by Paul Heald
She dropped Hopkins off in front of the downtown Sheraton and then circled back to park in the hotel garage. She was finishing a large but undistinguished margarita when he appeared, clean shaven and hair wet, eyes sparkling despite the travel fatigue he must have felt. He flagged down the first waiter who passed by, ordered a Sierra Nevada, and immediately jumped into the story of his extraordinary trips to Mallorca and Geneva. She sat in fascinated silence, unwilling to interrupt until he ended his tale with speculation that Granville and the English girl in Geneva had been discovered in their attempt to document the cotton-case bribery plot.
“So, you don’t think that Jacob murdered Diana?” She resisted reconceiving the prime suspect as possible victim.
“No, I don’t.” He licked a bit of foam off of his upper lip. “It’s possible that he’s some kind of super crafty serial killer, but I doubt it. He doesn’t really fit the profile. He was a serial cheater, for sure, but I think he and Brenda just got in over their heads. I’d say they got burned and that Diana Cavendish was just collateral damage.”
Melanie nodded, still struggling to fit all the facts to his theory. “Okay, but the reporter who brought the story to me in the first place says that the local police or the FBI or both tried to cover Granville’s tracks.” She filled the professor in on the history of obstruction Murphy had encountered investigating the disappearance. “Why have a conspiracy to protect someone that’s dead?”
The prosecutor watched as Stanley processed the information. He leaned back in his chair and bit his lip. “How would the cops or the FBI know that he was dead?”
It was a simple question, but a good one. If Ernest Rodgers and Sheriff Johnson knew that Jacob was dead, they would not have wasted their time slowing down the pursuit of him.
“Granville’s friends,” he continued, “may well have thought him alive and falsely accused. If they were sure he wasn’t the murderous type—and he probably wasn’t—then they might have thought they were helping him, not knowing that he was beyond their aid.”
“Of course, we don’t know for sure that he’s dead.”
“Fair enough,” the professor conceded as he signaled for another drink.
“But what you say makes sense. If he wasn’t a killer, then their willingness to obstruct the investigation fits a little better.”
“If they obstructed at all,” Stanley replied.
“The locals all knew him from childhood.”
He shrugged, “I suppose.” He put a big dent in his beer and yawned. “So, what next? We’ve identified a mysterious bribery guy who may have killed Brenda, Jacob, and Diana, or had them killed to protect some cotton-rich client, but that trail is stone cold.” He pulled Brenda’s cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Melanie. “I brought you Brenda’s phone so that you can read the text messages between her and Jacob. I think you’ll agree with me about what likely happened to them.”
“Could you hang around for a day or so?” She swiped her smart phone and checked her calendar. “I’m gonna want to talk to you again after I have the techies look at the phone.” She put it in her purse. “They might be able to pull some more data up. And it’d also be nice if you could give me something written, sort of an official narrative of your travels.”
“Sure,” he said, “but I wonder if Lonely Planet would approve of my porn-and-murder itinerary.” He stood up with a broad smile and helped her out of her chair.
She felt a sudden urge to give him a hug. “Thank you for everything,” she said as she took his hand. “I can’t believe you’ve done all this for nothing. It must have cost a fortune!”
“It wasn’t for nothing, and I’ve got more money than I know what to do with. Trust me, I really needed to get out of California, and this is the most fun I’ve had in a long time.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “And hanging around is no problem. I’m going to visit my late wife’s folks in Roswell and then go over to Athens for a few days to hang out with a former colleague of mine. I’ll write your report and spend a day in the University of Georgia library satisfying my curiosity about the cotton case. Some researcher must have written something intelligent about it by now.”
* * *
That night, Melanie read and reread the text messages between Jacob and Brenda, and although they were cryptic and fragmentary, she agreed with Stanley’s analysis of the situation. The next day at work, she brought the device down to the basement lair of the Department of Justice tech department, but they found nothing more of interest in the phone, apart from a list of calls made and received, all of which were to numbers in the EU or Switzerland. When she asked whether they could be traced, Hans shook his head. Privacy rules were stronger there, he explained, and from his own bitter experience, he was sure that only Interpol would have any hope of getting the cooperation of the phone companies.
Melanie mulled the situation over as she made her way back to her office. She sat down and put her feet on the window ledge. The early summer heat was rising off the parking lot and an office block in the distance shimmered in the sodden air. She would not be tempted to open her windows again until late September. So, what now? As the professor had concluded, the trail was five years old and maybe it was time to move on.
But not all the crimes were five years old. The past had reached out at least once during the investigation, and maybe it was time to coax it out again and whack it with a ruler. When she gave James’s name to the woman in Arkansas, his home was burglarized the very next day. And when she queried the FBI through Sammy Goodson, he refused to provide any information and warned her strongly off the case. The trail from these incidents was not five years old, and considering what she had learned in the last several weeks, she decided to give Sammy another call. She left a message on his voice mail and told him to call her back in the evening.
* * *
She was sitting at home watching The Voice and checking her email when she heard wind chimes tinkling on her cell phone.
