The Capitol Game

by Brian Haig

  The only peculiarity was that she preferred to work alone, with a curious tendency to be slightly secretive; she wasn’t snobby or standoffish, though. She was a welcome addition at the Friday night happy hours when the investigators unwound from a long week of weeding out crooks and busting perps.

  The past eleven months, she had been chasing the big-time white-collar crooks at the corporate level. And whatever doubts Nicky once harbored were a thing of the past.

  “What else are you working on today?” Nicky asked, very reasonably, as though this was negotiable. It wasn’t.

  “A meeting with the prosecutors on the Boeing case. Case goes to court next week. Also, I need to take some depositions on the Phillips Aviation case.” She waved a hand at the stack he had just placed on her desk, almost lost among all the other stacks. She was very neat and tidy but the profusion of paper was too much for such a small desk. “Don’t worry, Nicky, I’ll do it.”

  “Yes, you will. But thanks.” Nicky turned around and began the torturous journey back to his office.

  The moment he was out of sight, Mia pushed aside the documents dealing with Mendelson Refineries. She pulled out the stack she had hidden beneath another stack when Nicky surprised her and returned to the documents she had been reading.

  In her right hand was the Senate bill providing funding for CG’s polymer, in her left the House version of the same bill. She was halfway through the two pieces of legislation, meticulously comparing them line by line. They were identical, so far; even the periods and commas were identically placed.

  Mendelson Refineries, even if the tip panned out, was worth, at best, only $2 million in fraud. She would study it later, only after she finished her own project.

  A much bigger fish was in her sights.

  It took Morgan a full day to track down Su Young O’Malley in a small, untidy row house in Queens, about midway on a long block of eerily identical homes. He’d wasted nearly a week locating her. The name change threw him for a full five days. After she left Primo, it turned out, she had married an NYPD cop, produced four kids, and now lived the harried existence of stay-at-home mom.

  Morgan could hear small kids squalling in the background when she came to the door. He withdrew his phony badge and gave her the usual cooked-up story about a routine background check.

  She explained that she was alone with the kids, and quite busy. He assured her that he didn’t mind; he would fit his questions in between diaper changes and feedings.

  After a moment of indecision she caved and invited him in. The home was small and cramped, the floor covered with toys and child pens and enough kiddy bric-a-brac to outfit a Kids-R-Us superstore. Su Young immediately dashed over to a crib where a tiny runt in PJs was howling and flailing his arms.

  She lifted him out, planted him firmly on a shoulder, and began to weave back and forth. After about fifteen seconds, the kid shut up. “What do you want to know?” she asked with a strong Brooklyn accent.

  Morgan quickly took her through his repertoire of soft opening questions, the same ones he had tried out on Marigold Anders—was Jack a good boss, was he honest, forthright, a true red-white-and-blue American, and so forth.

  Yes, all the above.

  Then came an unwelcome break while she dashed into the kitchen for some mysterious purpose. He sat and listened to her banging around. She emerged a few minutes later, her hands loaded with feeding bottles. She tossed one at him. “Pick any kid you want and get to work,” she ordered.

  He chose the one who looked almost catatonic, put him on his lap, and stuffed the bottle between his lips. “You’re not working anymore?” he asked, an attempt to be friendly.

  “Nope.”

  “All these kids, I guess. Good call.”

  “No, I quit before the kids.”

  “Why?”

  “Working for Jack was a ball. After he left, I got stuck with a slimy jerk. One of those guys with a fetish for Asian girls. Know what I mean? Always touching me, always making lewd comments. ‘Hey, open my zipper and read your fortune, cookie. Why don’t you chop on my stick?’ And those were his best lines. I got creeped out and quit.”

  “Should’ve reported him.”

  “Hah! Good luck. It’s Wall Street. Boys will be boys.”

  Morgan paused for a moment. Who cared? “Do you remember a client named Edith Warbinger?”

  For a moment she looked confused, and he was ready to end it there. But she popped a palm off her forehead. “Oh, you mean Mrs. Warbitcher.”

