Blood Sport

Chapter Fourteen

Walt listened to what I had to say in a silence which hummed down the telephone wires more eloquently than hysterics.

‘You’re crazy,’ he said at last, sounding as if he seriously meant it.

‘Can you think of anything else?’

After a long pause he said grudgingly, ‘Nothing quicker.’

‘Right, then. I’ll fix everything this end and give you a call in the morning. And let’s hope it works.’

‘What if it doesn’t?’

‘Have to try something else.’

Walt grunted gloomily and hung up.

I spent an hour at the airport, and then went back to the motel. The evening oozed away. I played some roulette without enthusiasm and lost backing black against a sequence of fourteen reds; and I ate a good steak listening to a girl singer whose voice was secondary to her frontage. After that I lay on my bed for a while and smoked, and kept the blues from crowding in too close by thinking exclusively of the job in hand.

At two I dressed in a dark green cotton shirt and black jeans, went downstairs, stepped into the car, and drove along Pittsville Boulevard to 40159. The town itself was wide awake and rocking: the houses along Pitts were dark and silent. With dimmed lights I rolled quietly into the Clives’ driveway and stacked the bags of flour close to the front door. Then, holding the car door but not shutting it, I eased the Pontiac back along the road and parked it in the driveway of the same empty house that I had used in the afternoon. Again, not wanting any neighbours to remember hearing a car door slam, I left it ajar, and walked back to the Clives’.

The night was warm and gentle with a deep navy blue sky and stars like fluorescent polka-dots. Two miles away the blazing lights of Vegas raised a bell-shaped orange glow, but among the palms and orange trees the shadows were thick and black and comfortably concealing.

The Clives’ was only the latest of a great many houses I had broken into. My short cuts to truth were scandalous by all public and private standards, and Keeble rarely asked how I got my information: and as I would have had the press, the police, and public opinion all balefully against me if I’d ever been caught, A gag on eggs would have been clumsy in comparison. Law-abiding citizens never knew I’d been their guest. For the Clives’, however, I had alternative plans.

Wearing surgeons’ rubber gloves, and with my shoes stuck through my belt to the left of the Luger, I worked on the lock on the back door, and after not too bad a time, considering its complexity, the two sets of tumblers fell sweetly over, and the house was mine.

Inside, the air was stale and still, and dust sheets draped the furniture, looking like pale boulders in the dim light of my torch. The rear door opened into a spacious hall which led straight through to the front. I walked across, unbolted and unfastened the front door, brought in the bags of flour, and left the door ajar, like the one I’d come in by: the value of always being prepared for instant flight had been drummed into me by an ex-burglar who had once neglected it.

I went into the bedrooms. Large separate single bedded rooms again for Yola and Matt, and a guest bedroom, with a bathroom to each. I pulled all the covers off the furniture and flung on to the floor everything they had left in the chests and closets. Over the resulting mess in each room I shook six pounds of self-raising flour.

In the kitchen I emptied on to the floor a packet of soap flakes, a packet of rice, some cereal and four pounds of brown sugar, which were all lying handy in the pantry. I unlocked the pantry window and unfastened its outer screen, leaving both open: and as an afterthought tumbled some canned fruit off the shelf beneath it, to show that the intruder had come in that way.

In the spacious living room I again removed all the covers, put every ornament and small loose object in a heap on the floor, and flung flour over them and around the whole place. A smaller cosier room, facing the road, contained a desk full of papers, two large bookshelves, and a well-filled sewing box. Together the jumbled contents made a splendid ankle-deep mess on the floor. Pounds of flour fell over everything like snow.

It was while I was tearing open the last bag, ready for a final scatter round the hall, that I heard the distant police siren. Frozen, I doubted for a second that it was for me: then considered that either a too watchful neighbour had seen my torch in chinks through the blinds, or else that the Clives’ complicated locks weren’t their only protection, and that they had a direct burglar alarm line to the police.

Without wasting much time I shut the front door and heard the lock engage. Emptied the last bag of flour over a plastic flower arrangement on a table in the hall. Flitted through the rear door and clicked it shut behind me. Thrust the torch into my pocket.

