by Jeff Miller
The workroom was empty because there was no work to be had. The Professor hobbled about his study, lamenting this fact. “Without a case, we cannot have success, and without success, we lose our momentum. Without momentum, we lose our political capital.”
“Three dead bodies in St. Louis,” Brent said for the second time. He was sitting next to Dagny on one sofa; Victor sat across from them. “Similar MO. Found within three weeks. That sounds like a case to me.”
Dagny had grown up in St. Louis, and her mother still lived there. That was reason enough to be against taking the case. “Unless one of those bodies was found in East St. Louis, we don’t have federal jurisdiction,” she said.
“Were the victims black? Asian?” Victor asked. “Anything that gets us a civil rights case? Did one of the victims live over the river? Transporting over state lines would get us jurisdiction. Did one of them work for the government? There are ways to find jurisdiction.”
“I caught a serial killer in St. Louis thirty years ago,” the Professor said. “If that’s the best I can do now, I might as well shoot myself. Walton, what do you have?”
“Hundred-billion-dollar fraud—”
“Next!” the Professor barked.
“It’s a hundred-billion-dollar fraud,” Victor repeated.
“And how many deaths?”
“I don’t know. When you add up the families that won’t be able to afford medical care, you’re talking—”
“Bodies! Is that too much to ask for? A hundred billion dollars is nothing. Congress commits more fraud than that every day.” It was a reckless accusation, but the Professor was prone to them.
“If I’m right, it’s the biggest financial-fraud case ever. Bigger than Madoff.”
“And yet smaller than murder.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“You know how you can tell if a crime is big? If you can put a man to death for it, it’s big. Did we put Madoff to death?”
It was rhetorical, but Victor answered it. “No.”
“That’s because his fraud was smaller than your standard, everyday first-degree murder. Dagny, what do you have?”
“It’s a cold case.”
“That’s worse than Victor’s.”
Victor laughed at this.
“It’s a murder,” Dagny said. “You could put a guy to death for it.”
“First of all, I know what case you’re talking about, and it’s personal to you. We already did one of those. We’re not doing it again. Second, do you honestly think we can keep our arrangement going by solving cold cases? What keeps us in business?”
“Imminent harm,” Brent said.
“Right.”
“Like the imminent harm that’s going to happen to the next person murdered in St. Louis. And by the way, you can get the death penalty for that, too,” Brent said.
“Nobody cares about St. Louis, Brent. I want something big.”
“A hundred billion dollars is enormous,” Victor said.
“If you can solve a case without a gun, it’s not a real case,” the Professor said.
No one said anything for a few minutes. “Fine!” the Professor barked. He turned to Victor. “Tell us more about the fraud case.”
Victor smiled at Dagny. She shook her head. Not yet, she thought. You haven’t won yet.
He grabbed a remote from the top of the Professor’s desk and pushed a button to lower a plasma screen, then turned on his iPad and mirrored its display on the TV. “Abner Jenks came up in Goldman, and then opened his own investment firm in 2002.” Jenks’s picture flashed up on the screen. “And everything his investment firm did was a fraud.” Victor flipped to the next slide. “Here’s how it worked—”
“It’s a Ponzi scheme,” the Professor said.
“Yes. Let me show you—”
“I know how a Ponzi scheme works. Skip ahead. Why are you the only person in the country who knows about this particular Ponzi scheme?”
“Because I’m the only person with the patience to sift through the documents.” Victor took them through eighty-three slides of financial jargon and spreadsheets that compared Jenks’s representation of the performance of mutual funds in statements provided to investors to the actual market performance of the stocks comprising them. The fraud seemed pretty clear. “It’s an easy case,” Victor concluded.
“And a boring one. I can’t believe this is the best thing we have,” the Professor said, sighing. “But it’s the best thing we have.”
Victor smiled at Dagny again.
“One more week. If we haven’t found something better in one week, we’ll do Victor’s case. Lord help us.”
Dagny looked at Victor and shook her head to say, Not yet.
“Brent and Victor, you’re excused. Dagny, I’d like a moment.”
They looked at her, and she shrugged to signal that she didn’t know why the Professor wanted to talk to her, even though she had a pretty good idea. After they left, the Professor sat next to her on the sofa.
“When I was a toddler, I didn’t eat my vegetables,” he said. “It became a point of contention with my mother such that there was much yelling and screaming, tussling and punching. I tossed my plate to the floor on many occasions. Once, in a fit of anger, I kicked a hole through the kitchen wall.”
“Strong toddler.”
“Poor construction,” he said. “Another time, I threw my plate at her head, sending her to the hospital.”
“Strong toddler,” she repeated.
“Indeed. Two days later, my mother returned home. And do you know what she did?”
“What?”
“She served me a plate filled with nothing but vegetables. So what does that tell you?”
“That she was as stubborn as you are?”
“One way or another, I’m going to make you eat your vegetables.”
Even the analogies always came back to eating. “I agreed to try a one-on-one session.”
“Not try. Do.”
“Okay, Yoda.”
