The Enemy Inside

by Steve Martini

  Here, faced with the reality that others knew her secret, she was forced to stand by silently and accept the humiliation. She hoped in time he would let her go. He assured her that they would at some point. Until then there was nothing she could do, nothing she could say. Serna had discovered Grimes’s secret and had tried to extort favors and money from her only to discover that she was standing in line, that the people in front of her had a prior claim and that they held it with a death grip.

  SEVEN

  Mr. Madriani, call for you.” Brenda Gomes, my secretary, looks over at me from her desk, her hand cupped over the tiny microphone on her headset.

  I am out front looking for a file in one of the cabinets. “Who is it?” I mouth the words so as not to be heard at the other end of the line.

  “Mr. Diggs,” she whispers.

  “I’ll take it in my office.” Seconds later I am behind my desk, the phone to my ear. “Herman. Paul here.”

  “Benjawan Tjahana,” says Herman. “I’m not exactly sure how she spells it. But the man says that’s how she pronounced it. He remembers because he was very interested. So interested he wrote it down. It seems your client didn’t lose his entire memory. According to the guy at the tattoo shop, she’s a real dish. A regular rare-earth man magnet,” says Herman.

  “Lucky for us she made an impression,” I tell him. “Otherwise you might be looking forever.”

  “Makes sense,” says Herman. “They needed something to attract Ives. What better bait?”

  “Does he have an address for her? This man at the shop?”

  “No.”

  “Damn!”

  “But he got her cell number.”

  My eyes light up. “Good man!”

  “And a good part of her life story,” says Herman. “Seems that dragon on her leg is pretty good-sized, from just above her knee to the sweet spot on the inside of her thigh. The little dimple,” says Herman.

  “Sounds like you had a very detailed discussion with this man.”

  “And he got pictures.” Herman allows this to settle in.

  “Of her face?”

  “Among other things,” he says. “They had a long time to talk while she was on the table and he was doing his art. Says she’s an Indonesian national. Came here on a student visa to study computer science at the local C.C.” Herman means the two-year community college. “That was eight years ago.”

  “She’s overstayed her visa,” I say.

  “Unless they offer advanced degrees in digital rocket science,” says Herman, “she’s in the country illegally. Could give us some leverage.”

  “Or turn her into a rabbit,” I tell him.

  “According to what she told the man at the shop she was working at a private club out near the beach.”

  “What club?”

  “He gave me the name and address, but he says you won’t find it in the phone book or on the net. It’s in a commercial building near the pier. From what he was saying, it sounded like one of those places wouldn’t pass muster with the health department.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Where the female help cleans the tables with their bare behinds after you eat. Businessman’s lunch,” says Herman.

  “When’s the last time he saw her?” I ask.

  “He did the dragon in two sessions. Last one was three weeks ago. She may still be working there. I paid him a few bucks and he e-mailed two of the pictures he took. I’m sending them to you soon as I hang up. The guy got a couple of very good ones.”

  “I don’t need any thigh shots,” I tell him.

  “How do you know until you look?” says Herman. He laughs. “A clear, crisp head-and-shoulder close-up, and one a little farther out. She’s wearing a robe from the shop. Do me a favor and forward them on to your client. Give him a call and make sure it’s her before we get too excited.”

  “Will do,” I tell him.

  “In the meantime, let me see if I can find this club, see if she’s still working there. If we get lucky maybe vice hasn’t closed it down yet.”

  “If you strike out there, try her cell phone records. See if they have a home address.”

  “That’s always sketchy,” says Herman. “The way young folk move around. She’s had more than enough time to blow through a two-year contract with the carrier, and if she’s nervous about anything . . .”

  “You mean like being in the country illegally,” I say.

  “That and who knows what else,” says Herman, “then there’s a good chance she’s probably prepaid. I long for the days of the old landline,” he says, “when people were nailed to the ground if they wanted modern conveniences. This keeps up, pretty soon they’ll be able to take a digital dump long distance online. Then you’ll never be able to catch ’em at home.”

  “Send me those pictures,” I tell him. “And call me as soon as you find this place. That is, if she’s still working there. And do me a favor, Herman, don’t talk to her, not yet. Just locate her and call me. I don’t want to scare her off until we can nail her down.”

  “How you gonna do that?”

  “I don’t know. Let me think about it.”

  EIGHT

  If there was any debriefing to be done with Serna’s secretary, Proffit would do it himself. Serna’s original secretary had been lured away by another firm at an obscenely high salary more than a year earlier. Proffit had secretly guaranteed the woman’s increase in pay with the other firm for two years in order to get her to move on.

  Vicki Preebles, her replacement, was hired by Serna, but from a short list of applicants, all of whom had been carefully selected and screened by Proffit beforehand. They were paid for their time and sworn to secrecy. They signed nondisclosure agreements in blood and were told that they would be legally drawn and quartered if they revealed anything told to them during the selection process.

  Olinda Serna had been making a move on Proffit to replace him as managing partner for about eighteen months. She had been meeting privately with other partners in the firm, flying from office to office, lining up support for a palace coup. Proffit knew this from travel records and pieces of information he had gleaned from others in the firm, people who were loyal to him. He was taking no chances and no prisoners.

