Damage Control

by Michael Bowen

  “We’d better get to work.”

  “Yep.”

  Chapter Two

  “Strike ‘police officials.’ Insert ‘law enforcement authorities.’”

  “Right. ‘Law enforcement authorities have asked Ms. Kendall not to comment further, pending completion of the investigation.’”

  “How about ‘while the killer is still at large’?”

  His Bic poised over a legal pad on his lap, Rafe considered the idea. Then he shook his head.

  “No. Melodramatic. Like a New York Post headline. Just ‘while the investigation is under way.’”

  “I agree.” This came over speaker-phone from Seamus Danica, my boss. He definitely had a vote. “Read the whole thing.”

  “‘Official sources confirm that Josephine Kendall, senior development director for the Majority Values Coalition [D.C. address and phone number and link to website] was unharmed this morning in the ambush slaying of entrepreneur/environmental activist Jerzy Schroeder on his Maryland farm. Ms. Kendall, who was talking with Mr. Schroeder when a concealed rifleman killed him with a single shot from several hundred yards away, reported the crime to investigators. Law enforcement authorities have asked Ms. Kendall not to make further public comment while the investigation is under way.’”

  “Outstanding.” Seamus again, who’s fluent in hype.

  “Okay, who puts it out?” Rafe asked.

  “Zap it over here and I will,” Seamus said. “That way they’ll think we’re stonewalling to keep the focus off MVC instead of off Josie.”

  I’d known the answer before Seamus had given it and I’d been keypunching diligently throughout the conversation, so it was already set to go.

  “In cyber-space,” I told him one click later.

  “See you tomorrow morning. Looks like we have a million-dollar hole to fill.”

  “Right.” Activist fund-raising is an unsentimental business.

  Seamus hung up. Rafe looked at me.

  “Okay. Now comes the hard part.”

  Rafe and I had had the same thought from the moment our front door closed behind the cops. For them this was a murder investigation. For Rafe and me, it was a damage-control problem, like having one of your ambassadors killed in a terrorist attack that some numbnuts called a spontaneous riot would present if you were the Secretary of State, or having DUI documentation for your candidate pop up in a presidential campaign if you were the campaign manager.

  Whipping out a no-further-comment media release was the first damage-control baby step—the equivalent of finding Normandy on a map if you’re planning the D-Day invasion. Now to the real work.

  Job-one: Get ahead of the curve and stay there. Get the story out, which Seamus was now doing. After the media whores got the we-can’t-talk release, start talking—but to the right whores, and without attribution. Job-three will be to control the narrative. That brings us to Job-two: Come up with a narrative to control. I went first.

  “Klimchock did it?”

  “We can’t commit to that yet.” Rafe shook his head. “For all we know he’s dead or in prison somewhere.”

  “Right. But if we’re not ready to put our money on Klimchock, we sure can’t throw one of the other two under the bus.”

  “True. How about going at it from the opposite direction? Schroeder was a shadowy guy, right?”

  “Sure was.” I settled back in my chair and told myself not to think about cigarettes. “Got real rich real quick trafficking in stuff that’s legal but attracts a dubious crowd. Conflict minerals. Gray market oil. Cash stashed off-shore.”

  “Any drug cartels or terrorist groups in the background?”

  “I doubt it. He was too smart for that, and did just fine without them. Vague rumors about brokering sexual tourism years ago, when he was just starting out in the thug business, but even the worst stories don’t say he was a pimp or a consumer. Just a middleman.”

  “How about grown-up sex?”

  “Non-starter. Liked girls, plain vanilla, didn’t roll with pols. Divorced for three years. Must have had a high-class call-girl on speed-dial, but who cares?”

  “The sexual tourism stuff is provocative even if it’s just rumors,” Rafe said. “How about something really creepy, like, oh, a private island crawling with cute munchkins where he could take celebrities and influential ex-office holders?”

  “No. Jerzy was a Republican.”

  “Deviant sex is bipartisan.”

