Deep Cover (27 page)

“I'm trying to report this the way Jaime told it to me, but it doesn't make too much sense to me. Orozco's people trailed the subject into Phoenix. Trumble parked on a side street and walked into a small hotel in a state of great agitation. He made several calls from the telephone booth in the lobby and he spent two hours writing a letter on hotel stationery. He bought stamps at the desk. Orozco's man got close enough to read Trumble's handwriting and Jaime said this might be important because Orozco's operative saw the address Trumble wrote on the envelope. It was yours. The ranch here.”

“Here?”

“That's what Jaime said. Why would Trumble write a letter to you? He'd just been with you.”

“I have no idea.”

“Anyhow Jaime said Trumble mailed the letter and spent a few hours hobnobbing with his political cronies in Phoenix and got on the road toward Tucson around four-thirty. Jamie called here about five and told me to tell you all this. He said he'd be in touch with you later tonight or in the morning.”

“Did he say where I could reach him in the meantime?”

“No. I assume he'll be following Trumble, so he probably doesn't know where he's going to be.”

Forrester said, “I was going to call him off. But maybe it's just as well to let him go ahead. Writing to me—it's curious.”

“So am I.”

“Not much point worrying about it until we have more to go on.”

She lifted her hair loosely, high above her head, and let go and shook it out. “Coffee's getting cold.”

“Let it wait.” He took her hand and stood up and lifted her to her feet. She smiled again; her hands touched his shirt, shyly, and slid up the back of his neck.

“Odd how you find love only when you're not looking for it.”

“Just let this go on forever,” she whispered, and covered his mouth with hers.

She stood taut in her skin and Forrester rolled over on the bed and said drowsily, “You cried again.”

“I know. I'm foolish—it's silly. Every time we make love I'm terrified—what if this is the last time?”

“You're thinking of him again. It's a mistake to hang on to the past too tightly.”

“It's not that. Not the way you think, darling.”

“Then what?”

“I can't explain it. There are things it's better not to know about the people you love.”

When she blinked her eyes were moist again and he stood up and held her against him. “Never mind,” she said. Her voice was muffled against his chest. “Let's just think about here and now. That's all there really is.”

“Tell me what's wrong.”

She only shook her head and went ahead of him into the bathroom.

They showered together and afterward he took the phone off the hook.

Chapter Nine

“He'll be along any time now. You'd better get over there.”

The girl shifted her buttocks in the car seat and kissed Spode with moist warmth and suction. She reached for him and smiled. “He's a fat slob. If I had my druthers—”

“Git,” he said good-naturedly. He reached across and patted the far side of her rump. “I'm doing my best to act like a stoical stony-faced Innun and I wish you'd quit waving it at me or I'm likely to lose my cool.”

She was a sleepy girl with pale blond skin and the vaguely pretty face of a plastic mannequin, sewed into a tight skirt that showed little signs of strain at the seams and a blouse that revealed more than a small area of creamy breasts with a sweat-shine in the cleft between them.

Spode had parked at the curb in the middle of the block,
farthest from the street lights. Across the street the house was dark, a big low ranch-style on a landscaped hundred-foot lot. When the girl opened the door to get out she blew Spode a regretful kiss. Spode said, “He can drink you under the table. He may be a fat slob with a bad case of lechery but he used to be an FBI agent. Don't sell him short. Keep your head.”

“I get sixty dollars a day from Orozco—what do you think he pays me for, my virginal innocence?”

“Just don't get cocky, Jill.”

“How long am I supposed to keep him occupied?”

“Midnight at the earliest. Preferably one o'clock.”

“Where will you be at two o'clock, then?”

Spode grinned.

She stood there fitting into her clothes like a girl facing a seventy-mile-an-hour wind, breasts and buttocks swelling. Spode said, “Bet your ass.”

“I'll see you then.” She walked away swiveling and Spode's eyes followed her hungrily; she reached the far curb and stepped back into the shadows beside the hedge. Spode shifted his attention to the rear-view mirror and kept it there, waiting for headlights.

The first car was a false alarm. The lights came along the street slowly and at first Spode thought it was their man because the car slowed to a crawl fifty feet behind him. But evidently the driver didn't know the neighborhood and was looking for house numbers on mailboxes. The car drew level with Spode's and the driver was looking the other way, looking at Trumble's house; the driver studied the dark house for ten seconds and then drove forward. Spode had only a glimpse of the face in the reflection of dashboard light and there was nothing remarkable about it—a brown bland middle-aged face. The car moved away picking up speed, a pale Ford sedan. Insurance salesman, probably.

A breeze blew through the car and Spode hunched to light a cigarette, cupping his hands together against the wind. A gust of laughter carried across lawns from a house down the street. Someone's TV or stereo was turned up, a girl hoarsely singing “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?”

He hadn't heard that song in years and it took him back to the early days with the Agency.

He was still in the Army then. In a bar in Highland Park, New Jersey, sitting at the curve of the bar listening to the bouncer tell the kids to keep their glasses off the jukebox; he was taking another drink and knowing his mouth would taste rancid by midnight. Trying to decide whether to re-up. His enlistment was about to expire and he really didn't know what he could do outside the Army, and just then two guys in neat gray suits walked in and took the stools on either side of him and started talking. They had an easy jocularity and a casual way of getting right down to friendly first names—“I'm Donald Coe, just call me Don.”

They had signed him up that night.

When his enlistment expired he took four weeks off in New York and screwed everything that would hold still long enough and at the end of the month reported to the huge building in the Virginia woods outside Washington. They had kept him busy for fifteen years but in the end he had quit because he couldn't stand their brand of incestuous paranoia: he hated being watched constantly by security officers who even peeped on men's rooms. Anyhow toward the end they'd had him at a desk where all he did was disburse vouchers for confidential “Class A” funds that came out of hiding places in Congressional budgets. In the beginning the recruiters had looked up from the clipboards and warned him, “You may find yourself in some pretty tight places. Do you still want the job?” But they hadn't scared him out; they'd bored him out.

