Hawk said: "Are you thinking what I'm thinking, N3? Something real nutty — like make-believe and pretend and children's games?"
Before he answered, Nick Carter glanced again at the bookshelves containing the mysteries, the spy stories, the stacked assortment of comic books of like tenoi His keen eyes flicked to a little taboret where stood two bottles of scotch and a soda siphon. The seals on the whiskey were intact, the siphon was full.
Hawk followed his glance. "Bennett didn't 6moke or drink."
Finally Killmaster said: "It would make it nice and simple, sir. To decide that Bennett is just a nut who read too many spy stories, saw too much television. A juvenile mentality whose idea of glory was to earn his Junior G-Man's badge. I'll admit a lot of things point that way — but on the other hand a lot of things don't. Kids, even grown-up kids, don't usually take a hatchet to their wives."
"He's a psycho," Hawk grumbled. "A schizo. Split personality. He was a psycho, a nut, all his life. But he kept it pretty well concealed. Then suddenly something triggered him into a psychotic state, and he axed his wife."
Nick knew that his boss was thinking aloud and expecting Killmaster to play the role of devil's advocate. It was a technique they often used on a knotty problem.
"I think you're about half right," he said now. "But only half. You're oversimplifying it, sir. It's all right to say that Bennett was a childish romantic who liked to play at being a spy — but the FBI had turned up evidence that he could have been a real spy. Don't forget the total recall and the camera mind! The man's a walking record of everything important that happened in Washington in the past thirty years."
Hawk grunted and tore the unoffending wrapper from a fresh cigar. "Then why the hell didn't the Kremlin, if it was the Kremlin, ever try to contact him? Why didn't they pay him? It just doesn't make sense that they would plant a guy like Bennett and then not try to milk him over the years. Unless…"
Nick had replaced the trenchcoat and hat in the metal cabinet. He crossed the room and stood looking at a fake fireplace, of imitation red brick, that had been installed in one wall. Behind a cheap brass screen there was a small electric heater with an extension cord leading to a wall socket. Nick picked up the cord and plugged it in. The heater began to glow red.
Before the fireplace was a shabby armchair with torn vinyl upholstery. Nick Carter sank into the chair and extended his long muscular legs to the make-believe flame. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine himself as Raymond Lee Bennett. A dreary little man with a poor physique, not much mouse-colored hair, a bad case of acne scarring an ugly horse face. Very poor equipment with which to face the world. A world in which all the goodies went to the beautiful people, to the brilliant and the clever and the moneyed people. Nick, his eyes still closed, struggling to simulate and attune himself to the pinkish atomic armature underlying the brain of Raymond Lee Bennett — just one brain in billions — began gradually to evolve a hazy picture in his own mind. He could almost savor, nearly taste, the raw juices of defeat. Of frustration and a terrible wanting. A crying out that would not be answered. A soul wanting out of the skimpy body and begging rescue from the ravaged face. A have-not yearning to have. A fuzzy mind, yet conscious of the passage of time and with a horrible awareness of what was being missed. A poor puerile child locked away from the sweets of life.
Such a man — if man was the word — could only have found relief, surcease, in fantasy. Nick opened his eyes and stared at the glowing electric heater. For a moment he became Bennett sitting there, staring at the leaping flames of an apple wood fire, smoking a Sherlock Holmes pipe — no tobacco — and about to have a drink of expensive scotch — the seals on the bottle unbroken. Time was of the essence. Just time for a pipe and a drink before donning the trenchcoat and the snapbrim hat, pocketing the revolver, and going out in search of adventure. Because tonight the game was afoot, great events were in the making, with villains to slay and governments to save and maidens to rescue. Ah, the girls! The fair maidens. All naked and lovely. Busty and silver-thighed. How they smothered a man in their sweet-smelling flesh, clamoring for it, moaning for it, all of them sick with lust.
Fantasy. The secret room and the props and the dreams and time slipping away and the dreaming — the dreaming the dreaming…
Nick sat bolt upright in the chair. "I'll bet that Bennett is impotent!"
Hawk had not moved from his place in the shadows. He looked just the same, and for a moment Nick found that strange; then he knew that only a few seconds had elapsed. His own dreaming had seemed much longer. Now Hawk said: "You bet what?"
Nick left the chair and ran a finger through the thick dust on a barren mantel over the fake fireplace. "That our boy is impotent! He couldn't make it in bed. At least not in the normal way. That's the reason for the whips and the shoes and the girdles and all that stuff. The reason for the pornography. Bennett can't function sexually without some sort of artificial stimuli — maybe he has to be whipped first."
Hawk stared at his Number One boy with an odd mixture of awe and disgust. He moved closer, out of the shadows. "Spare me the Krafft-Ebing bit, for Pete's sake. I didn't bring you down here to look into Bennett's sex life, or lack of it, and I don't care much about his perversions, if any. I thought you might get some ideas…"
"I have," Nick interrupted. "A hell of a lot of them. More than I can use just at the moment. It will take time to sort them out — if it can be done at all. But if Bennett was a spy — and I'm inclined to think he was, in a dilettante sort of way at least — then I think we can expect another woman to turn up in the picture. Sooner or later, when and if we find Bennett, there will be a woman. And she won't be old and fat and ugly! In short, sir, Bennett has stopped depending on fantasy and gone after the real thing. He's suddenly realized that he's fifty-five, retired, and doesn't have too much time left. That's why he killed his wife! She reminded him of too much — of what he no doubt considers a wasted thirty years. And she was in the way! He couldn't just go off and leave her alive. That way he would never really be rid of her. She had to die. He had to kill her. It was Bennett's way of making a clean break, of making positive that he couldn't chicken out and come back home. Back to dreaming instead of action."
Killmaster put a cigarette in his mouth and snapped his lighter. "In a way you have to hand it to the little man — it took a lot of guts, of a sort, to do what he did."
Hawk scratched at the slight graying stubble on his chin. "You've lost me, son. I hope to God you know what you're talking about."
"So do I. The thing is — we'll never really know until we catch Bennett."
"You seen all you want to here?"
"One thing, sir." Nick pointed to the mantel. Hawk came to peer at the spot indicated. There was a thick patina of dust over the entire mantel except for an oval mark some three inches long and two inches wide.
"Something has been taken from this mantel recently," Nick said. "Probably it was the only thing kept on the mantel, and I'd guess that Bennett took it with him, but we'd better check it. Anything on it from the FBI?"
Again Hawk consulted the typed flimsy. "No. They don't even mention the mantel. Or the mark in the dust. They overlooked it, I guess."
Nick sighed and flicked ashes from his cigarette. "I'd like to know what it was. Probably it was the only thing he took from this room — it must have been important."
They left the hidden room. Hawk pushed the pseudocement wall back into place. Going up the steep basement stairs he said, "We'll probably never know unless we catch Bennett. His wife sure isn't going to tell us." The old man sounded very gloomy.