“Yeah. And this bail reform business. That’s antiblack too. Whites got houses and expensive cars and all to post as bail. Black man’s gotta go buy a bail bond. That takes cash.”
Freeman had two or three other points to make, then Brody asked, “Who tried to rip you off the other night?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I think Willie Teal’s behind it. He’s been getting his stuff through Cuba and that’s dried up on him. So I think he put the word out he’d pay top dollar for supplies, and that sorta tempted my guys. No way to know for sure, though, as the three dips that tried to rip me all got killed.”
“Saved you some trouble,” Brody noted and smiled.
“It wouldn’t have been no trouble. You gotta make folks want to be honest or you’re outta business. That’s part of it.”
The buzzing of the intercom caused T. Jefferson Brody to raise a finger at his client. “Yes.”
“Senator Cherry’s on the phone, sir.”
Brody looked at Freeman. “You’ll get a kick out of this.” He punched buttons for the speaker phone. “Yes.”
“Bob Cherry. How’s it going, Jefferson?” The sound was quite good, although a little tinny.
“Just fine, Senator. And you?”
“Well, I’ve been going over my reelection finances with my campaign chairman—you know I’m up for reelection in two years?”
“Yessir. I thought that was the date.”
“Anyway, those PACs that you represent have been so generous in the past, I was hoping that one or two of them might make a contribution to my reelection campaign.”
“Sir, I’ll have to talk to my clients, but I’m optimistic. They’ve always believed that someone must pay for good government.” Brody winked broadly at Freeman McNally, who grinned.
“I wish more people felt that way. Talk to you soon.”
When the phone was back on the cradle, Brody smiled at Freeman McNally and explained. McNally threw back his head and laughed. “They just call you up and ask for money?”
“You got it.”
“If I could do that, I could retire from business. You know, hire a few people to work the phones and generally take life easy.”
“Well, you’re not in Congress.”
“Yeah. My business is a little more direct. Tell me, is Willie Teal one of your clients?” All trace of humor was gone from his face now.
“No.”
“I’m glad to hear that. How about Bernie Shapiro?”
“Wellll … I’ll be straight with you, Freeman. My rule is to never discuss my clients’ identities or business with anybody. Ever. You know that.”
Freeman McNally stood and walked around the room, looking at this and that. “You got a lot of nice stuff here,” he said softly.
T. Jefferson Brody made a modest gesture, which McNally missed.
McNally spoke with his back to the lawyer. “Bernie Shapiro is in with the Costello family. They’re moving in on the laundry business. Gonna cost me. And I don’t like to pay more money for the same service.”
Brody said nothing.
McNally came over to the desk and sat on the corner of it, where he could look down on T. Jefferson Brody. “Tee, I give you some advice. You’re a good lawyer for what I need done. You know people and can get in places I can’t get into. But if I ever hear, ever, ever, ever hear that you told anybody about my business without me giving you the okay, you’ll be dead two hours after I hear it.” He lowered his face to look straight into Brody’s eyes. “You understand?”
“Freeman, I’m a lawyer. Everything you say to me is privileged.”
“You understand me, Tee?”
“Yes.” Brody’s tongue was thick and he had trouble getting the words out.
“Good.” Freeman got up and walked over to the window. He pulled back the drapes and looked out.
After ten or fifteen seconds Brody decided to try to get back to business. He had been successfully handling scum like McNally for ten years now, and though there were rough moments, you couldn’t let them think you were scared. “Are you and Shapiro going to do business?”
“I dunno. Not if I can help it. I think that asshole killed the guy who was washing my dough. And I think he killed the guy who owned the check-cashing business. Guy named Lincoln. Shapiro paid off a broad, a grifter named Sweet Cherry Lane who was servicing the guy, and she set him up.”
Bells began to ring for T. Jefferson Brody. “What does this Lane woman look like?” he asked softly.
Freeman turned away from the window. He came back and dropped into the client chair. “Sorta chocolate, huge, firm tits, tiny waist, tall and regal. A real prime piece of pussy, I hear tell.”
“If someone wanted this bitch taught a lesson, could you do a favor like that?”
A slow grin spread across Freeman’s face. “Lay it out, Tee.”
“She robbed me, Freeman.” Brody swallowed and took a deep breath. “Honest. Stole my car and watch and a bunch of shit right out of my house—and she stole the $400,000 that Shapiro paid for that check cashing business.”
“Naw.”
“Yes. The goddamn cunt pretended to be the widow, signed everything, took the check, slipped me a Mickey and cleaned me out.”
“What the fuck kind of lawyer are you, Tee? You didn’t even ask to see some ID before you gave her four hundred Gs?”
“Hey,” Brody snarled. “The bitch conned me. Now I want to slice some off her. Will you help me?”
The grin on Freeman McNally’s face faded in the face of the lawyer’s fury. He stood. “I’ll think about it, Tee. In the meantime, you get busy on those senators and congressmen. I’ve paid a lot of good money to those people, now I want something. You get it. Then we’ll talk.”
He paused at the door and spoke without looking at Brody. “I try to never get personal. With me it’s all business. That way everybody knows where they stand. When you get personal you make mistakes, take stupid risks. It’s not good.” He shook his head. “Not good.” Then he went out.
