Yellow-Dog Contract

Chapter Four

Vullo called both Murfin and Quane into his office, told them about the arrangement he had made with me, and instructed them to lend whatever assistance I might require. When Vullo mentioned the amount of money that I was to be paid for my fortnight’s effort, Murfin’s mouth abruptly went down at the corners in a look of frank appreciation. It sounded as if I’d pulled off something slippery and that made Murfin admire it.

I suggested rather politely, I thought, that Vullo call in a secretary and dictate a letter of understanding, which would, I pointed out, be mutually beneficial.

“He means he wants it in writing,” Quane said.

Vullo frowned, thought about it, chewed on a fingernail, and then rang for a secretary. When she came in he dictated the letter rapidly and didn’t object at all when I suggested a couple of phrases that I thought might be nice.

“You’ll want to wait for it, I suppose,” Vullo said.

I nodded and smiled. “Well, you know what the mails are.”

“Then perhaps you wouldn’t mind waiting in Murfin’s office. He’ll give you a copy of our file on Mix.”

With that Vullo picked up some papers on his desk and lost himself in them. I was dismissed. I was not only dismissed, but I also seemed to have been forgotten.

Murfin grinned, shrugged, and jerked his head toward the door. I rose and followed him and Quane out and down the hall into Murfin’s office where he handed me a large manila envelope.

“That’s our stuff on Mix,” he said. “How’d you and Vullo get along?”

“Okay,” I said. “He seems a little remote. But he’s probably just shy.”

“He doesn’t believe in what he calls unnecessary social pleasantries,” Quane said. “He thinks they’re a waste of time. So he’s eliminated hello, good-bye, please, thank you and a lot of other stuff like that from his vocabulary. It must save him a couple of minutes a year. Maybe even more.”

Murfin grinned again. It was his nastiest one yet. “Who does he remind you of?”

I thought for a moment. “Mix,” I said finally. “In a curious kind of way he reminds me very much of Arch Mix.”

“Yeah,” Murfin said. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

The house was on one of the more fashionable stretches of N Street in Georgetown and I had to go around the block three times before I could find a place to park. It was a fairly narrow three-story house of old red brick. But the brick was just about all that was still old because the front door, the windows, and the wood trim were quite new, although they had been custom made so that they would look just as old as the brick. All that had cost a lot of money, but then the owner of the house had a lot of money.

I walked up the six metal steps to the door and rang the bell. After perhaps a minute or so the door opened slowly. The young woman who stood there was nude, or stark naked, if you prefer, and she said, “Well, Squire, come on in.”

I went in and said, “Put some clothes on.”

“The air conditioning’s on the blink.”

“Put some clothes on and sweat a little.”

“Jesus, you’re such a prude.”

She picked up an almost transparent green robe that had been flung over a chair and slipped into it. The robe helped some, but not much, because I could still see right through it. But it did nothing for me because the woman’s name was Audrey Dunlap, she was thirty-two, a widow, and also my sister, the millionaire dope fiend.

I tried heroin once when I was sixteen and I liked it very much. So much, in fact, that I never tried it again on the theory that anything that made you feel that good must be bad for you. I think I acquired that particular mind set from the German side of my family. Certainly not the French.

Over the years I had tried most of the other drugs out of mild curiosity and most of them only made me feel dopey. Pot does absolutely nothing for me except make me cough a lot and giggle a bit. I never tried LSD, primarily because of my schizoid tendencies which, I have been assured, are pronounced. For my nerves I sometimes take a little gin.

My sister, on the other hand, had never tried heroin because she said she was saving it. I never asked her for what because she might have come up with the answer. She made do, or did the last time I had talked to her, with a little coke and hash and Quaalude and pot, which were all rather fashionable that year and my sister, if nothing else, was fashionable.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose you want a drink.”

“You got anything to eat?”

“You know where it is.”

“Where’s Sally?” I said. Sally Raines was my sister’s black companion, confidante, social secretary, and connection.

“She took the kids over to the park.”

“How are they?”

“Six and five,” she said. “Do you remember when I was six?”

“Too well.”

“Well, they’re both just like me.”

“A pain in the ass.”

“Right.”

