Danger Is My Line Page 3

  We crossed the red-brick sidewalk. There was a sleek black Jaguar XK-150 parked at the curb. Wally opened the door.

  “Some heap,” I said.

  “The Wally Baker trademark,” Wally said, patting the black fender fondly. “Marianne loves it. You should see her tool it up to ninety on the Shirley Freeway.”

  Benares began to growl, tugging at the leash.

  “Get in, boy,” Wally urged. “Come on, in you go.”

  But Benares tugged and growled, his muscular fore-paws braced on the curb. Scowling impatiently, Wally slapped the boxer’s flank and the big dog whined, tugged once again at the leash, then leaped in behind the bent back of the Jag’s driving seat.

  “He usually loves to go for a drive,” Wally said. “Drop you somewhere, Chet?”

  I shook my head. “You hurry on over to Marianne. I only live about eight blocks from here.”

  “Okay then.” Wally got behind the wheel of the Jag.

  “Give me the word as soon as you have it, Wally.”

  “It’s going to be a little girl,” he said, smiling shyly. “Any bets?”

  “Hell,” I said, liking this big bear of a man as I had liked him three years ago when I had told Marianne Wilder that it was fun but she was wasting her time with me because Wally Baker was the large, quiet man whose champagne she’d put bubbles in. “Hell, no bets. After all, you’re the manufacturer.”

  “Sure I can’t drop you somewhere?”

  “Go on, beat it.” To expedite him, I shut the car door and started walking through the fog.

  Five steps, maybe six. Then three sounds in rapid succession. Benares barking suddenly, the grinding of the Jag’s powerful starter. And a loud, booming blast that drove everything else out of me, the moist feel of the fog, the sea smell it brought into Georgetown, the pleasant thought of Wally and Marianne’s baby about to be born, the puzzling thought of George Brandvik who had or hadn’t murdered a U.N. trouble-shooter named Kolding—until I found myself sprawled on the sidewalk, knocked down by concussion, with blood on my cheek and my eyes badly out of focus.

  I got up, lurched back toward the car. The acrid stench of cordite hung heavy in the fog.

  The soles of my shoes grated on splintered glass from the Jag’s windows. A yellow rectangle of light went on across the street. A man’s voice shouted something.

  The Jag’s long hood was a ruin of bent, broken sheet steel. Smoke rose from it in a slow, lazy swirl, but there weren’t any flames.

  I found Wally behind the wheel, slumped over it, with his head twisted too far to the left to mean anything but a broken neck. His right hand was still clenched on the rim of the wheel. His face was gone.

  Sprawled bonelessly on what was left of the small bucket seats in back, Benares was dead too.

  4

  I STOOD THERE. Time seeped away on the fog, on the fading smell of cordite, on a last sigh from Wally Baker’s body as the air from the final breath he had taken escaped from the dead lungs.

  A voice called, “What’s the matter down there?” It came from the yellow rectangle of light, dimmed by the fog, that was a window across the street.

  The answer was a quick brittle tattoo of high-heeled shoes on the brick sidewalk.

  Fifty feet up the block a figure materialized under the wrought-iron street lamp, then was swallowed by the night and the fog. I caught a glimpse of a suit that might have been man-tailored, might have been dark blue or black. Of a small trim figure and blonde hair. The click-clacking high heels retreated. “Maja,” I called.

  I started running. A voice, not the voice across the street, said, “Hold it right there, mister. Under the light where we can see you.”

  I sprinted through the cone of light under the street lamp. Didn’t stop. A. gun went off behind me and a bullet whanged against the lamp post. Cops? I thought. Did they have a tail on Wally? It had to be the cops—but why? And why hadn’t they been able to stop whoever had planted the bomb in his car? I kept running. The girl—Maja Kolding or whoever it was—couldn’t get away.

  Footsteps pounded in pursuit. I left the sidewalk and ran up the middle of the street where the wrought-iron lamps wouldn’t silhouette me for another shot. They fired again, blindly.

