Matt Helm--The Interlopers (7 page)

“Fine, fine,” I’d said. “In other words, he liked girls. What girls? Since he was so damn normal, by your standards, he was probably concentrating on one, currently, so let me rephrase the question: what girl?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mr. Helm. You won’t meet her up north where you’re going, so there’s no sense in cluttering up your mind with irrelevant…”

I’d said, “Who’s doing this impersonation, you or I? Suppose you let me decide which irrelevancies I want to clutter up my mind with and which I don’t. Who’s the girl in Grant Nystrom’s life—my life, now?”

“Well,” he’d said very reluctantly, “well, there seems to be a wealthy society lady with radical inclinations, named Elizabeth Meredith…”

Stottman was waiting. I could feel him waiting. He was waiting for me to ignore the name he’d mentioned. It would have been a mark against me, since no man, under these circumstances, would be likely to let pass even a casual reference to his lady love. Or he was waiting for me to betray myself completely by asking who Meredith was, or by referring to the possessor of the name as masculine instead of feminine. He was a bright guy, for all his piggy looks, and he had the instinct for something wrong that makes a good agent.

“Meredith? Libby Meredith?” I said quickly. “Is she here? Where’d you see her?”

Stottman turned to me slowly. If he was disappointed again, he didn’t let it show. He said, “You ought to know where I saw her. Even if you didn’t get there in time to spot her going into the clinic, her car was parked right in front. I’m surprised you didn’t recognize it, Mr. Nystrom.”

My mind was working fast. “That yellow Caddy? Hell, Libby trades Cadillacs like some people trade stamps; I’d never seen this particular boat before. You mean that was hers? What’s she doing here, anyway? I left her down in San Francisco, and she didn’t say anything about coming up this way. Where is she now?”

“By this time, I suppose she’s well on her way back to Seattle. At least that’s where she came from, when I called Command and asked if there wasn’t somebody handy who’d check your identification for me. After watching you play footsie with that blond girl on the beach this morning, when you should have kept yourself available to take delivery, I wanted to be absolutely sure before I handed you the stuff.”

“You made absolutely sure, all right!” I said sourly. “You gave me a hell of a check. You never even let Libby see me! If you had, she’d have told you right away—”

“How did I know there was going to be a ringer waiting in the clinic, instead of you? We just set it up that she’d borrow a fancy dog to make it look good and be there when you came. She’d give me the signal, one way or the other, and go on back to her business in Seattle, whatever it is. There was no need for us to take the risk of talking together, or I didn’t think there was. By the time I realized there were
two
guys to identify, she’d got back into her car and driven off.”

I hesitated, frowned, and said, “Well, there’s an obvious way to settle this. How far is it to Seattle? Do you know where she’s staying?”

“She was at the Holiday Inn. At least that’s where I called her, setting it up over the phone. Room twenty-seven.” He hesitated. “It’s a couple of hundred miles to Seattle. But…”

I said, “If Libby gives me the okay, will you condescend to make delivery like you’re supposed to, and let me get on with my route. Or will you just think up a bunch of new reasons for not following orders?”

The dark-faced man called Pete said unhappily: “It’s a long drive, Mr. Stottman, and it’s getting late. Hell, he’s all right, he knows about Miss Meredith, he knows about everything. He’s got to be the right man. Can’t you just turn it over to him and—”

“Nobody’s got to be anything,” said Stottman coldly. “You take care of this stiff, Pete. Take care of it good, and then join me at the Holiday Inn, in Seattle. I’ll ride along with this guy.” His small, suspicious eyes studied my face. “I think he’s bluffing, Pete. I think he’s bluffing like hell.”

The trouble was, he was perfectly right.

It took us nearly six hours to reach Seattle. The roads weren’t bad and I could have made it faster if I’d wanted to—the new pickups handle better than a lot of passenger cars—but I wasn’t really in a hurry to get there just so I could have the rug yanked out from under my feet and the boom lowered on my head, to mix a couple of metaphors, if that’s what they were.

We entered the city from the east after crossing a mountain range or two in the dark. I had a hunch we’d missed a lot of beautiful scenery by making the drive at night, but at the moment I had other things to worry about besides picture-postcard views I hadn’t got to see.

