by Ross Thomas
He nodded, folded the money uncounted, stuck the bills down in his left hip pocket, buttoned the pocket carefully, then said, “What about expenses?”
“I’ll want receipts for everything they give receipts for. But for the stuff nobody gives receipts for, I’ll want a one- or two-word description such as, ‘Bribes, $500.’ Fair enough?”
Partain nodded again but Altford had already resumed her study of the red carpet. It was only then that he noticed she was wearing a different robe—a belted one of a light cream color that covered her from neck to ankles. Partain guessed it was cashmere and even hoped he was right.
After nearly forty seconds of utter concentration, Altford frowned, as if she had just reached a difficult decision, looked up at Partain again and asked, still frowning, “You like tamales?”
“Very much.”
“Then why don’t you go down and get the car and meet me out front in ten minutes and we’ll drive up to Santa Paula and have us some tamales for lunch? Ever been to Santa Paula?”
“Not that I recall,” Partain said.
It was a cool overcast day with the temperature down in the low sixties and Altford had dressed for it in a thick dark gray turtleneck sweater, tailored pale gray flannel pants and blue sneakers over bare feet. Partain stood beside the passenger door of the Lexus coupe, much as he would have stood if Altford had been a major and he a second lieutenant. Partain wore his blue suit, a fresh white shirt and his other tie. He opened the passenger door but she shook her head. “I’ll drive,” she said, went around the front of the car and slipped behind the wheel.
She was a quick assertive driver and took Olympic across Lincoln Boulevard, then cut down to the Santa Monica Freeway, dived into the McClure tunnel and came out the other side on the Pacific Coast Highway that was also State Highway 1. Except for a few gaps, State Highway 1 went all the way to the Oregon line.
“We’re taking the long-way-around scenic route,” she said, making “route” rhyme with “out.”
Partain nodded and they rode in silence until she stopped for a red light at Sunset Boulevard. “You like politics?” she asked.
“I like to vote.”
“Why?”
“Probably because I never got to vote on anything in the Army. Sometimes, just to get a rise, I’d argue that officers and noncoms should be elected. Nearly everyone else argued that that’d lead to anarchy. When I asked them to define anarchy, they’d usually come up with a pretty fair definition of democracy.”
“You voted in what—presidential elections?” she said.
“Never missed.”
“When’d you start?”
“‘Seventy-two.”
“Who for?”
“Nixon. Ford. Reagan twice. And Bush both times.” “Mind if I ask why?”
“I figured I was voting against a military coup.”
She stared at him and kept on staring until the car behind her honked. She moved her right foot from the brake to the accelerator and the Lexus shot away. “You’re not serious?” she said.
“There hasn’t been a coup yet, has there?” Partain said. “Not a military one anyway.”
Just past Oxnard, State Highway 1 merges with U.S. 101 for a stretch and it was then that Partain said, “Tell me about the missing one-point-two million and why you won’t go to the cops and report it stolen or embezzled.”
Altford slipped the car over into the far left fast lane and nudged it up to 73 miles per hour before she said, “You know how politics works?”
“I know how it works in the Army. You do favors for guys who, expecting more favors, do favors for you. Some call it politics. Others call it brownnosing. But it's how it works in the Army.”
“And everywhere else,” she said. “Except that in elective politics you make promises to get elected. And once you’re elected, you promise even more things to get reelected. But promising isn’t cheap— especially when you have to go on TV to outpromise your opponent. The entire political process requires God knows how much money and, like I told you, that's where I come in.”
She looked at him, as though expecting some kind of rebuttal. Instead, Partain gave her what he hoped were a couple of wise nods.
“I suppose I best tell you about the damp money,” she said with a small sigh.
“Is that money that went through the laundry but somebody forgot to fluff-dry it?”
“They didn’t forget. They just thought I might sunshine it dry. Once damp money's dried out, it's just plain old money. The missing one-point-two million was sun-dried. By me.”
“But still just a little bit damp?”
“Not enough to notice. Anyway, it made up a discretionary fund to be used only in emergencies.” “For example?”
She thought about it, then said, “I’ll give you a sanitized for instance.”
“Fine.”
“A sixteen-year-old U.S. Senate page is about to go public with an accusation that a forty-seven-year-old U.S. senator is the father of her unborn child. The Senator is privately questioned and admits he might’ve had sex with the kid once or twice, maybe even three times or, maybe, after thinking about it, half a dozen times.”
“Who asks him?”
“An intermediary or go-between of impeccable discretion, who's also a long way from being broke.” “Rich, huh?” “Sort of.”
“Does the go-between do much of this kind of thing?”
“Enough,” she said. “Anyway, it's two weeks or ten days before the November election when the go-between pays a call on the girl to find out how much she thinks her silence is worth.”
“How pregnant is she?”
“Two months.”
“What about her parents?”
“They’re back in Idaho, she's in Washington and, anyway, she thinks if they knew, they’d want a cut of whatever she gets.” “How much does she ask for?”
“She tells the go-between her silence is worth at least one hundred thousand. They bargain and the go-between knocks her price down to seventy-five. That's when he comes to me with his problem, which is money.”
