Ross Thomas - Ah, Treachery!

“Let’s get married,” she said.

“When?”

“Next year. The year after. Ten years from now.”

“That’s an idea,” Patrokis said, rose naked from the bed and hurried into the bathroom. Even with the bathroom door closed he heard the loud ring of the black nineteen-year-old Touch-Tone phone that had yet to need repair and whose twin models fetched $100 to $150 at the swap meets where Patrokis had acquired much of his clothing and all of the furniture for the apartment and VOMIT.

After the second ring the phone went silent. When Patrokis, still naked, came out of the bathroom, Shawnee Viar offered him the instrument and said, “It’s Partain.”

Patrokis said hello and Partain said, “I just got a call from General Hudson.”

“Why?”

“He wants me to meet with him and Colonel Millwed.”

“Again — why?”

“So we can talk about my going back in the Army as a lieutenant colonel, serving out my twentieth year and retiring on a well-deserved pension.”

“Tell him to go ahead and put in the papers.”

“I did, but he still wants to talk.”

“Where?”

“He’ll call back with time and place.”

“Why is it,” Patrokis asked, “that I suspect the three of you will meet by moonlight at some lonely crossroads in Rappahannock County?”

“Think I should take along a weapon?”

“You have one?”

“No.”

“The gun seller has no gun?”

“Do you?”

“What would I do with a gun?” Patrokis said. “He wants a gun?” Shawnee Viar asked.

“Hold on,” Patrokis said, put a hand over the mouthpiece, turned to Shawnee and said, “Why d’you ask?”

“He can have Hank’s,” she said. “I thought the cops took it.”

“They did, but he has a couple of others stashed around the house.”

“Would you lend one to Partain?”

“What’s he want with it?”

“I don’t know,” Patrokis said. “Maybe he wants to shoot Colonel Millwed. Or General Hudson. Or both.”

“Tell him I’ll bring it to him wherever he is,” she said.

At 8:59 A.M. the telephone rang in Edd Partain’s hotel room. After he answered it, Millicent Altford said, “My daughter back in her own bed yet?”

“She’s not here.”

“You dressed?”

“Yes.”

“Then get your butt over here right now without anybody seeing you. Think you can handle that?”

“I can try.”

Partain opened his hotel room door, glanced up and down the corridor, saw no one, closed his door, went four quick steps to the door next to his, opened it and slipped inside.

“Lock it up good,” Millicent Altford said.

Partain shot the bolt, fastened the chain and turned to look first at Altford, who was sitting in a chair, wearing her cashmere robe, then at General Vernon Winfield, who sat at attention in a straight-back chair, hat and gloves off but topcoat still on, the black overnight bag on his knees.

“Sugar here just killed himself a private detective,” Millicent Altford said. “The one you all had lunch with at the Dome.”

“Emory Kite,” Partain said, merely to be saying something.

“Kite,” she agreed, rose, went over to where the whisky was, poured herself an ounce and a half of Scotch and tossed most of it down. “Sugar here’s turning me into a morning drinker.”

“I take it he’s not here to kill you,” Partain said.

“I find that extremely offensive, Mr. Partain,” the General said.

“He’s got a gun,” Altford said.

“Want me to take it away from him?”

Before Altford could reply, the General removed the short-barrelled revolver from his topcoat pocket and looked at it thoughtfully. “It fires five twenty-two-caliber long rounds with hollow points. They do tremendous damage but are effective at only very short range. This particular weapon shoots high and right and is virtually useless unless fired by an expert marksman. I shot Mr. Kite just above the bridge of his nose from a distance of perhaps six feet. He was in motion at the time.”

Partain walked over to the General, held out his right hand and said, “Mind?”

“Not at all,” Winfield said and handed the revolver butt-first to Partain, who examined it, sniffed its two-inch barrel, nodded and tucked the weapon away in his right hip pocket.

“Now show him what’s in the bag, sugar,” Millicent Altford said.

The General thought about it first, then opened the black overnight bag to reveal the tightly packed banded bundles of $100 bills.

“How much?” Partain said.

“He says one-point-two million but I didn’t count it,” she said, turned to the General, studied him briefly, drank the rest of her Scotch, sighed and said, “Better tell Twodees how you shorted the yen, optioned all that raw land in Arizona, went in with that wildcatter up in North Dakota and then dumped your Chrysler to buy Apple Computer.”

“Yes, perhaps I should,” the General said and looked at Partain. “Over the past several years I made some extremely unwise investments. I had to cover my short position on the yen; sold some stocks I should have kept and kept those I should’ve sold. There were several other, well, desperate ventures, gambles really, and last October I was virtually bankrupt and in dire need of one million dollars. The magic figure. Not a great amount of money, if inflation is taken into account, but—”

Partain interrupted. “What about the property you own in Aspen?”

“It’s all leveraged to the limit with first, second and third mortgages. I can’t raise a dime on it.” He sighed. “Which is why I engaged Mr. Kite’s services.”

Partain looked at Altford. “Kite stole your one-point-two million?”

“Kite farmed it out, according to sugar here,” she said. “Remember poor Dave Laney? Well, he and Kite hooked up together somehow, maybe through General Hudson, who was Dave’s uncle. Anyway, Dave flew up to L.A. from Guadalajara on election day last year at Kite’s request. For a sixty-thousand-dollar cut Dave went up to my apartment, worked my safe’s combination, which he probably got from Jessica without her knowledge, put the money into a bag or something and was escorted in and out of the building by dear dead Jack Thomson, night doorman and sometime actor, who got five thousand dollars cash money and a bullet in the back of his head for his bit part.”

“Shot by Mr. Kite, I believe,” the General said.

“Why didn’t you mortgage your house?”

The General stared straight ahead. “The house was to go to the organization.”

“To VOMIT?”

Winfield nodded. “The money from Millicent I thought of as a loan.”

“Who really recommended me to you?” Partain asked Altford.

“I already told you, Nick Patrokis.”

“Not him?” Partain said, nodding at the General.

“I concurred when Nick told me,” the General said. “Millicent was extremely vague as to why she wanted a bodyguard. I of course knew it was because of the stolen money. She was frightened and understandably so.”

Partain said, “How’d you approach him — Kite?”

“Nick and I long ago discovered Kite’d been planted on us by General Hudson and Colonel Millwed. We’d had some of our people follow Kite several times and that led us to his meetings with Millwed at out-of-the-way places. After them, Millwed would usually rendezvous with General Hudson at this very hotel. They preferred small rooms on the fourth or fifth floor.”

“That doesn’t tell me how you approached Kite.”

“I simply went over to him in his office one day when no one else was around and asked if he knew of anyone who’d like to steal one million two hundred thousand dollars from a safe for which I had the combination.”