The Infiltrators (3 page)

I said, “I caught up with him, in a manner of speaking. I got to look at him in the morgue after somebody else had shot him.”

“Was that a satisfactory ending to your mission?”

I shook my head. “Not really. The man’s name, the inoffensive name he was going under, was Horace Bixby. He had others. He got off a shot before he was killed. I was too far behind in spite of what I’d learned from your client, Chavez; a day behind. If Bixby hadn’t thrown his first shot a bit, hurrying, or if his victim’s bodyguard had been slow and let him fire again, my mission would have been a total failure. As it was, I could kid myself that Bixby rushed into the job under unfavorable conditions because he sensed I was closing in on him. However, an important man took a nasty little wound and spent unnecessary time in the hospital, something I was supposed to see didn’t happen, since we knew what was planned even if we didn’t know whom it was planned for.” I turned my head to look at her. “It was exactly the opposite situation to the one you’re in, Mrs. Ellershaw.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand. What…?”

“I told you, we’re trying to avoid having you get killed, remember? In your case we’ve learned the person it’s going to be done to, but we don’t yet know who’s been sent to do it.”

She focused the expressionless gray eyes on me. “Don’t con me, man! Why the fuck are you trying to scare me? I mean, it just don’t make no sense!” She heard herself employing the ugly speech with which she’d lived for the past eight years and winced. “I mean, why in the world would anybody want to kill me now, Mr. Helm, after all the time I’ve been locked up in… in that p-place?”

I said, “Presumably because you could do no harm in there, but you’re out of there now.”

“Are you certain it’s me they’re after? How can you be sure? How can you even know that such a thing is being planned?”

“Look, Mrs. E„” I said, “we deal with all kinds of people, mostly nasty people. In fact it’s been said that we’re pretty nasty ourselves. But there’s a certain amount of give and take. Occasionally somebody gives somebody a break and it’s kind of expected that eventually, if the opportunity arises, something will be done in return. In this case, a certain agent let somebody go free maybe he shouldn’t have—apparently the basic assignment was finished and he was avoiding unnecessary complications—and the guy who was let go was grateful enough to get in touch about a week ago with what he considered a good tip.”

“What tip?”

I watched the road ahead as I drove, reproducing the words from memory. “It went something like this, a voice on the phone saying:
Somebody calling himself by a name you’ve been asking about is shopping for talent to hit the dame in the Ellershaw case when she gets out of that federal slammer, and don’t expect any more favors, see, this squares us.
”

After a little, Madeleine Ellershaw shivered abruptly. “What did he mean by a name you’d been asking about?”

“Did you ever hear of anybody named Tolliver?”

I hoped I made the question sound casual enough. The security freaks who’d saddled us with this assignment had thought the name important enough to give us. We might kind of listen for it if we had nothing better to do, they’d said; and if we heard it we should report the circumstances immediately with all relevant details. No, we didn’t need to know why.

“Tolliver?” My passenger’s voice indicated no recognition. “No, it’s sometimes spelled Taliaferro, isn’t it?”

I said, “We don’t know the spelling; we’ve only heard it over the phone.”

“I’m sorry. I know it as a name, of course, but I can’t think of anybody… Is it important?”

I shrugged, and dismissed the subject, a little pompously: “Who knows what is or isn’t important these days, Mrs. Ellershaw?”

She turned her head to study me for a moment, and asked, “To what do I really owe your presence, Mr. Helm?”

I liked the elaborately formal question, which she would have phrased quite differently back in the grim building we’d just left. The woman was digging inside herself for grammar and vocabulary that had been unused for years and trying it out on me; it was a hopeful sign.

“I told you—”

“Yes, you’re supposed to protect me.” She glanced at me sharply. “But why
you
? Why were
you
selected to be nice to the convicted spy and disbarred female attorney when she stumbled out of the joint in her cheap new clothes?” Her voice was flat and expressionless. “Just because we’d met once in the past and you’d bought me a dinner?”

“That was part of it,” I said. “Also, I know a bit about Santa Fe, where you live.”

