Yellow Dog Contract

by Thomas Ross

  “Have you been talking to some of them?” Murfin said.

  Koontz nodded glumly. “Yeah, I’ve been talking to them. Or they been talking to me, although they sorta sneak around to do it now that I’m out of a job. They’re worried that if there’s a strike, the party’s gonna lose St. Louis and if it loses St. Louis, it’s gonna lose the whole state. Well, that started me thinkin’.”

  “About what?” I said.

  “I started thinkin’, ‘How come Gallops picked on me?’ I mean, shit, I’m not the only frog in the pond. So I make a couple of long distance calls. Like I said, I ain’t got nothing else to do. I call Jimmy Horsely over in Philadelphia and Buck McCreight up in Boston. I figure maybe they might have a spot for me. But whaddya know, they’re just about to call me because the same thing’s happened to them just like it happened to me. They got dumped and they’re looking for jobs. And they tell me it ain’t no use callin’ Phil Leonard in New York or Sid Gershman out in L.A. or Jack Childers up in Chicago because they’re dumped, too, just like I was, except Gallops sent in more guys and spent a hell of a lot more money to get the job done in those places than he did here. Whaddya think of that?”

  Murfin looked at me with a glance full of something, significance probably, and then looked back at Koontz. “How about Detroit?” he said.

  “Same thing,” Koontz said. “Baltimore and Cleveland, too.”

  “Milwaukee?” I said.

  “Same thing. Also Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

  “They’re talking strike in all those places?” Murfin asked.

  “That’s all they’re talking.”

  “Well,” Murfin said, “ain’t that fuckin’ interesting?”

  “Ain’t it though?” Koontz said.

  “You know what you just named, don’t you?” I said.

  “Sure I do,” Koontz said. “I just named the ten or twelve biggest goddamned cities in the country.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MURFIN WAS ON THE PHONE for nearly two hours before he finally hung up, turned to me, and held out his empty glass. I took it, poured some bourbon into it, and then filled it with water from the bathroom tap. When I came back, Murfin looked up from the notes he had been making, reached for his drink, and took an appreciative swallow.

  “It all checks out,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “I was listening.”

  “I think we could use a few more details though. We’ll go to this meeting tonight and then I think I’ll take the long way back tomorrow.”

  “Chicago?”

  “Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and probably Baltimore. I’ll land at Friendship and rent a car. A few more details won’t hurt.” He studied his notes for a moment. “How come nobody’s put all this together before?”

  “You mean the papers?”

  “Yeah, the papers or maybe TV.”

  “Well, first of all it’s never happened before so nobody’s expecting it, and second, they don’t have anyone to remind them of Chaddi Jugo.”

  Murfin nodded. “It all goes back to Hundermark, doesn’t it.”

  “To him and the CIA.”

  “They brought you in, didn’t they, back in ’64?”

  “Except that I didn’t know it at the time. They wanted to make sure Hundermark got re-elected because if he didn’t, they’d lose their pipeline into the Public Workers International. And they were right.”

  “It made quite a stink, didn’t it?” Murfin said. “All about how the CIA was footing the bill for the PWI. It was Hundermark’s pet project. He got some good trips out of it—London, Hong Kong, Tokyo—all over. I thought it was one big bore.”

  “It wasn’t after Mix found out about it,” I said.

  “Yeah, first he fired you, then he blasted the PWI, and then he fired me.”

  “I’d already quit.”

  “Sure,” Murfin said. “Who’d they send down there, the guy from Texas?”

  I nodded. “Joe Dawkins. From Kilgore.”

  “He seemed like a hell of a nice guy. I wonder whatever happened to him.”

  “You mean after he dumped Chaddi Jugo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Last I heard he was doing good works for the CIA in Vietnam.”

  “Hell of a nice guy,” Murfin said. “You ever talk to him about it? About Chaddi Jugo, I mean.”

  “Once. He got a little drunk and came over to my place. It was when I was still living in the coach house on Massachusetts.”

  “I always liked that place.”

  “Well, we talked about it just that once. I think Dawkins was trying to justify it. Chaddi Jugo was something of a Marxist, of course, who’d got himself elected president in 1962 of that former British colony on the east coast of South America.”

  “That didn’t sit too well with the CIA,” Murfin said.

  “Chaddi wasn’t just a Marxist, he was also from Chicago, but he’d somehow wound up down there and gone into politics and taken out citizenship. And right after Independence in 1962 he got himself elected president for a two-year term.”

  “Yeah, but the British didn’t like it.”

  “They didn’t like it at all, according to Dawkins. They couldn’t quite stomach having some Chicago Marxist being president of their former colony so they got together with the CIA to see whether there wasn’t some way to dump Jugo in the 1964 election. Well, the CIA just happened to have its pipeline into the Public Workers International. It was into a lot of things back then—the National Students Association, a couple of magazines, and I think even a book publishing firm.”

  “Plus the Newspaper Guild,” Murfin said.

  “You’re right. I’d forgotten. Well, anyway the CIA cleared it all with the AFL-CIO and it sent good old Joe Dawkins and God knows how much money down to South America to see what he could do about dumping Chaddi Jugo.”

