by Ross Thomas
Beyond all this was the wall of glass that looked west toward the lights of Westwood, Brentwood and Santa Monica and beyond them to the blackness that was the ocean. It was a room, Partain decided, where it would cost you $1,000 for a glass of wine, a shrimp or twoand the chance to chat up somebody who wanted to be your mayor, congresswoman, senator, governor—maybe even your President.
Partain, who had never missed voting absentee in every presidential election since 1972, was wondering if he would ever vote again when the woman's voice behind him said, “Don’t move or I shoot.”
Partain ignored the threat and spun counterclockwise with his right arm extended to give the old Cape buffalo bag added momentum. He let go the bag and watched it slam into the unarmed woman's stomach. After an explosive whoof, she stumbled back and down into an easy chair, somehow hanging onto the bag.
Six or seven deep recovery breaths later, staring at him all the while, she grinned and said, “I’d’ve shot you if I’d had a gun.”
“You don’t look that stupid.”
She ignored him, lifted the bag from her lap, winced at its weight and dropped it on the floor with a clunk. “Christ, what's in there—the burglar tools?”
“Books and whiskey mostly.”
“You’re not the burglar?”
“No. Are you?”
“I’m Jessica Carver.”
“Who used to be Jessica Altford.”
“Wrong. I was always Jessica Carver, even if I do look like her. My mother.”
“You’re lucky to look like her.”
“Am I?” she said, rose and went behind the bar, mixed Partain the bourbon and water he requested, then poured herself a glass of wine.
Partain now sat on one of the stools. After tasting his drink he said, “Your mother didn’t call and tell you I was on the way?”
“Why would she? She doesn’t even know I’m here.”
“Since you’re Jessica Carver, who's Mr. Carver?”
“My dad. Dr. Eldon Carver. He died in ‘sixty-nine.” “Of what?”
“Of pain and an overdose of carefully self-administered morphine. He had cancer of the pancreas, the inoperable kind, and didn’t want to stick around. Nobody blamed him, certainly not Millie or me. He was her second husband.”
“And her first one?”
“Why?”
“I like to know about people I work for.”
“Well, her first was Harry Montague. They married in ‘fifty-seven and lived in Dallas until one Sunday afternoon in ‘fifty-nine when Harry took his old Stinson biplane up, did a couple of rolls, then tried an inside loop he didn’t quite finish. A year later Millie married my dad and I came along in February of ‘sixty-one, which makes me almost thirty-two, if you forgot your calculator.”
“Then came Mr. Altford, right?” Partain said.
She nodded and had another sip of wine.
“Who was he?”
“Slime.”
“Any particular kind?”
“The all-purpose kind. Lawrence Demming Altford is sexy, smart and very rich. He's also a dedicated liar, a louse and a top-seeded paranoid. It lasted three years until Millie gave up and divorced him. But when she didn’t ask for a property settlement or alimony, he sicced private detectives on her to find out what she was really up to.”
“Why’d she keep his name?”
Jessica Carver shrugged. “Tired of changing it, I suppose. Or maybe she thought ‘Millicent Altfford’ sounds kind of tony.” She had another sip of the wine and asked, “What’d you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. But it's Edd Partain.”
“Spell it.”
“Edd-with-two-ds P-a-r-t-a-i-n.”
“What if I called Millie and asked if she's ever heard of any Edd-with-two-ds Partain?” “I think you’d better.”
She put her wine down, picked up a phone that was beneath the bar, tapped out 411, asked for the hospital's number, called it and requested Millicent Altford's room. After someone answered, she asked, “Ever hear of an Edd Partain, Ma?”
She listened for twenty seconds or so, staring at Partain as if he were some recent purchase she might return. “Well, this one's forty or forty-one, about six-two, maybe 175 pounds and wears an old blue suit, white shirt, striped red and blue tie that's way too narrow and honest-to-God black lace-ups.”
