by D. F. Bailey
“No.” He set it aside again. “Where do you think you’re going with this Finch?”
“If it’s not your signature, then whose is it?”
“It’s a forgery.” His body shifted in the chair and his arm shook with a brief spasm that knocked his cane to the floor. “Damn. How am I supposed to know who forged it? You’re the CNN boy wonder. You tell me!” he cried with a sudden burst of emotion.
Finch narrowed his eyes. He could see that Whitelaw had entered a point in the interview that everyone reaches sooner or later: the moment when he forgets that he’s on record. And that everything he says will soon be broadcast to the world.
“Senator, do you recognize any of the other signatories to the GIGcoin incorporation?”
He nodded. “Dean.”
“What about Alexei Malinin?”
Whitelaw held a hand to his mouth as if he were deciding to change his approach. For a moment Finch wondered if Whitelaw regretted his decision to talk. If Finch didn’t get all the information he needed soon, the senator might bring the interview to a halt.
“All right,” he said with another wheezing gasp. It seemed as if he might be about to offer a confession. “Yes, Malinin was part of it. And the others. I met them all at Dean’s house in Marin County last year. It was a consortium that he and Malinin put together to exploit the software that Raymond Toeplitz developed. GIGcoin,” he added.
“Toeplitz was one smart bastard,” he continued in a confidential tone. “Do you know what the G-I-G stands for? GDP In Gold. It was the pièce de resistance.” His tone was now bright, almost ebullient. “The software is designed so that once a year the currency can be adjusted to reflect global GDP, either up or down, expressed in the current price of a gold ounce. That adjustment permitted buy-in by both the Keynesians and the Neo-cons. A piece of political-economic genius. It’s the keystone that bitcoin doesn’t have and therefore dooms it to extinction: a mechanism to adjust the currency to population growth and the vicissitudes of economic expansion and contraction.”
Finch watched the senator closely as he spoke. He seemed a different man than the shrunken figure who sat before him just minutes earlier. This was the once-youthful senator speaking now, a political visionary with an innate gift for street-fighting politics. Charisma writ large.
“But despite their efforts, the consortium never acquired the rights to the software, did they?”
The senator raised his brows. “What? Are you sure?”
Finch pushed a copy of the patent registration across the table. “According to the Patent Office, Toeplitz still owns the intellectual property rights — that is, they now belong to his estate. The document you are holding was verified as current and authentic by an arm’s length, third-party attorney one day ago.” He shrugged to suggest no other possibility existed.
“Christ.” His hand shook again and he dropped the papers onto the table with a shrug. “Dean,” he muttered dismissively as if his younger brother had fumbled the ball once again.
“I’d like to return to the forged signature on the incorporation papers.”
Whitelaw shrugged and gazed into the empty hearth of the fireplace.
“It seems to me that only two people could have put your name to the corporate seal. Dean and Malinin.”
He nodded, his face still turned away. His hand rattled as it rested on the chair arm. His despondent mood had returned.
“Then it would be Dean.”
“You’re sure? Has he forged your signature before?”
He adjusted his posture and settled his back into the chair. “We used to practice as kids. He got pretty good at it. All kinds of signatures. When he was fifteen he was good enough to bilk Dad out of fifteen hundred bucks by forging his checks.”
Finch could sense a new direction ahead. Obviously there was no love lost between the step brothers. Perhaps the senator’s distrust would lead to some kind of indictment of Dean Whitelaw. Maybe if Finch tried another way. “Senator, did you ever know Mark Gruman?”
“Who?”
“Mark Gruman, the deceased sheriff of Clallam County in Oregon.”
He shrugged. “How is he relevant?”
“A case is pending in Astoria that will prove that the sheriff shot and killed Raymond Toeplitz.” Finch saw the objection rising on Whitelaw’s face. “Before the bear found his corpse. He was shot in the car and left with the window rolled down. The lawyers will argue that your brother paid Gruman to kill Toeplitz after he refused to sell the GIGcoin software to your consortium.”
“Rough justice, I guess. Toeplitz died a few weeks after he declared his intention to testify against our firm in that bogus fraud charade!”
