Missionary Stew (12 page)

He watched for another three minutes, then ran a hand through his thick gray hair, felt the stubble on his face with the same hand, shined his shoes one after the other on the backs of his trouser legs, hitched up his belt, and crossed the street. He went through an iron gate and up a cement walk that curved back and forth for no reason that he could see. On the small porch he found a button and pressed it. He could hear two-tone chimes ring inside. He waited, but the door didn’t open. He would have been disappointed if it had. Only dopes
opened their doors at night. Meade had not come calling on any dope.

Meade rang the doorbell again. A woman's voice from behind the still-closed door said, “Who is it?”

“Me. Drew.”

“Good Lord,” the woman's voice said.

He could hear the chain being removed and the deadbolt being turned back. The door opened a crack. An eye peered out. The door then opened wide.

“Good Lord,” the woman said again. “Come in.”

“How the hell are you, Gladys, anyway?” Meade asked as he went through the door and into the living room.

Gladys Citron was wearing an ivory raw silk robe with a high Chinese collar. She backed up as Meade came into the room. “They say you’re dead.”

Meade nodded and looked carefully around the room. “Yeah, well, I’m not.” He smiled appreciatively at what he saw in the room. “You’re doing all right. You renting this place, or what?”

“I bought it—five years ago.”

“Well, shit, Gladys, aren’t you gonna ask me to sit down, take a load off, have a drink? You’re looking good, by the way. Real good.” “Well, shit, Drew, sit down. Take a load off. Have a drink. Bourbon?”

“Bourbon.”

Drew Meade picked one of the two wing-back chairs that were drawn up before the unlit fireplace and sat down. Gladys Citron turned to a tray that held bottles and glasses, and poured two drinks: bourbon for Meade, white wine for herself. She moved over to Meade, handed him his drink, and sat down in the opposite wing-back chair.

“So,” she said. “I heard you got rich.”

“Yeah, I did. For a while there.” He drank two large swallows and lit one of his Camels.

“What happened?”

“A couple of things fell apart.”

“And they kicked you out.”

“Who says they kicked me out?”

“Don’t try that, Drew,” she said. “Not on me.”

“Okay, so they kicked me out.”

“Heroin, I heard.”

“Some heroin, but a lot of hash. Mostly hash. I got set up by the slope generals.”

“Of course you did.”

“I took the fall.”

“Pity.”

“It was a long way down. The fall. You know what I’ve been doing for ten years now?”

“What?”

“Nickel-and-diming it, trying to come up with two bits. Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Djakarta—the circuit. Opals, a little gold, some blue-sky shares. Hell, I was even a tour guide in Bangkok for a couple of months. The
real
Bangkok, know what I mean?”

“I can imagine,” she said. “Then what?”

“Then—well, then I got lucky.”

“Tell me,” she said. “I like happy endings.”

“What happened is I ran into one of the Maneras brothers. Remember the Manerases?”

She nodded. “At the Bay. They were to have gone in on the first wave, except they were no-shows.”

“The Manerases always were pretty smart—for Cubans.”

“Which one did you run into?”

“Bobby—he's the oldest, isn’t he?”

Again, she nodded.

“Well, Bobby’d got himself into a mess. They were all looking for him. The narcs, some hard cases, the feebies, not to mention a whole bunch of other people. I mean, he was in a real mess. And what's more, he was broke. When I ran into him in Singapore he was living off an American Express gold card he’d dipped off some tourist. So
what the hell, Gladys. You know me. I got a heart as big as a house. I took him in.”

“Why?” she said.

“You got any more of this bourbon?”

“Help yourself.”

“I will.”

Meade crossed to the liquor and made himself another drink. On the way back to his chair he gave the living room another calculating inspection, and then sank down into his chair with a long pleased sigh.

“Why’d you take him in?” she said.

“Bobby? Because he had something to sell. Cheap.”

“What?”

“A story.”

Gladys Citron leaned forward in her chair, caught herself, and leaned back. Drew Meade grinned. She noticed that he still seemed to have all his teeth. They were big teeth, nearly square and absolutely even. They were also a strange shade of very pale yellow, although she now remembered that they had always been that peculiar shade ever since she had first met him in France thirty-what?— dear God, thirty-eight years ago.

