Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit by Mike Barry Page A

going to back away from the suspect with an embarrassed expression, pull out cigarettes, even offer the kid one maybe, trying to take the pressure off. Odd but all the sympathy for the kid would come from that quarter; Williams was the one who had put the knife-edge in the scene. He went through the reception room and into a back area, opened a door and went into a small, bleak office where there was nothing but a phone on the desk and a huge picture of a naked girl on the wall. The picture, in black and white showed the girl fingering herself; over this, on the wall itself, someone had neatly printed the caption ON THE TAKE. It had been hanging there for almost a week which was a record for this precinct house; probably it would hang on for another few days after which a lieutenant would come in and demand that it be taken down. Either that or the lieutenant would add his own caption which would render it instantly unacceptable to everyone else and it would be taken down. Williams turned his back on this—of course the girl was white but ten years ago she would have been black; such was the progress of interracial understanding in the department—he picked up the phone which if the clerk had been efficient had already been set into the line for his personal call. “Hello,” he said unhappily.
    “This is Wulff,” a voice said. “You’ve taken long enough, Williams; where the fuck have you been?”
    “I’ve been breaking the international drug trade,” Williams said. He held the phone tightly against his ear, trying not to show surprise. “Where the fuck have you been, man?” he said. “Where are you calling from?”
    “Where do you think?”
    “I have lost track of you,” Williams said. “I have lost track of you since you climbed on a certain flight outward bound from Las Vegas and got yourself taken to Cuba. But up until then I kept pretty good tabs on you, man. I guess everybody in the country knows who you are by now. You’ve made a pretty good name for yourself. You are no longer obscure.”
    “The hijacking got around.”
    “Everything got around,” Williams said. He propped the telephone under his ear, looked for a cigarette, realized that he had left them in the interrogation room and cursed.
    “What’s that?”
    “Nothing,” Williams said. “Where are you?”
    “Well,” Wulff said and paused, “I seem to be in Cuba.”
    “Still. Still in Cuba, eh? Well that’s fine,” Williams said. The need for a cigarette was overwhelming him but he would come to grips with it somehow. Discipline. “When are you going to come out?”
    “That all depends,” Wulff said. “I’m still looking for a certain valise.”
    “You got the valise, then,” Williams said. “You found it in Vegas.”
    “I found a lot of things in Vegas, Williams. I found about fifty corpses.”
    “And the valise. And you got on the plane with the valise and that was the reason for the hijack.”
    “Something like that,” Wulff said thinly. “You ought to go into police work, Williams. You’ve got a lot of talent for picking up clues and following a trail. Have you ever thought of getting into the police racket?”
    “How are you going to get out of Cuba?”
    “I don’t know,” Wulff said. “I don’t even know yet how I came in so it’s hard to figure the getting out. By plane, probably. But I’ve got some unfinished business here yet.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I’ve got to pick up the valise. Somewhere along the line I seem to have misplaced a valise but I’m going to get it.”
    “Why tell this to me?” Williams said, looking at the nude picture. These things were posed by professional models, all of them, but this girl looked as if she genuinely liked her job. Funny that he had never noticed the tilt of the mouth before. The fact that he was desiring a white woman sent guilt to mesh with lust somewhere in his head; it drew a coil, his fast erection faded. “Is there any way I can help you?”
    “You