duff presented himself in the office of the FBI.
Higgins listened, somewhat dazedly, to Duff’s account of the trip to New York. When Duff finished, the first thing he said was, “Haven’t you got any sense at all?”
The younger man flushed and stammered. What he finally got out was, “Apparently not!”
Higgins summed up his view of the affair, “To start with, you go on a wildgoose chase. If any customer of Miami-Dade was the sort of drop you thought of, you had no chance of finding it out just by making a call. Take a hundred men, working weeks — short of some lucky break. So your scheme is dumb. The next thing you do, just because you can pick locks, is break into what you call a suspicious building. That was plain crazy! If you d run into what you suspected, you’d be lying on the bottom of the Hudson now in a barrel of cement. Fortunately, the joint’s empty. But you saw a man — a whopping big man — come out. You’d also once seen Ellings talking to some flagpole-sized guy. There are many big men, Bogan, and unless a man stands beside somebody whose height you know, how can you tell how big he is exactly?”
“If you’d seen him! Here in Florida. There on Broadway—”
“So, all right! He gets in a car. Drives off. You never notice its license! So there’s no way on earth of tracing him. Even the FBI can’t find a man in New York by merely knowing he’s outsize.”
Duffs face was a deep scarlet. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m at last beginning to think I was souped up over nothing.”
For perhaps a minute, Higgins merely looked at Duff. When he spoke again, his brisk manner had left him. His tone was level and there was nothing sarcastic in it. “Look here, son. We’ve checked you from hell to breakfast You’re a solid citizen, from a solid family.
Can you keep your mouth shut?”
The long series of disappointments and embarrassments suddenly, incredibly vanished. Duff said, “Yes.”
Higgins rocked back in his chair. “I wouldn’t tell you this if General Baines hadn’t been brought into it by you lads. He thought you ought to know. One more crazy thing you did! A three-thousand-mile, cockeyed chase! And you go interview the Chief of Intelligence — through Smythe’s pull! Okay! Look. There is something going on in the country, Bogan, that involves a group of agents we’ve only just got wind of. It could be—
what you came in here claiming a while back. Getting A-bombs stashed here. It could be. It could be something less spectacular — some other sabotage system. Like making arrangements to start diseases, epidemics. We don’t know. We haven’t connected your boarder — your late boarder — to any of it. But something’s happening!”
Duff said, in a near-whisper, “I see.”
“One more thing. The head of this outfit may be just such a big guy as you keep describing. Six-ten, possibly even seven feet tall — and heavy, besides. He’s been seen. He apparently carries orders or gives orders. The men he sees are apt to move on afterward. To turn up missing.”
“Who is the guy?” Duff asked.
“You tell me!” Higgins was angry for an instant. “Three or four times, in various cities, our men have spotted him making a contact of some sort with somebody. Always at night — probably because he was so big. Conspicuous. So far, he’s eluded us. The people he’s spoken to have been checked. Nothing on any of them — just like Ellings. Loyal Americans.
We don’t care to pick up any of them at this stage of the game. No single one probably knows enough to mean much. Or to point to many others. So we wait. Watch. And, I don’t mind telling you, we worry!”
Duff repeated, “I see.”
The G-man rocked forward abruptly and resumed his ordinary crisp manner. “What I just said, you never heard. The Yates place may have been a freight station. It may have been a mere blind. Tell nobody what I told you. I presume, with Ellings dead, the Yates house is safe enough. It’s now under FBI surveillance, in any case, and that’s also under your hat. Go about your business perfectly normally. Keep your eyes open. If you notice anything, phone here at once. I’ll give you a list of people to talk to, in case I’m out. But don’t — absolutely don’t — try to do anything! If you phone us, be sure you aren’t listened to. That’s all.” He wrote busily for a moment and handed a list of names to Duff. “Memorize it on your way home and then burn it. We don’t want anybody to know that the FBI is interested in you or the Yateses! Understand?”
