Goodbye California (13 page)

Downstairs in the study Ryder said: ‘Glance through those court cases in the files. You may find something of interest, although I doubt it. I have a call to make.’ He dialled a number, and while waiting for his call to come through glanced at the list of names and telephone numbers he had taken from the safe. His number answered and he asked for Mr Jamieson. Jamieson was the night manager at the telephone exchange. He was on the line almost at once.

‘Sergeant Ryder here. Important and confidential, Mr Jamieson.’ Jamieson had delusions about his self-importance and liked to have those kept well stoked. ‘I have a number here and would be glad if you made a note of it.’ He gave the number, had it read back to him and said: ‘I think it’s Sheriff Hartman’s home number. Would you check and give me the address – it’s not in the book.’

‘Important, huh?’ Jamieson sounded eager. ‘Hush-hush?’

‘You don’t know how important. Heard the news?’

‘San Ruffino? My God, yes. Just now. Bad, eh?’

‘You just can’t guess.’ He waited patiently until Jamieson came back to him. ‘Well?’

‘You got the right name, right number. Classified, God knows why. One hundred-and-eighteen Rowena.’

Ryder thanked him and hung up. Jeff said: ‘Who’s Hartman?’

‘Local sheriff. That safe is wired to his office. Missed something up there, didn’t you?’

‘I know.’

‘How?’

‘If I hadn’t missed it you wouldn’t mention it.’

‘You noticed how readily LeWinter parted with the key to that safe. What does that tell you about Sheriff Hartman?’

‘Nothing much. Correction, nothing good.’

‘Yes. The number of people by whom LeWinter would willingly be found in such a scandalous and compromising situation must be very few. But he knows that Sheriff Hartman wouldn’t talk. So there’s a bond between them.’

‘LeWinter
could
have a friend in this world.’

‘We’re talking about probabilities, not the near-impossible. Blackmail? Unlikely. If the judge were blackmailing Hartman this would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the sheriff to make sure that the blackmail ended here and now. LeWinter could be the victim but I can’t see it that way. What I do see is that they are in some very profitable business together. Criminal business. An honest judge would never compromise himself by going into business with a lawman. Anyway, I know LeWinter is bent. I know nothing about this Hartman but he’s probably the same.’

‘As honest – if unemployed – cops it’s our duty to find out what Hartman’s bent about. In what now appears to be the usual fashion?’ Ryder nodded. ‘Donahure can wait?’

‘He’ll keep. Turned up anything?’

‘Hell, no. All these “whereases” and “whereofs” and “here-intofores” are too much for me.’

‘You can forget it. Even LeWinter wouldn’t express his deepest thoughts – or criminal intentions – in legalese.’ Ryder again dialled a number, waited then said: ‘Mr Aaron? Sergeant Ryder here. Now don’t get me wrong, but how would you like one of your photographers to take a picture of a prominent citizen caught in a compromising situation?’

Aaron’s tone was uncomprehending. Not cold: just not understanding. ‘I am surprised, Sergeant. You know that the
Examiner
is not a yellow tabloid.’

‘Pity. I thought you were and would be interested in Judge LeWinter’s peccadilloes.’

‘Ah!’ LeWinter ranked with Chief Donahure at the top of the list of Aaron’s target for special editorials. ‘What’s that crooked old goat up to now?’

‘He’s not up to anything. He’s lying down. He’s with his secretary who is young enough to be his grand-daughter. When I say “with” I mean “with”. He’s handcuffed to her, and they’re both handcuffed to the bed.’

‘Good God!’ Aaron made a coughing sound, probably trying to stifle laughter. ‘Intrigues me vastly. Sergeant. But I’m still afraid we couldn’t publish –’

‘No one asked you to publish anything. Just take a photograph.’

‘I see.’ There was a brief silence. ‘All you want is for him to know that such a picture has been taken?’

‘That’s it. I’d be glad if your boys would maintain the fiction I’ve told him – that I was sending people from the
Globe.’