“A charade? Or a last-ditch effort to get Dean to back off?” Tit-for-tat, thought Finch. For the first time he suspected that Toeplitz’s legal gambit might have been a flanking move against Dean’s demands to sell the software to the cartel.
“Who knows? I couldn’t keep up with it all. I have a job to do, you know.” Whitelaw slumped backwards into the chair. He drew a hand over his face and moaned. His voice was full of revulsion. The sort of disgust that Finch had observed in Gianna whenever she talked about her family.
“He was a bastard. Literally. His mother, Martha Meyers, brought him into the family when Dad married her. When Dean was two she died of heart failure and Dad adopted him out of pity.” He glanced at Finch with a look that asked, so what would you expect?
“But when we were kids — I was ten, he was seven, I guess — he did something that I could never square. Never. Back of the lodge one summer we found a litter of kittens behind the garage.” He pointed to the far wall as if the garage stood just behind Finch’s shoulder. “Decent kids would take those kits home, give them some warm milk and an old blanket to nest in, and one by one give them away to friends. Not Dean. First, he never had a friend. Not one. But then he took those kittens and he tied them.” Whitelaw held his hand in front of his chest as if he were tying a noose around his wrist. “Just like that. Around their necks. Then one at a time — snap.” He jerked his left hand as if he might be snapping it off his wrist.
Finch waited.
“That’s why I didn’t regret his passing. He’s the only one I don’t miss.”
※
The senator indicated that he wanted to move onto the deck and led Finch through a set of glass doors and over to the railing. The balcony provided a view across the Potomac River onto Teddy Roosevelt Island, and beyond that, Arlington Cemetery. Finch took a moment to ensure his phone was still recording their conversation and held it in his palm as discreetly as possible.
“Tell me, Finch, what do you know about the software?” The senator had a wary look in his eye, as if he were trying to measure an intangible quality in Finch.
Sensing there might be more to learn about GIGcoin, Will decided to play along. “From the patent papers I know that your brother didn’t own it. Nor did he have it in his possession.”
“Go on.” Whitelaw shuddered slightly, a tremor that rolled from his hand along the length of his left arm.
“I also know that a digital key is required to initialize the system.”
The senator’s eyes narrowed a little.
“Two keys, in fact,” Finch added, to establish the extent of his knowledge.
“Mmm. You sussed out more than I gave you credit for.” He leaned on his cane and let his fingers flutter on top of the crook. “And where do you imagine the software and these keys are right now?”
“With its rightful owner. “
“Rightful owner?” He chuckled at the idea.
“Eve Noon. She’s the beneficiary of Gianna’s estate.”
Whitelaw sniffled with surprise. “Who is this Eve Noon?”
“Your daughter’s best friend from Berkeley. You met her a few times.” He shrugged. “At least Eve remembers you.”
“Of course.” Whitelaw considered this as he gazed over the river. “So Gianna must have been Raymond’s b
eneficiary.”
“Yes.”
“Well, top marks. A-plus. You have done your homework.” He smiled with the fawning look of a benevolent teacher. “And the two keys — where are they do you suppose?”
“I understand that your old friend, Alexei Malinin, has one.” Finch thought it better to divert this line of conversation rather than reveal that Sochi had traded it for a spiked copy of the software.
He nodded. “And the other?”
“Your brother.”
“Step-brother,” he corrected.
“But since his death, there’s been no mention of it.”
Whitelaw lapsed into a brooding silence. He studied the river front, the passing pleasure boats gliding toward the docks as the midnight darkness swallowed them.
“You know what I think, Finch. There could be ten keys, a hundred — or no key at all. It won’t make a dime of difference. Why? Because money is nothing without the hypnosis of the citizens who are entranced into believing it has real substance.”
Finch nodded. Despite his pale demeanor, his shudders and shakes, the senator still possessed his innate incisiveness.
“And once your story about GIGcoin emerges — along with the stories of Toeplitz’s and Dean’s murder, of Malinin, all of it with my name attached to the scandal — GIGcoin will be entirely discredited.” He waved an imaginary wand above the patio railing. “In other words, mass hypnosis with this particular sparkling charm, GIGcoin, will be impossible.”