  “And Dawkins pulled the strike,” Murfin said. “It was a long one, I remember, but I don’t remember just how long.”

  “Two months,” I said. “It was the two months just before the election. Dawkins used his pot full of CIA money and his ties with the Public Workers International and somehow they struck everything—the buses, the railroad, the docks, the firemen, the police, the hospitals, and the whole damned government bureaucracy—even, or so Dawkins told me, the night-soil collectors. And most important of all Dawkins managed to make the blame for the strike land on Chaddi Jugo and stick to him. And that was about the last that anyone ever heard of Chaddi.”

  “What happened to him?” Murfin said.

  “He got whipped.”

  “I mean after the election.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You know something?” Murfin said.

  “What?”

  “Max probably didn’t have much more to go on than we do.”

  “And look what happened to him,” I said. “All Max probably needed to set him off was the mention of Chaddi Jugo’s name and he got that from Sally Raines who got it from my sister. After that he must have made some phone calls just like you did and figured out why Arch Mix disappeared. Max’s only problem was that he probably tried to cash in on what he found out.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but he told Dorothy that he had a big one going that might be worth two hundred thousand.”

  “That’d be a little rich for Max,” Murfin said.

  “That’s what I thought. But apparently whoever he was trying to get the money from decided that he wasn’t worth it, or didn’t trust him, so they had him killed. I guess they had Sally Raines killed for about the same reason. She must have known what Max knew. I don’t know whether she tried to cash in on it or not, but it doesn’t much matter. She’s just as dead either way.”

  Murfin took another swallow of his drink. “I figure the Arch Mix thing like this,” he said. “I figure Arch somehow got wind of the whole deal and they had to take him out, right?”

  “Probably. I know he’d never have gone a
long with it.”

  “No,” Murfin said, “he wouldn’t’ve.” He was silent for a moment and then his face broke into one of his dirty smiles. “Jesus, it’s sweet though, isn’t it? You get a labor union to strike the public employees in ten or twelve of the biggest cities in the country just two months before election. Now who’s gonna benefit from that?”

  “Not the Democrats,” I said.

  “Not fuckin’ likely. If they don’t carry the big cities, then they don’t carry the big states, and if they don’t carry New York, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and at least a couple of others, they’re fuckin’ dead come November second, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Murfin wagged his head from side to side in sheer admiration. “It’s sure a sweetheart, isn’t it?” Suddenly something seemed to bother him because his mouth went down at the corners and he wrinkled his forehead. “What I can’t figure out is who the hell’s steering it? It’s not Gallops all by himself. He couldn’t put something like this together. Not Warner B-for-Baxter Gallops.”

  “No,” I said, “he probably couldn’t.”

  “And it sure as shit couldn’t be the fuckin’ CIA again.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’d be a little rich even for them, especially just now.”

  “And the Republicans wouldn’t wanta take a chance on something like this, not with Watergate still hanging over them.”

  “I don’t think they’d do it even if they knew how, although if it works, they’re going to be the principal beneficiaries.”

  “You got any ideas?” Murfin said.

  “I don’t, but I think I know somebody who might.”

  “Who?”

  “My Uncle Slick.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “I’m not sure that he has anything to do with it, but he might have some interesting notions. Especially since dumping Chaddi Jugo was all his idea to begin with.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE INTEBNATIONAL ORDER of Oddfellows Hall was about six blocks from The Feathered Nest bar and grill in a not particularly fashionable section of downtown St. Louis.

  It was a two-story brick building with a flat front. Downstairs was the bar and card-gaming area and upstairs was the main hall, which was large enough to seat probably 500 persons if all the chairs were up, which they weren’t. Only fifty or sixty folding chairs had been set up in five or six rows in front of the speaker’s podium. The podium rested on a long table.

  By the time Murfin and I arrived and took seats in the rear there were twenty or twenty-five union members in the room, about three quarters of them men. Freddie Koontz, still in his grey leisure suit, was behind the podium in earnest conversation with a small band of members. There was much vigorous headshaking and nodding and when he wanted to make a point, Freddie Koontz liked to use two fingers to drive it home into his listener’s chest.

  Most of the members had stopped in at the bar downstairs and bought bottles of beer which they sipped from as they sat waiting for the meeting to begin. When Murfin saw the beer he asked me if I wanted one. I told him yes and he went downstairs and returned with a couple of bottles of Falstaff.

  We were drinking the beer and watching the members dribble into the meeting when the woman came through the door. Murfin dug me in the ribs with his elbow. “Remember her?” he said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “She’s changed.”

  “She’s just older.”

  “She sure as hell is.”

  The woman must have been forty-six and looked it, but when I had first met her, a dozen years before, she had been thirty-four and looked twenty-five. Or maybe twenty-eight. Her name was Hazie Harrison and in 1964 her vote at the forthcoming convention was considered to be worth a special trip to St. Louis. I had been the one who got to make the trip.

