by Steven Gore
It hadn’t been difficult for Gage and Babu to obtain entry. The low-caste ten-year-old servant girl had cowered at the sight of them fifteen minutes earlier, then backed away from the front door, eyes down.
The stucco house stood three stories tall on the edge of the town of ten thousand people bordering rice paddies and mango gardens; the rice tended by girls and women with their saris pulled up to their knees as they waded the shallow fields, the trees swarmed by young men in dhotis and sandals.
And Babu had known right where to find the house.
Hawkins was still rubbing his eyes as he walked from the kitchen and through the dining room carrying a bottle of Kingfisher beer. He first spotted Gage’s briefcase on the marble living room floor, then took two more steps before he froze as his eyes first widened and then narrowed on Gage sitting on a bamboo-frame cushioned couch to his right.
Gage recognized the remnants of the oil field scrapper displayed in the fifteen-year-old photo his wife had provided. Sixty-three years of weathered skin hung on his thin body. Wire-rimmed, aviator-style glasses and a receding hairline framed his face. Skinny arms extended from the sweaty T-shirt encasing his pot belly.
Gage rose as Hawkins stepped into the room. Babu remained seated.
“What the hell are you doing in my . . .” Hawkins didn’t finish the sentence. They all knew the answer.
Gage handed him a business card.
“TIMCO,” Gage said.
Hawkins frowned as he examined it, then shook his head as he looked up.
“I’ve got nothing to say.”
Having made his stand, Hawkins gestured for Gage to sit back down and settled himself into a lounge chair along the wall dividing the living room from the dining area.
Hawkins whistled, and a thirteen-year-old girl strode in from the kitchen, past the dining table, and into the living room as though she was the queen of the house rather than a servant. She was wearing a full sari of an adult woman, not the half sari of a teenage girl. She stopped in the doorway next to Hawkins’s chair.
“Beer? Coke?” Hawkins asked.
Gage and Babu both nodded at Coke, then the girl went back the way she’d come.
“You guys got something else to talk about besides TIMCO, I got lots of time.” He grinned. “That, I got a whole lot of. Information? Zip.”
“Just to make sure we’re on the same page,” Gage said. “I think you know what really caused the explosion at TIMCO.”
Hawkins rolled his eyes. “You didn’t have to travel all this way through this godforsaken country when you could’ve read that in my deposition.”
Gage sat forward, then aimed a forefinger at Hawkins’s face. “You lied during your deposition.”
Hawkins’s face flared. “So Porzolkiewski’s lawyers said, but they couldn’t prove shit.”
Gage glanced over at Babu, then fixed his eyes on Hawkins. “I don’t have time to screw around.”
He opened his briefcase and took out an eight-by-ten photograph taken by Babu four days earlier. It was a view into Hawkins’s bedroom on a night too hot to close the drapes.
Gage rose, took two steps, loomed over Hawkins, and then dropped it in his lap.
Just then, the girl walked up behind Hawkins carrying a hammered aluminum tray bearing two Cokes. She looked down at the photo, wild-eyed, mouth gaping open. The tray fell from her hands. The bottles exploded on the marble floor.
The photo showed her on top of Hawkins. Legs spread over his face, his penis in her mouth. She darted toward the front door. Babu leaped up, grabbed her by the arms, and swung her down on the couch in one motion.
Hawkins stared at the image, not bothering to wipe the soda spray off his face and arms. He finally looked up at Gage, forcing a smile.
“When in Rome . . .”
Gage reached down and yanked Hawkins up by his T-shirt, stretching it to its limits. Hawkins hung backward, suspended, gasping, flailing. Gage dropped him in his chair, then backed away, and locked his hands on his hips.
“You know how much time you could get for child molesting?” Gage said.
Hawkins looked past Gage toward the front door. “The police here won’t do anything.” Hawkins returned his eyes to Gage. His voice strengthened. “They don’t care. I pay them not to care. Hell, girls around here get married at nine.”