  That was when a car rounded the corner, its amber foglights picking up the trunk of a sycamore and the figure of a girl crouched against it. She cried out and ran down the narrow street the car had turned out of. I flattened myself against the side of a parked convertible until the amber fog-lights rolled past, until three running men went by on the sidewalk. I was close enough to see a gun in one of their hands. When they turned the corner after the girl, I followed them.

  The narrow street was flanked by dark Georgian façades, by an occasional coach light glowing in the fog, by unseen gardens protected by waist-high iron spear fences.

  Silhouetted by light ahead of me, I saw two of them running. Just two. The short hairs stiffened on the back of my neck. They didn’t help. They never do.

  “Now I mean hold it, mister. If you take another step you’re a dead man.” The voice was quite calm, and very close. I couldn’t see its owner. He might have been able to see me. I stopped and waited, swallowing the bitter taste of defeat.

  “Hands on top of your head. And go on under that light where I can have a look at you.”

  I did as I was told. In a few seconds he came long-leggedly over a spear fence. He had been waiting for me in the darkness among the azaleas and boxwood.

  “Now move those hands all the way up. High as you can reach. Grab the lamp post and hold it. That’s right, keep holding it. Now back up three steps. Three, mister, and climb up on your toes.”

  That left me with my weight on my hands on the lamp post. Ready for a frisk, or a slugging, or whatever he had in mind.

  “The girl,” I said. “She’s getting away.”

  He grunted and moved in to give me a hard, all-over frisk. He was a man who knew his job. His hand slid my wallet out of my breast pocket. “Two steps in toward the post,” he said. “Real slow. Extend your hands, mister.” Something prodded the small of my back. “Move!”

  When I had extended my hands on either side of the lamp post he was ready with a pair of nippers. He snapped them quickly on my wrists, mating me to the lamp post. Then in front of me where I could see him, he thrust his gun in a shoulder holster and went through my wallet. He was a tall, slender guy in his early thirties. The street light made his cheeks seem very gaunt. He wore a blue cord wash-and-wear suit.

  “This says you’re a private detective,” he told me, holding up a card. “Working for who?”

  “For Wally Baker.”

  “You better have something in writing to prove that.”

  “We were old friends.”

  All that got from him was a shrug. His quick fingers found another card, held it up to the light so he could read it. His lips parted, then came shut in a tight line.

  “This one says you’re a member of the F.B.I. Association,” he said flatly, as if he didn’t want to believe it. The F.B.I. Association is the Bureau’s alumni organization. I had been a Federal Agent for two years before deciding I wanted to say yes sir and no sir only to myself and hanging out my P.I. shingle.

  “I worked for the Bureau in fifty and fifty-one,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Miami Office.”

  “Name some names.”

  “I went through the Academy with Jack Morley and Andy Dineen and Pappy Piersall. Morley’s with the State Department now, Dineen is dead. I don’t know about Pappy Piersall.”

  “Who was your partner in Miami?” The voice was a little less chill now.

  “Robbie Trowbridge.”

  “I knew Trowbridge. Got killed L.O.D., didn’t he?”

  “Going into an alley after some Latin American gunrunners.”

  “Well, can you beat that! You were with the Bureau.”

  “Which makes you who?” I said. “And do I get the nippers removed before
or after gangrene sets in?”

  “I’m with Counter Espionage,” he said. “But don’t think you’re out of the soup because I once worked a case with Robbie Trowbridge.” He did nothing about the handcuffs.

  “Okay,” I said. “Counter Espionage was staking out Wally Baker. Why?”

  He just looked at me. Then we both heard footsteps coming up—slowly—from the direction of the river.

  I dropped another line into the water. “How’d they plant a bomb—right under your nose?”

  The lines of his long, gaunt face stiffened. “Baker didn’t take the car into work today. He left it home because his wife was pregnant, I guess. We didn’t have anyone watching the car.” We both listened to the approaching footsteps some more. “I talk too damn much,” he said.

  “Get him, Sam?” a voice called.

  “I got him.”

