The Big Law (1998)

by Chuck Logan

  Tom finished his Snickers and gulped his coffee. No Prozac for him. Male Prozac users paid for the chemical illusion of well-being with impotence. And that was just about the only part of his life that still worked.

  One newspaper era had ended. Another had begun. In between yawned a tough-luck chasm into which he was slipping inch by inch.

  When he started at the paper in 1978, the slot man on the copy desk wore a green visor and smoked a cigar and nobody had heard of serotonin. Depression was an economic condition best cured by the unconditional surrender of Germany.

  Back then, more than one desk drawer contained eightyproof refreshment, and some of the women still wore slips, nylons, and two-inch heels. Deadline sex was banged out standing up in the stairwells.

  Now the office was carpeted, smoke free, sexless, and passive as a monastery staffed by eunuchs. People over forty, especially white male people over forty, were feeling like endangered species. More specifically, Tom James was feeling especially vulnerable.

  Yesterday, because he was still on probation, he had not been allowed to work the bomb scare story. While everyone else ran around the federal building, he had been sent out to suburban Cottage Grove to interview a man who had strung ten thousand lights on his home for his Christmas display.

  "Oh, oh," cautioned gray-haired, forty-five-ish Barb Luct, the reporter who occupied the next desk. "Here she comes."

  She was Molly Korne, from Georgia—aka Cottage Cheese Knees—the new managing editor. Korne was single and childless. A dedicated corporate nun. Also loud and eggshaped, with a bizarre predilection for miniskirts that showed off her triple canopy dimples.

  Barb leaned over and whispered behind her hand. "Kim heard her bragging in the elevator to some guy in Advertising, how she's going to fire someone, just to show who's boss."

  Howie Norell, at the desk on the other side of Tom, piped in. "I heard she ordered all the supervisors to rank their staffs in order of who's the most productive."

  "Story quotas are next," Barb warned darkly.

  Tom nodded. But his eyes swept along the floor, locked on the open bottom drawer of Barb's desk and saw her purse in the shadows. Open. And amid the cosmetic clutter his eyes fixed on the plump luster of worn leather. A succulent green ripple of bills sprouted from the wallet like new lettuce.

  Barb got up and went to the LaserJet to retrieve the story she had just printed. Tom leaned forward, swept his right hand over the drawer and lifted two twenties. As his eyes came up level, he saw Korne rolling her folds toward Neighborhoods, like a predatory ball of suet.

  He tucked the two bills in his jacket pocket—something he would have never done a year ago, but he'd had a bad night at the casino, and he was in between paychecks, hurting for gas and lunch money. He didn't approve of petty theft and was furious that he had been reduced to it. But what really filled him with self-loathing was the realization that the only way he could reliably support himself was to show up in this office every day and do what he was told.

  By someone named Molly Korne.

  Tom watched her coming and felt a powerful nostalgia for the days when descriptive adjectives like fat and ugly were still vital engines of the language. She swatted her accent at the aging Neighborhoods reporters. "Wasn't for the Newspaper Guild y'all wouldn't be here." She grinned, waited for a reaction and then said, "Just kidding."

  Tom removed his horn-rims and cleaned the lenses on his tie to avoid her judging eyes. The new corporate style was subtle, couched in team rhetoric. It barely masked Korne's need to manipulate, control and dominate. According to a book Tom had just read by the leading FBI profiler, these were the same impulses that motivated serial killers.

  Korne moved on, to the Metro desk, and Tom watched a group of young reporters chirp around her, their smiles so wide and needy that Tom half expected to see a worm appear between her curved teeth, which she would plunge down the nearest gullet. There was an African American, an Asian, one Native American and one Hispanic. Only the Asian was a male. All were in their twenties. Look at them grin. Tanked with serotonin.

  Then his sugar binge flamed out and left his mouth coated with a lumpy metallic taste—like discovering a well-worn bit between his teeth. Dig in. Hunker down. He had twenty years at the paper. Ten more would fully vest his retirement. That would still leave fourteen years until he could collect a pension. He looked around. Twenty-four more years of this?

  The phone rang.

  He picked it up. "Tom James."

  "You know the bomb thing? It was an inside job," stated an electronically distorted voice. "Guess who the FBI is looking at?"

  "Huh? Who?"

  "Keith Angland."

  The line went dead. Tom immediately punched in *69. The phone company tape informed him his last call was from an unlisted number.

  He didn't move for a full minute. Angland. The infamous Narcotics lieutenant who was rumored to have called the new liberal St. Paul police chief "nigger lover."

  And who refused to deny it when confronted by the press.

  Tom had met him. He'd done a feature story about Angland's wife last August. He glanced over his shoulder. His supervisor, Ida Rain, was away from her computer.

  The tip was off his beat, but—Wow.

  His eyes roved the newsroom and settled on Korne, who was now employing her terroristic smile to motivate the Copy Desk. Individual threads on her lumpy wool skirt popped in his vision. He'd read about this adrenaline enhancement, an acuity that men of action experienced.

