by Mike Sager
“What are you doing?” interrupted McCarthy, aghast.
“What?”
“You can’t eat those.”
“I know it’s early, but these cinnamon ones are great.” He popped another. “You gotta try one.”
“That’s a gift from a source. You’re not allowed to keep it!”
“A can of mixed nuts?”
“No gifts from sources,” he recited. “No free meals, no free tickets, no drinks, no trips, no gratuities or special considerations of any kind. You know the rules.”
“You think a can of mixed nuts is going to compromise my journalistic integrity?”
“It’s not open to interpretation, Seede. There was a reminder last week from the ethics committee. The holiday memo? You didn’t receive it?”
“I can’t recall,” Seede said, quoting Ronald Reagan’s testimony before the Tower Commission regarding his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. Since the former president’s addled performance two years earlier, it had become one of the newsroom’s favorite retorts. Seede sat down in his swivel chair, hooked his boot around the Herald-issue wastebasket under the desk, and pulled it out. He took a last spiced pecan and popped it into his mouth. Then he upended the tin into the wastebasket.
“What are you doing now?”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t do that.”
“You said I couldn’t keep it.”
“You’re supposed to give it to charity.”
Seede peered mournfully into the wastebasket. He looked up at McCarthy. He shrugged.
“Jesus Christ, Seede. Why can’t you just grow the fuck up? You have a good deal here, better than you know. Why do you always have to gimme all this … attitude.”
“What attitude?”
“The one that tells me you don’t care about keeping your job.”
Seede’s brow beetled. “You’re saying you’re gonna fire me?”
McCarthy crossed his arms, reset his feet. “I’m saying something like that is not beyond the realm of possibility if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.”
Seede shook his head sorrowfully. “Maybe I should just quit.”
McCarthy gave him a look like he’d just lost his mind. The Herald was at the pinnacle of the newspaper profession. Where was there to go from here? To the same kind of bullshit at the New York Examiner? Many became disillusioned with the Herald, but few ever left. “Don’t you have a family to support, hotshot? A daughter? How far do you think that Hollywood money is going to take you? You’ll probably pay 35 percent in taxes off the top. Do you have any idea how much auto insurance for a sixteen-year-old costs? You know what a semester of college goes for these days? I hope you’re considering opening a tax-deferred college fund with some of that money. It’s a struggle out there, Seede. In a few years you’ll wake up and realize it. You’ll be facing down an avalanche of responsibility. You have to plan for the future. It’ll be here before you know it, pal.”
Seede said nothing. What could he say? That he’d been thinking a lot lately about just this sort of thing? That he had seen the Ghost of Christmas Future and it looked a lot like William “Buddy” McCarthy?
The ovoid editor glared at Seede, a low wattage beam of long-simmering resentment. He knew what it was like to be young and full of promise. “So what’s it gonna be? Are you quitting or are you working?”
Seede let the tin fall into the wastebasket; the sound echoed loudly across the huge empty room. “I’m all yours, boss.”
“Okay,” McCarthy said, trying to sound definitive, not quite sure if he was being had. Forty-eight years old and here he was, the first person in the newsroom every morning, dealing with these young assholes.
“Okay,” repeated Seede, not so definitive, either. Twenty-nine years old and here he was, doing the bidding of others, taking orders from this has-been. How had it come to this? Who would have imagined that working here would be so claustrophobic, so constraining, so dull and demoralizing. He had talent. He had ambition. He had ideas. He wanted to do what he wanted to do. It was becoming increasingly clear that working for the Herald was not it.
“So … this bust on Fourteenth Street,” McCarthy said, looking through his bifocals at a printout. “The overnight memo, if you would ever read it, mentions an arrest at a storefront operation run by that marijuana clown … What does he call himself?”
“The Pope of Pot?”
“Right. Apparently the good pontiff was busted last night with a major quantity of cocaine.”
“Cocaine? Are you sure?”
