Manhunt Is My Mission

by Stephen Marlowe

  Benson Capehart had made his pile in lumber in Upper Michigan quite a few years back. Since then he was what a generation ago would have been called a dollar-a-year-man. He had held down a desk at the OPA, the Interior Department, the Navy Department and, for a brief spell, had sat down the hall from the President’s unofficial chief-of-staff in the White House. He had run unsuccessfully for a Michigan Senate seat. He was currently the Under-Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and they said he was doing a top-notch job. They also said he was in line for the Ambassadorship to the Court of St. James, provided his party won the next election.

  A self-made man, he was almost religiously patriotic. If you disagreed too strenuously with this refreshing viewpoint he’d get a look on his face which said he’d just love to invite you out behind the barn to settle the issue. At a time when criticism of Uncle Sam was perversely fashionable, even in Washington, we needed more men like him.

  He lived in a small town house, big enough for a bachelor usually on the move, a block off Canal Road. The house was Georgian, with a dense boxwood hedge out front, a single huge magnolia tree, and a coach-light on the small porch. A maid let me in. She said the Secretary was expected back soon, and I said that’s why I was there. She led me into a library with rubbed mahogany and heavy black leather furniture and three walls lined with books which—Benson Capehart being the sort of busy pragmatist he was—would have been reluctantly unread. I made myself at home with some twenty-year-old Ambassador Scotch and waited.

  At six-thirty I grew restless, at a quarter to seven, uneasy and at seven o’clock I forgot the Scotch and began to pace. At a quarter after I was going to call Samia Falcon at the Shoreham, but just then the phone rang. I let it ring twice, told myself there must have been an extension elsewhere in the house, then picked up the receiver anyway.

  I heard the maid’s voice: “Benson Capehart’s residence.”

  “Maggie, this is Jesperson,” a man’s voice said breathlessly.

  “Won’t they be coming home for dinner then?” Maggie complained. “And me with a roast in the oven.”

  “I’m calling from Alexandria General Hospital,” Jesperson said, still breathlessly. “There’s been a terrible accident.”

  I felt my fingers tighten on the phone. Maggie said: “Oh the good sweet Lord! What is it? What happened?”

  “The car. We were hit by a truck. It’s a miracle we got out of it alive.”

  “Is the Secretary all right?”

  “I was driving,” Jesperson said, suddenly incoherent. “I don’t speed. The car. I’m a steady driver. I never even … it wouldn’t turn, that’s all there was to it, I saw the truck, they shouted, it wouldn’t turn … I never …”

  “Pull yourself together,” Maggie cut him off sharply. “Is the Secretary all right?”

  “He broke his arm, and two ribs.” Jesperson’s voice was flat now, the voice of a man in mild shock. “His brother. The doctor. They don’t think he’ll live out the night.”

  “Oh the good sweet Lord!” Maggie cried again.

  Jesperson said: “Has a man named Drum, a private detective—”

  “I’m right here,” I said.

  “Mr. Drum? They want you. At the hospital. I think you’d better hurry.”

  “On my way,” I said and hung up and started running.

  A big man wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt sat outside the emergency room of the Alexandria General Hospital. He had his knees spread and his elbows on his thighs and his head hanging down. He was sweating. Two cops stood near him. He looked up when I came in. His forehead had been bandaged and taped. Adhesive covered the bridge of his nose. He was telling the cops:

  “I couldn’t help it. Jesus, how the hell could I help it? She curves right there. The road. Just past the Pentagon on Route One.”

  “We know where it happened,” one of the cops said.

  “We got pictures,” the other one said.

  “I’m rolling along, doing maybe thirty, ahead of the clock and my load gone. I don’t even see him coming. He takes the turn, only he don’t take it. He’s got the whole highway, heading north. Me, I’m in traffic heading south. He takes the turn, only he don’t take it,” the truck driver repeated. “He sails right into me.” He shook his head, and sweat flew. “Jesus, you should have seen the car.”