“I certainly do!” Higgins rose lithely and held out his hand. “Fine! I might add this: We weren’t such chumps as you’ve probably imagined. We didn’t quite believe your tale, but lately we have been watching. Nothing and nobody suspicious has been near the Yates house since you left town. And look. If anything does come out of this, we’ll be grateful. Tips from people like you have helped us before. The tips you gave — that we seemed to brush off — may be a big help now. See?”
Duff saw.
When he went out on the street, his steps had new confidence. A great deal of his life was unsatisfactory: The Yates family was sad and Eleanor was pretty sore at him, or had been, before his trip to New York; he was broke and in debt to Scotty. But he hadn’t been such an utter fool as he had believed. Even though, he suddenly reflected, he couldn’t tell Scotty about that. Not yet, anyway.
Eleanor had just risen when he returned. She was wearing a light green, very sheer negligee that was part of her new wardrobe. He thought she was pale and thinner.
“Dear old Duff! I’m so glad you’re home!” She was suddenly embarrassed. “Oh, doggone it! When I called down, mother said you were out. I’m a fright! You can kiss me if you can stand it.”
“I just can.” He grinned and kissed her cheek.
She stepped back and surveyed him. “Come in the kitchen!” When they were there and the swinging door had shut, she went ont, “Duff, what happened? Mother told me you’d gone right off to see Mr. Higgins.”
He nodded.
“Where’s Scotty?”
“Went back to his place. Tired. We flew down in a private plane. Didn’t sleep any too well.”
“Tell me all about it! Your trip! Why on earth didn’t you tell us what you were doing?”
Duff walked over to the stove and poured coffee for himself. He felt as if he needed a dozen cups. He refilled her cup and added the two teaspoons of sugar she liked. “Look, Eleanor. What Scotty and I were doing was checking the tracking places. We didn’t find anything important. And from now on the FBI is taking over — whatever there is to take over.
I’m out of it. And I promised to quit talking about it to a living soul. And I’m dead tired.”
She said, “Well, I’m half dead! This Queen business is exhausting.” She sighed and then laughed. “All right. I won’t ask. Positively eaten with curiosity, but a lady to the end.
Anyway, I’m dreadfully glad you’re back again!”
The phone rang. She ran to answer.
Outdoors, Charles and Marian came in view. They were carrying pails of warm water, mops, cloths and a box of soap powder. Without ado, they began to wash the outside of a kitchen window, their dark heads bobbing in busy unison. Presently Charles called to Duff to lower the top section of the window, which he did. Duff remembered that Mrs. Yates had held a family council at which a list of necessary vacation chores had been drawn up. Charles and Marian were evidently working their way through the list. It wasn’t much of a holiday, Duff thought, but they didn’t appear to mind.
Eleanor stopped talking, started back, and the phone rang again. Her voice took up a new conversation with a pleasure he knew to be stimulated.
Meanwhile, through the now-open window, Marian and Charles began to discuss their sister, somewhat for Duff’s benefit.
“Phone again!” Charles said disgustedly. “Rings all day! You answer, it’s for Eleanor. Your pals try to phone you. The line’s busy!”
“A pain!” Marian agreed. “The doorbell rings, it’s flowers for the Queen. Or it’s a telegram for the Queen. Or clothes in big, fancy boxes. You walk out on the porch, some character is waiting for the Queen — maybe even with a mustache and in striped pants. Every time she skids past you, she’s got on something new. Gifts from the local couturiers.” She made deliberate hash of the French word. “You pick up a newspaper and what do you see?
The Queen, wearing her million-dollar, photogenic smirk!”
Duff chuckled; he was back “at home” all right. And very glad to be.
The phone rang a third time and Eleanor came through the door. “You, Duff.”
Through the window, Charles leered. “Amazing!”
“A gal,” Eleanor went on, her eyes a little curious. “With a voice like a torch song.”