  “As Barney Frank once said to Larry Craig,” I agreed, nodding gamely, “‘we’re on the same page.’”

  Rafe favored me with a withering eyebrow.

  “That’s right, you spend half your time with people who think gay sex is deviant, don’t you?”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  “If he didn’t have politicians in his pants, how about in his pocket?”

  “He spread campaign contributions around in the usual savvy way. Middle seven figures.”

  “Hence your interest in him.”

  “Hence my interest in him. MVC had the hots for a piece of that pie.”

  Pensive pause from Rafe. Thoughtful nibble on the cap of his Bic. I had to wait seven seconds for the next question.

  “What would Schroeder have been investing in if he’d sent Majority Values Coalition a check?”

  “Delete subsidies for a solar power start-up that’s gone six years without starting up and switch the cash to a wind-power thing that Jerzy had some high rollers salivating over. Dierdorf, the guy I mentioned this afternoon, is the solar power honcho. If Jerzy had brought off the switch it would have busted his chops.”

  “Yeah,” Rafe said, drawing the word out, “but risks like that are just part of the Washington game. Some days the eagle flies and some days the eagle shits. Assassination isn’t a standard lobbying ploy.”

  “Neither is threatening criminal prosecutions, but that’s what Jerzy had in mind for Dierdorf. He was trying to goose the Department of Energy into an audit—maybe even a full-scale investigation.”

  Rafe nodded in decisive satisfaction as he scribbled on a legal pad. No question about it: threatening the wrong guy with a close look at the Federal Sentencing Guidelines could get your head ventilated in a big damn hurry.

  “Okay,” he said, “first cut: Jerzy Schroeder was an entrepreneur with a passion for anonymity, a talent for making money in unconventional ways, and a contact list full of people who don’t belong to the Rotary Club. His universe featured sharp elbows and a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, with the standard-issue murky, nameless, but vaguely menacing East Europeans, Russians, and Central Asians floating around just out of sight. Odds are he flew a little too close to the flame and one of them clipped him. How about that for a narrative?”

  “Like it, except for the mixed metaphor. But we’re going to need at least one specific example that whoever we leak to can sink their teeth into so that they feel like real reporters.”

  “‘Whomever we leak to,’” Rafe whispered, in retaliation for the mixed-metaphor crack. “You’re right. Where do we get that?”

  “We don’t get it anywhere. I get it tomorrow from MVC’s pitch-file.”

  “Do you think Seamus will be on board?”

  “He may be on board without knowing it, but he’ll be on board.”

  Rafe put his pad down on his chair’s oversized wooden armrest. He leaned forward. His hazel-brown eyes dripped with tender concern that struck me as completely genuine. For a second or two I felt like shit.

  “One implication of our narrative will be that MVC was after money that was tattletale gray even if it wasn’t outright dirty.”

  “When it comes to money, we don’t discriminate on the basis of color.”

  “But you can’t say that out loud. You have a good Washington gig, honey—and you could lose it.”

 
“I’m probably toast anyway.” I shrugged as I imagined Tammy Wynette belting out “Stand by Your Man” in the background. “Let’s learn a lesson from George W. Bush and handle this one war at a time.”

  “Very good.” Rafe slapped his thighs. “We have a plan.”

  Damage Control Strategy,

  Day 1

  (the first Thursday after the murder)

  Chapter Three

  You don’t go after a million bucks from someone without a detailed pitch-file. MVC had one on Jerzy. It held the material that Seamus’ crew of “excellent nerds,” so named in homage to Lee Atwater, had assembled from every accessible data source on Earth, and some not so accessible, to help us shape our approach to Jerzy and then close the deal once we had his interest. Excellent nerds are by nature non-discriminating. Their theory is that you can’t read it if you don’t have it, but you can skip it if you have it and it doesn’t help, so they include everything they can get their hands on. That’s why I seldom bother with even ten percent of the stuff they rake up. Now, though, I needed media bait, so I’d be digging deeper.

