by Stuart Woods
“We’ve had a very nice conversation,” she replied.
“May I offer you some coffee?” he asked, glancing at his watch. “Or something more medicinal?”
“It’s been a long day,” she replied. “Do you have a bourbon-flavored medicinal?”
“I do,” Stone said, grateful for the opportunity to have a drink himself. He poured them both one, picked up her file from his desk, and sat down on the sofa, opposite her. They raised their glasses and drank.
“I should have been the senator from Kentucky, instead of Virginia,” she said.
Stone laughed. “Have you been in town long?”
“Only since this morning. I took the shuttle up to do some fund-raising. I don’t get to come to New York often enough to suit me. Next time there’s a vacant Senate seat here, I’ll give some thought to changing states. You aren’t recording any of this, are you?”
“Not a word. The President asked me to meet with you.”
“And me to meet with you.”
Stone glanced at her curriculum vitae: “Smith College, valedictorian. Harvard Law, editor of the Law Review, then a doctorate in constitutional law. And I see that in your years of private practice you pled cases before the Supreme Court more than a hundred times before being appointed solicitor general by Will Lee, and in that position you appeared before the Court another sixty-odd times.”
“I sound so well qualified when you say it like that,” she replied with a chuckle.
“Tell me, are your views on all the hot-button issues well known, or have you been terribly discreet about that?”
“I’m a Democrat,” she replied. “I think that about covers it.”
“So, if I asked you how you would vote on a particular case, how would you reply?”
“I would decline to reply, since the subject might come up if I were on the Court. I think the President is well aware of how I think.”
“As are the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee?”
“Oh, yes. I serve on that committee.”
“How do you get along with the Republican members?”
“I flatter them at every opportunity,” she said. “I’d show a little leg, if it would help.”
Stone laughed. This wasn’t going the way he had imagined it would. “Is there anything in your views that might surprise the President, not to mention the committee?”
Senator Bond thought about that. “You may have noticed that when I mentioned guns, I referred to ‘gun safety’?”
“I did notice that.”
“It wouldn’t bother me if every qualified American went around armed, if I could choose who was qualified. What I mean to say is, I’d let eighty or ninety percent of the population carry a concealed weapon after serious training, but I’d make it a lot harder to get a carry license, and I’d make them renewable annually, just to see who was serious. Of course, that’s more a legislative view than one from the court, but still, it might surprise the President.”
“Well,” Stone said, “it’s probably better that she hear that from me, instead of when a split decision was announced.”
“I’ll grant you that.”
“Is there anything in your personal life that she should know about?”
“I had a nasty divorce twelve years ago. My former husband is dead, and I didn’t shoot him, but still, he told some hurtful lies about me at the time, and I’m sure that’s in somebody’s opposition research handbook.”
“Have you remarried?”
“No, and if I should decide to do so, I’d have a broad field to choose from, because it could go either way, regarding gender.”
That stopped Stone in his tracks. “And what percentage of the population knows that about you?”
“Exactly two women and one man, including you.”
“And are the two women discreet?”
“One is dead, and you can’t get any more discreet than that. The other is married to a United States senator, has been for twenty-odd years, and I don’t think she’d want her children to know.”
“Would you want the President to know about that, going in?”
“I’m afraid I’m not going to make it easy for you, Mr. Barrington. If I had my druthers, I’d wait until I was confirmed before I let it out, but now I’ve done my duty by reporting it to the President’s man, and both you and she can do with it what you will, and I’ll not give a damn. May I have another drink?”
Stone was happy to get up and get her another, since it would give him a moment to recover. He poured them both another one and sat down again. “Anything else I should know about?”
“No bestiality or child porn in my past, present, or future. I’ve never committed a crime that didn’t involve a radar gun on a highway, and I don’t use drugs of any sort, except alcohol, and I never have more than two drinks in a twenty-four-hour period, so I won’t ask for another.” She raised her glass and drank.
They spent the remainder of their hour together chatting about whatever came up, and Stone liked her more and more. Finally, he and Bob walked her to her car, and he put her inside. He waved her off, regretting that circumstances didn’t allow him to be more forward.
50
Stone had dinner with Dino at Rotisserie Georgette, an East Side favorite of his that specialized in French comfort food. Viv was out of town on business.
“The Times reviewer said that the clock in this place stopped at ten minutes before cuisine nouvelle,” Stone remembered.
“That’s good enough for me,” Dino said, and they split a roast chicken between them.
“Okay, what happened after I left you at the Lowell?”
“Turns out that David and Alexandra, as they then were, ducked into the restaurant next door through the hotel lobby entrance, and the doorman there put them into a cab. We missed them by a whisker, and those New York yellow cabs have a way of all looking alike.”