From that, Duff knew who it was before he reached the phone. He wondered how Indigo had learned of his return. Probably she’d run into Scotty Smythe. He also wondered what she wanted — and found out. In fact, after elaborate refusals and protests, he eventually found that he was going to have dinner with her. When he hung up, he saw Eleanor in the doorway; she’d been listening; her expression was indignant, and not even humorously so.
“‘Indigo,’” she mimicked. “She’s notorious!”
Duff was surprised, embarrassed, and slightly annoyed. “Is she? She’s also darn good-looking!” He shrugged. “I can get the kids’ dinner — and then go out—”
“The kids can get their own!” She seemed unduly disturbed. “But, no fooling, she isn’t your type, Duff.”
Her attitude somehow pleased him and yet made him feel obliged to seem resentful.
“Brunette, you mean?”
“She’s actually Russian. Her parents were.”
“Wha-a-a-t?” He drew the word out skeptically. “Never met a more American dame in my life.”
“How did you meet, by the way?”
“Scotty dug her up. She lives in the Gables.”
“I know where she lives!” Eleanor retorted hotly. “Scotty would!”
“He told me,” Duff responded with heat, “that she wanted to meet me. What do you mean, she’s Russian?”
“She wants to meet any person in pants! Being tall, she likes tall ones, if available.
White Russian, she was. Family came here to Miami during the revolution. Ask mother.”
Mrs. Yates, whose door was open, could not avoid overhearing. She called, “Children! Quit squabbling!… Eleanor, Duff has a perfect right to go out with Miss Stacey if he wants.”
They heard the catch in her breath that indicated she was turning her wheel chair, and then she appeared in the doorway, smiling. “Stacey wasn’t the real name, Duff. It was, originally, Stanoblovsky. They changed it to Stacey. Back in the old days, before Walter and I came to Florida. And I guess the local people were fairly proud of having them. They were nobility, till the Bolsheviks threw them out. Maybe in 1917 or around that time. They made money here in lots of different businesses, mostly in selling cars. Mr. Stacey, Indigo’s father, had a big agency. Her uncle’s still—”
“Indigo!” Eleanor repeated scathingly.
“I always thought it was a very attractive name. The girl’a mother chose it because she claimed it was the prettiest word in English.”
“That’s what some broken-down Russian noble would think!” Eleanor turned angrily to Duff. “Go ahead! Fall for that towering twerp! Have a marvelous time with her!
Everybody does!”
“Eleanor!” said Mrs. Yates reproachfully.
The phone rang again at that point. Eleanor seized it, and instantly her voice became honey-sweet. “Of course,” she smiled. “I’ll manage, somehow! I’ve got to appear at the Watercade at four. And then there’s a cocktail party for me on the beach. And the ball. But I could spare a few minutes, maybe, between eight and nine.”
Charles came through the swinging door. “Is anybody getting lunch? Or do we just starve to death quietly?”
After lunch, Duff appointed himself a task that the Yateses had avoided. Harry Ellings’ room had been examined by the police, but his possessions had not been packed and the room had not, of course, been prepared for a new boarder. Nobody had even spoken about a new boarder. But the Yates budget meant that one would have to be found, and very soon.
Duff first packed Harry’s clothes in his suitcases. Then he put Harry’s letters, papers, pictures, books and personal knickknacks in cartons. These he moved to the barn and stored in its loft until they should learn what to do with them. The men who had gone through his effects and read every word of his correspondence had found no will. Mrs. Yates knew of none. He’d had, apparently, no relatives with whom he had kept in touch.
When all of Harry’s belongings had been removed from the room, Duff commenced to clean. There was dust beneath the bed which showed that the police, though they might have looked there, had not moved it. Duff presumed, however, that they had probed every square inch of the mattress, and when he stripped it off he thought he could see, here and there, tiny openings that long pins might have made. He carried the mattress outdoors. He went back and commenced, with the Dutch-wife neatness on which his mother had insisted, to dust the bed frame.
