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Rat Race

<h2>CHAPTER 27</h2> "What's the big idea?" I demanded. "I thought I was in the clear." Harcourt looked somewhat embarrassed. "Perhaps I oughtn't to tell you this, Mr. Tompkins," he explained, "but like you said, you're in the clear with the Bureau. We've checked and double-checked and any way we slice it, you're still okay. Maybe you're Tompkins with a lapse of memory, maybe this yarn of yours about Jacklin is on the level, but we're sure of you." "Then why all this interest in me?" I asked. "You've been swell with me personally, but it's getting on my nerves having you pop up all the time. Though I must say I was relieved when you showed up today. Mrs. Rutherford—" He grinned. "Red heads spell trouble anywhere, any time," he observed. "No, it's this Von Bieberstein we're gunning for. Mr. Lamb at the Bureau has a notion that Von Bieberstein may have some connection with you that you don't know about. He might be using your office as a post-box or be somebody that you know as someone else. It sounds screwy, I know, but this Von Bieberstein is a slick baby. For all I know, he might even be a woman." I glanced inquiringly in the direction of Virginia's apartment. "Not for my money," he said. "We've checked her, too. And it isn't that Tennessee secretary of yours, either. There's a girl for you. We've got her biog right back to the Knoxville doc that delivered her. But the Bureau doesn't think it's an accident that you turned up in the middle of this case, so I've been told off to check on all your contacts. Seems mighty funny, you a millionaire and me an average guy even if Arthurjean still thinks I got a wife in Brooklyn, but it's the war, I guess." "'Says every moron, There's a war on!'" I quoted. I scratched my head. "If only I could remember that blank spot, I might be able to help you." Harcourt studied his finger-nails attentively. "We're taking care of your office contacts, of course, and we have a couple of men working up in Bedford Hills. But New York's the hell of a big town and almost anything could happen to you outside of your office and your clubs. Got any ideas?" "What sort?" "Well, there's always women but I guess we've carried that line as far as it will take us. We've checked the doctors and the dentists and the bars and the nightclubs. How about astrologers, say? Hitler made use of them in Germany. He might use 'em over here, though we've screened 'em all since before Pearl Harbor." I laughed. "I doubt that a man like Tompkins would use astrology," I told him. Harcourt shook his head. "That's where you'd be wrong. You'd be surprised how many big Wall Street operators go for that guff." "It doesn't register," I replied, "but I'll phone the office and see if Miss Briggs knows." When I made the connection, Arthurjean informed me that the phone had been ringing all morning and when would I be in. Vail, she reported, was still in Hartford with a bad case of Emily Post. I asked her about astrologers and she said she didn't know but would find out. In a little while she reported that Phil Cone thought I'd once gone to see that Ernestina Clump that used to advise the Morgan partners. "Okay," I told her. "I'll be in about four this afternoon and will handle any calls or visitors then." I turned to Harcourt. "It doesn't sound like much but Phil Cone thinks I once consulted Ernestina Clump. Want me to make an appointment?" He nodded, so I looked up her number and dialed the office in the Chrysler Building where Miss Clump kept track of the stars in their courses and the millionaires in their jitters. Arranging for an immediate appointment through the very, very well-bred secretarial voice that stiff-armed me was not easy until I said that I would pay double-fees. Then she believed it might be arranged. "That will be two thousand dollars," she imparted, "and you must be here at one o'clock precisely." As we taxied downtown together, Harcourt was uncommunicative, except for the remark that it was right handy to Grand Central and would be no trick to stop off before catching trains. Miss Clump, as it turned out, was a motherly woman whose wrinkled cheeks and plump hands suggested greater familiarity with the cook-stove than with the planets. Her office showed the most refined kind of charlatanry—everything quite solid and in good taste, with no taint of the Zodiac. At a guess, about ten thousand dollar's worth of furnishings was involved and I imagined that the annual rental might run as high as six thousand. "Well, Mr. Tompkins," Miss Clump remarked in a pleasant, homey voice with a trace of Mid-Western flatness, "I wondered when you would be in to see me again. The stars being mean to you? Or is it another woman?" "Let's see," I stalled, "when was the last time I consulted you?" She cackled. "Young man, you've been comin' to see me, off and on, the last ten years. Last time was in March. That was about the red-head. Virgo in the House of Scorpio you called it." I nodded. "That would be it, I guess. She's more scorpion than virgin." She patted my hand comfortingly across the table. "They all are," she said, "unless they're really in love. Then even the stars can't stop 'em. What's the matter now?" "Police," I said. "Loss of memory. Women and money are all right but I'm being followed and I've drawn sort of blank for the whole month of March. Can you take a look at my horoscope and tell me what the stars were doing to me then?" She stared at me shrewdly. "Police," she remarked. "Land's sakes, I don't want trouble with the police. Young man, you—" I hastened to interrupt her. "That's only