Yellow Dog Contract (2 page)

Quane grinned. “Yeah, that one didn't work out too well, but the money was good.”

“How long did it last?” I said.

Quane looked at Murfin. “Couple of months, wasn't it?”

“About that,” Murfin said. “Then everybody found out that it wasn't a boom after all. What it was was sort of a popcorn fart.”

“But now you've got something else,” I said to Murfin. “Something that lets you drive a leased Mercedes and keeps Quane here in hundred-dollar loafers.”

Quane put a foot up on the table and let us admire one of his loafers. The right one. “Hell of a shoe,” he said.

“We sort of fell into the honeypot, me and Quane,” Murfin said.

“What's the honeypot's name?” I said.

Murfin grinned. It was his hard, nasty, pleased grin—not quite vicious, and although I had seen it often enough before it never failed to make me want to look away—as though I had been given a quick peek at some awful private deformity that was really none of my business. “Roger Vullo,” he said.

“Well,” I said.

“Vullo Pharmaceuticals,” Murfin said.

“I know. How old is he now?”

Murfin looked at Quane. “Twenty-nine?”

Quane nodded. “About that.”

“What's he up to this time?” I said. “The last I heard he was trying to buy himself a Congress.”

“Did pretty good, too,” Murfin said. “He spent maybe a million or so and ninety-six percent of the ones he backed got elected and it was gonna be veto-proof, except it didn't quite work out like that, and Vullo got a little disillusioned with politics.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I said. “At least I think I am.”

“Vullo came up with something else,” Quane said.

I nodded. “One should keep busy.”

“We've been setting it up for him.” Quane said.

I nodded again. “He chose well.”

“Us and the lawyers and some computer people.”

“It sounds fat,” I said.

“It is,” Murfin said.

“What've you been setting up, you and the lawyers and the computer people?”

“It's kind of a foundation,” Quane said.

“Something to do with good works,” I said. “And taxes, too, I imagine. Good works and taxes often seem to go hand in hand. What's the foundation to be called?”

“The Arnold Vullo Foundation,” Murfin said.

“Touching,” I said. “After his late father.”

“Grandfather, too,” Quane said. “The grandfather's name was Arnold.”

“Also the elder brother as I remember,” I said. “I mean Roger's elder brother. He was Arnold Vullo the third. All three of them, wasn't it, plus the mother. I mean all three Arnold Vullo's, plus Mrs. Arnold Vullo the second, were killed in that private plane crash leaving poor Roger at what, twenty-one, the sole heir to perhaps two hundred million or thereabouts?”

“Thereabouts,” Quane said.

“They never did find out who put the bomb in the plane, did they?” I said.

“Never did,” Murfin said.

“Young Roger was upset, as I recall,” I said. “He went around making public statements about shoddy police work. I think he said shoddy.”

“In private he said shitty,” Murfin said. “Shoddy was what he used in all those press releases he put out. And that's what the foundation's all about.”

“Shitty police work?” I said. “A ripe field. Very ripe.”

“He's narrowed it down,” Quane said.

“To what?”

“Conspiracy.”

“Christ,” I said, “who sold him on that? You two? I'm not saying that you don't know a lot about conspiracy. I mean, if I wanted to put one together—you know, a really first-class job—I'd certainly come to you guys.”

“Funny,” Quane said, “that's just what Ward and I were saying on the way out here. About you, I mean.”

We sat there on the porch in silence for a moment. And then, almost on cue, we each took another swallow of our drinks. Quane lit a cigarette. A mockingbird cut loose nearby with a shrill series of his latest impressions. Somewhere one of the dogs barked once, a lazy, half-hearted bark. Honest Tuan, the Siamese, stalked out onto the porch as if he thought he might have some business with the mockingbird. He changed his mind abruptly and decided that what he really wanted to do was flop down and yawn, which he did.

I reached over and borrowed a cigarette from Quane's pack. He still smoked Camels, I noticed. I lit the cigarette and said, “The Kennedys. He's going to stir all that up again, isn't he?”

Murfin nodded. “He already has. Maybe you've noticed.”

