The Vanishers (3 page)

“Why varnish? Use teak and let it weather, nice and salty.” There was something I had to ask, and I went on: “How’s Amy doing?”

Doug Barnett’s daughter and I had spent some time together, having become acquainted on the mission on which he’d lost his boat. However, she was basically a nonviolent girl, and in the end, like others I’d met of that persuasion, she hadn’t been able to resist trying to reform me; a sure way to kill a pleasant man-woman relationship.

“Amy’s doing fine,” Doug said. “Got herself a new boyfriend much younger and better looking than that ugly tall bastard she was seeing for a while; I forget his name. Schelm or something like that.”

“Good for her,” I said. “Well, keep your whistle wet and your powder dry. Eric out.”

That had been in the morning. After hanging up, I’d returned to the car and concentrated on making miles without catching cops or, more correctly, being caught by them. One would think grown men would have better things to do than hiding in the bushes and jumping out to say “boo” at honest citizens. In the afternoon, an hour from my destination, I stopped to fill up again, and to make another call before entering the Hagerstown danger zone.

This call also went to Florida, but to the other side of the state. I wanted to talk with a reporter on the
Miami Tribune
who’d helped me out before, when I was operating down in that part of the country. I’d tried for him at my earlier phone stop, but he’d been out. It took them a while to track him down this time; then his voice came on the line.

“Meiklejohn.” When I’d identified myself, he said, “Oh, it’s the Jack Daniels man.” I’d given him a bottle by way of thanks the last time I’d consulted him. He went on: “What do you want now?”

“Beilstein comma Janet. An executive-type lady in the computer business, missing. Can you look her up for me?”

“What’s the matter with your Washington sources?”

“They’re in Washington,” I said. “It’s a very nosy city, or hadn’t you heard?”

“Beilstein?” Spud Meiklejohn was silent for a moment, presumably searching his capacious memory. “I remember the story. I’ll have to look it up if you want her undergraduate and advanced business degrees and her complete employment record before she wound up at Electro-Synchronics, Inc., where she worked her way up to executive vice-president. But if you’re satisfied with learning that she’s fifty-two years old and ran off with her twenty-four-year-old tennis pro, and maybe a couple of million, although that’s not been confirmed, there you are.”

“The pro’s name?”

“Emil Jernegan.”

“Had he been around for a while, or did he just appear one day out of the blue, pretty much the way he disappeared? In other words, could he have been planted on her?”

“Well, he’d been on the job for only about six months before he zeroed in on the lady executive who’d started taking his lessons, very charming and attentive. But there seems to be no real mystery about him. Just another good-looking young tennis bum who couldn’t make it competitively and settled for a country-club job. But there seems to be a slight mystery about the Beilstein woman herself.”

“Give.”

“She’d take a few weeks’ vacation a couple of times a year,” Meiklejohn’s voice said in the phone. “She’d come back tanned and tough and healthy, they say, ready to lick her weight in financiers; but she’d never say where she’d been. Or with whom, if anybody. Not really normal for a single woman—well, she’d been married years earlier, but it didn’t take. But most dames back from a glamorous vacation in the sun can’t wait to tell the other girls in the office all about it. Not Mrs. Beilstein. No glowing holiday reminiscences from her.”

“She didn’t take the youthful tennis-playing Tarzan along on these mystery trips?”

“No. The times he was out of town don’t synchronize at all with the times she was.”

“Maiden name?”

“Janet Rebecca Winterholt.”

I said, “Okay, thanks. That’ll hold me for a while. One fifth of Daniels Black coming up.”

Meiklejohn hesitated; then he spoke slowly: “Funny the way people have been disappearing lately, Helm. Not really big important people who’d throw the country in an uproar if they went missing. Just kind of medium-prominent citizens good for a few stories; and always with a plausible reason for vanishing.”

“What are you trying to say?”

He said, “To hell with the thanks and the booze. Just remember me if you come up with something I can use.”

“You’re at the head of the list, amigo.”

