“Burkhardt ended up building Alta Bay,” LaFontaine said.
“But not until Jennings stood behind bars and the Feds had all but dismantled Concrete & Construction. That took eight years.”
“And you’re saying Burkhardt had a little to do with Jennings’s downfall?”
“It all happened so long ago, who’s to say? I just know a little of how the old man worked.”
“And how was that?”
Whitney picked up the napkin off the table and twisted it into a ball. The flicker of pain crossed his face again. “I attended UCLA, in the late sixties. Economics degree. Took a couple years off, then went to business school. My first year in the MBA program, there was a scandal.”
“I adore scandals,” News purred. “Keep going.”
“An undergraduate male brutally raped an undergraduate coed during a fraternity party. The woman never returned to campus. The boy’s father made a rather staggering donation to the business school through one of its trustees, the late Robert S. Carlton III.”
“The late president of your bank and, if I’m correct, the man who would eventually become the boy’s chief financial source.”
Whitney nodded.
“Nothing about the rape was ever made public?” News prodded.
“Money has a bleaching effect,” Whitney replied. “And once people learn they can whitewash their laundry, it becomes habit.”
“So you think there’s something similar inside that sealed case?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
LaFontaine could taste something in the air, something unsaid. He looked hard at Whitney, who glanced away, the pain now steady on his face. “Who was the woman, Mr. Whitney?”
He put his hand to his mouth and would not look at LaFontaine. “My cousin, Lucy,” he said. “Sloan Burkhardt beat her senseless. They let him get away with it.”
News felt shitty and elated. For the first time since he’d started looking at Sloan Burkhardt he knew there was something real behind that queasy sensation he’d gotten talking to the developer. But seeing Whitney’s obvious torment he knew the cousin still suffered from the effects of the rape. This was a sour victory.
Whitney composed himself. “What else do you want to know?”
“You’d like to break this deal, wouldn’t you?”
Whitney shrugged. “Of course I’d like to break the deal. I’d like to see Sloan rot in hell. But it’s not within my power. The bank made a commitment and we’ll stand behind that commitment unless …”
“Unless?”
“Unless someone such as yourself manages to bring things to light that might … shall we say … upset the process?”
“Are you saying that there are things to bring to light?”
“Nothing specific, but I have no doubt you’re working fertile terrain.”
“Nothing else? No place to start?”
Whitney wiped a spoon on the tablecloth. “I’ve always believed that to understand a problem, you begin with the people involved with the people believed to be involved. If I remember correctly, Sloan was married once. That would have been six or seven years ago, about the time that case was sealed.”
“I do believe I underestimated you, Mr. Whitney.”
“It happens,” Whitney said evenly. “By the way, we didn’t have this conversation.”
“Of course,” LaFontaine said. He got up from the booth without offering to shake the man’s hand. His stood still for a moment, balancing on his stiff ankle, then limped toward the door.
Pete smiled smugly as he opened the door for the reporter. “I hope it’s a torn tendon,” the bouncer said. “Better yet: a hairline fracture.”
News waited until he was almost by the bruiser, then swung full force with the good leg, toe pointed out, catching Pete square on the kneecap. The bouncer buckled and fell to the floor, howling in agony.
“Take that as a lesson,” LaFontaine snarled. “Never mess with someone who’s paid to do hatchet jobs.”
Night of the Zombie …
BLOOD STREAKED THE BACK of the Zombie’s hands. His knuckles were split. His feet ached. So did his back, his forearms, and his thighs. The bruise above his right eye carried hints of purple. His swollen tongue pressed thickly against his loosened teeth.
The Zombie took a deep breath to help him shove his suffering away in a remote corner of his mind. He trudged out of the brightly lit storefront past the crowd waiting to see the latest action movie toward his old white Ford pickup.
Every night of the week except Sunday the Zombie came to this Shotokan Karate Dojo and trained with men half his age. Every night except Sunday the Zombie vented his rage so he had the composure to write of the dead. Every night except Sunday the Zombie spent three hours breaking boards and sparring in full contact bouts. In his mind every length of pine and every young opponent who entered the ring lived on Lobotomy Lane.
