(1969) The Seven Minutes (46 page)

She stood solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. ‘I remember telling you I worked for Griffith, yes, and he never believed in no written references, but I don’t remember one other word you’re saying, because none of it is true. Where did you get such a story ? Lord in Heaven, why would I ever testify against a fine, upstanding man like Frank Griffith ? He was always good to me, and we only had a parting because Mrs Griffith wanted her niece to move out here to be her companion, and that’s the whole of it. He hated to let me go. I’ve always held him up in the highest consideration, as the kindest man to his wife and his boy and the whole world. I never had any employer who was more kind or so generous’

He gaped at Isabel Vogler, dumbfounded. He felt as though he had gone down the rabbit hole and found himself face to face with the Mad Hatter. ‘Mrs Vogler, listen -‘

‘You listen, young man. You have your nerve coming here and trying to involve me in your lawyer shenanigans, trying to turn Frank Griffith’s friends against him. I have a mind to call the police about you, that’s what. You stay away from Frank Griffith, that’s my warning to you. He’s a good man, and even when he had his odd side, like not giving references to former employees, he was always ready to help any of them if they were in need. Like me. He found out I was having a struggle on my own and trying to raise my young one. So you know what that good man did ? He didn’t call or send someone around, but he came here to see me himself this morning, right this morning. And you know the first thing he said to me? “Isabel,” he said to me, “I hear you’re having a little trouble. Now, what’s this all about? I’m here to lend a hand to an old friend.” And when he heard out my troubles, he did help me the way he offered. You can see for yourself, I’m packing right now. Mr Griffith, he said I was always deserving of a bonus, and now he’s given it to me so’s I can go back to Topeka with my youngster where I always belonged. We’re leaving on Monday.’

Barrett continued to gape at her, but no longer was he dumbfounded, only struck with wonderment.

Life was imitating art. For his mind had gone back to a baffling, and chilling folk tale familiar to him in his youth. It was about the elderly lady en route with her daughter from Bombay, via Paris, to her native village in England. The original vanishing lady. Now you see her, now you don’t. The lady and her daughter had stopped overnight at the Hotel Crillon in Paris. The lady had been feeling ill, and her daughter had gone off to a distant sector of Paris to obtain a special medicine from a pharmacist. This had been Paris in 1890, at the time of the Exposition, and the streets had been teeming with people, and the daughter in her quest had been repeatedly delayed. Finally, after a lapse of four or five hours, she had returned with the medicine. At the lobby desk, the clerk had not recognized her. No lady such as the girl’s mother had been registered, he said. There was no room that fitted the daughter’s description of the one she and her mother had occupied. No one in the hotel, in the British Embassy, in the Suret6, could help. The lady had no existence. Now you see her, now you don’t.

Yesterday morning there had been Isabel Vogler, foe of Frank Griffith, friend of the defense. This afternoon that Isabel Vogler had vanished, and in her place stood Isabel Vogler, supporter of Frank Griffith, enemy of the defense.

Barrett remembered that there had eventually been a solution to the mystery of the English lady who had vanished from the Crillon in 1890. The lady had died of the black plague, and if the cause of her death had been made known, even to the daughter, if it had

become public knowledge, not only would the hotel have been ruined, but the mighty Exposition would have been ended and Paris might have become a ghost town. So the truth could not be known, the room had to be repapered and redecorated in hours, and the lady could not be admitted to have existed.

There had been an answer then, and Barrett knew that there must be an answer now. The disappearance of the Isabel Vogler he had met and known might be an act of magic to those in the audience. It could not be an act of magic for those backstage who were aware of the wizard’s arsenal of tricks.

Frank Griffith had first tried to make the lady vanish the easy way. He had requested that Willard Osborn II have Faye pressure Barrett into dropping this hostile witness. Barrett had refused. Frank Griffith had then proceeded to eliminate the hostile witness in a more hazardous way. He had gone to her directly, exposed his need to her. He had then diagnosed her need and offered to remedy it. This morning he had performed a financial lobotomy. The prefrontal lobes had been severed. Under the skilled hand of the surgeon, hostility had been excised, and what remained was sweetness and light. Toward Frank Griffith, that is. By Monday, the day of the trial, the operation would have been completed. The witness would have disappeared entirely from the Los Angeles scene. A room to the past had been repapered and redecorated.

