MARCUS WALHEIM ADMITTED FLESHMAN into his compartment when the latter knocked. Several drinks had pumped a ruddiness into Walheim’s dark face, but this color, as he listened to Fleshman’s story, faded to normal and then to a sallow shade the hue of old lead. When Fleshman ended, Walheim spoke, and he sounded sober, and for all practical purposes he was sober too.
“That complicates things,” he said.
“It does that,” Fleshman admitted.
“She saw you!”
“No.”
“You damn fool! How else did they get wise?” Walheim said angrily.
Walheim’s fists now squared, his shoulders pitched forward, and he seemed about to hurl himself on the fat little man.
Fleshman was fully aware of the other’s sudden fit of rage, but he ignored it and took a seat on the bench that faced forward, and presently, when he discovered he had been holding his breath, he released the air from his lungs carefully. He seemed to have difficulty maintaining normal breathing, and he concentrated on this for a time. Finally, without lifting his eyes to Walheim, who still held the attitude of physical menace, he stated, “You amateurs are always so ready to get upset. Why don’t you do these things yourself if you’re so hot?”
Walheim controlled himself, but only with actual muscular effort, a clamping of lips, a pressing of clenched fists to his hard lean belly. He blurted, “Are you positive she didn’t identify you?”
Fleshman deigned not to answer immediately. He arose and took up the scotch bottle and a glass. He rinsed the glass, poured himself an uninvited drink, measuring the meager amount carefully with his eye, and when he had raised the level to the brim of the glass with ice water he resumed his seat. “She never saw me,” he said.
Neither man spoke for a time. Fleshman tasted the contents of his glass, grimaced, and at once downed the entire drink in three great swallows. Plucking a square of silk handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped the glass carefully, rim and outside, then wiped his lips.
Both men gave attention, and frowns of preoccupation, to the darkness streaming past the window. Abruptly the low-hanging moon was visible through clouds. As if the moon were important, Fleshman lowered his head a trifle the better to see it; the movement compressed and expanded his plump body. The moon was pale and the shape of a cutting off a fingernail. Below the moon mountains were hunched; nearer, so near that the train seemed to be running over it, was the shining expanse of a river that was not entirely frozen over, but had scabs of floating ice.
Thus far Fleshman, by tension and excitement that were foreign to his placid manner, had dominated the compartment; Walheim, far the fiercer personality of the two, had momentarily become the lesser. But now this balance swung back to Walheim. He, by stiffening stance, a renewal of confidence, a controlling of rage, gained the ascendancy. Fleshman saw this, and he scowled. He did not like Walheim. He did not admire Walheim’s hard resilience, his ability to take a blow and bounce back snarling and slashing. Fleshman didn’t like these qualities in anybody.
Fleshman lifted a rectangular pigskin fold wallet from his pocket. It was George’s wallet.
“This might give you a line on who he is.” Fleshman tossed George’s billfold to Walheim.
“Where ... ?” Walheim was astonished.
“I took it off him.”
“You mean a minute ago?”
“Yes. In the station. After I did what I did to him.”
Walheim flipped the wallet open. He glanced first into the currency compartment, found it empty, and scowled at Fleshman, who pretended not to notice. Walheim extracted George’s passport and said, “Hah, the guy travels!” He turned the cover and end papers and came to George’s personal data. He read George’s name, then read: “Business, BETA Airways ... !” He stiffened, blurted hoarsely, “For God’s sake! This guy—he works for Chance Molloy! The other one must be Molloy himself!”
Fleshman looked up from examining the water glass which he still held in his hand, bedded in the handkerchief.
“Molloy ... somebody you’ve heard of?”
“Yeah,” Walheim mumbled. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him, all right.” Shock, surprise, alarm, had suddenly given Walheim a whitened, drawn look.
“Who is he?”
Walheim gazed fixedly at the passport. “Let me think this out! ... Of all the damned bad breaks!”
It gave Fleshman some satisfaction to see that Walheim was worried. He watched Walheim distastefully for a moment, then proceeded to relax himself with soft movements of his shoulders, a tug at his trousers crotch, a widening of his thighs, a subsiding and expanding of abdomen. As a precaution against any sudden movement of the train menacing his comfortable inertness, he planted chubby hands on the bench.
Fleshman’s drowsiness was not entirely pretended. He was not particularly frightened, and not much disturbed by Walheim’s obvious alarm. Any danger that had menaced them five minutes ago had not been changed by the mere fact that they had learned Chance Molloy’s name. Actually Fleshman was incapable of prolonged states of fear.
