Missionary Stew

by Ross Thomas

  “Did you ever know a Drew Meade?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Mr. Replogle also knew him.”

  “That's right.”

  “Did Mr. Replogle tell you he had seen Mr. Meade in Singapore?”

  “He mentioned it.”

  “What did he say?—exactly, if you can.”

  “He said Mr. Meade looked like something out of Somerset Maugham.”

  “ ‘The Casuarina Tree?’“ said Tighe.

  “He wasn’t quite that specific.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “Money.”

  Yarn looked interested. “Can you give us a little more detail?”

  “Sure. Meade didn’t have any and he wanted Jack Replogle to lend him some.”

  “Did he?”

  “Probably. Mr. Replogle was not only an extremely industrious and patriotic citizen, he was also a very soft touch.”

  “So he lent or gave Meade some money?” Tighe said.

  “I didn’t say that. I said probably.”

  There was a brief silence. Tighe scratched Hubert's ears some more. Yarn wrote something in his black notebook. When he was finished, he looked up at Haere and said, “Is there anything else you can remember about what Mr. Replogle and Mr. Meade discussed?”

  Haere lied as a matter of course. “No.”

  Yarn nodded, as if that were the answer he had expected. “Tell us a little about yourself, Mr. Haere, what it is you do.”

  “You’re serious?”

  Again, Yarn nodded.

  “Well,” Haere said, “I try to shape the events that alter and illuminate our lives.”

  “Politics.”

  “Politics,” Haere agreed.

  “But you’re not a politician?”

  “I’m more of a shadowy figure who moves behind the scenes, a faceless manipulator grasping at the levers of power. If you want more, there's a fat FBI file on me nearly four inches thick that goes back almost thirty years to when I was a kid.”

  “We know,” Yarn said. “It's been coming in over the telex all evening.”

  “So long, pussy,” Tighe said as he gently dumped Hubert to the floor, rose, and gave Haere's enormous room another curious glance. “Much money in politics?”

  “Not if you’re halfway honest.”

  Still looking around, Tighe nodded as if what he saw spoke of total probity as well as dubious taste. Yarn was also up now, and they both moved toward the door after thanking Haere for his cooperation. When they reached the door, Yarn turned.

  “About Mr. Meade,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “He seems to have disappeared.”

  “Vanished,” Tighe said.

  “Into the usual thin air, I suppose,” Haere said.

  Yarn nodded. “Where else?”

  “Well,” Haere said and for some reason looked down at his bandaged hands. Tighe noticed.

  “They still hurt?” he asked.

  “No,” Haere said, “not much.”

  After they had gone, Draper Haere stood by the door, still staring down at his bandaged hands. He then turned, crossed to the phone, looked at his watch, picked up the phone, and dialed the number of Baldwin Veatch, the governor-elect.

  CHAPTER 7

  They met for breakfast the next morning at 7:30, the three of them: Draper Haere, Baldwin Veatch, and his wife, the former Louise Guidry of Crowley, Louisiana, where in 1967 at age eighteen she had been crowned queen of the annual rice festival. Two years later at Berkeley she had been one of the firebrands leading the march on People's Park. After being graduated in 1972, she had gone to work in Sacramento for Baldwin Veatch, then a newly elected state senator. They were married later that same year. In the fall of 1973 she and Draper Haere had begun their long, hopeless, and often acrimonious affair.

  Louise Veatch sipped tea and her husband black coffee in the booth at Kenny's delicatessen-restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. Across from them, Draper Haere mopped up the last of his two fried eggs with a piece of rye toast. Two booths away sat a pair of state policemen who were the governor-elect's bodyguards. Both were in their late twenties and neither ever drank anything stronger than orange juice.

  Draper Haere liked working breakfasts because he had found that most people were not at their best in the morning. It sometimes proved to be a slight, useful edge. He also liked Kenny's for its eavesdropping. Haere was particularly fond of psychobabble, and there wasa lot of it at Kenny's after 10:00 at night when the evening group-therapy sessions let out.

