Bad Optics

by Joseph Heywood

  “Do I look good?”

  Jesus, her questions were no more than potshots. “Depends on who is doing the judging.”

  “You, for example,” she said. “Do you think I look good?”

  “I never judge stuff like that.”

  She smiled and nodded demurely. “I am nine-zero years old.”

  Is she bonkers? No way she’s ninety, not even close. Seventy max, he guessed. He looked at Allerdyce, who, as usual, seemed interested in something else, in this case something on the mantel over the fireplace. He seemed to be looking around and not paying attention to the main business at hand.

  “I’ve been MICHIKOSS since 19 and 75,” the woman announced proudly.

  “What KOSS?”

  “Michigan’s Keeper of State Secrets.”

  “That’s an actual state office?”

  “In a manner of speaking, but not one bandied about outside the so-called inner corridors. My specialty is cracking secrets that need cracking, or protecting those that best serve our state by being kept secret. I traffic in information, all details and trivia welcome. Everything comes to something from something eventually. A noted historian once wrote that all events form a mosaic. Everything affects and is affected by everything else. How is never clear in the present. It’s always a nexterday deal. Time sorts out events, time alone, and only then do patterns appear. We and it and these things we call events or moments are connected in a cosmic sense.”

  Service was still mired in the KOSS thing, which he had never heard of. “There’s a state office called KOSS?”

  “No,” she said curtly. “Such an office doesn’t exist, and I don’t exist, which makes it and me damn hard to find.”

  He was confused. “You don’t look invisible.”

  “I’m not right now, but try to find me tomorrow and see how that works out.”

  “I don’t understand,” Service told her. “Are you M or aren’t you?”

  “M to some, Mph to others, Mageret to my friends, of which I have multitudes.”

  “M stands for Margeret?”’

  She grinned, showing a mouthful of gray teeth. “Of course not, it stands for nothing except mystery. I hope that doesn’t disappoint, but mystery is more than adequate, don’t you think? And what’s in a name? Absolutely nothing. It’s what’s inside the name that matters, the life force that propels the name. Nietzsche told us this, a name is only a name and no person is found there. I’m paraphrasing.”

  Weird. “What about Mph?”

  “Some call me Miss Potato Head, because for those people who I don’t want to know my true appearance, I make it a point to never look the same.”

  Service sucked in a deep breath. K Pop was reliable, but this . . . person? All the marbles didn’t seem to be all together in her ninety-year-old head, if that’s how old she really was.

  “Are you different people on different days?” he asked.

  She granted him a smile. “Aren’t we all?”

  “And who are you today?”

  “The real me, you silly man. You know that old saw about the enemy of my enemy?”

  “Is my friend,” he completed the ragged syllogism.

  “Right, and let me state here most emphatically that I loathe Sam Bozian, and I am told that you loathe Bozian. I want his scalp dripping his cold blood on my warm hands. Would you seek that too?”

  Is she legit? Service thought. “I don’t loathe or hate him. I don’t like or love him either. For me, he’s nothing more than a pain in the ass, a kangaroo obstacle that keeps jumping into my path.”

  “You just don’t know you hate him yet. He tried all the time he was in office to close my operation and put me out on the street, to pension me off like a post-prime racehorse, but he’s a mere politician, and I am a librarian and a career bureaucrat. You can’t out-game me. He’s gone and I’m still here. And yet, I have not had his blood.”

  “He’s been gone a long time,” Service reminded her. “And still you want to get him?”

  “Memories have no expiration date,” she said. “And hell yes, I still want to get him, don’t you?”

  “I want to know what he’s up to, nothing more.”

  “He’s an octopus, got hands and hands of hands, all grabbing and grasping, everything for money or payback, often combined.”

  “You work from your house?”

  “For your purposes, and today only, yes. Don’t you work from yours?”

  He laughed. “More from my truck than my house.”

