by Dale Wiley
“Can you tell where the money was coming from?”
“A trust account. We did a decent amount of estates and trusts work at the firm, so I know a little about that stuff. There’s not much info on the computer on it, but it mentions ‘Aunt Kat’ in a memo line.”
“Was he getting a steady payment from it?”
“No, different amounts. That’s the weird thing. I’ve got some more places to check after we get done.”
Through our entire lunch, the printer continued to spit out sections of Helper’s novel. Occasionally, I gathered them up and set them on the table, so they wouldn’t end up scattering everywhere, making a point not to read any of it. That was going to be a real joy, along with the last batch of other crap.
I put my plate on the same tray that hers was on and handed it to her to place in the hall. The printer was now done spitting out Helper’s masterpiece, and I jogged the pages into one pile and put it aside. I took the last pile of other documents and examined them.
There were various letters to family members, irate editorials, and the same stack of letters to editors I had seen in his desk. Nothing which would help me, though. I put everything but the novel in a pile and began that arduous task.
There were no ways out. That’s what Jess said. And on the languid, long summer nights, when the heat stayed down, oppressive, close like a phantom floating just above the soggy red earth, I kind of believed him. It took years to get that place out of my head, years and thousands of psychic miles, rolling down the highway towards the dawn.
Ugh.
Intolerable. I decided immediately to do the high school book report thing and just read the first sentence of every paragraph, but the thesaurus-inspired adjectives and adverbs were enough to make me gag anyway. I hoped Tabitha would be done soon and ready to concoct a concrete plan to save me.
I was on page twenty-five, reading about how backwards everyone was except him, when she finally looked up. “The trust is the only thing I can find that’s at all fishy,” she said. “He bought his house afterward, bought his new car, everything.”
“And it could be legit,” I frowned.
“And I would say it was if all your evidence didn’t point to him leading an international conspiracy against you.”
“So what do we need to do?”
“We need to find out from his bank about the trust. This will not be easy. And then we need to find out where the money is coming from and if anyone’s helping him at the other organizations.”
“We can get financial records of Regionarts from the web,” I said, trying to be helpful. “I imagine the other two will be a little harder.”
Tabitha proposed to start with McHolland, since it was in DC. I figured that there would be info on some kind of intranet, reachable if you just had the right phone number. We didn’t have the right phone numbers. She suggested going down there, getting into the system operator’s office and getting the number. “That wouldn’t be too dangerous.”
“And what am I going to do?”
“Stay here and hide.”
I shook my head. “I have to be a part of any action.”
She bristled and talked to me like I was in preschool. “Sit down and cut out that macho bullshit. I see way too much macho. This is not a complex task. I’ll take a cab and go get the number and be back here,” she looked at her watch, “in an hour or so.” It was about two-thirty.
I frowned, knowing she was right. She dressed conservatively, in the secretary outfit, and headed out after getting some of the money which was rightfully the Senator’s. I managed to make it a whole twenty minutes before I was itching for something to do.
Chapter
* * *
Nineteen
Believe me, it wasn’t easy. I wanted so bad to go with her that I could almost taste it. And I have no idea why, because I was an absolute target on the street. I think that when you’re on the run you develop an indescribable desire to have a hand in your own survival, but that may be too highbrow; it may be that I was just antsy.
So I took yet another nice, long, soapy, hot, relaxing, wonderful, stress-relieving bath and then pulled on my boxers and my T-shirt and fell into bed under the new sheets the maid had put on while we were breaking and entering. I turned on the TV to see what stunt I had pulled now. They reported finding my car at the airport—so much for the old license plate switcheroo—and said they were checking videotapes of passengers boarding flights. I wondered if the police weren’t saying that as a smoke screen and began to worry about the cabbie. Would he remember me, and would he rat if he did? He didn’t look at me much. He was in his own world. And, for the time being, I was hoping he would stay there. But I didn’t occupy as much of the news as I had the day before. I even worried about that for a minute.
I turned off the TV, reluctantly got out of bed, and grabbed the Post, which I hadn’t even read in all our hurry that morning. You get the Post, as my mom says, free gratis when you stay at the Watergate, which is not all that good a deal since the paper only costs a quarter. It had my picture as the lead suspect on the front page.
They had now taken the picture of me in my chunky days—why didn’t anyone else give them a better picture? Maybe my friends were loyal; maybe the press didn’t know who to ask—and turned it into a police drawing of what I would look like a few years older and with shorter hair. I guess someone had told them that I had lost weight, so this new picture was gaunt, and really didn’t resemble me as much as Tony Danza on diet pills. The artist gave me these crazy bug eyes, which just proclaimed Congressman Killer. I really needed to get a scrapbook.
On page three, there was an account of my life, which, like the page one article, had been written by none other than Gerald Greer, the famed skirt-chaser and arts writer. He mentioned that I drank in high school, left out the parts about me being in Student Council and National Honor Society, and talked again about how much of a loner I was in college.
