The Big Law pb-2

by Chuck Logan

  He massaged the dull ache seizing up in his left shoulder.

  Didn’t bounce as well as he used to. Why stage a fight and whisper about James and the money.

  Why was he wearing her ring? What was that sermon about the Russian cross?

  The early afternoon traffic was almost lulling; tires turned like prayer wheels. He fell into the shifting rhythms, cruising through the northern suburbs on U.S. 694: New Brighton, Fridley, Brooklyn Center. At the 94 interchange he turned south through Minneapolis, jogged east to 35 and took it to the bottom leg of the loop, turning east on 494 in Richfield.

  Broker thinking, thinking, tapping his right hand on the wheel. Trying to decipher Keith. The broad shadow of a commercial jetliner drifted over the freeway, flaps down, on approach to Minneapolis-St. Paul International. Broker drove through the sweeping shadow, looking for the trap-door that descended down into Keith’s mad thoughts.

  He saw Keith’s mind as a labyrinth of austere stonework.

  Like a Gothic cathedral, it had tortured figures imprisoned in stained glass, relentlessly vertical buttresses. Gargoyles.

  God and Satan. Right and wrong. No middle ground to take up the slack.

  The road turned north, curving around St. Paul. He left the freeway at Highway 5 and took the road to Stillwater.

  Didn’t tell J.T. what happened in the cell. Would he tell Jeff?

  He pulled into his motel, parked and walked into the lobby. The desk clerk handed him two messages. Jeff had called. The second note was from the Washington County Jail. He went to his room and called the jail.

  A deputy had called Cook County and received this number. He told Broker that Keith Angland would not be receiving visitors other than his attorney. The assault earned him a move to lockdown status. Did Broker want to press charges?

  No charges. The deputy thanked him and hung up. There would be no more communication with Keith. Before calling Jeff, Broker took off his coat, lay down on the bed and stared at the uniform pattern of holes in the ceiling tiles. Nothing emerged Rorschach-like from their monotony.

  He heaved off the bed and reached for the telephone on the desk. Jeff would have to wait. This was between him and Keith.

  “How’s Kit?” he asked when Jeff was on the line.

  “Coming down with a cold. What happened?”

  “Keith baited me, practically admitted to the murders of Caren and Gorski and dared everyone within earshot to prove he did it. Then he accused me of having an affair with Caren and jumped me. It took two deputies and Garrison to wrestle him down and cuff him.”

  “How are you?”

  “Sore. I’m getting too old to grapple with psychos.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  Not lying. Omission. “He’s wearing her wedding ring on his frostbitten little finger. They took off the first joint. It’s pretty gruesome.”

  Jeff said, “Garrison did some follow-up after talking to you.

  Two Duluth agents picked up the Subaru this morning. They filled me in on their theory about how the Russians made their approach to Keith. Didn’t know his mom was Russian.”

  “Yeah. Garrison walked me through it. And I gave him the letters. But we’ll never see James, they’re too taken with themselves and their big case.”

  “Maybe,” said Jeff. “Maybe not.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’ve got a sympathizer out there. Got a call with a message specifically for you, to use at your discretion. Looks like the feds might trip on their trench coats. That fake bomb with the tongue in it? Widely reported in the press to be the property of a missing FBI informant. That tongue?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s a woman’s tongue.”

  “What?”

  “No kidding. A person called me, who shall remain anonymous because I gave my word-but they could work in the state crime lab-they heard it from somebody in the Hennepin County coroner’s office, who got it straight from a big mouth at the FBI lab at Quantico. The feds ran DNA tests on the tongue and guess what-it had two of these DNA markers-amelogenin markers, I think they’re called.

  Males only have one. They mislabeled the report and put it out.”

  Broker touched his bruised cheek where Keith had hit him.

  “That could play hell with their case.”

  “You bet. My anonymous caller also said the tongue was pickled with formaldehyde, like they use in a medical school.

  The feds probably have a hundred agents checking med schools for missing tongues.”

  “Being real thorough about it, too, I’ll bet.”

