Emery McIntosh, chief of the Miami office of the FBI, listened to Higgins without interrupting. He was a medium-sized man of about fifty with a bald spot on the top of his head, nattily dressed in tropical-worsted suit, silk socks, black, highly polished shoes and a white shirt with a stiff collar. When he did speak, there was little in his accent to suggest his Scottish descent. But the ways and even the looks of his ancestors might have been read into the crisp mustache which matched his sandy hair, the blue glint of his eyes, the extraordinary firmness of his mouth and the deep, rather melancholy timbre of his voice. McIntosh looked, Higgins reflected, like a Presbyterian deacon dressed for taking up a Sunday collection—
which he was and had been about to do when the younger agent had telephoned.
“And the lad’s coming along all right?” McIntosh finally asked.
Higgins nodded. “Hardly a lad. Twenty-four.”
“But still in college,” the G-man sighed. “That keeps ’em young. One minute they can act like wise old professors. The next, fall apart like adolescents.”
Higgins’ grin was quick. “Well, Bogan is different. And he’s all right. They had him in a hospital soon after midnight. Eleven stitches.”
“Any tree bark in the wound?”
“Several bits, the surgeon said.”
“I see.”
“I’m not sure you do,” Higgins answered stubbornly. “The poor guy was clunked more than once. He could have been blackjacked. And then that limb could have been hauled down from the tree. And after that he could have been pounded a couple with it. I think they thought he was dead.”
“If there was a human agent — any ‘they’ at all! A big if.” Higgins shrugged in a swift, shadowy way. “All right. I couldn’t find tracks on the lawn or in the shrubbery. Hasn’t rained lately, so why should I? Nobody in the family heard or saw anybody. He must have made a big splash, going in, but the house is fairly distant. Ellings’ room’s on the other side. The mother and the girl were asleep. The boy’s room is on the back.”
“Ground wet around the pool? That box — if it existed — would have come out dripping.”
“The ground was wet, all right. But it would have been soaked by the splash of the man and the limb anyhow. There might once have been an impress of the box on the grass—
it would have been heavy. But the police were there first and they had it fairly well trampled.”
McIntosh sank lower in his swivel chair. “Tree?”
“I gave it a going-over. You could see where the limb had been jammed. Rubbed the bark of a sound branch. You could see that it hadn’t been attached by much. A few slivers of wood and bark. It weighed around a hundred and fifty pounds. It could, so far as signs show, simply have come loose while he crouched there, and dropped on him and conked him, turned as it hit the pool, and swatted him again. It could, for all I can surely prove.”
McIntosh looked at his watch. On its chain was a Phi Beta Kappa key. “You say the lilies were in wooden boxes. Could one of them have changed position so he mistook it, at night, in a flashlight beam, for what he imagined was related to his other — discovery?”
“How can anybody answer that except Bogan himself? He said he saw the box plainly. Said he saw brass screw heads. No screws in his lily boxes. And it’s hardly anything he’d dream up. Besides, the lily boxes have no tops. They’re filled with compost, and that’s covered with white sand.”
“One might turn turtle.”
“Yes. Except that it would haul under water a conspicuous bouquet of lily pads and buds and flowers.”
“You believe there was a box and Bogan got slugged and the box was taken away while he was unconscious?”
“Yes.”
“And you believe”—McIntosh took time to make himself say it—“that there was uranium in the box?”
“Or some other part of an A-bomb.”
“I don’t.”
Higgins started to say something argumentative, changed his mind, and smiled. “I don’t blame you.”
“Not one tangible piece of evidence! Bogan once had what he called a sample, a few particles he filed off, and he claims he analyzed them — which is difficult even for a specialist, and he wasn’t that. But he lost what was left of his sample before we could work on it. Ellings did have a hunk of platinum on hand, and that’s peculiar, but it’s not uranium.
Ellings met a man we’re supposed to believe was seven feet tall. Phooey! Ellings doubtless met a man. He may even be busy with some deal — a little smuggling or the passing of stolen goods. But do you realize what you’re saying when you talk about A-bombs?”
“Yes.”
“I doubt it. You’re saying, man, that whole cities are being prepared for slaughter without warning! And you’re saying this is being done by people we have no whisper of, line on, word about — not a notion of, a smell, scent, track, trail or even hunch about!”
“Exactly.”
“Frankly, I think that’s impossible.”