“Dr. Childs is excellent. I need you to be serious about this.”
“I will.”
“This is important. Do you understand why?”
“Because you care about me on a personal level.”
“Because our group is going to big places.”
“And also because you care.”
He shook his head no, which was how he said yes in sentimental moments.
She smiled. “Okay, Professor.”
Grabbing her backpack, she started to leave. When she got to the door, he blurted, “Martha and I never had children.”
Dagny turned back, surprised by his statement. She struggled for a response. “I lost my father when I was twelve.” By stating facts known to both of them, they were acknowledging a relationship they’d never discussed.
“I need you to be healthy, Dagny.”
“I understand.”
She turned to flee before any more feelings were expressed. As she left, he yelled, “Big things, Dagny!”
CHAPTER 7
Hank Frank was a radio survivor.
As a freshman at Miami University, he had worked the two-to-six overnight shift, spinning The Clash and Zeppelin for, perhaps, a half-dozen drunken frat brothers and an insomniac sociology professor or two. He was terrible, missing station breaks, fumbling with the commercials, launching rambling sentences he couldn’t finish. But he got better. He improved his enunciation, and between the songs, he began to talk about things that mattered. Disarmament. Homelessness. Poverty. The disconnect between the campus bubble and the factories closing around it. He said things that upset the school administration, and that’s when people started to listen to him. When they finally pulled him off the air, he was the station’s most popular DJ.
His first job out of college was selling ad time for WBRP, Dayton’s pop-rock station. When the afternoon-drive DJ left for Des Moines, Frank filled in and kept the spot. He was the first DJ in the area to play Michael Jac
kson’s Thriller; the first to play Madonna; the first to play his favorite song, Murray Head’s “One Night in Bangkok.” They moved him to the morning drive, paired him with Jennifer Lovely, and they bantered and joked and flirted between songs. They married after a year, divorced after another, and continued as the morning team for three more.
When Nirvana and Pearl Jam became popular, station management didn’t know what to do, so they fired everyone. Jennifer Lovely took a job doing the weather on television. Hank Frank drank. Beer and vodka and Scotch. A few pills here and there. He passed out on a sidewalk, spent the night in jail, and wandered into an AA meeting the next day. His sponsor owned a small AM station in Bilford and gave Hank a job playing oldies after Rush Limbaugh. One day the CD player broke, and he had to fill three hours with talk. He talked about the weather, and then the high school basketball team and the county fair. And then he talked about his failed marriage and his struggles with booze. By the end of the shift, he was crying. So was much of the audience.
They never fixed the CD player.
He couldn’t continue to fill three hours on his own each day, so he started taking calls and booking guests. The library director. City Council members. Restaurant owners. The pet shelter. Lawyers with legal advice; doctors with medical advice; stockbrokers with investment advice; therapists with sex advice. (He married one of those therapists, Trudy Day.) When Clear Channel bought the station, it was beating Dayton stations in the ratings. New management boosted the station’s signal so it could be heard from Cincinnati to Columbus.
He never intended for the show to become political, but it went that way. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were part of it. Having a kid was the rest. The world looked different to him as a dad. He saw dangers where he’d previously seen excitement. And so he became another right-wing talk-radio host, although he thought maybe he was a bit more than that.
“My dad worked the line at Deters for twenty-eight years, blowing heat that shaped the pipes that carried the exhaust out of a million cars or more. You probably drove one of them, back when you could feel good about a car.
“Sometimes I’d ride my bike over to the factory after school and watch the line from up in the rafters. The sparks flying, and metal yielding, and the pouring and the lifting—it was a sight to behold. Real men making something. How often did you see that? My father did it every day, along with another hundred and fifty guys just like him. Guys breaking their backs to put food on the table and send their kids to school.
“One time the chain on the crane broke, and a piece of steel fell down on my father’s leg. He was in the hospital for a week. Everyone from the plant, from the newest hire to the company president, stopped by to see him. Man, that made an impression on me, to see the president of the company stop by.
“My dad limped the rest of his life after that. ‘These things happen,’ he said. Went back to work as soon as he could. Did it with a smile. That man always smiled, no matter what was thrown at him.
“All that time, he made a decent wage, and we had a good health plan. The union did all right. We had a house and a car—neither fancy, but I didn’t know it. The TV worked. Sometimes we drove down to Riverfront and watched the Reds from the high seats. We were middle class when middle class meant getting by. He put me through college, scrimping and saving.
“When my father was fifty-eight, Deters announced they were closing the factory down. Not because their parts weren’t selling—they were, more than ever. No, they were shutting it down because they knew they could open a factory in Mexico and pay everyone three dollars an hour, and the company would make a lot more money. So my dad was out of work. Fifty-eight years old. He’d given his life to that factory; it was the only skill he had. And they shut it down.
“What do you do when you’re fifty-eight and your résumé has thirty years of factory work on it? Apply to work at Chester, maybe? Oh, that’s right, they shut down in 1987. Toolweather? They shut down in 1993. Maybe at OK Steel? They haven’t poured since 1982. There used to be jobs for people like my father. We sent them to places like China and Indonesia and Mexico.
