Sight Unseen (5 page)

“If Greer was imitated.”

Frowning, Manners said, “He’s a pretty important scientist.”

“And he had a key,” Lockwood said. “Have you found any other way to get into Area C without going up the elevator?”

Manners sighed. “No, that’s the hell of it. All the circuits are intact too. The elevator company recommended sealing the
circuits when they installed it, and none have been broken.”

“Maybe somebody stole a key to the elevator?” Lockwood suggested.

“Have you seen one?” Manners asked.

“No.”

From his jacket pocket Manners took a metal object six inches long that looked more like a can opener than an ordinary house
key.

“Well,” Lockwood said. “You couldn’t just take that to the local hardware store and make a copy.”

“Exactly,” Manners said. “It’s one of Rabson’s special locks, and the key has to be made of a certain magnetic alloy to work.
We had a man at the factory this morning, and their records show they’ve only made the four we’ve got.”

“Could the factory have been infiltrated?” Lockwood asked. “These guys sound thorough.”

“I’m one step ahead of you,” Manners said. “But you’re thinking the right way. Rabson received just enough blanks out of that
alloy for these special keys, and not one’s missing.”

“So Dzeloski, Greer, Myra Rodman, and whoever’s got the guard’s key ring are the only four people who had access last night?”

“Right,” Manners said. “And any other night. When the guard finishes his tour, he has to turn his key ring over to one of
these three.
And
sign a log, along with one of their signatures, to show it happened.”

“That narrows it,” Lockwood said. “But it’s hard to suspect one of those three.”

“Or Pops. You didn’t see anything in his house?”

“Not even anything that looked like petty theft—boxes of paper clips, pencils, petty office supplies.”

Manners looked sour. “That’s suspicious in itself.”

Lockwood laughed. “Have your crime experts figured out how many guys were in here last night?”

“At least two,” Manners replied. He pointed over his head to a long I-beam that ran down the length of the room to the elevator
on which hung a hoist and chain, and he said, “But with that hoist up there, even one man could have winched the bombsight
up and swung it onto the dolly by himself.”

“Fingerprints?”

“Not one. Maybe it was four guys. One drove the panel truck out, and the other three went back out through the hole in the
fence.”

“He could have driven right to the South Shore, couldn’t he?” Lockwood asked. “We’re only a couple miles from the Atlantic.
That bombsight could be a hundred miles out at sea now.”

“Well, naturally we thought of that first thing. By 7:20 this morning we had planes patrolling the coastline.”

“But that was too late.”

“Not really,” Manners said. “Low tide was at 3:00 this morning, and that’s not the Atlantic to the south of us, but Great
South Bay, inside Fire Island. They’d have to have driven toward New York or out toward Montauk in order to get to deep water.
How are you going to load a 500-pound hunk of machine made of steel and glass and fragile wire connections into even a pleasure
boat without pulling up to a dock? And there aren’t many places out here with a dock big enough where by first light, if not
before, fishermen aren’t going out. We don’t think so—and I’ve got men going over the North and the South Shore docks one
by one, asking the fishermen questions. I’m convinced they went underground around here somewhere—maybe in a garage—and are
going to wait for the heat to cool.”

“Then ship it out,” Lockwood said.

“Then ship it out,” Manners agreed. “But they’ve made one mistake.”

“What’s that?”

“The heat’s not going to cool on this one—not ever.”

Myra Rodman lived in a small neat house in a small neat town called Moriches that looked as if it had been transplanted to
Long Island from New England.

Lockwood had found a summer cottage he could rent for a few nights at next to nothing, for in April Long Island had few vacationers.
In a buzz of excitement he had showered, changed his shirt and tie, and dressed again in his gray worsted suit, wishing now
that he had taken the time to go by the Summerfield Hotel, to pack extra suits and slacks. Maybe he would drive in and give
Mr. Gray the full poop in a day or so and pick up some clothes. This assignment was likely to take longer than an overnight
stay.

Myra had changed from her white lab coat to a green spring frock that slithered against the curves of her body.

“Is this what the well-dressed Head of Research wears to dinner?” he asked.

