Ah, Treachery!

Chapter 39

Edd Partain lay fully dressed on the hotel room bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking about his dead wife, about General Winfield and about whether he wanted any lunch when the telephone rang at 12:33 P.M.

He took the phone off the bedside table without rising, brought it down to his left ear and said hello. A woman’s voice said, “Mr. Partain? This is Captain Lake, General Hudson’s aide? The General deeply regrets the short notice but hopes you’ll be able to join him for dinner tonight at his home in Arlington? Would that be possible, sir?”

“I think so,” Partain said, guessing she was from Virginia, probably from down around Lynchburg.

“Oh, good. Dinner’ll be around eight and the General can send a car for you. But if you prefer to drive yourself, I’ll see that a map to his house is left in your hotel box.”

“I’ll drive myself,” Partain said, relieved that the rising inflections had ended.

“He’ll be pleased to hear you’ve accepted.”

“Could I bring someone?” Partain said.

There was no hesitation when she said, “General Hudson was hoping you might.”

Connie Weeks, the Department of Interior statistician and after-six call girl, was wearing only a Cartier watch when she turned to General Hudson and said, “You were right. He’s bringing somebody.”

The General nodded and leaned back in the pale brown suede club chair to light a cigar. He wore only a pair of gray worsted pants.

“Probably bringing Patrokis,” said Colonel Millwed, who was sprawled on the long couch that was the color of rich cream. The Colonel wore only an unbuttoned white shirt.

“I didn’t think it proper to ask who,” Connie Weeks said and glanced at her watch. “Now if one of you wants a quickie, I’ve just got time. But no threesie.”

The General waved his cigar in polite refusal and said, “I’ll pass, but maybe Colonel Long Dong over there’s interested.”

Millwed, now gazing at the ceiling, shook his head and said, “Colonel Dong’s done been sucked dry.”

“Here you go, Connie,” the General said, reached into a hip pocket and produced a small plain white envelope. “You’ll find a little extra in there.”

She smiled, accepted the envelope and said, “Thank you, gentlemen,” turned and headed for her apartment’s one bedroom, only to stop and turn around when the General said, “Heard about Emory?”

“No,” she said. “What?”

“Somebody shot and killed him this morning,” he said, then waited for her reaction, which turned out to be one of surprise, if not shock, and of sadness, if not grief. “Emory Kite?”

“I hope to Christ he’s the only Emory I know,” Colonel Millwed said as he swung his feet to the floor and sat up.

“What time’d you leave him this morning?” the General said.

“Eight. Close to eight.”

“Notice anything different?”

“Sure. As I went out the front door some old guy wanted in. Middle sixties, I guess, about six feet tall, gray hair — what I could see of it — blue eyes, no beard, no glasses, no fat. He was carrying a black overnight bag and wearing a camel hair topcoat and a fancy hat and walked the way you guys walk, like you’re always in a parade.”

“He say anything?”

“He said, ‘Fun.’ ”

“Fun?”

“He looked like a possible client so I asked him if he liked fun. And he said ‘fun’ the way you just said it — as if he didn’t know what I was talking about. So I gave him my business card, the one with only my first name and phone number, and told him to call me anytime after six.”

“What’d he say?”

“Nothing. He just smiled a little and put my card in his pocket.”

General Hudson sighed, then nodded at Colonel Millwed, who rose behind Connie Weeks, grabbed her chin with one hand, the back of her head with the other, pulled hard right, pushed hard left and broke her neck.

Ten minutes later, Colonel Millwed was wearing a suit and tie and holding a roll of Bounty paper towels as he looked around Connie Weeks’s living room for something else to wipe down or mop up. The dead woman still lay on the polished hardwood floor near the cream couch.

“Any suggestions?” the Colonel said, carefully stepping over her body.

General Hudson, now in blue blazer, white shirt, tie and gray slacks, glanced around the room and said, “Just the semen in her vagina.”

“That’s yours. She swallowed mine.”

“Let’s go,” the General said and they left, taking with them Connie Weeks’s Cartier watch, her other jewelry, her cash and her credit cards.

They hurried along the apartment house corridor, met no one, took the stairs down one floor, caught an empty elevator, rode it to the basement garage and walked out separately, ten minutes apart. Colonel Millwed kept the cash and later threw the watch, the jewelry and the credit cards into the Potomac.

It was Nick Patrokis who officially identified General Vernon Winfield after the Metropolitan Police found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The body lay not far from the large ornate desk in the library, which Partain had guessed contained 9,000 books.

The homicide sergeant was Frank Tine, a tall light brown man of at least 40 who wore a handsome shockproof face and clothing chosen for comfort and warmth by someone, perhaps himself, perhaps his wife, who didn’t want him to go around looking all that handsome.

“Know how it looks to me?” Tine asked Patrokis, who stared at the General’s body as a police photographer shot frame after frame of 35mm film. “Looks to me like the General sat down at his desk and wrote it all out, then got up and walked over here and shot himself so he wouldn’t splatter anything on that new will of his that leaves everything to” — Tine looked down at his notes — ”the Victims of Military Intelligence Treachery, whatever the fuck that might be.”

“VOMIT,” Patrokis said. “He was one of its two founders. I’m the other one.”

“He also wrote something else.”

Patrokis didn’t ask what and looked around the huge room to see whether anything looked different. He decided that it looked as if somebody had died.

“Want to know what else he wrote?” Tine said.

“Sure.”

“A confession.”

“That he killed Emory Kite? Yeah, I heard that.”

“How the hell’d you hear he wrote a confession?”

“I didn’t. I heard he admitted he’d killed Kite. Mrs. Altford called me. After she called you.”

Sergeant Tine nodded and turned slowly all the way around, as if inspecting, maybe even appraising, the library. “Think he’d read all these books?”

“Most of them probably.”

“How much you think he was worth?”

“I think he was damn near broke and had been for some time.”

“Big house like this?”

“It’s got a maximum mortgage on it.”

“That mean you VOMIT folks aren’t gonna get much?”

“Probably nothing,” Patrokis said.

“Why d’you think he killed Kite?” the Sergeant asked, his tone lacking all curiosity.

“I don’t know,” Patrokis said. “Think he was sick?”

“Who — Kite?”

“The General.”

“No. He wasn’t sick.”

“Kite blackmailing him?”

“I doubt it.”

“But that’d give the General a motive, wouldn’t it?” Sergeant Tine said. “Say some pissant private cop’s threatening to ruin your life. That makes you mad enough to go do something about it. But you don’t think it through. And the glow from getting even lasts about two minutes, maybe less, before it hits you what you’ve really gone and done. So you go tell somebody about it, maybe your oldest friend, maybe this Altford lady, and then you go home, write some stuff, think if there’s anything else you ought to do, decide there isn’t except one last thing and you go ahead and do it.”

The Sergeant gave the big room another appreciative examination before he asked, “How many books in here, you think?”

“About six thousand.”

“That many?” he said, looked around some more, then turned back to Patrokis and said, “And the dumb funny thing about all this is that it happened to somebody who, from the looks of things, had it all, all his life.”

“He did have it all,” Patrokis said. “It’s just that he was never quite sure what to do with it.”

“Like we would,” Tine said.

Patrokis smiled slightly. “Like we would.”