“Hey, babe,” Sammy whispered in his best seductive voice, “are you in town?” Only Sammy Goodson could interpret her picking up the phone and saying hello as some sort of intricate come-on.
“No,” she said firmly, “I’ve just called to confess that I’ve been bad.”
“Ooh!” he exclaimed, “then tell me what you’re wearing.”
“No, you idiot. Do you remember our dinner in Atlanta?”
“How could I forget? You had those new black boots on—”
She interrupted his fantasy before he asked her to start talking dirty. “I asked you about an Arkansas phone number and some nameless drone over your head warned me to back off.”
“Yeah,” he replied guardedly. The reminder had the desired cold-water effect on his libido. “I remember.”
“Well, I didn’t take his advice or yours.” She could hear him breathe out heavily on the other end of the line. “To make a very long story short, I called that number because a notation in an FBI file stated that all inquiries about a guy named Jacob Granville should be directed there. I told the woman who answered about the reporter who had come to me asking about Granville, and two days later his house was broken into and some important papers stolen. Now, I’ve dug up quite a bit of shit on Granville, and I need to know who else is still so interested in his case.”
“You think that the bureau broke into this reporter’s house?” he sputtered. “Are you a lunatic?”
“No! I’ve worked with the FBI long enough to know you’re not thugs. I’m not attacking the bureau.” It was true. The break-in at Murphy’s house did not smell like the FBI. “But you guys do share information with people outside the bureau. In fact, on occasion the law requires you to do it, and who knows how that information might be used or by whom.”
“So what’s you point, Mel?”
“I need the source of that number.”
“Are you on crack? As it is, I’m going to have to report you just for asking.” He could barely contain his exasperation.
“
Come on, Sammy! Grow a fucking pair! You don’t have to tell anybody anything. Just do a little routine snooping around in your databases and find out for me who owned that number.”
Silence. She could hear the wheels turning even though her former lover was almost a thousand miles away. “What do I get in return?”
“What do you get? You get the assurance that you’re not a dick.” She tempered her approach. “You get to be on the side of justice and help out the good guys.”
“No, no, no …” He paused a moment more and then she heard a sound that closely approximated a cackle. “I want to fuck you one more time.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re serious!”
“Absolutely. Dead serious.” He laughed. “No nookie, no number.”
She considered his repulsive offer. She’d rather sleep with a urine-soaked bum in a New York alley, but there was no other choice, not if she really wanted to know what was behind the death of Diana Cavendish. She sighed and tried to remember a younger, more attractive version of her blackmailer. “Yeah, I’ll fuck you.”
* * *
Stanley had fun in Athens. His friend Kirk had moved there from Illinois at the same time as his own move to California, but whereas Stanley had been fleeing a denial of tenure, his friend had moved away to take a prestigious endowed chair. Stanley closeted himself deep in the University of Georgia library, using his friend’s password to access electronic resources during the day and then sampling his home-brewed IPA in the evenings. Kirk insisted on putting him up in his large and comfortable spare bedroom. He and his wife, Erica, had known Angela well, and for the first time since the accident Stanley found himself able to have a prolonged conversation about her. It hurt, but it wasn’t paralyzing.
Until Erica asked where he had laid her to rest.
He couldn’t very well answer, “The laundry room,” could he? So he changed the subject and then went back to the bedroom to think, but no solution to the problem magically appeared.
The next day, his reading in the library diverted him from his personal situation. He looked first in law journals for an explanation of the legal rationale for the WTO decision that US cotton subsidies were illegal. Interestingly, the WTO panel held that the US had violated its own express commitments to reduce a certain sort of agricultural payment. The US had simply not lived up to its own promises. The articles did a good job of translating the technical aspects of the panel’s decision into plain English, and he was left with the sense that the case had been pretty straightforward, but for its political implications. Several articles had been written after Congress had refused to comply with the decision. These were more interesting and focused on the huge risks the US was taking by refusing to bend. Not only was it undermining an international institution that the US frequently relied upon, but the threat of WTO-approved economic retaliation against US industry was very real, if not inevitable.
The law articles sent him scurrying to the political science and international relations literature. These were the folks who thought hard about the realpolitik behind the decisions of international actors, at least so his colleagues in those departments at BFU and Belle Meade claimed. After skimming a couple of theoretical pieces that opined about noncompliance generally, he found two long articles arguing that cotton subsidies were a key to understanding US foreign policy. He found the conclusions about US trade doctrine to be facile, but he was fascinated by the in-depth factual analysis of how the cotton subsidies came to be and why they were sustained.
Just as Bill Clinton’s sheep-herding friend, senator Max Baucus of Montana, seemed to dictate US policy on lamb production, senator Elbert Randolph of Arkansas seemed to play the same role for cotton. The son of a wealthy cotton grower, he had pushed for higher subsidies from the moment he was elected, and now, as the head of the powerful Senate Agriculture Committee, he controlled regulation of the commodity. Senate rules allowed him to single-handedly block any legislation related to cotton that he disapproved of. He was supported, of course, by any number of industry lobbying groups, all of which heavily funded his Senate campaigns. Interestingly, he had come under fire as frequently from environmental groups as from human-rights groups. Cotton was by far the most pesticide- and fertilizer-intensive crop grown in the US, and the environmental damage caused by cotton farming was apparently enormous. Randolph shrugged off all criticism.