Brody stared at the door and chewed on his lower lip.
Ott Mergenthaler returned from lunch at two-thirty in the afternoon with a smile on his face and a spring in his walk. Jack Yocke couldn’t resist. “Back to the old grind, eh, Ott?”
Mergenthaler grinned and dropped into a chair that Yocke hooked around with his foot. “Well, Jack, when you’re the most famous columnist writing in English and you’ve been in the outback for a week or so, the movers and shakers are just dying to unburden themselves of nifty secrets and juicy tidbits. They can only carry that stuff so long without relief and then they get constipated.”
“A tube steak on the sidewalk?”
“A really fine fettucine alfredo and a clear, dry Chianti.” Ott kissed his fingertips.
“Who was the mover and shaker, or is that a secret?”
“Read my column tomorrow. But if you can’t wait that long, it was Bob Cherry.”
“Cuba, right? Did you tell him to read my stuff?”
“That car-bus wreck and the Bush initiatives. God, what a mess! Half the country is screaming that Bush is overreacting and the other half is screaming that he hasn’t done enough. He’s getting it both ways, coming and going. Why any sane man gets into politics, I’ll never know.”
“Any line on who the ten pounds of dope belonged to?”
“No, but funny thing. Cherry implied that the government knows all about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he’s on the Oversight Committee and presumably has been briefed, and he just shrugged off the question of how the investigation is going. Muttered something like, ‘That’s not an issue.’ ”
“What d’ya mean, that’s not an issue? They know and aren’t telling?”
“Yeah. Precisely.” Ott Mergenthaler raised his eyebrows. “Normally you gotta watch Cherry like a hawk. He likes to pretend he knows everything, has a finger in every pie. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Now at lunch to
day he didn’t say so directly, but he left me and the other two reporters with the impression that the feds had a man on the inside. And he knew that was the impression he was creating and he could see by our reaction that we thought this was very important.”
“On the inside. Undercover?”
Mergenthaler nodded.
“You’re not going to print that, are you?”
“I have to. Two other reporters were there.” He named them. “They’ll use it. You can bet the ranch on that.”
“You can’t attribute this to Cherry.”
“That’s right. But this is an answer of sorts to a legit question. What is the federal government doing to bring to justice the people who indirectly caused eleven deaths in the heart of Washington? Cherry’s answer—that’s a nonquestion.”
“And if Cherry has said that to three reporters, who else has he said it to?”
“Precisely. Hell, knowing Cherry, he’s … And I know him. What I can’t figure out is, did he spill the beans on his own hook or was he told to?”
“If you knew that,” Jack Yocke mused, “you might get a better idea of whether or not it’s true.”
“Wonder what the government’s told the Japs.”
“Call the Japanese ambassador and ask.”
“I’ll do that.” Mergenthaler made a small ceremony of maneuvering himself out of the chair and strolling off toward his office.
Jack Yocke watched him go, then jerked the Rolodex around and flipped through it. He found the number he wanted and dialed.
One ring. Two. Three. C’mon, answer the damn phone!
“Sammy.”
“Jack Yocke. You alone?”
“Just me and Jesus.”
“Your phone tapped?”
“How the fuck would I know, man?”
“Ah, what an affable, genial guy you are. Okay, Mr. Laid Back Bro, a U.S. senator just hinted to one of our columnists that the government knows all there is to know about that car-bus wreck. Our guy was left with the clear impression that the feds got somebody undercover.”
“Give me that again, slower.”
Yocke repeated his message.
“That’s all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Who was the senator?”
“Bob Cherry.”
“Thanks, man.”
“It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper. Just thought you’d like to know.”
“Thanks.”
Harrison Ronald Ford hung up the phone and went back to his crossword puzzle. He stared at it without seeing the words. Then he went over to the sink and vomited into it.
It’s out! The word’s out. Hooper—that asshole!
His stomach tied itself into a knot and he heaved again.
He turned on the water to flush the mess down the drain. Saliva was still dripping from his mouth.
He heaved again, dry this time. He looked at the telephone on the table, tempted. No way! That fucker McNally had too goddamn many people on his payroll.
When the retching stopped, he grabbed his coat and slammed the door behind him.
“Hooper, you fucking shithead! What’re you trying to do to me?” Harrison Ronald roared the words into the telephone. “Calm down. What’re you talking about?”
Ford repeated his conversation of six minutes ago with Jack Yocke.
“Gimme your number. I’ll call you back in eight or ten minutes.”
“This is a fucking pay phone, you shithead! Nobody can call this fucking number because Marion fucking Barry doesn’t want fucking dope peddlers taking orders on this fucking phone.”
“So call me back in ten minutes.”
“In ten minutes I may well be as dead as Ma Bell, you blithering shithead. If I don’t call the funeral will be on Wednesday. Closed casket!”
He slammed the phone onto its hook and looked around to see who had been listening to his shouting. No one, thank God!
Hooper used the government directory to look up the number, then dialed. “Senator Cherry, please. This is Special Agent Thomas Hooper.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman said. “Senator Cherry is on the Senate floor. What is this about?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. When could I expect a return call?”
