A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  Swagger knew the story; the shot that hit the woman, not the robber, and paralyzed her. He thought it was all over, forgotten. Whose business was it?

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It’s caused a big stew. Some congressman is threatening hearings on how the Bureau is handling this. Nick’s been upstairs all day.”

  “He’s all right, isn’t he? Jeez, he’s their best guy.”

  “He is. But we don’t know what’s happening. There hasn’t been any news. There’s a rumor he’s resigned—”

  “Resigned!”

  “For the good of the Bureau. It’s all a mess, a typical Washington thing—politics, influence, lost time, anger, recriminations—and the press is eating it up.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Bob.

  “Do you want to talk to anybody else? Ron is here.”

  “Oh—No, I’ll wait and see how it shakes out. If you see Nick, give him my best and tell him, well, that I called.”

  “I will,” she promised.

  22

  Bill Fedders hit the putt, watched it ride the undulations of the green and break right just where he thought it would. But he hadn’t quite hit it hard enough, and it quit short six inches.

  “Great putt,” said the congressman. “I wish I could read a green like that.”

  “My one true talent,” said Fedders with a glowing smile, and the smile was really his one true talent. He went to the ball, insouciantly leaned over it, and knocked it casually into the cup with one hand. Par, another par, and the congressman’s handicap kept him close so he wouldn’t go home embittered.

  Bill could par any course in Washington. He was a superb gin, bridge, and poker player. He could drink ten Navy boatswains under the table. He had an aristocrat’s thick silver hair (you had to have had a relative at the original Round Table to get hair like that, he often joked), a keen, original wit, and a gift for strategy. His suits were Italian but subdued; he had an excellent collection of Aldens, in both wing tips and, for casual wear, the tasseled loafers. He had a good racquet sense, excelling at both squash and tennis. He could ride a horse or a motorcycle or pilot a sailboat or speedboat. He was a licensed flier. He was a Yale grad, from a grand old family. Skull and Bones, University of Virginia Law, Navy JAG during Vietnam, then a partner with Occam Dobalt Hunsucker until he established his own practice. He made three million a year and had put four kids through Ivy League schools and law school. He was on wife number three and mistress number twenty-five. He lived in a really big house in Potomac. He went to all the right parties, knew all the right people. He hated his life.

  The cell rang.

  “Oh, I know who that is,” said the congressman. “His master’s voice.”

  Bill rolled his eyes and turned to wander to the edge of the green, while caddy and foursome gave him privacy, as all knew he was Tom Constable’s number one guy in Washington, and even here, on the fabled thirteenth green at Burning Tree, under soaring poplars wearing their fall russets and golds, when Tom Constable called, Tom Constable expected an answer.

  “Yes, Tom. Did you see it?”

  “I saw it,” said Tom Constable, from wherever he happened to be, in Wyoming or Atlanta or China, for Christ’s sake, Tom was always on the go; he might have even been on the twelfth or the fourteenth here at Burning Tree.

  “Was it what you expected?”

  “I liked the information. The tone was more sympathetic than I imagined.”

  “Evidently Banjax got to know Memphis and liked him quite a bit. It seems everybody likes Memphis. I like Memphis.”

  “I’m sure I’d like him too,” said Constable. “That’s not the point. The point is, he’s in the way, he has to be removed. That’s the point, the only point. Tell me what I want to hear. He’s gone as of now. Some obedient number two guy is about to release the report. I don’t see how they can keep him aboard with all this shit in the air.”

  “No changes have been announced, but it’s still early. There’ll be a period when clarity isn’t available,” said Fedders. “It’ll be murky. Nothing will seem to be happening. What’s going on is that everybody is figuring out how the game has changed and how the situation now sits, where the power is, who’s got the momentum. That’ll take a bit of time. Then on to the next move.”

  “I know, I know. If I ran a goddamn business like that, I’d be in the goddamn poorhouse by now.”

  “That’s why I’ve always told you to stay out of Washington, Tom. You don’t have the temperament, and all you’d do is give yourself an ulcer. You pay me to have your ulcer for you.”

