Grave Error

by Stephen Greenleaf

  The one night he wasn’t working Nelson spent the evening at home, but even then he wasn’t alone. A covey of people poured into the house at seven and out again at eleven, all young and attractive, of an age where they could still laugh and cry and find reasons to do both. I just sat slumped in my car like an asthmatic reprobate and watched them go by.

  After they left Nelson’s house I waited for another hour, but nothing happened. I didn’t really expect it to, but I didn’t want to go home. One by one the lights in the Nelson house blinked off, leaving me in the dark and alone with my complexes. The next morning—yesterday—I’d called Jacqueline Nelson and arranged to meet her at the Institute at nine this morning.

  The Institute for Consumer Awareness occupied the entire sixth floor of a nondescript office building on Pine Street a few blocks below Montgomery. In the past seven years Roland Nelson’s task force had grown from a staff of three to an army of over fifty in San Francisco alone. This was the headquarters, but there were offices in five other cities as well, including New York and Washington.

  In the early years Nelson and his people churned out reports and analyses by the dozens, ranging from mimeographed pamphlets to a multivolume treatise on Medicare abuse by doctors and hospitals. For a while Nelson had clearly patterned himself after Ralph Nader, but when Nader began to be criticized for spreading himself too thin and making too many mistakes, Nelson changed his strategy. A year ago he announced that the Institute would focus on only one area at a time, rather than taking a scattergun approach.

  The first product of the new strategy appeared a few months ago. In a massive document, complete with a four-volume statistical appendix, the Institute charged that the failure of the government to enforce the Sherman Act, particularly in the automotive, oil, steel, computer, and communications industries, was costing the consumer billions of dollars a year while at the same time resulting in inferior products and the wasteful consumption of natural resources. Nelson’s major thesis was that the popular notion that big, monopolistic companies were more efficient and could thus produce goods less expensively than small, competitive manufacturers was demonstrably false.

  The report named names and companies and products and caused a furor. Business executives called Nelson a socialist and worse and demanded a congressional investigation of the Institute. One network president sued Nelson for libel. On the other side, consumer groups demanded that the Justice Department take action against all the companies named in the report, including criminal indictments against leading executives. One Congressman called Nelson a modern Gandhi who was leading the common man out from under the yoke of the capitalists. Another wanted him jailed for treason.

  The only people more worried than those named in the report were those who thought they might be the next subject of a Nelson investigation. An oilman feared the Institute was going to try to show that the gasoline shortage of 1974 was entirely the work of a domestic oil cartel, and that another one was planned for 1982. A former automobile executive was sure that Nelson had evidence that a major manufacturer had paid an octogenarian in Denver ten million dollars for patent rights to a device that would make the internal combustion engine obsolete and had then burned the plans. And so on. Nelson fertilized the paranoia of American business like no one since Eugene Debs.

  It wasn’t hard to admire Roland Nelson. For all I knew he weaved his way through life with single-minded devotion to the truth and remained unpretentious and unremarkable in all but the results he achieved. The list of people who contribute something more than dross to the world is a short one, but Nelson was on it.

  A creaking elevator deposited me in front of the door to the Institute. Inside, the girl behind the reception desk was working as hard on her image as she was on the letter she was typing. A pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head like a bird with a thyroid condition and wet strands of hair dangled in loose curls next to her ear. The point of her nose was black with ink. It was all very cute. Too cute. A rustic sign announced that she was Andrea Milton and that she was someone’s “administrative associate.” The euphemism was comforting.

  The girl continued to flick at the keys as I stood there. When she didn’t look up at my cough I went over and sat down. On the table next to me was a little glass ball and inside it were some tiny pink people standing by a tiny red house. I tipped the ball and created a blizzard. When it stopped I picked up a month-old copy of The New Republic and thumbed through it. I thought I had read it before but I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem to make much difference.

  Minutes rolled by like the closing credits of Star Wars. I yawned. Andrea typed. The world turned.

