by Mike Bond
“When I think of all my friends who died in Afghanistan and Iraq – to protect this?”
She chewed down her toast and refilled our cups, slid a hand up my thigh. “Welcome to the new America.”
IT WAS TIME to call Professor Donnelly at Bates, the former teacher of the reporter in Hawaii, Sylvia Gordan, who’d been murdered by the Wind Mafia. I gave him a rundown of what I’d learned, briefly mentioning my own multiple legal jeopardies.
“I warned you, young man, what you were getting into.”
“Do you know anything about this billionaire financier Irvin Goffman and his Maine newspaper monopoly?”
“Pono,” he said gravely, “why do you want to mess with that?”
“It may relate to what I’m doing.”
“The only relevance it will have is to get you in more misery. Don’t you want to go back to Hawaii?”
Suddenly I didn’t feel comfortable on the phone. “I know you’re busy – but can I come see you?”
He sighed, and I sensed he was evaluating something I didn’t understand. “Where are you now?”
“Hallowell.”
“Come right on down. It will give me a chance to talk you out of this.”
Tarred and Feathered
“YOU SHOULD DROP this investigation of Irvin Goffman,” Professor Donnelly leaned back in his squeaky leather chair, appraising me across steepled fingers.
I set my coffee cup on the table between us and sat back too. “Why’s that?”
“As you said, you’re already a suspect in two crimes you haven’t committed – this seems to be a habit of yours, getting blamed for other peoples’ sins…”
“When I was trying to find Sylvia’s killers I got to know an extraordinary guy, the head of one of the Hawaiian crime syndicates, and he gave me some great advice –”
“That was, pray tell?”
“Do no harm. Don’t even hurt your enemies, he said, and soon you won’t have any enemies…” Saying this I remembered I’d been willing to hurt Titus McKee when I thought he was the one who’d shot at me.
“But you do seem to have lots of enemies –” He sipped his coffee reflectively. “And that’s why you need to leave Irvin Goffman and his hideous wife alone.”
“The trouble is they seem connected to the situation I’m in. So if I don’t get to the bottom of it I’ll never get out.”
“You’ve seen House of Cards?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s the story of a Congressman who becomes Speaker of the House, then Vice President, then President. At each step he has anyone in his way eliminated, usually by political connivance, bribes or murder. He throws a young woman journalist under a train, gases a loyal ally to death and makes it look like suicide. It gives you a ringside seat into how corrupt our political situation actually is.”
He sat back, fingers clasped across his belly. “Irvin Goffman is already the subject of investigations into his funding of the owner of one of Maine’s most destructive wind companies… He uses his newspapers to lobby for industrial wind while his Congresswoman wife pushes it on the political side.”
My head swam. This was far above it. “I’ve heard that journalists on his papers can get fired if they write an anti-wind story.”
“No doubt. It’s a total media blackout on anything negative about wind projects.”
“But how is that different from what Governor Lemon did, helped pass the Expedited Wind Act then made millions in the ..?”
“It’s all timing. Governor Lemon got into the wind business after he’d helped write the laws. That’s legal in our venal political regulations. Like all these Senators and Congressmen who go into lobbying after they quit Congress – that’s how they make their multiple millions.”
He watched me. “Back to what I said earlier, young man, do you know the meaning of ‘sacrifice’?”
I thought of all my friends who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Sure, to give yourself to something greater.”
“Not originally. From the Latin, it means ‘to make sacred’ – sacer, ‘holy’, plus facere, ‘to make’. In the Old Testament, first-born children were sacrificed – burnt alive – by their fathers to please God, to bring good harvests… Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac to please God, remember? But God had finally had all the dead children He needed, so he let Isaac live.”
“I don’t get the connection.”
“The Wind Mafia and all their associated hooligans are going to make sure you are ‘sacrificed’ to make sacred the takeover of Maine by the wind industry. Like they wanted to do with your friend Bucky – is that his name?”
