Джон Макдональд: Flight of the Tiger

During the rest of lunch they talked about Dick MacLane, but Ben kept thinking of the blonde girl walking away into a crowd and losing herself. It was too bad. And it was none of his business. The experts were handling it.

“Dick MacLane was a strange guy,” Willsie said softly. “I remember how he used to talk after he’d spent a few days in that secret retreat of his. He was more sour than usual. To listen to him you wouldn’t think he believed in anything. Life, to him, was a farce. Everybody taking themselves too seriously. All he believed in were Helen and in the basic decency of most people, once you dig under the surface.”

“He used to talk to me all the time,” Ben said. “A lot of what he used to say bothered me. He made me... look at myself differently. Like those mirrors that are all bent. He told me I wasn’t educated. That I was just conditioned.”

“A man has to be conditioned to do what you have to do, Lieutenant. I would guess the less imagination you have, the better.”

“Then how could Dick do it?”

“He had more strength than most of us, maybe.”

“If it was bad — you know, convoy work when you get glimpses of them running — he’d be sick sometimes after we got back. He called it his ‘birdman stomach.’ ”

“How are you going to use your leave, Ben?” Willsie asked abruptly.

“I haven’t thought much about it.”

“Do you get out at the end of your leave?”

“No, I...”

“Oh, then you go back to flying.”

“No!” He realized as soon as the word was out that he had spoken too loudly. Willsie looked at him curiously. Ben said, quickly, “Not right away, anyway. I have to report to a training station.”

“Did you shoot down anything?”

“Three MIG fifteens.”

“That sounds like a good return on my investment as a taxpayer. Were those MIGs good?”

“They were faster than we were. They were damn’ well flown. The gunnery wasn’t as good, but their flight discipline was excellent. One of them knocked me out of the air the week before the truce.”

“When did you start back to the States?”

“A week ago Wednesday.”

“That was the day Helen disappeared,” Willsie said, and then he looked at his watch. He swallowed the last of his coffee. “They’ll be up there yammering my secretary’s head off if I don’t get back.”

Ben walked along the street thinking of Helen MacLane. She had been an unsmiling picture of a smartly dressed girl, static, unknown — Dick’s golden girl. Willsie’s story had put her into motion. She had run away to hide. Before the last of the twenty-seven days were up, he would be doing the same. That seemed to bring her closer.

He walked along the street and looked at the young girls. He thought of Eric Gorman and of how this could be a very bad town for young girls. Perhaps any big city was a bad place for a girl alone. It made him think of how different this leave would be if the other Ben Morrow, the unbroken Ben Morrow, were taking it. There would have been people he would have got in touch with — friends of friends. And inevitably there would have been one of the slim young girls, and ail the ancient and stylized formulas of approach and repulse, attack and defense, marked by a certain look in her eyes, a meaningful note in their laughter.

Now he had no heart for that game, and it made him feel drained and old. And there was no one to talk to about it. MacLane would have listened.

He walked slowly back to the Maralane. There wasn’t much to do with the rest of Saturday. Get drunk. Go to a movie. Go to the room and lie on the bed.

He walked up the flight of steps to the lobby and went over to the desk for his key. The tall thin-faced officer named Davis walked over to him. “Mind some more questions?”

“I don’t mind. In my room?”

“That’ll be okay.”

As they went up the stairs Davis said. “I thought you might go back to Willsie’s office with him, but he said he’d left you at the restaurant, so then I thought you might stop back here.”

Ben unlocked the door and they went in. There had been something alien about Davis in the paneled waiting room of Christy & Reeves. Here in the small shopworn room he seemed more plausible, and Ben could sense that he had spent a lot of time in such rooms as this, with people who lived in rooms like this. Davis tilted his hat back and sat in the single chair by the window, propped one thin ankle on his knee, popped a kitchen match with his thumbnail and lighted his cigarette.

“Short of dough, Lieutenant?”

“No. Why?”

“If it was me, I mean getting a leave like you’ve got, I’d get me the biggest suite in town. I’d fill it with blondes and liquor. I’d have a party, boy.”

“I guess I don’t feel very partyish yet,” Ben explained.

“When I got back to headquarters, I started talking to Waska and it came to us that with you knowing MacLane so well, we should have talked more to you. Maybe MacLane said something you could remember that would give us a lead on where the girl went.”

“I think I see what you mean. But—”

“Where did they go on vacations? Where did they go on their honeymoon? Who were their best friends? Usually when a woman runs, she runs to someplace she knows. A man will head for someplace he’s never been before, and so we usually pick them up easier. If a person running goes to a place they know, they can usually hide better.”

“I talked a lot with Dick, but it wasn’t that kind of talk. I mean, not about people and places he remembered. It was more... well, abstract, I guess you’d call it. Sometimes he would talk about newspapers he had worked on.”

“Didn’t he ever talk about his wife? Any man with a wife who looks like that Helen—”

“He talked about her, but not about the places they went or anything like that. And from the way Mr. Willsie told me the story, she might not even be alive.”

“I think she is. We’ve got sources. The word is that Gorman’s crowd thought for a while her disappearance was a trick we were pulling. A smoke screen. That we’d let it get around that she’d run out on us so they’d look in the wrong places. You know, I’ve seen this vanishing act happen a hundred times. It would break your heart. People are willing to testify, and then they get to thinking about it and decide it isn’t healthy.

“This Gorman is a rough joker. He’s no punk, either. A well-educated man. He doesn’t have the resources we have for trying to find her, but the word is that there’s a cash offer out for her — a big one, all in small bills and no questions asked. It’s big enough so that I can’t even be sure of all my own people. I think I’d have heard indirectly if somebody earned that money, so the guess is that she’s still in the clear. Damn’ fool girl. We could have kept her healthy.”

“Is there any information as to what it was they were hunting for in the apartment?”

“Only educated guesses. The Young girl had the run of Gorman’s apartment. She was a money-hungry kid. Maybe she found something she thought she could trade for a good income — an account book, a pay-off list — something that would be dangerous to him in a tax-fraud case. But he wouldn’t let anybody do that to him. The way I guess it, Gorman had planned to get word to her in the hospital that unless she handed it back — that is, if he couldn’t find it — she’d get more of the same. Plastic surgery might have fixed her up once, but not twice.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry I can’t help.”

Davis stood up. “That’s okay. It was an offbeat chance. We’re ready to try anything, anything we can dream up. These young girls hit this town every day — every day there’s a new platoon of them — seventeen-, eighteen-, nine-teen-year-olds, from West Overshoe, Nebraska, and Hicktown, Missouri. Some make out. What happens to the rest of them isn’t very pretty, usually. Like they say, the greater the risk the greater the profit. Some head here, and some head for the Beverly Hills routine. Well, take care, Lieutenant. You get any ideas, phone headquarters. I’m Detective Lieutenant Roger Davis. If I’m not there, they’ll give you somebody who’ll take the message for me.”