Have Gat—Will Travel (6 page)

Donna stopped beside me. "He'll be here in a minute and fix them up. Drink your coffee, Shell, and let's go."

That was the first thing she'd said that had hit me wrong. "Well, hell, honey," I said, "I'm going to wait . . ." I let it trail off, wondering why she was so anxious for me to drink the damned coffee. I looked at the full cup, then back at Donna.

She moistened her lips. "I'll be in the car, Shell."

I hardly noticed her going. When I looked at the tank again all the fish were dead. The water seemed murky. I raised my hand, rubbed it over my lips where they'd touched the coffee, then sat the cup down slowly, staring at it, a thin vein of revulsion and disbelief running through my brain. I walked out front. Donna wasn't in sight. The car was empty. I whirled around, ran back into the building, into the other room. It was empty, a door open in the far wall. Nobody was in or near the building, and when I sprinted back to my Cad and ground the engine, it didn't start. I found wires loose under the hood.

Sweating, with my hands moist and cold, I sat behind the wheel, thinking about Donna O'Reilly, who liked everything I like — because she must have planned it that way; Donna, who couldn't have drunk that steaming coffee so fast, who hadn't intended to drink any coffee from that thermos. But the one thought, oddly enough, hardest for me to accept was that anybody — not just a sweet-faced, lovely little Irish colleen, but anybody, could so casually have killed those thirty clowns.

C
aptain amos wade was a lean, almost cadaverous cop assigned to Bunco, but also the Department's antisubversive expert and liaison between City Hall and the FBI. He leaned back in his chair and said, "Drink your java, Shell. It won't kill you."

"Not this time, maybe." I was waiting until the chemist at Scientific Investigations reported on what was in that first cup of coffee, which I'd brought in. I'd told my story to the police, and looked at mugg shots in the "I" Room without seeing pictures of Donna or Mr. Gordon. I was here to kill time, but also because I enjoyed talking to Amos, to whom I'd been talking quite a bit lately. One of my closest friends, an ex-newspaperman and writer named Jim Brandon, was writing a book for which he'd got some factual material from Amos, and the three of us had often sat here jawing. Jim Brandon was tall and slim, brainy as hell, and looked a little like William Holden, which isn't bad. I not only liked Jim, but admired him because he was a good American who was working at it. In other words, he was actively anti-Communist. His book was anti-Communist, a nonfiction job.

Amos Wade said, "This Donna was a luscious little gal, huh?"

"On the outside. I met her at Pete's bar last night. She probably knew I usually drop in there when I leave the office. Hell, I thought I'd picked her up."

"No idea why the funny business?"

"How, but not why. She poured both cups of coffee from the thermos, then dumped hers into the fish tank. Wish that report would come in from SID. Like to know how I'd have died."

He grinned. "In agony, no doubt, in payment for your sins."

"No doubt, but I don't get it. This last year, I've handled twenty cases. Probably ten guys would like to knock me off."

"You just did another job for Jim, didn't you?"

"Yeah, flew to Boston. Got back night before last."

"How's his new book coming along?"

"Good. He's got to change something in it, he told me, but it's about wrapped up. He's coming over to my place this afternoon. Taking a whole half-day off, so he must be about finished." Jim had worked for three years, nights and weekends, on the thing and getting him away from the typewriter on Sunday was a rare occasion for celebration.

Wade's phone rang. I'd left word that I'd be here, and he listened for a minute and then handed me the phone. Jackson, the police chemist, told me they hadn't yet identified whatever was in the coffee, but added, "Wouldn't have killed you, Shell. Some kind of drug. Might take days to pin it down. We squirted a bit in some mice and a guinea pig. Killed the mice, put the pig to sleep. Haven't found any evidence of organic damage."

I thanked Jackson and hung up. This got stranger and stranger.

M
y apartment is in Hollywood's Spartan Apartment Hotel, and I'd just finished cleaning and oiling my .38 Colt Special, since it seemed possible that I'd be using it, when the buzzer sounded. It was nearly four p.m., when I expected Jim Brandon, but I loaded the revolver and snapped the cylinder shut before going to the door, gun dangling in my left hand.