“Live!” she murmured. “Where do I really
live
now, Mr. Helm? Last permanent residence, Fort Ames, Missouri! I had to sell the house and both the cars and my jewelry… Roy and I lived very nicely, but we didn’t have all that much, really. Two young people with good incomes, we’d assumed a lot of debt for the kind of life we wanted together. We could have handled it easily if everything had gone as we expected, but it didn’t go that way. When Roy disappeared and I was indicted it was like a pretty soap bubble,
pop!
I fought to keep the house, it seemed important to maintain appearances and stay living as I had, but it was more important to keep my freedom—going to jail seemed inconceivably degrading then.” She drew a long ragged breath. “That meant money for the bail. And the legal costs, even though the firm—Mr. Baron—was very generous about conducting my defense. But in the end it all went, the creditors got their share, and my court expenses took care of what was left. I wound up borrowing, too much, from my parents.”

She was silent for a little, watching the blacktop road rushing towards her. I didn’t speak. She drew another long breath and went on.

“They’re dead now, both of them,” she said. “My parents. I was their only child. They’d been very proud of me, of my… my professional success. My happy marriage. This killed them.” After a little, she said, “But I suppose I have to go back there first even though I don’t really want to. I’ll be bound to meet people I know—knew—and I don’t expect to enjoy their reactions when they see what’s become of the clever, clever girl who was going to set the world on fire. I was a bit self-satisfied in those days, I’m afraid. So it’s not something I’m looking forward to, but Dad’s lawyer, old Mr. Birnbaum—I call him Uncle Joe—wrote that he wanted to see me as soon as I got out. Some things still to be done about the estate. There wasn’t much left for me, I understand, just a few thousand, perhaps as much as ten or fifteen, but I guess that won’t go very far these inflated days judging by the little TV I got to watch in there. They gave me everything they could spare while… while it was going on. But it’s better than nothing; it’ll keep me for a little, while I’m figuring out some way of earning a living as… as a rehabilitated criminal who’s paid her debt to society. But God only knows what way.”

I said, “The record shows that while your prison behavior was exemplary in most other respects, you took no advantage of any of the educational or vocational—”

“Educational!” Her voice was suddenly fierce. “After… after all the academic honors,
real
honors, I’d earned, was I supposed to let a bunch of semi-illiterate stumblebums give me a degree in finger painting? Call it being stuck-up, they did, but I couldn’t bring myself to that. And as for vocational, can’t you see that I couldn’t do that? After all the years and all the effort and all the money that had been spent to make me an educated person and a good lawyer, a real professional woman, how could I? Standing in that ghastly shop learning how to set women’s hair! Or even learning how to work a simple computer like a good little office girl! That would have been admitting that… that there was no hope for me at all. That there was no real life left for me, the kind of life I’d been brought up to and educated for. Nothing but a gray tawdry hand-to-mouth existence stretching endlessly off into the dismal future… Of course I was kidding myself. That
is
all that’s left now, isn’t there?”

She was a contradictory mixture of elitist arrogance and hopeless despair. But I was glad to see the arrogance; I’d been afraid that all pride had been knocked out of her. I changed the subject deliberately.

“Did your husband have any distinguishing marks or scars in intimate places, Mrs. Ellershaw?”

She frowned at the sudden switch. “Why do you ask?”

“He disappeared and left you holding the bag, didn’t he? And now somebody wants you dead. Maybe Dr. Ellershaw has surfaced somewhere else with a new identity and a new appearance—plastic surgery, contact lenses, dyed hair—only there’s something he can’t change, something only a wife would know about. And he’s still a wanted man. Maybe he’s afraid that now you’re out you’ll come looking for him, one of the few people in the world who really know what to look for. Did he have any sexual peculiarities that might identify him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t quite know what you mean by that. Physically, well, his penis was perfectly normal, judging by my rather limited experience with penises, if that’s what interests you. Circumcised, if it matters, although he wasn’t Jewish. He had two testicles like half the human race. He liked the mouthy stuff sometimes. A blow job really turned him on.” Her voice kept switching disconcertingly between university refinement and prison vulgarity. “At the time we were married I thought it was… well, quite disgusting. I was terribly shocked when he first suggested it. I was sexually rather innocent and fastidious back in those days. I just liked having my husband on top of me doing it the nice old-fashioned way. The missionary position, I believe it’s called. Warm and cozy. But I loved him very much and I forced myself to do it the way he wanted when I realized it meant a lot to him. I enjoyed being able to please him so much, even though I still found the act itself rather revolting.” She glanced at me coolly. “You see, they have me well trained, Mr. Helm. No matter what intimate and personal and prying questions you ask, Ellershaw will speak right up like a good little felon who’s forfeited all rights to privacy.” After a moment, when I didn’t react to this, she went on: “Several million other men like oral sex, so it doesn’t give you much to go on, does it? Anyway, it’s a bum scenario you’re writing there, man. You’re way off the beam. Roy is dead.”

