It was quiet at Seafield’s as I drove up to his carriage-house home along the alley that it backed on. I parked and had a look through the garage-door windows. All but one of the spaces were empty. I considered that a good sign. Seafield’s T-Bird was not there.
The question was whether he was at work or at the police department. Miller had said they would be coming in “today”; I didn’t know whether that meant morning.
I went to the door at the bottom of the stairs to his living quarters.
“Howdy.” The voice came from beside the building, and belonged to Thomas Jefferson Walker, Sr. “Looking for Mr. Seafield?”
“That I am, Mr. Walker.”
“I know you?” With his head bent sideways, he shuffled so as to get a better angle on my face.
“I was here a couple of days ago. Mr. Seafield wasn’t in then, either.”
“He keeps unlikely hours. Can’t count on catching him any particular time. Hey. I remember you. You came here the other day. Say, I got some coffee on the boil. You care to share some with me?”
“I would,” I said, “and I remember your hospitality. But I’m in a bit of a spot. I really need to get into Mr. Seafield’s apartment. I think he may have something there that will be important to me.” I faced the old man squarely and honestly, and lied. “I’d hoped to catch him in.”
“You a friend of his?”
“Not exactly a friend. But we share common interests.”
“You one of these federal wheels, are you?”
“Told you about that, has he?”
“My son—he’s what owns this place,” he said. “We had a problem a while back and he explained it to me.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Aw, well,” he said reluctantly.
“Last January was this?” I guessed.
“Yeah,” he said, brightening. “Know about that, huh?”
“Quite a bit.”
“Seafield, he came in here and he was drenching in blood and that. Hell, I never liked him much and I was going to call the police, only he told me to call Tommy, Jr., about it. Tommy, Jr., that’s my boy. And he explained. I can keep my peace, that’s one thing. You won’t see me getting in the way of a government project just for the sake of a loose mouth.”
“I’m sure everyone involved appreciates that.”
“I expect.”
“I’m going to have to ask you a favor, Mr. Walker.”
“What’s that?”
“I need to have a look around upstairs. You can come in with me, that’s no problem.”
“Wal, I guess that’ll be all right,” he said.
I stood quietly while the breeze riffled the summer leaves above me. Walker returned with the key in a few minutes. We walked up the stairs to the carriage-house apartment without exchanging more words.
Apart from a kitchen and bathroom at one end, the space above the quadruple garage had been opened into a single huge room. And it was clear at a glance that Lee Seafield was short of nothing flashy that money could buy. If I’d been more relaxed, I’d have been jealous. I spent my first few minutes walking slowly around the room just seeing what caught my eye.
I noticed books first. A chemistry reference library. And Teach Yourself Portuguese, with accompanying records.
Then I saw pictures. A cardboard box filled with snapshots of presumably consenting presumable adults.
One picture attracted my attention specially. Not only because the photographic style and content differed from the others. But because it was of my woman.
The picture I kept in my Never-Touch box.
Against impulse, I left it. It was only evidence in situ.
And evidence was in short supply. The rest of the room contained little of interest, or evidence. No weapons, no drug stashes, no canisters with radiation markings.
“Well,” I said to Walker, “I can’t say this has helped me a lot. Sorry to have troubled you.”
A distant voice said, “Lee?”
The voice was sleepy and female, and came from above us.
For all my noting of Portuguese-language records, I’d neglected to realize there was no bed in the room.
Again, “Lee? That you?”
Next to the door we’d entered through, there were ladder steps mounted on the wall leading to an attic. I went to them and climbed up, leaving Walker below.
The attic was a massive peaked bedroom, with a huge bed in the middle beneath a section of roof that had been replaced with glass.
I saw Marcia Merom wallowing in the bed. And she saw me. Her eyelids opened wide; her pupils contracted to a pinhead. She sat up. “Don’t touch me!” she said.
“I’ll try and control myself,” I said, and sat on the edge of the bed next to her. She wriggled away, clutching the sheet. She was surprised and afraid. Ideal conditions to make her cooperative.
