Murderers' Row (3 page)

I tossed the paper aside and thought about Gail Hendricks. To be sure, our date had been very tentative— as tentative as the leave that had been promised me after the last assignment—but I'd made the mistake of wiring that things looked promising when I first hit Washington, and now I'd had to wire again. She wasn't any Penelope to wait years for her Ulysses.

I heard my people coming well before they reached the door. There were two of them, as I'd been told there would be. The man was delivering Jean right on the dot of ten-thirty, as he was supposed to. She was giving him a loud, drunken argument, as she was supposed to. They paused outside long enough to let me rise and take shelter in the bathroom. Then the door opened.

“I'm all right, I tell you!” Jean was protesting. Her voice was slurred. “Won't you please, please
, please
leave me the hell alone? The way you hang around watching me, anybody'd think I was sick or something—or that somebody didn't trust me!”

The man sounded reasonably sober. He had a young, embarrassed voice. “It's not that, Jean. It's just, well, I'm supposed to stick around and, well, help you through this phase.”

“Just because some snoop saw me taking a little drinkie, I've got to have a guardian!” she complained. “What's the matter, is somebody afraid I'm going to talk too much, or something? What I do to my liver is my own damn business!”

“Please, Jean. Not so loud. Here, let me—”

“Keep your cotton-picking hands off me!” Her footsteps came across the room unsteadily. I heard the bottle rattle against the glass as she poured herself a drink. “Not so loud!” she mimicked. “You're always telling me not so loud! Don't drink so much, don't talk so loud. Like a nice little boy saying please Mama don't make another scene. How old are you, anyway, honey? I swear you make me feel like Mrs. Methuselah!”

The young male voice was stiffly self-conscious. “I don't really think my age is pertinent to the discussion.”

“Pertinent!” She laughed. “Well, I'll talk as loud as I damn please, hear? And I'll talk about what I please! I'll even talk about—Do you know what folks in the know call that house in Washington we operate out of? They call it Murderers' Row, that's what they call it, and a damn good name, too! But we're not supposed to talk about that, are we? Not even in whispers, heavens no! We're not supposed to talk about the house, and if we go there, we can't drive straight to the door even if it's raining. Oh, no, we've got to get out blocks away and make sure nobody's following—”

“Please, Jean! This room hasn't been checked. It may be wired for all we know!”

She paid him no attention. “—and we mustn't ever, ever tell anybody what we really do, not on your life! And of course we mustn't say a word about the horrible gray man who sits in that upstairs office in front of that bright window and sends us out to—no, I won't shut up! If people only knew the dreadful things that are done in the name of peace and democracy! Horrible things!”

I heard her gulp at her drink. The man said hastily, “All right, Jean. All right. We'll talk about it when you're not—when you're feeling better. I'll be going now, but I'll be right next door as soon as I've had a cup of coffee. Call me if you need me. Remember, we're all trying to help you. Just don't make it too hard for us.”

“If thatsh a threat,” she said thickly, “if that's a threat, to hell with you, honey! You don't scare me a bit. You don't scare me one little bitty bit, hear?”

“I didn't mean—good night, Jean.” He seemed to hesitate. “I—er, good night.”

He moved away. The door opened and closed behind him. I glanced at my watch. It read ten-forty. His timing was good and he'd delivered his lines pretty well. But Mac had been right. This was, of course, the kid with the weak stomach—code name Alan—who'd refused to do the job; and I was ready to agree that he'd have botched it. It wasn't a job for a sentimental kid; particularly not a sentimental kid who, by his voice, was desperately in love with the somewhat older agent he'd been assigned to watch.

I now had twenty minutes while he drank his coffee, before witnesses. I pushed the bathroom door aside and went in there. She was standing by the big bed, swaying slightly. From the information I'd been given, the appearance of her room, and the sound of her voice, I'd expected a sodden female bum, but she looked surprisingly good, considering.

She was wearing a simple, long-sleeved black dress with a lot of pearls at the throat—the kind of standard dress-up outfit in which they can look reasonably well-groomed as long as they can stay on their feet and keep their stockings up. She was obviously loaded, sure, but at first glance she looked just like an attractive suburban housewife who'd overestimated her capacity at somebody's cocktail party and would be dreadfully embarrassed in the morning, wondering if anybody'd noticed.