“You can’t say it’s impossible, Mac.”
The Scotsman shrugged. “Very well. As unlikely as flying saucers. Put it that way.
On the other hand, grant, for a second, it’s true. What then?”
“That’s what I’d really like to discuss.” McIntosh put away his key and folded his hands across his chest. “All right. We’ll discuss it. I will. In the first place, any such an underground outfit actually doing any such thing wouldn’t hesitate for a second to murder this Bogan lad, or the whole Yates family, or any hundred other people.”
“Obviously.”
“Second, such an outfit actually might use the Yates house. It’s off the beaten track.
No other houses near. Rundown. Surrounded by big trees. Not conspicuous. And protected.
Those Yateses would be about the last persons anyone would suspect of doing anything criminal or haboring criminals. Mother a cripple. Beautiful young daughter — Orange Bowl Queen. Normal Americans. Two boarders. And a man like Ellings, if he were an enemy agent, would be ideal because he’s got such a long, hardworking, churchgoing, commonplace history.”
“Check.”
“Third, the whole routine you’re trying to sell me would therefore have worked — except this Bogan lad had a lot of cockeyed hobbies. Like picking locks. Like housework.
And he’s a physics graduate student, so when he sees metal, he’s curious. He has, besides, a hobby of raising tropical fish and water lilies. When he can’t get a satisfactory answer from us, he takes on another hobby.”
“Yeah,” said Higgins dryly. “The hobby of danger!”
McIntosh sniffed. “Nosing! He gets nosy. He gets the girl nosing, even. And he gets bopped on the bean by a branch — and lucky his brains weren’t knocked out.” McIntosh unlocked his hands and flattened them on his desk. “Not a sign that anything happened but a branch fell! Ellings, the logical one to hit Bogan if all this wonder dust is real, was in bed.
Mrs. Yates saw him come downstairs. So who hit him? Presumably, somebody coming for or standing guard over the alleged box in the lily pool. So now what? Four-five days, Bogan’s out of the hospital. Ready to nose some more!”
“We could tell him to quit. Tell him the bureau was taking over from here on in.”
The Scotsman scowled. “Which is exactly what we don’t want anybody to know!”
There was quiet elation and relief in Higgins’ voice. “Meaning, we are taking over?”
McIntosh frowned harder and then smiled. “If it weren’t Sunday, I believe I’d swear.
Of course, we’re taking over! However, we won’t accomplish anything unless all and sundry really believe we’ve missed our cues by deciding the injury was an accident, the box a myth.
You can see that?”
“Sure. The Yates place is hot. It will be as long as we’re interested. Or the cops.
Anybody. Maybe it always will be, from now on, and maybe — if Ellings was merely being used — we have only one hope: finding out who used him. But there’s one difficulty about telling Bogan and the Yates family that we don’t feel anything was going on around there.
It’s Bogan himself. He really believes what he reported. I believe it. And if we give him the brush, he’s undoubtedly going to push right on with—”
“His hobby of danger?” McIntosh smiled bleakly. “I suppose he is. But — still just being hypothetical — if there is such an outfit as you take on faith, will they be badly alarmed by a physics student’s attempt to catch up with them? I think not.”
“They near killed him.”
The bureau head was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “See here, Hig. If this operation is real, maybe several million people might get killed all of a sudden. Good Americans. Risking the life of one or two or even a family isn’t important. If it’s not real — which is my opinion— there’s no risk.”
Higgins gestured as if to protect that logic. Then he said, “Yeah.”
McIntosh consulted his watch again. “You go back to the hospital. Tell Bogan that we did have a watch on the place ever since he started bringing tales to us. Tell him no stranger or anybody else was even near the hammock trees that night. Tell him we’re calling off our men. Let him feel we’re sick and tired of a lot of to-do that pans out as nothing. Give him the notion that his accident, and his ‘theory’ that it was something different, is the last straw.
He’s already sore at us for apparently doing little. If you say we did a job of watching he knew nothing about, and are quitting now because this time we know he was mistaken — well, it’ll leave him high and dry.”
“Sure will,” Higgins said. “And I hate to do it to him. He’s a nice guy, Mac. Got brains. Sense of humor. Guts.”
