What of Terry Conniston? (4 page)

Hearing his name, Georgie lifted his head. “Time is it now?”

Theodore snapped, “That's the howmanyest time you've asked me that?”

Georgie rubbed his face. “Okay, go ahead, I'm listening.”

Floyd moved his glance deliberately from face to face. Mitch glared at him. Floyd said, “Prosperity is just around the corner, boys. It's time we change our station in life before we end up with holes in our shoes like my benighted old man, God rot his memory.”

“
Our
old man,” said Georgie.

“I stand corrected; your point is well taken.” Floyd's glance whipped down the room to him and there was something remote and vicious in it. “Georgie and I,” he murmured, “do not intend to end up like our old man.”

Theodore said, “You got us a job, huh?”

“In a manner of speaking. A very large job. What we're going to do is pull off a little extra-legal caper—a statutory offense if you will. We're going to borrow a rich man's daughter for a little while and the rich man's going to pay us to get her back.”

Mitch stared at him, not believing. Billie Jean said, “You talking about kidnaping somebody?”

Theodore's head swiveled. “Kidnap? Is that what you said?”

Floyd observed, “Theodore, you're incredibly adept at grasping the obvious as soon as someone spells it out for you.”

Mitch said, “Aagh,” in disgust and backed up against the wall, hooking his hands in his pockets. “You're putting us on.”

“I'm putting you onto a fat share of a half million dollars,” Floyd answered. It was a quiet snarl and he let it fall into the room and lie among them, stirring sluggishly.

It was a while before anyone spoke.

“A half million dollars?” Georgie said. “Five hundred thousand dollars?”

Theodore said, “Who do we have to grab for that kind of money? Who's got that kind of money?”

“Earle Conniston. As in Conniston Oil, Conniston Construction, and Conniston Aerospace Industries. He lives on a secluded estate he pleases to call a ranch about forty miles south of here. He has a daughter who's very dear to his heart because his only son was killed last year and she's all he's got left.”

Billie Jean was rubbing her palms on her hips. “That's a lot of money, Floyd.”

Mitch shook his head in exasperation and heard Theodore say, “Yeah, she's right. Nobody's got that much cash lying around and you can't exactly ask the man for a check.”

“Theodore, you hear the words but you don't hear the music, do you? Earle Conniston's a
very
rich man. Taking half a million from him is like taking dimes from a man who makes dollars. He'll never miss it—not a tenth as much as he'll miss his daughter.”

A broken interval of silent time stretched by. In the end, excited, Theodore bounced to his feet. “Sure. Why don't we? Hell, all that money? Man, Floyd, you are something else.”

Georgie sat up on the bed, drew his knees up and wrapped his thin arms around them. “I don't know, Floyd, I mean,
kid
naping—”

“And just how do
you
expect to pay for that habit of yours?”

“Habit?” Georgie's eyes wandered weakly away. “I took the cure, Floyd, I can take the stuff or leave it—Christ sake, I'm not a
junkie
or something. And if I like a jolt now and then it don't take any half million dollars—I mean, you go out and kidnap somebody, they lock you up for keeps.”

“Not if they never find out who you are,” Floyd said. His voice clacked abruptly: “All right, you've all had your say, now I'll put in my fifty-one percent worth. We abduct the girl tomorrow night and then we arrange to collect the money from Daddy Warbucks. I've got everything laid out—”

“Wait a minute.” Mitch, finding his tongue, stepped forward. “Wait just a minute. You can't expect us to go along with a crazy thing like that. Even Georgie knows better—lock you up for keeps is exactly what they'll do. Anyhow what do you need all that money for?”

“I'm going to paper my living room walls with it,” Floyd said darkly. “What do you think I'm going to do with it? Are you trying to tell me you can't use a hundred thousand dollars, Mitch?”

“Not in jail. Not in the gas chamber. They still have capital punishment in Arizona.”

“Nobody gets arrested. The way I have it planned nobody will even see our faces. They'll never find us out. It's perfect. It can't miss. The girl drives home the same route every night from school. She leaves the freeway at Mountain View and takes State Highway Eighty-three south to her daddy's ranch. It's a twenty-mile stretch of the loneliest mountain road in the world. We pick her up there tomorrow night and we take her to a place I've already reconnoitered—plenty of room to hide her and us and the cars. They won't find us even if they use X-rays. It's one of those old ghost towns, nobody ever comes around the place in the summer. Fifteen miles from the nearest paved road. You can see a long way from the rooftops—we can spot cars or helicopters before they get within ten miles of us.”

