“How far from the motel are we?” John Mayo asked. Ray glanced down at the odometer. “Seventeen miles,” he said, and pulled over. “That’s- far enough.” “But maybe-““No, if we were going to catch them, we would have by now. We’ll go on back and rendezvous with the others.”
John struck the heel of his hand against the dashboard. “They turned off somewhere,” he said. “That goddam flat shoe! This job’s been bad luck from the start, Ray. An egghead and a little girl. And we keep missing them.”
“No, I think we’ve got them,” Ray said, and took out his walkie-talkie. He pulled the antenna and tipped it out the window. “We’ll have a cordon around the whole area in half an hour. And I bet we don’t hit a dozen houses before someone around here recognizes that truck. Late-sixties dark-green International Harvester, snowplow attachment on the front, wooden stakes around the truck bed to hold on a high load. I still think we’ll have them by dark.”
A moment later he was talking to A1 Steinowitz, who was nearing the Slumberland Motel. A1 briefed his agents in turn. Bruce Cook remembered the farm truck from town. OJ did, too. It had been parked in front of the A amp;P.
A1 sent them back to town, and half an hour later they all knew that the truck that had almost certainly stopped to give the two fugitives a lift belonged to Irving Manders, RFD 5, Baillings Road, Hastings Glen, New York.
It was just past twelve-thirty P.M.
10
The lunch was very nice, Charlie ate like a horse-three helpings of chicken with gravy, two of Norma Manders’s hot biscuits, a side dish of salad, and three of her home-canned dill pickles. They finished off with slices of apple pie garnished with wedges of cheddar-Irv offering his opinion that “Apple pie without a piece of cheese is like a smooch without a squeeze.” This earned him an affectionate elbow in the side from his wife. Irv rolled his eyes, and Charlie laughed. Andy’s appetite surprised him. Charlie belched and then covered her mouth guiltily.
Irv smiled at her. “More room out than there is in, button.”
“If I eat any more, I think I’ll split,” Charlie answered. “That’s what my mother always used to… I mean, that’s what she always says.”
Andy smiled tiredly.
“Norma,” Irv said, getting up, “why don’t you and Bobbi go on out and feed those chickens?”
“Well, lunch is still spread over half an acre,” Norma said.
“I’ll pick up lunch,” Irv said. “Want to have a little talk with Frank, here.”
“Would you like to feed the chickens, honey?” Norma asked Charlie.
“I sure would.” Her eyes were sparkling.
“Well, come on then. Do you have a jacket? It’s turned a bit chilly.”
“Uh…” Charlie looked at Andy.
“You can borrow a sweater of mine,” Norma said. That look passed between her and Irv again. “Roll the sleeves up a little bit and it will be fine.”
“Okay.”
Norma got an old and faded warmup jacket from the entryway and a frayed white sweater that Charlie floated in, even with the cuff’s turned up three or four times.
“Do they peck?” Charlie asked a little nervously.
“Only their food, honey.”
They went out and the door closed behind them. Charlie was still chattering. Andy looked at Irv Manders, and Irv looked back calmly.
“You want a beer, Frank?”
“It isn’t Frank,” Andy said. “I guess you know that.”
“I guess I do. What is your handle?”
Andy said, “The less you know, the better off you are.”
“Well, then,” Irv said, “I’ll just call you Frank.”
Faintly, they heard Charlie squeal with delight from outside. Norma said something, and Charlie agreed.
“I guess I could use a beer,” Andy said.
“Okay.”
Irv got two Utica Clubs from the refrigerator, opened them, set Andy’s on the table and his on the counter. He got an apron from a hook by the sink and put it on. The apron was red and yellow and the hem was flounced, but somehow he managed to avoid looking silly.
“Can I help you?” Andy asked.
“No, I know where everything goes,” Irv said. “Most everything, anyhow. She changes things from week to week. No woman wants a man to feel right at home in her kitchen. They like help, sure, but they feel better if you have to ask them where to put the casserole dish or where they put the Brillo.”
Andy, remembering his own days as Vicky’s kitchen apprentice, smiled and nodded.
“Meddling around in other folk’s business isn’t my strong point,” Irv said, drawing water in the kitchen sink and adding detergent. “I’m a farmer, and like I told you, my wife runs a little curio shop down where Baillings Road crosses the Albany Highway. We’ve been here almost twenty years.”