“Can you think of a better way to handle it?” McIntosh rose and set his Panama carefully on his head. “If I hurry, I can just about hit the middle of the sermon. My wife’ll be annoyed.” He put his arm over Higgins’ shoulder and propelled him toward the single elevator in service on that Sunday morning. “You haven’t really got this thing focused yet, Hig. Remember what I said. If it’s all a pipe dream, no harm done. If it’s not, we have to run the risk of one man being in danger in order to have any chance at all, ourselves, of stopping something”—as the elevator came, he hesitated—“that we’d gladly sacrifice every man in the bureau to stop.”
Higgins, with whose words, felt the full impact of his chief’s fear. He walked around the building and got in his car and started toward the hospital again. He could tell Bogan that a man under great strain often mistranslates what he sees and hears, and Duff Bogan had certainly been under strain.
Thinking about it alone in bed, after Higgins had gone, Duff agreed that Higgins might be right. After all, they had watched the house. They had acted, when he’d assumed they were ignoring his story. It could have been a lily box, bright insect eggs, a falling branch. Or could it? In his mind’s eye, going over and over the scene, he could see the slots in the screw heads. Insect eggs didn’t have slots. He could tell them that. But they wouldn’t believe it. He could hardly believe it himself. Maybe it wasn’t true. The FBI didn’t believe it, and the FBI wasn’t dumb, so why should he?
With the last shreds of consciousness — of consciousness free of head-splitting pain — Duff answered himself: It was real and awful and growing worse because nobody would do anything about it. So he would have to do what he could, as soon as he was able to leave the hospital. He’d have to work alone.
It was only afterward, long afterward, that Duff could collate and define the moods and incidents that followed. At the time they seemed unrelated and inexplicable.
His head mended rapidly. The doctors were pleased. Duff explained to them with simulated hauteur that physicists had tough brains. He missed Thanksgiving at the Yates home, but not the meal, as Eleanor borrowed from a restaurant a portable foodwarmer and brought turkey with trimmings to the hospital. Three days later he was released, bandaged, but whole again.
Immediately upon his return he noticed a difference in the temper of the household.
Mrs. Yates seemed nervous and worried. The two younger children were cross and strained.
And Harry Ellings had been suffering from what he described as “attacks”; he stayed away from work twice. Eleanor showed the change most sharply if more subtly.
She was, if anything, lovelier than ever and seemed more aware of her attractiveness.
Miami’s best beauty parlors had vied for a chance to give her wavy, tawny hair its prettiest cut; they had taught her new uses of make-up. Stores in Miami and Miami Beach had supplied her, for the first time in her life, with a luxurious wardrobe. These gifts were, of course, donated for publicity — the traditional due of a Bowl Queen.
She was edgy, Duff thought. No doubt she was overtired. The mere fact that he had lain for a week in the hospital had meant a large addition to her work. And now that Charley Yates spent every afternoon carrying newspapers, she was short another helper. Her own job, the demands made on a Queen-elect and the burden of housework were more than enough for any girl. But, in addition to that, she had arranged several dates with other young men than Scotty: Avalanche Billings, the fullback, for one; and Tony Bradley, a Miami businessman, for another.
She seemed glad to have Duff back at home one minute, and the next, annoyed at everything. “Christmas is coming,” she kept saying, “and we’re so broke and there’s so much to do.”
When he tried to reassure her, she turned away.
Finally, they quarreled over the subject of most quarrels: practically nothing. He had worked late in the laboratory on a difficult problem. When he reached home, Eleanor was in the kitchen, and he went immediately to help.
She said petulantly, “Where in heaven’s name have you been?”
“Over on the campus. Working.”
“Fine thing! I needed you here! The pipe’s plugged under the sink!” She picked up a pan of hot vegetables and drained them over a larger vessel. “See?”
“I’ll fix it right after dinner.”
“You’ll have to or wash dishes in the yard! The kids are going to the movies tonight.”
She lifted the lid on a skillet of sizzling meat. He noticed that she was wearing no apron and hadn’t changed from a particularly pretty dress — gray and scarlet — in her new wardrobe. Her mood communicated to him.
“You’ll get spattered,” he said. “Let me turn the chops. You’ve no apron on.”
“You set the table,” she said. “It isn’t yet… I don’t know why Marian’s late!”
“But that meat’s spitting all over the place.”
She muttered something that sounded like, “Mind your own business,” seized a fork, and immediately was splashed so that the fresh dress was turned into something for the dry cleaner.
She said, “Damn!”
“I told you so.”