‘Mrs Vogler,’ Barrett said desperately, ‘I know what you promised me yesterday and I know what you’re saying now. It is clear to me what has happened in between. But even though Frank Griffith has tried to buy you off -‘

Her porcine features seemed to swell. ‘Don’t you talk to me like that! No matter what you make up, I’ve told you everything I’ve got to tell.’

‘Mrs Vogler, I could subpoena you,’ he said feebly.

‘What’s that?’

‘That’s getting a court order served on you, and that would force you to appear in court and take the witness stand and tell what you know about Frank Griffith.’

‘You just do that,’ she said. Then she added shrewdly, ‘Because all I’d tell about Mr Griffith and the way he brought up his boy would be favorable, mightily favorable to him.’

Barrett sighed and nodded. ‘You win, Mrs Vogler. I know when I’m licked.’

‘I’m glad you have some sense, young man.’

‘And I hope you’ll have a good trip,’ he said. He started to go, and then he said, ‘Where can I find a telephone in this neighborhood?’

‘If you mean mine, I just as soon not have you use it. There’s a drugstore on the corner. They got a phone. And, Mr Barrett, about Frank Griffith, I wouldn’t bother with him any more if I were you, because you won’t find anything against him.’

A word from the wise, he thought, and he left for the corner drugstore.

In the drugstore, near the soda fountain, there was an open public telephone on the wall.

In moments, he had Maggie Russell on her private line. She recognized his voice, and she was mildly surprised.

‘Maggie,’ he said urgently, and then realized that in his new Fayeless world he had addressed her by her given name for the first time, ‘I must discuss a few things with you. Maybe you can clear them up for me.’

‘Can you give me a clue?’

‘Frank Griffith, for one thing.’

‘I see. Certain subjects are difficult to discuss on the phone.*

Then would you mind doing it in person?’

‘I - I’m not sure.’

‘Maggie, I know the rules. But I have to see you. I have some questions. Maybe you can provide the answers, maybe not. Just speaking to you would be of some help to me. I don’t wa^nt to put you on the spot. Still, if we could have a quiet dinner tonight.,.’

‘Tonight ? Well…’ Her last word hung in the air, then she went on. ‘Possibly. Is this strictly business - or business and pleasure?’

‘Some business, but just seeing you would be a pleasure.’

‘Won’t Faye Osborn mind?’

‘Who’s Faye Osborn? No, that’s over with.’

‘I see…. Where are you now?’

‘I’m in Van Nuys, but I’m on my way to the office. I have to check on something there. That’s part of it.’

‘I’ll meet you at your office,’ she said. ‘Is eight o’clock all right ?’

‘I’ll be waiting, Maggie.’

It was evening now, twenty-five minutes before eight o’clock, as Mike Barrett entered the towering high-rise building from Wilshire Boulevard. Going to the elevators, he listened to the echoing clack of his footsteps in this futuristic cavern.

This was Friday night, and the building had been abandoned by all save the scattered janitors lost somewhere well above the ground floor. The marble walls were bleak and indifferent. The elevators were on self-service.

Presently, he consoled himself, Maggie Russell would arrive and there would be humanity and warmth.

Inside an elevator, he pressed the button for the fifth floor, and slowly he was carried aloft. The loss of the Jadway letters, followed so quickly by the loss of Isabel Vogler, had been a shattering blow. He wondered why he had instinctively turned to Maggie Russell. Speaking to her, he had made it sound as if he had a specific problem she might help him solve. Yet, actually, he was not sure what he really wanted of her. Perhaps it was that the real enemy was invisible to him, but known to her, and she might offer him some

insight without betraying her allegiance. That was the business. Perhaps it was only that she was she. And that was the pleasure.

The elevator had glided to a halt, the doors quietly parted, and Barrett emerged into the corridor.

