"Just an angel of good will," I said and saw her eyes flash with anger.
"That's right," she snapped back, tossing her head defiantly. "And everybody seemed happy about it too, so I didn't see a bloody thing wrong with what I was doing."
"John Dawsey's not happy," I said drily. "He's dead."
Her eyes clouded over at once and her lips became a tight line. She got to her feet and came over to me.
"Lord help me, Yank," she said. "I'm not a part of anything like that. I don't know a fair thing about it or why he was done in or who might have done it."
"What did you get for being this angel of glad tidings?" I asked. She colored and looked up at me with sudden tears flooding her eyes, dimming the smokiness of them.
"Stop rubbing it in, damn you," she said. "Yes, they paid me for my trouble. Just a little bit, a few pounds, but every little bit helps. I've been trying to save for a trip to the States. I've a cousin living there."
She shook the tears from her eyes and turned away. I tabled what she'd said about wanting to go to the States for later use. Her hands were nervously clenching and unclenching, and there was a frightened rabbit quality to her now, a sincerity I wanted to believe in. Suddenly she was a little lost girl and very appealing. I caught her eyes looking at me, at the dried and caked blood on my wrists and arms. I'd even forgotten it was there.
"You need some tending to," she said. "You've had a rough go of it."
"I can wait," I said. "What else do you know about the men who contacted you? They never mentioned where they came from or where they lived?"
From the way this thing was shaping up, I didn't expect they had. This was a careful, clever operation. But they might have dropped something I could use. Judy hesitated, seemed to be thinking and then she finally answered.
"They came from a ranch in the outback," she said. "That's all I know. All four of them came from there."
"Four?" I said in surprise. "I only met three. What did they look like?"
Judy's description fitted the three hoods who'd killed Dawsey. The fourth man wasn't one of them. She described him as hawk-faced, with burning eyes "that made you shiver." Her description of the other three was damn good, and I stored that of the fourth in a corner of my mind.
I got up and opened the closet that ran along one wall. There was nothing out of the ordinary in it. A second closet near the bed held more girl stuff, but it also revealed a large collection of scuba diving equipment.
"It's my hobby," Judy Henniker said defensively. "I've been doing it for years, ever since a bloke I once went with got me started."
I examined the stuff. It was all good but all ordinary. There was nothing there to cast doubt on her story and I knew that scuba diving was big in Australia. They had the underwater life for it and the wide, uncrowded stretches of beach and reef. I eyed her and tried to read her face. There was defensiveness in it and fear and honesty. I wanted her working for me if she could be trusted. There was a fourth man, and it was a better than good guess he'd be contacting Judy again. But the body of the Chinese with the fifty thousand in Australian pounds stuck in my mind. He'd been wearing scuba-diving gear too, when they found him. Suddenly the girl came over to me and I saw she had been watching my face as I turned one thought after another over in my mind. Her eyes looked levelly at me.
"Look, I'm scared out of my ruddy mind after what you've told me," she said. "If those blokes killed poor Dawsey to keep him quiet about something, then they might come after me — especially if they knew I'd been talking to you."
"If all you were was a contact girl, then you don't know anything worth killing you for," I answered. "They won't bother you, but I will. Right now you're an accessory to murder. I could forget that. I might even see to it that you get that visit to the States that you want."
Her eyebrows went up. "Could you?" she asked. There was a strange ingenuousness to her, despite her hard knocks background. There was still enough of the little girl in her to be trusting. But it only came out in brief spurts, to be immediately replaced by the wariness of learned distrust.
"And what's all that going to cost me?" she asked, looking sideways at me.
"Cooperation," I said. "I'll give you a phone number where you can reach me. If this fourth man shows, you call me. Or if anything else comes up, or if you think of anything, you call me at this number and leave your name if I'm not there. You play ball with me, Judy, and I'll get you a nice long visa for a visit to the States."
I wrote Major Rothwell's number down on a piece of paper and handed it to her. "Ask for Nick Carter," I said.
"All right," she said. "I'll do it. That's fair enough."
I started to turn but her hands grabbed my shirt.
"Wait," she said. "You're a bloody mess. You can't go about like that. Sit down a minute."
The tension and pace of the night had come to an end, and with it the pain in my ribs and the cuts on my wrists and arms and knees started to cry out to be heard. Judy returned with a basin of warm water and washrags. I took off my shirt and saw her eyes pause at Hugo as I unstrapped the sheath from my arm, and at the gun in the shoulder holster. She bathed the dried blood from my wrists and arms and knees. My ribs were more bruised than cut and there was little to do about them. Then she brought some antiseptic ointment and gently massaged it over the cuts. She had a gentle touch and she concentrated on what she was doing with a little frown creasing her forehead. The silk robe fell open enough for me to see the roundness of her breasts, very high and full.
"I was watching you at the Jug," I said. "You walk a pretty good tightrope."
"You mean staying out of reach of those hamhanded blokes?" she said. "It's not hard, once you get the hang of it. I don't go for anyone's hands on me, not unless I want them there."
"Kind of tough to hold to in that business, isn't it?" I asked quietly.
"Maybe, but I hold to it," she snapped back, a note of stubborn pride in her voice. She finished rubbing in the ointment and let her hands travel across my chest and shoulders for a moment. Her eyes met mine for an instant and then dropped away. She stood up and I reached out and caught her by the shoulder. She didn't turn but stood there, the wash basin in her hands.
"Thanks," I said. "I hope you've told me the truth about everything, Judy. Maybe this will all end up in something better for you."
"Maybe," she said, not looking up. "Maybe."
I left Judy Henniker with a strange mixture of feelings. It had been an alarming night in many ways. They'd silenced John Dawsey, but Burton Comford or the Air Force lieutenant would talk, I promised myself. There was damn little doubt left in my mind that the three «accidents» had actually been that. But most alarming of all was the growing certainty that I was dealing with very thorough, very competent and very dangerous professionals. If my suspicions about the operation were right, it was of itself a devilishly clever piece of work. And when I showed up and a possible crack appeared in the form of John Dawsey, they'd moved swiftly and efficiently to take care of it. And so, as of now, I had a stack of neat theories and suppositions but nothing I could take to anyone to convince them that the Australians were not to blame for the tragedies. The strains on the South Pacific Defense Alliance were continuing to deepen and I had nothing to change that.
It was dawn when I reached the cottage. I fell asleep hoping that Judy was no more involved than she'd said. I always hated to see something essentially good go downhill.
III
My bruised, battered body needed sleep, and it drank up the hours the way parched soil drinks up the rain. I don't usually dream, but I had brief moments of seeing molten rivers of copper cascading after me as I ran down an endless passage. By mid-morning I forced myself to get up. Aching plenty and steeling myself against the pain, I limbered up my stiffened muscles until I could at least move them freely. If I wasn't awake when I reached Major Rothwell's office, Mona took care of that. In a dress of shimmering light green jersey, with her red hair, she was as gorgeous as a sunburst. Her breasts thrust forward, a proclamation of their own. The Major was stuffing some papers in a brief case and paused to greet me effusively.