And then Trumble drove up and began to turn into the driveway and Jill, timing it nicely, came striding out of the shadows as if she'd been walking down the sidewalk and let Trumble's car clip her.

From where Spode sat it looked just right, very convincing. She jumped back after she'd slapped the fender loudly and her little cry was just startled enough without being theatrical. Trumble's car jerked to a halt, tail whipping up in the air, and Trumble climbed out shaking and hurried around to the far
side of the car. The girl was picking herself up and Spode heard Trumble's apologies falling all over themselves. “Are you hurt? My God. Are you all right? I'm so terribly sorry—I just didn't see you there at all.…”

Jill dusted herself off and smoothed down her skirt. As soon as it was evident she hadn't been maimed Trumble's attitude changed; in the glow of the headlights he stood back and stared at Jill. Spode chuckled privately. He heard Jill say, “Christ, these freeways are murder, aren't they?”

“I'm really sorry, Miss—?”

“Do you live here?”

“Yes—I, ah, if there's anything I can do?”

“You can damn well buy me a drink,” she said, and shuddered dramatically. “Christ. What a night. First Chuck walks out on me for some cheap chippie and now you come along and knock me on my ass. I should've stayed in bed.”

Trumble said eagerly, “Well by all means come inside, we'll fix you right up with a nice big drink to settle those nerves, Miss—?”

“Have you got bourbon? That's what I need, a good triple slug of Ancient Age. Christ.” Jill bent over to pick up her handbag and Trumble was staring down the deep plunge of her neckline.

“Bourbon, Scotch, gin, whatever you wish. My God, it's the least I can do. I might have killed you!”

“I wish you had.” She rubbed her hip and winced. “I'm going to be black and blue, I just know it.”

“Well come inside, come inside. One triple bourbon coming right up, Miss—?”

Spode watched him park the car and and go to the door with the attaché case in one hand and his house keys in the other. Jill waited by the door rubbing her hip and Trumble was so eager he almost dropped the keys.

They were inside three or four minutes. Then they came out onto the front step and Trumble was saying, “I can't understand what happened to it. I'm sure there were at least two quarts of bourbon on that shelf. I just can't understand it.”

Spode glanced over his shoulder at the dull gleam of the two bottles on the back seat of his car.

“Anyhow I doubt it was Ancient Age,” the girl said. “I just have this thing for Ancient Age, you know?”

“But that's just it. One was Bellows and I'm positive the other one
was
Ancient Age. I just can't understand it.”

“Well anyway it's very nice of you to offer to take me out. Are you sure I'm not intruding on your time? I really didn't know you were a Congressman and all. I mean that probably sounds stupid but I actually don't pay much attention to politics and things like that. My—Chuck always used to say, ‘Don't vote because it only encourages the bastards.' I mean, no offense, I didn't mean it personally—you're really a nice guy, you know that? But I don't want to intrude, you're probably frightfully busy.…”

“Nonsense. We're both shaken up—it's exactly what we need to quiet our nerves. I know a nice cozy little place on Grant Road.” Trumble was maneuvering her toward the car.

“It really is awfully nice of you, Congressman Trumble. Do I call you Congressman or Representative or Your Honor or what?”

“Call me Ross.” Trumble put his hand on her rump and smiled. He was wearing a rumpled suit and a five-o'clock shadow and a ridiculous pair of half-glasses low on his bulbous nose but the girl gave him an intimate smile. Spode watched the car drive away and straightened his face. He smoked another cigarette to give Trumble time enough to come back if he decided to ditch the girl after all, but there wasn't much chance of that. After ten minutes Spode got out of the car and walked across the street carrying his camera equipment and tools.

He had never crossed paths with Trumble in the old days but he knew a little of Trumble's background. Sometime after the Korean war he had turned up in Tucson with a law degree, passed the state bar exam and hired on as junior trial deputy with the County Attorney's staff. He hadn't been fat then. For
some reason he had quit that post in 1956 and joined the FBI as a recruit. After a few years he'd started to gain weight and according to the gossip Spode had heard, Trumble's determined satyriasis had come to the attention of the Bureau's district director, whereupon Trumble had been called on the carpet and asked if he would stand in the way of a replacement. Trumble had returned to Arizona and taken a job with Shattuck Industries doing some kind of legal work which amounted essentially to lobbying in Phoenix on the company's behalf. The work had brought him into close contact with politicians and before long he was working his way up in the Republican machine, and when the last Second District Congressman had opted to run (unsuccessfully) for Governor, Trumble had stepped into the vacated position. He had been in Congress four years now but his FBI background was evident in the security devices that protected his house. Spode had had the devil's own time breaking in an hour before to steal Trumble's whisky.

As a matter of course Spode went equipped with screwdriver and malleable wire and a small variety of burglar's tools, not excluding a few celluloid credit cards which were enough to break into most homes in five seconds. Sometimes it was necessary to open a door chain with a thumbtack and a rubber band and sometimes a lock actually had to be picked, but usually that was the extent of the difficulty. But in Trumble's case the burglar alarm was connected to every door and to strips of metallic tape around every windowpane. Undoubtedly there was some kind of auxiliary battery system indoors so that if the house current were cut off the auxiliary would take over immediately. In the past Spode had overcome such systems by going in with a glass cutter—making a hole in the center of a window rather than at the edges where he would interrupt the alarm tape. But here he couldn't afford to leave evidence that he had broken in.