by David Ellis
Maybe the woman isn’t so hysterical? It gets better.
Allison rubs her eyes. The point here, obviously, is an attack on typical male perceptions, but in the process Madley is writing an opening statement for the prosecution. Mat bribed some senators, Sam Dillon discovered it and was going to tattle to the feds, and Allison killed him.
Allison held her breath as Sam explained.
“Nothing happened, Allison. Nothing. Okay?”
She listened to him with her mind. But her heart was being ripped apart. Her body had gone cold.
She wanted desperately to believe him. But it didn’t erase the feelings. She was threatened by her own daughter?
“I said no, Allison.”
Allison sat down in her chair, feeling exhausted for the first time.
“And what’s this,” Sam asked, “about the ‘look on my face’ last night?”
Allison chewed on her lips, her eyes down. “I saw you looking at her at the party,” she answered.
“You saw—what did you see? I looked at your daughter? I thought she was attractive? Okay, guilty as charged.” He opened his hands. “She looks like you.”
She shook her head.
“Allison, don’t you get it?” he said. He moved to her, knelt down at her knees. “I’m in love with you. How do I begin to convince you of that?”
She was in a fog. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t see Jessica.
“You begin to convince me of that,” she said to Sam, “by firing Jessica.”
Allison turns her head away from the newspaper, but she has nowhere else to go. The picture is becoming clearer now, for the prosecutors and the media, and she has work to do. It’s time to snap out of the self-pity and keep her eyes open.
“Now,” she heard herself saying.
Sam paused. Allison looked away from him, closed her eyes, and heard him rise, lift the phone.
“Jody, hi, it’s Sam,” he said. “Is Jessica Pagone there? Great. Put it—put it into my office up there, would you? Tell her to take it in there.”
Allison became aware that her face had fallen into her hands, her body was trembling. This was not right. She knew that. But she had just regained something, in these last few months, and she was attributing it to Sam Dillon.
And she would not let it go.
She heard him talking. It was important. Close the door, Jessica. We have to talk. I’ve made a decision about something.
“Jessica,” she heard Sam say, “I’ve been thinking about things. You and I had a couple of personal conversations at the end of last year. I—no, it’s okay,” he said, his voice soothing. “I understand. It’s not that. It’s just that, well—I’ve been thinking. And under the circumstances, I think it’s best that we find you another place to work.”
Allison felt the moisture on her hands, felt a shiver run through her body.
“It just makes me uncomfortable, Jessica. I—probably should have done this before. I would never repeat this to anyone. I’ll give you a great recommend—”
Allison opened her eyes, looked up at Sam, an elbow on his desk, his slumped posture.
“This isn’t going to work,” he told Jessica, bringing his hand to his forehead and looking into Allison’s eyes. “Mat—Mat’s a friend. You know this is crazy. It always was.”
A long pause. Allison could hear her daughter’s protesting voice through the phone. Sam said nothing as Jessica spoke, his face locked in a grimace.
No, she felt sure. This was not right. This was not the way to handle this. Yet she did nothing to stop it.
“Jessica, I’m a lobbyist. It’s the appearance of impropriety. It’s not about being mad at you. I’m not mad at you. I’m—this is just the way it has to be, okay?”
There were more protests, more defensive responses. And then it was over. Sam hung up the phone, looked at her with a wounded expression.
Allison got to her feet and left the office.
Allison’s eyes return to Monica Madley’s newspaper column, her diatribe against the cliché of the hysterical woman who lashes out at the man who scorns her. Maybe the prosecutors will read this column and come away convinced that they made a mistake and bought into a stereotype.
Or maybe, she fears, they’ll decide that they have the right stereotype, but the wrong woman.
NINE DAYS EARLIER
FRIDAY, MARCH 5
Jane McCoy opens the file on her desk:
Zulfikar Ali Haroon was born in a small village outside of Quetta, in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, in 1978. His father, Ghulam Zia Haroon, was a shoemaker. His mother, Jamila Khan Haroon, was an English professor at Baluchistan University.
