Sight Unseen Read online

  “That marine guard at the gate is certainly an advertisement,” Lockwood said.

  Dzeloski grimaced. “He’s a case of too little and too late. We didn’t have anyone but our own staff till this morning, depending on the loneliness of this spot to keep us invisible.”

  A fast knock at the door announced a tall, nervous-looking man of thirty-five, whom Dzeloski introduced as Stanley Greer, “our chief engineer.” Before Lockwood could sit, an alert-looking woman in her early thirties with a mane of fiery red hair entered. Dr. Dzeloski introduced her as “Myra Rodman—our head of research—our own Madame Curie.”

  Myra stepped forward with her hand outstretched and surprised Lockwood with the firmness of her grip.

  “Haven’t you worn out that joke, Josef?” she asked Dzeloski, who only beamed at her.

  She was something to beam at, Lockwood told himself as he sat down. She looked intelligent, bright, crisp, and female as all getout. The room had taken on a snappier, more alert tone just on her entry. Lockwood felt his nostrils open with excitement and smiled at himself. The three men averted their eyes as Myra sat with suave grace and crossed her legs.

  “Can any of you tell me whether this missing object is animal, mineral, or vegetable?” Lockwood asked them.

  The three shot each other fast glances.

  “He doesn’t have clearance yet, does he, Myra?” asked Dzeloski.

  Before she could answer, another knock at the door, and a WAC burst in with a folder she delivered silently to Myra before she withdrew just as quickly. Lockwood saw his name on the folder’s cover. Myra opened it and read silently for several long seconds.

  “Congratulations, Mr. William Lockwood, born 1901, age thirty-seven, claims investigator at Transatlantic for five years, Columbia law graduate, and hero of New York’s Fighting 69th.”

  Lockwood gaped. “You’ve got all that there? This quickly?”

  “And much more,” she said in her smart bright way. “You’ve passed security. You can tell him anything you want to about the missing object, Josef. But not about anything else.”

  “Terrific!” said Josef. “A bombsight, Mr. Lockwood, that’s what was stolen last night.”

  “A bombsight?” Lockwood asked, amazed. “Five hundred pounds of bombsight? $75,000 worth?”

  Myra and Greer gave wry smiles, and Josef chuckled. “$106,000 worth of bombsight, my dear fellow. Over the past four years, we’ve developed three bombsights, each one more complex than the last. This one is for the next XB-17 Flying Fortress bomber.”

  Puzzled, Lockwood gestured feebly and asked, “But what’s so complicated?”

  Greer answered, “Mr. Lockwood, when a plane is flying at 15,00 feet at 300 miles per hour, with a bank of clouds below and a wind of 20 miles an hour blowing across the bomb’s path, it takes more than a tube with a couple of cross hairs to calculate when the bombs should be released.”

  Myra took up the explanation, “We have devices now that can put a 500-pound bomb, at night, within 2000 feet of the target. The bombsight that was stolen last night was a working prototype that I expected would put that same 500-pounder within 150 feet of where we want it—at night, with no moon or stars.”

  Lockwood whistled. “But who would—that’s something! But who would want it besides the government?”

  “America has enemies,” Myra said.

  “And they’d love to get their hands on it. It could put them a couple years ahead in their own programs,” Greer said. “And put us six months behind.”

  “And you think maybe they got it last night?” Lockwood asked.

  “We are sure one of them got it last night,” Myra answered.

  “We’ll expect our reimbursement at once, Mr. Lockwood,” Dzeloski said. “Or you might say, since they had a hand in negotiating the insurance contract, the G-men will expect it.”

  “They’re on their way up from Washington now,” Myra said.

  “We’re out of funds till July 1, the beginning of the fiscal year,” Greer said. “You will pay in ninety-six hours, won’t you? We were ready to make delivery to the Air Corps, when we were to receive $125,000.”

