Damage Control

by Michael Bowen

  “Yeah yeah yeah.”

  “By rights this should be a million-dollar campaign. Seven hundred thousand is really bargain basement.”

  “I’ll throw you a fig-leaf. Five hundred ten thousand. Dollars, not euros.” Seamus winced as if someone had gut-punched him, but DeHoic didn’t seem impressed. “That’s as high as I’ll go.”

  Long silence. My mouth stayed firmly shut. Seamus’ lips quivered. No way he’d walk away from the table with that kind of money sitting on it.

  “All right,” he said finally. “I’m not happy about it. We won’t make a penny at that level after we’ve covered creative and production costs. But for Jerzy’s sake I guess we can do business on that basis—if you accept the intended-use clause.”

  “Agreed in principle, but I need wiggle room.” Abruptly standing up, DeHoic wig-wagged her right hand between her lawyer and Seamus. “You two work on it and get it done. I’m going out for some polluted air.”

  She turned her gaze to me. I got the message right away.

  “Would you like some company?”

  “I certainly would.”

  I figured the point of the break was for DeHoic to have a cigarette, but I only get partial credit for that one. We’d put a full block between us and MVC’s building before she pulled her silver case out. She went through the motions of offering one to me, and she just shrugged when I murmured “No thanks.” She took her time lighting up—not the way someone does it when they’re desperate for a fix.

  It was a beautiful day, for July in Washington. Temperature under ninety and humidity behaving itself. Puffy clouds in a blue sky. Walking felt great. When you peel away all the pretension and facades and self-importance, Washington really is basically a Southern city—maybe not as southern as Birmingham or Nashville, but every bit as Dixie as Richmond or Baton Rouge. Walking along like that reminded me of strolling down St. Phillip Street with Papa when I was eight or nine years old, before he got sick.

  We stopped in the middle of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, leaned against the granite railing, and took in one of the views the tourists come for: Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, and the reflecting pool between the Lincoln and World War II memorials.

  “I can’t read you.” DeHoic let smoke trail from her lips toward the Potomac. “I can’t see the wheels turning in your head the way I can most people’s.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “Logically, I know you have to be thinking of some way to leverage this into a payday from Dierdorf. You’re young and not as savvy as you think you are, so you just might be dumb enough to think you can pull it off. But I can’t be sure.”

  “I have no idea of playing a double-game with you. As Louisiana’s own Huey Long once said, an honest politician is someone who, once he’s bought, stays bought. MVC is finished if word gets out that we betray paying clients.”

  “What would you have said if you were planning to fist-fuck me up the ass with Dierdorf before I was halfway back to New York?”

  “Exactly what I just said, I guess.” I turned an absolutely neutral expression on her. “But I would have said it with an earnest smile, and bobbed my head in a charmingly girlish way while I said it.”

  The smile she gave me for once seemed real. Had some warmth and depth to it. The barren womb apparently hadn’t completely wiped out her capacity for genuine human connection. She reached in her purse, fished around like women often do, and finally came up with a much-folded piece of paper that looked pretty beaten up. She handed it to me. I unfolded the thing and studied it. Looked to me like a PDF printed off an e-mail.

  “Flight plan for a Gulfstream two-eighty private jet,” I said. “Hays, Kansas to Washington, D.C. Leaving at five o’clock in the morning on the day Jerzy was murdered.” I memorized the aircraft identification number, just on the off-chance that it might match up with numbers in the improvised screenshot I’d taken.

  “One of Dierdorf’s main holding companies owns that plane. He’s not on the passenger list, but he treats that plane like his own personal property. It doesn’t fly anywhere without him.”

  “ETA D.C. area long enough before the murder to make setting up an ambush possible even after considering ground travel,” I said after studying the flight plan some more. “Cutting it a little close, though.”

  “Oh, Dierdorf himself wouldn’t have been the trigger-man. I’ve seen him hunt big game, or try to. It took him four shots to get one elk that just stood stock still, like the Helen Keller of quadrupeds.”

  “Then what’s the connection? Why would he fly to D.C. that day?”

  “Maybe he’d set up a meeting that Jerzy would leave his home to travel to, putting himself in a sniper’s sights when he did. Where were you and Jerzy supposedly going when he stopped the bullet?”

  “To see a key potential investor.”

  DeHoic looked at me for three long seconds, as if with a little silent encouragement I could connect the dots for myself. Then she apparently decided that another hint wouldn’t do any harm.

  “Which car were you going to take to the meeting?”

  “My Ford Fusion.”

  “Instead of Jerzy’s Infiniti or his Porsche.”

  “I buy American. MVC policy.”

  “It would make sense for Dierdorf to tell Jerzy to come to the meeting in a car that people wouldn’t recognize as his. And I’m betting Jerzy told you to park on the east end of the house’s long, curving driveway, where the hedge would screen your car from casual observers, instead of on the west end, near the garage.”

  I blinked. How did she know THAT? Then I nodded.

  “That’s why he took you out the back door and through the garden. That would be the quickest way to get to the east end of the driveway—if you started from the master bedroom on the second floor, and went down the back stairway to the kitchen.”