The siren wailed and stopped at the front of the house. Doors slammed, men shouted, boots ran. Someone with a megaphone urged me to come out with my hands on my head. The edges of the house were outlined by a spotlight shining on its front.

With bare seconds to spare before the first uniform appeared in silhouette around the corner I reached the nearest of the bushes flanking the trefoil pool and dived behind it. Being quiet enough was no problem, as the law were making an intimidating clatter all around the house, but staying invisible was more difficult. They brought another spotlight round to the rear and shone it full on the house. The shuttered windows stared blindly and unhelpfully back, reflecting the glare almost as far as my cover.

Lights appeared in neighbouring houses, and heads stuck like black knobs out of the windows. I eased gently away past a few more bushes and thought I was still a great deal too close to a spell in the zoo.

A shout from the side of the house indicated that they had found the open pantry window. Four troopers altogether, I judged. All armed to the teeth. I grimaced in the darkness and moved another few yards with less caution. I wasn’t going to give them any forefinger exercise if I could help it, but the time was running out.

They were brave enough. One or more climbed in through the window and switched on the light. I more rapidly crossed the last stretch of garden, stepped over the white-painted stones, and headed straight out into the desert.

Five steps convinced me I needed to put my shoes on. Ten steps had me certain that the only vegetation was prickly pear, and close-ranked, at that. I should imagine I impaled myself on every one in the neighbourhood.

Back at the Clives’ they had temporarily stopped oohing and ahing over the mess, and were searching the grounds. Lights moved round the next door houses as well. If they went five along and found the car, things would get very awkward indeed.

I had meant to be safely back in my motel long before I called the police early in the morning to say that I was a civic minded neighbour who had just seen a prowler coming out of the Clives’...

When they showed signs of shining the light out towards where I was stumbling along I lay down flat on the ground and listened to the thud of my heart. The spotlight beam flickered palely over the low scrubby bushes and outlined the flat spiky plates of the prickly pears, but in the shifting uneven shadows that they threw, I reckoned I must be just another clump. There was a good deal of shouted discussion about whether it was necessary to take a look-see in the desert, but to my relief no one came farther out than the boundary stones. Gradually, frustrated, the dazzle and commotion retreated and died away.

The lights inside the Clives’ house went out. The police car drove off. The neighbours went back to bed. I got to my feet and brushed off the surplus of dry sandy earth. What with that and flour dust even the blindest cop would have little difficulty in buttoning me on to the crime.

With more care than on the outward trip I headed back towards the houses, but at an angle I hoped would bring me near the car. The sooner I beat it from that little neck of the woods, the better...

I stopped dead.

How might one catch a prowler? Just pretend to go away, and wait somewhere down the road, and when he thought everything was safe, he’d come carelessly along and fall into your waiting hands like a ripe plum.

I decided not to drive back towards Las Vegas from that quiet cul-de-sac. Just in case.

At the fifth house along, everything was quiet. I cat-footed through the grounds, around the house, and took a distant look at the car. Still there. No trooper beside it. I stood in the shadows for longer than was probably necessary, then took a deep breath and risked it. I completed the steps to the car and peered in through the window. Empty. Made a quick cautious tour of the row of spiky low-growing palms hiding it from the road.

Nothing. No irate shouts. All quiet. Car undiscovered. Sighing with relief, the vision of the malicious Clives dancing at my trial fading a little, I pulled wide the already open door and folded like an understuffed rag doll into the driving seat. For five minutes I did nothing more energetic than to breathe freely, and enjoy it.

There remained however the problem of telephoning to Walt: and I chewed it over thoughtfully while absent-mindedly pulling prickly pear needles out of my legs.

I was a fair hand at wire tapping, when I had the kit: but it was in Putney. No doubt there would be a telephone in the empty house alongside. But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to risk this house too being directly connected to the police, if that was what had happened at the Clives’. On the other hand, I had been in the Clives’ house twenty minutes before the police showed up. Yet they might be quicker, on a second call.

