Guy Novel

by Michael Ryan

  I followed him to his desk, a French antique writing table— probably Chateaubriand’s or some Rothschild’s or somebody’s. The only things on it were two file folders and a little platinum ellipse two inches high that looked like a trophy (“LA’s Most Expensive Lawyer Per Pound”?). He sat down with his back to the window, and the light behind him framed him in a halo that could have been painted by Piero della Francesca. Nothing about this man was without design: the product of the utmost intelligence, will, and financial resources. In other words, exactly what you want in your lawyer.

  He clicked a switch at the base of the trophy that made the ellipse begin rotating while it shifted on its axis. It was like a mesmerist’s device or something out of those wonderful mad scientist labs in horror films of the fifties.

  He noted my amusement and said, “I spent too many years as a prosecutor to ignore the fact that surveillance is the best way to find out what you need to know, even if you never use the information in court. This little device will distort our conversation so that it won’t be intelligible to any of the long-range listening devices currently available on the market. I understand they’re devising a new apparatus that will unscramble it, but it won’t be available through private channels for another six months, at which time there will be another device that the new apparatus can’t unscramble. And so it goes, Mr. Wilder. This is what passes for progress these days. But it’s for your protection. What you say here will be strictly between us, and will of course be privileged according to law. It is completely in your interest to tell me the unvarnished truth.”

  I nodded. In contrast to his size, he had a voice like an opera singer: deep timbre that came from his diaphragm. He must have practiced like an opera singer to learn how to speak this way. It gave everything he said absolute authority.

  “I’m not taping this, are you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, taken aback. It hadn’t even occurred to me to tape it.

  “Fine. Well, I have good news.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen your receptionist.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “It’s an old joke, Mr. Sheed. The doctor says to the patient, ‘I’ve got bad news and good news, which do you want to hear first?’ ”

  “Right,” he said, unamused. “Don Leach mentioned you were a comedian.”

  “I’m not so sure anymore.”

  Sheed removed his hands from his desk and folded them in his lap, a gesture of patience that meant he was losing his. “Would you like to talk about your career plans, Mr. Wilder? Or your legal problem?”

  “Please excuse me. My legal problem.”

  “That’s the good news,” Sheed said. “You don’t have one.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There was no money taken illegally from the Bank of America branch at Second and Colorado on Friday.”

  “There wasn’t?” I asked, incredulously.

  “There was not. So we have here something more interesting. This is what I was able to find out for you in the twenty-four hours I’ve had my people working on this: the woman ‘Sabine’ is in fact named Angela Chase. She has never been employed as a teller at Bank of America. The $200,000 in cash she took with her on Friday belonged to her, part of the profit from the sale of a house in Malibu she owned with her brother.”

  This was hard for me to believe, despite the basso profundo with which he delivered it.

  “Um, wasn’t the withdrawal procedure a bit unusual for a real estate transaction?” I asked.

  “Yes, it was. The bank agreed to deliver the money to her in cash at the request of Washington, probably the State Department, although I doubt if I’d ever be able to confirm that.” Was this a put-on? A prank Don arranged?

  “And why, pray tell, did she take the money to Mexico?” Sheed sighed almost imperceptibly just to show me that he didn’t appreciate the “pray tell,” but since I was the client he was nevertheless going to be courteous and tolerant.

  “Miss Chase’s brother is named Michael. He is a vice president of international marketing for General Mills. He may also be involved in some less wholesome business. From his background, it seems likely. He was kidnapped in Mexico City two weeks ago today. I don’t know if he’s been released or not. I don’t know if Miss Chase raised all the ransom money or not. I don’t know if she has delivered the ransom money or not. I don’t know if either of them is alive or not. And that is essentially all I know at this point. You do not have a legal problem, because there was no crime. At least no bank robbery.”

  “I need to rewind a minute,” I said. “I don’t get something here. Maybe you can explain it to me. Sabine is Angela Chase. Angela Chase has a brother. He’s a business executive. General Mills. He was kidnapped, two weeks ago.”

  “Correct so far.”

  “I didn’t read about it in the papers. He’s an American business executive? That usually makes the news.”

  “Also correct. It didn’t make the news, luckily for him.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Two reasons. The current official policy of the United States government is not to negotiate with kidnappers. General Mills has—I believe the figure is—$3 billion in annual contracts with the Defense Department alone. That’s a lot of Cheerios. They supply all five branches of the armed services. It’s in their interest to be on board. If they refuse to pay ransoms, eventually their executives won’t get kidnapped. Eventually. They might lose a few executives at first, but then that’s it. The message is, if you want to kidnap a businessman, kidnap a Japanese, because they pay and we don’t. Of course it would be bad publicity if this were generally known. You might not buy your child’s after-school snack from such a heartless company. But they do want it known to the people in the kidnapping business. They also want to keep it out of the papers.”

  Sheed could see he was getting through to me. He leaned back in his chair and made a tiny pyramid with his hands by joining them, then held up two tiny forefingers the size of my pinkies.

