by Ross Thomas
“No telling,” Partain agreed.
“I know you’re gonna try and talk me out of it because you know what a softie I am. But this time I won’t change my mind. So don’t try and talk me out of it.”
“Okay,” Partain said. “I won’t.”
There wasn’t much to pack. There were a few books, the small Sony shortwave, the clothing and toilet articles, some personal papers, a camera and one and a half bottles of fair whiskey—just enough to fill an Army duffel bag and most of the old Cape buffalo overnight bag he had bought cheaply in Florence years ago.
There were no dishes, glasses, cutlery, pots, pans, furniture or bedding. All that belonged to Neal, the landlord, who said he was sorry to lose Partain as a tenant and thought being fired on Christmas Day was one for the fucking books. Partain agreed, said goodbye over the phone, then called a number in Washington, D.C. that was answered on the third ring by a man's voice reciting the last four digits Partain had just dialed.
“It's Partain,” he said. “They sent Millwed yesterday and I got fired this morning. My Christmas bonus.”
“If you were Greek Orthodox like me, the true Christmas would still be two weeks away and your self-pity would be considerably lessened. Millwed, huh? Ralph Waldo Millwed, our jumped-up colonel now said to be a comer.”
“Who says?”
“Rumor, of course.”
“Any suggestions?” Partain said.
“As a matter of fact—and no little coincidence—there is a possibility. But it's more of a feeler than a definite offer.” “Let's hear it.”
“A wealthy aged person of sixty-two years lies dying in Los Angeles. Needs bright aggressive go-getter to help solve one final problem. You interested?”
“What's the problem?”
“I don’t know, but it pays one thousand a week and found.” “
How many weeks?”
“Till death do you part, I suppose,” the Greek said.
CHAPTER 2
With his next-to-last $50 bill, Partain paid off the driver of the gypsy cab he had hailed and haggled with at LAX. As the cab sped away, he pocketed the $25 in change and turned to inspect the private hospital that was on the north side of Olympic Boulevard a few blocks east of Century City.
It was just past 6 P.M. and dark on the January Tuesday that was Twelfth Night. Partain found himself wondering whether the hospital had already taken down its holiday decorations or just hadn’t bothered to put any up. He didn’t care either way but regarded his mild curiosity as surprising, perhaps even encouraging.
As Partain studied the hospital, he began to suspect its architect had been enamored of long slabs of pale granite, and that its landscape designer had been equally smitten by drought-resistant plants—the expensive kind that still look thirsty even in a hard rain. Significant money also had gone into the hospital's outdoor security lighting system and Partain, who knew about such things, could find little fault with it.
He entered the hospital, carrying his Cape buffalo bag, avoided thereception desk, rode an elevator to the top floor, the sixth, and slipped into a spacious corner room where the Greek had told him his prospective employer lay dying of some rare but undiagnosed ailment.
Partain found her sitting cross-legged on a hospital bed, wearing a Chinese-red silk robe decorated with numerous small gold dragons who were either yawning or roaring at each other. She had just finished a slice—the last slice, he noticed—of a small pizza, eating it out of the box it had been delivered in, and was now washing the last bite down with what little remained in a bottle of Beck's beer.
She lowered the bottle, stared at him for a moment with clever-looking, not quite gray eyes and said, “Edd-with-two-ds Partain, I hope and trust.”
“They sometimes called me that—Twodees,” he said. “In grade school mostly.”
“Then I’d almost bet the Partains were Cajuns and probably in the oil bidness down around where—Opelousas? Lafayette?” She gave him a quick grin, showing off perfect teeth that Partain took to be perfectly capped. “Sorry,” she said, “but I do like to make up tales about fellas I’ve just met.”
“My folks moved from El Paso to Bakersfield right after the war,” he said. “My old man was an over-the-road hauler and my mother ran a beauty shop out of their living room. I suspect the Partains were French Huguenots way back, but I never asked.”