  “There you go. The caller also suggested this is the kind of bone Layne Wanger at the St. Paul paper might like to chew on.”

  “So, it’s a gift,” said Broker.

  “Spend it wisely,” said Jeff. “What do you want to do?”

  “Depends. Is Kit holding up?”

  “Sure. She’s graduated from Pooh to the hard stuff. Sally had her watching Mary Poppins last night.”

  Broker smiled, keeping it in separate compartments. “Okay, then I’d like to poke around a few more days. See if I can turn up something on James.”

  45

  The ebony marble art deco gallery of the St. Paul City Hall reminded Broker of the set for an old Flash Gordon serial.

  Any minute he expected Ming the Merciless to rise up out of the floor mosaic on a dais surrounded by fakey smoke and overweight spear carriers. What did rise on a dais in the dark, pillared concourse, and did in fact rotate, was Onyx John, a thirty-six-foot statue of an Indian with a peace pipe crafted from Mexican onyx.

  Layne Wanger was the only newspaper man he’d ever trusted. Wanger would screw you, but he’d tell you first.

  They hadn’t spoken in two years, but the St. Paul reporter agreed immediately to meet with him.

  Wanger stood in front of the statue like a temple guard dog in charge of the past. Hardy as crabgrass, he looked like he was wearing the same suit and tie he’d worn the day he cast his last vote for Richard Nixon.

  “You got your knife,” asked Broker, deadpan.

  Old joke. Years back, when Wanger was fresh out of the marines, a shiny new cops reporter, he’d bought a shiny new hunting knife. And he’d brought his shiny new knife up to Broker’s cabin, joining Broker and John Eisenhower for deer season.

  Never took that prized knife off. Wore it when he went to the outhouse, where he fumbled it down the hole.

  They’d spent a hilarious day drinking, grappling for the knife with coat hangers, and sterilizing it in successive gasoline fires.

  “Very goddamn funny,” said Wanger.

  They shook hands. “So how’s it going,” asked Broker.

  “Not too bad, considering the new cultural weirdness.

  Damn near afraid to say ‘bullshit’ in the newsroom anymore, worried some split tail is going to accuse me of offending cows.”

  The smile washed quickly off Broker’s face.

  Wanger’s eyes briefly touched the Band-Aid over Broker’s bruised cheek. More serious, he said, “So what’s up?”

  Broker brought his hand from his pocket, palmed the badge. “I’m back on the job, temporary with Cook County.”

  “The Angland mess,” said Wanger.

  Broker nodded. “We’d like to get a statement out of your former colleague, James, so we can close the case on Caren.”

  “Never happen,” said Wanger. “They washed him. The feds screw up a lot of things. Witness Protection isn’t one of them. Unless he wants out, you’ll never find him.”

  “So I’m learning. What kind of guy was he?”

  Wanger shook his head. “Last person in the world you’d expect to get shot and wind up as a protected federal witness.”

  “What’s the word that sums him up?”

  Wanger, a man of exact descriptions, squinted. “Gambler.

  In the worst sense.”

  “How so, worse?”

  “It ate him alive. Destroyed his marriag
e. Almost lost him his job.”

  “Who’d he hang with?”

  “Nobody. Everybody. He was good at that, drifting in and out of any situation.” Wanger frowned. “He couldn’t settle for being a fair-to-good reporter, he kept reaching for the gold ring. He’d always get close, then he’d get lousy breaks.

  Bad luck, you could say, an interesting affliction for a guy addicted to the casinos. Last year he wandered into Mystic Lake between assignments and got lost. Lost track of time, missed his deadlines. Problem was, some busybody supervisor in Circulation was at the casino on his day off and saw James drowning at the blackjack tables.

  “Problem was, he faked the story he was supposed to be covering. Word got out. He was suspended and demoted.”

  “Maybe his luck changed,” speculated Broker.

  “Not exactly the way I’d characterize getting shot,” said Wanger slowly, narrowing his eyes. “What you got going here?”

  Broker shrugged and dangled a sentence. “Could be I have something on the case against Keith Angland.”