In March of 1985, an aerial bomb destroyed a wing of Baluchistan University. Among the casualties were Professor Jamila Haroon and her four-year-old daughter, Benazir. The blast was widely accredited to the Soviets, as one of many attacks against Pakistan since that country became the focal point for resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Less than two months after the deaths of his wife and daughter, Ghulam Haroon was recruited. Ghulam joined the Hizb-i-Islami, the most fundamentalist of the Afghan resistance groups that formed the Central Alliance, and the group that received the bulk of CIA arms supplied to the mujahedin.
Ghulam Haroon was dispatched to Peshawar to assist in the flow of arms to the mujahedin. From the moment that he arrived in Peshawar, he introduced and registered his son as Ramadaran Ali Haroon, changing his first name from Zulfikar. Ghulam Haroon purported to work as a carpet merchant, but his principal work consisted in training and supplying freedom fighters on behalf of Hizb-i-Islami.
“Jane, Mr. Benjamin’s here,” Harrick says. “In the conference room.”
They take a stroll down the hall.
“Hello, Mr. Benjamin,” she says when she enters the conference room. “Mr. Salters.”
Walter Benjamin is the director of governmental affairs, Midwest region, for Flanagan-Maxx Pharmaceuticals. Gerald Salters is his lawyer, an aging veteran of the criminal courts.
“Appreciate you coming back down,” she says. “You came in through the underground entrance?”
“Of course,” says Gerry Salters.
“Okay. Good.” McCoy opens a file folder. Her notes from their last meeting were typed by an office assistant. A wonder, that the typist could comprehend her lousy penmanship. “First, I’d like to go back over what we originally talked about. Then I’d like to cover something new.”
“If you have a specific question, my client can certainly answer it,” says Salters. “But I don’t see why we need to cover old ground.”
“Call it a favor,” she requests. You always learn at least one new thing when someone tells a story a second time. Which is precisely why defense attorneys don’t like to let their clients have more than one conversation with law-enforcement types.
“That’s fine,” Benjamin says to his lawyer. The Flanagan-Maxx executive is painfully thin, but not in a way that she would attribute to exercise. He doesn’t look fit. He looks ill, actually. But you don’t see a lot of happy, healthy faces sitting across from you in this job. Not two years ago, she recalls putting the squeeze on an executive who was borrowing a little here, a little there from some corporate accounts, when suddenly he vomited all over the conference-room table. She ended up with no information from him that day except what he had eaten for breakfast.
Benjamin starts his narrative—hiring Sam Dillon to pass the Divalpro legislation, paying MAAHC to hire Mat, and the sudden switch of three votes in the Senate that allowed it to pass.
“How did Mat Pagone prevail on Senators Strauss, Almundo, and Blake to change their minds? Agent McCoy, I have no personal knowledge of that. You think I have time to micro-manage like that? I’ve got seven state legislatures I’m dealing with, I’ve got seven sets of statutory and regulatory compliance issues to deal with. I don’t have time to ask those questions.”
“Understood,” she says, because she believes
him.
“But then Sam calls me one day, January of this year. Couple months ago. About two months after veto session. He says he has some concerns about what may have transpired in the Senate. He tells me, he’s hearing whispers in the corridors of the capital. He says he heard Senator Blake talking about a trip to Sanibel Island, and he knows Mat took the same trip at the same time. So now, Sam says, he’s thinking about those three new votes for our bill. Strauss. Almundo. Blake. He tells me, flat-out, what that concern is.” Walter Benjamin shrugs. “We didn’t know what to do. Neither of us. We’re not sure. We don’t have the power to subpoena or immunize people. We can ask, but how exactly do you do that? Approach a sitting senator who just voted for your bill and accuse him of being on the take? We have to have a continuing relationship with these people. That’s political suicide.
“We asked Mat, did he bribe those senators? He said no. Were we totally convinced? Maybe not. But I didn’t know. Sam didn’t know. What more, in God’s name, are we supposed to do? We have nothing but suspicions.”
“Okay, Mr. Benjamin,” McCoy prods. “Keep going.”
