Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  “Bobby would help you with money. I would, too, if it came to it.”

  “My momma didn’t raise me to make others pay for my lack of foresight. Look. I should have had my assistant testify before the committee. Fine. But I didn’t think Bobby was going to run. And if he did run, I certainly didn’t think Erickson Bruce was going to get interested in my transaction. Why should he? The route was a good one. The state paid a fair price, and if they wouldn’t have paid it to me, they would have had to pay the same money to someone else. It was an investment that could have gone nowhere. I took the risk.”

  All of this makes me sad. Jeannie is not the sort of person I ever expected something like this from. “I’ll look at the papers as soon as I get home.”

  She gestures at me with her index finger. “And if there are penalties, I should get the penalties, not Bobby.”

  “So your public resignation from the campaign was not a mistake.”

  “No. Bobby will need a fire wall between him and me. Someone I can absolutely trust. You’re the fire wall.”

  I can see why she wants me to handle the problem. What I don’t know is whether, in any sense, I am up to it.

  Dr. Eugene Tyler gives me a quick once-over in his examining room the next day and then invites me into his book-lined office. I sit down across from his large walnut desk. He leafs through my folder one more time, looks at some lab results, and runs a hand through his thin gray hair. Then he folds his hands on the desk and looks at me.

  “We’ll give you the pneumonia vaccine in a month or so. You get this thing once, you can get it more easily the next time.” I nod. “So how are you doing?”

  “A little weak. Otherwise not too bad.”

  “I mean other than that. How’s your life?”

  “What do you mean?’’

  “How long have we known each other?” he asks. “Ten, twelve years?”

  “Longer, I’d say.”

  He nods and resets his glasses so he can look at me more fully. “Are you dating anyone?” I shrug. “Got any hobbies, pastimes? A pet? You know, a dog or cat.” I shake my head.

  “Work is fine. I’ve got a lot of friends.” I wonder when I say this if I sound as pathetic to him as I do to myself.

  He gazes at me neutrally, but the pupils of his blue eyes grow small. “I know you do. I consider myself one of them. So let me come right to the point. Ben, you drink too much. This is serious. You’ve got impaired liver function. Keep it up, and you can expect neuropathy, heart trouble, brain damage. You probably have them already.” He pauses to let this sink in. “You need to get involved in something outside of what you do now, something you care about. Volunteer work. A sport. Something. Or many things. And you’ve got to lay off the sauce.”

  “I only drink from time to time.”

  “Well, you must drink one hell of a lot when you do.” He lays his hand on my folder. “You don’t get AST and glutamyl levels like these with a cocktail now and then before dinner.”

  He gives me some brochures. They are about self-help groups. “I’ll work on it,” I say. “Really. Thanks.”

  “Think about getting some counseling.”

  “Can you recommend someone?”

  He writes down two names and phone numbers. “Tell ’em I suggested you call. They’ll squeeze you in. So. When the weather warms up, maybe you’ll join Betsy and me for a sail?”

  “I’d like that, Gene. Thanks.”

  I start to get up. “Ben,” he says. “Have you heard me?”

  For a second, I don’t know what he means. “Lay off the sauce,” I finally say.

  His eyebrows lift and he leans forward for emphasis. “Completely,” he says. “I’ve seen too many people destroy everything they had and everything they were or ever could be. Don’t be one of them.”

  “I hear you,” I say.

  He looks at me skeptically for a moment and sighs. “On your way out, take a look at the man sitting by the door. He used to be an engineer with Alcoa. He used to have a wife and two kids. He’s five years younger than you and looks ten years older. What he’s got now is three OMVI convictions, welfare, and a prescription for Antabuse.”

  Like someone who is told not to picture the color red and can’t help doing so, I glance at this guy despite telling myself not to. All right, he smells sour halfway across the room and looks like hell, dark rings under the eyes, thickish middle with skinny arms, nervously licking his dry, pale lips with a blotchy tongue, a fixed vacant expression on his bony face like someone pressed the pause button on a videotape of him. Okay. So Dr. Tyler is trying to tell me scary stories and claim this is the ghost of my Christmas future.

  At least he didn’t bring out Tiny Tim. As I drive home, I picture going to one of those smoke-filled meetings and drinking lots of coffee and listening to the tales of real dyed-in-the-wool drunks, or telling some paid stranger once a week about my woes. My mind slides away from the thought.

  I dump the brochures and the names when I get home. I not only don’t have any pets, I don’t have any plants. When you’ve got a black thumb, you’ve got a responsibility to be very, very careful about what you undertake. I’m best at handling things I don’t personally care about. Why should I have to? Surgeons don’t have to like their patients to do a good job. But this is why I deeply do not want to handle Jeannie’s case. At the first sign of a yellowing leaf, I’m out of there. She’ll have to find herself a new fire wall.

  Every once in a while now, unbidden, I get this picture of the man in Dr. Tyler’s office, his pale lips and raccoon eyes and nervous lip-licking, and I get a kind of scary, falling sensation in my chest. When I think of something else, though, the feeling goes right away.

