Страница 33 из 44
He made a tight U-turn and drove back the way they had come. Terry’s hand rested on his thigh as he drove.
C H A P T E R Fourteen
Somehow Earle Co
Halfway through this insomniac night they were gathered in the office—four people in the same room but not together. Carl Oakley was striding back and forth. Louise Co
Louise wore a rustling silk dress. When she twisted in the chair to look at Oakley her breasts handled the cloth seductively. “Why don’t you sit down?”
“I think better on my feet.”
“You’re nervous. You’re making me nervous, so you must be nervous.” Her words ran together carelessly; she was tight, or high—Oakley had never pi
Frankie Adams said, “What’s the capital of Ecuador? La Paz? Five letters.”
“That’s in Bolivia,” Oakley said absently.
Orozco muttered, “Quito.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Oakley tugged back his sleeve and looked at his watch. Two seconds later if someone had asked him the time he wouldn’t have been able to answer. He resumed pacing with his hands in his pockets.
Adams uttered a monosyllabic curse and slapped the pencil down on the newspaper. “I can’t do these damn things.”
Louise said, “It beats hell out of me how you two legal and detective geniuses can identify both those dead bodies and still come up with nothing.”
“We’ve got their names,” Oakley said, “and for the moment that’s all we’ve got. It’s worth about as much as a nun’s virginity—we’ve got it but what good is it?”
Orozco said in his unperturbed growl, “We’ll have more information coming in pretty quick. My stringers are working up files on them.”
“Sure—sure,” Louise said. “But what happens then?”
“I’m not clairvoyant,” Oakley said. “All I can tell you is they didn’t leave her there dead. Which means she may be alive.”
Louise knocked back her drink. “But if they let her go why haven’t we heard from her? And if they didn’t, why didn’t they?”
Oakley didn’t answer. He went to the big leather chair and sat back, crossed his legs at right angles, laced his hands behind his head and knitted his brows. He kept looking at the telephone. All evening he had swung pendulantly from one extreme of emotion to the other—elation, despondency. They had found the spliced phone wires early in the afternoon and after that things had moved fast: they had found the two naked bodies in the ghost town before sundown. A discreet contact of Orozco’s in the Tucson police lab had run the fingerprints through for identification and Oakley had still been on his after-di
None of the radio direction-finders had picked up any signals from the bugged suitcase. The two sets of tire tracks in the ghost-town barn meant very little, if anything—one set belonged to Terry’s Daimler, which had not been sighted anywhere, and the other set consisted of worn mismatched tires of a brand not used on new cars. Thus there was no way to identify the make of the larger car. Orozco’s operatives had put out the word on the red sports job but that, Oakley thought bitterly, was like looking for a needle in Nebraska. Arizona was crawling with two-seater cars and half of them were red.
Theodore Luke had a vague record of three arrests and one suspended sentence, on charges of simple assault and drunk-and-disorderly. George Rymer had a record of narcotics arrests. Both men had been musicians—New York City had refused Theodore Luke a cabaret license because of his criminal record. But there was nothing in the sum of that information to suggest that either of them had ever been involved in robberies, extortions, or any of the other varieties of crime that a lawyer might expect to find in a kidnaper’s background.
It was all elusive, inconclusive, mocking. Oakley’s eyes were lacquered with weary frustration.
Frankie Adams said crossly, “I’m going to bed,” and left the room. Louise stirred the melting ice in her glass; Oakley watched her moodily. She caught his eye on her and she smiled, her eyes half-closed; she looked warm and lazy. She sat up and lifted her arms to fiddle with her hair. Under the silk dress her breasts stood out like torpedoes, drawing Oakley’s masculine attention, arousing him and irritating him with the distraction. Louise, meeting his glance, became very still, her arms upraised; her eyes mirrored a sensual speculation. Still smiling, she yawned luxuriously and walked out of the room trailing musk.
Oakley’s palms felt moist. He felt his face color when he caught Orozco looking at him, bland-faced. He sees everything, Oakley thought, and made a note to quit taking Orozco for granted—lunatic chicano land-schemes aside, Orozco was a vigilant and clever man, possibly dangerous. The inscrutable Mexican, he thought dryly: Orozco had superb control, he never let you see anything he didn’t want you to see.
They kept vigil by the telephone, the prime umbilical. It did not ring. Oakley began to feel drowsy; he hadn’t had much sleep in the past three days. Getting old, he thought, and felt solemn and sad, regretting all the things he had not done when he was young and all the things he would never do, either because of lack of time or because of lack of passion. He had never been a man of passions; he saw himself as a repressed man, cool, cha
He came back to Louise. Young, attractive, widowed, sensual. Rich besides. If he played his cards right she would marry him; he was certain of it. But it wouldn’t do. He could endure a marriage without love; he probably wasn’t capable of making any other kind. But marriage to Louise would be a duel—a constant abrasive antagonism; a clashing of desires, the headstrong against the reasoned, the passionate against the temperate. He didn’t need a Louise. He needed a milkmaid.
His reveries began to distend and wander; he leaned back in the tilting chair and put his feet up on Earle’s desk, glanced drowsily at Orozco and closed his eyes…. The morning sun beamed across the desk and he came awake with a start, searched guiltily for Orozco and learned the room was empty. He mouthed a mild oath, lowered his feet to the floor, sat up.