It was on the inner edge of a steel angle iron that he found the capsule. He presumed it to be one of the large, pliant kind in which liquid vitamins and other medicines are commonly administered. Something Harry had used long ago, dropped and lost track of. It must have fallen between the mattress and the wall and rolled onto the bed frame. But the capsule wasn’t dusty. And wetness showed at the ruptured edge. Also, Duff could see dents where teeth had recently come down on it to bite it open.
It was brown and egg-shaped. He sniffed. Its odor was medicinal, not identifiable. He decided that it was something Harry must have taken just before his death, something the police hadn’t noticed the day before because they were looking for nothing of that sort. He went to his room to get an envelope and tipped in the capsule without touching it. He finished cleaning the room thoroughly, and then, for the sake of the family and their memories, he rearranged the furniture.
After that, with the envelope in his breast pocket, Duff went outdoors. He knew now that the Yates place was being watched and he thought he could locate the agent on duty. He walked clear around the large rectangle of roads by which the property was bounded.
At the back of the property three Negroes were busy in a languid, hot-afternoon fashion, clearing the overgrown edges of the paved street. There was no one else. He then decided the watcher was hidden in the woods, and entered them. The undergrowth was thick and he went cautiously, as he was very sensitive to poisonwood, which abounded in the hammock around the house. He passed the platform where Eleanor had found the box again.
The G-men had it now. Platinum. He thought of that and shrugged.
He came, finally, to the sinkhole. It was about twenty feet one way and thirty the other, overhung by big trees, with a big tree blown across it, and deep enough to contain water. Such sinkholes, common in Dade County, were caused by the eating out of soft limestone by underground water. When a pocket was thus formed its roof eventually collapsed. Most such “glades” were dry, but some, like this one, had been deeply eroded and held pools of dark water.
Duff looked in. The water, gleaming in the shade, reached back out of sight beneath great, thirsty roots and an overhang of limestone encrusted with fossil shells. Around its rim were faint signs of visitation. Kids came there occasionally — though forbidden by their parents— to catch minnows in traps or just to throw stones for the sake of the splash. The water was too shallow for drowning, but a person could have a nasty fall into it.
Looking down, Duff remembered the night he’d seen one of the mysterious boxes — if there had ever been “one” among many — in his own homemade lily pool. That thought led to another: the sinkhole reached back out of sight around its rim, and he was wearing old clothes. He could go back to the house for a rope or use a tree. He decided on a tree and found a suitable one nearby, a small palm uprooted by the October blow. He scrambled down it and landed high-deep, in warm water.
The bottom was mucky. Overhead was an oval of blue sky. Around him, the sides of the hole curved back and the water glinted in gloom. Sometimes, he recalled, there were alligators in these sinks. He saw none. He walked around the edges, peering into the recesses, stirring up mud.
Presently he came to an area, hidden from above by the overhang, which had been visited by somebody else. Perhaps by several people. And perhaps often. It was a kind of roofed room, open toward the pit; its muddy floor emerged as a soft bank. The bank showed many signs of feet — old markings and some probably not very old. There were flat marks, too, where boards had evidently sunk down into the mucky sediment. One or two boards were visible now, and he located another with his foot, then others. They’d settled beneath the surface of the ooze.
The footprints weren’t plain, except for one, which he studied. It was the mark of the side of a man’s shoe. The man evidently had fallen on the tarlike stuff. But his leg, curiously enough, had left no print. Duff decided that the man must have turned his ankle to make such a mark.
He wondered if the FBI had investigated the sinkhole. Doubtless they had; probably the footprints and boards were signs of FBI scrutiny, though there were other possibilities.
The little fish in the pool were sought by kids and also by men; they made excellent bait.
Some angler might have set minnow traps there from time to time, using boards to stand on.
Tramps might have found shelter in the half cave. High school boys might have used it as a place for a gang meeting or an initiation. It was hidden and pretty far from the Yates house.
Wet to the waist, he shinnied up the tree again. He hadn’t yet found the watching G-man that Higgins had said would always be near. He finished a search of the hammock without luck, returned to the house, took the capsule from his pocket, washed himself outdoors with a hose, and afterward changed his clothes.
