The Silencers

VI

After a moment, she laughed. Then, deliberately, she turned away from me and walked across the room to the dresser, studying her reflection in the mirror. She pulled up her long white kid gloves, grimaced at a smudged palm and tried to rub it clean. She smoothed down and brushed off her dress. The gleaming blue stuff was brocade, I noticed. My grandmother upholstered her sofa with it, but nowadays they wear it.

"May I have my purse, please?" she asked.

She glanced at me sharply, and swung back to face me, settling the fur jacket about her shoulders.

"My dear man, let's stop this foolishness. You haven't really got a gun in your pocket, have you?"

It was my first opportunity to study her at leisure at close range in good light. She was a very attractive woman, slender and graceful, slightly above average height, but, unlike her sister, not conspicuously so. I've been calling her pretty, but there was more than prettiness in her face. She had very large, clear gray-blue eyes, skillfully accentuated by make-up. She had a slim, aristocratic nose. She had fine cheekbones, with that faint, delicately haggard hollowness below that the girls all try for.

I mean, she was almost perfect, but the mouth gave her away. Not that it wasn't fundamentally a generous and well-shaped mouth, even if the lipstick had suffered some recent damage. It was a mouth with good potentials, but you could tell she'd never taken advantage of it. She'd never had to. She'd undoubtedly got by on her looks since she was a baby, and now, at thirty give or take a year or two, her mouth had the betraying, calculating, spoiled and selfish expression characteristic of the professional beauty.

There was the mouth to give her away, and there was the business of my alleged weapon. She hadn't had the guts to call my bluff at the bridge, as her sister would have done. This wasn't a woman who'd ever charge the muzzle of a loaded revolver, for any cause. No, she'd waited until it was perfectly safe to act brave and scornful.

I took the pen out of my side pocket, showed it to her without comment and clipped it to my inside pocket where it belonged. I got her purse out and looked inside it. Her various identity cards couldn't seem to agree on her last name, but I gathered she'd been born Gail Springer and lived in Midland, Texas. I remembered that the name Mary Jane Springer had figured in Pat LeBaron's report. I tucked the little wallet back into the purse and looked up.

"If you're looking for something respectable to call me," she said, "Mrs. Hendricks will do. He was the last, and I guess I'm still entitled to use his name."

"The last?" I said.

"The last for the time being, anyway," she said. "Before that, I was Countess von Bohin for a little while, and then there was that polo player from Argentina, and before that there was a cowboy named Hank, my only true love. I ran away with him when I was seventeen, and he broke his neck in a rodeo a month later."

"Tough," I said.

She moved her shoulders beneath the furs. "So? He only had one neck, and Daddy would have broken it for him, anyway, when he caught up with us. Or we'd have got on each others' nerves or something. This way I can remember how it was, bright and beautiful and unspoiled."

She said it all with a perfectly straight face, but she was kidding somebody in a bitter sort of way, me, herself, or a boy named Hank who'd died to give her a pleasant memory.

I asked, "How's Sam on horseback?"

"Sam?" She laughed. "What makes you think that phony can ride, those forty-dollar boots?"

"That's about the way I had him figured," I said.

"What's his full name?"

"Sam Gunther." She drew a breath to indicate that her patience was at an end. "If you won't let me have my nurse, at least give me my comb and compact and lipstick. I'd like to go into the bathroom and wash my face, for obvious reasons."

"No bathroom," I said.

"My dear man-"

"My dear woman," I said, "you stay where I can watch you until you give me what I want. Unfortunately, I didn't see you hide it. There were other things of more compelling and immediate interest to observe."

She said with sudden harshness: "Damn you! She was my sister! Don't talk as if her death was just a cheap act for your entertainment."

I shook my head. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way, believe me. I knew her too, slightly." I hesitated, but whether I liked Mrs. Gail Hendricks or not, she seemed to be genuine, and I had to give her the break of telling her a certain amount of truth. I said, "I went to that place to meet her. She worked for us, you know."

The big, beautiful grayish eyes narrowed. "Worked for? What are you, a strippers' agent or just a pimp?"

I said, "You're selling your sister short, Gail. I'm an agent, all right, but not that kind. And she was an agent, too. Did you think she was working in that joint for fun?"

"No," she said, "I thought-"

"What?"

She sighed. "Well, what would you think if your kid sister ran away from home in a… well, let's call it a highly disturbed state of mind, and when you heard of her again, after several years, she'd dyed her hair and was stripping in a Juarez dive?"

I said, "You thought she'd just hit the skids, is that it?"

"What else could I think? When some friends-friends!-told me, with that ghoulish kind of sympathy, enjoying every minute of it, that they'd just been to Juarez and there was something I ought to know but they didn't know quite how to tell me… Well, I couldn't go alone, not into a joint like that, so I got hold of Sam, and we drove down together. He didn't want to go, but I told him he owed her that much, we both did."

"Owed her?" I said.

Gail moved her shoulders slightly. "A pretty little family triangle. You know, the attractive older sister-if I may flatter myself a bit-and the big horse of a younger sister, awkward and shy, and the tall, handsome young man. Sam was just doing it for kicks, or maybe he had an eye on her money-we both got quite a bit when Daddy died-but she was desperately in love with him. To her, he was the first man to see the true beauty of her soul underlying the gawky…" She stopped abruptly. "That was bitchy, I guess. She's dead. I didn't mean to make fun of her. Strike it from the record, please."

I said, "So you took him away from her. To save her?"

