Cold Winter Rain

by Steven Gregory

  “Why don’t you just tell me what’s there?”

  Godchaux sighed. “It’s pages and pages of data. Real pump volumes and reported ones. Information about payments and payoffs. It’s all there. Everything you need. I don’t have the details. That’s why you create the document.”

  I nodded. “I think I know what the government will give me in exchange. But surely Kramer wasn’t ready to file a lawsuit based on the notes I saw in his file. Did you give him any other information?”

  “Yeah, I did. But I don’t believe any of that information would assist you in finding Kris Kramer.”

  Godchaux went up to the bar and borrowed a pen, then returned to the table and unfolded a cocktail napkin to one sheet. He wrote the password, an email address and a telephone number on the thin paper.

  “Here,” he said. “I’ve communicated past my comfort zone with the telephone number you used to contact me. This one is untraceable. So is the email address. Memorize.”

  The password and the telephone number were easy; the Hushmail email address, random numbers at Hushmail.com, not so easy. I looked at the information for a few moments, the rhythm of the numbers playing through my head like a melody. “Okay,” I said.

  Godchaux tore off the square of the napkin containing the numbers, produced a cigarette lighter, and before the bartender knew it had happened, the paper had turned to smoke and ash.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Back at Lakefront Airport, I called Bill Woolf on his cell and told him I needed to see him at his office first thing in the morning. He did not seem all that pleased to hear from me on Sunday morning, but he promised to meet me at seven-thirty in his office the next day.

  On the other hand, Sally seemed quite pleased to hear from me. I sent her a text and caught her shopping at Whole Foods. “Sunday morning is the best time to do anything in Alabama except any time when an Alabama football game is on TV,” she texted back. “All the Baptists are in church. Both times? LOL!” I told her I would connect with her when I landed in Birmingham.

  In the FBO to check the aviation weather, I reflected on my conversation with Michael Godchaux and the questions it raised.

  By nature, I’m a skeptic.

  A few years after the first Gulf War ended, a lawyer in Houston with a hundred dollar haircut and a beach house once featured in Southern Living called and wanted me to help investigate the complaints of so-called Gulf War veterans the media had named “Gulf War Syndrome.” My Birmingham law firm had played a minor role in one of his mass tort cases.

  The lawyer told me he’d interviewed two dozen Gulf War veterans, most of them women, and that he and some biologist had a theory that Gulf War syndrome was caused by a bacteriological agent invented in the United States and sold by this country to Iraq when it looked as though Iran was winning its war with Iraq. The bug was manufactured from part of the AIDS virus, he added.

  I asked Mr. Haircut, Esquire, how many regular Marine officers he’d interviewed. He was silent for twenty seconds. Then he said, “Well just because these victims are female… .”

  “How many female regular Army Rangers, officers or enlisted personnel, have you interviewed?” I said.

  There was another long pause. “Well, most of these ladies are reservists or members of National Guard units,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I said. “I appreciate your calling, but I don’t think I’m interested.”

  I wondered briefly whether in Michael Godchaux I had encountered another Mr. Haircut.

  The damp Southeastern weather had deteriorated since my flight down to New Orleans. The ceiling was now one thousand overcast, and a light rain was falling on Lake Pontchartrain. No safe choice but to file IFR and climb above the liquid atmosphere. Fortunately, the cloud tops were only at nine thousand feet, about two minutes of climbing through the gunk in the Albatros if the Houston Air Route Traffic Control Center would allow me the uninterrupted climb.

  The ARTCC controller nixed my proposed flight plan to go direct to flight level one eight zero and required me to hold at nine thousand feet. Turbulence would lurk at the horizontal condensation boundary.

  I read back the amended clearance and taxied out to the hold-short line. I was number two for takeoff behind a Cessna Citation I that had seen better days.

  One minute after takeoff and just after the tower handed me off to Center, the controller in Houston gave me approval to continue to eighteen thousand feet. I broke out into bright winter sunshine around nine thousand feet, rode a few bumps there and continued to the lowest of the flight levels.