This time Aaron positively cackled. ‘That would make him happy!’

‘He’s having fits. Many thanks. I’m leaving the handcuff keys on the study table.’

Dunne, as he’d promised, was still in his office when they returned. Ryder said: ‘Progress?’

‘Damn all. Almost impossible to make an outgoing call. Switchboard’s been jammed since the news announcement. At least a hundred people have seen the criminals – in, as usual, a hundred different places. You?’

‘Don’t know. You’ll have to help us if you will. First off, here are Judge LeWinter’s fingerprints.’

Dunne looked at him in disbelief. ‘He
gave
you his fingerprints?’

‘Sort of.’

‘I warned you, Ryder. Tangle with that old bird and you step out of your class. Donahure has powerful friends only locally but LeWinter has them’where it counts – in Sacramento. Don’t tell me you used violence again.’

‘Certainly not. We left him peacefully in bed and unharmed.’

‘Did he recognize you?’

‘No. We wore hoods.’

‘Well, thank you very much. As if I haven’t got enough on my hands. Do you know what kind of hornet’s nest you’ll have stirred up? And where will it all end up? In my lap?’ He closed his eyes. ‘I know who’ll be the next caller on those damned phones.’

‘Not LeWinter. He’s a bit restricted right now. Matter of fact we left him handcuffed to a bedpost and his secretary. They were there when we arrived. She’s Russian.’

Dunne closed his eyes again. When he’d assimilated this and steeled himself for whatever was to come, he said carefully: ‘And?’

‘This is interesting.’ Ryder unwrapped the hand-gun he had taken. ‘One wonders what an upright judge is doing with a silenced automatic. Can you have it tested for fingerprints? Incidentally, the girl’s fingerprints are already there. This is a notebook, coded. I imagine the key is in this copy of
Ivanhoe.
Perhaps the FBI can find out. Finally, this is his private list of telephone numbers. They may or may not be significant but I’ve neither the time nor the facilities to find out.’

Dunne was heavily sarcastic. ‘Anything else you’d like me to do for you?’

‘Yes. A copy of the file you have on LeWinter.’

Dunne shook his head. ‘FBI personnel only.’

‘Would you listen to him,’ Jeff said. ‘After all the legwork we do for him, after all the valuable clues we put in his hands –’

‘Okay, okay. But I’m promising nothing. Where to now?’

‘To see another lawman.’

‘He has my advance sympathies. Do I know him?’

‘No. And I don’t. Hartman. Must be new. Anyway, he’s in Redbank. County division.’

‘What has this unfortunate done to incur your displeasure?’

‘He’s a pal of LeWinter’s.’

‘That, of course, explains everything.’

Hartman lived in a small and unpretentious bungalow on the outskirts of town. For a detached Californian house it was virtually a slum: it had no swimming pool. Ryder said: ‘His association with LeWinter must be pretty recent.’

‘Yes. Lets the side down, doesn’t he? Door’s open. Do we knock?’

‘Good heavens, no.’

They found Hartman seated at his desk in a small study. He was a large, heavily-built man and must have stood several inches over six feet when he stood up: but Sheriff Hartman would never stand up again. Somebody had carefully cross-filed a soft-nosed bullet which had entered by the left cheek-bone. The dum-dum effect had taken off the back of his head.

It was pointless to search the house; whoever had been there before them would have made certain that nothing incriminating a third party – or parties – had been left behind.

They took the dead man’s fingerprints and left.

That was the night the earth shook. Not all of the earth, of course, but for a goodly portion of the residents of South California it might have been just that. The shock came at twenty-five minutes past midnight and the tremors were felt as far north as Merced in the San Joaquin Valley, as far south as Oceanside, between Los Angeles and San Diego, as far west as San Luis Obispo, close by the Pacific, to the southeast clear across the Mojave desert and to the east as far as Death Valley. In Los Angeles, though no structural damage was done, the shake was felt by all who were awake and it was pronounced enough to wake many of those who were sleeping. In the other main centres of population – Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Diego – no tremors were felt; but the earthquake, a very minor one of 4.2 on the Richter scale, was duly recorded on the delicate seismographs.