She listened again, then said, “The hair's real dark with little gray streaks in it. The eyes are a funny-strange gray-green. Real white teeth. An okay chin, but it's only a chin. And he's quick, the way a cat's quick.”
She again listened for several moments, looked at Partain and said in accented Spanish, “My mother wishes to know if you’re willing to share the apartment, if not your bed, with her daughter?”
Partain replied in Spanish. “Any arrangement pleasing to her is pleasing to me.”
“He’ll go either way, Millie,” Jessica Carver said, then listened some more and replied, “Christ, I don’t know. Until I find work—like always.” There were a few more seconds of listening before she said, “Right,” broke the connection and put the phone away.
To Partain she said, “Can you cook?”
“Sure. Can you?”
“No. So first I’ll show you your room, then you can show me your scrambled eggs.”
The apartment had three bedrooms—one master and two regulars. Partain said the regular one facing Wilshire was fine. Because there was really nothing to unpack, he put the old overnight bag on the bed and told Jessica Carver her scrambled eggs would be ready in twenty-five or thirty minutes. “Why so long?”
“You want biscuits, don’t you?” Partain said.
Partain served it all at the same time—the scrambled eggs, the hot Bisquick biscuits, the double-thick, extra-lean bacon, and the sliced tomatoes that had come with little gold stickers boasting that they were organically grown.
They ate in a kitchen that, while not large, had virtually every appliance a small fancy restaurant would need. They ate at an old wooden table, a veteran of at least 25,000 breakfasts with the stains, scars and chipped yellow paint to prove it. They ate mostly in silence until Jessica Carver picked up her last slice of bacon, the one she may have been saving for dessert, ate it and said, “Millie grew up eating breakfast at this table, and when she was sixteen or seventeen decided she was going to eat breakfast at it for the rest of her life. My ma can be a little weird.”
“She was born in Bonham, right?”
“She told you that?”
“No.”
“Then how’d you know?”
“The same way I’d be willing to bet she moved to Dallas when she was eight or nine.”
“Yeah, well, you could’ve guessed that from what I said about Harry and his Stinson.”
“I’m just good at American accents,” Partain said. “Your mother's comes and goes now, but it's pretty. If you go farther east along the Red River, they all start sounding like Perot.”
“Which can cause nerve damage.” Carver examined him curiously for several moments, then asked, “You travel a lot? Is that why you study accents?”
“I was in the Army a long time and it became a hobby.”
“How long?”
“Nineteen years.”
“What were you when you left?”
“A major.”
“West Point? OCS? National Guard? ROTC?”
Partain shook his head. “I was in a long-range recon outfit in Vietnam that got wiped out except for me and two other guys—both short-timers. The Army panicked and thought it was in desperate need of an experienced second lieutenant to rebuild the platoon— except there weren’t any experienced second lieutenants. There never are. So they made me one overnight.”
“Where’d you learn your pretty Spanish?”
“From my mother. Where’d you learn your Mexican?”
“Mostly from a shit I lived with for a year in Guadalajara.”
“Not a Mexican shit, though.”
“Worse,” sh
e said. “An American one.”
CHAPTER 4
The Colonel and the Major General met at midnight in room 517 of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. They met in a room registered to Jerome Able, which was Colonel Ralph Millwed's occasional nom de guerre and one he could document with a counterfeit Virginia driver's license, a real VISA card and a spurious Social Security number.
If more identification were needed, and it almost never was during normal commercial transactions, the Colonel would simply change his mind and walk away. Virtually all hotels, motels and car rental agencies readily accepted the VISA card. Once done with the rooms and cars, the Colonel paid for them with cash discreetly peeled from the $3,000 roll he always carried in $50 and $100 bills.