  “Hmmm.” Wanger feigned boredom, but Broker saw his jaw muscles tense, ready to bite.

  “But first, I’m curious how James got onto Caren. I need somebody who can help me get to know him real fast.”

  “Ida Rain,” said Wanger. “The East Neighborhoods editor, his boss. I detect a little heat there. She took it hard when he disappeared.”

  “What’s she like?”

  Wanger composed his face, searching for a word. “Interesting woman, independent, reserved. Classy dresser. She must have thought James could be saved. She does that every couple years. Plays medevac. Reaches down and pulls some fuck-up out of the glue and fixes them.”

  “What did she see in him?”

  Wanger squinted philosophically. “You ever meet a woman who’s pretty impressive. Has her life very together in all respects, except she keeps making this one mistake over and over.”

  “Yeah,” said Broker. Caren, who kept marrying cops.

  She agreed to meet thirty seconds into the call. “There’s a coffee shop catty-corner to city hall, around the block from the paper. I’ll be wearing a scarf,” she said in a husky voice.

  The muted autumn colors of the scarf were quietly understated in everything she wore. She stepped from a sudden snow squall wearing a slim gray wool skirt down to high-heel boots, a raw silk blouse and a bulky beige sweater. He guessed forty, with a complexion that stopped aging at thirty, lustrous reddish brown hair, smoky brown eyes, the fresh posture of a young Lauren Bacall…

  And a chin that rescued her from a life sentence of beauty.

  He stood at the door, pointed to her scarf. She extended a cool hand, long white fingers, tipped with burgundy-lacquered nails. “Phil Broker, wife of Nina Pryce, hello.”

  He cocked his head, let the playful jibe whistle past. Shook her hand. Ida lowered her eyelids a fraction. “I just mean that Nina is a headline. Some people are headlines.”

  Broker took a closer look at her and understood she could throw sex across a room like a ventriloquist. If you were in a mind to play catcher.

  Which did not occur to him.

  They sat down, ordered two cups of expensive coffee. “Do you know where Tom is?” she asked straight off.

  “He went into Witness Protection.”

  “I know that. But where is he?”

  “I was hoping you might have some idea. I need to find him,” said Broker.

  “So do I,” said Ida with a droll smile. “To hang up on him.

  He left without saying good-bye.”

  Not missing sleep over James. Not even bitter, he decided.

  Disappointed and…curious and maybe a little intrigued, talking to a cop about it. “The conventional wisdom is, you can’t find them once the feds disappear them.”

  “But you don’t believe that, or you wouldn’t be here,” she said, leaning forward. “Why do you need to find him?”

  After you looked at her awhile, the flaw in her face became less odd and more of an artistic exaggeration. She had a definite undertow. Broker wondered if her skin was that smooth all over. He thought of the snowy, nude Dresden figurine his dad had brought back, as a war souvenir, from Germany.

  He unzipped his satchel and placed a photocopy of the hate letter on the table in front of her. “I think he sent this to me.”

  Her eyebrows bunched as she scanned it, her lips curdled once. She slid it back to his side of the table. “Sick,” she said.

  “The person who wrote this was having a bad Stephen King experience. Why do you say Tom wrote it?”

  “I have a fourteen-month-old daughter,” Broker said. “Tom James spent two minutes alone with her. The next thing she did was almost choke to death on a piece of a hundred-dollar bill. Then he ran away before I could question him. An hour later Caren Angland was dead.”

  His words levered her back, erect in her chair.

  Broker smiled thinly. “Stuff they left out of the news stories.” Now that he had her full attention, he said, “You were his editor, so I wondered if anything about the writing was familiar?”

  She shook her head, a trifle too quickly. “Tom was more like Joe Friday in the old Dragnet series. Just the facts. Strictly old-school AP style. He was not a creative writer, believe me.”

  “I believe you. Just one of those grounders you have to run out.” But he left the sheet on the table between them.

