Philip Wylie - The Smuggled Atom Bomb

“‘Indigo,’” she mimicked. “She’s notorious!”

Duff was surprised, embarrassed, and slightly annoyed. “Is she? She’s also darn good-looking!” He shrugged. “I can get the kids’ dinner — and then go out—”

“The kids can get their own!” She seemed unduly disturbed. “But, no fooling, she isn’t your type, Duff.”

Her attitude somehow pleased him and yet made him feel obliged to seem resentful.

“Brunette, you mean?”

“She’s actually Russian. Her parents were.”

“Wha-a-a-t?” He drew the word out skeptically. “Never met a more American dame in my life.”

“How did you meet, by the way?”

“Scotty dug her up. She lives in the Gables.”

“I know where she lives!” Eleanor retorted hotly. “Scotty would!”

“He told me,” Duff responded with heat, “that she wanted to meet me. What do you mean, she’s Russian?”

“She wants to meet any person in pants! Being tall, she likes tall ones, if available.

White Russian, she was. Family came here to Miami during the revolution. Ask mother.”

Mrs. Yates, whose door was open, could not avoid overhearing. She called, “Children! Quit squabbling!… Eleanor, Duff has a perfect right to go out with Miss Stacey if he wants.”

They heard the catch in her breath that indicated she was turning her wheel chair, and then she appeared in the doorway, smiling. “Stacey wasn’t the real name, Duff. It was, originally, Stanoblovsky. They changed it to Stacey. Back in the old days, before Walter and I came to Florida. And I guess the local people were fairly proud of having them. They were nobility, till the Bolsheviks threw them out. Maybe in 1917 or around that time. They made money here in lots of different businesses, mostly in selling cars. Mr. Stacey, Indigo’s father, had a big agency. Her uncle’s still—”

“Indigo!” Eleanor repeated scathingly.

“I always thought it was a very attractive name. The girl’a mother chose it because she claimed it was the prettiest word in English.”

“That’s what some broken-down Russian noble would think!” Eleanor turned angrily to Duff. “Go ahead! Fall for that towering twerp! Have a marvelous time with her!

Everybody does!”

“Eleanor!” said Mrs. Yates reproachfully.

The phone rang again at that point. Eleanor seized it, and instantly her voice became honey-sweet. “Of course,” she smiled. “I’ll manage, somehow! I’ve got to appear at the Watercade at four. And then there’s a cocktail party for me on the beach. And the ball. But I could spare a few minutes, maybe, between eight and nine.”

Charles came through the swinging door. “Is anybody getting lunch? Or do we just starve to death quietly?”

After lunch, Duff appointed himself a task that the Yateses had avoided. Harry Ellings’ room had been examined by the police, but his possessions had not been packed and the room had not, of course, been prepared for a new boarder. Nobody had even spoken about a new boarder. But the Yates budget meant that one would have to be found, and very soon.

Duff first packed Harry’s clothes in his suitcases. Then he put Harry’s letters, papers, pictures, books and personal knickknacks in cartons. These he moved to the barn and stored in its loft until they should learn what to do with them. The men who had gone through his effects and read every word of his correspondence had found no will. Mrs. Yates knew of none. He’d had, apparently, no relatives with whom he had kept in touch.

When all of Harry’s belongings had been removed from the room, Duff commenced to clean. There was dust beneath the bed which showed that the police, though they might have looked there, had not moved it. Duff presumed, however, that they had probed every square inch of the mattress, and when he stripped it off he thought he could see, here and there, tiny openings that long pins might have made. He carried the mattress outdoors. He went back and commenced, with the Dutch-wife neatness on which his mother had insisted, to dust the bed frame.

It was on the inner edge of a steel angle iron that he found the capsule. He presumed it to be one of the large, pliant kind in which liquid vitamins and other medicines are commonly administered. Something Harry had used long ago, dropped and lost track of. It must have fallen between the mattress and the wall and rolled onto the bed frame. But the capsule wasn’t dusty. And wetness showed at the ruptured edge. Also, Duff could see dents where teeth had recently come down on it to bite it open.

It was brown and egg-shaped. He sniffed. Its odor was medicinal, not identifiable. He decided that it was something Harry must have taken just before his death, something the police hadn’t noticed the day before because they were looking for nothing of that sort. He went to his room to get an envelope and tipped in the capsule without touching it. He finished cleaning the room thoroughly, and then, for the sake of the family and their memories, he rearranged the furniture.

After that, with the envelope in his breast pocket, Duff went outdoors. He knew now that the Yates place was being watched and he thought he could locate the agent on duty. He walked clear around the large rectangle of roads by which the property was bounded.

At the back of the property three Negroes were busy in a languid, hot-afternoon fashion, clearing the overgrown edges of the paved street. There was no one else. He then decided the watcher was hidden in the woods, and entered them. The undergrowth was thick and he went cautiously, as he was very sensitive to poisonwood, which abounded in the hammock around the house. He passed the platform where Eleanor had found the box again.

The G-men had it now. Platinum. He thought of that and shrugged.

He came, finally, to the sinkhole. It was about twenty feet one way and thirty the other, overhung by big trees, with a big tree blown across it, and deep enough to contain water. Such sinkholes, common in Dade County, were caused by the eating out of soft limestone by underground water. When a pocket was thus formed its roof eventually collapsed. Most such “glades” were dry, but some, like this one, had been deeply eroded and held pools of dark water.

Duff looked in. The water, gleaming in the shade, reached back out of sight beneath great, thirsty roots and an overhang of limestone encrusted with fossil shells. Around its rim were faint signs of visitation. Kids came there occasionally — though forbidden by their parents— to catch minnows in traps or just to throw stones for the sake of the splash. The water was too shallow for drowning, but a person could have a nasty fall into it.

Looking down, Duff remembered the night he’d seen one of the mysterious boxes — if there had ever been “one” among many — in his own homemade lily pool. That thought led to another: the sinkhole reached back out of sight around its rim, and he was wearing old clothes. He could go back to the house for a rope or use a tree. He decided on a tree and found a suitable one nearby, a small palm uprooted by the October blow. He scrambled down it and landed high-deep, in warm water.

The bottom was mucky. Overhead was an oval of blue sky. Around him, the sides of the hole curved back and the water glinted in gloom. Sometimes, he recalled, there were alligators in these sinks. He saw none. He walked around the edges, peering into the recesses, stirring up mud.

Presently he came to an area, hidden from above by the overhang, which had been visited by somebody else. Perhaps by several people. And perhaps often. It was a kind of roofed room, open toward the pit; its muddy floor emerged as a soft bank. The bank showed many signs of feet — old markings and some probably not very old. There were flat marks, too, where boards had evidently sunk down into the mucky sediment. One or two boards were visible now, and he located another with his foot, then others. They’d settled beneath the surface of the ooze.