Thefts of Nick Velvet (22 page)

“I called him,” Sam said. “We needed the thirty thousand to pay your fee. The only way we could get it was from Solar. So I told him we’d have the manifest here at seven o’clock. I left the front door unlocked and told him to bring $80,000. I figured $30,000 for you and the rest for us.”

“What happened?”

“Terry arrived about twenty minutes ago and found him dead. It looks like he’s been stabbed.”

“You’re trying to tell me you didn’t kill him?”

“Of course not!” Sam said, a trace of indignation creeping into his voice. “Do I look like a murderer?”

“No, but then you don’t look like a kidnaper either. You had the best reason in the world for wanting him dead.”

“His money would have been enough revenge for me.”

“Was it on him?”

“No,” Terry answered. “We looked. Either he didn’t bring it or the killer got it first.”

“What am I supposed to do with this manifest?” Nick asked bleakly.

“It’s no good to me now. I can’t get revenge on a dead man.”

“That’s your problem. You still owe me thirty thousand.”

Sam held his hands wide in a gesture of helplessness. “We don’t have the money! What should I do? Give you the mortgage on this house that’s falling apart? Be thankful you got something out of Max Solar before he died.”

Ignoring Nick, Terry asked, “What are we going to do with the body, Sam?”

“Do? Call the police! What else is there to do?”

“Won’t they think we did it?”

“Maybe they’ll be right,” Nick said. “Maybe you killed him, Terry, to have the money for yourself. Or maybe Sam killed him and then sneaked out to let you find the body.”

Both of them were quick to deny the accusations, and in truth Nick cared less about the circumstances of Max Solar’s death than he did about the balance of his fee, and he saw no way of collecting it at the moment.

“All right,” he said finally. “I’ll leave you two to figure out your next move. You know where to reach me if you come up with the money. Meanwhile, I’m keeping this manifest.”

He drove south, toward Manhattan, and though the night was turning chilly he left his window open. The fresh air felt good against his face and it helped him to sort out his thoughts. There was only one other person who’d have the least interest in paying money for the manifest, and that was Herbert Jarvis.

He headed for the Wilson Hotel.

Jarvis was in his room packing when Nick knocked on the door. “Well,” he said, a bit startled. “Velvet, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Can I come in?”

“I have to catch a plane. I’m packing.”

“So I see,” Nick said. He shut the door behind him.

“If you’ll make it brief, I really am quite busy.”

“I’ll bet you are. I’ll make it brief enough. I want thirty thousand dollars.”

“Thirty …! For what?”

“This copy of the ship’s manifest for the
S.S. Florina
. The only copy that shows it’s carrying a cargo of rifles.”

“The business with the manifest is between you and Solar. He hired you.”

“Various people hired me, but you’re the only one I can collect from. Max Solar is dead.”

“Dead?”

“Stabbed to death in a house uptown. Within the past few hours.”

Jarvis sat down on the bed. “That’s a terrible thing.”

Nick shrugged. “I assume he knew the sort of men he was dealing with.”

“What’s that mean?” Jarvis asked, growing nervous.

“Who do you think killed him?” Nick countered.

“That computer programmer, Sam, I suppose. That’s his house uptown.”

“How do you know it’s Sam’s house? How do you know about Sam?”

“Solar was going to meet him. He told me on the telephone.”

It all fell into place for Nick. “What did he tell you?”

“That Sam wanted money for the manifest. That you were working for Sam.”

“Why did he tell you about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s take a guess. Could it have been because the check you gave him was no good? A man with Solar’s world-wide contacts could have discovered quickly that there was no money in South Africa to cover your check. In fact, you’re not even from South Africa, are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You told me you’re an artist, and since you volunteered the information I assume it’s true. But you said you have a studio in Capetown with a fine north light. Artists like north light because it’s truer, because the sun is never in the northern sky. But of course this is only true in the northern hemisphere. An artist in Capetown or Buenos Aires or Melbourne would want a studio with a good
south
light. Your studio, Jarvis, isn’t in Capetown at all. It would have to be somewhere well north of the equator.

