around to stare at them, blinked, and finally said,"Okay, Mac. You said it." He started with a terrific grinding ofgears, 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 look. If I'd known it was so close we could've walked."
"And saved half a buck," Malone said. "But don't let it botheryou--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 New Yorker doorman, whoequipped them with a robot bellhop and sent them upstairs to theirrooms.
Three-quarters of an hour later, Boyd and Malone were in the officesof the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on East 69th Street. Therethey picked up a lot of nice, new, shiny facts. It was unfortunate, ifnot particularly surprising, that the facts did not seem to make anysense.
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 anytime; there had been a lot of thefts reported, including some thathadn't had time to get into Burris' reports. New Jersey now claimedtwo victims, and New York had three of its own.
And all the cars weren't turning up in New York, by any means. Some ofthe New York cars had turned up in New Jersey. Some had turned up inConnecticut--including one of the New Jersey cars. So far, there hadbeen neither thefts nor discoveries in Pennsylvania, but Malonecouldn't see why.
There was absolutely no pattern that he, Boyd, or anyone else couldfind. The list of thefts and recoveries had been fed into anelectronic calculator, which had neatly regurgitated them withoutbeing in the least helpful. It had remarked that the square of sevenwas forty-nine, but this was traced to a defect in the mechanism.
Whoever was borrowing the red Caddies exhibited a peculiar combinationof 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 provedthat the criminal was either an extremely good lock-pick or else knewwhere 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 theignition?
That was the first place. The second place was just what had beenbothering Malone all along. There didn't seem to be any purpose to thecar thefts. They hadn't been sold, or used as getaway cars. True,teenage delinquents sometimes stole cars just to use them joy-riding,or as some sort of prank.
But a car or two every night? How many joy-rides can one gang take?Malone thought. And how long does it take to get tired of the sameprank?
And why, Malone asked himself wearily for what was beginning to feellike the ten thousandth time, why only red Cadillacs?
Burris, he told himself, must have been right all along. The redCadillacs were only a smoke screen for something else. Perhaps it wasthe robot car, perhaps not; but whatever it was, Burris' generalanswer 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 69th Street,Malone and Boyd started downtown on what turned out to be a sort ofunguided tour of the New York Police Department. They spoke to some ofthe eyewitnesses, and ended up in Centre Street asking a lot ofreasonably useless questions in the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Ingeneral, they spent nearly six hours on the Affair of theSelf-Propelled Cadillac, picking up a whole bundle of facts. Some ofthe 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 anddisillusioned thoughts.
And, after that, a week passed. It was filled with ennui.
Only one new thing became clear. In spite of the almost identicalmodus operandi used in all the car thefts, they were obviously thework of a gang rather than a single person. This required theassumption that there was not one insane man at work, but a crew ofthem, 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 minuteslater takes more than talent. It takes an outright for-sure magician."
This conclusion, while interesting, was not really helpful. The factwas that Malone needed more clues--or, anyhow, more facts--before hecould do anything at all. And there just weren't any new facts around.He spent the week wandering morosely from one place to anothersometimes accompanied by Thomas Boyd and sometimes all alone. Time, heknew, was ticking by at its usual rate. But there wasn't a thing hecould do about it.
He did try to relax and have some fun, as Burris had suggested. But hedidn't seem to be able to get his mind off the case.
Boyd, after the first little while, had no such trouble. He enteredthe social life of the city with a whoop of joy and disappeared fromsight. That was fine for Boyd, Malone reflected, but it did leaveMalone himself just a little bit at loose ends.
Not that he begrudged Boyd his fun. It was nice that one of them wasenjoying himself, anyway.
It was just that Malone was beginning to get fidgety. He needed to bedoing something--even if it was only taking a walk.
So he took a walk and ended up, to his own surprise, downtown nearGreenwich Village.
And then he'd been bopped on the head.
3
The patrol car pulled up in front of St. Vincent's Hospital, and oneof the cops helped Malone into the emergency receiving room. He didn'tfeel as bad as he had a few minutes before. The motion of the carhadn't helped any, but his head seemed to be knitting a little, andhis legs were a little steadier. True, he didn't feel one hundred percent healthy, but he was beginning to think he might live, after all.And while the doctor was bandaging his head, a spirit of new lifebegan to fill the FBI agent.
He was no longer morose and undirected. He had a purpose in life, andthe purpose filled him with cold determination. He was going to findthe robot-operated car--or whatever it turned out to be.
The doctor, Malone noticed, was whistling _Greensleeves_ under hisbreath as he worked. That, he supposed, was the influence of theBohemian folk-singers of Greenwich Village. But he put the noiseresolutely out of his mind and concentrated on the red Cadillac.
It was one thing to think about a robot car miles away, doingsomething or other to somebody you'd never heard of before. That wasjust theoretical, a case for solution, nothing but an ordinary job.
But when the car stepped up and bopped Malone himself on the head, itbecame a personal matter. Now Malone had more than a job to contendwith. Now he was thinking about revenge.
_By God_, he told himself, _no car in the world--not even aCadillac--can get away with beaning Kenneth J. Malone!_
Malone was not quite certain that he agreed with Burris' idea of aself-operating car, but at least it was something to work on. A carthat could reach out, crown an investigator, and then drive offhumming something innocent under its breath was certainly a unique anddangerous machine within the meaning of the act. Of course, there wereproblems attendant on this view of things. For one thing, Malonecouldn't quite see how the car could have beaned him when he was tenfeet away from it. But that was, he told himself uncomfortably, aminor point. He could deal with it when he felt a little better.
The important thing was the car itself. Malone jerked a little underthe doctor's calm hands, and swore subvocally.
"Hold still," the doctor said. "Don't go wiggling your head aroundthat way. Just wait quietly until the
dermijel sets."
Obediently, Malone froze. There was a crick in his neck, but hedecided he could stand it. "My head still hurts," he said accusingly.
"Sure it still hurts," the doctor agreed.
"But you--"
"What did you expect?" the doctor said. "Even an FBI agent isn'timmune to blackjacks, you know." He resumed his work on Malone'sskull.
"Blackjacks?" Malone said. "What blackjacks?"
"The ones that hit you," the doctor said. "Or the one, anyhow."
Malone blinked. Somehow, though he could manage a fuzzy picture of acar reaching out to hit him, the introduction of a blackjack into thisimaginative effort confused things a little. But he resolutely ignoredit.
"The bruise is just the right size and shape," the doctor said. "Andthat cut on your head comes from the seams on the leather