  The clatter finally stopped. The girl yanked the page from the machine, pulled her glasses down, and read it over, smiling from time to time at her incredible competence. Without taking her eyes from the page she stood up and scurried through a door behind the desk.

  I started another blizzard and the tiny kids seemed delighted. I resolved to leave if Andrea didn’t return in thirty seconds. She didn’t know my plan, so she made it back in twenty-eight.

  “Sorry,” she said distractedly as she looked at me for the first time. “That letter has to go out this morning. Bill was waiting.”

  She waited for a tribute to her indispensability but she didn’t get one. I ran out of sympathy for cute little girls a long time ago.

  “My name is Tanner,” I said gruffly. “I have an appointment with Mrs. Nelson.”

  “Mrs. Nelson?” she asked, emphasizing the title. “You mean Claire?”

  “Jacqueline. Wife of Roland.”

  “Of course. Let me see if she’s in.” Andrea punched some buttons and put a telephone to her ear. By cocking her head and lifting her shoulder she freed her hands to stuff something into a manila envelope. A very efficient young lady. Also a very sharp pain in the buttocks.

  The fern and I couldn’t hear what she was saying. In a minute she put the phone down and stood up.

  “Mrs. Nelson is in Mr. Nelson’s office,” she said grandly.

  “How cozy.”

  “Mr. Nelson is out of town,” she added quickly, as though I might get a wrong impression. “I’ll show you back.”

  She turned and led me into a huge open bay that whirred and writhed like an anthill under attack by a bear. Too many people fought for too few desks and chairs. Everyone was talking—to each other, to a telephone, or to themselves. Lithe bodies moved through the room like the principals in a Balanchine ballet. Paper was everywhere—piled and stacked and crumpled and torn, the crumbs of a giant croissant.

  Andrea didn’t seem to notice. She dodged through it all and led me toward a door in the far end of the room. The door was closed, but not for long. Andrea burst through without knocking or even breaking stride. I caught up with her just in time to see the scornful glance she threw at the woman sitting behind the large desk in the center of the room.

  The woman was Jacqueline Nelson. The upper right-hand drawer of the desk was open and Mrs. Nelson had obviously been searching through it. Andrea just as obviously had caught her. Shame and bravado struggled for control of Mrs. Nelson’s face. Bravado won.

  “You should never enter Roland’s office without knocking, Andrea,” Mrs. Nelson said sternly.

  “I didn’t think anyone was in here,” Andrea replied. “The door was closed.”

  “That’s all the more reason you should knock. I believe you owe me an apology.”

  “Sorry,” Andrea said. She didn’t mean it.

  “You’re fortunate that Roland wasn’t the victim of your lack of manners.”

  “Mr. Nelson never shuts his door,” Andrea replied and stalked out of the room. I didn’t get a chance to tell her to water the fern.

  Jacqueline Nelson looked at me somewhat sheepishly and shook her head. “They don’t teach consideration at Radcliffe, I guess,” she said. “Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned.”

  “Privacy is a concept foreign to anyone under twenty,” I told
her. “Their own lives are open books and they don’t see why everyone’s shouldn’t be.”

  “I just wish she hadn’t caught me looking through the desk. They don’t like me much as it is, those young girls. They don’t feel I’m worthy of being handmaiden to the great Roland Nelson.”

  “Are you?” I asked half-jokingly.

  “Does it make any difference?” she answered roughly.

  It didn’t and I told her so, but I didn’t like the idea of her snooping around in her husband’s desk drawers. If there was snooping to be done, I wanted to do it, to make sure whatever turned up didn’t fall into the wrong hands. It was a new experience for me, this respect I had for the subject of my investigation. I hoped it wouldn’t cause me to make a mistake. Mistakes come easily in this business, especially when you decide who’s good and who’s not so good before all the facts are in. And all those facts are never in.

