"Yes. Right. Charlie. We saw him at the occasional event. He may have come over once or twice. We even went to a barbecue at his house."
"What's his last name?"
"Jackson? Johnson? I can't remember."
"So he was a buddy of Frank's?"
"A colleague. I don't remember them being particularly close, but you know how agents are. The bond."
I recalled Charlie's desperate eyes, picking up the aqua glow of the spent-fuel pond. I trusted Frank. I trusted him with my life. Given the tattoo, I'd assumed the army, but there was also plenty of risk to go around in the Service. And evidently plenty of trouble to get into as well.
I asked, "And Frank never mentioned they were in the war together?"
"No, I don't think so. Or I didn't remember. But you know Frank. That doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean it was a secret."
"Isn't that a bit of a coincidence? Two guys from the same platoon wind up working together in the Service?"
Callie gave me the look she used to give Frank.
Steve said, "The Service recruited heavy after the war. And the CIA, the Marshals, the FBI. A lot of soldiers were steered the same directions by the same people, sent one another resumes. We tried to help each other out." He looked at his folded hands--he hadn't meant to let that "we" slip, not with me in the room.
"When did they work together?" I asked.
"Up until the end," Callie said.
We sat with that one, all three of us, and then I asked, "What did you know about Charlie?"
"Nothing, really."
"People always remember more than they think," Steve said. He looked interested despite himself. "Think about when you went to his house."
"Oh--he had a son," Callie said. "Troubled kid. I want to say drugs. A few years older than you, Nicky."
"Did they look alike? Same mouth?"
"I don't really remember. Just that he was so scowly. Charlie wasn't exactly all polka dots and moonbeams himself."
"Was he married?" Steve and I asked at the same
time.
"Going through a divorce. A rough one, maybe. He had a few tense late-night talks with Frank just before Frank was killed."
"He came to the house?" I asked.
"Phone."
Steve's jaw firmed, and our eyes met. Tense late-night calls and then a bullet to Frank's gut. I took a while to work up the nerve. "Do you think there's any chance Frank got pulled into something dirty?"
Callie said, "Never."
Steve looked at her, and I could see the skepticism in the set of his mouth, the sympathy in his eyes.
Callie implored me, "You don't believe that either."
"No," I said quietly, "I don't. But I don't like the way this is looking. There's some compelling stuff pointing to Caruthers. You know how Frank was about him. And now Charlie working under Caruthers, too. Plus, everything surfacing now, right before an election--"
"How do you know it's not Bilton behind it?" Callie asked. "That would be more in character. Bilton's the one who got a bounce in the polls from the San Onofre threat."
I said, "Bilton has no link to Frank. Or Charlie. Or anything Frank was dealing with seventeen years ago."
Callie said, "I'd believe that the whole Secret Service was dirty before I'd believe Frank was."
I felt diminished, as if in asking the question I'd given up something precious. I considered what she'd just told me about stars in my eyes and wondered what the costs of that might be for her, for me. If our image of Frank came apart, what else
would have to come apart with it? More than just the past seventeen years.
I slid the photograph into my pocket and rose. "Thank you. I'm sorry, again, for everything."
Callie stood nervously. "Maybe we could see each other sometime ... calmer. Em seems to have taken to you."
"Could've fooled me," I said.
Steve said, "I don't want him near my daughter."
Callie shot him a glare. "Then I'll see my son when she's not home. Shouldn't be hard--she sleeps over at her mother's every chance she gets." She looked back at me, a bit desperately, and I felt the pull of old fears. Contact meant trails and trace evidence and sedans with killed headlights in the night. And then a phone call. Sweat stung the faint lacerations on the base of my neck. Callie was studying me still, trying to figure out what to say. "Maybe we could cook or something."
"I don't cook," I said, as gently as I could.
Callie made a noise in the back of her throat, and they walked me to the door. I was glad I'd parked blocks away so I could breathe the sharp night air for a bit.
