BLIND TRIAL

by Brian Deer

  At the time of the trial, Ben missed most of the coverage: thanks to another of his mother’s sneaky tricks. One evening that spring she’d vanished to the Ronsons and, out of nowhere, a vacation was scheduled. She said she was coming, but then mysteriously backed out, so Ben, Luke, and Mr. Ronson drove to Gettysburg, Washington, and Savannah without her.

  But the trial dragged on into the week they returned and, on the Thursday, took a turn to stun Chicago. Not only did his father deny “wrongdoing in any shape,” but he’d worn his own wire when negotiating the bribes, and deposited matching sums in his own bank account, making the money trail fork two ways.

  LAWYER “STINGS THE STINGERS”

  At the judicial bribery case yesterday, controversial attorney Henry Louviere said he was attempting to uncover an extortion racket and was collecting proof when arrested. “I fumbled, but they [the FBI] fumbled worse,” he told defense attorney, Rhonda O’Reilly, on the 16th day.

  The final news clipping completed the reversal. The jury found Henry not guilty. “It is in my heart to forgive them,” he told reporters outside the courthouse. “I thank the people of Illinois for justice.”

  His son folded the pages, set the rubber bands, and carried the book to his car.

  Fifty-seven

  HE FIRST felt the rain like the spit from a shout as he unlocked his BMW. Spit became spots, as if a wet tree had shaken, as he climbed behind the wheel and fired the engine. Spots became drops as he set the wipers to low and backed the car away from the pool. Drops became splashes even before he left the complex and, as he waited at Monroe Drive—left turn-signal flashing—people ran with plastic bags on their heads.

  After five hundred yards, he hit the brakes. This stretch of road had history. The cement sidewalks were so tight, and grass verges so narrow, that telephone poles practically grabbed you. He picked up speed again passing the Grady school stadium, then slowed for the intersection with Tenth.

  Here was Midtown’s sleekest residential enclave, with every house different from its neighbors. Porches, columns, balustrades, shingle-styles, American foursquares, the odd Craftsman. Here were sandstone brick bungalows, neoclassic frontages, minor homages to Frank Lloyd Wright.

  He hung a right onto Greenwood, left onto Vedado, then stamped on the brake.

  What the fuck?

  A pair of TV live trucks, with open doors, blocked the street: Channel 2 Action News and Fox 5. Something big was going down, with cars parked at all angles and yellow tape strung between trees.

  His foot held the brake; rain hammered the roof; windshield wipers scooped.

  What the fuck?

  He slammed the gearshift, backed up, and shot forward, sending the rear wheels spinning on wet pavement. He drove a block south, signaled left into a curve, and was brought up short once again.

  More yellow tape. More vehicles every whichway: a gray Geo Prizm, a blue Chevy Bolt, a black Nissan Micra GSX. For some reason, they’d been moved and re-parked in a hurry. Then he realized from where—and why.

  A house on the right, up a steep sloping yard, was wrecked—torn apart—by fire.

  The roof was gone, with nearly all the second floor. An inferno had engulfed the property. What remained around the porch was a desperate shell, the windows mere roasted holes. At one corner, a beam had snapped and half-collapsed among the debris: splintering and twisting charred clapboard. Surviving shards of glass were caked in soot, and above the blackened ruin, now drenched in water, the barbecued branches of overhanging oak trees clutched at the sky like claws.

  He snatched a scrap of paper from a pocket in his pants, sprang from the car, and ran. In seconds, his hair was stuck to his face, his T-shirt glued to his shoulders. The stench of burnt cedar stung his possibly broken nose. He ducked police tape, dodged a wrecked car, and looked for street numbers.

  It was hers.

  What survived of the first floor—with the fire department’s compliments—looked like it was raised from the deep. Porch chairs were blown sideways, azaleas washed out, and a mudslide of soil had spilled down the yard to settle as silt on the sidewalk.

  He spun on his heels. His sneakers slipped and slid. Then he saw the rubberneckers, gaping. They were sheltered on porches, peering, gossiping, with faces that begged, “Give us more.”

