Operation Stranglehold (4 page)

“When a man in Senator Winters’ position in Washington leans on a government agency, you know perfectly well what’s going to happen,” Hazel said. “If you feel this strongly about it, why are you considering going to see him?”

“Because he said the magic word,” I replied. “Money. I’d be delighted to beat him out of a couple of oil wells.”

“Be serious, Earl. We don’t need money. We don’t need to go back to Ely. I’ll have Nate Pepperman sell the ranch and we’ll set up somewhere else.”

Hazel had inherited money from two husbands and invested it wisely. She regarded it now as my money, too. I tended to look at it differently. Besides, I knew what the ranch meant to Hazel. She’d been raised there. “We’ll talk later,” I said. “Right now hurry it up.”

We checked out and took a cab to the airport after Hazel called the private flying field and instructed them to hangar the Cessna until further notice. The girl at the UAL desk accepted without question my statement that we were flying at Senator Winters’ expense.

I’d expected to be stopped by a metal detector with the gun on my belt, and I was ready to give someone an argument. I wanted the 9-mm. in Washington with me. Instead, we were ushered into a private lounge until the plane arrived, and then we boarded it via a separate entrance.

“I wonder how many shares of United Air Lines stock you have to own before you’re afforded that kind of treatment,” Hazel observed as we settled ourselves aboard the plane.

I hardly heard her. I was already planning how to handle the Washington end of things with as little exposure as possible. I didn’t want Hazel seen by Winters’ people. Not until I knew more than I knew now, certainly.

We arrived at Washington National Airport without incident. It’s a place of which I have unfond memories due to a foulup on a caper into which Karl Erikson had plunged me. “You leave with the first group off,” I told Hazel while the plane was taxiing in from the landing strip. “I’ll wait until the crowd thins out and then meet you at the newsstand at the east end of the terminal.”

She nodded her understanding. I was sure that Winters’ office had been informed about his guest passengers before the plane ever left the runway in Kansas City, and he would have to be a flaming idiot if he didn’t have a UAL employee try to point us out to someone stationed at the Washington ramp exit. Leaving separately should confuse the UAL employee.

I debarked with the stragglers and hustled to a pay phone. I called Winters’ office, and the mention of my name brought the resonant voice on the line immediately. I doubted that Winters was always this handy. Something was gnawing at the senator. “I’m in Washington, as you probably already know,” I needled him.

“I’ve had about enough of this hare-and-hounds business!” he snapped, confirming my judgment that he had someone at the airport who had undoubtedly just hung up after confessing failure to view us.

“Okay. Where do we meet?”

“Nowhere near my office,” he said promptly.

We kicked it around, and finally settled upon Rock Creek Park after determining we both knew the ford where the creek bed crosses the roadway. “In an hour,” I said.

“Fine,” Winters agreed. “I won’t be alone, but I assure you our conversation will be private.”

I joined Hazel at the newsstand, and we went to the car rental desk. I explained the situation to her while I was driving across the Fourteenth Street Bridge. “You can check into the Shoreham for us while I’m meeting Winters,” I concluded.

“But I want to go along, too,” she protested.

“Not this time, baby. Let me get the shape of things first.”

She didn’t like it, but she’d learned when I meant things. I left her in the capable hands of the Shoreham staff, then continued out along Connecticut Avenue toward the District line. I turned at Military Road and followed the winding, scenic highway through Rock Creek Park. Lilacs, forsythia, and dogwood were in blossom everywhere.

I made one stop en route to the ford. I pulled over in a parking area and strolled into the woods carrying my cosmetics-and-wig case. Shielded from the road by thick shrubbery, I changed hairpieces and facial makeup. If anything went wrong during our meeting, I didn’t intend that Senator Winters would be able to identify me easily afterward.

A long black limousine was parked illegally on the grass at the east side of the ford. I drove through the hubcap-deep water flowing over the road and stopped a few yards beyond the limousine. A youngish-looking man in a dark business suit and chauffeur’s cap was standing beside it. His suit fit poorly enough to disclose a familiar bulge under his left arm.

I could see a burly-looking upper body and a photogenic mass of white hair in the back seat of the limousine. No one else was in the car. The whitehaired man was climbing out of the back seat when I approached the limousine. The aide-chauffeur-bodyguard held the car door for him, meantime studying me as one strange dog does another.