The sudden, unexpected emergencies are one thing: you can do nothing about them except deal with them as they come. It’s the ones you see approaching a long way off, the ones that are neither unexpected nor unavoidable, that cause a lot of wear and tear on the mental gears.

In this case, I was obviously walking, or driving, straight into serious trouble. The minute Miss Elizabeth Meredith saw me and opened her mouth, I was dead—well, maybe not instantly, on her motel room rug, but at least as soon as I could be transported from there to a suitably discreet and private place. I wouldn’t even have the satisfaction of getting myself killed by Hans Holz, as we’d planned. Stottman was clearly willing to attend to it personally, and to hell with the imported talent. Mac’s theories in this regard seemed to be springing a few leaks in practice.

The question I had to answer, then, was how far to carry this doomed masquerade, hoping for a miracle. Obviously the safest course was to extract myself from the mess right now, before we ever reached the woman. I could probably handle Stottman at the moment. He was suspicious, but there were undoubtedly some questions on his mind about the correctness of his suspicions; there had to be. It had been a long drive and I’d made no false moves. The chances were good that his guard had slipped a little. Furthermore, he was alone.

If I acted decisively now, before his partner rejoined him, and before his suspicions were confirmed by the Meredith woman, I could probably take him. Later, the job would be a lot harder, perhaps impossible.

On the other hand, I had established contact after a fashion, and I hated to break it now. Making a bluff and backing down on it, I told myself, was bad poker; better to play the hand through. Hell, the woman we were driving to see might slip in the shower and kill herself or drink herself senseless before we reached her door. She might even take off for parts unknown in her yellow Cadillac. If she proved unavailable after I’d indicated clearly my willingness to meet her, Stottman couldn’t reasonably pursue his suspicions much farther. All I needed was a little luck…

The Holiday Inn was located on the southern edge of Seattle, which meant we had to circumnavigate a good deal of the town to reach it. We’d already spent a little time checking me out of the motel in Pasco, and now we got lost twice trying to follow the sparse highway markers through the streets of the big coastal city, which seemed to be almost as badly loused up with waterways and bridges as Stockholm or Venice. As a result, it was well past eleven by the time we drove into the parking lot—and the yellow Cadillac convertible was there. So much for luck.

Stottman motioned to me to park beside it. Then he got out and again covered me as I slid over to join him on the pavement. I turned toward the camper.

He said, “Never mind.”

“To hell with you,” I said. “You don’t have to clean up the mess.”

“You’re stalling, Nystrom. You’re afraid of what Meredith is going to tell me about you.”

I shrugged. “Think what you like. The pup’s taking a walk or you’re shooting me right here. Make up your mind… Out you go, Hank. Don’t bite that man, he’ll give you indigestion.”

The black pup didn’t even take time to lick me. It had been a long haul, and he just skittered off across the parking lot and dove into the bushes to keep an urgent appointment with nature.

“
Now
what are you doing?” Stottman demanded.

“I’m feeding him,” I said, reaching into the camper. “Dogs eat, you know… Okay, Prince Hannibal. Back inside you go.” Returning, the pup leaped into the camper eagerly. He was attacking the bowl of dog food before I had the door closed. I turned to Stottman and said, “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Not a bite. Not even a snarl. And you thought you were going to be torn limb from limb! Now that the livestock’s been taken care of, let’s go see Libby and get this settled. Where’s room twenty-seven in this flossy joint?”

“Probably somewhere in this wing, since her car’s here. I’d guess the second floor from the number.”

“Brains!” I said admiringly, and preceded him up the stairs at the end of the building, and along the hall to number twenty-seven, which unfortunately wasn’t hard to find.

“Knock!” said Stottman, holding his gun steady.

I knocked. There was a long silence. I was strongly aware of the .25 automatic in Stottman’s hand. There are stories of the feeble little bullet being turned by a heavy overcoat, but I wasn’t wearing an overcoat. Stottman jerked his head in a peremptory way. I started to knock again, and the door swung open, away from my knuckles.