“So Mat comes to Sam, late January of this year. He’s panicked. He says federal agents want to talk to him. He says they’ve seized his bank records. They’re looking at money withdrawals Mat made over several months. It looks bad. It smells. Sam says to Mat, come clean. Tell me what happened. And that’s when Mat drops it on Sam.”
McCoy nods. This is her favorite part, or least favorite, depending on the perspective.
“Mat denies the whole thing, right? But he says it to Sam hypothetically. Mat says to Sam, ‘If I were to have done something wrong, the same could be said of you.’ He says to Sam, ‘If money were handed to Senator Strauss, it wasn’t handed to him by me. It would have been handed to him by you, Sam. So we’re in this together.’ ”
Benjamin sighs. “See, Strauss apparently had lunch at the Maritime Club with Sam and Mat, last—I guess it was October.”
“Right.”
“And that was after they played racquetball at the club. Sam and Strauss. But before that, apparently, Mat saw Sam and handed him a bag. A gym bag. He told Sam it was Strauss’s clothes from another time they had played—sweats, in a gym bag that Strauss had left in a locker. Turns out, I guess, that gym bag had some money in it, too. Sam swears he never looked. I’m sure if he had, he would have found some dirty clothes in there. But somewhere in there was, I assume, about a hundred one-hundred-dollar bills. About ten thousand dollars.”
“So Sam unknowingly handed the money to Strauss,” McCoy says. “In the locker room before racquetball, before all three of them had lunch.”
“Exactly,” Benjamin says. “And Sam’s no dummy. He gets it. Mat Pagone’s telling him, if he has any inclination to squeal, Sam will go down with him.
“So Sam meets with me and tells me all about this. We don’t know what to do. So he calls you guys, the FBI. You know he called you. He wanted you to subpoena him before the grand jury.”
“Understood,” McCoy says. “But let’s back up. Back to what happened after Sam confronted Mat, and Mat threatened Sam.”
Walter Benjamin frowns. McCoy, after hearing all this, wants to focus on conversations between Benjamin and Sam Dillon.
“You’re not a target, Mr. Benjamin. You know that. Sam came to see you, you said. Start with that.”
“Okay.” The executive sighs. “Sam comes to my office and tells me that his worst suspicions have been, more or less, confirmed. Mat Pagone all but admitted to bribing these senators and threatened Sam if he cooperated with the feds. Sam swore to me that he didn’t know what was in that bag that he handed to Strauss. And I believed him. I’ll go to my grave believing that. Sam’s a trusting sort of guy. Yeah, he’s political, but—Mat hands him a gym bag and says, ‘Strauss left this in the locker room, last time we played,’ Sam’s going to believe Mat. He’s not going to assume there’s bribe money in there.”
“I believe you, Mr. Benjamin. I do. Sam Dillon was a good guy. What happened next? Next thing you remember, after meeting with Sam?”
McCoy sees Owen Harrick, in her peripheral vision, his pen poised. McCoy asked for Benjamin to repeat the entire story for cover; this is the only part she needs to hear again.
“The next thing I remember?” Benjamin looks at his lawyer. “Like, going home or whatever?”
“Like,” she elaborates, “did you speak with anyone about this conversation?”
“Not in any detail, no.”
“At all,” she insists.
“At—” Benjamin’s focus strays to the ceiling. “Well, right. I think I told you this before. The scientist who came to my office. We were going to have lunch together. This was right after Sam left my office.”
“Okay. What was his name again?” she asks, another attempt at cover.
“Doctor Neil Lomas,” Benjamin says.
“Right. That’s right. Okay. Tell me about that again.”
“Well, he could probably see the look on my face. He told me I looked upset. We were supposed to have lunch in the cafeteria—we did that once a week. I said I needed some fresh air. We went across the street to this Italian place. Neil—Neil and I—Doctor Neil Lomas,” he explains. “He’s one of our top researchers. Works in pediatric drugs.”
Oh, yes. McCoy knows all about Doctor Neil Lomas, one of the chief pediatric researchers for Flanagan-Maxx Pharmaceuticals.
