A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion]

by William Lashner

  28. Three Conversations

  Three conversations to kill the cold case Scarlett Gould investigation, stuff it full of horsehair like Ginsberg’s meerkat, and mount it on a wall. Three conversations to prove that there was another way to play fixer in this fixed-up town. Three conversations to raise me to the top of the Hyena heap.

  The first conversation was the easiest, a little give-and-take setup over a burner cell with Detective Booth. I identified myself as Dick Triplett and arranged a meeting so my associate could give the good detective a token of my appreciation for his help in spiriting me away from the Chadwick Club. The detective was agreeable, especially after I mentioned that the amount should cover the difficulties he had been having with his mortgage. He didn’t like that I knew the status of his mortgage arrears, but he appreciated the amount. I tasked Gordon and Riley with handling the rendezvous at the naval yard. Gordon would carry the envelope; Riley would carry a camera with a long zoom lens.

  “Why am I stuck making the handoff?” said Gordon. “Why am I hanging out there like a sacrificial lamb with an envelope full of money and a cop being bribed? You set it up, you finish it off.”

  “If things go south, you can just say you’re a delivery man who didn’t know what was in the envelope or who you were giving it to.”

  “Oh, the SWAT team bearing down on me with AKs bristling will buy that for sure.”

  “Since when was risk not part of this gig?”

  “I accept risk, but I won’t be doing the scut work for this team.”

  “He’s right,” said Riley. “That’s why we have Kief.”

  “Riley, when you set up for the photograph, grab an angle where Gordon’s face is hidden while the detective’s bald head and mournful face are clear.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “They’ll have enough on me anyway,” said Gordon. “They’ll have more than enough. You need to treat me with more respect. Read your Coates, man. The black body is always being put at risk.”

  “That’s what you think this is?”

  “That’s what it sure as hell looks like. I’m not taking a fall for anybody.”

  “It’s not for anybody,” I said. “It’s for the rest of us.”

  That at least got a laugh out of Riley.

  “Truth is, Gordon,” I said, “you know so little about me you should be embarrassed. All I see in this world is me and everyone else. You’re one of everyone else. And out of the everyone elses we have working for us, you’re the best qualified to keep this from getting out of hand. Your size alone is enough to keep Booth from getting ideas about playing hero. Quit the squawking and get it done.”

  That he did.

  The second conversation was with Melissa Davenport, Rufus’s dissatisfied wife. I braced her in a Starbucks as she picked up her regular Grande Nonfat Latte Macchiato. I identified myself as Dick Triplett, that friend of Adele’s she met at that party in that place. When she pretended to remember me and tried to blow me off at the same time, I mentioned Scarlett Gould and that got her attention. We settled at one of the small round tables with the tall chairs for a chat. I have found that a small round table at a Starbucks is the perfect place for a private conversation: no one ever listens in because nothing is rarer in the world than something of interest being said at a small round table at a Starbucks.

  Melissa tried to avoid talking about Scarlett. Instead we talked about our families—I lied about mine—we talked about Adele—I lied about her, too—and then I showed her the contingency fee agreement signed by the Goulds and Alberto Menendez. When she asked how I knew she had any connection with Scarlett, I just looked at her. It took only a few seconds before the stern cast of her face collapsed into desolation.

  “I still can’t get over it,” she said. “Scarlett was so sweet and strong and independent. She cared so much about the world and with one act of violence all that caring is gone. We met when our foundation was looking to contribute to her nonprofit. We talked about the animals and life and we just hit it off. We had coffee, we met for drinks, I felt sort of like a mentor. And with my advice her organization was picking up steam, and not just from our funding. She was in discussions to go international. Her organization was negotiating to join forces with a wildlife sanctuary to help save the endangered Visayan warty pig.”

  “The Visayan warty pig?”

  “It’s a cute little animal with striped sides and warts on its face. It lives on only two small islands in the Philippines, very endangered, and right up Scarlett’s alley. It was all so exciting. She was just bursting with enthusiasm, bursting with life. And then . . .”

  I asked the expected questions about whether she had any information about the murder itself and she said she didn’t. And then I asked why she had contacted the police commissioner about the case, and why she had placed a series of calls to Detective Pickering’s cell phone, and when I did that a line of fear crept into her expression, which was good.

  “How would you know such things?” she said.

  “Maybe you should have used a pay phone when you made the calls,” I said.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Dick Triplett,” I said. “I work for the lawyer who is representing the Goulds. And our clients have made it clear that they want the memory of their daughter to remain pristine. They don’t want it soiled by publicity about a torrid sexual affair with an older married woman. They want you out of the picture, and out of pushing the investigation for your own purposes.”

  There was a flash of anger, something truly fierce in her eyes, and then it went out of her like a balloon deflating. “I didn’t like that Scarlett just disappeared and nothing was being done,” she said. “I wanted them to do more. I couldn’t bear that she’d be forgotten. That’s all it was.”

