"The chase took seven years. I think I know what happened during that time. Civac and Velda had to stay together to pool their escape resources. One way or another Velda was able to get things from Civac--or Erlich--and the big thing was those names. I'll bet she made him recount every one and she committed them to memory and carried them in her head all the way through so that she was fully as important now as Civac was.
"Don't underplay the Reds. They're filthy bastards, every one, but they're on the ball when it comes to thinking out the dirty work. They're so used to playing it themselves that it's second nature to them. Hell, they knew what happened. They knew Velda was as big as Erlich now--perhaps even bigger. Erlich's dreams were on the decline...what Velda knew would put us on the upswing again, so above all, she had to go.
"So The Dragon in his chase concentrated on those two. Eventually he caught up with Erlich and shot him. That left Velda. Now he ran into a problem. During her war years she made a lot of contacts. One of them was Richie Cole. They'd meet occasionally when he was off assignment and talk over the old days and stayed good friends. She knew he was in Europe and somehow or other made contact with him. There wasn't time enough to pass on what she had memorized and it wasn't safe to write it down, so the answer was to get Velda back to the States with her information. There wasn't even time to assign the job to a proper agency.
"Richie Cole broke orders and took it upon himself to protect Velda and came back to the States. He knew he was followed. He knew The Dragon would make him a target--he knew damn well there wouldn't be enough time to do the right thing, but Velda had given him a name. She gave him me and a contact to make with an old newsie we both knew well.
"Sure, Cole tried to make the contact, but The Dragon shot him. Trouble was, Cole didn't die. He told off until they got hold of me because Velda told him I was so damn big I could break the moon apart in my bare hands and he figured if she said it I really could. Then he saw me."
I put my face in my hands to rub out the picture. "Then he saw me!"
"Mike--"
"Let's face it, kid. I was a drunk."
"Mike--"
"Shut up. Let me talk."
Laura didn't answer, but her eyes hoped I wasn't going off the deep end, so I stopped a minute, poured some coffee, drank it, then started again.
"Once again those goddamn Reds were smart. They backtracked Velda and found out about me. They knew what Richie Cole was trying to do. Richie knew where Velda was and wanted to tell me. He died before he did. They thought he left the information with Old Dewey and killed the old man. They really thought I knew and they put a tail on me to see if I made a contact. They tore Dewey's place and my place apart looking for information they thought Cole might have passed to me. Hell, The Dragon even tried to kill me because he thought I wasn't really important at all and was better out of the way."
I leaned back in the chair, my insides feeling hollow all of a sudden. Laura asked, "Mike, what's the matter?"
"Something's missing. Something big."
"Please don't talk any more."
"It's not that. I'm just tired, I guess. It's hard to come back to normal this fast."
"If we took a swim it might help."
I opened my eyes and looked at her and grinned. "Sick of hearing hard luck stories?"
"No."
"Any questions?"
She nodded. "Leo. Who shot him?"
I said, "In this business guns can be found anywhere. I'm never surprised to see guns with the same ballistics used in different kills. Did you know the same gun that shot your husband and Richie Cole was used in some small kill out West?"
"No, I didn't know that."
"There seemed to be a connection through the jewels. Richie's cover was that of a sailor and smuggler. Your jewels were missing. Pat made that a common factor. I don't believe it."
"Could Leo's position in government--well, as you intimated--"
"There is a friend of mine who says no. He has reason to know the facts. I'll stick with him."
"Then Leo's death is no part of what you are looking for?"
"I don't think so. In a way I'm sorry. I wish I could help avenge him too. He was a great man."
"Yes, he was."
"I'll take you up on that swim."
"The suits are in the bathhouse."
"That should be fun," I said.
In the dim light that came through the ivy-screened windows we turned our backs and took off our clothes. When you do that deliberately with a woman, it's hard to talk and you are conscious only of the strange warmth and the brief, fiery contact when skin meets skin and a crazy desire to turn around and watch or to grab and hold or do anything except what you said you'd do when the modest moment was in reality a joke--but you didn't quite want it to be a joke at all.
Then before we could turn it into something else and while we could still treat it as a joke, we had the bathing suits on and she grinned as she passed by me. I reached for her, stopped her, then turned because I saw something else that left me cold for little ticks of time.
Laura said, "What is it, Mike?"
I picked the shotgun out of the corner of the room. The building had been laid up on an extension of the tennis court outside and the temporary floor was clay. Where the gun rested by the door water from the outside shower had seeped in and wet it down until it was a semi-firm substance, a blue putty you could mold in your hand.
She had put the shotgun down muzzle first and both barrels were plugged with clay and when I picked it up it was like somebody had taken a bite out of the blue glop with a cookie cutter two inches deep!
Before I opened it I asked her, "Loaded?"
"Yes."
I thumbed the lever and broke the gun. It fell open and I picked out the two twelve-gauge Double 0 shells, then slapped the barrels against my palm until the cores of clay emerged far enough for me to pull them out like the deadly plugs they were.
She saw the look on my face and frowned, not knowing what to say. So I said it instead. "Who put the gun here?"
"I did."
"I thought you knew how to handle it?" There was a rasp in my voice you could cut with a knife.
"Leo--showed me how to shoot it."
"He didn't show you how to handle it, apparently."
"Mike--"
"Listen, Laura, and you listen good. You play with guns and you damn well better know how to handle them. You went and stuck this baby's nose down in the muck and do you know what would happen if you ever tried to shoot it?"
Her eyes were frightened at what she saw in my face and she shook her head. "Well, damn it, you listen then. Without even thinking you stuck this gun in heavy clay and plugged both barrels. It's loaded with high-grade sporting ammunition of the best quality and if you ever pulled the trigger you would have had one infinitesimal span of life between the big then and the big now because when you did the back blast in that gun would have wiped you right off the face of the earth."
"Mike--"
"No--keep quiet and listen. It'll do you good. You won't make the mistake again. That barrel would unpeel like a tangerine and you'd get that whole charge right down your lovely throat and if ever you want to give a police medical examiner a job to gag a maggot, that's the way to do it. They'd have to go in and scrape your brains up with a silent butler and pick pieces of your skull out of the woodwork with needle-nosed pliers. I saw eyeballs stuck to a wall one time and if you want to really see a disgusting sight, try that. They're bigger than you would expect them to be and they leak fluid all the time they look at you trying to lift them off the boards and then you have no place to put them except in your hand and drop them in the bucket with the rest of the pieces. They float on top and keep watching you until you put on the lid."