The Brea File (28 page)

He laughed, and Erika Halbig smiled crookedly in acknowledgment.

Macimer was aware of her scent without identifying it. She wore a dress of a soft, clinging fabric in a turquoise color that glowed in the artificial light like a jewel. The skirt was slit along one side almost to the hip, exposing a smooth expanse of brown thigh. Macimer wondered how many bars Erika frequented alone on the evenings Halbig worked late. There was uncomfortable truth in her slightly bitter comment about Halbig’s relationship with the Bureau. As an Executive Assistant Director there might be many such evenings when he would not leave Headquarters until very late. Young, childless, bored and beautiful, Erika Halbig was one of a vast legion of those American women who begin drinking to fill a void.

They talked idly for several minutes, Macimer listening with one ear for the message from the bartender that he had a phone call. Seven o’clock passed. Searching for something to say, he felt the nudge of her bare knee against his. The pressure might have been accidental. He told her how much he had liked Hogate’s years ago when so many things were smaller and more personal.

“If you don’t like it so much anymore,” Erika commented as her empty glass was replaced with another Beefeater on the rocks, “why do you still come here? For your phone calls?”

“I don’t dislike it. Besides,” he added with a smile, “the mixed seafood platter is still one of the best bargains in town.” He shifted slightly on his stool to break the persistent pressure of her thigh. “What about you?”

Erika shrugged indifferently. She rattled the ice cubes in her glass and sipped the smooth dry gin.

“Do you come here often?”

She nodded. Her profile was virtually flawless, Macimer decided. So was the smoothly modeled elegance of neck and shoulder.

“You must like something about it.” The noisy crowds, perhaps. They offered company and anonymity at the same time.

“I don’t like it much.” Then Erika added, by way of explanation, “It’s not such a good idea to drink often in places you like.”

There was an awkward pause. She smiled crookedly at Macimer’s discomfiture. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know the lady was a lush? I’ll bet Jan noticed.”

Macimer did not reply to that. Jan had noticed, and Erika knew it. “Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself?”

“Who should know better? What’s the matter, Paul, do I embarrass you?”

“No. But you do concern me.”

“That’s sweet.” She placed a hand impulsively over his. The touch lingered, as if she were reluctant to break the contact. “That’s very nice.”

“Erika… my business may not take very long. Why don’t you get something to eat here? I’ll meet you as soon as I can and see you home.”

Her hand withdrew. “I’m not smashed, Paul. I’m not helpless. And you don’t have to worry about my picking up a stranger at the bar.” Her wryly bitter smile reappeared. “You’re not a stranger, Paul. And you’re not just anybody.”

The words seemed to have reverberations which echoed beyond their surface meaning. Before the exchange could move onto even more disturbing ground, the bartender signaled. “Mr. Macimer? Your call. Do you want to take it here?”

“I’ll take it down at the end.”

“Have fun!” Erika Halbig called after him.

The babble of music and conversation around him made it difficult for Macimer to hear the muffled voice on the phone. “You alone, Macimer?”

“As alone as you can be in a place like this.” He glanced toward the other end of the bar. Erika Halbig was raising her glass to her lips, tilting her head back as if to display the long graceful line of her neck.

“Good. Listen, we’d better meet a little later, like I said. You know the Roosevelt Memorial? Out on the island?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Meet you there around nine. It’ll be getting dark then.”

“Why there?”

“One good reason. There won’t be anyone else there. They close it up as soon as the sun goes down. There’s a gate at the land-side end of the pedestrian bridge. It’ll be locked but it won’t keep you out.”

“Isn’t there a security patrol?”

Antonelli chuckled. “What’s there to steal?”

“Wait a minute, Antonelli. Give me a reason why I should meet you after dark on a deserted island. Why shouldn’t I just call Senator Sederholm and ask him what kind of work you’re doing for him?”

“Because you know he wouldn’t tell you. You want a good reason, Macimer? I’ll give you one. I know about the Brea file.”

Before Macimer could answer he heard the click of the receiver. Antonelli had hung up.

