Davidson flipped the attaché case closed and folded his hands complacently on top of it, laughing a little at his own self-satisfaction.
“Do you mean that in the last five minutes or so you found a case answering the obscure question that lawyer just asked you?”
“Yep.”
He paused for a moment, grinning ambiguously like a conjurer who’s made an elephant disappear and can’t decide whether to reveal the cleverness of his trick or maintain the illusion of his magic. Cleverness won.
“It’s not that big a deal, actually,” he said, holding up the sheet he’d taken from his attaché case. “For ten decades or so, the West Publishing Company has divided all of American law into four hundred and twelve subjects, from Abatement and Revival to Zoning and Planning. They’ve divided each subject into topics and subtopics, from twelve topics for Dueling to over a thousand for subjects like Appeal and Error and Federal Civil Procedure. They’ve given every topic a number.”
“That sounds pretty daunting.”
“Now that we’re on computers,” Davidson continued, “there’s also a special code number for every subject. That’s what’s listed on this sheet. So you just go into the WestLaw database, ask for Indiana cases, code number 94 for Contracts, topic number 144 for Law Governing, and look at the most recent case. If it makes sense, you’ve answered the question.”
“It’s too bad they’ll never make you a partner.”
“Yeah, it is,” Davidson agreed. “But that’s a decision I made more than thirty years ago. Anyway, you came here to talk about Sharon Bedford, not me, and I don’t think you were finished yet.”
“I was just wondering as I thought about what you said. Just play Let’s Pretend with me for a second. Say Sharon picked up some isolated bit of information in one of the depositions she was reviewing—something that meant nothing special to the lawyers and the parties. Let’s say, though, that because of something else she knew, from her own background, she realized that information was actually very important. Big-league stuff. Possible?”
“Again, you say ‘possible’ and again I guess anything’s possible. I’d love for it to be true. Tell you the truth, I just don’t see it. I’ll tell you one thing for damn sure, though. If she did stumble on something, she made a record of it. She was absolutely the most meticulous person I’ve ever met. If God needs a staff clerk, He’s got one now.”
“Made a record of it somewhere in a deposition summary, do you think?”
“If she did and you can find it,” Davidson said with a smile and an exasperated shrug, “you’re a better man than I am. ’Cause I’ll tell you something: I’ve looked, and I don’t think it’s there.”
***
“Mr. Michaelson?” the feminine voice chirped at 5:17, when Michaelson was just about to give up. “Please hold for Mr. Quentin.”
Michaelson held while he tried to decide whether this approach reflected simple insensitivity or calculated rudeness. After holding for one hundred and seventy irritating seconds, he decided that he didn’t care. Then Quentin came on the line.
“Show me some tit,” were the first words out of his mouth.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Michaelson in unfeigned bafflement.
“The tease is cute, but I don’t have time for finger-fucking,” Quentin replied. “If it’s falsies under the D-cups, you don’t get my room key.”
“Fair enough,” said Michaelson, as something like understanding dawned. “Here goes. For twenty-five years-plus Walter Page Artemus soared through a dazzling army career. Late in the twenty-sixth, at the precise moment when he’d put his foot on the first step of the last stairway to the top, he inexplicably retired. He had ‘chief of staff’ written all over his ticket, then he crashed and burned overnight.”
“Everyone in town who can read knows that.” Quentin yawned. “Everyone who cares, anyway.”
“What everyone in town doesn’t know is why—and it’s not because he abused his rank to get special treatment for a relative.”
“So. Tell me why.”
“Not over the phone,” Michaelson said.
“Translation: You don’t know why, either.”
“That depends on how you define ‘know.’ In any event, I’m confident that between the two of us we could find out for sure. And I think that’s something you haven’t been able to do all by yourself up to now.”
“I ask for tit and you’re blowing goddamn smoke up my ass,” Quentin said. “Show me you have something besides bullshit in your sample case or this phone call is over.”
“I understand,” Michaelson said apologetically. “I’ve been out of the game for a while, and my reflexes are a bit rusty. Need not to know and so forth. Scott Pilkington is running on this one, and I’m supposed to talk to him.”
Michaelson winced as he finished this comment, anticipating an angry, contemptuous click. It didn’t come. When Quentin spoke again after two seconds of suspenseful silence, he had dropped the bullying swagger from his voice, in favor of aw-shucks innocence.
“Who’s Scott Pilkington?” he asked.
“Whose Scott Pilkington?” Michaelson answered, matching Quentin’s tone note-for-note. “Why, your Scott Pilkington, Mr. Quentin. I didn’t know anyone else owned a piece of him.”
The pause this time lasted less than one second.
“I’ll have to move some things around, but I can give you twenty minutes,” Quentin snapped then. “Ten-thirty sharp tonight.”
The line went dead.