After half an hour I pulled on the rubber gloves, climbed out of the car, and picked the front door lock. It turned all right, but unfortunately the prudent householders had also used bolts. Always a toss up which door of the house people bolted. I walked round to the rear, and let myself in. There was a telephone on a table in the hall. I walked over to it, then turned, retraced my steps, left the door ajar, went round to the car, started up, and drove quietly away in the dead end direction, not stopping until I was off the metalled road on to the gravel, and round a couple of bends. I switched off the light and smoked a cigarette.

Another half hour passed. No lights went on along by the houses; no police sirens, no disturbances at all. I drove gently back, parked in the same spot as before, went round into the house, and called up Walt.

He wasn’t amused at being woken at 5 AM.

‘A slight change of timing,’ I said apologetically. ‘The police have already seen the mess.’

He drew in a sharp breath. ‘They didn’t catch you!’

‘No.’ No point in telling him how close it had been: he hadn’t approved of my going in at all.

‘I suppose you want me to come now, then?’ he said, with resignation.

‘Yes, please. As soon as you can. Leave the car keys at the inquiry desk at Los Angeles airport, and I’ll pick them up. The helicopter pilot I’ve engaged at Las Vegas is Michael King. He’s expecting you. Just ask for him. The helicopter radio will pick up the frequency of the bug I’ve got with me, so you won’t need to bring my recorder. Was there anything on the tape today?’

‘Yesterday,’ Walt corrected. ‘Not much. I went over after dinner last night and ran it through. Offen had a friend over. There was two hours of just ordinary yapping. I didn’t get back here to bed until one.’

‘When this is over you can sleep for a fortnight.’

‘Yeah?’ he said sarcastically. ‘Tell it to the marines.’

He put down his receiver with less of a crash than usual. Smiling, I took out a five dollar bill and left it stuck half under the telephone. Then I let myself out, relocked the door behind me, and went back to the car.

Three hours uneventfully went by. Night changed to day. The air temperature began its morning climb. A few energetic birds sang: and I smoked another cigarette.

Soon after eight a patrol car went up the road, siren fortissimo. Pittsville Boulevard woke up. I eased out of the car, walked carefully down towards the road, and tucked myself invisibly between a palm and a bush, from where I had a clear view of everyone driving up towards the Clives’.

From along the road I could hear several excited voices, most of them children’s: and a small boy and a girl came past close to me doing an Indianapolis on their tricycles.

Several cars drove down from the houses, all with men alone, going in to Las Vegas. One woman followed. Three women came the other way, all looking eager. At nine-thirty two men drove in from Vegas, one of them adjusting a large folding camera: the local press.

An hour later a quiet-engined helicopter drifted over and landed out of sight behind a fold of hill.

At ten-fifty the hawk came to the lure.

A sky blue convertible Ford, with the hood down. Matt, driving fast, hunched with anger. Youth, strength, and fury, knotted into one callous personality. Even in a speeding car the impression came across with the solidity of a shockwave. Standing on his brakes flamboyantly late, he screeched down from sixty to nil outside his own house, scattering children like pigeons.

Satisfied, I got stiffly to my feet and went back up the drive to the car. There I removed from the boot the white overalls, white cotton gloves and a cap, and put them on, along with a pair of sunglasses. With a screwdriver from the tool kit I opened the tin of paint and gave the oily yellow contents an encouraging stir; cleaned and replaced the screwdriver, and rested the paint lid gently back on the tin. Then, picking it up by its handle with my right hand, and carrying brushes and ladders with my left, I strolled out on to the road, and along to the Clives’.

Matt’s Ford stood at the door at a crooked angle to the patrol car. A good many people were still standing around, staring and gossiping in the sun. I meandered slowly through them and took a closer look at the blue convertible, and then withdrew discreetly to the edge of the proceedings.

Taking the bug out of my pocket, I talked to Walt, hoping he could hear. He couldn’t answer: it was strictly one way traffic on the midget transmitter.

‘Do you read me, Walt? This is Gene. Our young friend came in his own car, not a hired one or a taxi. His name is on the registration. Pale blue new Ford convertible, at present with the top down. Grey upholstery. Nevada plates, number 3711–42. I’ll do the paint if I possibly can, though he may deal with it, of course; and I’ll put this bug in the car. When he starts up, you’ll hear him. Good luck. And for God’s sake don’t lose him.’