The whitehaired man spoke when I was still yards away from him, and even with no walls to contain or amplify it, his voice boomed like the lower register of a pipe organ. “Where are my men, Drake?” he demanded without preliminary. Senator “Cotton” Ed Winters’ hard blue eyes inventoried me thoroughly. I was glad I’d made the hairpiece switch.

“Under glass,” I answered him.

Winters made an impatient gesture. He stalked a few yards away from the car, out of earshot of the aide but not out of sight or gun range. The senator moved purposefully though not athletically. He wheeled to confront me again, careful not to place himself between me and the watchful bodyguard. I wasn’t the only one being cautious.

“What could have happened to foul up the delivery of a simple message to you?” he asked me. He held his voice down, but it still contained a trumpetlike quality. Winters had a strong-looking face, deeply lined. It was the face of a wounded eagle: dangerous.

I told him what had gone wrong, in detail. He stood there shaking his white head, slowly at first, then more rapidly as I warmed to my subject. I concluded with the forced departure of Bruno and Smitty from the ranch, but without mentioning how it had been accomplished.

“Dammitall, I should have warned them they weren’t dealing with a precinct captain,” Winters said irritably. His chilly eyes were still cataloguing me. “What’s your background, Drake?”

“Nothing that would interest you, Senator.”

“Then what was your connection with Karl Erikson that his office would send me to you?”

I chose my words carefully. “I’d been with him a time or two, but they were brushing you off, Senator. Look at it from their point of view. You’d used up their man, and you were back on their doorstep again. They steered you to me to get rid of you.”

“Nobody gets rid of me for long, Drake.” The organ voice was tinged with icicles. “I like to know with whom I’m doing business, so I pulled a report on you before I sent Bruno and Smitty to Ely. I didn’t learn much….”

I made no reply.

He was still studying me. “What’s the matter with your face?” he asked bluntly.

“It was rebuilt once.”

He nodded, started to say something, then changed his mind. “Would I be correct in assuming that my overture to you rousted you from a hiding place?” he asked finally.

“Essentially you’d be correct,” I agreed.

“Erikson’s office assured me he was the most capable man available for the job I wanted done,” Winters said. “Are you the next most capable man?” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “I appealed to Erikson’s patriotism. I’ve based a fifty-year public career on making seat-of-the-pants judgments of people, and I don’t feel that’s the approach to take with you. I estimate you to be a younger version of myself, a cantankerous sonofabitch, junior grade.”

He waited for a reaction, but I didn’t give him any.

“Let’s talk about money,” he went on after a momentary silence during which I could hear birds twittering in the nearby blue spruce trees. “Like a hundred thousand dollars.”

“I have respect for a hundred thousand dollars, Senator,” I said when Winters paused again.

“So I’ll appeal to your respect for a hundred thousand dollars,” Winters said. He gave me a brief smile as wintry as his name. “I have a job I want done. I don’t care how it’s done, I don’t want to know how it’s done, I just want it to get done. I used my influence to have Erikson assigned to me, to go to Spain and retrieve the son of a man who will be my party’s next presidential candidate.”

“Retrieve?” I said.

“The boy is in a Spanish jail for marijuana possession. The Spanish aren’t as enlightened as we seem to be. The penalty is severe, and the publicity would be disastrous. So far they don’t know who the boy is. Erikson was injured while attempting to release him, and they’re both in the same border detention center now. The crunch will come when they’re moved from the border to the capitol for arraignment. The situation is so delicate politically that no ordinary measures can be employed. I’ll pay to have the boy returned to the U.S. without publicity.”

“How will you pay, Senator?”

“How?” He gestured widely. “You name it.”

I thought about it for a couple of minutes. “The report you pulled on me undoubtedly mentioned Hazel Andrews,” I suggested.

“Yes.” Winters permitted himself another brief smile. “A character, evidently, albeit a sharp character.”

“Okay. Put the hundred grand in escrow in her name in the main branch of the Washington Bank & Trust Company, to be released by you upon completion of the job.”

“In
her
name?” Winters said sharply. “If anything happened to you, I might have trouble getting the money returned with a clever woman involved.”

I was counting on that, although I didn’t say so. “I’m planning on being with her when she collects, Senator,” I said.

He mulled it over briefly, then shrugged. “You’ve got me over a barrel, Drake. It’s a deal. I’ll set it up as soon as I get back to the office.”

