from THE BUTCHER’S BOY

Thomas Perry

1

The union meeting, thought Al Veasy, had gone as well as could be expected, all things considered. He had finally figured out why the retirement fund was in such trouble all the time, when everybody else in the whole country with anything to invest seemed to be making money. And he had explained what he knew, and the union members had understood it right away, because it wasn’t anything surprising if you read the newspapers. The big unions had been getting caught in similar situations for years. Low-interest loans to Fieldston Growth Enterprises—hell of an impressive name, but zero return so far on almost five million dollars. If the company was as bad as it looked, there would be no more Fieldston than there was growth. Just a name and a fancy address. When the union started to apply pressure some lawyer nobody ever heard of would quietly file bankruptcy papers. Probably in New York or someplace where it would take weeks before the union here in Ventura, California, heard of it. Just a notice by certified mail to O’Connell, the president of the union local, informing him of the dissolution of Fieldston Growth Enterprises and the sale of its assets to cover debts. And O’Connell, the big dumb bastard, would bring it to Veasy for translation. “Hey, Al,” he would say, “take a look at this,” as though he already knew what it meant but felt it was his duty to let somebody else see the actual document. Not that it would do anybody any good by then.

Or now either. That was the trouble and always had been. Veasy could feel it as he walked away from the union hall, still wearing his clodhopper boots and a work shirt that the sweat had dried on hours ago. He could smell himself. The wise guys in their perfectly fitted three-piece suits and their Italian shoes always ended up with everything. The best the ordinary working man could hope for was sometimes to figure out how they’d done it, and then make one or two of them uncomfortable. Slow them down was what it amounted to. If it hadn’t been Fieldston Growth Enterprises it would have been something else that sounded just as substantial and ended up just the same. The money gone and nobody, no person, who could be forced to give it back.

He kicked at a stone on the gravel parking lot. There probably wasn’t even any point in going to the government about it. The courts and the bureaucrats and commissions. Veasy snorted. All of them made up of the same wise guys in the three-piece suits, so much alike you couldn’t tell them from each other or from the crooks, except maybe the crooks were a little better at it, at getting money without working for it, and they smiled at you. The ones in the government didn’t even have to smile at you, because they’d get their cut of it no matter what. But hell, what else could you do? You had to go through the motions. Sue Fieldston, just so it got on the record. A little machinists’ union local in Ventura losing 70 percent of its pension fund to bad investments. It probably wouldn’t even make the papers. But you had to try, even if all you could hope for was to make them a little more cautious next time, a little less greedy so they wouldn’t try to take it all. And maybe make one or two of them sweat a little.

Veasy opened the door of his pickup truck and climbed in. He sat there for a minute, lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and blew a puff out the window. “Jesus,” he thought. “Nine o’clock. I wonder if Sue kept dinner for me.” He looked at the lighted doorway of the union hall, where he could see the men filing out past the bulky shape of O’Connell, who was smiling and slapping somebody on the back. He would be saying something about how we don’t know yet and that it’s too early to panic. That’s right, you big dumb bastard, thought Veasy. Keep calm, and you’ll never know what hit you.

Veasy turned the key in the ignition and the whole world turned to fire and noise. The concussion threw O’Connell back against the clapboards of the union hall and disintegrated the front window. Then the parking lot was bathed in light as the billowing ball of flame tore up into the sky. Afterward a machinist named Lynley said pieces of the pickup truck went with it, but O’Connell said there wasn’t anything to that. People always said things like that, especially when somebody actually got killed. Sure was a shame, though, and it was bad enough without making things up.

2

“Here’s the daily gloom,” said Padgett, tossing the sheaf of computer printouts on Elizabeth’s desk. “Early today, and you’re welcome to it.”

“Thanks,” said Elizabeth, not looking up from her calculations. She was still trying to figure out how that check had bounced. Even if the store had tried to cash it the next morning, the deposit should have been there at least twelve hours before. Eight fifteen, and the bank would open at nine thirty. She made a note to call. It was probably the post office, as usual. Anybody who couldn’t deliver a piece of mail across town in two days ought to get into another business. They had sure delivered the notice of insufficient funds fast enough. One day.

Elizabeth put the checkbook and notice back in her purse and picked up the printout. “All those years of school for this,” she thought. “Reading computerized obituaries for the Department of Justice for a living, and lucky to get it.”

She started at the first sheet, going through the items one by one. “De Vitto, L. G. Male. Caucasian. 46. Apparent suicide. Shotgun, 12 gauge. Toledo, Ohio. Code number 79-8475.” She marked the entry in pencil, maybe just because of the name that could mean Mafia, and maybe just because it was the first one, and the other prospects might be even less likely.

“Gale, D. R. Female. Caucasian. 34. Apparent murder. Revolver, .38. Suspects: Gale, P. G., 36; no prior arrests. Wichita, Kansas, code number 79-8476.” No, just the usual thing, thought Elizabeth. Family argument and one of them picks up a gun. She went on down the list, searching for the unusual, the one that might not be one of the same old things.

“Veasy, A. E. Male. Caucasian. 35. Apparent murder. Dynamite. Ventura, California. Code number 79-8477.” Dynamite? Murder by dynamite? Elizabeth marked this one. Maybe it wasn’t anything for the Activity Report, but at least it wasn’t the predictable, normal Friday night’s random violence.

“Satterfield, R. J. Male. Afro-American. 26. Apparent murder/ robbery. Revolver, .32. Washington, D.C. Code number 79-8478.” No.

“Davidson, B. L. Female. Caucasian. 23. Apparent murder/ rape. Knife. Carmel, California. Code number 79-8479.” No again.

Down the printout she went, letting the sheets fall in front of her desk to re-form themselves into an accordion shape on the floor. Now and then she would make a check mark with her pencil beside an entry that didn’t fall into the ten or twelve most common murder patterns. It was Monday, so she had to work fast to catch up. One thing Elizabeth had learned on this job was that a lot of people killed each other on weekends.

It was just after ten when she reached the final entry. “Stapleton, R. D. Male. Caucasian. 41. Apparent murder. Revolver, .45. Suspects: Stapleton, A. E., 38; no prior arrests. Buffalo, New York. Code number 79-102033.” Padgett, the senior analyst in charge of analyzing reports, would be on his morning break, she thought. The timing was always wrong, somehow. Whenever you got to the stage where you needed somebody it was either lunchtime or a break. She picked up the printout and carried it across the office to the glass-walled room where the computer operators worked.

She was surprised to see Padgett at his desk behind the glass, frowning over a report. She rapped on the glass and he got up to open the door for her without putting down the papers he was reading.

“I thought you would be on your break, Roger,” she said.

“Not today,” said Padgett. “Must have been a big weekend. Four of our friends bought airline tickets in the last three days.” He always called them “our friends,” as though the years of scanning lists for familiar names had prompted a kind of affection.

“All to the same place?”

“No,” he said. “Two to Las Vegas, one to Phoenix, and one to Los Angeles.”

“It’s probably the weather,” said Elizabeth. “They don’t like it any more than we do. You still have to scrape the snow off your car if it’s a Rolls Royce.”

He looked impatient. “Okay, love. What did you find?”

“Eight possibles. The numbers are marked. The rest are the usual weekend stuff—rapes, muggings, and arguments that went a little too far.”

“I’ll have Mary get the details to you as soon as they’re printed out. Give her fifteen minutes. Take a break or something.”

“Okay,” she said, and walked out again into the large outer office. She saw that Brayer, her section head, was just putting a few papers into a file, then throwing on his sport coat.

“On a break, Elizabeth?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Can’t do anything until the computer spits out the day’s possibles.”

“Come on,” said Brayer. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. I’m waiting on something myself.” They walked down the hall and into the employees’ lounge. Brayer poured two cups of coffee while Elizabeth staked her claim on a table in the far corner of the room.

Brayer sat down, sighing. “I sometimes get tired of this job. You never seem to get anything worthwhile, and you spend an awful lot of time analyzing data that doesn’t form a pattern and wouldn’t prove anything if it did. This morning I’ve been going over the field reports of last week’s possibles. Nothing.”

Elizabeth said, “Just what I needed—to hear my section chief talking like that on a Monday morning.”

“I guess it’s the logical flaw that bothers me,” said Brayer. “You and I are looking for a pattern that will lead us to a professional killer, a hit man. So we pick out everything that doesn’t seem routine and normal. The point about professional killers is that they don’t do things to draw attention to themselves. What did you get this morning, for instance?”

“A shotgun suicide. One where they tortured a man and then cut his throat. One where a man was poisoned in a hotel dining room, one where the brakes failed on a new car. And a dynamite murder, and—”

“There!” said Brayer. “That’s just what I was talking about. A dynamite murder. That’s no hit man. It’s a mental defective who saw a hit man do that on television. What we ought to be looking at is the ones that don’t look unusual. The ones where the coroner says it was a natural death.”

“You know why we don’t,” said Elizabeth.

“Sure. Too many of them. Thousands every day. But that’s where our man will be. And you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was a hit man or pneumonia. Dynamite, shotguns, knives, hell. You don’t have to hire a professional for that. You can find somejunkie in half an hour who could do that for a couple of hundred.”