  I must not have hidden by disapproval of her snooping too well, because Mrs. Nelson was looking at me fiercely. “He’s my husband, Mr. Tanner,” she declared. “Don’t look at me as if I’m some kind of thief. Roland’s in trouble and I’m trying to find out what it is so I can help him. Is that a crime?”

  I shook my head. We could have discussed ends and means for a while, but it’s seldom fruitful. “What were you looking for?” I asked instead.

  “Roland’s checkbook. I thought it might show how much he’s been withdrawing from the Institute. But it’s not here.”

  “Where does he bank?”

  “Farmers and Citizens.”

  “I might be able to get at his bank records. I know some people over there and this land of the free doesn’t have any laws that prevent them from telling me his bank balance.”

  “Good.”

  “Where’s your husband?” I went on. “I thought he was going to be here.”

  “He’s out. I’m sorry. I tried to call and tell you not to come today but I couldn’t reach you. He got a call just after I arrived and went dashing off to the Channel Nine studios. They want a statement from him about the complaint the Justice Department just filed against Federal Motors.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “I don’t know. But he did promise to be home this evening. He wants you to come by for a drink around six if you’re not busy.”

  “I guess I can fit it in.”

  “Maybe you should meet some of the staff as long as you’re here. Then you can come and go as you like, even when I’m not around. They don’t like strangers in the office.”

  “Who should I talk to?”

  “Bill and Sara, at least. They’re the main ones. I’ll run next door and ask Bill if he can talk to you for a minute. Bill and I get along,” she added, as if to supersede my memory of her duel with Andrea Milton.

  She closed the door behind her and I nosed around Nelson’s office. The desk was an ocean of mahogany that floated a fleet of file folders. Three wing chairs faced the desk like stiff-backed lieutenants. Behind the chairs a tufted leather sofa, cracked and stiff with age, was crushed by a pile of computer printouts. The top one dangled crazily to the floor, like a child’s slinky toy. The windows behind the desk were the old-fashioned kind that opened and closed and admitted real air. Behind the lace curtains the Bank of America building loomed higher than Gibraltar.

  A second wall was all books, well worn, with fading covers, as though the truths inside were dying out. On the wall opposite the desk were framed covers of Institute publications. Several of them were arranged in a circle around the cover of the first report Nelson had ever issued—an attack on the design of a new airplane. I remembered it. Two weeks after Nelson’s critique came out, one of the planes went down with three hundred people aboard. Roland Nelson immediately became a household word.

  The only personal items in the room were on the desk—two photographs, a bronze medallion that looked like an award of some kind, and a long-bladed dagger nicked and scratched from being used for something besides opening letters. One of the photographs was a formal portrait of Jacqueline Nelson, complete with black gown and diamond pendant. The other was a snapshot of a round-faced girl I assumed was their daughter, Claire.

  I glanced quickly at the papers scattered over the desk top but none of them seemed relevant to the job I was doing. I was back in one of the chairs by the time the door opened again and Mrs. Nelson came in.

  She was trailed by a tall, Lincolnesque figure wearing a ragged face that matched his ragged suit. His lapels, his tie, and his belt were each half the width of what they were selling in the store down the block.

  “This is Bill Freedman, Mr. Tanner,” Mrs. Nelson said. “He’s the power behind the throne around here.”

  “If what she means is that I do Roland’s dirty work, she’s right,” Freedman said mirthlessly. We shook hands. His fingers were as long and smooth as church candles.

  “Jackie tells me you’re going to do some investigating for us, Mr. Tanner,” he blurted suddenly, the words tumbling over each other as they poured out of his mouth. Before I could answer he plucked a Pall Mall from a red pack and placed it on his lower lip. Smoke drifted to the ceiling and spread over the room.

  “Roland keeps threatening to fire me if I don’t give these up,” Freedman said, rushing on as though silence were a curse that would turn him into a frog. “I just tell him if I quit smoking he’ll have to fire me. I’ll be a certifiable lunatic.” As if to confirm his prognosis, Freedman coughed harshly. There didn’t seem to be anything for me to say.

