The Hearing

by James Mills

  They sat in a small, dim living room with the smell of cigarette smoke. Doreen wasn’t smoking. A large posterlike painting of the zodiac hung over an orange couch. He glanced quickly around for photographs of Samantha. There were none.

  “Who are you, Mr. Parker?”

  “I represent a client who wants to locate your husband. Mr. Gier thought you might be able to help.”

  “How do you know Mr. Gier?”

  “We’re old friends.” He grinned, letting her know that was gonna be it.

  “Who’s your client?”

  “Someone who wants to find your husband. He thought that since you’ve also been trying to find him, you might be willing to pool resources.”

  “Pool resources?”

  “He has funds. You have information.”

  She laughed, a lighthearted chuckle.

  “Well, I’ve got information all right. Why’s your client want to find my husband?”

  “He wants to ask him some questions.”

  “About what?”

  “They’re personal.”

  “You won’t tell me who your client is, you won’t tell me why you want to find my husband. I’m just supposed to tell you everything I know and be happy with that? I hope I don’t look that stupid.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you have to give?”

  “What did Mr. Gier give?”

  “That’s between Mr. Gier and me.”

  “Let’s put it this way, Mrs. Young. If you provide information that helps me find your husband, I promise to tell you where he is. All the expense of finding him will have been borne by my client. You want to find him and I want to help you do that. You have nothing to lose.”

  “Oh, I don’t have anything to lose. But there’s profit in this for you and your client, so why not me too?”

  “If I find your husband, I’m quite sure my client will want to disclose himself to you. He just doesn’t want to do it now. What profit, if any, there might in it for you I can’t say. But I know him to be a very generous man, to those who are on his side.”

  She leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms and legs.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything that will help me find your husband. Where was he the last you heard from him?”

  “In a bar.”

  Carl couldn’t be sure if the touch of insolence in her smile was directed at him or at her husband.

  “Where?”

  “I have no idea. He called me from a bar.”

  “How did you know he was in a bar?”

  “He’s always in a bar. And from the background noise.”

  A sound came from another room, a door closing, maybe a closet.

  “He spent a lot of time in bars?”

  Her voice quickened. She wanted to end this, get rid of him.

  “He works in bars. He’s a pianist, plays in bars, nightclubs.”

  “Where was he working last?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. He just called.”

  “What did he call about?”

  “The usual. ‘Get off my back. Stop looking for me.’ Called me names. Told me what a bitch I was. Whenever he runs out of people to hurt he calls me.”

  Voices came from the other room. A girl and man quarreling. Samantha? Carl’s heart stopped.

  “I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you, Mr. Parker.” She stood. “If I think of anything else I’ll let you know.”

  “Do you have a picture of him?” She was in a hurry. Carl stayed in his chair. “I thought maybe a publicity photo, from a nightclub or something?”

  The kitchen door swung open and a young man in jeans and a black T-shirt walked in, swaggered in.

  Doreen opened a drawer in a cabinet and handed Carl a photograph. To the man, she said, “I told you to stay out of here.”

  The man ignored her and dropped into a chair. The T-shirt was too small for his muscles. Carl had put cuffs on hundreds of guys just like him. Fake tough, pumps iron in front of mirrors, bullies women and gays. Gutless, brainless, a wimp with biceps.

  Carl grinned at him. “Hi, Danny.”

  The man rolled his shoulders and looked up. “How’d you know my name?”

  Doreen glanced at Carl, and her eyebrows came to gether in a tiny frown. Before she could add her question to Danny’s, the door opened again, and an obese fifteen-year-old girl stood in the doorway. Barefoot, draped in a black dress from neck to ankles, she had a shaved head and angry blue eyes, mean beyond her years.

  Carl watched her, relieved she wasn’t Samantha.

  Doreen opened the front door. Danny glared.

  “Let me know when you find the bastard.”

  “Absolutely.”

