At all costs

by John Gilstrap

  His wife, Alba, believed him, though. She’d seen too many careers plummet at the hands of others to think that any act of deception or cruelty was out of the question. At least the children were grown, she reasoned, and there was some comfort in that.

  Still, Clayton and Alba had spent hours together on the phone with the kids, explaining what the media was about to release and assuring them that their father was not a pervert. By the end of the conversation, both kids agreed that it was a good time to take a quick vacation. Come eight o’clock tonight, Clay Jr. would be in Denali Park with his wife and two kids, and Amy would be basking in the sun in St. Thomas. Of the two, everyone agreed that Clay Jr. was less likely to be followed by the press. Alaska could get pretty chilly in October.

  “This is the Big One, isn’t it, Clay?” Alba asked as he hung up from his thousandth conference call with his senior staffers.

  The instant the handset touched the cradle, it rang again. It had been like that all morning, with calls pouring in from all over the world. Apparently, it was an otherwise slow news day. The senator lifted the receiver and put it right down. Three seconds later it rang again. They both laughed.

  Clayton made room for her next to him on the well-worn bedroom lounge chair. Countless stories and good-night kisses had been issued to the children from this very spot. He called it his thinking chair. “Not yet,” he said, putting more levity in his voice than he felt in his soul. “Not as long as the supposed pictures stay out of the media. If they get released, then yes. This’ll be the one that brings us down.”

  Alba rumpled his sleep-twisted hair, relieved that he’d finally been able to log forty-five minutes or so before dawn. “How are you holding up?”

  He gave a wan smile. “I guess I’ll be okay.”

  “Are you sure it’s Frankel?” Alba asked.

  The senator nodded as he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “It sure smells like him. It has to be.”

  “Can you beat him?”

  He shrugged. The thought of sleep was particularly pleasing to him right now. “Well, I won’t be charged with any crimes, if that’s what you mean. You can’t prove a case from receipts-or even from pictures-and even Frankel can’t invent witnesses.”

  Alba stood and stepped behind the chair to rub her husband’s shoulders. “He won’t stop, you know. Even if you let him waltz through the confirmation hearings, he’ll still have you under his thumb. It’ll never end.”

  The senator leaned all the way back in his chair and grabbed both her hands, pulling them down to his chest, until she was hugging him from behind. “You know me better than that,” he said. “I’ll fight him underground for as long as I can. If I can expose him for what he is, we’ll win. If not, then maybe it’ll be time to move back to Chicago. Time to go home.”

  Deep down inside, Alba wondered if her husband hadn’t grown tired of Washington, anyway. Life as a target for every bleeding-heart special interest was tough. Certainly, they could swing the financial aspects of retirement. Maybe this was all an omen that the time had come to quit.

  “So what happens first, do you suppose?” she asked.

  Clayton sighed again and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Well, the way I figure it, nothing happens until I want it to happen. The press will let this run its course for a couple of weeks, running my daily denials and the president’s daily suggestions that I retire from office. After that, it’ll get pretty hot, as the papers start collecting quotes from my own party, condemning me for godlessness and sanctifying you for your willingness to stand by such a horrible creature as me.”

  “Maybe I can go on Oprah,” Alba teased.

  Clayton laughed. “Pedophile Legislators and the Women Who Love Them,” he added in his best announcer’s voice. “If it goes the way these things usually do, we won’t be invited to a single Christmas party, but come Easter, we’ll be back on the A list. Then I announce my retirement at the end of the term, and in a few years we’re back in Chicago, and I get to live off speaking fees and book advances.”

  “Sounds like you have it all planned, Senator,” Alba cooed, rubbing his stubbly face gently with the back of her hand.

  “Oh, I do,” Clayton confirmed. “And best of all, I’ve got five full years left to figure out a way to break all of this off in Frankel’s ass.”

  “Jake, you’re crazy.” Carolyn seemed outraged that he would even mention such a thing. She turned her back on him and stormed into the trailer.

  Jake followed, with Travis close behind, despite his father’s warning to stay out of it. “Why am I crazy? This is a way to get our lives back.”