The $3,000 roll was replenished from a permanent cash hoard of $100,000 kept in the pseudonymous Jerome Able's safe-deposit box at a K Street branch of the Riggs National Bank. Whenever the hoard needed topping up, a fat wax-sealed brown envelope, stuffed with used hundreds and fifties, was delivered to the Colonel's apartment on Wisconsin Avenue just south of the National Cathedral. The delivery man was always the same silent morose cabdriver who seldom spoke and never asked for a receipt.
At first glance the 49-year-old Major General, Walker L. Hudson, seemed completely bald. But closer inspection revealed a faint gray-blond band of stubble that went up and over one ear, spread down to and across the nape of the neck, then climbed back up and over the other ear.
Tall and lean, almost skinny, the General was a wedgehead with a curiously small thin mouth that snapped itself shut into a short mean line after each utterance. At the end of the yard-long arms were huge hands that, even in repose, managed to look restless. The General sat quietly in the small room's only comfortable chair as his hands busied themselves with cigar, bourbon and water.
Neither the Colonel nor the General was in uniform. Instead, both wore dull suits, white shirts, muted ties and black shoes. Their topcoats were on the bed. Neither had worn a hat. After the General tasted his drink for the second time, he sighed and said, “Okay. Let's have it.”
“He's in L.A.,” Colonel Millwed said as he sat down on the room's lone bed and tasted his own drink.
“And?”
“Somebody hired him.” “Who?”
“Millicent Altford.”
“Jesus,” the General said. “What's she want with Twodees?” “Guess.”
Instead of guessing, the General said, “Draw me Twodees.” “Sure. For two years now he's been clerking in a gun store called Wanda Lou's Weaponry—”
“I gave you all that, for Christ sake.”
“Yes, sir. I was merely setting the fucking scene.”
“Let's stipulate it's Christmas Eve in Sheridan and the snow lies all about, cold and crisp and even. Poor Twodees, sad and lonely, is by himself in the gun shop when all of a sudden you waltz in. Then what?”
“I told him that some bad shit from our time together in El Salvador was due out from the U.N. in early spring. But it wasn’t the really bad shit. Then I urged him to stay buttoned up and gave him a verbal nudge or two.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Except for a crack about my being a colonel, he seemed indifferent. Even passive.”
General Hudson grunted his disbelief. “Twodees is a bunch of things, but passive's not one of them. He's half Mexican and maybe even part Apache. If he's passive, so was Cochise.”
“You want the rest of my Christmas carol?”
“Fast-forward it.”
“After giving Twodees the hard nudge, I went calling on his boss, a lovely widow of thirty-nine summers by the name of Alice Ann Sutterfield.”
“Slow it down a little.”
“I told Alice Ann how unstable Twodees is and informed her of the horrible crimes against humanity he’d committed in El Salvador. Alice Ann somehow got it all mixed up with Nicaragua and Ollie North, who she still thinks is real cute. But after I sort of straightened that out, she asked me what she should do about Twodees.”
“And you said?”
“I said that to protect not only herself but her community, she should fire Twodees first thing Christmas morning and pay him off in cash. She started bleating about how she couldn’t fire him because itdidn’t seem fair and, besides, she owed him three weeks’ pay, including two weeks’ vacation.” “How much, all in all?”
“A gross of $1,548. Less Federal withholding and Social Security, a net of $1,022.30.”
“What about state income tax?” “Wyoming doesn’t have any.”
“I think I’ll retire there,” the General said and asked, “Then what?”
“Then she said there was no way in God's world she could come up with that much cash on Christmas Eve with the banks closed. So I told her that since this was, in essence, a matter of national security, it was also her beloved nation's responsibility. Whereupon—”
“By God, I do like the occasional ‘whereupon,’“ the General said.
“Whereupon, I gave her two thousand cash money, eased her back into her bedroom and fucked her cross-eyed.”
The General chuckled. “And Twodees?”
“He’d cleared out of Sheridan by noon Christmas Day.”
The General's expression went from merry to grim. “That, I don’t like. He didn’t set up a howl. He didn’t lose his temper. He didn’t even beat the shit out of you the way he did me that time. He just packed his bags and caught the noon bus.”
