Missionary Stew

Chapter 6

For the past fourteen years home to Draper Haere had been a two-story red brick commercial building on Main Avenue at the northern fringe of Venice, almost in Ocean Park, a community that helps spell out the difference between Venice and Santa Monica.

It had been a cheap neighborhood back in 1968, a blowzy, end-off-the-line kind of place with dim prospects and depressed real estate prices, which was why Haere had moved there: It was all he could afford. He had paid $27,500 for the old building with ten percent down. Less than thirteen years later an Iranian offered him $425,000 for it, cash, thus convincing Haere that property, after all, was indeed theft.

In the seventies, speculators discovered Venice. The usual pattern followed. Out went the old retired Jews, the aging Beats, the students, the artists, the radicals, the dopers, the crazies, the pool cleaners, the professional tire changers, and in came the trendy young moneyed whom Haere often suspected of existing solely on cheese and chablis.

The Haere Building was forty feet wide and one hundred feet long, and ran from the sidewalk to the alley. The downstairs was vacant when he bought it, the last tenant having been a paint store that went broke. The upstairs was divided into small offices occupied at the time by a bail bondsman, an answering service, a collection agency, a couple of jobbers, and a freelance bookkeeper, all of them on a month-to-month basis. When Haere hinted he might have to raise their rents by ten dollars a month, they promptly moved out.

With the last tenant gone, Haere had all the partitions knocked down. That gave him one enormous room, forty by a hundred, four thousand square feet. Since much of his life had been spent in furnished rooms, including those in some extremely pricy hotels, he decided, perhaps perversely, to create the most enormous room of them all. The only enclosed space would be a rather indulgent bath.

Haere started at the rear on the alley and installed an elaborate kitchen. The kitchen lurched into the dining area, which jumped or fell into the living-work area, which more or less wandered into the sleeping area. He also built a great many bookcases, cabinets, and closets. Or had them built. It took four years to get everything just right, because Haere kept running out of money. When at last all was done, he found it magnificent. Nearly everyone else thought it monstrous.

Haere lived over the shop. Downstairs in the former paint store were the leased IBM computers that stored the names and the elaborate machinery that printed the God-ain’t-it-awful letters that were sent to the names pleading for money to rescue the Republic from ruin. Haere employed a staff of twenty-three direct-mail and computer specialists, whom he overpaid and who were fanatic in their loyalty. Ten years after he began the Haere Company, his employees had presented him with an oil portrait of himself, dressed in his usual three-piece blue pinstripe, standing with one hand resting formally on an ancient mimeograph machine. The small brass plate on the portrait’s oak frame read: Our Founder. Haere hung the portrait in the company’s small reception room.

Haere was a bachelor not only by choice, but also by misadventure. For nearly ten years now he had been in love with a married woman. It was a hopeless affair that he felt was doomed to grow even more so. There had, of course, been others along the way, at least seven women that he had been fairly serious about. Possibly eight. One had died. Four had married. Two had fled, one to Rome, the other to Costa Rica, and one had simply disappeared — suddenly, mysteriously, absolutely. Late at night Haere often worried about her.

Finally, Haere did what all bachelors are said to do: he got a cat. It cost $10 at the local animal shelter and it came to live with him at about the same time that, in a last gesture of vanity, he had his teeth capped. That had cost $2,355 back in 1975, and for a while Haere spent considerable time marveling at them in the mirror.

The cat was an extremely garrulous castrated half-Siamese tom that Haere named Hubert. When Haere traveled, he boarded Hubert at the Musette Hotel for Cats in Santa Monica, where Hubert seemed to like it, possibly because he could talk endlessly to a captive audience.

On the night that Haere flew in from Denver, he took a taxi from the airport to the cat hotel, ransomed Hubert, and tipped the driver ten dollars to lug the cat carrier up the stairs, which was something Haere didn’t want to attempt with his bandaged hands. After freeing Hubert, Haere got into pajamas, robe, and slippers. Next year, he thought, a tasseled nightcap.

