One Minute Past Eight (2 page)

IT WAS early when Jeff Lane woke the next morning. He could tell this from the amount of light that came in through the two windows, but it was a subconscious knowledge and it took a while for his mind to function properly. He understood first that he was in bed, apparently in a hotel room. A light blanket covered him and as he became aware of his body he knew that he was clad in shorts and undershirt.

The throbbing of his head and the thick disgusting taste in his mouth suggested a monumental hangover, but he could not remember how he got it. He knew he should be in Caracas, but he could recall nothing of the flight or his arrival at the hotel. Still groping mentally he raised his head and found his suit draped on a chair in front of the desk, the blue flight bag resting on the floor near by. His trench coat had been tossed on a second chair, but there was no sign of the two bags he had checked in Boston, and suddenly some silent alarm rang in his brain and he jumped out of bed and staggered over to the window.

The brightening of the sky told him the sun was coming up. Serried silhouettes of luxury hotels on the horizon stretched as far as he could see, and palm trees fringed the opposite shore of a bay crisscrossed with causeways and dotted with artificial islands. Only then did he know that the street below the window was Bayshore Drive and that he was looking at Biscayne Bay and Miami Beach; only then did his mind open up and let the memories come flooding back to compound the sickness that had heretofore been only physical The answer that came to him left him staggered and incredulous, and now, a glance at his wristwatch telling him it was six twenty, he strode back to the bed and snatched up the telephone.

“Desk clerk,” he said when the operator answered; then, seconds later; “Hello. This is Mr. Lane in”—he glanced at the circular disk on the pedestal—“1604. Were you on duty when I checked in last night?”

“Just a moment, please.”

Another pause. Another voice,

“Hello, Mr. Lane. I was on the desk last night.”

“What time did I come in?”

“About eight thirty. I can tell you exactly if you—”

“No, no!” Jeff said. “That’s all right. Did I register?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Did I do the registering? Did I come in alone?”

“Oh, no. Two friends brought you, Mr. Lane. You—ah—what I mean is, you weren’t able to register without help. You could hardly stand. Your friends said you’d been celebrating and—well, I took their word for it.”

“One of them registered for me?”

“And paid for the room in advance.”

“They came up to the room with me?”

“Yes. Someone had to. When they came back they said not to disturb you, that you’d be all right in the morning. They seemed very solicitous.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said, bitterness tingeing his words. “I’ll bet.”

He hung up and sat on the edge of the bed, his dark gaze brooding and morose, the object of his resentment a girl named Karen Holmes. He recalled her smartness, her nice complexion, the dark-blue eyes that had seemed so friendly and ingenuous. Every step of the clever routine came back to haunt him: the postponement of the drink on the plane, the suggestion of a double drink to make it less likely that he would notice the drug she had slipped into his glass after she had sent him to the cigarette machine. Here in Miami she had needed help—he remembered the two men he had thought he had seen talking to a woman in a dark-red hat—but until then she had done a letter-perfect job quite alone.

Because he now understood the reason for the pick-up, he stood up and went over to his coat. The wallet was in its customary pocket. The money in the bill compartment seemed intact. The birth certificate, the three copies of his tourist card, each with its passport-size photograph, were there. So was the cable that had started him on this trip.

It had been sent from Caracas by a man named Harry Baker, a private detective employed by the Lane Manufacturing Company for the past two months in an effort to find Jeff’s stepbrother, who had dropped out of sight four years earlier. Now, unfolding the cable, which was a long one sent at the deferred rate, he read it again:

Your stepbrother Arnold living here under his fathers name of Grayson listed in phone book. Have explained situation and requested return to Boston but Grayson holding up definite answer. Suggest you come earliest convenience to outline proposition in person. Feel my job done with this cable and am now off payroll. Have accepted temporary assignment here but will see you at Tucan where room engaged for you adjoining mine. Advise date of arrival. Baker.

The message had been sent on the previous Friday, but at the deferred rate it had not been delivered until Saturday morning. A quick conference of company officials voted to accept Baker’s suggestion and elected Jeff to represent them, but it had taken all day Monday to arrange for his tourist cards. By that time the through flight from New York to Caracas was booked to capacity, and rather than wait for the through light on Wednesday he had settled for the next best schedule.

