Flashpoint

by Ed Gorman

  ‘You all right, Robert?’ I said after a time.

  ‘Just ducky.’

  ‘I wish you’d think over what I said.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About telling Ben and Hammell everything.’

  ‘I already have.’

  I set my beer on the coffee table and stood up. ‘I’m going now.’

  Still with his head back, eyes closed. ‘What’re you going to do?’

  ‘Get some hookers up to my room and have a party.’

  ‘Fuck yourself.’

  ‘I’m working on something but I’m afraid to tell you because you’ll have to give a live statement sometime and I don’t want you blurting it out.’

  Head up, eyes opened. ‘You have a lot of faith in me.’

  ‘Actually, I do, Robert. But I’d blurt it out, too, because this could turn the story in a whole new direction.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about, Dev?’

  ‘Howie Ruskin’s been in town for a while.’

  There was a pause, then he said, ‘Ruskin’s behind this, he must be. Wait … Ruskin and Tracy worked together?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Ruskin killed her!’

  He was up on his feet like a man who’d just been saved at a religious event. He was even waving his hands in the air. He had seen the truth and the truth went by the name of Howie Ruskin. ‘How the hell can you just stand there so calmly, Dev? This is the whole nine yards. That prick set me up with Tracy and then killed her to make it look as if I’d done it.’ I sensed the kind of relief that comes to those whom the Lord has singled out for salvation; the salvation only a grifter peddling solace from the ugliness of an unforgiving world can inspire. In my fantasy revolution I hang all TV ministers and ministerettes. Right after the deserving Wall Streeters.

  ‘Proof, Robert. Proof. We don’t have any as yet. But he’s staying at the same hotel that I am and I’ve paid a bellman there to let me know the moment he sees him. The man’s name is Earl and he’s got my cell number.’

  ‘You’re awfully goddamned calm about this, Dev.’

  ‘Maybe we should get James back down here and let him handle it.’

  He made a face at me but then his entire body settled. The high had left him. ‘Yeah, you’re right. We don’t have jack yet, do we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I’d bet anything he’s involved.’

  ‘So would I.’

  A half-smile. ‘Well, my well-paid consultant finally agrees with me on something.’

  ‘Ass-kissers charge even more.’

  His long hands went to his face. He reminded me of Elise doing the same thing. ‘God, I just can’t believe this has happened to me. It’s so insane.’ The hands came down. He stared out the window. ‘I can hear them down there. They’ll all be filing story after story, even though there’s nothing new to report.’

  ‘Some of them have probably been in town interviewing people.’

  ‘Oh, sure. “I always figured that Logan for an ax-murderer. You know how those socialists are.”’

  I was walking to the vestibule where Mrs Weiderman had hung my coat. ‘I’m going to look up Earl when I get back to my hotel. If I get any news I’ll call you right away.’

  ‘I’m sorry for dumping on you.’

  ‘I’d be just as upset as you are, Robert. You got set up and I’m pretty sure we’re both right about who’s involved.’

  The temperature had to be in the low forties when I walked outside. Maybe the high thirties. But the weather hadn’t deterred the press. As I neared the checkpoint more than a dozen people with cameras and microphones ran toward the guards with the shotguns. A car leaving the Logan home? Maybe there was a story in it.

  The guards watched me approach and had opened the gate by the time I reached them so I could drive straight through. The reporters screamed at me as if I were a rock star.

  NINE

  Halfway back to town – I knew it was halfway because I remembered an ancient abandoned school being roughly midway – my cell phone rang. I pulled over.

  ‘It’s me, Earl.’

  ‘You got something?’

  ‘Yeah. Strange. I had to help set up for this big event tonight because there’s flu going around and we’re short on people. So while I was doing that, this Ruskin guy calls in and says he’s sending his assistant over to pay his bill and pick up his stuff. The kid at the desk told me she came in about five minutes after Ruskin called. She was real nervous and seemed scared, he said. Said she was kind of dumpy and looked sorta like a hippie. One of the other bellmen took her up to the room, she packed everything up and then left. The desk kid had his hour dinner break and the girl running the desk didn’t know anything about it. She told me that she hadn’t seen Ruskin so I assumed there was no problem. I got busy so I didn’t get a chance to ask this kid until a few minutes ago.’