  It took less than half an hour the next morning to turn up a pretty good candidate: brokering the sale in China of Lexus cars bought in the United States. Apparently you can sell a Lexus in China for four or five times what U.S. dealer cost is. I assume you have to grease some palms at the Chinese end to get the things into the country, but Jerzy earned his skim by getting the cars from the inventories of American Lexus dealers to loading docks in Long Beach. After that it was somebody else’s problem.

  You need a Jerzy for the U.S. part because Lexus frowns on having cars delivered to America sold to people who don’t know any college fight songs. Hence, the scam requires a little paperwork—a certificate of title here, a bill of lading there—and Jerzy ate forged documents for breakfast. You also need dealers who’ll play dumb. Being a little short of ready cash can make people play flat-out moronic. Jerzy had a talent for coming up with people who were short of ready cash.

  You could call all this fraud if you wanted to get tight-assed about it, and Lexus had found a United States Attorney in the Midwest who was downright constipated. He’d gone after the U.S.-based Asian contacts and the saps in the dealerships, but he apparently hadn’t come across Jerzy’s fingerprints. Yet. That was good enough for a running start on Jerzy as a smoothly suave rogue who fell in with bad companions.

  Seamus picked that moment to walk into my office. He sported his customary stringy gray-silver comb-over that somehow looks puckish instead of dorky, sparkling blue eyes that always seem alert, and round face that doesn’t show the tank-carload of Jameson’s he’s put away over his fifty-nine years. I hadn’t told him about digging up Jerzy’s past to take the heat off Rafe, so I tried not to look guilty. I’ve had a lot of practice.

  “We may have a lead on filling that million-dollar hole,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Schroeder’s ex-wife—fascinating lady named Ann DeHoic.”

  “Never heard of her. Fascinating how?”

  “Fascinating the same way Schroeder was.” That would be money. “Plus, even though you haven’t stumbled over her, she doesn’t share his aversion to the limelight. Shows up in boldface more than occasionally on page 6 of the New York Post. Known in New York, Paris, and Geneva as ‘the gray lady.’”

  “New York, Paris, and Geneva—no wonder I’ve missed her. Those aren’t TMZ-type places. The plutocrat gossip I traffic in is more Sunbelt-oriented. They have a lot higher ratio of MVC types down there.”

  “Good thing you’re a quick study, then. She’d like to meet you.”

  I asked the questions that a senior development director with a million-dollar shortfall has to ask in this situation. “Where and when?”

  “Outside Brookings at one-thirty.”

  Seamus couldn’t have surprised me more if he’d said outside Lenin’s tomb. The Brookings Institution on Massachusetts Avenue in northwest D.C. is where good Democratic policy wonks go when they die. Its amply credentialed denizens generate earnest, carefully researched, closely reasoned reports on head-scratchers like sovereign debt crises and logistical constraints complicating coordination of international efforts to enforce oil-trading sanctions and…Huh? Excuse me? Oh, sorry, I must have nodded off there for a second. Point is, someone—anyone—who had an appointment inside that place wanting to meet me would be like Chief Justice Roberts seeking a hook-up with Perez Hilton. At one-twenty-five p.m., though, I stood outside the Brookings Institution, feeling like a high school senior hoping the prom limo would show up on time.

  I had briefed myself on Ann DeHoic by blitzing through a thumb-drive Seamus had tossed me on his way out of my office. She’d gone through two husbands before Jerzy: one a Swiss national when she was twenty, formally annulled shortly after her twenty-first birthday; and the other, when she was twenty-four, to a guy whose name looked Russian to me. That one ended in divorce when she was twenty-eight.

  No kids with either of those husbands or with Jerzy. The hearsay, though, was that she’d tried hard for a baby with her second husband, including intensive fertility treatments, and come up empty. Barren. A biblical curse. That produced a pang in my own breast. I knew Rafe wanted a rug-rat or two, and so did I, but we hadn’t gotten below the fifty-thousand-foot level on that yet and the window figured to close for us in five years at most. No way a guy in his mid-seventies could ride herd on the bundles of mid-adolescent attitude and cussedness that my genes figured to produce. There was no reason to doubt my own fertility, but you don’t really know until you try. Had DeHoic taken the bad news with philosophical resignation? Or had it maimed something inside her that shrinks have a name for and anatomists don’t? Or was she somewhere in between?