He did go over, in his mind, what he knew about Walheim. He did this to reassure himself that Walheim was a capable leader, worthy of his, Fleshman’s, allegiance; since this matter might involve a noose around his neck, it was important. He had been acquainted with Marcus Walheim, sketchily, for about fifteen years. Once, twelve years ago, he had been an overnight guest at Walheim’s home, and he recalled Walheim’s father as a stocky man, intensely active and with great physical strength. The father was a successful clothing manufacturer. Walheim’s mother was a huge beefy woman who dominated the family, usually by shouting in a loud voice, in Polish or in very poor English. Both parents had come over from Poland about the turn of the century and now had eleven children, Marcus being the fourth from the oldest. The whole family had a headlong, physically active air that Fleshman hadn’t liked; he still recalled with horror how the father and all the sons had taken a stiff walk before breakfast, dragging him, Fleshman, along, tiring him so that his day was utterly ruined.
His later contacts with Walheim, while not intimate, had kept him aware that Marcus was making a great deal of money, legally and often otherwise. Walheim was in the pinball and slot-machine business, the manufacturing end, several years ago. Later he got into the machine-tool business, and the aircraft industry next—this last about the time war began, very conveniently enabling Walheim to evade the draft. Two years ago Fleshman had done a murder for Walheim; a matter of a man in Los Angeles who was about to go to the district attorney with something. The services had been well paid for, and there were no repercussions. Walheim, as a whole, was a satisfactory employer.
With a bitter intake of breath, followed by a violent expulsion—he was still badly upset—Walheim lifted his head.
“You better knock off the one on the train, too,” he said.
“And the girl?”
Walheim nodded. “Yes, the girl also.” His voice was thin with alarm. “She can’t, absolutely can’t, be allowed to live. Never!”
“All right.”
“I’ll pay you well!”
“I understand that,” Fleshman said. “I’m sorry about the slip earlier. That conductor shouldn’t have shown up when he did. The odds were all against it. In another thirty seconds the girl would have been off the train and dead.” He touched his lips again with the handkerchief. “Fortunately I do not believe in Providence or even in God. Miracles do not repeat themselves. Next time I’ll get her.”
“Molloy too.”
“Yes, I understand.”
Walheim frowned at the fat man, finding that Fleshman’s lazy indifference, for which he usually had a secret admiration, was now irksome. He asked, “Would you like to know more about what is behind this?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Not particularly.”
“I’ll be damned if I see why you prefer to work in the dark!”
“Oh, there are two reasons,” Fleshman explained mildly. “First, I am a specialist. I do one thing—I am like a workman in a factory who makes one part that goes into a machine; those fellows, if they want to be satisfied and happy, learn to have little interest in the whole machine, only in the part they make. I am satisfied to be like that.” He blinked slowly, added, “Second, the police, I have heard, have something to take information out of the most unwilling man. Scopolamine, I think the drug is called.”
“I see your point. But if the johns used truth serum on you they’d get enough to electrocute me—anyway.”
“Perhaps. We have had past dealings, at that.”
“For our own safety, I think you should know a couple of things.”
“Suit yourself.”
Bluntly, directly—he had already decided what he would and would not tell—Walheim launched his words. “A man named Paul Roger Copeland owns Transfa Air Industries and I’m an officer in the company. Copeland’s health has gone to hell and he’s liquidating his business. He turned the job of selling it over to the officers of the company. There’s about twenty millions’ worth of property being sold.”
Fleshman, who had not expected to be impressed, was impressed. He said, “That ... is a great deal of money.” He felt small; money, actually, meant a lot to him; he felt like an ant with its anthill beside a mountain.
Up came Walheim’s hand hurriedly.
“No, no, the take isn’t that big!” he said. “We’re not stealing the whole company. That would be nice if it could be done, but we couldn’t figure out a way. The take will run a percentage—somewhere between five and ten per cent. It figures about eight and a quarter per cent so far, but some overhead comes off.” His finger came up, pointed at Fleshman. “You’re overhead, for example.”
After a moment’s mental computing, eight and a quarter per cent of twenty millions, Fleshman was still floored.
“My God!” he said softly.
“It’s big,” Walheim agreed.
