Summitt

Chapter Three

At Summitt’s headquarters building, Sergeant Ledge inserted an identi-disc in the console slot of a limited access elevator.

Like certain other areas in Summitt — the film lab, the master greenhouses and specific hospital wards — the central Harlequin headquarters were restricted to classified security grades.

When the elevator reached the third floor, Ledge placed his card in an unlocking slot and kept his fingertips on the metallic edge to provide the computer with an identity-reading of his skin chemicals. A tracking hum sounded as he turned his profile to the scanning machines. With the ID check completed, the elevator doors opened and Ledge was allowed to enter a communications center lined with banks of electronic machines and walls of TV monitors.

Snapping on a row of sets, Ledge tracked Harry Selby along a graveled walk through the dusk toward his brother’s house. On other monitors, he picked up Jarrell Selby as he answered the door and the blond girl entering the living room with a tray of drinks.

Ledge listened to their casual conversation, Jennifer’s laughter, the clink of ice in raised glasses. He heard Harry Selby say, “Jarrell, is there something about the old man’s death you haven’t told me about, or don’t want to?”

“Didn’t Breck give you all the details?”

“Hey, quel dismal! This is supposed to be a party.” It was the blond girl. “Harry, how’s your drink?”

“It’s fine, Jennifer,” he said, but went on. “I was out walking and met your neighbor, Hank Ledge. He shut up when I mentioned it. Breck’s letter didn’t really tell me a damn thing. Wasn’t there a police investigation? Didn’t they check to see if the old man had been involved in a local feud or hassle?”

“There wasn’t anything like that,” Jarrell told him.

“What about somebody with a grudge? A business deal that went sour, did he have any enemies around there?”

“He never mentioned anything like that to me.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course, Harry...” Sergeant Ledge watched Jarrell shrug uncertainly. “I’d have known if he was in trouble... I can’t think of anything.”

“Well, it strikes me as odd his death seems to have an off-limits sign on it.”

“If I could think of any reason for the whole thing I’d be the first to tell you, Harry...”

Jennifer turned up the music. A high jazz saxophone muted the rest of what Selby was saying. She linked her arm through his. “Let’s have our drinks on the terrace,” she said. “Come on, Jarrell. The lake is lovely now.”

The door opened and Clem Stoltzer entered the communications room. Ledge snapped off the TV monitors. “We got ourselves a problem, Clem. That sonofabitch Harry Selby is just like his old man. I soldiered with Jonas in Korea, remember. A rockhead. Same goddamn bulldog streak, hit him with a club and he comes back for more.”

Stoltzer said, “This Harry Selby’s no rockhead, Sergeant. I watched him when we toured the plant and grounds. He doesn’t just look, he sees.”

Ledge rubbed his jaw with the calloused web formed between this thumb and forefinger. “What’d Jarrell tell you about the girl?”

“That she’s just a casual friend.”

“Where’d they meet? How come she arrived without notice?”

“Some party, I guess. I’m not sure.” Stoltzer shrugged. “I don’t think Jarrell is, either. She drove over from Memphis yesterday morning. He wants her here, he’s entitled to a normal sex life, what could I say?”

“I don’t like any of it,” Ledge said. “It’s Thursday and the green light’s on. They can’t scrub it now.”

“Can’t or won’t. It’s the same thing,” Stoltzer said.

Ledge stared at the dark monitors, frowning. “We can’t make any decisions on this. Not yet. I’ll try to get in touch with the major. Mr. Thomson should know. And, Clem, you call General Taggart direct, put him in the picture.”

Returning to his office on the first floor, Sergeant Ledge placed a call to George Thomson’s private number at his home in Wahasset, Pennsylvania, an estate that lay just across the state line from Harlequin’s offices in Wilmington, Delaware.

The call was answered by Thomson’s son, Earl, whom Ledge knew from the summers the young man had worked in the film lab at Summitt. An athlete, Ledge recalled, handsome but reserved, kept pretty much to himself...

Earl Thomson explained that his father was still in Europe, Belgium, he believed, but would be back in the States that weekend for a business golf tournament in New Jersey.

“We got a problem down here at Summitt, Earl,” Ledge told him, “and I need your father’s advice. Will he be checking in by tomorrow? This is urgent.”

“That’s a flip of the coin, sir.” Earl’s voice was smooth and assured. “Father sets his own schedules, of course. Sometimes he calls to let me know his plans, sometimes he contacts Mr. Lorso. Is there any way I can help, Sergeant?”

“If you can give him my message by tomorrow, yes,” Ledge said. “Tell your father Harry Selby came down here from Muhlenburg. He’s asking the wrong questions. He’ll understand that. Advise him we need Selby out of here before the operation. He’ll understand that too. Anything to get him off our backs before Saturday. You got that now?”

“Yes. A Mr. Harry Selby. Are you suggesting a ruse de guerre, a feint to divert the enemy away from the attack?”

Ledge remembered then that Earl had attended a military college in the east, never regular army, and had a habit of using this rookie bullshit, even with the major.

“Look, Earl,” he said, “just give your dad my message, okay? He’ll know what to do?”

“Aren’t you suggesting, Sergeant, that you’d like some pressure to get this Mr. Selby out of Summitt City?”

“That’s up to your father.”

“Then if I can’t reach him, this conversation is irrelevant, I’d say. Wouldn’t you prefer me to make it operational?”

