Operation Stranglehold

by Dan J. Marlowe

  Hazel’s bright red hair emerged from under the covers when the waiter departed after setting up. “You should’ve stayed out’ve bed and given the kid a treat,” I suggested, wheeling the cart over to the bed.

  “We are not amused,” Hazel declared, but she was smiling.

  She sat on the edge of the bed while I pulled a chair up to my side of the table. She ate with her usual healthy, longshoreman’s appetite. Neither of us said anything more until we’d finished and I’d lighted cigarettes for us both while Hazel poured herself a second cup of coffee.

  She leaned back upon a plumped-up pillow, unconscious of the all-star display, her cigarette cocked upward as she drew upon it. “I speak Spanish very well,” she announced.

  If some of Hazel’s remarks sound disjointed, it’s because she has a habit of ignoring preliminaries and cutting right to the bone. I knew she was declaring herself ready for a rescue expedition in Spain, but I wasn’t having any. “Spanish or Swahili,” I countered, “forget it.”

  “Can your doctor friend hold Senator Winters’ men forever?” she demanded. “Is it going to be any easier to get the senator to lay off six months from now than it is now?”

  She was right about that, anyway; nothing was going to change. Time wasn’t going to be on my side in approaching Edwin Winters to call off his dogs. All I could offer at any time was to send back his men in return for a promise to forget me. If I approached Winters at all, it might as well be right now. But still I hesitated. I hadn’t retained my mobility for so many years by ramming my head into lions’ mouths.

  “If you telephone him, you’ll at least find out what he wanted,” Hazel remarked with her customary practicality.

  I had a feeling I knew what he wanted, and that it wasn’t so very much different from what Hazel wanted. No other reason that I could see made sense of the senator’s effort to contact me. But I still wasn’t having any; I’d been down that road too many times before with Karl Erikson. I might be a chipped pitcher, but I was still unbroken, and I’d just as soon keep it that way. The minute I called Winters I was dealing myself into a hand with well-hidden hole cards.

  Hazel has an unnerving knack of reading my mind. “You could call him, and if you didn’t like what he has to say, we could disappear,” she prodded me.

  “Disappear from the highpowered posse a man like that could turn loose?”

  “He’ll turn it loose anyway if his men don’t show up soon,” she predicted. “He’ll start at the ranch, trace the route of the plane, show pictures around, the whole bit.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Until he lands in our laps.”

  “But we’re not staying here, baby.”

  “You just said it yourself, Earl; moving will only slow down a man like Winters.”

  “Don’t try to confuse me,” I growled.

  But she had a point. Hazel, certainly, was highly noticeable. I had no wish to subject her to a life-style of hiding out, either. I’d been that route too many times myself.

  I counted to ten, backed up, and counted to twenty, then reached for the push-button telephone. I punched the number I’d picked up counting dial clicks when the blubbery Smitty called it from the ranch. “Senator Ed Winters,” I said to the feminine voice that responded.

  “Your name and business, please?”

  “Put me through to the senator, young lady.”

  “The senator insists upon knowing to whom he’s speaking, sir,” the receptionist informed me.

  “It’s very important that I speak to Senator Winters,” I tried to bull my way past the line of scrimmage.

  A man came on the line. We went through the same routine. Another man was summoned, and the performance was repeated. I maintained that my business was personal. The man maintained that the senator spoke to no unknowns.

  “Tell him it’s about Bruno and Smitty,” I said finally when it began to appear like a total stalemate.

  That brought action.

  A moment later a resonant voice, obviously the product of years of wagon-bed oratorical projection, reverberated in my ear. “What’s this about Bruno and Smitty?” the voice demanded. “And who are you?”

  If a voice could be said to sound like a tidal wave, Senator Winters qualified. Bristling energy radiated from every syllable. “I’m Earl Drake,” I said.

  “Drake?” There was a loud snort. “Hell, man, I’ve got people looking for you and Bruno and Smitty right now. Where are you?”