“We help catch one now and then, you have to remember that.”

“Yes, we do. You’re right. We’re not just wasting time. But there has to be a better way to do it. As it is, we find what we find, not what we’re looking for. We catch lunatics, ax murderers, people like that. Once every few years an old Mafia soldier who wants to come in from the cold and can tell us who did what to whom in 1953. It’s okay, but it’s not what we’re after.”

“John, how many actual hit men do you suppose there are operating right now? The professionals we look for?”

“Oh, a hundred. Maybe two hundred if you count the semiretired and the novices who have the knack. That’s in the world. Not too many, is it?”

“No, not many when you’re trying to find them by analyzing statistics. From another point of view it’s plenty. I’d better go call my bank while I’ve got a minute. They bounced my check unjustly.”

Brayer laughed. “Typical woman,” he said. “Mathematical genius who can’t add up her checkbook.”

Elizabeth smiled her sweetest smile at him, the one that didn’t show that her teeth were clenched. “Thanks for the coffee. I’ll have the activity report in an hour or two.” She got up and disappeared out the door of the lounge.

Brayer sat there alone, sipping the last half of his cup of coffee and feeling vaguely bereft. He liked to sit at a table with a pretty woman. That was about as far as he allowed it to go these days, he thought. It made him feel young.

“May I join you, or am I too ugly?” came a voice. Brayer looked up and saw Connors, the Organized Crime Division head, standing above him.

“You’re perfect, Martin,” said Brayer. “You being the boss, this being Monday, and you being ugly enough to fit right in. It’s a pattern.”

“Thanks,” Connors said. “How are things going?”

“Rotten, I’m afraid. Elizabeth went back to pick out the second-stage possibles, of which there are several. None very promising, but they all take time. The field reports from last week are all blanks except the one from Tulsa, which is three days late and is probably just as blank.”

“I almost hope so this morning,” said Connors. “We’ve got just about every investigator in the field, and Padgett’s airline reports say at least four of the people we keep an eye on bought tickets west this weekend.”

“Anything in it?”

“Probably the usual. Old men like warm weather. At least I do. And Roncone and Neroni have investments out there. Legitimate businesses, or at least they would be if those two weren’t in on them. But there’s always a chance of a meeting.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Brayer without enthusiasm. “Well, I think I’ll go see if Tulsa phoned in. I’d like to close the books on last week before Elizabeth comes up with today’s massacres.”

“How’s she working out, anyway? It’s been over a year.”

Brayer sat back down and spoke in a low voice, “To tell you the truth, Martin, she’s a real surprise. I think if I had to retire tomorrow, she’d be the one I’d pick to replace me.”

“Come on, John,” said Connors. “She can’t possibly know enough yet. There’s a difference between being clever and pretty and running an analysis section. She hasn’t even been in any field investigation yet.”

“But I think she’s got the touch,” said Brayer. “She’s the only one in my section that’s smarter than I am.”

3

Two this week, he thought. Too many. After the next one, a vacation. At least a month. The old lady in front of him stepped aside to count her change, so he moved forward. “One way to Los Angeles, the three o’clock.”

“Five fifty,” said the weary ticket agent, running his hand over the bald spot on his head as though checking to be sure nothing had grown in there while he wasn’t paying attention.

He paid the money and waited while the man filled in the ticket. It would be no problem. After something like Friday, a man buying a ticket on Saturday morning for someplace far away might have stuck. A man buying a ticket for Los Angeles on Monday afternoon was nothing. He wasn’t leaving the vicinity of a crime. He was just leaving. This man behind the counter wouldn’t remember him. Too many people in line buying the same ticket, as fast as he could write. Not even time to look at them all. Not the men, anyway.

He stepped aside and pocketed his ticket. The clock on the wall said 2:45. Almost time to board. Not much time to hang around the bus station and get stared at. No reason for anybody to remember having seen him, because they hadn’t seen anybody in the first place. No chance they’d check on the motel either. He’d registered Friday afternoon three hours before the truck blew up, and the truck had been thirty miles away in Ventura. Another county. All clean and simple. From Los Angeles, you could take any kind of transport to anywhere. You practically had to set yourself on fire to attract a second glance in L. A.

On Monday, February twelfth, at 2:43 P.M., a man not fat, not thin, not young, not old, not tall, not short, not dark, not light, bought a bus ticket for Los Angeles at the Santa Barbara bus station. He was one of twenty or thirty that afternoon that you couldn’t have told from one another, but that didn’t matter because nobody looked at any of them. If the police were looking for someone in the area, it wasn’t on a bus coming toward Ventura on its way to Los Angeles.

Elizabeth studied the second set of printouts on the day’s possibles. The man who had been killed by the shotgun had left a note that satisfied his family and the coroner. The death by torture was linked to a religious cult that had been under investigation for a year and a half. The brake failure was officially attributed to incorrect assembly at the factory in Japan. That left the man poisoned in the hotel dining room and the victim of the dynamite murder.

The autopsy report on the unlucky diner convinced Elizabeth that there wasn’t much point in following up with an investigation. Chances were that he hadn’t even ingested the poison on the premises. It was a combination of drugs, all used for treatment of hypertension, and taken this time with a large amount of alcohol. Elizabeth moved on to the last one.

Veasy, Albert Edward. Machinist for a small company in Ventura, California, called Precision Tooling. Not very promising, really. Professional killers were an expensive service, and that meant powerful enemies. Machinists in Ventura didn’t usually have that kind of enemy. Sexual jealousy? That might introduce him to somebody he wouldn’t otherwise meet—somebody whose name turned up on Activity Reports now and then. Thirty-five years old, married for ten years, three kids. Still possible. Have to check his social habits, if it came to that.

Elizabeth scanned the narrative for the disqualifier, the one element that would make it clear that this one, too, was normal, just another instance of someone being murdered by someone who had a reason to do it, someone who at least knew him.

She noticed the location of the crime. Outside the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Machinists, Local 602, where he had been for a meeting. Her breath caught—a union meeting. Maybe a particularly nasty strike, or the first sign that one of the West Coast families was moving in on the union. She made a note to check it, and also the ownership of Precision Tooling. Maybe that was dirty money. Well what the hell, she thought. Might as well get all of it. Find out what they made, whom they sold it to, and tax summaries. She’d been expecting a busy day anyway, and the other possibles had already dissolved.

She moved down to the summary of the lab report. Explosives detonated by the ignition of the car. She made a note to ask for a list of the dynamite thefts during the last few months in California. She read further. “Explosive not dynamite, as earlier reported. Explosive 200 pounds of fertilizer carried in the bed of the victim’s pickup truck.” Elizabeth laughed involuntarily. Then she threw her pencil down, leaned back in her chair, and tore up her notes.

“What’s up, Elizabeth?” asked Richardson, the analyst at the next desk. “You find a funny murder?”

Elizabeth said, “I can’t help it. I think we’ve established today’s pattern. My one possible blew himself up with a load of fertilizer. You should appreciate that. You’re a connoisseur.”

Richardson chuckled. “Let me see.” He came up and looked over her shoulder at the printout. “Well, I guess it hit the fan this weekend,” he said. “But that’s a new one on me.”

“Me too,” said Elizabeth.

“How do you suppose it happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve heard of sewers and septic tanks blowing up. I guess there’s a lot of methane gas in animal waste.”

“Oh yeah,” said Richardson, suddenly pensive. “I remember reading about some guy who was going to parlay his chicken ranch into an energy empire. But you know what this means, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Brayer’s a walking bomb. His pep talks at staff meetings could kill us.”

Elizabeth giggled. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you about this. I suppose I’ll have to listen to a lot of infantile jokes now.”

“No, I think I got them all out of my system for the present,” said Richardson.

Elizabeth groaned. “Go back to your desk, you creep.”

Richardson said, “I’m going. But you know what?”

“What?”

“I’d have this one checked out.” Elizabeth made a face, but he held up his hand in the gesture he used to signal the return of the businesslike Richardson. “Seriously,” he said.

“Checked out with whom?” asked Elizabeth, moving warily toward whatever absurdity he was anxious for her to elicit from him. “And why?”

“I’m not sure who. I guess the bomb squad. Maybe even somebody over in the Agriculture Department. Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time. Who knows? I’m a city boy myself. But if it does we ought to know about it. We might be sending agents out into the field once a week to find out some farmer blew himself up with his manure spreader.”

Elizabeth studied his face, but he seemed serious. “I don’t know if you’re joking or not, but what you’re saying makes sense. It’ll take a few minutes to clear this up, and I’ve got some time on my hands this afternoon.”

“Then do it,” he said. “If only to cater to my curiosity.”

