The Vanishers (4 page)

Then I went out to find a doctor. The general-type physician in charge of the case referred me to the heart specialist, who, fortunately, was in the building. I had to pull a little rank before, a busy man, he’d stand still for my questions; but after seeing the impressive ID we carry, designed specifically to be brandished at such moments, he became quite pleasant and cooperative.

“Yes, it’s possible,” he said in answer to my question. “Melodramatic, of course, but possible. An overdose of thyroid might do it, but I think the effect would be hard to predict. However, there are other medications… I’d rather not commit myself until I’ve checked some authorities, Mr. Helm. Do you really suspect, shall we say, foul play?”

I said, “I’ll grant that it seems a clumsy way to commit murder. But our organization does make enemies, Doctor; and we like to investigate any mysterious accidents or illnesses involving anyone associated with us, even temporarily.”

A lean dark gent in a white coat, he studied me shrewdly with cynical brown eyes. “I didn’t catch exactly what your organization is.”

I grinned. “You weren’t supposed to. But if you’re worried about my credentials, I’ll give you a number to call in Washington and let my chief reassure you.”

He regarded me a moment longer, and laughed shortly. “I guess that won’t be necessary. We’re not dealing with state secrets. I’ll do a little research and let you know what I find out. You’ll be around for a few days?”

“Until Mrs. Watrous is released.”

“We want to keep her long enough to make certain there aren’t any more surprises and that she’s recovering well from this one. And that the new treatment is doing its job.”

“If her attack was artificially induced, will she be able to stop taking pills eventually, or is her pulse-rate mechanism, whatever you call it, permanently screwed up?”

“If a cardiac accelerator was used, the patient should be able to come off the medication fairly soon. But frankly, Mr. Helm, I’m not taking the possibility very seriously. It seems pretty cloak-and-dagger to me.”

“That’s the name of the game, sir.” I hesitated. “There’s no way somebody could have given her a fake quinine reaction, I suppose. Or a real one?”

He looked shocked. “Here in the hospital? I think your melodrama is running away with you! But I’ll look that up for you, too, just to set your mind at rest.” He smiled sourly. “And mine, now that you’ve made the suggestion,”

I found Astrid Watrous’ car in the staff parking lot. A dignified maroon color, it was a plushy Buick sedan that, although smaller than the impressive barges that used to wear the name, felt like an aircraft carrier after what I’d been driving.

But I wasn’t too preoccupied with driving the unfamiliar car to note that a white Honda had been behind me from the moment I left the hospital. On that short run, it could have been a coincidence, but I wouldn’t have bet a lot of money on it.

Mrs. Watrous’ room had, of course, been tidied up. The beds were made and the loose clothes that weren’t on hangers were folded on a chair. Her nightie hung on a hook behind the bathroom door, presumably the work of a conscientious maid, since it seemed unlikely that she’d have taken time to dispose of it so neatly, herself, when the heart-flutters hit. It was, I noted, being that kind of a guy, quite a pretty nightie. Packing it away in her suitcase, I saw some other intimate stuff that also looked sexy and expensive. A satin-and-lace lady after my own heart, I reflected; but I wished I were as sure of her motives as I was of her lingerie.

With her smart brown spring coat over my arm and her suitcase in my hand, I left the room. I made my way to my own and managed to work the key in spite of my burdens. Entering, I turned to set the suitcase back by the door where it would be out of the way.

“Just stay like that, right there!” said a strained voice behind me. “I have a gun! Don’t straighten up! Don’t move a muscle!”

“Is it okay if I breathe?” I asked.

The shaky voice told me that I had an amateur behind me, and a female amateur at that. Under the circumstances, there were various actions I could have taken with some hope of success. Although we’re taught that docile submission to a firearm is seldom an acceptable option, Hollywood and the cops to the contrary notwithstanding, I could have played along a bit, hoping to get close enough to disarm her. Or I could have slung the suitcase at her legs and flung the coat at her head and dived aside, pulling my own gun to shoot her dead.

Dealing with a man, I would probably have done one or the other, gambling that, although I might incur some damage in the hassle, it wouldn’t be fatal. However, the fact that there was a woman behind me made it, I decided, unnecessary to take the risk. A man, particularly a novice, holding a gun on another man, expects to have the situation under control. If his control is challenged, his pride is hurt, and anything can happen. The Wild Bill Hickok syndrome. With a woman, you don’t have that kind of macho pride to contend with. Maybe.