  “Yeah, I guess. How much do you remember about her?”

  “A lot. Too much. Our most high-maintenance account.”

  “I heard from someone that she had Parkinson’s.”

  “Only later. She was just very, well, let’s say demanding.”

  This didn’t match what Charles had told him, about a sweet, naïve old lady who had entrusted Jack with everything. Maybe it was a matter of perspective. “In what ways?” he inched forward and asked.

  “What way wasn’t she? She thought that bundle of dough gave her the right to be that way. She’d had a miserable life, and after the money came in, took it out on everybody. Drove Jack and me crazy.”

  “I heard she went on a long cruise.”

  “Oh that.” Su Young laughed. “What a relief. For us, I mean. I’m sure it was miserable for the cruise line.”

  “Then she disappeared, right?”

  “Someplace in Greece, I think.”

  “Any idea what happened to her?”

  “My guess would be the crew tossed her overboard. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but she really was a demanding bitch.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “I could tell you stories for an hour.”

  “What did Jack do when she disappeared?” he asked, before the stories could start.

  “He, or maybe the firm, hired some private detectives. For good or bad, she was our client. Jack insisted on it.”

  “Was she ever found?” Morgan asked.

  “What’s this got to do with Jack’s background check?” She was staring at him with growing suspicion now.

  “Just following up on something somebody mentioned. Please bear with me.”

  “No, she wasn’t found.”

  “And this was right around the time Jack left the firm?”

  “I suppose it was around then.”

  “Why did Jack leave?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “We did. I’m corroborating. Please answer.”

  Su Young pondered this for a moment, as though she had never considered the question. “You know what I thought? I don’t think he was ever happy there.”

  “Wanted to make more money, huh?”

  “No. I mean, I guess who doesn’t, right? Just, well, it wasn’t a nice place to work. Cutthroat, dog-eat-dog. Plenty of backstabbing and unhappy people.”

  “Did Jack have any problems with the CEO?”

  “You mean Kyle?”

  A quick nod. “I heard they were at each other’s throats.”

  “No, he… well, they all loved Jack. He brought in so much money, the big shots pretty much left him alone. Even gave him a million-dollar bonus when he walked out the door. Should’ve been a lot more, given what he did for them, you ask me.”

  Morgan had a long list of questions left to ask but it would be a waste of time to prolong this. Jack’s more questionable activities evidently did not make it down to the secretarial level, which came as no surprise. Morgan put down the baby and stood. He straightened his jacket, then slapped his head. “Oh, one last question.”

  Su Young was already out of her chair and moving for the child he had just put down. The kid was making fast tracks for the hot radiator in the corner, but she snatched him off the floor just in time.

  As nonchalantly as possible, Morgan asked, “Do you remember who introduced Jack to the firm? They must’ve been close. Another Princeton grad, I think.”

  “Tough question.” She paused
for a moment. “All the Wall Street firms are loaded with Ivy studs. But Jack was always pretty close with Lew Wallerman. I think they knew each other before.”

  Morgan thanked her, then walked out and closed the door quietly behind him. He stopped for a moment on the porch, withdrew the copy of Primo’s personnel chart, and began running his finger down the page, scanning for Wallerman.

  The thirtieth line down, there he was, listed as working in wealth management, just like Jack.

  “You’re Charles, and I got you,” he said out loud, and laughed.

  19

  By the second week of January, polymer-coated vehicles of all sorts were flying off the line. Humvees, Bradleys, M1 tanks, even the newest addition to the combat fleet, the Stryker, were lined up bumper-to-bumper to get a lifesaving face-lift. Fights broke out between the crews as they jockeyed to be next in line; the alternative was a long wait in a country where bombing had become the national sport.

  FOB Falcon; Camp Graceland; Rasheed Airbase; Camp Cuervo; Engineer Base Anvil; Camp Whitford; Camp Whitehouse, FOB Rustamiyah, Baghdad—all had painting facilities that were beehives of activity. Converting the same crews who had been armor-plating the vehicles into painting teams proved to be kid’s play.

