Ransom X
Page 19
Chapter 12 Brief
Legacy watched Wagner put down the brief and look across the table. Legacy kept himself detached from the emotions building behind Wagner’s eyes. He had a knack for acting like he truly didn’t care what anyone thought of him. It was Oscar worthy if it was an act. He could see that Wagner clearly was not impressed with what she’d read.
“What dartboard did you throw at to put together this - ?” She waited for a sign that Legacy was even listening.
“Report?” “Crap.” Legacy sighed with disappointment. They’d given him a knife with a sharp edge on one side and a dull one on the other. He needed her to see the other side of the criminal and she simply didn’t see it. It was a waste of time to explain, but the young agent demanded it.
“Let’s start with vague.” She rustled to the front page of the document. Wagner read Legacy’s break down of the Vinyl Men.
They were rebels, but now they’re on a tight schedule. The clock plays a very important role in their apparatus. There are no glitches, nothing is ever late. The organization is precise, no exceptions.
“So we look for people who shouldn’t have a schedule, who adhere to a very tight schedule now.” Wagner’s tone told him she saw nothing of value in the point. “Why not say they’re a highly efficient drill team who have relaxed into the porn industry.”
“This group is on a tight leash, and nothing about their behavior in front of the camera strikes me as professional training. They are being forced into a very tight mold.” Legacy looked at Wagner’s eyes, they were not receiving. The savant string quartet that Legacy played behind their conversation left a metallic, tortured feeling in the air.
“So we want to find a guy that looks at his watch all the time? I must admit, I had been expecting brilliant.”
“We want to find a group of guys that look at their watches all the time.” Legacy turned up a screeching violin solo performed by a person who seemed to think that the bow and a band sander carried the same subtle musical nuances.
“Now we go from general to ridiculously specific in the span of two paragraphs.”
“I like those two paragraphs.”
“Blue is impotent?”
“Most likely.”
“Do you have a personal relationship with him that I don’t know about?”
“And he’s had treatment for it. He’s far too angry at others for this to be a private matter.” His mind jumped forward as he heard his own words, what was he like privately? There was so much public about his persona, what was it like when he was not presenting himself to others? Legacy thought it was much different from what he was showing the world.
“Legacy?” Legacy snapped out of his trance, Wagner wore annoyed crease on her forehead. A photographer would have loved to capture her face in that moment, he thought. But before he could go off on another tangent Wagner poured out a frustrated bluster of mumble and murmur “that’s five minutes of my life you’ve been wasting staring at the table. I keep thinking that you’ll speak soon. That it’s just a skip in the record, then you sit there longer. I really should bring some kind of senseless time consuming hobby for times like these.”
“Like scrap booking?”
“It works for millions.”
“Blue’s behavior parallels the point brought up by the – adult actress we interviewed. He’s the one controlling the camera, and he puts it down when he enters the action. Blue has too many control issues for me to believe that this is his first solution for his lifetime of embarrassment in front of women. He has tried everything violent to make himself feel like more of a man. He must have tried other things.”
“And he found this? None of this is in your report, none of the justifications or explanations. Why don’t you put any of your reasons in the report?”
He shifted in his seat looking at the pictures on the wall. The collage of images formed a clear picture somehow, like a Mazaika photo mosaic in which a larger image is comprised of thousands of complete smaller images. It seemed like the more he explained the details of his view, the less people understood the larger image he had in his mind. The picture Legacy could see had some solid certainties, that were like the lines of greatest contrast in a developing photo. They might be incomplete, they might be misleading, but the full picture would come in time.
Legacy’s mind in this analogy worked like an old fashion flashbulb, a tangled course of razor thin distinctions and he couldn’t believe anyone could sort them out other than himself. Thus putting details of his thought process in the report merely prolonged misunderstanding. Legacy knew the people reading this initial document would not trust his conclusions anyway.
“I shouldn’t have to, I am not here to convince you, agent.” That could have come out better, Legacy admitted to himself. The veteran of over a thousand arguments with Chess, he should have recognized the warning signs. It was not the right thing to say, however, especially because he knew how authority affected Wagner, and the mood of the room changed sharply.
Wagner steadied herself then asked, “Can you explain the location section?”
“I can.” The violins were screeching over Wagner’s shoulder.
‘Thank God.”
“How about if we save those thanks for Laura’s homecoming.” Legacy spoke in the tone of a psychologist for the rest of their conversation. He connected the impossibly obscured dots of his Rorschach test report for Wagner. Her mood brightened considerably as Legacy explained that the contents of the paper were bold assertions without basis, rather they were well thought out assertions that obeyed the questionable physics of Legacy’s insight. By the time Legacy dismissed her, she wore a look of relief on her face. She said she was going home, but Legacy knew she would pass his report up the chain of command the second she cleared the doorframe.