Malice

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “You may.”

  Meyers strode across the floor and nearly tossed the binder to Huttington. “Is this a copy of your deposition taken last February?” he asked without regard for formalities or manners.

  Huttington made a show of opening the binder and leafing through several of the pages. Finally, he said, “Yes, it appears to be.”

  “Turn to the second-to-last page,” Meyers continued.

  Huttington did as told. He looked up and tried to smile at the jury, though to Karp it came off more as a grimace.

  “Now look four lines from the top, which begins with me asking you a question,” Meyers said. “You there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I asked, ‘Is there anything else you can think of that would be relevant or significant regarding this case? Something I might have missed or was omitted?’ Is that an accurate reading of what I said?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can skip Mr. Barnhill’s response, but I then said, ‘Mr. Huttington, I asked you a question. This is a deposition and you must answer my questions, even if your attorney objects. And do remember you’re under oath.’ Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you acknowledge here today, in front of this jury that you were under oath to tell the whole truth, just like you are today,” Meyers said, letting his anger show.

  “Yes,” Huttington replied. “I was…I am…under oath.”

  “Yes, please remember that,” Meyers said. “Now read the next line, which you addressed to Mr. Barnhill.”

  “I said, ‘That’s okay, Clyde, we have nothing to hide here.’”

  “Nothing to hide,” Meyers repeated. “So skip a couple of lines to your answer to my question, which was, ‘Is there anything else you can think of that would be relevant or significant regarding this case? Something I might have missed or was omitted?’”

  “I said, ‘Uh, no, I can’t think of anything to add that would be relevant or significant,’ and then you asked if I was sure,” the university president replied.

  “Thank you for adding that,” Meyers replied tightly. “And were you sure?”

  Huttington nodded.

  “The court reporter couldn’t hear that, Mr. Huttington. Were you sure?”

  “I said I was but that was because—” Huttington began to say, but was interrupted by Meyers.

  “I didn’t ask you to explain anything, as Mr. Zusskin likes to inform witnesses,” the young attorney spat. “However, my next question to you is…wouldn’t you think that a conversation with Coach Mikey O’Toole in which he admitted he’d made a mistake and had sponsored this party would be relevant or significant?”

  “I suppose, but like I said, I was trying to protect him,” Huttington replied.

  “You suppose? You suppose it might be relevant or significant?” Meyers said, looking to the jury, some of whom had smiles on their faces as they watched the young attorney light into the witness, who was turning paler by the moment.

  “Yes, in hindsight, I should not have tried to protect Coach O’Toole,” Huttington replied.

  “And maybe you should have answered honestly—since I ‘suppose’ you understood you were under oath—when asked if you could think of anything else that was relevant or significant,” Meyers shot back.

  “Objection,” Zusskin said, trying to sound as if this was all making a mountain out of a molehill. “Counsel should save it for his closing arguments.”

  “And maybe counsel should warn his client about perjury,” Meyers replied.

  Allen rapped his gavel once. “Gentlemen, quit the sniping. The objection is overruled. However, if you have anything else to say, Mr. Meyers, please frame it as a question to the witness.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Meyers said, and turned back to the witness stand. “So, Mr. Huttington, I believe a few minutes ago you told the jury that during this alleged meeting between you and Coach O’Toole at which he admitted he’d made a mistake, he also said he did it because he was desperate to sign Mr. Dalton and Mr. Mason because, and I believe I have the quote correct here, they were ‘white, smart, and better team players compared to the “me-first, dumb-ass blacks” on his team.’ Is that correct?”

  “Yes, uh, that’s approximately what he said,” Huttington replied, looking desperately at Zusskin, who looked back without emotion.

  Meyers moved closer to the witness stand but turned to face the jury when he said, “Such a vicious, malicious, terrible thing to say…and yet you made no mention of it when I asked you if you had anything relevant or significant to add to your deposition.”

  Huttington looked at the young attorney in front of him and shook his head, then shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t…I don’t know…I guess I wasn’t…”

  “What, Mr. Huttington, you guess you weren’t telling the truth?” Meyers finished for him.