  “They want it then—whatever Replogle had,” Veatch said.

  “Who?”

  “The FBI.”

  “I think they’ve already got what he had,” Haere said. “What I suspect they’re trying to do is put the lid back on and make sure nobody else gets it.”

  Louise Veatch looked at her husband. “Draper's right.”

  Veatch nodded. “Perhaps.”

  “The question is,” Haere said, “what do you want to do about it?”

  The Veatches continued to stare at each other. They were an unusual political couple, Haere often thought, even remarkable. Louise Veatch had kept all of her beauty-queen looks: still a blue-eyed, black-haired Cajun lovely with a touch of the wild about her. Veatch himself was a tall lean angular blond with calculating gray eyes, a disarming, lopsided grin, and the perfect political personality that all its life had struck up conversations with strangers at bus stops. She was the smarter of the two, Haere felt, but Veatch was the wilier. Their ambition was evenly matched in that it was limitless. She often brooded, but he went to bed optimistic and woke up feeling even better. She had unassailable convictions, while her husband had to make do with mere principles. They were colleagues, even friends, but rarely lovers. Sex to Baldwin Veatch was an occasional afterthought. To Louise Veatch it was a primary reason for living, which is why she so long ago had jumped into Draper Haere's bed.

  Haere had never once even bothered to ask Louise Veatch to leave her husband. It wasn’t that Haere didn’t love her. He did so desperately. Sometimes when they had been separated for a month or so, he would enter a room where she was and something strange happened to him. Something adolescent. He temporarily lost the power of speech. He had minor palpitations. He sweated. He suspected that he even blushed, although no one had ever said anything. But all DraperHaere had to offer Louise Veatch was love, politics, and a room over the store. If Louise Veatch had to live over the store, he realized she would just as soon do it in the White House.

  The Veatches were still staring at each other, engaged in some kind of wordless communication, when Louise Veatch finally turned to Haere and said, “Okay. Let's do it.”

  Haere nodded. “All right.”

  “Can you handle it?” Veatch asked.

  Haere shook his head slowly. “I don’t know how.”

  “Who would?”

  “A trained investigator, maybe a smart reporter, someone like that.”

  Veatch frowned, obviously running a list of unacceptable candidates through his mind. “We don’t want to share this though, do we?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone in mind?”

  “Not offhand,” Haere said.

  Louise Veatch turned to her husband. “Give me some change.”

  “Who’re you going to call?” he said, digging into a pants pocket.

  “Craigie Grey. If somebody like we’re looking ffor's around, she’ll know. Craigie knows everything.”

  Veatch rose to let his wife out. “Just don’t tip her off about—”

  Louise Veatch interrupted him. “Baldy. Have I ever?”

  “No,” he said. “Of course not. Never.”

  The two men watched Louise Veatch head for the pay phone in what a feature writer had once called “a rhythmic slither.” They turned back to look at each other, and again Haere wondered if Baldwin Veatch knew he was being cuckolded. And as always, Haere came up with the same answer
: Probably, but he doesn’t really care as long as it's discreet. Better me than someone else.

  “How was he?” Veatch said. “Replogle.”

  “I guess you’d have to say he was cheerfully resigned. The pain was getting to him.”

  “You two went back a long way, didn’t you?”

  “Ever since I was a kid. He and my old man were good friends. When they went after him for being a red back in ‘fifty-two, Jack was about the only one who stuck with him. He was like that. Jack, I mean.”

  “You know,” Veatch said, “I could never understand all this nostalgia for the fifties. Talk about a low and dishonest decade.”

  “I think it was Gable mostly.”

  “Clark Gable?”

  “Right,” Haere said. “If you closed your eyes when Eisenhower talked, he sounded exactly like Clark Gable. That must have been awfully reassuring to most people.”

  They both looked up when Louise Veatch returned to the table wearing a pleased smile. Veatch rose to let her in. She slid into the booth, looked at both men, said, “Morgan Citron,” and waited for their reaction.

  Haere was first. “The Chicago Daily News. A long time ago.”