All this went through my mind almost instantaneously as I crouched there. After all, the mental computer was programmed for situations like this, we’d been here before. The girl behind me—at least she sounded young as well as scared—started to speak again; but she had nothing more to say that I needed to hear. I released the handle of the suitcase and straightened up very slowly.

“I told you not to move!”

The voice was shrill; I hoped the trigger finger was less nervous. I reached out deliberately and grasped the knob of the door, which had closed automatically. I opened the door.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Moving with infinite care so as not to startle her, feeling very vulnerable in the spinal area, I stepped away from her, one deliberate step at a time, out into the Maryland spring night—it had got quite dark outside by this time. No bullets followed me. The door sighed closed behind me.

I drew a shuddering breath and told myself angrily that a stupid young bitch who’d never learned not to brandish a firearm she wasn’t going to shoot ought to be turned over somebody’s knee and spanked; and if nobody else would correct the serious flaws in her upbringing, I might even take her in hand myself, as a public service. It occurred to me that, dumb as she seemed to be, she might actually be foolish enough, now that the ambush had failed, to flee the joint heedlessly, weeping bitter tears of frustration. I moved to the side and waited by the door, holding Astrid Watrous’ nice brown spring coat in both hands like a bullfighter’s cape.

I’d judged the idiot female correctly. I didn’t even have to wait very long. Soon the door opened cautiously. Seeing the coast apparently clear, a smallish, white-clad blonde girl sidled out, or started to. I noted that her hands were empty, but the right was steadying a large white shoulder-strap bag. I didn’t waste time carrying the inventory further; I simply stepped out in front of her and wrapped the coat, and my arms, about her head. I marched her, blinded and stifled, backwards into the room, and hooked a heel behind her ankle, and slammed her to the rug, letting my two hundred pounds—well, I might have picked up a little additional weight on that Mexican food—land heavily on top of her. I heard the door close automatically, and the latch click.

It took me a tense moment or two to get a grip on the purse. I yanked it free and slung it across the room. The girl was getting back some of the breath driven out of her by the fall. She’d liberated herself from the smothering coat, and she was starting to fight me, but although she was strong enough to cause me trouble, she didn’t really know how. I clamped a grip on her neck, knuckles digging into a certain pain center under the ear in a certain way. I heard her gasp in agony. Her resistance ceased. I rose to one knee and, shifting my grasp to take her by the scruff of the neck like a puppy, hauled her across the other knee, facedown. Pinning her there left-handed, I raised my right hand to warm her bottom as she deserved. Then I dropped my hand again.

I mean, it was getting through to me at last that this was a very female little body with which I, a male, was wrestling. The rump was particularly delicious in snug white slacks. Even though I don’t go for dames in pants as a rule, I’ve been known to make exceptions. And for a gent my age to convince himself that he’s walloping the shapely ass of a girl her age strictly in the interest of education and discipline, with no irrelevant biological considerations whatever, isn’t easy. I stood up abruptly, dumping her to the floor. She sprawled there for a moment, clearly afraid to make a move lest it be the wrong move. At last, finding herself unraped, unshot, unwhipped, and unkicked, she sat up, regarding me warily through a veil of white-blonde hair.

“Get your purse,” I said. “Get the gun out of it and put it over there, on the table by the window. Anything else you care to do with it, or try doing with it, be my guest. But remember, I’m just looking for an excuse to shove it up your anus, butt first.”

She remained sitting for a moment longer, waiting for her breathing to subside. Then she got to her feet, a little awkwardly. She moved across the room and picked up the shoulder-strap bag. Showing a gleam of intelligence for a change, she turned to face me so I could see what she was doing, before opening it. She took out a tiny black pistol, neither a revolver nor an automatic, but a two-shot derringer. She crossed the room and placed it on the table as directed.

“Now let’s try you on something hard,” I said. “The coat. We can’t leave a nice coat lying on the floor getting all wrinkled, can we? Hang it up neatly over there in the closet corner by the bathroom. Oh, and there’s a nice little twenty-five caliber automatic right there in my open suitcase. By all means go for it if you like. I haven’t had a good gunfight all week.”