  Lockwood held his hand up. “Look, we don’t want to hold up America’s military affairs, but we have our procedures. First, I have to make sure there was a product, and then that it was in fact stolen—not misplaced in a closet someplace. And then that perhaps someone here, a member of this firm, didn’t steal—hold it! hold it!—misplace it, let’s say—”

  “Mr. Lockwood,” Dzeloski interrupted. Lockwood saw that he was flustered and shaky. “We have to have that money—it’s not just that we’ll be wiped out in weeks without it—although we will. If we fold, this country will go from being a year or two ahead of certain European countries to being twelve to eighteen months behind.”

  “We’ve got to build a replacement,” Myra said, “At once.”

  “Or get the bombsight back,” Lockwood countered.

  “That’s the G-men’s job,” Greer said.

  “Well, if Transatlantic finds it,” Lockwood said, “then we save ourselves a lot of money, don’t we?”

  Lockwood paused to let this sink in. He had been in this spot a thousand times before with clients, and he could see from the way they set their faces and snapped glances at each other that they were furious with his failure to pay at once.

  He stood up and said, “Would one of you show me where a bombsight sleeps when its keepers go home for the night?”

  With ill-concealed anger, Myra Rodman and Stanley Greer took Lockwood to Area C on the third floor, from which the bombsight had been stolen.

  Area C was a long room, thirty by sixty feet, with design tables at one end and a full machine shop at the other. This morning it was deserted, but Myra said it was usually full of engineers and machinists. “The G-men asked me not to let them in and trample down the evidence.”

  “What evidence?” Lockwood asked.

  She shrugged. “Got me.” She led the way to a metal table about three feet high. “Here’s where the Northstar 3 Bombsight sat when we left last night at 7:00. When the machinists came in this morning at 8:00, it had disappeared.”

  “How can you get in and out of here? Besides the elevator we came up in?” Lockwood asked.

  Greer said, “That’s just it. The elevator’s the only way.”

  Lockwood frowned. “The only way! What about the fire codes? An elevator isn’t a fire exit.”

  Myra smiled a thin smile. “Patchogue doesn’t have a fire code. We built Areas A, B, and C according to the government’s notions of security.”

  “So, no windows and just the elevator to get in and out,” Lockwood said. “This thing had to go down the elevator. How’s it operated? You used a key when we came up?”

  “That’s right,” Myra said. “It’s run off a key switch.”

  “Who has keys?”

  “Well, Myra and I do,” Greer said. “We give our keys to the elevator operator during the day.”

  “One of us has to be here on duty whenever the operator’s running the elevator,” Myra said.

  “And those are the only two keys?” Lockwood pressed.

  Myra and Greer looked at each other, and Lockwood wondered what the look meant.

  “Dr. Dzeloski has one,” Myra said. “And security has another. Pops would need a complete set to make his rounds.”

  “Who’s Pops?”

  “The night watchman,” Myra said. “He and Bingo, his dog, come on at 7:00 when we close down, and leave when we open up in the morning. I usually lock up. Stanley opens up in the morning.”

  “So that’s four keys,” Lockwood said. “Can’t the elevator be run without a key? Can somebody override the key switch?”

  Greer made a grimace. “I doubt it. When we built this place, we put most of the wires in steel pipes, and the control box is here in Area C.”

  “How much did this thing weigh?” Lockwood asked.

  “Five hundred pounds,” Myra said. />
  “What? How did they get it out? How would they carry it away?”

  “Ah—one of our little dollies is missing, too,” Greer said.

  Lockwood groaned. “You mean you left something in here that could be used to carry off the bombsight? Don’t you know you never leave a safe’s wheels on?—that thieves can just roll it away?”

  The two of them looked sheepish and shook their heads.

  “So nobody ever conducted a theft work-up out here, checking procedures?” Lockwood asked.

  “Does that mean you won’t pay?” Myra asked.

  “No, probably not,” Lockwood said. “But whoever wrote this policy ought to have his head examined, that’s all.”

  Lockwood had them show him over the room and explain the operation. The bombsight had been in its final stages of completion, during which time it was undergoing final bench tests before being loaded next week into a real XB-17 at Lakehurst, New Jersey, for field trials.

  “Odd it should be stolen this week, just as it’s completed, isn’t it?” Lockwood said in a suggestive way. He watched the two of them closely.

