Walter smiled at the bartender. “No,” he said. “I sure don’t.”
Ike said, “Well, it’s like this. What you see coming at you is not what you thought it was when it passed you by.” He sucked in an almost inhuman amount of smoke—Walter thought for sure the blazing butt would burn his fingers to a crisp—and while the smoke slithered out of both sides of his mouth and his nose at the same time, he added, “Just like life, boys. Just like life.” Then he flashed his trademark smile for all to see.
“Pretty close,” said Isobel, “pretty close.” Being around Ike had already made an impression on her. She found herself too often repeating something in the way he did. Once she realized what she was doing she made a successful effort to stop it, but the old man had his effect. She was here, back on St. John, in Billy’s Bar, sitting in the seat next to Walter, drinking a beer and munching on some french fries because the Moose had kicked her out of the paper until after New Year’s. It was
her own fault. She’d been summoned to his office right after Louise Hollingsworth was killed.
“Isobel, we can’t print this,” said Mel Gold, waving a sheet of paper in his hand as though her writing was on it, when in fact it wasn’t. He couldn’t remember the last time he read anything anyone wrote on paper. All he had done for years was read things on the monitor screen of his computer. The days of typing on paper were long gone, and, for many middle-aged newspapermen, sorely missed. “You know we can’t do that.” The Moose was more than a little pissed. Isobel had flown to Vermont and back by helicopter. She had her details, her interviews with law enforcement, even an exclusive—a preliminary report from the Medical Examiner. Her story began:
Leonard Martin, who has already killed four men, continues his relentless pursuit of those responsible for the deaths of his wife, daughter, and two grandsons. Yesterday it took him to rural Vermont, where he shot to death Louise Hollingsworth. Martin’s family died in the great E. coli poisoning disaster three years ago. The disaster, which paralyzed America’s food supply for months thereafter, was perpetrated by a combination of business interests. Their identities became known to Mr. Martin later. The personal pain and anguish that gave birth to his violent campaign for a justice he feels has been denied, appears undiminished. Ms. Hollingsworth, a Vice President and Senior Analyst at Stein, Gelb, Hector & Wills Securities Inc., worked with a small, high-level group within her company. Sources say it was Ms. Hollingsworth and others at Stein, Gelb, Hector & Wills, including Nathan Stein, Thomas Maloney, and Wesley Pitts, who were responsible for allowing more than a million pounds of deadly beef to be sold to the public. Mr. Martin has sworn to kill them all. “I can only imagine how he feels,” said Warren Kimbrough, Chief of the Vermont State Police.
The Moose shrugged, his mouth drawn tightly into a crooked line, one side pointing up, the other down. His chins seemed to take on a life of their own. He squinted in frustration, and finally, no longer able to control himself, grunted. He looked at his empty chair, knowing that if he sat down it would surely collapse and splinter into pieces from nothing more than the weight of his dismay. Isobel said nothing. She too chose to stand.
“It’s ‘advocacy.’ We don’t do ‘advocacy.’ Is this where you’re going?” Isobel remained silent. “Are you a reporter—a New York Times reporter—or are you looking to go back on 60 Minutes? Because this,” he waved the same empty sheet of paper in the air again, “this is exactly what they like. ‘The personal pain and anguish that gave birth to his violent campaign . . .’ That kind of language doesn’t belong in the New York Times.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Being dead.” That’s all she needed to say, just two words, for him to understand. Everyone at the Times knew those were the first two words from a legendary sentence in the story about the State of New York’s posthumous pardon of Lenny Bruce: “Being dead, Mr. Bruce is not expected to reap any immediate benefit from the pardon.”
“That got in the Times,” she said.
“Don’t give me bullshit! Lenny Bruce said ‘fuck you’ a couple of times. He didn’t kill five people! Now what the fuck is going on here?”
Isobel said nothing. Mel Gold tried to calm down, but he couldn’t. “Come on, damnit! Talk to me, Isobel!”
“They tried to kill me, Mel.” She spoke quietly, almost in a whisper.
“What!”
“Stein, Maloney, the gang of criminals at Stein, Gelb—”
“They—”
“They tried to kill me.” This time her voice was loud and clear. He heard every word and thought he glimpsed a look of relief in her eyes.