“Yeah.”
“But now they’re blaming this young woman, the dead man’s wife, it appears –”
“Abigail.”
“And so your friend’s off the hook, though they still have him for shooting out turbines, apparently. And she’s anti-wind, so she’s just as good a scapegoat as this Bucky was – even better, for apparently she was going to blow the whistle on them.”
“So if Goffman owns all the media, how do we get out the truth?”
He waved that annoying finger at me again. “We don’t, young man. One of the frustrations of journalism is knowing far more than can ever be revealed.”
This was too easy. “I’ll find a way.”
He stood; the meeting was over. “They’re going to use you to sanctify the evil they do.”
I limped on my broken toe into the cold clear noon. A few students straggled between classes; snow lay deep across the lawns and high up the sides of the elegant stone and brick buildings. I got in Abigail’s Saab and drove back Route 202 toward Augusta, empty of hope and solutions.
It could have been Halloween: all these Tammany hob-goblins handing out the poisoned candy of industrial wind media hustle and “community benefits” to their readers and constituents, who stuffed them in their mouths with the credulous innocence of children.
HERE’S ALL I could figure out, so far:
1. Ronnie Dalt’s murder: WindPower LLC seemed responsible. I just had to figure out how. That meant learning more about Dannon Ziller.
2. Abigail: My joy that she’d come back from the dead was beyond description. Yet now she was charged with her husband’s death, and still as much a danger to WindPower and their political allies as Ronnie had been, because she could blow the whistle on them. And if they hadn’t been able to pin his murder on her they would have probably killed her too. So she was still at risk.
3. Bucky: he’d been a perfect target because he’d admitted he shot out the three turbines. But he was probably going to do time for that and was thus less of a problem for them, so they didn’t need to keep pinning Ronnie’s death on him.
4. Titus McKee: he hadn’t shot at me, and would’ve said so if he had. He’d got two more turbines (for which I was still blamed). Had he shot out the other four turbines at Paradise Lakes for which no shooter had been found?
5. Irvin Goffman the derivatives billionaire and his wife Congresswoman Maude: they were typically nefarious but like all super-rich “movers and shakers” had extensive PR and law firms and kept any dirty work far beyond arm’s length. The best solution for them was to reveal their links with WindPower LLC and hope that might help to bring them down, or at least paint them with the dreck they had partially induced.
6. The cops: who had arranged for them to ruin Abigail’s press conference, to continue to harass me? What was the link between them and the Wind Mafia?
7. Lexie: God knows I loved her but one can love more than one person at a time and no way I was going to interfere now that she and Bucky were together. They were totally screwed by the wind turbines above their now-valueless farm but there was nothing I could do about it.
8. Who had stolen Abigail’s little green book of Legislative dirty deals, and the letter that had said in red magic marker READ THIS NOW?
9. Me: All I wanted was to get back to the South Pacific and surf; I’d had eno
ugh of trying to save the world and had done two prison stretches to show for it. So I had to find the true perps for Don and Viv’s fire and duck the charge for Titus’s shooting out the two turbines without implicating Titus. And because I love Maine I had to help find a way to bring WindPower LLC to justice. And because I loved Abigail I had to get her free and safe too.
Holy shit, was that all?
MARK TWAIN describes in Huckleberry Finn how snake oil salesmen were treated back in the day. When they came to a community to sell their worthless remedies they were tarred and feathered and run out of town. Things have gotten very PC since then, but when wind scammers come to Maine with their sweet-talking money and deadly towers it’s time to throw them out.
Personally I prefer tar and feathers but sadly that seems no longer an option.
Pay Dirt
15:00 IN MAINE was of course 10:00 in Hawaii so I knew Frank Hamata would be up and busy. Before he retired Frank was Vice President of a Hawaiian utility but quit when they fell under the spell (and cash) of WindPower’s plans to cover the Islands with 550-foot turbines.
