“Don’t blame me,” I told him. “I voted Democratic.”
“He could tell the Chinese where our missile installations are!”
“I thought that Bussinger—”
“He’s working for the Russians, Mr. Victor. Please try to keep it straight.”
“Sorry.”
“There are some higher ups-—” Charles Putnam got back on the track “—in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Intelligence Agencies who favor assassination as a means of dealing with former President Dickson. But they’ve been outvoted since such a solution is not viable for a number of reasons. Chief among these is that assassinating Dickson would compromise his successor, President Cadillac10 , beyond the ability of his shaky administration to survive. Dickson, you see, has a safe-deposit box which contains information that is damning to President Cadillac. With realistic paranoia, Dickson has served notice on the Chief Executive that if he should meet an untimely end, the contents of the safe deposit box will be forwarded to the Washington Post.”
“Politics makes absurd bedfellows!” I remarked. “But if Cadillac is so vulnerable, why did Dickson appoint him as vice-president -- his successor in effect — in the first place?”
“You wouldn’t expect Nick Dickson to appoint somebody he didn't have something on, would you?” Putnam asked scathingly. “Anyway,” he continued, “despite Cadillac’s vulnerability, there is still a strong faction involving many intelligence agents—CIA operatives in particular—who are determined to eliminate Dickson regardless of the official policy. You see, Dickson has let it be known that he’s writing his memoirs, and the infrastructure of the military intelligence community is afraid it won’t be able to survive his revelations of their secret operations in Southeast Asia. Incidentally, he may or may not be serious about the memoirs. They may just be a bludgeon to blackmail certain people. But either way there’s a real threat to his life from the I-spy fellows.”
It was just about then that I began to have a hazy idea of what Putnam might be leading up to where I was concerned. “Whoa!” I tried to head him off at the pass.
“Nor is that the only threat.” He galloped right around me. “There’s also an open contract on Dickson.
“The Mafia?” Momentarily I was too surprised to stay wary.
“That’s our information. Bought and paid for by a group of top executives in the buttermilk industry. When he was in office Dickson had a cozy arrangement with these boys regarding price supports. They skimmed the cream off the buttermilk and poured it straight into his reelection campaign fund. And Dickson hasn’t stopped milking the buttermilk cow since leaving office. Only now the buttermilk tycoons are paying for a diffferent reason. Dickson, as you know, is now immune from government prosecution for any illegal acts he may have committed while in office. But the people who bribed him aren’t immune from prosecution. There’s nothing to stop him from testifying against them. If he did, the heads of six billion-dollar buttermilk corporations could go to jail. So they keep paying, and he keeps squeezing the buttermilk cow.”
“He must be squeezing a little too hard if the Mafia has a contract,” I realized. “Is anybody else trying to kill him?”
“There was a recent attempt on Dickson’s life. The evidence indicates that it was by one of three women who are on the island with him. Or, perhaps, by all three acting in concert.”
“You mean one of these women tried to murder him?”
“We think so. Yes.”
“How?” I wanted to know.
“An attempt was made to strangle Dickson in his sleep with a sanitary napkin belt. It was an old belt and the elastic had worn out. He woke and struggled and his assailant fled. It was dark in the room and the only thing he was sure of was that the perpetrator was a woman.”
“But couldn’t it be any woman? Why one of a specific trio?”
“These three ladies, all middle-aged, are the only females on the island that wear that particular device. The other women there use more modern methods.”
“And you think they might have been acting together in a conspiracy to kill Dickson?"
“That’s one theory. Yes. You see, the three ladies have become very close since coming to the island.”
“Who are these women?” I asked.
“Marsha Twitchell11 for one,” Putnam told me.
“Mouthy Marsha? How come Dickson has her, of all people, on the island with him?”
“Marsha Twitchell knows about more closets with skeletons than any woman in public life since Lucretia Borgia. And she’s got a direct phone wire to every major gossip columnist in Washington and New York. If Dickson has her where he can keep an eye on her, that’s to his advantage. The question is, having already been snatched and held incommunicado by Dickson’s goons once, why should she want to stay in such proximity to him? The answer may have to do with the fact that she blames Dickson’s manipulation of her husband while he was in the cabinet for the breakup of her marriage. A southern vendetta, from everything we know of the lady, just might be her style.”
“To the extent of murder?” I was dubious.
“We can’t rule it out. She’s not been too—umm -- stable since her marriage went on the rocks. Hard as it is to believe, she really did love that ex-husband of hers.”
“It’s hard to believe,” I agreed. And it was. Don Twitchell12 had been about as unlovable a man as had ever corkscrewed his way through American politics. Backed to the wall, he’d used the ploy of ridiculing his wife to get off the hook with the media time after time. He looked like a mackerel left in cream sauce too long, and the various scandals associated with him smelled even more fishy than Twitchell looked.
“The second woman,” Putnam continued, “is Dotty Whiskers13 , the former lobbyist for I.L.L. You’re familiar with the affair14 , of course?”
“Sure.” Anybody who could read was familiar with the “I.L.L. Affair.” The papers had had a field day with it. It was one of the more outrageous matters which led to the deposing of President Dickson.
The facts were simple. The International Licorice & Lollipop Company, in reality a monster holding corporation, had faced an antitrust suit by the Justice Department which asked the court to force I.L.L. to divest itself of one of its most profitable subsidiaries (the result of a recent merger which was of itself of questionable legality), the Hotfoot Incendiary Insurance Company. The suit was settled out of court, the Justice Department charges were dropped, and I.L.L. was allowed to retain Hotfoot Incendiary. Around the same time a pledge of $400,000 to help finance Nick Dickson’s reelection was made by I.L.L. to his party’s fund raisers. Subsequently, a muckraking columnist had printed an I.L.L. interoffice memo spelling out that the antitrust suit had been dropped in exchange for the campaign contribution. The memo indicated that both President Dickson and his attorney general at the time, Don Twitchell, had personally negotiated the deal. It was signed by I.L.L. lobbyist Dotty Whiskers.
She denounced the memo as a fake. But between the time it surfaced and the denounciation, Dotty Whiskers was kidnapped by a special presidential “se- curity” group known as “the Flushers” and held incommunicado in a remote nursing home in the Northwest. Conveniently, but perhaps truly, the experience had affected her both physically and mentally. She never had been able to testify about the I.L.L. affair.
“The story that’s been handed out,” Putnam said, “is that Dotty Whiskers is on the island for R and R.”
“ ‘R and R’?”
“Rest and Rehabilitation. To get her health back. Also—and this part of the story isn’t handed out—it’s been secretly arranged for her to receive some sort of healthy pension.”