Ryder and Jeff, seated in the former’s living-room, both felt it and saw it – a ceiling lamp,
travelling through an arc of not more than two inches at maximum, oscillated for about twenty seconds before coming to rest. Dunne, still in his office, felt it and paid no attention to it – he had been through many such tremors before and he had more important things on his mind. LeWinter, dressed now as was his secretary, felt it through the open door of his safe, the remaining contents of which he was examining with some anxiety. Even Donahure, despite an aching occiput and a mind somewhat beclouded by his fourth consecutive large Scotch, was dimly aware of it. And, although its foundations were firmly embedded on the very solid rock of the Sierra Nevada, the Adlerheim felt it most acutely of all, for the excellent reason that the epicentre of the earthquake was no more than a dozen miles distant; even more importantly, the ‘quake registered strongly in the seismographical office installed in one of the caves – wine cellars – which Von Streicher had excavated out of the rock and on two other seismographs which Morro had foresightedly had installed in two private residences he owned, each about fifteen miles distant and in diametrically different directions.

And the shocks were registered, too, in institutes which, one would have thought, had considerably more legitimate interest in such matters than Morro. Those were the offices of Seismological Field Survey, those of the Californian Department of Water Resources, in the
Californian Institute of Technology and the US Geological Survey’s National Center for Earthquake Research. The last two, probably the most important of the four, were conveniently located where they would be the first to be demolished should a massive earthquake affect either Los Angeles or San Francisco, for the Institute of Technology was located in Pasadena and the Earthquake Research Center in Menlo Park. The nerve-centres of all four institutes were in direct and permanent contact with each other and it had taken them only minutes to pin-point, with complete precision, the exact epicentre of the earthquake.

Alec Benson was a large, calm man in his early sixties. Except on ceremonial occasions, which he avoided wherever and whenever possible, he invariably wore a grey flannel suit and a grey polo jersey, which went well enough with the grey hair that topped the tubby, placid and usually smiling face. Director of the seismology department, he held two professorships and so many doctorates and scientific degrees that, for simplicity’s sake, his numerous scientific colleagues referred to him just as ‘Alec’. In Pasadena, at least, he was regarded as the world’s leading seismologist: while the Russians and Chinese may have disputed this it was noteworthy that those two countries were always among the first to nominate him as chairman of the not infrequent international seismo-logical conferences. This esteem stemmed primarily
from the fact that Benson never made any distinction between himself and his world-wide colleagues and sought advice as frequently as he gave it.

His chief assistant was Professor Hardwick, a quiet, retiring, almost self-effacing scientist with a track record that almost matched that of Benson’s. Hardwick said: ‘Well, about a third of the people in the State must have felt the shock. It’s already been on TV and radio and will be in all the late editions of the morning’s papers. At the least guess, there must be a couple of million amateur seismologists in California. What do we tell them? The truth?’

For once, Alec Benson wasn’t smiling. He looked thoughtfully round the half-dozen scientists in the room, the vastly experienced nucleus of his research team, and studied their expressions, which were neither helpful nor unhelpful: clearly, they were all waiting for him to give a lead. Benson sighed. He said: ‘No one admires George Washington more than I do – but, no, we don’t tell them the truth. A little white lie and it won’t even rest uneasily on my conscience. What’s to be gained if we tell the truth other than scaring our fellow Californians even further out of their wits than they are now? If anything major is going to happen then it’s just going to happen and there’s damn all we can do about it. In any event, we have no evidence that this is a prelude to a major shake.’

Hardwick looked doubtful. ‘No intimation, no warning, nothing?’

‘What point would it serve?’

‘Well, there’s never been a ‘quake there in recorded history.’