  She crossed her arms, caught herself, unfolded them. Her eyes perused the sheet. “Why would he write that? He doesn’t even know you.” More than curious. She was trying to solve a puzzle in her mind. Good.

  “Maybe he’s angry at me because I accused him of hiding something. You know about the scene at my place up north?”

  “I read all the stories.”

  “Tom came alone, he left Caren down the road. By herself.

  If he’d brought her along, she’d be alive today. And, like I said, when I confronted him, he ran.”

  Ida twisted her lips in a half smile. “He saw his big chance to run out on everything. And he took it.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “Left his job, his debts and…”

  “You,” said Broker.

  “Correct.”

  “Ida, who is he?”

  “He uses people.” She took a measured breath. “He can’t help it. It’s not…malicious. He does it naturally. It’s the kind of gift that made him a good reporter. In his time.”

  “Why ‘in his time’?” Broker asked.

  Her shoulders shifted in a subtle shrug. “Things changed.

  New management arrived, went on a retreat and played spin the newsroom. Currently we are in the grips of team theory.

  Are you a team player, Mr. Broker?”

  “My stomach gets upset every time I go in an office,” he admitted.

  Ida continued. “The new atmosphere favors the young.

  Tom was no longer young. He also tended to get ahead of his facts, sometimes.” She sniffed. “Nothing a good editor couldn’t correct.”

  “I hear he gambled,” said Broker.

  “Blowing off steam. I may be wrong on that.”

  Broker wondered aloud, “What did he want most?”

  She cut him with a precise look. “That’s easy. He wanted to be someone else.”

  A custom-fitted aura of loneliness surrounded her, as carefully chosen as her attire.

  Broker came forward in his chair. “How, someone else?”

  She pulled back. “I’ll have to think about that. Do you have a card?”

  Broker reached into his wallet and gave her one of Jeff’s Cook County cards. He crossed out Jeff’s name and wrote in his own. On the back, he left his name again, his home phone and the number of his motel. “I’ll be at the last number for the next two days,” he said.

  She narrowed her eyes. “I researched every angle of the Caren Angland story. I even saw her, briefly, when she picked Tom up, in front of the paper. You were married to her.
”

  “Didn’t work out,” said Broker.

  “So this is personal?” she asked.

  “You could say that.” He was thinking more of Keith than Caren.

  Ida inclined her head. “You were a detective for the BCA.

  Before that, St. Paul. Two years ago, you took medical leave and went on your ‘adventure’ with Nina Pryce…”

  “Really,” said Broker.

  Ida hid her chin behind her knuckles. The effect was dev-astating. “Really. My job is checking facts. You traveled to Vietnam to find Nina’s dad’s remains. Which you did. The Vietnamese government awarded you something like half a million dollars in gold because you and Nina also unearthed a national treasure. There’s a rumor that you smuggled a lot more of that gold to Thailand and sold it on the black market. That you have these interesting foreign bank accounts.

  You quit the BCA and moved up north. You tell people you look after a bunch of lake cabins, but your folks really do that.”

  “Hmmm,” said Broker. “How’d you put all that together?”

  “I’m real good,” she stated boldly. “That part about the hundred-dollar bill, your daughter? Mr. Broker, Tom was broke as a church mouse, unless he won it gambling.”

  Broker smiled. If there was a key to James, she was it.

  “Maybe we can talk about it some more,” he suggested.

  “I’ll think about that,” said Ida. “And I’ll take this”-she picked up the letter-“and read it again.”

  He tapped his finger on the business card lying on the table. “Do that. Then call me.”

  Ida picked up the card, put it and the letter in her purse, and thanked him for the cup of coffee. He watched her walk from the coffee shop, hearing the two-inch heels on her boots strike the tile floor. A snappy rhythm to her walk. Like castanets. Like…

  Ida faded into the headlong snow streaming between the buildings, but Broker had tripped into a rabbit hole of memory and was thrown back more than twenty years, to a torpid summer day, sitting in a classroom at the army signal school in Ft. Knox, Kentucky, listening to dots and dashes beep from a sweaty pair of earphones. A crash code course, for Special Operations.