She whirled from the stove. “You tell me nothing, Duffer Bogan! All the aprons were dirty and I was too darn tired to change!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sure, you’re sorry! So am I sorry! I’m sorry my kid sister is probably giggling with some pimply boy in a schoolyard somewhere! I’m sorry you had to work late and Harry’s feeling rotten! I’m sorry we can’t afford a cook, or to eat out once in a while, or even own enough aprons to keep neat! I’m sorry we’re so mouse-poor, and right now I’m even sorry I’ve got what people think are good looks — except that maybe I can use ’em, somehow, to get this family out of a lousy mess that goes on forever!”
It wasn’t like Eleanor. It was nothing like her, Duff thought glumly. She had even called him by the derogatory form of his nickname. He felt pity but he thought it was no time to show it. Perhaps, too, he felt in a deep recess of his personality, where his aware mind couldn’t look, the blaze of resentment.
“All you have to do,” he said stonily, “is to say ‘yes’ to Scotty Smythe. I’m sure he’d manage things fine for everybody. You wouldn’t need boarders, so I’d be delighted to hunt up some other place—” It was childish.
He had never heard her shout in anger. She did now. She raised her fork and stabbed it in his direction and yelled, “Get out of this kitchen!”
As he went through the living room, Mrs. Yates called nervously, “What’s wrong, Duff?”
He answered, “Nothing,” and began to set the table. She didn’t offer to make up, so he didn’t.
The day after that, Harry Ellings announced he was going to take a week of his annual two weeks’ vacation to go up to Baltimore to see some doctors about his condition.
When Duff learned that, he wanted, once again, to let the FBI know. But Higgins, the G-man, had been very final in his last talk at the hospital. The FBI wouldn’t be interested in Harry’s trip, and though Duff ached with anxiety over the potential danger of it, he felt he could do nothing.
When Harry returned, he didn’t seem improved. His color had become a grayish yellow. His appetite was bad. His hands shook constantly. His neatly parted gray hair seemed to be getting thinner almost day by day. He talked little and spent most of his time, when he wasn’t at work, lying on his bed.
Nobody gave him much attention — the Yates family was demoralized. Dinners were hurriedly prepared. Every night, afterward, Eleanor either drove to Miami to her job or went to a meeting or had a date, leaving the dishes and most of the housework to Marian, Charles and Duff. With Eleanor absent, and while he worked with the youngsters, Duff could revive the old feeling of cheerfulness, but when Eleanor was at home a jittery gloom prevailed.
In early December there was a cold spell. It was the sort that Florida chambers of commerce would like to keep hushed up. Frost crept over the Everglades. The power company put every generator in service to meet the load of electric heaters glowing in tens of thousands of homes. People with fireplaces stoked them, so that all Dade County was spiced with pine-wood smoke.
During the night, millions of dollars’ worth of winter vegetables stiffened, took on frosty carapaces and perished ignominiously. Duff chopped wood and the younger Yateses did their homework around a fire while a kerosene heater burned odoriferiously in their mother’s room. In the morning, which was sunny, but, to natives, shockingly cold, public schools stayed closed and many business firms failed to open, owing to the absence of employees who had no overcoats to wear to their jobs. Duff went to his classes, however.
He was chilled through by midafternoon and stopped in the Student Club cafeteria for a cup of coffee before taking the bus. There he spotted Scotty Smythe, sitting alone, looking morose. Duff carried his cup over to Scotty’s table.
“Coming for your lesson tomorrow, Sir Isaac?”
Smythe looked up. “Hi, Einstein! Guess so.”
“Haven’t seen you around lately. What gives?”
Scotty stared thoughtfully at Duff. His lips drew out in a somber line, but his eyes flickered. “You observe here,” he presently replied, a young man, five foot ten and a quarter, one hundred and fifty-eight pounds. Hair, muddy black; eyes, putty gray; occupation, college senior. He is carrying the torch.”
“Fight?” Scotty contemplated the question. “No. Brush.”
“Meaning what?”
“You notice any change in Eleanor lately?”
“She’s tired. Nervous. On edge.”
The younger man turned over those words in his mind. “Minimally,” he said in the end. “She is also suddenly interested in a laddy-boy named Tony who owns half the hardware stores in Florida, or will, when his pappy kicks off or retires. This chump is pretty to look at; he went to Princeton, and he has a convertible too. Chartreuse.”
