Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,27

was my impression, I think, that he didn’t want me to go after the money—that is, it’d be quicker if he went too.”

“Well, when he stopped to write it on the way back to the vault, was it the stand where the hippie was?”

“No. It was the one at the rear.”

“Then the hippie couldn’t have seen the amount?”

“No, not unless he had exceptional eyesight—” Richter stopped, his eyes thoughtful. “Yes, he might have. As I recall now, he finished his counting and had gathered up his silver while your father was writing out the check, and he went past on the other side of the stand, going to one of the tellers’ windows. But I don’t think that’s significant; he could just as easily have seen, or guessed, what the three of us were doing back there by the vault with the bag, if he had robbery in mind. Anyway, as I said, he was still in the bank after your father left.”

Romstead walked back to the apartment, feeling baffled and frustrated. How could he be right and wrong at the same time?

6

“If the first supposition is right, then the second one has to be too,” he told Mayo. “Richter missed it, and now I’ve missed it; but it still has to be there.”

“Not necessarily,” she replied. She was wearing the housecoat and a pair of mules, but she’d combed her hair and put on lipstick. She was perched crosswise in a big armchair in the living room, sipping coffee. “You’re projecting your hypothesis from an opinion, not a known fact, when you say it couldn’t have been kidnap. It could have been a girlfriend.”

“A quarter million dollars?”

“Men as tough and as promiscuous as your father have turned out to be vulnerable, the same as anybody else, thousands of times. In which case he’d have come in alone to get the money. It wouldn’t have been voluntary, by any stretch of the imagination, but they wouldn’t have to be there.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You’re missing the key to the whole thing. They wouldn’t have had to be there to force him to sell the stock either. You ever hear of kidnappers coming in to discuss the thing in person? The threat comes by note or telephone. We couldn’t care less how you raise the money, Jack; just raise it.”

“But you don’t know they were there. Opinion again.”

“Yes, they were there. He wasn’t alone when he was talking to Winegaard; that’s implicit in the whole conversation. There are two phones in that house, one in the master bedroom and a wall-mounted extension in the kitchen, and one of the bastards was listening in while the others applied the pressure.

“Look—in kidnap or blackmail, a specific sum is demanded, and you raise it to suit yourself within the time limit. That being the case, he would have sold selectively, or at least he’d have let Winegaard express an opinion. But he wasn’t trying to raise a specific sum; he was selling a list of stocks with a gun against his head, knowing Winegaard was going to protest in a minute and he had to shut him up before he could mention some stocks that weren’t on the list.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I guess that’s right.”

“Sure. And utterly pointless, so far. After they’d done all that, there was no way in Christ’s world they could get the money. Except that they did.”

“Well, what are you going to do now?”

He considered. At the moment he could see two possible leads, both very tenuous and both calling for a hell of a lot of legwork. One was Jeri Bonner, and the other the Mercedes. He couldn’t explore both avenues at once, so the best thing would be to get some help doing the bloodhounding and backtracking here while he went back to Nevada. He had an idea about the car, something Brubaker had overlooked or dismissed as unimportant, and he had a hunch he could find the place. It would just take a lot of driving. He’d had enough of that highway up through Sacramento and across the Sierra, so he’d fly up and rent a car in Reno. He told her.

“When will you be back?” she asked.

“Tomorrow night, probably.”

“Can I go too?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“That desert’s hotter than the floor plates of hell. And you’d just be bored, and choked with dust—”

“Spare me the bullshit, Romstead. I can’t go because it might be dangerous, right?”

“Dangerous? Of course not.”

“You’re looking for a place, but you don’t have