“Can I?” She could see him leering over the phone, resolved to put off the meeting as long as possible. “I’ll put the request through to Sacramento right now. I can’t say how long it’ll take. Depends on how fast the information gets out and where he’s gone to.”
“I know it won’t take you very long, Don.” She was practically cooing into the receiver. “You can move fast when you want to.”
“Any speed you like,” he assured her confidently. “How about a place and time, now?”
“As soon as you find the car. See you, Don.” She hung up. Always nice to have friends, she thought. At least this one wasn’t a sicko, like some she’d made use of in the past. If she’d had access to the Highway Patrol registry and computer she could have located Pickett’s car herself. Access to official records like auto registration was usually not granted to strangers, however, so she’d have to be content to let acquaintances like Puteney do the legwork.
She’d never doubted that he’d help her. If the prospect of another meeting with her hadn’t been sufficient to induce him, the mention of a little chat with Mrs. Puteney would have done the job. She was glad it had worked out this way, though. She disliked a mess.
Besides, she might have need of Lieutenant Puteney’s services again some day. Catch more flies with honey. She eyed the wall clock. There was still plenty of CCM work to be done. She had no more idea when Benjamin would return to the office than she did when the lieutenant might call her back.
At least today was a weekday, she mused. Not that the police department shut down on weekends, but it would be easier to deal with Puteney through office channels, where she had the advantage of on-call computer information as well as built-in excuses for not talking to him at length.
She’d always enjoyed working with computers and had gravitated naturally to the profession. They were always so responsive, she thought. Predictable, never emotional or dangerous. Not like men. Of that more mobile and exasperating group she’d found Benjamin Huddy by far the most interesting and reliable. Some day, of course, it might be necessary to discard him. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. She genuinely liked Benjamin and he obviously felt the same way about her. There was a definite affinity between them. Nothing as ennervating as love, but rather a mutual admiration and willingness to work together to obtain mutually desirable ends.
She was examining a long train of statistics as it unscrolled on one green screen. Part of an upcoming report she would be putting together on CCM’s African operations. She reached for a file and extracted a single disk, which she inserted into the empty drive. Men were like software, come to think of it. She enjoyed being able to plug them in and out of her life.
Benjamin, Benjamin, she sang to herself, whatever have you stumbled onto? His enthusiasm had almost won her over, though the whole business she still found too absurd to believe. Telekinesis, indeed! The stuff of bad horror films, for all the scientific gobbledygook he’d quoted in support of it. Rationalizations and nothing more.
Of course, he’d been the only one to witness the old man’s miraculous demonstration. That was a pity. Bottle caps popping off beer bottles, dirt vanishing from the underside of a car; hardly the raw material from which great careers were fashioned. She’d gone along with the whole silly business this far because Benjamin always seemed to see opportunities where others saw nothing. If he felt this matter worth pursuing, she was bound to help him follow it through to the end. She wasn’t sanguine as to what that end would be.
But why had the old man disappeared?
It wouldn’t hurt her to stick with the project to find out. She wasn’t directly involved the way Benjamin was. Her machines provided her with distance and protective space. For example, she didn’t have to deal with people like those two horrible men Benjamin was compelled to employ. Drew was one name; she couldn’t recall the other.
Much better to let Benjamin deal with such types. It was a disturbing side of the business. Large, brutal, uncouth individuals, long on brawn and short on brain. Beneath the smart yellow dress her legs moved against one another.
“This won’t do,” she murmured to herself, concentrating harder on the central computer screen. “There’s work to be done.”
VIII
She spent the rest of the morning and a large part of the afternoon alternating work with replies to Huddy’s anxious inquiries. He called every fifteen minutes.
“No, Benjy,” she’d tell him repeatedly, “there’s nothing yet.” She could visualize him fuming away in his office upstairs, unable to work. He didn’t have the inner discipline she possessed.
At last, a call, not from him this time, but via her secretary’s outside line.
“Ms. Somerset? I have a Lieutenant Donald Puteney of the LAPD on the line for you.”
“Thank you, Sandy. Go ahead and put him through.”
A brief pause, then, “Hi, gorgeous.”
“Hi, yourself. You have something for me?”
He allowed himself a single sinister ha-ha before getting down to business. “Your man Pickett drives a 1961 blue and white Ford Galaxie, license number ay-dee-six, four-two-eff.” Her right hand worked with a pencil as he relayed the information. “Bought’it new in October sixty-one from—”
“Never mind that,” she interrupted impatiently. “Where is he now?”
“Highway Patrol finally located him heading east out of Blythe. The ID was made at the border station and since my office was the one that put out the request, I was notified. You said that you didn’t want him stopped so they let him through.”
“That’s what I wanted.” She was trying to picture a map of Southern California. She rarely drove anywhere outside L.A. “Going east from Blythe, you said?”
“That’s right. On Interstate Ten.”
“Thanks, Don. That’s what I needed to know.”
“Hey, wait a minute! What about…?”
“Call you back.” She hung up on the disappointed officer and hastily buzzed Benjamin’s office. He made it downstairs in record time. Meanwhile she took a quick geography lesson.
“Blythe,” he muttered as he strode through the doorway. “Going east out of Blythe.” He sat down opposite her. “That’s way south of the Sierras. Even for someone who might like to take the long way around.” He shook his head. “No, he’s running, Ruth, and not into the Sierras, either.”
“What’s east of Blythe?” she asked him.
“Nothing. Not a damn thing. Not until you get to Phoenix. After that on I-10 there’s Tucson and then nothing until….” His eyes widened slightly. “Texas. You remember?” He leaned over her desk. “The only relatives he has, the niece and grandniece, down by Houston?”
“That’s a hell of a drive,” she observed, “for an old man with a heart condition to attempt solo in an old car.”
“But why else would he be going that way?”
“Maybe he knows somebody in Phoenix who’s not in our records,” she murmured. “Maybe he’s headed someplace we haven’t imagined.”
“Well, I’m not going to wait to find out. I wish to hell I knew what I’d done to make him suspicious of me.”
“Too late for that now,” she pointed out. “What are you going to do?”
“Have him picked up, of course. Who do we have in the vicinity of Blythe?”
“Company, you mean?” She raised her eyebrows, swiveled in the chair. Her fingers danced over a keyboard. A moment later she was shaking her head discouragingly.
“The nearest company facilities are in Perris. That’s practically around the corner from Riverside. Nowhere near the border.”
“Nothing in Blythe itself?”
She shook her head again. “Not even a drugstore.”
“I know people in Vegas,” he said softly, “but even that’s too far. And the roads in that part of the country stink.”
“What about the Phoenix-Tucson area?” Her fingers moved again. “Here we go. Southwest Phoenix Division, Eutheria Plant and Products.”
“What do we have there?”
“Potash, mostly. Some borates. The General Manager’s name is Frank Lasenby.”
“Right. Get ahold of this Lasenby.”
“Get ahold of him yourself,” she told him. “I’m not your secretary, Benjamin.”