Chapter Twelve
If the secular liturgy of American politics offers anything else with the sacramental resonance of the White House at night, Michaelson reflected, he couldn’t imagine what it might be. TV screens showing the West Wing bathed in light meant drama, crisis, war. Michaelson had seen it before but, he mused as the guard checked his name on a list and waved him through at 10:23 p.m., you never stop being impressed.
Quentin’s office was on the second floor of the Old Executive Office Building, directly across West Executive Avenue from the White House. Though Quentin had occupied the office for over three years, it looked as if he had just moved into it and didn’t expect to remain for more than a week or so. No pictures or mementos graced the spare shelves or the dark wood, government-issue desk. No plants competed for space with the newspapers, magazines, videotapes, and computer printouts covering the desk and cabinet tops. The oatmeal-colored drapes and carpet were whatever the GSA had tossed into the room. The only thing in the office that Quentin seemed to have chosen was an elaborate phone console next to his computer.
As a young woman silently ushered Michaelson into the office, Quentin stood facing the far corner, as far behind his desk as he could get. A Rorschach splotch of sweat stained the back of his powder blue shirt. With the scratch of Michaelson’s chair on the floor, Quentin turned his head a fraction of an inch, showing Michaelson a silver of his face.
“All right,” he said. “Impress me.”
“Artemus never had his picture taken,” Michaelson said. “Four years in the Reagan White House, surrounded by lens-seeking flacks, and he didn’t make it to a single photo-op.”
“So what?”
“If you’re trying to let me know how small a blip I am on your radar screen, that’s perfect,” Michaelson said. “If you’re trying to make me think you really don’t appreciate the significance of what I said, you’re a beat too slow.”
Hands snaking into his hip pockets, Quentin swiveled around.
“I know what I know. What you think I know I could give a shit. You haven’t impressed me yet, and I’m beginning to think you’re bluffing.”
“The story of my life. Very well. I’ll spell it out. Camera shy implies security conscious. Security conscious plus military aide in the White House equals football. General Artemus followed the president around with the briefcase holding t
he nuclear launch codes—known colloquially as the football. Armageddon in calfskin.”
Quentin offered a half-smile.
“Pete Fiske carried the football for Reagan,” he said in a mildly puzzled voice. “I knew that clear back when I was designing ad campaigns for dandelion killer in Marin County.”
“General Fiske carried a decoy,” Michaelson said, unruffled. “General Fiske wore a uniform, and General Fiske got his picture in the paper. If the Soviets happened to have a marksman in range when the flag dropped, General Fiske was supposed to catch the bullet and General Artemus was supposed to open his briefcase. Please note my polite restraint in omitting any observation about everyone in town knowing that.”
“Everyone in town didn’t know that,” Quentin said, grinning with a hint of real warmth as he strolled back toward his desk. “How do you?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so why don’t we just skip it and talk about something else? Like why General Artemus started drawing his pension fifteen years early.”
“If I had that answer,” Quentin said, “I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
“I know how frustrating it must be. You poke your nose into filing cabinets and peek under desk blotters every chance you get and you keep coming up empty.”
“It hasn’t exactly been my only project. But it would just about be yours, wouldn’t it?”
“For all practical purposes,” Michaelson conceded affably. “Of course, I’ll be looking for the answer from outside the White House.”
“But from inside the establishment. That’s the key. I might get my face on talk shows every Sunday morning, and everybody might know I talk to the president for at least half an hour every day, but I’ll always be an outsider here. So will the president himself, for that matter. I’d have a better chance of being admitted to the Players Club in London than to that chummy little group where you’ve spent your adult life.”
“It’s nice to feel needed.”
“That’s why you’re sitting here,” Quentin said. He dropped into his chair and leaned back, reaching out idly with his left hand to tap a pencil eraser on his desktop. “Listen to me. Carefully. What you want. It’s within your grasp. It is literally within your grasp. Am I coming through?”
“Quite clearly.”
Quentin swiveled the chair slightly and leaned his head back, gazing at Michaelson from half-closed eyes. From the beginning of the interview his movements had seemed to Michaelson not just unnatural but elaborately choreographed, as if he’d spent ten minutes before Michaelson came in working out when to strike one pose and when to take another.
“I’m not talking about just getting a nice title to close your copybook with while a lame-duck administration plays out the string. I’m talking about an entire term. Maybe two full terms.”
Quentin’s eyes snapped open and he surged forward in the chair with a fierce intensity.
“Don’t laugh,” he said to Michaelson, who wasn’t laughing. “I can do it. I can fucking do it. I can pull off a bigger win than Johnson in ’sixty-four. I can lock the party into the White House for years. And if you’re the one who produces what I need to bring it off, you just name your price and I will, by God, deliver.”
“We understand each other perfectly,” Michaelson said.
