Haftmann's Rules

by Robert White

  “The principal.”

  “A liar and a fool.”

  “Also the individual you took to court. He said he only wanted to meet with you privately to straighten out a few things about your actions toward the rest of the faculty.”

  “A time bomb waiting to go off,” Gallatine sniffed.

  “He said you created . . . ‘an intimidating and menacing atmosphere’ that had people frightened of you.”

  He stood up. “Are you here to accuse me of something? I thought you were here to seek my aid?”

  I played another long shot: “He said Annaliese O’Reilly was one of those things he intended to straighten you out on.”

  “You’re a liar, and not a good one. Is that what they teach you in private-eye school?”

  “Who’s ‘they,’ Mister Gallatine?” He favored me with a thin-lipped smile that would look well on a cobra.

  “My concern with him had nothing to do with Annaliese.”

  “Then what did have to do with Annaliese, Mister Gallatine?”

  “Nothing, as I told you. I was her teacher. She was an excellent student, as I said, and that’s the end of it.”

  Brenda told me Annaliese had picked Marcus up on the rebound. What did I have to lose?

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “You—Get out of my house!”

  “One more question. You were dismissed from a high school in Pennsylvania before you came to Ohio. You sued them too. They settled. You seem to have a pattern of suing and collecting, don’t you, Mister Gallatine?”

  No disguising those little facial tics and muscle movements in the human face. Better than a trio of polygraph experts. The skin around his eyes and his jaws tightened, and his dark eyebrow humped over the bridge of his nose.

  “Get out! Get out of my house!”

  He didn’t move from the sofa. “Get out or I’ll call the police!”

  I folded up my notepad and tucked it inside my sport coat. “I know a guy like you. A little con named Artiss Clay. Could sweet-talk the birds from the trees. Knew how to use the system. It’s almost socially acceptable to steal money with a lawyer. Some jamoke tries it with a gun and we give him eight years in a hellhole like Lucasville. Unless he’s big enough to keep the predators from reaming his ass inside out or putting a shiv in his guts, he might live to do his sentence. Artiss wasn’t big enough. They threw a blanket party for him his first night in the joint.”

  This time he hissed like a basket of snakes. “Artiss—who is Artiss—? I said—”

  “Inground pool, twenty acres from I what I can see, probably a redwood sauna out back, two-and-a-half car garage. Nice digs for a teacher’s salary.”

  “I’ll get your investigator’s license revoked. You make one statement to anyone and I’ll sue you for slander.”

  He almost scissor-walked across the room to the phone.

  I couldn’t resist firing off what Micah used to call my Parthian shot. “When I was a kid growing up around here, I went to a Catholic school. My grandmother was from Germany. She’d been raped like every woman in Berlin. In the sixth grade, I was beat up by the Mc-Goneghal twins for having a dumb ‘Adolph Hitler face.’ The stupid clowns punched me silly on the playground and called me ‘a Nazi kike.’ Imagine that? I lifted weights and learned to fight back, but the lesson I learned was no one cares. No one ever stopped them, not my classmates, not the teachers. Their old man was a big shot—church donor, social clubs like the Ancient Order of Hibernians, all that kind of thing. Bullies never change.”

  I was almost out the door when he put his hand on my shoulder. It was what I hoped for.

  I placed my hand over his, turned and had his thumb in a come-along.

  “Aaaah, get your hands off me, you psychopath!”

  “All I want to know, fucker, is why you slept with a child.” I said it very close to his face.

  “I’ll—I’ll sue you—”

  I drew him a little closer to my face. “If I can prove you had sex with Annaliese O’Reilly, who was a minor at that time, I’ll call in every favor I’ve made in twenty years as a cop and see to it you do a stretch in a real jail.”

  I was seething spittle in the corners of my mouth, a real sign I was losing it. I realized that his wife was standing close by. I could feel her presence near my bad-eye side.

  “Let him go. He slept with her. Let him go.”

  Gallatine blanched, his eyes like cue balls, staring at his wife, then me, and then her. He was in shock, his world turned upside down like that sailor on the polar ice.

  She looked at him and I could see pity and hate in her eyes.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t find those pathetic love notes from that foolish, love-starved schoolgirl that you were carrying around in your briefcase like trophies?”