I got to know him when he called one day about surfing lessons. “For years,” he said, “I’ve been looking out the glass wall of my office at the surfers in Kewalo Basin, and I’ve finally realized I’d rather be with them than up here.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said. So next day we started surfing. Within weeks he was competent and in a few months good. And was, he told me, far happier than he’d ever been “in that office”. We became friends, and he was the first to explain me the evils of wind power back when Sylvia Gordon was killed for investigating a wind power deal and I’d been determined to find her killers and also hunted by them, and the lead suspect in her death.
“So Pono where are you?” Frank said.
When I explained him where I was he was genuinely sorry. “It’s seventy-eight here,” he said. “What’s it like there?”
I glanced at the thermometer outside Abigail’s kitchen window. “It’s up to eleven below.”
“Pono you should come home.”
“I can’t.” He understood. Because of my SF background he always assumes I’m on some mission or another. So I asked him about Dannon Ziller and Enron.
“I remember hearing of Dannon Ziller,” Frank said. “He was one of the many Enron crooks who escaped jail time by having expensive lawyers and friends in D.C. For those who don’t remember Enron it’s a story worth telling.” And without transposing our entire conversation, here’s what he said:
At the start of the Falklands War in 1982, Maggie Thatcher soon learned that the UK could not fly troops from Britain all the way to that embattled, frigid little island not far from Antarctica without midair refueling. But Britain had neither sufficient air tankers nor the bases to fly them from, so she called her good friend Ronnie who happened to be running the US at the moment. Now Ronnie was already semi-Alzheimers but his advisors were not; we can refuel you, they said, and in return why don’t you let a good friend of ours named Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron, break into the UK electricity market?
The UK electricity market was publicly owned and both cost-effective and efficient, but Enron promised to lower power prices if it could build a little power plant of its own. So it was allowed to build Teesside, the world’s largest gas-fired power plant (1,875 Megawatts), which sucked up a lot of Britain’s North Sea gas in just a few years before it was ignominiously shut down, made billions for Enron and shattered the UK’s public electricity market. Under the banner of deregulation, American energy companies went on to devour the UK’s twelve regional utilities, firing thousands of people and miraculously raising electricity rates while simultaneously cutting services. And Enron became a giant electricity broker in the US, creating its own house of cards built on lies, false finances, and illusory generation sources.
But Enron had friends in high places: GW Bush and Cheney tried to have Ken Lay appointed Secretary of Energy. However by then Enron was collapsing under the weight of its own transgressions, causing multiple brown-outs across the US, dragging down the stock market, stealing nearly one hundred billion from its investors, robbing its employees of their dividends and retirement funds, and causing, among many other cataclysms, the destruction of one of America’s “Big Five” accounting firms, Arthur Anderson, which had been assiduously covering up Enron’s crooked books for years.
In the ensuing investigations (there is nothing our elected officials like better than biting the hand that fed them the moment it comes under public scrutiny), Enron was publicly tarred and feathered, and the very lawmakers who had given it carte blanche became its most superficially hostile opponents.
A few top Enron execs did a little time in country club jails (they were white businessmen, after all), the regular Americans who had been fooled into buying Enron stock said goodbye to their savings, Ken Lay supposedly died and was buried, and a lot of top Enron crooks parachuted themselves into the wind industry, which was then becoming a multi-billion-dollar cartel built on taxpayer subsidies, Enron-like false promises, political connections, and rigged results.
Dannon Ziller, former VP of the most illicit of Enron divisions, now held a similar post at WindPower LLC, and had been the last person to talk to Ronnie Dalt before a .308 slug ended the latter’s life.
WHEN ABIGAIL came home from her last day at work she sat on my lap kissing me so intensely I could’ve actually believed I was some kind of hot guy. She has a totally prehensile mouth, our tongues interlacing and playing with each other like two puppies, mine exploring round her lovely sharp teeth and the smooth roof of her mouth, her nipping mine slightly, pushing into my mouth then withdrawing fast like a reluctant virgin’s, each tasting the other’s essence, our lips so in touch it felt like our whole bodies were one, which of course led me to kissing down her lovely breasts while she bit the back of my neck and my hands slid up her dress and pulled down her panties which caused all kinds of further disrobing and you can guess what happened next.