  “I hope the people you’ve got looking for me now have better manners than Bruno and Smitty,” I countered.

  Winters’ tone sharpened. “Where are they, damn it! Are they all right?”

  “Except for a couple of nicks.”

  “Exactly what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Winters demanded belligerently.

  “What I said: What’s your business with me, Senator?”

  “It’s not a subject for a telephone conversation, Drake. Tell me where you are and I’ll have a man standing in front of you in thirty minutes who’ll tell you all about it.”

  “No sale. You tell me. Or I’m gone.”

  “Why, you damned meathead!” the senatorial voice rasped. Winters paused while he plainly sought to control his senatorial choler. “It’s a sensitive subject, Drake! Do you know the meaning of the word?”

  I tried another tack. “How did you know where to find me?”

  “A highly recommended government employee was released to me by a Washington agency to undertake a delicate political mission,” the imperious voice declared. “The mission failed, and I went back to the agency. They suggested you.”

  I’d been trying to get a reading on the man from his voice. Winters sounded dignified but not pompous. Then the meaning of what he’d said got through to me. “You mean the agency blew my cover to a goddam tinhorn politician?” I raged.

  There was a momentary silence. “Young man, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve heard myself called a goddam tinhorn politician,” Winters said drily.

  I was getting madder by the minute. I was just beginning to realize I couldn’t ever go back to the ranch which had been a real asylum to me. Hazel and I had had a lot of good times there. “Whatever your package is, the hell with it!” I barked. “All I want is to be left alone! All I want—”

  “Are you a wealthy man, Mr. Drake?” Winter’s crackling voice overrode mine.

  “Wealthy? Hell, no. What’s that—”

  “Then I suggest you come to see me. In Washington. Go to the nearest city serviced by United Air Lines and tell them you’re flying at my expense. They’ll accept it. Since I seem to have disrupted your life in some manner I don’t at the moment understand, the least you can do is make me pay for it,” Winters continued suavely. “And for the mission.”

  “You could be singing my song, Senator,” I admitted as my temperature cooled. The subject of money has a soothing effect upon me. “Depending upon—”

  “No telephone discussion,” Winters interrupted me again. “Come and see me.” There was a click in my ear, and the connection was gone.

  “You were terribly hostile,” Hazel said as I replaced the receiver in the phone cradle.

  I didn’t debate it. “He’s out of his mind if he thinks I’m going to walk into his office where he can bag me,” I said firmly.

  “You’ve got Bruno and Smitty to trade,” Hazel pointed out. “What did you mean when you said he could be singing your song?”

  “He said he’d pay for service rendered. Type of service and type of payment unspecified.”

  “If it’s helping Karl Erikson, I’m for it, Earl.”

  “Get dressed and let’s start moving,” I returned. “A man like Winters is having that call traced right now.”

  Hazel moved toward her clothes. “When we get to Washington, we can try to find out—”

  “Who said we were going to Washington?”

  But we were, of course.

  It didn’t make sense to try to stay hidden from a man like Sena
tor “Cotton” Ed Winters forever.

  Plus I have a natural share of curiosity.

  And money still talks.

  But the thought that Winters had been able to reach out and find me at the ranch still rankled.

  “How do you like that?” I said angrily to Hazel, pulling my pants on. “The second Erikson isn’t in Washington to hold the lid on, his office peddles me two-for-a-penny. No more protection than a schoolgirl’s bare behind from her mother’s hairbrush. I’ll guarantee you they never get a chance to do it to me again.”

  “You didn’t ask how Karl was,” Hazel said, combing her shining red hair before the boudoir mirror.

  “I doubt if Winters knows—or cares. He pulls the strings; he doesn’t care what happens to the puppets. Look how easily he conscripted Karl’s services through the connivance of Erikson’s agency, and now he’s confident he’s going to do the same with me. Damn all politicians, anyway.”