  It was how he confirmed the details of the budding rebellion: pillow talk with Vicki Preebles. After she was hired by Serna, Proffit wasted no time setting Preebles up in an apartment, a place the secretary could never have afforded on her own salary, where, from time to time, he would visit her whenever he came to town, which was almost every week. He ordered in catered dinners, intimate evenings spent discussing office gossip, sometimes over champagne and, on more frisky occasions, shots of tequila.

  Proffit was married. He had three grown children and two grandchildren. But he was not averse to mixing a little business with pleasure. Besides, it was a necessary arrangement. He could have just paid Vicki for the information, but that might not have purchased her loyalty. Emotional connections, though sometimes volatile, were invariably more trustworthy.

  This afternoon the grieving secretary was still off work as he visited her.

  “What will happen to me now that she’s gone?” asked Preebles. “I don’t want to seem cold or uncaring . . .”

  “No one could accuse you of that,” said Proffit. “And there’s no need to explain. I understand. Don’t worry. You have a solid future with the firm. A job as long as you want it.” He smiled warmly as he lay bare chested in his boxers atop the thick feather comforter on her bed.

  Preebles was under the covers, naked, lying on her side, one breast partially exposed, her nipple hard as a nail head and twice as large.

  Proffit picked at the carefully arranged pieces of fresh fruit from a large platter that lay on the bed between them. It looked like a scene from one of DeMille’s Roman orgies. The only things missing were the slaves with their feathered fans and the jingling belly dancers.

  “Yes, but who will I work for?” she asked.
/>   He knew she was going to be trouble. But there was time for that later. “We will find a job for you that you will love. I promise.”

  “Why couldn’t I just work for you?”

  He shot her a quick glance. When he found her studying his face he rapidly turned his eyes back to the fruit.

  “You’re almost always here in town. It’s almost as if you live here. I know your office is in Los Angeles, but you could use someone in Washington. I mean, it would be very convenient for you, wouldn’t it?”

  He nibbled at a piece of pineapple and said nothing. “Well, it would, wouldn’t it?”

  When he finally looked up at her, she smiled. A sexual ether seemed to float across the hills and valleys of her body under the blankets like mustard gas on a battlefield. Her hand drifted toward him but the plate was in the way.

  Proffit felt the urge. But thankfully at his age it took a while to recharge the batteries. Time for new tactics. “I meant to ask you, one of the lawyers handling Olinda’s estate at the firm asked me if she kept a spare key to her house anywhere at the office.”

  “You mean her place in Georgetown?” said Vicki.

  “Yeah. She didn’t own any other property, did she?”

  “No. She stayed in town almost every weekend, unless she was traveling on business. A key, let me think. . . .” Preebles put a finger to her lips, the long shapely nail against the red gloss of her lips a little smeared from their recent antics.

  “We’ve looked but haven’t found one,” said Proffit. “They need to gain access in order to inventory the property at the house.”

  “Of course. I understand. If she had one, it would be in the big partner’s desk. The oak antique against the wall in her office.”

  “We’ve looked there. We didn’t find anything.”

  “You wouldn’t,” said Preebles. “There are hidden compartments all over that thing. It’s like one of those Chinese puzzle boxes. You know, the kind with sliding wooden compartments and hidden drawers.”

  “Yeah,” said Proffit. “I had one of those when I was a kid.”

  “Anything she didn’t want you to find she put in that desk.”

  “Really?”

  “Emm. You know you need a secretary,” she said. “Why can’t you just assign me to do that? After all, you are the boss,” she said.

  “You’ve seen these compartments?”

  “I have.”

  “How many are there?”

  “I didn’t count them.”

  “How big are they?”

  “Big enough for a key,” she said.

  “But not papers?”

  “I thought you were looking for a key?”

  He gave her a look as if to say, “Stop with the bullshit.”

  “I suppose it would depend,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On the form these papers were in.”

  He looked at her, a big question mark.

  She chose not to read it. “Tell me you don’t need your own personal secretary and I’ll stop bugging you.” She stirred under the blankets and rolled away from him as if she were about to get up.

  “OK, I could probably use a secretary,” said Proffit. “I admit it.”

  She stopped with one naked thigh already out from under the covers, settled back down, looked over and gave him the smile of victory. “If the papers were on a thumb drive they’d easily fit in one of the little hidey-holes in that desk.”

  “Did she use a thumb drive?”

  Preebles nodded. “She wore it on a lanyard around her neck, hanging down her top where you couldn’t see it. I saw her hide it in the desk on a few occasions when she was dressed in something where she couldn’t conceal it in her clothing. But never overnight and never when she left the office.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I checked,” said Preebles. “That’s why you hired me, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “I noticed that she used it mostly after certain phone calls and never on the office line. Only her cell phone. She’d talk and then take it off from around her neck, plug it into her computer, save whatever it was she was typing to the thumb drive. Then she’d take the drive out of the machine and put it back around her neck. Mostly it was like columns of numbers. She never let the little drive out of her sight. I assume it probably went up in the flames with her out in California,” said Preebles.

