Outside they heard Margaret’s voice. “Oh, sweetie, what a wonderful big boy you are. Thank you,” she sang.
“She’s trying to teach him to bring the paper in,” Chinese Gordon muttered. “He doesn’t get the idea yet. He keeps grabbing it and running out the door. That’s the third time today.”
Kepler popped the top of a beer can and stared at Chinese Gordon. “You really ought to break him of that.”
Chinese Gordon’s jaw tightened, the muscles on the side of his face working convulsively. He said quietly, “I’d like to do that. I’d like to. What do you think of the car accident?”
Kepler sipped his beer. “You train the cat too?” Chinese Gordon looked up to see Doctor Henry Metzger walking backward, laboriously dragging a large turkey leg through the kitchen doorway onto the balcony.
“Margaret probably gave him a treat,” he lied. He remembered leaving it out on the counter when he was making room for Kepler’s beer in the refrigerator. “He likes turkey.”
“He must.”
“What about the car accident?”
“It would be hard to know what really happened to them, but I agree with the President. Foul play can never be ruled out—or something like that. That good big sweetie out there nearly tore my arm off fetching the paper out into the alley, so I don’t remember the exact words. I suppose they might have gone along to watch their agents spring the trap on the late lamented Jorge Grijalvas and gotten taken out.”
“Doesn’t sound likely, does it? I mean, those two weren’t career spooks, they were appointed. They were both fatassed businessmen a year ago.”
Margaret walked in the door wearing large saucer-shaped sunglasses and a bathing suit. The dog followed her, with the newspaper still clenched in its jaws, leaping with pleasure and uttering muffled grunts. “Here’s the paper,” she said. The dog rushed up and dropped the newspaper on the floor. It was wet and had been chewed through in the middle.
Kepler looked down at it. “Smart as a whip, and a mouth like velvet. If we could get him to fetch those Donahue papers, our problems would be over.”
Margaret passed on up the stairs. At the top she called, “Chinese, you can’t give Doctor Henry Metzger a whole turkey leg. He’ll choke on the bones.” Then she said more quietly, “Come on, Doctor Henry, let me cut that up for you.”
Kepler sipped his beer and studied Chinese Gordon. “That’s curious,” Kepler said. Then his eyes seemed to brighten. “No, I guess you’re right. Those two were too important and therefore worthless for a night operation in the great outdoors. Let me look at the newschow and see how much of it I can read.” He gingerly peeled off part of the front page and examined the article. After a few moments he said, “In-house doctors, in-house autopsy, only CIA people on the scene. If they weren’t at Jorge’s final fiesta I’d say they were burned by their own band of merry men.”
Chinese Gordon nodded. “Okay, if that’s true, what does it mean?”
“A man whose animals outsmart him should not pretend he’s Socrates. Stop asking me questions you think you know the answers to.”
Margaret leaned over the balcony and said to Chinese Gordon, “Immelmann’s on his way, and I told him to bring a fresh newspaper.”
Kepler said, “Good, you can show him your dog’s reverse fetch.”
Chinese Gordon shrugged. “I don’t know why I waste my time talking to you. Margaret, tell him your theory.”
“What I think is that these two did not die in a car accident. They didn’t die at Palm Springs either. Therefore they were killed. The CIA is hiding the way it really happened, so they must have killed them. It doesn’t matter why they did it, what matters is that there are new people making the decisions now who know that the Director was killed.”
“So?”
“So even if it had nothing to do with the Donahue papers, they’ll be much more interested in keeping them a secret, because they have a whole new reason to worry about setting off an investigation.”
“I suppose so.”
“You suppose so?” said Immelmann from the doorway. The dog rushed to Kepler, snapped up the soggy newspaper again, and ran with it to Immelmann. “No thanks, old fella. I brought my own. Hey, Margaret, you’re doing great with him.”
“Yeah,” said Kepler. “She’s teaching him to take out the garbage.”
Immelmann said, “Well, what did you decide? Are we going to take them up on it?”
“Up on what?” said Chinese Gordon.
“I thought that was why you wanted me to bring my newspaper. Didn’t you read it? They made us another offer.”
Washington—(AP)—Benjamin Porterfield, who recently left the Mr. Food Corporation to become president of the prestigious Washington-based Seyell Foundation, announced to the Foundation’s trustees today the results of the independent audit he ordered upon assuming the post. The audit, conducted by the Maryland firm of Crabtree and Bacon, revealed that the Seyell Foundation has approximately five million dollars less than had been reported in last year’s audit. Mr. David Welby of Crabtree and Bacon said that it is customary for audits to be conducted whenever there is a change of power in a foundation of this kind, and that there is no implication of dishonesty on the part of previous officers of the trust.
“Actually,” said Welby, “it’s a series of bookkeeping errors made ten to twenty years ago and perpetuated. Tax-exempt organizations are regularly audited, but mainly to see whether someone is doing something he shouldn’t. Nobody, including the government, is interested when a foundation reports its assets too high.” When asked for examples, he mentioned that there was an entry in the list of assets of $619,352 for a house owned by Theophilus Seyell. Welby became curious because the location of the house in New York would indicate a higher value, and later learned that the house had been given to the city in 1954, and the cash value included in the foundation’s report as a cash asset. “It’s sort of pitiful,” said Welby. “The money was counted twice but never existed.”
PORTERFIELD SAT BEHIND THE GIGANTIC DESK in the Seyell Foundation office and stared across the room at the wall where the portrait of Theophilus “Just Plain Ted” Seyell hung above the door. He had already decided it had to go. In the days when Just Plain Ted had occupied this office, before it had been dismantled and transported to Washington, that space had been taken up for thirty years by a portrait of Seyell’s father, painted from Seyell’s description by a young artist of limited talent. Seyell’s father had been long dead by the time Just Plain Ted had become rich enough to require an ancestor. He’d reacted to the need with his usual common sense by hiring the artist who would work cheapest, a man who made his living dashing off caricatures at Coney Island for a quarter each on Sunday afternoons. It was the first time the man had been able to afford to work with oils on canvas, and the result was something like a police reconstruction of an old man wanted for long-forgotten crimes involving piracy on the high seas and the deflowering of virgins. When Just Plain Ted had seen it, the story went, he’d pronounced it satisfactory and paid the artist the thirteen dollars he’d agreed to. Then he’d said to one of his vice- presidents, “Hang the old son of a bitch up there where I can gloat at him now and then.”
During the inventory of the Foundation’s records the old painting had been found behind a filing cabinet in the basement, and Porterfield had decided that the time had come to hang it again.
Kearns walked into the room and sat down in the armchair in front of the desk.
Porterfield raised his hand. “Thanks for coming. And tell Goldschmidt I saw the articles in the paper. They should be fine.”
Kearns nodded. “The transfers are going pretty well. If we can assume that the people who dropped out of sight have the sense to take care of themselves until this thing is cleared up, we’ll be able to protect just about everybody.”
“I don’t suppose anything turned up since I talked to you?”
Kearns started at the pattern on the carpet. “You knew it wouldn’t. These people all worked for Jorge Grijalvas. Nothing about him seems to have any political implications. He was just an old-time gangster. He did
