by Martin Clark
“Sounds good so far.”
“Indeed. Ah, but you knew our girl Lettie. I offer Pichler my results and the basics. I truly am not privy to the precise composition of ‘VanSandt’s Velvet Number 108.’ That was her designation. Silly, huh? ‘VV 108.’ It was topical, by the way. Not oral. They asked me to call her.”
“Okay.”
“And I did.” Downs’s grin segued into a snicker. “Lettie flew hot. Was furious. I told her VV 108 was a failure for its intended purpose. The good news was that it evidently had utility to Benecorp and some interesting properties and a promising application. Not what she wanted to hear.”
Joe smiled as well. “Oh, damn,” he said. “I can imagine the conversation.”
“She thought highly of you, Mr. Stone. You obviously have a sense of her personality. She was angry because I suggested it couldn’t do what she said it would, and that was the extent of her perspective. She was positive it was a viable wound compound. I was certain it was not. She took it poorly. We’d been friends—well, correspondents, you might say—for many years. We’d even met at some numerology conventions. Broken bread together.”
“Classic,” Joe said. “Just perfect. You truly could tell Lettie she’d accidentally stumbled onto the cure for death itself, but if it didn’t fit with her exact plan, she’d argue with you until she was blue in the face.”
“Yes. Worse, not only are you telling her that her brainchild is a failure, but you’re also telling her you nonetheless want it. For purposes that are secret. Purposes you will not share with her. Ha! Many people who aren’t as suspicious and quirky as our friend Lettie would be reluctant, don’t you agree?”
“Perhaps. No doubt it would cause Lettie to go paranoid, I’ll grant you that much.”
“Did she mention this project to you? VV 108?”
“Listen. Lettie had so many balls in the air, so many grievances, so many complaints, so many inventions and concoctions, so many stupid legal jihads that I guess she might have, but I didn’t keep a list of all the windmills she and Sancho were trying to slay. But, now that I think about it, I do recall her, a few days before she died, wanting to sue a drug company because it was trying to steal something or other. She lit into me as I was headed to lunch. Of course, thousands of corporations had already stolen thousands of her other inventions over the years. It was a never-ending battle for her. I heard it monthly, if not weekly.”
“She brought it to your attention. Confirms my story.”
“Not with any specificity, and like I just told you, she’d pestered me with a zillion variations on this tale.”
“At any rate,” Downs continued, “Pichler blames me. I can’t deliver the goods. Can’t persuade Lettie to so much as accept his phone call. She threatens lawyers in an e-mail to me and Pichler. You were probably the lawyer. Pichler is livid and scrambling. MissFit really wants this. Around the same time, Mr. Seth Garrison, the man himself, was on site. Mr. G. The G-Man. He’s almost invisible, but there’s a rumor he’s there. I saw him board a helicopter. He’s very famous and powerful, Mr. Stone. But you already know that. Rarely seen. He is Benecorp. Among other things.”
“Why not just take it? Lettie’s a loon living in a backwoods trailer. It would be a piece of cake to have some scientist—Pichler, for instance—stand over a counter and stare at a test tube and scream ‘Eureka!’ and claim he’d suddenly invented a great new medicine. Benecorp is huge. They could grind her down for years. They could build a lab record and show their experiments and pass her off as an eccentric phony, which in fact she was to some degree.”
“They could. Yes. But remember they still have me as a problem, and they still have her, and she’s a squeaky wheel and a talker and a happy litigator and a gadfly, and no matter what, my notes and my entries are in the system.”
“Yeah, your notes say it was a failure. How would anyone ever know it was this formula, Lettie’s Velvet, that wound up hitting the jackpot?”
“Well, if you discredit me and purge the system, and MissFit and Pichler and Meade elect to be dishonest, they’re home free except for poor Lettie—and how, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, could she know the detailed and secret composition of a drug they claim to have created? Make no mistake, despite her oddities, I liked her. She took care of neglected creatures. But you already know that.”
“Do you have anything at all beyond your speculation? Any evidence that would make this more than a colorful hunch?”
