The Infiltrators Read Free Page B

after. When you came to see me that time and I arranged for you to talk with our client, Willy Chavez.” She hesitated, and said with a hint of reminiscent pride, “We got him off, you know.”
    “I didn’t know,” I said. “But I thought you would, all that high-powered legal talent.”
    She said, rather grimly, “I had exactly the same kind of high-powered talent, Mr. Helm, and you can see how much good it did me. It’s not always a matter of who can bring the biggest legal guns to bear. But you haven’t answered my question.”
    I said, “I caught up with him, in a manner of speaking. I got to look at him in the morgue after somebody else had shot him.”
    “Was that a satisfactory ending to your mission?”
    I shook my head. “Not really. The man’s name, the inoffensive name he was going under, was Horace Bixby. He had others. He got off a shot before he was killed. I was too far behind in spite of what I’d learned from your client, Chavez; a day behind. If Bixby hadn’t thrown his first shot a bit, hurrying, or if his victim’s bodyguard had been slow and let him fire again, my mission would have been a total failure. As it was, I could kid myself that Bixby rushed into the job under unfavorable conditions because he sensed I was closing in on him. However, an important man took a nasty little wound and spent unnecessary time in the hospital, something I was supposed to see didn’t happen, since we knew what was planned even if we didn’t know whom it was planned for.” I turned my head to look at her. “It was exactly the opposite situation to the one you’re in, Mrs. Ellershaw.”
    She frowned. “I don’t understand. What…?”
    “I told you, we’re trying to avoid having you get killed, remember? In your case we’ve learned the person it’s going to be done to, but we don’t yet know who’s been sent to do it.”
    She focused the expressionless gray eyes on me. “Don’t con me, man! Why the fuck are you trying to scare me? I mean, it just don’t make no sense!” She heard herself employing the ugly speech with which she’d lived for the past eight years and winced. “I mean, why in the world would anybody want to kill me now, Mr. Helm, after all the time I’ve been locked up in… in that p-place?”
    I said, “Presumably because you could do no harm in there, but you’re out of there now.”
    “Are you certain it’s me they’re after? How can you be sure? How can you even know that such a thing is being planned?”
    “Look, Mrs. E„” I said, “we deal with all kinds of people, mostly nasty people. In fact it’s been said that we’re pretty nasty ourselves. But there’s a certain amount of give and take. Occasionally somebody gives somebody a break and it’s kind of expected that eventually, if the opportunity arises, something will be done in return. In this case, a certain agent let somebody go free maybe he shouldn’t have—apparently the basic assignment was finished and he was avoiding unnecessary complications—and the guy who was let go was grateful enough to get in touch about a week ago with what he considered a good tip.”
    “What tip?”
    I watched the road ahead as I drove, reproducing the words from memory. “It went something like this, a voice on the phone saying:
Somebody calling himself by a name you’ve been asking about is shopping for talent to hit the dame in the Ellershaw case when she gets out of that federal slammer, and don’t expect any more favors, see, this squares us.
”
    After a little, Madeleine Ellershaw shivered abruptly. “What did he mean by a name you’d been asking about?”
    “Did you ever hear of anybody named Tolliver?”
    I hoped I made the question sound casual enough. The security freaks who’d saddled us with this assignment had thought the name important enough to give us. We might kind of listen for it if we had nothing better to do, they’d said; and if we heard it we should report the circumstances