“Why don’t you all come out to the farm Saturday,” I said. “I fixed up a swing that goes out over the pond.”

“Like the one in Opelousas?”

I looked at her. She was smiling at me. “I didn’t think you remembered that,” I said.

“I remember everything,” she said. “It was the summer of forty-eight. You were fifteen and I was five and the swing went out over the river or the creek or lake or whatever it was and you held me and then we fell a mile into the water. That was a hell of a summer, wasn’t it?”

“It was fine,” I said. “So why don’t you bring the kids out Saturday?”

“Ruth wouldn’t mind?”

“You know Ruth.”

“Ruth’s all right,” she said. “The only thing wrong with Ruth is that she makes me feel as if I’ve got some part missing. By comparison, I mean. I like her. I like her a lot. Did I ever tell you that?”

“You didn’t have to.”

“But then you and I don’t ever talk about anything, do we?”

“Who does?”

“Do you and Ruth?”

“Sometimes.”

“What about?”

“Everything,” I said. “Anything. Nothing.”

“It must be fun.”

“It’s different.”

We were still in the living room, which was furnished in my sister’s eclectic but impeccable taste. It was a blend of antique and contemporary furniture although blend makes it sound far too tame. Everything contrasted dramatically without jarring and the living room and the entire house, for that matter, had appeared in the Sunday supplements of half a dozen or so newspapers. Often Audrey, and maybe the kids, too, would be seen in the pictures, all dressed up, and even if you knew her very well and looked very closely, you couldn’t tell that the beautiful young matron was half spaced out.

I followed her back into the kitchen. “You want something to eat?” I said as I opened the refrigerator, which was large enough to have done for a small hotel.

“I just got up,” she said. “I think I’ll have some tea.”

I turned, put the kettle on, and went back to the refrigerator. There was a lot to choose from — cold roast beef, ham, fried chicken, several kinds of wurst, and maybe nine kinds of cheese. I decided on a chicken leg and roast beef sandwich. My sister watched as I made it.

“Guess who called the other day?” she said.

“Who?”

“Slick.”

The kettle started to whistle so I put a tea bag in a cup, poured the water in, and placed the saucer on top of the cup on the unproved theory that it would make it steep better. Then I went back to the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. It was Coors beer. It would be.

“Well,” I said. “How’s Slick?”

“Chipper,” she said. “Jaunty. Maybe even ebullient.”

“And as full of shit as ever.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I only talked to him over the phone. He asked about you.”

“What’d he ask?” I said, moving my sandwich and beer over to the kitchen table, which provided a view of the garden, fountain and all. The garden also had been featured in the Sunday supplements. My sister sat down opposite me with her tea.

“He wanted to know if you were still in hiding.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That as far as I knew you still were.”

I shook my head. “I’m not in hiding. We’ve got a phone in and everything now. You’ve got the number. So does Slick.”

“Does it ever ring?”

“Last week,” I said. “It rang last week.”

“Did you answer it?”

“I was outside and by the time I got there they’d hung up.”

“Have you got a cigarette?” she said.

“I’ll roll you one.”

“God, you’re quaint.” She rose, found a carton in a cabinet, tore open a pack, and lit the long, brown cigarette with a paper match. She blew some smoke out and said, “That suit. Are you supposed to be dressed up or something?”

I looked down at my suit. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s ten years old. At least ten.”

“Eleven.”

“What’s the occasion?” she said. “The last time you dropped by you were wearing your Big Mack overalls and your shitkicker high-tops.”

“Somebody wants to pay me a whole bunch of money for two weeks’ work. I thought I should look neat and earnest.”

“I liked the overalls better. Who’s paying you the bunch of money?”

“Roger Vullo.”

Audrey made a face indicating that she didn’t think much of Roger Vullo.

“You know him?” I said.

“We’ve met. He’s weird. What’re you supposed to do for him?”

“Give him my opinion about what happened to Arch Mix.”

She took it well enough. There was a slight tremor in her left hand as she raised the cigarette to her lips, but I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking for it.

“You’re a real son of a bitch, aren’t you?” she said.

“Probably.”