  “Bullshit! This is a way to get our lives ended!” She seemed close to tears.

  “Like this isn’t death?” He swirled his arms to take in the whole scene. “Christ, Carolyn, we’ve got to take a chance.”

  “Why now?” she insisted. “Last time we discussed it, you said yourself it was a stupid idea. What suddenly makes it any less stupid now?”

  “You’ve been caught,” Travis said evenly, stating the obvious.

  “You stay out of this!” His parents said it in perfect unison.

  Carolyn thrust her fingers into her thick hair, a gesture of ultimate frustration. “It’s too late,” she insisted. “The evidence is gone, and we’re too old.”

  Jake tossed his hands in the air. “Okay, we’re pushing forty,” he conceded. “But you know what? Next year we’ll be another year older. And so will the evidence. Now is a bad time only because we should have done it sooner!”

  “And what about Travis?” She was grasping at straws now.

  “What about me?”

  “Stay out of this!” Another perfect chorus.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s just a boy, Jake. We can’t get him wrapped up in something like this. It’s illegal.”

  “I’ll just tell them that you forced me to do it at gunpoint,” Travis offered helpfully, bringing the argument to a dead halt.

  “Thanks a lot, buddy,” Jake said, planting his fists on his hips. “With family like you, who needs prosecutors?” With just this glimmer of hope, Travis had become Jake’s ally; albeit a conditional ally.

  Carolyn worked her jaw muscles hard as she considered her husband’s plea. “There’s a million things that could go wrong,” she said. Her voice had softened, and even Travis recognized it as the time to tread carefully. The right words now would make it a go. Say the wrong thing, though, and the option would be shut down forever.

  “We only need a couple to go right,” Jake countered. He moved closer. “Think of it. It’s this for the rest of our lives, or we can take a shot.”

  She absorbed the words, looking first to Travis and then to Jake. “Suppose no one wants to help?”

  Jake shrugged. “We’ll never know unless we ask.” He was careful to smile.

  Closing her eyes, she sighed deeply and thrust her hand into her hair one more time. “This is insane,” she moaned.

  Travis cheered, “Yes!”

  They jammed themselves into the mildewed kitchenette and discussed the details for a good hour, re-creating long-forgotten logic paths and mapping out the logistics of what had to be done and in what order.

  With the initial plans complete, they headed back for the van. Jake started to lock the trailer’s door, then paused, recognizing the futility of it. “My contribution to young love,” he mumbled, and he put his key away.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Donovans needed a pay phone, but they may as well have been searching for the Holy Grail. In this part of southeastern West Virginia, it was hard enough to find buildings with foundations. The Gulf station up the road sported an international symbol for a telephone on the side of one of the service bays, but closer examination revealed that it had been out of service for quite a while-since, say, the Civil War.

  They drove for fifteen miles, seeing nothing but shacks and endless forests, all situated on near-vertical slopes. “Why would anyo
ne ever want to live here?” Jake wondered aloud.

  Finally, they came to Homer and Jane’s Roadside Diner, whose status as the only restaurant in this part of the state was plainly illustrated by the number of old cars and pickup trucks in the parking lot. The building was classic backwoods construction. The red brick center section may have had some charm in its youth, but as time had worn on, wooden additions had been slapped onto both ends of the place, with an eye toward nothing but efficiency and economy. Overall, the place had a droopy, unappealing feel. Not that it mattered; every window in the place displayed the profile of a live diner. More important, according to the sign affixed to the brick, Homer and Jane’s had not only a telephone but rest rooms as well.

  The van’s suspension moaned painfully as Jake piloted the vehicle into the crumbled and pockmarked driveway. “What do you think?”

  “I think-” Carolyn stopped before she could complete the thought. “Oh, God… take a look at the newsstand.”

  The gravity of her tone brought Travis forward. “What newsstand?”

