“Oh, honey, Gary, are you all right, did they hurt you, how do you feel, honey?” she crooned at him.
He hugged her, and then patted her brushed blond hair in a kind of manly tolerance for the histrionics of women. “Sure, Mom,” he said, “I’m okay. You don’t have to worry any more.”
She made half-laughing, half-crying sounds and kept on holding him very close to her breast. I looked beyond them and saw that Martinetti-with Proxmire at his heels-had come outside now; both of them wore rumpled slacks and old sweaters and weary smiles. They hunkered down, one on either side of the woman and the boy, and Martinetti clasped his son’s face between his hands and kissed his forehead. Proxmire looked as if he wanted to do the same thing, but he just squatted there with an odd sadness to the cast of his face and his eyes shining a little as he looked at Gary. I thought: He’s really fond of that boy, you can’t fake a look like that.
Beside me, Eberhardt said softly, “This is kind of a nice thing to see, but somehow it makes you uncomfortable to watch it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean, Eb.”
We stood quietly out of the way and let them have their reunion in some privacy. I noticed that Donleavy stood framed in the doorway, in blue dacron today, allowing the Martinettis and Proxmire the same privilege; he looked typically sad and sleepy. Eberhardt shuffled his feet around and began to fill his pipe with quick, nervous gestures. I thought his discomfiture was partially due to the poignancy he was witnessing, and partially because he felt no more at home in a milieu like Hillsborough than I did.
Martinetti straightened up after a time and walked over to where Eberhardt and I were standing. The change in him, now that his son had been found and returned home, was considerable; but the deep fissures in the hewn granite were still visible, and his eyes remained sunken even though there was life in them again-some of the strength and power of the man. The draining tension, the total lack of sleep, the fear and the worry, had left marks which would not heal in a single day or a single week. It would be some time yet before the haunted, skeletal look of him was completely gone, before the chiseled features were smooth and hard and clear of the corpselike grayness which still faintly tinged them.
He reached for my hand and shook it warmly and thanked me mutely with his eyes. Then he looked at Eb and said, “Is this Lieutenant Eberhardt?”
I said, “Yes, it is,” and made simple introductions.
“I’d like to shake your hand, too, Lieutenant,” Martinetti said, and they did that solemnly. He smiled with infinite weariness. “Come into the house. We’ll have a celebratory drink. God, I could use a drink just now.”
Eberhardt said he could use one, too, and that was unusual, because he did not like to take anything alcoholic when he was on duty; he was old-fashioned, or perhaps the word is sensible, that way. His agreeableness to the offer told me just how uncomfortable he was.
We followed Martinetti along the path. His wife was taking Gary into the house now, her arm tight around his shoulders, holding him hard against her side; she was not about to let go of him just yet. Proxmire followed them and then stopped at the door and hovered there nervously; when Martinetti went in and Eberhardt followed him, Proxmire took my arm and drew me aside.
“Listen,” he said earnestly, “I want to apologize for this morning.”
There was genuine contrition on the deeply hollowed surface of his face, in the tired and pouched depths of his eyes. I said, “You were under a heavy strain, Proxmire, I can understand that.”
“Yes, but I had no call to come down on you that way. I … feel like a complete ass.”
“We all feel like asses now and then,” I said. “Let’s just forget about it, why don’t we?”
“No hard feelings?”
“No,” I said, “no hard feelings.”
“You’re a generous man,” Proxmire said, and gave me his hand. I took it, and he smiled, and we stepped into the house.
The others were in the living room, and we went in there. Donleavy was standing over by the draped window with Eberhardt, talking softly to him. Karyn Martinetti had been sitting on the couch; she got to her feet when she saw me and threw her arms around my neck without shame and kissed me hard on the cheek. Her hair was very soft and smelled of violets in a pleasantly vague sort of way.
She whispered, “Thank you,” and stepped back, smiling, her eyes still wet. Then she turned back to the couch and sat down with her arm around Gary’s shoulders.
Martinetti and the maid, Cassy, entered from the opposite end of the living room. She was carrying a silver tray with some brandy snifters and a full decanter and a large glass of Cola on it; a wide smile on her thin mouth made her seem brighter, prettier, than I remembered her. There was no one else present that I could see, and I thought that that was just as well. I would not have trusted my manners if Channing had been there, not after that phone call this morning.
Martinetti poured us all a drink from the decanter and gave the glass of Cola to Gary, and we drank a toast. I put mine back neat, and saw that Donleavy and Eberhardt had done the same thing. Donleavy came over to where I was. “I’ve got something to show you and Eberhardt,” he said. “But not in here.”
“All right.”
He nodded and said to Martinetti, “You’ll excuse us, won’t you? We’ve got some things to talk over.”
“Of course.”
“We’ll use your study, if that’s all right.”
“Yes, certainly.”
Donleavy went out into the entrance hall and down the side hallway and through the ornately carved doors into the study. Eberhardt and I followed him. Donleavy shut the door and went over to the desk and switched on the lamp there. Then he took a small rectangular object from the pocket of his suit jacket and laid it carefully in the pool of illumination on the polished surface.
It was made of black styrene plastic, about the size of a small wooden matchbox. On the near side was a tiny on-and-off slide switch. There was a rubber grommet in one end, with four thin spidery wires-one red, one white, one green, one blue-protruding from it, about six inches each in length; at the end of each wire was a tooth-type alligator clip with a tiny rubber boot covering it as a preventive against shorting.
Donleavy said, “I guess you know what that is.”
“Phone bug,” Eberhardt said sourly.
I asked, “Where’d you find it?”
“I didn’t find it myself,” Donleavy said a little ruefully. “Reese found it. Reese is an eager-beaver, and he gets a lot of ideas. Every now and then, one of them pays off-like this one.” Donleavy reached out and tapped the telephone on the desk with the blunt tip of his forefinger. “He opened up the base of this unit here, about a half-hour before you called, and there it was.”
I looked at the bug. It was a simple package, nothing more than a miniature frequency-modulation transmitter. Its wires would have been attached, by way of the tooth clips, to the four leads coming into the phone; either an incoming or outgoing call would have activated it and transmitted an FM signal to a monitor somewhere in the immediate area. Judging from the size of the package, the monitor would have to have been put up within approximately a half-block radius. With a bug like that you could pick up conversations through a standard FM radio, tuned to a place on the dial which was not licensed for local broadcasting; somebody sitting in a car, for example, could monitor calls on the automobile’s radio. Or if he was afraid of the conspicuousness of a lengthy plant, all he would have to have done would be to run a patch cord between the input jack on a cassette tape recorder and the earphone jack on a portable radio, and then secrete both units in any one of a hundred places in the vicinity. The phone conversations would be fed directly from the opened line through the radio and into the recorder, ready for him to replay when he retrieved the equipment.