“But so much money ... How—”
“Any kind of factory equipment, tools, airplane parts, engines and engine parts, even factory buildings, are as scarce as hens’ teeth right now. A year from now the picture may be different. But now the whole damned world needs everything, and you can sell anything.” Walheim paused to smile—a humorless warping of his lips—in appreciation of the ripeness of the opportunity. “Big or little, people are a lot alike. You take a little guy with a forty-a-week job; he needs a car, he’s willing to slip fifty bucks to a dealer who’ll put his name at the top of the list. Okay, it’s the same if you need a dozen automatic gear planers worth a hundred grand apiece. You’re willing to slip someone ten per cent, get the goods, get it right now, and keep your mouth shut.”
“But so much money ... !” Fleshman repeated in dumb wonder.
“Copeland has been sick two years and doesn’t know much about Transfa. The price we’re getting for his stuff—market prices current, in most cases—will seem okay to him. That’s how simple it is.” Walheim scowled, crossed his legs, glowered at the billfold and passport which were still in his hands.
He said, “Martha Baxter had suddenly accepted a job as Copeland’s private consultant in New York. She had wired Copeland she would be there in five days. And she had notified this fellow Chance Molloy that she was going east to work and was worried about finding an apartment. Molloy had ordered a man who works for him, a vice-president of BETA named Roy Cillinger, to get Martha an apartment. Cillinger got the apartment, so he was expecting Martha to show up.”
Walheim paused and flipped the wallet open and shut three times. “We talked it over. We decided it would be too risky, too much chance of stirring up Copeland’s suspicions—to say nothing of Molloy and that Cillinger—if Martha didn’t go to New York. Particularly when we found out that Cillinger didn’t know Martha by sight.”
Fleshman was mildly puzzled. “Didn’t know her by sight?”
“So we sent Martha to New York.”
“Bought her off, eh?” Fleshman commented.
“No. She wouldn’t buy.”
“Oh, you tried, then?”
“Yes.”
The fat man opened his eyes. He was puzzled. “I don’t get it. Wasn’t it apparent this Martha was going to New York to spill what she knew to Copeland?”
Walheim laughed fiercely. “The Martha we sent to New York wasn’t Martha.”
“Eh?”
“We sent a girl from the office instead,” Walheim said proudly. “Her name ... We don’t need names, do we?” He chuckled. “This girl was my—ah, shall we say I knew her quite well. She had worked for Transfa, in the head office, three years. She had—and here’s the real sweet part of it—shared an apartment with Martha early this fall, until Martha threw her out. So she knew all Martha’s little habits and who Martha’s friends were. This girl—she wanted to be an actress, had come to California hoping to get into the movies—happened to have the habit of observing people closely.”
Animated now, his driving force restored, Walheim showed fierce pleasure by smacking a fist into a palm, then changing the fist to a hand with a pointing finger, which he leveled at Fleshman. “You see the setup!” he chortled. “A beautiful setup!”
“A bit complex, wasn’t it?”
“No. Everything fitted in.”
“But Copeland—”
“Oh, I forgot that—Copeland didn’t know Martha by sight. Had never seen her. We were sure of that. So what we did was make this girl up—red hair, gray suits and frocks—to somewhat resemble Martha.”
“Copeland was fooled?”
“Perfectly.” Walheim flung himself back, laughing again. “You see what we had? A spy right in Copeland’s nest—in case anything did come up! God, it couldn’t be beat!”
Now, violently, the pullman car gave the long-delayed lurch which Fleshman had been expecting; it caught him unprepared, though, and he was thrown sidewise and completely upset. He managed to remain on the bench only by frantic effort, a flapping of arms and legs, a struggle for balance, none of which seemed to have any effect on his attention or thoughts. Having restored himself to balance, he spoke as if nothing had happened.
“A truly nice bit of planning,” he said. “One of the nicest—in timing, audacity, the seizing of possible threads leading to danger—that I believe I have ever seen.”
“It wasn’t bad.”
“Wonderful!”
Walheim had liked the gesture of fist driven against palm, the pointing finger. He repeated it, said, “There was one damn hitch!”
“Ah!”
“Martha told us she had mailed the evidence against us to a party who would turn it over to Copeland if she didn’t reach New York safely.”
“Oh!” Fleshman looked as if he had been struck in the face. “She—was it true?”
The dark, sinewy hands turned palms up, the fingers splayed apart. We hoped it was a bluff. “We took that chance.” Fleshman added a shrug, dropped his hands. “That evidence-in-the-hands-of-a-third-party gag is an old one. You read it in stories, you see it in movies. We figured that Martha—well, she was in a position where she urgently needed such a story when she told us that one.”
