And later, in bed, after he had successfully convinced her that lovemaking would not constitute an invasion of the baby-to-be’s privacy, he listened to her measured breathing and wished he didn’t have to keep this part of his life secret from her. It was for her own good, he knew. She worried enough if he got on a plane, and if she had the slightest idea what he really did on those business trips, it would tear her up, no question about it.
Still, though, there were times when he ached to tell her, if only for the fun of checking out her reaction. He decided that she just wouldn’t believe it, any more than his mail-order stamp customers would believe that Howard Simmons was a Negro.
Four
It was clear hot weather in Joplin, so Dehn took the day off. He generally took off three or four days a week, not counting Saturdays and Sundays. If the weather was good, he liked to spend his time on a golf course. If it wasn’t, he sure as hell didn’t want to go around ringing doorbells. But once or twice a week the weather would be sufficiently unremarkable as to make golf unappealing and doorbell-ringing bearable, and on those days he would walk the streets of whatever city he happened to be in and try to sell some poor clown an encyclopedia.
He was pretty good at it because he got such a kick out of people. He traveled for a good encyclopedia, one of the two or three best, and he didn’t feel at all dishonest about conning people into buying it. When you came right down to it, nobody really needed an encyclopedia. A staggering number of people lived full and rewarding lives without ever being in the same house with an encyclopedia. On the other hand, though, if a guy was going to waste his money on something, he could do a lot worse. It certainly didn’t hurt you to have an encyclopedia in the house. It wasn’t like selling liquor or cigarettes or automobiles. Nobody ever got killed by an encyclopedia.
Because he got a kick out of people, and because he regarded both his work and his customers with the ideal mixture of sincerity and contempt, Dehn was a pretty decent salesman. He averaged close to a sale a week, and with his net on a sale pegged at $168.50 he earned not too much less money than he spent. He had figured that he ought to pay taxes on around ten thou a year. He made up the difference now and then by sending in an order and paying for it himself, generally with a money order drawn under a fictitious name. He had the sets delivered to orphanages and old folks’ homes as anonymous gifts, with the commissions that came back to him from the Chicago office boosting his income to a sufficiently realistic figure.
That day he got out to the golf course early. He hung around the clubhouse until three other loners accumulated, then played eighteen holes with them as a foursome. He hooked most of his tee shots, but his short game was on and he came in with an 82, which was a little better than he averaged on that course.
The weather was just as good that afternoon. He was going to play around again after lunch but changed his mind and put his clubs in the trunk. He drove out Grand Avenue into one of the newer developments and went around punching doorbells. The first fifteen houses he didn’t even get a foot in the door. The sixteenth was a bottle-blonde housewife with her kids in school and her husband at the plant, and after two and a half hours in her bedroom he could have sold her six encyclopedias and a second-hand Edsel, but he didn’t even try. He had done that once and it made him feel too much like a pimp.
He drove back to his motel and read Hydroz to Jerem until it was time to go out for dinner. He ate downtown, caught a movie, stopped at a drugstore for an ice cream soda, and got back to the motel around nine thirty. The telegram was waiting at the desk for him.
Dehn generally worked a new town for three or four weeks, and whenever he moved, he sent the colonel his address. He had mailed a great many postcards to Tarrytown since the last operation. Now, as the clerk passed him the telegram, his heart pounded faster. In his room he read: REGRET TO INFORM YOU AUNT HARRIET DIED PEACEFULLY IN HER SLEEP LAST NIGHT FUNERAL THURSDAY. ROGER.
He left the telegram on the nightstand. It took him twenty minutes to pack his suitcases and settle his bill. Another ten minutes and he was on 66 heading east. “Poor Aunt Hattie,” he said. “I wonder if she mentioned me in her will.”
Five
When Giordano opened his travel agency in Phoenix, a few of his friends told him he ought to change his name. “Because face it, Lou,” one of them said, “there’s this image people have of Italians. Me, I’m in construction, an Italian builder is something the average Joe can understand. But who’s gonna do business with a travel agent named Giordano?”
“Anybody who wants to go to Rome,” Giordano said.
Not many people did, as it happened. Giordano’s Travel Bureau occupied three magnificently appointed rooms in the best office building in downtown Phoenix, and Giordano himself occupied a penthouse at the Wentworth Arms, and everyone knew he had to be grossing better than fifty thousand a year. Everybody was wrong. The travel agency had everything but customers, largely because Giordano spent so much of his time traveling on his own and so little time handling business. He made enough to cover the salaries of the two girls who worked for him. His books — the ones he consulted when he filed his tax return — showed a net profit for the past year of twenty-one thousand dollars. The real books showed a slight loss, but not enough of one to get concerned about.
Giordano was 31, toothpick thin, with straight brown hair and angular features. He went into the Army looking like the 97-pound weakling in the Charles Atlas ads, and he enlisted in the hope that the service would build him up. He did put on a few pounds at first, and the little flesh he carried on his frame turned almost at once to muscle, but he never did stop looking undernourished. By the time he came home from Laos, a bad dose of malaria had him looking as bad as he did when he enlisted, and a hell of a lot older. On top of everything else, somewhere in the course of things his eyesight deteriorated, so now he was not only a shrimp but a shrimp who wore glasses.
He fooled people. Thin frame, thin legs, wrists like a schoolgirl, thick glasses, he fooled people all the time. When the colonel got them all together in Philadelphia for Operation Sharkbait, he planted himself as an invalid accountant with a ton of hospital bills. He got into the loan shark for a couple of thousand, not because the money mattered — the big score was almost forty times that figure — but in order to get a closer look at the loan shark’s operation.
The timing got slightly screwed up on that operation. The shark sent a couple of muscle boys after Giordano before the squad was ready to pull the chain, and Giordano came home one day to find a pair of heavies waiting in his room. He played his part as long as he could, whining and begging and promising to pay, but scaring wasn’t enough. They had orders to rough him up a little. His better judgment told him to take the beating, that they were pros and wouldn’t overdo it, but when they reached for him, his reflexes took over. He flipped one of the goons off a wall and chopped the other one in the Adam’s apple. Then he stood looking down at them and cursed himself quietly for jeopardizing the whole score. If they went back to their boss with the news that the sick, puny accountant was a tiger in disguise, things could suddenly get very sticky.
So he gave them each an extra chop in the neck. After he had made sure that they were both properly dead, he made a phone call, and Murdock and Frank Dehn drove over in a truck and carried the two hoods out in a pair of steamer trunks. They shipped them both express collect to Seattle. Giordano checked the papers for weeks afterward and never saw a line about it