“From I.L.L.?”
“Definitely not. Dickson, you see, is using her to maintain his hold over I.L.L. Who actually is paying her the pension is a secret so carefully concealed that even we haven’t been able to trace the money to its source.”
“Are you telling me that the former President of the United States is actually blackmailing I.L.L. executives by threatening to unmuzzle Dotty Whiskers?”
“Of course not. Did I ever use the word ‘blackmail,’ Mr. Victor?”
“No, but you implied—”
“I implied nothing.”
“Is Dickson really that hard up for dough?” I refused to play games with Putnam.
“Money doesn’t enter into it, Mr. Victor.”
“Well if he doesn’t want money from the I.L.L. brass, what does he want?”
“The name of the game is ‘Power,’ Mr. Victor. In politics that’s even more desirable than money. Dotty Whiskers knows where many an I.L.L. body is buried. That makes her an excellent lever for Dickson with one of the largest business conglomerates in the world.”
“Okay. So that’s why she’s being taken care of. But why would she want to bite the hand that’s feeding her? Why would she want to murder Dickson?”
“Revenge, perhaps. Her health is shattered; he’s responsible for ruining her life in a sense. It’s difficult to pin down a motive, but she’s definitely a suspect.”
“And the third woman?” I asked.
“Rosalie Forest15 .”
“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. “True-blue Rosalie, the faithful Forest? Dickson’s Aunt Tom? Why, the word is that Rosalie Forest is to secretaries what cocker spaniels are to canines. And the Dickson hand isn’t all she’d lick if circumstances dictated.”
“She is the epitome of loyalty in private secretaries,” Putnam granted.
“And the epitome of convenient inefficiency,” I remembered. “The loosest foot in Washington.”
“Well,” Putnam was philosophical about it, “if a slip of the lip can sink a ship of state, then why shouldn’t a slip of the foot serve to buoy one up?”
“Because an eighteen-minute gap on a tape is more of a booboo than a buoy,” I reminded him. '
“Perhaps her foot fell asleep.”
“Sure. And perhaps Marie Antoinette’s neck just happened to get in the way of the guillotine. But it cut what they wanted it to cut.”
“You're a cynic, Mr. Victor.”
“Yeah. So the faithful Rosalie is still Dickson’s secretary,” I mused.
“Privately he complains that she’s slowed down with age and he’d like to replace her. But publicly he’s stuck with her.”
“And why would she want to kill Dickson?”
“We don’t know that she does,” Putnam admitted. “All that ties her in as a suspect is the sanitary belt. That and the fact that she’s become very friendly with Dotty Whiskers and Marsha Twitchell and may have fallen under their influence, which is hostile to Dickson. Also, quite recently, after having perhaps one cocktail too many, Rosalie Forest was overheard making an uncharacteristically anti-Dickson remark.”
“If that were a crime, forty-seven percent of the people would be in jail by the latest Harris poll.”
Putnam shrugged it off. “There’s another threat to Dickson,” he informed me. “It comes from D.O.P.E.”
That surprised me. I’d thought that Nick Dickson, despite his having lost the Presidency, was still D.O.P.E.’s fair-haired boy. Publicly they’d stuck by him through the thickest of the evidence and the thinnest of his excuses. Indeed, if Dickson still had a political base left, then D.O.P.E. was it.
The initials stood for Destroy Obscenity! Pornogra- phy! Erotica! Originally, that had been the cause which brought D.O.P.E. into existence. But over the years their interests had widened and their political involvement had increased. While they were still anti-porno, they now managed to tie their cause into an anti-rad-lib posture that encompassed such issues as the energy crisis (they blamed the Jews), school busing (they favored running over the blacks with the buses), long hair (they’d sponsored a constitutional amendment to forcibly shave and shear hippies), and fluoridation (they were pro-tooth decay). In the interests of maintaining their original crusade, they blamed obscenity, pornography, and erotica on Jews, blacks, hippies, and dentists.
Nick Dickson had won their fealty early-on by disowning the results of his predecessor’s Presidential Commission on Pornography (they’d found it non- harmful). Through the years he’d come surprisingly close to echoing D.O.P.E.’s extreme-right-wing view. And now they canonized him in their literature as a martyr fallen in the struggle against perfidious communism -- Russian, Chinese, and homegrown. He, in turn, upheld most of their positions and every now and again spoke kind words about them.
“Why would D.O.P.E. want to harm Nick Dickson?” I asked Putnam.
“One explanation is that Dickson dead would have more propaganda value to them than Dickson alive. They could blame the radicals for assassinating him and use it as an excuse to force President Cadillac into a full-blown purge.”
“Who else is after Dickson?” I asked.
“We think that’s all.”
“You think?”
“We can’t be sure. There are so many unsavory facets to Dickson’s career that it’s hard to rule out anybody who might have a conceivable reason to either want him dead, or want to buy him. There is one concrete threat, but we don’t know who’s behind it.”
I said nothing. I waited patiently for him to explain. I was damned if I was going to make even a slight commitment by soliciting information.
“We intercepted and decoded a message to an agent. We don’t know who sent the message or who the agent was working for, except that he wasn’t working for us. This agent was to proceed to Rococco’s island where he would be contacted and given instructions by someone identified as ‘Insecticide.’ Ac- cording to these instructions he would either kill, kidnap, or buy former President Dickson. We’re not sure which. The agent died before he could tell us that.”
“Your goons were a little too enthusiastic,” I guessed.
“It happens.” Putnam shrugged. The shrug expressed it all. The stakes were high, involving a whole nation of people; an individual life was cheap; torture was sometimes necessary; the game wasn’t for girl scouts. “The thing is,” he continued, “that this ‘Insecticide’ is someone very close to Dickson, someone in his entourage. But we don’t know who. It’s crucial that we find out before ‘Insecticide’ can act. And that’s where you come in.”
Here it came! I steeled myself for nay-saying. I told myself to remember to accentuate the negative. I stared at Putnam without speaking. But there was “no-no” in my eyes!
“Mr. Victor, we must have someone on the scene to protect Dickson and to watch him. He has to be kept alive and he has to be kept from compromising the government. We need someone to blow ‘Insecticides’ cover. For obvious reasons, we can't use our usual operatives.”
“One of those obvious reasons,” I observed, “being that you can’t trust your own agents not to decide to eliminate Dickson themselves.”
“I’m afraid that’s true, Mr. Victor.”
“So you want me to pretend to be the agent you canceled and find out who ‘Insecticide’ is.”
“That’s right, Mr. Victor.” Putnam’s lip curled a sixteenth of an inch in an expression that passed as a smile with him.
“I won't do it.”
“Mr. Victor, your country—”
I made an impolite noise.
“Money, Mr. Victor? I can assure you that -”
I needed money all right, but I needed to stay alive more. He’d sucked me in on that basis on more than one occasion, and where had it gotten me? I always ended up broke again. I shook my head firmly.