“What kind of story?” she said.

“Interested, huh?”

“Perhaps.”

“That's some sheet you help put out, Gladys. I’ve seen a couple of copies. One had a story about this little girl who was swooped up by a flying saucer and flown to the moon or someplace and had a talk with Jesus. Hell of a story. People really buy that crap, huh?”

“Six million copies a week.”

“You pay for some of those stories, right?”

“We pay.”

“You pay pretty good?”

“We can be generous.”

Meade looked around the living room again, much as a bank appraiser might have looked. “How much does a house like this go for?”

“Three-fifty to three-seventy-five now. I paid three-twenty-five.”

“Seems like a hell of a lot to me.”

“It's in Beverly Hills.”

“Jacks up the price, right?”

“Right.”

“I oughta buy a place. Maybe a condo in New York or Chicago. Settle down, you know? Maybe write my memoirs. I’ve even got a title. ‘More Lives Than a Cat.’ What d’you think?”

“They’d never give you clearance.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

“Tell me about Bobby Maneras and his story.”

Meade lit another cigarette from the one he was already smoking. He tossed the finished butt into the fireplace. “I’d like to, Gladys, but I’ve got a little problem.”

“You’re broke.”

“That's part of it.”

“I could fix that.”

“I wanta put my feet up, know what I mean? I’m tired of the hustle. In New York, Chicago, I’d need fifty a year just to get by. That means I’d need half a million, doesn’t it? Put it into municipals maybe.”

“You’re dreaming, Drew.”

“I’m talking about cash, of course.”

She shook her head slowly. “Impossible.”

“I was thinking maybe I could tap you for around a hundred thousand. Secondary rights, I think they call it.” “Who's your principal buyer?”

“Lemme tell you about Bobby first, okay?” She nodded. “Bobby was in a real jam and flat on his ass and all he had to sell was this story of his. Well, shit, I didn’t have any money and he wouldn’t tell me the story until I came up with some. So what I did is, I got him to tell me
just part of the story, and I’ll tell you this much, it's some story. So then I had to figure out who’d pay for what I had. It just so happened there was this guy in Singapore I’d known a little, back in the fifties. I got ten thousand out of him.”

“For just part of the story?”

Meade nodded. “That's how hot it is.”

“Who is he?”

“We’ll get to that. Lemme get back to Bobby. Now Bobby's problem was he had to disappear. So what I did was, I got him a Filipino passport and offered him that and seventy-five hundred for the rest of the story. He grabbed it and for all I know Bobby's in Manila now, probably getting rich all over again.”

“But he told you the rest of the story?”

“Oh, yeah. All of it.”

“Then what?”

“Then I figured I’d better get out of Singapore.”

“Who?”

“They came looking for Bobby.”

“Who?”

“Everybody.” He paused. “And then they started looking for me.” He paused again. “Well, I had just enough money for a ticket to Santiago and then on to Caracas and from there to Mexico City. I crossed over at Mexicali.”

“Walked across?”

He nodded. “I figured I could sell the whole story for a bundle to this same guy who’d paid me ten thousand for just the taste. So I called him from a phone booth in Calexico and guess who I got?”

“I don’t guess. Who?”

“His widow.”

It was a long stare. The cool green eyes locked on the cold hazel ones. Neither gaze wavered. It was Gladys Citron who spoke first, asking a question whose answer she was fairly sure she already knew.

“Did he die in bed?”

Meade shook his head. “It was an accident. They say. A car wreck.”

She rose and reached for Meade's glass. When she was at the liquor, pouring two more drinks, she asked her next question casually, her back still to him.

“Who was he?”

“Replogle. Jack Replogle. John T. Replogle.”

“Replogle Construction,” she said.

“Big bucks, Gladys.”

“An accident, you say,” she said as she turned, moved back to the fireplace, and handed him his drink.

“So his widow claims, but what does she know?”

“What do you do now?”

“There was a guy with him.”

“With Replogle?”

“When the wreck happened. A money guy. He wasn’t hurt.”

“I see. You think he’ll buy.”

“I know he will.”

“And he's here—in L.A.?”

Meade nodded. “He gets first crack; you get second.”

“What's his name?”

Meade swallowed some of his drink and then frowned. “I’ve been trying to decide if I oughta tell you.”