  “We saw it,” one of the cops said.

  I said: “My name is Drum. Secretary Capehart sent for me.”

  The cop who had seen the car looked me over with those slow patient eyes they all get sooner or later and jerked his head toward the swinging doors behind him. Suddenly I was reminded of the operating room at the palace in Qasr Tabuk. I headed for the door.

  “Not you,” the cop said, and his side-kick in no great hurry went through the doors. I waited. The truck driver stared at me, shrugged and agonized: “You a relative? I swear to God it wasn’t my fault. I been driving ten years and never dented a fender.”

  The second cop came out with an intern or resident physician. He was young and he looked tired. That figured, because if he was an intern his work-week was a hundred and twenty hours long. A fresh smear of blood marred the whiteness of his medical tunic.

  “Are you Mr. Drum?” he said.

  “That’s right. How are they?”

  “The Secretary’s on his feet. He shouldn’t be, but he is.” He sighed and removed his glasses and looked at them and put them on again. They made him look younger and less sure of himself. “The doctor won’t live through the night. He knows it. We’ve told him. He wants to see you. If he had any kind of a chance at all, we wouldn’t let him. It doesn’t matter now. Compressed fracture of the fourth vertebra, with bone pressing against the spinal cord. We can’t operate. His legs went first. His arms are going. He can still talk. How long I don’t know. It will happen fast after he loses control of his vocal cords. Some time during the night. He’ll just stop breathing.”

  The intern scowled at me, as if somehow I was responsible for what had happened. “Will you follow me, please?”

  “… vehicular homicide …” one of the cops was saying to the truckman as we went through the swinging doors.

  Benson Capehart was wearing a hospital robe. His right arm was in splints. They hadn’t set it in plaster yet. He stood near the bed in the darkened room with his good hand resting on the shoulder of a tall blond lad who must have been Jesperson.

  “It just wouldn’t turn,” Jesperson said.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Jes. I know that. My brother knows it.” Benson Capehart turned to me. His big, heavy-boned face had the vacant, surprised look of a man who has just been awakened suddenly from a deep sleep. “Drum. Thanks for making it so fast.” He showed me his back. “Turner? Chet Drum is here,”

  “I walked out of it almost without a scratch,” Jesperson said. “But you, your brother … who the hell am I?” he wanted to know. “Why should I get off so easy?”

  “Please wait outside, Jes,” Benson Capehart said. The blond lad bowed his head and went slowly past me to the doors and through them. A nurse moved out of the shadows at the head of the bed to sponge the forehead of the man lying there.

  “Hello, Doc,” I said.

  He was covered to his neck. All I could see was his face. He looked pale and tired, but calm. His lips quirked in a little smile. “First things first,” he said. His voice was soft, but its brisk assertiveness surprised me. He was dying as he had decided to live those last few months, grabbing time and circumstance by the tail and riding it for all he was worth.

  “What first things?” I said.

  “That night near the frontier. Teerah. She was as healthy as a horse. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He was still smiling faintly. “Do you know the story about the would-be suicide? Someone saves his life and the suicide moves in with his rescuer and says, ‘Thanks, pal, you saved my life; now support me.’”

  I nodded. He stopped smiling. “You saved my life in the operating room
in Qasr Tabuk. Now I’m asking you to support me.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I was going to testify before the AUC. But it looks like I have another appointment first. As long as men like El Thamad are in power, the AUC shouldn’t give Motamar a nickel. Agree?”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “I want you to testify in my place. You’re the only one who can.”

  I didn’t say that they’d have listened to him where they wouldn’t listen to me. His chin moved. He was trying to raise his head but couldn’t. “Well?”

  I said: “I’ll do everything I can to see that Motamar doesn’t get the grant.” But I thought: the only rub is, Mrs. Welcome and her association won’t give a hoot in Hades what I do.