A long while afterwards we lay together sweaty and exhausted on her living room sofa, my chest against hers, our hearts thudding against each other with the same beat, in the same tempo, making me think of the little death, as the French call the orgasm, and how frail and temporal is our human heartbeat, and how sacred the short time we have while it lasts.
And that we must not waste it.
IT WAS 23:00 when I left Abigail’s for the parking lot in Augusta where her husband had died. The same hour, the same place, what did I hope to find?
From the front door of his office building I walked diagonally across the parking lot toward where his car had been, a Rav4 she had subsequently sold. “I didn’t want to look at it, think of what’d happened.”
The wind as usual cut down my neck. Without success I tried to find under the ice, sand, and salt the remnant of blood where his life had bled out. What had he been thinking, those last seconds before the bullet hit? About the wind takeover of Maine and what he’d done to make it happen? How he might yet stop it? About his failing marriage?
What had it been like for him to wake up every morning beside this insatiable sexual goddess? How had he, of all people, ended up with her to begin with?
Was there something I didn’t understand about their marriage? Was Abigail being straight with me about it? About anything?
It was spooky to look uphill toward the line of hemlocks at the edge of the park where the shooter had hidden. Under the parking lot’s halide lights Ronnie would’ve made an easy target from the trees barely forty yards away. I scuffed at the asphalt but couldn’t find where the bullet had buried itself after traversing Ronnie’s chest; I’d seen so many bullet wounds in those horrible years in Afghanistan and Iraq and yet sadly they’re all the same: the bullet when it hits flesh takes on a life of its own, spinning, ripping, changing direction, splattering and shredding bone, hemorrhaging blood vessels like a demonic spirit burning with hatred for life… It made me wonder as I stood in the
ravaging cold with my collar wrapped tight round my neck how could any human being create such a hideous thing as a bullet? Yet I too had used them, thousands of them, had killed, nearly been killed, and seen my friends killed by them – and as so many times before I couldn’t understand why.
From the line of trees it was such an easy shot; you lean through the feathery boughs and put your illuminated crosshairs on a man’s chest… the simplest is to set it up ahead of him then let him walk into it; the muzzle velocity of a .308 depending on the cartridge is about 2,900 feet per second, meaning it would cover the distance from these trees to Ronnie’s chest in about 1/23 of a second, faster than the mind can think or the eye can see.
From the shooter’s stand in the trees it was a quick trot to the corner where he could have jumped in a parked car and been long gone before the police, even if they had been called, could get there.
“PAY DIRT!” Mitchell exclaimed. As usual it was after midnight my time and as I slipped carefully out of bed, favoring my toe, I wondered what had him so excited.
“We’ve got Ziller!”
This seemed unlikely, as no doubt Ziller was sleeping the comfortable sleep of the unjust in his Portland mansion. “Huh?”
“I got into his phone.”
This woke me up. “And?”
This time Mitchell didn’t beat around the bush. “Thirty seconds after he hung up with Ronnie Dalt he called a dude named Jesús Truman.”
“Who?”
“He’s a Boston thug, a wet work guy, a Cuban originally from Miami. He’s stupid too, because he’d left his phone’s GPS on, and a half hour after Ziller called him he was a hundred and ten yards from Ronnie Dalt’s office.”
Kill Zone
ICOULD SMELL BLOOD. That this slimebag Boston killer might be my man. And that I was going to take him down. “I’ll send what the Feebies have,” Mitchell had said. “He’s the enforcer for Mass Hauling, a Boston-based trash business that has a monopoly on much of the state. Done time for vehicle theft, child abuse, stalking, assault and battery…”