The Hagerstown Holiday Inn was expecting me, having been alerted by its opposite number in Knoxville to the fact that one unit of business was heading its way. No mystery about that Helm character. He’d received his marching orders, and he was reluctantly making a detour on his way home to look in on a sick dame in whom his agency was interested. The motel was on the far side of the picturesque little city from the Interstate exit, and I had to buck a long string of traffic lights to reach it; but it turned out to be within a few blocks of the Washington County Hospital, as Mrs. Watrous’ temporary, we hoped, residence was called.

I could have walked over, it was that close, but I didn’t. Nobody followed my car as I drove away from the hostelry that overlooked a four-lane boulevard with a grassy median wide enough to boast some scattered shade trees that were just about to put out leaves. It had been late spring in Mexico and Texas, I remembered; but I’d come a long ways north as well as east. To make sure I was unescorted, I stopped at a shopping center and bought a handful of flowers at an exorbitant price—six tulips at four bucks apiece—and then I got myself lost, not quite accidentally, so that I had to circle around through a maze of little one-way streets to find the hospital. No surveillance yet. It made me feel quite lonely.

I passed up the parking garage across the street and found an open space along the curb a block and a half away. A little walk wouldn’t hurt me. I entered the hospital by the front door, flowers in hand, asked my question at the information desk, and was directed to the third floor. Room 357. I didn’t ask permission there. I just walked in and looked at the woman in the bed, who was a mess. Well, in a hospital they mostly are, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. But this didn’t look like a patient who was making a fine recovery.

Astrid Watrous turned her head to look at me. “Platelets!” she whispered bitterly.

“What?”

“Red blood corpuscles, yes, those I know. White corpuscles I know. But
platelets
?”

“What’s the matter with your platelets?”

“I do not have them. Only a few hundred per… per something, and one should have thousands. The quinine, it killed them. It happens sometimes, so they say. But why is it that everything that sometimes happens now happens to me?”

“I know,” I said without expression. “It isn’t fair, is it?”

She winced. “Now you are cruel. But it is deserved. I am sorry to be so cowardly, but I am not accustomed to illness. It frightens me terribly.”

The accent was intriguing, and she had the mannerisms of a woman accustomed to admiration; but she was under terrible handicaps here. I judged that under favorable conditions, properly dressed, she could have appeared quite youthful and handsome, but in the ugly cotton hospital gown, lying in the mechanized bed hooked up to the usual intravenous plumbing, she looked thin and plain and middle-aged.

The bones of the face were good, but they were much too prominent under the drawn gray skin. The brown eyes were dull and sunken. There was a considerable quantity of fine blonde hair spread over the pillow. It was probably spectacular hair in good times; but it was matted and uncared-for-looking now. I wondered if it was real; true brown-eyed blondes are scarce. Her lips had the dry cracked look that goes with serious illness. They looked as if they didn’t fit her mouth very well, and as if she were very conscious of having picked up the wrong size by mistake.

She licked the ill-fitting lips and moved them around in her face as if trying to get accustomed to them. She whispered, “Over six feet. Bony. Sarcastic. You must be the man called Helm. Washington said you were coming to help, but how can you help?”

“I’m the man called Helm. Is there anything you want that I can get for you?”

“I want to be out of here, but can you get me that? I want to be out before they ruin me completely with their medicines! The runaway heart, that was frightening enough, but…” She drew a ragged breath. “I woke up spitting blood; I must have bitten the inside of my mouth somehow. Just a little, but it will not coagulate properly without the platelets. Who ever heard of those things? They invent strange new small particles all the time! From school I remember only electrons and protons; and look what they do to the atom now; nobody can understand it! And all the idiotic microscopic things they are finding in the blood! But not finding, not enough, in my blood…” She swallowed hard, clearly on the verge of tears. “Look at me! I have the tiny red spots all over me, small hemorrhages under the skin. And they do not know where I may be bleeding inside. Instant hemophilia, all on account of their quinine and their platelets!”

I gestured towards the drip apparatus connected to the needle in her arm. “What are they pumping into you?”

“It is only glucose solution now. They do not want to make a new hole in me if I need another transfusion, so they leave the apparatus in place. They wait to see if I start making my own platelets again or if they must shoot more into me… Are those flowers for me?”