  “When a man in Senator Winters’ position in Washington leans on a government agency, you know perfectly well what’s going to happen,” Hazel said. “If you feel this strongly about it, why are you considering going to see him?”

  “Because he said the magic word,” I replied. “Money. I’d be delighted to beat him out of a couple of oil wells.”

  “Be serious, Earl. We don’t need money. We don’t need to go back to Ely. I’ll have Nate Pepperman sell the ranch and we’ll set up somewhere else.”

  Hazel had inherited money from two husbands and invested it wisely. She regarded it now as my money, too. I tended to look at it differently. Besides, I knew what the ranch meant to Hazel. She’d been raised there. “We’ll talk later,” I said. “Right now hurry it up.”

  We checked out and took a cab to the airport after Hazel called the private flying field and instructed them to hangar the Cessna until further notice. The girl at the UAL desk accepted without question my statement that we were flying at Senator Winters’ expense.

  I’d expected to be stopped by a metal detector with the gun on my belt, and I was ready to give someone an argument. I wanted the 9-mm. in Washington with me. Instead, we were ushered into a private lounge until the plane arrived, and then we boarded it via a separate entrance.

  “I wonder how many shares of United Air Lines stock you have to own before you’re afforded that kind of treatment,” Hazel observed as we settled ourselves aboard the plane.

  I hardly heard her. I was already planning how to handle the Washington end of things with as little exposure as possible. I didn’t want Hazel seen by Winters’ people. Not until I knew more than I knew now, certainly.

  We arrived at Washington National Airport without incident. It’s a place of which I have unfond memories due to a foulup on a caper into which Karl Erikson had plunged me. “You leave with the first group off,” I told Hazel while the plane was taxiing in from the landing strip. “I’ll wait until the crowd thins out and then meet you at the newsstand at the east end of the terminal.”

  She nodded her understanding. I was sure that Winters’ office had been informed about his guest passengers before the plane ever left the runway in Kansas City, and he would have to be a flaming idiot if he didn’t have a UAL employee try to point us out to someone stationed at the Washington ramp exit. Leaving separately should confuse the UAL employee.

  I debarked with the stragglers and hustled to a pay phone. I called Winters’ office, and the mention of my name brought the resonant voice on the line immediately. I doubted that Winters was always this handy. Something was gnawing at the senator. “I’m in Washington, as you probably already know,” I needled him.

  “I’ve had about enough of this hare-and-hounds business!” he snapped, confirming my judgment that he had someone at the airport who had undoubtedly just hung up after confessing failure to view us.

  “Okay. Where do we meet?”

  “Nowhere near my office,” he said promptly.

  We kicked it around, and finally settled upon Rock Creek Park after determining we both knew the ford where the creek bed crosses the roadway. “In an hour,” I said.

  “Fine,” Winters agreed. “I won’t be alone, but I assure you our conversation will be private.”

  I joined Hazel at the newsstand, and we went to the car rental desk. I explained the situation to her while I was driving across the Fourteenth Street Bridge. “You can check into the Shoreham for us while I’m meeting Winters,” I concluded.

  “But I want to go along, too,” she protested.

  “Not this time, baby. Let me get the shape of things first.”

  She didn’t like it, but she’d learned when I meant things. I left her in the capable hands of the Shoreham staff, then continued out along Connecticut Avenue toward the District line. I turned at Military Road and followed the winding, scenic highway through Rock Creek Park. Lilacs, forsythia, and dogwood were in blossom everywhere.

  I made one stop en route to the ford. I pulled over in a parking area and strolled into the woods carrying my cosmetics-and-wig case. Shielded from the road by thick shrubbery, I changed hairpieces and facial makeup. If anything went wrong during our meeting, I didn’t intend that Senator Winters would be able to identify me easily afterward.

  A long black limousine was parked illegally on the grass at the east side of the ford. I drove through the hubcap-deep water flowing over the road and stopped a few yards beyond the limousine. A youngish-looking man in a dark business suit and chauffeur’s cap was standing beside it. His suit fit poorly enough to disclose a familiar bulge under his left arm.