  ‘What time does the kid get off?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  It was eight thirty-six.

  ‘And there’s somebody else here looking for Ruskin, too. And he’s also looking for you.’

  ‘Did you talk to him?’

  ‘No, but the kid did. He said that right now the guy is in the hotel bar.’

  ‘I should be there in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Sorry I wasn’t more on top of things.’

  ‘You did fine, Earl. I appreciate it.’

  The sensible – or maybe the word should be lazy – reporters were hanging out in the hotel lobby. They stood around with drinks in their hands laughing and greeting new arrivals with shouts and verbal jabs. This had to be the second string. The ones freezing their asses off out at Robert’s place were the ones who mattered. These knew they weren’t important and were taking advantage of that fact.

  A few of them eyed me with whiskey scorn. I was, after all, not one of Them. The first thing I did was check for messages. There were none. The ‘kid’ as Earl called him – his name was Kevin, according to his name tag – said, ‘This is like Chicago tonight.’ He was stoned on the excitement. ‘Late in the afternoon four reporters I see on the evening news all the time checked in, all in less than an hour. I was going to ask for an autograph but I thought maybe I’d get in trouble.’ I guessed Earl was right to call him the kid.

  ‘Somebody told me that Mr Ruskin checked out and a woman picked up all his stuff for him.’

  He allowed himself a moment of surprise and then said, ‘Gosh, word sure does get around. But that’s right. A woman did pick up his things.’

  ‘Can you describe her?’

  ‘Describe her?’

  ‘Yes. Describe her.’

  ‘Oh.’ Suspicion played across his bland face. ‘Is something going on in the hotel I should know about, Mr Conrad?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Pretty dumpy. Hippie-like. She looks real young until you see her close up.’

  ‘So you took her up to his room?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Did you go in with her?’

  ‘Uh-huh. She had me put all his stuff in garment bags and put them on the cart.’

  ‘She say anything while you were helping her?’

  ‘She just told me what to do and then she just sort of ignored me.’

  Behind us the reporters started applauding for somebody or something.

  ‘They like to have fun, don’t they? I recognized one of them from Channel Eight from downstate. That’s where I grew up.’

  I was about five steps from the check-in when I saw Earl waving at me. He stood to the side of the door leading into the bar.

  ‘This place is a zoo,’ he said when I got to him. ‘We should have murders more often. No offense, but I’m getting rich tonight.’

  Earl didn’t have much of a future in public relations. Good for him he was getting rich tonight. A man innocent of murder was getting lynched in the media and I was losing a vital campaign. But I needed Earl. ‘I’ll see what I can do for you. Pick out a couple o
f people and I’ll off them for you. I mean, since murders are so good for your business.’

  I’d tried keeping my irritation out of my little joke but he picked up on my anger.

  ‘Hey, I said no offense, man. It was just a stupid joke, all right?’

  ‘All right. Now tell me about the man in the bar.’

  Basically he went through what he’d told me on the phone. But this time he added, ‘He’s an official of some kind.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He touched his nose. ‘I can smell them. Cops, politicians, narcs. You can’t catch bells all the years I have and not be able to pick them off. All the guys can who’ve been at it for a while.’

  ‘And you’re sure he’s still in there?’

  ‘Unless he went out the back door, which almost nobody ever does.’

  ‘How about you point him out to me?’

  ‘Sure. And listen, it really was a joke I made.’

  ‘I know, Earl. Believe it or not, I can be an asshole sometimes.’

  He handled it just right. He did a fake double take and said, ‘You be an asshole? I never woulda guessed.’

  Earl was all right; he could put you down and make you smile about it.

