Sight Unseen (3 page)

Lockwood found that one of the two-ton panel trucks was missing from the parking lot, and when he examined the gate guard’s
roster, he found that truck had left during the night at 2:17
A.M
. He then walked the perimeter of the mesh fence, and in the southwest corner of Northstar’s ten acres he found a two-foot
hole in the fence, which was partially hidden by a lush bramblebush. This was how the thieves had gotten in.

At 1:00 that afternoon he called Mr. Gray.

“What’s this all about?” Gray growled. “We don’t have to pay, right? What was stolen?”

“They won’t let me tell you yet what was stolen. I have to ask the G-men, who’ll be here any minute,” Lockwood reported. “I
don’t see how we can pay under the circumstances —if I ever saw an inside job, this is it. We can say that the boss, who had
one of the keys, did it. It’ll buy us time.”

“What do you mean, you can’t tell
me
?” Gray shouted. “I’m the
chief
of this department, Lockwood. And of course we won’t pay. Paying in ninety-six hours—I never heard of anything so silly.
Can you find it, Lockwood?”

Lockwood suppressed his anger at Gray’s raspy remarks. Nothing made Mr. Gray more irritable than the prospect of paying a
large claim—even a legitimate one.

“I don’t know, Chief. The night guard is due here any minute, and also a bunch of guys from Washington. From all the secrecy
out here, I’m not even sure the G-men are going to let us investigate.”

“
Let
us! How are they going to
stop
us?” Gray shouted.

“Take it easy, will you? All I can say is it looks like they had a—device—here yesterday, and it looks as if they don’t have
it today.”

“Don’t leave there, Lockwood! You find that ‘device’ or find some reason for Transatlantic not to pay, you hear? Take a week
if you need to, but find it, you hear me?”

Lockwood held the receiver a foot from his ear. He sighed. “Yes, sir, I hear you fine.”

Pops Tibbett, the night watchman, had not gone home yet. He looked calm for a man whose charge had slipped away the night
before. When Lockwood entered the spare office, the white-haired man rose and stood straight for a man over seventy. The German
shepherd at his side panted deeply and watched Lockwood as he asked Pop questions.

“I made my rounds just like I always do,” Pops answered. Lockwood jotted down the times of his rounds without telling him
when the truck had left last night. According to the Detex system, Pops had been on this floor at 1:46, just thirty-three
minutes before the two-ton truck had gone through the gate. When Pops had come back to Area C after forty minutes, the usual
length of his round, he had seen nothing.

“Bingo did whine and bark, and I let him sniff all around this room,” the old man said, his watery eyes looking as if they
might fill with tears, “but he didn’t see nobody.”

“Where do you leave your keys when you’re off duty?”

“With Miss Myra or Mr. Greer,” he said. “I told them the first day I come here I didn’t want to take them home. Just in case
something like this happened.”

Myra came in then and told Lockwood the G-men had arrived, and would Lockwood come back to Dr. Dzeloski’s office?

“Miss Myra,” Pops called after her. She stopped and turned. “I’m not going to lose my job, am I? I really need this job, and
I didn’t see or hear nothing last night. I’d have shot the crooks if I had.” He pulled his old pistol out and waved it around,
alarming Lockwood. The barrel pointed in the direction of Lockwood’s feet, and he backed up a couple of steps.

“I don’t think so, Pops,” she said, and she stepped forward to put her hand on his arm. “Sounds to me like you did your job.”

“I did, Miss Myra, I did.”

Lockwood didn’t buy the old man’s performance. Actually he wasn’t buying any of their performances. He had seen too many cases
like this. Myra, Stanley Greer, Pops, the gate guard, the engineers, Dzeloski himself—people had a thousand reasons for cheating
the insurance company, and his job was to find the one—if any—that applied here. As they went downstairs, Lockwood asked,
“Has he been with you long?”

“He was a machinist till two years ago, and we made him night watchman when he reached seventy. He’s been with Josef since
he first went in business—I think he came with the original factory in Queens—”

Josef Dzeloski’s outer office held six bland young men whom Lockwood spotted at once as Feds. In Dzeloski’s office itself
another two slightly older young men who also looked like Feds rose to meet him. Lockwood could feel the antagonism emanating
from them like heat from an oven.