“How did we miss this one, Seede? I thought, after last time, you were going to keep a close eye on this.”
“Like I explained last time: the cops didn’t notify any print people about that bust. That was strictly made for TV. The DA hates the Pope. He’s been going after him full throttle.”
“Well it sounds like they’ve got him now.”
“Except for one thing: the Pope is totally against hard drugs. He’s been arrested for picking up used syringes in the park and handing them over to the cops. The Pope dealing coke? That makes no sense at all.”
Despite everything, Seede found himself rising to the occasion, performing as he’d been trained, briefing his editor concisely about the situation at hand. Since college, and before his marriage to Dulcy, the Herald had comprised the sum total of his adult life experience. For the first four years, he’d scarcely taken even a day off. He’d worked, shared meals, partied, played sports, had sex with, and generally spent most of his time with other reporters. When he introduced himself—Jonathan Seede from the Washington Herald—he liked to joke that from the Washington Herald was his family name.
“He was some kind of midlevel bureaucrat at the Department of Agriculture … Treasury … one of those, I forget which,” Seede continued. “After twenty-some years of service, one day he just up and quit. Eventually he landed in Amsterdam—that’s where he got into the marijuana business. But it’s not just pot with him. He’s got this whole utopian vision thing going. And nonprofit status as a church. He actually feeds a lot of people. Underneath it all he’s a do-gooder. A little loony, but harmless. But I’ll tell you this: his pot isn’t harmless. Strictly the highest quality, people say, designer product with names like Purple Haze and Tripto-ganja. He sells to all the celebs who come through town. He claims to have cops and judges and senators as regular customers. You just call his toll-free number and a bicycle messenger comes out and—”
McCarthy’s eyes saucered. “Cops and judges, you say? Senators? Buying marijuana?”
He sat his ample posterior on the edge of Seede’s desk, leaned in conspiratorially. “When can I have that story?”
24
There was a knock on the door of Metcalfe’s study. Thornton Desmond gripped the armrests of his chair as if they were parallel bars, planted his feet at shoulder width. With the advance of age, with his thickening catalog of chronic aches, pains, stiffnesses, and bodily failures, the simple act of rising from a chair had become a complex gymnastic feat—the approach, the execution, the landing. Grunting, he rocked forward and pushed himself up.
He opened the door to find one of Metcalfe’s corps of messengers, a tall young woman wearing a one-piece lycra uniform and a pillbox hat. Behind her, with his black pompadour and trench coat, was Detective Massimo Bandini, the cop from Internal Affairs.
Metcalfe looked up from his place at the library table, where he’d been reading from one of his grandfather’s journals. “Do you have it?” he asked excitedly.
The messenger frowned. “He says it got away.”
“Got away?” Metcalfe looked crestfallen, like a seven-year-old who’d been expecting a pony for his birthday.
“I’d characterize it more as: temporarily eluded us,” Bandini corrected.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Prior to zero hour, sir, intelligence had the object in plain view—on top of a cabinet in the storefront on Fou
rteenth Street. But when we executed the raid, it was no longer in situ. Someone may have been tipped off. We’re checking now for any breeches of security that may have occurred within our operation—though that is unlikely. The only people who were aware of the plan in advance were my partner and myself. Even as we speak, every effort is being made to recover the object. It’s a small town. It shouldn’t take long.”
“This kind of incompetence really annoys me, detective. When I hired you, I thought I was getting the best.”
Bandini took umbrage. He was already out on a limb for this guy—he did not ordinarily bend the rules. On the contrary, he worked for Internal Affairs; he was about enforcing the rules, keeping things on the up and up. But Metcalfe was a most unusual man, a very rich man. He played golf with Margaret Thatcher, squash with Steven Spielberg. He exchanged favorite video games with the crown prince of Japan and favorite racing camels with members of Saudi royalty. Often he’d show up unannounced in an inner-city neighborhood and give out hundred-dollar bills. Scores of African villages owed their water wells to his philanthropic whim. He had the power of money, the power of association, the power of good intentions. Despite his small stature, he was truly larger than life. He had a way of getting people to do the things he wanted.