  “Pay you goddamn well, Bill, as I recollect. So, the story ran, the Bureau is locked up behind closed doors, media pressure is building, there’s a lot of scrutiny. Has the White House said anything?”

  “No, but Jack Ridings has gotten the Leader to threaten to hold hearings. The FBI does not want to go to the Hill and discuss dirty laundry, believe me. They want all this to go away.”

  “Don’t they see? Dump Memphis, issue the report, watch the case-closed signs go up, and everything is fine. No more books on poor Joan, no more Internet shit about me. Have you seen the latest? Joan had pictures of me in a feather boa dancing with J. Edgar. We look like Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. I had her murdered to get the negatives.”

  “Tom, there are lots of people who hate you. You know that. It’s not worth acknowledging their existence. They would love nothing better than to be sued by you.”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t let this slide, Bill. Stay on Jack, stay on the Bureau, keep me informed. I want to be in the loop. I want this goddamn thing closed.”

  “Yes, Tom.”

  “By the way,” said Tom, “you shouldn’t have hit the seven on the approach.”

  23

  Give it to Chicago homicide. In the four hours between the discovery of the Strong and Reilly bodies and the arrival of the FBI on the scene, not as advisers but as lead agency on the determination that a murderer-for-hire had crossed state lines (even though it seemed not to have gone that way) and the formation of Task Force Sniper, the usual processes had already begun to proceed. Given that Strong and Reilly were well-known and that their deaths were unusual enough to merit consideration as major cases, two teams of detectives were dispatched and spent the day interviewing witnesses and acquaintances under the commonplace theory that the vics’ death was rooted in their own behavior, not their membership in some larger, national pattern.

  Thus detectives interviewed neighbors, colleagues, some journalists (Jack was a favorite of theirs, always good for a radical quote to get readers’ blood boiling), and so forth. That campaign was formally halted around 3 p.m. and the detectives then reported to the FBI, which was not interested in their findings and reassigned them to crime scene inventory and other of the bureaucratic jobs important at a major investigative site. The feds already had their man, even if only a theoretical man, and local investigations were unnecessary.

  But no cop ever throws out a notebook. So a few weeks later, casually and informally, Sgt. Denny Washington, under his own initiative, canvassed the dicks involved and recovered five of the six notebooks, with promises to return them. He turned them over to Bob, who alone had the patience, the time, the interest, and possibly the context to examine them carefully.

  Bob was alone in his hotel room, sitting at a desk under a cheap HoJo lamp. It was near midnight, and today felt like a lost day, as he’d slept late, been disappointed to learn of Nick’s troubles and the way the case was now bollixed up in some sort of political situation. He’d watched the national news, where Nick’s face was prominently displayed, and anchor haircuts, without saying a word, communicated by eyebrow and turn of face their disappointment that the Bureau had chosen such a compromised candidate to head up this important investigation, and that the investigation, which had begun so promisingly, had seemed now to come off the tracks and was evidently barking up wrong trees or chasing wild geese hither and yon. What w
as wrong with the FBI? You’d think a case this big, they’d make sure not to screw up, huh?

  Some reporter named Banjax was all over cable, documenting his disclosures, trying desperately to separate himself from the implication of his words. He of course had no opinion on the appropriateness of Nick to head the investigation, no investment, emotional or professional; his job was to report the facts and let others draw the conclusions. He just felt the public had a right to know that the FBI’s chief sleuth had been himself involved as a participant in issues similar to the ones here—tragically so, sadly so—and the question of why was a logical one to ask.

  The Bureau had no comment; Nick, of course, had no comment. Bob saw a glimpse of the girl Starling, her head down, racing past the assembled cameras outside the Hoover Building in DC; he thought she looked upset.

  Then the shows all cut to an interview with Joan Flanders’s ex-husband, the rich oddball T. T. Constable. He was all cowboyed up, because now he lived in the West, had essentially given up his eastern identity, and by now everybody was used to seeing him in a cowboy hat and open-necked red shirt with a red bandana about his neck.