  It was risky.

  Thirty-three days ago he had wagered his November rent money on one hand of blackjack at the Mystic Lake Casino. And won. He'd tried to repeat the performance with his December rent three days ago and lost.

  He had two Snickers bars in his stomach. And two stolen twenty-dollar bills in his pocket. What would it be like to bet his job on one story?

  Purposefully, he stood up and walked across the newsroom, steering past the gaggle of loud young reporters. Their chatter dipped as he went by, as if they'd suddenly encountered a funeral cortege and remembered their manners.

  He continued on to the desk of Layne Wanger, the cops reporter. Wanger, fifty-five, reflected light off his bald head, steel-rimmed glasses and starched white shirt like a death ray. Wanger was working on the "tongue" story. And he was in a foul mood. Nobody would confirm the rumor.

  Tom smiled. Wanger would kill for the tip he had just received.

  "Yeah, Tom, what is it?" Wanger banged keys hunt and peck and kept his eyes pinned on his computer screen. Wanger considered Tom harmless. Possibly tragic. Tom had the physical persona of a handsome cocker spaniel, eager but needy; his manner elicited Samaritan impulses from total strangers. It was his most lethal tool as a reporter.

  "Last summer I did a story on this cop's wife," Tom began.

  "Huh?" Wanger continued to type.

  "Keith Angland's wife," said Tom.

  Wanger paused. "What about her?"

  "I did this story about her restoring an old Victorian house in Afton and I'm thinking about a follow-up. But her husband's still in hot water, right?"

  Wanger pushed his glasses up on his nose. "I'd back off on the wife."

  "You would, huh?"

  Wanger spun in his chair and gave Tom his full attention. "There's talk his marriage is in the toilet with his career. I hear he's been drinking."

  "Ah, I see what you mean," said Tom. But Wanger had already rotated back to his screen and had resumed banging keys.

  Briskly, Tom continued into the lobby, went up the stairs to the next floor and into the library. Without speaking to any of the staff, he walked directly to a file cabinet, paged through the As until he found Keith Angland's photo file, tucked it under his arm and walked from the library.

  He returned to his desk and picked up his assignment—a meeting of the Woodbury school board that was to discuss the school lunch menu. Right.

  Tom pulled on his coat. The Neighborhoods bureau hunched over thei
r keyboards like turtles, heads pulled into their shoulders. Ida was still out of sight. Good. That woman had radar like a bat and would pick up on his mood change. Avoiding eye contact, Tom strolled from the newsroom.

  He purposely did not take a company car.

  Sometimes, like now, he imagined himself walking in spotlights. Like when he first pushed through the doors of a casino with money in his pocket and knew that somewhere in the smoky room, among the swirling gaming lights, he had just locked eyes with Lady Luck.

  4

  U.S. 94 going east out of St. Paul looked like a dirty, frozen kitchen sink. Twelve degrees packed the cinder clouds. No sun, no wind and no snow. Tom tensed behind the wheel, running bald tires, ready for a skid. Invisible black ice vapors coughed from thousands of tailpipes and shellacked the frostetched asphalt. Not the time to get snared in a fender bender.

  Questions.

  Bomb hoaxes and rumors of human tongues. The feds had denied that a tongue was found in the fake bomb. But Wanger was taking the rumor seriously. So how in the hell was St. Paul Police Lieutenant Keith Angland mixed up in mailing tongues?

  And…

  Who leaked to him? Probably the FBI. Sending him into the grass to thump around and scare out some snakes. Because he'd been to the house, had interviewed the wife.

  Whoever it was, they didn't know he had been canned from GA and wasn't supposed to cover federal investigations. Tom was on a short leash, but fortunately, he licked the hand that held the leash.

  He pulled his nine-year-old used Volkswagen Rabbit to the shoulder, cranked open his window, flipped on his company cell phone and punched in numbers.

  "Ida Rain." She answered on the first ring, her best husky telephone voice.

  "Ida, it's Tom. My car quit on me. I won't make the school board meeting." He held his phone out toward the whooshing traffic. "It's the battery. I need a new one," he said, lowering his voice, "you know, like you told me when it barely turned over this morning," he added.

  "Okay," she said quietly, "I'll cover for you. You think you'll have it fixed by tonight?" she asked with a hint of amusement in her voice.

  "Sure. See you." He smiled. Lick lick. Ida would look out for him.

  He rolled up the window and shivered. The Volkswagen had one of those famous no-heat German heaters. The company leased new Fords that had good heaters but also radio antennas, and Keith Angland might spot it lurking around his house.

  Tom palmed the manila envelope on the seat next to him: Angland, Keith. Lieutenant, St. Paul Police. The library had filed the house feature about Angland's wife in his envelope. Photos fanned out under his fingers. Angland took a good picture, and he'd been in the paper a lot the last few years. Various awards. Honor graduate, FBI Academy. But those accolades came under the old police chief.

  He put the photos aside and consulted his Hudson's Street Atlas to refresh his memory of the location—an address on a gravel road along the St. Croix River in the quiet community of Afton.