It couldn't have taken more than a couple of seconds, but we crowded a lot into it. A lifetime. I swung the door open and saw the young guy standing there, saw the odd-looking gun pointed at my head, and almost instantly automatic reflexes sent me slamming sideways against the door.

There was a little popping sound and then my gun was jarring the palm of my left hand. I wasn't conscious of lifting my arm and pulling the trigger, but I saw the guy jerk, heard the meat-ax smack of bullets into his chest. I emptied the revolver into him.

Doors slammed, people came into the hall, a woman screamed. I was standing over the man's body, breathing as if I'd run a mile. The gun lay beside him and I picked it up. A perforated metal tube stuffed with cottony material was screwed into threads on its barrel — a pistol with a silencer. My neck was stinging and my hand came away from it stained with blood. Whoever was after me, they weren't trying to drug me now.

Inside my apartment I called the police. Jim was overdue and I phoned him, but there was no answer. Officers arrived and got busy, but Jim still hadn't shown, so on my way to Homicide, downtown, I stopped at Jim's small house on Rockledge Street.

There wasn't any answer to my ring. The door was unlocked and I went inside. He was in bed, covers part way down his tanned, well-muscled chest, mouth open.

I grinned, stopped beside the bed, grabbed his shoulder and shook him. "Wake up, you lazy —"

I jerked my hand away. A man's skin isn't ever that cold, not when he's alive. My throat seemed to close up. "Oh, God," I said. "Not Jim."

I've seen more dead men than I like to think about, but I had to leave the house and stand outside for ten minutes before I could go back into the bedroom. Then I looked the place over. Next to Jim's bed, in the drawer of a small night stand, was his gun, fully loaded. He always kept it handy; but he hadn't ever used it. I looked at the small .32 nestled in my palm, then dropped it into my coat pocket. Maybe I'd use it.

In the closet was a woman's coat and scarf, but I recognized them as belonging to Jim's fiancée, a lovely little redhead named Gale Winter. They'd been engaged for a year. Gale had seemed right for Jim too, typed clean manuscript for him, kept the coffee pot on when she was around, gave him a lot of love and encouragement. She'd been impatient about getting married, but Jim had known what he wanted most — or at least first — and that was his book in print. He'd had a special reason, more need to write his book than the average writer would have. Jim was not only an ex-newspaperman, but an ex-Communist. Ex-everything, now.

I
had already phoned Homicide, so I headed for City Hall. I'd looked all over Jim's house without finding even a trace of his manuscript. I knew much of what was in it, and I drove slowly toward downtown L.A., thinking about Jim, the book itself, and wondering if that book was why he'd been killed.

Years before I met him, Jim Brandon had been a reporter on one of the New York dailies, and had wound up joining the party. He was intelligent, hard-working, and had a free-and-easy way with words, so he'd landed in a professional group with other newspapermen and writers, plus a couple of radio commentators. They studied the technique of artful lying, how to combine emphasis with omission to create an impression contrary to fact, how to turn black into gray and sometimes — all the liars working together — black into white.

Jim went up fast in the party, and faster in the writing game. Fellow Communists promoted him and praised him publicly, and when he wrote his first book, a party-line novel, the Communist cabal applauded and it sold well.

Jim broke with the party, in 1945, right after the Duclos letter, and endured the standard smearing, went to the FBI and appeared before Congressional committees. The James Brandon who had been white became black overnight. Following the often-repeated pattern, he somehow became separated from his union, and his job, whereupon he came to the Coast and began writing what he somewhat facetiously called his "exposé." Naturally he wasn't really facetious about it.

The book dealt with the Communist party's huge propaganda machine in the United States, specifically with Communists in a large segment of the publishing industry — books, magazines, newspapers. His own story was in it but, more important, he'd done monumental research, named names, dates, places, quoted from Congressional documents and party literature. It was a kind of "interlocking subversion" in the brainwashing field, Jim had said.

Well, James Brandon was dead, and his book didn't seem to be around. Perhaps there was no connection.

This time I waited in the morgue. Amos Wade had come over to the Hall of Justice as soon as he got the word, and half a dozen of us stood together in a small group. Behind me the door opened and a deputy coroner came inside.

He said to me, "He'd been drinking a little, but death was due to cardiac — well, call it heart failure."

