“A thousand pardons if I’ve disturbed your royal slumbers.”

“Oh, shut up, Russ.”

Hastings grinned at him.

The fat man stirred and made a face. “You haven’t finished, have you?”

“No. There are more curious coincidences. Herb Capps, the NCI floor specialist at the Big Board. That’s number one. He promised me a list of buyers, but somehow he’s managed to delay it from day to day, and I still haven’t seen it. Is that coincidence? My secretary’s trying to find out right now. Number two, Elliot Judd. I tried to reach him in Arizona. I intended to make it a personal call, just sound him out, see if he had anything on his mind. It would help to know if he’s got suspicions of his own.”

“Has he?”

“I didn’t get a chance to find out. It seems he’s not taking phone calls.”

“That’s hardly surprising. Does J. Paul Getty answer his phone every time it rings?”

“Judd and I are pretty close. He’d be happy to talk to me-unless he had a specific reason not to.”

“Are you suggesting he knows something he’d rather not have us know?”

“It could be. Or it could be he isn’t well enough to come to the phone. You see what that could lead to, don’t you?”

Quint scowled at him. He was about to make a remark, but his interphone announced a call for Hastings; Quint handed him the phone and Miss Sprague said in Hastings’ ear, “About Mr. Capps’s secretary, she’s been out of the office since Tuesday. One of the girls in the adjoining office overheard Mr. Capps calling a florist to send flowers to her at home. She’s expected back at work Monday or Tuesday.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Not at all.”

He had to get up to cradle the phone; he stayed on his feet, restless and irritable. “The NCI floor specialist appears to be ruled out for now, but I’m not scratching anybody off the list just yet. I wouldn’t be surprised to find all kinds of people in this right up to their hairlines.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s big.”

“Granted. But we still need to know whether Elliot Judd has an active part in it. Without that piece of information, we’ve got nothing.”

“I know.” Hastings put his hand on the back of the chair he had vacated and squeezed it until the knuckles whitened. “I want to fly out there.”

“To Arizona?”

“Yes.”

“If he won’t come to the telephone, what makes you think he’ll see you?”

“It would be awkward for him if he didn’t-it would tell me something. Assume he’s doing something illegal-would he risk confirming my suspicions by turning me away?”

“And you honestly think if he’s concealing something you’ll be able to sniff it out just by seeing him?”

“That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“It’s also possible you’ll put him on the alert and make it ten times as difficult for us to catch him.”

“I think we have to take that chance,” Hastings said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t really believe he’s got anything to do with it. And if that’s true, he’s got to be warned. Right now. You see that, don’t you?”

Quint hesitated. Finally he said, “When do you plan going?”

Hastings moved his grip from the chair, “The first flight I can get tomorrow morning.”

“Very well,” Quint said.

17. Carol McCloud

Carol McCloud had two telephones, both in the living room of the suite. One was her listed number; the bell was disconnected, she never knew if it was ringing. An answering service took her calls on that line.

The unlisted telephone rang. She was lounging on the divan with a book; in her occupation, with most of the day to herself, she had a good deal of time for reading.

“Hello?”

“Carol?”

A man’s voice, calling her by her first name. She had the brief wild thought that there was only such a tiny handful of people in the whole world who would think of her when they spoke the name “Carol.”

She said, “Hello, Mason,” absenting all feeling from her tone.

“Have you got a date tonight?”

“How delicately you put it,” she said. “It’s Friday. What do you think?”

“Break it.”

“My clients don’t like that sort of thing.”

“Break it,” he said again. “Find somebody else to take your place.”

“If I could be replaced that easily at the last minute,” she said, “I wouldn’t be in my tax bracket.”

He laughed. Over the phone it was a hard, metallic sound. He said, “That’s my own line you’re using against me. Do you think that’s fair?”

“Since when have you ever worried about whether anything was fair?”

“Break your date,” he said. “I’ll be there at seven.”

Click.

She put the receiver down slowly and glanced at the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel-ten past five.

She had to make nine phone calls before she was able to find a suitable girl to cover for her. Afterward she went around the apartment doing meaningless busy things-adjusting ashtrays, moving a chair six inches, fiddling with air-conditioners. She was too angry to go back to her book.

In the bathroom mirror she inspected the fresh bruise on her right cheek and applied a new coat of makeup to cover it; the bruise had come on top of an old one that hadn’t quite healed, and her cheek stung with throbbing agony.

An East Side hotel manager had called yesterday-he had four tycoons from the Coast looking to have a party. She had rounded up three girls and shepherded them to the appointed suite. The four tycoons were in real estate, and there was an hour’s bragging about the millions they had made from Southern California land, after which they began to complain that the hotel manager had made them shell out the price of a small aircraft carrier and you girls God damn better be worth it.

The girls gave the johns a full-scale stag act. Three of the tycoons were high enough to loosen up and enjoy it. The fourth was beyond that stage into drunken surliness. He babbled something about his wife, something about Good Christian Women, something about Sin and Communists, and he belted her across the face. She laid his face open with her fingernails and kneed him in the groin and left him to his three companions, who shut him up.

It didn’t happen often; it had been a long time since she had accepted a john without references. She didn’t like being mauled; she feared exposure, the unknown allegiances of strangers. There were only two things she feared more. One was time, which would age her; the other was that voice on the telephone just now.

She went into the bedroom and put on her leotards and rolled out the mat on top of the carpet. She had done her exercises once today, but now she did them again, needing that mindless concentration on ritual physical movement. She spent an hour at it, exhausted herself, and knew she would be stiff in the morning; she took a hot shower, and a cold shower, and creamed and powdered her body, and after that she dressed herself in floor-length satin hostess pajamas. She took a great deal of care and time with her hair and her eye makeup, but just the same it was only six-forty when she was done. She went into the living room and sat down facing the door, folded her hands in her lap, and waited with no expression at all on her face.

He always made her vividly aware of the past she didn’t want to remember. She remembered the sagging clapboard Victorian farmhouse with its paint long gone, weathered to a splintery gray. Kentucky, childhood, endless cuddlings by numerous “uncles.” Her father had been an unidentified sailor who had spent one night in Lexington on his way to New London. About the only home she remembered was the old farmhouse, with a rusty De Soto up on blocks in the yard, a sagging washday line hung between house and tree, chickens and dogs, two rusty truck fenders, and a dented galvanized milk can. They were on the relief rolls, recipients of charity packages of clothes and food at Christmastime. Her mother had been a sleazy middle-aged bag of Southern discomforts, too distracted by sex and alcohol to mind living in lackluster filth.