  Even after spreading the chemical production around five different facilities located in five different states, the frenetic effort to supply sufficient quantities of the polymer fell abysmally short. Five or six large batches arrived in Iraq improperly mixed and had to be dumped, late at night, into nearby Iraqi rivers. Every other day, it seemed, the painting in Iraq ground to a halt. Quality control was another problem. Complaints poured back to the Pentagon about slipped schedules, shoddy workmanship, and the slapdash, miserably managed nature of the entire operation.

  The leaders of CG weathered the storm of criticism the same way they had withstood the old chorus of complaints about its uparmoring program, a program that had also experienced notable problems. They ignored it. Frankly, it came as little surprise. The same inept managers oversaw the polymer application, the same lackadaisical crews worked three-hour shifts, stole off for long lunch breaks, and retreated to their air-conditioned trailers by three every afternoon for prolonged happy hours.

  CG fell back on the tried-and-tested excuse that it was hard to hire good people for long-term duty in a scary war zone. What they wouldn’t admit was the bigger truth: in an effort to pump up profits, at the pitiful wages they were offering, nobody with half a brain would consider working for CG in Iraq.

  After a while, once the noise grew too loud, CG shipped over a few new bodies and added night crews who quickly adopted the local work habits and managed to produce only a minor improvement.

  But the results were spectacular, if you ignored the occasional blemish. In the first month, out of twenty attacks, only three coated vehicles were destroyed by roadside bombs. In each case, as investigations later revealed, the cause was faulty workmanship; CG’s coating crews had somehow, incredibly, overlooked the need to paint the whole vehicle.

  To manage the finances of this exploding new company, CG assigned a veteran CFO, a carefully chosen executive well seasoned in defense contracts, who promptly handpicked a team of cutthroats with similar backgrounds. Military contracting officials were notoriously overworked and outnumbered, and often were far less skilled than their private-sector counterparts. CG’s team knew all the tricks, and took them to the max.

  They padded the hours, added hundreds of ghost workers on the ground, jacked the cost of materials and production facilities through the ceiling, and double-billed as often as they thought they could get away with. And why not? The risks were almost inconsequential; in the unlikely event they were caught, a light slap on the wrist was the worst they could expect. The polymer was far too vital for the Pentagon to even consider anything as drastic as a punitive cancellation.

  But if the incredible happened, and the Pentagon caught on, CG would express contrition, reassign its managers, pay a small penalty, and bring in a new team of clever shysters who would start over with the same tricks.

  Eva continued to drop in at Jack’s like clockwork, every week. Their relationship seemed to be going nowhere fast, but she persisted. After all these months, they still hadn’t slept together, still hadn’t shared anything more passionate than a breezy peck on the cheek.

  Jack’s visits to D.C. had tapered off to a predictable routine. Once a week, he made a quick drop-by visit to his small office in CG’s headquarters to make the rounds and get updates on the polymer. Even those trips had turned into a waste of his time. The executives who had been so open and communicative in the early stages seemed to have developed collective lockjaw. Nobody would admit it, but somebody had put out the word to ignore him.

  A month before, Mitch Walters had coldly informed him of a new requirement: if he wanted to meet with the CEO, an appointment booked at least two weeks in advance was required. No problem, fine by him, Jack replied.

  He had yet to call for an appointment. For over a month, he had not spoken with either Bellweather or Walters. They could cold-shoulder and shove him aside as much as they liked, as far as Jack was concerned; he had something they couldn’t ignore in that big contract, after all.

  He owned a quarter of the polymer and its earnings.

  By the way the cherry red Camry corkscrewed into Jack’s driveway, mowing down three bushes before it squealed to a grinding stop, the TFAC watcher wondered whether she was drunk, furious, or both. After five months of observing Jack’s home the watcher couldn’t wait for this job to end. He was bored and miserable. The excitement Eva’s visits once prompted was a thing of the past. The betting game had long since been discarded; there were no longer any odds on whether Jack and Eva would or wouldn’t.

