William McGivern - Very Cold for May

“That’s a pointless question,” Jake said, wearily. “I’m your press counsel, remember? I can’t talk effectively to editors unless you give me straight information. You haven’t done that so far. First you sent Avery Meed to May’s to get the diary after telling me you’d let me handle the matter. Now Prior tells me a story about your operations that differs from yours on several important points. I can’t do you any good unless you keep me briefed on what’s happening, and tell me a straight story about your dealings with the Government.”

“That makes sense,” Riordan said. “You want to know how much of Prior’s story is true, I suppose. Actually, it makes no difference to you one way or the other, does it? Your loyalty is for sale and I’m buying it. I intend that you work just as hard for me if I’m a crook as you would if I were honest. That satisfactory to you?”

“Yes, that’s quite satisfactory,” Jake said after a pause.

“Fine. I like realistic people, Harrison. The world is glutted with fools who refuse to accept the simple, blunt facts of life. The world makes heroes of successful people. But it doesn’t put the credit where it belongs. Successful people get praised for going to school under polar conditions, or endowing a transept in a church, or for uttering some bromidic nonsense about their mothers. The truth is they should be praised for their rapacity, their single-minded absorption with making money, for those are the things that send you up the ladder, and they always have, in every country, in every age.” Riordan put a cigar in his mouth, lighted it, and laughed. “Don’t bother reading history. Just look around at the names in America that you see on libraries, churches and boulevards. And remember how their money was made. You should have spent some time in Washington during the war. By God, you could write a book about it. If I wrote it I’d call it ‘The Pig Trough.’ That’s what it was. Just a big pig trough with everyone grunting around and digging his snout into the garbage as far as he could.

“But to get back to Prior; he’s bluffing. He’s got no case against me and he’s getting desperate.”

Jake thought of asking Riordan bluntly about his whereabouts the night of May’s murder. But as he had lied to the police there was small likelihood he’d change his story now for Jake. He walked to the door and Riordan came with him and shook hands with him strongly.

“Don’t be a worrier, Jake,” Riordan said. “I don’t like worried people around me. They exude defeat. Nobody can touch me, remember that.”

“Okay,” Jake said. “I’ll remember that.”

He walked down to the elevators thinking over what Riordan had said, and wondering why he hadn’t advanced any argument against Riordan’s point of view. Once in his life he would have. But now he wasn’t in any position to, he perceived. Riordan was a crook and a thief; but he was running his errands. You couldn’t impose a moral judgment on anyone whose money was jingling in your pocket.

He stopped for a Scotch and soda at the Blackstone bar and smoked a cigarette while he drank it. He hadn’t enjoyed the session with Riordan. It was not pleasant to be told bluntly that your loyalty was for sale. But that’s what it amounted to, so there was no point in being annoyed. It was merely the process of supply and demand at work.

When he went outside to get a cab another idea occurred to him. He could regain Prior’s good will by telling what he’d learned of Nickerson; namely, that the man was dead. That would save Prior the time of making an investigation, and it couldn’t possibly hurt Riordan.

Waiting on the curb in the cold gray weather it occurred to him that he didn’t particularly want to ingratiate himself with Prior. He considered Prior a dedicated young ass. Yet it was necessary for him to make a placating overture, because Riordan might need even the tiniest speck of good will from Prior when things got grim.

It was, all things considered, an undistinguished sort of business.

Prior’s unit was installed in a suite of offices on the eighteenth floor of the Postal Building. A busy young man in the reception room told Jake that Prior was in conference and couldn’t be disturbed. Jake said he’d wait a moment and took a seat.

There was a door directly before him that led to a private office, and the transom above the door was open. Through this aperture a high-pitched irascible voice suddenly sounded:

“Excuses, gentlemen, are the base coin with which incompetents hope to buy the respect of conscientious men.”

The young man at the desk glanced at Jake and then up at the open transom before returning to his work with noticeably renewed energy.

The voice continued stridently: “The papers in this city have joined in excoriating your work, and I refuse to believe that this unanimity of opinion is traceable to anything but some egregious mistake in your procedure.”

“Senator Hampstead has arrived, I hear,” Jake said, recognizing the voice.

“That’s right,” the young man said, and smiled politely. “The tempo picks up a little when he’s around.”

“I can imagine.”

Jake had met Elias Hampstead, senior Senator from a midwestern state, several times in Washington and Chicago. He had considered him a windbag, a charlatan, and a bore; but the Senator had a staunch and zealous national following.

Senator Hampstead had a reputation among his followers for selfless honesty, unflinching rectitude, and deathless integrity; and for being, by actual count, at least a one hundred and fifteen per cent dyed-in-the-wool American.

He had been elected in the twenties on a fusion ticket which had as its platform the reestablishment of the pioneer principles of godliness and decency. No one took the campaign seriously except Elias Hampstead, who at the time was in his early forties and had lost his farm in the depression following the first World War. He had been selling religious pamphlets to care for his wife and son, when the political movement swept him up and gave him a reason for taking up space on earth.

He was elected to the Senate and immediately sponsored bills which respectively advocated the abolishment of horse racing, dog racing, prize fighting, professional baseball, and drinking. He became the butt of a thousand gags and cartoons. He was railed at as the personification of prudery, the epitome of provincial insularity. But there was something about his stubbornness, his boorishness, his refusal to stop braying forth his pious platitudes for even a moment, that perversely caused some people to admire him; and among certain cheerless sects he came to be looked upon as a sort of down-to-earth, home-spun Messiah.

Near the close of the war the Hampstead Committee was formed to investigate war profits and the breath of fear blew across the back of anyone it turned its attention to, because this committee was as harsh in its judgments as the laws of the Old Testament. The committee took its character from Senator Hampstead. He was incorruptible. His past was without a flaw or stain. He had lived for thirty years with a gray, retiring woman who had died shortly after their only son was killed in the war. He had no unexplained bank accounts. He was the militant foe of lewdness, of corruption, of wrong doing, of anything, in short, that differed from his concept of decency, modesty and godliness.

Such was the man, Jake thought with a humorless smile, who would weigh the evidence against Dan Riordan. It would be difficult to imagine two men more opposed in their tastes, convictions and motivations.

The door of the private office opened and Senator Hampstead emerged, trailed by Gregory Prior and Gil Coombs.