Free The Poisoners by Donald Hamilton Page A

chores for the opposition…”
    “Willi!” I said. “Does he fit the description I just gave you, of the rock-jawed, potato-nosed character in the Ford wagon? Willy, with a ‘y’?”
    “I’m afraid I didn’t monitor what you fed into the recorder. I planned to play it back later. Just a minute.” I heard him find the right section of tape and run it through. “Yes. It could very well be the same man.”
    “My God!” I said. “I should have known nobody could drive that badly without working at it.”
    “Mr. Keim is apparently an expert at handling all kinds of wheeled machinery.”
    “And Annette would have recognized him. He’s hard to miss. That could be our lead. Suppose Willi-Willy was still driving for Nicholas, either with or without Warfel’s knowledge, probably with. Suppose Willy picked up Nicholas at the airport. Say Annette spotted a familiar face and watched to see who joined Willy and was caught doing it. Obviously, she had to be killed. She’d seen old Santa Claus in the flesh and she had enough of the background to know, or at least guess, what she’d seen. So Nicholas took care of the job, arranged for a syndicate cover-up, and had Willy on the spot to see how well it worked out.”
    “That could be the way it happened, certainly. If it should be Nicholas… Well, you know the standing orders. He is on the high-priority list. We’ve lost enough good men—and women—to Nicholas.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “However, there’s a lot of guesswork involved, Eric. Don’t rely too heavily on this one theory.”
    “No, sir,” I said, “but assuming we’re on the right track, the big question now is: just what brings Nicholas back to these parts? It must be something fairly important or his superiors wouldn’t take the risk of returning him to the scene of a job that flopped as badly as that Mexican operation of his. A lot of underlings were caught and they must know that one might put a finger on their boy somehow—as Annette did. Do we know of anything big brewing down here, big enough to call for a man of Nicholas’ talents?”
    “No,” Mac said, “we don’t know, and we don’t really care, Eric. Don’t let your curiosity get the better of you. Remember that intelligence is the business of other departments. Your job is Nicholas, and whoever killed Ruby, if they are not the same person. Take care of that. If you happen to learn anything interesting in the process, by all means pass it along, but don’t let it distract you from your primary mission…”

8
    As a bodyguard, I was a bust. They took out the black man right under my nose.
    I’d been waiting a little ways up the street outside the office when Devlin’s people finally turned him loose with the Blaine girl, the way we’d planned it. I’d watched him say good-bye to her politely and assist her into the first to arrive of the two taxis that had been ordered at their request. He’d taken the second, which came along, with standard L.A. punctuality, some fifteen minutes later. I’d tailed him in the rental sedan Charlie herself had promoted for me—apparently her newborn spirit of cooperation didn’t extend to furnishing me with company wheels—but he’d stayed with the taxi less than half a dozen blocks.
    I didn’t think he’d reached his destination, when the cab swung to the curb. I figured he knew, or suspected, that he was being followed, and was about to play some tricks. I pulled into a parking space half a block away, cut my lights, and waited. It wasn’t a subtle, high-class, invisible job of surveillance, but I had little hope of staying with him in any case, and none at all if I got cute. He knew me by sight; he probably knew I was there; and it was his city, not mine.
    But it had seemed like something that should be tried, both for his sake and for mine. Watching over him, I might be able to save his life, although it wasn’t likely—as a matter of fact, I didn’t really think Warfel would be fool