“Well, not today. Perhaps tomorrow morning?” The pitch of her voice rose slightly when she said “morning,” making it a question and a pleasantry at the same time.
“I suggest you send an aide to find the senator. Tell the aide that if the senator does not telephone Special Agent Thomas Hooper at 893-9338 in the next fifteen minutes, I will send a squad of agents to find him and physically transport him to the FBI building. See that he gets that message or he is going to be grossly inconvenienced.”
“Would you repeat that number?”
“893-9338.”
The next call went to The Washington Post switchboard. “Jack Yocke, please.”
After several rings, the reporter answered.
“Mr. Yocke, this is Special Agent Thomas Hooper of the FBI. I understand we have a mutual friend.”
“I know a lot of people, Mr. Hooper. Which mutual friend are we discussing?”
“The one you just talked to, oh, ten or fifteen minutes ago.”
“You say you’re with the FBI?”
“Call the FBI building and ask for me.” Hooper hung up.
In half a minute the phone rang.
“Hooper.”
“Jack Yocke, Mr. Hooper. Trying to be careful.”
“Our friend tells me that you discussed with him a conversation that one of your colleagues had over the lunch hour with Senator Cherry. Who is the colleague?”
“Ott Mergenthaler.”
“And who else was a party to that conversation?”
Yocke gave him the names and the newspapers they worked for.
“Mr. Yocke, is my friend a good friend of yours?”
“Yes.”
“Then I suggest you not mention that luncheon conversation, this conversation, or his name to another living soul. You understand?”
“I think it’s clear.”
“Good. Thanks.”
“Bye.”
Hooper walked from his office to his secretary’s desk. “Is Freddy back yet?”
“From Cuba? He got in about seven a.m. He’s been over at Justice most of the morning.”
“See if you can find him.”
While Hooper was waiting he carefully and legibly wrote the three reporters’ names and the newspapers they worked for on a blank sheet of paper. Freddy came in about five minutes later. “How’d it go in Cuba?”
“We got Zaba. And enough evidence to fry Chano Aldana.”
“Great. But we have a more pressing problem. Senator Bob Cherry had lunch with these three reporters.” He shoved his note across the desk. “Cherry hinted that the government knew everything it wanted to know about that car-bus crash the other night because it had an undercover agent in place.”
“Aww, damn,” Freddy said. “He was just briefed on that this morning and he’s spilled it already!”
“Go to the director’s office, tell the executive assistant what the problem is, and see if the director will telephone the publishers of those newspapers and kill the story. Report back to me as soon as possible.”
“That may keep it out of the papers for a day or two, but that won’t cork it. It’s out of the bottle now, Tom.”
“I’ll talk to Cherry.”
“Good luck. He’s probably told a dozen people.”
Hooper rubbed his forehead. “Go see the director.”
He was still rubbing his forehead, trying to think, when the phone rang again, the direct line. “Hooper.”
“Okay, it’s me. I’ve calmed down a little. Sorry.”
“Forget it, Harrison. Where are you?”
“Why?”
“I’m sending an agent in a car to get you. You’re done.”
“How’d the word get out?”
“We t
old the President and briefed key members of the congressional Oversight Committees. One of the senators then had lunch with a team of reporters and dropped some hints.”
“Awww, fuck!”
“Where are you?”
“Now you calm down. Freeman patted me on the head after that incident. I’m in real tight now, man. He’s got a meeting sometime tonight with Fat Tony Anselmo. Something heavy’s going down. We’re cunt-hair close, Tom. No shit.”
“You are done, Harrison. I don’t want to see you a corpse. Not only would death be bad for your health, it’d leave me with no case. We’ve got enough to take Freeman and his associates off the street for a few years, and I’m not greedy. You’re done.”
“Now look, Tom. I’m a big boy and I stopped wearing diapers last year. I’m not done until I say I’m done.”
“Harrison, I’m in charge of this case. We can maybe keep Cherry’s little luncheon chat out of the papers for a few days, but he’s probably already run off at the mouth all over town. I don’t know. He’ll probably lie to me about it. This is your life you’re betting.”
“Two nights. Two more nights and then we bust ’em.”
“You are a flaming idiot.”
“That’s what everybody says. Talk to you tomorrow.”
The phone went dead.
Hooper hung the instrument up and sat staring at it.
When it rang again he let the secretary in the outer office take it. She buzzed him. “Senator Cherry, sir.”
He pushed the button. “Senator, this is Special Agent Hooper. We need to have a talk. Immediately.”
“I understand you made some threatening remarks a few minutes ago to one of my staff, Hooper. What the hell is going on over there anyway?”
“I really need to see you as soon as possible on a very urgent matter, Senator. I’m sorry if your secretary felt I was threatening.”
The senator huffed and puffed a bit, but Hooper was willing to grovel, and soon the feathers were back in place. “Well,” Cherry agreed finally, “I’m going out to dinner before I attend a reception at the French embassy. You could come by about sixish?”
“Senator, I know the unwritten rules, but I just can’t come over. You’ll have to stop by here.”
The senator gave him a few seconds of frosty silence. “Okay,” he said with no grace.
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