“And you decide if reelecting a U.S. senator who fucks sixteen-year-old girls is worth seventy-five thousand?” “Right.”
“Why not get the money from the Senator?” “One, he’d claim he hasn’t got it and, two, if he did have it, he’d be too tight to part with it. He’ll take his chances instead and his defensewill be that the girl's lying. If that doesn’t work, he’ll say he's not the only senator she fucked.”
“Sounds like a prince,” Partain said.
“Just average. So I ask the go-between to make sure the girl's really pregnant and that the Senator's really the father. He does and they are. I ask him if there's a chance the girl will take the money and then talk her head off. He doesn’t think so and is almost sure she’ll have an abortion, then simply blow what's left of the money. Because I trust his judgment, I hand over the seventy-five thousand.”
“What's his cut—the go-between's?”
“Zero.”
“Must be a lot of altruism going around these days.”
“I haven’t noticed,” she said. “Anyway, the girl vanishes after the payoff and the Senator never even asks what happened to her.”
“And that's when you tell him what he owes you?”
She turned to glance at him with obvious wonder, then quickly went back to her driving. “If we told him we’d spent seventy-five thousand on her, he’d’ve laughed and said we were a couple of marks who got taken by a teenage con artist.”
Partain thought that over, examining its weird logic, then asked, “Who gives you the okay to fork over that much money?”
“Nobody.”
“Why not?”
“Because nobody wants to get their hands dirty.”
“Ever get ripped off?”
“Twice.”
“Where's the money come from?” “You don’t want to know.”
“Okay. Then where did you keep it—the one-point-
two million? Under the mattress? In a tin trunk? A safe-deposit box?”
“In a floor safe in my bedroom closet under a pile of suitcases.”
“Good safe?”
“The best Diebold I could buy.”
“Yesterday, you said it might have been embezzled.”
“Since I’m the one entrusted with it,” she said, “I have to be the prime suspect. There's only one other person who knows where I kept it but he doesn’t have the combination. Still, since he did know where the safe was, that makes him a suspect—although I’m the most likely one.”
“Your cotrustee and the go-between and your old boyfriend and the General, the one who got you in touch with VOMIT, they’re all one and the same guy, right?”
“I thought I’d made that obvious.”
“You did, but I had to be sure. Another question. Do you keep a set of books and, if so, when do you tot ‘em up?” “Every February first.” “Then you have about three weeks.”
She said nothing and they rode in silence until Partain said, “When did you find out it was gone?”
“November the fourth—the day after the election. Most of the returns were in and I wanted to see how much we’d spent and how well we’d done.” She paused. “I opened the safe and went into shock for three hours. I finally pulled myself together but there wasn’t anyone I could call.”
“Not even the retired Brigadier?”
“Especially not him.”
“If you have to make an accounting to somebody or other on the first of February,” Partain said, “what’ll happen when you report that one-point-two million in off-the-books money disappeared last November, but you didn’t see much point in bothering anybody until now?”
“That won’t happen,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because on December seventh, Pearl Harbor Day, I replaced the entire one-point-two million,” Altford said as she turned off U.S. 101 onto State 33 that led into Ojai, where it turned into State 150 that went up over the mountains and down into Santa Paula.
CHAPTER 8
The Acropolis Restaurant on Connecticut Avenue occupied the ground floor of a sixty-six-year-old gray stone building that was only thirty feet wide. The building had no elevator but the retired Brigadier General walked up the four flights of stairs and arrived at the top-floor landing with no more loss of breath than if he had just completed a brisk stroll around nearby Dupont Circle.
He paused on the landing to remove his seventeen-year-old camel hair topcoat and drape it carefully over his left arm, which was encased in the sleeve of a fourteen-year-old tweed suit whose tailor had died at 83 two years ago in London.
After making sure his blue-and-maroon-striped tie nestled properly into the collar of his white shirt, the General removed the old light tan Borsalino—with its new dark brown grosgrain band— and transferred the hat to his left hand. He used his right hand to open the door whose upper half was mostly opaque pebbled glass. Painted on the glass in neat black letters were two signs. The top one read:
VICTIMS OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE TREACHERY
(V.O.M.I.T.)
Walk in!
The other sign read:
EMORY KITE
Investigations
There was no reception area beyond the door, but to the right was a partitioned-offf twelve-by-twenty-foot office with six-foot-high plastic walls whose top third was clear glass. The walls enclosed three bar-locked gray steel filing cabinets, a gray metal desk, a phone console, a personal computer, a fax machine, a photocopier and Emory Kite, licensed private investigator, who spun around in his swivel chair to wave at Vernon Winfield and give him a bass greeting of, “Hey, General, how's it going?”
Winfield paused, nodded formally to the small detective and said, “Very well, thank you, Mr. Kite.”Winfield then turned toward the nerve center of VOMIT, which was a massive seventy-three-year-old golden oak flat-top desk jammed up against two windows that overlooked Connecticut Avenue. The top of the desk was nearly buried under piles of domestic and foreign newspapers, magazines and government reports—all of them with that plump, well-thumbed, well-read look.