The senator was a man who obviously trusted his seat-of-the-pants judgments.

“Where shall I send you the balance of the details you’ll find it necessary to know?” he asked.

“To the Shoreham.”

He nodded. “You realize that you are absolutely, unqualifiedly upon your own?” The eagle eyes peered at me. “No backup? No intervention if there’s trouble?”

For a lot of years it had never been any other way. “I understand.”

“Then we’re in business.”

Senator “Cotton” Ed Winters returned to his car, climbed stiffly into the rear seat, and was driven away.

I left the park and drove back to the Shoreham.

“What feeling did you get about Winters himself?”
Hazel called to me from the hotel bathroom where she was rinsing out underwear.

“A sharp-toothed shark,” I replied.

I’d told Hazel everything about the meeting except Winters’ $100,000 offer. She emerged from the bathroom in a clinging slip and sat down on the edge of the bed. I was lolling in an armchair, sipping a brandy recently delivered by a Room Service waiter.

She fluffed out the solid mass of her red-gold hair until it dripped loosely upon her bare shoulders. “I’m glad we’re going to do it,” she said.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Rescue Karl.”

“You weren’t listening, baby. Rescuing Erikson isn’t even on Winters’ agenda. He just wants the son of his favorite political candidate removed from the clutches of the Spanish police.”

Hazel rose from the bed and came over and seated herself on my lap. “But we don’t need to follow the senator’s agenda, do we?” she murmured with her lips against my ear. “You can rescue Karl. You know you can.”

Beneath the tightly clinging slip there was just Hazel. Her clean-smelling hair tickled my nostrils. I slipped an arm around her waist, then lowered my hand and stroked and patted her silky curvilinear amplitudes. She snuggled down firmly against me.

“You know I’ve blown the ranch for you, don’t you, baby?” I tried to change the subject. It was very much on my mind. I knew how she felt about the ranch. Even if I disappeared, leaving her alone, she couldn’t go back without facing harassment from Winters, who would start looking for me there. He hadn’t mentioned Bruno and Smitty after his opening question to me, but we both knew that the rules of the game required their appearance.

Hazel turned her head again and nuzzled my ear lobe with soft lips. My toes started to tingle. “There’s other ranches, Earl,” she said softly. “We’ll set up someplace else.”

It was like her to say it. I was still hot at Erikson’s chief for exposing me to Winters, but I could understand it better after meeting the senator. The man really generated pressure.

Erikson’s chief had simply taken the easiest way out. I wasn’t one of his men, and it probably wouldn’t have helped too much if I had been. He had to get Winters off his back, and he’d done it, using me. I didn’t like being used.

If Hazel and I couldn’t go back to the ranch, I’d feel better if I could hand Hazel $100,000. Not that $100,000 would replace childish memories. Not that she needed the cash. It wasn’t Hazel the $100,000 would make feel better. It was me.

My train of thought was slowly dissolved by the increasing sensation afforded by the big, warm, scantily clad female body on my lap. The absentminded strokes and pats I had been dealing her malleable rondures took on a sudden fervor. Hazel sensed the difference immediately; she turned her head for the third time, and her lips fused with mine.

It was a long, electrifying kiss.

It was a kiss fraught with recollections of past sexual extravagances and exciting images of present possibilities.

When it ended, Hazel rose from my lap wordlessly and walked to the bed. I followed, shedding clothing en route. She made a teasing game of my removing her slip. Acres of dazzling white flesh became exposed to my eyes and hands. I was throbbing like a two-cycle engine. Hazel took hold of the throb, then went down on her back, and we blended in the mindless ballet that practice makes perfect.

I’ve said it before: It’s best when there’s nothing frantic about it. We matched rhythm which only gradually changed from blissful waltz to furious gavotte; from controlled exercise to heart-pounding frenzy. “You’re really—with it today—lover,” Hazel whispered to me.

I was already experiencing the deep-tingling prelude. I gripped soft, yielding buttocks hard, and the resultant double-barreled eruption wrenched us half-sideways on the bed.

The telephone rang.

Hazel laughed joyously as I raised my head and looked at it.

It rang several more times before I gathered myself and went over to it and picked it up. “Yeah!” I rasped.

“This is John Emery from Senator Winters’ office, old boy,” a cheerful voice announced blithely. “The senator felt a personal briefing might serve our joint purpose better than sending you an envelope of cold type.”