She got up and went over to the sink and ran the burning end of her cigarette under the tap and dropped it down the disposal. She switched on the disposal and let it run for a while, for much longer than was really needed. Then she turned back.

“It’s funny,” she said.

“What?”

“How much alike you and Slick are.”

“Sure.”

“When Slick called last week he wanted to know all about the kids and me. He must have talked for fifteen minutes about that. I thought he’d never shut up. He even offered to take the kids to the zoo. I told him they hated the zoo. Well, he dropped the kids and switched to me. How was I feeling? Was there anything he could do for me? Maybe we could go to dinner soon. And then — ever so casually, he even lapsed into French — he said, by the way, he was just wondering whether I had any idea of what might have happened to Arch Mix. And that was going to be your next question, too, wasn’t it, Harvey?”

“Sure,” I said again.

“Well, I’ll tell you the same thing I told Slick before I hung up on him. I don’t know what happened to Arch. We broke up six weeks ago. He vanished or disappeared or dropped out of sight four weeks ago. He’s dead by now, I guess. He must be dead.”

“It lasted quite a while, didn’t it?”

Audrey turned and started opening and closing cabinets. She finally found what she was looking for, a bottle of Scotch. She poured some into a glass, drank it down, and made a face. She seldom drank. She poured more Scotch into the glass, added water this time, and sat back down at the kitchen table across from me.

“You know how long it lasted,” she said. “A year. Then when he broke it off I came running to my big brother for what — solace? Comfort? A pat on the head? Well, I suppose I got as much from you as you’ve got to give. But Ruth made it worth the trip. She let me talk.”

“I let you talk.”

“You let me talk for fifteen minutes and then started fidgeting.”

“I made a mistake,” I said. “I didn’t know how serious it was. Mix wasn’t the first married man you’d busted up with.”

“I keep forgetting that I’m the whore of the eastern seaboard.”

“I said I made a mistake. A bad one.”

“I reckon that’s as close to an apology as you’re capable of,” she said. Sometimes my sister used reckon, sometimes guess. The reckon came from the South and the guess came from the North. Her voice was much like our mother’s which had had a French tinkle to it although, unlike our mother, Audrey had no accent except upper-income, undefinable American.

She drank a swallow of her Scotch and water and made another face. “How do people drink this stuff?”

“Practice,” I said. “It helps if you don’t start before breakfast.”

“They came to see me.”

“Who?”

“The cops.”

“How were the cops?” I said.

“Polite. Firm. Thorough. And puzzled, I reckon. Or maybe that’s just how they try to appear. I haven’t had too much experience with the police.”

“What about Mix?”

“What about him?”

“I mean how did he seem the last time you saw him?”

Audrey lit another of her long brown cigarettes. This time it seemed to taste better to her. “Noble,” she said. “He was being noble. Sad, noble and nervous.”

“You mean about going back to the kids and the little woman?”

She nodded slowly. “It’s strange how some men get after they turn forty or maybe fifty, especially if they marry early. They find something younger and perhaps prettier and they think it’s going to be their last chance so they grab it. But then they get guilty or scared or both and go back to where it was safe. Dull, perhaps, but safe.”

“You said he was nervous. Was there anything else that was worrying him?”

“If there was, he didn’t talk about it. We talked about Us and Art and Literature and Life. I tried to capitalize all those things, but I’m not sure I made it.”

“You did all right.”

“And sometimes he’d talk about Her. That’s capitalized, too.”

I nodded.

“Well, one time he said that shortly after he’d turned forty he woke up, rolled over, and realized that for fifteen years he’d been married to a stranger.”

“That’s not very noble.”

“But think of the sacrifice he made by going back to her.”

“She’s not all that bad.”

“Mother would have said coarse.”

“Mother was a snob.”

Audrey shrugged. “So am I.”

“You can afford to be.”

“It’s funny, but he was never interested in that. The money, I mean. I can tell. Jesus, how I can tell.”

“Well, rich young widows are rather popular.”

“He mentioned you a couple of times,” she said. “In passing.”

“Oh? He spoke well of me, I trust.”

“Not very.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said that you were a man with principles but no purpose and that he felt sorry for you.”

“You defended me, of course.”

“I said I wasn’t too sure about the principles.”