“I thought you and Lee were going down to police headquarters to tell them how I’d kidnapped you,” I said. “Isn’t that the idea?”
“We’re going in this afternoon,” she said.
“When you get there,” I said to her, “you’re going to have a surprise.”
She repeated her repertoire of disapproving facial expressions.
“I’ve seen the police already today,” I said. “And as you see, I’m still free.” Facts, juxtaposed. “I hope you can say the same after you’ve seen them.”
I gave it a moment to sink in. That I knew she’s accused me of abduction meant I had to have seen the police. It wasn’t for her to guess that I was on the run from them.
I concentrated on being relaxed and angel-may-care: I find it easy when I know I’m about to lie.
“You and your tall impulsive friend are going to have a little surprise when you go into police headquarters,” I said again. “The cops know that this F.B.I. business is all just a con. They are not pleased.”
“What do you mean, a con?” An element now of panic.
I couldn’t help raising my voice. “That it’s all phony. Lies. A cover. That you people are making yourselves rich out of the secrecy that surrounds covert government operations. That you’re no more working for the F.B.I. than I am.”
“That’s not true!”
I looked away, up and out of the glass top of the roof I saw the leaves of the trees rustling, but couldn’t hear them. I turned back to her. “Can you prove you work for the F.B.I.? Do you carry papers or credentials?”
She shook her head. She was worried. “They showed me letters,” she said.
“Who did?”
“Henry Rush and Tommy Walker, when they took me into an office and talked to me about it.”
“When was this?”
“About six months after I came to work at Loftus. I was really fed up.”
“What with?”
“The job was a dead end. I couldn’t see myself getting on to anything else for years and years. I saw that Lee was stuck, too, and had been for a long time. There are too many of us.”
“Us?”
“Scientists. A whole generation of young ones came in in the sixties, and they’re blocking promotion for all of us who happened to be born a few years later. Companies made a big youth thing and cut out all the people who were young too late.” She seemed genuinely bitter. I didn’t quite understand the grievance. My generation had grown up expecting the voyage to success to be a slow boat.
“What did they say when they took you into the office?”
“Henry and Tommy Walker, they came on very serious, swore me to secrecy. I didn’t know what was happening.”
“And?”
“They asked me how I felt about my country, whether I was patriotic, whether I could keep secrets, whether there were people who knew me who could vouch for my character. I answered their questions, and then I asked what it was all about.”
“A reasonable question.”
“Then Henry said, ‘I’m going to tell you something very important. I’m going to put my life in your hands.’ And he gave me a letter from the F.B.I. that talked about an anti-drug operation called Bagtag; it was all signed and official.”
“Who signed it?”
“J. Edgar Hoover. After I read it, Tommy showed me his identification wallet with pictures and everything. He said, ‘I’m an agent for the F.B.I.’ ”
“What did you say?”
“What could I say? I didn’t know what it was about.”
“Did you think the letter and I.D. were genuine?”
“I’m sure they were,” she said definitely. “But who’s ever seen that kind of thing?”
“What happened?”
“They wanted me to work with them. I felt honored and important. It changed the whole thing, working at Loftus. And what we’re doing is important, too.”
“What exactly do you do?”
“We refine drugs, mostly heroin, and then tag them with radioactive markers.”
“What happens then?”
“Tommy Walker takes what we make and delivers them to the organizations we deal with. In Detroit, I think. It’s taken years, but most of the drugs in the Midwest pass through us now. When we’ve finally involved all the distributors we can, then bang, the F.B.I. closes in on them and they’re holding easily identified drugs. They can check the whole distribution network.”
“So you supply refined drugs for the whole Midwest?”
“Tommy is the one who has to meet those people. His is the really dangerous job.”
“Except for John Pighee’s.”
“Well,” she said. “Well.” She rolled the edge of die sheet.
“Why,” I asked, “did Lee kill John Pighee?”
“He wasn’t supposed to,” she said.
“What was he supposed to do?”
“Just arrange an accident, so we could get him into the Clinic. We were going to keep him sedated.”
