Stuart Woods - Short Straw

"Just a mo-" The man stopped mid-word. "I'm afraid we have no one registered by that name, sir."

"Thank you," Eagle said, then hung up. He thought about it for a couple of minutes, then he made another call.

"Vittorio."

"It's Ed Eagle."

"Yes, Mr. Eagle, what can I do for you?"

"I've got a lead on Barbara's whereabouts." He described his phone conversation with Cupie and the man at La Reserve.

"I'm on it, Mr. Eagle."

"Wait a minute, Vittorio," Eagle said. "I want to reiterate: I do not want her killed, and I am not employing you for that purpose. I just want her signature on those blank sheets, this time, for real. Get that, and there's ten thousand dollars waiting for you."

"Yes, sir, I understand," Vittorio said. "I'll be in touch."

Vittorio hung up and began packing a bag. Ten minutes later he was on his way to Albuquerque Airport.

EAGLE ARRIVED AT SEVEN AT SUSANNAH'S NEW HOUSE ON Tano Norte for her first dinner party. As he got out of his car, another car pulled up, and Rick Barron, the chairman of Centurion Studios, whom he had met briefly at the airport, got out, along with a woman who appeared to be his wife.

"Good evening, Ed," Barron said. "Nice to see you again. I'd like you to meet my wife, Glenna."

"How do you do, Glenna," Eagle said. If Barron was in his eighties, his wife appeared to be considerably younger, perhaps fifteen years or so.

"I've heard of your work, Mr. Eagle," Glenna Barron said.

"Please call me Ed. Shall we go in?"

The front door was ajar, and Eagle called out to Susannah.

"Come in," she shouted from the kitchen, "and go into the living room. Ramon will get you a drink."

A houseman in a white jacket and black bow tie appeared and led them into a large living room off the central hallway. He took their drink orders and prepared them inside what appeared to be a large armoire, which was actually the entrance to a roomy bar.

A moment later, Susannah joined them. "Did you all meet?" she asked.

"We did," Eagle replied.

Ramon handed her a drink, and she joined them. "I'm glad you're in time for the sunset," she said, and they all turned toward the large windows to see a lurid sky with a sun sinking behind the Jemez mountains.

"Los Alamos is right up there," Susannah said, pointing. "Where the atom bomb was built."

"Which saved a lot of lives," Eagle said, "in addition to snuffing out a lot of others. Were you in World War II, Rick?" he asked the movie producer.

"I was," Barron replied. "I flew fighters off the carrier Saratoga, until I got a knee shot up over Guadalcanal. That got me sent home, so I wasn't one of the lives saved by the bomb."

Glenna spoke up. "I was actually able to see Rick aboard the Saratoga," she said, "the day before he was wounded."

"What on earth were you doing aboard an aircraft carrier in the middle of a shooting war?" Eagle asked.

"I came aboard with the Artie Shaw Orchestra," she said. "I was their singer on a USO tour."

"I was just a bit surprised to see her," Rick laughed.

They talked on until they were called to dinner.

AFTER DINNER SUSANNAH led them to a paneled library across the central hallway from the living room and served Eagle and Barron coffee and brandy, then she took Glenna on a tour of the house.

"I'm aware of your domestic difficulties," Barron said.

"Oh? Is word getting around?"

"Not really, but I have my sources. In the circumstances I might be able to suggest a solution."

"Do you have a lot of experience in resolving marital problems, Rick?"

"No, but I have a lot of other kinds of experience. Let me tell you a story: As a young man I was an officer in the Beverly Hills Police Department, and late one warm June evening in 1939, I was parked in a patrol car just off Sunset Boulevard when I heard something very loud and very fast approaching from the direction of the Sunset Strip. I looked up to see a Ford coupe on the other side of the boulevard run a stop sign and drive onto Sunset, directly into the path of a black Mercedes sports car doing, I don't know, sixty or seventy, I guess, and the sports car struck the Ford, spinning it around and pretty much totaling it. The Mercedes continued until it jumped the curb and came to rest in a hedge half a block away.

"I jumped out of the patrol car and checked the Ford: there was a very dead woman inside. Then I ran to the Mercedes and found that the driver, who had been thrown clear and landed in the hedge, looked very familiar. I suddenly realized he was the movie star Clete Barrow."

"I remember his films well," Eagle said. "He was killed in the war, wasn't he?"

"Yes, but that's another story. In those days, the Beverly Hills PD was very protective of movie people, and there were rules- unwritten-about how to do it. Barrow gave me the number of a man named Eddie Harris, who was a bigwig at Centurion Studios, and, after I'd put Barrow in the back of my patrol car and radioed in the report of the accident, and a sergeant had arrived, I called Harris and was told to bring Barrow to the studio.

"That I did, and Harris and a doctor were waiting in Barrow's bungalow dressing room. He was okay, and they took a sample of my blood to substitute for Barrow's, who was quite drunk, and so I helped my superiors and the studio cover up the whole business. That's just the way things were done in those days. The woman had been at fault, for running the stop sign, after all.

"Anyway, as a result of my performance that evening, Eddie Harris hired me as head of security for the studio. Part of my job- the biggest part-was protecting the actors and actresses under contract as well as the name of the studio. Glenna was an actress there, and that's how we met.

"Shortly after I came to work for Centurion, Eddie Harris gave me the name of someone who was willing to perform rather extreme services, when conditions became extreme and there was no other way. As it turned out, I had known the man for years. His name was Al Moran, and he ran a gun shop where all the cops bought their weapons."

"Did you ever employ Al's services?" Eagle asked.

"I did, but not his most extreme services; that came later and was not my doing. There was a gangster-a mafioso, you'd call him today-named Chick Stampano, who worked for Ben 'Bugsy' Siegel, and he loved going out with movie actresses. He also loved beating them up, and that made me very angry, especially when he became a threat to Glenna."

"What did you do about it?"

Barron took some money from his pocket and handed Eagle a hundred-dollar bill. "I wish to retain you to represent me as my attorney."

Eagle smiled. "All right," he said, putting the money in his pocket, "I'm your lawyer, and attorney-client confidentiality is in full effect."

"I confronted Stampano, more than once, and finally, I beat him up pretty good. He reacted by taking it out on Glenna. At that point, I was ready to call Al Moran and employ his most extreme services, but I didn't."

"What did you do?"

"Left no other alternative, I went over to Stampano's house with a gun, and when he came out the door with his own gun, I killed him."

"Wow," Eagle breathed.

"Then, by previous arrangement, I joined the navy. It was summer 1941, with Pearl Harbor still to come. Clete Barrow had been killed at Dunkirk the year before, and I was about to be a wanted man. After flight training-I was already a pilot-I served out my hitch in the Pacific, and came home and married Glenna. Eddie Harris and a couple of my friends on the police force had arranged for the Stampano killing to remain unsolved."

"That's quite a story," Eagle said.

"There's more," Barron replied. "On our wedding day, in 1947, we received an over-the-top floral arrangement from Bugsy Siegel, and Eddie Harris took that as a threat. Siegel was, apparently, still angry at me for killing one of his proteges. Eddie didn't tell me about this until years later, when he was dying, but what he did was call Al Moran. Al took a Browning automatic rifle over to Virginia Hill's house-she was Siegel's girlfriend-then he sat outside and fired a burst through a window at Bugsy Siegel."