“I’ve seen it. And him.” Scotty went on musingly, “Now, Eleanor never did okay my proposition exactly. But I felt she was interested in me. Seems not. No time for Smythes these days. She’s also taken to going places with that large charge of human barge known as Avalanche Billings.”
“A wholesome boy,” Duff said, not enthusiastically.
“In a nutshell, man, you’ve said it all! It’s not enough that his pappy is a brewer. His boy had to be an athlete too. Nearly All-American, you may have noticed. Avalanche is a clown — makes the girls laugh. Outside of rugged good looks— destined to become bloated as the years pass—”
“Very little,” Duff agreed.
“A cipher. A zero. A zed. What she sees in him—”
“Not even a convertible,” Duff murmured.
“Touché, pal!” Scotty chuckled dolefully. “You don’t sound so doggoned elated yourself.”
“Things are melancholy,” Duff agreed.
Scotty was silent. He finished his coffee. He eyed Duff for a while. “Speaking of beer and such,” he said, “and I was, by inference, a while back, are you a drinking man?”
“No,” Duff replied. “Not a matter of scruples. Purse. And lack of experience.”
“I was sitting here,” Scotty continued, “considering the poor condition of my soul. I was thinking of ringing up a babe and buying same a drink or two. Only a lack of companionship prevented me from recourse to the anodyne. But it runs through my mind, now, that if you’d consent to the measure, I might ring up two babes.”
Duff grinned. “You forget my devoirs, chores, duties.”
“On the contrary. I know your routine. I know the kids could manage things one evening without you. You could meet me at the Palm Paradise Café at eight o’clock, and I would bring the ladies. It would be my party. Celebration for an A in a math test.”
“You know,” Duff answered after a moment, “I think I will! I feel in a mood to do damned near anything!”
“I’ll pick a dame accordingly,” Scotty grinned.
When Duff had gone, Prescott Smythe took from a pocket a small black notebook and began earnestly to con its pages. Listed in them were the names and phone numbers of several scores of young ladies who would gladly consent to help lift any shadow from the Smythe soul. The problem was to find one who would serve Duff in the same way. Duff was not, Scotty reflected, the kind of collegian, or post-collegian, who impressed young women.
His small talk was unreliable. He had said once that he didn’t dance much. As far as Scotty knew, he had never been seen to take a cocktail or even a beer. He had dated no coeds, so there was no grapevine information available on him.
Scotty turned pages all the way to the S’s before he halted for any length of time. His finger rested on the name of Indigo Stacey. “Indigo Stacey,” the entry read, “99-7663.” And under that “bru— vgl — s—tt — cw — wfi.” That, in Scotty’s code, meant, “Brunette, very good-looking, sexy, too tall, college widow, worth further investigation.” He remembered.
Peculiar dame, but handsome. Graduated two years before. Lived with another gal in a bungalow near the campus. Liked older guys, even as a student; very tall and helpfully man-crazy.
The trouble with old Duff, Scotty reflected fondly, was that you had to get to know him to appreciate him. He gave the first impression of an absent-minded Leaning Tower of Pisa, and it took time to find out that he was as human as anybody and far brighter than most.
When the object of such meditations reached the Yates home, his feet were cold both literally and figuratively. He called to Mrs. Yates and then backed away from telling her. He dallied in his room and heard Eleanor come home, and finally went downstairs, where he found the two women together. In a kind of panic, he considered trying to tell Scotty by phone that he couldn’t make it, but, instead, he blurted, “Won’t be here for supper. Sorry, folks.”
Both women stared. It was true that he was occasionally absent, but always after giving long notice.
Eleanor said, rather crossly, “You might have told us!”
“Date,” he answered uncomfortably. “Just made it.”
“A date”—Eleanor was sarcastic—“with some little group, I bet, that does calculus for party games!”
“Dame,” he said coldly. “Who?”
“That would be telling.” He was rather pleased by the half-angry, half-startled look on Eleanor’s face, but mystified by the smile Mrs. Yates gave him behind Eleanor’s back.
Duff dressed. He put on his topcoat. He caught a bus at seven-fifteen. He got out nervously a half block from the Palm Paradise, and walked uneasily toward its glittering, one-story-high electric sign. He went in.