One was Guy Manners, a forty-year-old troubleshooter from the Treasury Department, and the other was a special agent from
military intelligence, George Porta.

Manners said at once, “Mr. Lockwood, I know you have good reasons to look into this matter, but this is something I don’t
think either the Treasury or the Army Air Corps can give you permission to investigate.”

“Hey, terrific,” Lockwood said. He put on his hat. “Mr. Dzeloski, thanks for—”

“Wait a minute,” Dr. Dzeloski said, stopping him. “You’re going to pay off, right?”

“Sir, we can’t if we can’t investigate,” Lockwood said. “If you’ll look at the policy, you’ll see we have the right to conduct
a full investigation when a claim’s made. If we don’t get full cooperation, we have the right not to pay.” Lockwood grinned
to show his threats were all part of the game. “Believe me, my boss will be delighted to hear we don’t have to pay.”

Dzeloski looked more nervous and flustered than before. “Guy, what is this? We can’t get any more money out of the committee’s
budget—there isn’t any till July 1st—probably more like mid-August. By then we’ll have lost our best engineers, which will
throw us another six months behind. We’ve borrowed up to the hilt. I can’t get a penny anywhere else. What harm can it do?
Let Mr. Lockwood investigate.”

“Mr.—Dr. Dzeloski,” Manners said, “
we
don’t want some private dick trampling down the grass around here. This is government business. We’ll find the bombsight.
That’s our business.”

“Producing Northstar bombsights is
my
business, Manners,” Dzeloski said, and now there was no give in his voice. “And while we may have a contract with the Air
Corps, this bombsight is still private property—my private property. I need this payment to stay in business. I’ve already
talked to Washington all morning. They won’t—they can’t—release the next payment till I deliver this prototype, and it was
stolen last night. So. Lockwood, you look around all you want. I want that money in ninety-six hours—just as my policy calls
for. Myra, make sure everybody on our staff cooperates with Mr. Lockwood.”

“Yes, sir.”

Manners’ eyes narrowed. Obviously he wasn’t used to civilians brooking his suggestions. Lockwood cheered the short president
of the firm—Dzeloski’s stance was precisely what Lockwood would have done. “I’m going to call Washington.”

“Talk to Lt.-Col. Maynard Anderson,” Dzeloski suggested. “He’s in charge of the project.”

Manners shook his head. “No sir. I’m going to call the director, and I expect he’ll talk to General Bridges himself.” He shot
Lockwood a contemptuous look. “The less amateurs, the better.”

Lockwood smiled and shrugged his whole upper body. “You’d be doing me a favor, Manners. I’ve got lots of other things I’d
rather do.”

“Like what?”

“Take a pretty girl to Montauk for a lobster. Tell my boss we can forget this claim.”

“Watch your step, Lockwood,” Manners said. “We like wise guys a lot less than amateurs.”

Saying nothing about his inquiries up to now, Lockwood left Dr. Dzeloski’s office and went to his car. At the gate he flashed
his badge and found out who had been on duty last night.

By 3:00 that afternoon he was knocking at the night guard’s door. A sleepy-looking forty-five-year-old man answered his third
knock.

“I don’t want none, fellow,” he said when he caught sight of Lockwood.

Lockwood flashed his gold badge and asked, “Fred Hamlisch? Would you answer a few questions?”

Hamlisch suddenly looked much more wary than sleepy. “About what?”

“About the theft last night.”

The question shook Hamlisch. “What theft?”

“Can I come in?”

Hamlisch considered this a few seconds, tried out a grin, and said, “If you’ll have coffee with me. I got to get moving. I
got to be to work by 6:00.”

Hamlisch led him through a quiet dark living room and a long dark hallway to the kitchen. As he fussed with the gas stove,
Hamlisch asked again, “What theft?”

“You really didn’t hear about it?” Lockwood asked.

“I wouldn’t ask if I had. How do you like your coffee?”

“You let the thieves out last night at 2:17, according to your log. It was an inside job and you helped them get away with
a $100,000 piece of U.S. government equipment.”

Hamlisch dropped the coffeepot into the sink with a clatter. “I did
what?
”

“You heard me.”

“I don’t know anything about this.”

“Didn’t a two-ton panel truck leave Northstar last night? Didn’t you inspect it?”

“I wasn’t supposed to.”