  “Objection!” Zusskin thundered. “Counsel just asked and answered his own question!”

  “Sustained,” Allen replied mildly. “Mr. Meyers, please allow the witness to answer your questions for himself.”

  “Yes, thank you, Your Honor,” Meyers replied. “All right then, Mr. Huttington, did you tell the truth when I asked you if there was anything relevant or significant to add to your deposition?”

  “I…well, no,” Huttington replied weakly.

  “So why should the jury believe you’re telling the truth now?”

  Huttington looked at his lawyers, who were looking down at the defense table. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Neither do we. No further questions for this witness,” Meyers retorted, and walked back to the plaintiff’s table, where O’Toole and Karp greeted him with smiles.

  After Huttington’s testimony, Zusskin had called a representative of the ACAA to explain the rules and procedures governing complaints and hearings. It was largely fodder to take up time until the end of the day so that the defense could use the weekend to recoup and plan their counter on Monday, which would be highlighted with the testimony of investigator Jim Larkin.

  As the spectators and the defense counsel filed out of the courtroom, Karp looked back and saw that there was one last spectator still standing in the pews. Coach J. C. Anderson looked at him, then shook his head and left. Same to you, Coach, he thought.

  However, it turned out that he was wrong about Anderson. An hour later, as he was awaiting a call from Marlene, there was a knock on the door of his hotel room.

  Opening the door, Karp found Anderson standing in the hall. Without saying anything, the old coach handed him a large envelope. Inside had been a tape cassette and a large sheaf of papers.

  Karp had looked at the papers, which turned out to be a 135-page transcript of Larkin’s interview with Steele Dalton and Michael Mason. “But how? Why?” he asked as he invited Anderson into the room.

  “The how is simple,” Anderson replied. “Zusskin kept the tape in his desk drawer at ACAA headquarters in Boise. The day after the hearing, I dropped by to ask him a few questions you’d raised about the transcript. He had the tape lying on his desk but stuck it in the drawer when he saw me look at it. He told me it had been taped over, but I figured he was lying or he wouldn’t have bothered to hide it. So after your little speech about me the other day, I had a friend, a former secretary of mine who I had a thing with a long time ago, borrow it for me. She also made the transcript.”

  “And the why?” Karp asked.

  Anderson looked at him for a long moment. “The why is a little more complicated.”

  The old man walked over to Karp’s window, which faced north into the mountains. “Beautiful view, no wonder Coach O’Toole likes it here,” he said, and took a deep breath.

  “I believe in the system, Mr. Karp. For most of my adult life, I’ve abided by its rules and regulations and believed that it had the best interests of the student-athlete at heart. A lot of good people, who believed the way I did, have worked for that organization. Yes, there have been times when the association has been hea
vy-handed and arrogant. However, I looked at all the good things the association did and decided the good outweighed the bad.”

  The coach tapped on the window and turned back to face Karp. “But I’ve noticed a lot of changes with the association over the past ten, even fifteen years. It used to be about the student-athlete, now it’s about the association and those in charge, about the power they wield and are unwilling to give up, even when they’re wrong. It’s a big corporation now, with overpaid executives telling coaches that they can’t give a kid money to get home for Thanksgiving or they could be suspended…. And in the end, they’re just a bunch of hypocrites who along with the universities rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in television revenues and ticket sales off the backs of college athletes.”

  “What I don’t get,” Karp said, “is why they went after Mikey O’Toole so hard on such a flimsy case. Even if any of it was true, and it isn’t, they didn’t have enough incontrovertible evidence to nail him for a parking ticket.”

  “That I don’t know,” Anderson said. “I’m aware there’s some animosity there, a holdover from Mikey’s brother, or maybe what the kid said at the funeral about his brother being blackballed. They got their noses out of joint on that one. Or maybe they did believe Porter based on bad fruit not falling far from a rotten tree. But a lot of it was also driven by the university—it was clear they wanted him out—and by Zusskin, but you’d have to ask him.”