  At a brick house opposite, a lunch party was gathered, waving drinks and napkins at the ruin. At another (green paintwork) they’d brought out folding chairs and ranked them like movie house seats.

  He skidded to a halt in front of the brick house, where his arrival had triggered thin smiles. With his hair and clothes soaked and his face punch-stained, he was this afternoon’s most welcome addition. He vaulted across a lawn, sliding in the wet, to the porch most opposite the scene.

  A mustachioed man—mid-forties; brown vest—held a phone to his face with both hands.

  Ben called, “Hey, what’s happened here?”

  “See for yourself.”

  “Doc Mayr… Is Dr. Mayr? She okay?”

  The man nodded toward a black van, parked across the street. “Don’t reckon she is. I’d say no.”

  “You saying? You got to be kidding.”

  “Smoking, they reckon. Smoking in bed. Makes you think. Don’t you think it makes you think?”

  Ben framed a question—when did it start?—but never got to ask it before a cop lifted her hat and, down the stone steps of Doc Mayr’s destroyed house, two women in waterproofs—one walking backward—stretchered a zippered gray bag.

  Drinks were lowered and chatter eased to whispers until only the hiss of rain, the hum of distant traffic, and the raucous squawking of displaced blue jays broke the silence on Vedado Way.

  Fifty-eight

  ON THE thirty-third floor of the 1280 West building, Theodore Hoffman sat on his balcony and filled a dry palm with Eucerin. All afternoon and into this evening, a cold front had teased the metro area heat island, bringing driving rain and fork lightning. Now it was passing, moving off toward the coast. Harsher, drier, air was tumbling in.

  Armed with rubber-lined binoculars, he’d sat here since sunset, seeing what in the world he could see. Sixteen miles east—past forests of Pinus Taeda and Quercus Georgiana—he’d watched Stone Mountain glow gold and fade to gray. Then he reverted to upper Midtown’s towers. The nearest: Promenade. To the right: One Atlantic Center. Further off: GLG Grand.

  He smeared his right arm, then his left, with the moisturizer, and massaged his shoulders and chest. From inside the apartment drifted a ballet by Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake, Act III, “In the Castle of Prince Siegfried.” The hero begs forgiveness, breaks the sorcerer’s spell, and finally gets the girl. The old story.

  Hoffman toweled his hands, stepped through a sliding door, and slipped into a Moroccan camp vest. Then he pulled open a closet, unfolded an ironing board, and plugged a Rowenta Steam Force into an outlet.

  At eleven, he’d catch up with Channel 2 news. They’d been running Midtown Blaze since breakfast. The pictures were sickening, thanks to that motherfuckin’ dickhead. Who else would want to torch Trudy Mayr? That wasn’t authorized, but there was no going back. Hoffman would wait a few months, quit BerneWerner, and relocate to Boulder or Denver.

  Maybe Monica Frankman would anchor at eleven. She’d bring a touch of class to the tragedy. Like Fox, she’d go heavy on the “old lady fried” angle but wouldn’t leave it hanging with sensation. She’d fill out the story with a public service message: be cautious when smoking in bed.

  Hoffman pressed his legs into a pair of black chinos, stepped into the bathroom, and returned with a mound of damp clothes. He licked a middle finger, tapped the Rowenta’s heat plate, and shook out a white dress shirt. Brother, how he hated the shirts. The collars were enough to make you bundle your laundry and haul it to conference hotels.

  But time was getting on. He’d better check on the kid. They’d not spoken since the meeting with Marcia. Doctor Dickhead called earlier, not ment
ioning his contribution to the day’s top news, and suggested “the module man may prove a problem.”

  Hoffman threatened him. “Lay a finger on Ben and I’ll bury you alive.”

  And he would have.

  HENRY’S BOY sounded nervous, his voice tight and raw. “Yep, hello, this is Ben.”

  “Hey, you got a new phone?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Sorry about that. All a tad confusing, I know. Send the bill to Crampton, why don’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Guess you picked up the news then? Damn tragedy. Tragedy. We’re all shocked, I can tell you. I’m shocked. Just unbelievable. Saw all the smoke this morning and wondered what that was. Right across Midtown you could see it.”