“He flew out,” Colonel Millwed said. “He flew to Denver and disappeared for about a week until he surfaced in L.A.”
“How’d you find out Altfford might’ve hired him?”
“Our guy in VOMIT.”
“Ah,” the General said contentedly, finished his drink, put the glass on a table and leaned forward, forearms on thighs, cigar now in his right hand. “What we need, Ralphie, is a direct line to Ms. Altford. Any notions?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t want maybes, goddamnit. I want specificity and hope.”
“It's better you don’t know just yet. Sir.”
“Since ignorance is not only bliss but also an alibi?”
The Colonel nodded.
“What else?”
“Comes now General Vernon Winfield. Class of ‘forty-eight. DSC from Korea. He was in Vietnam when you were.” “The deserter.” “He didn’t desert.”
“Might as well have,” the General said. “The son of a bitch said it was a dumb war and unwinnable. He was right, of course, but he shouldn’t have said it. Not then. Not in ‘sixty-eight with the whole fucking country about to explode. And who does he say it to? To that pissant wire service guy and zap, out it goes all over the world. Looking back, that's when I think we really lost it. Right then and there.”
“It was lost in ‘fifty-four at Dien Bien Phu.”
“Shit, Ralphie, you weren’t even born then.” The General sighed, drew on his cigar, blew smoke at the ceiling and said, “So what about General Winfield?”
“He's close to Millicent Altford.”
“How close is close?”
“They were sweeties back in the early ‘fifties and I hear they still hold hands now and then—or whatever it is they do at sixty-five or thereabouts.”
“I don’t know about you, kid,” General Hudson said, “but at sixty-five I plan to be fucking good-looking women.” “I’m sure you will be, sir.”
“So what’ve we got on Winfield other than that he lost Vietnam and coffounded VOMIT?” “Nothing.”
“Another wrong answer.”
“I can try to dig up something,” Colonel Millwed said. “But if nothing's buried, I’ll have to fabricate it and that can get expensive.”
“Tell me something, Ralphie,” the General said. “You really want that star by the time you’re forty?”
The Colonel only nodded.
“And do you want to retire at fifty, like I’m planning to, with a nice little pension and maybe a useful contact or two in whatever's left by t
hen of our military-industrial complex?”
“That very thought has occurred to me.”
“Then you’d better listen carefully to your orders, Colonel. One: You will remain on TDY until further notice. Two: You will get us some nasty on Vernon Winfield, even if you have to fabricate said nasty. Three: You will then coerce Winfield into using his liaison with Millicent Altford to feed us a running line on Twodees. And four, you will, at the appropriate time, fix Twodees.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why fix him now? He was more of a threat to us last year than now.”
“You apparently haven’t yet noticed, Colonel, that in two weeks or so we’ll have a new administration. In less than a year this new administration will find itself in deep political shit. New administrations always do. It will then cast about for a suitable diversion. What Twodees knows and possibly can prove could serve this new White House bunch as just such a diversion of the minor witch-hunt variety. Unfortunately, Colonel, it’ll be you and me they burn at the stake.”
Affter ten seconds of thought, the Colonel finally agreed with a reluctant nod.
“But with Twodees fixed,” the General continued, “this new bunch need never hear of you or me except, of course, in a most salutarymanner. And when it does find itself in need of a scapegoat or two, it can go hunt up somebody far more deserving.”
There was a lengthy silence until Colonel Millwed said, “I think,” then paused and began again. “I think I’ll farm out the fix on Twodees.”
CHAPTER 5
The man with the clipboard and the manila envelope didn’t look like a messenger to Edd Partain. But because of California's stubborn recession, Partain wasn’t at all sure how Los Angeles messengers should look.
The few he occasionally had dealt with in Sheridan had all been old guys, World War Two vets mostly, with ancient pickups, raging thirsts and a desperate need to supplement their Social Security checks.