What happened after that, he never clearly understood. Scotty was sitting at a ringside table, under revolving rainbow-hued lights, with two young ladies, one a girl with brown bangs who satisfied every detail of the “cute-college-type” description, and the other a stately, almost regal brunette with black hair, a heavy chignon at the nape of her neck, dazzling dark eyes and a smile, as Duff was introduced, which shocked him by its warmth and intimacy. He sat down, and there were cocktails. Scotty and his girl danced, but the tall brunette expressed herself as delighted not to do so, and she listened to Duff’s words, which flowed with increasing ease — as if every one were a jewel of remarkable brightness.
There was dinner, a very gay meal with a bottle of red wine. There was coffee with brandy in it. There was a floor show. Duff was further startled and pleased when Scotty, in a moment during which their ladies were absent, said, “You know, old-timer, when I called Indigo, she’d heard of you and seen you around, and said she was dying to meet you and already planning how to do it.”
“Wonderful girl,” Duff said. “Why me?”
“She goes for serious types, I guess,” Scotty answered. “Only girl I ever heard of named Indigo.”
“Suits her, though.”
“Deep purple? You bet! Well. Have fun, Archimedes.”
“I’m having a wonderful time.”
He was. The wonderful time continued. There was a long drive in the convertible, windows wound up “against the chill, and Indigo Stacey snuggled close as a further thermal measure. A Miami Beach night club and another floor show. A still longer ride back to Coral Gables — a ride on which Indigo said, “You can start kissing me good night about here, Duff.”
“Here” was some miles from her bungalow.
When the two young ladies had been deposited at their homes, Scotty suggested a nightcap.
And it was in a small bar not far from the campus where Duff, far removed from normal reticence and warmed by the fellowship of Scotty Smythe, shared his problem.
“You know, Duff,” Scotty had said, turning his nightcap highball in his fingers and not tasting it, “I can’t figure you out. On a party, you’re tops. You have fun. At school the work doesn’t seem to bother you — you breeze through it. And yet you act like a man carrying a mountain on his back all the time. Why?”
“Because I happen to be one,” Duff answered. And suddenly, without planning it, he told his story, beginning with the day, which now seemed long ago, when an old hobby had led him to pick the fairly new lock of a closet door.
Excepting for an occasional quiet expletive, Scotty listened to the account without interruption. At its end, his expletives were many and vehement. But they wound up mildly.
“Ye gods,” he murmured. “I’ll say you carry a mountain around. But you’ve got to do something.”
Duff shrugged miserably. “What can I do?”
Scotty drummed on the table, his drink forgotten. “Not much, here. Ellings — and whoever else is involved — that super-jerk you saw, no doubt — will certainly be careful not to act suspiciously for a while. But I bet they are using that truck company to ship the parts!
What I’d do, if I were you, is take that list of customers and go north for the Christmas holidays! I’d look into as many places those trucks serve regularly as I could. Because if you found even one that was a drop—”
“What,” Duff asked disconsolately, “would you use for money?”
Scotty smiled sympathetically and thought a moment. “I was going to fly up home for the holidays,” he said. “Come back after, with the family, as far as Palm Beach. But I could drive. We could. We could stop off at the various cities.”
The Yates family was surprised and disappointed by Duff’s sudden announcement that he was going home for the holidays. It was a very hard thing to do, and he almost hated himself for his decision. Eleanor took the news especially badly. She accused him of deserting. She reminded him that he wouldn’t see her as Orange Bowl Queen. And she burst into tears. But he stuck to his story that he was going to Indiana to visit his family.
Even Indigo Stacey, at whose home he spent an evening playing bridge — the one game in which he was expert — expressed disappointment. She told him that she had developed a “large passion” for him and that the approaching holidays would be the “longest and dullest in years” without him.
He felt, therefore, very much like a fugitive when, carrying a big, beat-up cheap suitcase, he took the bus, ostensibly to the train. Actually, at the station, he was picked up furtively by Scotty Smythe.
In Washington they put up at a second-class hotel, donned old clothes and began “job hunting” at the regular delivery places of the Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company.
These were stores, markets, wholesale houses and other trucking firms. There seemed to be nothing suspicious about any.
“Trouble is,” Scotty said at supper that night, “we don’t know what we’re looking for.
We do know it wouldn’t be anything conspicuous. To locate a receiver of the freight we believe is moving, evidently might take fifty guys a month. And I’ve got to show up at home pretty soon. I got one idea.”
“What?” Duff was leg-weary, insult-weary, discouraged.
