Nothing but the Truth

by John Lescroart

  The question was an instruction and a threat and it caught Valens flat-footed, as Thorne had no doubt intended. He went back to pulling soft-drink and single-serving liquor bottles from the bar area. “But speaking of cocktails, in light of all the frenzy around this unfortunateMTBE poisoning, it occurred to me that the candidate could make an extremely dramatic presentation in the next day or two that might put him over the top to stay.”

  He’d arranged the bottles and some glasses on a little tray and brought it over to Valens, placing it on the coffee table, then sitting on the couch kitty-corner. He reached for his inside pocket and extracted a flask.

  “What’s in that?” Valens asked.

  Thorne loved a surprise. For an answer, he smiled and unscrewed the cap, then poured a half inch of the clear liquid into one of the glasses. Picking it up, he smelled it, then passed it across the table. “You tell me.”

  A sniff. “It’s alcohol.”

  Another smile, this one beaming. “Yes, it is. Absolutely right. It’s ethanol, straight up.” Thorne popped the top on a bottle of orange soda and reached over, pouring it into the glass. “Bottoms up, Al. Really.”

  “You want me to drink this?”

  “I think that’s the idea. Go on, it won’t hurt you.” But Valens couldn’t seem to force himself to move. After a second or two, Thorne said, “Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” took the glass and drained it in a couple of swallows. “Since when have you been so timid, Al? Did you think I was going to poison you?”

  “No, of course not. I just . . .” He met his employer’s eyes. “I don’t know, Baxter. I’m just fucking worn down.”

  Thorne gave him an avuncular pat on the knee. “A couple more days and it’s over. You hang in there it will all have been worth it. Now”—back to business—“what do you think about my idea?”

  “I’m not sure exactly what it is. Make ethanol cocktails?”

  Suddenly Thorne’s face showed some animation. “Actually, that might be even better. That’s just an inspired idea, Al. Really. Reporters will always take a free drink, won’t they?”

  Valens felt some of his own tension break. “That’s been my experience.”

  “Exactly. You see, I was thinking of having Damon drink some ethanol—as I just did—at a press briefing. Think of the contrast . . .” Thorne was getting wound up, although his voice never changed its inflection. “A few gallons of MTBE finds its way into the water supply and the whole city is shut down, the poisoned water smelling and tasting like turpentine.” He paused briefly and held up his flask. “While the other additive, the natural additive, ethanol, is so safe you can drink it. In fact, people have been drinking it forever. I love it,” he said. “This could be very strong.”

  But Valens wasn’t so sure. “If Damon will go for it.”

  Thorne’s face clouded. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “Because he’s careful, Baxter. He’s not an idiot. He’s never specifically endorsed ethanol. He’s just opposed to MTBE.”

  “Which if my logic hasn’t failed me leaves only ethanol.”

  “True.” Valens hated Thorne’s attempts to micromanage—he’d done a damn fine job with the campaign, and controlling the candidate, to date. He turned to reason. “But our strategy, you remember, has always been to let the voters make that leap, which they’re doing by themselves. This other is a little . . . overt, don’t you think?”

  “Sometimes you need overt.” The voice was eider-down; the tone was cold steel.

  Here was Thorne’s defensiveness, which he’d seen often enough before. It was a signal to Valens that he’d better walk softly, because the truth was that Thorne frightened him badly. He wasn’t fooling Valens that he wasn’t behind this water poisoning.

  Sometimes, though, such as today, people died.

  “I agree,” Valens said. “Sometimes overt is good. So how about I ask Damon, get his take on it? If he’ll go, we go.”

  “All right,” Thorne said mildly, “since that’s our only option anyway.” He was pouring a couple of the airline portions of vodka into his glass. He added an ice cube, topped it off with more orange soda, slid back more comfortably in his chair and took a long drink. “Now, about this Hardy fellow. I’ve done some research. It turns out he may be a bit of problem.”