In the Los Angeles airport there are some people who stand on the moving walkway, letting the long belt carry them to the end of the corridor. Others walk forward on it, combining muscle and machinery into something over a dead run; and others, probably the biggest group, don’t use the machinery at all. This group consists of people who have spent too much time sitting down and know they’ll soon be sitting again for a few hours, or people who arrived at the airport an hour earlier than they needed to. Among them was a man not tall or short, not young or old, not light or dark, with a one-way ticket to Denver in his breast pocket. When the flight attendant checks his boarding pass for the seat number a few minutes from now, she won’t be able to decide whether he is on his way to one of the military bases in that area, or one of the ski resorts. And she certainly won’t ask. After that she won’t have time to notice. As soon as the lights go on she will be too busy to study faces. Once they are strapped in she will look mostly at their laps, where the trays and the drinks and the magazines will be.

The man at Treasury said, “That one’s not in our bailiwick, I’m afraid. Have you tried the FBI?”

“Not yet,” said Elizabeth. “I’d hoped to get something on it today.”

The man chuckled. “Oh, you’ve noticed. But I’ll tell you what you can do. There’s a guy over there who knows just about everything about explosives. Name’s Hart. Agent Robert E. Hart. If you call him direct you’ll avoid all the referral forms and runarounds. He’s the one you’d get to in the end anyway. He’s at extension 3023. Write down that name and number, because it’ll come in handy every now and then. Agent Hart.”

“Thanks,” said Elizabeth. “That’ll save me a lot of time.”

Elizabeth dialed the FBI number and waited. The female voice on the other end seemed to come from the soul of a melting candy bar: “Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Elizabeth retaliated, making her voice go soft and whispery. “Extension 3023 please, dear.”

That’ll hold her, thought Elizabeth.

“Whom would you like to speak with, ma’am?” said the voice, now suddenly businesslike and mechanical.

“Agent Hart,” said Elizabeth.

“I’ll ring his office,” said the voice.

The line clicked and there was that sound that seemed as though a door had opened on a physically larger space. “Hart,” said a man’s voice.

Elizabeth wondered if she had missed the ring. “This is Elizabeth Waring at Justice, Agent Hart. We have an explosives case and we need some information.”

“Who told you to call me?”

“Treasury.”

“Figures,” he said, without emotion. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything you can tell me about fertilizer blowing up.” “About what?”

“Fertilizer. Er … manure. You know, fertilizer.”

“Oh.” There was silence on Hart’s end.

Elizabeth waited. Then she said, “I assure you, Agent Hart, this isn’t a—”

“I know,” he said. “I was just thinking. What’s the LEAA computer code designation?”

“Seven nine dash eight four seven seven.”

“I’ll take a look at it and call you back. What’s your extension?”

“Two one two one. But does that happen? Have you heard of it before?”

“I’m not sure what we’re talking about yet,” said Hart. “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.” He hung up and Elizabeth said “Goodbye” into a dead phone.

She looked up and saw Padgett dash by with a cup of coffee in one hand and an open file in the other. Just then a loose sheet in the file peeled itself off in the breeze and wafted to the floor. He stopped and looked back at it in remorse.

“Got it,” said Elizabeth, and sprang up to retrieve it for him.

“Thanks,” said Padgett. “Too many things at once.”

“Are your friends having a nice time out west?”

“Much better than I am,” he said. “We’ve got to get a few investigators out there today before anything has a chance to happen, and I don’t know where we’re going to get them.”

“You mean it might be something?”

“Probably not,” he said, “but you never know. You can’t take a chance of missing another Appalachin just because somebody’s got the damned flu and somebody else is at an airport that’s fogged in.”

“How about holding the fort with technicians until the cavalry arrives? Locals even? Wiretaps and so on.”

“You know what that mess is these days,” said Padgett. “And we don’t even have probable cause. Just four men we can’t even prove know one another taking winter vacations within a couple hundred miles of one another. Want to go in front of a judge with that one? I don’t, and I’ve been there.”

“Well, good luck with it,” said Elizabeth, not knowing what else to say. The telephone on her desk rang, and she answered it with relief. “Justice, Elizabeth Waring.”

“Hart here,” came the voice.

“Good,” said Elizabeth. “What can you tell me?”

“It’s pretty much what I figured,” he said. “It’s the fertilizer all right.”

“You mean manure blows up?” she asked, a little louder than she had intended. She looked up and noticed that Richardson was watching her with a smirk on his face.

“No,” Hart said. “Fertilizer. The kind they make in factories and sell in stores. A couple of the nitrate fertilizers are chemically similar to dynamite. If you know how to detonate them you can use them the same way. They’re cheaper and you don’t have to have a license to use them. If you run out you can go down to the store and buy all you want.”

“That’s incredible,” said Elizabeth. “Do people know about this?”

“Sure,” said Hart. “A lot of construction companies use fertilizer all the time. Been doing it for years.”

“Then my case is closed, I guess,” said Elizabeth. “The poor man probably just blew himself up by accident. But somebody ought to sue whoever makes that fertilizer. It could happen to anybody.”

“No it couldn’t,” said Hart. “It doesn’t blow up by accident. You have to use blasting caps and an electric charge. Theoretically the gasoline in Veasy’s pickup truck is more dangerous than the fertilizer. More explosive power and easier to set off.”

“So you think it was murder?”

“Or suicide. I haven’t seen enough to tell, really, but I don’t think it’s likely he bought a bag of fertilizer for his garden and it just went off. I suppose if he was carrying blasting caps or shotgun shells or something, and the conditions were right, maybe. But the report says he was just sitting in a parking lot, not jolting along a country road, and something would have to set off whatever served as the detonator.”

“So it is murder.”

“I don’t know. But if this is a case you’re interested in I wouldn’t write it off yet. I’d at least find out what he was carrying around in the bed of his pickup, and whether he even bought any fertilizer.”

“Are you on this case, too? What I mean is, is the FBI interested?”

“No. At least I don’t think so. If the explosive had turned out to be dynamite we would have been. There you have a federal statute having to do with a traceable substance. But as it is, unless it somehow ties in with another case, I doubt there’ll be anyone on it. Local jurisdiction, no reason for the FBI to take an interest.”

4

“Gentlemen, we’re running this country like a goddamned poker game. The average man sees that he has nothing and somebody else has everything. He doesn’t make trouble because he’s optimistic enough to think that after the next hand he’ll have everything. Watch out for the day when he figures out that the chips aren’t changing hands the way they used to. And when he finds out that it’s because the fellow with the chips is playing by different rules, we’d better be ready with our bags packed. You talk about a tax revolt, hell, there’ll be a real revolt. See you next session, if there is one.”

“It’s the only game in town, Senator,” said the senator from Illinois, putting his arm on the old man’s shoulder and walking with him out of the committee hearing room. “Don’t worry. We’ll get a new tax bill passed next session. You put the fear of God into them.”

They were walking down the quiet private hallway that led back under the street to the Senate office building. No one was now within earshot. The old man continued, “Hell, Billy. You’re young yet. Boy senator from Illinois. But I may not even be alive next session. I’m seventy years old, you know. Six terms in the Senate. I’m not going to have a seventh, one way or the other, and when I go the chairmanship goes to—”

“I know, to Fairleigh. You watch seniority pretty closely if you don’t have any yourself. But don’t worry, Senator. Your tax bill is in the bag. Our esteemed colleagues aren’t even dragging their feet anymore. Too much mail from home.”

“I hope you’re right, Billy,” said the old man. “But I’d have felt a lot better about it if we could have gotten it all out on the floor this session. You know, I got a letter today from a woman who makes fifteen thousand dollars a year after twenty years working as a secretary. Her husband makes twenty-five thousand, so the first dollar she makes is taxed at forty-three percent. No tax shelters for them. By the time you figure state taxes, social security, and sales taxes that woman is losing over half her income. Maybe eight thousand dollars. Of the fifty richest people in my state, not one of them pays eight thousand a year in taxes. A lot of them don’t pay anything and never have. And the recent tax bills gave the rich the biggest subsidy yet. We’ve got to make some changes.”

“I know, Senator,” said the younger man, patting him on the shoulder. “I’ve been with you on this since I got here. It’s what got me elected. I said I’d try to work with you on income tax reforms that would help the average citizen, do whatever you wanted. They didn’t vote for me, they voted for you.”

“That’s bullshit. You got here because you were the best governor they’d had in twenty-five years. And you’ll get re-elected because you’re the best senator for the last thirty. If something happens to me before we get this bill passed I’m counting on you to ramrod it. Remind a few people of what they promised us. You know who I mean.”

“Well, here’s my office,” said the senator from Illinois. “Don’t worry. We’ll both be here to remind them, and we probably won’t have to. Most of them will get an earful while they’re home for the break. I leave myself in two hours. First speaking date is tonight.”

“Oh, to be young again,” said the old man. “See you in a few weeks, Billy.” The younger man watched the older senator walk down the hallway toward his office. The familiar blue suit was hanging from the old man’s stooped shoulders, but the white head was still held erect. The Honorable McKinley R. Claremont, senior senator from the great state of Colorado. He wasn’t fooling anybody with that frail elder-statesman routine. Anybody who was interested could check his schedule and see he had a press conference set for eight fifteen tonight in the Denver airport.

“You’re sure about all this?” asked Brayer.

