Thong, Dick & Harry 
Bruce Murphy

Bruce F. Murphy is the author of the Encyclopedia
of Murder and Mystery, published by St. Martin’s
Press in 1999. He has other crime stories forthcoming
in Thrilling Detective. He has also published a volume
of poetry (New York University Press) and articles
and reviews in various magazines.
©Copyright 2001
Bruce Murphy

A fellow called last week to invite me to dinner at the White
House.
“Last time I ate there I found a hair in my drink.”
“But Mr. Somerset, the big guy insisted. You’re the best card
player he has-as well as a brilliant conversationalist.”
By the “big guy,” he meant the President of the United States. We
are governed by 11-year-olds who go mountain biking on
weekends.
“Young man, at my age I can barely keep my eyes open at
anything except the opera. I haven’t been able to read any book
written in the past fifteen years. My television was banished to the
attic of the last house I owned. Power doesn’t excite me, it scares
me, and most of the people who hold it should be fitted for rubber
noses and size 34 shoes.”
There was no answer for a moment.
“What was that about shoes?”
“Forget it.”
“The President said to tell you you have first deal, and you can
bring the deck of cards.”
Some offers require an adjustment of principle.
I am the oldest living nonentity of six previous administrations.
This entitles me to continued respect, for some reason. I’m rolled
over like a Treasury CD.
The President shook my hand when I got up to the end of the
line. Cameras flashed. He had more teeth than most creatures that
walk the earth or swim in its seas.
“Glad you could make it,” he said.
Casualness at solemn occasions has always irked me.
“I hope there won’t be any rough stuff tonight.” I winked at him,
I hope nastily.
But that only amused him. Laughter issued like insincere pledges
from the hole in his head where he kept his forked tongue.
Of all the clowns who have lived in that silly monument to
ambition, he was the clowniest-if there is such a word (no one
seems to care anymore). My generation grew up with hypocrisy as a
norm-one couldn’t simply just brazenly be an idiot. One tried to
disguise it somehow. A beautiful rich wife would do the trick-
people would think “he must have something on the ball,” as we
used to say. But this character was a fool all the way around. He
advertised it, you might say.
Then I shook hands with the little woman, and that was no
amicus brief, I can tell you.
She hated anyone who was smarter than she was-and she hated
a lot of people. Her face seemed made out of a new experimental
ceramic.
After the period prescribed for cutting each other to pieces over
oysters, shrimp and potent drinks, we retired to the dining room. I
had the salmon, which tasted as though it had never swum outside
the Beltway. After dinner, thinking of poker (it was supposed to
begin only after the famous guests and the cameras that followed
them had gone elsewhere), I noted that the “big guy” was nowhere
to be seen. I wondered if he had snuck off somewhere to find
further hot H2O to get into. There was a reason why the English
tabloids had taken to calling him the “Commander in Cheek.”
I wandered down the hall to a room full of men in suits who all
stopped talking at once. I kept wandering, and found rich windbags
tittering in alcoves over their grappa and V.S.O.P. I encountered two
celebrities in leather attire-hardly appropriate, and rather
uncomfortable in this weather-who were either minutely
examining a ladies’ compact or inhaling its contents.
I turned a corner. I was bored (I am often bored). I opened a
door.
I saw a young woman dressed in the most creatively impractical
underpants I have ever seen. She was lying face down on the floor.
Startled (even at my age I am startlable), I then perceived that a
naked man was beneath her, struggling with her as with an
enormous doll. He squeezed out from underneath and rolled onto
his stomach to cover his private parts, thereby displaying a perhaps
equally unattractive hirsute posterior.
It was the Commander in Cheek himself.
To my surprise, the woman in the absurd panties made no
attempt to cover her naked breasts after she, too, had rolled over, 
jostled by his ungracious, shall we say, exit. She just lay there and
stared at me wide-eyed, because, unfortunately, she was dead.
“Oh,” I remarked.
The President burst into tears. But, never at a loss for words, he
assured me that he couldn’t understand how this had happened,
though of one thing he was absolutely sure: it wasn’t his fault. He
had never intended for any harm to come to this fine person whom,
after all, he did not know very well.
“Calm yourself,” I said. I remembered back . . . well, I can’t really
tell that story yet, can I? Though it would offer a nice contrast. Oh
well, such revelations of follies past seem to provoke people. I’ll
leave it in my memoirs, underlined in red. (Isn’t it strange how
those long dead have to abide by the morals of their time, it seems,
while the living run rampant?)
