The man took two glossy-print photographs out of the briefcase. “The Madisonburg Times doesn’t know these are gone yet,” he said easily. “They never published this one.”
It was a flashlight shot taken at night in a pelting rain. A girl running wildly, her head down, her forearm raised shielding her face. She was bareheaded, slender and as fragile as the long filmy white skirt she was clutching as she ran, toward a car parked with other cars in a curving driveway. At the other side of the photograph, startled people in dinner clothes were rushing out after her from the white-columned portico of a substantial fieldstone house with lighted windows.
“You can’t see her face.”
“You can see the license number on her car.” The man put his hand out and blocked off the house and the people running out of it, leaving only the girl running wildly through the pouring rain.
Vair laughed. “Somebody ought to be able to do a swell job with that one. Is that when it happened?”
“That’s right after she got the news. That’s what she’s running from.”
They both knew what the news had been. Neither of them needed to say it.
“Here’s when it happened.” He handed Vair the second photograph. “You can’t see her face in this one either.”
It was the same girl and the same car. The only part of the sodden white dress that showed was what a man’s raincoat did not cover as she lay in a small inert heap on the side of the wet road. A state trooper stood in the rain, arms out, holding back invisible spectators. Skid marks showed on the shiny asphalt. The car was a tangled wreck against a tree trunk, barren branches dripping down on the huddled girl under the raincoat.
“I haven’t found out whether she can walk yet,” the man said, in his dispassionate monotone. “Or where they’ve got her. She’s left the hospital. She wasn’t at their house in Madisonburg.—If you still want to know.”
“You’re damn right I want to know.” Vair turned to the cupboard and took out a stained green oiled silk pouch. “Here,” he said. “Maybe you’ll get a lead out of these. A lot of leads, for all I know. That’s your job. They’re just a batch of personal letters, but you can’t tell. Get ’em back—I don’t want the Marine Corps on my neck.”
There was a flicker of light in the grey eyes. He tightened his fingers on the pouch to keep the quick tremor of excitement that ran through them from revealing itself to Vair. “What are they?”
“I said personal letters,” Vair answered roughly. “If you don’t want to be bothered with them, give ’em back. A buddy of one of the Brent boys picked ’em up out in Korea after the kid’s company moved on. He brought them home and left them at my office to forward to the Brents—he thought they lived in my district because there’s a Brentool Plant there. He didn’t know they lived out West. I’ll return ’em, but you comb ’em first.”
Vair closed the cupboard door. “You know how to use that kind of stuff. Why don’t you try moving right in with the Rufus Brents? You’d have plenty then—if you could work it.”
He looked at his investigator critically, his eyes sweeping from the crisp caplike haircut down his pin-stripe flannel suit, shiny at the elbows and knees, to his shoes, good once but old and newly soled. “Better get a new outfit. You look mighty ragtag and bobtail to me. Draw what you need.” He still eyed him. “You don’t look as Harvard and Princeton—or was it Williams, I forget—as Sybil said you did when she knew you.”
The man’s eyes flattened for an instant at the barbed contempt in Vair’s eyes and voice. He caught himself. “I don’t use my props unless I need them,” he said easily. He reached in his inside coat pocket, took a pair of narrow steel-rimmed spectacles out of a battered tin case, put them on and looked at Vair with a faint smile.
“Ha!” Vair clapped him on the shoulder, laughing. “I wish a pair of two-dollar specs was all I needed to look like I just walked out of the State Department. What is it Sybil says?—Civilized. That’s it. I’d even trust you with my daughter. Why don’t you try the pulpit when you get through with the Rufus Brents?”
He laughed again. “I got to beat it back now. Sybil’ll be screaming her head off. Keep your mouth shut about the letters.”
The man waited until he heard Vair’s booming voice and rocketing laughter downstairs . . . the Hot Rod of the Marsh Marigold State top of the world again, on his way again. He took off the steel-rimmed spectacles that magnified his eyes just enough to make them match the rest of his face and made him look Ivy League and to the manor born, and put them back in his pocket. He untied the olive-drab tape around the stained silk pouch, took out the thick packet of airmail letters and began to read them. Half-way through the fourth he stopped, his hand shaking with excitement. This was it. This was all he needed.
He gathered the letters quickly together, slipped them into his briefcase and opened the file behind him. When they called Rufus Brent the little-publicized Western industrialist, they weren’t kidding. The only other picture of Molly Brent besides those he had stolen from the morgue of their small-town newspaper was a picture of the whole family in a slick-paper magazine article in the file. He opened it on the desk. It was a double-spread entitled “The Toolmaker Sticks To His Lathe.” There were pictures of the abandoned emergency defense plant in Vair’s Ninth District, and the gleaming white concrete and glass structure of the Brentool Plant, Tabor City, that had taken its place, and set Ham Vair back thirty-five thousand dollars on his junk deal with Surplus Property. There was a picture of Rufus Brent and his wife, in rocking chairs on the front porch of their frame house in their own home town. On the steps in front of them were three children, two boys, seventeen or eighteen, and between them their kid sister, about fourteen, with braces on her teeth, hanging on to the collar of a dog as big as she was. They were all laughing. The dog’s wagging tail was a white blur.
He glanced at the pictures of Molly Brent, four years older, that Vair had left on the desk. The girl running through the rain was a graphic statement of the personal and private reasons that had forced Rufus Brent to refuse to come to Washington. His coming in spite of them was the Toolmaker sticking to a bigger lathe. But with the Toolmaker in Washington, and Ham Vair in there cutting the Toolmaker’s throat, the letters in the green stained pouch gave him the one thing he needed and had searched for . . . a character and a name for the slickest shakedown he’d ever dreamed up.
It was a good thing he’d waited. He could have sold Vair out to Rufus Brent for a few paltry thousand any time since the idea first began to grow on him. But the dream that had been born the night of the girl’s accident wasn’t a matter of thousands. It was millions—if he married her . . . or if he got rid of her, and stuck to the old lady. . . . Son-in-law or adopted son, it was millions either way.
II
The day the Rufus Brent-Hamilton Vair dogfight became more to me than just another irritating headline in the morning paper is very vivid in my mind.
I’d had a long lunch with Colonel John Primrose (92nd Engineers, U. S. Army, Retired) in the Mayflower Lounge and left him there to go on up Connecticut Avenue to the hairdressers’. They have glassed-in cubicles that are divided, so I was only half conscious of the woman I was sharing one with. She’d got a fresh dye job and still had a brick-red streak behind her left ear. We each had a newspaper, and it had a story in flaunting type in a double column at the bottom.
COLOSSUS OF GREED WITH A WART ON HIS NOSE, VAIR CALLS BRENT IN TODAY’S BITTER ATTACK ON ITC HEAD.
“Today’s bitter attack” was right. There’d been one the day before and the day before that and there’d no doubt be another. I was aware of the woman in my compartment dropping her paper on the floor and closing her eyes, when I heard the operator ask if she’d like a glass of water.