Now the Moose sat down, confident his bulky frame wouldn’t break anything. “Hey kiddo, what’s going on here? There’s something I don’t know and I think you need to tell me. Sit down. Talk to me. Tell me.”
She did. She told him all of it. Some of it he already knew, some he’d never heard before—from Walter Sherman’s first call, to the incident with the former NYPD detective Jack Allen and the warning Walter gave Tom Maloney. She told Gold everything. Almost everything. She left out the sex. And, for reasons she did not fully comprehend, she did not give Gold a description of the “new” Leonard Martin. Whatever she saw of him remained her secret. She said he was “unrecognizable”—although only Walter Sherman had actually seen him—but she didn’t describe his appearance even as Walter had related it to her.
“What the hell does that mean, ‘unrecognizable’?” Mel Gold knew his voice was the wrong one, his manner delivering the wrong message. He wanted so badly to be more compassionate. He yearned to be a real friend to Isobel in her time of need, but he was a newspaperman. Like a soldier in combat, he newspapered on. “What does he look like?”
“I’ve never seen him,” Isobel answered. “I was blindfolded,
remember?”
“Sure, so what did Sherman say?” Isobel was silent. The Moose knew she was having a hard time giving him up. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “Listen closely, and if you don’t understand, ask me, okay?” She nodded. “If you’ve never seen Leonard Martin you can’t describe him. If Walter Sherman says he’s seen him and if he can describe him, if he says Martin has changed or altered his appearance in any way, we have no way of corroborating Sherman’s story, do we? We have only your word that someone, a third party—in this case Walter Sherman—told you something, right?” Again, Isobel nodded. “But we do have Sherman’s description. Can we use it? Can the New York Times publish a story about a physical description of Leonard Martin that differs from the public record? Can we do that based solely on what you say somebody else said?” He paused for a long moment. Isobel said nothing and she did not nod her head. She waited. “No,” he said. “We can’t. If we don’t have a first-hand sighting or a cooperative source, which I gather Walter Sherman is not, plus a second witness, we will not print a description for which we have no backup. Am I clear? Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now go back and write it. Give me every little detail Sherman gave you about Leonard Martin’s appearance. Do it on paper or on your own computer—not here. I don’t want it showing up anywhere on anyone’s hard disk or mainframe or wherever in hell all this shit gets stored. Print it out and give it to me. I’ll keep it at home. You and I will be the only ones who know, but I must know. There has to be a record. Believe me, the time will come when there has to be a record. And you and I have to know what we’re looking at when we see it.”
“You won’t share it with anyone? And we won’t print it?”
“Absolutely correct. I know you speak French and some other languages, even some I’ve never heard of, but you speak English too. You heard me. You do understand me, right?”
Isobel smiled at the big man. “Eai, I, Han jee, Io,” she said—yes, in Kiribati, Rotuman, Hindi, and the standard Fijian she spoke as a child.
Mel Gold grinned from ear to ea
r, then told her to get out of town until after New Year’s. He’d get someone else to finish writing the Louise Hollingsworth story. She would get her byline with whoever wrote the final draft.
“Now get out of here. You’re on the beach for a week or so.”
“D-d-dog days of summer, eh, Mel?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he said. “It’s December. It’s fucking Christmas, for Christ’s sake.”
Isobel gave him a kiss on the cheek, called Walter, and headed for the airport.
“Ike is close,” said Isobel. “Einstein published two theories of relativity. The first when he was only twenty-three years old. Can you believe that? He called it the ‘special theory of relativity,’ and ten years later he published a second one he called the ‘general theory of relativity.’ Relativity takes into account different points of view—literally, like Ike pointed out—and says that what you think is real could be seen in a different way. Einstein was all about questioning the interchangeability of absolute time. And this fits because his theory holds that the idea that every object has a form and a mass that are constant is false. He also deals with heavy mass objects, saying they actually curve with the universe, which explains gravity, although I don’t think that has much to do with the size of this boat.”
