His grin reassured her about false pride. “Mrs. Yates, I’m a small-town boy from the Middle West. I hope someday to get a Ph.D. in physics and maybe even to make a small contribution in some branch of the big field of ideas. All I’ll probably ever really do is teach high-school kids about gravity and friction and Ohm’s law. I don’t think the stars wrote me down for a big melodrama like catching spies — or for a hero part, like saving my country.”
“Yet you said—”
“Sure. I said! Got more mouth than sense! If what I really suspect is true, it’s so crazy I don’t believe it.”
Mrs. Yates was a sentimental woman, though not a sentimentalist. During his recital of his hopes she had felt a mist in her eyes and turned her head away. Now, however, she looked back at him sharply.
“You say you don’t know what to do. Well, you did one thing. You followed Harry and found his walks weren’t entirely innocent moon-gazing. You can go on doing that. If I had legs to walk on, and if I were a man, and if I thought it was useless to talk to the FBI again right now, I’d look over that trucking company where Harry works. Maybe that great, tall man works there, too. Anyway, you could find out what cities the trucks serve. You could perhaps get a line on their customers. If Harry was using trucks to move — what you think — up north, then where the trucks went to would be something to learn.”
Duff nodded. “That’s not a bad idea!” He lighted a cigarette. “I could maybe apply for a job there. Look the people over. At night when Harry wouldn’t be there to notice me around.”
It seemed a useful project. Actually, if it had any immediate value, the effort served to give some occupation to Duff at a time when the conflict between his suspicions and his feeling that what he suspected was absurd kept him in a state of nervous anxiety. It also served to show him how inept he was at any sort of investigation.
The Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company consisted of a half-dozen large buildings in a light-industry section of the city on its northwest fringe. The buildings were low and very large. Some were warehouses, and these were provided with huge doors and long loading platforms; one was the repair garage in which Harry Ellings worked by day; in another, idle trucks of the company fleet were merely parked; the smallest building contained the business offices of the concern, which operated around the clock. At night there was a loneliness about the place in spite of the occasional arrival or departure of a huge trailer truck or of a smaller vehicle bringing merchandise from the South Florida area for reshipment.
Duff studied the scene. Colored loading crews worked here and there under flaring lights. A watchman made his rounds occasionally, throwing the round finger of a flashlight at the vast blanks of closed doors. Across the wide and intermittently rumbling street was a diner which boasted, with painted, illuminated signs, that Truck Drivers Eat Here and We Never Close.
Duff walked around the establishment twice and then entered the front office, where a half dozen men worked at desks, smoked, roamed about with invoices in their hands and marked crates and cases and bundles.