“Trying to put my pants on.”
“Sweetie, this is no time for modesty. That was a gunshot. If you want to stick around to die with your bootlets on, that’s your business. But as for me, I’d rather be naked in Macy’s window and alive. I’m getting out of here.” Helen grabbed up her clothes and started for the bedroom door.
“Wait a minute! You can’t just leave. That shot came from the other bedroom. We have to see what happened.”
“You see. It can only be trouble. That’s something of which I don’t need any more. Drop me a line and let me know how you come out.” She paused in the doorway. “And, sweetie, you’re just not going to get both of your legs into one leg of those trousers. Face it. Start over again. ’Bye, sweetie.” And then she was gone.
Archie took her advice. He stopped hopping around the room like a one-legged kangaroo, sat down on the edge of the bed, and managed to put on his pants. Then he went into the other bedroom to investigate.
The door was open. The first thing Archie saw from the doorway was Professor André Beaumarchais. The professor was stretched out on the bed, naked, face up, his hands clasped behind his neck. He looked completely relaxed. There was a small hole at his left temple from which only a tiny trickle of blood was still oozing. His eyes were open. There was a smile, which even under the tragic circumstances could only be described as lecherous, on his face. He was dead.
Archie stood in the doorway and stared at the corpse for a long time, waiting for his emotions to settle. First came shock, then grief. Archie had been truly fond of Professor Beaumarchais. Then came a peculiar sort of sense of the rightness of the circumstances surrounding the professor’s death.
“Everybody has to die,” he had remarked to Archie earlier. “Could I choose the manner of my own death, I would elect to be shot by a jealous husband who caught me en flagrante with his wife on my ninety-fourth birth-day. ”
Well, it wasn’t the professor’s ninety-fourth birthday, but Archie was reasonably sure that his last moments had been filled with the variety of activity the professor enjoyed most. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet, but the telltale rigidity of one portion of the professor’s anatomy seemed to attest to his having died a happy man. How he would have chuckled over the idea, Archie couldn’t help thinking.
But why had he been killed? The Welter of emotions had Archie in a daze, and now he slowly came out of it. Why, indeed, had Professor Beaumarchais been murdered? As he raised his eyes from his friend's corpse, the answer was staring him right in the face. A picture hanging on the wall at the head of the bed had been pushed sideways. Behind where it had been hanging, a safe was now visible. The door to the safe was wide open. It was a small safe, and even from where he was standing Archie could see that it was empty.
The sight clicked in his mind. He remembered the conversation he’d had with Beaumarchais before, while they had been waiting for the girls to arrive. His calculations for the formula to turn zinc into gold had been in that safe --that’s what Professor Beaumarchais had said. They were gone now, and that had to be the motive behind the killing.
But who had killed him? Had it been Dixie, the redhead who’d shared his last moments in bed? She was certainly the most likely suspect. And she had run away. Why? Was it simply that like Helen she hadn’t wanted to get involved? Or was it because she was already involved to the tune of one murder? And if she hadn’t killed the professor, who had? Was it possible that someone else had gotten into the apartment?
There were other questions, too. In whose interests had the killer been acting? The Russians? The Chinese? The Cubans, perhaps? Or maybe some other power with interests more subtly opposed to the United States and France? Or perhaps not a power at all, but some party or parties who recognized the immense value of the professor’s calculations. Whoever it was, how had they managed to open the safe so quickly after killing the professor?
Archie’s eyes roved over the room, and he soon found the answer to the last question. The professor had thrown his clothes in a none-too-neat pile on a chair standing to one side of the bed. Now Archie saw that the pockets of his pants and jacket had been turned inside-out. Going over to the chair, he saw that the contents had been strewn atop the clothing. There were the professor’s address book, a keychain, a pair of eyeglasses in a case, a checkbook, a pocket comb, and a wallet. The money and papers which had been in the wallet were scattered on the floor in front of the chair. Archie bent down to look at them. After a moment, he came across one of the professor’s calling cards. On the back of it was the address and number of the apartment in which he’d been killed, written in the professor’s own small, meticulous, typically scientific handwriting. Under the address was a series of three three-digit numbers. Archie realized they couldn’t be anything but the combination to the safe. Evidently the murderer must have realized it too.
Archie picked up the address book and got to his feet. He rifled through it for a moment. On the left-hand corner of the inside front cover the professor had lettered “NEW YORK CITY” in capitals. Knowing the professor, Archie guessed he must have had similar books containing the addresses of willing females for other cities. Leafing through the book, he saw that all the addresses were indeed located in mid-Manhattan.
Archie put the address book down again and tried to think. The thing to do, he knew, was to call the police immediately. But the larger implications of the data stolen from the professor intruded on this idea and kept him from implementing it. Archie was remembering a talk, a conversation which seemed extremely pertinent to the situation in which he now found himself. The talk had been with a man he’d met at a half-social, half-business gathering which his stepfather, J. P. Jones, had held for some of his associates. It had been with a man named Strom Huntley.
Strom Huntley was a behind-the-scenes executive in the CIA. J. P. had introduced him as such to Archie and to the others present. He was there, at this particular meeting, for a dual purpose. Firstly, he wanted to reassure Jones and the other financiers present of the stability of a certain Central American government. There had been Communist rumblings in the country. These men had heavy investments there, and because of the rumblings were considering pulling out. Huntley was there to promise them—unofficially, of course -- that the American government stood ready to protect their investments. His second purpose was to elicit their cooperation in taking certain steps which would ease our own government’s relations with the rank-and-file of the area. He wanted them to raise wages in certain of the mines and factories they controlled, and he wanted them to take steps to improve working conditions. This would take the sting out of the local Reds’ charges of “Yankee imperialism."
When the business part of the evening was over, Archie had engaged Strom Huntley in conversation. “I’m curious,” he told Huntley frankly, “about your openness in admitting your connection with the CIA. I’d always thought CIA agents took all sorts of precautions to avoid being identified.”
“The thing is that I’m not a CIA agent,” Huntley explained. “I'm not a spy or an undercover man in any sense of the terminology. My job doesn’t require secrecy. Indeed, in liaisons of this sort, the men to whom I’m speaking must be sure of my CIA connections. How else could they have any faith in what I tell them?”
They’d gone on to discuss other aspects of the CIA. “What about this business of Communist infiltration of various spheres of American life?” Archie had asked at one point. “Is it really as much of a threat as J. Edgar and the neo-McCarthyites would have us believe?”
“That’s a leading question. And it’s getting into two areas I never discuss. One is politics. The other is the FBI. You see, in a sense, they’re a rival agency. We try to be circumspect in not stepping on their toes.”