  I winced. Tried not to, but I couldn’t help it. She looked back over the river, pretending that she hadn’t noticed. A gull, almost pure white with a little blue-gray tinge on the underside of its feathers, seemed to hang in the air, wings spread but motionless, floating on the breeze with only the minimal, barely perceptible forward movement necessary to keep from falling.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” DeHoic asked.

  “It truly is.”

  She took the flight plan back from me and refolded it.

  “That isn’t just a flight plan. It’s an insurance policy in case things get too hot for your husband. ‘Reasonable doubt’ written all over it. So if I were you, I’d try real hard to keep me happy.”

  “I assure you I will bend every effort in that direction.”

  “Don’t blow me off, honey. You’re a decent girl, and you’re not as dumb as you look. But you will be in way over your pretty little head if you start fucking around with Dierdorf. Plenty of taxpayer dollars could still stick to his fingers before that solar power boondoggle is played out.”

  “I hear you loud and clear.”

  She nodded at the gull, which seemed like it had hardly moved.

  “That lovely bird floating elegantly on the air with such luminous grace while the sun glints evocatively from its wings—do you know what it’s doing?” Without waiting for an answer, DeHoic turned to face me. “It’s looking for something to kill.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  By the time we got back, Seamus and DeHoic’s lawyer were finished and seemed happy with their work. DeHoic sat down next to her lawyer. Taking her time about it, she glared at the neat, Palmer Method handwriting squeezed into the margin of the draft agreement next to a printed paragraph that had been crossed out with a long, flat Z. She pored over it as if she were a rabbi parsing the Talmud.

  “Why can’t we say ‘present intention’?” she demanded, looking up and locking eyes with Seamus. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Because that w
ould tell anyone who sees it that I knew you might have a different intention in twenty-four hours—which would defeat the purpose.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Tell you what.” Seamus smiled and spread his arms expansively. “I can have these changes incorporated into a clean draft in five minutes. I bet the words will look better to you in type.”

  “Skip it. No clean draft. We’ll initial the changes and sign it as it is.”

  “That works too.”

  “But it’s going to cost you. Since you’re so scared of the cops, I get a bargaining-with-pussies discount. Four ninety-five. Say yes or I walk.”

  Seamus reached for the pen like it was the last cigarette on Earth.

  Damage Control Strategy,

  Day 9

  (the second Friday after the murder)

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “You know, miss, you can do this online.”

  “I do realize that, Ms. Robinson.” I nodded earnestly at the gray-haired, African-American woman across the counter from me in a room sprawling over roughly a quarter of the John Wilson Municipal Administration Building’s third floor. The white-on-beige nameplate in front of her read “Glencora Robinson.” “But I thought I’d better come down in person because of the urgency of my situation, what with the break-in at my office last weekend and all. I really hope that you’ll be able to expedite my application.”

  Pronounced skepticism colored the look she gave me. Outright hostility saturated the glare she gave Seamus. He had an inconspicuous digital camera trained on my encounter with this put-upon civil servant who just wanted to get to four-thirty p.m. so that she’d be one week closer to her full-pension vesting date. I was applying for a license permitting me to carry a firearm for personal protection and self-defense. Only my application or a bad case of constipation could have accounted for her painfully annoyed expression, and I’m betting on the application. If the Supreme Court hadn’t dragged it kicking and screaming into a plain-meaning view of the Second Amendment, the District of Columbia wouldn’t even let citizens possess guns in their own homes within city limits, much less walk around with the things.

  Robinson clicked her eyes down to the application I’d filled out. She frowned at it, like an English teacher looking for sloppy diction. Mumbling to herself, she went through the copies of my birth certificate, driver’s license, passport, and other attachments that were a big part of the reason it had taken me until Friday afternoon to get here. She looked back up at me.

  “Did you report the break-in you talk about to the Metropolitan Police?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you have a copy of the incident report prepared by the responding officer?”

  “Yes, ma’am, right here.” I produced it and pushed it across the counter through the opening at the bottom of the window.

  “Hmm.” Picking the single page up, she gave it critical scrutiny. “This says that the perpetrator was arrested.”

  “Yes, ma’am. My understanding is that he was released on bail earlier this week.”

  “Hmm.” She paused. Then her face brightened. “We will need a certificate that you have completed a properly accredited firearms-training course.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I have that right here.”

  I slid that one through her window. Seamus and I had taken care of it the day before, at a place called Shooter’s Paradise. Northern Virginia is lousy with accredited firearms-training courses, most of them sporting big NRA-Approved decals on their doors. I’d had to show that I could load the weapon safely, fire it properly, and clean it after firing it. Also that I was familiar with laws governing use of firearms, particularly about resorting to lethal force in self-defense. Ninety minutes flat. I’m a quick study, and the instructor had graded on a generous curve.

  Robinson sighed. She assembled the collection of paper and tapped its bottom and sides on the counter to even them up. She busied herself for about seven seconds making a photocopy of the application’s top page on a multi-use printer just behind her and to her right. She held the copy in a slot at the bottom of a large gray clock beside her. Something in the clock made a whirring-stamping sound. She passed the date-stamped copy back through the window to me.