“It’s what this one wears,” Myra answered. “Don’t men ever get over the fact that we’re as smart as they? Our brain pans are
the same size—we’ve just been chained to the kitchen and diaper pail throughout history.”

“You’re right,” he said. He gave her a sheepish grin. “That was thoughtless of me. Where would you like to have dinner?”

“Is this on Transatlantic?”

“You bet!”

“Gurney’s. You don’t mind the drive, do you?”

He laughed. “On an April night on Long Island, with a girl like you and in my convertible, with the prospect of lobster and
champagne?”

Myra smiled and cocked her head, as if she weren’t sure she liked so much enthusiasm.

“A Cord! Is
that
your car?” she exclaimed as they stepped outside.

“You like it?”

“Yes. Did you get the V-12?”

“I put a Packard Twin-Six in it myself.”

“I wouldn’t have a car without front-wheel drive,” she said. “Did you beef up the shocks?”

“Yes. Too springy otherwise.”

“It’s beautiful. One day I’m going to have one. With a Hanley supercharger.”

“I don’t think I ever took out a lady who wanted to own a Cord.”

“Oh, I love it. Can we put the top down?”

“What about your hair?”

“Hang my hair! I want to feel the wind in it.”

By the time he got the top down and they had swung out onto Highway 27, it was 7:30 and dusk. They were nearly alone on the
narrow blacktop road, and the smooth ride of the car through the cool valley the asphalt road made between the oak and pine
trees gave them the feeling that they were driving through some enchanted forest to an inn never to be found on ordinary earth.
At the end of an hour’s drive, during which Lockwood’s car radio picked up Glen Miller’s hour on WCBS, the car crunched onto
the gravel drive leading to Gurney’s.

An attendant took the car, and because this was a Wednesday night, they easily got a table looking out over the Atlantic.

“You know, I didn’t have lunch,” Lockwood said. “Sherry to start?”

“Whatever you’re having,” she said, smiling as if her compliant answer were some sort of joke, as if she were perfectly capable
of choosing a drink for herself, but she would play the game.

“My boss is going to have a fit when he sees this bill,” Lockwood said to her. “I’m going to tell him it was the only way
I could get any information out of you.”

“Oh? Is this business as well as pleasure?”

“I’m hoping to learn a thing or two about the care and feeding of bombsights, and why a pretty lady would make them rather
than babies.”

The waiter materialized from nowhere and in a murmur inquired if Lockwood wanted to order. Myra smiled benignly as the two
went into a huddle over the bill of fare and soon reached an understanding. First, oysters on the halfshell with a half bottle
of cold Rhine wine. Then the thin turtle soup that was a house speciality, followed by lobster Thermidor, wild rice, and broccoli,
to be served with a bottle of 1931 French champagne.

Lockwood felt exhilarated, as if he had never been anywhere in his life in which he felt more certain of being at the right
time and place. The band struck up Dorsey’s latest horn number, “Wandering Without You,” and Lockwood asked Myra to dance.

Only two other couples rose to join them, and while there weren’t many diners at this hour on Wednesday night—no more than
forty altogether in a room that held two hundred—after a minute or two most of them watched Lockwood and Myra glide across
the floor. Lockwood loved to dance and danced well: he held himself straight from the waist up and moved his legs in long
gliding movements. He felt Myra must be floating a quarter inch off the floor, she followed him so effortlessly.

“What a swell dancer you are, Miss Rodman!”

“You’re no slouch yourself,” she said and gave him a wide grin.

“You’re full of surprises. Smart as Madame Curie, beautiful as Vivian Leigh, a tongue as sharp as Kate’s, and as smooth on
your feet as an angel. What else do you do well?”

“My father was an astronomer,” she replied. “Mount Wilson. I can find all the named stars with a 50-inch telescope, photograph
them, develop the negatives, and construct a photo map of the northern hemisphere’s night sky. My mother was a psychiatrist—the
first female psychiatrist in America. Both my parents believed in giving their child a working knowledge of their disciplines.”

Lockwood smiled easily and yet shivered at the word “psychiatrist.” “Does this mean you can read my mind?”