Indirectly, vaguely, I again approached the car. No one took any notice. I was merely one of the time-passing onlookers, a workman who wasn’t working. Several of the children and some of their mothers had seen the state of the well-floured rooms, and thought it a dreadful shame. I leaned my ladder against the rear wing of the blue convertible, put the brushes and paint pot down casually on the flat surface of the boot, and mopped not too imaginary sweat off my face and neck.

Some of the blinds in the Clives’ house had been raised, so that in places one could see into the house. No one was looking out. I stretched a hand over the side of the car with the bug in my palm, and felt its sucker cling snugly under the glove shelf.

Still no faces at the windows.

I said to the nearest little boy, ‘Someone told me the intruder got in through the pantry window, round that corner.’

‘No kidding?’ he said, his eyes wide.

‘Sure thing.’

He told his mother. They went to look. Nearly everyone followed them, especially as someone nudged the press photographer, who said he would take a picture.

I took a last comprehensive look at the windows, turned to walk away, and with a quick backward flip of a gloved hand, tipped over the can of paint. The lid came off. The can rolled slowly across the flat top of the boot and clanked heavily to the ground. The result was a bright broad spreading pool of yellow on blue, and a proper lake on the gravel.

I was out on the road when the first child saw it and ran after me.

‘Your paint’s tipped over, mister.’

‘Yeah, I know. Don’t touch it. Don’t let anyone touch it, huh? I’m just going to fetch the stuff to get it off.’

He nodded importantly and ran back, and I made it safely along to the hired car, and drove away in peace towards Las Vegas, taking off the useful cap and gloves as I went. Back at the motel I showered, changed, packed, and paid my account; drove to the airport and returned the car to the Hertz agent: kept a very wary eye open in case Matt Clive had decided to travel by air; ate a much needed sandwich, and caught the first plane out to Los Angeles.

When I collected the car keys at the inquiry desk, there was a note from Walt as well.

Surprised, and not ungrateful that he should have bothered, I slipped his letter into my pocket and drove into the city to look for a good place for tape recorders. I managed in the end to hire for one week an elaborate recorder which would play at the ultra slow fifteen-sixteenths of an inch per second, the speed of my own, and with it sitting on the passenger seat beside me, pointed my nose towards Orpheus Farm, Los Caillos. Then I removed the full reel from the radio recorder and fixed it up with another: no one appeared to have disturbed it in its bush and boulder hiding place, and as far as I could tell, no one saw me come and go.

Lynnie and Eunice were just walking up from the beach when I got back to The Vacationer: but they both greeted me with ten degrees of frost and went straight on past, murmuring that they guessed they would see me at dinner.

Slightly puzzled, shrugging, I carried my bag and the recorder up to my room, rewound the tape I had collected, and started it to run through while I took off my city suit and turned the air-conditioning to high.

Yola rang up, in great agitation. The houseboy answered, and went to tell Offen, who was still in bed. By great good fortune the houseboy neglected to go back to replace the downstairs receiver when Offen lifted the bedroom extension, and the bug in consequence had picked up the whole conversation.

‘I’ve had a call from the cops in Vegas...’

‘Don’t shout, Yola. I’m not deaf.’

She didn’t listen. ‘Some vandals have wrecked the house at Pitts.’ She really minded: there was grief as well as anger in her voice.

‘How do you mean, wrecked?’

‘They say everything in the house has been thrown on the floor, and flour and sugar and stuff have been tipped over everything. They want to know what’s been stolen, they want me or better Matt to go down there and deal with it... and I can’t, Uncle Bark, I simply can’t. We’ve got thirty-two people in, and I can’t possibly get away. Matt will have to go.’

‘But Matt...’

‘Sure,’ she wailed. ‘Do you think I don’t know? But he’ll have to. Those horses won’t die if he leaves them for a few hours. It’s much farther for me, I’d be away at least two days. It’s hopeless. Everything’s gone wrong since we took that damn Chrysalis.’

‘And if you remember,’ Culham James said tartly, ‘that was your and Matt’s idea. I always said it was too soon after the last one. You and Matt have been too greedy ever since you found out.’

