Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Triska gave Dixon a look. “It means it went away,” the detective said.

  That earned a frown from Smolonsky. “Explain that.”

  A sigh, like this was obvious, and Triska in a bored voice said: “We made the case, picked her up, sent up the evidence. Prosecutor wants to proceed. Then it stops. Bartender is arrested and indicted. Not Emily.”

  “Why not?”

  “Big man said there’s no case.”

  “Big man?” Smolo asked.

  “Burdick.”

  “Dick Burdick,” Dixon explained. “The D.A. in Tucson.”

  “You hear Burdick say anything directly?”

  “What are you, born yesterday?” said Triska.

  “Then how do you know what happened?”

  Triska gave Smolonsky a stare that wasn’t half bad.

  “Because I knew what we had. Knew it made a case. Knew the A.D.A. was good with it”—the assistant district attorney. “And then it went away. Two plus two. I know you do funny math in D.C., but here that adds.”

  Smolonsky gave Triska a stare of his own, and it was better than Triska’s. “But you don’t have proof. Only suspicion.”

  “You guys gonna throw me under the fucking bus?”

  The skin above Triska’s bald forehead had crinkled up and little beads of sweat were forming. “Dixon, I heard you were a straight guy,” Triska said to the local P.I.

  “There’s no bus,” Smolonsky assured him. “We just need proof. Documents. Phone records.”

  Triska crushed an empty coffee cup and tossed it into a big wire trash can. “Didn’t you say you were a cop once?”

  “D.C. police,” Smolo said.

  “Well, be police like you used to be. Track it down. Or do you just clean up powerful people’s shit now?”

  “Bobby, we’re here asking, aren’t we?” Dixon said. “We just need as much proof as we can get.”

  That calmed Triska a little. Smolonsky felt for him. Bringing big cases against family members of powerful people was dangerous. And one thing was true everywhere: cops were at the bottom of the food chain. But that meant you had to make your cases even stronger. Not become bitter if they weren’t.

  “Look, ask Stroman. He was the assistant D.A. Gung ho for it. Jeff Stroman.” Triska paused. “That’s what I got. Not paperwork. Or evidence bags. Just what happened. Or my own noose for you to put my neck in.”

  Now Triska balled up his empty hot dog wrapper, threw it at the trash can, and missed. “I gotta get back to my partner and back to work.”

  Smolonsky held out a hand and Triska shook it. “I know these stick with you. The ones you can’t make,” he said. Smolonsky wanted to end on good terms with Triska. He didn’t need a disgruntled local cop to make the visitor from Washington a new part of his story of cover-up to protect Wendy Upton. “But I need to ask one other thing. We can keep you out of this, but this last question matters. Anyone ask you about this recently? Anyone at all? Or has it come up in conversation?”

  Triska glanced at Dixon, who nodded him to answer.

  “No,” Triska said. “Not to me.”

  SMOLONSKY CALLED RENA FROM THE CAR. “Maybe we found something. On the sister.”

  Twenty-Six

  Washington, D.C.

  The Ford was parked along the water in East Potomac Park. You could see the sunrise from here, and it was quiet, just a few runners and cyclists. He liked the peacefulness of it. Across the little channel, where there were slips for sailboats, was Fort McNair, where they hanged the conspirators for Lincoln’s assassination. Down the road, near where the Anacostia River merged with the Potomac, they were building a new billion-dollar wharf development. Going to ruin the place, the guy thought. Make it all retail and hipster and drive out the poor. So it goes. He would be out of the country in a few weeks. Not his problem.

  He looked at the man next to him in the car and made a phone call. “Guy may have spotted us last night,” he said into the phone. After a moment he added, sounding irritated: “Whaddya mean, which guy? Guy I’m talking about. The fixer. Guy you had us following. Rena.” He listened again and explained, “We were watching his place. Listening. Through monitoring the digital stuff in the house. He had the senator there. It was perfect. They were asking her for dirt. She was giving it to us!” The voice on the other end was talking. “Then he went upstairs and seemed to be looking down the street, like he knew someone was there watching the place. Then he came outside. By then we took off.” He listened again. “Because it was three in the morning. I’m letting you know now. I know you sleep at night, now that you’re fat and rich.”

  He seemed to be getting instructions of some kind. “No shit,” he said. “Yeah, I figured. Looser surveillance. Keep the monitoring.”

  * * *

  Rena and Brooks’s team was gathered in the fourth-floor attic conference room. The topic: what they’d learned after two days and nights. The Grid, their digital case-tracking system, was filling up with names of suspected blackmailers who might want to threaten Upton—billionaire donors, trade associations, and political action committees. But they were missing hard evidence linking any of them to making a threat.