  “Second,” he continued, “this Michael Chase may be dirty. He may have been the corporation’s point man for bribing Mexican government officials. He may be involved in drugs or arms smuggling or who knows what. In any case, it may be to the corporation’s advantage to hang him out to dry. So much so that they may have set it up. But that’s completely in the realm of speculation.”

  “You’re still way ahead of me, Mr. Sheed.”

  “It is a great deal of information to absorb, I’m sure,” he said.

  “It’s not a world I live in.”

  “You stumbled into it, I’m afraid. And let me tell you something: it’s real. It’s going on right now as we speak. I am simply trying to describe your situation to you.”

  “I’m still back asking why Washington would intervene with the Bank of America to allow the money to be withdrawn in cash.”

  “All we know is that they did. It may have been for humanitarian reasons. However, it’s more likely that Angela Chase threatened to inform the press of her brother’s kidnapping if the government did not at least help her to obtain her own money for the ransom. And that would have put President Clinton in an awkward position—in an election year. Remember what happened to Jimmy Carter with the Iran hostage crisis? Voters don’t like when presidents fail to rescue Americans kidnapped abroad. There are hundreds of such kidnappings a year in Mexico alone. How many do you read about in the papers? Not many. Officially, the ransom’s a private transaction. No governments involved. No negotiations. No publicity. Simple quid pro quo among private citizens. As far as the world is concerned, it never happened.”

  I had an insight at that moment about Sheed. He liked the money but money wasn’t the point. Money was only a by-product of the high-powered lawyering, being an insider at the highest level. This was what he liked. He would have taken my case for free.

  He opened the top folder on his desk.

  “Let’s return to your involvement in this situation. I have a few questions
for you. You stayed with Angela Chase at the Esperanza Resort Hotel, correct? In the honeymoon suite. She was not registered. She signed nothing nor paid for anything with a credit card.”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “But you did.” He opened the first folder. “American Express dated Saturday posted yesterday for $873.13.”

  “How did you get that?”

  “That’s easy, Mr. Wilder. Any bozo can get it, which means any bozo who wants to can find out where you have been and how you spend your money. You ate chicken enchiladas in the restaurant and drank a bottle of Negra Modelo. Fortunately, we couldn’t trace Angela Chase to Mexico at all. Plus, according to the hotel records, you were staying with your new bride.”

  “I still don’t get where I come in. Why would anyone bother to find out any of this about me?”

  “Only one reason. To link you to Angela Chase in case you would release the story to the press if she’s taken hostage or murdered.”

  “But I wouldn’t know.”

  “I know that, you know that, Angela Chase knows that, but the government agencies that don’t want the story in the news wouldn’t know that. Nor would they take a chance. They would assume you will release the story if you do not hear from her by a certain prearranged date.”

  “Which government agencies? Which government?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Am I in some sort of danger?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Probably not? Is that supposed to be comforting?”

  “As I said, we are completely in the realm of speculation here. But by virtue of the fact that you’re sitting here with me instead of lying dead in a ditch, they obviously haven’t linked you to Angela Chase. If she flew out of Baja, there’s no record of it. She must have had a false passport and paid for her ticket with a dummy credit card or cash, which as you saw she had in abundance. Another question: the note she wrote to you. Where is it now?”

  “Don’s got it.”

  “Has anyone else seen the note? Have you told anyone else about it?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Don did fax it to me, but my fax line is secure. It’s on hotel stationery but it’s not signed. I would destroy it as she advised. She wasn’t kidding about it possibly compromising her safety. And yours.”

  That made me remember her—a tactile memory, the way her body felt against mine, shot through me.

  “All right,” Sheed continued. “The hotel staff. You must have talked to a desk clerk.”

  “Yes. His name was Octavio.”

  Sheed wrote it down in the file. “What did you tell him?”

  “Not much. He thought Sabine . . .”

  “Miss Chase.”

  “Whoever she was. He thought she was my wife. He thought her mother had passed away suddenly and that was the reason for her abrupt departure. And the reason for her screaming noises that came from our room an hour or so before she left.”

  “Screaming noises,” Sheed repeated.

  I explained her screaming noises, as euphemistically as I could. Sheed thought a minute.

  “I don’t want you to be alarmed. I’m simply trying to cover all the bases here. This Octavio could still be the one means of linking you to Angela Chase. But first they have to know she was at the hotel and I don’t think there’s any way to know that, unless Octavio tells them, which means that he would have to be previously connected in some way to the interested parties.”

  “Gets pretty rococo.”

  “By which you mean attenuated. Tenuous. I agree,” Sheed said. “I don’t think you’re at risk. Most likely this is a straightforward American businessman kidnapping not arranged by the US government, the Mexican government, or General Mills. None are likely, but the most likely of the three is General Mills.”

  “Abducted by Cheerios,” I said.