Floyd went on, talking smoothly. It was the hypnotic confidence of his baritone voice more than the words themselves that always made it hard to dispute him. He had an oracular air of sincerity and omniscience; he made any thought of argument against him seem foolish and demeaning.

He said, “Tomorrow morning we'll sell the Pontiac and steal a car that can't be traced to us. I've already fixed us up with a lineman's telephone rig—there's a phone line at the main road fifteen miles north of Soledad and we can splice right into the cross-country line. We'll use electronic whistle codes to dial Conniston's phone direct, through the automatic switchboard—it'll take the phone company months to figure out where we were calling from. They can't trace calls to a phone that doesn't exist. We'll only hook it in when we're using it—we disconnect after each call. Now, we'll stock up on food and water tomorrow afternoon….”

His voice droned on, flat and authoritarian, leaving nothing open to challenge. When he stopped it was Theodore who spoke first:

“You sure thought of everything.”

“Everything,” Floyd agreed. “Nothing happens that I don't want to happen. There'll be no unnecessary frills, no gimmicks. It's a simple job. I've got the ransom drop worked out to the last detail. There'll be no traps and no way for them to see who picks up the money.”

As he spoke Floyd kept his eyes level on Mitch. Mitch felt cornered. He said, “They'll bring the FBI in right off.”

“What if they do? They won't find us. Nobody will—nobody can.”

“Nuts,” Mitch said. “It's ridiculous. You're not even talking about kidnaping a little kid. The girl's grown up.”

“Are you suggesting the five of us can't handle one seventeen-year-old girl?” Floyd aimed a slow wink at Theodore, who uttered a penetrating rasp of a laugh.

Mitch looked at the others, suppressing a sense of panic. He saw no help anywhere. Georgie's eyes weren't tracking quite right but even so he was pointedly avoiding Mitch's gaze. Theodore and Billie Jean moved forward and fixed themselves to Floyd. Dark sweat-circles stained the armpits of Theodore's T-shirt. Mitch felt his face color under Theodore's ugly one-eyed stare.

Floyd smiled and reached out suddenly, gripping Mitch's arm. The steel fingers bit into Mitch's flesh, the thumb casually working cartilage against bone. Mitch burst out in a gray sweat. Floyd said softly, “I need you to make it work, Mitch.”

“I—”

“You'll do it. You didn't like grinding your life away in school, did you? You don't want to starve on the beer circuit, do you? It's the best opportunity anybody ever offered you.”

“I never did anything like that in my life,” Mitch said weakly. “I never even thought about it before.”

“It's a me-first world, Mitch. You take what you can grab.”

Theodore said, “If Floyd says we need you then you do like he says. Or we turn out your lights, see?”

Floyd turned his arm loose. Mitch rubbed the pain abstractedly. He wasn't looking at anybody. He could hear the ragged sawing of Theodore's breathing.

He said, “All right—all right. Hell, why not?”

Floyd smiled. “That's the way.” Then, turning away, he stopped to look at Mitch once more, and asked merrily, “Am I not a son of a bitch, Mitch?” He laughed.

Mitch nodded with little jerks of his head. He knew what he was going to do anyway. He was going to get loose of them the first chance he saw and make a run for it.

C H A P T E R
Four

Earle Conniston's ranch sprawled across a third of a million scrub-grass acres of valley and foothills. A hand-crank gasoline pump stood at the end of the landing strip opposite the windsock. Coming in an hour ago, Carl Oakley had had to buzz the strip twice to chase half a dozen white-face steers off the grass runway. He had parked his Cessna beside Conniston's big Lear Jet and hitched a ride with a Mexican cowboy in a jeep loaded with rock-salt to the main house a quarter of a mile from the airfield. The house was boomerang-shaped, elaborate and Moorish, built of high-quality adobe with the archways of a shady galleried verandah running the length of it. The house was shaded by a copse of tall heavy cottonwood trees, planted twenty-five years ago and earnestly watered twice a week.