“Sedated? For months? Maybe years?”
“It was better than killing him.”
“But why?” I asked. My chorus refrain for the whole case. “He was one of the . . . group.”
“He was,” she said, emphasizing the past tense. “He broke the rules.”
“What rules?”
“I don’t really want to—”
“Look, lady,” I said emphatically, “it’s gone past what you want or don’t want.”
“John infiltrated us. Or was taken over by the dealers after he joined us,” she said.
“What rules did he break that meant he had to be ... eliminated?” I said. My voice was rising.
“We weren’t supposed to put things on paper,” she said. “I . . . saw that he had a book sometimes.”
“A book?”
“A notebook. With stuff about the lab in it. He wasn’t supposed to do things like that. And when I saw he had some of the calcium—”
“Calcium?”
“Calcium 45. It was one of the tagging materials we use.”
Radioactive?”
“An active isotope, yes.”
“Does that come in one of the little cans with a radiation symbol on it?”
“That’s the outside container, yes.”
“And Pighee had one?”
“We weren’t supposed to take anything—anything at all—out of the lab. Not notes, not materials.” She paused. “So, I had to tell Henry about it.”
“And Henry decided that Pighee had to be killed.”
“No!” she said. “Not killed. Just—just made inoperative. We had a meeting. We decided to get him into the Clinic and keep him sedated, so at least we could think about what to do at more leisure.”
“When was this meeting?”
“The afternoon—no, morning. Well, about lunchtime.”
“On the day of his accident?”
“Accident, yes,” she said.
“My God,” I said.
“They’d been infiltrated before,” she said. “They said they couldn’t waste time.”
“So Lee went and killed the guy.”
“I think it was an accident,” she said.
I shook my head. “Lee was covered with blood when he came back here that night. He was there and close and probably did it with a hammer himself and set an explosion afterwards.”
“I don’t know that,” she said. “But they didn’t want him killed. There were insurance problems, keeping investigators out, and all that.”
“I can believe there were problems,” I said. “Your friend Lee, your colleague, he is not the most controlled kind of person, is he?”
“No,” she said.
“Did he kill Simon Rackey? The chemist who, presumably, was the last infiltrator?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but bent her face into her sheet. To me it meant that he had told her about it. Intimately and in detail.
“So,” I asked, “where did Seafield come in with you? Did that start when you joined the team?”
“No,” she said. “He had other . . . other arrangements, or whatever, I guess.”
“Well?”
“I don’t think he thought about me that way. But a week after John’s . . . accident Lee came to my place. I let him in. He was quiet and nice. We talked about how things were working out at the Clinic. I gave him a drink.” She looked up, through the glass, at the trees, at the summer sky. “He said that I must be looking for a lover now that John was . . . gone. He said that he would fill in, if I liked, until I got someone to replace him. I said no, thanks. I’d get along. And then . . .” She shook her head, and tears formed. “It . . . he . . . it . . .”
“What happened?”
“He did it.”
“He raped you?”
She nodded, but said, “Nearly.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do?” she asked vehemently. “I couldn’t do anything. Not with the project and being in it. There was nothing . . .” She paused.
“It kept happening?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t want it?”
“No,” she said. Then corrected, “Not really. I . . . I don’t like to think about it, except when we’re, when he’s . . .”
“You’re afraid of him?”
“Yes,” she said definitely. “He’s so—so rough. And not nice to me. He hurts me and he’s never grateful or satisfied or . . . or nice.
No, I don’t like to think about it.”
“But when it’s happening?”
“It’s different then.”
“You bought a gun. To frighten him?”
“Yes.”
“Did it work?”
“I haven’t had a chance to use it, I mean show it, I mean . . . Well. I don’t know whether it will put him off.”
“Or turn him on. He doesn’t seem the type to shy away from violence.”
“No,” she said. “He’s not.”
“Do you think,” I asked, “that the F.B.I. lets its agents rape people? Much less other agents?”
“I didn’t think they’d know.”
“Or murder people?”
She shrugged.
I left.