by Ross Thomas
It took Citron only two trips out to the Toyota to bring in everything he owned. As he was storing away the last of his three aluminum cooking pots, a woman's voice said from the still-open door, “Can you fix a running toilet?”
Without turning, Citron said, “No.”
“What about a broken heart?”
“Not that either,” he said and turned.
His first impression was that although she was not very old, she was not nearly as young as she looked, which would have made her around nineteen, possibly twenty. Twenty-one at most. Somehow Citron knew she was at least thirty. It might have been the melancholy that peered out through her eyes, which were large and almost the color of woodsmoke. She had a beach dweller's careless sun-streaked hair and an oval face with a rather interesting nose and a wide mouth set above a quite small chin that nevertheless looked defiant—or perhaps only stubborn. She was effortlessly pretty and with a little artful makeup might even have been beautiful in a vulnerable sort of way.
“I’m in Apartment E—in front,” she said. “My name's Keats. Velveeta Keats.”
“Velveeta.”
“Sort of tips you off, doesn’t it? I mean, about my family. You’re wondering what kind of folks would name their youngest daughter Velveeta.”
“Am I?”
“Sure. The answer is: my kind of folks. The Keatses. The Florida Keatses. Or to pinpoint it: the Miami Keatses. My family was very big in the drug trade down there in the sixties and seventies.”
“But no more,” Citron said.
“They cashed out and went into T-bills. At least, that's what they were in a year or so ago. They may be in municipal bonds by now. You ever notice how fast things move nowadays? The Keatses went from dirt-poor to hog-rich to banker-stuffy in one generation. But when I was born back in ‘fifty-two they named me Velveeta because back then they thought it sounded pretty and tasted good.”
“They still like Velveeta?”
“The name?”
“The cheese.”
“They don’t like either one anymore. Mama calls me Vee now and they switched to Brie. Mama puts it on crackers with slivered almonds and sticks it in the microwave for a few seconds. If you’re wondering what I’m doing out here, I’m a remittance woman. Are you the new super?”
“Caretaker really.”
“What's your name?”
Citron told her.
“That's nice. French, isn’t it?”
“French.”
“Well, I’ve got this running toilet.”
“Jiggle it.”
“The handle?”
“Right.”
“I did that.”
“Try taking the top off. There's a round ball in there that floats. Bend the rod that holds the ball. Bend it down. That sometimes works.”
“I did that, too.”
“Have you got a radio?”
“Sure.”
“Well, put the radio in the bathroom and turn it on. If you play it loudly enough, you won’t hear the toilet.”
She came farther into the apartment and looked around curiously. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“Not at all.” He gestured toward the recliner, but Velveeta Keats chose instead one of the bent-iron-and-plastic chairs. Citron took a half gallon of Gallo red out of one of the two cardboard cartons he had carried in from the Toyota and poured wine into a pair of mismatched Kraft cheese glasses. He handed one of them to Velveeta Keats and then sat down opposite her at the table.
She examined her glass. “I remember these. Pimento cheese usedto come in them. The Keatses always drank out of these and jelly glasses. Back when we were poor. Are you poor?”
“Extremely,” Citron said.
“What’d you do—before you got poor?” she said. “That's my personal question.”
“I wrote and traveled.”
“You mean you were a travel writer? What's doing in Omaha? Beautiful, unspoiled Belize. Tierra del Fuego on twenty a day. Stuff like that?”
“I guess I was really more of a writing traveler.”
“What's the difference?”
“Well, I’d travel to someplace where not too many people go, live there awhile, maybe six months, sometimes longer, and then write about what it was like.”
“Is that what you’re doing here—in Malibu?”
Citron shook his head. “No.”
“What happened?”
“I think I ran out of places.”
“How long’ve you known the landlady?”
“Craigie Grey? Not long.”
“How long's not long?”
“About five hours.”
“You’re right. That's not long.”
