Warren Murphy: Kill Or Cure

Farger was not at campaign headquarters. Roused long enough to be coherent, one of the bunny-secretaries confided to Remo that Farger had come in uncharacteristically early, gotten a phone message and left.

‘He ain’t gonna be late getting back, is he?’ she said, snapping her gum as she talked. ‘I was going to use today’s check to go shopping at lunch hour?’

‘Today’s check?’

She nodded. ‘Farger pays us by the day. He thinks that’s the only way we’d show up. But I’d show up anyway, just to see you. You’re cute.’

‘You’re cute, too,’ Remo said. ‘Do you know who the phone message was from?’

The girl looked at a pad on her desk. ‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘This party called early, and left the number. When Farger came in, he called it and left.’

She gave Remo the number and turned away, humming, ‘Sunshine is Nicer’.

Remo went to Farger’s desk and dialled the number. ‘Mayor Cartwright’s headquarters,’ a female voice answered. Even though it was early in the day, in the background Remo could hear the buzz of excited voices, typewriters pounding, other telephones ringing. Remo held the phone to his ear for a moment, listening, and ruefully contemplating the three bunnies in the Mac Polaney Campaign Hutch. Then, angrily, he hung up.

Double-agent Farger. Gone, no doubt, to report to Cartwright how he was taking the smartass easterner’s money and was sinking the Polaney campaign.

Why had he ever gotten involved in this? Remo wondered. Why? What did he know about politics? The dumbest green kid from a ward club would have handled himself smarter than Remo had. His first impulse had been right. Knock off Cartwright. Stick to what he knew. And what he knew was death.

First, Farger’s.

Cartwright’s headquarters were in another hotel on the Miami Beach strip, five long blocks away.

‘He was here earlier,’ a bright-faced, young girl told Remo, ‘but he left.’

The office was a maelstrom of activity and people and noise,

‘Think you’re going to win?’ Remo asked the girl.

‘Certainly,’ the girl said. ‘Mayor Cartwright is a fine man. It takes one to stand up to the fascist pigs in Washington.’

Suddenly, Remo realized a great truth. There were no real reasons why anyone supported a political candidate, not logical ones anyway. People voted their stupidities, and then justified them by seeing in their chosen candidate what they wanted to see.

Like the girl. A government-hater, she cast Cartwright in that mold, and made it the most important part of his makeup. Logic, obviously, had no part in it because if it had, she would certainly have supported Polaney, whose election was a guarantee of instant anarchy.

Democracy was a statistical accumulation of stupidities, which cancelled each other out, until they produced the public will. The most insane thing of all was that the public will generally was the best choice.

Remo returned the girl’s smile and she turned away with a shout. ‘Charlie,’ she called. ‘Get those brochures down into the truck.’

‘What truck?’ a much whiskered young man said.

‘On the side driveway. A green panel. It’s taking the brochures to our other clubs around town.’

‘All right,’ Charlie said. He moved toward a half dozen bulky cartons of brochures that were on a four-wheeled hand truck. Remo walked over to give him a hand. He helped Charlie steer the car to the service elevator, then rode down with him, and helped Charlie load the brochures on the back of a green truck. They had just finished when the driver walked out of a saloon across the alley.

‘You know where this stuff goes?’ Charlie asked him.

‘Got the list right here, kid,’ the driver said, patting his shirt pocket.

Charlie nodded and went back toward the hotel.

‘I’ll ride with you,’ Remo told the driver. ‘Help unload.’

‘Suit yourself.’

The driver was humming ‘Sunshine is Nicer’ all along the way. He turned on the radio and in Polaney’s clear, resonant voice, they heard the same song on a commercial.

Two miles down the strip, the driver turned off Collins Avenue and began heading for the clubhouse in the northernmost section of Miami Beach. After a few blocks, the traffic thinned out to an occasional car.

‘You for Cartwright?’ Remo asked the driver, still humming the Polaney jingle.

‘I voted for him last time,’ the driver said, in what Remo realized was a non-answer.

‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Remo said. ‘Pull over here.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Just pull over. I’ve got to check the load.’

The driver shrugged and pulled the truck to the side of a small roadway bridge that crossed a slimly built river. He stopped and turned to look at Remo who put him out with a knuckle to the neck.

The driver crumpled forward over the wheel. He would be out for a few minutes.

Remo hopped down from the truck and opened the side door in the little truck. Shielded from the highway by the body of the truck, he began to remove the cartons.

One at a time, he drove his steel-hard fingertips into the boxes of brochures, perforating them with big jagged holes. Then, one at a time, he tossed them over the railings and into the water below. The holes would let the water flow in and destroy the printing.

Remo stuck a fifty dollar bill into the driver’s shirt pocket, left him sleeping, went across the road and hitched a ride back into town.

So much for political counterespionage. Tonight, he thought, he might get a garden rake and go tear down the Cartwright billboards which were beginning to blossom around the city.

But first there was Farger.

Willard Farger, fourth deputy-assistant commissioner of elections, finally came to Remo. He came in a box, addressed simply ‘Remo’ and delivered to the Polaney campaign headquarters. He came with an ice pick jammed into his right ear.

Remo looked down at Farger’s body, scrunched up into the reinforced carton. A faint scent rose to his nostrils and he leaned forward, his face close to the box. He had smelled it before. It was floral. Yes. The same scent had come from the ice pick that he had seen jammed into the right ear of City Manager Moskowitz. It was lilac. A lilac-scented ice-pick.

Remo just looked at the ice pick in disgust. On its point had been skewered, not only Farger but the entire Polaney campaign. The only person in the whole campaign who knew anything at all, and he was dead.

It was the ultimate insanity, Remo thought. CURE, which had been created to use violence to help save the nation and its political processes, was now being destroyed by the most basic of the political processes—a free election—in which its opponents were free to use violence while Remo wasn’t.

And he just did not know what to do about it.

For a moment, he thought of the phone. Smith was only a telephone call away. His hand began to move for the phone and then he shook his head, and began to lug the carton containing Farger’s body to one of the back rooms.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

After Remo had disposed of the body, he told of Farger’s death to Teri Walker, who broke down and wept real tears.

‘I didn’t know politics was going to be like this,' she cried. ‘That poor man.’

‘Well, we’re not going to say a word about it,’ Remo said. ‘We’re just going to go on campaigning.’

She nodded and wiped her very wet eyes. ‘That’s right. We’ve got to go on. He would have wanted us to.’

‘That’s right,’ Remo said. ‘You go on. Do your commercials and your advertising. Do your thing.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m going to do mine.’

‘We’ve got that television special Monday night,’ she said. ‘That might just win it for us.’