Toad turned and looked at Rita, who was staring at the back of Elizabeth Thorn’s head and frowning.
Toad Tarkington gazed out the window at the empty parked cars as he considered it. “Why tonight? When I’m out with Rita?”
“If I had walked up to you when you were alone, you would have brushed me off.”
That comment irritated him. “Pretty damn sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
Farrell didn’t reply.
Toad again glanced over his shoulder at his wife, who met his eyes. She was going to be full of questions as soon as they were alone. Now she opened her door and stepped out of the car. She walked around to the front of the vehicle where she could watch the other woman’s face.
“This better be good,” Toad said. “Let’s hear it.”
It took less than sixty seconds. Toad made her repeat it and asked several questions, none of which Elizabeth Thorn answered. From her coat pocket she took a plain white unsealed envelope, which she passed to Toad. He opened it. It contained a photo and a negative. The photo was a three-by-five snap of a middle-aged white man seated at a table, apparently at an outdoor restaurant, reading a newspaper. There was a plate on the table. His face registered just a trace of a frown.
“Want to tell me who this is?”
“You find out.”
“Any hints?”
“CIA. You’ll talk to Grafton?”
“Maybe, if you’ll help me with the caption.” He wiggled the photograph. “Like when and where.”
“Jake Grafton can figure it out. I have a great deal of faith in him.”
“But not much in me.” Toad sighed. “How about this: just before he took his first — and last — bite of eggs Benedict injected full of arsenic trioxide by beautiful spy Hannah Mermelstein, Special Agent Sixty-Nine realized that the Sauce Hollandaise had a pinch too much salt?”
Her face showed no reaction whatever.
Toad Tarkington shrugged. He put the photo back in the envelope and placed the envelope in an inside jacket pocket. “So how did you know Rita and I were coming to this play tonight?”
Judith Farrell opened the car door and stepped out. “Thank you for your time, Robert.” She closed the door and walked away. Toad watched her go as Rita came around the car and climbed into the front passenger seat.
“Who is she?”
“Mossad.” The Israeli intelligence service.
“You were in love with her once, weren’t you?”
Trust a woman to glom onto that angle. Toad sighed and pulled the transmission lever into reverse.
When the car was out on the street, Rita asked, “When did you know her?”
“Five years ago. In the Med.”
“Her real name isn’t Elizabeth Thorn, is it?”
“No. She got out that name right up front, so I wouldn’t call her anything else.”
Rita waited for him to tell her more, but when it became obvious he wasn’t going to, she remarked, “She’s very pretty.”
Toad merely grunted.
“Are you going to tell me what she said?”
“No.”
Rita seemed to accept that with good grace. And she had gotten out of the car without being asked. She was a player. Toad told himself, a class act, every inch the professional Judith Farrell was. Perhaps he should have been nicer to Farrell.
This thought was still tripping across the synapses when Rita remarked, “I think you’re still in love with her. Not like you love me, but you care for her a lot. That was obvious to her, too. If you didn’t care you would have been nic—”
“Shut up!” Toad snarled.
“Listen, husband of mine. In three years of marriage neither one of us has told the other to shut up. I don’t think—”
“I’m sorry. I retract that.”
“I feel like I’m trapped in a soap opera,” Rita said. After a pause she added, “And I don’t like it.”
No fool, Toad Tarkington decided to let her have the last word.
Later, as they waited for a traffic light, Rita asked in a normal tone of voice, “So what does Elizabeth Thorn do for the Mossad?”
Toad considered before answering. He decided maybe the truth was best. “Five years ago she was running a hit squad. Maybe she still is. She’s a professional killer. An assassin.”
Toad awoke at dawn on Saturday and took his clothes into the kitchen to dress so he wouldn’t wake Rita. After enough coffee had dripped through to make a cup, he poured himself some and went out into the backyard of the little tract home he and Rita had purchased last year near Andrews Air Force Base. The morning was expectant, still, with the diffused sunlight hinting of the heat to come in a few hours. Not even the sound of jet engines of planes from the base. Too early yet. Someone somewhere was burning last fall’s leaves, even though it was against the law, and the faint smell seemed to make the coffee more pungent.
Judith Farrell. Here.
Although he would never admit it to Rita, seeing Judith had been a jolt. And Rita knew anyway. Blast women! All that crap about body language and nonverbal speech that they expected men to sweat bullets acquiring was just the latest nasty turn in the eternal war between the sexes. And if by some miracle you got it they would think of something else you needed to know to meet tomorrow’s sensitivity standards. If you suffered from the curse of the Y chromosome. Aagh!
He sat sipping coffee and pondering the male dilemma.
After a bit his mind turned to Judith Farrell’s message for Jake Grafton. Probably Farrell hadn’t tried to contact him when he was home alone because even he and Rita never knew when that would be. This was his first free Saturday this month. That crap about brushing her off… Well, it was true, he would have.
Someone told Farrell — told the Mossad — that he and Rita had tickets to that play last night. Who?
He tried to recall just when and to whom at the office he might have mentioned that he and Rita were going last night. It was hazy, but he seemed to recall that the play had been discussed several times by different people, and he may have said he had tickets.
He purchased the tickets over a month ago by calling a commercial ticket outlet and ordering them. And there was no telling to whom Rita might have mentioned the planned evening out. It was certainly no secret.
So that was a dead end. Frustrated, he went inside and poured himself another cup of coffee.
He got out the envelope and looked again at the photo. A very ordinary photo of a very ordinary man. He held the negative up to the light. It was the negative of the photo, apparently. Given to prove the genuineness of the photo. Okay, so what was there about the photograph that made it significant? Toad studied it at a distance of twelve inches. The guy’s sitting in front of a restaurant. Where? No way to tell. When? Nothing there either.
Well, Jake Grafton would know what to do with it. Grafton always knew how to handle hot potatoes, a quality that Toad had long ago concluded was instinctive. The guy could be tossed blindfolded into a snake pit and still avoid the poisonous ones.
The water began running in the bathroom. Rita must be taking a shower. He replaced the photo and negative in the envelope and put it into his shirt pocket.
Toad was outside trimming weeds along the fence when Rita appeared in the door wearing a flight suit, her hair braided into a bun that was pinned to the back of her head. “I’m leaving, Toad.”
He paused and leaned on the fence. “Back for supper?”
“Yes. Are you going to call Admiral Grafton?”
“I dunno. Haven’t decided.”
“You are, then.”
Toad resumed the chore of cutting weeds, trying not to let his temper show.
Rita laughed. He tossed the hedge shears down and turned his back on her.
In a few seconds she appeared in front of him. “I love you, Toad-man.”