“Of course I’m sure,” said Elizabeth. “I’m sure of the facts, that is. I’m not sure about what interpretation to hang on them, because there aren’t enough of them. Veasy was carrying two hundred-pound sacks of nitrate fertilizer in his pickup truck. He must have bought them that day according to the Ventura police, because nobody saw them before that. Somebody apparently came along while he was in a union meeting and did something to the fertilizer so it would explode. And the FBI agent said that was perfectly possible for somebody who knew how.”

Brayer leaned back in his chair and tapped his pencil absently on the glass desktop. He stared off into space. Finally he turned to her and said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what to make of it either, but it’s sure not ordinary. Whoever did it was fast on his feet. He’d have to ad lib, if the fertilizer was only bought that day.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Elizabeth. “Does it warrant an investigation or not?”

“I’m not sure I know what warrants an investigation these days. We’re supposed to be keeping an eye on organized crime, not giving an Academy Award for the most imaginative performance by a murderer. Do you have any reason to believe this fellow Veasy might have had anything to do with the Mafia?”

“He didn’t have a record, if that’s what you mean, and his name didn’t come up when I had Padgett run the Who’s Who program on the computer. But who knows? Maybe he borrowed money, maybe he smuggled something for them—Ventura’s got a harbor. Maybe anything. It could even have had something to do with the union. We just don’t have anything to go on.”

“Except the fact that whoever snuffed him was clever about it.”

“Right,” said Elizabeth. “Clever enough to be a professional?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a world-class amateur, maybe a lunatic with beginner’s luck. But there’s always the chance it’s the real thing. Lunatics and beginners usually spend some time planning. They’re not up to working with what they find.”

“So you’re going to dispatch an investigator?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’m not even sure if I have anybody I can send right now. What was that FBI agent’s name, again?”

“Hart. Robert E. Hart. Extension 3023. Why?”

“I’ll see if I can con his boss into sending him. If he’s as good as the Treasury man said and I haven’t heard of him, he’s young enough and new enough to be eligible for legwork.” He picked up the phone, then looked at her expectantly.

“You mean I have to leave?” she asked.

“ ‘Fraid so. It’s hard to lie, cheat, and steal in front of an audience. Close the door on your way out.”

5

Just one more before payday, and then a little vacation. Sometimes he wondered how long he would keep it up. At the beginning he’d thought five years was a long time, but now it had been six—no, almost seven, and still going strong. Living in motels and rent-by-the-week cottages could get to be pretty old after a month. It would be nice to be back in Tucson, where he could relax a little and get the old edge back. Eating in fast-food places and spending half your time traveling wasn’t so good for your body. It had to catch up with you sooner or later.

Denver wasn’t bad this time of year, though. Cold and clear. Later he’d take a walk down Colfax Avenue and see a movie. The plane wouldn’t arrive until tonight, and the press conference would make the eleven o’clock news. For the first day or two the old guy’d be surrounded by reporters and hometown minor-league political hacks anyway. After that, when the rosy glow faded, there’d be time to work something out. Just a matter of seeing your best shot and taking it, like pool.

He turned off the television and walked to the dresser. He leaned over his suitcase and peered at the face in the mirror. A little tired from the plane ride is all. No lines, nothing, he thought. It would be ten years yet before it was the kind of face people remembered.

Brayer opened the door of his office and beckoned to Elizabeth, who was sitting at her desk glancing at a newspaper. She brought it with her into Brayer’s office.

“Get down to Disbursement and pick up your travel vouchers,” Brayer said. “There’s a plane at eight that’ll get you to L.A. International by ten o’clock Pacific time, and a hop to Ventura that’ll get you in by eleven.”

“Me?”

“Do you see anybody else?”

“But I’m an analyst, remember? Good old Elizabeth? I’m no investigator. I haven’t been out of this office since—”

“You’re going, Elizabeth,” he said. “You’ve got the rating and the qualifications. Just because you haven’t done it before doesn’t mean you can’t do it, or if it comes to that, that I can’t order you to. I checked it with Martin Connors. So you’re going.”

“So the FBI wouldn’t do it?” she smiled slyly.

“Yes, they will. But they’ll only guarantee to let us use Hart for two days. They can pull him back any time after five o’clock Wednesday afternoon. And they’ll only send him if he’s there to investigate explosions, not handle the whole case by himself. Now get down there to your friendly local travel agent in Disbursement so they have some chance of getting you both on that eight-o’clock plane.”

“I’m on my way,” she said, heading for the door. “I hate snow anyway.”

“If you come back with a tan anywhere but on your face I’ll skin it off you and nail it to the wall,” said Brayer. “You’re not on a vacation, Waring.”

She stopped in the doorway and said, “I thought the usual thing was the Death of a Thousand Cuts?”

“Get going,” he said. To himself he thought, Damn. The best I’ve got. Maybe the best data analyst outside the National Security Agency, off on a wild-goose chase. The worst part was that he had needed to convince Connors to arrange it. He tried to remind himself there was no need to worry. The case and the timing could hardly be better for starting her in the field. It was the longest kind of long shot, complete with a trail that was already cold. She’d have little chance to put herself in harm’s way before she was ready, getting in on armed surveillance or arrests. With four of the capos suddenly showing up in the West on the same day, it hadn’t been hard to convince Connors that it was time to try Elizabeth in the field. The department really did need seasoned field investigators, and if she worked out, who could tell? A female with her brains out in the field—hell, it might make a difference some time. But, he thought, if Connors ever got around to reading the preliminary reports and saw the kind of case he’d sent two people out to investigate, Brayer would have some explaining to do. He consoled himself by planning what he’d say to Grosvenor, when and if he finally bothered to report in from Tulsa.

As Elizabeth stood in the elevator she was glad Brayer had said that about the suntan. California would be warm. It wouldn’t do to show up wearing a heavy overcoat and wool skirts. It wasn’t a vacation, as he’d said, but there was nothing in the rules that said you had to humiliate yourself in front of strangers, looking as though you’d arrived in California by walking over the North Pole. Besides, the bathing suit she had in mind didn’t take up much room.

At the United Airlines desk there were two men. One sat drinking coffee, looking impatient, while the other did all the work. When Elizabeth reached the head of the line and handed the man her travel voucher, he nodded to the other and said, “Miss Waring, Mr. Hart is here waiting for you.”

Hart dropped his cup in a basket and stepped around the desk to help her with the suitcase. “Good to meet you,” he said, looking at the suitcase instead of at her.

“Same to you,” she said. For once she meant it. He was tall and thin with a kind of delicacy about his hands and a rather unruly shock of light brown hair that probably made him look younger than he was. He guided her away from the desk to a line of seats facing the loading gate like a man conducting a lady off a dance floor. This wasn’t going to be so terrible after all.

When they were seated she noticed that he had somehow managed to pick a spot that looked as though it was in the middle of things, but wasn’t close enough to anyone so they couldn’t talk.

He said, “Before I forget, are you carrying a weapon?”

“Yes,” she said. “They admitted there wasn’t any reason, but regulations say field investigators have to. Are you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Same regulation. We’ll have to board early so we don’t attract too much attention when they wave us through the metal detectors.”

“I’m glad you came,” said Elizabeth, venturing onto the most dangerous ground first so she wouldn’t have it in front of her later. “What made the FBI decide to get involved?”

“Your Mr. Brayer. He asked for cooperation and the Bureau is being very cooperative these days. Ten years of bad press, all the political stuff, massive housecleaning after Hoover died—you can imagine. Brayer offered a fairly straightforward murder case with a chance of something bigger, and all he needed was two days of legwork.”

“So the Bureau jumped at it? I hope it’s not a waste of your time,” said Elizabeth.

“No,” said Hart. “The Bureau is reestablishing its usefulness, doing favors. So either way it’s no loss to the organization. As for me,” he said, and Elizabeth could see he was going to step out on the tightrope, “I’ve been on assignments that didn’t pan out before, and none of them involved flying to Southern California with a pretty lady.”

Nicely managed, she thought, if a little clumsy. So he, too, liked to cover the hard part first. She rewarded him with the best smile she could risk. No sense in setting him up for some kind of embarrassment, but at least let him know we’re friends.

The voice in the air said, “United Flight 452 arriving at Gate 23,” and Hart looked at his ticket. “That’s us,” he said.

They sat in silence and watched the rest of the passengers filing in and getting settled. Then the door slammed with a pneumatic thump and the engines wound themselves up to a high whine and the plane began to taxi out away from the buildings into the night. At the end of the apron it spun around and faced into the wind, the engines screamed, and they shot down the runway into the sky.

Elizabeth said, “You had your job long?”

“Four years, about,” said Hart. “You?”

“Only a little over a year. It’s interesting, though. What made you decide to work over there?”

“Came back from the service, went to an undistinguished law school where I earned an undistinguished record,” he smiled. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. Either that or spend the next twenty years researching precedents and hoping to become a junior partner somewhere. This sounded like more fun.”

“Sounds familiar,” said Elizabeth.

“You too?”

“With variations. For me it was Business Administration, and the twenty years would have been spent doing market analyses,” said Elizabeth, and turned to look out the window. They were above the clouds now, and she wondered how long she could keep looking out there before he remembered that all she could see was the tip of the wing.