She wanted to protest against being ordered around so rudely and sarcastically, but a little common sense seemed to have fought its way to the surface through the thick layers of stupidity. She contented herself with a resentful glare, and picked up the coat. While she was taking it across the room, I examined her weapon. Two stubby black barrels; actually a solid, gun-shaped little block of metal bored with two holes, one above the other. A small curved butt that, with a hand of any size, wouldn’t accept a full complement of fingers. If you held the gun normally, the pinky would be left waving in the breeze; but you don’t shoot a derringer normally. You lay your trigger finger along the barrels, and point it at the cheating sonofabitch across the poker table, and pull the trigger with the middle finger.

The old-time gamblers wore them up their sleeves, or maybe in special leather-lined pockets of their embroidered waistcoats. The best-known specimens came in .41 caliber, throwing a big blob of lead without much velocity or accuracy; but how much do you need across a pile of marked cards? However, this was a modern job in .22 Magnum, an oddball rimfire cartridge that has considerably more punch than the standard .22 but still not enough to loosen the fillings in your teeth when you fire it. Incidentally, the derringer was first invented or at least popularized, we’re told, by a guy named Deringer. Nobody seems to know where the extra
r
came from.

“May I…” On the other side of the room, having put Astrid Watrous’ coat on a hanger, the girl hesitated, embarrassed. She spoke stiffly, avoiding my eyes: “I would like to use the toilet, if I may.”

I refrained from grinning. After the suspense of waiting for me to walk in so she could wave her horrid gun at me, and the shock of being roughly manhandled, she undoubtedly did need to go. And while it was necessary for me to bully her a bit to keep her from getting independent and doing something else stupid, there was no need to humiliate her about a simple call of nature.

“Help yourself,” I said.

She disappeared into the bathroom. Waiting, I finished checking the diminutive weapon in my hand. It broke open like a double-barreled shotgun, but reluctantly, with the stiffness of a brand-new weapon. Two brass cartridge heads showed in the twin chambers. I picked out the loads, closed the gun, and tried the trigger pull. The old-time derringer had a hammer that had to be cocked before each shot. Since the hard work was done with the thumb, the trigger finger had a relatively easy job. With this modernized, hammerless version, however, you simply hauled back on the trigger, cocking and firing the piece in a single operation—a very tough operation. It was the longest, roughest, heaviest double-action pull I’d ever met on a weapon, well over twenty pounds. It made me feel a little foolish. I’d really been in no danger. Even if she’d managed to fire the little monster, using both hands, the chances of her hitting anything while struggling against that incredible mainspring were practically nonexistent.

I reloaded the gun and dropped it into my jacket pocket. I looked into the big purse she’d also left on the table. There was a box of .22 Magnum cartridges inside, full except for the two in the gun, no practice rounds missing. I pocketed that as well. There was also, among the standard feminine junk, a passport. I examined it quickly. It was Swedish, issued to a female person born twenty-four years ago next June—a female person named Karin Agneta Segerby.

I stood for a long moment looking down at the little book in my hand. I had to hand it to her, she took a good picture. Any girl who can look pretty in a passport photo ought to grab the first plane to Hollywood. She looked cute and bright. Karin Segerby. The girl I was supposed to investigate if Astrid Watrous died. The sinister female who’d probably murdered her own husband and poisoned Astrid Watrous. According to Astrid Watrous. I grimaced, and dropped the passport back where I’d found it, and checked through her wallet quickly, finding nothing that didn’t agree with her identity as a Swedish girl temporarily residing in Washington, D.C., U.S.A. She seemed to be employed by a firm called Nordic Textiles, Ltd.

She emerged from the bathroom and came across the room and stopped in front of me in a challenging way, letting me know that, having dealt with her most urgent problem, she was now prepared to endure some more of my petty harassment. We faced each other like that for a moment. She wasn’t actually tiny, I realized. She just had the kind of compact female body that’s so nicely proportioned that it looks smaller than it is. Her waist was slim enough to keep her from appearing sturdy. She had a tomboy face without looking the least bit boyish, if you know what I mean, with a short nose and a generous mouth. Her eyes were very blue, shading to violet. Her complexion was breathtaking. If you could have bottled and sold it, you’d have made a fortune. Her hair, as I’d already noted, was pale blonde. It was cut moderately short, and it was reasonably tidy again. Well, with that kind of a hairdo, a shake of the head will do it.