I took a chance on kidding her a bit. “If I can’t find a prettier girl to give them to.”

After a moment, she drew a long breath, pulling herself together with an effort. She made a small, feminine gesture towards ordering her hair, and laughed ruefully.

“No problem,” she said. “Just reach out and take the first female person who walks down the corridor. I am a very stringy and unattractive specimen today; you should have no trouble doing better.” She watched me uncover the flowers; then she grasped the wrist of the hand with which I offered them to her, and drew me closer. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “If I do not live, look around Lysaniemi. Somewhere around there, up above the Pole Circle, the Arctic Circle. Remember Lysaniemi. Say Lysaniemi. But softly, someone may be listening.”

I formed the word clumsily. “Loosanaymie.”

She shook her head impatiently. “Lysaniemi.”

“Leesanaymie.”

She said irritably, “It is terrible, your pronunciation. I thought, from your name, that you were of Swedish descent.”

“Leesanaymie isn’t Swedish.”

“All right, it is Finnish, but most Swedes can pronounce it better than that. You have been in America too long.”

“Hell, I was born here.”

“Some of us keep the old ways, the old languages, nevertheless.” She shrugged, and dismissed my linguistic deficiencies. “Lysaniemi. I heard them talking about it, all snow and ice. They were boasting that it was a place no one would think to search for anyone. But you must find them without me if I never leave this bed. My Alan who is not mine any longer, and his new woman, his dark woman, Hannah Gray. Perhaps he was weary of blondes, and I do not blame him. Find them, help them, set them free. Please. Oh, and investigate Karin Segerby, please.”

“Karin Segerby?”

“You have heard the name. You live in Washington, I was told; and it was in all the Washington papers.”

“I don’t spend much time in that town. The apartment there is just a place I hang my hat between assignments.”

“The newspapers were very cautious, of course. It was about a year ago, when her husband was murdered. She was released on a technicality, but there’s really not much doubt… And no doubt at all, in my mind, that she is the one who gave it to me when we had lunch together in Washington before I started on this trip; gave me the poison that made my heart behave so crazily that very night. That is why I stopped driving early, here in Hagerstown because I was feeling very strange and had to get off the highway. Remember Lysaniemi. Remember Segerby.”

I nodded. There were a great many questions to be asked, and answered; but she seemed to think the room was bugged, and maybe it was. And maybe she just liked to dramatize things.

I asked in normal tones, “Where were you driving when this cardiac thing hit you?”

“To see my parents, in Indiana. To be with them for a little, while I waited to hear about Alan. If there was anything to hear. Your chief said it was all right, I needed to relax, he could reach me there.”

I nodded. “What are they giving you for the heart now?”

“Well, if it means anything to you, they gave me a steroid last night, Solu-Cortef, to build me up, I suppose, after tearing me down so badly. But for the heart they are trying something called Procaine or Procan. Yes, Procan SR.” She drew a long breath. “The flowers are very beautiful, Mr. Helm. We must give you a medal for valiant floral service beyond the call of duty. Really, it was sweet of you. I will call and have something brought to put them in…”

After the tulips had been cared for, we talked a little longer. Quite steady now, completely under control, she asked me to do something about her car. It was in the hospital parking lot that wasn’t supposed to be used by patients, just staff. However, sick and frightened in the middle of the night, with her heart going crazy, she’d just left the car in the nearest vacant spot a few steps from the emergency entrance and stumbled inside to get help. She’d been told that the physician whose space she’d taken would like it back.

She also asked me to settle up for her at the motel. She’d asked them to hold the room for her when she headed for the hospital. After giving her directions, the night man at the desk had offered to find somebody to drive her, she said, but she’d thought she could make it by herself since it was so close, and she had. But now, with this stupid reaction, it looked as if she was going to have a long siege here, so she’d like me to check her out and pack her things and bring them to her, not forgetting her coat in the closet and her toilet things in the bathroom. I said I probably wouldn’t find it too much of a strain, since, not quite by coincidence, it was the motel in which I was staying.