Movies were always a good way to spend those early hours of the evening in a strange town. A large crowd, a dark place, and a built-in etiquette that kept people from looking too closely at one another or starting a conversation. By the time the lights came up in the theater and he joined the file of people pouring out onto the sidewalk, he was hungry.

Years ago Eddie Mastrewski had told him always to forget he was using a cover. You should be whatever you pretended to be, all the time except when you were actually working. That way there were only a few hours a year when anything could happen to you. The rest of the time you really were an insurance salesman or a truck driver or a policeman, and you weren’t in any more jeopardy than anybody else. If you slipped once your other life would go a long way toward saving your ass. Besides, it gave you something else to think about. Eddie was a butcher.

Of course that had all happened in the days before the trade got so busy. Nobody had that kind of time anymore. You were crazy if you passed up the kind of business you could get. It was easier now, too. Everybody was a stranger, and everybody traveled. The only cover you needed was to look like the others and do what they did when they did it. Right now people were eating. He walked down Colfax looking for a restaurant that was crowded enough.

“Don’t be a jackass, Carlson,” said the old man. “If I’m in any danger it’s not from some guy with a gun, it’s from some big corporation afraid of a bill that would take away its tax advantage. Criminals don’t give a good goddamn about tax reforms because they don’t pay any taxes.”

“What I’m saying, Senator, is that things aren’t that simple or predictable,” said Carlson, a man in his thirties who was so tastefully dressed and well groomed as to appear abnormal. “You’re a national figure now. Your picture is on the television every night. The exact composition of your politics isn’t what we’re talking about. It’s the visibility in the media. That alone makes you a target. If your picture happens to be on the screen at the moment some borderline case finally gets his big headache, you’re going to need security.”

“Fine,” Claremont said. “Get me some security, then. Meanwhile get the hell out of my way and let me do my job.”

“Right, Senator,” said Carlson, opening the door of the limousine for Claremont and climbing in after him, still talking. The black automobile moved away from the curb and into the traffic so quickly that it looked as though the two men had barely caught it in time.

The plane touched down at Los Angeles International and Elizabeth began to prepare herself for whatever came next. Five hours in the air after a full day of work, and now at least one more hour before she could be alone and take her shoes off. She wondered what she must look like by now, then put it out of her mind. She probably looked like a woman who had just worked a thirteen-hour day, she thought, and there wasn’t a whole lot she could do to hide it.

Elizabeth went over the notes she had taken during the long flight. First stop in the morning would be the Ventura police. Hart would handle the postmortem on the remains of the truck and the lab reports and the interview with the technicians. Elizabeth would read through the full report and interview whoever had written it, then follow whatever leads looked promising.

As the no-smoking light flickered and the engine wound down she wrote an additional note on her pad: bank records. If Veasy had a business relationship with organized crime there would be something that didn’t fit. He would have made some surprising deposits or some surprising withdrawals. Or if not, there would be a discrepancy between the bank accounts and the way he had lived—maybe a sign that he had a source of money that didn’t pass through the accounts. She added safe-deposit box? to her notes, then put the pad in her purse.

Elizabeth was glad to be able to move again. Airplane seats are small for a woman five feet five. She wondered what it must be like for Hart.

They joined the line of passengers moving past the flight attendants and out the door into the movable corridor that carried them to the terminal. Then they were in an airport lobby. Hart led her down another corridor to a second lobby, where there was a check-in desk for Golden West Airlines. He had a few words with the desk manager and then waited while the man picked up a telephone and turned his back. He hung up and said, “You can board at nine fifty-five at Gate Forty-one, Mr. Hart. Your bags will be transferred automatically, of course.”

As Elizabeth and Hart wandered across the lobby, she checked the big wall clock: nine thirty. Not enough time to relax, too much time to wait comfortably in one of those blue plastic chairs. She was glad when Hart said, “How about a drink while we’re waiting?”

They sat in a dark corner of the bar with their backs to the wall. The traffic was fairly thin, so the waitress was there for their order immediately. She scurried off to get them their drinks. She was back so fast that they hadn’t said anything to each other.

“I’ve been thinking about this case,” said Elizabeth. “It’s going to be a little bewildering.”

“They always are,” said Hart. “This one is going to be more than that. You’ll be better off if you think of it as preliminary research instead of a case of its own.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re looking for professional touches. If you find any, that’s about all you’ll find, most likely. There’s not much chance we’ll make any arrests. If it’s a professional there won’t be anything to connect him with Veasy, and more likely than not we’ve never heard of him before. And this time there isn’t even a case on record of anyone who works that way, so if it’s a pattern this is the first of the series.”

“So I shouldn’t get my hopes up,” said Elizabeth. “I haven’t.”

“Oh I don’t know,” said Hart. “Hope doesn’t cost anything. But we’ve got very little this time. In a truck explosion like that there can’t be any fingerprints. But there may be something connected with the method or the circumstances that’ll be useful later.”

“I’ve got a few ideas to start with,” said Elizabeth. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

He nodded and sipped his drink. “Maybe, if we’re thorough and careful and don’t make any mistakes ourselves. But the best thing to do at the start of it is to forget about looking for anything in particular. Just look and write down everything you see or hear. It may make sense to somebody a year from now.”

Elizabeth smiled to herself. He was a man all right—telling her not to get her hopes up, and then suggesting that it would all work out in a way that was too far off for anybody to predict. The endless replay of John Wayne handing the woman a pistol and saying ominously, “Save the last bullet for yourself” before he climbs over the stockade with a knife clenched in his teeth.

Elizabeth picked up her purse. “Nine fifty. Time to go.”

He bolted the last inch of his Scotch, tossed some money on the table, and followed her out into the lobby. One more short flight, she thought, and then the chance for some rest.

He walked out of the restaurant and bought a Denver Post from the vending machine at the curb. Time to start doing some research on him. If they didn’t publish his schedule, at least they might have a picture of him. You had to start somewhere. He remembered hearing a story about Dave Burton trying to collect on a next-door neighbor once. Probably not true, but you never knew. Things like that could happen if you weren’t careful, and the big ones like this were worth taking a little extra time with. For that kind of money, why not? And this was the last one for a while. Another one of Eddie Mastrewski’s proverbs. Always take it slow when you’re tired. The police can be dumb as gorillas, make a million mistakes, but at the end of it they still get paid and go home to watch television. You make one and you’re dead. If the police don’t get you the client will because he’ll get scared.

Getting out had to be the simplest part this time. He’d thought of that part right away, as soon as he’d heard the timing. A charter flight to Las Vegas, booked in advance. There was some kind of rule about that. Charter flights had to be advance booking, so the police wouldn’t look closely for fugitives there. If you couldn’t leave from another town, a charter flight wasn’t bad.

Elizabeth held her exhaustion in abeyance while the little plane flew along the coast toward Ventura. At first she could see the incredible lighted expanse below her, stretching down the long valley to fade into a feeble fluttering like stars. Then the plane moved out across the coastal range and over the water, and there was only darkness and calm on her side of the cabin.

It seemed like only a few minutes before the little airplane began to descend. The Ventura airport wasn’t much. They put a short wooden staircase next to the fuselage for people to step on, and there was an eager young man in a gold sportcoat that seemed to belong to an absent older brother to serve as spotter for the deplaning passengers. He smiled and hovered, his hands held out silently announcing his intention to catch any passenger who might begin to fall.

The night was calm and warm, like late spring. The airport reminded her of a small-town bus station, but they managed to find a cab driver lounging out front who knew the Ocean Sands Motel, where Disbursement had made their reservations. She was pleasantly surprised to see the sprawling, vaguely Spanish stucco building half-buried in luxuriant, unfamiliar vegetation. She wondered at first if Disbursement had made a mistake, but then remembered that the economies were always inconsistent: the leather-bound notepads with the cheap, thin paper in the office told it all.

Hart took charge and registered for them. Elizabeth couldn’t help wondering if it was just his faintly antiquated courtesy again, or if his experience of hotels was all of the sort where the woman didn’t sign her own name. She didn’t think about it for long, because as soon as the key to her room was in her hand she was on her way toward the cool, clean sheets. When she was lying there it occurred to her that she probably hadn’t bothered to say goodnight to him. She didn’t think about that for long either.

He always made a point of staying away from women when he was traveling. It wasn’t that any of the ones he was likely to meet would suddenly become suspicious and make inquiries to the police, or anything like that. It was just that it was too damned complicated. You had to make up something to tell them about yourself, maybe even make up a fake address and phone number, agree to be someplace at a particular time. Things like that took most of the fun out of it anyway, and added an element of danger.

So he walked more slowly to keep from catching up with the one ahead of him on the sidewalk. She was definitely trolling for someone—maybe him. He couldn’t see her face, but her way of walking—her back arched slightly and her hips rolling a little as she strolled down Colfax Avenue—he had seen a thousand times. Women almost always walked fast when they were alone, especially on this kind of street. When they didn’t, it was usually to say, I’m not going anywhere in particular and don’t have anything to do: I’ve got all the time in the world. Another time, he thought as he watched her, his eyes moving irresistibly to the round, firm buttocks. A week from now it would be different.