‘No matter. Even a major ‘quake there wouldn’t be of great importance. Devastation of property and loss of life would be insignificant, because the area is so sparsely populated. Owens Valley, eighteen-seventy-two, the largest recorded earthquake in Califomian history – how many people died there? Maybe sixty. The Arvin-Techapi ‘quake of nineteen-fifty-two, at seven-point-seven the largest in Southern California – how many died there? Perhaps a dozen.’ Benson permitted himself his customary smile. ‘Now, if this latest jolt had happened along the Inglewood-Newport Fault I’d take a different view entirely.’ The Inglewood-Newport Fault, which had been responsible for the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, actually ran under the city of Los Angeles itself. ‘As it is, I’m in favour of letting sleeping dogs lie.’

Hardwick nodded. Reluctantly, but he nodded. ‘So we blame it on the poor old blameless White Wolf Fault?’

‘Yes. A calmly reassuring release to the media. Tell them again, briefly, about our ESPP, that we are cautiously pleased that it seems to be going according to plan and that the intensity of this shake corresponds pretty closely to our expected estimate of fault slippage.’

‘Release to the TV and radio stations?’

‘No. General. Wire service. We don’t want to lend anything that smacks of undue urgency or importance to our – ah – findings.’

Preston, another senior assistant, said: ‘We don’t let ethics creep into this, huh?’

Benson was quite cheerful. ‘Scientifically indefensible. But from the humanitarian point of view – well, call it justifiable.’

It said much for the immense weight of Benson’s prestige that the consensus of opinion was heavily on his side.

In the refectory hall in the Adlerheim Morro was being equally cheerful and reassuring to the anxious hostages who had gathered there. ‘I can assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that there is no cause for alarm. I grant you, it was quite a nasty shake, the worst we have experienced here, but a shake of a thousand times that magnitude would leave us completely unharmed. Apart from the fact that you will probably have already learned from your TVs that there has been no damage throughout the State, you must all be intelligent enough and widely-read enough to know that earthquakes spell danger only for those who live in dwellings on made-up filled land, marshy land whether drained or not and on alluvial soil. Damage rarely occurs to dwellings that have their foundations on rock – and we have our foundations on thousands of feet of rock. The Sierra
Nevada has been here for millions of years: it is not likely to disappear overnight. It is unlikely that you could find any safer or more desirable – from the earthquake point of view – residence in the State of California.’ Morro glanced smilingly around his audience, nodding his approval when he saw that his words seemed to have had the desired calming effect. ‘I don’t know about you people, but I have no intention of allowing this passing trifle to interfere with my night’s sleep. I bid you all goodnight.’

When Morro entered his private office the smile was markedly absent. Abraham Dubois was seated behind Morro’s desk, a phone in one hand, a pencil in the other, his huge shoulders hunched over a large-scale map of California. Morro said: ‘Well?’

‘It is not well.’ Dubois replaced the phone and delicately pricked a pencil dot on the map. ‘Here. Exactly here.’ He used a rule then set it against a mileage scale. ‘The epicentre, to be precise, is exactly eleven and a half miles from the Adlerheim. This is not so good, Mr Morro.’

‘It’s not so good.’ Morro lowered himself into an armchair. ‘Does it not strike you as ironic, Abraham, that we should pick the one spot in the State where an earthquake takes place outside our back door, so to speak?’

‘Indeed. It could be an ill omen. I wish I could fault the triangulation, but I can’t. It’s been checked and re-checked.’ Dubois smiled. ‘At least
we didn’t pick an extinct volcano which has suddenly turned out not to be so extinct after all. What option do we have? There is no time, there is no alternative. This is our operating base. This is our perfectly secure cover. This is our weaponry. This is the only multi-band radio transmitting station we have. All our eggs are in one basket. But if we pick up that basket and try to walk away with it the chances are that we will fall and be left with only the ruined ingredients for an omelette.’

I’ll go sleep on it although I don’t think I’ll wake up feeling any differently from the way you do now.’ Morro pushed himself heavily to his feet. ‘We mustn’t let what could be only a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence affect our thinking and planning too much. Who knows, there may not be another tremor in this area for a hundred years. After all, there hasn’t been one for hundreds, not at least that we know of or has been recorded. Sleep well.’