  Beats of silence: Ben wasn’t convinced. “They said she was smoking in bed.”

  “Damn right, what I heard. Damn nasty way to go. And to think of her yesterday, all guns blazing. That meeting must’ve cranked her all up.”

  “Said nicotine helped her condition.”

  Hoffman trained his eyes on the Four Seasons Hotel but tuned his attention to sound. The stakes were high. What he needed to hear were the words “no problem,” or some similar sign of acceptance. “Be a warning to others, though. Do not smoke in bed. Biggest cause of domestic fires.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Ben wasn’t buying it. He sounded too cool. Surprised, but too cool.

  Or was he?

  “Guess, like, she’d be glad for people to know about that. Help others and everything. Quite a lady.”

  Hoffman parsed the words like a polygraph examiner. Invisible needles flickered between his ears. The great transformation to fiber optics and package-switching made it trickier than the days of end-to-end copper wire. Lie? Obfuscation? He’d once caught them all. These days, ninety percent.

  What happened to Trudy Mayr was as plain as the burning crosses that once lit party nights on Stone Mountain. But Hoffman knew the Louvieres. He knew what made them tick. He’d iron this situation free of wrinkles.

  “Now look, Marcia’s saying maybe we need to get some kind of tribute going in DC tomorrow. Minute’s silence thing, or something along those lines. You think we should do that?”

  “Me? I don’t know. Guess, I suppose. Don’t know about the protocol myself. Would have been her day, what with the vaccine being her baby and everything. Sure gonna be weird there without her.”

  Weird there without her? So, he expected it would happen. “Respect’s the protocol. That old girl was one fine lady. Broke the mold after making Trudy Mayr.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, I was thinking how maybe we should name our scholarships in her honor. Reflect the more scientific approach Marcia wants to get going. What you think about ‘the Dr. Gertrude S. Mayr Scholarship in Science’?”

  “The Dr. Gertrude S. Mayr Scholarship in Science. Sure has a ring to it. Keep her memory alive.”

  “And I know, I just know, she’ll be up there someplace, beaming down, so proud.”

  “Like an angel thing.”

  “Hell, they’ll make the old girl a Seraphim.”

  Hoffman studied the view: busy for a Sunday evening. Traffic was backed up around the arts center. Over in Promenade, half the offices were blazing. In the Four Seasons, he glimpsed a guy breaking bottles. “What you think about your first assignment then? Huh? Enough action for you? Huh? Or you hankering for more Crampton overheads?”

  He tuned his hearing to maximum sensitivity. There was no Plan B for Ben. He was a chip off the block: looks and mind. The same soul as his daddy’s looking out. Just watching him move, seeing his wide shoulders roll, had made Hoffman feel young. Yes, young.

  “Yes, sir. Interesting. Sure. Lot of dilemmas and stuff. Real-world dilemmas and stuff.”

  The thing about the Louvieres was they wanted to belong. More than anything, they needed tight holding. Hoffman lowered the binoculars. “Guess that’s why I love it. Wouldn’t want to do anything else.”

  A pause and a sigh: a soft outpour of breath. The kid wasn’t squared. He’d an issue.

  “Something wrong?”

  Another sigh. “No—well—I’m wondering then, is that the end of it for me then now? Back to marketing. Giving out iPads in that crummy module? Making slide shows for that Vendrecol crap?”

  Huh. He was dealing, trying to chisel an advantage. A chip off the block, for sure. “Hell, marketing. That was just to start you off. Gotta remember we don’t always have the openings all the time. Left you hanging around, I know.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “First you get your raise I promised, then Doctorjee’s got an idea. What you say to a job with the Regulatory Affairs Unit? Some action coming their way after the licensure, I’d reckon.”

  He remembered the shirts. If they dried too much, it would mean more time with the Rowenta. “We can talk about this in the week. Come up and see me Tuesday or Wednesday. Check with Corinna. We’ll work something out. Not a problem.”

  “I could sure do with a move.”

  “We’ll fix it.”

  “And I guess there’s still the laptop thing. You know, the final warning from that asshole?”

