“Gosh,” Rep said, “I can’t do that. I mean, just start naming people on speculation because a machine beeped.”
“We’re going to have to insist,” mufti said.
“Excuse me,” Rep said, blustering a bit in indignation at this gross deviation from everything he’d taken the trouble to learn in Criminal Procedure I at a top-rated American law school, “but you’re not in any position to insist. You can’t just hold me here for questioning without arresting me.”
“Okay,” uniform shrugged. “You’re under arrest.”
“On what charge?”
“Failure to provide proper cooperation and assistance to law enforcement authorities in the course of a legitimate criminal investigation,” mufti said.
“Is that a crime in Michigan?” Rep asked in genuinely interested astonishment.
“It’s a crime in this room until a judge says it isn’t,” uniform said.
“Look,” Rep said, “this is ridiculous. I have a plane to catch in less than half an hour.”
“I wouldn’t be counting on that,” uniform said. “You have the right to remain silent, et cetera. You know, like from NYPD Blue.”
“I know the rest,” Rep sighed. “I’m a fan.”
Chapter 10
Melissa had sworn that she’d never do what she was about to do. She sat at Rep’s computer in their den at six o’clock Friday night and got ready to read his e-mails.
She just didn’t see that she had any choice. She had gotten home to find a message from Rep on the answering machine saying that his flight was delayed and he’d update her when he knew more. But no update had come, and when she dialed his digital phone number all she got was an invitation to leave messages that a satellite would pass on when and if it felt like it. She normally took this kind of thing in stride, but Charlotte Buchanan’s case wasn’t a normal situation. Especially after what she’d learned in the library this afternoon, the tension pooling in her gut had gradually congealed into worry, and the worry was starting to feel a lot like fear.
But she couldn’t exactly call the police, could she? Yes, officer, well you see there’s this English movie, and then I found an article in a 1962 issue of Life magazine…. So, conscience-stricken but resolute, she pulled up the last e-mail Rep had gotten, which had come in after they’d both gone to bed.
Rearward,
I read your post. That’s terrible. I don’t have anything for you now, but I’ll keep my ears open. Hang in there.
Rosie Cul
Melissa blinked. Post? Then she remembered the web sites he’d visited while she was reading bleary-eyed through lame working scripts—the sites that had sent her to bed in tight-lipped indignation. It took nearly twenty minutes for her to navigate through the unfamiliar waters, but she found the sex.soc.spanking bulletin board and scrolled quickly to a posting by Rearward at 7:45 yesterday evening:
Big problem. Someone has learned my name and is spreading information about my interests to people who don’t share them. It’s gotten to the point where others may be hurt. I need to know if anyone has been making inquiries about me in the past year or so. Please do not post responses but e-mail at the following address: [email protected].
Rearward
It took a few seconds for the implications to penetrate. When they did, though, Melissa sat back open-mouthed for a moment, awestruck. Rep wanted the information he sought so badly that he had told what could not be told; spoken what must forever remain unsaid. He had revealed himself, offered his most vulnerable flank. He had given his actual, real-world e-mail address to who knows how many casual net-surfers, one or more of whom might be able almost instantly to put his actual name and face with it.
Despite Rep’s injunction not to respond with an answering post, Melissa checked two screensful of bulletin board entries following Rep’s. Many of them shrieked with outrage at the wanton invasion of privacy Rearward had indicted. Most expressed unqualified sympathy and support for him. But none of them actually offered any information, and she realized that this kind of stuff wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
She went back to the e-mails sent to Rep and reviewed them in reverse chronological order. The fifth one she came to set the bells off in her head.
Rearward:
I wouldn’t ordinarily respond to this type of thing, but the situation you describe is very bad. The entire system and all the good it does depends on respecting each other’s privacy and space. (Or to put it another way, from certain points of view it’s bad for business.) I do have some information that may be helpful to you, but I’m afraid I can’t e-mail it—after all, we aren’t completely sure who’s reading your e-mails, are we? I’m leaving tomorrow for the Chicagoland Scene Party this weekend, but I’ll be back in L.A. on Monday. Call one of the numbers on my web site and we’ll set up a secure way to communicate.