  “Not so long,” Veatch said. “Eleven years. Ten maybe.”

  “How old is he now—fifty?” Haere asked.

  Louise Veatch shook her head. “Craigie says forty or so—if that.”

  “I thought he was older,” Haere said.

  Baldwin Veatch looked up at the ceiling, his expression thoughtful. “There was something,” he said slowly, “something about a Pulitzer, wasn’t there?”

  “He was nominated,” Louise Veatch said, “and everyone thought he was going to get it, but then they changed their minds, or something like that.”

  “Why?” Veatch said.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I remember his stuff, though,” Haere said. “There was this one long piece he wrote for The New Yorker about Togo and Dahomey— about four or five years back. Very sad, funny stuff.”

  “That's not quite what I had in mind,” Veatch said.

  “Wait a minute,” Louise Veatch said. “I recollect now. About the Pulitzer. He was in Vietnam. It was a series he did on corruption. They threw him out of the country.”

  “You’re right,” Haere said. “So where is he now?”

  “You know Craigie's place down on the PCH in Malibu?”

  Haere shook his head.

  “Well, that's where he is. He's Craigie's new super.”

  “Jesus,” Veatch said.

  They kept the governor-elect out of the approach to Morgan Citron. They kept him out for the usual reasons: so that he could deny he knew anything about it, so that he could attend yet another breakfast meeting with his transition team at the Beverly-Wilshire, and so that Haere and Louise Veatch could steal an hour to thresh around in bed together. Veatch at first was not at all sure he wanted his wife in on the approach to Morgan Citron until she crisply reminded him of her admittedly uncanny ability to spot hidden defects of character, faith, and morals.

  “Remember that banker up in Redding—the one you were going to make chairman of your campaign finance committee?”

  Veatch nodded glumly. “The child molester.”

  “Well, who spotted him right off?”

  Veatch sighed. “Okay. Go ahead. You and Draper size him up and if he looks good, hire him.” He turned to Haere. “But he’ll be working for you—not me. Understand?”

  “Perfectly,” Haere said.

  Morgan Citron was slicing some carrots into his new batch of pot au feu when they knocked on the door of Unit A. Still carrying the knife and the carrot, he crossed to the door and opened it. Louise Veatch stood there, smiling. Draper Haere was just behind her.

  “Mr. Citron?” she said.

  Citron nodded. “Somehow,” he said, “I don’t think you two’re the Jehovah's Witness folks.”

  “My name's Mrs. Veatch,” she said, extending her hand. “Mrs. Baldwin Veatch.”

  “I know,” Citron said, accepting her hand.

  “And this is my friend and associate, Mr. Haere.”

  Citron looked at Haere, who moved his still-bandaged right hand in a small apologetic gesture.

  “Draper Haere, right?” Citron said. “The money man.”

  Despite himself, Haere was pleased by the recognition. He smiled and said, “We were wondering if we might talk to you.”

  “All right,” Citron said. “Come in.”

  Louise Veatch and Haere entered the apartment and looked around. What they saw made them keep their expressions carefully neutral. Citron smiled. “Not exactly your basic Malibu sybaritism.”

  “Not exactly,” Louise Veatch said.

  “Sit down,” Citron said, waving them to the Formica table and its molded plastic chairs. “Coffee?” “If it's no bother,” Haere said.

  “It's instant,” Citron said and moved to the Pullman kitchen's small stove, where a pot of water was boiling. He spooned instant coffee into three mismatched mugs and poured the water. “I’ve got sugar, but no cream.”

  Louise Veatch said she drank hers black; Haere asked for sugar. Citron served the coffee, sat down at the table, leaned back in his chair, smiled slightly, and waited for the pitch to begin.

  “Craigie Grey told me you were looking after her place,” Louise Veatch said. “Have you known Craigie long?”

  “Not long.”

  “Craigie's—well, Craigie's unique.”

  “She seems to be.”

  Haere took up the indirect interrogation. “You were in Africa not too long ago.”

  “It's been a little more than a year now.”