“Perhaps.”
“In which case this” — he drew an SD card from his pocket and held it between his trembling thumb and index finger — “has no more value to the world economy than a bent coat hanger.”
He smiled at Finch again and continued.
“This is the second key. After he died, I found it in a small vault in Dean’s home office.”
Finch studied the chip, a Secure Digital card. The gold contact pins glittered briefly when they caught the patio lights.
“Would you like it?” He handed him the SD card, a sixty-four gigabit marvel the size of Finch’s thumbnail. “You know Mr. Finch, if you refuse to publish your findings — and if you possessed the first key and the software — it’s likely you could salvage the entire GIGcoin project with that card. You would become a multimillionaire overnight.”
Finch considered the possibilities. He and Eve would own the entire kit. But could he patch together the political partnerships that Dean and Malinin had created? He hesitated and then shook his head. “No. I think it carries more value as criminal evidence.” Nonetheless, he slipped the SD card into his shirt pocket.
“Well, there you have it, then.” He took his cane in one hand. “And I think that finishes our interview, Mr. Finch.”
“But —"
“No.” He held a hand up. “Don’t fret. We have more to discuss. But off the record.”
Finch put aside his disappointment. He knew the senator had much more to tell. Instead of turning off the recorder, he simply clicked off the screen. Whatever else Whitelaw said, he’d record for background purposes only. But from this moment on, Finch couldn’t quote another word.
When he turned back to Whitelaw, he saw the senator gazing at the distant crosses standing on the lawns of Arlington Cemetery. Perhaps he could see the ghosts rising in the gloom. To Will it was all darkness and shadows.
“A lot of dead souls. Over four hundred thousand people are buried there,” Whitelaw intoned with his signature gravitas. “I look across there and it reminds me of what I’m supposed to be doing in this town.”
And what, exactly, is that? Fraud? War-mongering in Iraq? Finch declined to pursue this line. “Senator, I know you’ve taken a lot of blows lately. Your daughter last month. And now —"
“You smoke, Finch?” He held out a pocket cigar humidor which held three short Cohiba Club cigars. Finch shook his head, but Whitelaw lit one for himself. “Most people don’t know that I smoke. Fact is, I just took it up a few months ago. Jeb Peterson got me started.” He smiled weakly and let out a jet of smoke through his lips. “Obama’s initiative is bringing them back in style. What do you think?”
Finch looked down river to a finger of land sticking into the water. A narrow point called The Mole. He turned back to face Whitelaw. “I think we’re running out of time, Senator.”
“Indeed. We are,” he said and a streak of pain seemed to grip his face, twist it and then let go. “All right. Let’s get to the heart of things, shall we? You want to know about my children? About the way they died? Of course, you know quite a lot about that already. You and your cabal of vipers euphemistically called the media. But what you really want to know is if I conspired in their murder and suicide don’t you? If I’m the cause of their misery!” His face turned a deep red. “You want tears, you want rage, you want fury! Well, I’m going to give it to you mister!” A horrible spasm ran up his leg as he stomped out the cigar on the deck tile and retreated back into the condo, stabbing the floor with the tip of his cane as he went.
Finch waited a moment. The heat of Whitelaw’s surprise outrage sent a rush of fear along his spine. He hadn’t seen this coming. But now that the senator’s mood had spiked, he wondered if he should call someone. Maybe Jeb Peterson. In any case, it’s time to leave, he told himself. Before Whitelaw’s emotions run out of control.
When Finch stepped back into the condo, he saw Whitelaw leaning on the kitchen bar, his arms propped straight ahead, stiff-arming the counter top. The scarlet intensity of his face had ebbed but his hair was ruffled, as if he’d dragged his fist over his skull two or three times. He held his eyes on Finch without blinking. To get to the front door, Finch would have to pass directly in front of him. He tried to think of a distraction.
“Can I use your bathroom?”
The senator stared at him with a penetrating gaze. Then with a brisk jerk, he tipped his head toward the bedroom corridor.