  My words, which didn’t satisfy me, satisfied Turner Capehart. He changed the subject by asking abruptly:

  “You think what happened tonight was an accident?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Benson Capehart looked at me sharply. I didn’t know whether he’d wanted me to say it was or it wasn’t. What empathy I had was all for the man on the bed. He stared past me, seeing nothing—or perhaps seeing the one thing we all must wait our whole lives to see. He smiled the faintest ghost of a secret smile, and his voice when he spoke again was so soft I could hardly hear it.

  “I’m not afraid to die. It’s just that … there’s so much left to do.” His eyes widened. “Benson!” he cried out, much louder. “Benson, I think I’m going!”

  He was wrong about that. He lingered another hour, but those were the last words he spoke. He had lost the power of speech. His brother remained at the bedside until the end. I waited outside with Jesperson. The cops and the truckman were gone. For a long time Jesperson and I chain-smoked and ignored each other, like two strangers waiting outside a maternity ward, too scared to talk and not wanting to show it.

  Finally I said: “You know where they took the car?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “You said it wouldn’t steer. I want to know why.”

  His laughter was harsh and bitter, like a sob caught in his throat. “You never will. I walked out of it without a scratch, but it was a total wreck.”

  “A police mechanic—” I started to say, and then Benson Capehart came out.

  “It’s over.”

  Jesperson turned to the wall. His back was stiff.

  I asked Benson Capehart the pointless but somehow essential question: “There anything I can do?”

  He shook his head. The intern came out of the emergency room. A few minutes later an attendant brought us hot coffee. “I’ll let you know about the funeral arrangements,” Benson Capehart said. “He’d have wanted you to come.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I shook his hand and squeezed his shoulder. We shook left-handed because it was his right that had been broken. “You ought to have that attended to now,” I said.

  He told me he would. He said: “I had a hunch there was going to be trouble. So did he. That’s why he went to Fredericksburg.”

  “You think it wasn’t an accident?” Jesperson blurted.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t. I’ll tell the police.” He suddenly hit his forehead with the palm of his hand and asked: “What good will it do? They’ll have diplomatic immunity. The police won’t be able to touch them.”

  “The police won’t, that’s right,” I said.

  He gave me the same sharp look he had given me in the emergency room.

  I said nothing else. He said, musingly: “It took him all his life to find himself, and when he did I had to make fun of what he was doing. I’m nothing. I’m nothing. There are a hundred men, better than I am, doing the same kind of work I am in Washington. He was a great man.”

  That made two of them, I thought. Falcon Pasha and now Turner Capehart. El Thamad and his cronies had killed one of them. If Turner Capehart was right, they had killed the other, too.

  I left them there, Benson Capehart with his grief and Jesperson pathetically hoping they could prove it was no accident.

  21

  I DROVE NORTH AT dusk on Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. Montrose Park slipped by, the daylight fading among the oaks and magnolias like elusive thoughts. I had an elusive thought, but it stayed with me all the way to Calvert Street and the Shoreham Hotel. I’d made a promise to Turner Capehart on his deathbed, and I intended keeping it. I couldn’t keep it the way he wanted me to. The AUC might listen politely to what I had to say, if for no other reason, than because Benson Capehart would pressure them. They’d listen, and then they’d do exactly what they decided to do before they ever heard of a private eye named Chester Drum.

  And then?

  If the cops could prove it was murder?

  But if it was, despite what Marianne had said, the trail to El Thamad and his cronies would be difficult. The strong man of the Scourge of Allah had killed out of necessity before, in half a dozen Near Eastern countries; sometimes with the power of the state back-stopping him as in Motamar, but sometimes in back alleys with hashish-eating assassins who knew the quick thrust to the vitals with a knife or the sudden parting of crossed hands that held a garrote.

  He could have set Turner Capehart up for death even before he flew to Washington. They said the Mufti of Jerusalem had connections in New York, as he had in every major city on six continents. If the Mufti did, then El Thamad did too.