“Well, you already know I’m Millicent Altfford or you wouldn’t be here,” she said, laying the empty beer bottle on its side in the empty pizza box. She then removed both box and bottle from her lap, placed them on the bed, slipped gracefully from her cross-legged perch to the floor and asked, “Want a beer?”
Partain said yes, thanks, and thought her come-and-go Red River Valley drawl must have originated at least 40 miles northeast of Dallas and not much less than 190 miles south of Oklahoma City. When thedrawl went away, it was replaced by something cool and crisp out of Chicago, where, the Greek said, she had spent four years at Foote, Cone and Belding before signing on as a fund-raiser for the second Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign in 1956.
Altford glided barefoot to a small built-in bar that provided gin, Scotch and vodka but no bourbon. There were also some glasses, a tiny stainless-steel sink and, below that, a miniature refrigerator sheathed in a grainy brown Formica that looked nothing at all like walnut veneer.
Bending from the waist, she opened the refrigerator door and, with legs still straight and eyes now almost at knee level, peered inside and offered to fix Partain a real nice pastrami on rye with stuff the Stage Deli had sent over. Partain thanked her but said he had eaten on the plane.
She straightened as effortlessly as she had bent over—a bottle of Beck's in either hand—and turned to stare at him with an expression of what he assumed was sympathy. “You eat on planes?”
“An economy measure,” he said, lowering his overnight bag to the floor.
“Well, we’ll have to fix that, won’t we?” she said and shut the refrigerator door with a backward kick of her bare left foot—a movement Partain suspected of being practiced and maybe even choreographed.
After crossing the room to hand him a beer, Millicent Altford turned and sank down onto a dark blue three-cushion couch, giving its center one a couple of invitational pats. Once both were seated, a cushion between them, Partain tasted his beer and said, “They told me you were dying. I assume they lied.”
“I told ‘em to lie. That way, if I didn’t take to you right off, I could say: ‘Sorry. Forget it. I’m just too busy dying.’“
“Since you’re neither sick nor dying, it might be suspected you’re hiding from something or somebody.” He again looked around thelarge private corner room. “Although this has got to be one hell of an expensive place to hide.”
“It’d cost anybody else or their insurance company at least two thousand a day—plus.”
“Plus what?”
“Gourmet meals. The hospital went and hired itself a French chef with a yard-long menu, and now you can lie abed of a morning and spend an hour or so figuring out what you’re gonna eat for the rest of the day and on into the night. But to me it's all free-gratis-for-nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because when they first started planning this thing back in ‘eighty-three, they needed a million or so in seed money. I raised it in four days, didn’t charge a dime for my services and now, well, now I’ve got myself sort of a permanent due bill.”
“They actually cure anything here?”
“They’re said to be hell on the clap.”
To Partain she looked more like 52 than 62 despite the cap of thick short-cropped hair that had the color and sheen of old silver newly polished. Block out the hair, he thought, or dye it back to what must’ve been its original honey-blond, and she might, with the light behind her, pass for 41—your age.
Altford moved her legs around beneath the long red silk robe until they were back in their cross-legged position. She had a swallow of beer from the bottl
e and stared at Partain for a moment before she said, “Tell me about you and Nick Patrokis and all those renegade ex-spooks who call themselves BARF or VOMIT or some such.”
Partain took his time before replying. “It began as Veterans of Military Intelligence, with VMI as its abbreviation. But when the Virginia Military Institute squawked, Nick and the rest of them thought up VOMI, which nobody liked. But because most of its members are fucked-over and otherwise disenchanted veterans of some kind ofmilitary intelligence, they decided, just for the hell of it, to call themselves Victims of Military Intelligence Treachery, which comes out VOMIT and makes an acronym nobody else’d want. It also got them some publicity, and that's the other reason they chose it.”
“How long’ve you been a member?”
“I’m not anymore,” Partain said. “I can’t afford the dues.”
“How much are they?”
