Hamilton, Donald - Novel 02 (19 page)

 
          
He
had trouble finding the nail again on the rough gravel of the road. He put it
back and braced it with the edge of his shoe.

 
          
“Ahead,”
he said.

 
          
He
snatched his foot away as the car moved forward. There was a sudden hiss that
settled rapidly to a sighing that gradually died away. The springs creaked as
the weight of the car shifted.

 
          
“Far
enough,” he said. “Bring the keys, quick!”

 
          
He
was aware of her coming at a run around the car and he heard questions that he
did not answer, snatching the keys from her hand to open the trunk. He passed
tools out to her.

 
          
“Make
with the jack,” he said, “while I get this spare clear.”

 
          
“The
handle—”

 
          
“Never
mind the handle!” he said breathlessly, angry with her.

 
          
Then
headlights flooded around the bend above them, pinning them against the rear of
the convertible. Emmett was aware of the girl beside him straightening up to
sweep back her hair with the back of her hand, in a completely natural gesture.
He set down the suitcases he had pulled out of the trunk to free the spare
tire. Ann turned her back to the lights and bent down again to fit the jack
into place. She was, he thought, doing very well. He remembered that she had a
certain amount of practice at this sort of thing during the war. The thought
made him feel a little inadequate. He did not know how well he was doing.

 
          
As
the other car slowed for them he walked back toward it and glanced over his
shoulder at the space between the stalled Mercury and the edge of the road,
beyond which the canyon was a black chasm.

 
          
“I
think you can make it, Mister,” he shouted, squinting at the vague face behind
the lights and windshield. “Take it easy and I’ll coach you.”

 
          
He
stepped aside to let the other car go past; but it stopped alongside him. The
man behind the wheel leaned out to look at the slender figure in the checkered
shirt and the tailored brown slacks, kneeling in the gravel by the rear bumper
of the convertible.

 
          
“Got
a flat tire, eh?”

 
          
Emmett
said, “Uhuh. Picked up a nail.” He tried to keep the incredulity out of his
voice. He had never seen the man before in his life. Then he realized that
there was no reason why he should have; Mr. Nicholson could afford to hire more
than one investigator.

 
          
The
man pulled up his emergency brake and got out. “Don’t cotton to the looks of
that shoulder,” he said. He walked out on the edge and stamped his foot. In the
shine of the lights Emmett could see him clearly: a solid, middle-aged man in a
brown suit without a vest and a light cattleman’s hat. His trousers were tucked
into carved boots with two-inch heels. “She won’t hold,” he said, after testing
the ground again. “Reckon I’d better give you a hand.” He walked to the rear of
the convertible. “Here, I’ll take care of that, Ma’am.”

 
          
Ann
straightened up, rubbing her soiled hands together. She was smiling at the man
as Emmett swung the jack handle, striking at the shoulder, not the head, not
wanting to take a chance of killing.

 
          
The
shock of the blow going home left Emmett as surprised as the man he had struck.
Part of his mind had been calmly certain that he would never get away with it;
that he would find himself standing there flatfooted, holding the bar of iron,
while the man pointed a gun at him, and told him to drop it and stop acting like
a jackass. Instead the man in the Stetson hat gave a little grunt and grabbed
for his shoulder; then staggered as the pain got to him, swayed against the
car, and sat down in the road.

 
          
Emmett
was aware of Ann running to him and catching at his left hand. They stood
looking down at the man sitting in the gravel, in the glare of his own
headlights, staring up at them with wet, pain-glazed eyes.

 
          
“Who
is he?”

 
          
“Damned
if I know,” Emmett said, and freed himself from her grip. Holding the jack
handle ready, he went forward. The man’s eyes followed him.

 
          
“It’s
broken,” the man whispered. “You bastard.”

 
          
“Think
if it had been your head,” Emmett said. He stood over the man with the jack
handle ready. “Take your gun out and throw it over to her.”

 
          
The
man shook his head. “No gun,” he whispered hoarsely. He looked ready to cry.

 
          
“Stand
up.”

 
          
The
man pushed himself painfully up, holding his shoulder, and stood uncertainly,
rocking a little in his high-heeled boots. Emmett made him turn around. There
was dust on the rear of his trousers and on the skirt of his coat. Emmett felt
his hips and armpits from the rear and found nothing but a wallet identifying
the man as Henry Fulton McElroy, salesman for Whitmore and Lovett, equipment
for all types of mining operations. He walked the man back to his car. Some
precautionary sense made him search the car before the man got in; there was a
sawed-off little Colt .38 slung by a bracket under the dash. It didn’t mean any
thing, he reflected; lots of people in these parts carried guns. A salesman
traveling nights through this type of country would be very apt to keep a gun
handy. Emmett thought: how the hell did I ever get into this, anyway?