Then he went up to the bus line, rode into the Gables and phoned Higgins from a booth in a drugstore. The G-man didn’t seem much interested in the capsule, but he told Duff to leave it with the druggist to be picked up. Duff went home to help with supper for the kids.
Indigo came for him in her car after dark. When they drove down Flagler Street together, on the way to Miami Beach, the crowds, the lights, the Christmas decorations seemed out of key with his life and his mood and his fatigue.
“It’s beautiful!” Indigo kept pointing to everything. And she said, “I’m so glad you’re back! I was lonesome for you.”
He watched her drive, looked at her sleek, dark desirableness, breathed the perfume she wore and felt sure it was called Damnation or something of the sort.
He grinned. “Glad to be back! I was going kind of stale. I’m tired, besides.”
“For being tired, the extra cocktail is recommended.”
“Probably go straight to my head.”
“The very effect I had in mind.”
Duff laughed. “Why, Indigo? How come?”
Her lucent, dark eyes flashed briefly. “Why? Who can say why? I saw you on the campus one day. And again at a football game one night. I asked people who you were.
Why?” She shrugged as she turned the car. “When you get a certain kind of feeling you shouldn’t ask why.”
They dined and sat afterward in a moonlit patio on the edge of the sea. At midnight they drove back to her house and kissed good night. Duff, for a reason he couldn’t quite name, refused to go in to have a nightcap, and went home by bus because his refusal angered her. They quarreled on the doorstep, and she went in, finally, slamming the door in his face.
During that space of time the capsule left in a drugstore made a journey to the FBI in Miami and thence to a laboratory. About two o’clock in the morning, when Duff was in bed, but unable to sleep, owing to alternate waves of self-approval and self-castigation over his rather alarmed flight from Miss Indigo Stacey, Higgins, who was sound asleep at home, reached from his bed to snatch up a ringing phone.
“Yeah?”
“This is Ed Waite, at the lab. Sorry to wake you.”
“Okay. What?”
“That capsule. Anybody take the stuff?”
“Probably.” The G-man was wide awake, then. “Person that did is dead, if so.”
Higgins evaded the implied question. “What was it?”
“Aconitine. Enough to kill a few horses.”
“How would the person die?”
“Like heart failure,” Ed said. “And you couldn’t find the stuff by autopsy. It combines chemically with substances in the body and disappears.”
“I see. Thanks.” Higgins was about to hang up.
“One other thing, Hig. I don’t think that dose was made in U.S.A.”
“No? Why?”
“Because I never heard of anything like it. Aconitine isn’t used to put animals out of misery — nothing like that. And the capsule wasn’t any kind — chemically speaking—
manufactured here. Different base. The gelatin part, I mean. Another thing: It isn’t a little item anybody would whip up to poison somebody else.”
“No?” Higgins sounded skeptical. “Why?”
“You couldn’t feed it secretly to anybody. Too big. They’d see it or else feel it and not swallow it. And you wouldn’t want to try to bust it over somebody’s soup. Skin’s tough.
It would splash and spurt all around.”
“I see. Well, that’s good work, Ed.”
“Only thing it could be, Hig, I figure, is something I’ve only read about.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, if you were a foreign agent in somebody else’s country, for instance, and you thought you might be nabbed at any point and you wanted to be sure you’d never talk, you’d carry around, something about like that. Taped to you someplace. In a crisis, you could pop it in your mouth, bite, swallow — and quick curtains.”
Higgins said, “Thanks, Ed. Keep it to yourself.”
“Right.”
When Duff wakened, it was after ten. He leaped guiltily out of bed and took a shower. Then he tiptoed downstairs and learned from Mrs. Yates that the precaution hadn’t been wasted: Eleanor was still sleeping.
“A whole bunch of people drove her home last night around three,” she said. “This being Queen is bad for girls, Duff. I thought I’d brought up Eleanor so nothing in the world could turn her head. But with everybody in the city at her feet — with dates every second and things to do and all the clothes and the photographs! I’d hate it if—”
“If what, Mrs. Yates?”
