Bird's-Eye View

by J. F. Freedman

  • • •

  Maureen and I sit on the cheesy fake-leather couch in her motel room. On the way, we stopped at a bottle store and bought a pint of tequila. I needed something potent to cleanse the bitterness of the encounter with Roach and Wallace out of my mouth, and to steady my nerves. Maureen joins me—the incident shook her up, too, even though I haven’t told her the reason why.

  “What in the world is going on, Fritz?” she asks. “What was that about with Roach and that other man? He was creepy.” She spasms involuntarily, a frightened shiver. “What were you talking about?”

  I tell her about the sailing excursion, and Wallace almost shotgunning the kid and me. She shudders. “Roach should’ve fired him on the spot,” she says forcefully. “There’s no excuse for keeping a loose cannon like that around. The man used terrible judgment, shooting a gun off on a sailboat. He’s supposed to be a professional, isn’t he? A professional wouldn’t do that.”

  “It was Roach’s idea to bring the gun on board in the first place.”

  She shakes her head dismissively. “Doesn’t matter. Roach isn’t the pro, Wallace is, the way you describe him. I don’t think Mr. Roach is telling you the truth about their relationship, Fritz.”

  I knew that as soon as I saw Wallace get off the airplane with Roach, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Now she’s forcing me to. “I don’t know,” I temporize. “Maybe.” If she really knew the full story, she’d freak out.

  She knocks back her shooter of tequila, picks up the bottle, pours herself another. I’d join her but I have to drive home. And I know if I stay, she’s going to bombard me with questions I don’t want to answer.

  “I’m bushed,” I tell her, heaving to my feet. “I have to get going.”

  “Fritz.” She takes my hand. “Do you want to stay here tonight?”

  Ah, Jesus. At last. “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . I can’t.”

  She turns away. “I thought . . .”

  “You thought right, you’re not mistaken about that. But the timing’s wrong.”

  “Because of Johanna? I don’t care that you slept with her. That stuff happens. And it seems to be finished.” She hesitates. “I’m jealous, actually.”

  It’s hard to disengage from her after hearing that, but I do. “You’re going back to your real life in a few weeks. I can’t get emotionally involved with anyone right now, knowing there’s no future to it.”

  “So if you didn’t care for me, we’d sleep together?” she asks.

  “Yes.” Which I did last night, with Whitney. Now I wish I hadn’t.

  “That’s stupid, Fritz.”

  “It’s what it is.”

  She closes her eyes, opens them. “You’re right, I know that. But I wanted to anyway, and worry about the consequences later. There’ll be consequences to wishing we had, too.”

  “We’ve become good friends, Maureen. Let’s stay with that for now.”

  She walks outside with me. “You could take a room here.”

  “And stay in it all night? I don’t think so.”

  She nods, accepting it. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow night. I’m busy during the day. Family business.”

  “Be careful driving home, Fritz. Just . . . be careful.”

  “I will.”

  As I drive away I look in my rearview mirror. She’s standing where I left her, watching me go.

  I drive across the Potomac River to Virginia and head west through the low countryside toward Taneyburg. It rained earlier, a long thundershower, so it’s cooler and less humid today than it has been for weeks, a welcome relief. The drive is pleasant, taking me through low lush countryside—much of it overgrown woods of pine, oak, ash, hickory. About every ten miles the verdant landscape is interrupted by a small town, comprised of a few blocks of commercial and residential streets, a couple traffic lights, cemeteries on the outskirts. Civil War monuments and plaques, of ancient skirmishes and impoverished bivouacs, adorn the sides of the road. That terrible war raged all around here, back and forth, for almost the full four bloody years it was fought. Even in a moving car you can feel the history.