  Inside the high-ceilinged, gold-domed, white-marble, century-old state capitol building are the offices of the attorney general. And next to these offices in what used to be two large conference rooms is now the newly partitioned domain of Erickson R. Bruce, Special Prosecutor by Extraordinary Executive Order of the Honorable William T. Roberts, Governor. For the last eighteen months, Bruce has been bringing to trial various government officials, contractors, legislators, and municipal employees who have been involved in corrupt practices. These have ranged from kickbacks, price-fixing, and bribery to the hiring of family for no-show jobs. While the guilty individuals have come from both political parties, most of them come from or have been supporters of Bobby’s and the governor’s party.

  If the Midwest itself could be said to have an East, a West, and a South, with each of these regions at their borders sharing at least as much in topography, climate, and accent with Easterners, Westerners, or Southerners as with Middle Westerners, our state might be said to be the Midwest of the Midwest, where the soil is black and fertile, the hills low and rolling, and the r’s are vigorously pronounced, as if to make up for the missing g in words that finish with “ing.” The names of towns and cities are a crazy quilt of Sac, Sioux, and Fox, French from early explorers and missionaries, and plain old Anglo-Saxon English from trappers and pioneers. And if the state’s summers and winters are about as extreme as they come, the people are apt to be friendly and mild.

  Mild, but with a keen sense of right and wrong. The Underground Railroad had a main trunk passing through the heart of the state to send escaping slaves north, and the abolitionist John Brown felt comfortable enough to make his headquarters here.

  Scandal and corruption have never before been a feature of our state’s history or understanding of itself, so these government scandals, though of the ordinary garden variety elsewhere in the country, are especially—you also might say horrifyingly—scandalous to the citizens here. Which is why the governor swiftly appointed the state’s first-ever special prosecutor at the first whiff of trouble and set up special new watchdog boards and committees to review almost every aspect of governmental functioning.

  One of those watchd
og boards was specifically established to choose the siting plan for the new interstate bypass.

  The act of walking down the capitol building’s entrance corridor reminds me vividly of my unpleasant days—and they were literally days—as a low-level assistant in the attorney general’s office, my “reward” for helping elect Governor Roberts to his very first term of office almost twenty years ago. Whatever state-requisitioned disinfectant they used then is the same one they use now, its faint carbolic acid smell mixing with the smells of wax and dust and soap and damp linoleum and polished marble resulting in a combination I have smelled nowhere else. The governor has not been governor all the years since. He left government for eight years to run a huge charitable foundation, one whose fortune came from a family who was successfully messianic in promoting the many uses of soybeans, and then he spent a few years making money for himself in the private sector—soybeans again, though of the corporate agribusiness kind. Six years ago, in the middle of a severe regional recession, William Thaddeus Roberts ran once again and, with Bobby as his running mate, won in a walk, and was reelected two years ago. It occurs to me that I have not set foot in the capitol building since I stopped offering my services back in the governor’s first administration. I had an appointee of his to thank for my departure then, and I have an appointee of his to thank for my return visit now.

  In what used to be a waiting lounge is Attorney Bruce himself. The room, while newly carpeted and appointed, is far from the high and spacious corner office he is used to as an equity partner in one of the state’s oldest and most distinguished law firms.

  Rick, as Erickson Reynolds Bruce is known to his friends, is what Jeannie calls a goo-goo type, goo-goo being her self-deprecating term for those people, like herself, who are dedicated to providing “good government.” Former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, former Navy SEAL, and former law review editor, Rick is respected by both political parties for his skills and his integrity, and if he is willing to take a big pay cut, he is a man with a judgeship certain in his future. I have dealt with him only once before, back when I was assistant prosecutor for the county and he was doing pro bono work for an indigent client charged with squatting in an abandoned county garage.

  I give the prosecutor’s secretary my name and am invited immediately to go in his office.

  I am nervous. I have not done face-to-face dealing like this in a long time. I remind myself I’m only here to get information; I don’t have to worry about making a mistake. And then I try to believe it.

  From time to time I have heard that Rick Bruce has political ambitions for himself, though for what office and from which party remains a mystery. The rumors persist at least in part because he has the reputation of being unwilling to grind any special ax to further his ambitions. This time for the pursuit of justice he has been handed an ax by the governor honed to unusual keenness. Its use fits Erickson Bruce’s temperament perhaps too well. He is a polite man, but inclined to the astringent, his blond-topped square and ruddy face rarely smiling, his well-conditioned body and frosty blue eyes both chronically tensed and vigilant. If he were bearded and had a less-developed sense of fairness, he would be the sort of individual the old Jewish moguls might have wished to cast as an Old Testament prophet in a Hollywood movie adaptation of the Bible.

  Jeannie needs justice tempered with mercy, and Erickson Bruce is the wrong man for it. He is a prosecutor, not a clergyman. I do not expect he will look kindly on a person who used her work, ostensibly on behalf of the public interest, to feather her own private nest. I will try to do what I can, but as I enter his office I have little hope of doing much more than assessing the damage.

