Free Missionary Stew by Ross Thomas Page A

looked around the room again. “This looks as if it would be a good place to write. Maybe even a book.”
    “I’m not writing a book, Mrs. Veatch.”
    Haere nodded, this time sympathetically. “It must’ve been a lousy experience—being in jail there, I mean.”
    “Yes,” Citron said. “It was.”
    “My father was a newspaperman,” Haere said, wondering why he even mentioned it. He then uncharacteristically tacked on yet another autobiographical note. “Down South. In Birmingham.”
    Citron smiled pleasantly.
    It was Louise Veatch who asked the question Citron had been anticipating. “Was he—well, was he really a cannibal?”
    Citron shrugged. “That's what a lot of people say, anyway.”
    Louise Veatch leaned back in her chair. She looked at Citron and smiled slightly. Haere took it to be her stamp of approval and decided to get to the point. “You don’t have anything scheduled right now, then?”
    “No,” Citron said. “Nothing much.”
    “Would you be interested in taking something on?”
    “It depends.”
    “Of course. ButwhatImeanis, areyou free to takeonsomething?”
    “I’m free.”
    Louise Veatch leaned her elbows on the table and dropped her voice down into a lower register. It made her tone throaty and confidential. It sounded to Citron something like a born conspirator's voice. “A friend of ours got killed up in the Colorado mountains justoutside of Denver yesterday.” She paused and looked at Haere. “Was it just yesterday?”
    Haere nodded.
    “We think he was murdered.”
    “Well,” Citron said because she seemed to expect him to say something.
    “His name was Replogle. Jack Replogle.”
    “Replogle Construction?” Citron said.
    Haere looked surprised. “You knew him?”
    Citron shook his head. “I used to see his signs in some of the countries I moved around in.”
    “The hot countries.”
    “Right,” Citron said. “The hot countries.”
    Louise Veatch looked at Haere. “Tell him what happened, Draper.”
    Haere again repeated everything Jack Replogle had told him about Singapore and Drew Meade and how Meade, according to the two FBI agents, had gone missing. Citron listened, made no notes, but asked Haere to repeat the names of the FBI agents. When Haere had finished, there was a silence, which was broken when Citron shoved his chair back, rose, and moved to the stove, where he picked up the knife and resumed slicing the remainder of the carrot into the pot au feu .
    “Smells good,” Haere said. “What is it?”
    “Stew,” Citron said, put down the knife, turned, and leaned against the sink, his arms folded across his chest as he examined the attractive, well-dressed woman and the man with the despairing face. Citron sensed that they were more than mere political colleagues. They spend a lot of time in bed together, he told himself, and was mildly surprised to find that he approved of the notion. It had been two years at least since Citron had last approved or disapproved of anything.
    “What you want then is just the political stuff—the dynamite this guy Meade said he had.”
    “That's right,” Haere said. “Just the political stuff.”
    Citron looked at Louise Veatch. “Who’d I be working for—your husband?”
    “For me,” Haere said.
    Citron continued to stare at Louise Veatch. “But for your husband really—at one remove.”
    “My husband, Mr. Citron, knows nothing about this.”
    “I don’t believe that.”
    “If you believed it,” she said, “Mr. Haere wouldn’t hire you.”
    Citron smiled. “Deniability, I think they’re calling it.”
    “Or covering our ass,” Haere said.
    Citron looked at Haere. “You don’t care who killed him?— Replogle, I mean.”
    “I care,” Haere said. “I care very much, but Jack Replogle was dying of cancer, so whoever killed him put him out of his misery. We’ll let the cops and the FBI do their job and we’ll do ours. And if the stuff that he bought from Drew Meade does what he hoped it would