“Thereabouts,” Quane said.
“They never did find out who put the bomb in the plane, did they?” I said.
“Never did,” Murfin said.
“Young Roger was upset, as I recall,” I said. “He went around making public statements about shoddy police work. I think he said shoddy.”
“In private he said shitty,” Murfin said. “Shoddy was what he used in all those press releases he put out. And that’s what the foundation’s all about.”
“Shitty police work?” I said. “A ripe field. Very ripe.”
“He’s narrowed it down,” Quane said.
“To what?”
“Conspiracy.”
“Christ,” I said, “who sold him on that? You two? I’m not saying that you don’t know a lot about conspiracy. I mean, if I wanted to put one together — you know, a really first-class job — I’d certainly come to you guys.”
“Funny,” Quane said, “that’s just what Ward and I were saying on the way out here. About you, I mean.”
We sat there on the porch in silence for a moment. And then, almost on cue, we each took another swallow of our drinks. Quane lit a cigarette. A mockingbird cut loose nearby with a shrill series of his latest impressions. Somewhere one of the dogs barked once, a lazy, half-hearted bark. Honest Tuan, the Siamese, stalked out onto the porch as if he thought he might have some business with the mockingbird. He changed his mind abruptly and decided that what he really wanted to do was flop down and yawn, which he did.
I reached over and borrowed a cigarette from Quane’s pack. He still smoked Camels, I noticed. I lit the cigarette and said, “The Kennedys. He’s going to stir all that up again, isn’t he?”
Murfin nodded. “He already has. Maybe you’ve noticed.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. “Who else? King? Wallace?” Murfin nodded again.
“That’s four,” I said, “and all the crap that happened afterward. Anybody else?”
“Hoffa,” Quane said.
“Jesus,” I said. “Jimmy’s almost still warm.”
“We figure that’ll be the easiest one,” Murfin said. “It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“There’s one more,” Quane said. “Yours.”
“Mine?”
“Uh-huh. Yours. Arch Mix.”
The mockingbird abruptly shut up. There was no sound for a moment, no sound at all, and then a trout jumped in the pond. I rattled the ice in my glass. Then I said, “Never.”
“Ten thousand,” Murfin said quickly. “Ten thousand for two months’ work. If you turn it, another ten thousand.”
“No.”
“You know why we’re handing it to you, don’t you?” Murfin said. “I mean, you knew Mix better’n anybody else. Christ, you didn’t do anything but study him for what, five months?”
“Six,” I said. “I grew old studying him. When it was over I came down with mono. That’s silly, isn’t it? A thirty-two-year-old man with mono.”
“Harvey,” Murfin said. “Talk to Vullo, will you? That’s all. Just talk to him. We told him we really didn’t expect you to turn up the who on Mix, but maybe you could come up with the why. If we got that, the why, then me and Quane could turn some redhots we got loose on the who.”
“You think there is a who, don’t you?” I said.
“There’s gotta be,” Murfin said and Quane nodded wisely. “Look,” Murfin went on, selling me now, “a guy has a great job. He gets along with his wife — well, okay anyway. His health’s good. He’s forty-five and his kids aren’t in jail and that’s something. So he gets up one morning, has breakfast, reads the paper, gets in his car and starts to work. He never gets there. They never find him. They never even find his car. He’s just gone.”
“It happens all the time,” I said. “Every week. Maybe every day. It’s called the ‘Honey, I Think I’ll Run Down to the Drugstore for Some Cigarettes’ syndrome.”
“Mix didn’t smoke,” said Murfin, the stickler.
“You’re right. I forgot.”
“Harvey,” Quane said.
“What?”
“Five hundred bucks. Just to talk to Roger Vullo.”
I got up and went over to the porch rail. I took off my shirt and jeans. Underneath I was wearing some swimming trunks. I picked up the long bamboo pole with the hook on the end that I’d made out of a coat-hanger. I used the hook to pull the rope swing in, grasped the gunnysack, and climbed up on the porch rail. I turned. Murfin and Quane were watching me. So was Honest Tuan.
“A thousand,” I said. “I’ll talk to him for a thousand.”
I shoved off of the porch rail and sailed out over the pond. At the top of the swing’s arc I let go and started falling. When I hit the water I made a fine big splash and it was as much fun as I had thought it would be. Maybe even more.
Chapter Two
In my youth, which I sometimes enjoy thinking of as misspent, I was a bit of an over-achiever in a limited kind of way. Or perhaps I was simply in a hurry although a bit unsure of my destination. If any. But by the time I was thirty-two I had been a student, a police reporter, a state legislator, a foreign correspondent, a political gunslinger, and some even thought, mistakenly, a secret agent of sorts. Now at forty-three I was a poetaster and a goatherd, providing that two Nubian goats could be considered a herd.
I learned my political primer in the New Orleans French Quarter where I was born, reared (rather loosely in retrospect), and whose crime I eventually covered for the old Item, a newspaper that I went to work for at seventeen while attending Tulane University. My studies were less than arduous since I majored in French and German, two languages that I learned to speak before I was five because my mother had been born in Dijon, my father in Düsseldorf.
In 1954 when I was twenty-one and just graduated, some of the more depraved elements in the quarter decided in a fit of political pique, defiance, and probably despair that they should send a bitter joke to Baton Rouge as their state representative. They sent me. I won handily as a kind of machine candidate and achieved no little notoriety by making a good solemn campaign promise, which was to introduce a bill that would legalize cunnilingus and fellatio between consenting adults. Needless to say (then why say it?) my political career died swiftly and my self-appointed mentor, a kindly, aging former crony of the sainted Huey Long, advised me in all seriousness that, “Harvey, the state just ain’t quite ready for a pussy-eatin’ bill yet.”
But a state legislature is an excellent place to further one’s political education, and if one is particularly interested in the study of political chicanery, knavery, improbity, and bamboozlement, the Louisiana state legislature was then — and may yet be — the fons et origo of all such knowledge. After my single term there I was never again to be shocked or surprised by political rascality. Saddened a few times and amused often, but shocked never.
For no very good reason, I was thinking about my tarnished past as I stood before the mirror in the bathroom trying to decide whether to shave off my moustache. Ruth went by in the hall, stopped, and leaned against the door jamb.
“If you shave it off,” she said, “you won’t look like Mr. Powell anymore.”
I put a finger up trying to block out the moustache. “But there’d be a startling resemblance to Victor McLaglen wouldn’t there?”
She looked at me critically. “Perhaps,” she said, “especially if you learned how to twist a cloth cap in your hands. He could twist a cloth cap better than anyone.”
“Well, hell,” I said, “I think I’ll leave it.”