Jennifer Payne
Melissa was still far from mastering the lingo, so she didn’t know that people who shared Rep’s, er, interest and actively tried to meet others with the same inclination described themselves as being “in the scene.” Even so, she had no trouble connecting this reply with Rep’s note about “Jennifer Payne” and the “C/land Scene Play.” The only problem this left was that she didn’t know what to do now.
Well, yes, she did, actually, but she was having trouble making herself do it. It wasn’t being afraid, so much. It was more that she just couldn’t imagine herself doing it. She remembered almost weeping with rage and frustration in the none too ample trouble-lane of I-80 when she was 19, staring fecklessly at the jack and the tire iron while her father, who could have changed the flat in ten minutes, told her that by-God she was going to do it, not him, because someday she was going to have to change a tire when there wasn’t any man around to help her and she’d better know how. It was the same kind of thing. She hadn’t been afraid of getting her hands dirty. It was just—what, me? change a tire?
Then the computer pinged and an envelope icon appeared in the lower right-hand corner. She had mail. Or, rather, Rep did.
Trembling a bit, she brought the new message up. It had hit the machine at 4:37 P.M.
Mr. Pennyworth:
Big time change of plans. Big news. You need to get face-to-face with Aaron Eastman pronto. As in yesterday. He’ll be in northern California, at the St. Anthony Hotel in Pomona Sunday night, supposedly trying to line up some Silicon Valley financing Monday for his next flick. (This is from a very reliable source, and it’s on the money.) He’s just gotten some very critical information, and you need to strike while the iron’s hot. (Sorry for the cliché, but I’m writing this in a hurry.) I won’t be reachable, but I’ll try to get word for you at the St. Anthony. I’ve already had someone make a reservation for you for Sunday night.
Charlotte Buchanan
Back to the web sites. Sex.soc.spanking didn’t have the information Melissa was looking for, but Disciplinary Wives Club did. The Chicagoland Scene Party would run from four o’clock this afternoon through noon on Sunday. DWC helpfully provided a hot-link for anyone who wanted to go directly to the Scene Party site and sign up. Melissa clicked.
Three minutes later she had filled in all the blanks on the screen. She had identified herself as Aunt Stern, which she thought was kind of clever for spur of the moment and everything. She had given Rep’s e-mail address, because that cat was pretty much out of the bag. She had blanched when she’d filled in her credit card data, despite the banner saying that if she really turned out to be a woman, 70% of the $300 fee would be rebated to her.
The screen arrow rested on “SEND,” and her index finger hovered over the mouse. But she hesitated. It wasn’t the money that was holding her up. It was the thought that that credit card had her name on it—not Rep’s or a crafty nom de guerre.
Irritated at her own continuing timidity, she impulsively dialed Louise Krieg’s number, as a recollection of their chat this morning vectored into the pattern her mind had a
lready formed from the data she’d been gathering.
“Happy Friday night,” Krieg said delightedly after Melissa identified herself. “I’m just about to get blitzed. Care to join me?”
“Can’t,” Melissa said. “I have a quick question. You said there was someone in Tavistock’s AV department who ended up getting a job with a production company in L.A. What was his name?”
“All I can say is it’s a bloody good thing you asked that before I fired up my little white friend here. Let me think. Tall, neatly bearded, mellow schtick, longish hair—Selding. That’s it. His name was Selding. Jerry or Harry or something.”
“Thanks,” Melissa said. She clicked SEND at the same moment.
Chapter 11
The first thing Rep saw after the cell door slammed was a guy coming toward him out of gauzy shadows made of gray light filtered through dank air. A big guy and bald, with a scarred, misshapen pate. Applied to him, “knuckle-dragger” would have been barely metaphorical, and “mouth-breather” relentlessly literal. A loose leather vest worn over a sleeveless top exposed arms where tattoos featuring snakes and skulls rippled. His expression suggested indignation at someone else being chosen to play Uncle Fester in the last Addams Family remake, and it seemed to Rep that he had a point.