 
          
Ann
came up to him. He did not answer the question in her eyes. He did not even want
to consider the possibility that he had struck down an innocent passerby, who
doubtless, in spite of his pain, was carefully taking note of their appearance,
and of the beautifully illuminated
Illinois
license plate staring him in the face from
the rear of the convertible ahead.

 
          
Emmett
glanced at the shiny wet face of the man, and at the gun in his own hand, and
shivered a little; in his mind a sudden clear picture of the man reaching for
the weapon and he, John Emmett, instinctively pressing the trigger and becoming
a murderer. He held the gun out to Ann.

 
          
“Stick
it in the glove compartment,” he said as she frowned at it. “I can handle him
without it. But it looks as if you were elected to change the tire.”

 
          
He
knew that he did not trust her to hold a gun on the man, either; he could not
trust her not to shoot. They were very close to the edge of something dark and
irrevocable, but there was still hope as long as nobody else got killed.

 
          
No
headlights followed them when they drove off again. The road let them down
through a slot in the mountainside where the walls towered black above them and
they could hear the rushing water of a mountain stream far below, never seeing
it; then the canyon widened again and there were no more trees except for the
scattered, stunted desert junipers of the foothills, black in the sudden
morning twilight.

 
          
Ann
said, “It’s funny, the way there aren’t any trees above a certain point up
there; and then there aren’t any below a certain point down here.”

 
          
Her
voice sounded rusty with disuse. They had not spoken for several hours.

 
          
Emmett
said, “Above the timberline, the cold kills them. Down here they don’t get
enough water.”

 
          
She
said, “I wish I could wash my hands.”

 
          
He
glanced at the slender, grimy, somewhat battered hands she displayed in the
light of the dashboard. There did not seem to be much to say about them. If you
wanted to make something of them, you could remember her, by way of contrast,
in the restaurant in Jepson where they had first talked together, grimacing at
her white gloves with fastidious distaste because they were minutely soiled.
Perhaps this was the comparison she wanted him to draw, he thought; but a
contrast that could be wiped out by a bar of soap and a swab of mercurochrome
did not seem to him of any great significance. He thought the contrast in
himself, then and now, was rather more important.

 
          
Ann’s
voice asked abruptly, “Do you think he’s going to be all right back there?”

 
          
Emmett
shrugged. “Somebody’ll find him.”

 
          
“But
if he should try to drive… What if he went off the road? He might be killed.”

 
          
He
glanced at her. Then he stopped the car and pulled up the emergency brake, and
cut the engine. He felt his hands beginning to shake, and his stomach muscles
were fluttering as if he had been cold for a long time. After a while he
started to fill his pipe. He felt her take it, and the pouch, from his hands.
He brushed at the spilled tobacco in his lap.

 
          
“Why
don’t you keep your big mouth shut?” he asked savagely. “What did you want us
to do, take him to a hospital?”

 
          
She
did not answer. He watched her fill the pipe carefully, rather inexpertly, not
tamping the tobacco down hard enough; but he did not correct her. When she
looked at him, her eyes seemed very large in her pale face, the face smudged
with dirt and weariness.

 
          
“I’m
sorry,” he said. “I’ve just got the shakes, is all.” She held out the pipe, but
he did not take it. Instead he took her by the shoulders, waited for her face
to turn up for the kiss, and kissed her. She buried her face in the shoulder of
his jacket.

 
          
“What
are we going to do, darling?” she breathed. “What are we going to do?”

 
          
He
held her without answering. The sun was rising over the plains visible through
the shallow notch of the canyon ahead. He felt the sickening tension inside him
somehow relieved by her nearness, and his mind began to work again for the
first time in hours. He knew that she was crying soundlessly; and he knew when
she had stopped. When she stirred in his arms he released her and, without
looking at her, threw off the brake and let the car begin to move down the
steep canyon road. When it was rolling, he let in the clutch, starting up the
engine.

 
          
“You’ve
got lipstick on your mouth,” Ann said. “I didn’t think I had any left.”

 
          
He
watched her carry her suitcase around the corner of the filling station, which
was precariously balanced on a few square feet of level ground between the road
and the slope of the canyon wall leading down to the creek below. Standing
beside the car, he lit his pipe, feeling already the promise of heat in the
early morning sunshine on his back. The tobacco tasted strong and harsh to his
tongue. A man in overalls came out of the shack with a sandwich in one hand and
a steaming cup of coffee in the other.

 
          
“Fill
her,” Emmett said. “Can I use your phone? I want to call
Denver
.”

 
          
“I
reckon,” the man said. He put his cup aside and came forward without haste. “Have
the operator tell you what it cost when you’re through.”