Tonight he had delivered a devastating flying roundhouse kick to a surrogate of Neil Harpster, which had knocked the editorial stand-in clear off his feet. Ordinarily that blow alone would have gotten the Zombie through the weekend and to his desk on Monday morning. Of late, however, his loathing had intensified to the point where even body blows wouldn’t calm the hatred.
As he had each evening for the last two weeks, the Zombie left the karate dojo, climbed in his truck, and drove north to The Ranch. He parked down the street from Harpster’s new home. He sat there for several hours, staring at the whitewashed walls around the expensive house, staring at the rosebushes and the orange tile roof, staring for what seemed an eternity as the sores on his knuckles scabbed over and the blood on his hands stuck to the steering wheel.
The Zombie, whose real name was Harley Stein, had come to The Post in 1966 after winning several journalism prizes for exposing fraud and collusion at a horse racing track in New Mexico. He was a provocative interviewer and a tireless worker. Stein also possessed an elegant writing style that set him apart from the run-of-the mill reporters. As the copy editors put it, Stein knew how to use semicolons.
But Stein was haunted by childhood. When he was ten, his family was leaving a circus in Cincinnati. An armed man emerged from the darkness. His father struggled with the man. The pistol barked. Stein’s older brother screamed vengeance and jumped at the mugger. The gun barked again. Stein held his brother while he died. He watched his father die in his mother’s arms. The killer avoided the electric chair because the defense convinced the jury that the murderer’s father had been bad to him when he was a child.
Though the terrible loss made him aware of the fragility of life, it forged in Stein a passionate love of truth. The primary truth: the guilty deserve to be punished. Stein joined the news business as an avenging angel.
The longer he’d remained in newspapers, however, the more Stein had to face the inescapable fact that the truth was illusory, fleeting. That imbalance nagged at him, made him susceptible to the lure of barbiturates at night to calm the chatter. Which in turn demanded a pick-me-up pill in the morning to start the internal dialogue again.
In the early 1980s, at the height of his journalistic powers and at the depths of his pill addiction, Stein was assigned to cover a debate between two fringe congressional candidates. As Prentice LaFontaine would retell the story again and again, Stein fought the assignment, screaming at then executive assistant city editor Neil Harpster that it was ridiculous to give these lunatics legitimacy.
Lawlor had backed Harpster’s research-based conviction to cover the debate even if the participants were of dubious quality. Steaming with anger, Stein headed out at noon.
By four o’clock he had not called in. The desk began to worry. At 6:00 P.M., on deadline, Stein finally called the city desk. He told Harpster in a Quaalude-induced slur to come to the window and look at the fourteenth floor of the Mariott Hotel.
Fearing that Stein was about to commit suicide, Harpster sprinted to the window with half the newsroom in tow. There, fifth window from the left on
the fourteenth floor of the Mariott, stood Stein completely naked, semierect, with his arm around an equally buff young lady. Stein saluted and bellowed into the telephone, “Harpster, you told me to get out there and get the fuck to it. Well, I’m getting the fuck to it, aren’t I?”
Stein could have survived that debacle had he emerged from drug rehab repentant. But two weeks after his return, Stein entered the men’s room to find LaFontaine standing alone at the urinal. News asked, “Any regrets?”
“Regrets, bullshit,” Stein responded. “Thing that sent Harpster off wasn’t that I was chucking the story or that I was stoned off my ass. He just resented seeing my assets. It’s common knowledge that while Harpster avidly chases poon, he has no balls.”
The stall behind Stein swung open to reveal Harpster, red-faced, his pants around his ankles. “My sack’s full you asshole. And these balls got something to tell you: it can be hell to let people hear what you really think.”
Harpster had Stein demoted to copyediting the food pages. When that did not bother him enough, Harpster made him obituary writer. And everyone at The Post knew that Stein, because of his childhood, lived in dread fear of funeral homes and death.