  He walked down the porch steps to the sidewalk. He’d been in a lot of living rooms with a lot of strange people, but he’d never been as uncomfortable as he’d been with Doreen and the fifteen-year-old. Danny didn’t bother him—he was an open book. But the girl had filled the room with menace. He had sensed the traces of it when he was alone with Doreen, like a leftover stench, and when the girl came in, the two of them together, it turned real. He had never experienced that feeling before, not from anyone he had ever arrested or any place he had ever been. He knew how to handle guys like Danny, he was safe with them, but Doreen and the girl were different, the danger was different. What had it been like in that house for Samantha? Had the girl been there then? Where did all that evil come from?

  He had to find Samantha.

  It began to drizzle. Next door to Doreen’s house an elderly man was on the front lawn raking leaves. But there were no leaves. And he was doing it in the rain.

  Carl walked slowly past him. The man looked up and smiled. “How you doin’?”

  “Not too bad,” Carl said, smiling. “How’re you?”

  “Okay.”

  He stopped raking. This was a man with something to say.

  Carl intensified his smile and nodded at the house.

  “You know them?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure do.”

  He gave Carl a look. Carl tried to make his smile talk. We’re on the same side. Speak to me.

  “Well, I can’t exactly say I know them—if you mean like in a social way, so to speak.”

  “So you don’t know them socially.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Not your kind of people.”

  He gave his head an exaggerated shake. No way.

  “What kind of people are they?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to speak against them, neighbors you know, but—” He hesitated.

  Carl said, “I can understand that.”

  “You a cop?”

  “No.”

  “But a sort of cop, right?”

  “Maybe. Yeah. A sort of.”

  “Somethin’s wrong in that house.”

  Carl waited.

  The man looked as if he might be about to say something. Then he glanced at the Cherokee, lifted the rake, and walked back toward his house.

  Carl headed for the car, imagining what might have been on the man’s mind. He wondered what it had been like for Samantha in that house, and what it was like for her now with Larry Young. How much should he tell Gus? It wouldn’t help Gus and Michelle to know about that house and Doreen and the girl and Danny. He’d just tell them Larry was a pianist, plays in bars, nightclubs. That was the helpful part, the lead, what he’d come for.

  As he pulled out of his parking place, he spotted a dark blue Plymouth with two men in the front seat headed the other way, toward the house. In his rearview mirror he watched the Plymouth stop next to the Cherokee.

  “Milwaukee’s finest,” Carl said aloud. “Doing their duty. Goodbye, Danny.”

  12

  Senator Eric Taeger sat at his desk, staring bleakly at a rain-drenched asphalt parking lot, reflecting on the past week, one of the worst of his life. Tuesday he’d seen his lawyer, who told him his wife was leaving him. Thursday he’d s
een his doctor, who told him he had Parkinson’s disease. Stay away from lawyers and doctors.

  Not that he cared that much about his wife, but they’d been together forty-seven years. Well, together—they shared a house, but not a bedroom, they shared an abiding hatred for each other, and they shared the love of their two children. A week ago she’d moved out, told her lawyer to tell him that with both children now out of the house—his son was at West Point, his daughter had just married—she saw no reason to continue the marriage (“the agony,” she called it).

  He knew he was a lousy husband, had been guilty of just about everything his wife accused him of, which was everything she could suspect or imagine. If ever a man deserved to be abandoned by his wife, it was he. But what really startled him was what had happened yesterday afternoon, Friday, a day after the doctor told him he had Parkinson’s disease. It had suddenly occurred to Taeger, with great certainty, that if his wife had known about the Parkinson’s (there were, as yet, no symptoms evident to her) she would not have been able to leave him. She would have felt compelled—by duty, pride, the pressure of friends—to stay and look after him, to care for him as he disintegrated through debility to death. He discovered with amazement a profound relief, deep in his heart, that simply because he saw the lawyer before the doctor, she had been spared that. Somewhere far beyond his hatred for her, he had uncovered a tiny, still-warm ash of what had once been love. Incredible. Wonderful. If the disease had given him that, the disease was not all bad.