But Dubois did not sleep well for the excellent reason that he did not go to bed. Morro did sleep, but it was for only an hour or so. He awoke to find his light on and Dubois shaking his shoulder.

‘My apologies.’ Dubois looked rather more cheerful than when last he had been seen. ‘But I’ve just made a video-tape of a TV newscast and I think you ought to see it as soon as possible.’

‘The earthquake, I take it?’ Dubois nodded. ‘Good or bad?’

‘One could not call it bad. I think you might well turn it to your advantage.’

The replay of the video-tape lasted no more than five minutes. The newscaster, a bright and knowledgeable youngster who clearly knew enough about what he was talking about not to have recourse to a teleprompter, was remarkably brisk and fresh for one who was up and around at the unchristian hour of 3 a.m. He had a large relief map of California hanging on the wall behind him and wielded a slender cane with all the fluent dexterity of a budding Toscanini.

He began by giving concise details of what was known of the earthquake, the area over which it had been felt, the degree of apprehension felt in various areas and the amount of damage which it had caused, which was zero. He then went on to say: ‘From the latest authoritative statement it would appear that this earthquake is to be regarded as a plus and not a minus, as a matter for some self-congratulation and not as a pointer towards some future calamity. In short, according to the State’s top seismological sources, this may well be the first earthquake ever knowingly and deliberately brought about by man.

‘If this is correct, then it must be regarded as a landmark in earthquake control, the first successful implementation of the ESPP. For Californians, this can only be good news. To remind you: ESPP stands for “Earthquake Slip Preventative Programme”, which must be one of the clumsiest
and most misleading titles thought up by the scientific fraternity in recent years. By “slip” is meant simply the rubbing, sliding, jarring, earthquake-producing process which occurs when one of the eight, maybe ten – no one seems very sure – of the earth’s tectonic plates, on which the continents float, push into, above, under or alongside each other. The title is misleading because it gives the impression that earthquakes may be brought under control by preventing this slip from taking place. In fact it means precisely the opposite – the prevention of earthquakes, or at least major earthquakes, by permitting, indeed encouraging, this slipping factor to take place – but to take place in a gradual and controlled process in which there is a continuing and progressive easing of the strain between the plates by allowing them to slide comparatively smoothly past one another producing a series of minor and harmless quakes at frequent intervals instead of massive ones at long intervals. The secret, not surprisingly, is lubrication.

‘It was purely a chance discovery that led to this possibility – which would now appear a strong possibility – of modifying earthquakes by increasing their frequency. Somebody, for reasons best known to themselves, injected waste water into a particularly deep well near Denver and discovered, to their surprise, that this triggered off a series of earthquakes – tiny, but unquestionably earthquakes. Since then there have been many experiments, both in the laboratory
and under actual field conditions, that have clearly demonstrated that frictional resistance in a fault zone is lessened by decreasing the stress along the fault.

‘In other words, increasing the amount of fluid in the fault lessens the resistance in the fault while withdrawing the fluid increases the resistance: if an existing stress is present between the faces of two tectonic plates it can be eased by injecting fluid and causing a small earthquake, the size of which can be fairly accurately controlled by the amount of fluid injected. This was proved some years ago when Geological Survey scientists, experimenting in the Rangeley oil fields in Colorado, found that by alternately forcing in and then withdrawing fluids they could turn earthquakes off and on at will.

‘To what may be to their eternal credit, seismologists in our State were the first to put those theories to practical use.’ The newscaster, who seemed to relish his role as lecturer, was now tapping the map on the wall. ‘From here to here’ – he indicated a line that stretched from the Mexican border to the San Francisco Bay area – ‘massive drills, specifically designed for this task, have bored holes to an incredible depth of up to forty thousand feet in ten selected areas along this roughly south-east-north-west line. All of those bore-holes are in known earthquake faults and all in areas where some of the most severe of recorded earthquakes have taken place.’