She shrugged again. "Thank you, sir. I'm sure my motives were lovely, perfectly lovely. They always are. Anyway, she caught us and… well, never mind the details. I'll admit she scared me silly. I thought she was going to kill us both. She had a gun, and she'd always been good with horses and firearms and fishing rods and things. But she just threw the damn gun out the window. In the morning she was gone. I tried to find her, and I did catch up with her once, in New York, where she was doing some modeling, but she slammed the door in my face. After that, I let it go. If that was the way she wanted it…" Gail gave that little shrug again. "The next time I heard, several years later, she was in Juarez. The rest you know." She looked at me steadily. "If you're a government agent of some kind-I suppose that's what you're hinting at-show me something to prove it."

I said, "We don't carry badges. They have a habit of cropping up at inconvenient moments."

"I'm supposed to take your word for it?"

"It would make things easier on both of us," I said.

"I don't doubt it would make things easier for you!" she said scornfully. "But you're forgetting one thing, aren't you? I was there. I saw it. Mary Jane didn't want to give you anything. She didn't want to tell you anything. You were standing right over us, and she looked you straight in the eye and turned to me. How do you explain that, Mister So-called Agent?"

"I don't explain it," I said. "I don't have to."

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

I said, "When we have finished in this room, please remember that I told you the truth from the very start. I told you that I am an agent of the U.S. Government. I asked you to turn over to me certain property and information given you by your sister, a member of the same undercover organization as myself. These are facts. I probably shouldn't have revealed them to you, and I may even catch hell for doing it, but I'm putting my cards on the table and asking you nicely-"

She said, "My dear man, if you expect me to believe you without any evidence whatever, you must think me an awful fool!"

"Oh, I do," I said gently. "I think you're the sophisticated kind of fool who'd rather play safe and assume all men are liars than risk trusting one and maybe have him make a sap out of you. But I had to give you a chance, if only for your sister's sake."

She said angrily, "Why in Heaven's name should I trust you, a man I've never seen before! A man who ran out and left his friend in the lurch!"

"Don't talk about things you know nothing about, Gail," I said. "When two men on the same team are running down a field, and one is carrying a football, does he lay down the ball when trouble occurs and go back to help his poor outnumbered teammate, or does he keep plugging for the goal?"

"It's not quite the same thing! This is… I don't know what it is, but it certainly isn't a game!"

"No, and you're not a football, either. But the principle remains." I looked around for something you find in most hotel rooms. It wasn't in plain sight, but I found it in a dresser drawer-a Gideon Bible. I placed my hand upon it and looked the woman in the eye. "What I have told you is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God."

I put the Bible away. There was a little silence; then Gail shook her head quickly. It was corn and she was no goose; she wasn't going to swallow it.

"Mary Jane obviously didn't want you to have it," she said. "I can't just take your word. If you had something to prove-"

I said, "It would take me anywhere from a couple of hours to a day or two to get proof here that would satisfy you. That's too long to sit in this room watching to make sure you don't do something clever with what you're carrying, or just something perverse to spite me. We'd both get pretty damn tired of it, not to mention such details as eating, sleeping, and going to the john. I'll tell you this. Mary Jane's feeling against me was probably personal. We got at cross purposes once, we got our signals mixed…" I told her about the incident in San Antonio. "That was before she was assigned a job that involved undressing in public and got over being embarrassed by the idea. I know of no other reason why she should have acted the way she did tonight."

That was still the truth, if only just barely. I didn't know of a reason, even though Mac's attitude had indicated there might be one.

Gail hesitated, watching me. "What were you and Janie doing in San Antonio?"

I said, "That comes under the heading of classified information."

"What branch of the government do you work for?"

"Same answer."

She said, "If you're really a government man, why did you have to smuggle me through immigration with a pretend gun in my ribs?"

I said, "For one thing, I was afraid they might separate us before I got my story told and confirmed; I didn't want to let you out of my sight. For another thing, my chief doesn't like us letting other government agencies into the act when it isn't absolutely necessary." I paused, and went on: "Gail, I've already told you more than I should. There are a million questions you could ask, most of which I couldn't answer, either because I don't know the answer or because I'm not free to give it. And at the end of it, you'd still have to look at me and decide whether I was lying or telling the truth. So let's not waste the time. Make up your mind. Are you going to trust me or aren't you?"

I saw at once that I'd overdone it. The word 'trust' killed it. You can use it once, kind of diffidently, but essentially it's a dirty, conniving, treacherous, sneaking word these days. If you ask somebody to trust you, twice, he knows you're playing him for a sucker-if he's smart, and she was smart. Nobody was going to put one over on her.

"No!" she said.

I drew a long breath. "Well, in that case… It seems that every time I meet one of the Springer girls, I have to ask her to take her clothes off."

She stared at me, shocked. "My dear man-"

I took a step forward. "As they said in that place: all the way, Gail. All the way."

She took a step backwards and wound up against the dresser. She drew herself up in a dignified way. "Really-" I said, "You're being pretty silly. You're not Mary Jane. You can't possibly be embarrassed, not a woman who's had four husbands and a Sam Gunther, at the very least. Incidentally, if you try to scream or go for the phone or anything like that, you'll wind up sitting on the floor with all the wind knocked out of you."

She said angrily, "You wouldn't dare! If you think you can bluff me again-"

There was that, of course. I was starting from behind; I'd already bluffed her once, with a ball-point pen, and it rankled. She wasn't going to fall for my tough-guy act again. She knew that behind my crusty exterior lurked a marshmallow heart.

If it had only been a matter of searching her, I might still have tried to work it our peacefully, but she not only had to be made to give me something, she had to be made to tell me something. I had to impress her, somehow, with my fundamentally vicious nature. Now she was talking again, in her haughty and indignant way, and her attitude gave me a pain, anyway. I just reached out and yanked the dress off her.