  His intercom buzzed, and he heard the voice of his secretary.

  “Mr. Harrington is here.”

  “Send him in.”

  Harrington stuck his head through the open door and saw Taeger bent over a stack of papers. The old man looked up, studied him for a moment, dropped his eyes back to the papers, and said impatiently, “Well, all right, John, where are we?”

  Taking that as an invitation, Harrington approached the mahogany desk. Twenty-two years earlier, Harrington had been an attorney on Taeger’s Senate staff, and today Taeger remained his bread and butter. Access to Taeger, and through him to other senators and senior staffers, wasn’t all he had to sell, but it was most of it. Take away Taeger and Harrington’s shop looked bare.

  Taeger was seventy-six years old, six-feet-six, skinny, white-haired, rich, and scary. Harrington wasn’t sure who frightened him more, Eric Taeger or Ernesto Vicaro. When it came to fear, Taeger’s office was not that different from the interview room where Harrington met Vicaro. Both stank, literally or figuratively, with a coldly regulated savagery. That Taeger’s power was predominantly political and Vicaro’s predominantly physical made little difference. The thought of those two men coming together against a common enemy—even Gus Parham—made Harrington shudder.

  Taeger had earned his money from a nationwide chain of 232 automobile repair centers, and he conducted much of his Senate business out of this office on the second floor of the main center a few miles from Capitol Hill. Lobbyists said it was the only place in town you could change legislation and your brake linings in one stop. Taeger hated more people, had hurt more people, had made and destroyed more careers than anyone else Harrington could think of.

  Harrington sat in a black suede chair overlooking the parking lot and heard Taeger repeat his question. “Where are we?”

  Harrington said, “How long do you have?”

  Taeger’s praying-mantis body hunched over the desk. He’d been leading the committee’s interrogation of Judge Parham, and so far the media was calling it a draw.

  “About five minutes.” His eyes swiveled up to catch Harrington’s gaze. “But for you I’ll stretch it to ten. I’ve gotta be back on the Hill by three.”

  He smiled, although you had to have known him awhile to know that’s what it was.

  “You talk to the dean?”

  Harrington said, “He says he wants to check her SAT scores, but it’s okay. He’s not happy, but he’ll do it.”

  “He doesn’t have to be happy. You tell Derek?”

  Derek Seleck, a pro-Parham senator on the Judiciary Committee, had an academically mediocre daughter applying at an Ivy League university whose admissions dean owed a debt to Taeger. (Harrington didn’t even want to guess what that debt might be.) Taeger had suggested to Seleck that his daughter’s admission could be assured for the price of his vote. It had then been Harrington’s job to tell the dean that if the girl were admitted his debt to Taeger would be forgotten.

  “I thought maybe you’d want to do that.”

  Taeger made a note, but didn’t speak.

  Harrington said, “Seleck’s wife plays bridge with the wives of two senators on the—”

  Not lifting his head, Taeger said, “Tell me something I don’t know, John.”

  He continued to read documents, applying his signature, making notes. “What about this Vicaro affidavit?”

  At their last meeting, Harrington had told Taeger about the possibility of a Vicaro affidavit accusing Parham of stealing some of the luggage-locker money. Taeger had had a recollection of Vicaro. They’d met seven years earlier at a reception in the Colombian embassy. Taeger said Vicaro stuck in his mind because at the tender age of nineteen, between years at Florida State, he was already serving as a second secretary in the political section. A year after that he’d been elected to the Colombian senate. With a rich and influential father, he was clearly on the fast track. And now here he was doing federal time for cocaine trafficking. Sic transit gloria mundi. No wonder Vicaro hated Parham.

  “Still working on it. It’s got some major problems.”

  Taeger said, “I hear someone got hurt.”

  “Hurt?”

  “Broken ankles. Young fellow from your office.”

  “Oh, you heard about that?”