“He took a job at Harvey’s Auto on McLean. Fifty-eight years old, and he was starting a second career as a mechanic. He knew cars well enough and knew how to fix them. Answered to a boss who was half his age and knew a third as much. Fifty-eight, and he was sliding under engines, getting dirty. Long hours. Was paid a fraction of what he got before. No health benefits.
“Three years later, they let him go. Said business was down, and they had to trim costs. He got a job at Walmart after that. It was a great job for him. Finally, he didn’t have to work with his hands. He just had to smile. Welcomed people to the store so that they could buy things we don’t make anymore at low, low prices. The company was good to him, too, although he didn’t make nearly what he’d made at Deters. When my dad passed away, I counted forty-three coworkers from Walmart at the funeral. There were a hundred from Deters. No one came from Harvey’s Auto.
“This morning I picked up the local paper and read that Sheriff Don Marigold raided Harvey’s yesterday and picked up two Mexicans. Both here illegally. Fake Social Security numbers, phony paperwork. And all I could think was, thank God for Sheriff Don. These Mexicans aren’t bad people, for all I know. But they took two jobs from hardworking Americans. One of those jobs used to be my dad’s. Sheriff Don gets it. He looks around and sees that we’re all suffering here, and there are hardly any jobs, and it’s absolute insanity that we’d give those jobs to people who came here illegally instead of people who were born and raised in this community. The feds don’t care about this. The feds don’t care about you. That’s why Sheriff Don is doing their job. Because they won’t.
“The phones are all lit up, and I’m going to get to your calls, but before I do, I want to tell you something my dad used to say. He said a great man doesn’t complain for himself, but he’ll complain for others. My dad never complained for himself. I’m privileged to do it for him, and for guys like him. We owe them that much.”
Hank glanced up at the monitor and held his finger over the first button on the phone. “Let’s go to Margaret on line one.” He pressed the button. “Hello, Margaret, you’re on The Hank Frank Show.”
“Hank, you had me in tears again.” She sounded old.
“That’s what I do, Margaret.”
“I want to add to what you’re saying, because it’s not just the jobs. My son goes to Harrison Elementary in Englewood, and did you know that they have Spanish class? Not a class where the kids learn to speak Spanish, mind you. A class where everything is taught in Spanish. Math is taught in Spanish. History is taught in Spanish.”
“Yep. Yep.”
“English is taught in Spanish. My God. They’ve got these kids who speak Spanish at home, aren’t learning English, and we’re not even trying to teach them. And we put up with it.”
“I hear you, Margaret.”
“People used to come here and learn our language. Learn our ways. Learn our values. And now we don’t expect them to. I don’t even blame them. If we don’t expect them to, why should they expect it of themselves?”
“Thank you, Margaret.”
“Thank you, honey.”
He dumped the call and freed the line. It filled immediately. “You know, everything Margaret says is true. We have lowered our standards, and once you lower them, it’s hard to get them back. But even more than that, we’ve got these kids in our schools, and we’re spending extra money to accommodate them, and half of their parents aren’t paying taxes into the system to support the schools. And it all just adds up, you know. We lose good jobs to them, and then we lose our bad jobs to them, and then, as we’re struggling to get by, we’re still paying to educate their kids so they can take our kids’ jobs.”
He pushed down on the second line and glanced up at his monitor. “John, you’re on with Hank Frank.”
“Hanks a million.”
“Hanks back at you.”
“Brother, you are speaking the truth today. You are speaking the word of God.”
“I’m just speaking my mind.”
“Your mind is on fire.” The caller laughed. “Sometimes I feel so alone. And then, to hear your voice, speaking so rationally. Speaking such sanity. These people are taking our jobs. They’re taking our money. They are taking our lives, Hank.”
“Yes, yes.”
“They’re killing us. They are killing us, Hank. And that’s why I’m killing them.”
“It’s killing us, John.”
“Which is why I’m killing them. I’m killing all of them. I’m killing them—”
Hank slammed the button to drop the call. There was a moment of silence as he thought about what to say. When he found the words, he started slowly and softly. “To speak like that, even in metaphor, is abhorrent. To trivialize life like that is abhorrent. To speak of such violence, and to do so with such glee—it’s abhorrent. I open these lines so we can all talk frankly to each other. So that we can tell the truth. And some people don’t like the truth, and they want to discredit it, so they do what this gentleman did. They call in and pretend to be one of us, and then they say something god-awful. And they do it because they hate us, and they want everyone to hate us. They impersonate us for the sole purpose of trying to make us look bad. You saw it at the Tea Party rallies; there was always someone there holding some racist sign, and it’s always some hipster college kid, you know, a plant. He’s trying to make us look bad, and it’s not working. Mark down his number, Lucy; we’re never letting him through again. Let’s go to a break.”
He glanced through the glass to the control booth, where Lucy shrugged her shoulders. Hank removed his headset and walked from the studio to the control booth. “Did that just happen?”