Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,48
old chunk of wood. There was a thin wire sticking up through it and the thing was ballasted on the bottom so the wire would stay upright. Inside the styrofoam was a real tiny radio transmitter—it turned out to be when the narcs got hold of it—using the wire for an antenna. And attached to the bottom with stainless-steel wire was a watertight plastic container with nearly a half kilo of heroin in it.
“Well, Kessler never would identify the people on the boat, but he did cop out to the extent of explaining how it worked, which the narcs knew anyway. He’d built the little transmitter, of course, and on the boat there was a small radio direction-finder he’d also built. It was tuned to the same frequency as the transmitter, so all the boat people had to do was home in on the signal until they could pick up the float in their searchlight. They’d pulled it off twice before and got away with it.
“Your father had to take part of a trip off to testify at the trial, about ten months later, I think. He left the ship in San Francisco and rejoined it in Honolulu. Kessler was convicted, but I never did know what sentence he got.”
Paulette fell silent and took a sip of her drink.
“He didn’t make any threats of any kind against the old man?” Romstead asked.
She shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
Revenge could have been a motive, of course, along with the quarter million dollars, and he was thinking of that lactose poured in his father’s mouth, in conjunction with another thing she’d said.
“You said he had a sadistic sense of humor. How was that?”
“Oh, nutty practical jokes, things like that, with the electronics junk he was always experimenting with. Real tiny bugging devices almost as far out as the old gag about the bugged martini olive. Wiring a girl’s room in a cathouse was a big laugh. And then the creepy things he remote-controlled by radio—”
“Remote control?” Romstead interrupted. He frowned.
“Sure, you know. Like those model airplanes people fly with little transmitters that make ‘em bank and turn and loop-the-loop. Of course, he didn’t invent the idea; it’s been around for years, but he added his own touches. He was a little hipped on the whole subject, as a matter of fact, and used to brag he could radio-control anything if you paid him enough.
“For example, he bought a couple of battery-operated toy cars and tore them down and rebuilt them with radio controls for starting and stopping and turning. Then he paid a kid in Manila to kill him two of those big gruesome rats on the docks there—I mean, they’re something else. Any tomcat crazy enough to tackle one of ‘em, I’d give you the tomcat and eight points. He tanned the skins and built foam-rubber bodies for the cars and sewed the skins over them. Talk about freezing your blood, to see those two things coming at you in formation. He used to take them ashore with him; they say he could empty a whorehouse in ten seconds.”
Romstead felt the hair stabbing the back of his neck. His mind was racing now as all the bits and pieces began to fall into place. He thought of the terrified little burro fleeing out across the flat with its clattering beer cans, and then exploding ... “The subhuman son of a bitch,” he said.
He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud until Paulette looked at him blankly and said, “What?”
“Don’t you see? That’s what nobody’s ever been able to figure out—how the old man could be forced to go into the bank alone and cash that check. You’ve just told me.”
“Eric, darling,” she said, “you’re farther around the bend than Kessler. You don’t remote-control a man, and certainly not that one.”
“Oh, yes, you can,” he replied, “if the threat is right. Tell me, didn’t Kessler wear glasses?”
“Yes. He was myopic, I think. How’d you guess?”
“The color of his eyes has changed. He’s wearing tinted contacts.” Dying the hair was routine, of course, and there were drugs that would darken the skin. He must be out on parole, so he’d violated it and skipped from wherever he was supposed to be, which meant he’d been up to something criminal all along. He’d run into Jeri at that electronics supply place where she worked, and even if she hadn’t recognized him, he remembered her—
Romstead’s thoughts broke off as he realized Paulette was asking him