  “The world has changed, Mr. Wilder. It’s a world of corporations, not nations. There are many surprises coming in the next century.”

  “Any more surprises for me?”

  “At this time, the risk to you is infinitesimal. Statistically insignificant. You are more likely to be run over by a truck crossing the street. As I said, the kidnappers almost certainly work for themselves, so they wouldn’t be interested in you at all. It’s a thriving business down there. It would be bad business to collect the ransom, then murder the person they kidnapped, much less the person delivering the ransom. So I don’t think they’d hurt Angela Chase either. Possibly the kidnappers were hired by a drug cartel or some other illegal organization, but those organizations usually simply kill someone like Michael Chase instead of bothering to kidnap him.”

  “There’s still a few pieces that don’t fit,” I said. “The woman I took to Mexico was a teller in the bank. She was cashing people’s checks. She cashed my check.”

  Sheed pulled a piece a paper from the bottom folder and handed it to me across the desk. It was a xeroxed copy of a California driver’s license. The picture on it was Sabine’s. The name on it was Angela Chase.

  “Is that the woman?” Sheed asked.

  I said it was.

  “She has never worked in a bank. But she has done some other interesting things.” He handed the whole folder across the desk.

  “I can look at this?” I asked.

  “That’s your copy. You’re paying for it. Take it home with you.”

  “I still don’t get one thing: why me?”

  “Again, speculation: Angela Chase has to transport $200,000 in cash from Santa Monica to someplace in Mexico. By herself. How would you do it if you were she?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Think about it a minute. There are many people who would be eager to kill someone for considerably less than $200,000. What if she’s under surveillance? It’s a 100 percent certainty that she was, surely by the government agency that arranged for her to withdraw the cash, and maybe by one or more other black-box agencies. What can she do? General Mills isn’t going to pay the ransom, the US government’s not going to pay the ransom. She’s got to raise the ransom and deliver it, or her brother’s dead. You will see in the file that she has a deep attachment to her brother.”

  I opened the folder on my lap. There were a number of photographs, including one of Angela and her brother at what appeared to be her college graduation. She wore a gown and mortarboard and they had their arms around each other’s shoulders and were laughing. The quad where they stood looked familiar to me, but it didn’t register why. Michael Chase was as beautiful as Angela was, chiseled and rugged, thick hair, good teeth: what a gene pool.

  Sheed continued, “Her first problem is to get the money. That she does. You’ll see how she came to own her parents’ house. Not a happy story. Her second problem is to get the money out of the bank. She can’t just walk in and walk out. She can, but she could be robbed and murdered if she does. There are hundreds of Bank of America branches in Southern California, some of them closer to the Mexican border. Why does she choose the one at Second and Colorado in Santa Monica?”

  I said I couldn’t guess.

  “I can, but it’s only a guess: maybe she knew somebody. Her brother had banking connections. Let’s say she has arranged to masquerade as a teller. That gives her a little more room to maneuver. At least she doesn’t have to walk in and walk out with the money. It gives her time to pick her moment. And there you were: her moment.”

  “So it wasn’t my irresistible manhood?”

  “Not by half,” said Sheed. “She’s an exceptionally attractive woman. That’s one power she can use. Let’s say this was not the first day she was in the bank. Let’s say she was there all week. She could have gotten one hundred rides home but she’s going to be observed coming out of the bank with every one. What’s different in your case? One thing: the rain. You drove her home in the middle of a deluge. You picked her up at the curb. Even if she was seen coming out, they probably lost you in the traffic. She took the one long shot she had, and it worked.
”

  “But then we went to her house.”

  “Are you sure it was her house? Remember, she sold her parents’ house. Maybe it was a safe house. Maybe it’s owned by the US government. Maybe it actually does belong to a producer. Clearly she didn’t take you to where she had been living.”

  I paused a moment to try to absorb this. It meant rearranging my memories like a jigsaw puzzle and trying to make another picture of them, say of the Matterhorn with a goat on top. (I was the goat.)

  “All right,” I said after the pause. “Let’s assume every detail of your version is accurate. How could she possibly know that I would drive her to Mexico?”

  “She didn’t,” Sheed answered, with that unquestionable authority of his. “You wouldn’t make a very good lawyer, Mr. Wilder. You have to be able to imagine point of view. She was playing it by ear. Again, look at the situation she’s in. She’s going to try to rescue her brother. That’s boilerplate. You’ll see when you read her file. She’s going to try to save his life even if it means losing her own. So, under possibly hostile surveillance, she’s got to get the money, get out of the bank, and get away safely. How can she do it? You’re the ticket. I have no idea how she planned to travel to Mexico before you presented yourself as her chauffeur. I suspect that’s why she had a false passport. Once she’s out of the bank with the money, having lost the tail, the last step—getting to Mexico—is a stroll through the park. You just made it easier, honeymoon suite and all. You were the perfect dupe.”

  The perfect dupe. Why did this term not make me particularly merry?