The woman who stood in the doorway was moderately tall, very nicely put together, and expertly preserved, so that you could safely say only that she was over twenty and under forty. I happened to know, having pried the information out of Mr. Smith’s young men, that she was almost exactly halfway between those ages. Her hair was dark and rather short, cut almost boyishly, if the term means anything in these days of shaggy young males, but there was nothing boyish about her face or figure.

She was still wearing the yellow silk pants and the lacy blouse and the yellow silk jacket, open now as if she’d been about to take it off when interrupted. The elaborate, fragile costume had put in a long day on the road, and showed it, and so did she. She’d probably been heading for a bath and bed when we knocked on the door. But even tired, and slightly soiled and rumpled, she was a very good-looking woman, and normally I’d have been happy to meet her. Tonight, however, I’d have preferred a diamondback rattlesnake.

There was a little frowning crease between her eyes as she looked from me to Stottman and back again. Then she stepped forward impulsively and threw her arms around my neck.

“Grant!” she cried. “Oh, Grant, darling, I’ve been so worried about you…!”

There are all kinds of Elizabeths, and you can pretty well determine which variety you’re dealing with by the nickname your specimen wears. At one end of the personality range are the sweet, shy Beths—I was married to one, once. It was at a time when I’d quit all undercover activities and was earning a peaceful living with typewriter and camera, but things happened, as they do to people who retire from this profession. She learned about my dark and bloody past the hard way. It broke her up and our marriage as well. A typical, sensitive Beth. She went to Reno and I went back to work for Mac, but ever since I’ve considered myself something of an authority on Elizabeths.

In the middle of the personality spectrum you’ll find some wholesome, normal girls called Betty. At the far end are the tough and sexy ladies who go by the nicknames Liz and Libby. I don’t say it always works this way, but I’ve found the correlation pretty good.

Libby Meredith did nothing to make me revise my conclusions, Elizabeth-wise. She might be tired from all the driving, but the kiss she gave me showed me no signs of it. By the time she’d finished, I’d been made uncomfortably aware that there was a healthy woman inside the slightly wilted silk-and-lace outfit that something drastic should be done about, and if a bed wasn’t handy, the wall-to-wall carpet would do. Of course, it wasn’t a very practical idea at the moment, but I couldn’t help having it just the same.

She drew back slightly to look at me. There was a hint of malice in her greenish eyes, letting me know that she was well aware of the biological effect she’d produced; but from where he stood, Stottman couldn’t see her eyes. Her voice, which he could hear, was tender.

“Oh, darling!” she murmured. “When I saw that strange man and that crummy black dog trying to impersonate you and your Hank in that funny little pet clinic, I was so afraid… I figured he must have killed you, or at least had you kidnaped, so he could take your place. I wanted to stay and find you, but you know how they are about following instructions. Are you all right?”

“Sure,” I said. She’d given me time to get my brain working again, and the role I was expected to play was pretty obvious. I went on, “Some crazy kids tried to run me into a deadfall, but I managed to shoot my way out of it.”

I made my voice carefully casual, the way a man like Grant Nystrom might, after having for the first time proved his manhood with a gun. Libby Meredith looked aghast.

“
Shoot
your way?” she gasped, and of course she was acting, too.

Her mocking eyes told me she knew quite well that shooting guns at people was nothing new in my life. It was fairly easy, now, to guess where she’d learned this. I was beginning to understand from whom Mr. Smith’s young men had extracted so many intimate details of the late Grant Nystrom’s life; although her motive in spilling all this information to the authorities, and in coming here to help me act the part of her dead boyfriend—if that was why she was here—was not yet apparent.

“Shoot your way!” she repeated, sounding shocked and horrified. “Oh, darling, you’re supposed to be just a courier, not a gunman. If I’d thought for a moment, when I talked you into it, that there was any danger in the work our people needed you for…” She paused. Her expression was, for the moment, odd and unreadable. “Did you… did you have to kill anybody?”

“I got one of them, a punk with a fancy rifle who was drawing a bead on Hank.” I was still Grant Nystrom, trying to work out the proper attitude for discussing his first homicide. “It was pretty much like shooting fish in a barrel. I’ve worked lots harder stalking deer and elk. I don’t know what’s so tough about killing a man—he can’t smell you coming, and he seems to die fairly easily.”