“And your husband is running from him?”
“Barclay’s only one of them. Running, yes. In the past three months we’ve lived in New York, San Francisco, Denver, and Sanport.”
“Couldn’t he get police protection?”
“I suppose so. But it isn’t much of a way to live.”
I still hesitated, without knowing why. What was I afraid of? I believed her, didn’t I? Maybe that was it. I was too eager to believe her.
Suddenly she reached out and put her hand on my arm. The gray eyes were large and unhappy and pleading. “Please,” she said.
You couldn’t look at her and refuse her anything. “All right,” I said. “But I’d like to have until in the morning before making it definite. Suppose I call you?”
Three
She sighed with relief and reached for the ignition key. We started back. I lit another cigarette and thought about it. I still wasn’t too sold on the thing. I was sold on owning that boat and I was practically panting to believe anything she said, but she hadn’t said enough.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to know where he is, or what’s in the plane, as long as it’s really his. We can skip that. But don’t you think you’re asking me to make up my mind with damn few facts to go on? It’s a queer-sounding deal. You’ll have to admit that yourself.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. I guess it is. And I can understand your wondering if it’s entirely aboveboard, without knowing any more than you do.
“But maybe this will help. My husband’s full name is Francis L. Macaulay. He is—or was, rather—an executive in a firm of marine underwriters in New York. The name of the company is Benson and Teen. If you’ll call either them or the New York police they’ll assure you he isn’t in any kind of trouble with the law, and never has been. The only people he’s hiding from are gangsters. I’d rather not go into it any further than that, because it’s his business, and not mine. But that’s what you really wanted to know, wasn’t it? That this wasn’t something that might get you in trouble with the police?”
“That’s what I wanted to know,” I said.
Something still puzzled me a little, though. And that was the fact that hoodlums seldom bothered to hunt down and kill some perfectly innocent law-abiding John Citizen who was hardly aware they existed. As a rule you’d been connected with them in some way, been near enough to have a little of it rub off. But an executive in an insurance firm? That didn’t make sense at all.
But where did the plane come in?
“You’d better warn your husband that if he can’t pinpoint that plane crash within a mile he’s just going to be wasting his money,” I said. “It’ll be impossible to find it.”
“That’s all right,” she said with assurance. “He knows right where it is.”
“He’s sure, now?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was right off the coast. And he was in it when it crashed.”
“I see,” I said.
But I didn’t see much.
Where had he been going? What was in the plane? And how had he got back here, assuming he was here?
I could tell, however, that she was reluctant to talk about it any more than she had to, so I quit asking questions. There’d be time enough for that when I gave her definite word I’d take it.
But why was I holding back? It puzzled me. I’d have given my left arm for that auxiliary sloop Ballerina, and here it was being tossed in my lap. The job was easy, the pay was fantastic. I believed she was on the level. What did I want, anyway?
Of course, I didn’t have any desire to look down the end of Barclay’s gun again, but that was calculated risk, and besides he probably wouldn’t have any reason to connect me with it until it was too late and we were already gone.
Something kept bothering me, but that wasn’t it. I gave up.
It was a little after five when we began to get back into the outskirts of the city. We hit the peak of the traffic rush right on the nose and crawled through the downtown district a slow light at a time. After a while she pulled into a parking lot and we walked up to the corner to a cocktail lounge for a drink. That was where the odd thing happened.
It was one of those too-utterly-utter places I usually avoided, dimly lighted, with blue-leather-upholstered booths and a soulful type who needed a haircut playing Victor Herbert on an electric organ. We sat down in the last booth and ordered Scotch and water.
After the drinks came she wrote down her telephone number for me. “You’re sure it’ll be all right?” I asked. “They haven’t tapped your phone?”
“It’s not likely,” she said. “But you never know for sure. Just be careful what you say; tell me you want to see me again, or something like that. I think it’ll be all right if we meet just once more, to give you the money, but beyond that it’s too risky.”
“Yes, it would be,” I agreed, knowing she was right but still feeling let down about it.
We both fell silent, listening to the music. A moment or two went by. I was looking at her face when she suddenly raised her eyes and saw me.
“You’re quiet,” she said. “What are you thinking about?”
“You,” I said. “You’re probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”
It was completely unexpected. I hadn’t intended to say a thing like that. It startled me, and I cursed myself for an awkward idiot.
She was startled, too, for an instant. Then she smiled, and said, “Why, thank you, Bill.”
She was probably wondering when they’d flushed me out of the hills and put shoes on me.
We finished our drinks in silence while I tried irritably to figure out why she affected me that way. God knows I wasn’t a particularly smooth type, but I’d never had this many thumbs and left feet around a woman before. She was married, I had known her exactly one day, and yet in less than four hours I’d managed to insult her and then startle her out of her wits with a piece of off-the-cuff brilliance like that. Maybe it just wasn’t my day.
We walked back to the car. She offered to drive me out to the pier, but I vetoed it. “You’d better stay away from places like that,” I said. “They’re not safe with those people following you.”
She nodded. “All right.” We shook hands, and she said quietly, “I’ll be waiting to hear from you. You’ve got to help me, Bill. I can’t let him down.”
I watched her drive away. Restlessness seized me, and I didn’t want to go back to the pier. I went into another bar and ordered a drink, nursing it moodily. Twice I started to the phone to call one of the girls I knew for a date; both times I gave it up. I tried to think calmly back over the day, to pull it into perspective, and I kept bumping into Shannon Macaulay at every turn. She ran through it like a brilliant silver thread through a piece of burlap.
Look, I asked myself, what was with Shannon Macaulay? I didn’t know anything about her. Except that she was married. And her husband was on the lam from a bunch of mobsters. So she was tall. So she was nice looking. So something said sexy when you looked at her body and her face, and sweet when you looked at her eyes. I had seen women before, hadn’t I? I must have. They couldn’t be something entirely new to a man 33 years old, who’d been married once for four years. So relax.
I left the bar.
I remembered after a while I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I went into a restaurant and ordered dinner. When it came I wasn’t hungry.
It was an easy job. It probably wouldn’t take a month altogether, if he really knew where that plane was. A month—Just three of us at sea in a small boat. I shook my head irritably. What the hell difference did that make? It was just a job, wasn’t it?