“Oh, if she got glamour-struck. Thought she could get in movies. Anything like that.
Eleanor’s actually serious — and a simple person. A homebody. If she got yearning to be rich and famous and all that, she could make a wrong marriage! Even if she didn’t try Hollywood.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much. She’s level-headed. And I don’t believe it hurts a girl to be Cinderella once in a lifetime. Something to remember.”
“If she doesn’t develop a prince complex! Yes.”
The doorbell rang and Duff answered it.
Higgins was standing there, smiling. “Hi, Bogan.”
Duff opened the screen door. “Come out in the kitchen, will you? I just got up.”
In the kitchen, Mr. Higgins told Duff briefly about the capsule.
“You see,” he concluded, “how we can all go haywire. My men went through his things with the police. Never looked under the bed — which is the first thing an old maid would do. Never looked, I mean, beyond seeing nothing big was there. Thought I’d have a squint, myself.”
Duff bit toast he had made. He shook his head. “Too late. I cleaned the place yesterday. You think, then, that Harry—”
Higgins exhaled slowly. “Knocked himself off. Sure. They do. The heat was on him.
His people”—Higgins cursed softly—”whoever they may be, were probably sore at him because you started uncovering Harry’s business. I think when Harry went to Baltimore he was trying to contact somebody. We had men on him the whole time.”
“You did!”
Higgins’ eyes smiled, but not his lips. “This isn’t any amateur outfit, Bogan! Yes. But he never made a contact — not that our men saw, anyhow. He did consult doctors. He said he was sick — and I guess he was. Sick from fear. The doctors couldn’t treat that. So he came back here and maybe got the word. Or knew his number was up because they didn’t get to him in Baltimore. So he took that thing — and probably coughed the skin of it out as he died.”
“That means,” Duff said gravely, “Harry knew what he was doing the whole time.”
Again the G-man swore. “It means that, whatever the hell they are trying to do! By now, I’d give a leg to know. A life, I guess! I’ll take a fast gander at the room, even though you did clean it up.”
Duff nodded. “Okay. Incidentally, I tried to find your agents around here yesterday.
They must have been taking a day off.”
Higgins stared. Then he laughed. “You thought you could deliver the capsule to my men, hunh? They were here, just the same, son. As I said they’d be.”
“But there wasn’t a soul! Except some colored road workers!” Duff, seeing the G-man’s look, broke off and blushed. “Oh!” He joined ruefully in Higgins’ chuckle. “I did find one thing, though. There’s a sinkhole”—he pointed out the window—”beyond the banyan and those gumbo-limbo trees.”
Higgins said he’d have it looked over. Perhaps it had been; Duff couldn’t tell from the G-man’s response. Higgins went upstairs and returned to the kitchen shortly. He said to Duff, who was eating a home-grown banana and drinking coffee, “Brother, you sure would make some girl a wonderful wife! When you clean, you clean!”
Duff walked down the drive with him. “Thought you didn’t want any — people to know you were still interested in this place?”
Higgins nodded. “I checked with my road crew before this call. If anybody peculiar had showed up, I’d have got a signal and you’d have had to sneak me out.”
“There’s another item. Harry’s funeral. That’s tomorrow. Since we know now what Harry was, perhaps the family—”
The G-man shook his head. “No. They’re going?”
“They intend to. Even Eleanor plans to cut some of her schedule.”
“Lovely girl,” Higgins said absently. “No, Bogan. Things have to keep seeming normal around here. We’ll have a man at the services, of course. There won’t be many people. Some of his old letter-carrier pals. A few from the garage. Some of the cronies he used to fish and spot-cast with. You and the kids and the missus, you go. Don’t tell ’em Harry was a spy.”
The word, even then, shocked Duff. “A funny person to be one.”