She turned then and he knew that she was aware of him. She stopped to look in a store window, but he knew she was studying his reflection. He fixed his eyes in front of him and walked purposefully ahead at the same pace. As he passed her she began to walk again. If anyone else had seen it, it must have looked like an accident. A pretty lady window shopping, a man on his way to the parking ramp down the street to pick up his car. He heard her say, “If you like it, maybe you should try it.” The voice was soft and confident at the same time, perfectly modulated to establish a kind of intimacy that said I know everything you feel and desire: I know you. He felt a wave of resentment well and pass over him at the violation, the casual assumption of knowledge like an assertion of possession.

He slowed and said, “Excuse me?” feigning a look of surprise.

She smiled the satisfied-cat smile they always had, with the lips closed and the amused eyes. Then she said, “If you’re lonely, I’m not doing anything.”

In one part of his mind he was thinking she was extremely tempting—huge, bright blue eyes that seemed to peep out from behind a veil of heavy brown hair. In another part all the danger signals were reminding him that this was neither the time nor the place. To have anything to do with her now would put him in jeopardy: she was risking his life and he was angry about it. So he said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Miss. I’m a married man.” He did his best to look flustered, to make her think she’d been wrong this time, to convince her that this time she’d picked a man who hadn’t even seen her. And then he quickened his pace, behaving like a frightened businessman who wanted nothing more at the moment than to escape the place where he’d been embarrassed, but after thinking it over and smoothing out the rough edges, wouldn’t be able to resist telling his wife and one or two close friends about it because he thought it magnified him: a real prostitute came up to me on the street and … well, she offered herself to me. I couldn’t believe it.

He turned off on a side street and kept going, moving along in his preoccupied businessman’s stride. Then he turned again onto a narrow street that ran parallel with Colfax—almost an alley, really. It was darker, and on one side were the backs of stores and taverns and restaurants, nestled together and indistinguishable from one another with their steel fire doors and loading docks and navy-blue Dumpsters piled with cardboard boxes.

The girl had put him into a bad mood, reminded him of how impatient he was for this trip to end so he could go back to Tucson and relax. It wasn’t easy to live for days at a time without so much as talking to anybody, and for weeks without saying more than “What’s the soup of the day?”

He glanced at his watch. A little after ten. Time to head for the motel and read the paper while he waited for the eleven-o’clock news. Then the watch disappeared in a flash of pain, and he was aware that he had heard the sound of whatever had crashed into his skull even while he felt it. But he was on the ground now and his left kneecap seemed to hurt, too. Dimly he could see a rock the size of two fists beside him as he rolled in the gravel. He didn’t have time to decide whether that was what hit him. He just scooped it in and had his arm cocked when he saw a human figure bending toward him for the next blow. With all of his strength he hurled it into the darkness where the face must be, pushing off the ground with his right foot at the same time. There was a sickening thump as it hit, and a high, tentative half-scream that never got all the way out before the shape crumpled.

He was up and moving now, whirling around because the other one would be behind him. This time he wasn’t quite fast enough. A blow across his back with something long like a club electrified him with pain and terror, and he wasn’t sure he could move himself. But then something hit him in the face and he was on the ground again and the other one was winding up for a kick. He grabbed the stable leg with one hand, pulling the man off balance, and punched up into the groin with the other—a quick, hard jab. This time there was no cry of pain, only the sound of the air leaving the man’s lungs. Then the man lay on the ground doubled up like a fetus, rocking and grunting.

He stood up and looked for the others, but no, there had only been two. Muggers, he thought. Jesus! He looked down at them. The first one was probably dead. He wondered what he should do about the other. He didn’t have anything with him—not even a knife. He couldn’t leave them this way. They had almost certainly gotten a good look before they’d done anything. He walked over to the first one, picked up the bloody rock that lay by his head, and brought it down once, hard. Then he did the same to the other one. He dragged them by the ankles into the shadows behind the Dumpster and moved away down the alley, limping from the pain in his left knee. His back was throbbing and he could feel a thin trickle of blood warming his right cheek, but he couldn’t tell if it was his head or his face. The face worried him. Muggers. Jesus.

The senator sat back in his chair and watched a commercial for new cars. There wasn’t really anything in it about cars, but there was a small Japanese car there, and a lot of enthusiastic Americans cavorting around it, showing surprise and pleasure and amazement to a spirited musical score.

Then the news came on. Carlson went over and turned the volume up a little. Not enough so the senator would have to take notice of the fact that Carlson knew he was old and probably didn’t hear as well as he used to. Just enough to make explicit the view they shared, that commercials were a kind of atmospheric interference but the speech at the airport was the very essence of importance.

A newsman was saying, “Congress ended its regular session today and began its midsession break. We’ll have footage of Senator McKinley Claremont’s return to Denver. There was a brief flareup of fighting in the Middle East, an earthquake shook Central America, and New England is racked in the worst snowstorm in twenty years. More about these and other stories in a moment.”

The Japanese car commercial came on again. “It’s the same commercial exactly,” said the senator, peering at the screen in amazement as the enthusiastic Americans mugged and pantomimed their way through the song again. “Carlson! When did they start doing that?”

“Doing what, Senator?”

“Playing the same damned commercial twice in a row?”

“Are they? I didn’t notice,” said Carlson.

6

He moved as quickly as he could. There’d be plenty of time to baby the bumps and bruises later when there wasn’t anybody to watch him do it, but now the important thing was to get back to the motel room and out of sight before anybody found the bodies. He made a quick inventory as he walked—there was a tear in the left knee of his pants, and the whole suit was dusty. With effort he brushed himself off. There was definitely blood on his face, but that was easily taken care of. He pulled out his handkerchief and brought it to his right cheek, but had to stifle a yelp at the pain.

“Damn,” he muttered, wishing vaguely that there was something more he could do to them. There was no question it would show: by morning there would be a bruise, and the swelling had already started. He just hoped there wouldn’t be a scar. Maybe all the blood was coming from beyond the hairline. “Damn!” he said again, under his breath. “Stupid. Rocks and clubs, like animals. Baboons!”

Down the alley he could see the pool of light of the motel parking lot. He stopped to listen for a car coming his way, but there was nothing. He was surprised to see that he still had his newspaper. He didn’t remember picking it up. But a wave of relief washed over him. He opened the paper as though he had been reading it since he parked his car down the alley. Then he took a deep breath and came around the corner of the motel, heading for the back stairway. He heard a door somewhere in the other wing slamming but he kept on going, trying hard not to limp. His ears picked up the sound of keys jangling and muffled voices, but he kept on going, gritting his teeth against the pain. Up the stairs he climbed, using the handrail to keep the weight off the leg. He swung around with the paper under his arm, keeping his left side to the light as long as he could, then pressing his face so close to the wall it almost touched while he unlocked the door.

He was inside, and breathing hard. He carefully stripped off his clothes, leaving them in a pile on the floor, then walked into the bathroom. The mirrored wall told him what he had feared. He stared at it, and what stared back at him was a thin, nondescript man in his early thirties who looked as if he’d walked away from an airplane crash. The right side of his face was already beginning to blacken and swell, and a thin trickle of blood was beginning to snake down from his temple. He watched it saturate the sideburn and then quickly curve down the cheek to the chin. As he leaned closer to search the face, the drop reached the point of his chin and fell, making a bright blotch in the sink. He carefully washed his face, then ran the water in the bathtub.

He sat on the edge of the tub and stared at his knee while he waited. A scrape, a cut with a little dirt in it maybe. He flexed the leg, studying the pain as though he were fine-tuning it. No cracks or chips, he thought. Just a scratch is all. But the face—he wasn’t ready to think about that yet. He padded out into the other room and turned on the television. The news was just coming on. He caught sight of himself in the other mirror, sitting naked on the bed. A small, whitish animal with a few tufts of hair. And hurt, too. As he watched, the injured face in the mirror contracted a little, seemed to clench and compress itself into a mask of despair. A sigh like a strangled squeak escaped from its throat. He said aloud to the face, “You sorry little bastard.” And then the moment was gone. The people on the television screen seemed to be dancing around, celebrating something having to do with a little car parked behind them. He wished them all dead.

Then the newsman came on. He padded back into the bathroom to check the water. It was beginning to get deep enough now, so he turned the tap off and tested the temperature. Too hot: time enough to watch the news.

When he got back to the bed, Claremont and his aide were descending the ladder of the plane. It was pretty much what he’d pictured—a white-haired, stiff-necked old coot in a three-piece banker’s suit of the sort you could hardly buy in a store anymore, followed closely by a neat, short-haired, milk-complexioned young man who appeared to be the prototype of a new doll.

He studied their moves as they approached the terminal. The senator looked old and frail and a little tired. Then there was a different scene, at a podium bristling with microphones. He was saying, “We’re going to fight it through this time to the end. We’ve got key people from both parties working very hard in Washington and in their home districts.”

