“We’d still want to know ‘Why?’ We’ll find out. We’re all tired of Hinschelman. Nobody favored releasing him but you.”
“Me, the warden, and the parole board.”
“Yeah, invite them all over, drink some warm beer. You’ll keep us posted, naturally.”
“I always do,” smiled Seal.
He returned to the arcana that Fingers had lifted from the school. Straddling a heap of minor mysteries was the reasoning behind the theft of these things. On the film slides were microscopic rows of scriptography, indecipherable without a projector. Mimeographed were alphabetical rosters (‘N’ into ‘O’) tom at random from a loose-leaf notebook listing donors and foreign foster children of the charity fund. He read the five pages. Here, in the orphan column, might be something worth driving over to his Uncle Malcolm’s about.
He was folding the pages when a penciled notation on the back of one caught his eye. It was in Hinschelman’s handwriting. It said: “Ubiquity Mailing Service, San Francisco.” Miss Springer had mailed a package to that address. He opened his address book and dialed a San Francisco friend.
“… ALL IN STEP NOW, THIS IS RUSSIA, ONE AND TWO AND LENINGRAD; CAREFUL, KEVIN, WATCH THE NORTH SEA, NO WET FEET AND HUP TWO THREE…”
“What in God’s name?” asked Stout.
“Nursery school over there,” the Inspector said. This park bench was well back, farther back than yesterday’s, behind the oleander bushes near the bandstand.
“Well, they’re busting a city ordinance, all that noise.”
“They may be busting more than that.”
“What does that mean? What are you up to anyway, getting me out here in the woods?”
“You wanted information on Hinschelman.”
“You found him?” Stout asked.
“No, and wouldn’t tell you — yet — if I had. Got something better. He was shot out of that warehouse door by a hood named James T. Keech, alias Bullfrog. You don’t know him — he filtered down here after four years at Bagwell State, where he seems to have been a contemporary of Hinschelman’s. Nice book on Bullfrog. Armed robbery, assault with deadly weapon—”
“Friend of Hinschelman’s—”
“Wrong. Hinsch didn’t know him but had seen him somewhere and remembered the face. Ergo, Keech didn’t know Fingers until yesterday, which recognition he celebrated by ambushing him with a .32.” He handed the spent round to Stout.
“We call that withholding evidence.”
“How withholding? I just gave it to you.”
“You know, sometimes you just make me squirm,” Stout said. “And you wouldn’t possibly be able to describe this guy or help us out on where he is.”
“Can do both with the greatest precision, once we get a thing or two straightened out.”
“I knew there was a catch. Get on with it. I can’t sit out here all day for some cheap grifter.”
“I may offer you something bigger.”
Stout mouthed his cigar. “Wonder what it is about that word ‘offer,’ when you say it, that comes on like a hyena eating glue? What’s the deal?”
“Immunity for Hinschelman.”
“Doesn’t need it. You said he’s straight.”
“Anything he did I asked him to do.”
“Go to hell, Seal. You’re retired, you’ve got no authority to do anything or have anyone else do it for you.”
“Subject is a five-year-old boy, Captain. You want it?” Stout massaged his round face. Cigar ashes dropped to his tie.
“The two things are interlinked,” Seal went on. “What Hinsch did for me and the shooting. I tell you that Keech acted under orders, and I ask who of any stature would risk killing a small-time pickpocket unless something of considerable importance was involved.”
“Keep talking.”
“I sent Hinschelman into a building for some information. Someone apparently saw him there, but nothing was done about it on the site. Your desk says they never called you. An hour or so later Keech shot him. The place Hinschelman entered employs, for the most dubious reasons, Keech.”
Stout spoke as the wind changed. “…MEXICO AND YUCATAN AND ONE AND TWO AND…”
“I said what’s this touchy institution?” Stout bellowed.
“You’re hearing it from that window right ahead of you. The Peter Pan Nursery and Reading School.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” groaned Stout and stood up. “I’m going home.”
Seal pulled him back by an arm. “Sit down. You want a coast-to-coast AP story or don’t you? We’ve already got an unregenerate hood running loose in a houseful of kinder-gartners from the best homes in town, and that doesn’t pique your cement head? There’s a lot more going on in there than a nursery school.”
Seal rose to peer over the oleander bush. Keech was guarding the door, but Grivas’ car hadn’t arrived.
“And what is that?” Stout said wearily.
“Thing called Foster Children International.”
Stout stared at him. “Antoine Grivas? You’re out of your mind. Mess with him and you’ll have every Women’s Club in the country after your scalp.”
“Better now than a million dollars later.”
“I’ve got five more minutes. Go on.”
He began with Billy Wagner and progressed to Miss Springer and then to Hinschelman. He dwelt on the strange behavior of the woman. “I’m waiting for one particular portion of the geography drill she’s giving, then I’ll be sure.” He told of the phone call last night. “She said, ‘Not dead?’ and then ‘Yes, you must go to him.’ Unusual things to say, just as if she’d been sitting there expecting it. I’d said ‘a friend,’ not ‘her’ or ‘him.’ ”
Seal paused, signaling silence. Stout eyed his wrist watch. “Go ahead.”
“I’m listening,” Seal said, “we’re getting to it. Here it is.”
“… HERE WE GO NOW, ROUND THE WORLD, ROUND AND MARCHING, THREE AND FOUR; FASTER, WILLIAM, THREE AND FOUR; NO, NO, SUSAN, YOU MISSED FRANCE; TURN RIGHT, REUBEN, GREECE IS NEXT AND HUP AND TWO AND THREE AND FOUR…”
Like a cat by a fireplace, Seal stretched, smiling. “Susan missed France yesterday. Missed it twice, once while she was clear out of the room on the way to the candy store. I missed it because I was racing to the eye doctor.”
“Brain doctor’s where you should have gone. I don’t get a thing.”
“It’s a tape,” Seal said. “It’s not the innocent geography class that passersby are supposed to think it is. I now submit this bizarre document from those premises — a list of the donors to Foster Children International and opposite each the name and location of his-or-her respective adoptee. Notice these foreign villages: you’ve never heard of a single one of them!
“I paid a call on my rich Uncle Malcolm who spent twenty-five years junketing for National Geographic and has notes and maps that money can’t buy. They exist, all right, these villages, but they’ve all got one thing in common: they’re unreachable unless you have a helicopter or a dogsled. If not in ten-thousand-foot mountains they’re deep in some primeval swamp or buried among Amazon headhunters or in forests you couldn’t get a bulldozer through. Their one and only contact with the outside world is the mail burro or outrigger or native runner, whose arrival sets off two weeks of bonfires and tribal dancing.”
“And what do you plan to do, relocate them?”
“Wake up, Jonathan. Say you ‘adopt’ one of these infants and, as time passes, get sentimental enough to go voyaging off for an in-person interview in his mudhole. Impossible. Conveniently so. That gets us to another murky area. Every school day a parcel goes out of that nursery addressed to Ubiquity Mailing Service in San Francisco. I found out what Ubiquity is. Ubiquity will, for a healthy fee, see that mail is remailed to an addressee bearing the postmark of any town, village, igloo, or cliff dwelling on earth. They do a brisk trade for practical jokers, college kids, ‘missing’ husbands, and such as play games with the F.B.I.”