  She had been blond then and she was blond now, but that was almost all that had stayed the same. In 1964 she had been slender and willowy, but now she was chubby, if not fat, and her once pretty face sagged at the jowls and wrinkled around her eyes.

  She stood in the doorway to the hall and the drink she held in her hand was almost dark enough to be ice tea, although I was pretty sure that it wasn’t tea, but nearly straight bourbon instead. I remembered that she had liked bourbon. She stood there in the doorway and looked about the room as if seeking someone to sit next to. Her gaze ran by Murfin and me, stopped, and backed up. She dug a pair of glasses out of her purse, put them on, and looked at us again. She smiled, put the glasses back in her purse, and started toward us.

  “She saw you,” Murfin said out of the corner of his mouth.

  “It’s you that she has the real memories of,” I said.

  When she reached us she said, “Well, well, well, well, and well. If it’s not Harvey Longmire and Wardie Murfin.”

  Murfin and I were up by then and I said, “How are you, Hazie?” Murfin lied and said, “You’re looking great.”

  “I look like shit,” she said. “I thought you guys were dead, but apparently you aren’t, although with Ward here it’d be sort of hard to tell on account of he wasn’t too much of a fuck as I remember, at least not like you, Harvey.”

  “You haven’t changed, have you, Hazie,” I said.

  “Why should I?”

  “No reason.”

  She cocked her head to one side and ran an appraising eye over me. “You look a little older, Harvey, but that’s about all except for that moustache. I think it’s kinda cute.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Does it tickle down you know where?”

  “My wife says it doesn’t.”

  “You’re married, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You know how many times I been married now?”

  “At last count it was two.”

  “It’s five now and I might make it six. I got this old guy lined up who thinks I give terrific head.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said.

  She giggled. “You oughta know.” She looked at Murfin. “You, too, baby.”

  “Best in St. Louis,” Murfin said.

  She nodded gravely and I could see that she was more than just a little drunk. “That’s what I was, wasn’t I? The best fuck in St. Louis. Guys used to come from all over—from Chicago, Denver, Omaha, all over—just to find out if it was true and every man jack of ’em told me it was.” She looked at me and smiled and I saw that there was a lot more gold in her smile than there had been.

  “You remember that time you flew all the way out from D.C. to romance me into splitting off from Freddie and Arch Mix and going with Hundermark at the convention?”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “It was 1964, right?”

  “Right.”

  “We stayed up all night, didn’t we?”

  “All night.”

  “Then the next morning we called Murfin here and got him up out of bed in Washington.”

  “My wife liked that,” Murfin said. “She liked it a lot.”

  “Then at the convention,” she said to Murfin, “you took over to make sure that I stayed in line.”

  “It was pure pleasure,” Murfin said.

  “And I did, too, didn’t I,” she said. “I told you I’d go with Hundermark and I did because I always do what I say I’m gonna do. I never go back on my word. Never.”

  “You’re tops, Hazie,” Murfin said.

  “You guys back with the union?” she said and swayed a little.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “They’re talking about a strike. I don’t want no fuckin’ strike. Strikes are dumb.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Murfin said.

  “I been with the tax assessor’s office twenty-three years and we haven’t had any fuckin’ strike yet. But all you hear about now is strike.”

  “Maybe they won’t have one,” I said, just to be saying something.

  “Well, I sure don’t want one. All I wanta do is have a little fun.”
She winked at me and then at Murfin. “How about later, after the meeting, you guys gonna be busy?”

  “We’ve got to catch a plane, Hazie,” I said.

  “That’s too bad. But if you change your plans, lemme know. I got a girl friend who’s real neat.”

  “We’ll let you know,” Murfin said.

  “Well, I guess I better go find a seat.”

  “Nice seeing you, Hazie,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said with a note of surprise, “it was sorta nice, wasn’t it?”

  Freddie Koontz liked to make speeches, probably because he was very good at it. The one that he was making to the forty or forty-five members of the Public Employees Union was full of dire warnings about how an unjustified strike would affect their economic future. He made it sound grim.

  “Lemme tell you something,” he said in his speech-making voice, which was a mild roar. “I’m not against us public employees striking. I’ve walked as many picket lines as any man or woman in this room. I’ve had my head split open by goon squads and I thought it was worth it because it helped build the union. But the strike they’re talking about now ain’t gonna build your union, it’s gonna bust it.”

  “You tell ’em, Freddie!” It was a woman’s voice, slurred but loud, and I didn’t have to look to know that it belonged to Hazie Harrison. There’s usually at least one drunk at every union meeting, and this was no exception.

  “The city’s in rotten shape,” Freddie Koontz went on, ignoring Hazie, “and it got that way because the politicians who run it are dumb managers. You know that and I know it and about the only people who don’t know how dumb these guys really are are the people who vote for them. Well, lemme tell you something, certain ones of these politicians ain’t so dumb that they won’t welcome a strike with open arms. You wanta know why? I’ll tell you why. Because then they’ll have themselves a whipping boy to blame all the city’s problems on, and that whipping boy is gonna be you, the members of Council Twenty-one of the Public Employees Union, AFL-CIO.”