“General Baines. Three stars. Friend of my old man. Has something to do with Military Intelligence. Maybe the FBI didn’t see your tale as anything but hallucination. The Army boys might be different.”
“We could try,” Duff agreed.
They tried the next morning. The general was located by phone in his office in the Pentagon Building. He told Scotty that he was “right busy.” He agreed, however, that, since the matter “involved national security;” he could spare a few minutes.
So Duff and Scotty wound their way through the Pentagon labyrinths, found the outer office, waited half an hour, and at length stood face to face with a uniformed, silver-haired, paternal-looking officer who worked in an atmosphere of maps, papers, flags and autographed portraits of great men. He was cordial and quiet.
The general’s reaction to the narrative was familiar to Duff; it angered Scotty. When the interview was ended, when the two young men were out in the winding, sloping corridors again, Scotty said enragedly, “He thought it was a gag! Tried to be polite! Tried to shoo us out, like a couple of flies at a picnic! Got positively humiliated when we kept talking!
Annoyed too.”
Duff shrugged. “That’s how the G-men felt about it!”
“What a country! Easy pickings for an enemy!”
Neither Duff nor Scotty had any way of knowing that that the moment after they had left General Baines’ office, he had picked up his phone, switched to a special line, and said,
“Chief of Staff. It’s an emergency call.”
The two self-appointed investigators reached Manhattan in an aggrieved mood.
Ordinarily, the elegance of the modernistic, duplex Smythe penthouse would have awed Duff. The warmth with which he was received by Scotty’s white-haired, aristocratic-looking mother would only partially have put him at ease. The amiability of Scotty’s father would have helped. On the other hand, the cool though well-mannered greeting of Scotty’s sisters — Adelaide, home from Sweet Briar, and Melinda, back from Vassar— would have frightened him. As things were, however, he was so downcast about the journey that the skyline view from the picture window had no impact for him. Even the palatial surroundings, the silver and damask at dinner, the dressed and dated, orchid-wearing sisters scratched only the surface of his mind. Inner suffering enabled him to appear more poised than he would otherwise have been.
Duff spent a night at the Smythe residence, and then put up at a small, midtown hotel.
Scotty had wanted him to remain in his home, but Duff had been too embarrassed for that, too aware that he lacked the clothes, even the temperament, and above all the funds for the round of entertainment on the Smythe holiday schedule. His hotel bill was to be paid by money which Scotty wanted to “give to the cause” and which Duff insisted he would only borrow.
The three days remaining before Christmas Duff devoted to a survey of Miami-Dade delivery points in and near Manhattan. It was an exhausting and fruitless effort. He posed, according to the nature of each firm, as a potential buyer, shipper, customer or job seeker. He learned nothing and spent the lowest Christmas in his life — alone at his hotel, unable to engage even in his vain researches because every place in the city was closed. He thought of the Yateses all day and of the work his foolish venture had added to their slim yuletide.
Then, on the day after Christmas, his patient checking of the list Eleanor had contrived to get for him led to a warehouse located in the downtown area of Manhattan, three blocks from Broadway, near Wall Street. There was nothing remarkable about the warehouse. In fact, it was the least provocative of any of the places he had visited, inasmuch as he was able to see, by peering through a very dirty window in the early twilight, that the mammoth interior was absolutely empty. Duff would have gone back to his hotel, then and there, tired, defeated, shamed by his absurd efforts, if he had not heard, while he was still peering, the sound of a door closing somewhere. An empty building is unsuspicious; an empty building with someone moving about inside it is different.
Duff crossed the street and fixed his eye on the vast brick structure overtowered on both sides by taller buildings which were as grimy. He buttoned his coat under his chin. He crouched in a doorway.
It began to rain. The rain brought quick darkness, shiny streets, spattering traffic and a glitter of light on the cobblestone pavement. At last a little door cut in the truck entrance of the warehouse opened slowly. A man came out. One of the tallest men Duff had ever seen in his life — a man proportionately broad.
The misery, the despair, the frustrations of past weeks disappeared in the first sharp breath Duff drew. For this huge specter against the night was like an abrupt light in a long and dreadful darkness. The man looked up the street, down the street and across the street.
He flipped up his coat collar and strode toward Broadway.
With surging excitement, Duff followed. He was sure it would be simple to do. The man towered above the other pedestrians; he would stand out a block away, even at night.