  I’m not in a hurry; my appointment with Simmons isn’t until lunchtime. I got an early start, so I’d have time to meander. At one of the small towns I stop at a Mobil to gas up and have a cup of coffee. Across the street there’s a statue of a man on a rearing-up horse, dressed in Confederate garb. I cross over and read the inscription. Colonel Thaddeus Whitherspoon, 11th Tennessee Cavalry. Killed in battle following the retreat from the Wilderness, 1864. Statue erected in 1913 by the Daughters of the Confederacy. I sight the man and horse, frozen forever in time, through my camera lens, and take a couple of pictures.

  Taneyburg is old and quaint, but it isn’t touristy, it’s far enough off the main interstates and other big highways that it has avoided rampant commercialization. A typical Southern village, dominated by a town square with the mandatory Confederate statue in the center, bordered on its four sides by wood-frame two-story buildings—a movie theater, a Walgreen’s, The Gap, Banana Republic, and some older, local establishments. A couple of restaurants. Nothing remarkable, but comfortable, homey. A good place to raise a family, which some residents do. Expatriates from the city, they commute to Washington or Richmond, an hour in each direction.

  Simmons’s house is easy to find, a modest two-story wood colonial on a shady street a few blocks from the town center. It could use a paint job around the trim, but looks solid otherwise. There are flowers in the front yard, the grass is neatly trimmed, the stone walkway is clean, uncracked. Mr. Simmons is proud of his house.

  “One minute.” I hear rustling around inside when I ring the doorbell. “Cassie, stay.” The heavy wood door opens. We peer at each other through the screen door. He’s leaning on a cane.

  “Mr. Tullis?”

  “Yes, Mr. Simmons.”

  He opens the screen door, one hand holding on to the collar of an ancient golden retriever. “Come in. She’s harmless, but she wants to run outside, chase squirrels. She’s blind, so I can’t let her. She’s my last remaining companion.”

  I follow him into his house. The furnishings are a hodgepodge, a few good pieces interspersed with heavy department store–style stuff from the ’40s and ’50s. The wallpaper is faded, some curled edges around the floorboards and ceiling trim. Newspapers and magazines clutter the tables and chairs.

  “Excuse the mess. I’m not a good housekeeper, and the cleaning lady doesn’t dare discard anything.” His gaze wanders the room. “If my wife was still alive she’d throw three quarters of this out. She was a tidy woman, I vexed her with my pack-rat ways.”

  He leads me through a sunroom that overlooks a spacious backyard. Through the windows I see a vegetable garden against the back fence; corn and pole beans are growing high, alongside running melon vines, squash, tomatoes.

  “Gardening’s my hobby,” he says with pride. “Gets me outdoors, and I don’t have to get in my car to do it. I gave up golf when my eyesight started going, so now I work in dirt.”

  “You’re going to have a passel of beans,” I observe, a sincere flattery. “Corn, too.”

  He smiles at the compliment, but doesn’t reply. We sink into cushiony wing chairs. A sweaty pitcher of iced tea is set on the glass-covered side table between us.

  “Thirsty?” He pours a glass for me, one for himself. I take a sip; it’s heavily sweetened.

  “You want to know about James Roach.”

  “Whatever you know about him that you can tell me.”

  “Are you in litigation with him? I won’t allow my name to be dragged into a court mess. I don’t want to go through any more aggravation.”

  “Nothing like that,” I assure him. “You won’t be involved in anything, I can promise you. No one knows I’m here, or that I’ve contacted you. No one’s going to.”

  He nods, assured enough to go on. “What I know about James R
oach.” He leans back in his upholstered chair, gazes at the ceiling. There are some water stains in the corners.

  “James Roach is a murderer.”

  “A murderer?” I sit up on the edge of my chair.

  “Figuratively. I don’t know for a fact that he’s actually ever killed anyone. But the weapons he’s profited from sure as hell have. He got away with murder, is how I would describe it.” He looks off for a moment, recollecting. “He committed crimes and got away with them. Scot-free.”

  “You were prosecuting him.”

  “We were prosecuting him. The government. It was my case. But it wasn’t any kind of personal vendetta, like some of these special prosecutors have embarked on. The government—the Justice Department—brought him to trial. I ran it.”