He pursed his lips, frowning. I felt stunned. It simply hadn't occurred to me that Jim might have died a normal death.

But the coroner's deputy was going on, "An extremely thin hypodermic needle inserted through the center of the left nipple, between the ribs, and directly into the heart muscle. A massive dose of digitalis injected, and — heart failure." He shook his head, still frowning. "We wouldn't have found it, not this soon, except that we had a couple of others killed the same way."

It was quiet for a long time. Then I said, "A couple of others? Who were they?"

He jerked a thumb at Amos. "He can tell you about them."

Wade's face was slack. "Both local Commies," he said quietly. "Apparently they got into trouble with the party." He paused, brow furrowed, then suddenly snapped his fingers and spun on his heel. "Come on to my office, Shell."

W
e went back to City Hall. It took fifteen minutes for Amos to find what he wanted; then he grinned at me. "Five-nine, bad acne scars . . ." He went on giving me the description of the man I'd shot. He phoned the "I" room and Homicide. Soon a man came in with a glossy photo. Amos glanced at it, handed it to me. "Otto Rheims," he said.

"That's the guy. Another one?"

He nodded. "His description rang a bell, but it wasn't until Jim that it hit me. Otto was in here once on a bunco rap and I checked his record. Twenty-four front organizations, May Day Parade, CP nominating petitions." He grinned wryly.

"Yeah," I said. "Amos, I didn't see Jim's manuscript in the house. He told me the only other people who'd seen it were you and Gale. Remember anything in it that looked important enough to cause this?"

"Sure. The whole thing. But I saw only a few excerpts, Shell. I don't remember anything specific."

"Screwy way to be killed. Especially three men."

Amos said, "Maybe the answer to why it's been used three times — three we know about — is that we've kept the story in the department. Could be the killers think those deaths passed as natural — which they almost did."

I swore. "How in hell could you stick a hypo into a man's chest without getting shot or knocked around? He'd put up a fight, maybe get marked up. I suppose you'd have to drug him first . . ." I stopped. Involuntarily I stood up, and cold seemed to start in my throat, spread to my heart and ripple over my body. "Drug him," I repeated. "In liquor, maybe. Or coffee."

D
riving toward Gale Winter's home, I knew that I wasn't going to work on anything else but Jim's death until I found out who'd killed him. Our friendship would have been clear enough reason, but it was also clear that I'd have to learn who had murdered Jim before I'd know who was trying to kill me. And if I didn't learn fast the next time they tried they might get me. I thought of a thin, hollow needle. . . .

Somewhere in the pages of Jim's manuscript, or in what I knew of that book, or maybe in those conversations we'd had, there must be an answer; somewhere in what I knew of Jim. And the party. I thought back over the two years I'd known Jim, letting my mind brush the high points.

There was the night when he'd first told me about having been a Communist. It had been winter then, raining, and logs were burning in the small fireplace in his front room. Jim overflowed with nervous energy and he was pacing the room while he talked. We were drinking beer from cans and he'd just told me about joining the party, meeting with the pro group, finally getting fed up.

He ran a hand through his thick black hair, a quick, nervous movement that was typical of him. "I broke with them right after the Duclos letter," he said to me. "Christ, you should have seen the comrades, running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The new line hadn't come down from Moscow and nobody knew what to do, including me. Well, I'd been kidding myself for six months, pretending I was still making up my own mind, no matter what, but that finished it for me. I grew up in two days, walked out and never went back."

He shrugged. "Guys join the party and leave it. Guys get sick, too, but that doesn't mean they die. Some of us get well. That's why the comrades hate us ex-Commies, Shell; we're experts at diagnosing the disease. That's also why they have to kill us off." He was silent a long time before he added, "One way or another."

Maybe Jim had expected what had happened. Maybe. But the only time I'd seen him look scared had been in connection with an investigation I'd run off for him, the one that took me to Boston. That had come up during the last week.

He'd been saying about the book, "It's going to raise some hell, if I do say so, Shell. When you write a book attacking a segment of the publishing world, you've got to find somebody in the other segment who'll print it. I damn near didn't find a publisher — Barney Goodman here in L.A.'s the only man I've found willing to put it out. Barney's got a lot of guts, since I'm probably going to wind up with half a dozen libel suits."