But that didn’t mean Bandini had been bought. Over the course of his involvement with this case, the detective had developed a few questions of his own. “What I’m wondering,” Bandini said pointedly, “is why you waited so many years to look into your own background. Weren’t you curious about your grandfather before now?”
“The best defense is a good offense, is that it, detective?”
“By the time you called me in—”
“I believe it is my privilege to conduct such matters as I please,” Metcalfe interrupted. “This isn’t a criminal case. This is you moonlighting for me in your off-time, conducting a private investigation.”
“I understand that. And we’ve come a long way, considering how cold the trail was to begin with. Finding those papers and journals, I told my men, that took some damn fine investigative work.”
“And you are to be complimented for your brilliance, detective. I know you’ve already been well paid. And you will be paid even more when you complete the job you started.”
“The fact is, sir, at this point, certain lines have been crossed, and you need to know that.”
“I understand. I appreciate your efforts. I know you will do the right thing as regards the law. But the question remains: how long until I have the Master Skull in my possession?”
“No more than forty-eight hours, sir.”
“I have your word?”
“I guarantee it.”
“In that case …” Metcalfe said dismissively, turning his attention back to the journal.
Bandini made to leave, then stopped himself. “One more thing, Mr. Metcalfe.”
Without looking up: “Yes, detective?”
“Sometimes, in the course of an investigation, we get what we like to call ‘by-product.’”
“By-product?”
“Investigational by-product. It’s like turning over a rock. You’re looking for one thing, but sometimes you find things you weren’t trying to find, things you weren’t expecting.”
His full attention now: “Yes?”
“How to say this …”
“Just say it, detective.”
“We believe you have a child, Mr. Metcalfe.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No, sir. It is quite possible.” He flipped a few pages in his notebook. “A daughter. Born October 7, 1967, in Cape Canaveral, Florida. I believe you were there for a space launch in late January of that year.”
Metcalfe looked stunned. “Not a launch. I was checking out Apollo 1. They were still testing. There was a fire. All three astronauts died.”
“You were there at the invitation of the mission commander, Virgil Grissom.”
“One hell of a man,” Metcalfe said, a look of sadness curtaining his face. And then: “Good Lord. How does this happen? I have a child and no one tells me? What kind of woman … How sure is this, detective?”
“If you’d care to submit to a blood test, I could have our lab work up the DNA. My partner will be contacting the young woman very soon”—Bandini paused to gauge the reaction—“unless you’d prefer he didn’t. I could reach out to him and wave him off. There’s still time.”
“No, no,” Metcalfe said. “Let’s do it. I’ll messenger a blood sample to you by this afternoon.”
“Hopefully we’ll have more conclusive results for you by tomorrow, sir.”
“Find that skull. You gave me your word … forty-eight hours.”
25
Salem crossed the lobby of the Capitol City Motor Lodge, doing her best to ignore the rheumy leers of the resident pensioners and old farts who passed their days playing Tonk around the card table in the corner. Pausing at the glass door of the diner, she signaled the creepy Indian guy behind the front desk. He smiled crookedly, issued a fey little wave. The lock buzzed. She pushed her way inside.
The diner was a lovely relic, red Naugahyde and tarnished chrome, with tableside jukeboxes, three songs for a quarter. The rumble of the morning traffic outside on New York Avenue was palpable underfoot; the smells of bacon grease and cumin commingled in the air with exhaust fumes. Brenda was sitting in a booth at the rear, nursing a mug of coffee.
“Sorry I’m late,” Salem said, sliding in opposite.
“Not late. I ain’t even ordered yet.” Brenda had olive skin and sparkling black eyes that commanded attention. “So how’d you get past management?” she asked.
Salem smirked. “I gave him a little sumpn-sumpn to help him sleep, just like you suggested.”
