“What time are you supposed to see Mr. Vullo?”
“Eleven. You need anything?”
“Gin,” she said. “We’re low on gin. And I also need three birthdays, a tenth and twentieth wedding anniversary, two get wells, a congratulations for a five-to-seven-year-old, and a couple of miss you’s.”
About half of our income — which the previous year had reached a staggering $11,763 — came from the sale of Ruth’s watercolor drawings to a Los Angeles greeting card firm. She drew gentle, immensely clever caricatures of animals and her models were mostly members of our own menagerie — plus a couple of beavers who lived upstream from the pond and for the most part minded their own business. The Los Angeles firm couldn’t get enough of Ruth’s drawings.
Quite by accident I had found that I had a remarkable talent for writing greeting card verse that contained just the right touch of simpering banality. The L.A. firm paid me two dollars a line and occasionally dropped me warm little notes that compared my efforts favorably with those of Rod McKuen. I did a lot of composing while milking the goats. Birthdays were my specialty.
I told Ruth that I’d write the stuff on my way to Washington. I had also discovered that while driving I could usually compose a line a mile. In the bedroom I opened the closet and studied the remnants of a once fairly resplendent wardrobe. Time, fashion, and personal indifference had reduced it to one London-tailored suit (the last of six), which I planned to be cremated in, a couple of tweed jackets, some jeans, and a seersucker suit with suspicious labels. I chose the seersucker, a blue shirt, a black knit tie, and when I looked in the mirror I thought I looked quite natty — providing that one still thought of 1965 as a natty year.
I drove the pickup into Washington. It was a 1969 Ford with a four-wheel drive, which came in handy when it snowed or rained. I left our other car for Ruth. Our other car was a five-year-old Volkswagen.
By the time I arrived at Connecticut Avenue and M Street I had composed thirty-six lines of doggerel, which I dictated into a small portable tape recorder, shouting some of the lines, even declaiming them to make myself heard above the Ford’s clatter. They rhymed, they scanned, and they were as sticky as honey and twice as sweet.
I treated myself to one of those dollar-and-a-quarter-an-hour parking lots and then found the M Street address that Murfin had given me. It was a fairly new building just east of Connecticut Avenue on the south side of the street. I rode the elevator up to the sixth floor, walked down the hall, and went through a door that was lettered: THE ARNOLD VULLO FOUNDATION.
On the other side of the door was a young receptionist and behind her was a rather large area filled with metal desks that were separated from each other by thin, pastel partitions that rose about five feet above the floor. The partitions were light tan, pale blue, and dusty rose. At the desks sat about two dozen men and women, most of them in their late twenties, although some were older, who typed, read, talked into phones, or simply sat staring into space. It looked very much like the city room of a prosperous, medium-sized daily newspaper.
I told the receptionist that my name was Harvey Longmire and that I had an appointment with Mr. Murfin. She nodded, picked up the phone, dialed a few numbers, said something into it, and then smiled at me as she hung up.
“Won’t you take a seat, Mr. Longmire? Somebody’ll be here in a moment to show you to Mr. Murfin’s office.”
I took a seat and looked around at the reception area. It was all good, solid furniture that had a kind of W & J Sloane look to it. It was as if whoever had chosen it had decided on stolid durability and comfort rather than flash. I looked at my watch and saw that I was ten minutes early, but then I usually am, so I took out my small tin box and rolled a cigarette. I once smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, Luckies, unfiltered, but since I had started rolling my own I was down to the equivalent of a pack a day for which my lungs seemed grateful. I also saved approximately $124 a year.
I could sense the receptionist watching me so I decided to give her a thrill and rolled the cigarette with one hand. I looked up at her and grinned. “I used to be a cowpoke,” I said.
“You never,” she said, smiling. “I wish I could do that.”
“You don’t smoke, do you?”
She smiled again. “Not tobacco. That is tobacco, isn’t it?”
“Afraid so,” I said.
The receptionist went back to doing what she was doing when I came in, proofreading, it seemed, and I went back to smoking my roll your own. I was about halfway through it when a door opened and a tall woman with streaked blond hair came in and said, “Mr. Longmire?”
I said that I was Longmire and she said that she was Mr. Murfin’s secretary and that if I would follow her she would show me to Mr. Murfin’s office and even get me a cup of coffee and how did I like it. I said I liked it with sugar.
I followed the woman with the streaked hair down a carpeted hall that had five or six doors leading off of it. All of the doors were closed. She stopped at one of them and opened it, indicating that I should go in. I went in and found Murfin behind a large desk and Quane seated on a couch, his feet up on the coffee table.
We didn’t shake hands this time. Quane waved at me lazily and Murfin nodded and grinned and said, “You’re right on time.”
“Habit,” I said. “My only good one.”
“Ginger’ll get you some coffee,” Murfin said.
“Ginger’s the blonde?”
“My secretary.”
I looked around at Murfin’s office and nodded. “They seem to do you well here.”
Murfin also looked around and nodded, a little possessively, I thought, at the good-sized room with its dark brown carpet, fabric covered walls, long sofa, four easy chairs, the coffee table, and what looked like a bar in one corner although it could have been a cleverly disguised filing cabinet. There were even some tasteful prints on the walls, but I was sure that Murfin hadn’t selected them because Murfin had no taste.
“I’ve had worse,” Murfin said. “A lot worse.”
“I know.”
“Vullo’s gonna be tied up for about ten minutes so I thought we’d have the coffee first and then I’d take you in and introduce you.”
“What about the money?” I said.
“No problem.”
“He means he wants it in advance,” Quane said. “Right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Jesus, Harvey,” Murfin said, “you don’t hardly change at all.”
“In our changing world constancy is a treasure.”
Ginger, the secretary, came in with a tray containing three cups of coffee. There were even saucers and spoons to go with the cups. She served me first and then Quane and then Murfin. When she was done, Murfin said, “Bring that Longmire check in, will you, Ginger?”
She nodded, left, and came back a few moments later with a check which she handed to Murfin. He thanked her and when she was gone he took out a ball-point pen and signed the check and then slid it over to Quane who used the same pen to sign his name. Quane then handed the check to me. I looked at it and put it in the breast pocket of my jacket.
“You guys sign the checks around here?” I said.
Murfin nodded. “Some of them. I sign them and Quane here countersigns them.”
“That’s good,” I said. “They’ve got the fox watching the weasel. That’s very clever.”
We all took a sip of our coffee and I noticed that Murfin still slurped his after blowing on it first. I decided that he hadn’t changed much since I had first met him twelve years before. He had put on a few pounds, but not many, and his dark brown hair was greying a little, but he still had his round pink face, almost unlined, his stubby nose, apple chin, wide, thin mouth with its mean smile, and eyes that were shaded a merciless blue.