“I don’t just need an answer. Oliver Stone has all the answers, but he also has slightly less credibility than the Flat Earth Society. I need documentation. Hard copy. Can you get-it?”
“I’d tell you yes regardless of what the truth was and you know it,” Michaelson said. “So why bother to ask the question?”
For the first time in the conversation Quentin’s face lit with an expression that didn’t seem entirely rehearsed. His lips split in a broad grin, simultaneously malicious and delighted.
“You are a very dangerous man,” he said.
“Yes I am,” Michaelson said as he rose and extended his hand.
It was the first time in the last five minutes that either of them had told the complete truth.
Chapter Thirteen
“Wasn’t Pilkington upset about you going to Quentin behind his back?” Marjorie asked when Michaelson joined her at Cavalier Books shortly before noon the next day.
“He was quite cross,” Michaelson acknowledged. “At least he pretended to be. I pointed out that if I’d talked to him ahead of time, he would technically have been collaborating with me. I opined that Quentin would have seen through me instantly and tumbled to my guilty association with Pilkington, to Pilkington’s presumed prejudice. At that point he pretended to be mollified.”
“Did he give you the disks?”
“Disk,” Michaelson said, handing a manila envelope to her. “There’s only one, and I’m afraid his giving it to me means he’s had someone look at it and he doesn’t think there’s anything significant on it.”
“No sense booting it up and plugging ‘Highways to Indians’ into Word Search, then?” Marjorie asked.
“You know,” Michaelson said thoughtfully, “I think that in the two chats I’ve had with Scott Pilkington since we visited Ms. Bedford’s apartment, ‘Highways to Indians’ has somehow failed to come up in the conversation. Forgetful of me, but then I’m getting to an age where that kind of thing is apt to happen.”
“I’ll give the disk a try, then—even though it’s a little hard to believe that I’ll stumble onto something that the professionals available to Pilkington and Quentin would miss.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. Whatever professionals they’re using haven’t produced what Quentin’s after yet. Partly I think that’s because Quentin’s not going to let anyone know exactly what he is after until he’s holding it in his hand and is ready to use it. That’s why he swore to me that he didn’t know why General Artemus had been forced into early retirement.”
“You think he was lying about that?” Marjorie asked.
“Not a doubt in my mind. He knows every detail. Sitting where he has been since the last inauguration, he’d have to be brain-dead not to learn that much if he really wanted to find it out.”
“Then why did he favor you with that high-wattage sales job, that luminous bribe about naming your own cabinet position? What does he want from you?”
“He wants me to come up with usable, concrete documentation of what he already knows. He thinks there’s at least a chance that I can do that. The catch is that to have a prayer of accomplishing anything like that, either you have to find a road map on the disk that will lead us to the documentation, or I have to find out why Artemus got canned and work backwards from there.”
“But Quentin won’t tell you why Artemus got fired, or even admit that he knows himself. So how do you plan to get the information?”
“The only idea I’ve come up with so far,” Michaelson said without a trace of enthusiasm, “is to ask Artemus.”
Michaelson took his leave and Marjorie prepared to confront the lunch-hour rush at Cavalier Books. At the stroke of two she mentally declared the rush over and hustled the computer disk Michaelson had left with her back to her Spartan desk in the stockroom.
In impatient anticipation she slipped it into her Compaq and summoned its directory onto the screen:
Arliss v. Hardacher
PTFDEPSUM
Arliss v. Hardacher
DEFDEPSUM
Cucurri v. Gardner A/K/A
SIMONDEPSUM
Charlton Co. v. Barron
REIMERDEPSUM
Darrin v. State Farm Insurance
PTFDEPSUM
Donovan v. O’Hara Brokerage
DENNYDEPSUM
Easton, Inc. v. Doherty Corp.
HILLDEPSUM
Fenton v. Rose
PTFDEPSUM
Fitz v. Zelda
REPDEPSUM
Garrett v. Daily
MASDEPSUM
Grace v. Ernest
DEFDEPSUM
Halloway Tectronics v. Albert
EXPERTDEPSUM
Ionia Development Corp. v. Baker
DEFDEPSUM
Kable v. Allstate Insurance
RODHAMDEPSUM
Lake v. Christopher
MAITLINDEPSUM
Miller v. O’Neill
PTFDEPSUM
Miller v. O’Neill
DEFDEPSUM
Page v. Bottle Realty Co.
ELLIOTTDEPSUM
Queen Corp. v. Bailey Printing
PTFDEPSUM
Roehr v. Allison Partners
TINKERDEPSUM
Stuart v. Teterond
ARGYLDEPSUM
Temple v. Atchison
PTFDEPSUM
Virdon v. Osteen
HERTERDEPSUM
She sighed.
She pulled up the first file:
ARLISS VERSUS HARDACHER
Summary of the Deposition of Steven Arliss
Worst Case Scenario Page 10