  A few minutes later, I was handed off to Atlanta, and by then it was time to start down. I was cleared to descend in a series of steps and a couple of turns until I came dripping down out of the low clouds on the ILS approach to runway two-four in Birmingham. I landed, and, since no aircraft were holding for takeoff, I used air braking to save the brakes, holding the nose wheel off the centerline down to fifty knots.

  Back in the FBO, I texted Sally again. She was home on the Southside, and, having little else to accomplish on a Sunday afternoon, I stopped at the hotel, picked up my running shoes and gear, a change of clothes, and on impulse, red carnations at the gift shop, and drove to her place.

  Warm and filled with midday light, Sally’s condo felt like a haven from the cold, damp day.

  “Hey,” Sally said when she opened the door.

  “Hey yourself.” I handed her the carnations. “Here. For you.”

  “Thanks! Carnations. Love them. My father used to wear a white one in his lapel sometimes. Aren’t you coming in?”

  “I suppose I might,” I said.

  Sally filled a crystal vase with water for the carnations. “There. Not just for me,” she said. “For us.” Barefoot, she wore an Alabama Southern sweatsuit and, I soon discovered, nothing else. We spent the next two hours in her bedroom.

  Afterwards, I made a late lunch for us, shrimp salad, goat cheese, and cranberry crackers Sally had bought at the Whole Foods store. We sat at her little bar to eat while I gave her a general outline of the Michael Godchaux meeting.

  “I’ve been thinking while you’ve been jousting about the South,” Sally said. “You know it’s not as though I don’t have a stake here. One of my girls is missing, another dead, and you know about my relationship with Don. You asked me why I said what I said in the dorm. ‘We have to get them.’ Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “I do want to participate. I know I’m just a soccer coach, so tell me if I’m intruding, but I do have some questions about all this.”

  I nodded. “Understandable.”

  “So, why did you go to New Orleans today?”

  I explained the purpose of my visit to the Crescent City without naming Michael Godchaux.

  Sally frowned. “So, how is this person related to Kris Kramer’s disappearance, exactly?”

  “I barely know whether it’s related vaguely. Much less exactly. But I do know Don Kramer was working on a big case involving the oil business and politicians on the take. Maybe payoffs from the New Orleans Mob. And I know somebody sent muscle to try to scare me off. That’s the style of that sort of crowd. I’m just pulling on strings. Somewhere there’s a string connected to Kris Kramer.”

  “And someone killed Akilah.”

  “Yes.”

  “Same someone?”

  “I’m sure that question has occurred to the police. I’m just trying to concentrate on finding Kris.”

  “I appreciate that. It’s just… .”

  “What?”

  Sally hugged herself and shook her head slowly from side to side. “Don led a … a complicated life. He worked on more than one legal matter. When I was with him, he’d take calls from people. Not just related to his law practice. Politicians. College friends. Lawyers he’d met traveling for cases. People he’d met in bars. All sorts.”

  “I think I understand. I should not approach this with tunnel vision. Could be related to so
me other case.”

  Sally shrugged. “Just keep pulling on those threads.”

  We finished eating, mostly in silence. As the dark afternoon grew darker, the rain began again, a steady downpour that didn’t look as though it might abate for hours.

  Sally collected the plates and rinsed them and placed them in her dishwasher. She came around behind me, leaned her head on my back, and spoke softly into my neck. “You don’t really want to go back to that convention hotel tonight, do you? After all, if you’re concerned about my safety, what better protection could I have than your presence?” she said.

  I didn’t want to spend another night in a convention hotel, not this night, not any night. “Actually, I see no reason to go back there at all except to pack my bags and check out.”

  “And stay here for … for the duration?”

  “What saves a man is to take a step,” I said. “Saint-Exupery.”

  “It seems like the right step to me if it does to you,” Sally said. “Sally Kronenberg.”