Gage shook his head. “Not here. In the States.”
Hawkins straightened himself in the chair.
“There’s no way India’s gonna extradite me to the U.S. for coming over here to screw these girls. Brings in too much money. Bombay is the new Bangkok. Just check the Internet. The worst they’ll do is tell me to lay off.” Hawkins shrugged. “So maybe I got to pay off some prosecutor. So what?”
“Not child molesting here, you idiot. In Richmond. Your kids.”
Hawkins’s jaws clenched.
Gage walked over to his briefcase and pulled out a criminal complaint charging Wilbert Hawkins with molesting John Doe and Jane Doe, forged by Alex Z a couple of hours after Gage had left Jeannette’s house.
Hawkins’s eighteen-year-old son awaiting trial for fondling little girls. His teenage daughter screwing thirty-year-old men. It wasn’t hard to figure out how it all started.
Gage tossed the complaint at Hawkins. He grabbed at it too late.
Hawkins picked the Coke-soaked pages from the floor. Shaking hands jerked them around in front of his face, making it hard to focus his eyes.
He got the point anyway.
“Relax,” Gage said. “Nobody knows where you are . . . except me.” Gage pointed at Babu. “And him.”
Gage reached into his pocket and pulled out a tape recorder.
“You’re going to tell me what happened at TIMCO, who ordered it, and who sent you out of the country.” Gage paused, then scanned the furniture, the marble floor, and the half-dozen girl servants now gathered at the kitchen door. “And how you’re paying for all this.”
As they were driving away from Gannapalli two hours later, Babu let out a sigh.
“I only was kidnapping a wife, but you . . .” He glanced over at Gage, then shook his head. “You crushed that man.”
Chapter 26
Of course there’s a litmus test. Only fools think there isn’t.”
Senator Landon Meyer pulled the phone away from his ear, then glared at it as if it were the idiot, not the Republican National Committee member on the other end of the line. He spoke into it again: “There are a half-dozen litmus tests this time around: abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, terrorism, assisted suicide, prayer in schools—you think I chose Starsky and Hutch for their good looks?”
Landon slammed down the phone.
Screw these people. I was elected senator in a Democratic state because of a litmus test.
It was called the death penalty, and he never let thoughts of that election drift too far from his consciousness for fear he’d begin to take the gifts of chance for granted.
As soon as Senator Doris Wagner called for a moratorium on executions, the election was over. Maybe not that day, but no later than the following one when a maniac murdered six students and two teachers at a Compton elementary school. The Democratic base began to collapse when African-American political leaders prayed for the revenge they called justice on the schoolhouse steps—that and a last-minute revelation that fifty thousand dollars wired into Wagner’s campaign bank account early in the year had originated with Arab charities under FBI investigation for supporting jihadists.
Landon picked up the telephone again. His brother answered on the first ring.
The next morning Senator Landon Meyer, federal judge Brandon Meyer, and Senator Blanche Zweck, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sat on facing couches in Landon’s office. Half-empty china cups of now cold coffee lay on the low table along with an oversized spreadsheet. Only forty-six senators were committed to vote for Starsky and Hutch, five short of confirmation. Forty-four against. Ten undecided, and seven of those
up for reelection.
“I don’t see it,” Zweck said. “It’s political suicide for at least four of the seven on abortion and the Patriot Act alone. Women and liberals in those states will gang up, and hard-line don’t-trust-the-government conservatives will stay away from the polls. The cost of getting our own voters to show up would be astronomical.”
“That’s why Brandon is here,” Landon said.
“We’re talking maybe an extra twenty million dollars.” Zweck shook her head. “There’s no way we’ll get it, not with a presidential election coming up. Too many of us are chasing the same money. Contributors are already feeling like punching bags.”
“As I said, that’s why Brandon is here.”
Brandon leaned in toward the table. His crowlike eyes peered up at Zweck.
“If you can come up with five million,” Brandon said, “I’ll find the rest.”
