Ross Thomas - Ah, Treachery!

Partain thought that over, examining its weird logic, then asked, “Who gives you the okay to fork over that much money?”

“Nobody.”

“Why not?”

“Because nobody wants to get their hands dirty.”

“Ever get ripped off?”

“Twice.”

“Where’s the money come from?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Okay. Then where did you keep it — the one-point-two million? Under the mattress? In a tin trunk? A safe-deposit box?”

“In a floor safe in my bedroom closet under a pile of suitcases.”

“Good safe?”

“The best Diebold I could buy.”

“Yesterday, you said it might have been embezzled.”

“Since I’m the one entrusted with it,” she said, “I have to be the prime suspect. There’s only one other person who knows where I kept it but he doesn’t have the combination. Still, since he did know where the safe was, that makes him a suspect — although I’m the most likely one.”

“Your cotrustee and the go-between and your old boyfriend and the General, the one who got you in touch with VOMIT, they’re all one and the same guy, right?”

“I thought I’d made that obvious.”

“You did, but I had to be sure. Another question. Do you keep a set of books and, if so, when do you tot ’em up?”

“Every February first.”

“Then you have about three weeks.”

She said nothing and they rode in silence until Partain said, “When did you find out it was gone?”

“November the fourth — the day after the election. Most of the returns were in and I wanted to see how much we’d spent and how well we’d done.” She paused. “I opened the safe and went into shock for three hours. I finally pulled myself together but there wasn’t anyone I could call.”

“Not even the retired Brigadier?”

“Especially not him.”

“If you have to make an accounting to somebody or other on the first of February,” Partain said, “what’ll happen when you report that one-point-two million in off-the-books money disappeared last November, but you didn’t see much point in bothering anybody until now?”

“That won’t happen,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because on December seventh, Pearl Harbor Day, I replaced the entire one-point-two million,” Altford said as she turned off U.S. 101 onto State 33 that led into Ojai, where it turned into State 150 that went up over the mountains and down into Santa Paula.

The Acropolis Restaurant on Connecticut Avenue occupied the ground floor of a sixty-six-year-old gray stone building that was only thirty feet wide. The building had no elevator but the retired Brigadier General walked up the four flights of stairs and arrived at the top-floor landing with no more loss of breath than if he had just completed a brisk stroll around nearby Dupont Circle.

He paused on the landing to remove his seventeen-year-old camel hair topcoat and drape it carefully over his left arm, which was encased in the sleeve of a fourteen-year-old tweed suit whose tailor had died at 83 two years ago in London.

After making sure his blue-and-maroon-striped tie nestled properly into the collar of his white shirt, the General removed the old light tan Borsalino — with its new dark brown grosgrain band — and transferred the hat to his left hand. He used his right hand to open the door whose upper half was mostly opaque pebbled glass. Painted on the glass in neat black letters were two signs. The top one read:

The other sign read:

There was no reception area beyond the door, but to the right was a partitioned-off twelve-by-twenty-foot office with six-foot-high plastic walls whose top third was clear glass. The walls enclosed three bar-locked gray steel filing cabinets, a gray metal desk, a phone console, a personal computer, a fax machine, a photocopier and Emory Kite, licensed private investigator, who spun around in his swivel chair to wave at Vernon Winfield and give him a bass greeting of, “Hey, General, how’s it going?”

Winfield paused, nodded formally to the small detective and said, “Very well, thank you, Mr. Kite.”Winfield then turned toward the nerve center of VOMIT, which was a massive seventy-three-year-old golden oak flat-top desk jammed up against two windows that overlooked Connecticut Avenue. The top of the desk was nearly buried under piles of domestic and foreign newspapers, magazines and government reports — all of them with that plump, well-thumbed, well-read look.

Beyond the desk and against the building’s south wall were overcrowded and unpainted pine bookcases that rose to the fourteen-foot ceiling and stretched thirty feet toward the alley. Close to the desk were a personal computer, a fax machine, a small Xerox copier and a very old, very large, wide-open safe with flanges that had been bolted to the floor so long ago that the bolts had rusted to a dull red.

Occupying, or perhaps filling, the golden oak swivel chair in front of the desk was Nicholas Patrokis, a huge half-bald man in his forties, who wore an enormous black mustache and a gold ring as big as a wedding band through his left ear. Patrokis’s eyes were as black as human eyes ever get and above them a pair of dark hedges just failed to meet over a nose that hooked down toward the mustache.

A white scar formed a lightning bolt that began near the top of Patrokis’s left ear, slashed across his mouth and chin and ended an inch or so below the right earlobe. A woman had once told him the scar made him look like an N. C. Wyeth illustration of a pirate in one of her childhood books. Patrokis liked the image so much that on days he judged too hot or too cold he wore a red bandana wrapped pirate fashion around his half-bald head.

Hunched over the desk now, a phone clamped to his left ear, Patrokis listened and scribbled notes on a gray legal pad. At the General’s approach, he turned, phone still to his ear, and pointed with a ballpoint at a wooden armchair whose seat was occupied by a foot-high stack of The Economist . Patrokis used the worn jogging shoe on his left foot to kick the magazines to the floor, then went back to his listening and note-taking.

General Winfield settled into the chair and glanced around with the neutral expression of someone who knows all there is to know about waiting. From his seat next to the desk he had a fine view of the entire fourth floor and automatically began taking inventory of its contents.

About two-thirds of the fourth floor was devoted to what Patrokis liked to call the auditorium. This was an open space separated from the two offices by a divider railing much like those found in courtrooms. Beyond the railing were fifty folding metal chairs in two rows that were five wide and ten deep. Some of the chairs were gray, some brown, a few were black and all of them were old.

Beyond the chairs and near the alley end of the room was a long golden oak table placed parallel to the back wall. On top of it was a speaker’s podium that faced the wrong way. Surrounding the table were fifteen more folding chairs used for board meetings, panel discussions and by those who dropped in on Saturday afternoons to clean up and help with mailings.

Against the exposed brick back wall was a five-gallon coffee urn that rested on a fifty-gallon steel drum. Next to the urn was a card table that held three gallon cans of Yuban coffee, six small cans of Pet milk and a ten-pound paper sack of C&H sugar. Six boxes of Styrofoam coffee cups were stored beneath the table.

The walls offered no posters, no slogans, no photographs. The only decoration was a huge American flag turned upside down in the traditional signal of distress. The General thought the upside-down flag was sophomoric and raised the issue at each board meeting. But his motion to right the flag always lost 7 to 6.