“Twenty-five a year.”
“Twenty-five hundred?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
She grinned. “You are broke.”
“Or poor,” he said. “I think there's a slight but significant difference.” He had more of his beer, then asked, “How’d you hook up with Nick?”
“I have an old boyfriend who's a retired brigadier general?” she said, using the rising inflection indigenous to the Red River Valley and much of the South.
“Army or Marines?”
“Army. Truth is, he's the only general I’ve ever really known. But when he was my boyfriend back during the tail end of the Korea thing, he was a captain with funny politics.”
“How funny?”
“He was a Stevenson Democrat.”
“That's pretty funny from what I’ve read.”
“A dozen years later, early Vietnam time, he was a colonel.”
“And a fairly rapid riser.”
“Goddamn brilliant, too. They sent him to Vietnam in ‘sixty-five and made him a brigadier in ‘sixty-seven. By then, he had his twenty years in. So in ‘sixty-eight he came out against the war and retired.”
“In that order?”
She thought about it. “In that order.”
“You still see him?”
“He's had two wives and I’ve had three husbands. But he and I still get it on now and then. After I started looking for somebody, I called and told him I needed to hire me some brains and brawn. He said they seldom came in the same box but, if they did, Nick Patrokis’d probably know where. So I called Nick and he called back with your name.”
“Then you don’t really know Nick?”
“Just over the phone. But I expect you know him pretty well.”
“We met in Vietnam, where he had some rotten luck,” Partain said and waited for her to ask what kind of rotten luck. When she didn’t, his estimate of her rose a few degrees.
“Tell me about VOMIT,” she said.
“It's really a one-man organization. Nick's a cofounder and executive director. He's also the publicist, fund-raiser, speakers’ bureau, bookkeeper, gofer and editor of its now-and-again newsletter. He and VOMIT share an office with a skip-tracer on Connecticut Avenue a few blocks north of Dupont Circle—you know Washington?”
She nodded.
“Well, the office is above a Greek restaurant owned by Nick's uncle. Nick eats there free. The uncle also owns the building and doesn’t charge VOMIT any rent. A few of the more crabby members, some sympathizers and even a groupie or two usually show up Saturday afternoons to carp and bitch and clean up and help with the mailings and such.”
Altford nodded again, abruptly this time, signalling she now knew all she would ever need to know about VOMIT. “So how’d you get to be a victim of military intelligence treachery?” she said.
“I hit a superior officer and was permitted to resign my commission for the good of the service.”
“How superior?”
“A colonel.”
“And you were what?”
“A major.”
“How hard you hit him?” “I beat the shit out of him.” “Why?”
“You need a reason?”
“Yes, sir, I believe I do.”
“He lied to me.”
“All this happened where?”
“El Salvador.”
“When?”
“Nineteen-eighty-nine.”
A silence followed that Millicent Altford ended before it bothered either of them. “You say you were also in Vietnam. You don’t look old enough.”
“From nineteen-seventy to ‘seventy-five.” “Right to the rotten end, huh?” He nodded.
“I thought all you guys went home after ‘seventy-three.”
“A few stayed on.”
“Until ‘seventy-five?”
He nodded again.
“Then where’d you go?” she asked.
“Back to the States for a while, then to Germany for four years, stateside again, then to Tegucigalpa and on to El Salvador.”
“Why there? I mean why you in particular?”
“I like to think it was because of my outstanding leadership qualities. Actually, it was because I speak Spanish.”
“Learned where—El Paso?”
“From my mother. Her name was Sandoval. Beatriz Sandoval.”
“How long were you in, all in all?”
“Nineteen years.”
“No pension?”
“None.”
“Where’ve you been working recently?”
“Until Christmas Day, I was a clerk at a gun store in Sheridan, Wyoming.”
“What happened—the economy?”
“Irreconcilable differences with management.”
Altford grinned, placed her now empty beer bottle on the blond coffee table and shifted around on the blue couch until, still cross-legged, she faced Partain.
