Corruption of Justice

by Brenda English

  “I’ll get your bag,” he said, walking toward the rear of the car.

  “Thanks,” I answered and fished the phone out to find out who needed me now. It was Sy Berkowitz.

  “McPhee, what the hell is this bullshit about not running with the ballistics story?” he yelled at me when I said “Hello.”

  “Hold on,” I responded, and put my hand over the mouthpiece to tell Lansing I would be inside in just a minute. As soon as he and David went through the front door, I turned back to the telephone.

  “Fuck off, Sy,” I said, just as vociferously if not as loudly. “You know why. I’m sure Rob explained it to you, even in the simple terms you require.”

  “That’s crap, McPhee, pure, unadulterated bullshit! You got the information straight from the police, so you know it’s good. Now, let’s run with it!”

  “It’s only one piece of the story, Sy. The rest has to do with somebody trying to kill me, and we don’t have that piece yet. So shut the hell up and do what you’re told. At least Mark seems to know what he’s doing here. Listen to him!”

  “Yeah, well, maybe next time whoever is after you will get it right, and I can do that story without you getting in my way all the time!” He hung up in my ear, loudly, leaving me listening to a dial tone. I turned the phone off and dropped it back into my purse, then walked slowly up to Lansing’s front door, trying to get all the names I needed to call Sy said under my breath before going inside.

  Twenty

  Lansing and David were coming back down the stairs, apparently from having deposited my bag in one of the upstairs rooms, when I came through the front door.

  “Come join us in the kitchen,” Lansing said, as David went down the last two stairs ahead of him in hops. “Gradella has gone for the weekend, so David and I are cooking tonight.”

  “We’re making spaghetti!” David said, coming up to grab my hand and tug me along after his father.

  “It’s one of David’s basic food groups, along with pizza,” Lansing told me over his shoulder. “But we make a pretty mean spaghetti, don’t we, Chief?” he asked looking back at his son.

  “It’s real good,” David assured me. “You’ll like it a whole bunch.”

  “I’m sure I will,” I agreed as we walked through the hall doorway that led into the kitchen. I was promptly relegated to a chair at the kitchen table, given a glass of iced tea, and ordered to do nothing except enjoy myself while Lansing and David cooked.

  They were a fascinating study in contrasts, I had to admit, watching them together. David was all energy and excitement, with his enthusiasm far outrunning his physical coordination, which I guessed was the case with most boys his age. Lansing was all patience. I had yet to hear him, in any of the time I had spent in their company, raise his voice to David more than one increment. Yet, that seemed to be all it took to get David’s attention when he was getting a little too carried away with something.

  I wondered how much of what I was seeing was the result of losing Sarah. While it must have been incredibly stressful for Lansing to have been left alone with a baby, I could see how it might, at the same time, have given him an extra appreciation of David’s importance in his life. And while David probably had been too young to remember his mother’s death, I also guessed that her absence had to have made his surviving parent that much more important to him, important enough to want to please that parent as much as possible.

  As I sipped my tea and watched the two of them working together, we talked about inconsequential things from our day. David, who was perched up on a bar stool from which he could stir the pot of spaghetti that soon was boiling on the stove, had spent much of the afternoon at a neighbor’s swimming pool, playing with the neighbor’s two sons.

  Lansing told us about a traffic accident he had happened to witness in Tysons Corner, involving a truck full of chickens and a station wagon full of people dressed in clown suits on their way to some kind of neighborhood fair. No one was hurt, he told us right away, so we were free to laugh until we cried at the images of clowns chasing terrified chickens all up and down Route 7.

  It was apparent to me that Lansing probably told David little of what his job really was like. The details would have been far too gruesome for a six-year-old. I followed Lansing’s lead in choosing conversational subject matter and asked David if he had ever flown on an airplane. When he said he hadn’t and wanted to know whether I had, I told him about my flight back from Florida earlier in the day.

  Before long, the spaghetti was ready, as were the salads and garlic bread Lansing had been making while David had supervised the spaghetti. I helped them carry the food into the dining room, where the table already was set for the three of us, and we sat down to eat.

  * * * *

  It was later, as I helped Lansing clean up the dishes and put away the leftovers, while David was upstairs getting ready for bed, that Lansing first broached the subject that hung in the air between us.

  “You want to talk about why you have that trapped animal look in your eyes?” he asked, drying the large stainless steel pot in which the spaghetti had cooked and which was too big to fit into the dishwasher.

  I looked at him in surprise, not having anticipated what he had been about to say. He returned my look, the drying cloth pausing in its swipes around the bottom of the pot. There was no escaping those eyes, no hiding behind glib talk or euphemism. I could see he wanted an honest answer, which, I thought to myself, was the kind I generally gave.

  And the kind that usually gets you into big trouble, my ever-present little friend chose that moment to remind me.

  “Because,” I answered Lansing, leaning against the counter behind me for support, “I think I’m finding all this a little intimidating.”

  “And all this is?”