  “We’re similar creatures, you and me,” she said. “We both hate playing rigged games, and we also hate losing at anything.”

  “Bozian’s in a rigged game?”

  She said in a professorial tone, “Sam’s a politician, which is all he knows. His electorate, those fools who voted for him and licked his ass and his much-trumpeted governing principles, have no clue that his words aren’t who he is. All he knows is everything is rigged. It’s his definition of public servant.”

  “You know why I’m here?” Service asked the woman.

  “Not until K Pop gave me a heads-up RFA—that’s Request for Audience. Snooped around a bit since then. They’re alleging unprofessional judgment in taking a felon on as a partner in your patrol truck. They don’t have anything hard to nail you to the cross with, only this soft judgment-related thing, which amounts to so much pudding at room temperature. It’s their legal tool, a delaying tactic to sweep the offender off the field, dump him or her in limbo, and, during that void, push ahead the desired agenda. This is classic bureaupoliticracy, and if you can’t move your business fast enough, you keep pushing back your opponent’s suspension end date until you achieve your goal.”

  “Then?”

  She shrugged. “By then it’s moot. Doesn’t matter if the opponent’s there or not, done is done, fait accompli, we’ve gotten what we wanted, done deal. By the way, you clearly have way more than enough time in to retire. Why haven’t you?”

  “Why haven’t you?” Service countered.

  “Touché,” she said. “Do I look like a candidate for the drool pool?”

  “No ma’am.” She had an intensity that, even at ninety, still hurled heat across a room. What had she been like at thirty?

  “You know what they say about me?” she asked.

  “I didn’t know there was a you until today, and I have no clue who they are. Until I saw K Pop yesterday I’d never heard of anyone known by a single letter, except for the odd superstar entertainer.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “Familiar with the Hannex?”

  “Dutch to me.”

  “It’s my fortress, my hideaway, it’s on the campus, attached to Ivy Free Hall, tunnel connecting to the main library. Even cops don’t know we’re there.”

  “I’m a cop.”

  “Moot. Any idea why Bozian wants you out?”

  “No doubt I rub him the wrong way.”

  “Granted, so do I. But for you there’s more. With Bozian, there’s always more. The truth is, I don’t yet know the scope of his animus for you. You see, I’m like the late J. Edgar High Heels. I’ve been in place so long that it’s assumed that I know, if not everything, then way too much. Which is probably true. But I do all of my fighting off stage, behind the scenes, and solely with information, which can be far more lethal than bullets.”

  She reminded him of his detective job, where information was ammo. Sometimes all you had to trade was information to get better information. “You’re an information broker,” he said.

  “Trade it, sell it to the highest or lowest bidder, depending on circumstances, give it away free, bank it for future use to let it accumulate interest, spread it around in smaller compartments to make the whole invisible to the untrained eye, compile it, contemplate it, manipulate it. Information is currency in this place. Tell me what yo
u think Lansing is.”

  “The state’s capital.”

  “Spoken like a sixth-grade civics student. Lansing is just a word, shorthand for a meeting ground for the rich and powerful and well-connected, a playground for queen bees and drones alike, a nest and hive for lawyers, analysts, organizationalists, social engineers, religious enthusiasts, rights-fighters for this and that, here of your own volition, or your master’s, or your god’s. It’s a place where tribal reps meet to smoke peace pipes or do war dances, to cavort and fuck and find ways to hurt enemies and enrich those few friends in their own little selected circle. The Capitol is minutes from drugs of all kinds, hookers, dog and cock fighting, S & M houses, opium dens, child trafficking, black marketing, the feeble, the insane, the hopeless homeless—you name any extreme in society and it is here within daily sniffing distance of politicians. Not one of these creatures ever smells it because they’re not here to fix problems for people, they’re here to line their own pockets and the pockets of their supporters. Have you ever really been in love, Service?”

  The question caught him unprepared. “Rhetorical?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “I have.”