A man in ordinary circumstances would have quit the newspaper. But Esther, Stein’s daughter from a short-lived marriage, had contracted lupus at an early age. Stein knew that if he left the paper, Esther would lose the health insurance she so desperately needed to keep the wolf at bay.
So Stein stopped living to write about the unliving. The hatred he felt toward Harpster and the rest of Lobotomy Lane festered. By the end of his first year writing obituaries Stein decided to follow Harpster’s advice—he would never again let anyone in his professional life hear what he thought. By the end of the second year he became a voluntary mute and began to train his body and his mind for future revenge.
Esther graduated from high school and went on to Stanford. Stein got his black belt, then his second degree, and ultimately his third. Esther got her bachelor’s degree in May. She had her own job and insurance.
Now, as he sat in his pickup outside Harpster’s house, the rage of Stein’s silent decade bubbled like pressured lava under the hardened cone of a dormant volcano.
At 9:00 P.M., Harpster pulled his white Audi into the driveway, got out, and put a brown satchel in the trunk. He brushed back his hair with his fingers, burst a shot of breath spray into his mouth, and went in. An hour later the lights upstairs blinked off.
The Zombie waited another two hours until he was sure all was quiet. He pulled a black balaclava out and tugged it down over his head. He slid from the truck with the stealth of a Shaolin monk. He swept across the street dressed entirely in black. He noted with satisfaction the gaping hole where the barrel cactus had once stood. Harpster thought it was the work of landscape rustlers. The Zombie allowed himself a sick grin, then eased himself over the redwood fence into Lydia’s gardens.
The Zombie stood in the shadows until he was sure he hadn’t alerted the occupants. He dipped deep into the well of his loathing. He took two steps toward a blooming camellia bush and dealt the base a killing blow with the blade of his hand. The Zombie spun. He crouched low, a ninja intent on psychological assassination. He looked at the house. Still dark. He clipped an azalea to the root stems with two savage swipes. He bit the pistils and stamens from a dozen tulips. He high-kicked the trunk of a magnolia sapling. The tree cracked and the crown swung over and down.
The way the sapling dangled in the starlight made him stop for a moment before cat-crawling back over the garden wall. The Zombie believed he’d never seen anything so beautiful as that dying little tree.
Across town that strange Friday night, Stanley Geld, the Zombie’s city editor, was performing sloppy pirouettes in the red silk boxer shorts and white ballet shoes he had purchased after work. “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies” lilted from the speakers of his living room stereo system. Geld, who was very drunk, held red and blue darts in his hand. His wife, Judy, cowered in the bedroom.
In time with the music, Geld raised his elbows parallel to the floor and pressed his hands together, knuckles to knuckles. He spun on the carpet. As he came around, he lost his balance. He tripped forward, launched the dart, and crashed.
His target: the photograph of Bobbie Anne Pace Vanity Fair had used for its glowing profile last year. Two darts were stuck an inch above the top of her head. One was embedded to the left of her chin. A fourth just to the right of her ear. The fifth had missed the photograph completely and hung limply from the wall. Five misses. One dart left.
Geld reached for the nearly empty fifth of bourbon, took a belt, lifted his elbows, and spun. Wildly off-balance his feet tangled. The city editor reeled to his right. Miraculously he released the last dart before colliding with the corner of the coffee table. It knocked the wind out of him. He landed facedown on the hardwood floor.
Geld gasped for air. He rolled over and looked up at the photograph. The dart had pierced Pace’s left nostril. Geld grinned and laughed, the laugh becoming a depraved snigger. “I’m gonna get you, Bobbie Anne!”
He pounded his fist on the floor. “I’m gonna get you!”
He stopped yelling. The pounding became weak slaps on the carpet. “I just don’t know how yet.”
The bedroom door slammed. Judy held a small suitcase in her hands. Her lower lip trembled. “Stan, I can’t take this anymore,” she announced. “I’m going to my sister’s.”
“Can’t see how those fucking Russians do that full spin without falling,” Geld said.
“Stanley, I’m leaving you,” Judy said.