“You mean he wanted nothing in writing about the deal out on the loose.”

“There’s that to be said about it, too,” the cheerful voice admitted. “Where would you like to meet?”

“There’s a tavern on M Street in Georgetown called the Potomack Inn.”

“Excellent. Thirty minutes?”

I glanced at the bed where Hazel was sprawled in languorous abandon. “Make it forty-five.”

“Done.”

“How will I know you?”

“I’ll know you, Mr. Drake. The senator was most explicit about your appearance.” The line clicked in my ear.

I went back to the bed.

“Aren’t we lucky that lower Connecticut Avenue and Wisconsin Avenue are close enough together to give us time for this?” Hazel teased me as we began a highly satisfactory second inning.

“I could’ve told him a week later instead of forty-five minutes,” I responded with my lips against her throat.

She laughed again.

There was no more conversation.

The Shoreham had better check into the furniture-depreciation aspect of their room-pricing policy. I have a feeling they’re losing money.

• • •

The Potomack is a pseudo-Revolutionary hostelry. I entered its oak-beamed, dark-paneled, comfortably old-fashioned premises and glanced around. No one stepped up to claim me, so I permitted a long-skirted hostess to seat me in a booth. Since I was to be recognized, I’d been careful to use the same hairpiece and makeup style I’d worn at the meeting with Senator Winters.

I had had a Thanksgiving dinner at the Potomack some years before. Its menu, historically authentic, was taken from a letter written in 1779. It featured roast turkey with walnut cornbread dressing, venison with Cumberland sauce, roast goose stuffed with apples and grapes, chine of pork with ginger sauce, epigrams of beef, and baked hen in Scuppernong wine. Our forefathers ate well while they were creating the country.

I ordered a Jim Beam on the rocks that I didn’t want and I hoped I hadn’t long to wait.

I still had half my drink when a slim, blondhaired man entered the restaurant. He ignored the hostess while he studied the diners. He looked like a Saville Row dandy who had had Joseph’s coat of many colors re-created in weskit, jacket, and trousers of extreme cut. “Ah, there!” he said with a little wave to me, then came to my booth and seated himself across from me.

He extended a hand across the table top. “I’m John Emery,” he announced. There was nothing dandyish about his firm handshake.

“Earl Drake,” I confirmed. “What was the senator so explicit about concerning my appearance?”

Emery produced a smile as debonair as his appearance. “The senator’s little joke,” he said. “I was instructed that you’d be the only man in the place who looked as though he could eat Billy the Kid for breakfast and Wyatt Earp for lunch.” Emery’s smile brightened; it was a genuine toothpaste-ad smile.

“I’ll look up the senator when I need a press agent,” I responded.

But Emery had finished with the niceties. “The first point in our dialogue, old boy, concerns Bruno and Smitty. I trust that nothing permanent has happened to them? The senator was adamant that I determine their condition as my first order of business. He is prepared to concede their obnoxiousness while still cherishing their good health.” Emery’s bright smile was guileless, but his piercing gray eyes were not.

“Bruno’s a little scuffed up, but they’re healthy,” I said.

“Bravo,” Emery approved. “You understand, of course, that their—ah—resurrection is a requisite for your continued employment?”

The guy sounded like a first-class cookie pusher, but something about the eyes and the set of the mouth told me that he wasn’t. “Provided there’s no glitch in the terms of employment,” I agreed.

“Oh, I’d say that’s impossible,” Emery returned lightly. “You seem to have carte blanche in the manner of your procedure. My curiosity’s quite piqued, in fact. The senator is rarely this liberal. You must come extremely well recommended. Of course that would be a requirement for the task.”

“Speaking of which—”

“Yes. The boy’s name is Walter Croswell. His father is Raymond Croswell, chairman of the board of Croswell Industries.” Emery paused to see if the information had created the proper impression.

It had. Croswell Industries was at the top of the tree as a successful worldwide organization on the order of a semi-conglomerate. One of its products with which I’d had firsthand experience was a superior brand of plastic explosives.

“Raymond Croswell has been a kingmaker in politics for a long time,” Emery went on. “This year because splintered party factions cannot agree upon a candidate, Senator Winters prevailed upon Mr. Croswell to make himself available. He will almost surely be the party’s presidential nominee. Any leak about his son’s present predicament would damage his candidacy, of course, and the senator is most anxious that this shall not happen.”