  “Christ, no. Crampton’s gonna write you. Didn’t I tell you? All a mix-up. Crossed wires. We’ll get you a better one: an Apple. And didn’t I say? We’re making your student loan into a grant. Be paid off tomorrow. It’s a new thing we’re doing for all our scholarship intake. Forget about it.”

  “Not mad at me then about what happened in California? You know, I got kind of confused about it all, in the heat of the moment.”

  “Hell no. It is confusing. But if you not got the full picture, you maybe sometimes don’t see what we’re trying to get done. Too many folks make judgments without all the facts. We all do it. Human nature.”

  MONDAY JULY 28

  Fifty-nine

  ABOVE THE deco-style canopy of the Marriott at Metro Center, three of four flags attached to sloping staffs were disarrayed Monday afternoon. Maryland’s red-and-white crosses and black-and-yellow checkerboards were lowered with Old Glory on the east side of Twelfth Street, as if mourning a public figure. The District of Columbia’s three red-on-white stars and two stripes, meanwhile, were tangled like a bandaged bloody finger.

  At a quarter after two, Drs. Honda and Murayama climbed from a taxi which sped them from Dulles airport, and spun through the revolving glass door. Sumiko was dressed in a gray work suit, her partner his usual attire. Each clutched a bag—hers white, his black—with their free hands clasped in each other’s.

  They’d nearly gone to the wrong location. Ten days’ back, Marcia Gelding announced that today’s event would be hosted by the National Institutes of Health, ten miles northwest at Bethesda. But Maureen Valentine phoned last night and disclosed a change of venue. Apparently, a public relations firm had advised the company that a hotel was more convenient for the media.

  As the couple skirted the pot of lime green chrysanthemums, Sumiko feared Maureen was mistaken. No crowds, news crews, photographers, or signs suggested a momentous occasion. A sleazy bossa nova (piano, clarinet, wire brush, and vocals) spoke only of business as usual.

  Hiroshi squeezed her hand. “Can’t be the right place.”

  “Maureen sounded incredibly certain.”

  Maureen was right. At a pink marble counter, a crisply styled clerk with a titanium smile confirmed a last-minute booking. “Left along the lobby, down the staircase, on the right. See it straight ahead. Have a good one.”

  At the foot of the stairs, they reached a security table where a brown-uniformed guard with a red face and blue gloves checked bags with a flashlight and stick. Then they joined a line shuffling forward into a hard-floored foyer: windowless, airless, with a row of double doors that opened to the Grand Ballroom, on the right.

  Sumiko felt a pang to see the white BerneWerner module in which, ten days ago, she met Ben. Its
outer walls were missing the LED display panels, and the pairs of chrome poles which flanked its entrance arch were strung with a pink banner.

  THE TIME HAS COME

  And then she saw Ben: in an immaculate black suit, white shirt, and fleur-de-lis tie. He stood by a trestle table, handing out literature as the line edged toward the ballroom. He looked engrossed, content, even happy, she thought. Any danger she’d once seen was gone. The only feature out-of-place for a company stooge was a purple-yellow stain round one eye.

  He barely looked up as the line crept forward. He moved like an early-model robot. He lifted three sheets of paper from three piles on the table, added a brochure, a typescript, and a The Time Has Come bumper sticker, bundled them together in a gray-and-pink folder, rapped them on the table, and passed them.

  Rap-rap. “Thank you, doctor. Take any seat. We’re trying to fill up from the front.”

  Rap-rap. “Thank you, doctor. Take any seat. We’re trying to fill up from the front.”

  His expression didn’t change when she reached the table. He looked up, then back to his task. One sheet, two sheets, three sheets, the brochure, the typescript, the bumper sticker, the folder.

  Rap-rap. “Thank you, Dr. Honda.” Rap-rap. “Dr. Murayama. We’re trying to fill up from the front.”

  She whispered, “Thank you Ben,” and followed the line through the first pair of double doors to the right.

  The ballroom was brighter than she remembered from last time, with extra lights on metal racks and chairs laid out without tables—theater-style—divided by an aisle down the middle. At the far wall, a podium was loaded with microphones, tulips, and bottles of water, while at the rear, between the doors and the last row of chairs, yawned an expanse of jazzy mauve carpet.