Zweck shook her head again. “The president needs this vote in a matter of weeks. He wants to push it through like a tsunami before the opposition gets organized. The swing senators aren’t going to carry IOUs out on a limb that skinny. They’ll want money in the bank. No way you’re going to raise fifteen million dollars that fast.”
Landon dropped into the high-backed black leather chair behind his desk after Zweck left the office, then looked over Brandon.
“Will you need to dip into our own money?”
“I don’t think so.” Brandon stood and stretched. He hadn’t slept on the red-eye from San Francisco. “But so what if we do? You get Starsky and Hutch onto the Supreme Court and Duncan will bless you as the next presidential nominee. That’ll save us fifty million in primary costs alone. Maybe more.” Brandon smiled. “Call it an investment of real political capital.”
“How long is it going to take to come up with what you promised Zweck?”
“A week, maybe. A little money committed to us slipped away a couple of months ago.”
“How?”
“It’s not important. We’ll get it back in time.”
“Fifteen million isn’t small change.”
Brandon gazed down through the office window toward the Supreme Court.
“Don’t worry. We’ll get it. We have no choice.”
It was only after Brandon was halfway back to California that Landon remembered he’d wanted to ask him if he ever got his wallet back.
Chapter 27
This time John Porzolkiewski opened his front door wide. He surveyed Gage, then shook his head and smiled.
“You look like hell.”
“A little jet lag is all.”
Porzolkiewski’s smile faded.
“You got something new,” Porzolkiewski said, “or are we just going to be like hamsters chasing each other around in one of those wire wheels.”
“Something new.”
Porzolkiewski shrugged, then stepped back. “Suit yourself.”
Gage walked inside and found a living room reminding him of his grandmother’s in Nogales in the 1970s, except for the cats rubbing their sides against his legs. Not a sofa, but a huge flowered davenport covered in plastic. Not wing chairs, but two brown leather recliners facing an old-style television in a console. He had the feeling that Porzolkiewski had preserved the room just the way it was on the day his wife died.
Porzolkiewski directed Gage toward a lace-covered dining table. He walked to the head and pushed aside his half-eaten chicken and rice dinner, then motioned Gage to sit to his left and sat down.
Gage reached into his suit pocket and set his digital recorder on the table between them.
Porzolkiewski held his palms up to Gage. “Even if I had something to say, which I don’t, I wouldn’t say it on tape.” He folded his arms across his chest.
“It’s not for recording,” Gage said, “it’s for playing.”
Porzolkiewski’s face brightened. It struck Gage that he was probably once a charming man.
“But,” Gage continued, “I want to cut a deal. Part of what you have for part of what I have.”
Porzolkiewski’s eyes narrowed. “Why only parts?”
“Because if you knew it all, you might get a gun and kill someone.”
“So I guess one part isn’t you trying to get me to say I shot Charlie Palmer.”
“For the moment, let’s classify his death as a kind of suicide.”
“Now I’m confused. I thought Palmer was the point of you coming by the first time.”
Gage shook his head. “Not entirely.”
“Then what is it you want?”
“Judge Meyer’s wallet.”
“I told you I don’t have it.” Porzolkiewski paused, and then pointed a forefinger at Gage. “I’ll give you something for free. And it’s really true. Two guys came by after Palmer did. They gave me ten grand and I gave it to them.”
A piece fell out of the puzzle Gage had put together in his mind. Meyer already had his wallet back when he called Gage in. Gage shoved the piece back in a different direction. Maybe Meyer just didn’t want to explain how he got it.
“How about copies?” Gage asked.
Porzolkiewski smiled. “Let’s see your part first.”
“If it accounts for what happened at TIMCO, will you give them to me?”
“If I believe it.”
Gage didn’t like making decisions when he was jet-lagged, but he had years of reading faces and he knew that underneath Porzolkiewski’s anger was a very sad man.
He pointed at the recorder. “Wilbert Hawkins.”