  Jake didn’t see it either at first, but when he followed her finger, his stomach flopped. In the windows of their coinoperated dispensers, three competing newspapers-two from West Virginia and one from Washington, D.C.-displayed pictures of the world’s most notorious environmental terrorists. Instead of the old Wanted-poster shots, however, the press was using current photos lifted from their driver’s licenses.

  “Shit,” Jake said. “Looks just like us.” Something about seeing the story in the paper made the threat to them more palpable.

  “Well, we certainly can’t go in there,” Carolyn said. “Those people are eating breakfast. Half of them are probably reading about us as we speak.”

  It was a very good point. Wanted posters, as such, never posed much of a threat. People rarely made eye contact to begin with, and they certainly didn’t remember pictures of people they’d never met. In a tiny community such as this, though, where everyone undoubtedly knew everyone else, strangers couldn’t help but draw attention. When the focus of that attention was the very people whose pictures appeared before them in the paper, God only knew what might happen.

  “I can go in,” Travis volunteered. “I don’t see any pictures of me.”

  Instinctively, Jake and Carolyn started to say no, but then stopped.

  Jake arched an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

  “C’mon, Mom, I can do it.” Travis was anxious to prove himself. “Hell, it’s only a phone call.” Simultaneous glares silenced him, and he rolled his eyes. “I meant, heck, it’s only a phone call.”

  “This isn’t a game, Travis,” Carolyn scolded.

  “I know that, but Jesus-um, I mean Jeeze- why risk you guys getting recognized when the only thing I have to do is make a phone call?”

  Another very good point, drawing another shrug from Jake. “I don’t see why not.”

  “But Harry doesn’t know him from Adam,” Carolyn countered.

  “He’ll know who I am after I tell him,” Travis offered. “C’mon, you guys, just tell me what to say, and I’ll say it. Then he’ll tell me, and I’ll tell you.”

  Maybe it really was that simple. “Have you ever made a collect call?” Jake asked.

  “Uh-huh. Remember that time in Amarillo when the Tawingos’ car broke down? I called you collect to tell you I was gonna be late.”

  Jake and Carolyn looked to each other for some sound reason to say no but couldn’t find one.

  “Okay,” Carolyn said with an uneasy sigh. “Here’s what we need you to say.”

  As he watched his son climb out of the back of the van and stride purposefully toward Homer and Jane’s, Jake enjoyed a moment of intense pride. Here the kid’s world had been turned completely inside out, and yet he truly wanted to help. Much was left to be done, of course, and this adventure was far from over, but as ridiculous as it sounded, Jake felt that they were more of a family at this moment than they’d been in years.

  “I wonder how Harry will react,” Jake mused aloud.

  “I’m sure he’ll be relieved,” Carolyn said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  Carolyn’s maternal uncle, Harry Sinclair, owned more of Chicago’s Miracle Mile than any other single investor. Widely known for his intense loyalty to his friends, and his ruthless business practices, Harry was both feared and revered, all depending on which side of the negotiation table he was seated. Harry was a man accustomed to winning, regardless of the cost. Rumors abounded of competitors threatened into submission, but none of the accusations were true-at least not in the sense that people imagined.

  Harry Sinclair knew only one subject-business-and he played the game with a passion matched by only a few. Jake had met the man only twice, yet he had the old bastard’s mantra down cold: “You can always tell a sucker,” he’d told Jake back when he and Carolyn were just dating. “He’s the guy who believes that the game is over when the other side gives up. Growing up on the South Side, I learned the real secret to winning. As long as the other guy can stand, the game’s still on.”

  The lecture was the only form of speech that Harry Sinclair knew; and from that very first day, Jake couldn’t stand the man. He was the embodiment of everything that was wrong about business-the very attitude that allowed the Pennsylvania coal-mining barons to send Jake’s father into hell every day, knowing full well that the fetid atmosphere in those tunnels would corrode his lungs. For people like Harry, business was just a euphemism for crushing people who didn’t have the means to fight back. They were bullies, pure and simple, differentiated from the schoolyard variety only by their expensive suits and silk ties.