“Did you shoot any of your entourage?”
“Nah, it wasn’t their fault, it was yours, for not figuring that trick with the door.”
“I assume you exercised your rights under the search warrant?”
“I did. We took the suite apart, but there was nothing there but clothes and the sort of things people travel with.”
“No fake IDs or paperwork of any kind?”
“You tell me—was the guy carrying a briefcase when they got on the elevator with us?”
“Jesus, I think you’re right. I forgot about that.”
“Then that’s where the goodies were. I’d give a lot to rummage through that briefcase.”
“Would you like me to do my magic trick and find out if they’ve checked into another hotel?”
“You mean get Bob Cantor to use his ill-gotten computer program?”
“I did not say that.”
“Did you know that in France, when anyone checks into a hotel, a little card is filled out, and those are collected every evening by the local cop shop, and all the names entered into their computer?”
“I did know that, but I’d forgotten it. You should buy Bob’s computer program, you know.”
“We would, if he hadn’t stolen parts of it from half a dozen other pieces of copyrighted software. He’d have to rewrite all the code from scratch before we’d touch it, and that could take months, if not years.”
“It might be worth the wait,” Stone pointed out.
“But to get back to the subject at hand. I don’t think D and A are in a hotel, I think they’ve got a little hidey-hole somewhere in the city, probably not far from the Lowell and the Carlyle, where they keep their wardrobe and the tools of their trade—computer, cameras, color copying machine, laminator, et cetera, plus checkbooks, letters of credit, and all the other paraphernalia that the modern con artiste employs.”
“I would have thought they’d be out
of town by now.”
“Nah, we did some digging and found traces of them here and there. They’re supremely confident, those two. Did you notice how cool D was when you introduced me? And believe me, they had already planned an escape route out of that hotel or they wouldn’t have been staying there. It was like they went up in a puff of smoke.”
“So what’s your next move?”
“I don’t have one,” Dino admitted, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if we heard from them again. By ‘we’ I mean ‘you.’”
“Why would they contact me?”
“To gloat, maybe.”
“You think they’re that cocky?”
“Oh, hell yes. I expect they’ve made a very nice living, maybe a fortune, out of what they do, and they admire themselves.”
“That reminds me—I had a call from my New Mexico sheriff. He checked with the hotel, and they used a credit card there with no customer or bank name on it, just a number and the usual strip of magnetic tape.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“They’ve got an offshore bank account—maybe in the Cayman Islands, maybe more than one place. They can wire-transfer funds into it from anywhere, and they can use the anonymous card to get cash at ATMs, or use it at hotels, rental car agencies, and like that.”
“That sounds pretty smooth,” Dino said. “I’d like to have one of those.”
“All you need is a ticket to the Bahamas, where you charter a light airplane to fly you to George Town, Caymans—and enough cash in your bag to impress a banker. You need never visit the bank again.”
“How long do you suppose they’ve been doing this work?”
“They’re in their late forties, early fifties, I’d say, and I’ll bet that at least one of them has worked in a bank or on Wall Street. They’d need that kind of experience to work their scams.”
“Did they take Carrie Fiske for any money?”
“I think they had planned to, but once they got a whiff of her jewelry collection, they probably ditched the long con they usually run and went for the ice. But they got greedy and impatient and killed the golden goose.”
“And what do you think they’re doing now?”
“Looking for another goose.”
51
Stone got up a little early the following morning to greet his next person of interest for the Big Court. This was Congressman Terrence Maher, the bane of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Stone found him drinking coffee and reading a Washington Post (his own) on the sofa in his office. Bob watched him carefully from a respectful distance.
“Good morning. I’m Stone Barrington.”
“Terry Maher,” the man said. He was short, thick, and pugnacious-looking, with short, thick, graying hair and a poorly reconstructed broken nose.
“Can I get you more coffee?”
“You don’t want to experience me on two cups of coffee,” Maher replied.
Stone picked up the Maher folder on his desk and sat down. “Let’s see—City College of New York, BBA in accounting, Columbia Law and law review. Eight years with the late, great accounting firm of Arthur Andersen & Co., then ran for Congress in the Tenth District, formerly the home of Ed Koch and Carmine DeSapio. If I hadn’t grown up and moved uptown, you’d be my congressman.”
“And you would be a lucky citizen,” Maher said.
“You look like a former pug.”
“U.S. Marine Corps middleweight champion. I’ve put on a little tonnage since those days.”
“What was it like being gay in the Marine Corps?”
“It would have been hell on earth and probably fatal, if they had found out, but I managed to keep it quiet until I ran for Congress, then the Post unearthed an old lover—not even a very good one—and almost blew me out of the water. I think the gay vote in the Village saved me, and I’ve been eternally grateful to them ever since. I even tried to get the Stonewall Inn made a national monument—nearly drove the Republicans crazy.”