Finch stepped down the short hallway, shut the bathroom door behind him and locked it with the finger bolt. My God, what is going on? He turned on the taps and let the water rush into the basin. Then he drew his phone from his pocket, found the audio file containing the senator’s interview and studied it a moment.
“Yes, just in case,” he murmured to himself. He clicked the share icon, typed in Wally’s email address and sent the audio recording of the interview to his editor. Then another reminder of Wally entered his mind: Stand Up 4 Justice. The app used to record evidence of assault. He clicked on it, watched as the app spun into play. Then he turned off the sink taps and walked back into the living room with the phone in his hand.
※
The senator had moved to the center of the room where he slumped forward and adjusted his balance on the cane. His free hand, tucked in his jacket pocket, appeared to be balled in a fist.
“I’m sorry. My behavior out there” — he nodded to the balcony — “was completely uncalled for.”
Finch didn’t know how to respond. He frowned and made a motion to leave.
“Wait.” The senator held up a hand. “Do you know what Parkinson’s Disease is?”
“Of course.” Finch moved sideways. His back pressed against the bar counter next to the kitchen.
“I was diagnosed three years ago.” He shrugged. “At first I thought I’d defeat the problem just like everything else that’s challenged me in life. Outsmart it, out-tough it, out-spend it. But within three months I realized a war against Parkinson’s is a war no one can win. Hell, I didn’t even win the first skirmish.” His head shook and a grimace settled on his face. “The best I could do was to keep it hidden from the public. From people like you.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.” Finch now recognized that all the symptoms he’d seen earlier — the slumped posture, the brittle movements, the tremors and shakes in his limbs — pointed to one cause. And yet Whitelaw’s mental faculties were completely intact. Another manifestation of PD.
“Then last month, after the news about Gian
na’s death, the disease accelerated past me, completely passed my ability to cope. Then Dean’s murder. And now Justin’s suicide.” Whitelaw wiped a hand over his eyes, paused, and took a step toward Finch. “I felt surrounded. I realized I had no way out. That’s when I decided to hole up here. With Jeb and his cigars.” He tried to grin, an effort that resulted in a bland sneer as the senator took another few steps forward. He stopped an arm’s length from Finch.
“All I think about now is what lies ahead: complete loss of bodily functions. Someone to feed me. Someone to change me, wrap me in diapers and put me to bed. Aghh.” He shook his head at the bleak prospect.
“I’m going to tell you something, Finch. When you reach the end of life precious few pleasures remain. Only one, if you’re lucky.” He stood teetering on his cane, the right hand still bunched in his pocket. “The sense of taste. Of Cohiba Club cigars.” This time his smile held, a broad grin that revealed his still beautiful teeth and his prevailing sense of irony.
“Now I’m going to give you one last gift. Here, give me your hand.”
“What?”
The fragrance of Cuban tobacco wafted through Finch’s nostrils as the senator leaned his cane on a side table and adjusted his weight so that he could stand on his own.
“Your hand.”
Finch thought of dismissing the gesture, but from a feeling of sympathy, perhaps even a sense of duty, he shifted his phone into his left hand and held out his right. What was the senator offering? Another SD card?
Holding the flap of his jacket with his left hand, Whitelaw tugged his fist from his suit pocket and revealed a small pistol.
“What?… What’s that for?”
“For you.” He placed the gun in Finch’s palm, wrapped both his hands around Finch’s fingers and pressed the snub-nose barrel against his own chest. The trembling abated. His hands felt surprisingly strong. “Now pull the trigger. Please.”
“No!” As he tried to wrestle free, Finch dropped his phone on the floor. He cursed and then one at a time, he pried the senator’s hands away from his own. “Christ! What are you thinking?”
“I’ve done some research, too. I know how your son died, Mr. Finch. I know that it broke you.” Whitelaw held the gun, the barrel pressed to his heart. For a moment Finch thought, how strange, the way he holds the pistol by the very tips of his extended fingers, as if he can’t bear to touch the weapon. “Then you became obsessed with me and my family. You chose me. Somehow you imagined that by destroying us, you could save yourself.”