Missionary Stew by Ross Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

unofficial scholarship scouts. It took only a few minutes for the banker to decide that Draper Haere would do wonderfully well at his alma mater.
    When Haere told his old man about the scholarship offer, the senior Haere had grinned and said, “No shit? You going to take it?”
    “I don’t know,” Haere said.
    “I don’t see why not.”
    “I’ll think about it,” Haere said.
    He reached his decision four weeks later when his father died from heart failure, seated in front of the radio listening to the detested Fulton Lewis, Jr. He also would have detested anyone's calling it heart failure. “Heart failure kills everybody,” he sometimes told Haere, quoting one of his favorite copy-desk maxims. “But people die from heart attacks and heart seizures . Remember that.”
    There was just enough money to bury him in a cemetery called Memorial Park. There were no services of any kind. The man from Sylacauga came up for the burial. He and Haere rode out to the cemetery together in the funeral-home car behind the hearse. No one from the paper came. Haere never did know why. Perhaps, he told himself, they just forgot.
    There were two funeral-home attendants in the hearse. They, along with Haere and the man from Sylacauga, were to carry the casket, the cheapest available. At the last moment another car, a 1949 Hudson, pulled up and a man in his late forties got out. Wordlessly, he took hold of one of the handles and the five of them carried the casket to the open grave, into which it was lowered by a pair of gravediggers.
    The man who came late turned to Haere. “I knew your father,” he said. “I admired him.” The man had a European accent of some kind. He didn’t say anything to the man from Sylacauga. Haere thought they might not have known each other, or it might have been that they did know each other but the man from Sylacauga simply ignored the stranger the way he ignored almost everyone.
    “Would you like me to say a few words?” the man with the accent said.
    “Sure,” Haere said. “If you want to.”
    The man with the accent reached down, picked up a clod or two of red clay, and tossed the earth down on the casket.
    “I knew this comrade,” said the man with the accent. “He was steadfast in the pursuit of justice all his life.”
    The man from Sylacauga snorted in disgust, turned, and walked away. Draper Haere never saw either man again.
    At virtually the same time that Draper Haere and his bleak thoughts were passing over the Grand Canyon on their way to Los Angeles, Morgan Citron was parking his 1969 Toyota sedan on the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
    From the highway, Craigie Grey's apartment building didn’t look like six million dollars to Citron. Or five million. Or even four. It was only two stories in height and a bare fifty feet in width. Its architecturewas mineshaft modern, and it was protected from Valley marauders by a seven-foot-high redwood fence that had a locked gate. Citron tried the key Craigie Grey had given him in the gate's lock and was mildly surprised to find that it worked.
    He went through the gate and into a small bricked patio. The bricks were used and divided into squared-off sections by old railroad ties. The patio also boasted a small green jungle of potted succulents and ferns illuminated by an outside floodlight that was mostly focused on the gate. From the light Citron could determine that the apartment building was constructed of redwood and shingle, which would burn quite merrily when one of the periodic fires swept down from the Santa Monica mountains and hopped the highway. If the place was really worth upward of four million dollars, Citron decided it must be because of the sound caused by the bang and crash of a heavy surf, which was so loud he could scarcely hear the highway traffic.
    The grungy downstairs back apartment seemed to be Unit A. Using the same key he had used on the gate, Citron unlocked the apartment door and went in. He felt for