  I could see a burly-looking upper body and a photogenic mass of white hair in the back seat of the limousine. No one else was in the car. The whitehaired man was climbing out of the back seat when I approached the limousine. The aide-chauffeur-bodyguard held the car door for him, meantime studying me as one strange dog does another.

  The whitehaired man spoke when I was still yards away from him, and even with no walls to contain or amplify it, his voice boomed like the lower register of a pipe organ. “Where are my men, Drake?” he demanded without preliminary. Senator “Cotton” Ed Winters’ hard blue eyes inventoried me thoroughly. I was glad I’d made the hairpiece switch.

  “Under glass,” I answered him.

  Winters made an impatient gesture. He stalked a few yards away from the car, out of earshot of the aide but not out of sight or gun range. The senator moved purposefully though not athletically. He wheeled to confront me again, careful not to place himself between me and the watchful bodyguard. I wasn’t the only one being cautious.

  “What could have happened to foul up the delivery of a simple message to you?” he asked me. He held his voice down, but it still contained a trumpetlike quality. Winters had a strong-looking face, deeply lined. It was the face of a wounded eagle: dangerous.

  I told him what had gone wrong, in detail. He stood there shaking his white head, slowly at first, then more rapidly as I warmed to my subject. I concluded with the forced departure of Bruno and Smitty from the ranch, but without mentioning how it had been accomplished.

  “Dammitall, I should have warned them they weren’t dealing with a precinct captain,” Winters said irritably. His chilly eyes were still cataloguing me. “What’s your background, Drake?”

  “Nothing that would interest you, Senator.”

  “Then what was your connection with Karl Erikson that his office would send me to you?”

  I chose my words carefully. “I’d been with him a time or two, but they were brushing you off, Senator. Look at it from their point of view. You’d used up their man, and you were back on their doorstep again. They steered you to me to get rid of you.”

  “Nobody gets rid of me for long, Drake.” The organ voice was tinged with icicles. “I like to know with whom I’m doing business, so I pulled a report on you before I sent Bruno and Smitty to Ely. I didn’t learn much….”

  I made no reply.

  He was still studying me. “What’s the matter with your
face?” he asked bluntly.

  “It was rebuilt once.”

  He nodded, started to say something, then changed his mind. “Would I be correct in assuming that my overture to you rousted you from a hiding place?” he asked finally.

  “Essentially you’d be correct,” I agreed.

  “Erikson’s office assured me he was the most capable man available for the job I wanted done,” Winters said. “Are you the next most capable man?” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “I appealed to Erikson’s patriotism. I’ve based a fifty-year public career on making seat-of-the-pants judgments of people, and I don’t feel that’s the approach to take with you. I estimate you to be a younger version of myself, a cantankerous sonofabitch, junior grade.”

  He waited for a reaction, but I didn’t give him any.

  “Let’s talk about money,” he went on after a momentary silence during which I could hear birds twittering in the nearby blue spruce trees. “Like a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “I have respect for a hundred thousand dollars, Senator,” I said when Winters paused again.

  “So I’ll appeal to your respect for a hundred thousand dollars,” Winters said. He gave me a brief smile as wintry as his name. “I have a job I want done. I don’t care how it’s done, I don’t want to know how it’s done, I just want it to get done. I used my influence to have Erikson assigned to me, to go to Spain and retrieve the son of a man who will be my party’s next presidential candidate.”

  “Retrieve?” I said.

  “The boy is in a Spanish jail for marijuana possession. The Spanish aren’t as enlightened as we seem to be. The penalty is severe, and the publicity would be disastrous. So far they don’t know who the boy is. Erikson was injured while attempting to release him, and they’re both in the same border detention center now. The crunch will come when they’re moved from the border to the capitol for arraignment. The situation is so delicate politically that no ordinary measures can be employed. I’ll pay to have the boy returned to the U.S. without publicity.”