  We stood in the dark doorway of the crowded bar while he scanned the room. I didn’t see how he could find anybody in the packed drunken crowd. But then he said: ‘There. The tall guy talking to the little redhead.’ Almost as soon as he said it the redhead disappeared behind a surge of bigger people. But the tall man with the rimless glasses and the gaunt face could still be seen. He must have been six-five, at least.

  ‘He says his name is Michael Hawkins.’

  ‘Thanks again, Earl.’

  For the next three minutes I pushed, twisted and sidestepped my way through a crowd of resistant bodies that smelled of perfume, aftershave, sweat, cigarettes and most especially alcohol. Hawkins loomed like a lighthouse above this wreckage, almost serene in his indifference to all the clamor of the people who were talking at him. He was just taking it in, like a recorder. Some kind of law, he had to be.

  He didn’t hear me at first because I had to shout over the din. The third or fourth time I shouted, the green eyes behind the rimless glasses narrowed and then the gaze ran down his long, thin nose and settled on me. The briefest smile. He managed to say: ‘The coffee shop. Five minutes.’

  Grateful we weren’t going to stay here, I turned and plowed and muscled my way back to the lobby. Earl wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  The coffee shop had red leather booths and a small spray of fresh flowers on every table. The food and the coffee smelled warm and inviting. I took a booth next to the window. I ordered coffee and a tuna sandwich and sat watching people stream from the parking lot into the hotel. The wind was knocking them around; a few of the slighter women resembled toys being scrambled by the invisible hand of a girl playing dolls.

  ‘That bar is one hell of a place, isn’t it?’

  Hawkins seated himself in parts; he was that tall. Now that I got a good look at him I saw he was in his forties, graying of hair and decent-looking in a stern, Latin teacher way. He wore businesslike blue pinstripes. He had that kind of quiet authority the good ones have.

  The waitress came so quickly I didn’t even get a chance to tell him that I agreed – that the bar was indeed one hell of a place. He ordered coffee and a steak sandwich.

  Long fingers then went inside his suit coat and retrieved the kind of small brown leather holder that contains badges. ‘Just so you know who you’re talking to, Mr Conrad. My name is Michael Hawkins and I’m an investigator for the US Attorney in this district.’

  He showed me the badge and then the ID on the facing side. Since the ID contained not only his name but also his photograph, I had no doubt that he was who he said.

  ‘I was looking for you because I’m trying to locate a man named Howard Ruskin. I’ve never worked a political case like this one before but I do read the newspapers. Ruskin has quite a reputation.’

  ‘I’m not sure why you’d think I could help you locate him. I work the other side of the street politically.’

  ‘We have a warrant out for his arrest. We believe he’s been in our jurisdiction for over a month now but I haven’t been able to find him. This morning our office got a tip that Ruskin was spotted in town here. I was on my way before anything about this murder broke.’

  ‘Senator Logan did not murder her.’

  He leaned back. ‘Believe it or not, Mr Conrad, I’m only interested in Senator Logan’s case as a spectator. I’m after Ruskin. I assumed that you might be assuming that Ruskin might be involved in your case in some way. I checked you out. Army intel and you’ve worked on criminal cases for a couple of your clients.’

  Pretty impressive. He would assume that I would assume Ruskin was behind the murder – maybe even committed it himself – so I would be trying to track him down. So why not tap me for any information I’d already been able to pick up and save himself some time in trying to nail Ruskin?

  ‘If I had anything, I’d share it with you. I want to catch up with the bastard as badly as you do.’

  He kept his elbow on the table until the waitress brought his coffee. The longer I watched, the more I saw a professor under the investigator. He was judicious in his words, almost ruminative. ‘I can’t tell you much about why we want him but I can say that it involves extortion.’

  ‘I’m surprised that it took till now to catch him at it. He’s made a lot of money and I always assumed he was shaking people down. But I still don’t know why you’d think I’d know where he is.’

  ‘As you say, Mr Conrad, you work a different side of the street. You may hear something I wouldn’t be privy to. So I’d appreciate you sharing anything you have with me.’

