Charles Williams - Man on a Leash

“We’ll take a long cruise, down the west coast as far as Panama, across to the Galapagos, back up to Hawaii, and then out through the Marianas and Carolines. How about it?”

“Mmmmm—I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Why?”

“Let’s don’t go into that now. What are the other two things you’re going to do?”

“The first is I’m going to find that son of a bitch who murdered the old man. And then I’m going to light one of those Havana cigars and smoke it very slowly right down to the end while he’s begging me to call the police.”

“And you wonder why I’m doubtful about marrying you.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re just as arrogant and self-sufficient and ruthless as he was. Make up your own laws, and the hell with civilization.”

“You ever hear of a place called Murmansk?” he asked.

“Sure. It’s a Russian seaport in the Arctic. Why?”

He tried to tell her—dispassionately, of course, since this was hardly the setting for the kind of cold rage that had kept growing in him driving down from Nevada—tried to tell her of the gales, the snow, sleet, ships solidly encased in ice, dive-bomber attacks, submarine wolf packs, and the eternal, pitiless cold that could kill a man in the water in minutes. He hadn’t known any of this at the time, of course; he was only a very young boy leading a very easy existence in an upper-class Havana suburb, but he’d learned it later through reading about those convoy runs in World War II and what it was like to carry aviation gasoline and high explosives up across the top of the world while the Germans and the merciless Barents Sea did their level best to kill you. His father had done it, for months on end, along with a lot of other men who could have found cozier backwaters to ride out the war if they’d tried.

“He was out there taking his chances where some real hairy people were gunning for him, and then he winds up on a garbage dump, tied up and blindfolded so some chickenshit punk can shoot him in the back of the head.”

“Well, the police are looking for them, aren’t they?” she asked.

“Oh, sure. After a fashion, and for the wrong people for the wrong motives.”

“What do you mean?”

“The heroin angle. I think the whole thing was a plant. And it worked, at least so far. They got just the situation they wanted: The sheriff’s department in Coleville has jurisdiction because that’s where it happened, but they’re convinced the crime was committed by professional hoodlums from San Francisco. The San Francisco police will help as much as they can, but they’re not about to run a temperature over a dead man in Nevada; they’ve got a dead man of their own—a whole morgue full of ‘em and more coming in by the hour. We’ll be in touch, fellas; how’s the weather up there? And neither police force, Coleville or San Francisco, is going to start a crusade over a rubbed-out heroin dealer: Well, that’s one son of a bitch we don’t have to contend with anymore; they ought to do it more often.”

“Then you think he was killed for that money he drew out of the bank? Somebody knew about it.”

“No. He was forced to draw it out of the bank; and then the same people killed him. You can futz around with it until you’re blue in the face, and you’ll never make a case for his having drawn that money out voluntarily.”

“You mean extortion?” she asked. “A threat of some kind?”

“Right.”

“But how? They said he came into the bank alone. What was to keep him from calling the police?”

“Richter just has to be wrong about it, that’s all. Somebody was covering him, and they missed it. What other forms of extortion are there? He was too tough to pay blackmail, even if they had something really serious on him, which I don’t believe for a minute. Kidnap? I’m the only family he had, and nobody tried to kidnap me.”

“Maybe they’d read ‘The Ransom of Red Chief,’ “ she said.

“Smartass.”

“How are you going to find out?”

“Go talk to Richter and Winegaard, to begin with.”

“Did they teach you investigative techniques in the CIA? Or just interrogation—the iron maiden—bastinado?”

“Will you cut it out? CIA!”

“Didn’t you know you talk in your sleep?”

“I do?”

“Scared you, didn’t I? Well, you do, but it’s always in Spanish. I’ve been thinking of enrolling at Berlitz.”

“I’m probably talking to the other drivers; Berlitz doesn’t teach that kind of Spanish. Anyway, why wouldn’t I speak it? My mother was Cuban, and I lived in Havana most of the time until I was fourteen, when she died.”

“I know. And then you gave up a career in professional baseball to become a stodgy old businessman in Latin America—”

“You’d be surprised how easy it is for a catcher hitting one sixty to give up a career in professional baseball.”

“Stop interrupting me. And this was just before the Bay of Pigs. Odd, wasn’t it?”

“If I plead guilty to all charges, can I make love to you again?”

“Well—”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. Why didn’t I think of copping out before? Did you know I also fomented the Boxer Rebellion and started the War of Jenkins’ Ear?”

* * *

He arose a little before nine, showered and shaved as quietly as he could, and took a fresh suit and the rest of his clothes out into the living room to dress. This was accomplished with only one or two drowsy mutters from the depths of Mayo’s pillow, largely undistinguishable except for something about a goddamned rhinoceros.

He expected to find the kitchen barren of anything edible, the way he’d left it when he had taken off for Baja California, but discovered she’d restocked it, at least for breakfast. He put on coffee, mixed some orange juice, and toasted a cinnamon roll in the broiler of the oven. It would be an hour yet before the bank opened, so he’d have time to talk to Winegaard first. He looked up the number and dialed. Yes, the secretary said, Mr. Winegaard was in and would be glad to see Mr. Romstead. In about fifteen minutes. He scribbled a note to Mayo saying he’d be back before noon and walked over to Montgomery Street. It was a sunny morning, at least downtown, but cool enough to be typical of San Francisco’s summer.

There was a customer’s room with a number of desks and big armchairs where men were watching stock quotations on a board, with the partners’ offices at the rear of it. Edward Winegaard’s was large and expensively carpeted, with a massive desk, and a mounted Pacific sailfish on one wall. Winegaard was a man near his father’s age, trim and in good shape and tanned, with conservatively cut silvery hair. He arose to shake hands and indicated the armchair before his desk.

“It was a very tragic thing,” he said. “And I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it at all.”

“Neither do I,” Romstead replied. “But all I’ve had so far is secondhand information, which is why I wanted to talk to you. You’ve known him for a long time?”

“Twenty—ah—twenty-seven years now.”

“Then there’s no question he made that money in the stock market?”

“None at all. Why?”

“The police seem to have some doubt of it.”

“I don’t see why. It was quite easy, looking at it in retrospect; anybody with a good job and a little money to invest every month could have done it. All he’d have to do is study stocks the way your father did.” He smiled faintly, like a man remembering some golden age that was gone. “And get into the market when the Dow was in the two hundred to three hundred range, good solid shares were selling at five or six times earnings, and the big glamour issues were still to come.