I wanted to sue them for printing that loner shit; I had lots of friends. But I realized if they were reading any of the information they saw in the papers, they weren’t exactly ready to run to the phone and contradict the reporters; it looked like I was pretty damn guilty. And they were probably thinking—as I would have in the exact same situation—that it just showed how little we knew about people and yadda, yadda, yadda.
And this was one of the better papers! I picked up the phone and put on the clam chowdah accent and called the concierge. I told him to bring me a copy of USA Today and a copy of the New York Post. Within minutes, someone was there with the papers, and, after telling him to leave them on my door and waiting until he left, I collected the papers and went inside. I pulled back out the Washington Post and started doing a comparison.
The Washington Post
“Timmons’ Alleged Slayer Kept to Himself”
by Gerald Greer
The alleged assassin of Gregory Timmons was a personable loner, his sources and friends said after hearing his name mentioned in connection with a variety of crimes. Trent Norris, an intern at the National Endowment for the Arts, who hasn’t been seen since Wednesday morning, found more time for books than socializing during college …
My professors and parents would not have agreed.
… and was known for a virulent …
Thesaurus, anyone?
… opposition to authority.
I will admit that I have never, ever really liked to be told what to do.
Norris went to college in Atlanta at Emory University, a respected and expensive liberal arts school. There he majored in English but spent most of his time writing for the student paper …
At this point, they really could’ve mentioned the dissolute life I was living—all the drinking and girls and stuff. It would’ve been a half-truth but closer than some of the crap they were printing and a good deal more flattering as well.
… specializing in columns criticizing the university administration.
Speciali
zing? Again, the tying the chancellor up with yarn suggestion comes back to haunt me.
Students describe Norris as likable, but somewhat unpredictable, often taking off on a whim for places as far as New Orleans.
I went on a friggin’ road trip with my friends to Mardi Gras! Come on!
Since moving to Washington during the summer, Norris had evidently frequented some of the city’s more notorious bars …
I saw bands like Bikini Kill at places which weren’t necessarily in the best part of town.
… and was dissatisfied with his work at the National Endowment for the Arts.
The New York Post
“Did the Intern Clean the House?”
by Robert Parks
Trent Norris was a loser, even his friends say.
The alleged Congressional Killer saw himself as a writer but became depressed when his novel was not published.
I wasn’t happy about it.
Norris was friends with drug users, party types, and even one convicted felon, and, while not known as a drug user himself, was present at many occasions where drugs were known to be used.
Okay. EVERYONE knows drug dealers, and I happened to go to high school with a guy who got sent up on a burglary rap.
Norris’s controversial views were often reported in the student newspaper, where he worked for three years.
A sign of my stability, let me add.
Well, that article went on and on, dissecting me in short, fantastic sentences. The USA Today article was more of the same. In general, the print media was depressing me even further, and I knew I had no chance of going to sleep. I didn’t want to read any more of Helper’s novel, so I turned the boob tube back on and watched a rerun of M*A*S*H, one of the awesome early ones with Henry and Trapper. I thought about watching every night at 6:30 in grade school, laying on the floor, with my dad sitting in his arm chair, and my mom doing whatever, thinking about how I wanted to be a surgeon—I didn’t yet know the depth of my loathing for science.
And I cried. I thought about what my parents, friends, and relatives were seeing and reading, that they were probably being grilled by reporters and cops, and that they probably believed I was a murderer. I knew in the pit of my stomach that I should’ve turned myself in long ago, when the thing first started. I could’ve straightened everything out. Everyone I knew would’ve been willing to help. My family would’ve done anything they could’ve. But I didn’t think; I was more interested in running than thinking about the consequences of doing just that. They could probably use all of my actions, if they wanted to, as further proof of my guilt. Now I was trapped, with one real chance: Tabitha and I would have to find who killed Timmons and Roger and, even more importantly, why.
Timmons and Roger weren’t as lucky as I was. I had avoided the obstacles to this point; they didn’t even see them coming. And now there were mothers, fathers, wives, and babies who thought that I killed their loved ones. I sobbed and shook and would’ve traded anything to see just one face not messed up in all this, something that triggered memories away from this big, concrete city that was trying its best to kill me.
And, of course, Tabitha picked that moment to come in. I thought for a second about running to the bathroom, trying to dry my eyes, and staying in there until I looked less puffy and weepy, but it was no use. She was ready, I think, to tell me good news, but, when she saw me, she put down her bag and hurried to me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, taking off the blazer she had worn.
“I watched M*A*S*H.” I choked the words out.
She hugged me close, in a soft way I needed.
Chapter
* * *
Twenty
After I was sufficiently comforted, Tabitha pulled a slip of paper out of her purse. “I got the number for the McHolland Foundation’s computer system. I just told a guy I needed some help setting up an intranet, and he gave me all kinds of stuff. I also got a copy of their annual report from the receptionist. It has all the budget. And then I went to the bank where Helper’s trust came from and got their electronic banking software. I’ll see if I can do anything with that.”
