“Be there at exactly ten-fifteen tonight. Have the money in a suitcase in the back seat of a four-door sedan. Park your car, but don’t get out of it. At exactly ten-twenty the back door will be opened. Don’t look around. I mean it. Don’t look around. The shield will be put in your back seat. Wait five minutes and then you can do whatever you want to do. Have you got all that?”
“I’ve got it.”
The phone went dead and I hung up. Fastnaught was sitting up on the bed; Demeter had put his paper on the floor. Both of them were looking at me.
“Tonight at ten-fifteen,” I said. Then I told them what the cottony voice had told me.
“Sort of a public place, isn’t it?” Demeter said.
“Not if it’s still raining,” I said.
Fastnaught went to the window and peered out. “It’s stopped,” he said. “Looks like it might clear up.”
Demeter rose and stretched. “Ten-fifteen tonight, huh?” he said. “How’s your golf game, Fastnaught?”
“Lousy.”
“Maybe you’ll get a chance to improve it tonight, but right now we’ve got some work to do.”
“You’re not leaving?” I said.
“Sorry to rush off like this, St. Ives, but we’ve got things to do, people to see, and plans to plot.”
“You’ll be around tonight, I suppose.”
“Just look for the car with the flashing lights and the extra-loud siren,” Fastnaught said.
They moved to the door. “St. Ives hasn’t got a thing to worry about now, has he, Fastnaught?” Demeter said.
“He should be worry-proof,” the Sergeant said.
“Just one item, Lieutenant,” I said.
“What?” Demeter said as he opened the door.
“Try not to screw it up.”
He turned from the door and let his bright black beanlike eyes run from the tips of my cordovan shoes to the top of my head where my hair lay in a neatly trimmed pile that could have been a little thicker, but was nicely touched with gray at the temples. From the expression on Demeter’s face, he could have been measuring me for a casket. A cheap one. “We’ll try not to screw it up, Mr. St. Ives,” he said with something that almost resembled a smile. “We’ll try not to very hard.”
When they had gone I picked up the green telephone book and looked up a number. I dialed and when it answered, I said, “What time do you close?”
“At ten o’clock,” a woman’s voice said. “The stacks close at seven forty-five.”
I said thank you and hung up and went to the window to see if Fastnaught had told the truth about the rain. He had so I left my raincoat hanging in the closet, took the elevator down to the lobby, and flagged a cab from the sidewalk. After I was in, the driver turned and gave me a questioning look. He wanted to know where I was headed so I said, “Library of Congress, please.”
If you had enough time and enough patience, I suppose you could find out all about everything at the Library of Congress. I spent two hours in its periodical section, guided in my search by an elderly gentleman with a hearing aid who didn’t mind scurrying back and forth bearing back issues of some rather esoteric and extremely dull publications. When the periodical room closed at 5:45 I went to the main reading room and spent another hour with the bound back issues of some more tedious publications which looked as if no one had leafed through them in 20 years. When I finished at 7:30 I had acquired a sizable chunk of information and some of it might even prove useful.
I caught a cab to the Hertz place, rented a four-door Ford Galaxie, and parked it in the Madison’s garage. In my room I tried to call Frances Wingo at home, but there was no answer. I poured a mild Scotch and water and then telephoned down for a steak sandwich and a tall glass of milk. I chewed the sandwich and drank the milk and tasted neither. Afterwards, I stretched out on the bed and studied the ceiling and watched some thoughts go galloping through my mind, stumbling a little now and again, but galloping around and around and winding up at the same place because they had nowhere else to go.
Chapter seventeen
The golf driving range was called Puckett’s and it took up several acres of gradually sloping land on Wisconsin Avenue just this side of the District line. A dozen or so golfers were trying to straighten out their hooks and slices with big tin buckets full of balls that they drove with varying success at markers which told whether they were hitting 100, 150, 200, or 300 yards. There was also a single marker that read 500 yards but nobody seemed to pay it much attention. Giant banks of floodlights provided almost day-bright illumination, and out in the middle of the driving range a gasoline-powered cart covered with a steel-mesh cage shuffled back and forth gobbling up the spent balls like an oversized vacuum cleaner. There were more cars than there were golfers. Some of them probably contained people whose television sets had broken down for the night and who would watch anything, even 45-year-old duffers, as long as it was for free. Some of the cars were empty and some contained lone women who seemed resigned to a fate which had married them off to men who thought that breaking 100 at Chevy Chase ranked in historical significance with the signing of a nuclear-test-ban treaty or dinner for four at the White House.
I parked the Ford five cars down from the white wooden hut that rented the balls and clubs. I sat there, exactly on time at 10:15, with $250,000 worth of neatly wrapped, well-used tens and twenties on the back seat, and watched a man in his sixties top his ball three times in a row, and waited for someone to open the rear door and hand in a brass shield that some thought could save the lives of thousands and which had already cost the lives of four.
At ten-seventeen the lights went out. One moment the big banks of floodlights on top of the tall wooden poles bathed the driving range in a glaring yellowish white. The next moment there was nothing but blackness, made even more impenetrable by the eyes’ inability to adjust. Reaction was slow. It took at least five seconds before the first horn blew. Then another. Somebody on the tee, a man, yelled, “What the hell—” and the rear door of the Ford opened. I forgot the warning and started to twist around and it may have saved my life. Something quite hard landed on the side of my head, just above the vulnerable temple, and I didn’t get to see who delivered the blow in what, I later decided, was a most competent and professional manner. Nor did I have the opportunity to see who made off with a man’s suitcase stuffed with a quarter of a million dollars in neatly wrapped, very negotiable currency.
When I came out of it I was lying on my back on the front seat and the first thing I saw was Demeter’s face upside down above me. I twisted my head quickly and threw up on the floorboards. While I was doing that Demeter kept saying, “Are you all right, are you all right?” and I kept wanting to say, “No, I’m not all right, my head hurts like hell,” but I had to throw up some more instead. Finally I was through and managed to sit up. I felt the sore place on my head and the knot seemed to be not less than an inch high and two inches wide. It wasn’t really that large; it only seemed so to my carefully sensitive touch. It hurt enough to be twice that large.
I leaned back in the seat and looked at Demeter, bending half crouched in the open right-hand door as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to get in.
“Are you all right?” he said again. I noticed that the lights were back on.
“No,” I said. I started to turn around and look in the back seat, but I didn’t because I knew it wouldn’t be any use. “No shield,” I said.
“No,” Demeter said.
“No money either.”
“No. No money.”
“One of them got to the main switch.”
“Probably the woman,” he said.