Operation Deathmaker Read online

  “Her boyfriend at school wanted her to cash in her educational endowment and set him up in business.”

  “Sounds like a precocious type,” I commented with an attempted lightness I didn’t feel.

  “But she couldn’t do it without my signature,” Hazel went on. “Which I refused to give. So this could be …” She stood there, thinking. “How did they get her away from you?”

  “Two men. I was gassed. Knocked out in the car. She may have been, too.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a fake. Although, of course, they’d want to make it look good.”

  “They?”

  “Melissa and Stan. Her boyfriend.”

  “Stan who?”

  “I never asked. Our conversation didn’t get very far after she told me what loverboy had on his mind.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing. Literally.” Hazel began to pace the room. She paused briefly at the sitting room’s limits to stare blankly at the blond, Danish furniture, then resumed pacing again. “You didn’t report it?” She answered herself immediately. “No, there’s no way you could, of course. Dammit, if I thought that precious pair had faked a kidnap—” She slowed her rapid stride. “But what if they didn’t? How could they, for that matter? He’s back east at school. She talked to him last night. Anyway, what you describe doesn’t sound faked. Earl, I don’t know what to do!”

  “Either way, about the only thing we can do is wait for a phone call.”

  “Phone—? Oh. Yes. Ransom.” Hazel drew a deep breath. “I don’t think I believe it yet. How much of a look did you get at them?”

  “The kidnappers? Damn little. Almost the first thing I knew was that I had a faceful of gas. If you want an impression, I’d say neither was young. Why don’t you sit down instead of wearing a path in the carpeting? You’re getting your nerves all jangled.”

  She sat, but she remained perched on the edge of a chair as if poised for flight. “Maybe I should have okayed letting her tap the till,” she muttered. She looked at me appealingly, as though for moral support. “But when she told me her story, my gut reaction was that her boyfriend was trying to use her.”

  “I trust your gut reactions. How much money was she asking for?”

  “We never got that far.” Hazel sounded sheepish. “I guess I blew my stack.”

  “Coming from a long line of stackblowers, it figures,” I said soothingly.

  Hazel stood up again. “Could it mean anything that Melissa advanced her departure by a day, Earl? If she’d flown tomorrow as she’d originally planned, it would have been me who drove her to the airport.”

  “You mean they might have grabbed you both? No, I don’t think so. Who’d have paid the ransom?”

  “You’re not exactly a pauper,” she retorted.

  “Yes, but who knows it?”

  She was silent because there was no answer. We’d come back from Mexico recently, where I’d made a nice touch—more than $300,000. Hazel had grown nervous watching me carry it around the country with us. She kept insisting that cash should be invested. I have my own reasons for thinking that commercial banks aren’t the safest places to put money, but I’d finally let her talk me into putting it into bearer bonds.

  “We can pick up the bonds from the brokerage office on Monday,” she said as if she were reading my mind.

  “What about this fund of Melissa’s?” I was trying to distract Hazel; I realized I was watching the telephone myself, expecting it to ring. “How’s it set up?”

  “I don’t know the details,” she replied. “But I remember when Charlie did it after his brother died. The last year of his own life Charlie couldn’t seem to do anything wrong gambling. He stood in front of the lawyer’s desk and pitched handfuls of stock at it until the lawyer said there was enough for a seven thousand dollar annual yield. That’s all Melissa can get her hands on, the annual yield, but with stock appreciation through the years, the fund has now built up into a considerable estate.”

  “Considerable?”

  “I’d say a quarter million, give or take a few thousand. I was surprised when Jed called me and I asked him the same question.”

  Jed Raymond was Hazel’s new financial adviser. He had taken over recently after the death of her long-time money manager, Nate Pepperman. Jed was a good friend of us both. He’d originally introduced us. “Why did Jed call you?” I asked.

  “Because Melissa had phoned him, wanting to know how much she could take out of the estate.” Hazel sounded resentful. “I don’t think she’d ever have thought of it herself. I’m sure her gold-digging boyfriend put her up to it.”