  “This,” I answered, gesturing largely at the room and house around me. “The whole thing. The house. The yard. David. You. The whole domestic family thing.”

  Lansing looked offended.

  “Wait,” I said quickly, “that came out all wrong. It’s all wonderful, I’m sure. I’m just not sure I know why you’ve brought me into it.” I felt as if I were seriously foundering in trying to describe what it was I was feeling, and that made just one more situation in which I wasn’t used to finding myself.

  Lansing put the pot down on the countertop, folded the drying towel in half, and draped it across an edge of the sink before turning back in my direction.

  “Don’t you know?” he asked quietly. “Don’t you?”

  I was saved from drowning in his eyes by David, who chose that moment to appear around the kitchen door in his pajamas.

  “I’m ready,” he said to his father, who looked at me a second longer before his eyes released me.

  “On my way, Chief,” he said, turning and walking across to sweep his son up into his arms. David laughed, and they both turned back to look in my direction.

  “If you want coffee,” Lansing told me, “everything you need is in the top cabinet right behind you. I’m going up to read to David before he goes to sleep, but I’ll be back down soon, and we can finish our conversation. And no falling asleep on the sofa this time.”

  “Okay,” I answered. “Good night, David. Thanks for the spaghetti.”

  David grinned and waved at me over his father’s shoulder.

  “Night, Sutton,” he replied, and the two of them went out into the hall to head upstairs. Instead of making coffee, I picked up the drying towel Lansing had been using and took the blue enameled colander out of the drying rack. I began drying it, but I soon was lost in the tangle of thoughts and feelings that the look in Lansing’s eyes had brought rushing up for me.

  * * * *

  I was brought out of whatever trance my chaotic emotions had transported me to by Lansing’s reappearance in front of me. He looked from my face down to the colander and drying cloth, both of which I still held but which, apparently, I long since had stopped noticing. Lansing reached down and took them from my
hands, putting them down on the counter next to the spaghetti pot.

  “Is he asleep already?” I asked, deciding as soon as I said it that it was a stupidly obvious question.

  “Already?” Lansing responded in surprise. “I’ve been up there for half an hour. And yes, he’s asleep.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I guess I got a little lost in thought.”

  “Don’t you think,” Lansing asked, stepping closer to me and putting his hands on my shoulders, “that you’ve done enough thinking for one night?”

  I fell right back into those eyes again, and as I let him pull me into his arms, my seldom-silent observer chimed in.

  Oh Lansing, Lansing, my nemesis mocked. But I no longer was capable of a reply. My body and brain both were immediately and completely engrossed in kissing the man with the blue eyes.

  Saturday

  Twenty-one

  I won’t go into prurient detail. We made love.

  Well, okay, we made amazing love. So amazing that I lost all sense of where my body ended and his began. So amazing that he touched me in places I had just about forgotten I had but that came awake under his touch with sensations that were almost more than I could stand. So amazing that I couldn’t remember ever having had an experience like it, and I hadn’t been a virgin for a long time. So amazing that, some time in the middle of the night, we woke up and did it all again.

  And so amazing that, when I found my way out of sleep into the growing sunlight of the next morning, I was truly terrified. Because there was no undoing what had happened between us, no forgetting it, no going back to the night before when I hadn’t known what completely losing myself in another person was like, no pretending that there was any way I was getting out of this one with my defenses intact. I turned my head to look at Noah Lansing, in whose bed I had spent the night and who was awake, too, and smiling at me, and I pushed all my fears back down into their deep, dark holes, where I knew they would wait patiently to confuse me, but where I could keep them from escaping for a little while.

  I rolled the rest of me over in the bed in Lansing’s direction, and he reached up to brush a strand of hair out of my eyes.

  “Stop worrying,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts. “We’re both where we’re supposed to be.”

  “It’s not that,” I lied. “I have to go into the office and do some research.”

  You coward, my little voice piped up, apparently awake as well.

  And it was right, of course, I thought to myself as Lansing kissed me on the forehead and let me up out of the bed. Probably his and Sarah’s bed. In which David could very easily walk in and find me. That thought sent me fleeing the room. Oh, God, I groaned silently, now reminded of one more thing to worry about. How the hell could I possibly hope to compete with a dead woman who probably lived on in the memories of her husband and her son as the perfect woman?

  I fled to the shower. And then to the office.

  * * * *

  Halfway into the District, my cell phone rang. It was Cooper Diggs.

  “I’ve got information for you,” Cooper said when I answered. He sounded pleased with himself.

  “Are you at the office? I’m on my way there now.”

  “No. At home. But I could stop by at lunchtime if you’re still going to be there then.”

  “That would be great,” I told him. “And yes, I’ll be there most of the day.” Even if I hadn’t had things to work on, I wondered if I might not have manufactured some, anyway, just to give my head a chance to clear a little outside of Lansing’s physical presence.