  High school at a Swiss lycée with a pricey-sounding name. Studied art history at Brown but left early in her junior year, around the time of marriage number one, and never bothered to finish her degree. Occasional gigs with art museums in Europe and Asia—nothing you could call a career, though. Parents both dead before she turned thirty. No dope about the size of her trust fund or payouts under pre-nups, but I was betting the only coupons she clipped were on bonds, not supermarket advertising supplements.

  As Seamus had said, her name showed up now and then in East Coast gossip columns. Here’s something interesting about that part: nary a word out of her mouth. The closest any scribbler ever came to quotation marks in writing about her was a crack in Time magazine from a French actor whose name I didn’t recognize. He’d shacked up with DeHoic during the Cannes film festival one summer between the Russian and Jerzy, but the tryst had an early end tumultuous enough to get the attention of Time’s stringer. According to him, the actor had said, “Any male who could spend twenty-four hours with that Yankette without smacking her at least once is either a weakling or a saint.” I suspect that the politically incorrect epithet Time had euphemized into “weakling” was the one that got a Fox News anchor suspended for using it on the air to describe President Obama.

  Chapter Four

  I recognized DeHoic the second I saw her strolling out of Brookings’ main entrance. Blonde/blue, five-six, one-twenty stark naked if I’m any judge (I am), thirty-six, both age and breasts, little tiny bit of work done on the outside corners of her eyes but very subtle, makeup, low-key and perfectly applied.

  No mystery about the gray-lady nickname. White cotton Oxford-cloth blouse, but everything else she wore was perfectly matched gray—a little darker than dove but at least three shades short of charcoal. Pumps, skirt, jacket—this is Washington, D.C. in the middle of July and she’s wearing a jacket with her outfit—hat somewhere between 1950s stewardess and 1990s female midshipman, and dress gloves. She carried the gloves in her right hand instead of wearing them. Louis Vuitton purse also gray. And it all matched. Even the gloves.

  “Good afternoon. I’m Ann DeHoic. You must be Josie Kendall.” East Coast a
ccent but more Philly than NYC, with a little hint of that Swiss finishing school.

  “Yes. Delighted to meet you.” We shook hands.

  A Mercedes S550 purred up to the curb. Gray. Matched DeHoic’s outfit. Seriously. A chauffeur in black livery with red and gold trim popped out to open the rear door for us. His gray uniform must have been at the cleaners.

  We slid in. The car started rolling toward DuPont Circle. DeHoic extracted a silver cigarette case from her purse, opened it, and held it out to me. I took one. Snap judgment. Good call. She got one for herself and lit them both with a Piaget lighter that probably cost half as much as my first year in college.

  “Jerzy said you don’t smoke.”

  “Basically smoke-free for two years now, but I have a what-the-Hell cigarette every now and then.”

  “Good for you. Smoking can be companionable, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  DeHoic produced an elegant smoke stream at a forty-five-degree angle toward the car’s open sunroof, followed by that look of perfect, eyes-closed contentment that confirmed smokers get from the first puff. Then she met my eyes.

  “Whoever said politics is show business for ugly people never met you. Your photo on the MVC website is attractive, but it doesn’t do you justice. There’s something quite striking about you—an éclat that the picture doesn’t capture.”

  I inclined my head modestly to acknowledge the compliment, and unconsciously touched the bas-relief St. Monica on the ivory brooch I always wear. Photographers who could do me justice charge more than Seamus would pay for anything short of circus sex with an A-list trio.

  “Your hair isn’t dyed, is it?” She sounded surprised.

  “Nope. Creole mom plus Cajun dad equals jet black and glossy. Same with the complexion that makes me look like I’m just back from spring break in Fort Lauderdale even at Christmas parties.”