  A cabled and coded message to the Motamar Consulate in New York, a phone call, to one of those connections, some dickering as to price, and a team of professional killers who had no more apparent tie with Motamar than I had with the King of Katmandu would be on their way to Washington. They’d be mavericks. They wouldn’t be syndicate men. Syndicate men wouldn’t kill for hire unless the Board of Directors, in corporate meeting assembled, gave the word. They’d do their job and then blow north on the next plane or on the Congressional Limited. They’d be as hard to track down as a subversive idea in Freedomland, U.S.A. El Thamad would never even know who’d done the job for him. The hired killers would never know who’d footed the bill for them.

  I pulled the Olds up in front of the Shoreham. Getting out, I remembered the sharp look Benson Capehart had given me after his brother’s death. Because I’d agreed the police wouldn’t be able to touch El Thamad?

  Did he expect me to? More important, now, did I expect myself to? “Cut it out,” I grumbled out loud. “You’re out of character. You’re no Sicilian on a vendetta.”

  The doorman stared at me with the expression they reserve for early drunks.

  I identified myself to the clerk I’d spoken to on the phone. “Well, if you’re a friend of Captain Myrtle’s,” he said dubiously. “It’s Suite 636.”

  The house-phones were in an alcove behind one wing of the desk. I used one to call Samia’s suite. I expected a dressing down because I was an hour late. Instead I got a man’s voice. He said: “Hello?”

  “Six-three-six?”

  “Who’s this?”

  I recognized Captain Myrtle’s voice. The elusive thought which had kept me company all the way north from Georgetown finally hit home. I felt adrenalin spurt inside of me. El Thamad’s hypothetical hired killers would like hell have blown north. They had another job to do.

  “This is Drum,” I said. “What’s going on up there?”

  “Take the elevator up,” he said. “You might of warned a guy.” Then he hung up.

  Curtis Myrtle’s story was that a sad, incognito drunk had rented a suite on the sixth floor of the Shoreham for the express purpose of killing herself. “But at the last minute she didn’t jump,” he said belligerently. “She lost her courage. Lots of them do.”

  “Sure,” I said. “You’re a great detective. She flies three thousand miles from London, picks out a sixth floor suite, decides to jump, loses her nerve and calls for help.”

  “So?” Myrtle demanded, still belligerent. In his old Custer Street days he had been built like a beer barrel and just as h
ard. He wore better clothes now, in keeping with his new station in life. He might have been wearing a girdle too; the beer-barrel shape was gone. He had the patient, sad, befuddled face of a hound dog. He’d always had that. It hadn’t changed.

  “So if she changed her mind, why call you at all?”

  “Because she wants sympathy. I’m no psychliatrist,” he said, and mispronounced the word to prove it. “Ask the house doc inside with her. He’ll tell you.”

  “What’s her story?”

  “Her story?” Myrtle laughed. “You think her story matters? She’s sick, I’m telling you.”

  “It matters to her, Myrt. It matters to me.”

  “You think something happens like this, it’s good for the hotel? We can do without her story, brother.” Myrtle mopped his high, wrinkled, hound-dog forehead. The air conditioning was humming away in the living room of Samia’s suite, but he was sweating.

  “Let’s hear it anyway.”

  “It’s cockeyed.”

  “Sure. About as cockeyed as a Custer Street bouncer winding up as the big cheese of security over here.”

  “Hey now listen,” Myrtle whispered devoutly. “I once got some big huckamuck’s kid out of a jam on Custer. Hotel exec’s kid, and it paid off. Lay off of it, will you please? The huckamuck’s off building a hotel in Saudi Arabia or somewheres. I’m not.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Myrtle sighed. “It’s seven-thirty. She’s at the window looking down at the pool. They light it up at night real fancy. There’s a knock at the door. She thinks it’s you and opens up. It’s a hotel maintenance man, in uniform yet. He mumbles something about the plumbing and she lets him in. She drifts back in an alcoholic fog to the window.”

  “Wouldn’t it be closed, with air conditioning?”