Warren Murphy: The Head Men

"It doesn't make sense, Chiun. Now we know whoever put Walgreen here killed him. But why a security agency he hired to protect him?"

"You are jumping to conclusions," Chiun said. "Perhaps the security agency was tricked into bringing this Walgreen to Sun Valley. Would the story of The Fly have been any different if he did not go with the shogun himself to have him dig the hole, but had tricked someone else into doing

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it? The lesson would be the same, the result the same. The shogun dead."

"I guess you're right," Remo said, strolling the neat lawns of the Minneapolis suburb where Walgreen had lived. "But I'm scared for the President. How are they going to get him into a hole? And who are they? Was there anything else Smitty told you?"

"Who remembers what liars say?" Chiun asked.

"Smitty isn't a liar. That's the one thing he's not."

"Not only is he a liar but a foolish one. He promised that I was in charge and before the emperor, your President, he withdrew that promise and shamed me."

"What did he say? Come on. What's the connection? What's the connection between the death of this Walgreen here and an attempt on the President's life?"

"It is quite obvious," said Chiun with a lofty smile. "What they both have in common is simple."

"What's that?"

"They are both white."

"Thanks for the big help, Chiun."

Remo tried to think as he gazed along the driveway that curled behind Walgreen's house, effectively opening it up to an attack from any side. The furniture inside the house was covered. There was a f or-sale sign on the lawn, which was four days past being neatly cut. It was a home where Walgreen had lived the kind of life Remo could never live.

Remo could touch this house with his hands and yet he could never have it. He envied Wai-

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green what Walgreen had had when he was alive. Killers could never get Remo that way but Remo could never have this house, the family that had lived here, the life they had shared.

Across the street, a woman with very yellow hair looked at Remo and Chiun too often to be disinterested. Remo watched her leave her car..

She walked with a smooth voluptuous grace, accustomed to assaulting male eyes with her very appeal. A light blue silk dress clung over full breasts. Her lips were pulpy and glistened. She smiled as if she could stampede a football team with a wave of her hand.

"That's the Walgreen house," she said. "I couldn't help noticing you examining it rather closely. I am an investigator for the House Committee on Assassination Conspiracies and Attempts. Here's my identification. Would you mind telling me what you're doing here?"

Her hand produced a small leather foldover wallet. Inside the wallet was her photograph, looking quite somber and hardly sexy at all, and the Congressional seal on the identification. Pressed underneath the identification was a folded piece of paper which Remo removed.

"You're not supposed to see that," she snapped. "That's important Congressional correspondence. It's a privileged communication. It's a Congressional communication."

Remo unfolded the paper that had been wedged underneath the identification. It was on the stationery of Rep. Orval Creel, chairman of the House Committee on Assassination Conspiracies and Attempts, in parentheses (CACA). The note read:

My place or yours?

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It was signed: Poopsie.

"What are you investigating?" asked Remo.

"I'll ask the questions," she said, snatching back the folded piece of paper. Her name, according to her identification was Viola Poombs. "Now what are you doing here?" she asked, reading from a card that told her to ask that.

"Planning to murder the Supreme Court, Congress, and all the members of the Executive Branch making more than $35,000 a year," Remo said.

"Do you have a pencil?" asked-Miss Poombs.

"Why?" asked Remo.

"So I can write down your answers. How do you spell planning."

"What did you do before you became a Congressional investigator?" asked Remo.

"I was a model in a finger-painting parlor," said Miss Poombs. Her billowing pinkish cleavage rose proudly and smelled moist in the spring heat. "But then Representative Creel made me an investigator. The problem for me is I don't know the difference yet between a murder and an assassination."

"In this degenerate country, child, you wouldn't," Chiun said. "But you will know. I have decided to teach you. Of all your kind, you will understand the difference best of all. Your committee will have wisdom and you, among your kind, shall be venerated as wise."

"My kind? What kind is my kind?" asked Miss Poombs.

"The billowy breasted white person," said Chiun, as if he were describing a bird he had seen on a winter meadow walk.

"That's cute," said Viola.

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"Come on, Chiun, I'm working," Remo said. "You're not going to teach anybody anything."

"You're not cute," said Viola. "You're nasty." She glared at Remo and added, "I always wanted to be loved for my mind."

Remo looked at her chest. "Both of them?"

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CHAPTER FIVE

Viola Poombs was all excited. She was going to find out who killed everybody. And the nice little Oriental man, why he was telling her so many things, nobody ever knew so many things about assassination, why Poopsie and his committee would just love to know everything. Everything! He might even run for senator and governor and then there would be better jobs than just being an investigator, she might even get to be vice governor or whatever one gets to be when they are close to their governor.

But first she had to do some things.

"With your clothes on ?" asked the nasty white man called Remo.

"I wasn't going to take them off. I never take off my clothes in public. I'm not an exhibitionist. I am an employee of the federal government of the United States of America and I would take off my clothes only upon a direct order from a duly elected representative of the American people."

And that showed him. All right, maybe he knew more about killings and things but she had her rights too. And she was cooperating enough.

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She had called the Secret Service and made an appointment with the assistant director, and he said he would see her. And they all went to Washington, and they were all going to see this man and they would ask questions. Important questions. Viola Poombs knew they were important because she was told she wouldn't understand them. That could mean only one of two things: either they didn't want to tell her or she really wouldn't understand them. Most things she didn't understand. What she did know was that you asked for things when men were all excited and that was the best time. Afterwards, when they were comfortable and released, that was the worst time.

It was not much that Viola understood but that simplicity had earned her, at twenty-four, the beginning of a $78,000 pension fund, 3,000 shares of Dodge-Phillips, $8,325.42 in a passbook account, and at least two years at $28,300 a year from the American taxpayers. She rightly understood that her good years were between now and thirty. Between now and then she would have to learn to do something with her mind. Unless she got married. But marriage was not that easy nowadays, especially considering that she looked for someone with more financial solvency than she had.

The thing she had to do before any of them stepped into the office of the assistant director of the Secret Service was to call the chairman of the committee she worked for.

"Hello, Poopsie," she said when Congressman Creel's secretary finally got her through. The secretary had been trying to learn to work the phone buttons for months now, but every time

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she had it almost down pat, she would have to take time off to prepare for another contest. Next year, she hoped to be Miss Walpole, Indiana.