“Welcome to jail,” the guy grunted through a yellow, picket-fence smile. “Let’s play house.”
That’s when Rep woke up. He was still in the airport’s windowless interview room. The uniformed state trooper and the bullet-head in civvies were conferring in a corner with their backs turned toward Rep, as they had been when he’d dozed off.
They had done this periodically during Rep’s sojourn in the room. At other times, one of them would step outside with a portable phone that they apparently shared. Most often, though, they would confront him together, either to ask him questions or to speculate, ostensibly between themselves but patently for his benefit, on the impossibility of an intake judge being found anytime before nine o’clock Monday morning—sixty hours from now, as Rep verified with a glance at his watch.
He hadn’t made any phone calls, although they’d told him he could make one. He hadn’t called Melissa because he didn’t want her name to figure any more prominently than it had to in the report these guys were going to write. And he hadn’t called a lawyer because if he’d known one who lived in Traverse City, and had had his home phone number, and had been lucky enough to reach him, and if that lawyer had possessed the legal acumen and street-smart craftiness of Clarence Darrow, Louis Nizer, and the O.J. Dream Team combined, the very best advice he could possibly have given Rep at the moment would have been, “Keep your mouth shut.”
Rep was accomplishing that without any help. Not so much because he had any police court savvy to spare as because this evening’s trauma seemed to have shut down several of his mental circuits. He could no longer generate the cerebral energy to take a writeup on a client’s bill, much less answer challenging questions.
The door opened and another man came into the room. He was wearing a navy blue sport coat over an open-necked white dress shirt and khaki slacks. Rep sighed inwardly with relief at this indication that the man had about as much imagination as the average can of tuna fish. God preserve me from imaginative lawyers, he managed to think.
The man introduced himself. Rep didn’t bother to note his name but he picked up the title: Assistant United States Attorney. A couple of the sputtering synapses in Rep’s brain coughed back to life. Not assistant district attorney for whatever county Traverse City was in. Not corporation counsel. Not deputy Michigan attorney general. Not anyone paid by the State of Michigan or any of its appendages, as Trooper Smokey and Coach Bullet-head were. Rep’s custodians had passed the buck to the federal government.
Gee, Rep thought, now I’ll have an FBI file. Just like mom.
The guy held out his hand as he pulled up a chair across the table from Rep—friendly, first-time-in-this-bar kind of way. Rep found himself shaking the hand, not by conscious choice but by almost involuntary reflex. The guy smiled—friendly, new-face-at-the-Kiwanis-Club kind of smile.
“So. What’s the problem?” he said.
Rep didn’t say anything.
“Look, this is just routine. We’re not talking SWAT teams at four A.M. PETN, if that’s what it really is and that machine didn’t blip when it should’ve blinked—well, PETN is serious stuff. We just need to follow up in a discreet and professional way. You can understand that. You’re a professional. You’d do the same thing. So what’s the problem?”
Rep didn’t say anything.
It went on like that for quite awhile. Solicitude. Can we get this man some coffee, maybe? Low-key carrots. Just give me something to chew on. Coupla names and we’ll call it a night. Low-key sticks. I don’t wanna go the grand jury route. Which do you think would bother your clients more—five-minute chat in the office or a piece of paper with Latin on it? Humor. You don’t need immunity, do you? ’Cause I’m definitely not gonna make it back for last call if that’s what’s holding us up. A break now and then—the guy had a taste for Diet Dr. Pepper without ice—followed by little snatches of OK-fun’s-fun-but- dammit-this-is-serious. You know what you’re acting like, don’t you, partner? You’re acting like someone who’s been through the mill and has something to hide. You want me to walk out of this room thinking that’s what you are?
