The Bessie Blue Killer. Richard A. Lupoff

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a question. He popped a forkful of Lyonnais potatoes into his mouth and followed it with a sip of ice water.

      “He was hot stuff as long as the money kept rolling in. Those guys make a lot of money, you know. Nuclear trigger designers. Get treated like royalty. President of the United States comes around to the shop. Puts on a white lab coat. Gives the boys a little pep talk. Serving the cause of freedom. Making the world safe for our children and our grandchildren. Holding the forces of tyranny and oppression at bay.”

      “I’ve seen the clips,” Lindsey said.

      “They start to believe it themselves. You know that? Those Stepford Husbands with their sports cars and their big houses and their pert little wives with the big station wagons.”

      “You drive a station wagon?”

      “The Red Octopus dies and Uncle Sam doesn’t need all those weapons factories anymore and they have to start looking for an honest job.”

      Lindsey didn’t pursue the station wagon.

      “You know what?” Aurora put down her glass, picked up her fork, speared a piece of lamb chop and chomped down on it. Lindsey couldn’t tell whether she was nodding in agreement with some thought she’d had or if the motion of her head had to do with chewing the piece of lamb chop. “All of a sudden, nobody wants nuclear trigger designers. And there’s not much positive transfer of the skills.”

      “What did he do?”

      “He had a couple of offers from universities. For about a quarter what he was making.”

      “What did he do?”

      “He called some of his old buddies. You know, they network, those nuclear trigger designers. I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe he wasn’t as popular as he thought with his old buddies. Maybe they didn’t like him. Maybe there’s just no work out there.”

      “So what did he do?”

      “He took it as long as he could.”

      “Yes.”

      “Then he couldn’t take it any more.”

      “Yes.”

      She picked up her glass again and looked at Lindsey. The roll baskets were empty. The waiters were clearing away the dinner plates. At the head table a major corporate big shot, Ms. Johanssen from National, was looking around. Clearly, she was getting ready to make a speech.

      Lindsey asked Aurora, “What did he do?”

      The spotless white linen tablecloths were still spotless. International Surety people ate carefully at corporate banquets.

      Desmond “Ducky” Richelieu, the director of International Surety’s Special Projects Unit/Detached Status, was on his feet, waiting for the room to quiet so he could introduce their distinguished guest, Ms. Johanssen from National.

      The murmured conversation dropped to a dead silence. Huh, maybe it was Cole Porter, not Gershwin and not Jerome Kern either.

      Aurora Delano said, “He came home from a job interview. I knew it had gone badly and the poor lamb was so upset, he had to do something. So he broke my arm.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      The International Surety suite was upstairs in a glittering office tower just off Speer Boulevard. The receptionist had a sign on her desk. Mrs. Blomquist. She wore her hair on top of her head like a Gibson Girl. Lindsey could not remember ever seeing a woman with skin that looked so pale and powdery. He wondered what she had to do to make it look like that, and why she did it.

      The thin air made for a snappy morning even in May, but Lindsey had packed his topcoat and taken a cab wearing a medium-weight gray suit. He usually dressed a little more casually than this, but he was on his way to visit his new boss and he didn’t want to look like a California swinger.

      Mrs. Blomquist made Lindsey wait while she buzzed Mr. Richelieu, then made him wait some more. Lindsey browsed through the Rocky Mountain News, looking for stories with California datelines. He could care less about scandals in the Colorado state legislature, shakeups in the Denver Police Department, new real estate developments in Arapahoe and Elbert Counties, or the draft strategy of the embryonic National League baseball team that seemed to have the local papers in a complete tizzy. He was eager to get home.

      Richelieu stood up when Lindsey walked in. The sign on the inner door said simply, Desmond Richelieu. Nobody called him Ducky to his face. He wore a neatly-trimmed moustache and rimless bifocals that glinted in the sunlight pouring through his office window. He looked like a steel-engraving of the French Cardinal Lindsey had once seen in a high school library edition of The Three Musketeers. There was even a shadowy suggestion of the Cardinal’s dark, pointed goatee. He gestured Lindsey to a seat.

      “I always like to have a chat with each of our graduates before they head out on their first assignment. I imagine you’d heard that.”

      Lindsey nodded. He’d carried his attaché case with him and he placed it carefully on the carpet beside his chair.

      “The way the Chief used to do it when I worked for the Bureau.” Richelieu made a barely perceptible motion with his head. His hair was very black with just a tuft of pure white above each ear. Richelieu had combed his hair with some sort of pomade that made it look like glossy corduroy.

      Lindsey followed Richelieu’s gesture with his eyes. A tastefully-framed, diploma-like document stood out against the elegant paneling. Beside it hung a blown-up glossy of a boyish Richelieu shaking hands with a dumpy, bulldog-faced man in a double-breasted pinstriped suit. The picture was cropped so you couldn’t see either man’s feet.

      “It’s a funny thing,” Richelieu said. “The FBI is like the Mafia. Once you’re in it, you’re never really out.” He shook his head sadly. “But once John Edgar was gone, the Bureau was never the same. Mixed up in Watergate, White House interference. They never got away with that when the Chief was alive. He took on everybody. The Kennedys, everybody. But once he was gone, why, it was never the same.”

      Lindsey had heard that J. Edgar Hoover had been sensitive about his height, had stood on a box for photo-ops with his underlings. Bureau photogs knew that they had to keep the focus up and not show the box. Agents knew that they had to keep their eyes up and not see it, either. Failure to comply could cost a man his career. He might not get tossed out of the Bureau, but he’d reach age sixty-five counting pencils in the Fargo, North Dakota, branch office.

      Richelieu leaned his forearms on the glass top of his desk. The glass was polished to a perfect sheen. There was nothing beneath the glass but polished mahogany and nothing on top of it except for Richelieu’s spotless sleeves. “When Harden at Regional recommended you for SPUDS, he said you were reluctant to take the job, Hobart. Is that right?”

      Lindsey hated his first name. He preferred Bart, didn’t mind Lindsey, hated Hobart. He said, “Yes, sir.”

      “That’s all right, a lot of my people join up reluctantly. What happened to your job in Walnut Creek?”

      Richelieu didn’t have Lindsey’s personnel folder on his desk. He must have studied it before Lindsey was admitted to the inner sanctum. Lindsey said, “I was hospitalized.”

      “Yes. Shot in the СКАЧАТЬ