I stood nervously at the threshold, then moved awkwardly to hug my mom. She embraced me, and then we pulled apart and stood there for a moment, unsure what to do next.
I offered my hand to Steve, but he just glared at me and said, "If half of what you're saying is right,
you've got a long, nasty haul between you and the truth. And from what I've heard, you've never finished anything in your life."
Moths swirled around the porch light, pinging the glass. "Maybe this," I said.
"What?"
"Maybe I'll finish this."
I heard them arguing in hushed tones as I headed down the walk, the picture of Frank and Charlie snugged in my back pocket.
Chapter 27
My windows were locked, the front door dead-bolted, the blinds closed. Spread on my sliced mattress was the shrapnel from whatever had sailed in and exploded my life. A black-and-white photograph of Frank pointing with his mess-hall fork, Charlie turning to listen from one table over. A hundred eighty grand, neatly bound with purple bands. A torn sheet of numerals in nine columns. A pager number, scrawled in a con girl's signature on a scrap of paper.
What the hell did all this have to do with my stepfather?
Sitting cross-legged, I propped my face on my fists and studied my neat display. Blissful stillness. No helicopters, no zoom lenses, no sniper scopes, no loud locksmiths and transparent Nokias and limousine rides. The lights were off, the items illuminated only by the muted TV and the streetlight spill around the blinds.
The Voice had to be Charlie's son. Nothing else explained as well the shared mouth, the hitch in his words when he explained his debt to the dead. Charlie did this for me. Why "for" him? Callie's description was a start. Troubled kid. I want to say drugs. A few years older than you, Nicky.
It was a story of a father and son. Sonny got into trouble, owed the wrong kind of people the wrong kind of money. More money than Pop could spot him on a Secret Service pension. So Pop came to the rescue, hauling out a seventeen-year-old secret and putting it up for sale when it was at peak election-year value. To a point he'd known how to handle himself. He had army training. Secret Service training. He knew who the right people were in Caruthers's inner circle and how to contact them. He started going wrong when he didn't figure out that his two-hundred-grand down payment was bait to set the hook. And the Powers That Be had lived up to their title. When he found himself cornered, Charlie's last desperate shot was the stepson of an agent he'd worked with, an agent he'd admired.
Charlie's last resort, sadly, was me.
Seventeen years ago Frank had been pushed to his snapping point. By what? Had he and Charlie stumbled across something while digging up dirt for Caruthers? Or covering something up for him?
Frank had skipped a few days of work there at
the end, for the first time in his career. He was into something bad and was figuring out how to get clear of it without putting me and Callie at risk. He was cautious, guarded, strategic. What he didn't count on was me following my dick out the door that night, giving the wet-work man his window of opportunity.
But if Charlie also knew the secret, why had he been spared the visit in the night? Maybe they didn't know he knew. Or maybe he'd cut a deal. Regardless, all these years later would he have been willing to reopen Pandora's box because his kid had gotten himself into a fresh round of trouble?
; Would Callie?
I closed my eyes, breathing the sensation swirl of paranoia--the phantom smells of English Leather and too-strong coffee, Frank sunk in his chair, that grainy Zapruder footage playing across his impassive face. Had Frank damned himself with a thousand small decisions?
An overheard message pointing to Firebird. An agent showing up at my condo to urge me onto the phone with the president. Frank and Charlie calling each other late at night just before Frank's murder. The Voice in the Dark, spinning tales of extortion. The facts were colorful, and they fell into different patterns depending on which way I twisted the kaleidoscope. There were more variables than I could pin down. So, of course, I called Induma.
She picked up after a few rings, her voice rough from sleep. "Yuh?"
"Hi. Sorry. I. .
"What? Nick?"
"I need your help."
"Okay. I'm here alone."
"Alejandro's not spending the night?" I regretted asking the minute it left my mouth. Between Kim Kendall's deception, braining Callie's husband, and my latest round of dirty hypotheses, I was irritable, out of sorts. I made a fist, pressed my knuckles to the wall.