  * * * *

  “Now, before you go through this stuff,” Cooper was saying as he sat down in the chair he had pulled up next to my newsroom desk, “you have to appreciate that you gave me something of a challenge this time.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Because I was going back to a time before most agencies and companies had the majority of their records on computers. You’re talking about the midseventies here. The computerization was beginning, but it was by no means widespread. Especially in things like credit reports, legal records, etc. Although a lot of it has been computerized after the fact, particularly from the credit bureaus’ records, not everyone has gone to the trouble or expense to put all their records from that time on computer. So what I’m giving you is everything that the computers can find on any of these guys, which is a lot, but I can’t guarantee that other important stuff isn’t gathering dust in a filing cabinet somewhere. Still, on the plus side, you also have some information you had no right to expect to get. The credit bureaus are supposed to remove stuff from their files after a certain number of years, but we all know how it is with computers. Even when something is moved from one file, it’s almost never gone permanently. So I also found some things that really shouldn’t have been there.”

  “I understand,” I told him and took the sheaf of pages he had been holding. Cooper stood up.

  “Since I’m here anyway, I’m going to run down to the library and take care of a couple of things,” he said. “I’ll be around for a little while, so if you have a question about anything, just call me in the library.”

  “Thanks Cooper,” I said, my appreciation genuine. “I will.”

  It was a good forty-five minutes later that I noticed something that seemed out of whack. I had gone over each page in Cooper’s printouts and newspaper articles carefully, looking at details but also trying to let my subconscious see the whole picture. There had been nothing that struck me as out of the ordinary in any of the information on Robert Coleman, Ford Truesdale, Lawson Thomas, or even on Arthur Williams until, of course, the time of his suicide and the financial disaster that followed it. It wasn’t until I began looking through the pages on Henry Bryant, whom I had thrown into the mix almost as an afterthought, that my subconscious began to nag at me that something didn’t fit. I picked up the phone and called the library.

  “Can you come back up for a minute?” I asked Cooper when he answered. “I want to get your opinion on something.”

  “Be right there,” he replied.

  Sixty seconds later, he came into the newsroom through the stairwell door. When he got to my desk, he looked over my shoulder at the sheet of paper in my hand and at the pile through which I already had read.

  “So you noticed it, too, huh?” he asked.

  “Am I reading this correctly?” I asked him in reply.

  “Tell me what you think you see.”

  “This is Henry Bryant’s credit record. And according to this, he went through a really bad stretch in the midseventies, when his debts went through the roof. I’m assuming, based on the dates and some of the people he owed money to, that all this was during the time when his wife had cancer and then died.” I looked back at the sheet of paper.

  “There are all kinds of bad debts here,” I went on, running an index finger down the list. “The hospital, doctors, department stores, credit cards, even the funeral home. And it looks as if, by that time, he also was about to lose his house. According to this, his mortgage was something like four months in arrears, and the bank was getting ready to foreclose on it.”

  “That’s the way I read it, too,” Cooper said.

  “But here’s what I don’t understand,” I told him. “Bryant owed a hell of a lot of money to a lot of people by the time he buried his wife. More than $200,000, which in the seventies was a lot more than it is now. Then, within a period of just a couple of weeks, he paid off every one of the bills, including the back payments on his house.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “If his financial situation was such that he couldn’t avoid getting into such awful debt in the first place, where did he get the money to pay off all the bills at the same time?”

  “Go right on thinking out loud,” Cooper said, now smiling in obvious satisfaction that our minds had run along the same track in interpreting the information. “I’m listening.”

  “Well, first of all, I don’t see any r
ecord here of him taking out any sort of loan to pay all the bills off, even if he could have found a bank that would have loaned him that much when he already was in such financial straits, and even if it wouldn’t have taken him forever to repay it from his salary as an assistant state attorney.”

  “Neither did I,” Cooper agreed, “and I looked for it. Again, it might be in a filing cabinet somewhere, but if he paid it off over several years, chances are there would be some mention of it somewhere in somebody’s computerized records. Either the lending institution or the credit bureau or both. By the time he would have gotten it paid off and the time limits had expired for keeping it in his credit bureau file, all that stuff was on computers.”

  “So then, I’m thinking maybe he got it from an insurance policy that paid out when his wife died.”

  “Could be,” Cooper said.

  “But does it make sense that he would have risked losing the roof over the heads of his two little kids and his dying wife if he had a life insurance policy he could have cashed in sooner than that?”

  “Not to me,” Cooper said, shaking his head from side to side, which sent a clump of blond hair sliding down into his eyes. He reached up and brushed it back into place. “And none of the insurance databases I got into showed any such policy. So what else do you see?”

  I studied the pages some more, once again trying to look at them as a whole picture and not just details. Something kept pulling my eyes back up to the photocopy of the newspaper article about Bryant’s nomination to the Leon County Court seat. Eventually, I realized it was the date that was nagging at my subconscious brain, and when I focused on it, several things fell into place.

  “Uh-oh,” I said, realizing what I was seeing but still searching for its meaning.

  “What did you pick up?” Cooper wanted to know. “The money was as far as I was able to go with it.”