“You living with anybody now?”
“Hell, I’m married to a really sweet guy, another ex-Marine, nearly a year, now.”
“Congratulations. Does that leave anything in your personal life that might embarrass the President during the confirmation hearings?”
“Oh, the Post dragged all that out years ago. I’ve got some scar tissue, but no sucking wounds.”
“How do you see the hearings going? Any hope of getting confirmed?”
“As long as I don’t make an ass of myself while testifying, I don’t think they’d dare give me much trouble. The tide has turned and come roaring in, and they know that a vote against me would cause demonstrations in their districts. On the other hand, a vote for me would give them a leg to stand on come election day.”
“What about questions on more substantive issues?”
“All they can say is that I don’t follow their ideology, and I’ve voted on the moderate-to-conservative side of enough issues to give me some shade to stand in. Also, I’ve helped out every member of that committee in one way or another over the years. They’re not going to treat me as an embarrassment. I might even make it easy for them—get a suit made and grow a better haircut for the hearings.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Stone said. “Remember, they’ll be showing all that on TV for years to come—might as well look good.”
“Let me ask you something,” Maher said.
“Shoot.”
“How’d I end up getting vetted in your office. I didn’t even know who the hell you were until I asked around.”
“What did you hear back?”
“Lawyer at a top firm, used to be married to the widow of a movie star—that’s about it.”
“To answer your question, the President asked me to meet you and report back.”
“Yeah, but why you?”
“I understand you’re meeting four people, and I don’t know who the others are, but I would guess they’re people she knows well and from whom she can expect a straight answer to her questions.”
“Fair enough. Are you seeing Tiffany Baldwin?”
“Yes.”
“Would you believe that she once tried to put the make on me? How crazy is she?”
“An excellent question. Maybe she doesn’t read the Post.”
“I guess not. I wouldn’t want to go three rounds with her, either. I’m not sure I’d walk away.”
“Your instincts are good, Terry.”
“What else do you want to know? I’ve got a record—the President knows what I’m for and against.”
“What’s likely to come up in the hearings that might surprise her?”
Maher thought about that. “I’m one hell of a good cook,” he said. “French, Italian, anything you like.”
“Well, that surprises me.”
“I’ve often thought that when somebody finally unseats me—not that that’s possible—I might open a restaurant.”
“I’ll be your first customer.” Stone stood up and offered his hand. “Good to meet you.”
“And you.” Maher left; Bob watched him go but didn’t move.
“And what’s the matter with you, Bob? That guy scare you?”
The tail did the talking.
—
Joan buzzed. “Tiffany Baldwin in half an hour. I tried to get her to do it in public, but she wouldn’t budge.”
“All right. When she gets here I want you to come in here with a steno pad.”
“You know I don’t do shorthand.”
“Pretend, and don’t leave her alone with me for a second.”
52
Stone was waiting for Tiffany Baldwin to arrive when Joan buzzed him. “Somebody named Daryl Barnes is on line one. He says you know him.”
“I don’t.”
“Want me to get rid of
him?”
Stone had a thought. “No, and call in that number Dino gave us and ask for a trace.” He waited for a slow count of ten, then pressed the button. “Mr. Barnes? This is Stone Barrington.”
“Hello, Stone.”
“Have we met?”
“Several times, most recently at the Lowell.”
“Ah, are we using real names now?”
“It’s what my mama put on my birth certificate,” he said, and with a Southern accent.
“And is that a real accent?”
“It’s the way I used to talk, before I was led astray by Yankees.”
“How about . . . what’s your wife’s name?”
“Annie Allen, though we haven’t had the benefit of clergy. Yes, she’s a Southerner. We’re both from a little town called Delano, Georgia.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Stone said. “Meriwether County, isn’t it?”
“I’m impressed. I wouldn’t have thought your geography lessons in school would have covered Meriwether County.”
“It’s a pretty name, it stuck in my mind, I guess.” Stone looked at his watch; at least a minute gone.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I called.”
“Actually, Commissioner Bacchetti predicted you would.”
“Did he? The man’s clairvoyant!”
“Just very smart.”
“Why did he think I would call?”
“Because you’re cocky.”
That got a laugh. “Well, he’s nailed me, I guess.”
“If he hasn’t, he will. It’s what he does.”
“I must say, I was flattered that the commissioner of police came personally to arrest me.”
“He lives down the block from the Lowell—I guess he wanted his neighborhood’s air freshened.”
“Now, let’s not get nasty. I called because I want to hire you.”
“For what purpose?”
“To defend me against the charge the commissioner came to arrest me for, whatever it is.”