  “I mean really, completely whole-hog, out-of-your-ever-lovin’-mind, over-the-top, no-holds-barred love?”

  “Yes, like that.” And then some, but he had no interest in sharing details with this woman or anyone else. What he’d had with Maridly Nantz was theirs and theirs alone.

  “Then you should recognize that when you are in that intense minefield of love, you can’t see reality because you are measurably physically and emotionally blind. This causes you to see your beloved object in the precise way that object wants you to see it. Your instincts, your experience, your peripheral and night vision might ordinarily be second to none, but now, in the aura of this love thing, you are crippled, all your strengths are switched off, because in looking at the other you’re really only looking at you. That’s how love works. It insists on a way to make everything about you and only what you want. And in the end, sadly and gloriously, the fucking you get is not worth the fucking you get.”

  Limpy, who had been silent, mumbled quietly, “Girlie right, sonny.”

  She was a load, this strange little woman. Whether she was effective or not remained to be seen, and his gut was strangely silent on the question.

  “Here’s the deal,” M said. “I’ll help you if you’ll help me.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Let’s leave that open-ended for the moment and think of it as a player to be named later. You a Cubs fan?”

  “No.”

  “Good, I loathe Cubs fans and all the peace-love-and-peacenutters who follow them like a cult, expecting to be disappointed and to lose, wanting to lose.” She reddened as she ranted.

  “I don’t like open-ended deals,” Service said.

  “No? Then you can’t be much of a game warden or a cop, yeah? Ones I’ve known—the good ones—when they catch someone red-handed, on a triviality or even certain big issues, they let them walk, or reduce the charges. They tell the perp he now owes and if he doesn’t come through, the cop will go back and reactivate and elevate all charges and push it like a virgin’s defense of her treasured sweet hymen. You’ve never done that?”

  She was quick-witted, opinionated, and forceful and seemed to be knowledgeable. But was she more than talk? “Sure I have.”

  “Well, this deal is sort of like that. I talked to Fellow up in your neighborhood, and she told me about what you’ve got her doing for you.”

  “Did she come to you?”

  “Everybody comes to me, sooner or later. This man Kalleskevich out in East Lansing, he’s a serious player here in LaLansingland. Shaker and mover, power broker, got lots of muscle and heap-heap throw-weight, and all the charm of broken glass on your bathroom floor.” She added, “This outfit, Drazel Sisters L.L.C. Satellite Services & Earth Surveys, was incorporated a week after your initial suspension.”

  “That’s significant?”

  “Don’t play Colombo with me, sir. You’re a detective and you know timing is almost always significant. It takes three to four weeks to process a new corporation, which means the process was no doubt initiated before your keester got drop-kicked.”

  “Correlation isn’t cause, and timing isn’t cause and effect.”

  “Isn’t it? Didn’t your sappy old pal have the woman you talked to express surprise at your presence because you were supposed to be on suspension and not in your area? From what I’ve been able to determine, this information was not at all publicly known.”

  “That’s a stretch,” he said, though he had entertained similar thoughts.

  “A business immediately goes into effect after you get suspended. The business seems to be focused in the very wilderness area formerly under your professional protection. And somehow the people there know you’re not supposed to be there, and in encountering you, someone calls one of the women off. You think this is an idle pile of harmless coincidences?”

  Before he could respond, she went on. “I let Hollywood, conservatives, and dunderheads drown in their own cockamamie conspiracy theories. I deal in evidence, which sometimes, early on in a case, is purely circumstantial. Shall I continue?”

  Service took in a deep breath; he couldn’t sort out the woman’s extravagant claims to power in such a bland setting. Pale blue walls, pale blue carpet, it was as if all the heat had been sucked out of the room. “Please do.”

  “I get your reluctance, I really do. Fellow thinks you’re pretty much of the Royal Boy Scout School, only in your uniform, a black-and-white warrior while in uniform.”