Higgins said grimly, “That’s the worst thing about it! About those — those — Hell! No word for ’em. They reach the insides of patient, peaceful, law-abiding guys like Ellings! Rot out their hearts! And yet leave their outside just like always. You see some good-humored, industrious chap. Courteous, helpful, loves kids, sticks around home. Maybe, long ago, he was slighted or hurt or made to feel inferior. Something — something that switched him over to that crooked, rotten, enemy line! So he goes overboard. He keeps on looking like a good citizen. But in his head, night and day, he’s scheming to kill or enslave every man and woman and kid in the country! You know, Bogan, it’s the ability to do that to people that frightens me more than all the war and defeat and national uproar and trouble put together. It gets me!” He tried for a better phrase. “I hate it!”
Duff said, almost whispered, “Yeah. Me too.”
Higgins doubled his fist, stared at it unclenched it. “Shooting it out with gangs. That was easy! Tagging tax violaters. That’s just work! But finding out that people who do things you’ve been led to admire are just rotten, low, filthy enemies! Traitors! It makes a man sick!
It scares a man!” He nodded curtly and walked away toward the road.
Duff went over to the campus that afternoon. He had left some notes in a laboratory locker, he explained to Mrs. Yates. He had decided to go over them during the holidays and to finish a thesis on certain aspects of electromagnetic fields and radiant particles. He smiled when she answered him by making a funny face; she didn’t know what he meant.
Even to himself, Duff did not quite admit, until he walked up to the bungalow, that he was really going to Coral Gables to try to call on Indigo. He felt ashamed of running away from her. He also felt more than a little intrigued by her avowed passion for him; it was an unprecedented experience and Duff, after all, was a young man. He had always liked girls, but he’d never really had a girl of his own. Any other young man, undergraduate or graduate student, or any young instructor, for that matter, would almost surely have accepted Indigo’s passion with enthusiasm; even with a certain smugness. The fact that he was wary of her made Duff wonder if, perhaps, when the right girl came along, he wouldn’t know how to behave. In that case, he’d wind up a bachelor.
On account of such sensations and speculations, it seemed very necessary to Duff to make amends for refusing her offer, on the evening before, of a nightcap — a possible euphemism for something more personal and disturbing than alcohol, which had scared him away.
There was a car parked in front of Indigo’s pretty, modernistic bungalow. Her own car was in the garage and the sedan of the girl with whom she lived was not there. Duff shied at the fact of a caller and then decided that it might be better, diplomatically, to see her first in the presence of others. So he stepped up to the front door and dropped the chrome knocker. Nobody answered. That surprised him because he had heard voices inside. He knocked again, loudly, but there was no response.
So she did have a visitor, but she didn’t want to be disturbed. Duff reflected gloomily that a girl like Indigo could easily find a thousand admirers and doubtless would brush one off in a hurry for behaving as he had. He walked slowly away. Great swain, I am, he thought.
Casanova and Don Juan rolled into one. He reminded himself never to tell anybody of his behavior and its swift rebuff.
He spent two desultory hours in the lab and went back to the Yates house with a crowd of bus riders who held a general discussion on the prospects of a University of Miami victory in the Orange Bowl game. It was only days away. And thank the Lord for that, he thought. Perhaps afterward Eleanor would return to normal.
It was dark when he reached home. Dark — and Mrs. Yates was fretting. “I wish this business was over, Duff. It’s nearly six. And Eleanor’s due at a banquet at seven. And she has to change, but she’s not home yet. I know it’s not her fault that she gets delayed—”
Charles was setting the table. Marian was cooking. Duff inspected the contents of pots and pans on the oil stove and told Marian — making her happy by doing so — that the guy who won her would have not a good cook, but a real chef.
He took his notes upstairs, looked through them and straightened up the room. He heard Charles calling numbers, asking for his sister and getting unsatisfactory replies, for he kept dialing. Duff lay down on his bed and read a chapter on nuclear engineering.
He was interrupted by the boy’s voice, coming worriedly up the stairway, “Hey!
Duff! Eleanor never did get to the Fashion Parade today! I just found out!”