“So that means—”

“There remains the fact that Mr. Croswell is anxious to see his son in less—ah—uncomfortable circumstances,” Emery interrupted me.

“Then why doesn’t he do something about it himself?”

“A small element of lesson teaching.”

“The kid’s been in trouble before?”

“I’ve never met the young man.” Emery evaded my query.

“But he’s a spoiled brat?”

“Why should we deal in gossip when what you need are facts?” Emery countered. “The foremost of which is that Walter Croswell is in detention at Lanuza. That’s near the French border, northeast of Vaca. He was caught with marijuana in his possession at the northern Spanish border. He didn’t give his real name, and the U.S. Embassy in Madrid has covered his disappearance to date with a cover story of lost contact during a hiking trip in the mountains. Haste is necessary, because the boy is scheduled—for the second time—to be brought down from the border for arraignment.”

“For the second time?”

“The first was interrupted by Karl Erikson’s rescue attempt.” Emery paused. “Which failed.”

“And Erikson was hurt?”

“So we’ve been informed.”

I waited, but Emery had nothing more to say on the subject. Afraid of spooking me, I speculated. “So at this point the Spanish authorities have no knowledge of possible political repercussions from their capture?”

“A situation possible only because of the nonlimelight status of the small border town in which it took place …”

“Spell it out for me,” I invited.

“Your mission is to recover Walter Croswell in any way possible that doesn’t involve the U.S. Embassy or any other government agency. You should understand clearly that this is a privately sponsored venture which has no connection with any official sources. Knowledge of the mission is known to just a few select individuals, and it has no recognition or backing from any government group.”

“Nobody wants to make a grab at the hot potato.”

“You could say that,” Emery agreed.

“Suppose I do spring the kid. What then?”

“Get him and yourself out of the country immediately.”

“And Erikson?”

“Oh, yes, Erikson too. If possible. If circumstances permit.” Emery hesitated. “He can always be released later working through channels.”

“Is that your attitude toward me, too?”

“This is not a penny-ante game, Drake.”

“Erikson’s expendable?” I persisted. “I’m expendable? I just like to know these things.”

“I wasn’t led to believe you were the type who needed to have his hand held.” Emery felt he had wasted enough time on nonessentials; he proceeded with the briefing. “Croswell Industries has a branch office in Madrid. Sam Morgan is branch manager. You can call upon him for financial and material assistance, but he is not to know the reason for the effort being made. Erikson reported before his—ah—accident that the transfer of detainees to the arraignment site involves movement on foot from Lanuza to a mountain village from which they would then be moved by truck to Madrid. Once in Madrid your task would be next door to impossible. Your best chance is to intercept young Croswell in the mountains.”

“What happened to Erikson’s interception?”

“We don’t know.”

I doubted the calmly made statement. “You realize you could keep me from making the same mistake if you told me what happened to him?”

Emery ignored me. “Before all systems become go—” he smiled at me blandly “—there’s one final detail.”

“Yes?”

“Bruno and Smitty. The senator requires that I speak to them personally before he sets up the financial arrangement you discussed.”

“You don’t mean he thinks I killed them?” I asked in pretended amazement.

“He insists upon assurance to the contrary,” Emery said suavely.

“They’ll call you within a couple of hours,” I promised.

“Then that concludes our business,” Emery said briskly. “Sam Morgan will reimburse you for your air fare to Madrid, and he will also advance you any reasonable amount necessary for the project.”

“Reasonable amount?” I repeated. “What about chartering a plane if necessary?”

“If you’re speaking figuratively, yes,” Emery replied. “The money will be no problem, but I’m sure you’ll find the Spanish government retains much tighter control over private citizens in the area of transportation than we in this country seem to feel necessary.”

“I believe that does it,” I decided. “Unless there’s anything else I need to know?”

Emery spread his hands. “Nothing.”

We slid from the booth and stood up. This time Emery made no move to shake hands. I was now an employee in the presence of one of the company wheels. He nodded to me and walked from the restaurant.

I followed after paying for my still unfinished drink. I stopped at a drugstore at the next corner and used the pay phone to call Kansas City. “This is the hard metals man, Doc,” I said. “You can turn that pair of lovebirds loose. I’ll send you a money order for their keep.”