Upon further examination, of course, I could see that the attractive picture was terribly out of focus in a very fundamental way. This wasn't just a pretty woman who'd had one too many, slightly rumpled, apologetic, and appealing. This was—or seemed to be—a real lush, going downhill fast.

“Hello, Jean,” I said, coming forward.

She waited for me to reach her, and looked up. Most women have to, even the tall ones, and she wasn't very tall. She had soft, light-brown hair, a little mussed now, and bright, baby-blue eyes, a little bloodshot. Her hands made a clumsy, mechanical gesture towards tidying the hair, while the eyes searched my face.

I guess she'd been wondering what kind of a guy would be sent to do the job friend Alan had turned down. She'd agreed to have the operation, but she wanted to know that the surgeon was a capable man. It was a reasonable attitude; but she looked hard enough and long enough for me to wonder if she'd forgotten her lines. Then she moistened her lips with her tongue, and said, as she was supposed to, “Who—who are you?”

“Never mind names,” I said. “You can call me Eric if you like. A man in Washington asked me to look you up. He's disappointed in you, Jean, very disappointed indeed.”

“What—what do you want?”

There was a nice note of drunken apprehension in her voice, but she shouldn't have worn those pearls. Close up, I could see that they were too big and perfect to be real, just costume jewelry; nevertheless their luster made her skin look gray and tired. Well, maybe that was the idea.

I felt very sorry for her. The worst assignments aren't the ones requiring you to do something nasty; the worst assignments are the ones demanding that you
be
something nasty, maybe for weeks or months at a time. I'd been through it myself, and I knew the humiliation she must be feeling, seeing herself through a sober stranger's eyes: a sloppy, swaying figure of disintegration and decay.
One day,
she'd be thinking,
one day I'll show this supercilious jerk what I'm really like—that is if I can ever be human again.

It was hard to remember that this unpleasant playacting had a purpose, that it was necessary because a certain man was thought to be held somewhere for eventual transport overseas, with knowledge in his head that threatened the national security. It was hard to remember that this woman, who looked hardly capable of putting herself to bed, was supposed to reach Dr. Norman Michaelis, somehow, and either rescue or destroy him before he could be made to talk about an invention with the unlikely name of AUDAP.

I didn't have any faith in her chances of effecting a rescue single-handed, and I doubted that she did. That left her pretty well committed to the unpleasant alternative, after which she was supposed to get away—extricate herself, as Mac had put it—to tell us all about it. If she couldn't make it, she knew what to do. In the armed forces, you're supposed to be brave, if captured, and tell nothing under any circumstances but your name, rank, and serial number. We're not required to be that brave, thank God. We're merely required to kill ourselves.

It wasn't a future to which anyone would look forward with joy, and I could understand the resignation in her blue eyes. I spoke the lines I had been given to memorize.

“I think you know what I want, Jean. I'm sorry, I really am. Everybody goes through bad periods. It's a lousy, dirty business, and we understand and sympathize, up to a point.”

“A point?” she whispered. “What point?”

I said, “It wasn't nice of you to fool the kid who just left. It wasn't nice, Jean, and it wasn't smart. Why do you think we sent a green youngster to keep an eye on an experienced operative like you? When you seduced him and tricked him—and made contact with certain other people right under his nose—when you did that, you crossed a line. You gave yourself away. We'd been wondering about you. You told us what we needed to know.”

She gasped, “But I haven't really
done
—I haven't really told them—I never meant to go through with—” She swallowed hard. “I was just—a little crazy, I guess.”

“It is,” I said, deliberately, “a form of insanity that we can't afford to tolerate. I'm sorry.”

Don't blame us for the dialogue. Somebody wrote it for us in Washington. Jean stared at me for a moment longer. Her eyes were that china-blue color that never looks real in anyone's but a child's face. They disturbed me, and I saw another disturbing thing: the glass, which she'd kept hidden from me, was full to within an inch of the top with straight whisky—it had to be that, since there was no water nearer than the bathroom, and she hadn't gone in there.