He glanced back at Andy.
“But I knew there was somethin wrong from the minute I saw you two standing by the road back there. A grown man and a little girl just aren’t the kind of pair you usually see hitching the roads. Know what I mean?”
Andy nodded and sipped his beer.
“Furthermore, it looked to me like you’d just come out of the Slumberland, but you had no traveling gear, not so much as an overnight case. So I just about decided to pass you by. Then I stopped. Because… well, there’s a difference between not meddling in other folks” business and seeing something that looks damn bad and turning a blind eye to it.”
“Is that how we look to you? Damn bad?”
“Then,” Irv said, “not now'. He was washing the old mismatched dishes carefully, stacking them in the drainer. “Now I don’t know just what to make of you two. My first thought was it must be you two the cops are looking for.” He saw the change come over Andy’s face and the sudden way Andy set his beer can down. “I guess it is you,” he said softly. “I was hopin it wasn’t.”
“What cops?” Andy asked harshly.
“They’ve got all the main roads blocked off coming in and out of Albany,” Irv said. “If we’d gone another six miles up Route Forty, we would have run on one of those blocks right where Forty crosses Route Nine.”
“Well, why didn’t you just go ahead?” Andy asked. “That would have been the end of it for you. You would have been out of it.”
Irv was starting on the pots now, pausing to hunt through the cupboards over the sink. “See what I was saying? I can’t find the gloriosky Brillo… Wait, here it is… Why didn’t I just take you up the road to the cops? Let’s say I wanted to satisfy my own natural curiosity.”
“You have some questions, huh?”
“All kinds of them,” Irv said. “A grown man and a little girl hitching rides, the little girl hasn’t got any overnight case, and the cops are after them. So I have an idea. It isn’t so farfetched. I think that maybe here’s a daddy who wanted custody of his button and couldn’t get it. So he snatched her.”
“It sounds pretty farfetched to me.”
“Happens all the time, Frank. And I think to myself, the mommy didn’t like that so well and, swore out a warrant on the daddy. That would explain all the roadblocks. You only get coverage like that for a big robbery… or a kidnapping.”
“She’s my daughter, but her mother didn’t put the police on us,” Andy said. “Her mother has been dead for a year.”
“Well, I’d already kind of shitcanned the idea,” Irv said. “It don’t take a private eye to see the two of you are pretty close. Whatever else may be going on, it doesn’t appear you’ve got her against her will.”
Andy said nothing.
“So here we are at my problem,” Irv said. “I picked the two of you up because I thought the little girl might need help. Now I don’t know where I’m at. You don’t strike me as the desperado type. But all the same, you and your little girl are going under false names, you’re telling a story that’s just as thin as a piece of tissue paper, and you look sick, Frank. You look just about as sick as a man can get and still stay on his feet. So those are my questions. Any you could answer, it might be a good thing.”
“We came to Albany from New York and hitched a ride to Hastings Glen early this morning,” Andy said. “It’s bad to know they’re here, but I think I knew it. I think Charlie knew it, too.” He had mentioned Charlie’s name, and that was a mistake, but at this point it didn’t seem to matter.
“What do they want you for, Frank?”
Andy thought for a long time, and then he met Irv’s frank gray eyes. He said: “You came from town, didn’t you? See any strange people there? City types? Wearing these neat, off-the-rack suits that you forget almost as soon as the guys wearing them are out of sight? Driving late-model cars that sort of just fade into the scenery?”
It was Irv’s turn to think. “There were two guys like that in the A amp;P,” he said. “Talking to Helga. She’s one of the checkers. Looked like they were showing her something.”
“Probably our picture,” Andy said. “They’re government agents. They’re working with the police, Irv. A more accurate way of putting it would be that the police are working for them. The cops don’t know why we’re wanted.”
“What sort of government agency are we talking about? FBI?”
“No. The Shop.”
“What? That CIA outfit?” Irv looked frankly disbelieving.
“They don’t have anything at all to do with the CIA,” Andy said. “The Shop is really the DSI-Department of Scientific Intelligence. I read in an article about three years ago that some wiseacre nicknamed it the Shop in the early sixties, after a science-fiction story called ‘The Weapon Shops of Ishtar.” By a guy named van Vogt, I think, but that doesn’t matter. What they’re supposed to be involved in are domestic scientific projects which may have present or future application to matters bearing on national security. That definition is from their charter, and the
