Читать книгу Washington Whispers Murder - Leslie Ford - Страница 3

The man with the traveling bag and briefcase waited quietly on the service stairs of Mrs. Sybil Thorn’s handsome house on Woodley Road in Washington, D. C. When the coast was clear he crossed the hall to the small room second floor back, and stood listening to the cocktail party going on in the rooms below. If he hadn’t caught a quick glimpse of Congressman Hamilton (Call Me Ham) Vair’s heavy blond figure through the pantry door as the maid discreetly slipped his note into Vair’s hand, he’d have thought he’d come to the wrong place to find the man whose private undercover investigator he’d now been for several months. Normally, you didn’t have to look for Ham Vair, much less listen.

He closed the door of the small room and took off his seedy grey overcoat. The glamorous Mrs. Thorn must have been giving Ham Vair lessons in deportment.—Forget that a dizzy columnist ever called you the youthful and handsome Hot Rod from the Marsh Marigold State. Don’t boom, and don’t burst out laughing, and don’t clap people on the back, she’d probably told him . . . or not these people anyway. He remembered the string of shiny limousines parked on both sides of Woodley Road. Because the party was obviously one more step in the master plan to groom Ham Vair for bigger and better things. It took dough, of course, but Sybil Thorn, twice divorced and as cynically ambitious in her way as Vair was in his, had plenty of that, and friends to kick in more when his campaign got rolling.

The man took his briefcase over to the desk. Parties to meet the right people were just frosting . . . for a wedding cake, Sybil Thorn was no doubt figuring, when dime-a-dozen Congressman Ham Vair became Senator Hamilton Vair, one of the prestige-and-power laden Ninety-Six. The real stuff was right here in the mahogany file by the desk, kept in Mrs. Thorn’s back room because Vair was too cagey to keep it in his apartment or in his office on Capitol Hill.—If you called it a file, the man thought dispassionately. A monument, was more like it. A monument to a vindictive personal hatred that circumstances had suddenly converted into the political opportunity of a lifetime. It was a file on a man named Rufus Brent. Rufus Brent’s appointment to head up the new Industrial Techniques Commission had given Congressman Vair, the thirty-one year old representative from Taber City, center of the Ninth District out in the Marsh Marigold State, a target that would make him front page news from coast to coast. And Vair had hated the guts out of Rufus Brent before the Industrial Techniques Commission was ever thought of.

He started to open the file when he saw the ball of crumpled paper lying by the baseboard, as if someone had crushed it up and hurled it at the wastebasket. He picked it up and smoothed it out. It was a page from a weekly news digest that had hit the stands that day. Half-way down the savagely crumpled page he saw why Vair was neither booming nor laughing at the party down there. A single paragraph had jerked the Senate seat out from under his eager posterior.

“Look for an indefinite delay,” it said, “in setting up the new Industrial Techniques Commission. Reason is, nobody to head it. Congressional approval for an agency with unprecedented peacetime power to cut red tape and expedite vitally necessary retooling for late model military and commercial aircraft was based on a strictly bi-partisan agreement to keep the Commission clear of politics. Rufus Brent, able but little-publicized Western industrialist, was unanimously accepted as the Commission czar before the Bill could be submitted to the Congress. He has since been forced to refuse the job, for what are authoritatively stated to be purely personal and private reasons. It is unlikely that anybody else of his calibre that both parties can agree on can be found at this time.”

The man’s face was expressionless as he read it through a second time and put it down on the desk, glancing at the door. Vair barged into the room, his florid handsomely heavy face flushed, his jaw thrust out the way he thrust it out on the hustings, a campaign natural. His blue eyes were glittering.

“Look, you——” He shut the door and lowered his voice to a savage whisper. “You know better than to come here when there are people around. What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re fired. Get out.”

The glitter in his eyes hardened as he looked at the man behind the desk—crisp brown caplike haircut, shaggy at the edges, smooth impassive face, not handsome but casually attractive except for the eyes that were too small, too flat, and too cold-grey, the one flaw in an otherwise perfect counterfeit. The flush on Vair’s face deepened as he saw the man shrug and reach calmly out to pick up his briefcase.