“Wow,” I said. “Thank you.”
She shook her head shyly.
“But,” I said, always the party pooper, “we still need to remember to find out how Timmons ties into all of this. It’s great to find out Helper’s got his hand in the till or whatever, but if we can’t prove that Timmons knew, it doesn’t make a whole helluva lot of difference. Is there anything I can do?”
“It’s gotta be in something that ties the organizations together. Look at the annual report,” she said.
While she tried to crack the systems, I pored through dry page after dry page, trying to see anything in the budget that looked irregular. Problem was this wasn’t going to be the place to see any irregularities. In the annual report, to keep it from being a zillion pages long, they only reported the general and not the specific. In other words, they just said, “Office Supplies $2000” and didn’t mention where they got them. That was more than enough information for most people and not nearly enough for me.
It was getting close to supper time, and it looked like I would get to have at least one more meal in freedom. I watched traffic and walkers and was constantly on the lookout for cops.
“Hey,” she and I said at the same time.
We looked at each other, and, before I could even try to speak, she continued her thought. “I don’t think I’m gonna get anywhere with this stuff. I got a phone number, but I don’t have any idea about a password, and the banking software is calling for a password too.”
I frowned. With my knowledge of computers, I had no answer.
“One of my clients is a bit of a cracker,” Tabitha said.
I had visions of a white southern racist. She could tell this from my expression.
“A computer hacker who breaks into stuff.”
I showed signs of recognition, and she continued.
“He hates the government and he hates big business. He hates about everyone except me. But … would you be willing to trust him? It’s your butt in the sling.”
I thought about this. “Think he’d help us?”
She nodded knowingly.
I shrugged and considered this. “What the hell.”
Tabitha called, but her client’s answering service told her he would be out of town until the next day. So much for that. As much as I wanted to wait for him, I knew there were only so many hours before they would catch me.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t think we could break into the bank, but later tonight we probably could break into the Foundation.”
She looked dubious. “This isn’t like breaking into some house, Trent. Have you even been there?”
I nodded, a little defensive. “We had a meeting there last month. It’s over by the Hilton. There’s a security guy at the front desk, but I think the whole building is non-profit organizations and such, so I’ll bet they never see any action.”
Tabitha considered this. “How do we get past him?”
I knew she was going to ask that, and I was almost prepared. I told her that “we” wouldn’t be breaking in; I would. She would be distracting the guard with some story about her car breaking down. Standard stuff, but I was betting that a bored security guard at a building that housed non-profit organizations—the equivalent of being an FBI agent assigned to school crossing guard duty—would fall for it, especially when the distressed motorist was as shapely and blond as Tabitha.
“What can you get there that you can’t get from the annual report?”
I explained to her that the report itself was too general. What I needed was on their computer systems.
“But you don’t have a password, so you can’t get into it from here. That’s not going to change just because you commit another crime.”
I knew, though, that if the foundation was anything like any of the other places I had ever worked, if I could actually get inside the of
fices, I would have no trouble getting a password. Because everyone in the world believes their computer isn’t going to be broken into, just like people used to believe their houses were not going to be burgled. So people—smart people—did the things that you were never supposed to do such as writing their password near their computer and making their passwords too easy—that kind of stuff. And although I wasn’t a computer genius, I felt quite sure if I actually had someone’s password and login name, even I could break in.
“Well, we can’t go until late tonight. Everybody would have to be gone,” said Tabitha. “But it sounds like a good idea.” From the look she gave me, I wasn’t sure whether she really meant it.
After our supper, I was beginning to get seriously stir-crazy. Due to my overly-dramatic personality, I now felt like my entire life had been spent on the run and hiding from people—kind of like a huge rock band on tour but without all the sex and drugs. Even The Simpsons weren’t enough to hold my interest.
“Can we go do something?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A movie or something.”
“Yeah right. That’s where they got Lee Harvey Oswald.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m so tired of all this.”
“But you don’t want to have done everything you have only to get caught by some ticket-taker.”
She was right.
I lay on the bed, trying to look pitiful enough that she would come up with something to do. She pulled a roll of SweeTARTS out of her purse. “A movie’s too risky. After all, what about Spectra-Vision,” she said, and I gave her a dirty look.
“What you need is something to take your mind off all this.” She bit her lip and drummed her fingers on the end table, looking at me and trying to decide something. Hot as she was, I was praying that she wasn’t planning to take off her clothes and suggest the horizontal mambo. I had encountered enough problems in my life by hooking up with friends to know it’s not a good idea as a rule; it’s especially not good if you’re both sober and in grave danger. If your potential partner is the best friend of the girl you’d still like to get together with, and if she’s also a prostitute, and if, most importantly, she’s your only real chance of survival, it’s an especially bad idea. But I hoped she wouldn’t even suggest it, because I was afraid that she would somehow misconstrue all of my fairly genuine motives for declining.