The Half-Million Dollar Decoy
by C. S. Park
Decoys are of many kinds, human and inhuman, or perhaps I mean real and artificial, or live and dead? Suit yourself in classifying this one.
You don’t feel everything at once if you happen to be looking down on mangled flesh that a few minutes before had been warm and eager under your hands and lips. You can’t. You’re numb.
John Randolph could see her in the light of the flickering flames without bending, because the top of the big car had been peeled back like skin under a surgeon’s knife.
She had been wearing a light blue dress. It had been blown away. There was a kind of yellow tint to the part of her that was not bloodied or blackened. It was the same on the soft skin of her inner thighs as it was on that part of her face that had been left intact. Her shoes had been torn from her feet. Her feet pointed backward.
The big, heavy, expensive automobile that had been the very best in strength, beauty, and durability was now only twisted hot metal mingled with the once yearning flesh of a young and quick woman.
Reluctantly, John Randolph gave back before the heat of the flames that soon formed Henrietta Smetana’s unexpected funeral pyre...
Randolph knew he could never erase that scene from his mind. He stood now at the bar of the old Alhambra Hotel, just around the corner from the explosion site. The bar was drab and dingy and empty in this early evening. He held bourbon and branch. His hand shook. The odor of burning flesh seemed forever seared into his nostrils.
Beside him stood Vincente Gomez, chief of the Santo Tomas Police Department. Compared with big Randolph, he was a small, comic-opera figure in a fancy uniform.
He said, “This is a better place to talk than back there on that terrible dark street. The cries of the injured are distressing. You are lucky not to have been hurt.”
The liquor was doing its work on Randolph, loosening the tightness in his chest and stomach. Henrietta’s vibrant kiss had still been tingling on his lips when she had died. In shocked daze he had done what he could to help the stunned and bleeding residents of the street until more competent medical help had arrived. Now reaction was making him weak.
“I was with Henrietta, right here. I couldn’t have put a bomb in her car.”
“You might have kept her busy while someone else did the job.”
A year ago, Randolph had been stationed at the United States Customs House across the border from this tired Mexican village. From then, he knew that Gomez’ improbable uniforms covered a shrewd investigator and a very tough man.
“She was a lovely woman, Vincente,” he said. “Why would I want to kill her?”
Gomez nodded. “Why? Shall we start at the beginning?”
“I saw her the first day I arrived at the Project — Los Alamos. She was the wife of the most important scientist there: Baruch Smetana. Randolph finished his drink. She was very much interested in the Mexican border. Particularly Santo Tomas. That gave us something in common.”
Gomez said wryly, “You were seen embracing beside the car just before the explosion. Was that the atmosphere of romantic old Mexico, or an affair of long-standing?”
Stolidly, Randolph said, “She was never allowed to go anywhere without Smetana. He watched her all the time. He looks like a big fat toad with glasses. He is nothing but a big brain, with the rest of him completely out of touch with the world. He has no human feelings. He looks like the monsters he creates, and he used to beat Henrietta until she really hated him.”
Dryly, Gomez suggested, “A young, beautiful woman forced to live with a man like that. A perfect set-up for an eager young man. Why was she here?”
“Smetana and Henrietta left the Project on the same day I did. Everybody thought they were going to New York. But she was the first person I saw when I checked in at the La Osa guest ranch.”
“You didn’t know she had already been on the border for a week? You didn’t come to Santo Tomas to meet her?”
“I came to renew old acquaintances. Yours, for example.”
“I only brought you bad luck, John.”
He meant, Randolph knew, that although theirs had been a profitable association for Gomez, it had gotten Randolph into trouble. A year or so ago, acting upon information furnished by Gomez, Randolph had seized several thousand dollars worth of Swiss watch movements. Gomez had spent the informer’s fees to which he was entitled on himself and Randolph right here in the Alhambra’a tap room. The staid Bureau of Customs, learning about that, considered Randolph’s participation highly irregular. While they were debating what to do about it, Randolph quit. Subsequently, he went to work in the Security Division at Los Almos, instructing the guards in target-shooting.
Randolph said, “For some reason, she wanted me to meet her here at the Alhambra. It was her idea that we drive around in her car and talk afterward. Not mine.”
“But you were walking away from her car when the bomb went off. Why?”
“I was going to drive my car back to the Custom House and get it off your dark streets. She was going to pick me up there.”
“Why hadn’t you both come over in her car, or yours?”
“She said she had an errand to run and might be delayed.”
Gomez sucked the last drop of beer from his glass. “So here was the golden opportunity? Clandestine romance?”
“She seemed — well, excited.”
“And you think meeting you excited her?” Gomez shook his head slowly.
“Who else?”
Gomez said, “You know me, Juanito. If something doesn’t ring true, I investigate it. I was interested in Henrietta, but she was too busy to get acquainted. Busy at what? So I kept her under surveillance. I listened in on a call she placed to Los Alamos.”
“It would be natural that she place a call to there. She had friends and acquaintances there.”
“Is the Director of the Security Division her friend?”
“My boss.” Randolph hadn’t known they were acquainted.
“She told him,” Gomez said slowly, “that she knew where an atomic device was being introduced into the United States in the next twelve hours. For the full amount of the reward authorized by some Atomic Weapons Reward Act, she would tell when and where it was to cross the border. That, incidentally, was ten hours ago. There are about two left.”
“It was a shake-down,” Randolph said, but was disturbed, nevertheless. “A half-million dollar shakedown.”
“She told him to arrange to have one man, authorized to negotiate, s sent to Santo Tomas. Was she wrong in thinking that it was you?”
“So you disappointed Henrietta,” Gomez said. “You weren’t the man she thought you were.”
“They wouldn’t send a security guard on a mission like that,” Randolph said. “I imagine the Director contacted the Atomic Energy Commission for instructions. It’s a cinch you couldn’t simply call up, like Henrietta did, and expect someone to show up with a half-million dollars, a few hours later. There would be at least an elementary investigation. One could be going on right now. Probably is.”
Gomez didn’t say anything for a while. When he did, he was on another subject. “I didn’t consider you seriously as a suspect in the explosion, John. But I’m thinking you might be marked down as another victim of the bomber.”
Randolph felt quick, driving anger. “I’d like to get my hands on—”
“So would I,” Gomez cut in. “My prime suspect is a man named Conrado Suarez. They call him El Cubano. A skinny man, a machinist by trade, with radical ideas about government and who has a police record. He operates the machine shop right across from where Henrietta was killed.”