  Gallatine dropped to his knees. I made my exit, but neither one watched me leave. Their two children had come in from the other room and were standing there looking at their parents in that uncomprehending way children do when confronted with life’s terror. The tableau from a TV family sit-com was gone like smoke. I closed the door on the wreckage behind me as gently as I could.

  On the ride back, I noticed the fluorescent green of the leaves beginning to take hold in the woods far back from the road; lilac bushes and dogwood were in bloom. The air was redolent of smells in the drizzle, noisy with the chirruping of insects and the scree-caw of red-winged blackbirds among the cattails; starlings roosted on the wires above, perhaps soothed by the hum, utterly oblivious to hundreds of thousands of volts humming beneath their warm bodies. I needed my headlights by the time I arrived back home, and as I pulled into my driveway, I caught my own tulip tree in full bloom. There was a message from Phil on my answering machine. Marcus and his doper friends were clean, no rap sheets or priors, just a couple FI’s, Field Interviews, which could mean something or nothing. A gang intelligence cop in Cleveland used to call FIs a semi-legal excuse to get to know who’s banging—stopped for “mopery with intention to gawk,” although he’d write it in cop jargon in his reports.

  I’d have to check them out later. I walked into the kitchen and made a cup of tea. Micah’s eyes turned that sienna color whenever she was aroused or angry. In the days leading to the divorce, that tea-color was reflected back at me in angry outbursts over nothing, which I now realized was her own way of deflecting her self-disgust at her betrayal. Blame the victim.

  It surprised me that I had not noticed spring’s arrival before this. My grass would need cutting in a week. Spring is the season of death, not autumn. Ask any cop: the statistics on suicide jumps exponentially. It’s simple. If you reason from the suicide’s point of view, the whole world is renewing. It’s just you that’s not. Whenever I get the urge to stop doing the backstroke in the toilet bowl, I think about the universe—all that emptiness and blackness out there, all the galaxies roaring away or colliding with one another, stars a million times bigger than our sun imploding into black holes. I imagine billions of comets with ice hurtling through space, maybe destined to crash on another planet to bring that precious substance that exists between gas and matter, water that is so rare because its molecules slide over one another. I figure it this way: we’re just dust anyway. Why do anybody a favor? Call me a sentimental existentialist.

  I did some further checking on Lawrence Gallatine, and I found some strange bedfellows in his past. He had gone to work for one of the most corrupt politicians in Cleveland, a man who might have become Attorney General if a scandal involving mortgage fraud hadn’t come to light. Gallatine had, it seemed, political ambitions of his own, and some of his biggest donors were either front men for some very conservative causes—and I mean to the right of Attila the Hun—or they were impossible to winkle out of hiding. I got lost in a maze of front organizations and banal acronyms that hinted at “family values” and other kinds of neoconservative affiliations with various right-wing groups in Ohio. I crosschecked a few of these and found some names in common with shifty organ
izations Hate Watch liked to keep track of. Behind the political dollars he raked in, he seemed to have a finger in some strange pies that were not exactly off the charts but weren’t the sort I would cast him as a spokesperson for. The image he presented didn’t fit. In the past he did some propaganda writing for a few of these Second-Amendment rights and Michigan militia groups. Gallatine was a man more than the sum of his parts and none of the parts added up to a profile. Family man, educator, political aspirant, right-wing proselytizer, born-again Christian, and finally, most confusing of all, older lover of a biracial girl. Who was Lawrence Gallatine? I had known men like him who had gone fishing in strange waters; sometimes they came up with a thing best left in the murk.

  Chapter 3

  Before I left for my redeye flight from Cleveland-Hopkins to Logan, I called on O’Reilly at his office on Bridge Street in Jefferson. Jefferson is the county seat; it’s where Micah worked and where she found her lawyer. It’s quaint, small-town, mind-numbing, and full of secrets. Most of the professionals work for the government in one capacity or another. Backroom deals and political fixes are made here. A couple years back, a nasty scandal broke out when one of the country club wives and a pediatrician decided to run off together. They belonged to a suburban “key club,” wife-swappers, in other words and the resulting divorces were messy. Two of the children from each side, teenagers, were collateral damage. The boy OD’d before his senior year at Jefferson High, and the girl ran all the way to Florida and got herself involved in some big trouble. I remember it well because I extricated her from that mess and I took a beating from a couple hard guys for my trouble. They claimed she was working off a debt for them.

