Casey's Slip

by Richard L. Wren

  I told her there wasn’t anything we could do except wait. “The best thing we can do is get a good night’s sleep. The only link we have is Gus and we have to believe he’ll call us as soon as he can. Probably he’ll call you on your cell. You might as well try to sleep. He’ll phone when he can. Whatever they’re up to, all we can do is wait. Does that make sense?”

  Reluctantly, she agreed.

  “But if you hear anything, you call me right away, okay?”

  “I guess you’re right. How about a big hug and a kiss before bed?”

  Sounded like a good idea to me.

  “Did you hear anything?” were the first words I heard from Josie the next morning. She’d knocked on my door just as I was finishing dressing. I wasn’t surprised. I’d expected her to be up early.

  “Not a peep.” I replied. “You?”

  “Nothing. Let’s get over to Little George’s house and find out what’s happening. Maybe they’re back.”

  In no time at all we were there, only to find no one was in except a rather old Mexican lady who served as a maid and cook, and she didn’t know anything except that no one was there when she arrived.

  She asked us if we wanted to wait, and offered us breakfast.

  Josie said “absolutely,” and that some breakfast would be appreciated. Nervous and fidgety, we hadhuevos rancheros– fried eggs, Mexican style – and toast with lots of coffee.

  I was just starting my third cup when we heard several cars and motorcycles pull into the driveway. As bike after bike cut its engine, that noise was replaced by a fifty-fifty mix of laughter and cursing. In a minute or two they started piling into the house.

  First in was Little George, with Smitty right on his heels. Both seemed real pleased with themselves. I’d expected Smitty to be upset when he saw Josie but it was just the opposite. He dashed over to her, grabbed her by the waist, picked her up off her feet and swung her around in a circle. “It was great! Couldn’t have gone better!” he told us. “We scared the livin’ shit out of him!”

  Little George and every one of the rest of the guys tried to tell Josie just how great it had been, all together, each trying to out-talk the rest. Total pandemonium.

  Finally, Smitty let out a loud shout. That did the job. “Shut up, you guys!” he yelled. “Shut up and grab a seat. Maria, can you rustle up some grub for this gang of miscreants? They’ve been workin’ all night without a bite to eat. Their bellybuttons are probably rubbing on their backbones by now.”

  She scurried off, the guys all sat down at the dining room table and Smitty said he’d recap the whole night for us.

  “Okay. First off, we got in touch with the chief again to see what kind of legal pressure we could bring to bear on the senator. We filled him in on all the stuff we’d found out about him. He told us that we had plenty of stuff to take to a D.A. But then he asked us how we got all the information. I told him about the fake job interviews and the reporter impersonations, and he reversed himself – he said there was no way a D.A. could use that stuff. Hell, I hadn’t even told him about what we did with the gal from the AG’s office.”

  “So…?”

  “Upshot? We decided we had no choice but to take things into our own hands. That’s what the meetings yesterday were all about. I left you three out of it ’cuz I didn’t want the guys intimidated by you. Well, fat lot of good that did! We hadn’t been in there more than a couple of minutes when one of the guys said we should listen to what you’d been saying about avoiding violence. Hell, you might as well have been there. Anyway, that’s what they decided.”

  “Pretty soon most of the guys came ’round to the idea that death was too good for him, anyway. We decided complete humiliation would be the best punishment. Not everybody agreed, of course – there were still a couple of holdouts who thought death was the perfect solution, but they were outnumbered.”

  “Question was how could we humiliate him without resorting to violence?” Smitty continued. “One of the guys said, there’s violence and then there’s violence. Another guy says, the senator doesn’t have to know we’re not gonna use violence.”

  Josie’s back stiffened. “I hadn’t promised toavoidall violence,” Smitty continued in his own defense. “I’d promised to avoid thetype of violence that had led me into trouble before.”

  “Dad, you’re splitting hairs!”