“And wipe that superior smirk off your wellbred mug or I’ll knock it off.” He swung his arm back. “—Investigator. Undercover expert! I knew you were nothing but a high-class shake-down artist, but I didn’t know you were a lousy heel. Four months you’ve been bleeding me white, investigating Rufus Brent, and I have to go buy a twenty-cent magazine to find out the great Western industrialist’s not taking the job.” His voice rose, brutal and mocking. “For purely personal and private reasons. And where the hell have you been? You’re supposed to be hot stuff at personal and private reasons. What the hell have you been doing? Why didn’t you tell me six weeks ago that old devil wasn’t coming to Washington? You let me beat my brains, figuring out my whole campaign to make hash out of Mister Rufus Brent . . . and Mister Rufus Brent’s not coming to Washington. You dirty double-crossing——”

The man went across the room and picked up his coat. “If you’d kept your pants up and your blood pressure down,” he said coolly, “I’d have been glad to tell you . . .”

“Tell me what?”

The man shrugged again. He moved slowly, putting on his coat. With the really big shakedown of his career just in front of him, he couldn’t afford to let Vair fire him now. Congressman Vair had become too important a factor in it.

“I just got fired, remember?” he said casually.

Vair’s blue eyes stabbed him, bright and hard as dagger points. The flush on his face receded. “You’re hired. Stuff it. What’s on your mind? What have you got?”

“Rufus Brent is coming to Washington.” And you could go to hell if he wasn’t. I wouldn’t need you if the old fool had stayed home.

He let his overcoat drop back on the chair. “I didn’t phone because I didn’t want to risk a leak. I flew back. They’ve persuaded him to come—long enough to get ITC organized and rolling anyway. Your senior Senator—the old goat you’re trying to unseat—spent the weekend with him. Devotion to duty is what they call it, I believe.”

Vair’s eyes were bright, his jaw and hands working. “Oh, man!” he said softly. “Oh, brother! That’s what I wanted to hear. I’m going to crucify him. I’m going to make the Toolmaker wish he’d never come into my state and my district to build one of his damned plants. He’s going to rue the day he walked in there and rooked me out of thirty-five thousand fast and easy bucks on the scrap deal I worked like a hog to get going. I’d be a rich man right now if it hadn’t been for Mister Rufus Brent. He’ll see.” He laughed shortly. “We don’t like foreigners in my state. They’ll run him out of there on a rail before I get through with him. He’ll wish he’d made the measly contribution I crawled to ask him for. He’ll wish he’d let me take his red-haired daughter to the Brentool Village square dance when I offered to. He can snap his fingers at Congressman Ham Vair, but Senator Vair. . . . He’ll crawl, damn him. Mister Rufus Brent’ll crawl till his knees bleed. And the red-head’ll crawl too.”

He crossed the room to the panelled cupboard by the fireplace, reached up to open it and jerked his head back. “What about that girl?” he demanded abruptly. “Where is she? Where is Miss Molly Brent? Have you found her yet?”

“Not her. I’ve found a couple of pictures of her. I don’t know whether you’ll want to use them. They may be too hot to handle. I don’t know just how far you want to go.”

He opened his briefcase slowly, delaying as he’d delayed putting on his overcoat. The heavier Vair laid it on the Brents, the more the Brents were going to need a friend when the time came.

Vair’s face flushed again. “You don’t? Well, I’ll tell you. All the way. Do you get that? I said I was going to crucify Rufus Brent and I meant crucify him. Nothing’s too hot to handle. Let him blow his brains out if he wants to. That I’d like to see.”

The man took two glossy-print photographs out of the briefcase. “The Madisonburg Times doesn’t know these are gone yet,” he said easily. “They never published this one.”

It was a flashlight shot taken at night in a pelting rain. A girl running wildly, her head down, her forearm raised shielding her face. She was bareheaded, slender and as fragile as the long filmy white skirt she was clutching as she ran, toward a car parked with other cars in a curving driveway. At the other side of the photograph, startled people in dinner clothes were rushing out after her from the white-columned portico of a substantial fieldstone house with lighted windows.

“You can’t see her face.”

“You can see the license number on her car.” The man put his hand out and blocked off the house and the people running out of it, leaving only the girl running wildly through the pouring rain.

Vair laughed. “Somebody ought to be able to do a swell job with that one. Is that when it happened?”

“That’s right after she got the news. That’s what she’s running from.”

They both knew what the news had been. Neither of them needed to say it.

“Here’s when it happened.” He handed Vair the second photograph. “You can’t see her face in this one either.”

It was the same girl and the same car. The only part of the sodden white dress that showed was what a man’s raincoat did not cover as she lay in a small inert heap on the side of the wet road. A state trooper stood in the rain, arms out, holding back invisible spectators. Skid marks showed on the shiny asphalt. The car was a tangled wreck against a tree trunk, barren branches dripping down on the huddled girl under the raincoat.

“I haven’t found out whether she can walk yet,” the man said, in his dispassionate monotone. “Or where they’ve got her. She’s left the hospital. She wasn’t at their house in Madisonburg.—If you still want to know.”