  John O’Reilly, middle name Hugh, father of a missing daughter and my client, was dulling his pain in the middle of the afternoon with expensive whiskey when I found him. I drove to his furniture factory located some miles from the Courthouse where my friend the judge presides. It’s part-rural, part industrialized in the northeastern section. Many Amish live and farm here. Some of the more liberal sects work in Gallatine’s factory. He was one of the lucky ones. He makes blonde wood furniture that has a gimmick to it: everything fits together with pegs rather than nails. Somebody from the Department of Defense thought that was a nifty idea and John O’Reilly woke up one day to a small but tidy fortune in a no-bid contract to sell furniture—including tent poles—to our armed forces in Saudi Arabia. There are a lot of soldiers over there who need chairs and tables to go inside those air-conditioned tents. He still pays minimum wage to his workers.

  He was slumped in front of a bottle of Glenlivet, disheveled, yoyo-ing between maudlin self-pity and black-humored nastiness. The worst kind of drunk.

  I found him at his business, alone, drunk behind a walnut desk, his face bleached white behind the glare of a banker’s lamp. He looked up at me.

  “You lousy cockshuck—cocksucker, Haftmann.”

  “Why do you say that, O’Reilly?”

  “You just discovered who’s payin’ your fuckin’ bill, Mister Private Eye? Little more resh-respect is what’s needed around here, by God.”

  He pinched off a smidgeon between thumb and forefinger to show me how much was needed. “Ain’t takin’ no shit offa you—anybody. Alla you, all you fuckers.”

  I reached for the bottle and gently put it out of his reach with a sideways motion.

  “How’s about I ask you a few questions—”

  “Questions, questions, questions. How’s about you kiss my big wide Irish ass?”

  “That’s not a nice thing to say,” I replied.

  “No, no. No more questions! I’m all outta answers for your questions, Mister Big-Shot Detective. You find Annaliese!” Trying to straighten up in his chair, he almost went ass over teacup.

  “I’m trying,” I said. I looked at my watch.

  “Oh, you got an appointment to run off to, huh? Mister Big Spender. On my money no less, you . . .”

  “I can return your money to you right now,” I said. I reached inside my jacket as if to extract my checkbook, safely tucked in a drawer at my house.

  “Wait a minute, you. All I’m sayin’ is, I’m not paying you to ask all these goddamned questions.”

  “I want you to agree to something first.”

  “Oh fuck me. What is it?”

  I pushed a folded sheet of paper over to him and watched him attempt to read it. He was long past the point of no return, however. I watched him scrunch up his face but his neocortex would no more handle English than Martian at that point in his inebriation.

  “Whassiss?”

  “It’s a contract. It says that if I locate her, and if she’s willing to return to Ohio, she’s to be given a living allowance from you which include rental payment and a monthly stipend regardless of whatever income she makes on her own. There is to be no unsupervised contact between you except at her discretion.”

  “Fuuuck you, Haftmann. Who do you think—” Whitened spittle collected in the corners of his mouth.

  “Sign it, O’Reilly.”

  “No fucking way, asshole.”

  “Then our business is finished,” I said.

  He gathered himself in a parody of an opera star collecting wind for a long heroic passage—in O’Reilly’s case, I assumed a rendition of what I had just heard. So I reached over his desk and clamped my hand over his mouth.

  His eyes bulged in pure fury, and he attempted to rise. His own hands flew to his face to tear away my hand but I stiffened my arm and squeezed it tighter. Panicked, airless, he attempted to rise from his chair, but I used my leverage to shove him down, not easy because of the damned swivel chair. He thrashed about until I rammed him backwards against the wall and then pinned him with a knee to his chest.

  Finally, I eased my grip. I said, “If I take away my hand, will you be reasonable?”

  He nodded for yes.

  I eased my hand away but balled it in front of his face for emphasis.

  “You cocksuck—”

  Whap. I backhanded him across the meat of his cheek. The sound was more significant than the blow. I did it again. Whaaaaap, a real bell-ringer this time, and it made the impression I hoped for.

  He was stunned, jowly flesh aquiver, but unhurt, appalled that he had been hit by an inferior, his own employee, no less. I don’t know what got into me. He brought out the Neanderthal in me.

  While he rubbed at the red striations on his face, I repeated: “Sign it now, please, or our business is through and you can hire someone else for the job.” In truth, I was hoping he would. Any sober man would have and done it while phoning the police to press charges.