While the President sniveled, I delivered one of my more
pompous lectures. “I had the pleasure, sometimes dubious, of
serving in your father’s administration. He too had his moments of
indiscretion, though he was never caught so brazenly, so literally
with his pants down. And from time to time,” I said, “you have
called upon me for fatherly advice. Seeing that you have never
taken it, I would feel fully justified in turning and walking out of
this door, leaving you to your fate.”
“No!” he squealed.
I held up my hand for silence. “No doubt you are aghast, like
many of your generation, at the thought of not having someone else
to bail you out yet again. It’s only out of my great respect for your
high office that I stay.”
To be truthful, it was only out of my great boredom. It would
have been far more dull to go home in a huff after such a scene
than to remain. It had such tragicomic possibilities. For myself, I
cared not. I had nothing to fear. Of those persons in the room, alive
and not, only I was clothed, after all.
He proceeded to tell me that the woman had become so excited
by his efforts that she suffered a heart attack, and died.
I am no longer a reliable judge of young women, since to these
eyes they all now seem so beautiful (though I prefer those in whom
the elan vital still operates), but I would have said she was only 25
or 26.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” I said. “Men have been
impeached for less, as you know. However, the great romantically
disappointed public sees that they are let go. But a death alters the
case substantially.”
He looked around frantically.
“I-I-I-”
“If you are contemplating a cover-up, I suggest that you begin by
putting on your pants.” 
This he did, with a minimum of moaning.
“I would also recommend that you call some trustworthy aides,
but I suppose you don’t have any. Therefore, we will have to make
do ourselves.”
I will pass over our re-clothing of the body in its tasteless flamered
lamé. Luckily, the gown was so low-cut and brief that its
apertures were ample enough for us to insert the corpse.
“Now, you must guard the body while I do a short errand.
However, I will need several hundred, or preferably thousand
dollars. Do you have the money?”
He looked at me dumbly and shook his head. I have little
patience with dumbness.
“Damn it, man, you were planning to run one of your naughty
little high-stakes poker games with your father’s rich cronies tonight.
Are you telling me you forgot to bring your stake?”
He then remembered the sheaf of fifty and hundred-dollar bills in
his jacket. The rich and dissipated are so careless with money-
public funds, if possible.
“I will return soon, successful or not. Lock the door,” I added.
One can’t be too careful when dealing with a simpleton.
Fortunately, I found the two perspiring leather-clad celebrities in
exactly the same positions they had occupied before. They were
sentient enough to part with the ladies’ compact for a large number
of bills. I returned to the President highly amused.
Who would ever believe that elderly Harry Somerset bought
drugs?
“Now,” I said, “all we have to do is leave this compact with the
victim, wipe all surfaces you may have touched-”
As I went to do so, I made a horrifying discovery.
“Good God, this is the Oval Office!”
I could have abandoned the infant ruler right then and there. But
an old war-horse like me encounters so few truly interesting
problems anymore. Moving a corpse, especially through the White
House during a party, is a ticklish bit of work. Given that my
accomplice was reduced to jelly, I had small chance of success.
There is no more helpless animal than a frightened politician.
My plan, though rash, could have worked. It was to deposit the
woman in a stall of the nearest ladies’ room. The President took the
shoulders, being younger and more fit, and I the ankles. We looked
to see that the coast was clear.
Politicians have an uncanny nose for responsibility and avoid it
assiduously. We had just reached the ladies’ room when two Secret
Service men-that color suit is only worn by their ilk-came around
the corner chatting. By the time their eyes turned toward us, the
Commander in Cheek was nowhere to be seen. Later, I realized he
had ducked into the ladies’ room himself. 
I was left holding the dead woman with the compact full of
cocaine, which I now wished I hadn’t stuffed in her purse.
Needless to say, I have become (privately) an eternal friend of the
President, though he avoids me like the plague. The headlines are
terrible, of course: Patrician Wonk Mixed in Love-Pet Death, and
worse. It doesn’t matter, naturally, that the young lady died not from
cocaine overindulgence but of anaphylactic shock brought on by a
shellfish allergy-I’d heard of that, but never expected to be glad of
it. I am simultaneously being investigated by the Senate, the FBI,
and the Secret Service, not to mention the ravening hordes of the
fourth estate.
I am a celebrity.
I would be welcome and would receive obscene amounts of
money just to show my face on any one of the various juvenile
television programs that pass for sources of news, but my lawyer
will not allow it, alas.
Of course, at my age, it is all quite fun.