  “Too bad we don’t know his name. It really does sound as though we should have a little talk with him.” I pulled my sticky shirt collar away from the back of my neck. “I’m going to take a shower. Yell for me before you answer the phone.”

  I went through the bedroom and into the bathroom, shedding clothing. I peeled off my wig and placed it on a shelf. I put my automatic beside it. I could see in the mirror the multiple body scars acquired from the extensive plastic surgery transplants that had rebuilt my face after a gasoline-tank explosion had almost destroyed it.

  The shower’s refreshingly cool water was a bracer, but I didn’t linger. I wrapped a towel around myself and went back to the sitting room. Hazel was sitting in the chair next to the telephone. She shook her head wordlessly, and I could see that she was tense.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “Nothing can happen until they call.”

  “Earl, what are we going to do!” she burst out. Her hands were twisted together in her lap. “What can we—”

  The phone rang.

  Hazel reached for it so quickly she almost knocked it from the table. She snatched the receiver from the cradle on her second grab at it. “Yes?” she blurted. She listened for no more than five seconds, while I moved toward her, hoping to catch the sound of the voice at the other end of the line. Hazel held out the phone to me. “It’s for you,” she said.

  We eyed each other above the extended phone cord.

  I don’t get telephone calls.

  I make them.

  I took the receiver from her. “Yes?” I said.

  “Listen close, Drake,” a male voice growled in my ear. “I’m only gonna say this once. If’n you wanna see the kid alive again, be at the pay phone in the shoppin’ center at Alvarado an’ Mission in thirty minutes.”

  “Let me talk to—” I began.

  “Thirty minutes,” the voice cut me off. The receiver clicked in my ear.

  “That was it,” I said needlessly. I handed the phone back to Hazel. I was trying to analyze the voice. A Southern accent? “But they won’t deal through this phone, probably because it’s switchboard-monitored. They gave me half an hour to get to the pay phone at the Alvarado Shopping Center.”

  “Then get dressed!” she urged.

  “There’s plenty of time. I wonder how the caller knew my name? We registered here in yours.”

  “From Melissa,” Hazel said swiftly.

  “It doesn’t mean she’s part of the kidnapping,” I argued. “Even if she hadn’t volunteered it they could have whacked it out of her in about fifteen seconds.”

  “Get dressed,” Hazel said again, but I could see that her mind was on other matters. I went into the bedroom again. I had just pulled a set of underwear from a bureau drawer when I heard her voice. “Earl! Earl!” she was calling.

  I tightened the towel around me and ran for the living room. The sliding-glass patio doors were open, and Hazel was standing on the terrace looking down into the street. “What’s that boy doing?” she demanded, pointing.

  A skinny, scruffy-looking, long-haired kid, in a dirty white shirt and patched jeans, was moving along on the other side of the street, trying each car-door handle on the driver’s side as he came to it.

  “It looks as though he’s trying for a car to rip-off,” I said.

  “In broad daylight?”

  “H
e’s probably flying high on some kind of junk.” I watched the kid try another car door. “And I didn’t bother to lock your car,” I remembered.

  The kid reached Hazel’s car. He opened the driver’s door and looked inside, then walked to the front of the car and raised the hood. I saw the flash of metal clips on jumper wires as he pulled them from a hip pocket.

  I’d said it, but up till then I hadn’t really believed it: the kid was trying to steal the car. “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM THAT AUTOMOBILE!” I bellowed.

  Either the kid was a pro or he was so zonked on whatever he was taking that he couldn’t hear me. He never even looked around. He leaned in over the motor, the hot-wire leads in his hands. Seconds later the engine quivered, sputtered, but then died.

  “I’ll fix his wagon!” Hazel muttered. She ran to the stairway leading down to the street. I stood there helplessly in my towel while the kid attempted a restart. Hazel reached the bottom of the stairs and sprinted down the walk. I knew if she got her hands on the kid in her present mood he wouldn’t know Tuesday from Friday.

