Dunne looked at him in disbelief. ‘He
‘Sort of.’
‘I warned you, Ryder. Tangle with that old bird and you step out of your class. Donahure has powerful friends only locally but LeWinter has them’where it counts — in Sacramento. Don’t tell me you used violence again.’
‘Certainly not. We left him peacefully in bed and unharmed.’
‘Did he recognize you?’
‘No. We wore hoods.’
‘Well, thank you very much. As if I haven’t got enough on my hands. Do you know what kind of hornet’s nest you’ll have stirred up? And where will it all end up? In my lap?’ He closed his eyes. ‘I know who’ll be the next caller on those damned phones.’
‘Not LeWinter. He’s a bit restricted right now. Matter of fact we left him handcuffed to a bedpost and his secretary. They were there when we arrived. She’s Russian.’
Dunne closed his eyes again. When he’d assimilated this and steeled himself for whatever was to come, he said carefully: ‘And?’
‘This is interesting.’ Ryder unwrapped the hand-gun he had taken. ‘One wonders what an upright judge is doing with a silenced automatic. Can you have it tested for fingerprints? Incidentally, the girl’s fingerprints are already there. This is a notebook, coded. I imagine the key is in this copy of
Dunne was heavily sarcastic. ‘Anything else you’d like me to do for you?’
‘Yes. A copy of the file you have on LeWinter.’
Dunne shook his head. ‘FBI personnel only.’
‘Would you listen to him,’ Jeff said. ‘After all the legwork we do for him, after all the valuable clues we put in his hands —’
‘Okay, okay. But I’m promising nothing. Where to now?’
‘To see another lawman.’
‘He has my advance sympathies. Do I know him?’
‘No. And I don’t. Hartman. Must be new. Anyway, he’s in Redbank. County division.’
‘What has this unfortunate done to incur your displeasure?’
‘He’s a pal of LeWinter’s.’
‘That, of course, explains everything.’
Hartman lived in a small and unpretentious bungalow on the outskirts of town. For a detached Californian house it was virtually a slum: it had no swimming pool. Ryder said: ‘His association with LeWinter must be pretty recent.’
‘Yes. Lets the side down, doesn’t he? Door’s open. Do we knock?’
‘Good heavens, no.’
They found Hartman seated at his desk in a small study. He was a large, heavily-built man and must have stood several inches over six feet when he stood up: but Sheriff Hartman would never stand up again. Somebody had carefully cross-filed a soft-nosed bullet which had entered by the left cheek-bone. The dum-dum effect had taken off the back of his head.
It was pointless to search the house; whoever had been there before them would have made certain that nothing incriminating a third party — or parties — had been left behind.
They took the dead man’s fingerprints and left.
CHAPTER FIVE
That was the night the earth shook. Not all of the earth, of course, but for a goodly portion of the residents of South California it might have been just that. The shock came at twenty-five minutes past midnight and the tremors were felt as far north as Merced in the San Joaquin Valley, as far south as Oceanside, between Los Angeles and San Diego, as far west as San Luis Obispo, close by the Pacific, to the southeast clear across the Mojave desert and to the east as far as Death Valley. In Los Angeles, though no structural damage was done, the shake was felt by all who were awake and it was pronounced enough to wake many of those who were sleeping. In the other main centres of population — Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Diego — no tremors were felt; but the earthquake, a very minor one of 4.2 on the Richter scale, was duly recorded on the delicate seismographs.
Ryder and Jeff, seated in the former’s living-room, both felt it and saw it — a ceiling lamp, travelling through an arc of not more than two inches at maximum, oscillated for about twenty seconds before coming to rest. Dunne, still in his office, felt it and paid no attention to it — he had been through many such tremors before and he had more important things on his mind. LeWinter, dressed now as was his secretary, felt it through the open door of his safe, the remaining contents of which he was examining with some anxiety. Even Donahure, despite an aching occiput and a mind somewhat beclouded by his fourth consecutive large Scotch, was dimly aware of it. And, although its foundations were firmly embedded on the very solid rock of the Sierra Nevada, the Adlerheim felt it most acutely of all, for the excellent reason that the epicentre of the earthquake was no more than a dozen miles distant; even more importantly, the ‘quake registered strongly in the seismographical office installed in one of the caves — wine cellars — which Von Streicher had excavated out of the rock and on two other seismographs which Morro had foresightedly had installed in two private residences he owned, each about fifteen miles distant and in diametrically different directions.
And the shocks were registered, too, in institutes which, one would have thought, had considerably more legitimate interest in such matters than Morro. Those were the offices of Seismological Field Survey, those of the Californian Department of Water Resources, in the Californian Institute of Technology and the US Geological Survey’s National Center for Earthquake Research. The last two, probably the most important of the four, were conveniently located where they would be the first to be demolished should a massive earthquake affect either Los Angeles or San Francisco, for the Institute of Technology was located in Pasadena and the Earthquake Research Center in Menlo Park. The nerve-centres of all four institutes were in direct and permanent contact with each other and it had taken them only minutes to pin-point, with complete precision, the exact epicentre of the earthquake.
Alec Benson was a large, calm man in his early sixties. Except on ceremonial occasions, which he avoided wherever and whenever possible, he invariably wore a grey flannel suit and a grey polo jersey, which went well enough with the grey hair that topped the tubby, placid and usually smiling face. Director of the seismology department, he held two professorships and so many doctorates and scientific degrees that, for simplicity’s sake, his numerous scientific colleagues referred to him just as ‘Alec’. In Pasadena, at least, he was regarded as the world’s leading seismologist: while the Russians and Chinese may have disputed this it was noteworthy that those two countries were always among the first to nominate him as chairman of the not infrequent international seismo- logical conferences. This esteem stemmed primarily from the fact that Benson never made any distinction between himself and his world-wide colleagues and sought advice as frequently as he gave it.
His chief assistant was Professor Hardwick, a quiet, retiring, almost self-effacing scientist with a track record that almost matched that of Benson’s. Hardwick said: ‘Well, about a third of the people in the State must have felt the shock. It’s already been on TV and radio and will be in all the late editions of the morning’s papers. At the least guess, there must be a couple of million amateur seismologists in California. What do we tell them? The truth?’
For once, Alec Benson wasn’t smiling. He looked thoughtfully round the half-dozen scientists in the room, the vastly experienced nucleus of his research team, and studied their expressions, which were neither helpful nor unhelpful: clearly, they were all waiting for him to give a lead. Benson sighed. He said: ‘No one admires George Washington more than I do — but, no, we don’t tell them the truth. A little white lie and it won’t even rest uneasily on my conscience. What’s to be gained if we tell the truth other than scaring our fellow Californians even further out of their wits than they are now? If anything major is going to happen then it’s just going to happen and there’s damn all we can do about it. In any event, we have no evidence that this is a prelude to a major shake.’