  This was not what Valens needed just now. He came forward to the first two inches of the couch. “How’s that?”

  In his low-key way Thorne outlined what he’d discoveredabout Frannie, the grand jury, Ron Beaumont, a little of Hardy’s history, that he was a meddling lawyer who wasn’t always loath to get his hands dirty.

  “We can only assume,” he concluded, “since he buttonholed Kerry, that he’s made the leap—no pun—from Bree’s death to gasoline additives, which is not good news for us. I do wish we could locate Ron.” A sigh. “We should have acted more quickly, I’m afraid. I blame myself, really. I should have just hacked into her system and deleted the damn thing instead of—”

  But Valens was shaking his head. He didn’t want to get into another discussion with Thorne about the “instead of.” “No,” he interrupted, “she would still have had the hard copy and probably a backup disk. That’s what I was trying to get her to give me, to hold her off until after the election.”

  “Come on in, Al. Thanks for coming by.”

  He took in the incredible penthouse at a glance as he came through the door. He’d never been here before and the grandness of it surprised him, although maybe it shouldn’t have—every thing about Bree Beaumont made an impression. He was, he believed, largely immune to the attractive power of her physical presence but he wasn’t fool enough to deny its existence.

  She was Damon’s girlfriend and as such a campaign factor to control, so he tried not to think of her as a woman. He didn’t care that she was a woman. She was butting into his campaign and his business and he didn’t like her, period.

  But this was the first time he’d ever been alone with her. As she led him through the ornate living room and back to the sitting area near the balcony, he was subliminally aware of the tasteful decorating, the fancy art, the panorama out the windows.

  There was a better view close up, however. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Bree’s perfect ass, which she’d poured into a pair of designer jeans. He’d never before seen her in jeans. Or in a T-shirt with nothing under it. Or barefoot. Her blond hair cascaded halfway down her back. He thought he could encircle her waist with both his hands.

  Somehow all of this made him vibrate with a dull anger, as though she could walk around like this, around him, and the vastness between them was so great that it would be literally unthinkable for him to have any reaction to her. She was so far above him that he did not exist. And this did more than simply piss him off.

  She was making small talk as she led him back. “Sorry I’m such a mess,” she said. “I’ve been working all afternoon on the computer and lost track of the time.” He was half listening and all the way still looking when she suddenly turned—did she catch where his eyes were?—and motioned to one of the low, upholstered chairs. “Anyway, just to thank you again for coming. I wouldn’t have bothered you but I don’t know what to do. I wanted your advice before I burden Damon with anything else.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Valens said lamely. He was a few inches under six feed—about Bree’s height—and weighed in at near two hundred pounds. Brown hair, heavy shadow, understarched white shirt, and rack suit. His tongue wouldn’t work. “I appreciate your thinking of me.”

  Perhaps sensing his reaction to her, she stood a moment, awkwardly, then motioned to one of the chairs. “Do you want to have a seat? Can I get you something to drink? I’ve got anything really.”

  “Yeah, I’ll take a beer, thanks.”

  He watched her again, then forced himself to look out over the balcony to the city beyond. In a heartbeat, she was back with a bottle of some foreign beer, a chilled pilsner glass, and a plastic bottle of Evian.

  Valens thanked her
politely. “This is a nice place,” he said, pouring.

  She was unscrewing the cap on the water bottle and she stopped, her face turning wistful. “Yes. Though I’m afraid it looks like we’re going to have to let it go pretty soon. But I shouldn’t complain—it’s been very nice, more than we ever thought we’d . . .” She stopped. “The upkeep’s just too much. And anyway, Ron and I—my husband?—well, you know.”

  “He’s not around, is he?”

  She shook her head. “No. He and the kids went . . . well, it doesn’t matter. They’re out now.”

  Valens took a deep draft, then tried to ask it gently. It wouldn’t do him any good to show anything. “So is this about him?”