  Jack, for whatever reason—and many had been deliciously debated over the months—simply had no intention of letting Eva into his sack.

  They admired his humbling willpower, and detested his indifference.

  The TFAC man watched Eva stumble out the car and weave her way precariously to Jack’s front door. “She’s both,” he blurted into the microphone connecting him to the man parked in the van at the end of the block.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Eva. She’s back, rotten drunk, and pissed enough to throw a punch. Old Jack’s about to get an earful.” He rolled down his window and listened. What fun. He was parked nearby, across the street, in the driveway of a young couple who were off on a European safari for a month. He could hear everything.

  Eva pounded loudly on Jack’s door and stood there, swaying back and forth. “Jack, you bastard, come to the door. Come on, open up, I know you’re there.” She was bellowing loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear, nearly the whole county. Lights began popping on in bedrooms. A few faces crowded up to windows.

  After about a minute of her hollering and banging, the door opened. Jack stood there in his bathrobe. He invited her inside but she refused. “I’d rather have it out, here, buster. I want the whole neighborhood to hear this,” she announced at the top of her lungs. She was definitely getting her wish.

  “If that’s what you want, fine,” Jack said, remarkably smooth and patient. He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorjamb. “What’s this about, Eva? What’s the matter?”

  “You just shut up, ’cause this is my show. I’ll do the asking.” Her speech was slurred; the s’s came out with h’s, and the t’s virtually disappeared. She was totally, utterly smashed.

  Jack shrugged.

  “How long have I known you?” Eva demanded.

  “Seven months, more or less.”

  “Am I ugly?”

  “No. You’re very, very beautiful.”

  “You got a problem? Some fetish I don’t satisfy? Whatsa matter with me, Jack? Boobs too small? Butt not big enough? Too easy, not easy enough, what?”

  He smiled and tried to get her to relax. When she didn’t smile back he said, “It’s cold, come inside.�
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  She leaned forward and gave Jack a strong blast of whiskey breath.

  “You’re drunk, Eva. You’re making a fool of yourself.”

  “What if I said I’m in love with you, Jack?”

  “That’s nice. I like you, too. I just don’t like to be rushed.”

  She swayed drunkenly from side to side. She was beautiful. Even drunk, with messy hair and slack, boozy features, she was still beautiful, and sexy. When she nearly toppled over, Jack reached out and grabbed her arm. She brushed it off. “Why haven’t you ever kissed me?”

  “Maybe I’m too busy to get involved right now. Maybe the timing’s not right. Listen, you drove all the way up here, you’ve been drinking, and you’re unsafe on the roads at any speed. Come inside. Let me put some food in your stomach.”

  The watcher nearly slammed a fist on the dashboard. Food in her stomach? Wrong combination, you jerk. A stunning woman is standing outside your door, she’s inebriated and loose, and desperately wanting something more than polite conversation and a light kiss. Come on, Jack, he felt like jumping up and screaming—be a man. All these months of frustration, give her a night to remember. Just do it out of pity.

  Suddenly the air seemed to go out of Eva. Her shoulders slumped and she sagged against the doorjamb. “Can I spend the night?” she asked, sounding suddenly both tired and meek.

  “I think you’d better.”

  “With you?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  The watcher could hear her sobbing as she stepped inside.

  Definitely, Lew Wallerman was not Charles.

  He was short and very, very black, for one thing. Morgan wondered how a black man ended up with a name like Wallerman, but was afraid to ask.

  He wore decrepit clothes that were loud evidence of indescribably awful taste—brown checkered suit that would be hard to push at a Goodwill sale, blue-and-white polka-dot tie, and thickly striped shirt that was a mass of wrinkles and stains. His scuffed black shoes were at least ten years old and hadn’t smelled polish in years.

  Lew Wallerman had loser written all over him.