Claremont looked old and vulnerable all right. Too old to run or fight, probably too old to even make much noise. He had that sharp-eyed hawk-face look that old people got sometimes, and his temples were marbled with blue veins. The picture changed and the newsman was talking about something having to do with some dark, intense little men in olive-drab fatigues. He switched off the television, went into the bathroom, and slowly settled himself into the hot tub. He studied the knee again, watching the tiny pink cloud swirl away from the cut like liquid smoke. Then he settled back, relaxing every muscle in his body. In a minute he would submerge his head and try to clean those wounds, too. That would hurt but it had to be done. No sense getting an infection.

He tried to think the situation through. He couldn’t travel with a face like that. People remembered things like black eyes and bruised faces. And in the morning they’d find the two bodies, and start looking for somebody who’d been in a fight. The first place they’d look would be in the hotels and motels around here, starting with the cheapest first. It would look like a gang fight, but not enough like one to keep them from checking out transients right away while they could still put their hands on them. He’d paid in cash for the room, three days in advance, like always. And then there was the charter flight for Las Vegas—paid in advance, too. But that didn’t leave until Thursday night. Too soon for the face to get back to normal, and too long to wait while the police looked for a man who’d been in a fight. So it had to be tonight. There was no other way. He had to be somewhere else before they knew what they were looking for. And then his mind stopped dead. There was still the senator. How could he do the senator and get out of Denver in one night with a face like that? He thought again about the two men in the alley. If only they hadn’t picked him out, or picked that alley, or had thought of it another night. But there wasn’t much he could do about it now. He started again from the beginning. How can I travel with a face like this?

McKinley Claremont sipped the last of his bourbon and watched the film of the Arab gun crew expertly loading and firing at a distant hillside. He wondered if it was stock footage, or if they were really getting that organized. In ‘67 he’d been to Egypt on a fact-finding tour and it hadn’t been like that. After a couple of rounds, the ammunition they had with them had turned out to be the wrong size, so the crew he was with just sat down and started eating and drinking. Two hours later a captain told him they were waiting for the supply lines to get untangled, or for further orders, whichever happened first. Meanwhile they sat in the sun behind their useless cannon, waiting.

Carlson interrupted his thoughts. “I’d say it came off very well, wouldn’t you, Senator?”

“All right, I guess,” said the senator. “On television they don’t get the chance to spell your name wrong, anyway.”

“Big day tomorrow,” said Carlson tactfully.

“Right,” said the old man. He set down his glass and raised himself slowly from his chair. “Call me at eight and while we’re having breakfast we’ll try to figure out what’s got to be done. That is, if we’ve got time for breakfast?”

“Yes sir,” said Carlson. “First appointment isn’t until ten.” 

“Fine, see you in the morning then.”

“Good night, Senator,” said Carlson, already halfway out the door. “My room is right next door if you need anything. Four oh eight.” The door shut.

Claremont shuffled over to the closet and brought out his pajamas. He tossed them on the bed and then took off his suit, carefully hanging it up so it wouldn’t get wrinkled. If he didn’t hate the idea of losing his privacy, he’d get a valet, he thought. Living out of a suitcase half of each year was bad enough. Then you had to decide whether to spend your time worrying about wrinkles or give up the few minutes of solitude you ever had.

He eased himself into the strange bed and tried out a couple of positions for comfort. Politics wasn’t so bad for the young fellows, he thought. Trouble was, by the time you knew anything and had enough seniority to make anybody listen to it, you were too old. He peered through the darkness at his teeth soaking in the glass on the nightstand. Those things were older than some of the men in the House of Representatives. He chuckled to himself. Still plenty of bite to them, though.

He felt the water around him loosening the taut muscles and soaking some of the hurt out of him. He began to feel stronger. Now and then he would take a deep breath and lean back with his chin tucked into his chest to submerge his whole head. Then he would wait until his breath came back and do it again for as long as he could. Finally he sat up, took the soap between his hands, worked it into a lather, then rubbed soap over his head and face. It was as though dozens of hornets were stinging his scalp, his cheek, his temple. He gasped to fill his lungs again and ducked under. Slowly the pain went away.

He waited a few seconds, then climbed out of the tub and began toweling himself off, gingerly. When he came to his knee he dried around it. No telling what germs there were on a hotel towel, and no sense leaving bloodstains. He looked in the mirror again. This time the face didn’t seem quite so bad, with the hair combed and no clot of blood on it. It was the cheek and the eye that’d give trouble, but with the right pair of sunglasses, maybe not so much, at least until tomorrow night.

He knew what he had to do now. There just wasn’t any other way. As he dried himself he walked out into the bedroom. He picked up his watch from the dresser and put it on. Eleven thirty-nine. It would be a long night, no matter what. If only this had happened when he was working on something normal. He could call them and ask them to send somebody else, or even farm it out himself to someone he knew—Eddie Mastrewski had done that with him a couple of times. That reminded him of something Eddie had said, and it brought back the nervous anxiety: “Never work when you’re hurt, kid. If you don’t feel good you won’t think straight, either. And if people can see it they’ll remember it. I don’t mean major surgery either. I wouldn’t work with a pimple.” Eddie was full of reasons not to work.

He put on clean clothes and carefully combed his wet hair. There was one consolation, he thought. If anybody saw him and he did get away, what they’d remember about him was the bumps and bruises, and they’d be gone in two weeks with any luck.

The whole thing would have to be changed now. He had planned to get a high-powered rifle with a scope, and get him through a window in his hotel. That was the way the crazies whose fantasies didn’t include getting their pictures in the newspapers all did it. There wasn’t time for that now, and he didn’t have a gun, and—no use even thinking about it. He’d just have to live with the situation as it was.

He went to his suitcase and rummaged around for a few seconds, collecting some things. A pocketknife, a ballpoint pen, a clean handkerchief, a pair of sunglasses. He tried on the sunglasses and studied his reflection. It wasn’t great, but it was something. He made a mental note to get a pair with bigger lenses, maybe the wraparound kind. Then he sat down to read the newspaper.

There was an article on the front page about the senator’s return. He studied it, but could find nothing that would tell him where the old man was staying tonight. He flipped through the paper until he came to a second article. This one had pictures of the old man and his aide getting out of a limousine in front of a building. Only part of the facade was visible, but it was a hotel, all right. They had said the old man had never lived in Denver. He had started out as a state assemblyman in Pueblo and still owned a place there. He studied the picture for clues. There was a doorman wearing one of those ridiculous comic-opera costumes, but no insignia on it, and nothing on the marble facade of the building except a number. He smiled. That would do it. 1905.

He picked up the telephone book and leafed through it until he came to a page marked Hospitals—Hotels. There were dozens, but it didn’t take him long. The Constellation Hotel. 1905 19th Street. He went through the rest of the list to see if there was another one with a 1905 number—he had been the victim of enough coincidences for one day—but there wasn’t. So that was it. He studied the section carefully, looking for the hotel’s ad. There wasn’t any. So he turned to Restaurants. In a few seconds he’d found what he needed.

He got up and packed his suitcase, then tore his bed up a little. He set the key on the dresser, and looked around one last time to see if he’d left anything before he turned out the lights. He walked down the back stairs and through the alley. The cold made his knee stiffen up a little, but he was walking better now. A few blocks down there was another motel, and a telephone booth at the gas station across the street.

When he came to it, he called a cab company.

“I’d like a cab, please.”

“Where are you now?”

He read the sign across the street. “The Wee Hours Motel on Colfax.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“The Pirate’s Cove Restaurant on Alameda.” He’d almost said Alameda and 19th. Never work tired or hurt.

“Right. He’ll be there in about five minutes.”

They always said five minutes, he thought. Now the suitcase. He couldn’t ditch it here. The police might not recognize the rock as the weapon and go around to all the trash cans looking for something else. Never overestimate the police, count on them figuring out the obvious. He decided to hold on to the suitcase for the moment. The worst thing the cabdriver could think was that he was skipping out on a motel bill in the middle of the night.

He saw the cab pull up in front of the motel across the street. The driver was staring at the office window for his fare, so he didn’t see the man with the suitcase until he was almost to the car. When he did he reached behind him, swung the back door open, and said, “Pirate’s Cove?”

“Yep, that’s me.”

The cab was fitted with an oversized heater that blew a continuous rush of hot, impure air into the back seat. After the cold outside he figured he could tolerate it for a few minutes. He sat in the driver’s blind spot.

The driver said, “Hell of a cold night, ain’t it?” as he pulled away from the curb.

“Sure is. Glad you got here so quick.”

“Not much business this time of night. Mostly dedicated lushes who’ve lost their licenses. A few old folks out visiting each other. Now and then a whore or two.”

“Must be hard to break even.”

“Not too bad, really. When it gets slow we hang around the airport for the late flights. Nobody wants to call Aunt Mary to come pick them up at two A.M.”

“I guess not.”

They sat in silence for a while. He could see one advantage to the late shift. Even on Colfax the traffic was light, and the cab was able to glide down the street catching each signal just at the moment when it turned green. He looked at his watch again. Just a little after midnight. He resented the way time was passing. He was going to need as much as he could get. At the Pirate’s Cove he reached over the seat and gave the driver a bill. “Ten cover it?” he said, facing downward away from the light.

“Sure,” said the driver. “Thanks.” He’d tipped generously but not enough to be remembered.