In another corner of the lounge a three-piece group of musicians began tuning up their instruments, one man plucking at an electronic guitar, another fingering a bass fiddle. A burst of laughter enveloped some new arrivals. Macimer stood motionless, still holding the phone, as the questions boiled up. Was Antonelli a free lance in this affair? Had he stumbled onto the same information Gerella had? Did he know who Gerella’s informant was? Was the thief sending samples from the file to Sederholm’s committee as well as to Gerella? And what was in those samples?

Macimer wished that he had talked to Gerella, but the latest word from the Georgetown hospital had the reporter still under sedation, though resting comfortably. He could probably answer questions for a brief period in the morning.

Without more information from Gerella, Antonelli was even more of a mystery. Why did he want a secret meeting? Was he selling information—or his silence?

Macimer moved slowly back along the length of the bar, pushing his way through the good-natured crowd, sorting out his questions but finding few answers. Erika was sitting where he had left her. There was a question in her eyes and he answered it immediately. “It looks like I have some time, after all. And we could both use some supper. How about it?”

“Lead on, chief. Us troops will follow you anywhere.” She was joking, smiling crookedly, but he thought afterward that she had seemed relieved.

* * * *

For the dozenth time Raymond Shoup nervously examined the contents of his unlovely rented room. It was spartanly furnished—an unmade twin bed without a frame, resting on the floor in one corner; a beige vinyl chair with a cigarette burn on the seat; an old black-and-white television set on a roll-about stand; a couple of scarred tables holding battered lamps, overflowing ashtrays, a pile of old
Playbody
and
Hustler
magazines. One wall contained a combination stove-refrigerator-sink unit. The sink was full of unwashed dishes.

Unlovely. Undisturbed. Nothing missing.

But someone had been here.

Raymond wasn’t even sure how he knew. Maybe it was the magazines. They were where he had left them on the table next to the beige chair, but… not exactly as he had left them. He was not an orderly person—“I don’t know where you get it,” his mother used to complain. “Your father was so orderly, so neat about everything. You should have seen the polish on his boots. And the crease on his trousers—you could cut your fingers…” Raymond had never seen the knife-edge pants or the gleaming boots except in the photograph on the dresser, the uniform crisp and clean, the cap precisely cocked over one eye. And the ears sticking out, the Marine haircut leaving the temples scalped. Jack Shoup had been killed in Vietnam; he had never seen the son who was born three months after he shipped out.

The magazines had been carelessly stacked, he saw as he stared at them. But
stacked
. He threw one down when he was done with it, speared another randomly from the pile when he was in the mood. He didn’t stack them.

The bed was unmade but he was certain the mattress had been moved. It was never exactly in place over the worn box-spring unit. It was now.

The room had been searched. He
knew
it.

His thoughts jerked back, like a twitch of panic, to what Alice Volker, who ran the boardinghouse for its wealthy absentee owners, had said. “There was someone asking about you. Are you in any trouble, Raymond?”

“Who was it? Did he say who he was?”

“He said it was insurance, but…” Alice Volker had a nose for cops. The burly man asking about Raymond Shoup had been polite, soft-spoken, but he hadn’t been sure of the name. An insurance investigator verifying the address of a witness to an accident would have known his name, wouldn’t he?

“What did he want? What did you tell him?”

But Alice Volker had told the investigator little. That Raymond Shoup lived in 211. That he was respectable—she ran a respectable boardinghouse. That Raymond lived alone and was presently unemployed. That she didn’t know when he would be back that afternoon.

“You didn’t let him in?” There was anxiety in Raymond’s question.

“Of course not!” she snapped. “Are you in trouble with the police, Raymond? I don’t want any trouble here.”

He had reassured her, but he was far from being reassured himself. Who had been asking about him? The police? The FBI—because of the stolen car and its missing file? But how could they possibly know his identity? How could they have found him? Was it the reporter, Gerella?

“Raymond?” Alice Volker was at the door, looking peevish as she generally did when she had to walk up the stairs. “You have a phone call.”

“A phone call? Me?” A weight of dread lay cold and heavy in his stomach.

The telephone was in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. Alice Volker lingered in the doorway of the manager’s apartment, but Raymond waited her out, staring at her until she sniffed and turned back into the apartment, closing the door. Then Raymond picked up the phone. “Hello, Gerella?”