  The coach stuck out his hand. “But I mostly brought that to you because of what you said to me about my little talk on fair play when you were a kid. I must have given that speech ten thousand times, and I believe every bit of it. You reminded me of that.”

  Karp shook the coach’s hand. “See you Monday in court?”

  “I’d rather not take the stand, if that’s what you mean,” the coach said. “But if you need me to, I will.”

  “I’ll see what I can do to avoid it.”

  25

  THE TWO GUARDS ON DUTY AT THE UNIFIED CHURCH OF THE Aryan People gatehouse peered through their gun slots into the moonlit forest across the highway, sighting along their AR15 rifles, hoping to get a shot at the intruder. A sudden yipping on the left followed by a howl on the right had them swinging their rifles back and forth like pendulums and spurred another argument.

  “It’s dogs,” Andy Vonderborg stated authoritatively. “Or maybe coyotes. I’ve heared them before on my daddy’s farm in Iowa.”

  “It was wolves, I tell ya,” Ernie Hucker replied. “They’re all over this part of Idaho. Rufus told me that, and he should know. Lived here all of his life.”

  Hucker kept lifting and dropping his goggles over his eyes. “I don’t know about you, Andy, but these night-vision goggles give me the creeps the way they turn everything green in the moonlight, especially the snow under the trees.” He put them back on, looked back through the sights on his rifle, and made little shooting noises. “Pow. Pow. Boy, I’d like to get me a wolf. I’m tired of shooting at paper targets. Maybe the race war will start soon and I can shoot me some niggers.”

  There was a howl again off to the left and they both swung their barrels in that direction, trigger fingers itching to snap off a couple of rounds. Then something landed in the gravel to the right of the gatehouse. They looked at the flash grenade just as it went off.

  The effect through night-vision goggles was about the same as someone sticking white-hot pokers into their eyes. Howling, they ripped the goggles off.

  “Ernie, help me, I can’t see,” Andy cried.

  “I’m blind,” Ernie shouted. “I can’t help you, I’m blind, I tell ya!”

  The young neo-Nazis screamed again, once, when unseen forces clubbed them to the ground and gagged them; and before they could say ‘Heil, Hitler,’ they had their wrists and ankles bound together with plastic wrist cords.

  “Done,” Tran whispered triumphantly. “You too slow. It’s those big fat Indian hands; the fingers get in each other’s way. Now you owe me a dollar.”

  “Like hell,” Jojola whispered back. “You had a head start on me and your guy is skinnier. You have hands like a girl, and why are we whispering; we checked it out, there’s no bad guys within a mile of here.”

  The conversation stopped momentarily when Vonderborg groaned. “That was too easy,” Jojola said. “These guys are the master race?”

  “Doesn’t exactly leave me trembling in fear,” Tran agreed, toeing Hucker to make sure he wasn’t dead. The skinny youth whimpered. “Still want to shoot some niggers, tough guy? Maybe I shoot you.” He looked at his companion with a grin. “Just like the old days. Shall I give the signal?”

  “Be my guest,” Jojola replied. “I’ll get the gate.”

  Stepping back outside the gatehouse, Tran aimed a laser pointer up the road and gave two quick flashes. Immediately engines could be heard starting up and approaching at a rapid clip. Jojola opened the gate just as the dark forms of vehicles traveling without headlights turned onto the gravel road and came to a stop next to the gatehouse.

  Marlene Ciampi stepped out of the lead Hummer along with Sheriff Steve Ireland and a deputy. The next two Hummers carried the eight members of the Payette County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team, who deployed as soon as their vehicles slid to a stop off to the side and took off running down the road.

  “A little dramatic, aren’t they,” Ireland said, grinning at Marlene.

  “Like their boss,” she noted.

  “Oh, to be young again.”