  As usual, he was ornery and colorful, and the cameras ate up his rugged, tanned face and grizzle of day-old beard, as if he’d spent the day ropin’ and brandin’ instead of sellin’ short and firin’ low producers.

  “Well, damn,” he said, “I do expect more from the FBI. We all know who did this, and the sooner we reach that legal determination, the sooner we can put it behind us and celebrate Joan’s great life instead of her unfortunate death at the hands of some screwball marine who thought he was still in the war or something. It’s so straightforward, it’s a mystery to me how they could get it so knotted up.”

  Then the Wyoming congressman—the shows didn’t point out that he represented the district in which much of Tom Constable’s vast ranch, one of several, was located, nor did they mention that his party affiliation was the same as Tom’s and that Tom had donated generously to his campaign—this Jack Ridings took over, and promised hearings on FBI hiring and promotional practices, and wondered how a situation like this could come about. Essentially you had a sniper investigating a sniper, and was it not fair to wonder where his allegiance lay? Did he have some sort of psychological investment in the act of sniping? Did he think it was noble to eliminate a human being at long range; would that cloud his professional judgment, cause him to refuse to accept certain realities?

  Bob turned it off then. Enough. And shortly thereafter Washington called, at the end of the duty day, saying yeah, he knew what was going on, but he did have these notebooks for Bob, if Bob wanted them. Bob wanted them.

  So Bob sat there, trying to make this or that out of the notes. Each guy or gal had his own scheme, his own method, his own set of abbreviations, so it wasn’t easy going, and a lot of it was guesswork or inference. Eventually, he got to know the two simplest styles of penmanship, so he could read those books easily enough, even if some of the initials remained mysterious, and another guy had gone back over his notes with a red pencil, starring each entry that he thought might lead to further inquiries.

  Essentially what he found confirmed his own investigations. In the past few months or so, both Jack and Mitzi had been morose, uncommunicative, seemingly depressed. Friends wondered about the health of the marriage or the long-term depression the rejection of Jack’s book might cause. A perhaps too bitchy interviewee made the point that it had been so important to him to have a big New York publisher take it, but nobody would, and that had been a devastating blow to Jack’s dream of literary glory and a return to centrality. Plus, he now owed the publisher the money he’d been living on for five years.

  But then everyone agreed that there’d been a miraculous recovery. Suddenly the old Jack, the old Mitzi were back: they always had a swagger to them, a charisma, and a happiness, an ebullience. Most people seemed to put this as happening somewhere early in September; it was as if that ship, which seemed to have vanished, had arrived at long last.

  What could have happened? Bob wondered.

  He wished he could get back into the house, maybe look more carefully at appointment books or calendars for that time period. Once he’d penetrated the safe, that’s all he’d cared about and he’d concentrated on it at the expense of everything else.

  Fool! Idiot! Making mistakes! Sloppy, old, stupid, eyes not working, brain asleep.

  He tried to think what to do with the information. He could go over the information from the safe again, for the fiftieth time; he could go over the notebooks again, thinking perhaps he’d missed something; he could log on to the Internet and call up newspapers from the first week in September on the possibility that it was something out there, in the real world, that had left a mark that he could understand and link to them for a clearer picture; he could go through the biography a journalist had written about them and check to see if something in their past happened around the first and they were celebrating—but that one was dumbest.

  He was so tired. It was time to go to bed. His mind was blurring; he was getting nowhere.

  But he couldn’t tear himself away. Silly as it seemed, he had to run it out. He got out his laptop, logged on to Google. He thought he’d just Google randomly for a bit, Jack Strong/Mitzi Reilly/September, and see what he’d get. He got nonsense. Nothing, crazy, insane, lots of refrains of some song or pieces of doggerel poetry like “Try to remember, it was the kind of September, when we were mellllllowwww,” whatever that was. He jumped through the listings, and then something caught his eye on about the seventh screen under the listing O. Z. Harris, an obituary, from the Chicago Tribune, page D15, with the lines blackened “. . . and was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzy Reilly, a 1997 biography.”