Replacing the cable as his mind went on, he knew that Karen Holmes’s mission was to delay him so that she could talk to his stepbrother first. He knew, too, that she must be working for the Tyler-Texas Corporation just as he knew that if Arnold Grayson decided to vote the shares he would presently claim as part of his stepfather’s estate with the Tyler-Texas crowd, the Lane officials would presently lose control of the company.

But how could Karen Holmes know about the cable? How did she know what plane he was taking? Who were the men who helped her at the Miami airport? How could—

He broke off the thoughts abruptly, aware that such speculation was not only a waste of time but served also to aggravate his frustration and resentment. There were better things to do and now he went back to the bedside table and consulted the telephone directory. When he found the number of the airline he wanted he put in his call and explained the situation, saying that he had been taken ill at the airport the night before and missed the Caracas flight.

“What happens to the bags I checked through?” he said. “When can I get out of here?”

The airline clerk heard him out and then said: “Let me check on this, Mr. Lane. Where can I call you back, say in five minutes?”

Jeff told her and then went over to examine his flight bag, finding nothing missing and taking out his toilet kit and the clean shirt. He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth and by the time he had finished the telephone summoned him back to the bedroom.

“I’ve checked with the terminal office, Mr. Lane,” the clerk said, “and there’s no need to worry about your bags. They’ll be waiting at Maiquetia; that is if you plan to continue to Caracas.”

“Good,” Jeff said. “When can I get out of here?”

“We have a flight this morning at seven forty and another at eleven thirty.”

“How much difference in time of arrival?”

“Only fifteen minutes. That’s because the first flight goes by way of Camaguey, Kingston, Barranquilla, and Maracaibo; the later one goes to Port au Prince, Ciudad Trujillo, and Curaçao.”

Jeff said he wasn’t interested in scenery and was there a seat on the eleven-thirty flight.

“Yes, there is. Be at the airport at ten forty-five or at our downtown office at ten fifteen.”

Jeff hung up, tickled the connection bar, and when he got the operator, asked for room service. He ordered tomato juice, toast, and a double order of coffee. While he waited he shaved and showered, the cold spray washing away some of his physical lassitude but doing very little to cure his internal queasiness.

When the waiter had been paid, tipped, and had taken his departure Jeff tried the black coffee and waited for it to hit the bottom of his stomach before he continued. When it stayed down he tried the juice and found it good. Thus encouraged he finally ate a piece of toast, not because he wanted it but because he thought he should. The second cup of coffee reassured him sufficiently to try a cigarette and by that time he knew he was going to be all right…

As the DC 6-B winged its way east and south through the bright afternoon skies, Jeff Lane was in no mood to appreciate the view afforded him by his window seat. The Caribbean was blue as advertised except along the reefs of nameless islands. The spectacular mountains of Haiti and the Dominican Republic were no different from other wooded tropical mountains he had seen before, and the picturesqueness of Port au Prince became to him only a half-hour stop when, because of regulations, he had to leave the plane while it was refueled. Ciudad Trujillo meant a wait of twenty minutes, and after that there were only clouds and water below the wings and a torment in his mind as he thought of Karen Holmes and the Tyler-Texas Corporation, and of the man he had grown up to accept as Arnold Lane, now known as Arnold Grayson,

He, Jeff, had been four and his sister six when his father had married a widow named Grayson with an eleven-year-old son, and in the early years, Jeff’s memory of Arnold was hazy. He understood now that his stepbrother was a bully with an ingrown streak of meanness which in those days revealed itself with a cuff, a pinch, or a twist of the arm, always surreptitious, so there would be no parental punishment.

Later he learned, from dinner-table talk, of Arnold’s escapades at three prep schools before one tolerated him long enough for graduation. There had been a year each at two universities, followed by a series of jobs in and out of the family company. What made it more difficult for Jeff’s father was the fact that he was devoted to his second wife, and while she was alive he overlooked her son’s troublesome ways. It was only after she had died and Arnold was older that he seemed to realize the hopelessness of the obligation he had assumed.

