“If I’m no longer working for you, Haskill,” Jeff said, “I’m sure you won’t mind taking your little conference someplace else.”
Haskill stood up, yawned. “Come on, O’Reilly. We’ll mail your final check to your bank as usual, Rayden. The contract calls for six month’s pay in case of termination without notice. Your desk will be cleaned out for you. Advise the office where you want the contents shipped. And please don’t make the mistake of asking for the release of any of the rights we hold on your past work.”
They left the room. Forty minutes later Rayden was opening a bottle of prime bourbon.
Chapter Two
The Memory Veil
Kiddle was a sleazy little man who looked as though he were fashioned of suet. He wet his lips constantly and masked furtiveness with jerky expansive gestures.
“It’s the investment,” he said with an attempt at firmness.
Jeff made marks on the tablecloth with his knife. “Okay,” he sighed, “but please come off the pose that you’re publishing a respectable magazine. That rag of yours is a classic example of poor taste, girlies and ax murders. I’ve got the dough to finance my own investigations. I’ve been digging into Means’ past for the last three weeks. I’ll be frank. I’ve been trying to peddle my wares, but Means has picked up such powerful backing in the last month that nobody wants to touch it. I had to come to you, Kiddle. Even though I despise your rag, it does have a circulation of almost a million.”
“I got to be sure of your stuff, Rayden.”
“You know my reputation, Kiddle. So I’ll finance myself and you won’t reimburse. Now, what about the rate? I’ll feed you the data in four-thousand-word chunks.”
“Maybe five hundred?” Kiddle said cautiously.
Jeff snorted. “Maybe twenty-five hundred.”
They settled for fourteen-hundred and fifty, dependent on Kiddle acceptance of Jeff’s material as acceptable for the readers of Unveiled.
“Now what you got so far?” Kiddle asked.
For a moment Jeff felt a touch of wild laughter in his brain. How would Kiddle react if he heard about the first step of the investigation? Kiddle would send for the little men with the nets.
And, Jeff thought, it might be the right answer.
He could still not quite believe what had happened that first morning after he had been fired. He had wanted to find out how Means could divert an airliner on a scheduled run. He had gone to the big desk at the San Ramon Terminal and had talked to the clerk.
“What was the answer on Flight 49 coming in late yesterday?”
The clerk stared at him. “Late? It was right on the button.”
“Oh, they were able to make up the time, I guess.”
“I don’t get it, sir. Make up what time?”
“Look,” said Jeff. “Don’t play dumb with me. I’m Jeffrey Rayden. We were on Flight 49, westbound, yesterday. There was a Change of Destination for the two of us and Flight 49 let down at the strip at Dos Almas. The stewardess said it was twenty-five minutes flying time out of the way. I’m trying to find out how Means could do such a thing.”
“Dos Almas?” the clerk said with infuriating blankness, “Strip?”
“Check your records, will you please? I don’t like your attitude.”
The clerk flushed and went away. He came back with the terminal manager, a big man with a hearty manner. Jeff explained it all again.
The man laughed uneasily. “I don’t understand all this, Mr. Rayden. You see, just by coincidence, I was on that flight myself. A little conference up the line. There were no unscheduled stops, and I never heard of Dos Almas, believe me. If there’s a strip there, I’d know about it, wouldn’t I?”
“Where’s that stewardess?”
“She went on with the flight, of course. Shell be laying over in Los Angeles, I expect, Mr. Rayden.”
“Okay,” Jeff had said, smiling thinly, “we’ll try a new approach. Miss O’Reilly and I were certainly on the manifest. So how come we didn’t get off the plane here? Did we get out at ten thousand feet and walk down to Dos Almas?”
The clerk coughed. He said, “The full manifest list arrived here, Mr. Blaid.”
“And you’re lying!” Jeff said hotly. “I get it now. You boys did Means a favor but you don’t want it on the records. You might catch hell. So you’re trying to snowjob me. I’m not that simple.”
Mr. Blaid had immediately lost his hearty manner. His eyes turned ugly and small. “Friend, I don’t know what your game is. If you’re serious, you better hunt up a good doctor. This airline doesn’t make unscheduled stops except under emergency conditions. Borden Means couldn’t force us to make a stop hike that. I was on the flight. I remember you.”
“And you saw me get off here?”
“My dear fellow, where else would you have gotten off?”
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”
When he reached the door he looked back across the terminal and saw Blaid and the clerk staring after him with the look of angry pity with which the incomprehensibly insane are usually favored.
No, it wouldn’t do to tell Kiddle that episode and then follow it up with the real twist — the real kickeroo — the parsley on top. It made him dizzy to think of it. Two hours in the public library at San Ramon, and finding that according to all the reference books, there was no such place as Dos Almas. It didn’t exist. It never had.
“What’s the matter?” Kiddle asked. “You look funny. You gonna give me the dope you got, or aren’t you?”
There was other information for Kiddle. Information he would find it easier to accept.
“When the letter from you is in my hand setting forth the terms of our agreement, I’ll tell you what I’ve got,” Jeff said.
“So we go to my office now?”
Kiddle’s personal office was overly flamboyant. On the rest of the floor of the office building occupied by the staff of Unveiled, the offices were dim little plywood cubicles.
Jeff read the letter carefully, insisted on two changes, then folded the altered copy neatly and put it in his pocket. He leaned forward.
“Now listen to this. Borden Means was born in eighteen ninety-eight in a shack near Bandera on the Guadeloupe River northwest of San Antonio. He was the third of seven children. His pappy raised sheep and goats. They didn’t have a dime. I talked to some old settlers there. The Means family was dirty, sullen, unfriendly and pretty damn touchy. The birth of the seventh kid killed his old lady. Borden Means took off when he was thirteen. He was big for his age. He got a job as a ranch hand south of Kerrville. I found a guy who worked for the same ranch. Means was truculent, quarrelsome and tough. Big for his age. He got into one jam after another until he enlisted. He went to France in the first war. He never got above corporal. Coming back on the ship he cleaned up in a crap game. Several thousand bucks. He hung onto it and bought himself a spread near San Ramon. He didn’t make any friends. He worked like a fool and plowed every nickel back into more land and more stock. By the time he was twenty-five he had a good ranch. I talked to the guy who was his foreman. Man named Ike Looder. Looder said every hand on the place hated Means’ guts but they couldn’t do anything about it because he could lick every last one of them. Turnover was high. Now we begin to see the business talent cropping out. Say that his childhood gave him a big yen for monetary security. He had no time for women, games, liquor. He saw his chance and unloaded the ranch at a profit. He sank the dough into more land. Then the Barnton Field was proved. His spread was just off the dome. He got a neighbor drunk. Nobody knows what happened. When the guy recovered, Borden Means had his land deeds and claimed he won ’em. They were properly signed over and witnessed and the witnesses wouldn’t talk. Five wells were brought in on the land he took over, Now again we see a new development. He went off to a damn good mining engineering school and hammered enough geology and such into his thick skull, so that he equipped himself to find oil. He got his own crews together and began sinking holes. His luck went sour and he was down to his last buck when he brought in the first well on the Hobarth Field. He’d taken options all over the place. From that day on he’s never had a minute of financial worry.”