Geld raised a leg to show her the ballet shoes wrapped around his feet. “You think I bought the wrong size?”
“Oh, Stanley!” Judy cried out. She rushed down the hallway. A door opened and slammed shut.
Unsteadily Geld got to his knees and then to his feet. If he couldn’t figure out a way to displace the Assistant Managing Editor for News and Information tonight, he was determined to unravel the mystery of the pirouette.
Geld closed his eyes. He thought about the videos he’d rented of Baryshnikov. He applied it to his own history as a soccer forward and let it gel.
Raise the elbows, hands in tight, a slight drop in the center over the front knees, hips lead the arc, then snap! He spun, tripped, and collapsed again. He got up, tried another, and sprawled even harder. Bourbon-flavored sweat boiled out from under his permed curls. He threw his arm out and pointed at the picture of Pace. “It’s all your fault!”
He looked at his arm quizzically. He threw it out again. He threw out the other one. Then both at the same time. Balance! he thought. He’d have to regain his balance at the end of the pirouette or crash.
Geld jumped up. This time he spun hard and, as his hips passed through his original stance, he flung his arms out at right angles to his torso. He came to a screeching halt exactly where he’d begun the pirouette. He did it again and again and again. And each time he twirled, a thought grew at the back of his sour-mashed brain until by the sixth spin it stood on point, a clear, audacious plan with all the elegance and line of a treacherous leap by Nureyev.
If Bobbie Anne Pace would trip, he must upset her equilibrium. Make that the entire balance on Lobotomy Lane! If someone must sprawl on the floor with her, so be it.
Geld pirouetted to his word processor. He opened a file and began composing.
Meanwhile, Connie Mills fumbled with the lock at the door to her condo. She got it open finally and picked up the bag of takeout Japanese food she’d bought on the way home. A fitting dinner, she supposed.
Her early evening cavort with Neil Harpster had featured kimonos and a Kurosawa film on the video machine in the motel on State Street. Neil had raced about making guttural noises and acting like a samurai. She had posed as the demure geisha.
Mills crossed the tiny kitchen. She got out a seltzer water from the fridge and opened the sushi and udon noodles. As she ate she looked around at the bare walls an
d the cheap couch and the television-VCR-stereo center she’d bought on layaway. She thought of her meager clothes collection. She thought of her dwindling savings account and the eight-year-old Chevy sedan she drove.
“So much for the overachiever,” she muttered.
Before accepting her job at The Post, Mills had led a relatively uneventful life. Her mother and father were academicians, he a math professor at a state university in northern California, she a research librarian. They’d lived an austere life in a farming community thirty miles from the university. She was a quiet girl, with few friends. Not much to look at until she turned seventeen and an odd mix of genetics, clean air, and hours picking tomatoes combined to produce the luscious form she now inhabited. At Stanford she lost her virginity to an insecure psychology student in a Ph.D. program who often wept after their lovemaking because he “didn’t deserve to worship at a temple that belonged in Playboy.”
At first she rejoiced at the power her body exuded. But the crying got to be too much. She wanted someone who had a mind and physique to match her own. Then this job at The Post came along. At an office party she had one drink too many. Harpster whispered in her ear that putting on black sunglasses and wigs and having Rastafarian sex could be loads of fun.
Harpster had lots of muscles and a wonderful leer. She squeezed him on the butt and told him to meet her outside. They did it under a banana tree.
That was two years ago. And since then, other than the brief biweekly trysts at the motel, she hadn’t had a real date. Men always asked her out. But she wanted to be free for Harpster. She enjoyed their work together. And he’d promised to recommend her for his job when he moved up the ladder. And she enjoyed, no adored, the sex.
Often, of late, she’d been trying to determine what exactly about Harpster turned her on so much. He was drop-dead handsome, no doubt. But so were a lot of men. She’d decided it was his voice. In anticipation of carnal pleasure the timbre of his voice deepened and the tone became raw like an old blues guitar growling of the unspeakable pleasure to come. The music they created together was overwhelming.
Hard News Page 14