  She raised her hand and waved it at him. “In your personal life? Mezza mezza. Not so much. Interesting dichotomy, and believe me, I rather admire that, but no, I was not referring to continuing to talk. Do you want me to take this case or not?”

  “It’s not a case.”

  “To me it is, and as old Dubya used to say, I’m the decider here.”

  “How much?”

  “Do you care?”

  He thought for a moment, and shrugged. “Not really.”

  She grinned. “That’s because you’re loaded and money has little meaning or motivation for you. It took me less than fifteen minutes to get your full financial picture. Very, very impressive. So Grady Service is not about money. He’s about honor and other prehistoric intangibles. My reward will be when we thwart Bozian, if God keeps my heart beating until then. I’d love to destroy that son of a bitch, but I’ll take thwarting and costing him money in lieu of cash from you. Think teamwork and cooperation toward a shared goal, my friend, you’re not the only believer in such things.”

  “You’ll be working with Fellow Marthesdottir?”

  “Not exactly. She’s taking care of your surveillance needs up in the wilderness. My work will cut a wider swath, and understand this, I’m not going to propose solutions, no tactics, no plans, nothing theoretical or real-world practical. My job is strictly intel, the cleanest and most complete I can compile. Whatever you do based on that specific intel is entirely your decision and business.”

  The woman, for all her brashness and braggadocio, was cautious and did not want to get nailed for aiding action against Sam Bozian. Interesting. Boiled down, she was like the rest of the Lansing thugs she had described. Could she produce results? His gut said yes.

  “Okay, deal.”

  “Do you even know at this moment what you should do?”

  “No.”

  “Good, we’ll both figure out what the hell we should be doing, and I’ll look out for me and at some point show you mine if you’ll show me yours.” Her eyes were twinkling.

  “You’re a pill,” he told her.

  “Indeed I am,” she said.

  Minutes later Service backed his truck out of the driveway, which nee
ded re-surfacing, and headed to Frandor. Back in his Michigan State Police days, he had known of a great hotdog joint in the shopping center. He hoped it was still in business. He’d not noticed it the other night. Allerdyce was quiet, almost brooding. Service said, “You didn’t have much to say back there.”

  “I ain’t all that gabby in the presence of da bloody devil.”

  “You think she’s the devil?”

  “Youse don’t? Can we go back up over da britch now? Please?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Allerdyce scowled. “Dat’s what my ma use to say.”

  “What did she mean?”

  “She mean I keep asking she beat my ass red as sugar beet.”

  “There you go,” Grady Service said. “We’ll see.” He wondered why he felt the need to make Allerdyce squirm. He’s trying to help you. Service couldn’t find an answer.

  Chapter 15

  Ivy Free Hall, MSU Campus

  East LansingIngham County

  Another text message launched their new day: Meet Lobby, IFH, 1000. Aller-dyce looked at the message. “IFH?”

  “Ivy Free Hall. Weren’t you listening yesterday?”

  “Sometimes better look den listen, Sonny.”

  “Really. What did you see?”

  “I seen dat ain’t ’er place,” Allerdyce said.

  “Conclusion reached based on . . .?”

  The retired poacher made a sour face. “Youse jump track, an’ youse start hump it, an’ after while youse begin smell dis ain’t right. Don’t know why ain’t buyin, but ain’t, hey?”

  The old man was right. Sometimes your best evidence came from something in your gut that had no real name. “Let’s go see,” Service told his partner. “We’ve got time.”

  A realtor’s FOR SALE sign greeted them as they pulled into the driveway at the Northlawn address where they parked yesterday.

  Allerdyce went to the sign and with one hand lifted it from the holes. “Saw da holes yesterday, knew it weren’t no fall skunks grubbing dere.”

  And no more camera at the door. All the windows were blocked with closed blinds. Strange. What had she said? Try to find me tomorrow and see how that works? We’re depending on this old nutcase to help us? What am I thinking?