  The question seemed to surprise her. “No. Nothing about that really.”

  He waited.

  She looked out over his shoulder, absently bringing the water bottle to her lips. “I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching lately, Al. And also a lot of research.”

  “Okay.”

  She brushed some hair away from her face. “You know, ever since Damon got me to start questioning my assumptions on my work on the petroleum side, looking in different directions as he’d say, it’s really been . . . I guess you’d say an education.”

  Valens nodded.

  “Which is funny, given that I’m considered an expert on all of these issues.”

  A shrug and an attempt to smile. “Well, you saw the light, that’s all.”“

  But she shook her head. “I don’t know what I saw really. I think, other than just being so hurt that I’d been misled by people I trusted and mad at myself for being so stupit—I mean, Al, I am not stupid—anything else, okay, just not stupid.”

  “No,” Valens said, trying to keep it light, “we could go with not stupid.”

  But the levity went by her. Impatiently, she brushed her hair away again. “But even more, other than that, Damon got me back to why I started doing all this . . . my work, I mean . . . in the first place.”

  “Which was?”

  She stopped. “This will sound stupid.”

  Valens shook his head. “No, we’ve agreed we’re not going with stupid. So why’d you start working in the first place?”

  “I wanted to do good.” She let out a breath in a whoosh. “Okay, there. I’ve said it.”

  “Okay.” Big deal, he thought. “So you wanted to do good?”

  “And I did, too. I did what I set out to do, with MTBE. Do you know how great that stuff works cleaning up the air, Al? It cuts toxic emissions down to almost nothing. You go out to Pasadena now in August and you can see the mountains. Or even out there.” She pointed to the window. “You can see it! It has made the world cleaner, do you realize that? Do you see what an incredible achievement that was?”

  Now she was all wound up and had to stand to walk off some of it. Over to the balcony doors, pulling them open, letting in a blast of cool air. It seemed to calm her after a moment, and she turned around to face him again.

  “Anyway, in spite of its bad press now, the point is that it really worked, and I was part of it, a big part of it. The EPA loved it, everybody loved it. Can you understand how invested I was in it? How when the complaints started to appear, I didn’t want to look? I couldn’t look.”

  “Anybody could understand that,” Al said, although he wasn’t sure that he could. “That was natural.”

  “It was,” she agreed. “It was so natural.” Sighing, she came back to the chair across from him and sat in it, their knees almost touching. “Anyway,” she said, “then I saw it, what I was doing, because of Damon.”

  “And you did right.”

  “Well, as far as it went.”

  Valens cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I guess I was angry. I’d been made to look like a fool and I didn’t want it to happen again. I realized that Damon was starting to look like he was pushing for ethanol, even if he wasn’t really doing it directly, and I wasn’t positive he wanted to go in that direction, either.”

  For Valens, this was the worst possible news. His candidate wasn’t a scientist—he didn’t need to know the details. All he needed to know was that MTBE polluted the groundwater and ethanol didn’t. Therefore ethanol was better. But he couldn’t show his concern. Instead, he stalled for a minute with his beer, then smiled. “Well, Bree, as you say, he’s never made ethanol part of his platform.”

  “Except it’s there. You know it is, Al.”

  “And is that so bad?”

  “Well, it’s not a great fuel. It’s expensive to make, it’s not as efficient—”

  He had to cut her off. “But it’s no danger in groundwater, and does make gas burn cleaner, right?”

  Bree grimaced, hesitated.

  “What? Tell me.”

  “We don’t need either of them. The whole additive industry is basically just one giant, greedy scam. The oil companies, as we know, are making billions on MTBE. But that’s not all. Have you ever heard of SKO, the farming conglomerate?”

  Valens felt his head go light. “Of course.”

  “Well, it’s making zillions, too, in subsidies for ethanol. They can’t make the stuff profitably, but somehow they’ve convinced the government that it’s in the national interest that we keep making it.”