But she answered evenly. "No. He's out clubbing. With club people. You know how I like club people. Now what's going on?"
I'd already called her, after I'd left Callie's, to give her Charlie's possible last names, but she'd been tied up and couldn't talk at length. So now I shorthanded everything that had happened since I'd seen her last and the theory I'd managed to work out about Charlie's extorting Caruthers to get money for his son. Then I asked if she'd dug anything up on Wydell and Sever.
"Just that they've both been in the L.A. office for years," she said. "Wydell for six, Sever for five."
"You couldn't find out which protection details they were on before that?"
"I'm an open-source-software geek with a few police connections through the crime lab, but I can't do everything. I've called in a handful of
favors, but what you're asking for is too sensitive, Nick, for obvious reasons. It's not like they list this stuff online."
"Did you find out whether the Service was at the Culver City house with LAPD for the shoot-out?"
"I couldn't. That operation would've been run through LAPD's counterterrorism unit, which is as close to airtight as it gets." She sensed my frustration and said, "Look, I don't have to tell you, this is all mirrors and shadows. Given that you're risking your ass, it's probably worth asking: Are you willing to pursue this even if it proves that Frank was dirty?"
"Frank could've been killed for not going along," I said, a bit too quickly. She let the silence work on me. It made a more effective argument than I had. I thought of the Voice, coming at me out of the darkness, asking if I knew what it meant to owe someone after he was dead.
"That's not an answer," she said.
I pressed my teeth into my lower lip until I felt the sting. "I have to know what happened. Whichever way it goes. I have to know what got Frank killed."
"He's dead. It's not like he has a name to clear." Induma waited out the pause. "Maybe it's time to start taking care of people who are alive."
She didn't often get judgmental. I stood quietly, thinking of Callie and what this could do to her if it proved to be as ugly as I feared.
Induma asked, "If he was dirty, would that change who he was to you when you were a kid?"
"It's who he is to me now. That didn't die on the living-room floor. So maybe you're right. Maybe this isn't just about Frank. Maybe he made his own goddamned bed. But he wasn't the only one affected by his choices. And if all that went down for no good reason, or worse . . ."
We were silent for a while, together. "Okay," she said softly. "I spent a good amount of time plowing through databases after you called earlier. I can't get clearance for a lot of them, obviously, but I'm strong on financials." An uncharacteristic hesitation. "I checked federal pension records, and I can't find a Charlie Jackson or Johnson in the Secret Service back then. In fact, there were only three Charlies and Charleses and Chucks even in the Service in a two-year span around Frank's death. Two were black guys, and the third was fifty-two years old then."
"What does that mean?"
"Look, this kind of search? Where I have access to a federal pension database? If I can't find him in there, the guy doesn't exist."
"I saw him."
"I'm sure he told you he was Charlie--"
"My mother met him. He had a tattoo. The mouth. Not a face you forget. He exists. I have a
picture of him."
"Now you tell me you've got a picture?"
"That helps?"
"Of course. I can take a run with some facial-recognition software, see if it picks anything up on the other California and federal law-enforcement pension databases. It's not a lock, but it'll help the search criteria. I'll come pick it up."
"It's not safe for you to come here."
"They won't mess with me if they don't know who I am. And once they do their homework and figure it out, they really won't want to bother with me. I'm high-profile, and not a little politically connected. Dragging me--or my corpse--into this will only complicate whatever they're trying to get done."
"Still, why take the chance?"
"Fine." A silence, and then, convincing herself, "Fine. Put the picture in an envelope, tape it beneath the lid of the Dumpster at that corner mart by your place. I'll get it in a few hours. Let's meet at Starbucks at noon tomorrow. Free Internet."
"The one on Montana?"
"The other one on Montana."
After she hung up, I shut the phone and held it at my side. I closed my eyes but didn't like what I saw there either. Leaving aside the photograph and the slip with the pager number, I gathered together the items on my mattress, stuffing them back into Charlie's rucksack. It fit snugly into Evelyn's giant pasta pot in the kitchen cupboard.
