“Brother! You have poured the tea! Would you run over the topic with me some night? I’d appreciate it!”
“Glad to.”
“What about day after tomorrow? It’s one of Eleanor’s working nights, so I won’t be distracted. Be able to concentrate. At least till she comes home.”
“Okay,” Duff said.
He continued toward his class alone, watching the retreat of the elegantly dressed Mr.
Smythe. Duff didn’t need to glance down at his own faded jeans and frayed shirt cuffs to visualize the comparison or to think how odious it would seem to a young lady soon to serve as Orange Bowl Queen.
He threw off the thought and replaced it with another; in the process, no doubt, merely exchanging hostilities. Professor Slocum could be overconfident about the American vigilance. He, Duff Bogan, could have been right about his tests. People — suspicion-proof people like Harry Ellings — could be busy on a project calculated to go far in overthrowing the freedom of the world. Somebody would have to investigate further, even if it was only an overtall, underweight, overworked, badly dressed graduate student named Allan Diffenduffer Bogan.
“I don’t know what to do, exactly,” Duff said later in the day to Mrs. Yates, who had listened patiently to his story. “I can keep following Harry, of course. If he has a secret date with that big guy again — that darn-near giant — I can try to follow the big man when he leaves cover. I’m a lousy follower, though.” He grinned. “One of my many hobbies wasn’t being a boy detective. Or even trailing animals in the woods. I never did make a good Boy Scout.”
Mrs. Yates smiled maternally. “I can imagine. Poor Duff.”
“Oh,” he hurriedly protested the pitying sound. “I had my compensations, remember.
Best stamp collection in town. I could send Morse Code, as I taught the kids and Eleanor.
Pick locks and do escape tricks. I was the best slingshot marksman in the county.”
She nodded and sighed. Her eyes rested on him wonderingly. He was twenty-four now, she thought. An age when lots of men had homes, jobs, families. But Duff was a sort of split personality. Half of him was stuck in his childhood and his innumerable boyish interests. The other half, abstract, precocious, was far ahead of most of the college boys brought home by Eleanor.
“Why don’t you,” she suggested, “go see that Mr. Higgins and tell him about Harry’s meeting? He seemed very shrewd, from the glimpse I had.”
Duff’s long head shook slowly. “Not me! Not again! Not until and unless I can tell him something that’ll really convince him.”
“You afraid, Duff? False pride? Or what?”
His grin reassured her about false pride. “Mrs. Yates, I’m a small-town boy from the Middle West. I hope someday to get a Ph.D. in physics and maybe even to make a small contribution in some branch of the big field of ideas. All I’ll probably ever really do is teach high-school kids about gravity and friction and Ohm’s law. I don’t think the stars wrote me down for a big melodrama like catching spies — or for a hero part, like saving my country.”
“Yet you said—”
“Sure. I said! Got more mouth than sense! If what I really suspect is true, it’s so crazy I don’t believe it.”
Mrs. Yates was a sentimental woman, though not a sentimentalist. During his recital of his hopes she had felt a mist in her eyes and turned her head away. Now, however, she looked back at him sharply.
“You say you don’t know what to do. Well, you did one thing. You followed Harry and found his walks weren’t entirely innocent moon-gazing. You can go on doing that. If I had legs to walk on, and if I were a man, and if I thought it was useless to talk to the FBI again right now, I’d look over that trucking company where Harry works. Maybe that great, tall man works there, too. Anyway, you could find out what cities the trucks serve. You could perhaps get a line on their customers. If Harry was using trucks to move — what you think — up north, then where the trucks went to would be something to learn.”
Duff nodded. “That’s not a bad idea!” He lighted a cigarette. “I could maybe apply for a job there. Look the people over. At night when Harry wouldn’t be there to notice me around.”
It seemed a useful project. Actually, if it had any immediate value, the effort served to give some occupation to Duff at a time when the conflict between his suspicions and his feeling that what he suspected was absurd kept him in a state of nervous anxiety. It also served to show him how inept he was at any sort of investigation.
The Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company consisted of a half-dozen large buildings in a light-industry section of the city on its northwest fringe. The buildings were low and very large. Some were warehouses, and these were provided with huge doors and long loading platforms; one was the repair garage in which Harry Ellings worked by day; in another, idle trucks of the company fleet were merely parked; the smallest building contained the business offices of the concern, which operated around the clock. At night there was a loneliness about the place in spite of the occasional arrival or departure of a huge trailer truck or of a smaller vehicle bringing merchandise from the South Florida area for reshipment.
Duff studied the scene. Colored loading crews worked here and there under flaring lights. A watchman made his rounds occasionally, throwing the round finger of a flashlight at the vast blanks of closed doors. Across the wide and intermittently rumbling street was a diner which boasted, with painted, illuminated signs, that Truck Drivers Eat Here and We Never Close.
Duff walked around the establishment twice and then entered the front office, where a half dozen men worked at desks, smoked, roamed about with invoices in their hands and marked crates and cases and bundles.
“What do you want?” one of the men yelled at him from a desk.
Duff grinned. “Looking for work.”
“What kind?”
“Any.”
“We haven’t got any kind. Just three kinds right now. Driving trucks — and you gotta be expert. Timekeeper. And paper work.”
“No experience on those big rigs.”
“You work a night shift?”
“Sure.”
“Then come around in the daytime. That’s when they hire the night force and the day force.” The man seemed to think it was pretty funny that they hired the night shift in the daytime, so he laughed.
Duff laughed. “This company go to all cities?”
The man rocked his chair back. “You looking for work? Or transportation?”
“Work.”
“Florida’s full of guys that came down and couldn’t find a job and want a free ride somewhere else.”
Duff stood in front of a railing that crossed the wide, dingy room. “Look. Suppose I could bring a friend’s business here? Would that help me get a job?”
“Wouldn’t hurt none. What kind of business?” Duff invented a business. “Making a modernistic line of furniture out of bamboo. Getting popular up north. He ships by rail right now.”
“Fool to, I’d say.”
“He’s got a pretty good deal. Still, if your trucks go to all the big cities — regularly, I mean—”
“New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo, regularly. And points between. And unscheduled trips about once a month to ten-fifteen more cities. Would that suit your friend?”
“Sounds good,” Duff said, and left.
He went over to the diner. Four big-shouldered truck drivers leaned on the counter drinking coffee, dunking doughnuts, listening to radio dance music. Duff ordered the same.
The men were alert, fresh — waiting, obviously, for trucks to be loaded and their runs to begin. By morning they wouldn’t be so tidy, so cleanly shaven, and they’d look tired.