The telephone, which had been ringing intermittently all day, finally woke Devlin at four o’clock in the afternoon. He rolled over, stiff and sore from a twelve-hour sleep, lifted the receiver.
“Hello—”
“Dev?” It was Jennifer, her voice nervous and irritated. “Where on earth have you been? I’ve been calling you for two days, I’ve been worried sick—”
“I haven’t been in much,” he said tonelessly. “I’ve been out following the men who have your husband. ”
“Alone?” she said incredulously. “Day and night?”
“Yes.”
“What are you trying to do, kill yourself? Why didn’t you get some help?”
Devlin grunted. “Mainly because I wouldn’t know how to explain why I needed it,” he said wryly. “How do you ask for assistance to conduct a surveillance of six private citizens of spotless reputation, against whom you have not a shred of factual evidence, to connect them with the abduction of a man they apparently don’t even know and who isn’t even officially missing. You figure that one out for me and then I’ll ask for help.”
Jennifer was silent for a moment, then she said, “Did you find out anything?”
“Yes, two things,” Devlin replied, his voice reflecting the frustration he felt. “I learned that the six men and one woman involved are leading daily lives so perfectly normal that you couldn’t charge any one of them with the offense of jaywalking, much less anything more serious. And I have compiled a very thorough and accurate list of all the places of captivity where your husband isn’t being held.” He reached one hand behind him to massage his aching back. “I also learned,” he added as an afterthought, “that I’m not as young as I used to be.”
Another silence came over the wire between them. Devlin took the opportunity to sit up on the side of the bed. He picked up a nearly-empty brandy bottle from the floor and sipped enough to rinse a wretched taste from his mouth, afterward swallowing it as quickly as he could.
“You don’t sound good, Dev,” Jennifer said at last. “You don’t sound right.”
“I’m not.” He sighed heavily, not caring whether she heard him or not. “This case has gotten to me,” he said quietly. “It’s inside of me, chewing away at me in different places. I’m too close to it; there are too many personal factors involved—”
“What personal factors?”
“You, for one,” he told her flatly. “Todd, for another. And others.” Like Janet Sundean and Evelyn Lund, he thought half-sadly, half-bitterly.
“Why don’t you give it up, Dev?“ Jennifer asked hesitantly. “Why don’t we both give it up?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s go away somewhere, Dev. Get away from all of it. Let them all go to hell in their own way.”
“Including your husband?”
“Him most of all. I’m sure you must realize by now that he deserves whatever he gets.” She paused for a moment, then added coolly, “And I wish you’d stop referring to him as my husband every chance you get. I haven’t forgotten for a moment that I’m still legally married to him. ”
“I wish I could say the same,” Devlin answered quietly, thinking of the night they made love in the house of the man he was looking for.
“Do you really mean that?” she asked, and Devlin heard the pitch of hurt in her voice.
“Yes, but not the way you think,” he said gently. “It’s not a question of remorse over the way I feel about you; it’s whether my failing to find your—to find Keyes is a result of those feelings. I’m wrestling with my own conscience, to put it simply.”
“I see. I suppose your conscience wouldn’t permit you to even consider going away with me.”
“On the contrary, I had already thought about our going away together,” he said frankly. “In fact, I probably had the idea before you did. But thinking about doing something wrong and actually doing it are two different things. And it would be wrong for us to run away; I think you probably know that as well as I do.”
“Yes, I do, and I don’t care,” she said evenly.
“That’s the way I might expect Keyes to talk,” he told her, “but not you.”
“Did you think it was wrong when we made love the other night?” she asked bluntly.
“Not in the sense that you’re using the word,” Devlin said. “The other night was a spontaneous thing; neither of us were forced into it, neither of us hurt the other, and what we did didn’t hurt anyone else. If one of us had deliberately planned it, or if we continued it now, then it would be wrong; very wrong.”
“You draw a pretty fine line, don’t you?” Jennifer asked pointedly.
“Perhaps,” Devlin admitted. “But I don’t ask anyone else to follow it. Everyone has to establish his own personal values. If mine are difficult for you to understand, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do to change them, however.”
“All right,” Jennifer said, herself sighing this time; the sigh of one unused to not getting her own way. “What do you intend to do now?”
“The same thing I’ve intended to do since the beginning,” he said matter-of-factly. “Find your husband. ”
“When will I see you again?”
“When it’s done.”
“Not before?”
“Not before.”
“You seem to find it considerably easier to stay away from me than I find it to stay away from you,” she said.
“Possibly that’s because I realize how important it is that Keyes be found; important to you, to me, to him, even to Todd and the others who have him. It may even be important to something else, something bigger than any of us, something none of us can see. That’s what I’m concerning myself with, and I imagine it makes our being apart a little less trying on me than it is on you.”