I grabbed my keys, left, and walked the few blocks, stopping occasionally at windows and newspaper vending boxes to check behind me.
Homer was sleeping off a drunk, slumped against the convenience-store wall, one leg flung over a parking space's bumper block. A car pulled in right in front of him, headlights glaring into his face. He raised an arm against the light, wagging sluggishly. The driver hopped out, chatting on his cell phone, and scampered inside.
Homer was cursing and rearranging himself. He looked like a brown puddle. He got nasty when he boozed hard, not like the affable bums you see in movies. His eyes were bloodshot and sinister, his crow's-feet white lines in his dirt-caked face. I thought about what Kim Kendall had told me about his wife and kid, how he'd let his past run him into the ground. I seemed to be on a pretty good course for the same destination.
"Hey, Homer," I said. "Did you talk to anyone at the VA for me about tracking down those soldiers?"
". . . ffffuckin' think you are . . . ," he said, in a dry-throated mutter. "Leeme the hell alone."
I stepped past him into the shop. When I laid two more throwaway cell phones on the counter, Hacmed leered at me. "You start a telecommunications company, Nicolas?"
I set down some cash and went outside. Homer was out cold on his back, his mouth a ragged oval. His head was shoved up against the bumper block. I did my best to move him, but his girth and odor
outmatched me. I finally managed to roll him onto his side, his forehead clunking to the asphalt. I wedged a folded piece of cardboard beneath his sweaty cheek and left him snoring prodigiously.
The corner mart's rear wall, papered with flyers for independent films and sex-caller lines, abutted a rank alley with a Dumpster. I taped the picture of Charlie and Frank beneath the lid, then studied the slip of paper with the pager number.
Ten digits on ripped paper. My sole channel to the Powers That Be.
I flipped open one of the cell phones I'd just purchased, dialed the pager number, then punched in the digits printed on the back of the cheap plastic earpiece. I hung up and waited. A half-peeled ad proclaimed, Have Sex Wi
th Locals Now!!!! I wondered how they decided to stop at four exclamation points. The breeze wafted a faint sewer smell from the grate, but faint was enough.
The shrill ring startled me. I answered in a low voice, "Hello?"
Silence. A whisper of static coming through the live line. A soft rustle, a puff of breath catching the receiver. And then nothing.
"Hello?" I said again, wanting back just a single word to match against my memory of Sever, the Voice, Charlie. But there was only a click and, eventually, a dial tone.
I smashed the phone on the ground, threw it in the Dumpster, and headed for home.
* * *
I came awake in terror, gasping for breath, shoving at my sheets. For a few wretched moments, I tumbled through scenarios, disassociated. Was I holding Frank on the blood-glistening floorboards? Hurtling back from the blast that consumed Charlie's head? Battling an intruder by the sliding glass door? The fabric between past and present had torn, and I was in free fall between them.
Finally I realized that I was in the grip of night terrors. I didn't have to check the clock to know what time it was. My witching hour.
I spoke the facts out loud to try to calm myself: "It's 2:18, and you're safe in your bed. It's 2:18, and you 're safe in your bed. "
But still I couldn't slow my breathing, my thoughts, my furious heartbeat.
The ghouls had fled their cages, and there was no herding them back.
Chapter 28
Starting early the next morning, I sat with my back to the wall, knees drawn to my chest, watching the front door. I was waiting for a knock, the delivery of another transparent cell phone. But it kept not coming. I walked around my place, peering yet again through the blinds down at the morning-bright street. Finally I left a handful of messages,
pushing back my upcoming appointments--a job interview, a teeth cleaning, a get-together at Maloney's to watch the Dodgers-Giants game. I reached the dean at the Pepperdine MBA/Public Policy program and apologized for missing our meeting. Reacquainting myself, even briefly, with my normal life only underscored how far off the tracks the last few days had sent me.
We Know (aka Trust no One) (2008) Page 16