The senator had divested all his farm holdings shortly after being named to the Senate Agriculture Committee, but his connections, both familial and social, to the small coterie of Texas and Arkansas cotton millionaires were incestuously tight.
What the popular press had to say about the senator was also illuminating. Apart from the occasional environmental rant, newspaper stories were generally positive. The American people cared little about issues surrounding subsidies. In fact, the Farm Aid movement had even glorified them as necessary to save the family farm. No one seemed to have noticed that the vast majority of cotton benefits went to wealthy corporate farmers. Liberals cared more about issues like civil rights, and the senator’s positions on race and literacy were admired by many in the press, as was his support of a recent campaign to address childhood obesity in Arkansas. He had been one of Ted Kennedy’s best friends before the senator from Massachusetts passed away.
He seemed like a nice guy. Unless you were a struggling cotton farmer in Mali watching your family starve.
Although there was no reason to believe that Randolph himself was behind the attempt to bribe the WTO, the stories painted a vivid picture of an industry that could not survive without massive injections of money from Congress. Granville had accused the millionaire supplicants of killing African farmers. Might not one of them have been willing to kill more locally to maintain his status? Certainly the environmental press accused them of killing the sensitive ecology of various river deltas.
Stanley spent the rest of the afternoon delving into the environmental literature that demonized Randolph. He had never responded directly to criticism, but organic farmers had made claims of harassment against two of Randolph’s best friends, massive cotton growers Howard Stewart and Jamie “Weevil” Bulmer. News stories described allegations that Stewart and Bulmer had engineered successful counter-demonstrations against environmentalists who “wanted to destroy the family farm.” When an office was set up in Little Rock by a green activist group, it was firebombed. Statements from an Arkansas cotton trade group about the bombing bordered on cheerleading.
Stanley delved yet deeper and found no shortage of farmers and lobbyists willing to go to extremes to keep cotton alive and well in Arkansas. The most incongruous player of all was the Mexican government, which strongly supported all of Senator Randolph’s initiatives. A large percentage of the US cotton crop went straight to maquiladoras on the Mexico-US border that manufactured clothing to sell back to the US market. Without the cheap US cotton, Mexico had little chance of competing with Asian fabric dynamos. The senator was photographed smiling broadly with factory owners and the Mexican ambassador to the US after they all had testified before Congress about the win-win situation cotton subsidies presented for the two neighboring countries. Here, labor groups, rather than environmentalists, took aim at the senator for implicitly approving of the horrific working conditions in the factories just south of the border.
After the dozenth article, Stanley had had enough. He was depressed and his curiosity was satisfied. He blinked and sneezed hard as he emerged from the library into the bright sunshine of the campus’s main quadrangle. He sighed. Education was clearly not the answer to all human problems. His research expedition had just provided an excuse to ignore Erica’s question about Angela. God, he dreaded going back to California.
* * *
While Stanley read in the library, Melanie conducted a review of all cases currently heading for trial under her direction. She had been distracted for several weeks now, and she called a parade of attorneys into her o
ffice, demanded memos, and generally terrorized the young prosecutors while she waited for Sammy to call her back. With the exception of a botched response to an evidentiary request made by a counterfeiter of DVDs, she expressed satisfaction with the efficiency of her department. She was scanning her case log when her cell phone rang.
“Hey, Gorgeous!” The enthusiastic chirp of Sammy Goodson’s voice was unmistakable. What had she ever seen in this guy? He was handsome, quite intelligent in his own way, and a surprisingly attentive lover, given his other shortcomings, but he really was as shallow as a kiddie plastic wading pool. Their jobs in Washington had kept them so busy and their lives so separate that his character flaws never seemed too horribly relevant until her thirties were a thing of the past. “I’ve just bought tickets to come to Atlanta!”
“Lucky me.” She didn’t even try to hide her lack of enthusiasm.
“Hey,” he replied, an edge to his voice, “you’re not having second thoughts about our deal, are you?”
“Well,” she said, “it depends on what you have for me. Who did that Arkansas number belong to?”
He hesitated for a moment. “You’ve got to promise me first that you’re not going to do anything stupid with the information … you need to just let things be.”
“Just spit it out, Sammy.”
“All right,” he sighed, “it belonged to someone in the federal building in Little Rock that houses members of Congress and their staffs. I can’t tell you any more than that, because there’s been dozens of numbers associated with that building over the years. They are all landlines and they all move around. The records only provide the building address, not any particular office.”
Melanie digested the information and regretted the bargain that she had struck with her ex-lover. “Thanks, Sammy. I appreciate the information. You’re right, there’s not a whole lot that I can do with that.”
“Now,” he replied in the smokiest voice that he could muster, “please tell me that you’ll be around next weekend.”