  He called it up.

  The headline read Radical journalist O. Z. Harris, 81.

  He read,

  Oscar Zebulon Harris, a Pultizer Prize–winning journalist who challenged the system and earned renown for his integrity and intrepidity, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, died Wednesday after a long illness.

  Harris, 81, better known as “O. Z. Harris” and “Ozzie” to the many young writers who admired and loved him, covered the American left over many years and worked for, among others, The New Republic, The Nation, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and finally his own newsletter, called Ozzie’s Oz, a famous muckraking journal that took on the powers that be.

  Frequently called an agitator and, in a different age, an activist, Ozzie was as prickly to his enemies—usually the Justice Department, four Republican administrations, the Department of Defense, and the Department of the Army—as he was loving to his friends, which included a generation of progressive journalists and activists.

  His reporting on war crimes in Vietnam won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 and he was the author of four books, including Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, a 1997 biography.

  He died September 3.

  According to his own wishes, no services will be held and his body was cremated. Donations on his behalf may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union.

  The Cook County Department of Public Administration warehouse was west of the city, even beyond Oak Park, in a town near O’Hare called Franklin Park, full of tidy bungalows and Italian, Mexican, and Korean restaurants, tracing the demographic tides that had flowed outward from the big town. It was flat, out here, and so far gone the skyscrapers that contributed to America’s second-greatest skyline were unseen. Trees filled the little crosshatched streets off the main drags, but the drags themselves were the usual run of strip malls, chain restaurants, the odd old free-standing restaurant, even a racetrack with an imposing stadium abutting it.

  Washington and Swagger found the nondescript old factory building on Mannheim Road, in an area zoned for light manufacturing, each building separated from the others by cyclone fences with barbed wire discouragement up top. They
turned off the busy Mannheim, pulled through a gate, earning admittance on the power of Washington’s police ID, found parking, and went through a green door to a grimy office with a counter.

  What brought them there was Bob’s call to Dennis Washington, Washington’s to the coroner’s office to learn the hospital in which Harris had died, followed by Washington’s visit to that establishment. The hospital kept careful records, and it became clear that over the last months of his life, Ozzie Harris was regularly visited by his friends and comrades Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly and nobody else. Washington did some quick, casual interviews, found a few people who remembered and all agreed that the old radical really came to rely on Jack and Mitzi, who in turn had treated him with respect and love. He remained “Mr. Harris” to them, never “Ozzie,” as everyone else called him.

  The clerk eventually noticed Bob and the imposing Washington and ambled over with a melancholy weight to his movements. It wasn’t much fun, Bob thought, working among the aisles and aisles of unclaimed property of the dead; most of it, according to statute, would remain in escrow against claims by long-lost relatives for six months; then it was auctioned, and what remained went to the burner.

  Washington flashed ID, laid the death certificate out, and the clerk toddled away, returning with a key attached to a necklace that wore a metal disk upon which H-1498 was stamped.

  “Go on in, Detective. It’s pretty self-explanatory; you just follow the rows to H, then go down the shelves till you get to unit 1498. The key opens the padlock. I’d take a mask; it’s pretty dusty in there.”

  “Thanks,” said Washington, and he and Swagger headed through the big double doors into a kind of cathedral of American stuff, a huge, darkened brick room that was crosshatched by a wooden latticework that supported Cyclone wire dividers.

  Ozzie Harris didn’t have much, as his life had clearly not been about stuff. There was furniture, surprisingly Victorian, bags of old clothes, Oriental lamps, rolled-up woven rugs, an ironing board, a small TV that was probably black-and-white, various cheesy appliances like a microwave and a toaster, an old Mixmaster, a juicer, a crate of cereal and laundry products, surely burner-bound, an old bike, a Barcalounger, a state-of-the-art 2003 computer and printer from some clone outfit, tons of books and magazines, six filing cabinets, a ratty set of golf clubs from happier days, the inevitable framed photos of world events Ozzie had witnessed or written about, speeches he’d given, conventions he’d covered, great men he’d loved or despised.