Ruth’s excuse for leaving after she put the tray on the table was a charming lie about how she had to drive into Harpers Ferry for something that she had forgotten. I would have believed her myself except that she was one of those persons who almost never forgot anything. But her excuse made both Murfin and Quane preen a little because she made it sound as if she were regretfully forgoing what promised to prove the most fascinating afternoon of her life.
The tray that she had placed on the table contained three glasses, a bucket of ice, a pitcher of water, some fresh mint, and a quart of Virginia Gentleman, which is a bourbon distilled not far from Herndon and has something of a local following.
Neither Murfin nor Quane wanted any mint in their drinks so I mixed two without and one with. After we had all taken our first swallows, Murfin looked around, nodded approvingly at what he could see from the porch, and said, “You sure got it fixed up nice. I never thought you’d ever get it looking like this.” He turned to Quane. “I was with him when he bought it; I ever tell you that?”
“About six times,” Quane said. “Maybe seven.”
“When was it,” Murfin said to me, “eleven years ago?”
“Twelve,” I said.
“Yeah, 1964. We’d just made that swing through the South about half a jump ahead of old Shorty Trope and he finally catches up with us in New Orleans and, Jesus, is he mad. Jumping up and down, all four foot eleven of him, half drunk like always, and yelling about how he’s gonna clean both our plows good.” Murfin gave his head a small, regretful shake. “Shorty’s dead now. You know that?”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Died a couple of years ago in an old folks’ home down in Savannah. Somehow he gets one of the niggers to bring him a jug. Old Cabin Still, I hear. Pays the nigger twenty dollars. Maybe twenty-five. They’re not sure cause the nigger lied, of course. Well, Shorty’d been off the booze for a couple of years on account of his heart, but he gets this fifth and drinks her down in a couple of hours and then passes out and dies dead drunk and probably happy.”
“Probably,” I said.
“How old was he by then,” Quane said, “sixty?”
“Sixty-three,” said Murfin who always liked to have all the details, even down to the amount of the fatal bribe. It was probably what made him good at what he did.
He went on with his tale, Quane only half listening now because by his own count this would be the eighth time that he’d heard it. Murfin told how he and I had flown out of New Orleans about two in the morning, both of us more than a little drunk, and still nowhere near sober when we landed at Dulles at six, and how I’d bought a copy of the Washington Post and read the ad and then had insisted that he drive me all the way out here, although it really wasn’t much more than half an hour from Dulles. From Washington it was an hour. Often a little more.
“It sure as shit didn’t look like much then, did it, Harvey?”
“Not much,” I said.
“Well, by God, we walked all over it, over all eighty acres with this old guy who owned it — what was his name? Started with a P.”
“Pasjk,” I said. “Emil Pasjk.”
“Yeah, Pasjk,” Murfin said. “Well, this old man Pasjk says he wants three-fifty an acre and Harvey here dickers with him some and then goes out to the car and comes back with a bottle of gin, Dixie Belle, I remember, and they dicker some more and by ten o’clock in the morning the gin’s half gone and the old man’s down to three hundred an acre so Longmire here whips out his checkbook and writes a twenty-four-hundred-dollar bum check for the down payment. How much you have in the bank then, Harvey?”
“About what I’ve got now,” I said. “Three hundred. Maybe three fifty.”
“It must be worth a hell of a lot more than that now,” Quane said.
“Shoot,” Murfin said, “you could probably get twenty-five hundred an acre for it now, couldn’t you?”
“Maybe,” I said.
Quane took another swallow of his drink and looked around. He was still looking away from me when he said, “We’ve got an idea that maybe might interest you.”
“Uh-huh,” I said and I must not have been able to keep it out of my voice, whatever it was, probably suspicion, maybe even dread, because Murfin caught it, countered it with a small deprecatory gesture, and said, “I swear it’s nothing like the last one.”
“The last one,” I said, perhaps a little dreamily. “I remember the last one. A rare gem of an idea. Maybe even one without price. It’s still kind of hard to decide. I remember that I had to get all dressed up in a suit and tie and drive into Washington and have lunch at the Jockey Club and drink four martinis while I listened to your invitation to hop on the bandwagon for twelve hundred and fifty a week plus expenses. It was January thirteenth, as I recall, 1972. That was the last one you guys came up with. Wilbur Mills for President. Jesus.”
Quane grinned. “Yeah, that one didn’t work out too well, but the money was good.”
“How long did it last?” I said.
Quane looked at Murfin. “Couple of months, wasn’t it?”
“About that,” Murfin said. “Then everybody found out that it wasn’t a boom after all. What it was was sort of a popcorn fart.”
“But now you’ve got something else,” I said to Murfin. “Something that lets you drive a leased Mercedes and keeps Quane here in hundred-dollar loafers.”
Quane put a foot up on the table and let us admire one of his loafers. The right one. “Hell of a shoe,” he said.
“We sort of fell into the honeypot, me and Quane,” Murfin said.
“What’s the honeypot’s name?” I said.
Murfin grinned. It was his hard, nasty, pleased grin — not quite vicious, and although I had seen it often enough before it never failed to make me want to look away — as though I had been given a quick peek at some awful private deformity that was really none of my business. “Roger Vullo,” he said.
“Well,” I said.
“Vullo Pharmaceuticals,” Murfin said.
“I know. How old is he now?”
Murfin looked at Quane. “Twenty-nine?”
Quane nodded. “About that.”
“What’s he up to this time?” I said. “The last I heard he was trying to buy himself a Congress.”
“Did pretty good, too,” Murfin said. “He spent maybe a million or so and ninety-six percent of the ones he backed got elected and it was gonna be veto-proof, except it didn’t quite work out like that, and Vullo got a little disillusioned with politics.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “At least I think I am.”
“Vullo came up with something else,” Quane said.
I nodded. “One should keep busy.”
“We’ve been setting it up for him.” Quane said.
I nodded again. “He chose well.”
“Us and the lawyers and some computer people.”
“It sounds fat,” I said.
“It is,” Murfin said.
“What’ve you been setting up, you and the lawyers and the computer people?”
“It’s kind of a foundation,” Quane said.
“Something to do with good works,” I said. “And taxes, too, I imagine. Good works and taxes often seem to go hand in hand. What’s the foundation to be called?”
“The Arnold Vullo Foundation,” Murfin said.
“Touching,” I said. “After his late father.”
“Grandfather, too,” Quane said. “The grandfather’s name was Arnold.”
“Also the elder brother as I remember,” I said. “I mean Roger’s elder brother. He was Arnold Vullo the third. All three of them, wasn’t it, plus the mother. I mean all three Arnold Vullo’s, plus Mrs. Arnold Vullo the second, were killed in that private plane crash leaving poor Roger at what, twenty-one, the sole heir to perhaps two hundred million or thereabouts?”