  He spluttered, his voice rising in tremolo notes to the top of the range. Then he said: “You psychopath! You’re damned right I’ll get another private investigator, you dime-a-dozen, flatfoot.”

  I complimented him on his articulateness. It was a relief after so much mushy-voweled drunken bullying.

  “You’re going to prison for assault and battery, you cheap shamus . . .”

  I said, “You civilians will never learn the difference between simple assault and assault and battery. Oh well. Have it your way, O’Reilly, but I want you to know something. I’m the only one who can help you find her.”

  “You listen to me, fuckface. I made three and half million dollars last year!”

  “Congratulations. You can afford me now,” I said.

  “How much did you make, gumshoe? Huh? How mush—much?”

  He was trying to stand up but only succeeded in knocking over a pile of papers from his desk. “You don’t make money, you low-rent nobody. I can buy and sell you twenty times over!”

  He started to come at me but he zig-zagged like a man trying to stand up in a bass boat in choppy seas. He cocked his fist and drew it behind his ear telegraphing it all the way from San Francisco. His entire body led by his fist hurtled past me. I barely moved four inches to elude the whole package and he crashed into a small table—one of his factory samples probably—and wo
und up on the floor.

  I watched him try to get up. There was blood coming out his nose and he wiped a smear of it across his face. He looked at his hand and sat crosslegged on the floor and grunted—or laughed. I’m not sure which.

  “Are you done, Mister O’Reilly, because I have a flight to Boston to catch, and I need to know whether you’re going to authorize me to be on it.”

  He blinked at me a couple times and I thought he was about to blow up in another rage. Instead, he crooked an index finger and made one of those come-hither gestures. I brought the paper to him and he signed it without reading any of it still sitting on the floor. A couple drops of ruby-red blood hit the paper while he was signing it. His signature was illegible, a drunken flourish, but I guessed it would stand up in court if it ever came to that. O’Reilly wasn’t the first rich prick I’ve dealt with in my career. I brought a sixteen-year-old daughter back to a mansion in Columbus once and waited while the father’s lawyer did a line-by-line scrutiny of my listed expenses. I don’t pad bills. I got tired of explaining everything in detail and agreed to reduce the bill by a third. I’ll never forget the father’s smirk as I was leaving.

  “Thank you, Mister O’Reilly,” I said. “I’ll call you from Boston.”

  “Go to hell,” he said.

  His secretary came in from the outer office and looked at her boss sitting there with blood leaking out of his nose.

  “It’s all right, Mary,” he said. “Contracts with the devil have to be signed in blood. Cut him a company check for fifteen hundred.”

  She stood rooted to the spot cutting her eyes between O’Reilly and me. A look of terror on her face.

  “Haftmann,” he said, weary resignation in his voice, “find her.”

  I left him sitting there with whatever shred of dignity a man could have under those circumstances.

  My detective years were not misspent. There’s something every homicide officer learns fast: how to hustle a sale past an unwary customer. When you get a suspect in an interrogation room, you have to tell him his rights. The big one is Miranda, of course: the right against self-incrimination. The art of interrogation requires you to sell yourself to the suspect despite the fact that everything he says is going to be used against him. Unless a suspect is completely braindead, he shouldn’t open his mouth to a detective—ever. Because a detective is selling one thing—jail. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about the victim at this point; you show the suspect that you are in total control and he controls nothing. You tell him the vic he knifed or shot or bludgeoned must have had it coming. Did he sodomize that young girl and leave her bleeding on the highway or in some deserted shithole to die? ‘Oh well, we all like to go up the old dirt chute once in a while.’ You hold your stomach in, but you tell him anything to get him talking, which is to say, confessing. Nothing else matters. Miranda stopped the brutality of the interrogation room. That’s all. After the Mirandizing, you just glide right past that old waiving rights and having an attorney present as smoothly as you can. This is the one thing the lawyer in Reg could never understand whenever we got to knocking back a few on the Strip. “I actually have to tell these idiot clients of mine not to open their mouths to you guys.” He’d shake his head and mumble something like, “I’ll never understand why they do it.” I’d bug him by giving him my most soulful father confessor look, which would usually irritate him more: “Haftmann, the day your face inspires anybody to confess is the day the pigs eat my brother.”