  “Maybe the time has come for forgetting. Maybe you should stay away from the police and spend more time with little Jason. Maybe volunteer at his preschool on Wisconsin Avenue. Maybe take him to the zoo on sunny afternoons instead of dumping him on the nanny. Heaven knows you would regret missing those special moments if something happened to the dear, sweet boy down the road.”

  That look, there, yes, that’s the look you get when they see you torturing the hamster. That’s the look you get when they finally realize exactly what you are. I used to hate that look, but not so much anymore. Now I find it a bracing bit of truth. But that day, when I got the look, I knew the job was done. Melissa Davenport would no longer be pushing the investigation, which meant that with the third and final conversation I could pretty much wrap up the case.

  I had set it up with a text, and she was sitting at the bar when I arrived, a martini in front of her, double olive. Her blonde hair was newscaster glossy, her dress was black and short. Pearls. Bright-red lips and blue high heels. Yeah. It seemed like she had something on her mind.

  “You look great,” I said. “You meeting someone?”

  “I wanted you to pine.”

  “I’m sweating Pine-Sol.”

  “Good. You hungry?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I made a reservation. Let’s have a drink and then we’ll Uber there.”

  “That sounds right.”

  She turned to the bartender. “Scotch, over ice, and make it something good. This is a man who knows the difference.”

  It wasn’t much of a surprise, the way she was acting over drinks, that we ended up at Del Frisco’s for dinner. Del Frisco’s, of course, was the same steakhouse I had tried to take her to the last time we were together. That night, instead of the date I thought she would want, she got me drunk and screwed me and sent me packing. Now, at this silken high-toned restaurant, after she ordered the sea bass with spinach, and I ordered the twenty-two-ounce bone-in rib eye, with Chateau potatoes and a plate of asparagus with hollandaise, she asked for a bottle of champagne.

  The bottle opened with a satisfying pop; the bubbles rose like laughter in our glasses. We clinked, we drank, the wine went down our throats li
ke soft kisses.

  “You might be wondering what this is all about,” she said.

  “I’m just enjoying seeing you happy.”

  “I’m not quite happy. I don’t get happy. For me, Jefferson’s pursuit is destined to end in failure, but I’m trying.”

  “Champagne always helps.”

  “Martinis, too. And sex.”

  “And money.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “Are rich people really happy?”

  “They’re at least happy that we’re not as rich as they are.”

  “True. But by the cut of your suit, you’re doing okay.”

  “What does okay have to do with it? Since when does okay fit the bill? What do you want to be, little Johnny, when you grow up? I want to be okay.”

  “But from this end of the conversation, okay seems pretty damn sweet.”

  “So, Linda, what’s this really all about? Champagne and steak? Are you breaking up with me?”

  “I wanted to apologize.”

  “Why? Did you get sober behind my back?”

  “I’ve been through a lot the last couple of years. The way the marriage fell apart, and the divorce, and the fight over our daughter. And then there’s the job. It’s a great job and I love it but it turns you cynical. Everyone’s lying, everyone’s guilty, even if not of the crime you’re investigating. Life has jaundiced me. And then you appeared and picked me up in a bar and I thought I knew exactly what this was, which was all I thought I could handle. All I wanted to handle.”

  She traced a finger across the rim of her flute. Her finger was slender, her nail short, her polish natural. She was looking down at the table and so I could stare. She was quite pretty, not young but pretty with a sense of substance in her cheekbones, in the tight skin around her mouth, and an appealing sadness in her eyes. My wife had been bouncy and young and game for anything and I thought that was what I wanted. But just then, in that restaurant, I sensed that Linda Pickering, with her toughness and her sadness and the way she laughed through her pain, might be just the thing. We meshed in a way I didn’t understand. And I did like looking at her.

  “So when you came in with your flowers and your romantic plans,” she said, “I wanted nothing to do with it. It was so sweet, sweeter than anyone’s been to me in a long while, except I just wasn’t able to deal with sweetness right then. It was easier to get drunk and screw and roll over to go to sleep than to actually try. It was easier to stay in a fog. But when you stormed out—”

  “Did I storm? I thought it was like a drizzle.”

  “Maybe a squall.”

  “Heavy drizzle.”

  “But when you left in a heavy drizzle, carrying your hurt feelings with you, I began to think. You were sweet and I was a bitch and I just wanted to apologize, and not just for that night. I wanted to apologize for not treating you, or this, like it mattered. I don’t know where it’s going, maybe nowhere and that’s fine, but it matters enough to take it seriously. At least a bit. So there it is.”

  “There it is.”

  “You want to run? I wouldn’t blame you.”

  I didn’t run just then. What I did was stand, walk around the table, and lean forward and kiss her. And she reached a hand up to my cheek. And I put my hand over hers. And I thought again that maybe she was just the right match for this thing that I was. That she was the one who could maybe save me from myself. But of course, there was no saving me from myself.

  “Are we going dancing after this?” I said when I was back in my seat.

  “God, I hope not.”