  Haere nodded as if grateful for being corrected on some minor point. “I remember reading about it—when you got back to Paris. It was a wire-service story, I think. AP.”

  “They all moved it,” Citron said. “AP, UPI, Reuters. And then it died. Thank God.”

  “You never wrote anything about it yourself though, did you?” Louise Veatch said. She looked around the room again. “This looks as if it would be a good place to write. Maybe even a book.”

  “I’m not writing a book, Mrs. Veatch.”

  Haere nodded, this time sympathetically. “It must’ve been a lousy experience—being in jail there, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Citron said. “It was.”

  “My father was a newspaperman,” Haere said, wondering why he even mentioned it. He then uncharacteristically tacked on yet another autobiographical note. “Down South. In Birmingham.”

  Citron smiled pleasantly.

  It was Louise Veatch who asked the question Citron had been anticipating. “Was he—well, was he really a cannibal?”

  Citron shrugged. “That's what a lot of people say, anyway.”

  Louise Veatch leaned back in her chair. She looked at Citron and smiled slightly. Haere took it to be her stamp of approval and decided to get to the point. “You don’t have anything scheduled right now, then?”

  “No,” Citron said. “Nothing much.”

  “Would you be interested in taking something on?”

  “It depends.”

  “Of course. ButwhatImeanis, areyou free to takeonsomething?”

  “I’m free.”

  Louise Veatch leaned her elbows on the table and dropped her voice down into a lower register. It made her tone throaty and confidential. It sounded to Citron something like a born conspirator's voice. “A friend of ours got killed up in the Colorado mountains justoutside of Denver yesterday.” She paused and looked at Haere. “Was it just yesterday?”

  Haere nodded.

  “We think he was murdered.”

  “Well,” Citron said because she seemed to expect him to say something.

  “His name was Replogle. Jack Replogle.”

  “Replogle Construction?” Citron said.

  Haere looked surprised. “You knew him?”

  Citron shook his head. “I used to see his signs in some of the countries I m
oved around in.”

  “The hot countries.”

  “Right,” Citron said. “The hot countries.”

  Louise Veatch looked at Haere. “Tell him what happened, Draper.”

  Haere again repeated everything Jack Replogle had told him about Singapore and Drew Meade and how Meade, according to the two FBI agents, had gone missing. Citron listened, made no notes, but asked Haere to repeat the names of the FBI agents. When Haere had finished, there was a silence, which was broken when Citron shoved his chair back, rose, and moved to the stove, where he picked up the knife and resumed slicing the remainder of the carrot into the pot au feu.

  “Smells good,” Haere said. “What is it?”

  “Stew,” Citron said, put down the knife, turned, and leaned against the sink, his arms folded across his chest as he examined the attractive, well-dressed woman and the man with the despairing face. Citron sensed that they were more than mere political colleagues. They spend a lot of time in bed together, he told himself, and was mildly surprised to find that he approved of the notion. It had been two years at least since Citron had last approved or disapproved of anything.

  “What you want then is just the political stuff—the dynamite this guy Meade said he had.”

  “That's right,” Haere said. “Just the political stuff.”

  Citron looked at Louise Veatch. “Who’d I be working for—your husband?”

  “For me,” Haere said.

  Citron continued to stare at Louise Veatch. “But for your husband really—at one remove.”

  “My husband, Mr. Citron, knows nothing about this.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “If you believed it,” she said, “Mr. Haere wouldn’t hire you.”

  Citron smiled. “Deniability, I think they’re calling it.”

  “Or covering our ass,” Haere said.

  Citron looked at Haere. “You don’t care who killed him?— Replogle, I mean.”

  “I care,” Haere said. “I care very much, but Jack Replogle was dying of cancer, so whoever killed him put him out of his misery. We’ll let the cops and the FBI do their job and we’ll do ours. And if the stuff that he bought from Drew Meade does what he hoped it would do, it can be his memorial.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t just a hit-and-run accident and nothing more?”

  Draper Haere looked down at his bandaged hands. “I’m sure.”