His wondrous refrigerator’s automatic ice-maker and cold-water dispenser enabled him to mix a Scotch and water without too much difficulty. He had just taken the second long swallow when the downstairs buzzer rang. Haere crossed to the intercom, pressed the button, and asked: “Who is it?”

“This is the FBI, Mr. Haere,” said a man’s voice made thin by the small speaker. “We’d like to talk to you.”

“Who’s we?”

“I’m Special Agent Yarn. Special Agent Tighe is with me.”

“How do you spell Tighe?” The voice spelled it for him.

“What do you and Special Agent Tighe want to talk to me about at eleven o’clock at night?”

“We’d rather not discuss that down here on the street.”

“Who’s in charge of your San Francisco office?”

A name was offered promptly. It meant nothing to Haere, but because there had been no hesitation he pushed the button that sounded a buzzer and unlocked the downstairs street door. A moment later he could hear the footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs that led up to his apartment.

FBI agents were no novelty to Haere, not since the early fifties when they had started coming around to investigate his father’s old friends. In the sixties they had come around wanting to know if some of Draper Haere’s older friends were really fit to serve in the higher reaches of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. By the early seventies the agents were back wanting to know about the bomb-throwing tendencies of some of the children of those older friends.

But back in the fifties, FBI agents to Haere had seemed stern elders of the law, sober-sided, grim, forbidding. They grew younger over the years, of course. The two who appeared on Haere’s doorstep that night were mere tykes, neither a year over thirty-two. One was blond, the other brunette.

“Mr. Haere?” the blond one said.

Haere nodded, and they whipped out their folding ID cases and offered them for inspection. Haere reached for both with his bandaged hands and took his time examining them.

“There was a man I knew in Washington once,” Haere said, still examining the credentials. “Back in the late sixties. A psychologist. He was hired by the FBI to put agents through sensitivity training. It seemed that when some of you guys got home, instead of kissing the wife, you’d whip out your ID at her and say, ‘Carson, FBI.’”

Special Agent Tighe looked at Special Agent Yarn. “I do that all the time, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Yarn said. “Every night.”

Haere handed back their ID cases and told them to come in. The blond one was Yarn, John D. Tighe’s first name was Richard. He had no middle initial. Their hair was neither short nor long. Yarn wore a suit and tie, Tighe a gray herringbone jacket, dark-gray slacks, and no tie. Haere noticed that both wore loafers with rubber heels. Yarn was a little over six feet tall, Tighe a little under. Neither was handsome, neither was ugly. Only their eyes were alike: steady, watchful, and curious. Extremely curious. All four eyes, two brown and two blue, were now taking in Haere’s enormous room.

“Just the one big room, huh?” Yarn said.

“That’s all.”

“Interesting.”

“Different,” Tighe said.

“Sit down,” Haere said.

Yarn sat down on the leather couch that had once graced the Washington office of Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Tighe chose the padded walnut armchair that had been in Henry Agard Wallace’s Capitol office when Wallace was Roosevelt’s Vice-President. Haere sat in the old high-backed easy chair he almost always sat in, the Baton Rouge chair, which a dealer in Opelousas had sworn was the last chair Huey Long ever sat in before he was gunned down in 1935. Haere collected political furniture. Political mavericks’ furniture, to be precise. For a year now he had been dickering with a man in Tulsa for a brass spittoon that the almost forgotten Alfalfa Bill Murray of Oklahoma was said to have been partial to.

Yarn took out a black notebook and a ballpoint pen. Hubert jumped up into Tighe’s lap and screamed in his face. Tighe scratched Hubert’s ears absently with the air of a man who knows all about cats. “Lot of Siamese there,” he said.

Haere nodded. “Half.”

“We’d like to talk to you about Mr. John T. Replogle,” Yarn said.

“He’s dead.”

“We know. Tell us about him.”

“Tell you about him?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Well, sir,” Haere said, “he was a hardworking, industrious citizen,and probably the most steadfast and patriotic son of a bitch I ever knew. As for politics, he never belonged to any political party. He was a Democrat.”

Yarn wrote none of that down. Tighe, still scratching the cat’s ears, said, “Mr. Dooley?” without looking up.

“Will Rogers,” Haere said.

“Oh.”