“I see,” said Fleshman, nodding. “Yes, such a story is a hackneyed device. Twice in my life I have ...” He halted himself, closed off his bit of reminiscence. “Never mind. What else developed?”
“A telegram from Missouri!”
“Ah!”
The thin lips compressed angrily. “Listen to this! Just listen!” Walheim jutted his head forward. “ ‘Have reception committee Grand Central 2 A.M. train Friday. Bringing secret for you. Love. Julie.’ ” He paused dramatically. “There! What do you think of that?”
“It would alarm me, I believe.”
“It alarmed us! You’re damned right it did! The telegram came yesterday afternoon, from this Julie, a girl friend of Martha’s in Missouri. You see what it means, don’t you?”
“Martha had mailed the stuff to Julie to keep?”
Walheim’s head jerked down, up, in emphatic agreement. “Exactly! That’s the answer.”
“But the delay ... ?” Fleshman’s soft lips puckered roundly with puzzlement. “Why did she wait so long?”
“Oh, that’s easy! She thinks Martha is in New York. Our Martha has been corresponding with her, following the pattern of old letters which Martha had kept.”
“I see. That phrase in the wire—‘bringing secret for you’—does seem condemning. Yes, it does.”
Walheim flung himself back on the seat. “Okay! Now you see that part of it. This Julie”—he leveled an arm again for emphasis—“must be disposed of. It has to be done! Julie, who has been Martha’s friend from childhood, is the one logical person Martha would have trusted with material to guarantee her safety. We did not, unfortunately, realize this until the telegram came. We thought that it would be someone in Los Angeles—if there was such information, and a person holding it. Actually we assumed Martha had lied.” He made, on the end of the extended arm, a fist and added, “She did not lie! You see that now, don’t you?”
“Yes, it seems clear,” Fleshman replied.
Presently Fleshman arose with reluctant torpidity, restored the water glass to its holder, then—an afterthought—wiped the liquor bottle free of his fingerprints before restoring the large white handkerchief to his pocket.
He wore on his softly round face, for Walheim’s benefit, a simpering smile, but it was not genuine. Sitting sourly in his mind, well concealed however, was his former dislike for Walheim, now enhanced by a sickness that came of seeing that Walheim would make out of this one thing as much money, more, than he would make in his lifetime. He hated, loathed, the qualities in Walheim that gained him so much—fierce directness, drive, callousness, fierce daring. Fleshman had no envy. He did not want these qualities in himself. He just hated them. But his dislike would have no real effect—he would do Walheim’s work, take Walheim’s pay. Long ago he had learned and accepted the fact that men who hired killers were not apt to be likable.
“However”—he threw, quietly, a barb into Walheim—“there is the matter of Chance Molloy.”
Walheim winced. “That jerk! ... He’s snooping to find out what happened to his engine parts of course!”
Fleshman saw, far out in the river that was snaking past, a tugboat laboring through the ice cakes drawing a string of three barges. The tug glowed with lights like a Christmas tree, the barges were floodlighted, but the effect to the eye was bleakly cold. Fleshman shivered.
He said diffidently, “For three instead of one ... You have in mind a fee?”
Walheim mentioned a sum. “That’s the absolute top,” he added.
“It seems ample.” Fleshman was quite satisfied.
“For God’s sake, let’s not have any more slips!” Walheim said harshly. “Molloy is a rough customer.”
“Yes ... Yes, his appearance indicates as much,” Fleshman agreed. He was still on his feet; he glanced at the seat, but ignored, reluctantly, its comfort. He sighed and moved to the door, paused, and said, “You know ...” He let it hang.
“Know what?” Walheim asked sharply.
“Oh, I was thinking ... Murder—past, not present or future—has a tongue-binding effect on one, does it not?”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“Martha.”
Walheim’s lips arranged themselves loosely.
Fleshman added, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“No—”
“Murdered! Wasn’t she?”
Walheim, after a moment, said thickly, “Suit yourself, damn you!”
The fat man drew on gloves and buttoned the middle button of his suit coat. A hand on the door, he let his gaze touch regretfully the luxurious seat; his full-blown sigh indicated how much he would have liked to sit there again. He said casually to Walheim, “Oh, I know you did not personally kill her, Marcus. Not you.” He pulled at the door, which resisted a moment, then gave, and he went out into the corridor.