 
          
Inside,
Emmett could hear sounds of movement through the thin partition at the rear of
the office. He looked at the wall for a moment, and studied the long-limbed
figure of a girl on the calendar tacked to it. The girl was blonde and was
wearing very little except a pair of high-heeled sandals, and reminded him
uneasily of Helene Bethke. He turned to the telephone and frowned.

 
          
“Give
it a crank,” the attendant shouted, from outside. “Crank like hell and tell the
gal your number.”

 
          
Emmett
picked up the receiver and wound the crank at the side of the box, filling the
office with a tinkling ringing more like the sound of a doorbell, he thought,
than like that of a telephone.

 
          
“Give
me
Denver
,” he said when the operator answered. “The
Estes Hotel,
Denver
. I want to speak to Mr. R. Austen Nicholson. Person to person, please.”
The operator asked a question. He looked at the instrument in front of him and
found the answer. “Mariposa seven four, ring two short, one long.”

 
          
As
he waited, he heard Ann suddenly begin to move about again beyond the thin
wall, resolutely and a little too noisily, as if determined not to eavesdrop.
There was a rush of water from a faucet. The sound surprised him; after a
moment he realized that he had not expected the lonely filling station to have
running water. There was talk on the telephone; then a voice spoke in his ear.

 
          
“Nicholson
here.”

 
          
Emmett
said, “This is John Emmett, Mr. Nicholson.”

 
          
“Yes?”
The older man’s voice was expressionless, neither in favor of, nor opposed to,
John Emmett. It was not, Emmett realized sharply, the voice of a man who had
heard a report from an employee with a broken shoulder. He was aware of a small
sick sense of panic; the man he had struck must have been found by now. It
followed that either the man had no connection with Mr. Nicholson, or he had
been in too bad a condition to report to his employer. Emmett thought:
Christ, maybe he was from the FBI.
But
there was no time to think of it now.

 
          
“I’m
not alone,” he said into the telephone.

 
          
There
was a pause. Mr. Nicholson’s voice asked, “How is she?”

 
          
“Fine,”
Emmett said.

 
          
“Is
she listening?”

 
          
“I
don’t know.”

 
          
“Are
you bringing her to me?”

 
          
“No,”
Emmett said. “Not directly.”

 
          
“I
see.” After another pause, the distant voice asked, “How much do you want,
Emmett?”

 
          
Anger
tempted Emmett to find out how high the price could be made to go, but he said,
“Nothing. All I want is some information and some help.”

 
          
“All
I want is my daughter,” the man in
Denver
said. “Before the police get her.”

 
          
Emmett
said, “Well, I’m not going to let anybody railroad a girl into the insane
asylum for their own convenience, Mr. Nicholson; on the other hand, if she
is
off the beam—” He cleared his throat.
“You get what I mean, Mr. Nicholson? I mean, she trusts me, more or less. I
want to do what’s best for her. I don’t want to make any money out of it.
However, I don’t want to get into any trouble.”

 
          
Mr.
Nicholson said harshly, “Don’t you think we’re qualified to judge what’s best
for her, young man?”

 
          
“Who’s
we?” Emmett asked.

 
          
“Myself,
her father. Her doctor and nurse—”

 
          
Emmett
said, “That’s a question I wanted to ask. Exactly where was Dr. Kaufman at the
time Ann was supposed to be trying to kill herself in
Boyne
?”

 
          
“Dr.
Kaufman?” Mr. Nicholson sounded startled; then he laughed. “Oh, I see!”

 
          
“What
do you see, Mr. Nicholson?”

 
          
The
older man’s voice said wearily, “Does she claim now that she didn’t try to kill
herself?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
“I
suppose it’s no use pointing out to you that it’s only eighteen months since
she tried it before; and that she’s now trying to claim that
that
was an accident, even though she
admitted at the time… Now she wants us to believe that the latest attempt was
Dr. Kaufman trying to murder her? Hell, Emmett,” Ann’s father said roughly, “don’t
be gullible. Anyway, Doc was at a University Club dinner that night.”

 
          
Emmett
said, “What about checking on it, Mr. Nicholson?”

 
          
“Hell,
I was with her the next morning, Emmett. She didn’t say anything then. It’s
just something she’s cooked up since to make trouble. If she’d spent as much
time learning how to act decent as she has trying to harass her medical
attendants…” Emmett remained silent. “Oh, all right,” Mr. Nicholson said. “I’ll
put Plaice on it. What else is worrying your goddamned conscience?”

 
          
“Dr.
Kissel,” Emmett said.

 
          
There
was a pause. “I see.”