Velveeta Keats finished her wine, put the glass down, and cupped her face in her palms. “I was married to a Cuban for three years.”
Citron waited for the rest of the tale. When there was nothing but silence for almost fifteen seconds, he said, “Well. A Cuban.”
“His family used to own all the milk in Cuba.”
“Before Castro.”
“Uh-huh. I don’t know how anyone could own all the milk in Cuba, but that's what he always said. When I married him, he was in the dope business. That's really why I married him, so the Keatses andthe Manerases could combine operations. It worked out okay. Sort of, I reckon. For a while. You ever been married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“The usual reasons.”
“Name two.”
Citron thought for a moment. “Well, one died and the other one said no thanks.”
“Then you’re not gay?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The guy who was here before you, he was gay. I mean, he was gay gay. I’d be feeling low and he’d pop over with a plate of fudge and the latest gossip and have me in stitches in no time.” She examined Citron carefully. “Somehow, I don’t think you’re the type to pop over with a plate of fudge.”
“Who can tell?” Citron said.
Velveeta Keats rose. “Well, thanks for the wine and the plumbing advice.”
“You’re welcome.”
She moved to the still open door, stopped, and turned. “I’m a good cook,” she said.
Citron smiled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Yes,” she said. “You do that.” She then turned and went through the door.
After Velveeta Keats had gone, Citron continued to sit at the table with his almost empty glass. He felt it stir then, almost uncoil, the first faint signs of the disease that had killed a billion or so cats. Curiosity. He began to wonder how it would all turn out and where he would be a year later. He was not accustomed to thinking of the future in terms of more than a day or a week—a month at most. The thought of a year was unsettling. It seemed like infinity. For a moment he thought of repacking his two cardboard cartons and returning to the comfort ing hopelessness of the Cadillac People. Instead, he rose, rinsed out the two glasses, transformed the couch into a bed, brushed his teeth, and got between what seemed to be a pair of reasonably clean sheets. After fifteen minutes or so, the sound of the surf put him to sleep. He dreamed of Africa.
CHAPTER 6
For the past fourteen years home to Draper Haere had been a two-story red brick commercial building on Main Avenue at the northern fringe of Venice, almost in Ocean Park, a community that helps spell out the difference between Venice and Santa Monica.
It had been a cheap neighborhood back in 1968, a blowzy, end-off-the-line kind of place with dim prospects and depressed real estate prices, which was why Haere had moved there: It was all he could afford. He had paid $27,500 for the old building with ten percent down. Less than thirteen years later an Iranian offered him $425,000 for it, cash, thus convincing Haere that property, after all, was indeed theft.
In the seventies, speculators discovered Venice. The usual pattern followed. Out went the old retired Jews, the aging Beats, the students, the artists, the radicals, the dopers, the craz
ies, the pool cleaners, the professional tire changers, and in came the trendy young moneyed whom Haere often suspected of existing solely on cheese and chablis.
The Haere Building was forty feet wide and one hundred feet long, and ran from the sidewalk to the alley. The downstairs was vacant when he bought it, the last tenant having been a paint store that went broke. The upstairs was divided into small offices occupied at the timeby a bail bondsman, an answering service, a collection agency, a couple of jobbers, and a freelance bookkeeper, all of them on a month-to-month basis. When Haere hinted he might have to raise their rents by ten dollars a month, they promptly moved out.
With the last tenant gone, Haere had all the partitions knocked down. That gave him one enormous room, forty by a hundred, four thousand square feet. Since much of his life had been spent in ffur-nished rooms, including those in some extremely pricy hotels, he decided, perhaps perversely, to create the most enormous room of them all. The only enclosed space would be a rather indulgent bath.
Haere started at the rear on the alley and installed an elaborate kitchen. The kitchen lurched into the dining area, which jumped or fell into the living-work area, which more or less wandered into the sleeping area. He also built a great many bookcases, cabinets, and closets. Or had them built. It took four years to get everything just right, because Haere kept running out of money. When at last all was done, he found it magnificent. Nearly everyone else thought it monstrous.
