Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

‘But you live in Miami Beach, Bill.’

‘And Abraham Lincoln lived in Springfield. So what?’

‘Bill, you’re not president of the United States. You’re just another guy who’s trying to re-elect Tim Cartwright as mayor next week. So I think you’d better talk to the Dispatch and the Journal.’

‘I think it’s my business, not yours, Sheriff,’ said Willard Farger, who a week earlier had offered to sweep out the sheriff’s garage and had been refused, because it might be construed as using public employees for personal purposes.

Sheriff Clyde McAdow had thrown up his hands, given a last warning that when the national reporters left, the Dispatch and Journal would still be in Miami Beach, and all of this reached Willard Farger not at all.

Men who were on national television did not go taking advice from local sheriffs. Willard Farger kept the telephone off the hook so that local reporters couldn’t reach him. He would have to get an unlisted telephone, he thought as he rolled out of bed. Maybe send the number to the presidents of CBS, NBC and ABC. Perhaps Times and Newsweek also. He couldn’t leave out the New York Times or the Washington Post either, even though their circulations nationally were not as heavy as the magazines. Important in the intellectual communities, however.

Farger yawned and shuffled into the bathroom. He blinked his eyes and rubbed his face, a somewhat fleshy face with a bulbous nose and small blue eyes, topped by a good head of gray hair, which he thought gave the impression of strength and wisdom and dignity.

He looked into the mirror that morning and liked what he saw.

‘Good morning, governor,’ he said, and by the time he was finished shaving, he was—in his mind—conducting cabinet meetings in the White House.

‘Have a good day, Mr. President,’ he said, applying the stinging after-shave lotion.

He bathed, then hot-combed his hair, mentally toying with the idea of a united world, free of war and strife, where every man could sit under his fig tree and be at peace.

He put on his gray worsted that morning, a television blue shirt, and when he sat down to breakfast, his wife Laura, still in curlers, put an envelope on his plate instead of soft-boiled two-minute eggs.

‘That’s this?’ asked Farger.

‘Open it,’ said his wife.

‘Where are my eggs?’

‘Open it.’

So Willard Farger tore the end off the fat envelope and saw tightly compressed bills in it. He pulled them out slowly and was surprised to see that they were twenty-dollar bills. Thirty of them.

‘This is six hundred dollars, Laura,’ he said. ‘Six hundred dollars. Not a bribe, is it? I can’t have my career ruined by a measly six hundred dollar bribe.’

Laura Farger, who had seen her husband gratefully accept five dollars to fix a ticket, cocked a disdainful eyebrow.

‘It’s not a bribe. It’s mine. It was given to me for a magazine interview.’

‘Without checking with me? You don’t know how to ’handle reporters, Laura, You know nothing of the intricacies and the traps of the media. For a crummy six hundred dollars, you may have damaged my career. What did you tell the magazine?’

‘I told them you were a wonderful husband, a good family man, and that you loved dogs and children.’

Farger pondered that statement for a moment.

‘Good. That was all right. Did you tell him anything else?’

‘No. Just that I’d speak to you. He wants to interview you.’

‘What magazine?’

‘I forget.’

‘You give an interview to a magazine and forget? Laura, how could you do this to me? Just as my career is taking off. An amateur handling the media is the most dangerous thing for a political career. Politics, Laura, is for pros, not housewives.’

‘He said he’d pay $6,000 for an interview with you.’

‘Cash?’ said Willard Farger.

‘Cash,’ said Laura Farger who knew by the way her husband asked the question that, she could count on at least a trip to Europe that year. Six thousand dollars went a long way. ‘The guy’s name who interviewed me was Remo something. I forget his last name.’

‘Cash,’ mused Willard Farger.

On a yacht cruising past the famous skyline of Miami Beach, a man who smelled heavily of lilac cologne heard complaints from Sheriff Clyde McAdow; Tim Cartwright, mayor of Miami Beach; and city manager Clyde Moskowitz.

‘Farger is becoming impossible,’ said McAdow. ‘Impossible.’

‘Impossible,’ said Mayor Cartwright.

‘Incredibly impossible,’ said City Manager Moskowitz.

‘Idiots usually are,’ said the man who smelled heavily of lilac cologne. ‘And you forget that if he were not an idiot, he would not have done what we wished.’

‘Which was?’ Cartwright asked.

‘To make himself a target for the people who are trying to send you to jail, Mayor.’

‘Yeah. But what can they do to him now? Under the glare of all this publicity?’

‘Gentlemen, it is going to be a long hot day today and I intend to get some very good sleep. I would suggest you get some sleep also. When you asked my help, you said you would leave everything in my hands. Consider it left. And don’t panic if a few more idiots get killed.’

The three politicians exchanged glances. Jail after indictment was one thing; murder and killing was something else totally.

‘Gentlemen, I see by your faces that you feel somewhat betrayed,’ said the man with the lilac cologne. He was a squarish sort of man with heavy shoulders and a tubular waist, whose ample bulk made him appear shorter than his six-feet two. His face had the smooth, unworried look of old wealth; the sort of tan one does not sit on the beach for, but acquires naturally when one lives in Palm Beach, eats breakfast on the patio and yachts extensively.

Now he sat with a towel draped around his waist, lounging in the stateroom of his vessel with three nervous men in business suits.

‘Let me ask you a question,’ the man said. ‘You blanch at killings. It offends you. Does it offend you enough, Mayor Cartwright, that you will return all the millions in graft, the diamonds in safe-deposit boxes, the stocks and bonds in Switzerland?’ He ignored Cartwright’s open-mouthed state, and went on: ‘And you, Sheriff, does it offend you enough to give up your wife’s 50 percent interest in the construction company which gets most of the city’s building contracts? And to give back the money which helped buy the auto dealership that you list under your brother-in-law’s name? And you, Mr. Moskowitz, how much does it offend you? Enough to give back all the money you have taken by adding 10 percent to every city purchase in the last five years?’

He looked at the three men, hard, one after another.

‘You are surprised that I know these things,’ he said. ‘But you forget. I have the notebook that Bullingsworth compiled and it is only the fact that I have it, and not he, that keeps you three from jail. The price I paid was his death; would you have me give a refund?

‘Now the simple fact is that a secret organization of the federal government has been planning for two years to put you all in jail. By following my advice, you have foiled this plan. Publicly exposing the government has made it impossible for the government to act against you. Now this secret organization is making its last attempt against you. And instead of letting you three be the targets, I am using poor, simple Willard Farger as the target. And suddenly you are struck with remorse. It is too late for attacks of conscience. If you wish to stay in office and out of prison, you must do it my way. Because no other way will work.’

Mayor Cartwright and Sheriff McAdow were silent, unmoving, but City Manager Moskowitz shook his head vigorously from side to side.