  During that first meeting, convened out at Harry’s estate, and carefully orchestrated to intimidate the unsophisticated coal miner’s kid who was sniffing around his niece, Harry laid it all out on the table. Sitting in his $2,000 chair and sucking on a thirty-dollar cigar, he told the story of a Korean grocer named Kim Po, who refused to sell his store to make room for Sinclair Plaza, a sprawling, fifty-story granite and glass office/retail complex on Michigan Avenue.

  A man who prided himself on always playing by the rules, Harry got zoning approval to build his vanity tower, anyway, bringing his building within six inches on three sides and the top of Po’s grocery. The Korean filed suit, of course, at which point Harry began his siege, filing a countersuit alleging emotional distress, and beginning an escalating war of legal fees which Po knew he could never win.

  After six months of warfare, fought in the trenches of the courthouse, Po caved in and offered to sell his store. Harry refused. “I’d already spent that money on legal fees and architectural changes,” he relayed to Jake. “I offered him forty cents on the dollar, though, and he turned me down.”

  With the value of his property dangling below the payoff price for the five college educations he’d leveraged against it, Po did the honorable thing. He dug in to make the best of things.

  But, as Harry pointed out, he could still stand. When Sinclair Plaza finally opened, the old man made sure that the space just inches away from Po’s store was leased to a competing grocery, which coincidentally specialized in everything that the Korean sold, only more of it at a lesser price.

  Harry ended up declaring victory on the day he finally bought the ruined grocer’s real estate as the only bidder at the trustee’s sale.

  Predators like Harry Sinclair drove federal regulators nuts. For the last two decades, they’d worked tirelessly to keep the old man honest. They’d nabbed him only once, back in the late seventies when the IRS found enough indiscretions to justify a five-year prison sentence.

  To Jake, Harry would forever be a jailbird, even as Carolyn worshiped every step the old man took. As the only girl among a sea of boy cousins, Carolyn had always been Harry’s “Sunshine,” and the real estate mogul played his role to the hilt, bringing her silver dollars and chocolate bars every time he saw her. There was an unbreakable bond there, part of the great mystery that was Ca
rolyn’s childhood.

  Distasteful business practices aside, Jake recognized loyalty when he saw it, and while he detested much of what Harry Sinclair stood for, there was no denying that the old man had come to Jake and Carolyn’s aid at a critical time. As the entire world bore down on the Donovans in 1983, Harry provided them with everything they needed to disappear, from identities to cash-all just months after Harry himself had been released from prison and stood to lose a great deal in the transaction.

  Sitting there in the van outside the diner, Jake shook his head in disbelief. This was the man from whom Travis was soliciting assistance? The punch line of an old joke popped into his mind, making him squirm in his seat: We’ve already established what you are, madam, now we’re just haggling over price.

  As he waited for Travis to return, Jake let his thoughts drift back to his second meeting with Harry Sinclair-Jake’s first in the role of fugitive. The old man had sent a car to pick up Jake and Carolyn at a prearranged spot downstream from Buford. He remembered the driver’s name to this day. Thorne: a sinewy, large-torsoed military type who rarely said a word but whose dark eyes continually cast a threat. The pickup had been late at night, as Jake recalled, and they drove straight through till morning to a house somewhere in southern Illinois.

  Jake had slept most of the way, finally awakened by the heat of the rising sun. Carolyn was already awake, sitting upright and talking in hushed tones to Thorne. Jake stretched noisily, and slowly worked his way up to a sitting position.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” Carolyn said happily. “About time you woke up.”

  “What time is it?” He was too sleep-dumb to think of checking his watch.

  “About nine. We’re almost there.”

  “Correction,” Thorne interrupted. “We are there.”

  The only building in sight was a largish farmhouse planted in the middle of a huge expanse of green farmland. Thorne slowed the Cadillac nearly to a halt to catch a rutted dirt path. The house was gorgeous, in a uniquely midwestern way. Probably dating back to the 1920s, it vaguely resembled a squatty Aztec pyramid, anchored at its base by a huge, wraparound porch, and rising two more stories in classic Victorian style to a slate roof and an intricate collage of gables.