“Of course you would ask me. Understand I’m fighting the leviathan here. So I’ve tried to prepare our case. First: I’m not sure even Benecorp can erase phone records. If they tried, it would be a battle of a big powerful corporation—Benecorp—versus a big powerful incompetent corporation—the phone company. Hard to whip incompetence. For sure Pichler called her from his number.”
“Easy to explain. He was responding to her question or her threat to sue his company or your request to explain the failure of her latest juju. A phone call is a phone call. Next?” Joe’s one-word demand was professional, objective. He wasn’t rude to Downs.
“I have an e-mail from Lettie. We talked too. On the phone. They sent ‘negotiators’ here, right here to Martinsville, Virginia. Under the radar. Hush-hush. They threatened her. Warned her. She was spooked. Afraid.” Downs ended with another tic, and his eyes shut simultaneously with the lip spasm.
“Unfortunately, Lettie isn’t around to confirm any of this.”
“But I have the smoking gun, Mr. Stone. Lettie gave me the plate number for their car.”
“Uh, Doctor, I’m afraid that’s hardly ‘smoking.’ ”
“You can trace the license plate. Listen, it’s not going to belong to Mr. Garrison. But you already know that. Or Pichler. Pichler probably couldn’t pass the test to get a learner’s permit. But I bet if you check, it will be irregular. What would you lose? The car was at Lettie’s around September second or third or fourth or fifth. Early September. She sent me the e-mail on the fifth and said they’d just been there.”
“It’ll probably come back to a rental company. Big deal. And I doubt they’d give me any information about the rental particulars. And so what if the car was in fact registered to Benecorp?”
Downs’s face remained placid. He leaned forward to Joe’s desk and raised a legal pad and a file and another file, peered underneath them, always searching. “Well, if the plate isn’t kosher, at least it might make you consider the possibility of power in numbers. Numerology.” Downs summoned a smile, and he came off, momentarily, as quite sane and composed, his inflection, features, demeanor and message all briefly in sync. He reached into his inside coat pocket and withdrew a partial fist, stood and hunched over and deposited a matchbox on the desk. “The number,” he said, “is inside.” He glanced at the ceiling, examined the window. “The technology is such, Mr. Stone, even the basic technology, that a satellite could read every number I’ve written. Clear as a bell. They’d see it better than you can. Be careful. But you already know that.”
Joe made no effort to camouflage his skepticism, his amusement. He laughed at Downs, dismissively. “Yeah, sure, I know that. And tell me again why it matters, especially given that they already have the number, right? It was their rental. Hardly a secret to them.”
Downs began sawing his chin with his thumb. “A warning for future reference. And believe you me, Benecorp is watching and listening. Listening and watching. To me. You too now.”
Joe didn’t reply. He got up and thanked Downs for his concern and shook his hand and escorted him all the way through the waiting room to the exit door, trailing a few feet behind him at a steady pace to ensure that the scientist kept moving and didn’t stray. Joe thanked him again for his interest in Lettie, and Downs, dispirited, his frail shoulders sagging, faced Joe and met him eye to eye and begged him to please at least check the license plate. Downs also warned him again to be cautious, told him, in a close whisper, that he’d be in contact by e-mail, using the alias Robert Culp.
Despite Downs’s obvious peculiarities and his fantastical tale, Joe decided to open the small cardboard box on his desk. He had nagging concerns about what might actually be inside, so he stopped by the toilet and took a pair of yellow rubber gloves off the lip of a cleaning pail and returned to his desk. Wearing the gloves, he palmed the box, gauging its weight, then slid it apart and dumped out a scrap of notebook paper that had been accordion-folded to a fraction of its full size. It was only a few inches long but wouldn’t rest flat, zigzagged from crease to crease. Joe slipped the gloves off and spread the paper and saw “VA ZZB-4132” was typed onto it. For the heck of it, he checked the ceiling, traced the same perimeter Downs had scanned a few minutes earlier, hesitating at the cat gouge from Lettie’s final visit. He considered calling Lisa in Nassau. According to his wristwatch, it was 4:20. March 4. He smiled, shook his head. Hell, even if the number was registered to Seth Garrison himself, so what? “A snipe hunt with a witch doctor as my guide,” he muttered to the empty room. “You ready, Brownie?”