  Retired prosecutor Simmons might not have had a vendetta against Roach when he was trying to prosecute him, but he took losing personally, that’s obvious, listening to him—twenty years after the fact he still loathes the man.

  “Roach was selling arms to Libya, a country that was off-limits for us to trade with. Which meant to dictatorships and anti-government insurgents all over the world. Iran, China, the contras, the Hezbollah, IRA, whoever. Massive sales, billions of dollars.”

  This information dovetails with what Fred’s cousin had speculated on. Roach’s farm is a natural for clandestine activity—isolated, with access to shipping anything anywhere, via the Bay, plus the airstrip, which was built long enough to accommodate jets.

  I take out a notepad and pen. “Do you mind?”

  “Go ahead. It’s in the public record. But only the summations. Not the rest of it. The dirty parts.”

  “Sealed files?”

  He nods. “National security, so-called.” He coughs derisively. “National security, my behind. There were no breaches of national security, except the laws he was breaking.” He grits his teeth, remembering. I’m sure he has relived this over and over for the past twenty-odd years.

  “Those were very sensitive times.” He’s going back in the past now, I can see the faraway look in his eyes. “Terrible times for this country. This was happening during and right after the Iran hostage crisis, our government was tied up in knots, especially after the failed raid in the desert.”

  “How could Roach get away with doing that on the huge scale you’re describing?”

  “The usual way that they all did, through dummy corporations set up in third-party countries. Layers and layers of cover, almost impossible to penetrate.” His fist is clenched, remembering. “But we did it, this time. We broke through.”

  “And you felt you had him dead to rights?”

  “We had him dead to rights, no ifs, ands, or buts.”

  “Then why didn’t you go ahead with it?”

  “Because the Reagan administration didn’t want to.”

  I scribble quickly, to keep up. “Did you go to trial?”

  He shakes his head. “We were a month away from formally indicting him. One short month. And Roach was scared to death, let me tell you. His lawyers were trying to cut any kind of deal they could, anything that would keep him from going to trial.”

  “What reason was given for shutting down the process?”

  Simmons scratches his old blind dog’s head. “Everyone was weary by this time, from the hostage situation, the aftermath of Watergate, all the garbage. The new administration didn’t want to drag the old administration’s manure along, they were looking to a more pragmatic future. Pragmatic meaning accommodating skunks, of course. You have to remember, by this time almost everyone in Washington hated Carter, even in his own party. He’d crash-landed them into the ground.” He drinks some of his iced tea. “They knew that down the line other things like this might crop up and they didn’t want to deplete their ammunition on what they said was an iffy case. It wasn’t iffy—it was solid.” He puts his glass down. “But they shut my operation down.”

  “National security.”

  He nods. “A big rug. Lots of dirt gets swept under it.” He fixes his gaze on me. “And there was money involved. Big money.”

  “Are you saying Roach bought his way out of the indictment?”

  “He could’ve, but I doubt it was that blatant. Campaign contributions, insider information about deals he was making; it amounts to the same thing. You see it all the time—someone leaves his position in the government, a short time later he has a cushy job with a company he was regulating. The pot of gold on the other side of the revolving door.”

  I look out the window at the tomato plants ripening in the sun. This is much more complicated than I ever imagined. What the hell am I doing pursuing this, sitting here in this old man’s living room, dredging up the ancient past?

  Because I’m too stubborn and stupid and reckless not to. “Do you have any material about this I could look at?” I ask.

  He’s thrown by the question. “I told you, it was classified.”

  “I thought maybe you held on to some things, for your own records.”

  “In case I write my memoirs someday? The frustrations of a spoke in the wheel?” he says self-deprecatingly.

  “You were a federal prosecutor. That’s an important position.”

  “It secured me a decent pension, that’s all it was. We’re all fodder, son. We oil the machine, and then we let it eat us.”

  “So you don’t have anything.”