“And if you lied about being from South Africa, I figured the check drawn on a South African bank is probably phony too. You reasoned that once the arms shipment was safely out to sea there was no way Solar could blow the whistle without implicating himself. But when he learned your check was valueless, he phoned you and probably told you to meet him at Sam’s house with the money or he’d have the cases of guns taken off the ship.”

“You’re saying I killed him?”

“Yes.”

“You are one smart man, Velvet.”

“Smart enough for a two-bit gunrunner.”

Jarvis’ right hand moved faster than Nick’s eyes could follow. The knife was up his sleeve, and it missed Nick’s throat by inches as it thudded into the wall. “Too bad,” Nick said. “With a gun you get a second chance.” And he dove for the man.

He remembered the address of Sam’s house and got the phone number from a friend with the company. Sam answered on the first ring, sounding nervous, and Nick asked, “How’s it going?”

“Velvet? Where are you? The police are here.”

“Good,” Nick said, knowing a detective would be listening in. “You did the right thing calling them. I don’t know why I’m getting you off the hook, but tell them Solar’s killer is in Room 334 at the Wilson Hotel on Seventh Avenue.”

“You found him?”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “But he didn’t have any money either.”

“N
ICKY,” GLORIA SAID ONE
evening, looking up from her beer, “you never take me anywhere.”

Nick Velvet, relaxing in the back yard as he soaked up the mild April weather, asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“Well, you’re always traveling
some
place—Paris, London, Florida, California, Las Vegas. And never with me.”

“I take you sailing on the Sound.”

“But that’s in the summer. I want to go somewhere
now
, Nicky.”

He sighed and put down his glass. Perhaps she was right. He had been neglecting her. “Where can we go in April?”

She thought about it for a moment. “How about Washington to see the cherry blossoms? We haven’t been back there since we first met.”

It was true. He’d taken Gloria to Washington for a weekend ten years ago, when they were just getting to know one another. It had been a busy ten years for Nick, but for Gloria the time had brought only a monotonous sameness centered around their house and boat. “Sure,” he said, making a quick decision. “Let’s fly down for a week. We’ve got nothing to keep us here.”

They arrived in Washington on a sunny Monday morning, rented a car at the airport, and drove downtown to one of the newer hotels. Nick guided Gloria to the registration desk through a lobby bristling with diplomats and businessmen. They registered as Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Velvet, as they had ten years before, and were given a room on the seventh floor.

“The city has changed, Nicky,” Gloria said as she stood by the window overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Some,” he admitted. “But the country has also changed in the last ten years.”

“Let’s go look at the cherry blossoms.”

He still felt good with Gloria walking at his side. She had retained the vigor that first attracted him to her, and a decade’s time had actually improved the loveliness of her face. He always felt a touch of pride when others turned to look at her as they strolled by.

It was a good day, a reminder of how it had been when they first met. But when they returned to the hotel he was surprised to find a message awaiting him, giving only a phone number to call. “Who knows you’re here, Nicky?” Gloria asked. “We didn’t tell anyone we were coming.”

“I’ll see who it is.”

While Gloria stepped into the bathroom he sat on the edge of the bed and dialed the number he’d been given. The phone at the other end rang twice and was answered by a gruff-voiced man. “Yes?”

“I was given this number to call.”

“Would you be Nick Velvet?”

“That’s correct.”

The voice relaxed into friendliness. “I’m Sam Simon, the columnist. This is my private line. I have to see you.”

“How did you know I was in Washington?”

“My staff checks all hotel arrivals. It’s often good for an item.”

“I’m no item,” Nick said. “I’m on vacation.”

“This is business. I want to hire you.”

“For what?”

Sam Simon sighed. “I don’t think it’s wise to be more specific. Not on a telephone. Let’s just say it’s your specialty. You’re a famous guy in some circles, you know.”

Nick glanced up at Gloria as she re-entered the room. “All right, I’ll meet you.”

“My office, tomorrow morning at ten. I’m on Virginia Avenue. I’ll give you the number.”

Nick jotted it down and hung up to face Gloria.

“What was all that, Nicky?”

“Some business. A man who heard I’d checked in offered me a job.”