‘Relatives ought to share their good luck, not to keep it to themselves.’

‘So you’re always saying.’

Nothing like a little blackmail to cement a family together, I thought in amusement. Offen had been happy with his half million a year, it seemed: but Matt and Yola, stumbling on the honey pot, had been in a hurry for more. Impulsive, ingenious, greedy Clives; if they had only been content with a share from Showman and Allyx, Offen would never had been found out.

Yola glossed over the longstanding squabble and returned to the current disaster. ‘I didn’t get Matt’s number. What is it?’

‘I haven’t got it here, it’s in my book downstairs...’

‘Well look, will you call him? Tell him to get right on over, the cops will be there waiting. Tell him to call me from there and tell me what gives... I can’t bear it if those bastards have stolen my mink wrap... and there’s all that money in the safe...’

‘Better face up to it that it’s gone,’ Offen said, with the tiniest trace of malice.

‘They might not have had time,’ Yola said. ‘The alarms go off when anyone goes in the den, and there isn’t supposed to be time for anyone to find the safe and open it before the cops get there. We paid enough for it...’

It had been their bad luck that by the merest chance I had left the den until last.

Yola disconnected, and after the twenty second gap on the tape, Uncle Bark called up Matt from the downstairs telephone. Matt’s comments were mostly inaudible though detectably explosive. He agreed to go to the house, but nothing Offen said gave any clue as to where Matt was at that moment. It appeared only that he was somewhere within a reasonable radius of Las Vegas, as he was going to be able to drive there, see to things at the house, and get back in time to feed the horses in the evening: which narrowed it down to somewhere in an area of roughly a hundred and fifty thousand square miles. A pocket handkerchief.

A brief telephone conversation of no interest followed and then, presumably in the afternoon, Offen had switched on his television set to watch a racing programme. As far as I could tell from spot checks, it had used up the whole of the rest of the four-hour playing time.

Sighing, I switched off, and went downstairs. Lynnie and Eunice, dressed in dazzling colours, were drinking daiquiris and watching the Pacific sunset. I got another cool welcome and monosyllabic replies to my inquiries about their day.

Finally Eunice said distantly, ‘Did you have a good time in San Francisco?’

I blinked. ‘Yes, thank you.’

They relapsed into a longer silence which was broken only by a waiter coming to tell me I was wanted on the telephone.

It was Walt.

‘Where are you?’ I said.

‘Las Vegas airport.’

‘How did it go?’

‘You can relax,’ he said comfortably. ‘The horses are on a small farm in a valley in Arizona, out beyond Kingman. We landed there and I asked around some. Seems the couple who own the farm don’t make much of a living, but last week they said a friend was giving them a trip to Miami, and a young fellow would be looking after the place while they were away.’

‘That’s great,’ I said with emphasis.

‘The paint made it easy. We heard him yelling blue murder when he saw it, but I guess it had dried on by then and he couldn’t get it off, because it was way past midday, and I’d begun to worry that he’d gone already and we hadn’t heard him or that they’d picked you up planting the bug... anyway, we took off when his engine started, and the yellow splash was easy to see from a height, just as you said. He went right through Las Vegas and out on to the Hoover Dam road and across into Arizona. I kept the binoculars on him and we never flew near enough for him to notice us, I’m certain of that. He went up a winding graded road into the hills south-east of Kingman, and that was it.’

‘You’ve done marvels.’

‘Oh, sure. It was simpler than we were prepared for, though. You could hear the bug pretty clearly through the helicopter’s headsets as high as two thousand feet, and we could have followed him in the dark if we’d had to, especially as he had his radio on for most of the way. We could hear music and news broadcasts now and then.’

‘Are you coming back tonight?’

‘Yeah, there’s a plane in a half hour from now. But it’ll be better than midnight when I get in.’

‘I’ll be awake,’ I said. ‘And just by the way, Walt, what did you tell Eunice and Lynnie I was doing in San Francisco?’

He cleared his throat. ‘I said you had some unfinished business there.’

‘What sort of business?’

‘Uh... like... er... female.’

‘Thanks,’ I said sarcastically. ‘You’re a right pal.’

Something very like a laugh lingered in my ear as I disconnected.