“I've noticed,” I said. “Who else? King? Wallace?” Murfin nodded again.

“That's four,” I said, “and all the crap that happened afterward. Anybody else?”

“Hoffa,” Quane said.

“Jesus,” I said. “Jimmy's almost still warm.”

“We figure that'll be the easiest one,” Murfin said. “It's kind of obvious, isn't it?”

“Kind of,” I said.

“There's one more,” Quane said. “Yours.”

“Mine?”

“Uh-huh. Yours. Arch Mix.”

The mockingbird abruptly shut up. There was no sound for a moment, no sound at all, and then a trout jumped in the pond. I rattled the ice in my glass. Then I said, “Never.”

“Ten thousand,” Murfin said quickly. “Ten thousand for two months' work. If you turn it, another ten thousand.”

“No.”

“You know why we're handing it to you, don't you?” Murfin said. “I mean, you knew Mix better'n anybody else. Christ, you didn't do anything but study him for what, five months?”

“Six,” I said. “I grew old studying him. When it was over I came down with mono. That's silly, isn't it? A thirty-two-year-old man with mono.”

“Harvey,” Murfin said. “Talk to Vullo, will you? That's all. Just talk to him. We told him we really didn't expect you to turn up the who on Mix, but maybe you could come up with the why. If we got that, the why, then me and Quane could turn some redhots we got loose on the who.”

“You think there is a who, don't you?” I said.

“There's gotta be,” Murfin said and Quane nodded wisely. “Look,” Murfin went on, selling me now, “a guy has a great job. He gets along with his wife—well, okay anyway. His health's good. He's forty-five and his kids aren't in jail and that's something. So he gets up one morning, has breakfast, reads the paper, gets in his car and starts to work. He never gets there. They never find him. They never even find his car. He's just gone.”

“It happens all the time,” I said. “Every week. Maybe every day. It's called the ‘Honey, I Think I'll Run Down to the Drugstore for Some Cigarettes' syndrome.”

“Mix didn't smoke,” said Murfin, the stickler.

“You're right. I forgot.”

“Harvey,” Quane said.

“What?”

“Five hundred bucks. Just to talk to Roger Vullo.”

I got up and went over to the porch rail. I took off my shirt and jeans. Underneath I was wearing some swimming trunks. I picked up the long bamboo pole with the hook on the end that I'd made out of a coat-hanger. I used the hook to pull the rope swing in, grasped the gunnysack, and climbed up on the porch rail. I turned. Murfin and Quane were watching me. So was Honest Tuan.

“A thousand,” I said. “I'll talk to him for a thousand.”

I shoved off of the porch rail and sailed out over the pond. At the top of the swing's arc I let go and started falling. When I hit the water I made a fine big splash and it was as much fun as I had thought it would be. Maybe even more.

CHAPTER TWO

I
N MY YOUTH
, which I sometimes enjoy thinking of as misspent, I was a bit of an over-achiever in a limited kind of way. Or perhaps I was simply in a hurry although a bit unsure of my destination. If any. But by the time I was thirty-two I had been a student, a police reporter, a state legislator, a foreign correspondent, a political gunslinger, and some even thought, mistakenly, a secret agent of sorts. Now at forty-three I was a poetaster and a goatherd, providing that two Nubian goats could be considered a herd.

I learned my political primer in the New Orleans French Quarter where I was born, reared (rather loosely in retrospect), and whose crime I eventually covered for the old
Item
, a newspaper that I went to work for at seventeen while attending Tulane University. My studies were less than arduous since I majored in French and German, two languages that I learned to speak before I was five because my mother had been born in Dijon, my father in Düsseldorf.

In 1954 when I was twenty-one and just graduated, some of the more depraved elements in the quarter decided in a fit of political pique, defiance, and probably despair that they should send a bitter joke to Baton Rouge as their state representative. They sent me. I won handily as a kind of machine candidate and achieved no little notoriety by making a good solemn campaign promise, which was to introduce a bill that would legalize cunnilingus and fellatio between consenting adults. Needless to say (then why say it?) my political career died swiftly and my self-appointed mentor, a kindly, aging former crony of the sainted Huey Long, advised me in all seriousness that, “Harvey, the state just ain't quite ready for a pussy-eatin' bill yet.”