  He pulled back into traffic, drove east, sorted the pictures of Angland's wife out and left them on top of the pile. Tom believed a wife would talk when a marriage was going down, even a cop's wife. You just had to catch them at the right moment, be a good listener and have patience to wait for the verbal slip that, with the right coaxing and pleading, dropped a detail on which a story could turn.

  The wife's picture cut a rectangle of green whimsy against the winter day, taken against a sweep of summer sunshine and foliage.

  Tall and outdoorsy, tanned tennis legs in cutoff jeans, she wore a work-stained pebble gray T-shirt on top, Architectural Digest blazed in script across the front. Hands on, when she had to be. But Tom pegged her as more comfortable in a dress and makeup, flipping through swatches of drapery and wallpaper.

  For the camera, she had arranged a row of tall window frames on sawhorses and was removing layers of old bubbled paint with a putty knife. A red bandanna turbaned her tightly curled dark hair.

  He fingered another picture, the family shot, that showed her with her husband. No kids. No pet. Keith Angland resembled a blond, two-hundred-pound falcon instantly ready to tuck and dive after a mouse in a square mile of cornfield. His eyes were intense hazel, he had a cleft in his chin and all the ruddy skin on his body looked tight and hard as the skin stretched over his high Slavic cheekbones. He'd have a radioactive ingot of testosterone for a heart.

  In contrast, the wife's vivid features harked back to a pretelevision beauty that Tom associated with old black and white movies on big screens; when theaters were temples, not cineplexes, and filmmakers used close-ups of faces to carry whole scenes. Hers was heart shaped, with protruding expressive eyes and a classic profile that evoked the Spirit of Westward Expansion Pointing the Way on a WPA mural in a post office. Straight, tall and brave.

  A poster wife for Keith, the tough guy cop.

  Caren with a C.

  Tom turned off the freeway and went south on Highway 95. He came to the tiny collection of storefronts clustered around a frost-burned, desolate park. Afton, Minnesota. He checked the Hudson's again. A secondary road paralleled the river and passed through stands of oaks that still

  clutched brown leaves. He located the house and trolled by.

  Once he'd owned a garage full of tools and woodworking manuals. He knew a little about old houses. He'd always dreamed of getting one and fixing it up. But his ex-wife, who didn't want to live in a cloud of Sheetrock dust, nixed the idea. So they lived cramped with two kids, a dog and a cat in a rambler in Woodbury until Shirley filed for divorce and took the kids to Texas last year. Woodbury was a first-tier bedroom community to St. Paul. Afton lay twenty minutes and several steep income brackets to the east and was, by comparison, country living.

  The Angland house was roomy and old enough to have a stairway off the kitchen for the servants. It had bird's-eye maple on the ground floor. And a mansard tin roof and a square turret topped by a delicate scrim of blackened metalwork.

  The house sat on a big lot back from the road overlooking the water. Last summer, the peeling paint had been seaweed green. Now that paint was gone. The wood siding had been sanded, but only half the surface had been sealed with primer. It gave the structure a mangy, deranged aspect that was amplified by missing sections of gingerbread trim. A scaffold, fouled with frozen leaves, leaned, stranded, against a wall.

  Work interrupted; that could signal a marriage on the rocks? And other homes on this road had put out wreaths, boughs, and strings of lights. The Angland house displayed no holiday garnish.

  No one seemed to be home. No lights on. The windows winked, cold black rectangles, a hundred yards off the road, behind a screen of red oaks. As he drove past, he rolled down the window and inspected the cobbled drive next to a back door. Empty. Garage doors closed. Keith would drive an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria from the police motor pool. He saw Caren in a sports utility or maybe a small truck.

  In back, a patio hugged the bluff. A stairway descended to the water, the rails silhouetted against the iron and brown hedgehog of the Wisconsin river bluffs. The nearest neighbors were a quarter mile in either direction, separated by brittle regiments of standing corn.

  A long gust of cold wind swirled up from the river and rattled the cornstalks. Closer in, curled oak leaves skittered down the cobblestone driveway like hollow scorpions.

  There was no place for him to hide his rusty blue Rabbit near the house, so he drove on, turned and waited at a bend in the road.

  Staking out the house was a long-shot gamble. People were naturally defensive at the threshold of their castle. Angland could be home, his car out of sight in the garage.

  He needed Caren to go out, on an errand, to the grocery, to the bank. Then he would slide up and start a conversation to test her mood. If he saw the right signals, he would put his questions.

  But right now it was just cold. Should have made a move ten years ago, when he still had the legs. Someplace warm. His breath made a chalky cloud. Not a very big on
e. Was that really the size of a lungful of air?

  A measure of his life.

  Tom hugged himself and looked around suspiciously. Other measures, the numbers, were never far away. He kept them at bay by staying busy, by keeping on the move. Now he was stationary, and he imagined them creeping out from the cornfield. A picket line of strident dollar signs circled him and banged on his car.

  The rent.