Missionary Stew (7 page)

“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 a
suit 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 probably 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.”

“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 was
a 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 Draper
Haere 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.”