Joe drove an older Jeep Wrangler with a hardtop, and he was almost to the vehicle, finished for the week and headed home, when he spotted Toliver Jackson, a spindly, balding black man on the cusp of going to seed across his belly. Jackson was a Henry County investigator, a bright, solid guy who could be counted on to testify truthfully and not take it personally and sulk and fume just because he had to answer a few aggressive questions about a Miranda waiver or chain of custody.
“Hey, Toliver,” Joe called, opening the door and tossing his briefcase into the passenger seat. “You keeping crime under control and the county safe for us?” He snapped his fingers, and Brownie crouched and jumped and wiggled through the Jeep and took his spot on the rear seat, near the middle, behind the gearshift.
“You know it, Joe. Course we might be better at it if we didn’t have to deal with slick lawyers scammin’ Judge Gendron into freein’ the guilty.” Jackson smiled. The jab was friendly, Friday afternoon banter between middle-aged men who’d crossed paths in the same system for years and never hoodooed each other, never cheated or cut corners.
“Our goal is to improve your job skills. Keep you sharp.”
“I got your bill for my divorce, and I wanted to say thanks again. I appreciate the hard work and the damn fair results. You didn’t have to give me a discount, though. It was a long fight. I never expected it to end as well as it did.”
“Glad to help. And we give all our law enforcement clients a discount. Even the rogues like you.”
“Well, all kiddin’ aside, I appreciate it. Sure do. Let me know if I can ever return the favor.”
Joe paused, looked off. Three blocks down, he noticed Steve Draper leaving from his clothing store. The street was mostly empty, a smattering of cars, a few people. “Huh,” he said, turning back to the cop, “come to think of it, your timing is pretty good. It’s a long shot from an iffy character, but could you track a tag number for me? A rental, probably.”
“How come you want it?”
“It’s connected to Lettie VanSandt. Her estate. I’d decided not to fool with it, but I figure I’ll never use the favor otherwise and you showing up right now is awfully coincidental. So yeah, if you could chase it down, I’d be grateful.”
“Lettie was crazy as a bedbug. Can’t say she is too much missed by those of us at the sheriff’s department.” Jackson pocketed both hands and studied Joe. “You’re not leadin’ me into anything, are you? Nothin’ I can’t take care of?”
“As far as I know, you’re just tying off a huge, improbable loose end, okay? If that changes, I’ll tell you. I’m only asking for a plate number, Toliver, not a wiretap or grand jury testimony or Daniel Ellsberg’s file. Hell, I could probably locate the tag information on the Internet if I wanted to spend the time on it.”
“What’s the number?”
“I’ll have to get it from the trash can in my office. That ought to give you a clue just how remote the possibilities are.”
“Okay. Then I got to head to Figsboro. Ollie Akers’s Mexicans are back for the tobacco season, and they’ve had some kinda cuttin’ ruckus.”
“You usually don’t hear a peep from that bunch,” Joe said. He and Jackson had started for his office, Brownie, unloaded and leashed, right with them. It was a clear, cold day, no hint of spring, and they both were still wearing winter coats.
“Same group’s been comin’ for twenty years or so. This is the first scrape we’ve had.” The two men were side by side as they walked. “It’d chafe my butt if I lived in Texas or Arizona and had the illegals hikin’ through my yard and cloggin’ my schools and suckin’ down social services dollars and refusing to hablo any English everywhere you go. But Ollie’s crew, they’re mostly here to work. You won’t be findin’ very many Henry County types who want to prime tobacco or pick apples or dig a ditch for Fulton Lester. Least the Mexicans aren’t afraid of an honest day’s work.”
“Can’t argue with you,” Joe said, “on either point.”
“Only problem I have with the Mexicans bein’ here is you can’t find an eight-hundred-dollar pickup or a two-hundred-pound white girl. All taken during the farming season.” Jackson glanced at Joe and grinned.
“Only you,” Joe said, “could cram two offensive stereotypes into such a short sentence. Didn’t the sheriff send you to some kind of diversity training?”
“Nobody has a sense of humor about anything these days,” Jackson griped.