“We’ve been pretty close, recently. Neil’s wife left him, just like that, about a year ago.”
Fourteen months ago, to be exact.
“And he’d gotten into some problems. He’d been—well, I don’t know if I—Neil came pretty unwound when his wife left. It was out of the blue. He was a train wreck. So—he’d been having some problems.”
Some problems. McCoy would react, visibly, under other circumstances. Yes, Doctor Neil Lomas has been having some problems. Cocaine for starters, a habit that set him back about twenty thousand dollars over the last year. McCoy doesn’t know if this was the result, or cause, of his wife’s rather hasty departure. Now he gambles, too, and he’s not very good at it. Self-destructive habits, both of them, and McCoy has always wondered whether addictive gamblers, deep inside, want to lose. Lomas has a second mortgage on his house and tough alimony payments to boot. Yeah, a few problems. He was into a bookie for over fifteen thousand before his debt was purchased by someone with another agenda, and he’s not off the cocaine yet.
A drug-addicted, distraught gambler. The perfect scientist to compromise. Buy his debt, supply him cocaine, whisper whatever bullshit into his ear that he needs to hear, and he’s yours.
Benjamin, given his audience, doesn’t want to mention Lomas’s narcotics use or gambling problems, and McCoy won’t force the issue. She won’t tell Benjamin that she knows the identity of the person who purchased Lomas’s gambling debts from the bookie Jimmy, that she knows that this is the same person who is supplying Lomas with cocaine on a daily basis, after work. McCoy wants, in fact, to give the impression that she is entirely unconcerned with Doctor Neil Lomas. But that may be difficult.
“So there was a history of confiding in each other,” Benjamin explains. “But I swear to you, I didn’t go into detail. I just told Neil there were some problems. That there was some possibility that someone had been doing something they shouldn’t, and that there would be a federal investigation.”
“And how did Doctor Lomas respond to that?”
“He was concerned. Like a friend should be.”
“Be specific, please, Mr. Benjamin. Word-for-word, if you could.”
“Word-for—okay. Well, he asked me questions. He wanted to know what kind of investigation. He wanted to know what department was being investigated. He asked me who was interested. He wanted to know who had initiated this investigation. He wanted details.”
“Word-for-word, Mr. Benjamin.”
Benjamin closes his eyes a moment. “God. Okay. I said there might be a problem with somet
hing. I said someone outside our company had raised a very disturbing concern. He wanted to know who had raised the concern, he wanted to know what kind of concern. Well, he could pretty much figure out the who part.”
“He could?”
“Well, he had seen Sam walk out of my office. In fact, out of common courtesy, I had introduced them.”
Jesus. McCoy’s stomach reels. This is new information, a seemingly innocuous detail from Walter Benjamin’s perspective. Benjamin had given Doctor Lomas a name, a name that Doctor Lomas had passed on.
“So,” McCoy says, with all the casualness she can muster, “Doctor Lomas knew that it was Sam Dillon who had some disturbing information.”
“Yeah. I mean, the name ‘Sam Dillon’ meant nothing to him. I just said, Sam had raised some questions.”
“And what did Doctor Lomas ask about that?”
“Well, he wanted to know what questions. I said I didn’t know.”
“You lied?”
“Yes. I said I didn’t know, because if I told Neil I did know, he’d keep pressing me. You have to understand Neil. You have to understand our relationship. I’ve been his confidant. The guy he talks to. He needs someone like that. So he would expect the same from me. He would expect me to be open with him. So I lied.”
“Tell me, Mr. Benjamin, exactly what you said.”
Walter Benjamin pauses. “I said, ‘I don’t know the details. All I know is that Sam told me something illegal was taking place, and he was going to report it to the U.S. attorney, and he wanted me to know in advance because the feds might be paying us a visit soon.’ ”
McCoy looks at her partner.
“And I told Neil, that was all I knew. I said I didn’t know any details. Sam had just paid me a courtesy call, I told him, so I wouldn’t have my pants down when the FBI showed up.”