  The car’s engine caught again, and this time it purred steadily. The kid slammed down the hood, ran around the front, and dived under the wheel. He backed away jerkily from the car parked in front of Hazel’s, and I saw the brake lights come on.

  Then I couldn’t see anything.

  There was a puff of white smoke, a roar of sound, and a shock wave that pushed me away from the terrace railing. Doors flew off both sides of the car, and a bundle of bloody rags was blown out onto the roadway.

  Hazel had reached the middle of the street when the blown-off driver’s-side door struck her with a sodden sound. She collapsed on the pavement, the heavy door partly covering her. The white smoke cloud formed a halo above the shattered car roof, while I stared down stupidly at the unbelievable scene.

  I had been instructed to get into the car and drive to the shopping center’s pay telephone booth.

  It was never intended that I would arrive there.

  The bomb-rigged car had been a death trap meant for me.

  TWO

  I DON’T KNOW HOW MANY SECONDS ELAPSED WHILE I stood on the terrace staring down at Hazel’s unconscious figure on the pavement.

  A dozen different thoughts battled for supremacy in my mind. If I couldn’t risk reporting Melissa’s kidnapping because of undesirable police questioning, there was even more reason why I couldn’t afford to be connected with the car bombing of a wealthy widow with whom I’d been associated.

  Crazy things ran through my mind. The tag end of something I’d read about electronics surfaced: Reverberation is the bounce of sound over short distances and the return of the sound to the listener before the sound is completed, while echo is sound bounced over a much greater distance and returned to the listener after the initial sound has ended.

  It was reverberation that had moved me a step backward on the terrace, not echo.

  The sound of excited voices below finally put me in motion. People were pouring out into the street. I left the terrace hurriedly. I jerked on shirt and pants in the bedroom, then ran barefoot from the suite down the hall to the door of Valerie Cooper’s quarters. I punched the chime button and listened impatiently to its leisurely roulade. I interrupted it by pounding on the door with both fists.

  The door opened on the chain latch and Val Cooper’s brown eyes looked out at me over a bare shoulder. “Don’t talk,” I said rapidly. “Just listen to me. Hazel is unconscious down in the street. She got caught by a bomb blast that destroyed her car. The police and an ambulance will show any minute. Get down there. Go to the hospital with her. Get her admitted. Don’t use my name. Don’t answer questions. Will you do it?”

  “I’ll do it for Hazel, of course,” she said after the briefest of pauses. The expression on her face said plainer than words, “I always knew there was a hole in you, buster.”

  “Stay with her until I get in touch with you. There’ll be a police guard at her hospital door, but you stay, too.” I was trying to think of everything.

  “You’re leaving?” she asked. Disdain struggled with curiosity in her voice.

  “Right now. Please hurry.” She stood there, looking at me through the crack in the door. “Move, damn it!”

  She slammed the door in my face.

  I dashed back to the suite and dressed again from the skin out. I found my briefcased makeup kit and changed wigs. A few dabs of skin cream darkened my patched-up face. It wasn’t much in the way of disguise, but even Val Cooper would have had to take a second or third look to recognize me.

  I holstered my automatic, pulled on a jacket, then walked out to the terrace again. A huddle of people was clustered around Hazel’s prone figure. Valerie Cooper, again in a housecoat, was kneeling beside her. Two police cruisers and a flasher-topped ambulance ringed the scene. A cop and an ambulance attendant were lifting the twisted car door from Hazel.

  Her car had been blown partway onto the sidewalk across the road. Wisps of smoke were still curling from it. The front of the roof had been peeled back until it dangled crazily from scorched fabric. The windshield was gone, obliterated. The side of the car facing me had a puffed-out, convex appearance. All the glass in the cars ahead and behind it was gone.

  A home made, black-powder pipe bomb had done the job. It was murderously simple. A thin wire from the brake pedal running under the floor mat to the trigger of the bomb under the front seat was all she wrote. Had I been the one in the car after the phone call, the bloody bundle in the street, above which another cop was crouched, would have been me.

  But why?