She made a mocking moue in his direction. “Of course! It’s not hard to see that under your veneer of gentleman, a caveman
lurks—ready to fell the first young miss he spies with his twenty-pound club and drag her back to his cave.”

Myra’s jibe hit too close to home for Lockwood to contain his blush completely. Already tonight the thought of spending the
night in her neat cottage had shot across his mind half a dozen times. He smiled to hide how closely she had hit the target.
Behind her, Lockwood saw their waiter bearing down on their table with their sherry, and he escorted her back.

As he raised his glass to her, Lockwood said, “To a delightful evening.”

She raised hers. “May you find me my bombsight fast, Bill. I miss Baby. It’s going to take me months of work—tedious work—to
rebuild her.”

“What’s your theory of what happened?”

She eyed him sharply. “Tell me what you and the G-men have come up with, and I’ll see if it stirs anything.”

Lockwood unloaded. Myra certainly knew how to listen. She said next to nothing during the ten minutes he covered what he and
Manners had done during the day, only asking for clarification.

The oysters arrived, and for a couple of minutes the bombsight was forgotten as they feasted on the sunny wine and the sea’s
gray dollops.

“Those four elevator keys are the key,” she said.

“That’s what we think. So which one of the three of you should we suspect?”

“Four. Don’t forget Pops. He could have just given them his key—or opened the door himself.”

“Not so easy. Dzeloski’s no dummy. That key ring that Pops carries is welded together, and the Detex system he carries—”

“The what?” she asked.

“Like all guards, Pops has to check in at stations all over the building at certain hours during the night. A clock mechanism
made by a security company called Detex checks him. When he arrives at a station, like Area C, he puts in the Detex key there—it’s
chained to the wall—into the Detex clock he carries, and the clock records where and when Pops makes each station during the
night. His paper record for last night was on target—he was where he was supposed to be.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Suppose he just collected all the keys from the stations along the way and stood in the elevator
with his elevator key in the lock, punching himself in all night long as he helped the thieves make off with Baby?”

Lockwood smiled at her ingenuity. “That’s good, very good.”

“For a woman.”

“For anybody. I don’t think it happened, but it’s easy enough to check. We can see if the chains on the station keys have
been tampered with—usually they can’t be easily removed.”

“But what you really want to know is where Baby is now.”

“Yep. Tell me who would really want her?”

“The Germans. The Italians. Maybe even that Franco. Possibly the Japs.”

Lockwood frowned. “You’re as bad as Manners, and you don’t work for the government. A foreign government would be crazy to
sneak into your place and steal something like this.”

“Not really.”

“Suppose they’d gotten caught? And besides, we’re not involved in this craziness in Europe.”

“What do you mean we aren’t! Don’t you read the papers? Do you think that that man in Berlin is going to be satisfied with
Austria and Czechoslovakia?”

“Come on. Don’t start that liberal stuff.”

“Do you think Franco’s going to be satisfied bombing Barcelona into ruins? The papers last week had interviews with refugees
coming from there into France—wholesale executions again. The Japanese have tasted blood in China. They won’t stop till the
minnow has swallowed the whale—
we’ve
had one world war and
we
had to fight in it, even though we struggled to stay out. It’s going to happen again. If Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, or Hirohito
get Baby, they’re not only going to use it on Paris, London, and Stockholm, but on Washington, New York, and Philadelphia.”

“You get worked up over all this, don’t you?” Lockwood said. “Europe has always had its internal quarrels, and the Orientals—who
can understand what goes through their yellow minds?”

Color rose in Myra’s cheeks, and she threw her napkin onto the table. “I don’t know if I can enjoy your company further, Mr.
Lockwood.”

“Hey, what’s got you so riled up?”

“Your ignorance of world affairs.”

“Politics hasn’t got anything to do with my job out here or our having a good time tonight. Let’s go back to where we were
before you got so het up.”

“No,” she said in a voice that fell like an axe between them. “I care about this world, Mr. Lockwood. It’s the only world
I have. I care about the civilization in Europe—it’s our mother continent. I care about the civilization in China—it reaches
back five thousand years through some of the most gorgeous turns man’s civilization has ever taken. What do you think the
Japanese will leave of it? What do you think the Japanese will do with that bombsight?”