  The next two cars, a regular police cruiser and a pickup truck, were driven by Payette County deputies but otherwise occupied by the 221B Baker Street Irregulars. A third truck, driven by Tom Warren, held the kennels of his bloodhounds, who began to bay until he quickly got out and persuaded them to stop with doggie treats.

  The scientists got out of their vehicles and stood gazing around, wide-eyed with excitement. Somebody quietly told a joke, probably Reedy, and the others laughed.

  Behind the lead cars were four more vehicles, a large black minivan, and a big six-wheeled truck towing a trailer on which sat what looked like a baby bulldozer. The truck driver and the occupants of the minivan stayed in their vehicles.

  That was by agreement with the sheriff, a six-foot-five, 250-pound block of granite with an immense dark mustache, who now walked over to Jojola and Tran and nodded toward the gatehouse. “I take it you two reserve deputies served the warrant,” he said.

  “We tried, but they resisted, sir, and are currently incapacitated,” Jojola replied. “I’m afraid we’ll have to serve the warrant farther up the road at the main compound, sir.”

  “Well, thanks for trying,” Ireland growled. “Knock off the sir and let’s get moving. We’re wasting all of this beautiful dark.”

  Leaving the deputy to watch over the prisoners and the entrance, the three men walked back to the lead Hummer and got in, with Ireland driving and Marlene in the front passenger seat. He looked over at her. “Any ladies want to get off the train, better do it now.”

  Marlene gave him a sideways glance and shook her head. “Screw you. Let’s go, Caveman.”

  “Yaba-daba-doo,” Ireland replied. Putting the car into Drive, he stepped on the gas.

  Yeah, look who’s calling who dramatic, she thought with a smile as they tore down the road. The “Caveman” had been brought into the picture shortly after Marlene called Zook from Colorado, explained the Baker Street Irregulars plan, and suggested that they were going to need help with security.

  Although there were concerns that the Unified Church had sympathizers in the Sawtooth police department, Zook had vouched for Ireland, the sheriff of Payette County.

  “If it was up to him, he would have run the Unified Church off a long time ago,” he said. “The guy’s ex–Green Beret, served something like three tours in Vietnam. All sorts of medals. I once talked to him about what he thought of these Aryans who had just bought the place. He wasn’t too happy about it, said that a lot of the guys he fought beside and ble
d with were black and Hispanic. He had always been known as a good judge of character. After that, all the rest to him was mere cosmetics.”

  When Ireland first met with Zook and Marlene, he’d listened to their plan and began to laugh. “So you’re suggesting that I deputize an Indian police chief who’s a thousand miles out of his jurisdiction and a Vietnamese…well, whatever he is that you’re not saying, but I take it he isn’t your typical Asian gentleman. And that with my little crew, we take on fifty or sixty armed Nazis, so that you and a bunch of ivory-towered theorists can dig up a car and a murder victim…maybe.”

  “That’s about it in a nutshell,” Marlene agreed.

  Ireland looked at Zook, who nodded his head. The sheriff laughed again. “I like it. When do we get started?”

  After Lucy, Jojola, Tran, and Ned arrived, they’d all met at O’Toole’s house instead of the sheriff’s office to avoid raising eyebrows and starting tongues wagging. By consensus, they’d agreed that Ireland would be the tactical commander of the security team.

  “Colonel Steve Ireland was a legend in ’Nam, even for some of us who also spent a lot of time out in the bush, hunting guys in pajamas like this old fart,” Jojola said, hooking a thumb at Tran.

  “I will ignore your insults, as my people were building stone temples and delving into the arts and sciences, when yours were living in mud huts and howling at the moon,” Tran said. “However, I concur with my esteemed comrade’s assessment: Ireland was feared, a ferocious warrior, who some of my men thought could not be killed.”

  Ireland had brought with him U.S. Geological Survey topographical maps, which he laid out on the dining room table. Pulling a sausage-sized Mancuso cigar out of a side pocket of his camouflage pants, he bit off the end and was about to light it when he looked at Mikey O’Toole. “Sorry, do you mind?” he asked, holding up the cigar.