Time of Terror by Hugh Pentecost

but someplace some distance away, she may have gone to him.”
    “And still not checked back here to find out about the girls?”
    “It’s hard to imagine,” Martha said.
    “Neither of you has any other suggestion?” I asked.
    I thought they exchanged a kind of uncertain glance. They knew something, I thought.
    “Look here,” I said. “I have two different stories, one from you, Andrews, and one from Jim Priest.”
    “Good man, Priest,” Andrews said.
    “He vouches for you,” I said, “but he doubts your story, particularly one part of it. You tell me Cleaves is a woman chaser.”
    “My track shoes are worn out,” Martha said.
    “Priest tells me that the story is that Connie is the promiscuous sex addict in the family. Cleaves seems to back that up.”
    “There’s always gossip about beautiful women,” Martha said. “Unfortunately nobody gossips about me.”
    “I’d like the truth,” I said. “Does Connie have a rich lover somewhere she can have gone to for help?”
    “If she hasn’t, she ought to have,” Martha said.
    “Why does she stay with Cleaves if he’s what you say he is?” I asked.
    “Because he’s got something on her,” Martha said.
    “An affair or affairs?”
    “He could take the children away from her if he has proof,” Martha said.
    Andrews lit a cigarette and sat staring at a small landscape by Eugene Ludins that hangs over one of the bookcases. “You’re not out for something to pass on to the local gossip boys, are you, Haskell.” It wasn’t a question. It was a conclusion he’d come to. “Still, I can’t tell you everything I know about Terrence Cleaves. Martha knows some of it; she’s been digging for me on the inside. But if anything should leak, the sonofabitch might get off the hook before I can land him. I’ve been on his trail for two years, Haskell, and I can’t risk having all that go down the drain.”
    “So you can’t talk,” I said. “All I want is help in finding Connie. Where she could have gone; if there is any other likely person beside her father she might count on for help. You must know the whole history of the Cleaves family, Colin. If there is someone like that—?” I let it lie there.
    Colin Andrews took a deep drag on his cigarette. “So here is something,” he said finally. “Until about four years ago the Cleaves marriage seemed to be a happy and successful one. It was about that time that Cleaves invested a very large sum of money, probably most of his liquid assets, into a project for manufacturing and marketing a new sports car.”
    “The TC 4,” I said. “Priest told us that.”
    “It was a disaster,” Andrews said. “The car was too expensive; inflation and taxes in Britain were eating up the average man alive. It was a question of coming up with a new product at the very worst possible time. Cleaves had to pour in more money to try to save his original investment. I know, from my research, that he mortgaged his property, borrowed, and—and eventually stole in an effort to save himself.”
    “Stole?”
    “Used funds that didn’t belong to him,” Andrews said. “Then he was faced with finding money to replace what he had stolen. Most of his friends had no idea how bad his situation was. They knew he’d taken a whipping, but not how bad a whipping. All this time he was in highly sensitive positions in the government. He knew things about international financial dealings in which our government was involved. And he knew a great deal about our defense plans, our secret diplomacy. In short he was a man in a position of the highest trust. He still is, or he wouldn’t be at the United Nations. But we live in a time when political leaks are part of the world of government. You people in this country know how it was with Watergate. A whiff of smoke here, another there, suggesting a raging fire somewhere. Some of those whiffs of smoke came my way, which is when I started to work on the Cleaves story. What those whiffs