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Authors: Donald Hamilton
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himself a little. He must be a better lawyer now; he wouldn’t still be with the firm, and doing pretty well with them, if he weren’t. I let him take care of some things for me when I… went away. He even came to see me once in Fort Ames. I think the poor boy had fallen a bit in love with me in a perverse and guilty sort of way: the glamorous office colleague whom he’d failed in her hour of need. Even seeing me in that drab p-place looking just like all the other gray-faced female convicts in my baggy uniform didn’t seem to disillusion him. He asked for permission a couple of times later, but that was after”—she glanced at her scarred wrist—“after I couldn’t bear to have visitors gawking at me anymore. They made me feel like a mangy, scrawny female mountain lion I’d once seen pacing her stinking little cage in a roadside zoo, obviously dreaming of the sleek, glossy creature she’d once been and the wild, free, glorious life she’d led before the trap closed on her.” She hesitated. “There was a note with the clothes Walter sent. Apparently he even got his partnership recently. Perhaps the one I would have had if… She stopped, and swallowed hard. “God, such a tragic figure! Don’t I just make the tears pop into your eyes? Thanks for the sedative. I’ll be all right now.”
In the morning I made a phone call from my room, reporting to Mac, whose official day would already have begun, considering the one-hour time differential. When he answered, the sound of his voice let me visualize him at the desk in front of the bright window, apparently indestructible, no grayer now than when I’d first gone to work for him. Sometimes I wondered uneasily what would happen to the organization when time finally caught up with him. Mac said it was too bad we hadn’t been able to take the shotgun specialist alive, and he’d been identified as an independent operator named Victor, George Victor, born Georgio Victoroff, from New York City; and while the woman he lived with off and on had known he was away on a job that promised to be quite remunerative, she had no idea who his employer had been, except that the name Tolliver had been mentioned, but she’d thought that was merely the contact man who’d arranged the contract. No, she didn’t know how the fuck it was spelled. Taliaferro? If it was spelled Taliaferro, wouldn’t they
say
Taliaferro, for Christ’s sake? Mac said for me to stay with the subject; it seemed more than likely there’d be another attempt on her life. I said I could hardly wait, and hung up.
I shaved and put on a clean shirt and looked at my shapeless slacks, but to hell with them. Cross-country travelers are supposed to have sloppy pants. I was running a comb through my hair and reflecting that if the face in the dresser mirror had picked me up at the prison gates I’d have thought a long time before trusting it, when there was a knock on the connecting door.
“Come in,” I said.
I made a final pass with the comb, which didn’t achieve any sudden miracles of rehabilitation or rejuvenation. I gave up and put the comb away and turned to look at her. She was waiting in the doorway. She was back in yesterday’s drab traveling costume, but there were small but important changes. The brown hair was still unbecomingly cut, but it had been brushed very smooth and seemed to have picked up a little healthy gloss. The shoulders seemed to be a bit more square than they had been, and the back more straight. And the bitter mouth seemed to have softened slightly, and had even been treated to a touch of lipstick. She was still no young glamor girl; but then I could hardly be called a young glamor boy, either. She colored a little, selfconsciously, under my regard.
Then she said firmly, “Mr. Helm, could we start over, please? I was totally impossible yesterday, just a manic-depressive bitch. It was… it was the first day, and I simply didn’t know how to behave after years of being told
In the morning I made a phone call from my room, reporting to Mac, whose official day would already have begun, considering the one-hour time differential. When he answered, the sound of his voice let me visualize him at the desk in front of the bright window, apparently indestructible, no grayer now than when I’d first gone to work for him. Sometimes I wondered uneasily what would happen to the organization when time finally caught up with him. Mac said it was too bad we hadn’t been able to take the shotgun specialist alive, and he’d been identified as an independent operator named Victor, George Victor, born Georgio Victoroff, from New York City; and while the woman he lived with off and on had known he was away on a job that promised to be quite remunerative, she had no idea who his employer had been, except that the name Tolliver had been mentioned, but she’d thought that was merely the contact man who’d arranged the contract. No, she didn’t know how the fuck it was spelled. Taliaferro? If it was spelled Taliaferro, wouldn’t they
say
Taliaferro, for Christ’s sake? Mac said for me to stay with the subject; it seemed more than likely there’d be another attempt on her life. I said I could hardly wait, and hung up.
I shaved and put on a clean shirt and looked at my shapeless slacks, but to hell with them. Cross-country travelers are supposed to have sloppy pants. I was running a comb through my hair and reflecting that if the face in the dresser mirror had picked me up at the prison gates I’d have thought a long time before trusting it, when there was a knock on the connecting door.
“Come in,” I said.
I made a final pass with the comb, which didn’t achieve any sudden miracles of rehabilitation or rejuvenation. I gave up and put the comb away and turned to look at her. She was waiting in the doorway. She was back in yesterday’s drab traveling costume, but there were small but important changes. The brown hair was still unbecomingly cut, but it had been brushed very smooth and seemed to have picked up a little healthy gloss. The shoulders seemed to be a bit more square than they had been, and the back more straight. And the bitter mouth seemed to have softened slightly, and had even been treated to a touch of lipstick. She was still no young glamor girl; but then I could hardly be called a young glamor boy, either. She colored a little, selfconsciously, under my regard.
Then she said firmly, “Mr. Helm, could we start over, please? I was totally impossible yesterday, just a manic-depressive bitch. It was… it was the first day, and I simply didn’t know how to behave after years of being told
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