Haere lived over the shop. Downstairs in the former paint store were the leased IBM computers that stored the names and the elaborate machinery that printed the God-ain’t-it-awful letters that were sent to the names pleading for money to rescue the Republic from ruin. Haere employed a staff of twenty-three direct-mail and computer specialists, whom he overpaid and who were fanatic in their loyalty. Ten years after he began the Haere Company, his employees had presented him with an oil portrait of himself, dressed in his usual three-piece blue pinstripe, standing with one hand resting formally on an ancient mimeograph machine. The small brass plate on the portrait's oak frame read: Our Founder. Haere hung the portrait in the company's small reception room.
Haere was a bachelor not only by choice, but also by misadventure. For nearly ten years now he had been in love with a married woman. It was a hopeless affair that he felt was doomed to grow even more so. There had, of course, been others along the way, at leastseven women that he had been fairly serious about. Possibly eight. One had died. Four had married. Two had fled, one to Rome, the other to Costa Rica, and one had simply disappeared—suddenly, mysteriously, absolutely. Late at night Haere often worried about her.
Finally, Haere did what all bachelors are said to do: he got a cat. It cost $10 at the local animal shelter and it came to live with him at about the same time that, in a last gesture of vanity, he had his teeth capped. That had cost $2,355 back in 1975, and for a while Haere spent considerable time marveling at them in the mirror.
The cat was an extremely garrulous castrated half-Siamese tom that Haere named Hubert. When Haere traveled, he boarded Hubert at the Musette Hotel for Cats in Santa Monica, where Hubert seemed to like it, possiblybecause he could talk endlessly to a captive audience.
On the night that Haere flew in from Denver, he took a taxi from the airport to the cat hotel, ransomed Hubert, and tipped the driver ten dollars to lug the cat carrier up the stairs, which was something Haere didn’t want to attempt with his bandaged hands. After freeing Hubert, Haere got into pajamas, robe, and slippers. Next year, he thought, a tasseled nightcap.
His wondrous refrigerator's automatic icemaker and cold-water dispenser enabled him to mix a Scotch and water without too much difficulty. He had just taken the second long swallow when the downstairs buzzer rang. Haere crossed to the intercom, pressed the button, and asked: “Who is it?”
“This is the FBI, Mr. Haere,” said a man's voice made thin by the small speaker. “We’d like to talk to you.”
“Who's we?”
“I’m Special Agent Yarn. Special Agent Tighe is with me.” “How do you spell Tighe?” The voice spelled it for him.
“What do you and Special Agent Tighe want to talk to me about at eleven o’clock at night?”
“We’d rather not discuss that down here on the street.”
“Who's in charge of your San Francisco office?”
A name was offered promptly. It meant nothing to Haere, but because there had been no hesitation he pushed the button that sounded a buzzer and unlocked the downstairs street door. A moment later he could hear the footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs that led up to his apartment.
FBI agents were no novelty to Haere, not since the early fifties when they had started coming around to investigate his father's old friends. In the sixties they had come around wanting to know if some of Draper Haere's older friends were really fit to serve in the higher reaches of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. By the early seventies the agents were back wanting to know about the bomb-throwing tendencies of some of the children of those older friends.
But back in the fifties, FBI agents to Haere had seemed stern elders of the law, sober-sided, grim, forbidding. They grew younger over the years, of course. The two who appeared on Haere's doorstep that night were mere tykes, neither a year over thirty-two. One was blond, the other brunette.
“Mr. Haere?” the blond one said.
Haere nodded, and they whipped out their folding ID cases and offered them for inspection. Haere reached for both with his bandaged hands and took his time examining them.
