Warren Murphy: The Head Men

"The manual says it is."

"You are referring to an old Secret Service manual which was acknowledged as incorrect almost as soon as it came out."

"I hear it all the time. Just on television, a commentator said terrorists aren't afraid to die. I heard it."

"It's still wrong. And I don't think I am dealing with a terrorist."

"The terrorist mind is cunning."

"Captain Lapointe, what I want to know is what are you going to do for the protection of my life?"

"We're going to give you thorough police protection, weave a defense web around you on one hand and try to identify and immobilize the terrorist in his lair on the other hand."

6

"You still haven't said what you are going to do."

"I most .certainly have," said Lapointe, har-umphing indignantly.

"Be specific," said Walgreen.

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me," said Walgreen.

"It's very technical," warned Captain Lapointe.

"Go ahead."

"First we pull files looking for an MO, which is..."

"Which is modus operand! and you're going to find out all the people in this area who have phoned other people threatening to kill them, and you're going to ask them where they were at 11:03 today and when you find a few who give funny or contradictory stories, you will annoy them until they tell you something that the city attorney is willing to prosecute on. Meanwhile, the people who are going to kill me will have killed me."

"That's very negative."

"Captain Lapointe, I don't think these people are in your files. What I would like is a team surveillance and some access to people who know how to use weapons. With luck, we might foil the first attempt on my life and be able to find out possibly who the killers are. I think it's more than one which gives them more power but also makes them more liable to exposure, especially at their linkages."

"Secondly," said Lapointe, "we're going to send out an all points bulletin . . . that's an APE . . ."

Walgreen was out of Lapointe's office before the sentence was finished. No help there, he thought.

7

At home he told his wife he was going to Washington. Mildred was at her small Shim-oo pottery wheel. She was centering a reddish mound of clay and the spring heat had given her skin a healthy flush.

"You've never looked so beautiful, dear."

"Oh, c'mon. I'm a mess," she said. But she laughed.

"There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think more and more how right I was to marry you. How lucky I was."

And she smiled again and in that smile there was so much life that the great death he knew he was facing, made no less great by its commonness to all men, was, in that smile of life, made less fearful for a moment.

"I married a beautiful person too, Ernie."

"Not as beautiful as I did."

"I think so, dear. I think so."

"You know," he said, trying to be casual but not so casual that Mildred would see the effort and suspect something, "I can finish up a Washington project in three weeks, if . .."

"If I got away on a trip," she said.

"Yes," said Walgreen. "Maybe to your brother's in New Hampshire."

"I was thinking of Japan."

"Maybe we'll both go, but after your brother's."

She left without finishing the pot. It would be two days before he found she had spoken with his secretary and knew how seriously he had taken that telephone threat. He would realize later she knew why she was being sent away and did not let on so he would not carry the extra burden of worry. When he did realize it would be too late.

8

She took an afternoon flight to New Hampshire and the last picture Ernest Walgreen would remember of his wife was how she fumbled with her purse for her ticket, as she had fumbled with her purses since he had met her so very long ago when they were young together, as they had remained until that airport, young together, always.

At Secret Service headquarters in Washington, when Ernest Walgreen got through the lower functionaries to finally speak with a district man, he was greeted by:

"Well, here comes the big rich businessman. How ya' doing Ernie? Sorry you left us, huh?"

"Not when I buy a new car," Walgreen said and added softly, "I'm in trouble."

"Yeah. We know."

"How?"

"We keep track of our old people. We do guard the President, you know, and we like to know what our old friends do all the time."

"I didn't think it was still that tight."

"Since Kennedy, it stays that tight."

"That was a helluva shot that guy got from the window," Walgreen said. "Nobody can stop that kind of stuff."

"You know better than I do. When you're bodyguard to the President, nobody measures your success by how many assassination attempts fail."

"How much do you know about me?"

"We know you think you're in trouble. We know that if you stayed with us, you would have gone to the top. We know some local police are making noises and moves on your behalf that

9

you're supposed to be unaware of. How good are your locals, Ernie?"

"Locals," said Walgreen.

"Oh," said the district man. It was a gray-fur-nitured office with the antiseptic cubicity of those who have very specific jobs and need not be expansive to the public. Walgreen sat down. It was not the kind of office that even old friends offered each other a drink in. It was more a file cabinet drawer than an office as Walgreen knew it, and he was very glad he had left the Secret Service for carpets and drinks and golf dates and all the cozy amenities of American business.

"I'm in trouble, but I can't dot the 'i' on it. It was just a phone call, but the voice ... it was the voice. I don't know how much you know about business, but there are people you know who are just for real. It's a calmness in their voices, a precision. I don't know. This one had it."

"Ernie, I respect you. You know that."

"What are you driving at?" asked Walgreen.

"A phone call isn't enough."

"What do I have to do to get you guys in on it? Be killed?"

"All right. Why does this person want to kill you?"

"I don't know. He just said I should get all the protection I could."

"Were you drinking?"

"No, I was not drinking. I was working."

"Ernie, that's a standard crank call you got. That's a standard. They tell you to get a gun, to put on extra men, 'because, buddy, I'm gonna blow your brains out.' Ernie. Please."

"It was for real. I know standard crank calls. You're lucky you've got computers nowadays to

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keep track of them. I know crank calls. Moreover, I think you know I can tell the difference. This voice was not a crank. I don't know the why of it but, between you and me, this one's for real."

"You know I'm helpless, Ernie."

"Why?"

"Because in a report, it doesn't have Ernie Walgreen looking me in the eye like you're looking now and me knowing, right where you know it, that these people are for real. Knowing it in the gut."

"Got any suggestions ? I've had a lot of practice making money."

"Use it, Ernie."

"With whom?"

"After Kennedy got shot out from underneath us, there was a big shakeup here. Pretty quiet but pretty big."

"I know. I had something to do with it," Walgreen said. The district man looked at him with mild surprise.

"Anyway," the district man said, "it didn't do anything because there was no way we could have stopped a guy getting in a shot like Oswald did, but we had to look like we made some changes so we could tell Johnson that the Secret Service that lost Kennedy isn't the same as the one guarding you now. In the shakeup, some good men, really good men, quit. They were very bitter. And I can't blame them. They have their own security agency now . . ."

"I don't need some retired policeman in a blue uniform to discourage shoplifting."