I drove on through the sunny countryside for a while before speaking. “Yes, I know that’s what you said before the trial, but you never offered any proof, any evidence. And no body has ever been found.”

She laughed shortly. “It’s probably just as well. The way they were acting, they would have tried me for his murder, too. In fact, they thought I was confessing to it when I first told them he was dead. They wanted me to take them straight to where I’d hidden the corpus delictus. Then they decided that I was just engaging in a deliberate campaign of misdirection to cover my own guilt. I don’t think they ever really looked for a dead body, just for a live Roy, the principal in the crime to which I was an accomplice.”

“But you think he was murdered?”

She said, “I know it.”

“How?”

“He never came back, did he? He wouldn’t have done that to me, left me ‘holding the bag,’ as you called it, if he were alive. If would have been strictly impossible for him to do it, just as impossible as for him to hire somebody to kill me, as you just suggested.”

I studied her face for a moment, and returned my attention to the road. “You mean,” I said, “he couldn’t have done it because he loved you?”

She gave me her slow flat glance once more. “That’s exactly what I mean. Don’t sneer at it.”

“I wasn’t sneering, but it’s hardly evidence.”

“It’s evidence to me,” she said firmly. “But of course I always knew, after that first night they had me in jail, that he wasn’t coming back. He died some time after two in the morning—I could have told you more exactly, but they’d taken away my watch, along with my purse and jewelry, when they put me into that cell after questioning me. That was about one-thirty in the morning. I’d never been locked up before in my life. I fell on the cot completely drained and exhausted, too tired even to take my shoes off, but I was too outraged by the way I was being treated, too shocked and angry and frightened, to really sleep. I just kind of half dozed; and suddenly I sat up with a gasp knowing that Roy was dead. He screamed before he died. I heard him.” She threw me a contemptuous glance. “You don’t believe any of this, do you? Nobody believes it. They all think it’s some kind of a trick. They’re all puzzled by what that smart Phi Beta Kappa girl with all those university degrees magna cum laude hopes to achieve by telling such a stupid and implausible story.”

I said without expression, “Last year I was down in Latin America, at some ruins in the jungle. They had an old native high priest there. As a matter of fact, his name was Cortez, just like that restaurant we ate in. One night he called to me to come help him. He was way underground in a cave being beaten by some men, never mind the details, and I was sleeping in a hotel almost a mile away, but I awoke knowing that he’d called me and I had to go. And a lady archaeologist who knew the cave, whom I needed to show me the way, was coming up the path fully dressed when I started for her cabin to wake her. She’d got the same message. Somehow. Don’t tell me what I believe or disbelieve, Mrs. Ellershaw.”

She licked her lips. “All right. Sorry. You’re the first one who hasn’t laughed.”

I said, “You woke up on the cot knowing that you’d heard… felt him scream and die. Go on.”

She swallowed. “It wasn’t
exactly
like that. I might have dismissed it as imagination, something triggered by all the ugly unfamiliar sounds disturbing me in that strange and awful place—at least it was strange to me then. I got to know places like that very well, later.” She gave a sharp, rueful little laugh. “I hadn’t realized how different a jail looks when you’re in there for real, not just as a lawyer visiting a client. But there was something else that made me know what had happened.”

“What?”

“The light had gone out,” she said.

I frowned. “In your cell?”