“They let people take stuff out in the dead of night without supervision? Come on, Hamlisch.”

Hamlisch put water into the coffeepot and put it on the fire.

“Say, mister, I don’t know what this is all about, but I’m no crook.”

“Well, you’re in a lot of hot water,” Lockwood said. “You let somebody drive a $100,000 piece of equipment right through your
gate.”

The man crumpled into a chair across from Lockwood. “Look, they didn’t tell me to look in that truck. They told me
not
to.”

“Who told you what?”

Hamlisch’s eyes appeared lost as he looked back in time. “That truck’s been going out every second or third night for the
past two or three weeks. Same guy driving it.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” Hamlisch said. “It started about three weeks ago. Mr. Greer called me up about 6:30, just after I come on, and says
that a new guy’s going to be working late and’ll be taking out a load of garbage in the middle of the night, and it’s okay.”

“Did you look in the truck?”

“First time or two I did. He had fiberboard trash barrels full of junk.”

“Last night?”

“It was the same guy as before. He gave me a cigarette, and we shot the breeze a minute or so. I wrote down the license number
and the time, and he drove off—same as always.”

“How do you know it was Greer?”

“I—” Hamlisch suddenly looked frightened. The coffeepot boiled over, and he jumped to take it off the stove, burning his fingers
in the process. He ran some cold water over his injured fingers and then wrapped his hand in a filthy dish towel.

“Aw, Jesus,” Hamlisch said when he sat back down.

“What?”

“I don’t know it was Greer. He just said it was him.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling it wasn’t Stanley Greer,” Lockwood said. “I bet you’ve been had.”

Fear in his face, Hamlisch asked, “Think I’ll get fired?”

“If you worked for me, I’d fire you.”

Hamlisch shook his head, looking as if he might cry. The look exasperated Lockwood. “I got to have this job.”

“What did he look like?” Lockwood said.

“Who? The guy in the truck?”

Lockwood nodded.

“Said his name was Morgan. Dave, I think. In his early thirties, blond hair, blue eyes, light skin. Real friendly. Didn’t
like driving the truck. Said he was just married, and this night work was ruining his home life. Just a friendly working stiff,
that’s all.”

Lockwood got up to go. “If I were you, Hamlisch, I’d get on out to the plant. There’s about a dozen guys from the Treasury
Department running around there who’re going to want to talk to you, and it wouldn’t hurt your case if you went to them instead
of making them find you. They’ll probably go at you through most of the night.”

“What about my job?”

Lockwood sighed for the frightened man. “You didn’t do it, so they’ve got the marines doing it. I think the U.S. Government
has just taken over your job.”

Lockwood left, and as he drove up to the front gate of Northstar, he saw Pops Tibbett driving out in a ’35 Ford. It wouldn’t
hurt to see where he went now that the T-men were finished with him. Lockwood waited until the car got a quarter of a mile
down the road and then swung in behind the black Ford. He reached under his coat for his .38, and cursed silently when he
remembered it was still on Dr. Dzeloski’s desk. He wondered if he would have any trouble getting it back and wearing it with
all these Feds around.

Pops drove at a maddeningly slow pace northward until he reached a community called North Shore Beach. Pops pulled into the
driveway of a run-down house that looked as if it might collapse with weariness in the next rainstorm.

Lockwood drove on past and out of the corner of his eye saw Pops get out and enter. He stopped up the road out of sight and
crept back through the field until he had a good view of the front and back of the house. Lockwood made himself comfortable,
deliberated whether to have a cigarette, and using his better judgment, decided not to.

After a half-hour, the back door opened, and Pops stood there on the stoop with a long round case in his hand. He looked all
around in a wary manner. Lockwood froze. The screen door opened then, and Bingo pushed his way out. Pops moved off, but Bingo
stopped and looked around, whining in a puzzled way.

Pops seemed in a hurry and nagged Bingo to come along. Lockwood didn’t move, scarcely daring to breathe.

The two disappeared down a path that cut through the scrub bushes. Lockwood gave them three minutes and then followed. After
twenty minutes, by which time Lockwood’s black socks were covered with twigs and irritating little seeds with hooks, he came
to a sudden halt, seeing Pops not fifty feet in front of him. Lockwood took off through the woods and circled around, coming
up on the old man from the woods.