 
          
“She
wants to see him,” Emmett said. “She thinks he can clear her. If she’s right,
if he should say that she was innocent in the French business, that wouldn’t
leave her much motive for killing Stevens, would it? I think even the
Chicago
police would admit that.”

 
          
Mr.
Nicholson said, “I doubt it. First of all, since she doesn’t remember, she’s
still got the motive, hasn’t she? And second, they’d simply claim we bribed the
man. Assuming he says what you hope, young man.”

 
          
Emmett
said, “Fortunately, unless you’ve been in contact with him during the past
twenty-four hours, there are some pretty reliable witnesses to swear that
nobody’s contacted Dr. Kissel. It happens that Dr. Kissel is a little more
important, and considerably less accessible, than everybody seems to think. Why
do you think I’m calling you, Mr. Nicholson, instead of just driving up to
Fairmount and knocking on the door? Because Dr. Kissel isn’t there. He’s
working for the government down in
New Mexico
, and the FBI is keeping an eye on him. That’s
why I need you to put pressure on the man in charge, a Mr. Kirkpatrick, to let
us see Dr. Kissel…”

 
          
“The
FBI!” Mr. Nicholson’s snort was explosive. “And why the hell, young man, should
I get involved with the FBI, in addition to my other troubles? Why don’t I just
call up the Associated Press and give them the story?”

 
          
Emmett
said, “I think Kirkpatrick will agree to keep everything quiet. He doesn’t want
publicity any more than you do. You can reach him through the
Denver
office. Arapahoe six two six two.” He went
on in a different tone of voice, “Of course, if you’d prefer for us to try it
by ourselves and get picked up trying to crawl through the barbed wire…” There
was a period of silence. Then the voice in the telephone, thinned by distance,
said, “You’re going to see Dr. Kissel, come hell or high water, is that it?”

 
          
“That’s
right, Mr. Nicholson.”

 
          
“Tell
me, young man, is this really Ann’s idea, or is it yours?”

 
          
“Well,”
Emmett said, “mine, I guess. At least, you could say I’ve taken it over.”

 
          
“I
thought so.” The man in
Denver
hesitated, as if organizing his thoughts. “Suppose I can convince you
in some other way,” he went on presently. “All you want to know is what Dr.
Kissel is going to say, right? For your own peace of mind; to know you’re doing
the right thing for her. Suppose I tell you—”

 
          
“Then
you have been in touch with him,” Emmett said quickly.

 
          
There
was anger in Mr. Nicholson’s voice when he answered. “Do you think Reinhard
Kissel is the only person in the world who knows what my daughter did in
France, young man? I only wish that were true. Give me credit for a few human
instincts, Emmett, no matter what she’s told you about me—”

 
          
Emmett
said, “Ann hasn’t—”

 
          
“I
know what she thinks of me, Emmett,” Mr. Nicholson went on. “But before you
judge, remember that I’ve given her the finest treatment possible for over
three years; I’ve shielded her and protected her; her mother and I have never
let her know that we even guessed—”

 
          
Emmett
said, “Ann seemed to think you didn’t have any idea until Stevens—”

 
          
“Do
you think we wouldn’t check? Do you think I wouldn’t try to find out what had
turned my daughter from a normal, rather snippy, young debutante to a suicidal
neurotic? And I found out, Emmett. I can show you the reports of investigators
who located the survivors of the resistance unit she and her husband were
members of in
Paris
; they all believed Monteux’ wife had betrayed them… I know,” he said as
Emmett tried to interrupt, “they could have been deceived or mistaken. But I
didn’t stop there. I can show you authenticated photostats of her dossier,
completely damning; and of arrest records for those who were caught and
executed, all reading identically:
Subject
arrested on information furnished by Ann Monteux (File 2037-A), wife of gang
leader Georges Monteux (still at large)…
”

 
          
The
door at the rear of the filling station opened and closed, and she came past
the window; then she was putting the cheap new suitcase back into the trunk of
the car. He saw her turn to look into the dusk of the office where he was
standing. Her freshly brushed hair looked light and fluffy in the early morning
sunshine, soft and a little disorganized, beginning to escape the discipline of
her expensive permanent wave. She had exchanged her wool shirt for a brief
scarlet halter that left her shoulders and arms quite bare; she stood for a
moment hugging herself as if a little cold.

 
          
Her
father’s voice stopped listing the evidence against her. Emmett watched her
turn away and get into the car. He did not want to look at her; yet he could
not stop looking at her, trying to learn what was the truth.

 
          
“I
can get the documents for you in eight hours,” Mr. Nicholson’s voice said in
his ear. “Why should I want to slander my own daughter, Emmett? Why should I
lie? Goddamn it, young man, do you think I
like
it?” There was a terrible sincerity in the metallic voice; and Emmett had a
momentary vision of how it might be for the parent.