Of course, there were written reports, too. Burris had handed Malone a
sheaf of them--copies of the New York police reports to Burris
himself--and Malone, wanting some time to look through them, had taken a
train to New York instead of a plane. Besides, the new planes still made
him slightly nervous, though he could ride one when he had to. If jet
engines had been good enough for the last generation, he thought, they
were certainly good enough for him.
But avoidance of the new planes was all the good the train trip did him.
The reports contained thousands of words, none of which was either new
or, apparently, significant to Malone. Burris, he considered, had given
him everything necessary for the job.
Except, of course, a way to make sense out of the whole thing. He
considered robot-controlled Cadillacs. What good were they? They might
make it easier for the average driver, of course but that was no reason
to cover up for them, hitting policemen over the head and smashing cars
and driving a hundred and ten miles an hour on the West Side Highway.
All the same, it was the only explanation Malone had, and he cherished
it deeply. He put the papers back in his brief case when the train
pulled into Penn Station, handed his suitcases to a redcap and punched
the 'cap's buttons for the waiting room. Now, he thought as he strolled
slowly along behind the robot, there was an invention that made sense.
And nobody had to get killed for it, or hit over the head or smashed up,
had they?
So what was all this nonsense about red robot-controlled Cadillacs?
Driving these unwelcome reflections from his mind, he paused to light a
cigarette. He had barely taken the first puff when a familiar voice
said: "Hey, buddy--hold the light, will you?"
Malone looked up, blinked and grinned happily. "Boyd!" he said. "What
are you doing here? I haven't seen you since--"
"Sure haven't," Boyd said. "I've been out west on a couple of cases.
Must be a year since we worked together."
"Just about," Malone said. "But what are you doing in New York?
Vacationing?"
"Not exactly," Boyd said. "The chief called it sort of a vacation,
but--"
"Oh," Malone said. "You're working with me."
Boyd nodded. "The chief sent me up. When I got back from the west, he
suddenly decided you might need a good assistant, so I took the plane
down, and got here ahead of you."
"Great," Malone said. "But I want to warn you about the vacation--"
"Never mind," Boyd said, just a shade sadly. "I know. It isn't." He
seemed deep in thought, as if he were deciding whether or not to get rid
of Anne Boleyn. It was, Malone thought, an unusually apt simile. Boyd,
six feet tall and weighing about two hundred and twenty-five pounds, had
a large square face and a broad-beamed figure that might have made him a
dead ringer for Henry VIII of England even without his Henry-like fringe
of beard and his mustache. With them--thanks to the recent FBI rule that
agents could wear "facial hair, at the discretion of the director or
such board as he may appoint"--the resemblance to the Tudor monarch was
uncanny.
But--like his famous double--Boyd didn't stay sad for long. "I thought
I'd meet you at the station," he said, cheering up, "and maybe talk over
old times for a while, on the way to the hotel, anyhow. So long as there
wasn't anything else to do."
"Sure," Malone said. "It's good to see you again. And when did you get
pulled out of the Frisco office?"
Boyd grimaced. "You know," he said, "I had a good thing going for me out
there. Agent-in-Charge of the entire office. But right after that job we
did together--the Queen Elizabeth affair--Burris decided I was too good
a man to waste my fragrance on the desert air. Or whatever it is. So he
recalled me, assigned me from the home office, and I've been on one case
after another ever since."
"You're a home office agent now?" Malone said.
"I'm a Roving Reporter," Boyd said, and struck a pose. "I'm a General
Trouble-shooter and a Mr. Fix-It. Just like you, Hero."
"Thanks," Malone said. "How about the local office here? Seen the boys
yet?"
Boyd shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "I was waiting for you to show
up. But I did manage hotel rooms with a connecting bath over at the
Statler-Hilton Hotel. Nice place. You'll like it, Ken."
"I'll love it," Malone said. "Especially that connecting bath. It would
have been terrible to have an unconnecting bath. Sort of distracting."
"O.K.," Boyd said. "O.K. You know what I mean." He stared down at
Malone's hand. "You know you've still got your lighter on?" he added.
Malone looked down at it and shut it off. "You asked me to hold it," he
said.
"I didn't mean indefinitely," Boyd said. "Anyhow, how about grabbing a
cab and heading on down to the hotel to get your stuff away, before we
check in at Sixty-ninth Street?"
"Good idea," Malone said. "And besides, I could do with a clean shirt.
Not to mention a bath."
"Trains get worse and worse," Boyd said, absently.
* * * * *
Malone punched the redcap's buttons again, and he and Boyd followed it
through the crowded station to the taxi stand. The robot piled the
suitcases into the cab, and somehow Malone and Boyd found room for
themselves.
"Statler-Hilton Hotel," Boyd said grandly.
The driver swung around to stare at them, blinked, and finally said:
"O.K., Mac. You said it." He started with a terrific grinding of gears,
drove out of the Penn Station arch and went two blocks.
"Here you are, Mac," he said, stopping the cab.