  “You think somebody who works here told the thieves when to take it?” Myra said.

  “And how, and gave them the key, and set up some way for them to cart it off.”

  “You’re making us sound awfully dumb,” Stanley said.

  Lockwood looked at him. “You have been. I’m just surprised they waited this long. I bet they waited till you’d put the finishing touches on it before carting it off.”

  Lockwood found that one of the two-ton panel trucks was missing from the parking lot, and when he examined the gate guard’s roster, he found that truck had left during the night at 2:17 A.M. He then walked the perimeter of the mesh fence, and in the southwest corner of Northstar’s ten acres he found a two-foot hole in the fence, which was partially hidden by a lush bramblebush. This was how the thieves had gotten in.

  At 1:00 that afternoon he called Mr. Gray.

  “What’s this all about?” Gray growled. “We don’t have to pay, right? What was stolen?”

  “They won’t let me tell you yet what was stolen. I have to ask the G-men, who’ll be here any minute,” Lockwood reported. “I don’t see how we can pay under the circumstances —if I ever saw an inside job, this is it. We can say that the boss, who had one of the keys, did it. It’ll buy us time.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t tell me?” Gray shouted. “I’m the chief of this department, Lockwood. And of course we won’t pay. Paying in ninety-six hours—I never heard of anything so silly. Can you find it, Lockwood?”

  Lockwood suppressed his anger at Gray’s raspy remarks. Nothing made Mr. Gray more irritable than the prospect of paying a large claim—even a legitimate one.

  “I don’t know, Chief. The night guard is due here any minute, and also a bunch of guys from Washington. From all the secrecy out here, I’m not even sure the G-men are going to let us investigate.”

  “Let us! How are they going to stop us?” Gray shouted.

  “Take it easy, will you? All I can say is it looks like they had a—device—here yesterday, and it looks as if they don’t have it today.”

  “Don’t leave there, Lockwood! You find that ‘device’ or find some reason for Transatlantic not to pay, you hear? Take a week if you need to, but find it, you hear me?”

  Lockwood held the receiver a foot from his ear. He sighed. “Yes, sir, I hear you fine.”

  Pops Tibbett, the night watchman, had not gone home yet. He looked calm for a man whose charge had slipped away the night before. When Lockwood entered the spare office, the white-haired man rose and stood straight for a man over seventy. The German shepherd at his side panted deeply and watched Lockwood as he asked Pop questions.

  “I made my rounds just like I always do,” Pops answered. Lockwood jotted down the times of his rounds without telling him when the truck had left last night. According to the Detex system, Pops had been on this floor at 1:46, just thirty-three minutes before the two-ton truck had gone through the gate. When Pops had come back to Area C after forty minutes, the usual length of his round, he had seen nothing.

  “Bingo did whine and bark, and I let him sniff all around this room,” the old man said, his watery eyes looking as if they might fill with tears, “but he didn’t see nobody.”

  “Where do you leave your keys when you’re off duty?”

  “With Miss Myra or Mr. Greer,” he said. “I told them the first day I come here I didn’t want to take them home. Just in case something like this happened.”

  Myra came in then and told Lockwood the G-men had arrived, and would Lockwood come back to Dr. Dzeloski’s office?

  “Miss Myra,” Pops called after her. She stopped and turned. “I’m not going to lose my job, am I? I really need this job, and I didn’t see or hear nothing last night. I’d have shot the crooks if I had.” He pulled his old pistol out and waved it around, alarming Lockwood. The barrel pointed in the direction of Lockwood’s feet, and he backed up a couple of steps.

  “I don’t think so, Pops,” she said, and she stepped forward to put her hand on his arm. “Sounds to me like you did your job.”

  “I did, Miss Myra, I did.”

  Lockwood didn’t buy the old man’s performance. Actually he wasn’t buying any of their performances. He had seen too many cases like this. Myra, Stanley Greer, Pops, the gate guard, the engineers, Dzeloski himself—people had a thousand reasons for cheating the insurance company, and his job was to find the one—if any—that applied here. As they went downstairs, Lockwood asked, “Has he been with you long?”