a figure of speech. I'm in trouble with the government. Just tell me what I was doing in March and give me a hint of what lies ahead next month." She examined the chart carefully and made a few pencilled notes on a scratch-pad. Then she looked up at me in bewilderment. "This doesn't make much sense, Mr. Tompkins," she told me, "but here it is. So far as I can make out, in March you went on a long trip and had some kind of bad accident. There's Neptune and Saturn in conjunction under Aries and Venus in opposition. That could mean more trouble with that girl, I s'pose. Then early in April you came under a new sign—money it looks like, lots, of it, and Venus is right for you. It looks like happiness. Now for the future, there's something I don't understand. There's a sort of jumble—an accident mebbe—right ahead of you and then some kind of crisis. You're going to live quite happy with a woman for a while—and, well, that's all I can see, except—" she paused. I raised my eyebrows. "Except what?" I asked. "I want the truth." She lowered her head. "It might be a bad illness," she said, "but it's the combination I generally call a death—somebody else's death, that is. You aren't planning to murder anybody, are you?" I leaned back in my chair and laughed heartily. "Good Lord, no! Miss Clump. And even if I did I have money enough to hire somebody to do it for me—like the government. Here's a check for you," I added. "Two thousand, I think you said." "Be careful," she told me in a low voice, almost in a whisper. "Be very, very careful. I don't like to see that combination in the stars. It might mean bad trouble." I rejoined Harcourt in the downstairs bar of the Vanderbilt Hotel and gave him a quick account of Miss Clump's forecast. "That looks pretty hot," he allowed, "except that it sounds like anybody. The usual line is money coming in, successful trouble, and just call again sometime. Anyhow, the Bureau doesn't handle murder and you don't look like a killer to me, even though you've got yourself back in good shape, physically, I mean." "She sounded pretty much in earnest," I told him, "but I'm damned if I know where I'd begin if I went in for a career of killing." "So you think she's on the level?" he asked. "It's all hooey to me." I considered carefully before I answered him. "The astrologers claim," I told him, "that they practice an exact science. They have won law-suits based on that claim and have won exemption from the old statutes against gypsies and fortune tellers. Miss Clump is a good showwoman. Her fees are high as the Chrysler Building and her office costs plenty. No stuffed owls or dried bats or any junk that would make a businessman think he was going slumming. When she talked to me she seemed honestly surprised at what she claimed she saw in the stars and she certainly sounded entirely in earnest when she warned me. My guess is that she's on the level and has nothing to do with Von Bieberstein, if there is such a person." Harcourt sipped his Coca-Cola, being on duty and hence not drinking, in official silence. "Yeah," he agreed at last. "Could be, though we'll have to check her and her secretary and her clients, right up to but not including Democratic Senators and Cabinet officers." "How about barbershops?" I asked him. "Or drugstores? I've always thought they'd make the best intelligence centers in America. You can't keep track of everybody who buys a dime's worth of aspirin or a package of Kleenex. What's to prevent the cigar counter at any hotel or drug store being the place where two Nazi agents meet. The clerks wouldn't know them and in a town like this nobody would even notice them." The Special Agent finished his drink and banged the glass down on the table. "That's just the trouble with this town," he announced. "There's so many services here that everybody uses you can't possibly check them. Well, you run on down to your office and see if you can't find out something else. Thanks for the lift on Miss Clump. Now I've got to call headquarters and get a special detail to go to work on her." "You don't seriously think that she knows anything about Von Bieberstein, do you?" I asked. He smiled ruefully. "No, I don't, but the way you describe her, she's a sort of nice, old-fashioned woman, and yet she drags down a thousand bucks for fifteen minutes of astral horse-feathers in this tough burg. There's something screwy about a set-up like that. Now I've seen the files on most of the big-time astrologers that operated here—Evangeline Adams and Myra Kingsley were tops in their time—and there's not one of them can touch this Clump woman for money. I don't forget that the first woman I ever arrested—it was before I joined the Bureau and I was on the homicide detail in Raleigh—was just as sweet and gentle as your Aunt Minnie. All she'd done was poison her husband and her two children so's to be free to sleep with her brother-in-law. So it's going to be plenty work for the Bureau to check this one, before we're sure she's okay." I told him that I didn't enjoy being put in the position of an F.B.I. Typhoid Mary, who automatically exposed his acquaintances to immediate visitations of G-men. "Shucks! Mr. Tompkins," he assured me, "they'll never know we're around. We got a pretty smooth outfit now and we have ways of checking you never dreamed of. When we go to work, we do a neat job and if we don't learn anything, well, that's that—but we don't bother folks while were doing it." "All right," I agreed. "I'll be down at the office until the morning." <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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