  “I know, I know, but be patient.” Josie slumped back in her chair. Smitty looked relieved. “Anyway, we came up with a plan. You know we’d been charting his daily routines and had a good idea where we might isolate him and get his attention. One thing in our favor was that he was a loner. He lived by himself, drove himself to and from the office, and often took work home with him.

  “Dad, I don’t like the way you keep referring to him in the past tense. Tell me you didn’t do away with him. Is he still alive?”

  CHAPTER 75

  “No, no. He’s very much alive,” Smitty insisted. “Maybe not too happy, but he’s definitely alive!”

  Gus added, “He’s right, Josie. We never hurt him. We just spent the evening with him and did some convincing.”

  Smitty continued. “We decided that in order to get his full attention we needed to get him isolated, scared and helpless. The best place to do that, we all agreed, was in his own home, so that’s what we did. One of the guys tailed him from his office to his home and phoned us when he was getting close. We were parked near his front door but ducked down in our cars so as not to be seen.”

  One of the guys spoke up, “he never even looked around.”

  Smitty continued, “As soon as he was out of his car, we surrounded him and told him we were from his home county and asked him if we could come in to discuss something with him. He fell into our trap and invited us in. But as soon as we started talking about blackmail, he invited us out. When we refused he started to struggle. Course with nine of us that didn’t work out too well for him. See Josie? It wasn’t a kidnapping. We met him outside his home and he invited us in. How can you be kidnapped in your own home?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. “Remember when I told you what Dan said ‘there’s violence and then there’s violence?’” That got me to thinking and I remembered reading that the fear of violence works on some people better than actual violence. I asked Dan to look into that and he came up with some ideas.”

  He turned to one of Little George’s young guys, “Dan, tell them what you told me.”

  Dan said he’d read that the first thing to do to make prisoners lose their confidence was to strip them. He said the prisoner would react worse to that than they would to real violence. “Most people, unless they’ve been trained in resistance, start imagining the worst. Their imagination becomes more effective than actual torture.”

  Dan struck me as a bookworm type. I later found out he was a computer nerd. Little George had used him for some research before.

  Smitty went on, “So the first thing we did, was the x-rated part. We closed and locked the doors, pulled down all the shades, made him take off all his clothes and sit in a kitchen chair in the middle of the living room. But Josie, we never touched him. Besides, he ain’t gonna tell nobody nothin’ about last night, you’ll see.”

  “So by this time he was scared shitless. The first thing that came out of his mouth was an offer to buy us off. Offered us money and all kinds of shit. All this time, none of us said a word. Dan said the other thing he’d read was to leave them alone and helpless. We’d already figured it’d probably take all night, so we just left him, naked as a really fat jay bird, except for his shoes and knee high socks held up with garters. Dan was right about him being naked. Even with just one guy watching him, he never tried to escape. Remember what his staff said about he always wears a suit? I think he wore it as a kind of protection. Anyway, he sure fell apart as soon as he was naked.”

  “We split up and started searching the house. I was willing to bet he’d been crooked so long without being caught, he’d become careless
. Turned out I was right. We found a hidden file in his upstairs office that all by itself would end his career if any of its contents became public.”

  “You searched a State Senator’s home?”

  “Only after he invited us in. Anyway, after about an hour or so of letting him stew in his own juices, I went in to him and asked him a question. ‘What would you do to someone you knew was responsible for murdering two of your friends?’ Then I walked back out. Half hour later, I went back in. ‘We know all about your friend Carpenter and how you had him killed. And walked out again. Next time I went in, he said he had to pee. I told him to go right ahead and walked out.

  Here he was, this hot-shot state senator, accustomed to being kowtowed to, used to hiding behind five-hundred-dollar suits, now stripped naked and forced to urinate in public. I figured he’d cave before long, and we weren’t in any hurry. We had all night.

