Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  “You got it, Wanda. Thanks for helping me out.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she said, “ever.” She walked out.

  As he waited to exit, he contemplated what to do next. Asking Natascha Schroeder about the white Impala now seemed a bad idea, given the risk it could pose to Wanda. A better plan would be to discover what “ARC” meant in as oblique a manner as possible.

  He checked his watch. Time to go. He donned his overcoat and walked through RM’s kitchen into the alley. The café was the center establishment of a seven-space strip mall. At the front south corner, he scanned the parking lot. No one seemed to be taking an interest in his car.

  He fired it up, turned onto Burlington Road and headed downtown, scanning his mirrors every few seconds. No one seemed to be following him. Wanda’s paranoia was catching.

  He drove to the Kansas Public Life Foundation’s offices on Aaron Burr Street, a block east of the Capitol, and parked in the underground garage. The nonpartisan foundation was a think tank, financed with the oil and ranching fortune of the Williams family. He took the elevator to the third floor. At a desk below a sign saying “Media Division” sat a male receptionist in a blue blazer and gold tie.

  “Terry Conklin, please. Tell him Joe Emery wants a few minutes of his time.”

  The kid nodded and spoke into his desk phone. Fewer than 30 seconds later, Conklin, portly, graying, shaggy, bearded and rumpled as always, came lumbering down the side corridor. “Call security,” he boomed to the receptionist. “I want to know how this man got up here.” As the kid picked up the phone, Conklin, who had no quiet voice, intoned, “Kidding, Harold, kidding.” He threw his arms around Emery and asked, “How ye be, Joseph, how ye be?”

  Hugging him back, Emery said, “Just great, Terry. I’m in love. Wonderful sexy woman named Carol Clark. I've asked her to marry me. I'm to get her answer Thursday.”

  Conklin, who had left the Topeka Ledger a year earlier, was the think tank’s public information director. He pushed Emery to arm’s length and looked him up and down. “Love agrees with you, Joseph. For someone who’s stirred up so much shit and gotten so much blowback, you look remarkably well.”

  Back in Conklin’s office, the men spent 10 minutes bringing each other up to date on their lives. Then Conklin asked, “What brings you up here?”

  “For almost six weeks now, I’ve been working on discovering the story behind the story on the Gunderson dam explosion.”

  “I’ve followed your efforts on The Vindicator. Splendid blog, by the way. Making any money yet?”

  “Yes, actually. More than I thought I’d be making at this point in the mission. Can I talk to you way off the record?”

  Conklin’s eyes narrowed. “You know you can.”

  “It involves your dear friend Natascha.”

  “In a bad way, I hope. That bitch almost got me fired from the Ledger. Claimed I harassed her sexually. And me a gay man.”

  “Yeah, I remember. A bad time for you. Mourners at her funeral promise to be few. It’s not yet clear whether my deal hurts her. It could, I suspect, not that I want to inflict misery on anyone.” Emery told him the story of the white Impala with the classified license tag, culminating in his lunch with Wanda Willetts (whom he didn’t name).

  “What I need to know is how I can find out what ‘ARC’ or ‘the ARC’ is without further setting off alarm bells. I need to protect my source, and I don’t want to alert whoever I’m up against that I know about this. I didn’t want to do research at the state library on state computers or from my own laptop on the Capitol Wi-Fi system. So I thought of you.”

  “Gotcha.” Conklin turned to his desktop and tickled the keyboard. “We have a search algorithm that can identify any state program, agency or contractor, past or present. It combines public information from the state with data from Google, Bing and other private super-search engines. Our IT people, who are 10 times better than the state’s, designed it for us.”

  After perhaps 40 seconds, he motioned Emery to stand behind him. “Look at this. Only one hit. A blast from the past. The Agricultural Research Center. Established in the early 1980s, when rural interests still controlled the Legislature. As I recall, it was a taxpayer giveaway – ‘investment,’ the Ag Lobby called it – for plant genetics research, livestock breeding improvements and better irrigation methods in the west, i.e., drawing down the aquifer even more quickly. But after the 1990s census, when the cities and suburbs took over the Legislature, public funding dwindled.”

