Washington Whispers Murder. Leslie Ford
Washington Whispers Murder
Copyright © 1953, renewed 1981, by Zenith Brown.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
I
The man with the traveling bag and briefcase waited quietly on the service stairs of Mrs. Sybil Thorn’s handsome house on Woodley Road in Washington, D. C. When the coast was clear he crossed the hall to the small room second floor back, and stood listening to the cocktail party going on in the rooms below. If he hadn’t caught a quick glimpse of Congressman Hamilton (Call Me Ham) Vair’s heavy blond figure through the pantry door as the maid discreetly slipped his note into Vair’s hand, he’d have thought he’d come to the wrong place to find the man whose private undercover investigator he’d now been for several months. Normally, you didn’t have to look for Ham Vair, much less listen.
He closed the door of the small room and took off his seedy grey overcoat. The glamorous Mrs. Thorn must have been giving Ham Vair lessons in deportment.—Forget that a dizzy columnist ever called you the youthful and handsome Hot Rod from the Marsh Marigold State. Don’t boom, and don’t burst out laughing, and don’t clap people on the back, she’d probably told him . . . or not these people anyway. He remembered the string of shiny limousines parked on both sides of Woodley Road. Because the party was obviously one more step in the master plan to groom Ham Vair for bigger and better things. It took dough, of course, but Sybil Thorn, twice divorced and as cynically ambitious in her way as Vair was in his, had plenty of that, and friends to kick in more when his campaign got rolling.
The man took his briefcase over to the desk. Parties to meet the right people were just frosting . . . for a wedding cake, Sybil Thorn was no doubt figuring, when dime-a-dozen Congressman Ham Vair became Senator Hamilton Vair, one of the prestige-and-power laden Ninety-Six. The real stuff was right here in the mahogany file by the desk, kept in Mrs. Thorn’s back room because Vair was too cagey to keep it in his apartment or in his office on Capitol Hill.—If you called it a file, the man thought dispassionately. A monument, was more like it. A monument to a vindictive personal hatred that circumstances had suddenly converted into the political opportunity of a lifetime. It was a file on a man named Rufus Brent. Rufus Brent’s appointment to head up the new Industrial Techniques Commission had given Congressman Vair, the thirty-one year old representative from Taber City, center of the Ninth District out in the Marsh Marigold State, a target that would make him front page news from coast to coast. And Vair had hated the guts out of Rufus Brent before the Industrial Techniques Commission was ever thought of.
He started to open the file when he saw the ball of crumpled paper lying by the baseboard, as if someone had crushed it up and hurled it at the wastebasket. He picked it up and smoothed it out. It was a page from a weekly news digest that had hit the stands that day. Half-way down the savagely crumpled page he saw why Vair was neither booming nor laughing at the party down there. A single paragraph had jerked the Senate seat out from under his eager posterior.
“Look for an indefinite delay,” it said, “in setting up the new Industrial Techniques Commission. Reason is, nobody to head it. Congressional approval for an agency with unprecedented peacetime power to cut red tape and expedite vitally necessary retooling for late model military and commercial aircraft was based on a strictly bi-partisan agreement to keep the Commission clear of politics. Rufus Brent, able but little-publicized Western industrialist, was unanimously accepted as the Commission czar before the Bill could be submitted to the Congress. He has since been forced to refuse the job, for what are authoritatively stated to be purely personal and private reasons. It is unlikely that anybody else of his calibre that both parties can agree on can be found at this time.”
The man’s face was expressionless as he read it through a second time and put it down on the desk, glancing at the door. Vair barged into the room, his florid handsomely heavy face flushed, his jaw thrust out the way he thrust it out on the hustings, a campaign natural. His blue eyes were glittering.
“Look, you——” He shut the door and lowered his voice to a savage whisper. “You know better than to come here when there are people around. What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re fired. Get out.”
The glitter in his eyes hardened as he looked at the man behind the desk—crisp brown caplike haircut, shaggy at the edges, smooth impassive face, not handsome but casually attractive except for the eyes that were too small, too flat, and too cold-grey, the one flaw in an otherwise perfect counterfeit. The flush on Vair’s face deepened as he saw the man shrug and reach calmly out to pick up his briefcase.
“And wipe that superior smirk off your wellbred mug or I’ll knock it off.” He swung his arm back. “—Investigator. Undercover expert! I knew you were nothing but a high-class shake-down artist, but I didn’t know you were a lousy heel. Four months you’ve been bleeding me white, investigating Rufus Brent, and I have to go buy a twenty-cent magazine to find out the great Western industrialist’s not taking the job.” His voice rose, brutal and mocking. “For purely personal and private reasons. And where the hell have you been? You’re supposed to be hot stuff at personal and private reasons. What the hell have you been doing? Why didn’t you tell me six weeks ago that old devil wasn’t coming to Washington? You let me beat my brains, figuring out my whole campaign to make hash out of Mister Rufus Brent . . . and Mister Rufus Brent’s not coming to Washington. You dirty double-crossing——”
The man went across the room and picked up his coat. “If you’d kept your pants up and your blood pressure down,” he said coolly, “I’d have been glad to tell you . . .”
“Tell me what?”
The man shrugged again. He moved slowly, putting on his coat. With the really big shakedown of his career just in front of him, he couldn’t afford to let Vair fire him now. Congressman Vair had become too important a factor in it.
“I just got fired, remember?” he said casually.
Vair’s blue eyes stabbed him, bright and hard as dagger points. The flush on his face receded. “You’re hired. Stuff it. What’s on your mind? What have you got?”
“Rufus Brent is coming to Washington.” And you could go to hell if he wasn’t. I wouldn’t need you if the old fool had stayed home.
He let his overcoat drop back on the chair. “I didn’t phone because I didn’t want to risk a leak. I flew back. They’ve persuaded him to come—long enough to get ITC organized and rolling anyway. Your senior Senator—the old goat you’re trying to unseat—spent the weekend with him. Devotion to duty is what they call it, I believe.”
Vair’s eyes were bright, his jaw and hands working. “Oh, man!” he said softly. “Oh, brother! That’s what I wanted to hear. I’m going to crucify him. I’m going to make the Toolmaker wish he’d never come into my state and my district to build one of his damned plants. He’s going to rue the day he walked in there and rooked me out of thirty-five thousand fast and easy bucks on the scrap deal I worked like a hog to get going. I’d be a rich man right now if it hadn’t been for Mister Rufus Brent. He’ll see.” He laughed shortly. “We don’t like foreigners in my state. They’ll run him out of there on a rail before I get through with him. He’ll wish he’d made the measly contribution I crawled to ask him for. He’ll wish he’d let me take his red-haired daughter to the Brentool Village square dance when I offered to. He can snap his fingers at Congressman Ham Vair, but Senator Vair. . . . He’ll crawl, damn him. Mister Rufus Brent’ll crawl till his knees bleed. And the red-head’ll crawl too.”
He crossed the room to the panelled cupboard by the fireplace, reached up to open it and jerked his head back. “What about that girl?” he demanded abruptly. “Where is she? Where is Miss Molly Brent? Have you found her yet?”
“Not her. I’ve found a couple of pictures of her. I don’t know whether you’ll want to use them. They may be too hot to handle. I don’t know just how far you want to go.”
He opened his briefcase slowly, delaying as he’d