Yarn frowned slightly. “You were with Mr. Replogle — when he died?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us about it.”

“You must have the Colorado Highway Patrol’s report by now.”

“We’ve got it,” Tighe said, “but we’d like you to tell us about it, if you don’t mind.”

“Why?”

“You said it was no accident,” Yarn said. “That it was intentional. If so, Mr. Replogle could have been murdered. If he was murdered, then there’s the possibility that his civil rights were violated. If so, the Bureau is interested — definitely, officially.”

“Your instructions are coming out of Washington?”

Yarn nodded. “Out of Washington.”

Haere told them about the drive from the Brown Palace to Idaho Springs, where he had first noticed the blue Dodge pickup. He then described the drive into the mountains and estimated they had gone approximately fifteen or sixteen miles when it happened.

“It was actually fourteen point three miles,” Tighe said. “Past Idaho Springs.”

It was Yarn’s turn again. “What’d you and Mr. Replogle talk about on the way up? — if you don’t mind us asking.”

Haere shrugged. “Death and dying. Thanksgiving. Old times. He had terminal cancer. Of the prostate.”

“We know,” Yarn said.

“Was he despondent, apprehensive?” Tighe said.

“Well, he wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.”

“What I mean is, did he seem to think that anyone was trying to kill him?”

“No.”

It was again Yarn’s turn. “Did he mention Singapore?”

“He said he’d been there recently.”

“Did you ever know a Drew Meade?”

“A long time ago.”

“Mr. Replogle also knew him.”

“That’s right.”

“Did Mr. Replogle tell you he had seen Mr. Meade in Singapore?”

“He mentioned it.”

“What did he say? — exactly, if you can.”

“He said Mr. Meade looked like something out of Somerset Maugham.”

“ ‘The Casuarina Tree?’ ” said Tighe.

“He wasn’t quite that specific.”

“What did they talk about?”

“Money.”

Yarn looked interested. “Can you give us a little more detail?”

“Sure. Meade didn’t have any and he wanted Jack Replogle to lend him some.”

“Did he?”

“Probably. Mr. Replogle was not only an extremely industrious and patriotic citizen, he was also a very soft touch.”

“So he lent or gave Meade some money?” Tighe said.

“I didn’t say that. I said probably.”

There was a brief silence. Tighe scratched Hubert’s ears some more. Yarn wrote something in his black notebook. When he was finished, he looked up at Haere and said, “Is there anything else you can remember about what Mr. Replogle and Mr. Meade discussed?”

Haere lied as a matter of course. “No.”

Yarn nodded, as if that were the answer he had expected. “Tell us a little about yourself, Mr. Haere, what it is you do.”

“You’re serious?”

Again, Yarn nodded.

“Well,” Haere said, “I try to shape the events that alter and illuminate our lives.”

“Politics.”

“Politics,” Haere agreed.

“But you’re not a politician?”

“I’m more of a shadowy figure who moves behind the scenes, a faceless manipulator grasping at the levers of power. If you want more, there’s a fat FBI file on me nearly four inches thick that goes back almost thirty years to when I was a kid.”

“We know,” Yarn said. “It’s been coming in over the telex all evening.”

“So long, pussy,” Tighe said as he gently dumped Hubert to the floor, rose, and gave Haere’s enormous room another curious glance. “Much money in politics?”

“Not if you’re halfway honest.”

Still looking around, Tighe nodded as if what he saw spoke of total probity as well as dubious taste. Yarn was also up now, and they both moved toward the door after thanking Haere for his cooperation. When they reached the door, Yarn turned.

“About Mr. Meade,” he said.

“What about him?”

“He seems to have disappeared.”

“Vanished,” Tighe said.

“Into the usual thin air, I suppose,” Haere said.

Yarn nodded. “Where else?”

“Well,” Haere said and for some reason looked down at his bandaged hands. Tighe noticed.

“They still hurt?” he asked.

“No,” Haere said, “not much.”

After they had gone, Draper Haere stood by the door, still staring down at his bandaged hands. He then turned, crossed to the phone, looked at his watch, picked up the phone, and dialed the number of Baldwin Veatch, the governor-elect.