  “What funding, if any, does it get now?”

  Conklin caressed the computer keys a bit more. “According to our proprietary expanded state budget program, annual funding for the ARC, through the Department of Agriculture, declined to $100,000 between 1995 and 2006, held tight at $100K for the next three years and then increased over the last budget cycle to its current level of $1 million. And get this: Instead of three research centers, like it had as recently as 1995, the ARC has only one. The ones in Ellis and Crawford counties – that’s north central and southeast Kansas respectively – were apparently turned over to nearby public universities. The remaining center is …”

  “In Garfield County.”

  “That’s right. Sixty three hundred acres – that’s nearly 10 sections – near the town of Eminence. That’s the back of the back of beyond.”

  “So I’ve been told. A million dollars? What on Earth for?”

  Conklin shrugged. “According to the Ag Department, research and development for improving irrigation methods and livestock husbandry.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  Conklin shrugged. “Within those broad R&D confines, it’s discretionary grant spending for the ag secretary, Eunice Swindle, and her department’s governing board. Pretty generous, considering how tight state revenue has become. But if anyone can find out what it means, I'll bet you can.”

  “Until a few days ago, I wouldn’t have taken that bet,” Emery said. “Thanks, Terry.”

  “Thank you, Joseph. You've brightened what was shaping up as a really dull afternoon.”

  Chapter 22: An Old Soul

  November 23, 8 p.m.

  “I’ve got something for you, Poppy, something you really need.” Jay Three Emery, or J-3, as he now inscribed his name, patted the backpack dangling from his left shoulder. Having just finished an oh-so-civilized dinner with Emery’s ex-wife and her husband at their elegant Queen Anne home in the Lawrence historic district, father and son, bundled up in their coats, were walking up Massachusetts Street toward Emery’s hotel. The brisk north wind had cleared all but a few pedestrians from the sidewalks of the downtown shopping district.

  “What is it?” Emery asked.

  The younger Emery leaned close to his father’s ear. “Gun.”

  “What?”

  “A handgun.”

  “What are you doing carrying a gun around?”

  J-3 shrugged. “I like guns. I have several. This one has a clean history. It’s perfect for an ink-stained wretch who keeps fucking with the hyenas. Dude I know over in K.C. sold it to me. Don’t worry. It’s clean.”

  Emery was appalled. “What has happened to you, kid? I come up here to take you out west for Thanksgiving only to learn you’ve dropped out of KU and are earning what appears to be a good living by means invisible to your mom and stepdad. You’re a gunrunner, is that it?” They stopped at Ninth Street to wait for a red light to change.

  “Fuck no, Poppy. I’m no gunrunner. I’m an opportunist, an entrepreneur. I see ways to corral a little money for myself and my friends and I seize upon them. I’m good at it. We're into group homes for our little tribe, for instance. We buy old houses from slumlords for next to nothing and fix them up as crash pads for us and our friends. Those who crash pay us a little rent. Adds up. Pretty lucrative. Carpe diem, just like you always taught me.”

  “Damn it, J-3, I meant that as an intellectual construct for building a life and a career.”

  The kid, Joseph Raymo
nd Emery III, medium of height like his father but maybe 20 pounds lighter and sporting a brush cut, laughed heartily. “I’m not a vagabond or a criminal, Poppy, though sometimes I do things the cops wouldn’t like, like carrying a gun across the state line to make sure my father has a way to protect himself. Words won’t cut it with the hyenas after your ass.”

  They crossed the street with the green light, walked halfway up the block and turned into the hotel lobby. As they waited in silence for the elevator, Emery wondered why he wasn’t more upset by the life his 20-year-old son was leading. J-3 had been a hard-nosed but cheerful realist virtually from the day he emerged from the womb – so grounded in the world, so bereft of fantasy that Emery often wondered whether he possessed one of those legendary old souls. But if the kid was a member of that select confraternity of wizards whose purpose on Earth is to show ordinary mortals the path of true progress, he certainly didn’t lack the capacity for love – or the need to be loved in return.