“Just see that he gets my message, Earl. I don’t have the authority to suggest anything else.”

Replacing the phone on his father’s desk, Earl Thomson stared through the terrace windows at the lawn shining smoothly in the last cool sunlight. He sat in his father’s leather chair and stretched his long legs under the desk, putting his head back and listening to the sounds in the busy house. By concentrating, he could track and imagine the activities, maids chatting in the distant kitchen, Santos’s footsteps padding above him in his mother’s suite. Time for her shoulder rub, her tea tray and the evening news. In the kennel run the Dobermans were barking.

Earl felt at the center of this web of activity, seated as he was at the position of power in the long, shadowed study, in his father’s chair, facing the imposing desk with its row of clocks and phones. But it was, he thought, a sensation of spurious privilege; he was, in truth, isolated from the lines of important function anywhere beyond this house. He was bitterly aware of that. Unconnected in any way to the powers of Harlequin or Summitt City.

The feeling he had talking to Sergeant Ledge, the furious, belittling anger, was intensified now by the faint laughter from his mother’s room. He was never really at the center of things...

He remembered Ledge, silent, weathered-burned features, eyes that hadn’t respected him. Urgent, the man had said, serious matters, but not for Earl Thomson, those serious matters always swirled tantalizingly beyond him.

The name was in the local phone book, a quick check disclosed — Harry J. Selby, with an address on Mill Lane, R.D., Muhlenburg.

Intelligence was the “eye of the command,” they had taught him at Rockland, and reconnaissance was its “brains and nerves.”

Tearing up the notes he had made of Ledge’s call, Earl dropped them into the fireplace where they burst into flames on the glowing logs.

A small farmtown on Route One between Philadelphia and Baltimore, Muhlenburg was only twenty-odd miles from the Thomson estate in Wahasset. Within half an hour after Ledge’s call from Summitt City, Earl Thomson’s red Porsche turned at Pyle’s Corners in Muhlenburg and headed up Fairlee Road toward Harry Selby’s farm.

A housing park appeared, a lighted sprawl of trailers and motor homes. Several miles beyond it Earl came to Mill Lane, a narrow, curving blacktop. A young girl was riding a bicycle up the road toward a gate marked by split-rail fencing. Thomson saw a sign that read selby glowing in his headlights.

Passing the girl in the dusk, Earl had only an impression of blond hair held back with a ribbon, thin white legs pumping hard, and tight denim shorts. In his rear-view mirror he saw the girl turn into the driveway marked selby and pedal through a row of trees toward a house where a dog was barking...

At a bar on the main highway, Earl had a bag of potato chips and two bottles of beer. He smoked several cigarettes and played a pinball machine. It was dark when he drove back to Mill Lane. The Selby house was set back from the road. He could see the lights through the trees. Now he didn’t hear the dog.

He drove past the gate and down a short hill to Fairlee Road. Making a U-turn, he went back up the blacktop, slowly this time with his window rolled down.

The silence put him on edge, and so did the slow, heavy rush of wind in the trees. At the top of the hill, Earl noticed an overgrown entrance to an old logging road, a narrow trail that seemed to run across the top of the Selby meadow. The gully in front of it was floored with weather-warped logs and the entrance itself was choked with honeysuckle and thin saplings.

Earl turned into the opening, fed gas to his powerful car and slowly forced a way through the undergrowth. Soon he was clear of it, topping a rise that gave him a view of a shining pond, a grove of squat fruit trees and the Selby house beyond them, bright with lights on two floors, like a small ocean liner in the darkness.

A woman moved about on the first floor. He could see her through the window, a wide-hipped, indistinct figure. She seemed to be clearing a table.

Taking binoculars from the glove compartment, Earl studied the house. Smoke rose from a chimney, a spark flared occasionally. Lamps mounted on tall posts illuminated the driveway and garage. Beyond he made out a small log cabin, a kennel run and neatly stacked rows of firewood.

Movement at the second floor window caught his eyes. It was the girl he’d seen on the bicycle. She was taking the ribbon from her hair. Adjusting the scopes, he brought her face into sharp focus. She was shaking her head, loosening her hair and letting it tumble back and forth around her shoulders.

He could see her red mouth, and the shine of her lips when she moistened them. She looked so close in the scopes that he could imagine putting out his hand and touching her.

Harry Selby’s daughter.

The “eyes of command” told him she was the key to their problem. Her father must love her very much. If she had trouble of some sort, an accident, say, Harry Selby would return quickly. No question about it...

The excitement he’d felt earlier was intensified by something free and defiant in the way she shook out her hair and pulled off her blouse. They always knew what they were up to, even when they assumed they were alone and no one would see, keeping in practice...

She unbuttoned the waistband of her shorts. They were so tight she had to wriggle her hips to get them off. A falling coldness settled into his stomach and loins. He was oblivious to everything else around him. The riot in his blood nearly betrayed him. He didn’t hear the furious barking until it was almost too late.

The dog raced toward him across the meadow, huge and black in the moonlight, a German shepherd with a small boy running behind him.

“Blazer, Blazer, what is it?” he had shouted, and it was this sound that alerted Earl and broke his rigid trance.

He hadn’t cut the engine, the Porsche was idling softly. Earl backed rapidly from the logging road, smashing recklessly through the thick coils of underbrush.

As he accelerated and drove away, the blast of the engine drowned out the fading challenge of the big guard dog.