“Porter, if I let you off the hook tonight, will you make it your first business in the morning? I’ll be in the apartment in the Hotel Washington.”
“I heard you were going to be using it,” Porter Craig said.
“Geoff called me and told me you would be there.”
“And I can’t tell you why, Porter, except that there will be the usual complement of loose women. And seeing that tomorrow will be during business hours, check them out with Dun and Bradstreet—the confidential reports. I want to know who they’re loaning money to.”
“I’m beginning to think this is really important to you. You want to tell me why?”
“It is, and no.”
“All right. I’ll get on it first thing in the morning. Let me write all that down.”
Lowell put the telephone back under bar, picked up his drink, and looked at Captain Portet.
“Porter has not been playing Santa Claus,” he said. “And by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, I think we’re going to have a pretty good idea of just what the Gresham Investment Corporation is.”
“I guess you think I’m an ass,” Portet said. “I feel like one.”
“Yeah, JP, I do,” Lowell said. “But I will forgive you if you come to Washington with me, either tonight, after dinner, or in the very wee hours tomorrow morning.”
“What’s that all about?”
“Felter wants to pick your brains about Joseph Désiré Mobutu,” Lowell said. “Following which, he will return you here in the Lear.”
Lowell drained his drink.
“I’m for the shower,” he said, and walked toward his bedroom. “You think of some plausible reason you can give Hanni for rushing away with me in the middle of the night.”
“You seem pretty confident that I’ll go.”
“I think you’re almost as curious about the Gresham Investment Corporation as I am,” Lowell called over his shoulder.
[ THREE ]
Apartment B-14
Foster Garden Apartments
Fayetteville, North Carolina
2105 10 January 1965
Dinner had been a little late, and if Mrs. Marjorie Portet had been asked, she would have admitted that she would have preferred to dine alone with her husband, rather than with two of his fellow officers.
But just before five, when he had been expected home, Jack had called from Camp Mackall and said he would be a little late, he had to go to the PX at Bragg. He arrived at half past seven, both arms loaded with groceries, and trailed by Captain John S. Oliver and Warrant Officer Enrico de la Santiago, who were each carrying a case of beer.
They were all in fatigue uniforms.
Jack had kissed her, and she had returned the kiss with considerably less enthusiasm than she planned.
The groceries and the beer had been deposited in the kitchen, and the three had left the apartment, to return a few minutes later, staggering under the weight of an enormous cardboard carton.
“What the hell is that?” Marjorie had asked after they had pushed her new coffee table out of the way so they could set the carton down on her new carpet in the middle of the living room.
“I have a speech to make, Miss Marjorie, but first I need a beer,” Johnny Oliver said.
Beer bottles were opened and passed around. The officers, having declined the use of her new pilsner beer glasses, partook of them directly from their necks.
“That, Miss Marjorie, is a wedding present,” Johnny Oliver said. “From Mr. de la Santiago and myself. More precisely, two-thirds of it is a wedding present from Enrico and me. The other third is a small token of my appreciation to you personally for two things. First, for being the only general’s daughter in the history of the Army who did not make a royal pain in the ass of herself to her daddy’s dog-robber.”
“Oh, Johnny!”
“And the second for your deeply appreciated, if doomed to failure, efforts on my behalf with the Ice Princess.”
“Oh, Johnny,” Marjorie had repeated, genuinely surprised that tears had formed in her eyes.
“Unveil the present, Mr. Santiago,” Oliver ordered.
“Yes, sir,” Enrico said.
De la Santiago pulled a wicked-looking knife, which Marjorie hadn’t noticed before, from his boot and slit the carton open.
It held a not-assembled bottled-gas-powered grill, the largest one Marjorie had ever seen.
“I think we have two little problems,” Johnny said. “First, the assembly of that device will require tools, and second, it may not fit on the balcony.”
“There’s a tool set in the Jag,” Jack said.
“You go get it,” Oliver said. “And if Miss Marjorie can come up with a piece of string, for use as a measuring device, we will