  “It appears that everything is in order.” She didn’t sound any too pleased about that. “That is your verification that your application is complete and has been accepted for filing and consideration this date. After appropriate review and verification, you will receive written notification of the disposition of the application.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Do you know when I might expect to hear about being allowed to protect myself?”

  “I will advise the appropriate offices of your wish for expedited treatment, but I cannot promise that you will hear by any particular date.”

  I gave her a pleading little pout that I’d worked on in front of a ladies’ room mirror just before Seamus and I came over.

  “It’s just that, with the break-in and everything, I’m pretty concerned about my physical safety and I was hoping…”

  That did it. Challenging her answer instead of just walking away after she’d dismissed me broke through the armor-plated bureaucratic caution she had built up over the years during her slow but steady rise from clerk-typist to her present position.

  “I will advise reviewing officials of your request for special treatment,” she said icily, saying ‘special treatment’ as if it were the kind of language that used to get kids’ mouths washed out with soap. “But everyone who submits one of these things thinks they have to have a gun yesterday morning.”

  Seamus beamed. That sound-bite provided the icing on Friday’s cake.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Had a little bounce in my step as Seamus and I headed back to the office. Partly fantasies of A Star is Born with yours truly playing the lead, but mostly just TGIF. Main item on Friday night’s agenda was pizza and beer with Rafe and Theo McAbbott, and I was flat looking forward to it.

  Then just as I got to my office a call from Rafe snagged things up.

  “You’ll have to solo with McAbbott, babe.”

  “Why?”

  “Matt Crisscuts is having a crisis of conscience.”

  “He has one of those about every six months, doesn’t he?”

  “Roughly. If he changes his position on abortion, his cable show will no longer be viable outside the womb. Or inside it, for that matter. So he’s convinced himself that he can square the position with his religious faith. Then he sees a picture of himself as an altar boy or smells some incense or accidentally looks at a Planned Parenthood sting video, and he spirals downward. Bottom line, he needs an old buddy to listen to him while we drink all night.”

  Couldn’t argue with any of that. As Papa used to say, pangs of conscience mean you still have a conscience, and that’s good. Besides, when a friend needs you, that trumps everything else.

  “Maybe we should just reschedule,” I said.

  “Can’t see it. We need to feel out Theo about that picture before you debrief your Uncle Darius.”

  “True.” Chewed on my lower lip for a second while I tried to figure out how to square the circle. Failed. “Okay, then. You and Matt have yourselves a good night. I’ll tackle Theo all by myself.”

  ***

  Wonder if he’s gay. I know it makes me sound full of myself, but that thought actually crossed my mind near the end of my first half-hour on Theo’s screened-in back porch Friday night. We’d eaten six slices of not-bad thin-crust cheese pizza between us. We’d had a Miller Lite each. And Theo McAbbott had not come on to me. Not even the first little off-color joke to get the ball rolling. Theo’s only wife had divorced him more than ten years ago, and most of the time an unmarried straight male who isn’t in holy orders will put some kind of a move on me if we’re alone together for more than ten minutes.


  Not Theo. So: Wonder if he’s gay?

  I had gone over the DeHoic/Dierdorf picture while we were noshing, getting non-committal nods and “uh-huhs” in response. With no intention of nibbling at either of the two remaining pizza slices, it seemed like as good a time as any to circle around to the excellent nerd’s story about getting the picture from Theo. So I did. Theo took it totally in stride.

  “That boy was telling the God’s honest truth.” Theo nodded emphatically. “I took the picture, and I’m the one gave it to him. And I’ll tell you what: he made it worth my while.”

  “How in the world did he do that?”

  “Oh, come on now.” Theo’s chuckle made the sides of his mouth and the outside corners of his eyes crinkle in a way that reminded me of Papa. “You’re way too smart to think I can answer that question. Anything I’d tell you would have to be a flat-out lie. So why don’t we just mark it as a no-comment and move on?”

  “Fair enough. And you sure aren’t going to tell me whom you were working for when you did the surveillance.”

  “Amen, sister!” Huge grin, punctuated by a hallelujah clap with his arms stretched way out, like you might see at a tent-revival.

  “So, is there anything you can tell me?”

  Theo did your basic U-turn and he did it in a big hurry. Face got serious, almost solemn. For two or three seconds I couldn’t hear anything but the rotating fan behind me blowing evening air around, and frustrated flies bouncing off gray mesh screens. When Theo spoke he’d dropped the bantering salesman schtick and talked to me like I was just a buddy on the receiving end of an intervention.

  “There is one thing I can tell you. One pretty important thing.” He took a deep breath. “Sanford Dierdorf is your basic twenty-four-carat bastard. Bad guy. Any crime that pays well and doesn’t require physical courage, he’s game for it. He’s fleeced taxpayers and investors fourteen ways from Sunday on at least three different projects. That solar power start-up that he’s skimmed several million from is the least of his frauds—practically a sideshow.”