Murder in Black Letter
Copyright© 2025 by Poul Anderson
Chapter 19
The Phone buzzed. Kintyre snatched it up. “Well?” he cried.
“Trig. Headquarters has just gotten word from San Francisco. Miss Lombardi isn’t home. They checked inside with the superintendent’s passkey. No trace of a ruckus. Couldn’t she simply have gone out?”
“Look,” said Kintyre. His vocal chords felt stiff. “This concerned her own family, herself—and O’Hearn, whom she had been forced to slug. I’d promised to call with the latest news. Would you have stepped out, even for a minute?”
“No. Of course, they queried her neighbors, parents, employer, and so forth. At last reports they were still getting nulls.”
“Another thing,” said Kintyre. “Clayton knew she saw me last night. I mentioned it to him yesterday afternoon!”
It whistled in his receiver. Then: “So you think he picked her up in the hope of finding out exactly where you are and what you know. Isn’t that taking quite a risk?”
“For him, it’s a greater risk to remain passive,” said Kintyre. “Didn’t we agree that if necessary he can probably buy a witness to account for a day or so absence? Though if Bruce, Guido, C-c-corinna, and I—Margery—if we’ve simply been found murdered, he might not even need that. There’ll be no evidence to convict him.”
“But why should he gamble his own precious hide? Let Silenio and Larkin do this job too.”
“No. For one thing, Corinna might have been under protection already—God, if we’d had the brains to request it!”
“Mm, yes, I see. A gangster could ring her doorbell and pull a gun when she opened, and be nabbed the next minute if the police did have a stakeout. Clayton is a friend of her family; she’d invite him in and he could extract the gun in privacy after conversation had established it was safe to do so.”
“That’s it. Clayton doesn’t know what we know. All he’s sure of is that somebody has O’Hearn. He’s got to find out who.”
“Does it matter so much? O’Hearn doesn’t know Clayton.”
“But he knows Silenio, who does. Now suppose the police do have O’Hearn. They won’t get the facts from him in a hurry, so there’ll be time to dispose of those of us who Corinna tells Clayton know more than he likes. However, eventually the police will learn a few things, and in Chicago they’ll be prepared to arrest Silenio and Larkin for questioning. So he’ll have to give Silenio and Larkin a prolonged vacation somewhere, till the whole affair has blown over.
“On the other hand, if I am keeping O’Hearn, I can be expected to get rough. Therefore Clayton and his friends will have to act in an awful hurry. But if they succeed, all will be well for them: because I and any associates of mine will have been eliminated, in the course of rescuing O’Hearn, and no clues at all will be left for the police.”
“Games theory,” murmured the telephone. “You plan your strategy on the basis of the strategy your opponent would plan on the basis of the information you believe him to have. But this game is for keeps. What do you think we ought to do?”
“Throw out a dragnet, of course,” said Kintyre. “As for the news angle, the knowledge we admit having—”
“That’s an obvious one. The police can handle it. Though frankly, events will probably move so fast that our news releases won’t influence them one way or another. Sorry, Bob, it had to be said.
“One more item. Now that their house is unsafe, have you any idea where they’ll go?”
Kintyre groaned. “That’s the one thing I can’t even guess.”
“You’ve done pretty well so far,” said the gentle tone. “Need any help?”
“Yes,” said Kintyre. “Get out there and find her.”
“I’ll do what I can,” said Trygve Yamamura.
Kintyre hung up. Guido sat knotted about a kitchen chair. “Well?” he asked raggedly.
“You were listening,” said Kintyre. “They’ve got her. Give me a cigarette.”
“My sister,” mumbled Guido.
Kintyre barked an obscenity. “Hell of a brother she’s got,” he said.
He lit up and stalked the kitchen floor. The clock said after eleven. Corinna had been taken—when? Three-plus hours ago, at a guess. But they would have had to find a place to question her. That would give a little time. They could conceivably be en route this minute.
“We’re being a pair of prize schtunks,” said Guido.
“Hm?” Kintyre threw him a look.
“Sitting here calling each other hard names. I mean, we ought to be out searching for her.”
“Where?”
“Any place!” Guido’s face was drawn taut; there was a tic over his right eye. “Every address we eliminate is something.”
“How many houses in the Bay Area?” Kintyre flopped onto a chair. Through the doors he had locked in himself, the horror hooted.
“Well, for Chrissake, man,” said Guido, “I don’t mean to search the bishop’s! We can think of some possible places, can’t we?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah, spit. We’re doing nobody any good. Let’s go for a ride. It might clear our brains some.”
“The great American solution. Let’s go for a ride.”
Guido regarded Kintyre for a moment or so.
“Does it help you to feel superior, cat?” he asked quietly.
Kintyre’s head jerked up. After a few seconds:
“Okay. I’ll just phone in to let the police know we’re going.”
They left the cottage and Guido took the wheel of Kintyre’s old black sedan. “Any special route, Doc?” he inquired.
“Oh, I don’t know. The coast highway, southbound.”
“State One? It’s a bastardly slow drive beyond the freeway.”
“What have we to hurry for?”
Guido slid the car into smooth motion. One-handed, he lit a fresh cigarette. “My solitary trick,” he said wryly.
“You sing pretty well,” said Kintyre.
“Not as well as I might. That takes work, and I’m not that interested.”
“What are you interested in?” Kintyre responded mechanically.
“Right now, getting her back unhurt,” said Guido. “Think there’s a chance?”
“I thought we were going to clear our brains,” rapped Kintyre.
They remained silent past the tollgate. Once they were on the bridge, with the quicksilver sheet of the Bay under them and San Francisco thinly misted ahead, Guido nagged:
“Where could they go? It’d have to be some place nobody would hear them, no cops would come around to. Pretty short notice to rent a house again. I mean, especially when an alarm might go out with their descriptions. Of course, they could just bust into a house offered to let.”
“The police will be checking that.”
“Uh-huh. Only Doc, wouldn’t they expect it and try to outsmart the police? Dig me? Let’s turn off at the ramp. I’m a waterfront kid, I know some old places where you could get in and—”
“Would they know about it?” snorted Kintyre.
“I suppose not.” Crestfallen, Guido held the car in the middle lane. When they got onto the southbound freeway, he opened up.
Kintyre, a conservative driver, had never pressed his car to the limit. Now he saw the needle hover at ninety; wind snapped by the doors. “You want a ticket?” he asked.
“I don’t much care,” said Guido roughly. “Man, I got to do something, don’t I? If I can’t help her, I got to do something.”
The minutes passed. No patrol car sirened at them. There was not, indeed, much traffic at this time of a Thursday. As they fled south, onto the old two-lane highway, the sky grew overcast.
“Nuts,” said Guido. “There’ll be fog along the coast. We’ll have to crawl. Let’s turn back.”
“No,” said Kintyre. “Keep going.”
Guido stole an indignant look at him. “Wait a second,” he began.
“Keep going, I said!” Kintyre roared it.
Guido started. Then, shrugging, he gave his attention back to the road. “Is it that important?” he asked.
Kintyre didn’t answer because he didn’t know. He sat hunched into passivity, not caring how fast they went or if they crashed. It shouldn’t matter to him where he was taken. But it did. He couldn’t tell why—damn that fouled subconscious of mine, anyway! But it was like a hand upon him.
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