Vic Daniel 6 - As she rides by

half-pint Romeo, forget it, he was welcome to her. I needed muscle to gain a discreet entry into the portals—to say nothing of the files—of the eighth or ninth largest corporation in the fine state of California , IMM.
    So who had muscle of the kind I needed? And spare me your jibes about Arnold Schwarzenegger, please. A VIP is who. And how many VIPs did I know? One and a half, at the most, which significantly narrowed my choices, particularly as the half was in an institution of the highest security, owned and operated by the Federal Department of Prisons, just outside Tampa , Fla. , so then there was one. He was an ex-governor of a neighboring state to ours. When I met him he was still an aspirant to that high office but unless I could retrieve certain amatory epistles he had penned a few years previously he could pack those aspirations away forever up in some dusty attic in his old Air Force flight bag along with his stripes and war decorations and fading photos of foreign ports. His name? What’s in a name? I don’t want to be unnecessarily mysterious, but neither do I want to be a kiss-and-tell, so I won’t. Anyway, I did retrieve the letters, not without some difficulty and some cunning but highly illegal maneuvers. He was grateful. Two weeks later he married a stunning Italian diva. After suffering a slight stroke in his third year of office, he retired to his family ranch in New Mexico, and as far as I knew, was still there ropin’ and brandin’ and burning his fingers on the campfire coffee pot.
    Once before he’d written me a rave recommendation when I needed a short word with a Hollywood idol who was so far up the ladder of stardom that he’d disappeared entirely into the gossamer clouds of total inaccessibility. Could he and would he do a similar service again for his old compadre? Not to keep you in suspense, he could and would. And did, that very day. It turned out to be no trouble at all getting through to him, as I still had his phone number from last time; I merely dialed his number and when a male voice answered, “Yes?” asked if I could have a word with the Governor, please.
    “Don’t see why not,” I was told. “Hang on there and I’ll put you through.” He put me through to the Governor, who turned out to be talking into a cordless phone down by the corrals. Sure he ‘membered me. Nah, I wasn’t interrupting anything serious, he was just admirin’ his new pacer, who was gettin’ broke in.
    “Broke into what?” I said.
    “Pacin’,” he said. “What else? What can I do for you this time ‘round, son?”
    “I need a quiet word with someone very high up at IMM,” I said. “Preferably someone with half a brain and a close mouth.”
    “No sweat,” he said. “I know just the horse thief. Soon as I get back up to the house I’ll give you a holler.”
    I gave him my number, thanked him, then asked, “How’s the health? Hope you still got enough to put away the occasional fifth of that rotgut Tennessee mash you tried to force down my throat the night we were celebrating.”
    He laughed. “Well, son,” he said, “if I work at her and concentrate real hard I find I can get a sip or two down of an evening.”
    I said I was glad to hear it and severed the connection. Not a bad guy, all in all, for someone who’d been a politician most of his life and who never got caught once. It’d be strange being married to an opera singer, though—you’d never be able to understand a word she said.
    I cleaned up my desk, then brought my accounts up-to-date, then answered a slightly scatalogical scribble I’d received the week before on the back of a change of address notification; it was from a good old boy who’d got me a job with the Burns security people when I’d first moved out to the coast, and then I had a phone call from a lady. She wanted to know if I was Mr. Vic Daniel. I said I was. She asked me to hold on, please. I held on, which is generally speaking an activity I enjoy roughly as much as back-combing tarantulas. After a minute or so, a man came on the line and told me his name was Ralph Howieson and that he was a senior vice president of International Machine & Mercantile.
    “How do you do, sir?” I said.
    “I’ve just had a rather strange call from an old college friend,” he said. “He suggested I listen with some attention to what you had to say as it had been his experience that despite a certain lack of appreciation for some of the finer things of