Malone stared at Boyd with a reproachful expression.
"So how was I to know?" Boyd said. "I didn't know. If I'd known it was
so close, we could've walked."
"And saved half a buck," Malone said. "But don't let it bother you--this
is expense account money."
"That's right," Boyd said. He beamed and tipped the driver heavily. The
cab drove off and Malone hailed the doorman, who equipped them with a
robot bellhop and sent them upstairs to their rooms.
Three-quarters of an hour later, Boyd and Malone were in the offices of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on East Sixty-ninth Street. There,
they picked up a lot of nice, new, shiny facts. It was unfortunate, if
not particularly surprising, that the facts did not seem to make any
sense.
In the first place, only red 1972 Cadillacs seemed to be involved.
Anybody who owned such a car was likely to find it missing at any time;
there had been a lot of thefts reported, including some that hadn't had
time to get into Burris' reports. New Jersey now claimed two victims,
and New York had three of its own.
And all the cars weren't turning up in New York, by any means. Some of
the New York cars had turned up in New Jersey. Some had turned up in
Connecticut--including one of the New Jersey cars. So far, there had
been neither thefts nor discoveries from Pennsylvania, but Malone
couldn't see why.
There was absolutely no pattern that he, Boyd, or anyone else could
find. The list of thefts and recoveries had been fed into an electronic
calculator, which had neatly regurgitated them without being in the
least helpful. It had remarked that the square of seven was forty-nine,
but this was traced to a defect in the mechanism.
Whoever was borrowing the red Caddies exhibited a peculiar combination
of burglarious genius and what looked to Malone like outright idiocy.
This was plainly impossible.
Unfortunately, it had happened.
Locking the car doors didn't do a bit of good. The thief or thieves got
in without so much as scratching the lock. This, obviously, proved that
the criminal was either an extremely good lock-pick or knew where to get
duplicate keys.
However, the ignition was invariably shorted across.
This proved neatly that the criminal was not a very good lock-pick, and
did not know where to get duplicate keys.
Query: why work so hard on the doors, and not work at all on the
ignition?
That was the first place. The second place was just what had been
bothering Malone all along. There didn't seem to be any purpose to the
car thefts. They hadn't been sold, or used as getaway cars. True,
teenage delinquents sometimes stole cars just to use them joyriding, or
as some sort of prank.
But a car or two every night? How many joyrides can one gang take?
Malone thought. And how long does it take to get tired of the same
prank?
And why, Malone asked himself wearily for what was beginning to feel
like the ten thousandth time, why only red Cadillacs?
Burris, he told himself, must have been right all along. The red
Cadillacs were only a smoke screen for something else. Perhaps it was
the robot car, perhaps not--but whatever it was, Burris' general answer
was the only one that made any sense at all.
That should have been a comforting thought, Malone reflected. Somehow,
though it wasn't.
After they'd finished with the files and personnel at Sixty-ninth
Street, Malone and Boyd started downtown on what turned out to be a sort
of unguided tour of the New York Police Department. They spoke to some
of the eyewitnesses, and ended up in Centre Street asking a lot of
reasonably useless questions in the Motor Vehicle Bureau. In general,
they spent nearly six hours on the Affair of the Self-Propelled
Cadillac, picking up a whole bundle of facts. Some of the facts they had
already known. Some were new, but unhelpful.
Somehow, nobody felt much like going out for a night on the town.
Instead, both agents climbed wearily into bed thinking morose and
disillusioned thoughts.
And, after that, a week passed. It was filled with ennui.
Only one thing became clear. In spite of the almost identical _modus
operandi_, used in all the car thefts, they were obviously the work of a
gang rather than a single person. This required the assumption that
there was not one insane man at work, but a crew of them, all
identically unbalanced.
"But the jobs are just too scattered to be the work of one man," Malone
said. "To steal a car in Connecticut and drive it to the Bronx, and then
steal another car in Westfield, New Jersey fifteen minutes later takes
more than talent. It takes an outright for-sure magician."
This conclusion, while interesting, was not really helpful. The fact was
that Malone needed more clues--or, anyhow, more facts--before he could
do anything at all. And there just weren't any new facts around. He
spent the week wandering morosely from one place to another, sometimes
accompanied by Thomas Boyd and sometimes all alone. Time, he knew, was
ticking by at its usual rate. But there wasn't a thing he could do about
it.
He did try to relax and have some fun, as Burris had suggested. But he
didn't seem to be able to get his mind off the case.
Boyd, after the first little while, had no such trouble. He entered the
social life of the city with a whoop of joy and disappeared from sight.
That was fine for Boyd, Malone reflected, but it did leave Malone
himself just a little bit at loose ends.
Not that he begrudged Boyd his fun. It was nice that one of them was
enjoying himself, anyway.
It was just that Malone was beginning to get fidgety. He needed to be
doing something--even if it were only taking a walk.
So he took a walk, and ended up, to his own surprise, downtown near
Greenwich Village.
And then he'd been bopped on the head.