  Proffit couldn’t afford to make that assumption. “How is it that she allowed you to see all this?”

  “She didn’t know I was looking.”

  “What were you doing, hiding under her desk?”

  “On the bookshelf behind her,” said Preebles. “What they call a pinhole camera. It’s wireless. They sell them at the spy shop here in Washington. It showed up in a little box in the upper right-hand corner of the monitor to my computer outside her office. It had pretty good resolution. If you expanded to the full screen you could read the monitor on her computer. But I didn’t want anybody to catch me doing it.”

  “Good thought,” said Proffit. She’d gone way beyond the call of duty.

  “The camera toggled on and off with one key on my keyboard. Anybody came by I just turned it off and the little box on my screen disappeared. I removed the camera the minute I found out she was dead.”

  “Did this camera have a tape?”

  “I couldn’t afford it,” said Preebles. “Those get really expensive.”

  “I can imagine. Let me ask you a question. Do you know how to get into all the little hidden places in that desk?”

  She propped herself up on one arm. “I think I could remember. I know I could if I was your personal assistant in the Washington office. You need my eyes and ears. You know you do.” She plucked one of the large strawberries from the platter and dragged it lasciviously across her nipple, breaking into a smile and then giggling a little as she did it.

  He could have the desk dragged out to a medical office somewhere and have it x-rayed if he had to. And then take a chainsaw to it. He made a mental note to get a safe with double locks installed in his D.C. office and have it swept for bugs hourly before he allowed Preebles anywhere near the place.

  NINE

  Herman called me. He found the place. The gentlemen’s club is in a building in a commercial area a few blocks in from the pier at Ocean Beach, what is left of the amusements from the old boardwalk era.

  As I cruise slowly down the main drag, its denizens are T-shirt shops and souvenir stands. An antique cotton candy machine on wheels sits forlornly chained to the side of a building in front of a taffy shop. Late afternoon, middle of the week, most of the tourist haunts are closed.

  The only place showing signs of life is a microbrewery doing a brisk business, people grabbing a cold one on the way home from work. All the storefront little businesses are neatly painted, mostly pastel colors, some of them with sparkling awnings out front. What you would think of as an upscale California beach community. I know the area. There are million-dollar homes just a few blocks away.

  To the naked eye the gentlemen’s club is invisible. According to what Herman told me on the phone it lurks in a back alley under a sign posing as DARKSTONE’S BAR AND GRILL with an arrow pointing up a flight of stairs.

  I pull into one of the diagonal parking spaces out on the street. I’m driving my old Jeep, a 1980s vintage Wrangler that I’ve stored for years. I use it for work from time to time just to keep the engine alive. I’ve had it since before Sarah was born. I retain it for sentiment as much as anything else. A time machine for going back to the past whenever I’m behind the wheel, if only for a brief illusion.

  Home is not the same anymore. Joselyn and I have been living together for more than a year. She has been away on a project in Europe for two months now, her job with the Gideon Quest Foundation. During a recent excursion up north, she suffered a traumatic incident; I nearly lost her. She fell under the influence of a man who was suffering from mental war wounds and who very ne
arly took her life. She is recovering, but we are still working to restore our relationship. It was difficult for me to see her go, but it was necessary to give her some space as part of the process of recovery. I’m looking forward to her getting back. Joss, like me, is also a lawyer, but one who left her practice to do good works—in this case as director of a foundation dedicated to the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. After my being alone for years, my wife deceased, the Fates brought Joss and me together while the tensions of a world gone crazy seem to keep us apart. I am missing her and wishing she were here. We keep in touch on Skype.

  Sarah is gone, no longer living near me, now on her own up in Los Angeles. She has a new job, a career, and friends. I see her only occasionally on weekends. She is busy with her own life, getting on, and getting away. She’s had enough of my law practice and the problems that it caused in our lives. I can’t say that I blame her. Growing up without a mother—Nikki died of cancer when Sarah was young—was only part of it. Having to hide out from a psychotic named Liquida, a killer hired by the Mexican cartels who crossed my path like a black cat, the result of my practice, was enough to send Sarah packing.

  She has no interest in being a lawyer or anywhere near a courtroom. I have at least cured her of that. I have often wondered why it is that children, when they come of age, often shy away from what their parents do for a living. The tailor’s son won’t make clothes and the banker’s boy wants to be a doctor.

  A few of Sarah’s friends have come to me asking for letters of support to law schools. Of course, when they’ve asked me about a career in law, I do what every other lawyer does. I lie. What others perceive as lucrative and glamorous, your own kid sees up close for what it is, rancorous, dispute-ridden, and sometimes dangerous. They should ask Sarah. Criminal law is largely long hours, seedy clients, uncertain pay, and short-tempered judges, the stuff of which ulcers are made. How do you tell that to some bright-eyed grad with sufficient grades to get into Stanford? You don’t want to pop their balloon with the barbed stinger of cynicism. Listen, kid, the only reason the system tolerates you at all is that it grinds on and could not grind without you. Like the tango, human dispute is impossible without at least two to argue. The criminal defense lawyer’s sole claim to existence.