The next step was the first in his counterattack against the hidden opposition. The constant frustrations, followed by the chance reminder of electronic eavesdroppers, followed by the information that ‘repairmen’ had dismantled his telephone while he was out of the office, had led him now to seek final confirmation of the enemy’s devastating espionage. He must examine his telephone. If, indeed, it had been bugged, then he would reveal this sensational discovery to the press and public. The exposure would indict no one by name. Yet the implications would be comprehended by one and all. It would be the beginning of a bid for public awareness of the ruthless nature of the prosecution forces, perhaps even a bid for public sympathy toward the defense, and the start of the defense’s counterattack in the critical arena outside the courtroom. Even though, he knew, his revelation might come about too late.

Barrett inserted his key into the lock, opened the door toDonna’s dark office, and turned on the overhead light. Leaving the reception-room door open for Maggie, he went to Donna’s desk. No messages. The electric IBM typewriter wore its gray hood. The Dictaphone rested in silence.

He was eager now for a look at the telephone in his office.

He crossed the inner corridor to his door, opened it into the shadowy room, stepped inside, fumbling with his left hand for the light switch. Unexpectedly, he heard a creak, a movement, an inhalation behind him, and the chill that instantly enveloped him froze his fingers above the light switch.

There was Someone.

He had started to turn, when suddenly an arm hooked in front of him, closing in on his neck. Choking, he raised his hands to clutch at the strangling arm, to tear it free. There was a vise clamped on his throat, as he clawed at the arm, and the black room was filling with crazy dots of meteors and stars.

Savagely, panting like a cornered animal, he had freed himself from the muscular noose, and was trying to twist around to get at his unseen assailant, when a fist clubbed against the side of his skull, and his knees buckled. His outstretched hand found his desk and kept him from falling completely, and then wildly, gasping, he staggered upright and forward, plunging at the giant silhouette before him. He had hold of the other now, trying to pin down the flailing arms and hammering fists, trying to wrestle the monster to the floor. But the attacker’s arms rammed upward, breaking Barrett’s hold, and sent him reeling against the desk.

The black form closed in, and Barrett lashed put, missing, and tried to slide away along the desk. The black form followed relentlessly, and suddenly it had speech.

‘Get him,’ it growled.

Instinctively, Barrett tried to wheel around to protect himself from what was behind him and unknown. In that split second of turning, he saw there was another hulk, arm rising and slashing down toward him. Desperately he tried to duck, as the butt of a pistol drove past his face and smashed into his chest.

Pain opened like an umbrella through his body, and then it spiked upward into his head. His head rolled and his knees were rubber, and as he saw the shape of the arm rise and fall again, he tried to cover his head, but a weight crashed against his skull, and the floor flew up to meet his face.

He felt the rough nap of the carpet on one cheek, and a sticky rivulet roll down past a cheekbone, and brilliant colors swirled behind his eyelids, and faintly, distantly, he heard a reedy voice sing let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.

Colors dissolved. Life died.

Blackness. Nothingness.

Inside his head, he awakened to a world of inky hue, and he sought freedom from this bottom of the Cimmerian lake, and gradually, ever so gradually, he floated to the surface.

He felt a damp coolness across his forehead and cheeks, and at last the refreshing air and the scent of perfume.

Inhaling deeply, he tentatively opened his eyes.

There was a face above his own, fuzzy, shimmering, and then it became defined. Soft black hair and green eye and crimson lips.

‘Maggie,’ he whispered.

‘Yes, Mike.’

‘What are you - ?’ To make sure it was not a dream, his gaze strayed past her to the ceiling fixture, then to the office couch and chairs and open door. Once more he returned to her. His head was in her lap. His coat and shirt had been removed, and he was stretched on the floor, and she was sitting on the carpet, legs tucked beneath her, holding his head on her lap while one hand caressed his brow and the other held a wet handkerchief spotted with blood.

‘Are you all right, Mike?’ she asked with anxiety. ‘How do you feel?’

‘I’m not sure. Okay, I guess.’ His hand came up to his temple. ‘Feels a little like someone is using a pile driver up here, and against my chest.’

‘I’m not surprised. You’ve got a lump almost the size of an egg on the back of your head. And you were bleeding along your neck when I found you. I cleaned it. The skin was scraped, torn a little. I took off your shirt. The only other thing I could find was a nasty bruise on your ribs. Do you want me to call your doctor ?’