  A little later, I came back in and asked if he’d missed his girlfriend over at the Attorney General’s office yet? That one really got him. I could see he was shaken. This time we left him alone for a couple of hours. We kept peeking at him through the kitchen door, but he didn’t try to move or anything.

  It was still dark when I went in the next time. Sure enough, he’d peed in the corner of the room. I told him that his girlfriend was singing her head off into a tape recorder, all about the lies he’d told her and all the stolen stuff she’d given him. Still later I told him we’d found all his papers plus we had all of Carpenter’s papers, including his personal diary We left him like that all night, nobody talking to him except me, but he knew there were a lot of us there.

  “So Josie, we never kidnapped him, he was in his own home all night. We never touched him except to make him take his own clothes off. We didn’t even tie him up. On top of that he knows we found his private papers stash, he ain’t gonna say nothin’ to anybody about anything. We really got him by the short hairs”,

  Smitty continued. “Early this morning we decided it was time to tell him our demands. We let him get dressed, sat him down at his kitchen table and surrounded him. I told him. ‘Because of you, two of our friends are dead. It took us a long time to find you. We had to find Carpenter first and deal with him in order to find you. It really doesn’t matter who we are, except we have our own set of laws. One of the biggest of them is a life for a life.”

  “He said, ‘I never killed anyone. I said, ‘Maybe not personally. But you ordered the killings and that’s the same thing.’ I told him, ‘Look, we’re just wasting time. We know you had Carpenter murdered before we could do it.

  Of course we hadn’t been planning on doing away with Carpenter, but it wouldn’t do any harm to plant the idea.

  I told him, now it’s your turn. We could just find a way to do away with you like we were gonna do with Carpenter, or – we can ruin you and let you live.

  He tried to bluster. ‘You’ll never get away with this. When I get out of here I’ll get the law down on you so fast you won’t know what happened.’

  What makes you think you’re going to get out of here? At least alive?

  He caved.

  ‘Okay, okay. ‘I’ll do anything you say.’

  I didn’t trust him, but went on with our plan. You’ve got a choice: life or death. Right now. Plan A: you can agree to resign from the Senate, and admit everything we have records of to your fellow senators and the press, or Plan B: we just put an end to your miserable little life right now. We’ll make it look like suicide.

  I added, ‘Before you make your decision I want you to know, this being a democracy and all, we had a vote on whether we should just go ahead and kill you now. The vote was really close.’

  There was no hesitation on his part. He went for Plan A, saying he’d do whatever we asked. I asked him if he was sure and he assured me he’d never been so sure of anything in his life. I told him he had a week to get his act together and publicly resign or we’d start publishing his papers and he’d have to walk in fear of us the rest of his life, which probably wouldn’t be very long. He got the message loud and clear and agreed, reluctantly, to everything.

  “By this time it was daylight, time for us to get out of there. Goldberg was a complete mess. He’d peed on the floor, stank of fear-induced sweat and looked like what he really was. An old, wrinkled shell of a man. I told him we’d be keeping an eye on him every minute of every day. That if we caught him deviating from the agreement in any way, we’d be on him like a ton of bricks. I also told him he’d get a list of everything he was to admit to in the mail. He nodded his agreement, but I told him he had to say it! He croaked out a, ‘Yeah, I understand. I guess I have no choice.’ I assured him he was right on that point.

  Everything went pretty much as we’d planned. But I’ve still got some reservations about him. Looking back at his reactions to us, I had a feeling that a guy like him wasn’t gonna give in that easily. He gave me the impression of a wily old fox of a politician, the type of crook who probably thinks he can weasel himself out of almost any predicament. Given that he’d spent a lifetime as a politician, blackmailer, thief and murderer, I had a lotta trouble putting any faith in his word. I couldn’t shake the feeling that his word’s worthless, even if his life is threatened.

  Anyway, that’s what we did. On the surface it looks like we’re gonna completely ruin Goldberg. Once he resigns and goes public with all his misdeeds, he’ll be totally disgraced and on his way to jail. He’ll be as good as dead. He’ll bebetter than dead. So – that’s what went down last night. We left him sitting there in his kitchen, an empty shell. It was beautiful!”