  “The girl got away.”

  They joined us under the lamplight, one a burly man who looked like an ex-football tackle and the other small and dark with a thick-lipped, handsome profile. The one named Sam told them my name and that I was a member of the F.B.I. Association. “Says he was working for Baker,” Sam added.

  “Working for him why?” the ex-football tackle said.

  “He wasn’t convinced George Brandvik had killed Kolding. Since he was writing the story for View Magazine, he had to make sure.”

  “That figures,” the smaller one admitted with some reluctance. “And what did you find out?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  A stout man came by whistling and walking an Irish setter on a leash. He stopped whistling and all but stopped walking when he saw us.

  “Move along,” Sam said gruffly. “Keep moving, mister.”

  The stout man went away, not whistling any longer.

  “And the girl?” Sam asked me suddenly.

  I held my answer up just a shade too long, not really knowing why I didn’t want to tell them I was pretty sure as to the girl’s identity. Maybe it was because I wanted to get to Maja Kolding before the buttons—any kind of buttons, including the F.B.I.’s Counter Espionage Agency. “I saw her running away right after the explosion,” I said. “Just like you guys did.”

  “Know her?” the ex-football tackle asked.

  “It was dark,” I said. “And foggy.”

  “What she look like?”

  “A blonde. Not very big.”

  “But you don’t know her?” the ex-football tackle asked.

  “You hollered something after her,” Sam said.

  “Like ‘major,’” the other one chimed in.

  “I don’t remember what I hollered or if I hollered at all,” I said. “I was pretty upset.”

  The ex-football tackle tilted my face into the light. “Got blood on his cheek.”

  “Who’s the girl? What’s her name?”

  “The girl you called ‘major.’”

  “Wally Baker found something out,” I said, “something that had all but convinced him Brandvik hadn’t murdered Jorgen Kolding. He never had the chance to tell me what. Would you know?”

  “He means he wants to trade,” the ex-football tackle said. “We tell him what we know in exchange for the girl’s name.” He was mad.

  “I didn’t say that,” I said.

  The smaller one shrugged. “I’d better co-ordinate with the cops,” he told his partners. “You taking him downtown?”

  They weren’t mean. Just tough and competent and obeying the maxim that often distinguishes a live law officer from a dead one: you trust no one.

  “It looks like we’ll have to,” Sam said. He unfastened the handcuffs and I massaged my wrists, then went around the corner flanked by him and the ex-football tackle. Before we reached their car, which was an unmarked black Chevy, I heard a siren’s distant, complaining wail.

  5

  GOVERNMENT COFFEE THE SAME as they brew in Miami?” Sam said.

  I sipped the strong, scalding liquid from a thick cup. “Well, it isn’t much better.”

  “We’ll see our union about it,” Sam said, smiling a little. The ex-football tackle, sitting on a corner of the desk in the small gray office in the Department of Justice building, didn’t smile.

  Sam said, “Be reasonable, Drum. We’re going to find out who the girl is, with or without, your help. So how’s about opening up and we can all go home to sleep?”

  They would find out, of course. But I was hoping they wouldn’t before I got to her. Nobody in his—or her—right mind plants a bomb and then hangs around to see it go off. And anyway, if you can find a single M.O. file in any police headquarters in the country that lists a girl bomber, I’ll eat it. A bomb is not a woman’s weapon. Maja Kolding had wanted to see Wally, must have been on her way to his place when he started the car and the bomb went off. I wanted to find but why. I didn’t think I would if the Bureau got to her before I did.

  They asked me to run through the day’s activities. I told them about the message from Wally and my visit to George Brandvik and that Brandvik wanted a bodyguard. I left Maja Kolding out of my story, thinking as I did of my old friend Jack Morley, who worked for the Protocol Section of the State Department and whose job it might well have been to squelch the Maja Kolding story too if the Department wanted it that way. Probably they would, I decided, and chances were Jack was their man. I’d have to see him first thing in the morning—if they released me.

  At twelve-thirty the small, dark guy came into the office. “Dynamite bomb,” he said. “Wired to the starter.”