  ‘Of course. I want him caught.’

  ‘Then we’re on the same team.’

  Our food arrived at the same time. Occasionally I glanced out the window at the men and women battling the invisible force of the wind, nearly getting knocked on their dressed-up asses for doing so.

  The dialogue got rote – a little politics, a little sports and a little rote remorse about how pols so often went bad these days though, as I had to point out, we were living in a second Gilded Age and the first one had become the textbook the current plutocrats still used. In the 1880s and 1890s senators were so openly crooked some newspapers didn’t identify them by state; instead, they said, ‘The Senator from Oil’ and ‘The Senator from Railroads.’ These days we had public relations agencies working for senators to make them more palatable to the public.

  Yes, Senator Gleason did indeed drunkenly run over an eighty-six-year-old woman in the crosswalk, but he was on his way to a cancer fundraiser. What a guy.

  Toward the end of our conversation, he said, ‘I try to stay as apolitical as I can in my job. You know the US Attorneys took a hit a while back when they fired some lawyers for political reasons. I don’t want politics to get in the way.’

  The Bush administration had fired a number of sitting US Attorneys because they wouldn’t carry out his political schemes. They had mostly been replaced by young graduates of Holy Shit University who came on with not only a political agenda but a religious one as well. They pretty much destroyed the integrity of the whole operation. I wasn’t the only one who was still skeptical. I wondered how many of them had actually been driven out.

  ‘I appreciate that, Mr Hawkins.’

  He nodded as he wiped his mouth with the paper napkin. The way he set the napkin down signaled that our meeting was over. He put a long hand across the table and we shook the way two guys do in used-car commercials where the sucker grins his pleasure at now owning a car that had been driven off a cliff six months earlier.

  He picked up the tab and left a handsome tip for the waitress, and we walked back to the lobby together. He nodded to all the reporters who had divided up into small groups. Two or three of the better-looking female reporters were surrounded by eager collecti
ons of horny boozed-up admirers and seemed to be enjoying it.

  ‘I would appreciate having your cell number, Mr Conrad. I’d be happy to give you mine.’

  When we finished punching the numbers into our respective phones, he said, ‘Good luck to both of us.’

  TEN

  In my room I dumped my clothes so I could sit in my shorts and T-shirt with a Blue Moon beer next to my laptop and get to work. The first thing I did was log on to the US Attorneys website and make sure Hawkins was legit.

  It took a few minutes but finally there he was. He was so gaunt in his official photo he resembled one of those early New Englanders who enjoyed burning witches. DePaul University graduate, Cincinnati homicide detective five years and five years at Global, a giant security company that was as insular and mysterious as the Vatican. Four years working as an investigator for the Illinois Attorney General’s office. This was his third year with the US Attorney’s office in this jurisdiction. He was official all right.

  I consulted the sacred Rolodex I had on my computer. I remembered an attorney I knew from the Chicago Democratic machine. Decent guy. He’d invited me and my woman of the moment to a party at his house a few years back. Tom Neil. I dialed his number and asked the young girl – maybe eight or nine – if her father was home. ‘Yes, he is. May I tell him who’s calling, please?’

  I smiled and thought of my own daughter at that age. All the times I’d been on the road and her only contact with me was phone calls from afar. The kind of memory you hate yourself for till the day they plant you.

  ‘My name’s Dev Conrad.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  When he came on the phone, he said, ‘This is a pleasant surprise, Dev. Great to hear from you. We never did have that drink. I’m sorry I had to cancel that time. A hysterical client, as I recall.’

  ‘Happens all the time. No problem, Tom.’

  He got quieter. ‘I can’t believe what’s happening with Senator Logan.’

  ‘I don’t have any choice. I have to believe it.’

  ‘They’ve already got him in the execution chamber.’

  ‘That’s one of the reasons I’m calling. There’s a guy up here from your office. I just met him and I wanted your opinion of him.’