“Yeah, well, Sinbad, while you’re honing your comedy routines, I’d also like you to discover to whom the car was leased if it is in fact a rental. And the total mileage, the odometer when it left and when it returned.”
“You won’t find that shit on the Internet, huh? I’ll see what I can do. So how about a good lawyer joke? Or are those off-limits too?”
“Have at it,” Joe said.
“Okay. So what happens to a lawyer when he dies?”
They were almost at Joe’s building. “His chances of becoming a Henry County cop increase?”
“Nope,” Toliver replied. “He lies still.” The officer paused for effect. “And that would apply to Mexican lawyers, Greek lawyers, English lawyers, black, white, yellow, man, woman, old, young. It’s what we in the police business call race neutral.”
Brett and Lisa’s suite at the Ocean Club opened out onto a ground-level patio and a sweeping view of the ocean, and when the porter inserted their plastic key card and sidestepped away from the entrance and Lisa saw where they’d be staying, she was still wearing her Virginia clothes, and she dropped her purse and wool jacket on a counter and left Brett behind, sailed across the room, past the elaborate bowl of fruit and bottle of champagne, right through the patio doors, and she didn’t stop until she hit the water, the air warm and salted, the sun close enough to do her some good, the blue and turquoise and the long horizon and lollygagging heat a sublime improvement on the dregs of a Henry County winter. A Jet Ski banged over waves, chatter from the hotel’s bar meandered down the beach, a swell nudged in and rose to her knees, soaking her slacks. Her shoes were kicked off on the sand, neither of them upright, separated and pointed in different directions.
Brett waited on the patio, drinking a Kalik beer, dressed for Nassau—flip-flops, a wrinkled linen shirt—since he’d boarded a plane in Roanoke. She returned after a while and used the tub spigot to wash her feet and changed clothes in the bathroom, and she and Brett walked to the bar, which was built on a bluff’s edge and caught the tail end of a trade wind, just enough breeze to register. They sat at an outside table, both of them facing the ocean. She had no plans, nowhere to be, no more ambition than to finish her drink, a tourist piña colada, and why not, she told the waiter, she was a tourist and it was the Bahamas and what could be better?
The Ocean Club was elegant and polished, a tile and mahogany showcase with British trimmings. The pool was beside a terraced garden populated by classical statues: a stone gathering of satyrs, a Hellenistic Zeus, a bare-breasted
demigoddess and flitting cherubs eager to spread Bacchus’s wisdom. Oddly enough, a marble FDR and Napoleon had also joined the party. Unlike her last Caribbean vacation, there was nary a T-shirt salesman or hair braider in sight, no teenagers hawking trinkets on the beach, no touts for the banana boat and booze cruise, no all-you-can-eat buffets. Their suite came with a butler, and shiny electric golf carts navigated paved trails to deliver guests to their various accommodations, the carts’ only sound the brake pedal springing free as the driver started forward.
After Lisa had finished a second drink and been brought another, Brett asked if she wanted to leave and visit the casino at Atlantis, maybe shoot dice or play baccarat or try her luck at blackjack, but she told him she was happy where she was, and she scooted her chair closer to him and rested her hand above his knee, her flat palm intimate and frankly carnal against his leg.
“I don’t really know, uh, what interests you,” Brett said. “I guess that sounds kind of strange given our current circumstances. But tell me, okay? I hope you will.”
“Hard to beat this,” she answered.
“No kidding.” He covered her hand with his.
It didn’t take long for the alcohol to affect them, but they were high and loose, not obliterated like they’d been in Roanoke, and Lisa asked for a glass of water and a plate of fruit, had to think for a moment because the waiter inquired if she wanted her water plain or with gas. “Plain will be fine,” she told him. As it slipped away in increments, the sun put on a nonchalant soiree, illustrating the sky and Technicoloring the clouds and water, and a group of gulls casually glided and dipped over the ocean, the boldest ones landing on a wooden railing at the bar to plead and screech for scraps, their heads herky-jerking, bobbing.
“Let’s walk back to the room,” Lisa suggested, “and watch the last of this.”
“You want to take anything to drink? Should I order a traveler?”