  Then Little George added, “And Josie, just like your Dad said we never laid a hand on him. He walked into his house with us on his own, even undressed himself. He’s guilty as hell and we simply let him know his time is over. We scared the crap outta him, but we never touched him. Right guys?”

  A chorus of agreement and one guy said, “Just the way we hoped it’d go.”

  CHAPTER 76

  “Anybody want to add anything?” Smitty asked.

  One of the guys spoke up. “Yeah, Smitty. You didn’t say anything last night about having doubts whether this would work or not?”

  “Well, truth is, while we were planning it and during the early hours of the night I didn’t have any doubts. But toward morning, I thought I was seeing something in his behavior that gave me second thoughts. It kind of looked to me as if he was moreactingbeing afraid than actuallybeingafraid, that he was faking it. Maybe we’d dragged it out too long. Once he figured we weren’t gonna kill him right away, maybe he thought he could outsmart us somehow. Did any of you guys get that feeling?”

  There was a long silence.

  Finally Gus spoke up. “Looks to me like you covered that anyway, with your one-week deadline. If he doesn’t follow through, you just unload everything we know onto a few newspapers and his goose’ll be sizzlin’. In fact, why don’t we just go ahead and do the newspaper thing right now? Why wait?”

  Smitty replied that the group had looked at that option before. “When we decided not to kill him ourselves, we decided we needed to get him out of politics and into jail in the most humiliating way possible. What’s he most proud of, what does he value most? We decided it was his seat in the California Senate.”

  “We thought if he had to get up before his fellow senators and publicly admit that he was a blackmailer, had stolen information from the Attorney General’s office and was under investigation in cases having to do with murder and sex with a minor, if he was forced to do that in front of the entire Senate, it’d be something he’d never recover from.”

  Smitty wanted to wrap it up. “Well, we are where we are,” he said. “What we need now is that demand letter for the senator. It can be pretty simple. All we have to do is list everything we know about him and demand that he confess it all to the entire Senate.”

  “While it’s in session and being televised,” I added.

  “Right. In session and tel
evised,” Smitty said. “So, Casey. Can you whip up a letter like that in an hour or so?”

  “Piece o’ cake.”

  And it was. We had so much – Carpenter’s diary and papers, Mrs. DeHaven’s confession, the connection between the senator and the murders, plus all the new incriminating paperwork they’d found in the senator’s home. Just for starters, he’d been caught molesting a page boy by another senator’s aide. The aide had tried to blackmail him. From what we could piece together it looked like the senator had bought the aide off, but kept his letters – an unfortunate decision for the senator because now they were inour possession. On top of that we found a stash of the files he’d had Mrs. DeHaven steal.

  An hour later I had a handwritten sample letter. I gave it to Smitty. He glanced through it, then said, “Let me read it aloud. See what you guys think.” Everyone settled down to listen.

  “In order to avoid the consequences we spoke of yesterday, you must do the following. You must stand up in the Senate within one week, while it is in session and being televised, and request time to make a statement. In the statement you will admit to the following:

  1. You have stolen files from the Attorney General’s office.

  2. You have used those stolen files to blackmail prominent people out of untold thousands of dollars.

  3. You have used your position to coerce an employee in the Attorney General’s office to help you steal those files.

  4. You had an ongoing business relationship with one Peter Carpenter of El Cerrito and supplied him with blackmail information so that he could be your front man in the blackmailing.

  5. That you were responsible for Peter Carpenter being murdered because you were afraid he would give you up.

  6. That some years ago you were caught molesting a page boy and bribed your way out of the charges.

  After admitting to all the above, you will resign from the senate. And, do not forget, we have documentary evidence of everything you are going to admit to. You either do as requested or all that evidence will be made available to every major newspaper in California.