  If the kidnappers wanted to kill me, why hadn’t they done it at the airport when they had a perfect chance?

  The ambulance attendants carefully lifted Hazel onto a stretcher and slid it inside the white van. Val Cooper climbed inside to sit beside her. The rear doors were closed, and the ambulance pulled away, siren wailing. A younger cop circulated among the onlookers, notebook in hand.

  I left the terrace again.

  The kidnappers, thinking I was dead, would call the motel again to deal with Hazel. When no one answered their repeated calls, in desperation they would finally call the number of the pay phone at the Alvarado Shopping Center.

  Someone was due to be surprised when I answered that telephone.

  And if I got just a little bit lucky, that was just the first and the smallest of the surprises I intended for the bastards.

  Before I left the suite I took the money in Hazel’s handbag.

  I was going to have some expenses.

  At the motel’s rear entrance I emerged onto the next street and hailed a cab. “The Miramar Motel,” I told the cabbie. The Miramar wasn’t a quality motel, but it had advantages not apparent to the naked eye, not the least of which was a management and staff that made a profession of minding its own business. Friends of mine had stayed there when they wanted to avoid official attention.

  In less than a mile the driver turned in from the street onto a long, narrow driveway that led to a single-level building set amid a grove of trees. It was a rambling structure, obviously added onto at various times, but the grounds looked well kept up. A kidney-shaped swimming pool seemed spotless. While the Miramar was several cuts below the Viking in class, it promised to be adequate.

  “Wait for me,” I told the driver when he pulled up in front of the office. He nodded and lit up a cigarette while he relaxed behind the wheel.

  Inside, the lobby maintained the same air of orderliness as the grounds. “I need two large rooms across a corridor from each other,” I told the girl desk clerk. “I’d like to see them first.”

  The girl checked her room chart before leaving the switchboard operator in charge, led me down a carpeted corridor, and showed me the rooms. They were identical, both large, clean, and airy. “I’m sure these will be satisfactory,” I said after glancing into the bathrooms.

  On the way back to the front desk I considered another problem: aliases. The police were g
oing to be looking for me, and I didn’t intend giving them any help. First they would check airline, train, and bus terminals, but eventually they’d get around to checking hotels and motels.

  A name like Emanuel Danada was out, because a smart cop might check for new arrivals with the same initials as Earl Drake. A phony name with the same initials is the easiest for anyone to remember, of course. But sometimes it makes it too easy for the other guy.

  Aliases can be risky. In the old days I remembered two big jobs that had been fouled up because the coconspirators, even using their own initials, forgot their aliases and couldn’t get in touch with each other.

  I registered the two of us as Dewey Elliott and Catherine Vernon. Reversed initials shouldn’t attract anyone’s attention, except an exponent of ESP. “Mrs. Vernon will be checking in later,” I told the clerk. She would be if I succeeded in persuading her to continue her new role.

  I paid for one night. I might need to make another move, depending upon the demands of the kidnappers. I went back outside to the waiting taxicab. “The Alvarado Shopping Center,” I told the driver.

  It proved to be just five minutes away. So far the action was confined to a limited area. The first thing I did after paying off the cabbie was to tour the outside of the center completely and make sure there was only one outdoor public telephone booth. I took up a position near it, briefcase in hand. I hoped I looked like a pharmaceutical house’s detail man waiting for the proper time to make his call.

  I had arrived just minutes before the end of the thirty-minute time limit given me to reach the pay phone, but I didn’t expect the kidnappers’ call to be prompt. They weren’t going to expect anyone to be at the shopping center phone, least of all me. I was supposed to have been eliminated by the bomb blast.

  The kidnappers’ first calls were going to be made to the suite of Mrs. Hazel Andrews at the Viking Motel. Eventually the switchboard operator would inform the caller that Mrs. Andrews wouldn’t be taking phone calls for a while. That should alert the kidnappers to a swerve in the road even if the police muzzled the operator to keep her from blurting out the truth of what had happened. Even a fairly stupid set of kidnappers should send someone to the Viking to find out what had taken place.