Twenty-three years ago Oakley, the young GI-Bill lawyer, had met Earle Conniston, the thirty-five-year-old businessman. A knee-injury from college football had kept Conniston out of the wartime army and by 1947 Conniston had built a small war-surplus junk business into the beginnings of a cartel. Conniston in those days had had a glittering smile, a quick glibness, a pushing dogged ambition. He was chest-combingly masculine, big-shouldered with thick hair on his arms and legs, and eyes that needed to look at things only once: he could absorb hundreds of details with a glance. He was big enough to seem oversized, as craggy as Rushmore even at thirty-five. He wasn't ugly but he was huge and rough; he had the important look of austere dignity that prevented people from slapping his back or elbow-nudging his ribs—he always got quick service from waitresses and desk clerks.

Oakley had met him in a poker game. By 1949 he had won two lawsuits for Conniston and made himself indispensable to the rising buccaneer. He had appraised Conniston of the tax advantages of cattle ownership and scouted the Southwest until he had found the right property at the right price. Eighteen years ago, on Oakley's advice, Conniston had bought this ranch.

Since the end of the war in Korea Earle Conniston had divided and multiplied like a financial amoeba. He was a tough grizzly and, fittingly, his powerful wealth came right out of the guts of the world—oil from Texas, steel from Michigan, steamships prowling the oceans, lumber and pulp mills in northern California, trucks on highways and tractors on vast company-owned farms and ranches from Florida to Montana.

Oakley had traveled the whole route with him. His personal fortunes had massed, the result of abundant salary and generous bonuses; if remaining a mere salaried employee disturbed him he gave no indication of it. Conniston never offered partnership and Oakley never demanded it. But the intricate convolutions of the Conniston empire were kept in balance mainly by the cleverness of Carl Oakley's brain; Oakley had seen to it that he became the vital cornerstone of the structure. They were friends; they respected each other's talents like two generals, one of whom commanded plans and the other operations; yet it was an alert relationship, honed by mutual distrust. Sometimes in fits of black humor Oakley saw himself as Conniston's Rasputin. He lacked the power to displace the czar on the throne; yet he had far too much damaging knowledge ever to be expendable.

Today Oakley had come down from Phoenix in two hours, been met by Conniston's third wife, Louise, and shown to the largest of the guest bedrooms, where he stripped and showered in preparation for the long afternoon's intense conference. He scratched his belly and stood in front of the mirror with his lips peeled back, inspecting his strong teeth and thinking idly that perhaps it was about time he got married. The decades of sybaritic bachelorhood were beginning to wear on him. A little flab starting to show up around the waist and shoulders: it might be best to find a marriageable woman before he lost his hair and his looks. Getting into slacks and sport shirt, he ran down the catalogue of eligible divorcees and spinsters, made a face and went out into the thick-walled corridor.

The house was cooled by a seven-ton air-conditioning plant concealed in oleander bushes beyond the swimming pool; the corridor was noiselessly cool in spite of the hundred-degree heat outside. Oakley's moccasins flipflopped along the carpeted hundred feet of hallway to the huge front room, where Louise stood petulantly arranging flowers in a vase. Either she hadn't seen him or she was pretending to be unaware of his approach. She moved around the vase, inspecting it from various angles, moving slowly because it was more graceful; almost everything Louise did was studied. She was only twenty-eight. Conniston had met her two years ago in New York, shortly after the divorce from his second wife. Louise had been a showgirl-turned-actress; in some ways Oakley knew more about her than Conniston did, since it had been his job to run down her past when Conniston became serious enough about her to warrant the investigation. She had worked her way up from modeling runway to off-Broadway stage, done a few television commercials and been tapped by a producer to play the ingenue opposite Henry Fonda in a bit of Broadway fluff that ran seven weeks. That was where Conniston had seen her; he had invaded backstage country, breached her dressing room and rushed her like a football running-back.

Conniston had the customary tycoon's desire for younger women; he also liked talent in his women. His first wife, Terry's mother, had been a violinist; when her desire to return to her career had crossed Conniston's need for an ornament and social hostess the marriage had cracked up. The second wife had been a painter; her work was as vivid and flashy as her person. Conniston had paid an art professor to write a book about her painting but even that hadn't helped get the canvases into respectable galleries; her one and only critical notice in the
New York Times
had said, “As for Mrs. Conniston's work, aside from a certain flamboyant gusto, it can only be described as a mediocre example of the neo-excretionist school.” That marriage had soured for much the same reasons that caused today's rigid expression on Louise Conniston's sensuous face.