Death Smells of Cordite. Gordon Landsborough

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СКАЧАТЬ shoulders shrugged. “A very new widow. I can’t get over the shock. What’s it going to mean to my life to be a widow? Without Joe. My Joe!”

      He grabbed her quickly as she halted and swayed. Suddenly he was touched by the grief in her voice—here was one girl who loved her husband. He thought perhaps that was why he found her vaguely attractive to him; most of the girls he knew didn’t love their husbands if they had any, and wouldn’t love them when they got them. And “them” wasn’t a careless choice of word with the Lydia van Heusons in that part of America.

      He soothed her down. Anyone watching him, as there was, would have looked at his rough, unpractised gestures in that light.

      He patted her shoulder a few times, then stroked her back until he realised that was no thing to do to a lady. And all the time he was saying things like, “C’mon, you’ve got to keep living. Okay, make the best of it—just stop thinking for a coupla months and then let yourself wake up gradually.”

      It did her good, again. If he had softened his voice and spoken sympathy she would have broken down, but as it was he gave her no opportunity to indulge in self-sympathy.

      “Where shall I take you?” They were walking back towards his car. He thought, anyway, he wasn’t over-bothered about sailing. That was just to get his mind off the silent, nearly empty Farran works.

      She shrugged her slim shoulders again. “I don’t know. Don’t care. I know I don’t want to go home for a while.” She looked quickly at him, pleading with her eyes for understanding. “It’s a little place—a two-roomed apartment. It’ll be—full of Joe. You know what I mean. Reminding me. And Joe was a—was a.…” She couldn’t end it.

      “A fine guy.” Farran supplied the tail to the epitaph; it wasn’t inspired but it was sufficient. “Okay, keep away from your apartment for some time. Maybe don’t go back there again ever.” He thought for a moment. “I know a good place in the country—you know, flowers and fields and trees. It’d set you up again, maybe.”

      She was looking across the road, shaking her blonde head slowly. “I don’t know where I want to go. I—I’m afraid of loneliness. We felt pretty lonely as it was, coming to this strange town. But without Joe—” She was near to breaking down.

      It was a problem. Farran solved it. “Maybe you’d better move out to my place. We’ve hundreds of rooms. I suppose.” He wondered how she would get on with Elsa and the rest of the family, but decided it might work out all right. The family only gunned for him, Russ Farran, who had inherited the Farran Empire.

      “That’s nice of you.” Her blue eyes were searching his face. “You’d do me good, you know, being near me.” It shook him a bit. She went on, “You don’t fuss and say the right things—the right things that right people say, that is. You—you brace me when you talk. I’d like to come out to your place. Won’t I be in the way, though?” There was a wistful uncertainty in her voice.

      He spoke truthfully; he always did, which was why he had few friends, but they were very good ones. “Guess I’ll have work to do, but maybe I’ll be able to help with things.” He was wondering how girl-widows like this were able to cope with inquests and funerals and setting about the job of starting to live again. “You won’t see much of me, but Elsa—she’s my stepmother—can be quite friendly in her way.”

      He started to reach out for the door handle, but the girl said, “Keep walking. I want to make—sure.”

      It startled him, but he found himself going on up the street. He heard the girl say, “I learned a lot from Joe. He was a very smart G-man in his day.”

      “We’ve passed my car,” he reminded her. At that she turned very quickly; he caught up with her and they went back to his car.

      Then she told him they were being followed. She said it as though it was a shock to her.

      Farran took a quick look along the sidewalk, but he didn’t see any tail or anyone who looked as though he could be tailing them. So he said so.

      The girl said, “You’re not looking in the right places. No good tail ever walks behind you—only in movies. He’s always across the road from you. Look.”

      She pointed to where a big guy with too much in his pants-seat was suddenly being interested in a ladies’ underwear display. A really big guy, who would have looked more at home staring at fight bills or a horseracing programme.

      Farran helped her into his car and started up. “Why’s he tailing us?” He was an aircraft manufacturer, not a ’tec, and he didn’t know any of the answers. The girl didn’t know many, either.

      She shrugged. Both were sneaking glances across the road out of their eye corners. As Farran pulled out, they saw the big guy whistle in a cab and come after them.

      Farran went down towards the harbour, then turned south. If it came to a chase, he didn’t think that cab was going to hold him for long, not with this half-million bucks’ worth of metal beneath him.

      But Farran wasn’t the kind to run away without knowing why he was doing it. He let the cab keep close behind until they came to a flower-ornamented roundabout in the suburbs. Then he gave it the gun and went round the circle at a dizzy speed. The taxi tried gallantly for a second, then fell rapidly behind. A quarter of a minute later and Farran was tailing the cab.

      It gave the show away. Their tail knew now he had been spotted, but for a full half minute he didn’t know what to do, so the cab went on chasing madly round the roundabout with Farran hooting derisively ten yards in the rear. Finally the tail must have told the cabbie to pull out on to the Farranville road, and it cut across the thin traffic stream that hadn’t appreciated all this manoeuvring and crawled away.

      Farran drove it into the side of the road and made it stop. The girl grabbed him as he started to climb out. “What are you going to do?”

      “Bust his flat pan for him,” snarled Farran. “I don’t like being followed—not by apes like that.”

      But she clung to him and her voice was urgent, “Be careful—don’t you see, this might be someone who shot Joe!”

      That thought hadn’t occurred to him. He just wasn’t built for detective work, he decided.

      He said, “Yeah, it’s an idea. But bustin’ up his face could still go into the programme.”

      The big ape was taking the cab to bits in an effort to come quickly through the door. Farran was there right in front of him when he came out.

      “I’m going to pretty up your profile unless you have a sound reason for tailing me,” Farran began, and his fist was hard back ready to start travelling.

      The big ape looked at him from eyes that had been punched back a couple of inches into his thick skull. He mouthed, “I’m too big a boy ter start fightin’ with strangers,” and he pulled a gun on Farran.

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