“Damn,” Ike said. Billy and Walter had nothing to add. They were indeed speechless. Each assumed the others, like himself, were still in the dark. “Damn. Where’d you learn that, child?”
Isobel said, “St John’s.”
“Not here you didn’t,” said Billy.
“That’s for damn sure,” said Ike, poking through his pockets, looking for another cigarette.
“I didn’t mean here, St. John. I said St. John’s, with an s.”
“What’s that?” Billy asked.
“It’s a college,” said Walter. “Unlike the three of us, this charming and lovely young lady is an educated woman.”
“That true?” Ike asked. “St. John’s a college?”
“It is,” Isobel said. “A fine institution of higher learning. In Annapolis, Maryland.”
“And you learned about Einstein?”
“I did Billy. I surely did. But don’t hold that against me.”
“You studied it, but I almost got it right, didn’t I?” Ike was bubbling with pride and soon smoking with it too. Isobel smiled and nodded at the old man.
Walter said, “I still say that sounds like an argument to me. Write it up, Billy.”
“Write what up?”
“Einstein, Stugots, and Isobel.”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Ike, “but it sounds good.” He shook his head, giving the okay to Billy.
“What’s the ‘Isobel’ for?” Billy asked.
“Beauty,” said Walter. “Beauty and knowledge.”
“A mighty powerful combination,” Ike said.
Once more the bartender with an uncertain past and more than one name picked up the chunk of blue chalk lying near the register and wrote on the familiar blackboard: Einstein/Stugots/Isobel. He poured himself a glass of tomato juice, took a swig, and said to no one in particular, “It ain’t ‘Stugots.’ It’s ‘The Stugots.’”
New Orleans
Leonard rented a one-bedroom second-floor apartment on St. Ann near Burgundy, a block away from N. Rampart Street, the northern end of the French Quarter. He paid a premium holiday rate, taking the place for both Christmas and New Year’s. He’d seen an ad for the apartment on the Internet and made all his arrangements by e-mail. The owner told him there had been a cancellation and he was lucky to find a place, any place, still available inside the French Quarter. Leonard e-mailed back that he wanted to rent the apartment through the month of January. He told the owner he and his wife loved New Orleans and this was a special surprise for her. He mentioned he was already in transit, and, as such, it would be more convenient if he paid in cash when he arrived. Leonard called when he was less than an hour’s drive from New Orleans, arriving purposely after dark. The owner, a middle-aged gay man named Erubio, was waiting at the entrance to the building with the key. The transaction took only a moment. Leonard did his best to look away from the man’s face as he handed him the money, and he wore a floppy, brown cowboy hat pulled down across his eyes. He handed the money over in an envelope, took the key, and disappeared inside. He never said where his wife was and was not asked. Although he paid for six weeks, he intended to be gone by the middle of January.
Leonard had been there ten days, far away from Vermont. Newspaper and TV reports speculated he was headed for, or already holed up in, New York City gunning for the rest of the crew at Stein, Gelb. The New York Post twice reported Leonard Martin sightings complete with fuzzy, grainy, out-of-focus photos in which, of course, his face was never shown. They were all photos of fat guys with long, light-colored hair. One such picture, supposedly showing Leonard leaving a movie theater on Third Avenue, made most of the major papers in the country. He saw it on page one of the New Orleans Times-Picayune over coffee and funnel cake loaded with powered sugar, in a tiny restaurant near Jackson Square. He laid the paper, photo up, next to his coffee cup on the small, round table and looked at himself in the mirrored wall. He looked as much like the man in the picture as he did like Santa Claus. His waitress came over and refilled his empty cup. Gazing at the paper, she said, “I hope they catch that guy, but I hope he gets all the others first.” Then she smiled at the real Leonard Martin and asked if he wanted anything else.