  “He was a machinist till two years ago, and we made him night watchman when he reached seventy. He’s been with Josef since he first went in business—I think he came with the original factory in Queens—”

  Josef Dzeloski’s outer office held six bland young men whom Lockwood spotted at once as Feds. In Dzeloski’s office itself another two slightly older young men who also looked like Feds rose to meet him. Lockwood could feel the antagonism emanating from them like heat from an oven.

  One was Guy Manners, a forty-year-old troubleshooter from the Treasury Department, and the other was a special agent from military intelligence, George Porta.

  Manners said at once, “Mr. Lockwood, I know you have good reasons to look into this matter, but this is something I don’t think either the Treasury or the Army Air Corps can give you permission to investigate.”

  “Hey, terrific,” Lockwood said. He put on his hat. “Mr. Dzeloski, thanks for—”

  “Wait a minute,” Dr. Dzeloski said, stopping him. “You’re going to pay off, right?”

  “Sir, we can’t if we can’t investigate,” Lockwood said. “If you’ll look at the policy, you’ll see we have the right to conduct a full investigation when a claim’s made. If we don’t get full cooperation, we have the right not to pay.” Lockwood grinned to show his threats were all part of the game. “Believe me, my boss will be delighted to hear we don’t have to pay.”

  Dzeloski looked more nervous and flustered than before. “Guy, what is this? We can’t get any more money out of the committee’s budget—there isn’t any till July 1st—probably more like mid-August. By then we’ll have lost our best engineers, which will throw us another six months behind. We’ve borrowed up to the hilt. I can’t get a penny anywhere else. What harm can it do? Let Mr. Lockwood investigate.”

  “Mr.—Dr. Dzeloski,” Manners said, “we don’t want some private dick trampling down the grass around here. This is government business. We’ll find the bombsight. That’s our business.”

  “Producing Northstar bombsights is my business, Manners,” Dzeloski said, and now there was no give in his voice. “And while we may have a contract with the Air Corps, this bombsight is still private property—my private property. I need this payment to stay in business. I’ve already talked to Washington all morning. They won’t—they can’t—release the next payment till I deliver this prototype, and it
was stolen last night. So. Lockwood, you look around all you want. I want that money in ninety-six hours—just as my policy calls for. Myra, make sure everybody on our staff cooperates with Mr. Lockwood.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Manners’ eyes narrowed. Obviously he wasn’t used to civilians brooking his suggestions. Lockwood cheered the short president of the firm—Dzeloski’s stance was precisely what Lockwood would have done. “I’m going to call Washington.”

  “Talk to Lt.-Col. Maynard Anderson,” Dzeloski suggested. “He’s in charge of the project.”

  Manners shook his head. “No sir. I’m going to call the director, and I expect he’ll talk to General Bridges himself.” He shot Lockwood a contemptuous look. “The less amateurs, the better.”

  Lockwood smiled and shrugged his whole upper body. “You’d be doing me a favor, Manners. I’ve got lots of other things I’d rather do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Take a pretty girl to Montauk for a lobster. Tell my boss we can forget this claim.”

  “Watch your step, Lockwood,” Manners said. “We like wise guys a lot less than amateurs.”

  Chapter 3

  Saying nothing about his inquiries up to now, Lockwood left Dr. Dzeloski’s office and went to his car. At the gate he flashed his badge and found out who had been on duty last night.

  By 3:00 that afternoon he was knocking at the night guard’s door. A sleepy-looking forty-five-year-old man answered his third knock.

  “I don’t want none, fellow,” he said when he caught sight of Lockwood.

  Lockwood flashed his gold badge and asked, “Fred Hamlisch? Would you answer a few questions?”

  Hamlisch suddenly looked much more wary than sleepy. “About what?”

  “About the theft last night.”

  The question shook Hamlisch. “What theft?”

  “Can I come in?”

  Hamlisch considered this a few seconds, tried out a grin, and said, “If you’ll have coffee with me. I got to get moving. I got to be to work by 6:00.”