  “I’ll tell you frankly, Tanner,” he went on. “I’m not in favor of using outside people on Institute projects. It’s not good policy.”

  “I can understand that as a general rule,” I said. “But Mrs. Nelson tells me these gentlemen might decide to play rough. You wouldn’t want one of your troops tossed off the bridge, would you?”

  “I guess not,” he mused, raising his heavy brows. “Then again, if we really wanted to shut them down, that might be the best thing that could happen.”

  “Bill,” Mrs. Nelson scolded. “You shouldn’t pay any attention to him, Mr. Tanner,” she said to me. “He’s been plotting Institute strategy for so many years he’s lost control of his imagination. And his tact. I remember when he and Roland were fighting for a height limit on the waterfront buildings. Bill wanted to build a brick wall around the mayor’s house one night, so he’d wake up and see what it felt like to end up behind one of those monstrosities. I think he even got an estimate, didn’t you Bill?”

  Freedman ignored her and turned to me. “Have you got an approach figured out?”

  “Not yet. I want to study Mrs. Nelson’s background material first.”

  “Okay. But we should get moving on this. It’s a preliminary investigation to see if we should turn the whole Institute loose on the project. If you wait too long we’ll be into something else. You’re probably going to have to get inside one of their facilities to do us any good.”

  “I agree.”

  “Done it before?”

  “No comment.”

  “Fair enough. What kind of fee do you want?” he asked.

  “We hadn’t decided. I usually charge two hundred a day.”

  “That’s too much,” Freedman said bluntly.

  “On something like this I guess I could go to a hundred a day and I’d bear all expenses under fifty bucks.”

  “That’s more reasonable. Let’s start at that and see where we go.”

  Freedman started to leave, but it was time to get some information I could use. “I understand the Institute pays its people pretty well,” I said. “Not like Nader’s operation.”

  “We’re competitive with the private sector. We try to keep within twenty percent of what the big law firms and accounting factories pay. Our starting lawyers get eighteen. Most of them stay at that level since they usually leave within a couple of years. We only have ten senior staff. Then Sara and me. Then Roland. That’s our organizational chart.”

 
“What does Nelson drag out of here?”

  Freedman turned sharply, his head veiled in smoke. “We don’t make that public,” he said with exaggerated precision. “Do we, Jackie?”

  It was a warning, and she knew it. “No,” she said.

  I hurried on. “Where do most of your funds come from? Foundations? Gifts?”

  “Almost entirely gifts. The Federal Motors foundation gave us money early on but cut it off when we turned on them. We’re very good at biting the hand that feeds us. We also get a lot of money from students. They used to work for us to reduce their guilt, but these days a couple of bucks seems to take care of it. Times change.”

  “I see your ads on television once in a while.”

  “That’s our main effort, the Awareness Drive. We do it twice a year. Nationwide. Last year we raised five million.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Not bad, but not enough. There’s never enough.” Freedman’s face clouded over, as if he had inhaled an unpleasant memory along with the smoke. He crossed his arms on his chest.

  “Our standards are high, Tanner,” he said carefully. “We don’t stand for shoddy work. No mistakes, of commission or omission. Our work is thorough, it’s accurate, and it’s fair. Keep it in mind.”

  “Of course, Your Excellency.”

  “It’s not a joke. These are crucial times for the Institute. The subjects of our past efforts are uniting to bring us down. The IRS is checking our books. Several Congressmen are trying to tie us up in committee hearings so we won’t have the time or the resources to get on with our next project. Some of our more, uh, illustrious members are losing their zeal. Or worse.” He glanced quickly at Mrs. Nelson. “Don’t let us down, Tanner. We can’t afford to fail.”

  I was tempted to ask him the number of the closing hymn; instead, I told him I would do my best. Freedman’s zeal was intimidating.

  Someone knocked at the door and Freedman told him to come in. A moon-faced young man showed us his head.

  “Bill,” he said urgently, “the Washington office is calling again. It’s important. Senator Kale may be backing off.”