  I couldn’t argue with Saint-Exupery and Kronenberg. I called the hotel and told them I would be checking out this afternoon, then drove to the hotel, collected my things, checked out, and moved in with Sally.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Monday January 30

  Last night’s rain had stopped after midnight. Dawn arrived gradually over Red Mountain, a smooth gray dome covering the Birmingham sky. Before Sally awoke, I sat on the cushion for fifteen minutes, then showered and made a breakfast of eggs, whole wheat toast, and coffee.

  As I finished cooking, Sally walked out of the bedroom in a white satin robe. “I woke up and smelled coffee,” she said. “I’m hungry. Did you make enough for both of us?”

  “Two of us here, aren’t there?” I set out plates and napkins and served the food while Sally poured coffee, and we ate together in silence like an old married couple.

  Chewing her last bite of toast, Sally gestured toward my zabuton and bolster, which I had stowed in a corner beside the windows with the view of the mountain. “Were you doing yoga?” she asked.

  “Not exactly.” I explained that I tried to meditate a few minutes every day.

  “So, are you a Buddhist?” she asked.

  Tempted as I was to say “Not exactly” again, I had come to recognize such an answer for the dodge it is, particularly in the deep South, where it seems at least at first glance that the only categories of religious views recognized by most are Baptist, Episcopalian, Holy Roller and atheist. Only the broad-minded recognized Catholics and Jews. That’s a vast oversimplification of a North American region where religious practices – did I mention snake handlers? — are as varied and complicated as they are anywhere but India.

  Nevertheless, I sometimes dodged the question, but this did not need to be one of those times. “Yes,” I answered. “I suppose I am.”

  “You’re an interesting man, Slate.”

  “I don’t know about that.” I forked up my last bite of egg, picked up the plates and turned to the sink, my back to Sally. “I sort of walked through the back gate of meditation and discovered, inside, the garden of Buddhism.

  “I didn’t grow up going to church every Sunday like so many Southerners. My parents weren’t atheists, and I’m not sure they’d ever met a Buddhist, but my grandparents forced them to spend so much time in redneck churches that they had a bellyful of Southern-fried religion by the time they were grown. So they didn’t take me to church much.

  “After my wife and son died, I started seeing a psychiatrist here in Birmingham, at UAB. Dr. Beverly Adams. I don’t have many family members and few close friends, and I needed to talk to someone.

  “Anyway. Of course Dr. Adams is also a medical doctor, and she would always take my blood pressure before we started to talk. After a couple of sessions, she suggested I try meditation because my pressure was above normal. I read a couple of books and started on my own, just sitting in the floor in the morning for a few minutes. More reading led me to a few books about Buddhism. The title of the first one might describe me: The Accidental Buddhist. Then I discovered that right here in Birmingham a real Tibetan monk trained by the Dalai Lama himself had started a Tibetan Buddhist center. I visited a few times, bought those cushions, and started mediating thirty minutes morning and evening.”

  “So, did your blood pressure come down?”

  “About twenty points. I started working out more too, but I think the pressure drop was mostly attributable to meditation.

  “So that’s pretty much the whole story. I’m still not sure Buddhism is exactly a religion. No creator deity. The Dalai Lama himself admits that Buddhism may be more properly characterized as a philosophy.”

  I placed the last of the dishes in the dishwasher. “Anyway, it works for me so far.”

  “That’s pretty cool,” Sally said. “And now I want to amend interesting to fascinating.” She stood. “We’ll talk more later. But now I have to get ready for work.”

  Sally gave me her spare key, and I gave her a lingering kiss goodbye. She finally pushed me away and scooted for the shower. I left the apartment, locked the door with my new key, and headed downtown for my conference with Bill Woolf.