  I was famished from my day of conversations and so I smartly waited until we were finished eating to get down to business. The steak was marbled and fat and burnt like I like it, the potatoes creamy, the asparagus snappy as a lounge singer under its cape of butter and egg yolk and lemon. We kept up with the champagne, and the bubbles tickled the roof of my mouth as Linda Pickering twittered on about this and that in a voice as appealing as apple sauce. I gazed at her while she picked at her bass and felt a wave of happiness. It gave me hope, the whole evening, like even with my condition I could create something sustaining in my life. But not with her.

  “I have something for you,” I said, finally getting down to it after the waiter cleared the plates from our tabletop.

  She looked at me and then looked down and her smile glowed in the light of the candle, like I had a gift for her, and I suppose I did.

  “I told you I was a fixer of sorts,” I continued, “and in the course of that work I came across something that I thought might interest you. I shouldn’t be sharing, but because I care about you, I’m going to anyway.”

  She tilted her head in confusion as I took a thin envelope from my pocket, placed it on the table, and slid it to her. As she picked it up, her hands slightly shaking, I told her that inside the envelope were photographs of her partner, Detective Booth, taking a bribe. Also inside were financial documents that showed Detective Booth with high debts and an income that exceeded his salary.

  “And why are you giving this to me?” she said, her voice taking on the rhythm of an old-fashioned typewriter being hunted and pecked.

  “If this information got out, it wouldn’t just impact your partner, it would impact your department, your division, and, most troublingly, you. It could even impact your custody fight.”

  “My custody fight? You’re talking about my custody fight?”

  “There’s more that we found,” I said. “Some of it quite ugly, involving an after-hours sex club in Georgetown for politicians and people of power. If Detective Booth’s involvement with such a club was spread across the media, it could be the worst kind of scandal.”

  “I still don’t understand what you’re doing.”

  “I’m trying to protect you. Which is why it is important that you know that there are concerns about the way the Scarlett Gould investigation is progressing.”

  “Scarlett Gould? This is about Scarlett Gould?”

  “Somehow the investigation is turning away from the obvious suspect into a direction that is overtly political, driven by a woman with an ulterior motive. That is a problem. Some would like the emphasis turned back where it belongs.”

  “Oh God,” she said, trying to force out a laugh even as her face finished its collapse from happiness to wariness to misery. “Now I see. Sometimes I am such a fool.”

  “The pressure from Melissa Davenport will disappear; my associate has already taken care of that.”

  “You’re a fixer, and I’m the one that needed fixing.”

  “And these photographs and documents will be fully buried, I promise you.”

  “Sometimes I want to just shoot myself in the face.”

  “But we think Bradley Beamon really should remain the prime focus of the investigation. I mean, who else threatened the victim in such an overt fashion? Who else had such a brutal motive? And really, with Bradley around, you wouldn’t be able to convict anyone else anyway. They’d just point the finger and put the infamous woodpecker Facebook post on the screen before the jury and that would be that.”

  “You don’t mind if I take more champagne for myself, do you, Phil?” Even as she asked this she turned over the bottle and poured gulps into her flute until the wine splashed over onto the table and then she swallowed what remained in the glass like water.

  “But if the whole investigation just slows down and gets buried beneath the other files on your desk,” I said, “that wouldn’t concern us at all. And it would give you plenty of time with your daughter, which is preferable to what would happen if all of this got out.”

  “The thing was I liked you,” she said. “That is what’s so laughable.”

  “And I liked you, too, truly. But now I have to run, I’m sorry. You can keep those, they’re just copies.” I pulled out my wallet, took out a short stack of hundreds, and dropped them on the table. “This should cover the tab. Keep what’s left over. I actually had a wonderful time. I’m going to miss yo
u.”

  “What’s amazing is that you did all this as breezily as if you were discussing the weather. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so appalled and impressed at the same time. It is surely more impressive than your technique in bed. I suppose you’re mixed up with that Dick Triplett fellow we’ve been hearing about. Is he as cold as you?”

  “Colder,” I said as I stood. “He wouldn’t have cut short the evening like this. With those blue heels of yours, he would have fucked you first.”

  “It’s nice to know,” she said with eyes appealingly wet, “that chivalry isn’t dead after all.”

  III

  SAMURAI

  29. Idyll

  When the magazine writer returned through the shack’s back door, her hand was clasped over nose and mouth. The outlaw had warned her that Ginsberg’s eggs had been known to cause ejectments of all kinds, and he hadn’t been wrong. She was embarrassed enough to have run out like she did; her mortification was only made worse by the way the outlaw laughed as she sheepishly slunk back to her seat. His mockery was a fitting price for her self-righteous impulsivity. As if a single pickled egg could lend her the courage she so desperately sought.

  “I’m sorry,” the outlaw said after trying and failing to cut short his laughter, “but the disgust on your face is thick enough to carve. I should have warned you before you visited the outhouse. It’s almost better to crap on a rock and wipe yourself on a cactus than to enter that vile little hut. Here, try this.”

  He pushed her Scotch glass toward her, a fresh cube of ice inside, and poured another dram. The noxious fumes still in her nose and mouth were burned away by the smoky brilliance of the whiskey. And yet, it wasn’t only the lingering stink that was the cause of her distress. It was the man across from her, too.