“A little warm milk?”
“A man with a hard dick is a tool,” Salem quoted.
“Who-eva tole you that?” Brenda giggled.
Salem gave her friend a high five. “I think it was you, sista.”
When Salem had first shown up in town, the new girl on the Strip, Brenda and her two partners had been the first to befriend her. On the street, the trio of independents were known as Charlie’s Angels. Nichelle was a blonde, a few degrees south of wholesome. Soledad was deep ebony with braided hair extensions. They’d hooked up with Brenda, who was Salvadorian and Vietnamese, in Las Vegas a few years ago. Sharing expenses, watching each other’s backs, the trio had worked in Chicago and Atlantic City before coming to DC. Because they had no pimp, Jamal called them renegade hos. He thought they were a bad influence on Salem.
As green as she was, Salem knew differently. There were constant variables on the street—foul weather, guard dogs, angry residents, undercover cops, sicko tricks, crackheads, peeping toms, thieves. From his seat in the Lincoln, Jamal could do only so much to protect her. Witness the bust of Debbie. You needed a partner on the track, a buddy, an extra pair of eyes. Someone to lend you a condom or a pair of panty hose. Someone who’d last seen you getting into a car with a stranger, who could pick him out of a lineup. Someone to invite along on a three way or a bachelor party—those were the highest paying gigs besides all-nighters, but they could get unruly, being so outnumbered in a room. It was hard to explain, but to Salem, working the street, giving a blow job in a car, just you and a nervous john, well … It felt a lot safer to her than stripping. A room full of men, together, drunk, watching a naked girl dance. What was supposed to happen next? The whole equation made no sense to her.
Having undertaken her new career with little research or consideration, Salem had quickly discovered there was much she didn’t know. There is, after all, an art to every pursuit, no matter how high or low. Lucky for her, Brenda was a nurturing type, willing to share trade secrets: which corners attracted what kinds of tricks; which cars the undercovers always drove; which parking lots and alleyways were safe for transactions; which downtown hotels would call the cops; which bouncers in which clubs would allow you to use their bathrooms
—there was one guy, at the Silver Dollar, who would even let you take a trick into the storeroom for a small fee.
Over the last several weeks, as they’d click-clacked together along the sidewalks in their four-inch heels, Brenda had kept up a running Socratic commentary, a sort of crash course in the modern practice of the world’s oldest profession: Use the opportunity of removing a trick’s pants to check for cleanliness, sores, or off-odors. Use a red-wrapped Trojan, nonlubricated and extra durable. Conceal the condom in your palm, roll it on with lips and teeth; the less obvious you are with the condom the better—it cuts down on arguments. No condom, no sex, no exceptions. Steer tricks toward the half-and-half, a blow job followed by intercourse—it takes only a little longer, but you can charge four times as much. Also it gets them to your motel room—you can charge a usage fee. Riffling their pockets when they go to the bathroom is another option. What are they gonna do? Call the police?
Always take the top during intercourse. Put a hand on the trick’s shoulder, your knees outside his hips, your feet inside his knees, allowing for maximum control and serving to keep the trick from kissing you. Always refuse to do it doggy style—the trick has too much control, too much access to your neck. Carry a single-edged razor inside a pack of matches in your purse. Never shower with a trick after sex: a man always lasts longer the second time around; after he’s done, he won’t want to pay for it. Always get the money up front. And no refunds—ever.
Now, at the table, Salem took notice of something new about her friend. “Oh … my … God!” she gushed. She took Brenda’s left hand. “Look at that rock!”
Salem turned the ring this way and that, a three-quarter-carat solitaire with a thin fourteen-carat gold band. It sparkled in the harsh lighting of the diner, a literal diamond in the rough. “I can’t believe you have an engagement ring on your finger!” Salem squealed. She half stood and reached across the table to hug her friend.
“Can you believe it?” Brenda asked.
“Here come the bride!”