“‘Night,” he said and quickly got out, heading toward the glass door of the restaurant. When he heard the cab pull away he bent down to tie his shoe until the car was too far away for the driver to see him. Then he straightened up and moved off down the street toward the Constellation Hotel.

It was seven stories, shaped like a cereal box. He went around the block to approach it from the rear. There was a parking ramp and a broad loading dock. To the left of the dock he could see that one part of the back wall was pierced with ventilators and fans with screens over them and a number of pipes—the kitchen. Just in front of it he noticed a small wooden stockade. He walked up to it, opened the gate, and looked inside. There were two large garbage Dumpsters. He opened the first, and the smell of it nearly gagged him. He tried the other, and it seemed to be mostly cardboard boxes flattened to save space. He set the suitcase on top and closed the cover, then made his way to the back entrance of the parking ramp.

There was an elevator, so he entered it and studied the panel of buttons, then pushed Lobby, and waited. He hoped it wasn’t too empty. The way he looked he couldn’t afford much company, but if he were alone it would be worse. When the doors opened he stepped out quickly, keeping his head down and moving across the lobby at a slight angle from the front desk toward the only doorway he could see. There were two young couples, well dressed, lounging in the oasis of furniture in the center of the room. One of the women had her shoes off and was rubbing her toes wearily. The man with her said something about a nightcap and she rolled her eyes in distaste.

He knew exactly what he was looking for, but had no way of knowing if the hypothesis was correct. As he came abreast of the front desk he quickly stared at the mailboxes. Room 406, unquestionably, he thought. He had to try it, anyway. The person most likely to have written messages pile up in his mailbox this late at night in a hotel would be the senator. He kept on going out the front door to the street, then walked around to the parking ramp again and pushed the elevator button for the fourth floor. This would be the hard part.

When the door opened he was prepared to see a uniformed guard, but the corridor was empty. As he searched for 406, part of his mind was taking note of which rooms seemed to be occupied. He heard voices behind one door, the background music from a television show behind another. There were Do Not Disturb signs hanging from some of the doorknobs. He went past 406 and down the corridor to take a look at the other elevator and the stairway. He had to get out of here afterward.

At the end of the hallway there was a room where the sign said, Please Make Up the Room. He wondered—it could just be somebody who’d reversed the sign by accident, meaning to leave the Do Not Disturb side out. He stopped and listened. There was no sound. He decided to chance it.

He took out his wallet and selected a credit card, then carefully slipped it into the door latch, easing the door open and waiting for the chain to catch. The door wasn’t chained, so he moved inside and stood still, his back to the door, listening. He waited for his eyes to get used to the light, trying to sense whether there was anyone asleep in the bed. He crouched, trying to line up the surface of the bed with the dim glow of the window. When he succeeded he was sure. The silhouette of the bed was flat.

Quickly he walked to the window and out to the balcony. The senator’s balcony would be the fifth one over. He wondered if he could even do it now, tired and hurt and cold. He studied the row of identical, iron-railed balconies. Yes, he thought, that was the way in. They were far enough away from one another so a fat-ass architect would assume no one could make it from one to the other.

He went back into the room and closed the window. He looked around for something long enough to reach. There was a long, low table along one wall. He studied it—no, it was bolted down too securely, and it was too heavy to handle alone. Then he noticed the closet. It was a double closet, huge, for a hotel room. He looked inside and saw the shelf. Perfect, he thought. It was a good ten inches wide and eight or nine feet long. Thank God for good, substantial hotels. And it was screwed in, too. Working rapidly, he used his pocketknife to take out the screws, then brought the shelf out with him to the balcony.

He stopped to take one last look at the layout of the room, memorizing the location, size, and shape of each piece of furniture. Then he slowly and carefully extended the board across the void between his balcony and the next one. It reached, the other end making a light tap on the railing as he set it down. He lifted his right leg up and got his knee on the board, then the other one. He winced with pain. He had forgotten that. It would be a long, hard crawl. The shelf bowed in the middle as he eased his weight onto it, but it seemed safe enough. Four floors below him he could see the little fence with the garbage Dumpsters in it, a tiny square in the corner of the parking lot. He thought about falling all that way; lying there in the cold, smashed on the pavement. But then he was at the end of the board. He swung his legs down to the balcony and turned to pull the shelf behind him. One down, four to go.

One after another he took them, not thinking about the rest of it now, not thinking about anything but crossing the cold, empty space that separated him from the fifth balcony. And then he was there. He leaned the shelf against the wall, then thought better of it. There might be some vantage, from some other building, where somebody could see it. He laid it down flat on the balcony, then ran his hand along the edge of the sliding window to feel for the latch. There wasn’t one on the outside. Another security feature, he thought. Then he went to the other end of the window and checked that, hopelessly.

He would have to take the chance of leaving a sign. He opened his knife and slipped the blade under the rubber molding a few inches below the level of the inside latch, then slowly brought it up. The glass shifted minutely. He smiled, and kept smiling even though it hurt. It was just as he’d hoped. The latch was secure, but the glass wasn’t fitted tightly to the aluminum frame. Using a gentle, steady pressure of his fingertips, he slid the large pane as far as it would go away from the latch, then stuffed his handkerchief into the crack to hold it there. He studied his accomplishment. He had about an eighth of an inch to work with now. Using his knife as a pry, he bent the aluminum frame a little to gain a few more thousandths of an inch. Then he took the knife and pointed the blade up under the latch. The spring was strong, but he managed to lift the hook clear of the catch and slide the window free. He stopped for a moment with the window open a hair, and pressed the molding and frame back into shape. He whisked his handkerchief over the glass and the frame, just in case. They wouldn’t put it in the papers, he thought, but they’d send somebody to do it even if they thought he died of old age.

He took out the ballpoint pen he’d brought with him and held it up out of the deep shadows. He took out the clear plastic refill and looked at it. To any other eye it looked like nothing, a refill that only had about a third of its ink left. But the last two thirds were a clear liquid, like water only thicker.

Touching the window with his handkerchief, he quietly slid it aside and slipped into the room, closing it behind him and moving away from the light. He stood there, silent and unmoving, studying the room. Claremont was sound asleep, his slow, regular breathing faintly audible.

Now to find just the right thing, he thought. A bottle of pills, maybe. Or a laxative. Old people make a big deal out of taking a shit. He saw a glass on the coffee table, so he went over and sniffed it—liquor. That wouldn’t do now. He could feel the seconds slipping past him, seconds he needed. He moved into the bathroom straining his eyes to find something for his purpose, but no—it was too dark. He thought of just forgetting the whole thing and smothering him with a pillow, but that was too dangerous and chancy. The bed was next to the wall, and all the old bastard would have to do was pound it once or twice in the struggle and that would be that. Old or not, he could make noise. He came out of the bathroom and stared at the sleeping figure. There was nothing—only the bed, the nightstand with the lamp and the glass. The liquor would have been great if he’d managed to get here in time to help with the mixing, he thought, but not now. And then he realized it wasn’t the same glass. The liquor glass was on the coffee table.

Slowly and carefully, he drifted over to the bed and stared at the nightstand. He had to look a little to the side to discern anything much in the darkness. He brought his face close to the glass and then almost laughed out loud. Of course, he thought. False teeth! He slowly reached over and poured the contents of the pen refill into the glass.

Then he drifted back out to the balcony and closed the sliding window behind him. In a few seconds he was already on the third balcony and putting down his portable bridge to the second. He looked down again, this time elated by the height, but he held himself in check. Always work slowly when you’re tired, he reminded himself. He channeled his concentration into his work, moving along the shelf and then pulling it after him, setting it on the next shelf and easing himself onto it. And then he was there. He slipped back into the room and closed the window, this time letting it lock. Then he went to the closet and set the shelf back on its supports. For a second he considered just leaving it, but no. Later he’d regret it. He took out his knife and carefully replaced the screws. Then he forced himself to stand quietly for a moment. Did he have everything? Was anything out of place? He reached into his coat pocket and screwed his pen back together. Then he took a few deep breaths, listened, and stepped out into the hallway.

At the elevator he pressed the button for the parking garage. The doors sighed and opened immediately. That was a good sign, he thought. In all that time since he’d come up, nobody had used that elevator. He glanced at his watch. It was only one fifteen. And then he realized he was getting an erection. It struck him as funny, but he didn’t dare laugh yet.

When the elevator doors opened again and he felt the cold night air he forgot about it. He moved across the parking ramp and out to the lot. At the fenced-in Dumpsters he stopped and retrieved his suitcase, then kept on going. At the first public trash can he came to, he broke his pen in two and threw it in among the crumpled cups and napkins and bottles and cans. He moved again, nursing his injured knee into exactly the right pace for a man disappearing into the night.

The senator stirred, then woke up. The room seemed awfully cold. The Constellation hadn’t been the same since they’d remodeled it in 1972, he thought. It was those damned fancy windows and balconies and things. The workmanship just wasn’t any good anymore. People didn’t take pride in their work. But then he reminded himself that he was an old man, a cranky one at that, and it was probably just his bad circulation. He rolled over and composed himself to go back to sleep. “A goose probably just walked over my grave.”