She looked at me, with those odd, blue, child's eyes staring out of the pretty, plump, dissipated woman's face. Then she ducked her head abruptly, and drank down the contents of the glass, shuddered, and set the glass aside. It took her a moment to catch her breath after that massive slug. Well, if she wanted to anesthetize herself at this point, having said almost everything she was supposed to say, I couldn't really blame her.

She licked her lips, and got out her final line with difficulty, “I know—I know, you're going to—to kill me!”

“Not kill, Jean,” I said. “Not kill.”

As I went to work, I was glad for her sake that she had all that alcohol inside her, but I wished she'd stuck to those corduroy pants. She was still kind of attractive in spite of everything. Nicely dressed as she was, it was kind of like taking an axe to the Mona Lisa.

I wasn't halfway through the scientifically brutal roughing-up program Dr. Perry had laid out for me when she died.

It wasn't the worst moment of my life. After all, I've been responsible for the deaths of people I knew and liked: it happens in the business. Although we'd worked for the same outfit, this woman had been a stranger to me. Still, she'd trusted me to know what I was doing, and it's no fun to find yourself holding a corpse and wondering what the hell went wrong.

I caught her as she collapsed, and I felt her fight for breath—for life—and fail to make it. It took only a moment. Then she was dead. I was clumsy about easing her to the floor; I got my watch strap tangled in her necklace. Maybe I was just a bit rattled, too. Anyway, suddenly there were artificial pearls all over the rug. Several strands had been broken by the time I'd managed to lay her down and disentangle myself. The damn beads kept slipping off the broken strings by twos and threes, and rolling about in a nasty alive way while she lay among them, absolutely still. Edgar Allen Poe would have thought it was swell.

I straightened up and took a couple of long breaths and listened. She'd died practically in silence, but it had been a very loud silence, if you know what I mean; and there had been a bit of scuffling before that. It seemed as if somebody outside must have noticed something, but apparently nobody had.

I took another long breath, and knelt down and made a brief examination. There was nothing fundamentally wrong, that I could see, except that she was dead. She was kind of a mess by this time, of course. She was supposed to be. That was what I was there for. The idea had been for her to look spectacularly beat-up—to show how seriously we took her disloyalty—without having anything really broken except a certain bone in the forearm. As Mac had said, she had to have at least one broken bone or they wouldn't buy it. Besides, a nice big cast makes a person look very harmless and helpless, while at the same time it affords concealment for a number of small emergency tools and weapons, properly designed. The surgeon at the local hospital had his instructions...

But I hadn't got that far when she keeled over; and a woman doesn't die from a bruised eye or a cut lip. She doesn't die from a split dress seam or a laddered stocking. I'd been following instructions carefully. Except for the incidental damage to her clothes and necklace, nothing was broken, and she'd lost no significant amounts of blood. She was just dead, lying there.

I rose and went over and sniffed the glass she'd set aside. It smelled of whisky and nothing else. I uncapped the bottle she'd used and tasted the contents cautiously. If there was an adulterant, it had the flavor of whisky, or no flavor at all. Of course, she could have been given something slow-acting in a drink before she came in here, or in her food, if she'd eaten. Or she could have been shot with a poisoned dart, or stuck with a hypo, or bitten by a black widow spider. Or she could simply have died of heart failure.

I grimaced. Matt Helm, boy detective. It didn't matter what she'd died of, for the moment: she was dead. Scratch Jean, agent, female, five feet four, a hundred and thirty pounds. I went to the door and paused to check my watch band for telltale fibers, and my pockets and pants cuffs for beads. I kicked a slim black shoe out of the way, reflecting absently that I'd never yet met a woman, pro or amateur, who could stay in her pumps when the going got rough.

I looked back. If you can do it, you can damn well look at it, no matter how badly you've loused it up. I never trust these delicate chaps who are hell behind a telescopic sight at five hundred yards but can't bear to come up close and see the blood. I gave her a long look, lying there among her spilled pearls. What did I think about—besides wondering, again, what the hell went wrong? Well, if you must know, I thought it would be nice to be in Texas, which is a hell of an attitude, for a good New Mexican.