Deadline (14 page)

“Virg…

“Wait, let me get it all out. Now that I’ve started, let me finish and then you can have it. The guy’s name is Blanton Smith. That’s not the name he’s admitted under. He’s in the hospital as Joseph Collins. But he’s Blanton Smith, and he’s with the Bureau out of Washington.”

Donovan didn’t say anything.

“He was shot up real bad, Al. Took three in the chest, high up. They didn’t have much hope for him when I was there early Saturday.”

“And this was supposed to be a robbery attempt?”

Craig touched the news clipping. His face was deadpan.

“Where’d they pick him up?”

“Just off Tenth Avenue, not far from the Lincoln Tunnel. That’s what the report said, anyway.”

“Who found him?”

Craig shrugged his shoulders.

“Anything else?”

The waiter brought their lunches. Craig seemed lost in thought for a while, picking over his food. “When I got up there, around two o’clock Saturday morning, he had just come out of surgery. The ether was just starting to wear off, and he was crazy, you know, delirious. He started to moan and talk. I couldn’t understand any of it, except for one word. ‘Bitch.’ He said that over and over. ‘The bitch.’”

“What time’d they bring him in?”

“To the hospital, you mean? Around eight-thirty. Must have been found a few minutes before that.”

Donovan turned it over in his mind. “It’s strange, all right, and the timing’s right. Just about the time the Lewises were killed. It might fit in or it might not.”

“Whether it does or not, it’s off my chest.”

The waiter came. Virgil Craig indulged himself. He ordered dessert. “You like football, Al?”

“What? Oh, sure.”

“How do you like the Steelers this year?”

They parted outside the restaurant. From a phone booth, Donovan called his office. There were several messages; none from Walker.

He called Riverside Hospital and asked for a condition report on Blanton Smith. The woman said they had no one of that name registered.

“How about Joseph Collins?”

“Are you a relative?”

“No, just a friend.”

There was a long delay. When the nurse returned, she said, “Sir, Mr. Collins passed away about three hours ago.”

He tried calling Walker at the
Tribune
and got a gruff man named Kanin. “Walker hasn’t been in all day,” Kanin said. “But that’s nothing new.”

He called the office, told them he was out for the day, and took the train home.

Kim greeted him at the door, on her way to a shopping spree. She was surprised to see him home so early. He took a drink into his den and sat under the picture of J. Edgar Hoover, drumming his fingers.

Some ugly thoughts were forming in his head.

He reached for the telephone and got the number of Blanton Smith in Washington. He shouldn’t make the call from here. He knew that. There should be no record that Al Donovan had tried calling the dead man’s home.

The hell with it. He placed the call.

A woman answered. She sounded very cheery, as if all was right with the world. He asked for Mr. Smith.

“Mr. Smith is out of town. Who’s calling, please?”

“Is this Mrs. Smith?”

“Yes.”

“When do you expect him home, Mrs. Smith?”

“I’m not sure. He had to go to New York for a few days. May I ask who this is?”

“I’m a friend of his. My name wouldn’t mean anything. You understand that, don’t you, Mrs. Smith?”

“Yes. Of course I understand.”

Yes. A good agent’s wife would understand. Still, he had to be sure.

“Is this the Smith who works for the FBI?”

“Yes it is. Is there anything I can do?”

“No. Thank you.”

He hung up.

There was nothing Mrs. Smith could do, nothing anybody could do. Blanton Smith was dead and his widow didn’t even know it. Donovan wondered how they would tell her. He wondered what the explanation would be, what kind of story they might concoct.

He tried Walker again. Kanin told him Walker hadn’t come in or called in, all day long. Donovan tried Walker’s apartment. There was no answer.

He went into the bedroom and found Kim’s address book. Now, for some awful reason, he found himself in a mental block. That girl, Walker’s girl. He couldn’t remember her name. Younger, he thought it was. She and Kim had hit it off. Maybe Kim had taken the number.

Yoder. Diana.

He tried her apartment. No answer.

He waited awhile, and had himself another drink. At last driven by an increasing sense of curiosity, he called Radio City. The person there didn’t want to cooperate. He identified himself as an FBI agent and was put through to someone else, who told him that Diana Yoder had called in early that morning, and had quit her job. No notice. No explanation. Nothing.

“Son of a bitch,” Donovan said, placing the phone gently in its cradle. “I wonder where
they
went.”