“You wanta go to work for me?”
“Depends on what or who you’re hiding from.”
“Little Rock.”
Because she seemed to be expecting or even needing some kind of reaction, Partain said, “No kidding?” and “Why?”
“Partly because they’re real grateful for the two-point-six million in soft money I raised for the party. But shoot, that's what I hired on to do. What they’re real, real grateful for is the two hundred and fifty-four thousand I bundled up for them, not the party, just three days after the New Hampshire primary. Check that after. And to do that I had to talk two hundred and fifty-four close personal friends into Fed Exing me checks for a thousand apiece made out to Little Rock's campaign. And you’re damn right I delivered that bundle in person.”
“So why all the hide-and-seek?”
“Because Little Rock wants to do something nice for me, and to them something nice might mean ambassador to Togo or some such and I’m just not cut out for stuff like that. But I didn’t want to hurttheir feelings, so I checked in here real sick and plan to stay that way ‘til it all blows over and they forget about it, which I figure’ll take another three days, maybe four.”
“That's what you do, then—raise political money?”
“I’m a rainmaker and a good one. In odd years I sometimes go back to the plushbottoms I’ve hit up and try and put ‘em together with a few solid guys I know who can make big bucks even bigger. When it works, I get a small percentage and the plushbottoms are so grateful they’re almost happy to see me the next time I drop by to shake their money trees.”
“Let's get to it,” Partain said. “What d’you want with me?”
“One-point-two million in political funds have gone missing. Stolen, for sure. Maybe embezzled. I want it back.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Yeah, but I do,” she said. “But while I’m doing it—and, O Sweet Jesus, I’ve just been dying to say this all day—I need somebody to ride shotgun.”
Partain smiled. “I think I could handle that.”
CHAPTER 3
Once he made it to Wilshire Boulevard, Partain drove west in Millicent Altford's black Lex
us coupe until he reached the apartment building that bore the name of either a failed British prime minister or the world's first garden.
The Eden was twenty-six stories of condominiums on the south side of the Wilshire corridor a dozen or so blocks east of UCLA. It had tinted windows and a facade of light brown stucco whose peculiar shade was called Jennifer after the late August tan of a 19-year-old beauty the architect had once met on Broad Beach in Malibu.
At 7:56 P.M., Partain made a left turn across traffic into a curved drive and stopped in front of the Eden's entrance. A uniformed doorman materialized on the driver's side, opened the door and said, “If you’ll just leave the ignition key, Mr. Partain, I’ll take care of the car.”
Partain thanked him, grabbed the Cape buffalo bag and got out. The doorman handed him an electronic door key in the form of a plastic card with holes punched in it.
“This’ll get you through the front door and into Fifteen-forty, Ms.Altford's place,” the doorman said. “When you need the car again, just press the asterisk on your Touch-Tone phone and ask for Jack.”
“You’re Jack?”
“I’m Jack.”
The electronic key card worked nicely and the door to 1540 opened into a small formal foyer large enough for a burled elm wall table that could hold the mail, the keys and even a long shopping list. There was also room for a lyre-back occasional chair that looked as if nobody had yet found an occasion to sit on it.
A large mirror above the table was surrounded by an ornate gilt frame and both mirror and frame looked their age, which Partain guessed to be at least two hundred years. Opposite the mirror was a door that he assumed led to a coat closet. The foyer floor was covered with large black and white squares that his leather heels informed him were marble.
A few more steps and he was in an immense living room that boasted a Steinway baby grand and a real bar with lots of bottles and six comfortable-looking stools. There were more than enough couches and easy chairs, some covered in leather, some in fabric. There were also plenty, maybe even an excess, of tables and lamps. The floor itself was oak parquet and partially hidden by aging rugs woven in countries that were then called Persia and Mesopotamia. On the walls were a few large pictures, all representational oils, by painters whose names Partain thought he should recall but couldn’t.