  Indeed, the kid loved his family and friends with an intensity that sometimes was frightening. Emery recalled the pounding that J-3 had given a middle-school classmate who’d said Alice, his mom, looked fuckable. The larger, stronger boy was out of school with cuts and bruises for a week; J-3, who’d come through the fight unscathed, was out of school on suspension for the same period. After that, and all through high school, no one messed with the kid, even though he was smaller than many of his classmates.

  The kid was a 17-year-old junior when, two years before, the Examiner reassigned Emery to Wichita, 140 miles southwest of Lawrence. That was when Alice acted on her feelings for Erasmus Biddle, an abstracted, tweedy professor of philosophy with a sweet disposition and a trust fund, and dumped her scribbler husband. She’d never forgiven Emery, her sweetheart at Ohio State back in the 1970s, for abandoning his plan to attend law school. The pay cut the Examiner had imposed on Emery as a condition of keeping his job was too much for her to accept. Rather than look for work to supplement the family’s income, she opted for a life of faux refinement with Biddle. The only good news in the break-up was that Emery wasn’t required to pay alimony and got to keep the money from the sale of their house.

  When Emery told J-3 that a divorce was in the offing, the kid professed to have seen it coming for years. He appeared to take what should have been a major life disruption in stride, blithely announcing he’d remain in Lawrence with his mom and stepdad rather than follow his father to a city with which he was unfamiliar.

  “Don’t take it personally, Poppy,” the kid had said as Emery searched his eyes for signs of hurt and betrayal. “Biddle’s an idiot and Mom’s lost her brains. I’d really rather be with you, but I know the set-up up here. I’d have to start over down in Wichita, which I would've done if you guys had split earlier, when the marriage began to fall apart, and I had more time to adapt.”

  “When was that?” Emery demanded wryly.

  The kid shrugged. “When Mom and Biddle started fucking, back in the ninth grade.”

  Emery, shocked and distressed that the kid had tumbled to was happening with Alice long before he did, discontinued that conversation. But he had always worried that the break-up caused more damage to J-3’s soul – old though it might be – than the kid let on.

  Now, as he unlocked his room and motioned J-3 to enter, he said, “Level with me, kid. Do you feel like your mom and I abandoned you? I worry that our self-absorption made you feel you’d been thrown to the hyenas.”

  J-3 gave Emery his enigmatic smile. “Naw, Poppy, it was cool what happened. I know you guys love me. I never doubted it. I knew the break-up wasn’t about me. I know it wasn’t my fault, like you said over and over. Most importantly, you and Mom helped me understand the importance of looking out for No. 1, Mom especially. It gave me courage to live with no illusions, no blinders.

  “The only thing that frosted my cojones was that you were so passive about it all. For awhile I thought you were a wimp, letting Biddle take Mom away from you. But later I realized that was the way you wanted it. You were sick of her.”

  Ouch. Too true. Time to discontinue this conversation, too. So he said, “I can’t take that gun, J-3. I want you to get rid of it. I want you to swear off guns.”

  “Can’t do that, Poppy. I rarely carry but when I do, I really need to. In some situations, it’s the only way people will take you seriously. But I’m not reckless, Poppy, honestly I’m not. I’m disciplined. I keep my guns locked up in a safe place. So far, I’ve only fired them at our range. I'm a good shot.”

  “Our range? You have a firing range?”

  “Yeah, over in DeSoto in the basement of this abandoned warehouse. My man Juwan found it for us. We sound-proofed it with sandbags. A bunch of us do target practice over there.”

  “Juwan Pham, your little friend from grade school?”

  “He’s not so little now, Poppy. He’s six foot, 200 pounds, all muscle. Smart as hell and strong. Says you know his older brother Malik, who went all Republican on the family, poli sci at the U, moved to Topeka, wears sharp suits, helped that dude Jung in his campaign for governor.”

  All this was too much for Emery, who, not for the first time, cursed himself for his careerism, which obviously had diverted too much of his attention and energy away from the development of the kid. “I know Malik a little,” he murmured.

  Apparently a mind-reader, too, J-3 grinned and said, “Don’t worry, Poppy. I am a very careful person. For instance, I only carry a pre-paid cell phone. Once a month, sometimes more, I drop my SIM card into the Kaw and get a new one with a new number. Paranoia equals safety.”