“There’s no way to make you change your mind?” she asked, her voice deepening in its obvious meaning.
“No.”
“Not even if I came over right now? All you’ll have to do is lie there and wait for me—”
“I won’t be here,” he told her. “I’m going out.”
“Where now?”
“To see the one person I know who may be able to help me find Keyes.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you that, Jennifer. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps when it’s over.”
“Looks like I have to wait until this thing is finished for everything,” she remarked with forced lightness. She sighed again, wearily this time. “Will you call me? As soon as you can?”
“Yes.”
“Promise, Dev?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
“I’ve got to go now,” he said.
“All right. Goodbye—but hurry.”
“I will. Goodbye.”
Devlin replaced the receiver and stood up, feeling the stiffness crack and split throughout his body. He stripped off the underwear in which he had slept and went into the bathroom. He brushed his teeth for five minutes, scrubbing the brandy-sourness from his mouth. Then he went into his tiny kitchen and took a quart of milk from the refrigerator. He drank half of it on his way back to the bathroom and finished the bottle after he had showered. Lathering his face, he shaved very closely with a straight razor that had cut the beards of four generations of Devlin men. With the fine edge gliding smoothly over his face, the bone handle cool to his fingertips, Devlin felt his spirit rejuvenating within him. He felt his blood flowing again, the juices of his body beginning to stir restlessly; in the mirror he saw the steel hardness, deep and dark, return to his eyes.
When he finished shaving and had rubbed a liberal amount of witch hazel onto his face, he walked naked back to the kitchen and put on a kettle of water for coffee. Then he returned to the bedroom and dressed very slowly, enjoying the fresh feel of clean underwear and sox against his skin, the snug fit of his belted trousers, the soft Oxford-cloth collar around his neck, the heavy leather of his Scotch-grain wingtips. He knotted a silk necktie and slipped it into place as he went into the kitchen again to rescue the screaming kettle.
Standing at the Pullman counter, Devlin mixed a cup of instant coffee, cooled it below the scalding point with tap water, and gulped it down in a long swallow. Immediately he made a second cup and carried it into the living room. He laced it generously with brandy and sat down to sip it leisurely with the day’s first cigarette.
He began to make his plans for the evening. He knew where he was going and what he was going to do, but he did not know exactly how he would go about it. It was a drastic step that he planned to take, one that he did not look forward to, but one which was, under the circumstances, absolutely necessary.
Devlin was now facing the Keyes case with a complete and total honesty with himself. He no longer thought that he could handle it alone, unaided. The panorama of his thoughts during the fiasco-surveillance he had attempted had convinced him of that fact. He was not functioning at anywhere near his usual efficiency; his thought of processes were off, his judgment was faulty, he was making too many errors. He was not sure why; perhaps it was a combination of things: his emotional involvement with Jennifer, with whom he had felt he was falling in love, but to whom he could not bring himself to make love to again; with Todd Holt and Janet Sundean, two of the people who had been closest to him in his life, but who had somehow drifted away from the principles in which all of them had once believed; and even Evelyn Lund, a lonely, frightened girl for whom he had developed a sudden deep affection until he saw that she had let her loneliness and fright force her to clutch at a security based on evil, an evil to which she had contributed as much as—yes, he had to admit it to himself now—as much as Jennifer had contributed to it.
And perhaps that was why he had not gone back to Jennifer or let her come to him—
Whatever the answer, he told himself now, he did not have the personal capacity to resolve the case without help. There were too many locked doors behind which were the corridors of secrets that lay between him and Keyes. What he needed, what he intended to get tonight, was a master key to help him unlock one of those doors. The door to Todd Holt.
He crushed out his cigarette and swallowed the last of his brandy-coffee. Five minutes later he was guiding his car off the parking lot.
The drive to the western suburbs took him more than an hour, for he travelled at a leisurely pace in order to have time to formulate in his mind the words he would use later. He kept to the slow lane of the expressway for fifteen miles, then turned off to a road that became a main street traversing the center of a small suburb. He followed the street through town until it became a road again, and continued several more miles into the country. Eventually he came to a wide asphalt drive leading through a stone fence and curving up to a stately, ivy-covered mansion. A wrought-iron plate mounted to the gatepost was inscribed SUNDEAN. It was the home of the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court.
Devlin parked at the edge of the drive in front of the house. He walked onto the porch and rang the bell. Its chimes sounded softly within the house. Waiting, Devlin looked out across a vast expanse of lawn at the twilight sky. He saw rainclouds gathering on the horizon.
The door opened and he turned back to the house.
“Good evening, Mr. Devlin.”
“Good evening, Ito,” he said to a small, obviously wiry Oriental dressed in a neat blue chauffeur’s uniform.