  “Too bad.” Taeger’s eyes swiveled up again, pinned Harrington. “Always regrettable when politics gets violent.”

  Was that supposed to be irony? No one knew more than Taeger about the occasionally lethal kinship between politics and violence. Fifty years earlier, when Taeger was a young politician running for the Kansas state legislature, his opponent had been arrested with a prostitute in the front seat of a car, five ounces of marijuana in the back. Charged with reckless driving, lewd behavior, and felony drug possession, the opponent had hanged himself in his jail cell the night of his arrest. Taeger won the election, and a month later the prostitute told a vice squad cop that Taeger had paid her to jump into the opponent’s car, grab him around the neck, spill perfume and alcohol, and drop the marijuana. The prostitute later recanted, left the state, and no charges were filed.

  Harrington, referring to what had happened to his assistant’s ankles, said, “I wouldn’t call that politics.”

  The senator had lost a son in the Vietnam War, another lesson in the violence of politics. He said, “More like police brutality?” Then he smiled, if that’s what it was.

  The FBI, working with the chief of security for the Sony Corporation, had identified the videocassette Warren Gier handed over as one of a batch Sony originally shipped to Singapore. Sony’s Singapore wholesaler identified it as part of a consignment to Hong Kong, where it had been sold locally.

  So Carl flew to Hong Kong. It was his first visit in seven years.

  He had not been in his hotel five minutes when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Carl?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Doug Cabot.”

  “Well, Doug Cabot. How are you?” A Honk Kong—based DEA agent. Carl wasn’t surprised to hear his voice. He’d seen the surveillance around his taxi on the way in from Kai Tak Airport. The Hong Kong Narcotics Bureau had the best surveillance teams in the world, men and women on foot, bicycles, motorcycles, in cars, trucks, and taxis, weaving in and out, coming and going, here one moment, gone the next. They didn’t fight the traffic, they became the traffic. They didn’t watch you, they enveloped you.

  “Fine. How was the flight?”

/>   “Great.”

  Carl had worked with Cabot sixteen years earlier in the Chicago office and found him sly and manipulative. What did he want?

  “I’m just calling because I saw a cable this morning from the Congressional Liaison Office asking for a daily update on your activities. Thought you might like to know.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Carl felt a sudden pang of disappointment. How cheaply some people sell their loyalty. He could guess where the congressional request had come from: Senator Eric Taeger, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Leading the stop-Parham campaign in the Senate, Taeger would naturally want to know what a pro-Parham investigator was doing in Hong Kong. And Cabot was ready and eager to curry a little favor, help him find out, look good with the senator.

  “You need anything, Carl, give me a call. How’re you fixed for transportation?”

  That’d really make Cabot’s job easy, know everywhere Carl went.

  “Just fine, thanks. I’ll call if I need anything.”

  “Do that. We’re here to help.”

  “Of course you are.”

  So now Cabot had something to put in his answer to the cable. “Special Agent Falco arrived Hong Kong. HKNB surveilled him to the Kowloon Park Hotel, where Special Agent Cabot telephonically confirmed his presence.”

  Later on, Cabot would hit HKNB for the surveillance reports and for transcripts of Carl’s telephone conversations from the hotel room. Send it off to Washington, make it sound like he did it all himself—wouldn’t Cabot look like a good little boy then? Politics screws up everything, even sixteen-year-old friendships.

  Carl hadn’t been to bed for almost thirty hours, but it was just past midnight, perfect for what he had to do. He left the hotel, ignored the taxi rank, walked two blocks, flagged down a cab, took it through the tunnel under the harbor, and got out at the Mandarin Hotel. He gave the concierge a hundred-dollar bill and said, “I’m looking for a friend who plays piano in a bar or nightclub. Problem is I don’t know which one. Where should I look?”

  Wordlessly, the man fished a sheet of notepaper from under the counter and began listing names. When he’d put down eighteen, he gave the paper to Carl.