Gladys Citron smiled—a small, slight, confident smile.

“Well, why the hell not? His name's Haere.”

The smile went away. “Draper Haere?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

“We’ve met a time or two.”

“He's a money man,” Meade said. “Politics.”

“I know.”

“What I’ve got is sort of a political shoot-’em-up.”

“I see. Do you know Draper Haere?”

“Sure, I know him. Not well. I used to know his old man pretty good, though. He was a commie.”

“How do you know that?”

“How?” Meade asked with a cold grin. “What the hell, Gladys, I turned him in.”

“To the subcommittee,” she said. “Back in the ‘fifties.”

Meade nodded, still grinning his cold, almost mechanical grin that contained, as far as Gladys Citron could detect, neither regret nor apology. Nor humor, for that matter.

“I want in, Drew,” she said.

“I figured you would.” He frowned as though in warning. “It's big bucks though, understand?”

She shrugged. “I’ll have to make a few calls. You want to spend the night here? There’re a couple of spare rooms.”

“What's wrong with yours?”

“I go for younger men these days.”

“What the hell,” he said, “I’m only thirty-three.” He paused and frowned again. “Maybe thirty-four.”

At three that morning, Gladys Citron rose quietly from her bed, turned to inspect the sleeping Drew Meade, and walked barefoot into the living room. In the bedroom Meade opened his eyes. It was absolutely quiet in the house and he could just make out the woman's low voice as it spoke into the telephone.

“That's right, he's here with me,” she said. “He wants a hundred thousand—for what he calls secondary rights.” There was silence as she listened. “He says he's going to give first crack at it to Draper Haere, that's H-A-E-R-E.” She listened again. “He wants it in cash.” Another brief silence and she said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

In the dark bedroom, Drew Meade stretched and smiled up at the ceiling.

CHAPTER 13

Morgan Citron awoke and turned his head to inspect the left side of the king-size bed that took up most of the space in the small room. Velveeta Keats was no longer there. Citron looked at his new watch and saw that it was a few minutes past four. They had gone to bed around 11:00 and made love—or fooled around, as Velveeta Keats would have it—for forty-five minutes or an hour. Citron hadn’t kept precise track of the time. Velveeta Keats had proved to be a passionate, inventive, even amusing lover much given to acrobatics and experimentation. Despite nearly four hours of sleep, Citron still felt slightly ravaged, but pleasantly so.

He located some of his scattered clothing—his shorts and shirt— put them on and went into the living room, where he found Velveeta Keats standing before the large sliding glass doors, a mug of coffee clutched in her hands. She was wearing a light cotton robe and staring out at the pale moonlight on the ocean. She was also crying, although she made no sound.

Citron put his arms around her. “Still scared?” he said.

He felt her nod against his shoulder. “I reckon … I reckon I’d best call him.”

“Your father.”

There was another nod against his shoulder. “He oughta at least know, hadn’t he?”

“I think so.”

She looked up at him. “What time is it back there?”

“Miami? About seven. Is that too early?”

She shook her head. “He won’t talk to me, though.”

“Not at all?”

Again, she shook her head no. “I suppose I could talk to Mama, but she’d just go into a tizzy. Mama doesn’t much like scary news.”

“Is there anyone else you could talk to—a brother, maybe a sister?”

“I had a brother, but Jimmy killed him.”

“Jimmy?”

“My husband. My late husband. I told you all about him, didn’t I?”

“You mentioned him. That's all.”

“Jimmy found me in bed with Cash.”

“Cash was who?”

“Cash Keats. My brother. He was two years older’n me. I.” She turned away from Citron and resumed her inspection of the moonlit ocean. “Sounds like one of those sorry tales all about Southern decadence and incest, doesn’t it?”

“It happens.”

“Did you ever wanta go to bed with your sister or mama?”

Citron smiled. “Certainly not my mother. I don’t have a sister, so I can’t really say.”

“But you can imagine it?”

“Sure. It's not hard.”

“Well, Papa couldn’t. He quit speaking to me, packed me up, and sent me out here. I call Mama now and then, or she calls me, and she says he hasn’t budged—Papa, I mean.”

“You want me to talk to him?”

She chewed her lower lip before answering. “I—I’d appreciate it.”