“Yeah!”

Raymond Shoup leaned against the wall. His hands shook and his knees went soft in the wash of relief. Not the police! Not the FBI!

He missed something the reporter said. Then he stammered out a question: “How did you find me?”

“Do you think there’s much that Oliver Packard can’t find out in this city?”

Raymond laughed weakly. In his relief he did not pursue the question of how Oliver Packard or his reporter could have tracked him down when he had given no name, no address, no phone number in his communications with Gerella.

“We want the file, Raymond. The whole thing. What’s your price?”

Raymond had thought about it, and the figure he had settled on surfaced without hesitation, in his mind a bold grab for as much as he thought he could get. After all, there was nothing in the file that seemed important. “Five thousand dollars!” he blurted.

After a slight hesitation his caller responded. “You’ve got it, Raymond. But we want the file tonight. Have you got it with you?”

Shoup grimaced. He knew instantly that he had set his sights too low, that he could have got more. “I can put my hands on it,” he said. Not where you could find it, he thought, not in my room. And suddenly he was angry, realizing that the reporter had tried to steal the file, to get away without paying off. In that moment Raymond made the decision to hold out for more. Five thousand wasn’t enough, it was peanuts to Oliver Packard. There had to be something important in the FBI file that Raymond hadn’t recognized.

“Raymond, we’ll have to meet somewhere we won’t be seen together.”

“Why?” Raymond demanded, immediately suspicious.

“Hey, Raymond, use your head. Don’t you know there are laws against stealing FBI classified documents?”

“What about publishing them?”

“Let us worry about that. But we don’t reveal our sources, so you’re in the clear as long as we’re not seen together. If we were, the file might be traced back to you once the fat hits the fire, and you could be charged. Neither of us wants that.”

Raymond Shoup’s habitual suspicion faded. He didn’t want to be on the FBI’s list. That part of it had frightened him from the moment he opened the box in the trunk of the stolen car and saw that it contained FBI documents. “Okay,” he agreed. “Where do we meet?”

“You know how to get to Roosevelt Island?”

“Hey, man, no way, I don’t have any wheels!”

“So much the better. Cars can be traced. For God’s sake, don’t steal one. Look, you can pick up the Metro blue line. Take it across the river and get off at Rosslyn. You can walk from there to the island in ten minutes. Go over the footbridge to the island. I’ll meet you there by the monument.”

“Why can’t you pick me up in Rosslyn? No one would see us.”

“Don’t ever underestimate the FBI, kid. They’re combing this town for that stolen file. Don’t forget… I found you.”

Raymond Shoup shivered in spite of the close muggy heat in the dim hallway. He glanced toward Alice Volker’s doorway. The door, which had been firmly closed, was open a crack. The bitch! She was listening!

“Okay, okay,” he said. “What time?”

“Eight o’clock sharp. If you’ve got to pick up that file somewhere, Raymond, you’d better get started.”

“Don’t try to follow me!”

“Now why would I do that, Raymond? How many times do I have to tell you we can’t be seen together? It isn’t us you have to worry about. Do you think we want you blowing the whistle on us, telling everyone we bought stolen FBI documents? The way this is going to come out, Raymond, it’s going to look like someone leaked them to us. Nobody will ever know who or how. That’s the way it’s got to be.”

“Okay, man, okay,” Raymond said, his last objections dissipating. “You bring the money.”
It’ll buy you something
, he thought, the roller coaster of his emotions rising to angry resentment once more,
but not what you think, not the whole file. That’s gonna cost you!

“Eight o’clock. Don’t be late, Raymond. This is one boat you don’t want to miss!”

* * * *

“What shall we talk about, then?” Erika Halbig asked, the tone of voice sardonic rather than amused. “Is it going to rain again tomorrow, do you think?”

“Probably.”

“Ah, the careful Bureau-cratic response, right? Don’t commit yourself, never reveal too much.”

Paul Macimer wondered if having Erika join him for dinner was not a mistake, after all. She had left most of her huge seafood platter untouched after picking at her salad. And she continued to drink, switching from gin to the white wine she had asked for to go with the fish.