New Year’s Eve was already a thing of the past, and the Super Bowl still weeks from kickoff. The French Quarter was crowded anyway. Even the unusually cold weather didn’t keep the crowds away or the best players from coming out to blow their horns. In the mornings, Leonard took the twenty-minute stroll to Jackson Square or Decatur Street down by the Mississippi River. He’d have breakfast in one of the many small coffee shops in the area, read the morning paper, and take in some fresh air. After two winters in the mountains of New Mexico, a chilly morning in New Orleans was like a spring day. The rest of the time he spent in the apartment, on the Internet, making calculations, checking the spreadsheets Carter Lawrence had sent him. Most nights he walked up the block to the corner of St. Ann and N. Rampart
to Donna’s Bar & Grill. He liked Donna’s because the place had the
casual atmosphere of a neighborhood bar or a slightly rundown Cajun hangout. Of course there were always a few out-of-towners and tourists, but Donna’s was off the beaten path for the conventioneers at the Hilton or the Marriott, and certainly not the kind of place visited by the folks from Iowa in the Big Easy on a two- night, three-day package holiday.
The old man, Charlie, was always there, with Donna, and they were happy to see you no matter who you were. Leonard also liked the anonymity numbers afforded since Donna’s was always packed even in the wee hours of the morning. The best brass band music in the world is heard there nightly. New Orleans has no second team. For musicians, no minor leaguers need apply. There are no off-nights, no such thing as a slow season. Donna’s Bar & Grill was the place in the Quarter where the hornmen showed up after playing their regular gigs on Bourbon Street or the small joints over on Iberville or on Canal near the businessmen’s hotels, where the Quarter ends and New Orleans becomes just another city. One after another they’d wander in, instrument in hand. A few were instantly recognized by some in the crowd and applause greeted their entrance. Even if they were unknown, anyone carrying a horn case, especially a black man, caused an immediate stir among Donna’s patrons. No doubt, he came to play. As the hours passed the band got bigger or smaller as players arrived or called it a night. Sometimes there were as many as a dozen playing at the same time. Trombone and coronet players traded solos on “Tiger Rag” or “Bogalusa Strut” like boxers whipping their left jab into an opponent’s helpless face—snap, snap, snap. Then—it was always the
same, a kind of ritual—they stopped and smiled, the crowd cheered, and another boxer, dancer, painter, or poet stepped forward to pick up the gauntlet, accept the challenge. A couple of hours, a few beers, and Leonard could walk back to the apartment, hoping for a dreamless sleep. He was in Donna’s every night for more than a week, until one night when Charlie greeted him with a friendly smile and a small nod of his head, acknowledging familiarity. Leonard could have none of that. He left immediately and never returned.
Wesley Pitts longed for the gym. His size and speed set him apart, even as a child. By the time he was ten or eleven his days of running free on the street or in the woods were over. Would-be and future coaches ushered him into the inner sanctum of high-tech body care. His birth certificate was altered to make him a year younger. That change delayed his entrance to high school by a year, allowing his high school football coach the luxury of playing him until Wes was almost twenty years old. During those years and the time to come in a bigtime college program and finally at the highest echelon of professional football, he had at his disposal the finest workout equipment and facilities in the world. Once he tasted steak it was unthinkable he would go back to macaroni and cheese. Now he found himself in the backwoods of Mississippi. The only exercise option around was running, so he ran twice each day. In the morning, before breakfast, he’d jog a mile and a half from his grandmother’s house to the intersection with one of the two red lights before you get to town. On one corner was a small grocery store, and diagonally across the street a feed-supply warehouse. At seven o’clock in the morning neither was open for business. He’d turn around at the light and this time run—sometimes sprinting—all the way back. He repeated this at about four-thirty each afternoon. The round trip took at most twenty to twenty-five minutes.
On the morning of January 15th, Wesley Pitts jogged to the red light. He bent over, his hands on his knees, catching his breath, and turned around, ready to begin his run back. He had excellent vision, a seldom mentioned yet key aspect to his success as a receiver. Some people could judge distance by car lengths, others by city blocks. Pitts had a keen sense of distance measured in yards, in football fields. As he looked up he saw something he figured to be about two hundred and fifty yards away. It looked like a man standing in the middle of the road. The man appeared to be wearing a cowboy hat. He held something up to his shoulder or chin with both hands. The instant it took for Wesley Pitts to realize the man was holding a rifle was his last. The bullet struck him in the center of his chest. Almost at the same time, two more hit him. None of the three mortal wounds were more than two inches apart.
The Knowland Retribution Page 32