I
N THE MORNING DONOVAN TRIED
Blanton Smith’s house again. A man answered.

“Mrs. Smith isn’t available.”

“That’s okay, it’s Mr. Smith I wanted to talk to.”

“Mr. Smith is dead.”

So. They had broken the news, sometime during the night.

Donovan pretended shock. “Dear God, how?”

“An accident. Who is this?”

He hung up.

It was almost a rerun of last night. Walker wasn’t at the
Tribune,
and he hadn’t called in. The Yoder girl wasn’t home, and they weren’t at Walker’s apartment. The only new wrinkle was that Blanton Smith’s death had finally come out in the open. As an accident. Probably a closed-casket case, who would be buried in Arlington by tomorrow.

Throughout the morning, Donovan tried to reach Walker. He isolated himself from the small office staff and kept to his room, staying on the phone throughout the morning and declining two offers to break for coffee. At eleven o’clock a call came through from the New York office.

“Donovan? Roland Simon here.”

“Hi,” Donovan said. He never knew how to address Simon. The young turks in the field office called him Mr. Simon, but Donovan—a full fifteen years older than Simon—felt slightly degraded by that. The use of Simon’s first name suggested an intimacy he didn’t feel, and the last name without the “Mr.” seemed a bit too arrogant. Usually he used no forms at all. He slouched down in his desk.

“I thought you handled the press well,” Donovan lied.

“It’s not the way I’d have wanted to handle it,” Simon said.

“Under the circumstances, it went as well as you could expect.”

“I was wondering if you could get over to the city this afternoon.”

Donovan, anticipating the question, had already looked at his calendar.

“I’m supposed to be in court. I may have to testify this afternoon.”

“You won’t,” Simon said. “I know about the case, and it’ll be continued until tomorrow.”

“Oh.”

“Well then?”

“Well then, sure.” He knew he wasn’t being asked. He was being politely ordered, and the next order wouldn’t be so polite.

“Fine,” Simon said. Some of the ice had disappeared from the edges of his voice. “See you here. Three o’clock.”

The phone clicked off. Donovan put the receiver down slowly and looked up at the clock. It was noon. He called Walker. Walker wasn’t in. Somehow, he didn’t think Walker would be.

He skipped lunch and went to Walker’s apartment. The old lady who managed the building looked at his credentials for a long time, then reluctantly led him up the three flights to Walker’s door. She stood at the threshold and watched while he walked through. The place smelled slightly stuffy, as if it had been locked up and no one had been there for a while. He moved into the kitchenette and found the remains of an old meal still in the sink. The dishes hadn’t been washed, and he guessed they had been used late Saturday or sometime Sunday.

The bed was mussed, and there was a smear of mud on one of the sheets. The covers had been tossed carelessly on the floor and left there. He crossed the dark room and looked in Walker’s closet. Some of Walker’s clothes were still there. The dresser told the same story: the drawers were partly full, indicating that perhaps some clothes had been taken. But he couldn’t tell for sure.

He went over to New York an hour before his meeting with Roland Simon, and went through the Yoder girl’s place. This time the manager let him roam at will. He went through her apartment carefully, as much out of personal curiosity as professional interest. The girl was a strange one. She intrigued him. Her bedroom was simple. A picture of Christ hung over her bed. Across from that, a Ruysdael reproduction, a grassy Dutch meadow with a heavy cloud bank. The apartment was incredibly neat; not a speck of dust anywhere. The hardwood floors were for the most part uncovered, though each room had an oval rug in its center. He went through the notebook by her bedside, where the telephone was, and found the notation
Walker.
Under it, Walker’s telephone numbers at work and home. He went into the bathroom. In her medicine cabinet, he found a container of birth control pills with six missing, beginning on Monday and ending Saturday.

It told him little that he couldn’t have figured out anyway. That the girl and Walker were becoming pretty thick pretty fast. Perhaps they had run off to get married. Now there was a thought. An angle, as they said in Walker’s business. But it didn’t quite mesh with the Walker he knew. Still, what did mesh? At his best, Walker was unpredictable, given to sudden impulse. When all the chips were down, Donovan could picture Walker doing something dumb like that.