Rep kept on not saying anything and eventually it was ten-fifteen. Coach Bullet-head, who had been outside with the door closed, came back in and tapped the Rotarian Assistant United States Attorney on the shoulder. They walked outside and when they came back in thirty seconds later the Rotarian didn’t bother to sit back down.
“Okey-dokey, pal, don’t say I didn’t try to do it the easy way. We’re not holding you. You’re free to go. But I’d get myself a frequent-flyer card with Quad States if I was you. I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing each other again soon. And when that U.S. marshal comes by with that great big lucite-covered shield on his coat pocket and that bulge under his left armpit and that grand jury subpoena in his right hand, don’t be surprised if he strolls right into the middle of a conference with your senior partner and your biggest client.”
Rep stood up and retrieved his laptop. They insisted on keeping the case, so he gathered the bulky accessories stored there into an awkward bundle that he pinned under his arm: power cord and modem connection, plus the recharging unit for his digital phone—umbilical baggage that his ancestors had conquered a continent without but that he desperately needed for a low-key, Midwestern trademark and copyright practice. The laptop case had been his only luggage, so he had to pull out a legal pad and a thin correspondence file as well.
He was astonished at his good luck when he found someone still tending the Quad States counter. By 10:26 he had secured a ticket on the flight back to Indianapolis at 9:10 Saturday morning. Now all he had to do was find an airport hotel with a vacant room, wait twenty minutes or so for its shuttle, jolt through a half-mile ride that for some reason would take ten more minutes, check in, call Melissa, take a shower—with any luck at all he could be asleep before midnight.
He turned away from the desk to find Trooper Smokey waiting for him.
“I can give you a ride to the Day’s Inn,” he said. “I mean, missing your flight and all. I don’t have any chits, but if you send the receipt in the airport authority can reimburse you.”
What, the whole sixty-nine-ninety-five? Rep thought. He came very close to telling Trooper Smokey contemptuously to skip it.
But he didn’t. He took a deep breath and after the exhalation the guy he saw wasn’t Trooper Smokey. He was someone who got up every day to do his job just as Rep did, except that his job meant facing physical danger and nasty people so that guys like Rep could make five or six times his salary by pushing papers across a desk in air-conditioned offices.
“Thanks,” Rep said. “That’d be great.”
Six minutes later t
he trooper dropped him off outside the Day’s Inn lobby, exactly half a mile from the terminal and a snappy one hundred fume-choked yards from a noisy, arc-lighted Budget Rent-a-Car facility. Rep was in his room by 10:40.
He found that he couldn’t plug in both his laptop and his digital phone without moving the bed. Not feeling up to anything quite so ambitious, he connected the laptop and put the phone on his pillow so that he’d remember to recharge its battery before retiring for the night. He was surprised to get the answering machine when he called home, but he left a message updating Melissa (who he supposed was taking a shower) and figured he’d try again after checking his office messages and e-mails.
While his computer was booting up he flipped on the room TV and began banzai channel-surfing in search of white noise. He clicked past CNN and MSNBC without a flicker of attention. He wasn’t physically tired but he didn’t have an ounce of mental energy to his name. The ordeal of arrest and interrogation and the exhilaration of surviving them left him pumped and drained at the same time. He was looking for pure eye candy, mental junk-food.
He found it. Entertainment Tonight! Coming up not at the top of the hour but in three minutes, after two last beer commercials and a final wrap-up of the Tigers’ game against the Indians. Perfect.
Rep propped himself up in bed, dialed his computer into his office, and started reviewing e-mails. The one from Charlotte Buchanan was four down the list. He reached it at the exact moment Entertainment Tonight! introduced its first story.
“A lot of people wouldn’t call what we bring you on ET! hard news,” a male anchor who seemed to be smiling in spite of himself was saying. “Well, tonight is an exception. We lead off with a copyrighted story featuring Lisa Goldman that we ran on today’s first ET! edition at six o’clock Pacific Time tonight.”
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