  As if to prove his point, J-3 scanned the room carefully, focusing on the walls and ceilings. Then he pointed to Emery’s Dell laptop, sitting on a table beside the bed. “That up?”

  Emery shook his head.

  The kid looked at the lamps and phone jacks. Apparently satisfied his dad wasn’t under surveillance, he opened the backpack and pulled out a purple velvet Crown Royal pouch. From it he extracted an elegant little snub-nose revolver. “This here’s a Charter Arms Undercover Lite, .38 caliber, easy to hide. There’s five rounds in the cylinder. Nice thing about this gun is it leaves no brass. That’s why I chose it over the Glock I was also considering.”

  “Guns creep me out, J-3. I really don’t want it.”

  “What if those men in the Crown Vic had stopped and come back to finish you off? Wouldn’t you have been glad to have a weapon like this?”

  Emery thought about the helpless rage that sometimes consumed him, and that ongoing sense that thugs were conspiring to harm him and his loved ones and he could do nothing about it. “I’ll take it,” he said.

  J-3 handed the pistol over, butt first. Emery guessed it weighed less than a pound. It felt good in his hand. “Can I have that pouch?”

  J-3 smiled and handed it to him. Emery put the gun the pouch, then stashed it deep inside his tech bag. He’d decide later where to store it.

  He looked at his son and said, “You know, they might come after …”

  “I know,” the kid interrupted. “Juwan and I and our friends are already on it. We’ll protect Mom and goofy Biddle if the hyenas try to cause trouble over here. It’s you and your new chick and her peeps I’m worried about.”

  “Me, too, J-3, and please call her Carol to her face and behind her back.”

  “Got it, Poppy. I meant no disrespect.”

  Emery smiled at his son, heart churning with love and dread. “I know you didn’t, kid.”

  “Look, Poppy. I know you came up here to take me out to – where is it again?”

  “Ouimet, out past Dodge City.”

  “Juwan and I want to drive down by ourselves. He’s tricked out a new ride he wants to road test, an ’05 Honda Civic with the V-Tec engine.”

  “That’s fine,” Emery said. “I needed to come up here anyway today. If you have your own transportation, it'll save me a trip back – though I'll miss spending more time with you. I’ll e-mail you the
directions. I’ll let Rose, Carol’s mother, know we’ll need another place at the table and a place for you guys to sleep. Just allow plenty of time to get down there. And keep in mind that if you speed and the troopers stop you, they can search your car at will.”

  J-3 beamed. “We know that, Poppy. We'll leave tomorrow. We’ll keep a low profile. And we’ve got a contraband compartment the cops will never find if they do stop us.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  Chapter 23: Thanksgiving

  November 25, 9 a.m.

  The big question for today was whether Carol would say yes to Emery’s marriage proposal. Lately, she’d been silent on the subject. Whether she would agree to marry him, however, was not the only question on his mind as he stood beside Carol and Rose in their kitchen playing sous chef: chopping sweet potatoes, mixing ingredients for biscuits and dinner rolls, filling pie shells with pureed pumpkin and sliced apples, mixing green beans with mushroom soup concentrate and mixing diced celery and onions with bread crumbs for turkey stuffing (Rose scoffed at the newfangled notion that baking stuffing inside the bird posed a health risk).

  There was also this nettlesome question: What, if anything, should be done about the mutual attraction that had engulfed Sadie and Juwan Pham Wednesday afternoon, after he and J-3 arrived in Ouimet?

  Emery had known Juwan since he and J-3 met in the third grade. He saw no problem with a relationship between Sadie, whom he'd come to love as his almost-stepdaughter, and his son’s best friend. Juwan still possessed the innate sweetness that had prompted Emery and Alice to deem him a suitable playmate for their only child (not that they had much say in the matter). But Carol seemed nonplussed that her sensible 18-year-old daughter, a former 4-H’er whose grounding in rural life had seemed rock-solid, was smitten with a young post-modern man who was equal parts Caucasian, Vietnamese, African American and, as he had explained at dinner Wednesday night, “Trail of Tears Cherokee.”