Even so, he tried, and though these were the years that Jeff was in college and, later, in Korea, he knew of two occasions when only his father’s help had kept Arnold from prison. The first came as a result of a bar-room brawl when Arnold had cut a man severely with a broken bottle. Influence and twenty thousand dollars to the injured man helped Arnold get off with a suspended sentence. The second case was one of out-and-out embezzlement from a brokerage partnership that Jeff’s father had financed originally. Here again the shortage was made up, but with this came an ultimatum. From now on Arnold was on his own; there would be no more money, no allowance, no hope of any inheritance.

The ultimatum was delivered by registered letter to a Los Angeles address where Arnold was staying four years earlier. Jeff had not seen him since. He had heard Arnold was in Las Vegas for a time and he knew that two men from that city had come looking for him in Boston. He still did not know why.

Yet, in the end, Jeff’s father had relented. It may have been some twist of conscience once he knew he was going to die; it may have been due to the fact that he had once loved Arnold’s mother and still felt some obligation to her son. Whatever the reason, he had called Jeff in to say he had changed his will and that if Arnold could be found within ninety days he was to share equally with Jeff’s sister and himself in the forty-five per cent of the Company shares still held by the family.

Jeff had promised to do his best to locate Arnold, and it was a promise he intended to keep, if possible, in spite of this deep-rooted dislike of his stepbrother. And so Harry Baker had been hired to try to pick up the trail, after four years, a trail that led up and down the West Coast, to Las Vegas, and back to Los Angeles, to Panama, and finally, with roughly thirty days to go before the bequest would be invalidated, the search had ended with the cable Jeff now carried in his pocket.

To claim his inheritance, Arnold Grayson had to return to Boston, but once he claimed it he could vote his fifteen per cent of the company stock as he saw fit. Somehow, George Tyler of Tyler-Texas had learned about Jeff’s mission, and Karen Holmes now had a twelve-hour start at trying to convince Arnold to cast his lot with the opposition…

The voice of the stewardess demanding attention cut through Jeff’s thoughts and he listened as she announced the impending arrival of Flight 433 at Curaçao.

“We will be on the ground approximately thirty minutes,” she said. “Passengers en route to Caracas may leave their personal things on the aircraft”

Jeff listened as the instructions were repeated in Spanish and then he looked out the window at things he had seen once before from the ground: the compact little city of Willemstad, the channel leading to the landlocked harbor, the oil tanks, the famous pontoon bridge which separated the two parts of the city and was constantly being opened and closed to make way for the coastal tankers that shuttled back and forth from Venezuela. As the plane banked again he saw that the bridge was open now, the municipal free ferry which served the populace angling toward the main part of town ahead of two oncoming tankers. Then the aircraft was dipping and he sat back to await the landing.

Flight 433 was twenty minutes early coming into Maiquetia, the modern airfield close by La Guaira, where the mountains of Venezuela level out on the man-made plateau before touching the sea. There were two terminals here, one for local traffic, the larger and more impressive structure serving international flights.

Once on the ground the passengers were herded together and ushered by an official past a patrolling FAK—a green-uniformed, tin-hatted, rifle-carrying member of the National Guard—to the small air-conditioned waiting-room which funneled the passengers in to the immigration authorities.

Because he was in a hurry, Jeff had managed to be second in line, and now he stood before one of two clerks who began to fill in cards on their typewriters. He stowed his papers, answered questions automatically, and was finally instructed to come behind the counter to a pair of desks near the end of the room.

Here he stood before a mustached, grim-faced individual, who inspected his tourist cards and birth certificate, inspected him personally and with some care, and then consulted two bulky loose-leaf black books. Apparently there was some cross-indexing involved, because it took a while and pages were flipped one way and then the other in an effort to find out if one Jeffrey Lane had anything against his name or record that would make him undesirable as a tourist. Jeff guessed that the procedure was more of a safeguard for political reasons than anything else, so he stood and waited until the man flipped his papers with a weary gesture to the adjoining desk. A second official stamped the three tourist cards, initialed them, gave one to Jeff along with the birth certificate, and put the other two aside.