  “We did an intervention with Upton last night,” Brooks was saying. “She acknowledged she has had a couple of sexual experiences with women.”

  “That’s further than she’s ever gone before,” said Jonathan Robinson, their political communications guy.

  “I wouldn’t say she poured her heart out,” Brooks said.

  She looked exhausted.

  “And there’s an old boyfriend from JAG in Germany,” added Ang Liu, who did not appear as worn out.

  “I’m tracking him down today,” said Hallie Jobe. She and Liu had already talked.

  “Ellen and Smolo think the sister, Emily, is a soft spot,” Brooks said. “Smolo is on it.”

  Rena was standing in the corner watching. If he sat down, he thought he might fall asleep.

  But he was worried. They were still too scattered; there was too much to do; they didn’t have enough time. “Our core job,” he said, “is to find who’s making the threat. Who feels wounded by Upton? Someone rich. Who hates her that much?”

  The answer, he was convinced, was buried in Upton’s political work. “Committees. Key votes.”

  Walt would track the case against the sister in Tucson. But they still had to find out who was using it and why.

  And they probably had to do it today. Sometime by nightfall, Traynor and Bakke would likely withdraw their overtures to Upton about the vice presidency. Then it wouldn’t matter what they found. The threat would have done its job—and they might not ever know what it was or from whom the threat came. A deft maneuver on the part of whoever was behind this: destroy your enemy with only the possibility of a threat. Whoever it was, Rena had a growing sense they were more formidable than he first imagined.

  He looked at Lupsa and Wiley: “We need to use technology to help the political search,” he said. “We need to match who gave money to Upton’s rivals to who’s on this list of people whose ox she might have gored. Can you help?”

  Lupsa said, “Already started. I’m writing code that will match who gave to what political PACs with which companies or their parent companies might have been affected by work done by Upton’s committees.”

  When the meeting was over and they were back downstairs, Rena walked into Brooks’s office.

  “Something I didn’t tell you last night.”

  She was sitting in her desk chair, leaning back, half asleep. “I’m not going to like it, am I?”

  “Not a bit.”

  She smiled, and he sat down.

  “Arvid’s little monitoring sensors in my house last night were flickering. Someone was tapping the digital devices in the house, probably listening to us as we talked to Upton. I spotted a car outside. When I got out there, they’d driven off.”

  Maybe because she was so exhausted, Brooks didn’t look as alarmed as Rena expected. She did
n’t like the cloak-and-dagger side of what they did. She was a political animal and she could play that game as hard and as tough as anyone he had ever seen. Harder than he was comfortable with sometimes. But she was a lawyer who used her skills to research people and their organizations—legally. She was not a cop.

  Increasingly, however, being an investigator meant being in harm’s way. More than it used to. Technology was part of it. It was just too easy to invade people’s lives. And that had seemed to intertwine with something else, like a vine that jumps your neighbor’s fence and begins to wind itself around everything that grows in your yard. Because technology made snooping so easy, there seemed to be fewer lines that people wouldn’t cross. And for those with enough money and arrogance, the laws prohibiting invading others people’s lives, and hiring thugs to do it, seemed increasingly irrelevant. People signed terms-of-service agreements every day with a click of their mouse without reading them, handing over most of their lives without a thought. Political hardball was one thing. To Brooks that meant holding public figures accountable for their records and their words. All this—threatening people, blackmailing them, listening to them in their houses, even making things up on the Internet to destroy them—this wasn’t hardball. This wasn’t a game. This was the culture and its mores slipping out of whack.

  “You’re not flipped out?” Rena asked.

  “I’m too tired.”

  “This means someone has people probably following Upton. That’s how they would have known about us. They’re listening to her. And now they’re listening to us.”

  To his surprise, Brooks smiled.

  “Whoever it is, they’re not from politics,” she said. “And they must be worried about us.”

  Rena smiled back. His partner was always stronger than he expected.

  She asked: “They see you spotting them?”

  “Probably.”

  She rocked a little in her desk chair and said, “What do you want to do?”

  “I already called Sam. The first night we met Upton. I told her to come to D.C. from Colorado, that we might need her. So last night she was already here. I told her to start. Full on.”

  Brooks made a concerned face. Samantha Reese did surveillance, body work. So now she would be tailing Upton, too. Two sets of people tailing the senator, their person and someone else’s. A perfect recipe for disaster.

  “This is getting very cowboy,” she said.

  “We’re still the white hats.”

  That earned only a small smile. Brooks got up from her desk. She had an appointment with someone on the Hill, but she looked back over her shoulder and said:

  “Maybe we should be worried if we’re deciding good and evil based on the color of the hats.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Tucson, Arizona

  Jeff Stroman, the former assistant district attorney who had tried to prosecute Emily Upton, was not hard to find.

