Donald Westlake - Smoke

"He left without his things?"

"I threw him out, I told you. Let me see that warrant."

The tough cop laughed, fished it out, handed it to her. "Always happy to help a citizen," he said. "Especially if the citizen's gonna help us."

Peg looked at the warrant. It seemed real, but what did she know? "I think," she said, looking at the tough cop, "I think this is legitimate, and I think you're a cop, but who's this other guy?"

"Detective Leethe," said the tough cop.

The other one, "Detective Leethe" bullshit, said, "Let me handle this, Barney."

So this is the power, he's letting the cop march around and be tough out in front. Peg said to him, "You're no cop."

"I want to talk to Freddie Noon," the guy said, and took a little leather case from his inner pocket. From it, he withdrew a business card, extended it toward her. "I mean him no harm. It's to his advantage to talk to me."

Peg took the card. Leethe, that part was right. Mordon Leethe. The guy was a lawyer! Wishing she had a crucifix to hold up, Peg said, "You still came to the wrong place." She held the card out, wanting him to take it back. "You'll have to get the message to him some other way."

The tough cop wasn't finished. "Don't waste our time with all this shit, okay, Peg?" he said.

The lawyer wouldn't take his card back. Still holding it, Peg said to the cop, "I won't be seeing Freddie, all right? I guarantee it."

The lawyer said, "Is that some sort of joke, Miss Briscoe?"

Peg was so startled that she let him see she was startled, which was of course stupid. He knows! she thought, as she saw the look of satisfaction touch his sour face. Trying to save the situation, even though they both knew it was too late, she said, "Whaddaya mean, a joke? Freddie Noon's the joke, that's why I threw him out."

"If you have the opportunity to speak with him," the lawyer said, "would you tell him I represent the doctors?"

Peg shut down. This lawyer already knew too much. "I'm not going to see him," she said.

The lawyer offered a wrinkled kind of little smile, as though he didn't use those muscles often. He nodded at Peg, nodded at the card she still held, then looked at the cop. "Come on, Barney," he said. Once more, he nodded at Peg. "Sorry to disturb you," he said.

After they left, Peg went back to the kitchen to try to concentrate on what she'd been doing before those two had come crashing in here. But it was hard not to be distracted. And she couldn't bring herself to throw away the lawyer's card.

23

"Frankly," the attorney said, "I believe you've been avoiding me."

Well, of course Mordon had been avoiding the fellow. It was sufficient reason merely that this attorney, one Bradley Cummingford, had left a series of messages over the past week describing himself as representing the doctors Loomis and Heimhocker, and leaving a number at Sachs, Fried, one of the most prestigious old-time law firms in New York. However, had Mordon known that Cummingford was also someone who said "frankly," he would have gone on avoiding him forever.

Anyway, so far as Mordon was concerned, Loomis and Heimhocker were cut out of this matter, no longer involved. Besides which he was their attorney, through the beneficent goodwill of NAABOR; the idea that the doctors might feel the need for outside counsel — independent counsel, if you will — was aggravating, but no more.

At least, not until today's phone memo, which had been waiting on Mordon's desk when he'd arrived this morning. He hadn't returned to the office after yesterday's unsettling session with Miss Peg Briscoe, a self-possessed tart with rather a quicker brain than Mordon had expected. After they'd left Miss Briscoe's residence yesterday afternoon, with a pretty good idea that Fredric Noon had been somewhere in the vicinity, but was no more, Barney had said, "Leave it to me from here," and Mordon had been happy to agree. He knew his own uses for an invisible Fredric Noon were essentially benign — NAABOR would pay the fellow well, for what amounted to no more than industrial espionage — and he suspected that Barney's ideas were cruder and probably more dangerous and less legal, but they could work out their differences later, once they actually had their hands on the man.

In the meantime, Loomis and Heimhocker were no more than irrelevancies, if irritating ones. But now, this morning, the latest message from their "attorney," Bradley Cummingford, was: The doctors intend to go public.

Go public? With what? To whom? How? Nevertheless the threat was enough to force Mordon at last to return Cummingford's call, only to hear him say "frankly."

Twice. "Frankly," Bradley Cummingford said, "I had expected more courtesy from a firm of your standing."

Had you. "What surprises me, " Mordon said, "is that you represent yourself as attorney for my clients."

"I believe," Cummingford said, "your client is NAABOR."

"I represent Drs. Loomis and Heimhocker," Mordon said, "in matters concerning their employment by the American Tobacco Research Institute. Any invention, discovery, product, commodity, or theorem they produce as employees of the institute naturally belongs to the institute. It is my job to protect the interests of both the institute and the doctors in any matter concerning or relating to that employment."

"And if the interests conflict?"

"How can they?"

"Frankly," Cummingford said, doing it again, "I was thinking of the invisible man."

Mordon blinked rapidly, several times. "I'm not sure I—"

"Frankly, Mr. Leethe, my clients are afraid you have it in mind to make off with their invisible man."

" Their invisi—"

"Leaving them to fret over questions of medical ethics, not to mention laws that might be, perhaps have already been, broken. My clients have no intention of being made the goats in this matter, which is why, against my advice, they have expressed the desire to go public with the facts of the case."

Against Cummingford's judgment; well, at least there was that. "What do they hope to gain by going public, as you put it?"

"Frankly, they hope to distance themselves from any legal fallout that might ensue."

"Have you told them, Mr. Cummingford, that they'll simply make fools of themselves? That either they won't be believed, which will ruin them as researchers forever, like those cold-fusion idiots from Utah, or they will be believed, in which case they are already at legal risk?"

"Frankly," the damn fellow said, over and over again, "my clients have, I would say, minds of their own. Which is why, Mr. Leethe, I strongly suggest a meeting among the four of us, before my clients do anything irrevocable."

No way out of it, Mordon saw. But Cummingford, apart from his infernal "frankly"s, seemed rational enough. "Where?" Mordon demanded. "When?"

"The sooner the better. Four this afternoon?"

"Fine. Where?"

"The conference room here is very—"

"Bugged."

A tiny silence, and then a laugh. "Well, yours over there will be, too, won't it?"

Mordon didn't dignify that with a response.

Cummingford said, "How about the doctors' facility? You've been there before, I understand."

Facility — oh, yes, that place. "The townhouse, you mean."

"At four?"

Damn you all. Is Barney Beuler accomplishing something or not? Is there any point in delay? Or is there too much danger? "At four," Mordon agreed.

24

Rhinebeck. What was the damn woman doing in Rhinebeck? Meeting three trains so far, and so what?

Yesterday, after tossing Peg Briscoe's apartment and reassuring himself that Freddie Noon actually did live there, Barney had sent lawyer Leethe on his way and had then driven slowly and purposefully around the neighborhood. He had earlier collected, from Motor Vehicle, the make, model, color, and tag number of a van registered to Margaret Briscoe at that Bay Ridge address, so all he had to do now was find it.