He arrived at the field office a few minutes early, and was kept waiting for almost half an hour. When at last he was shown into Roland Simon’s office, he found the remains of a continuing discussion scattered around him. The desk contained a number of closed files, and one that was open. The open file was on what had become fixed in everyone’s mind as the Sayers case.

The air was blue. Simon was a chain-smoker who looked at you with puffy eyes and coughed a lot. Seated on his right was a spotless young agent, Kevin Lord. Donovan didn’t know him, except by sight and through grapevine reports that he had become one of Simon’s pets. He wore a dark gray suit and had his hair styled. He was about thirty. Across from Kevin Lord was Joe Armstrong. Donovan had seen Armstrong off and on for more than twenty years. Armstrong was Lord’s opposite in almost every way. Heavier, older, with craggy features and a flat nose. If Kevin Lord’s face had been carved in marble, Armstrong’s had been pounded in clay. His clothes clashed, but in a quiet way. The FBI didn’t like conspicuous dressers. Over the years Armstrong had found a way to accommodate Bureau guidelines and his own atrocious taste. His eyes reflected keen intelligence, but disinterest. Donovan guessed that Armstrong was bored by life.

Armstrong made an imposing figure when you walked in on him. Somehow he managed to inhibit you without even moving, or without looking your way. Simon sat back in his swivel chair and seemed to be searching for a way to begin. Finally he said, “Al, we’ve got a problem.”

It was the first time Simon had ever used his given name. Kevin Lord leaned toward him and Armstrong just gazed at him with bottomless eyes. Donovan wondered if they were going to sweat him, catch him in a crossfire between them. But it was Simon who continued talking. “We’ve got a delicate situation on our hands, and only part of it has come out in the press. We hope we’ll be able to keep it that way.”

“He’s telling you no more leaks to your reporter friend,” Armstrong said.

Donovan bristled. So it was a sweat job after all. “Shove it, Joe,” he said. “If there’s a leak around here, it’s not me.”

“Then the son of a bitch must be a mind reader,” Armstrong said.

“Walker was working on this story long before we were. It’s natural that he’d have some background.”

“Just as natural as you thinking of it as a story. To me it’s a case. Maybe you should have been a newspaperman, Donovan.”

“I’m trying to tell you how he thinks, in case you’re interested.” Donovan looked at them and decided to play it straight. “You want to know where Walker got his information, then ask him.”

“We would,” Simon said. “Only we can’t find him.”

“Besides,” Armstrong said, “we all know that’d be a waste of time, don’t we? This Walker cat wouldn’t tell us anything.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” Donovan said. “He called me late Friday night, early Saturday morning. I don’t know what time it was. I told him no go, whatever he got on this he was going to have to get himself. And he found it, gentlemen, right there in the
Tribune
vaults. Any fool can see that his story was written from clips.”

“Yeah,” Armstrong said. “Any fool can see that.”

Lord picked up the attack, but in a smoother, more civilized voice. “The thing is, we think Walker was still a few steps from being able to write that story when he left the scene.”

“What makes you think that?” Donovan said. “Did he tell you that?”

“Use your head,” Armstrong said. “Why’d he give us the pictures?”

“Because,” Lord said, “he didn’t have the ID’s made yet. He needed our help on that.”

“We had those pictures a week,” Donovan said. “A lot can happen between Monday and Friday. Maybe he had them made by Friday night.”

“And maybe the Pope don’t wear a high hat,” Armstrong said.

Simon flexed his fingers. “Well, we didn’t call you in here to argue.”

“You could have fooled me,” Donovan said.

“We’re all on the same side,” Simon said. “We all want the same thing. Once we get the Sayers girl, the papers can do anything they want. I don’t give a damn.”

“Look,” Donovan said impatiently. “Walker’s no dummy. Sometime between the morning he gave me those pictures and the morning after the Lewises were killed, he pieced it together. You’re asking me how. I don’t know how. All I know is that somewhere he got a name, and it wasn’t from me. I know what I think, and I told you that. Once he had the name, the rest was duck soup.”

“Fish soup sounds more like it,” Armstrong said. “That smells stronger.”

“All right, can it, Joe,” Simon said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. What we’re saying, Al, in our charming way”—he smiled crookedly at Armstrong—“is we know how you work with the press. And that’s fine, we understand it. It’s unusual, but fine, it’s your way and up to now we’ve had no complaints. It’s done us some good turns in the past to have friends in the news business.”