“There was a man I knew in Washington once,” Haere said, still examining the credentials. “Back in the late sixties. A psychologist. He was hired by the FBI to put agents through sensitivity training. It seemed that when some of you guys got home, instead of kissing the wife, you’d whip out your ID at her and say, ‘Carson, FBI.’“
Special Agent Tighe looked at Special Agent Yarn. “I do that all the time, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Yarn said. “Every night.”
Haere handed back their ID cases and told them to come in. The blond one was Yarn, John D. Tighe's first name was Richard. He had no middle initial. Their hair was neither short nor long. Yarn wore asuit and tie, Tighe a gray herringbone jacket, dark-gray slacks, and no tie. Haere noticed that both wore loafers with rubber heels. Yarn was a little over six feet tall, Tighe a little under. Neither was handsome, neither was ugly. Only their eyes were alike: steady, watchful, and curious. Extremely curious. All four eyes, two brown and two blue, were now taking in Haere's enormous room.
“Just the one big room, huh?” Yarn said.
“That's all.”
“Interesting.”
“Different,” Tighe said.
“Sit down,” Haere said.
Yarn sat down on the leather couch that had once graced the Washington office of Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Tighe chose the padded walnut armchair that had been in Henry Agard Wallace's Capitol office when Wallace was Roosevelt's Vice-President. Haere sat in the old high-backed easy chair he almost always sat in, the Baton Rouge chair, which a dealer in Opelousas had sworn was the last chair Huey Long ever sat in before he was gunned down in 1935. Haere collected political furniture. Political mavericks’ furniture, to be precise. For a year now he had been dickering with a man in Tulsa for a brass spittoon that the almost forgotten Alfalfa Bill Murray of Oklahoma was said to have been partial to.
Yarn took out a black notebook and a ballpoint pen. Hubert jumped up into Tighe's lap and screamed in his face. Tighe scratched Hubert's ears absently with the air of a man who knows all about cats. “Lot of Siamese there,” he said.
Haere nodded. “Half.”
“We’d like to talk to you about Mr. John T. Replogle,” Yarn said.
“He's dead.”
“We know. Tell us about him.”
“Tell you about him?”
“Yes. Please.”
“Well, sir,” Haere said, “he was a hardworking, industrious citizen,and pro
bably the most steadfast and patriotic son of a bitch I ever knew. As for politics, he never belonged to any political party. He was a Democrat.”
Yarn wrote none of that down. Tighe, still scratching the cat's ears, said, “Mr. Dooley?” without looking up.
“Will Rogers,” Haere said.
“Oh.”
Yarn frowned slightly. “You were with Mr. Replogle—when he died?”
“Yes.”
“Tell us about it.”
“You must have the Colorado Highway Patrol's report by now.”
“We’ve got it,” Tighe said, “but we’d like you to tell us about it, if you don’t mind.”
“Why?”
“You said it was no accident,” Yarn said. “That it was intentional. If so, Mr. Replogle could have been murdered. If he was murdered, then there's the possibility that his civil rights were violated. If so, the Bureau is interested—definitely, officially.”
“Your instructions are coming out of Washington?”
Yarn nodded. “Out of Washington.”
Haere told them about the drive from the Brown Palace to Idaho Springs, where he had first noticed the blue Dodge pickup. He then described the drive into the mountains and estimated they had gone approximately fifteen or sixteen miles when it happened.
“It was actually fourteen point three miles,” Tighe said. “Past Idaho Springs.”
It was Yarn's turn again. “What’d you and Mr. Replogle talk about on the way up?—if you don’t mind us asking.”
Haere shrugged. “Death and dying. Thanksgiving. Old times. He had terminal cancer. Of the prostate.”
“We know,” Yarn said.
“Was he despondent, apprehensive?” Tighe said.
“Well, he wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.”
“What I mean is, did he seem to think that anyone was trying to kill him?”
“No.”
It was again Yarn's turn. “Did he mention Singapore?”
“He said he’d been there recently.”