Porzolkiewski’s eyes hardened as he repeated the name. “My lawyer hired a private investigator to look for him after the judge dismissed the case. He wanted to file a motion for reconsideration. But the guy disappeared . . . gone. Where’d you find him?”
“Can’t say. That’s one of the parts you don’t get.”
Porzolkiewski opened his mouth to object, and then closed it. He stared at length at the recorder. Finally, he said, “Okay.”
“Portions are beeped out, like where he is. And this is not all of it, just what you need to know at this point.”
Porzolkiewski nodded.
Gage turned it on:
“My name is Graham Gage. I’m a private investigator from San Francisco, California.” I’m in BEEEEEEP talking to Wilbert Hawkins. I need you to identify yourself for the tape.”
“My name is, uh, Wilbert Hawkins. I was a welder at TIMCO fourteen years ago.”
“That’s the asshole,” Porzolkiewski said. “I still recognize his fake Okie accent.”
“How long had you been working at TIMCO before the explosion?”
“Nineteen years.”
“My understanding is that there was a turnaround a month before the valve failed on the kerosene line on Fractionating Tower 2.”
“Yeah, there was.”
“Explain what a turnaround is.”
“It’s, uh, when we shut down the tower for maintenance. You know, take apart the critical components and then make whatever repairs are needed. Takes a couple of weeks.”
“Tell me what happened when you examined the pressure device on the valve.”
. . .
“Answer the question.”
“I need a lawyer. Even a lawyer from BEEEEP.”
“You’re not getting a lawyer.”
Porzolkiewski smiled.
“Answer the question.”
“I . . . I took the valve apart and, uh, found the pressure release was corroded.”
“You tell anybody?”
“My . . . uh . . . supervisor. Then me and him went to the, uh, plant manager. The tower was old. Nobody made that valve anymore. It was gonna cost maybe fifty grand to make another one from scratch—and we’d have to replace dozens of them, all over the refinery. We knew from experience that this one going bad meant that all of them had gone bad. He needed the plant manager to make the decision ’cause it meant shutting down all the fractionators for a couple of months.”
“And . . .”
“
And TIMCO would’ve lost millions of dollars. We had kerosene, diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline coming off those towers. Huge amounts. Big contracts from buyers already signed.”
“What did the plant manager tell you to do?”
“He talked to the big bosses in Dallas, then called me in . . . He . . . he . . . uh . . . told me to pull out the release device and . . . uh . . . weld over the hole and try to keep the pressure in the pipe down once the tower was back in service.”
“What happened?”
“We didn’t keep it low enough. And with no pressure release . . . the . . . . uh . . . the . . . uh . . .”
“The what?”
“The whole valve blew.”
Gage switched off the recorder and watched Porzolkiewski finish the story in his mind. Kerosene spraying down onto the scrubber, flames exploding back up the tower. His son and three other men incinerated because a hundred-billion-dollar company didn’t want to lose a few bucks.
Porzolkiewski closed his eyes, then lowered his head. Jaws clenched. Face flushed. Fighting back tears. Hands gripped together on the table. His whole body shuddered, then he buried his face in his palms. Muffled crying, almost hysterical.
Years of outrage had dissolved into immeasurable grief.
Gage reached over and gripped Porzolkiewski’s shoulder. “I’m sorry you turned out to be right,” Gage said. “I wish it had been just an accident.”
A few minutes later, Porzolkiewski looked up, then wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “I never . . .” He cleared his throat, then took in a breath and exhaled. “I never cried for him like that before . . . I guess I was always too angry.”
Porzolkiewski pushed himself to his feet and walked into the kitchen. Gage heard him open the refrigerator, then the inside freezer door, expecting him to return with ice water. He came back carrying a Ziploc bag and handed it to Gage.
“This is what you want.”
Gage removed a dozen eight-and-a-half-by-eleven folded pages. Gage laid them out. They warmed in the dining room air.
Displayed before them were photocopies of Brandon Meyer’s life, in paper and plastic.