  “Maybe it is. Maybe—”

  But she cut him off. “No. No, it’s not, Al. Listen to this. Did you know that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than the stuff generates as a fuel?”

  “I don’t think so, Bree. How is that possible?”

  “Tractor fuel, cost of shipment, storage, refining, like that.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well nothing. And since it has less fuel energy than gas, it guarantees worse gas mileage, which affects everybody who drives. Plus,” she continued, having worked herself into a high dudgeon, “do you realize that every dollar of SKO’s ethanol profits costs the American taxpayer thirty dollars? And I’m leaving out all the science here. This is just the crappy business stuff. It’s just awful.”

  Valens had no response to any of this. He didn’t know if any of it was true or not, and didn’t care, but it was clear that she had come to believe it and might take her message to Damon. That was the issue. That’s what he had to deflect.

  He kept his voice under control. “But Bree, almost all businesses—”

  “But Damon isn’t involved with almost all businesses. He’s involved with this one. And this ethanol thing isn’t even the worst of it.”

  He waited, hardly daring to breathe. What could be worse than what she’d already come to? “So what is?” he asked.

  She leaned forward, and her zealot’s eyes locked into his. “We don’t need either of them.”

  “Either of what?”

  “Either MTBE or ethanol, or any other gas additives for that matter. The EPA has mandated them, but the whole thing is a scam. The whole thing, do you realize that?” Her voice went up several decibels with her outrage.

  “I . . . I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he managed to stammer.

  “No, no. I know you don’t. How could you? Nobody does. Wait a minute.”

  Suddenly she was up, nearly running, disappearing into a hallway across the kitchen area. In another moment she reappeared carrying a large handful of papers. “Look,” she began without preamble. “I don’t expect you to understand the science,” she said, “but let me try to explain some of this.”

  He listened for what seemed an eternity as she went over the salient points of the report she’d been working on for the past month or six weeks. It contained a great deal of data— graphs, equations, analyses of comparisons in burn rates, emissions, efficiencies of gasoline—and gradually even Al Valens began to see what Bree had assembled.

  Culled from patent applications, lawsuit transcripts, internal memos, executive summaries, and expert testimony of dozens of combustion engineers, Bree’s report detailed a startling truth—that the oil companies had discovered a way to formula
te gasoline so that it burned cleanly without the addition of oxygenates, without any additives at all. “So you see, Al, it’s what I was telling you. The whole additive question is a scam. Damon’s got to be made aware of this. I’ve got to tell him.”

  When she finished, Valens gathered his thoughts. It wouldn’t do to alienate Bree now. If she did go running to Damon with this, if she convinced him to start talking about it, it would be a disaster. He sighed histrionically. “This is terrible,” he said. “Just awful. I wonder why it hasn’t made the news in a big way.”

  But Bree knew the answer to that one. “It’s a bunch of individual papers, experiments, opinions. That’s how we scientists work—on small problems, little tweaks here and there, which are fascinating and challenging in themselves.

  “Like with me and MTBE. At the beginning, in layman’s terms, my job was to prove it made for cleaner air. And every way I tested it, it worked. And then somehow my job changed and gradually I wasn’t really a scientist anymore. I was a spokesperson defending what I’d done, what Caloco believed in, what I believed in. So I wasn’t interested in groundwater, in cleanup, even in this reformulated gas. My job, my life, was MTBE. The rest of it wasn’t my problem.” She looked at him hopefully. “Do you understand at all?”

  He nodded. “Of course. Of course I do.”

  She squared the pages of her report, and sat back with it in her lap. “But I was wrong.”

  “No. I don’t think so. I think you trusted your employers. ” Valens reached across and touched her knee with his fingertips. Quickly. Even through the jeans, it burned. “Bree, you did the right thing calling me about this. I want you to know that.”

  She let out a long breath. “I didn’t know what else to do. Part of me feels like I should tell Damon, but he has so much on his mind already . . .”