  Since the interview with Godchaux, I knew that, no matter how or why the memory stick had come into the possession of the starting goalkeeper on the Alabama Southern women’s soccer team, the electronic files arguably constituted the work product of Kramer and of his law firm. Even though I wanted to trade the information in those files for the use of the FBI’s computer experts and their work product and for whatever the FBI might know about Mr. Godchaux of New Orleans, no way would I share information that might waive the work product privilege in a lawsuit. The work product privilege shielded information from discovery when that information derived from or tended to reveal the thoughts and mental impressions of counsel. A court would order such information revealed only when the party seeking it could show that no other means of obtaining the information existed.

  I arrived at Woolf White at seven-thirty on the dot. A deposition was already underway in the large conference room off the lobby, and the lobby receptionist/legal assistant/switchboard operator, busy as an air traffic controller, chattered into her headset. Bill Woolf walked out of the deposition, legal pad in hand. “What can I do for you, Slate?”

  I asked him if we could step into his office. “Back here,” he said, indicating the law library occupying the space adjacent to the foyer. The law library, like those of most large firms, served these days as a place for lawyers to concentrate, or, in truth, as a visual reminder for clients of all the impressive knowledge their fees bought. The books themselves were as anachronistic as illuminated manuscripts.

  We stood among the volumes while I explained the issue. “Got it,” Woolf said. “Find out if we have a joint prosecution agreement with the government in the qui tam case. If not, have the U.S. attorney send over the government’s standard agreement. We could assert the joint prosecution privilege without it, but let’s have it in hand. That’s all I need. Then give them the disk, or thumb drive, or whatever it is.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  “Thanks, Slate. If you need anything else, let me know. I have to get back to this deposition. Billable hours are calling me.”

  The day was still too fresh to expect to find an assistant U.S. attorney or an FBI agent at his or her desk, but I had another visit to make this morning.

  The Birmingham city jail on Sixth Avenue South, a dozen blocks from Elmwood Cemetery, kept early hours for visitors. The jail personnel did not make appointments, and I had not been invited. Maybe Chief Grubbs’ office would have called down to the jail if I had asked, so the guards would have Royal ready for my visit. And maybe not. I liked it better this way. The chances that Royal would agree to see me were pretty good, I thought. I also thought it might be a good idea for a guard to remain in the vicinity. Royal might want a little revenge.

  The front door of the jail opened to
a large, bleak waiting area: chipped, dirty beige paint, cheap plastic chairs along the walls, drink and snack machines in one corner. Families and friends were camped out waiting on other relatives, hoping for a five-minute visit with a prisoner: wives and girlfriends and children; grandmothers and grandkids; uncles, aunts, cousins; homies, brothers, sisters; two-year-olds playing in a corner with blocks; babies on laps.

  Behind a window of thick glass set into a metal wall in one corner, a uniformed guard, a woman, African-American, heavy-set and unsmiling, sat at the sign-in desk for visitors. After I ran the gauntlet in the waiting room, she handed me a clipboard with a ratty photocopied sign-in sheet attached. I filled in Royal’s name and the time of my visit. For the purpose of my visit and relationship to the inmate, I wrote the single word: “lawyer.” Not exactly right. Not exactly wrong. A lawyer’s response.

  “Since you’re a lawyer, Mr. Slate, we’ll bring him up to the library,” the guard said. “And you can come on back.”

  The metal door at the end of the corridor created by the cage for the sign-in guard made a metallic click as I neared it, and a buzzer sounded. I pulled open the door and stepped into another corridor about fifteen feet long and four feet wide, sheathed in metal walls, with a heavy metal door at each end, the first of which I had just been buzzed through.

  “Walk on,” a voice instructed me.

  As I approached the second door, the same buzzer sounded, the door clicked, and I walked out into a short concrete block hallway painted a lighter shade of beige. Running perpendicular to this hallway was an immense hall of concrete block and linoleum tile, with harsh fluorescent lighting and no windows.

  A door twenty feet away opened and another uniformed guard, who looked big and strong enough to play offensive guard for the Saints, strode toward me, his rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the tile floor. “Mr. Slate?” he said. “You here to see prisoner Royal?”