He closed the book, tossed it on his table and clattered downstairs. Mrs. Yates had wheeled herself into the living room. Her anxiety had visibly increased. “Charley just reached someone who was there, Duff. They waited for Eleanor till half past four. They tried to call here, but the line was busy all the time. No wonder. The calls that come in. So they went ahead without her.”
Duff said, “Probably got her dates mixed. Wouldn’t be surprising! She had some shenanigan at Fort Lauderdale for tomorrow. Bet she went there by mistake. Probably come in, any minute.”
“It isn’t like her,” Mrs. Yates insisted.
Duff grinned rather soberly. “She isn’t herself, these days.”
“She wandered off with somebody,” Mrs. Yates went on. “I didn’t see who. I’d wheeled into the kitchen to block a sweater, and she’d changed to that gorgeous brown dress she was to wear at the Fashion Parade today. She didn’t take the car and I don’t know who was to call for her. Scotty came by and they talked a while, and then he drove away and I had a glimpse of her standing out by the banyan. After that, somebody must have picked her up.”
Marian, who had gone into the stair hall, now called, “She certainly is getting absent-minded! She didn’t even take along the hat that goes with the new brown rig!” Marian came, then, carrying a hat the color of Eleanor’s eyes, with canary-yellow trimming.
It was not until then that Duff became alarmed. But alarm, when it appeared, was instant and formidable. She wouldn’t go without the hat. She was orderly. She was responsible. She had a good memory. And lately, she’d been almost vain; so much attention would have made anybody conscious of beauty. It was hard to imagine that Eleanor would barge away when somebody arrived to pick her up — without a hat that, obviously, was a main part of a planned costume for a very important social event.
As he felt ice inside himself, Duff instantly dissembled. “Maybe Scotty knows about it.”
He went to the phone and dialed. He got Scotty’s roommate and, presently, Scotty himself.
“Hi, you phony Sherlock!” Scotty said.
Duff frowned at the greeting and then realized that, as far as Scotty knew, his idea about the boxes had been mistaken and their trip to New York a blunder. He grinned tensely and asked about Eleanor.
“No,” young Smythe answered. “I didn’t see the Queen depart. I had a little colloquy with her around three, and I blew. I left her among the Yates trees and shrubs.”
Duff thanked him. He tried two members of the Orange Bowl Committee without success. He phoned the people who were sponsoring the banquet and asked if they had heard anything from Eleanor. They hadn’t. The family tried some of Eleanor’s closest girl friends.
Nobody knew anything about her.
“We’re probably going bats for nothing,” Duff said. “After all, she was terribly balled up with dates. Let’s eat.”
Eight o’clock.
No sign of Eleanor. Duff called a number Higgins had given him, and a sharp voice said, “Rolfe, here.”
“My name is Allan Bogan. I live at the Yates house—”
“Right. Where you calling from?”
“There.”
“Better use another phone.”
“No. The thing is, Eleanor Yates has disappeared. I mean, she was due home over two hours ago — been missing since around four.”
“Right. We’ll check.”
Duff hung up, wild-eyed.
“Who was that? The police?”
Duff nodded. “Sort of.”
Mrs. Yates began to cry a little.
Duff nervously walked out on the porch. If they had seized her — if they had taken her away — who were “they”? Why had they done any such thing? Where had they taken her?
There could be a reason. Weeks before, unsatisfied by his effort to convince the FBI that something was happening, she had gone to see Higgins without telling him. Since his return from New York, Duff hadn’t exchanged confidences with Eleanor or anyone else.
Higgins had forbidden that. It was possible that Eleanor had found out something so final, so telling, that she’d been— What?
“They” wouldn’t mind killing a girl. “They,” perhaps, were working to kill millions of people. You couldn’t even think, rationally, of what “they” might be planning.
Duff paced back and forth on the porch. It was a warm evening, but not so warm as to explain the sweat that burst on his brow, soaked his shirt. Only fear could explain that.