“You’re damn right I want to know.” Vair turned to the cupboard and took out a stained green oiled silk pouch. “Here,” he said. “Maybe you’ll get a lead out of these. A lot of leads, for all I know. That’s your job. They’re just a batch of personal letters, but you can’t tell. Get ’em back—I don’t want the Marine Corps on my neck.”

There was a flicker of light in the grey eyes. He tightened his fingers on the pouch to keep the quick tremor of excitement that ran through them from revealing itself to Vair. “What are they?”

“I said personal letters,” Vair answered roughly. “If you don’t want to be bothered with them, give ’em back. A buddy of one of the Brent boys picked ’em up out in Korea after the kid’s company moved on. He brought them home and left them at my office to forward to the Brents—he thought they lived in my district because there’s a Brentool Plant there. He didn’t know they lived out West. I’ll return ’em, but you comb ’em first.”

Vair closed the cupboard door. “You know how to use that kind of stuff. Why don’t you try moving right in with the Rufus Brents? You’d have plenty then—if you could work it.”

He looked at his investigator critically, his eyes sweeping from the crisp caplike haircut down his pin-stripe flannel suit, shiny at the elbows and knees, to his shoes, good once but old and newly soled. “Better get a new outfit. You look mighty ragtag and bobtail to me. Draw what you need.” He still eyed him. “You don’t look as Harvard and Princeton—or was it Williams, I forget—as Sybil said you did when she knew you.”

The man’s eyes flattened for an instant at the barbed contempt in Vair’s eyes and voice. He caught himself. “I don’t use my props unless I need them,” he said easily. He reached in his inside coat pocket, took a pair of narrow steel-rimmed spectacles out of a battered tin case, put them on and looked at Vair with a faint smile.

“Ha!” Vair clapped him on the shoulder, laughing. “I wish a pair of two-dollar specs was all I needed to look like I just walked out of the State Department. What is it Sybil says?—Civilized. That’s it. I’d even trust you with my daughter. Why don’t you try the pulpit when you get through with the Rufus Brents?”

He laughed again. “I got to beat it back now. Sybil’ll be screaming her head off. Keep your mouth shut about the letters.”

The man waited until he heard Vair’s booming voice and rocketing laughter downstairs . . . the Hot Rod of the Marsh Marigold State top of the world again, on his way again. He took off the steel-rimmed spectacles that magnified his eyes just enough to make them match the rest of his face and made him look Ivy League and to the manor born, and put them back in his pocket. He untied the olive-drab tape around the stained silk pouch, took out the thick packet of airmail letters and began to read them. Half-way through the fourth he stopped, his hand shaking with excitement. This was it. This was all he needed.

He gathered the letters quickly together, slipped them into his briefcase and opened the file behind him. When they called Rufus Brent the little-publicized Western industrialist, they weren’t kidding. The only other picture of Molly Brent besides those he had stolen from the morgue of their small-town newspaper was a picture of the whole family in a slick-paper magazine article in the file. He opened it on the desk. It was a double-spread entitled “The Toolmaker Sticks To His Lathe.” There were pictures of the abandoned emergency defense plant in Vair’s Ninth District, and the gleaming white concrete and glass structure of the Brentool Plant, Tabor City, that had taken its place, and set Ham Vair back thirty-five thousand dollars on his junk deal with Surplus Property. There was a picture of Rufus Brent and his wife, in rocking chairs on the front porch of their frame house in their own home town. On the steps in front of them were three children, two boys, seventeen or eighteen, and between them their kid sister, about fourteen, with braces on her teeth, hanging on to the collar of a dog as big as she was. They were all laughing. The dog’s wagging tail was a white blur.

He glanced at the pictures of Molly Brent, four years older, that Vair had left on the desk. The girl running through the rain was a graphic statement of the personal and private reasons that had forced Rufus Brent to refuse to come to Washington. His coming in spite of them was the Toolmaker sticking to a bigger lathe. But with the Toolmaker in Washington, and Ham Vair in there cutting the Toolmaker’s throat, the letters in the green stained pouch gave him the one thing he needed and had searched for . . . a character and a name for the slickest shakedown he’d ever dreamed up.

It was a good thing he’d waited. He could have sold Vair out to Rufus Brent for a few paltry thousand any time since the idea first began to grow on him. But the dream that had been born the night of the girl’s accident wasn’t a matter of thousands. It was millions—if he married her . . . or if he got rid of her, and stuck to the old lady. . . . Son-in-law or adopted son, it was millions either way.