  Bruce pulls back from his desk and stands up, perhaps an inch taller than my own six-three and about thirty pounds heavier, very little of it fat. His suit coat is off and his sleeves are rolled up. He extends a thickly veined forearm and gives my hand a squeeze that is several increments past firm. “It’s good of you to come all the way up here, Ben. How are you? I hear you’ve been sick.”

  “I’m better, thanks. How are you doing?”

  He presses his lips together and shakes his large head. “Busy. Can I get you some coffee? Juice?”

  My mouth is dry, but I say no thanks. I can see we have come to the end of the polite preliminaries. He looks down at the folder in front of him.

  “How is Jeannie?” he asks.

  “Basically, she is scared. For one thing, she has multiple sclerosis.”

  “I heard. Is it bad?”

  “It’s not stable at the moment. And it’s what lies behind this whole mess.”

  “Oh?” He steeples his fingers and waits.

  I explain her inability to get life insurance or change jobs, Brendan’s uncertain income, Andrew’s impending college expenses.

  He listens, nods, then looks at me neutrally. “She aims to leave them well-provided,” he says.

  “She wanted to, yes.”

  “You said ‘for one thing.’ What else is she scared about?”

  “You.”

  There is a traditional game played between a prosecutor and a defense attorney. To give himself latitude and to preserve the element of surprise, the prosecutor tries to withhold information about the directions of his inquiry. The defense tries to find them out.

  If Erickson Bruce wants, he can attach Jeannie’s assets, prosecute for fraud, and, if he wins, seize virtually all her property and threaten her with a prison sentence. Or he can prosecute her for violating state ethics laws, charge her with conflict of interest, and recommend she be disbarred. She can easily end up not only with no money, but no livelihood.

  She stepped in shit, all right.

  “I want to say,” I tell him, “for the record, that Jeannie has instructed me to cooperate fully in your investigation. Anything you want will be provided as quickly as possible.” I hand over a thick manila envelope. “These are all of her personal financial records for the last five years. If there is anything incomplete or confusing, please let me know.”

  Since this information was not directly under subpoena, Bruce looks surprised for an instant. Then he nods. “Good.”

  “Can you tell me, based on your present knowledge, if charges against her are likely?”

  “I see the likelihood of discipline by the legal society resulting in disbarment. I see civil fines. I see the probable end of her work in the area of public interest.”

  The only item on that list for which he is directly responsible is civil fines. I nod grimly, hoping not to hear anything more. I have hoped for too much.

  He adds, “Criminal charges remain a possibility.”

  “She did not commit fraud,” I say. “Under the pressure of illness and anxiety for her family’s future, she admits she acted unwisely.”

  “In the end, Ben, her motivation is not important. The facts will remain. As of right now, I don’t have enough facts to say what we will do one way or another. But,” he says quietly, his blue eyes growing a shade frostier, “if she misrepresented the land she testified about or if her testimony should prove to be essential to the siting committee’s decision about the bypass, this all goes before the grand jury.”

  I have reviewed the records, and nothing she testified to about the bypass’s environmental impact was inaccurate or unsupported by other evidence.

  “How could her testimony be a sine qua non for the committee’s decision? She was one of thirty-two witnesses the committee interviewed under oath.”

  “If,” he says dryly, “the other thirty-one wouldn’t have been enough.”

  “I have one last question. But first I want to thank you for being so forthcoming. I know you didn’t have to be.” He looks at me noncommittally. “How soon do you expect to dispose of this case? One way or another.”

  “Good question. I’ll put it this way. People from both parties have asked me to bring
cases involving elected officials to quick action. They argue that the voters should have as much information as possible placed before them before the election in November. In this case, I think we are talking about weeks.”

  “But Jeannie is not an elected official.”

  “No, but she is politically prominent. Or was until last week.”

  “She wanted me to be sure to tell you her brother knows nothing about the details of this case. Or even that there is one.”

  “Nothing?” Bruce asks.

  “Nothing.” If Jeannie or I had told him, he would be obligated under the state ethics laws to report the matter to the attorney general’s office. An office which, as Jeannie reminded me, leaks like a sieve.

  He gives a small wintry smile. “I can see how ignorance might be…useful at the moment.”

  I think about asking him to explain himself, but instead thank him for his time, excuse myself, and head down the waxy, disinfectant-smelling corridors to my rental car, a wave of exhaustion washing over me. By the time I sit behind the wheel, I become aware of an even larger wave of relief.

  I got the information I came for and I didn’t fuck up.

  But Bobby is going to have to deal with this mess, too. Not because Jeannie is his sister, a circumstance even his enemies will admit he had no choice about, but because she has long been his closest adviser.

  The question I most wanted to ask the special prosecutor is the one he would never answer. How did Jeannie and her land transaction ever come to his attention in the first place? She bought and sold the land under the name of a shell business she set up, Anbren (after Andrew and Brendan), and her own name was never listed in the newspaper account of the real-estate transactions for the county. Of course, my finding out how her activities came to be known to Erickson Bruce wouldn’t change anything. But underneath my fatigue the question still itches. Somebody led him to it. Who?