Beyond the desk and against the building's south wall were overcrowded and unpainted pine bookcases that rose to the fourteen-foot ceiling and stretched thirty feet toward the alley. Close to the desk were a personal computer, a fax machine, a small Xerox copier and a very old, very large, wide-open safe with flanges that had been bolted to the floor so long ago that the bolts had rusted to a dull red.
Occupying, or perhaps filling, the golden oak swivel chair in front of the desk was Nicholas Patrokis, a huge half-bald man in his forties, who wore an enormous black mustache and a gold ring as big as a wedding band through his left ear. Patrokis's eyes were as black as human eyes ever get and above them a pair of dark hedges just failed to meet over a nose that hooked down toward the mustache.
A white scar formed a lightning bolt that began near the top of Patrokis's left ear, slashed across his mouth and chin and ended an inch or so below the right earlobe. A woman had once told him the scar made him look like an N. C. Wyeth illustration of a pirate in one of her childhood books. Patrokis liked the image so much that on days he judged too hot or too cold he wore a red bandana wrapped pirate fashion around his half-bald head.
Hunched over the desk now, a phone clamped to his left ear, Patrokis listened and scribbled notes on a gray legal pad. At the General's approach, he turned, phone still to his ear, and pointed with a ballpoint at a wooden armchair whose seat was occupied by a foot-high stack of The Economist. Patrokis used the worn jogging shoe on his left foot to kick the magazines to the floor, then went back to his listening and note-taking.
General Winfield settled into the chair and glanced around with the neutral expression of someone who knows all there is to know about waiting. From his seat next to the desk he had a fine view of the entire fourth floor and automatically began taking inventory of its contents.
About two-thirds of the fourth floor was devoted to what Patrokis liked to call the auditorium. This was an open space separated from the two offices by a divider railing much like those found in courtrooms. Beyond the railing were fifty folding metal chairs in two rows that were five wide and ten deep. Some of the chairs were gray, some brown, a few were black and all of them were old.
Beyond the chairs and near the alley end of the room was a long golden oak table placed parallel to the back wall. On top of it was a speaker's podium that faced the wrong way. Surrounding the table were fifteen more folding chairs used for board meetings, panel discussions and by those who dropped in on Saturday afternoons to clean up and help with mailings.
Against the exposed brick back wall was a five-gallon coffee urn that rested on a fifty-gallon steel drum. Next to the urn was a card table that held three gallon cans of Yuban coffee, six small cans of Pet milk and a ten-pound paper sack of C&H sugar. Six boxes of Styrofoam coffee cups were stored beneath the table.
The walls offered no posters, no slogans, no photographs. The only decoration was a huge American flag turned upside down in the traditional signal of distress. The General thought the upside-down flag was sophomoric and raised the issue at each board meeting. But his motion to right the flag always lost 7 to 6.
The General sat as he almost always sat, not quite at attention, knees nearly together, hands on thighs, topcoat folded over knees, hat on topcoat, back straight but not touching anything. Winfield had restless shiny blue eyes that were fine for distance but needed glasses for reading. They flicked around the big room, noting all changes— even a nearby recent copy of El Pais, airmailed from Madrid. He assumed Patrokis must have recently subscribed to it.
The General's gaze eventually landed on the back of Emory Kite's head. He noticed the private investigator wore earphones as he typed away at his computer. Winfield didn’t care for Kite and had opposed renting him space. But the $1,100 monthly rent Kite had agreed to pay for a fourth-floor walkup office was such a godsen
d to the organization that the General had withdrawn his objection.
When Kite stopped typing to stretch, both hands high above his head, Winfield shifted his gaze back to the upside-down flag. Kiteswiveled 180 degrees, noticed the General's fixed stare and used the opportunity to inspect him for signs of dissipation or dotage. He found only planes and angles that formed a resolute chin, an extra-bold nose, a rather stern mouth, a smart high forehead, a sagless throat and a lot of thick white hair, neither short nor long, that lay flat on the narrow head and looked as if it had been parted on the left at birth.
Kite was wondering how many men still wore real hats when Patrokis finally ended his phone call, turned to the General and asked, “You got any idea where we could lay our hands on five thousand dollars cash money?”
As Patrokis's raspy baritone came through Kite's earphones, he quickly turned back to his personal computer, switched on a concealed mini-recorder and slowly began typing “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party” over and over as he both recorded and listened to the conversation between the two founders of Victims of Military Intelligence Treachery.
It was a moment or two before General Winfield replied to Patrokis's question with a sigh and a question of his own. “Five thousand for what?”
“There's this Salvadoran ex-Army Captain, an illegal, holed up on Columbia Road who claims he has facts, figures and names concerning Langley money that went astray in nineteen-eighty-nine.”
“What does he say ‘astray’ means?”
“That the money was passed by Langley to U.S. Army advisers who only passed half of it to the Salvadoran Army brass.” “Half of how much?” “Two-point-four million dollars.” “How many of our people were involved?” “Only two. A captain and a colonel.” “No names, of course.”
“For five thousand we get names,” Patrokis said.
“What do you think?” the General asked, then sighed again, as if he already knew the answer.
Patrokis shrugged. “If I had five thousand, I’d buy. But it's been three years since I saw that much cash all at one time.”