  “Cops want Drum?” Sam asked.

  “I didn’t tell them about Drum.”

  “Well, well, well,” the ex-football tackle said.

  “He’s talking?” the small guy asked.

  Sam shook his head.

  “Okay, Drum,” he said. “You can take off.”

  I stood up and walked across the small office, that was furnished in gun-metal gray. When I reached the door Sam called, “Drum?”

  I turned around.

  “You forgot your cigarettes.” He tossed the flip-top box at me.

  I knew three pairs of eyes were watching as I shut the door, softly, behind me.

  I took a taxi home, knowing they weren’t finished with me. The Bureau never is, until they can put a case in the dead records’ file. But they had made the same decision about me as I had made about them in regard to Maja Kolding: turn me over to the cops as a material witness and they wouldn’t get anything out of me. Whatever it was they wanted, they wanted bad enough to let me go.

  At home I made myself a stiff drink of Jack Daniels and then I made the phone call that I knew I had had to make all along.

  “Georgetown Maternity Hospital,” the voice on the other end of the wire said.

  “I’m calling about Mrs. Wallace Baker.”

  “Is this Mr. Baker?”

  I didn’t want the drink all of a sudden. I let it stand there. “No. I’m a friend of the family. The name is Drum.”

  “Mrs. Baker is in the labor room, sir. Just a moment.”

  Silence, then a man’s voice: “Dr. Chappell speaking.”

  “I’m a friend of Wally Baker’s, doctor. I—”

  “What’s the matter with that man Baker? He’s supposed to have been down here hours ago.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “No, not really. It’s false labor again, unfortunately. But still I’d like to keep Mrs. Baker here overnight with Mr. Baker’s approval. Whom did you say you were?”

  “You’d better make sure you keep her there overnight, doctor.”

  “Has Baker been delayed? Will he be along soon?”

  “Wally Baker was killed tonight,” I said.

  “Oh, my God.…” A hoarse whisper.

  “Please keep the cops away from her if they come around.”

  The voice, hoarse still but no whisper now, said: “Don’t you think I have enough sense to do that, young man?”

  “I’ll keep in touch with you,” I said.


  “But how did it happen? What—”

  “I’ll call tomorrow, doctor. Drum’s the name. Remember, keep the cops away from her. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “I can and I assuredly will,” he said, a little angrily.

  I hung up and drained the glass in three long swallows. It did nothing for me.

  6

  AN APOLOGETIC, EARLY-MORNING VOICE on the clock-radio woke me up by explaining that last night’s fog had been on the edge of a weather front that would make today a scorcher. I got up and shaved listening to the news roundup. Trouble off the coast of Red China, it said. An on-the-spot correspondent told of the latest border clash between Arabs and Israelis. Then, after I had been informed that I probably did not carry enough life insurance, the local announcer said:

  “Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer-writer Wallace Baker was found murdered last night outside his house on a fashionable street in Georgetown. Baker, who was doing a series on confessed scofflaw murderer George Brandvik for a prominent national magazine, was discovered by local police behind the wheel of his foreign sports car. A bomb attached to the starter had killed Baker instantly.” There was the usual contradictory statement by the police to the effect that there were no suspects but an early arrest was expected.

  I put up a pot of coffee and showered, then dressed in my best—my one and only—Italian raw silk summer-weight suit. After all, I would go calling today on members of the diplomatic corps.

  Three cups of coffee and a platter of bacon and eggs later, I called the State Department and asked for Jack Morley. After the usual banter I asked him:

  “What are the Icelandics doing with Maja Kolding until she leaves the country?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re tied up in that one?” Jack asked incredulously.

  I admitted that was one way of putting it.

  “They’d rather she stayed incommunicado until she leaves the country, Chet. So would we.”

  I just waited.

  Jack sighed. “They have a summer place on the river past Anacostia Park near the Maryland border.” Jack gave me the address. “Say, did you hear about Wallace Baker? You knew him, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. I knew him.”