The Vanishers Read Free Page B

warhorses grazing in quiet pastures in various parts of the country, waiting, maybe even hoping, for the battle bugle to blow once more. Well, I was blowing it.
    “Barnett here.”
    Using his code name, and mine, to make it official, I said, “Abraham, this is Eric. A slight problem in Washington. Contact: 325-3376. Code: arrhythmia. Pass the word. Do you want a repeat?”
    “A slight problem in Washington. Contact 325-3376. Code arrhythmia.”
    “You’ve got it. Good luck, amigo.”
    “Shit, I was just going to varnish the brightwork around the cockpit.”
    “Why varnish? Use teak and let it weather, nice and salty.” There was something I had to ask, and I went on: “How’s Amy doing?”
    Doug Barnett’s daughter and I had spent some time together, having become acquainted on the mission on which he’d lost his boat. However, she was basically a nonviolent girl, and in the end, like others I’d met of that persuasion, she hadn’t been able to resist trying to reform me; a sure way to kill a pleasant man-woman relationship.
    “Amy’s doing fine,” Doug said. “Got herself a new boyfriend much younger and better looking than that ugly tall bastard she was seeing for a while; I forget his name. Schelm or something like that.”
    “Good for her,” I said. “Well, keep your whistle wet and your powder dry. Eric out.”
    That had been in the morning. After hanging up, I’d returned to the car and concentrated on making miles without catching cops or, more correctly, being caught by them. One would think grown men would have better things to do than hiding in the bushes and jumping out to say “boo” at honest citizens. In the afternoon, an hour from my destination, I stopped to fill up again, and to make another call before entering the Hagerstown danger zone.
    This call also went to Florida, but to the other side of the state. I wanted to talk with a reporter on the
Miami Tribune
who’d helped me out before, when I was operating down in that part of the country. I’d tried for him at my earlier phone stop, but he’d been out. It took them a while to track him down this time; then his voice came on the line.
    “Meiklejohn.” When I’d identified myself, he said, “Oh, it’s the Jack Daniels man.” I’d given him a bottle by way of thanks the last time I’d consulted him. He went on: “What do you want now?”
    “Beilstein comma Janet. An executive-type lady in the computer business, missing. Can you look her up for me?”
    “What’s the matter with your Washington sources?”
    “They’re in Washington,” I said. “It’s a very nosy city, or hadn’t you heard?”
    “Beilstein?” Spud Meiklejohn was silent for a moment, presumably searching his capacious memory. “I remember the story. I’ll have to look it up if you want her undergraduate and advanced business degrees and her complete employment record before she wound up at Electro-Synchronics, Inc., where she worked her way up to executive vice-president. But if you’re satisfied with learning that she’s fifty-two years old and ran off with her twenty-four-year-old tennis pro, and maybe a couple of million, although that’s not been confirmed, there you are.”
    “The pro’s name?”
    “Emil Jernegan.”
    “Had he been around for a while, or did he just appear one day out of the blue, pretty much the way he disappeared? In other words, could he have been planted on her?”
    “Well, he’d been on the job for only about six months before he zeroed in on the lady executive who’d started taking his lessons, very charming and attentive. But there seems to be no real mystery about him. Just another good-looking young tennis bum who couldn’t make it competitively and settled for a country-club job. But there seems to be a slight mystery about the Beilstein woman herself.”
    “Give.”
    “She’d take a few weeks’ vacation a couple of times a year,” Meiklejohn’s voice said in the phone. “She’d come back tanned