People, furthermore, looked up at him in sudden astonishment and made extra way for him, which added to the ease of pursuit. On a city street, furthermore, Duff felt that his own clumsiness would be no handicap; there was noise and confusion everywhere.
But what Duff hadn’t thought of soon happened. The huge man stopped walking abruptly. Duff dived into a doorway. The man again looked up the street, down the street and across it, as he stood at the curb. He had that habit; evidently, he seemed to suspect or fear he might be followed. Quite suddenly, then, he too keys from his coat pocket, bent, opened the door of a parked car, climbed in, switched on its lights and drove into the traffic stream.
Duff searched so wildly for a cab in which to follow that he neglected to notice the license number of the car. There wasn’t an empty cab in sight. When Duff thought of the number, the big man’s car had disappeared.
He was ashamed of his error. But now he was no longer without resources. He would have to find a hardware store that was still open, and make certain purchases. He would have to learn, after that, the timing of the watchman’s rounds, if the empty warehouse was watched at all. It took him an hour to locate a store. He gave half an hour to watching the warehouse. No man seemed on duty there. He crossed the street in a hard, icy rain — a rain now welcome — and applied himself to the lock on the small warehouse door. It was difficult and he was forced, whenever a pedestrian passed, to exhibit a bunch of keys and pretend he was having trouble finding the right one. Nobody stopped him or questioned him, and eventually the door opened. He went in, turning on a flashlight as he did so.
He hurried through an office that showed, by closed roll-top desks and gritty furnishings, long disuse. Another door led to the main floor of the place. A ramp in the rear sloped up through cavernous emptiness to a floor above. Another like the first rose to the top floor.
Afraid that there might be a partitioned room within-a-room on the two upper floors, Duff climbed both ramps with his flashlight switched off. He found that in the whole building there was nothing — nothing but over-all grime and rubbish in the corners, nothing but spiderwebs and a scuttle of rats somewhere in the walls, nothing but gleaming specks on the ground floor of rock particles such as constitute the underlying base of Manhattan and stick to wheels of vehicles— nothing but hollow silence, the dusty odor of desertion and the dim-heard rumble of the great city outside.
The very emptiness of the building had at first seemed meaningful. The meaning now appeared only to be that it was waiting for some new and perhaps different cargo. It had been a storage garage; more recently a warehouse. Now, perhaps, it had changed hands and was being prepared for other uses by the towering and somehow terrifying figure of the man whose face Duff had not yet clearly seen. The giant. Duff thought of him in that term.
He left the building cautiously and hurried for the subway. No use to call Scotty now; Scotty would be at a post-Christmas party.
And no use, Duff thought to get in touch with the New York FBI office. What would be added to his story by the report of a menacing figure lost in the night and an empty building?
He was hungry, wet and weary as he went up the steps of his nondescript hotel.
The desk clerk stopped him. “Mr. Bogan! A Mr. Smythe has been trying to get in touch with you. Been here twice and phone every fifteen minutes since!”
Puzzled, Duff went into a phone booth and dialed. The ring was answered instantly by Scotty, “Duff! Thank the Lord! Look! Eleanor phoned at half past four this afternoon—”
“Eleanor!”
“Asked for you. Talked to me. I’ve talked again to her since.”
“How’d she know where I was?”
“Called your family in Indiana, first! You evidently wrote ’em you were spending Christmas with me — gave ’em my name — something.”
“Oh. Yes, I did! You mean Eleanor phoned clear to Indiana?”
“Listen, chump!” It as then that Duff got the overtones in Scotty’s voice. “Harry Ellings is dead.”
“Dead?”
“Died in bed. The family thought he’d been up early working in the yard and got a ride to Miami. So they didn’t find him till afternoon. Charley.” Scotty said the name grimly.
“Tough on the kid to find the body. Could have been heart failure — probably was, the doctor thought. But that’s not all. Eleanor said she’d found something. Can you imagine what? She said she wasn’t able, to move it.”
“A box!” Duff all but shouted.
“I presume so. Look, pal! We gotta get back, and fast! I’ve been frantic for you to call! My old man’s working on the air lines — they’re loaded. If he can’t chivvy space for us, I have a pal in Mineola with a sweet, fast job. War surplus plane he bought. I told Eleanor to phone Higgins or Mr. McIntosh at once.”
“I’ll be over in fifteen minutes!” Duff said. “Whatever is happening, this time it looks as if we were going to prove something they’ll believe!”