“Nicky, we’re here on vacation!”

“I know. But it just involves running over to Maryland to look at a new plant site. Maybe I could do it in the morning and be back in a few hours. You could take one of those bus tours that stops at the White House and the F.B.I.”

“Without you?”

“Then wait for me. It’s just tomorrow morning, and I won’t be long. I promise.”

Sam Simon was a little man with a balding head and sharp, deep-set blue eyes. Nick had read his column on Washington politics occasionally in the New York papers, and had often seen his name mentioned in other news dispatches. Some called him a second Jack Anderson in his ability to ferret out leaks in government departments. He stopped at nothing in what he printed. “It’s investigative journalism,” he once told a critic. “Hell, if it won the Pulitzer Prize for Anderson it can do the same for me!”

Now he sat behind a desk cluttered with newspapers and books and the latest wire-service dispatches, flanked on his right by a handsome young assistant with long hair and a bushy mustache. “Glad to meet you, Velvet,” Sam Simon said abruptly. “Good of you to come. This here’s Ronnie Arden, my legman and Number One writer. On days when I’m too lazy to do a column, he takes over for me.”

“Glad to meet you both,” Nick acknowledged. “But as I told you on the phone I’m here on vacation.”

“We want a job done,” Sam Simon said, ignoring Nick’s resistance. “Your kind of job.”

“What kind is that?”

Ronnie Arden answered. “You’re a thief, Velvet. Let’s quit playing games. You’re, a thief and we want something stolen.”

Nick smiled: “I only steal things of no value. I couldn’t take government documents or anything like that.”

“Would a bag of garbage be valueless enough for you?” Arden asked.

Nick turned to look at Simon. “Is that it? A bag of garbage?”

“Yes.”

“I charge twenty thousand dollars. For that kind of money you could buy a truck and collect it yourself.”

“There are—well, complications,” the columnist admitted.

Nick wasn’t surprised. In his business there were always complications. “The garbage is at the Bureau of Engraving?”

“No, no! It’s real refuse, of value to no one.”

“No one but you.”

Sam Simon smiled. “No one but me. Tell him about it, Ronnie.”

The mustached man cleared his throat, as if about to deliver a lecture. “The refuse is that of General Norman Spangler, the President’s adviser on foreign affairs.”

“Military secrets are out of my line.”

“No military secrets. I’m sure he has a paper shredder at his office for those. This would be at his home—the apartment where he and his wife live alone. He’s on the fourth floor of the Potomac Arms, just a few blocks from Watergate.”

It was almost two years since the Watergate scandal first burst on the Washington scene. Careers had been destroyed, men had been imprisoned, some of the highest officials of the government had resigned and been replaced. “I don’t want any part of another Watergate,” Nick said. “My business doesn’t lend itself to testifying before Senate committees.”

“This isn’t another Watergate,” Ronnie Arden said. “You can take our word for it.”

“Where does the general dispose of his trash?”

“That’s the problem. That’s why we need you. Every morning he waits for the mail to arrive. It comes early, around nine, because the building has it picked up at the post office. Spangler checks his mail, leaves his apartment a few minutes later, then drops his daily bag of garbage down the incinerator chute. Then he gets his car and drives to the White House, arriving at his desk by nine thirty.”

“Incinerator chute,” Nick mused. “I see.”

“Naturally he can’t know his garbage is being stolen, so you can’t hold him up or take it by force.”

“Which day do you want it?”

“We don’t know exactly. Let’s say every day for a week, starting tomorrow.”

“That might cost you more than twenty thousand. It would mean more than one theft.”

Arden glanced at his boss. “Can we go a little higher?”

“We can go higher if you deliver what we need, Velvet. Twenty should buy us the first two days, at least.”

“Agreed.” They shook hands and Nick started for the door. Then, as a final thought, he turned and asked, “How is security at the Potomac Arms? I’m sure you’ve checked it out.”

“No problem once you get by the doorman. And that shouldn’t be difficult for you.”

Nick nodded and left.

The problem was with Gloria.

He’d never had her along on a job before, and the idea of sneaking off for two mornings and leaving her alone was something he hadn’t reckoned with.