manner.
'We can do it,' I told him. 'Be here Sunday night and we'll go to work the following Thursday morning.'
'Sounds great,' he said heartily. 'Sounds like you really been behind the plow, too. You know that all work an' no play makes Drake a dull boy. I'll be in around ten Sunday night, an' I'm gonna bring along with me a few feet of film that'll tickle the risability in your staff of life.'
'We won't have time for anything like-'
'Relax,' he urged me. 'This'll do you good. See you Sunday.'
And the connection was broken.
The phone call from Harris came at three A.M. Sunday morning. It roused me from sleep. I had been about to give up on him and call the Schemer for a replacement. 'How about it, Drake?' he asked in his flat, Midwestern accent.
'We can do it.' I repeated what I had said to Dahl. 'I had this coming Thursday earmarked if you can make it here by tonight.'
'It'll be late,' he said. 'Right now I've got to get some sleep. I've just come from twenty-two hours at the table.' From the tone of his voice I didn't need to ask him which way it had gone. 'I've looked up connections. There's a feeder plane that'll get me into Philly around midnight.'
'One of us will pick you up at the airport.'
'That means Dahl's still aboard?'
'He's still aboard.'
There was a momentary silence. 'I hope we can keep the damn fool under wraps this time,' Harris said finally.
And the connection was broken.
I thought it over afterward.
I didn't need to go ahead with it. I didn't need to take on a job with two partners neither of whom I would have selected myself if the circumstances had been different.
There were at least two men in the country to whom I could have gone, identified myself, asked them to throw in with me, and had never a qualm about their performance.
But if I did that, I had to give away the secret of my new face and my totally new identity.
Was it worth it?
I finally decided that it wasn't. I'd stay with the program.
It's not only in the marriage contract that the phrase 'for better or worse' occurs.
10
Dick Dahl called me from the airport on Sunday night two hours earlier than I'd expected. He balked at first when I told him I'd meet him behind the first lane of cars in the parking lot. 'Don't be so damn lazy,' I said. 'There's absolutely no point at all in our being seen together in the terminal.' He gave in reluctantly.
He was waiting when I parked and walked to the rendezvous point. 'Got away sooner'n I thought,' he said, his good humor restored. 'What about Preacher?'
'He won't be in until after midnight.'
'No sense hangin' around,' Dahl said. 'We might as well go to your motel.'
Since this agreed with my own thinking, I led the way to my car. Dahl had the ever-present movie camera slung around his neck. The man really traveled light. The first time I'd seen him he carried a briefcase. This time he had a suitcase, lightweight airplane luggage. From the way he leaned away from it, though, it was heavy.
The airport parking lot was well lighted. As we approached my car, a woman was getting out of another car in the next row. The man with her locked the car doors while the woman walked toward us, her high heels click- clicking on the macadam. She wasn't pretty, but she carried herself well. 'Hurry up or we'll miss them,' she called over her shoulder. When she passed us, the thin sheath of her dress made it readily apparent that her hips measured twelve inches more than her waist.
Dahl dropped his suitcase with a thump. He bent over it, snapped the catches, grabbed up a powerful-looking light, and clamped it onto his camera. The bright beam of the light shot out, enveloping the undulating tick-tock movement of the woman's haunches while the camera whirred. At the sudden glare of light, the woman looked back at us in surprise.
The man strode toward Dahl and seized him by the arm. 'What the hell you think you're doin', Jack?' he growled belligerently. He was two inches shorter than Dahl, but broader. He had an inch-and-a-quarter cigar butt between his teeth and a two-day growth of beard.
Dahl shook off the hand and turned to me, ignoring the man. 'The assistant district attorney is at the exit,' he said to me.
'Assistant district attor-' The heavyset man paused. 'What you
Dahl turned back to him. 'Just tell the truth and everything will be all right.' He removed the light from his camera and restored it to the suitcase.
The belligerence had departed from the stocky man's attitude. 'Truth?' he said uneasily. 'Truth about what?'
'You can call your lawyer later,' Dahl said, bending over his suitcase again to snap its catches.
The man spun on his heel and hurried after the woman. He took her by the arm and hustled her along while she protested. They veered from the parking lot exit toward which the woman had been headed and went toward another some distance away. 'Works every time,' Dahl said to me with a broad grin as we got into my VW. 'Sometimes I think everyone in the world has secrets, sexual and otherwise, that he doesn't want to talk to assistant district attorneys about.'
'You'll pull that on a bishop someday and wind up in court for invasion of privacy,' I said.
'Not a chance. A bishop would have run. You wouldn't believe their sex habits.'
'You're an authority on the sex habits of bishops?'
'I'm an authority on sex habits, period,' Dahl said calmly. 'You got anything to drink at the motel?'
'No.'
'Stop somewhere and I'll pick up a bottle of Scotch.'
'This is Sunday, remember? In Philadelphia.'
'Oh, yeah. Stop at a hotel, then, an' I'll scrounge a jug from a bellboy.'
Twenty-five minutes later we arrived at the Carousel, the fifth of Scotch firmly in Dahl's hand. -He splashed two liberal drinks into water tumblers and handed me one. Then he opened his suitcase on the bed-I could see only a spare shirt in it in addition to all his movie equipment- and removed a projector. 'Got somethin' to show you, cousin.' He sounded pleased with himself. He fitted a small reel of film into the maze of sprockets and gears on the projector, then aimed the lens at the expanse of white wall at the end of the room.
The last thing I wanted to do was view home movies. 'We should be going over-'
'Only take a minute,' Dahl said smoothly. He flicked a switch, and a blurred image appeared on the wall. Dahl adjusted the focus, and a brilliantly clear color shot showed a girl in a bikini sitting beside a swimming pool. The camera lingered on her until she glanced up and reached self-consciously for a towel to place between herself and the camera.
It was only when the scene cut suddenly to two women unlocking a motel room door that I remembered the movies Dahl had taken at the Marriott during the occasion of our first meeting. Before I could say anything, the scene changed again. Clearly in focus were a group of women in what appeared to be an institutionalized setting I didn't recognize. Backs to the camera, two of the women were in the process of lifting their dresses and slips up around their shoulders, and I realized with a sense of shock that these were the movies that Dahl had taken inside the Washington bank.
Three women were facing the camera, obviously arguing, but in seconds they turned and emulated the first