  He shakes his head. “They cleaned out my files. The FBI, the CIA. This was before the computer era, remember, when you couldn’t copy the world onto a floppy disk. They took everything that was in my office.”

  I close my notebook. “I guess that’s it, then.”

  “I wish I had it to give to you. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I tell him. “I shouldn’t be looking into any of this. I should leave James Roach alone, and let him leave me alone.”

  He looks at me, startled. “Do you know James Roach?”

  “I’ve met him,” I admit abashedly. “He’s a neighbor of my mother’s. I went sailing with him once.”

  “So this is personal.”

  “He didn’t screw me over, if that’s what you mean. We get along all right. He’s an important, interesting guy. I’d like to know more about him.”

  Simmons puts his glass down, looks down at his old dog, lying at his feet. “I knew you had some kind of agenda. You lied to me over the phone, son. Not nice to do to an old man, although I knew there was something up your sleeve.”

  “You’ve caught me,” I admit. “Although technically, I didn’t lie to you. You asked me if I was a reporter or a cop. I’m neither.”

  “Private eye?”

  “None of the above.”

  He looks at his dog, curled around his feet. “Are you trying to bring Roach down?”

  “I’m not trying to—”

  He interrupts me. “I shouldn’t have asked that. I don’t want to know.” He looks at me again. “I wish someone would, though. That case ruined my career. I never got a good one after that, I wasn’t a team player. I had to take early retirement. More important, though, was the shameful miscarriage of justice. Things like that should never be allowed to happen.”

  The interview is over. Simmons walks me to the front door. I opened some old wounds in him today, which I regret. His final days, like my mother’s, should be without stress.

  We stand in his doorway. “I wish someone would go after that bastard,” Simmons says wistfully, blinking against the afternoon sun. “To think that he’s with the State Department today—talk about inviting the fox into the henhouse!”

  “Doesn’t help you keep faith with the process, does it?”

  “The ends justify the means,” he says with sad anger. “They always have, and they always will.”

  • • •

  I call Maureen’s motel on my way home. She isn’t in. I leave a message that I’ll be back at my place before nine.

  She’s waiting for me when I drive up. “Did everything go okay?” she
asks as soon as I get out of my car.

  “Could’ve been better.” I don’t elaborate, she doesn’t push.

  We sit in the battered wooden deck chairs on my back porch and watch the last rays die into the water. Cold bottles of long-necked Budweisers help ward off the heat. She sheds her fancy boots and socks, props her long bare red-toenailed feet in my lap. Just like Johanna did. I feel guilty about that for a moment, but it passes. Johanna was a transitory encounter that was over before anything got started, as almost all encounters between men and women are. This is much deeper. I haven’t felt like this since Marnie. It’s a scary feeling. Wonderful, too.

  I drink from my bottle. Past her, in my line of vision, I see phosphorescence on the water from the early moonlight. It feels dreamy, but there’s nothing dreamlike about what’s going on in my life—it’s all too real.

  “I’m going to tell you about some of what’s been going on,” I say, once we’re comfortable. “I can’t keep you in the dark any longer. It isn’t fair to you, and I need to confide in someone.” I pause. “I want to confide in you.”

  She runs a bare foot along my leg. “I’m glad.” She pauses, drinks from her own bottle. “You’re safe with telling me anything, Fritz,” she tells me seriously. “I want you to know that, up front.”

  I look at her and think, how much should I tell you? That I saw a man murdered on Roach’s property? That the victim was an important diplomat? That his body was found a week later a hundred miles from here, deliberately planted there to draw any possible suspicion away from Roach? That I have pictures of the killing?

  The answer, for now, is none of the above. She wouldn’t be able to handle any of that. She’d want me to run to the cops as fast as I could, and if I didn’t, she would. For my protection, of course; but protecting me isn’t her job. I can take care of myself. And if it turns out I can’t, I’ll live with the consequences. Under these circumstances, though, it is my place to protect her; she’s the one in the dark. She has no connection to this, except through me.