But a state legislature is an excellent place to further one's political education, and if one is particularly interested in the study of political chicanery, knavery, improbity, and bamboozlement, the Louisiana state legislature was then—and may yet be—the
fons et origo
of all such knowledge. After my single term there I was never again to be shocked or surprised by political rascality. Saddened a few times and amused often, but shocked never.

For no very good reason, I was thinking about my tarnished past as I stood before the mirror in the bathroom trying to decide whether to shave off my moustache. Ruth went by in the hall, stopped, and leaned against the door jamb.

“If you shave it off,” she said, “you won't look like Mr. Powell anymore.”

I put a finger up trying to block out the moustache. “But there'd be a startling resemblance to Victor McLaglen wouldn't there?”

She looked at me critically. “Perhaps,” she said, “especially if you learned how to twist a cloth cap in your hands. He could twist a cloth cap better than anyone.”

“Well, hell,” I said, “I think I'll leave it.”

“What time are you supposed to see Mr. Vullo?”

“Eleven. You need anything?”

“Gin,” she said. “We're low on gin. And I also need three birthdays, a tenth and twentieth wedding anniversary, two get wells, a congratulations for a five-to-seven-year-old, and a couple of miss you's.”

About half of our income—which the previous year had reached a staggering $11,763—came from the sale of Ruth's watercolor drawings to a Los Angeles greeting card firm. She drew gentle, immensely clever caricatures of animals and her models were mostly members of our own menagerie—plus a couple of beavers who lived upstream from the pond and for the most part minded their own business. The Los Angeles firm couldn't get enough of Ruth's drawings.

Quite by accident I had found that I had a remarkable talent for writing greeting card verse that contained just the right touch of simpering banality. The L.A. firm paid me two dollars a line and occasionally dropped me warm little notes that compared my efforts favorably with those of Rod McKuen. I did a lot of composing while milking the goats. Birthdays were my specialty.

I told Ruth that I'd write the stuff on my way to Washington. I had also discovered that while driving I could usually compose a line a mile. In the bedroom I opened the closet and studied the remnants of a once fairly resplendent wardrobe. Time, fashion, and personal indifference had reduced it to one London-tailored suit (the last of six), which I planned to be cremated in, a couple of tweed jackets, some jeans, and a seersucker suit with suspicious labels. I chose the seersucker, a blue shirt, a black knit tie, and when I looked in the mirror I thought I looked quite natty—providing that one still thought of 1965 as a natty year.

I drove the pickup into Washington. It was a 1969 Ford with a four-wheel drive, which came in handy when it snowed or rained. I left our other car for Ruth. Our other car was a five-year-old Volkswagen.

By the time I arrived at Connecticut Avenue and M Street I had composed thirty-six lines of doggerel, which I dictated into a small portable tape recorder, shouting some of the lines, even declaiming them to make myself heard above the Ford's clatter. They rhymed, they scanned, and they were as sticky as honey and twice as sweet.

I treated myself to one of those dollar-and-a-quarter-an-hour parking lots and then found the M Street address that Murfin had given me. It was a fairly new building just east of Connecticut Avenue on the south side of the street. I rode the elevator up to the sixth floor, walked down the hall, and went through a door that was lettered: T
HE
A
RNOLD
V
ULLO
F
OUNDATION.

On the other side of the door was a young receptionist and behind her was a rather large area filled with metal desks that were separated from each other by thin, pastel partitions that rose about five feet above the floor. The partitions were light tan, pale blue, and dusty rose. At the desks sat about two dozen men and women, most of them in their late twenties, although some were older, who typed, read, talked into phones, or simply sat staring into space. It looked very much like the city room of a prosperous, medium-sized daily newspaper.

I told the receptionist that my name was Harvey Longmire and that I had an appointment with Mr. Murfin. She nodded, picked up the phone, dialed a few numbers, said something into it, and then smiled at me as she hung up.

“Won't you take a seat, Mr. Longmire? Somebody'll be here in a moment to show you to Mr. Murfin's office.”