  He was no longer with the city but at a defense litigation firm called Fulton, Day & Stroman. It was located in one of the shiny tall office buildings in Tucson’s small downtown.

  Stroman said he preferred to meet out of the office. So Emily Upton was a sensitive subject for him as well, Smolo thought, just as she was with Detective Bobby Triska.

  Stroman picked an old-fashioned diner. They sat in a booth. Smolo explained he was working for Upton, but the job was to find any skeletons he could and to be honest about them. It was possible Upton was holding things back from them. The firm he worked for didn’t sweep things under the rug. You protected a client by knowing the truth, and either getting ahead of it or knowing when it was so bad that it was time to tell the client to get out.

  The lawyer was more suspicious than the detective. “How do I know you’re not lying and working for her enemies?”

  “Call her chief of staff, Gil Sedaka,” Smolo said, handing over one of Sedaka’s business cards. Rena had gotten a batch of them the first day for just this purpose. “If you want to use my phone, he’ll be certain to pick up.”

  Stroman sighed and shook his head. “Ask what you want. I’ll tell you what I’m comfortable telling you.”

  Smolo figured the lawyer would lose patience quickly, so he tried to save time by being direct. “I heard you had a drug case against Emily Upton that was squashed from above.”

  Stroman took a few extra seconds to answer. “The decision was made not to prosecute. That’s what I know.”

  “Help me, Jeff. If Emily Upton did something wrong, I need to know.”

  “I’m not volunteering anything,” Stroman said. “You tell me what you’ve heard. I’ll tell you if I can confirm it.”

  This game, huh, Smolo thought. People watched too much TV. “My understanding is you recommended prosecution. The D.A. did not accept your recommendation.”

  “Which happens all the time. He’s the D.A. He scores the wins and losses, knows the court schedule, has the big picture. And he has more experience. That’s the D.A.’s job—to make those calls. I brought him what we had.”

  “Which was?”

  “Less than perfect. The bartender was guilty. He flipped on Upton. We needed a little more to make the case. If we’d kept going, I think we would have gotten it. Boss said no.”

  “Why no arrest for Upton?”

  “Good question,” Stroman said. “A senator’s sister? What could possibly explain it?”

  “But you don’t have any proof Upton interceded?”

  Stroman looked at Smolonsky with quick contempt. “You’re going to screw me over with this, aren’t you? Smear me to protect her.”

  Smolonsky gave a sharp look of his own. “Not how this works. I don’t care if she’s dirty. I just need to know what’s coming, what shit is out there and if it’s proven or just hearsay. I miss things, I’m screwed.”

  Stroman was trying to decide if he believed it. He said: “The bartender worked more than one place. He was selling drugs from both. I was sure Emily knew and maybe was getting a cut. That’s what the bartender was offering to get himself out from under—Emily. But proving it would have taken more work. Probably sending the bartender all wired up to have a conversation with her. I was told to just go with the bartender. So that’s what we did.”

  Smolo asked a few more questions and got a few more answers, but Stroman was keeping himself out of it as much as he could.

  “I need to ask one more thing, and I really need you to answer this one. If nothing else, answer this one.”

  Stroman tried to look cool but finally shrugged.

  “Anyone else asking about this? That you know of?”

  If the answer were yes, it was a signal that someone else, the blackmailer, knew about this quashed drug case against Emily Upton and was using it.

  “I heard someone was nosing around town. Yeah. But I haven’t seen them.”

  Smolo couldn’t decide if the lawyer was lying.

  * * *

  The D.A. of Pima county, Dick Burdick, proved a harder man to see than a former assistant D.A. now in private practice or a detective second grade whose career had stalled. Smolonsky’s initial efforts to see Burdick went nowhere. So he solved the problem of access the way any out-of-towner with connections might, if you were dealing with an asshole and wanted him to think you an even bigger asshole.

  Smolo got Rena to call Gil Sedaka, who in turn called Burdick personally with a simple message: Senator Upton would appreciate if Burdick could extend every possible courtesy to Mr. Smolonsky. Less than ten minutes later Smolo got a call saying the district attorney had a sudden opening in his schedule.

  According to their local P.I., Phil Dixon, and Ellen Wiley’s quick file on him, District Attorney Elton Richard “Dick” Burdick III was a man in a hurry. Burdick came from an Arizona political family, had made D.A. of Pima County at thirty-seven, and had no intention of holding the job for another thirty years. Dixon thought Burdick had his eye on the state attorney general’s office, and from there the governor’s mansion. After that
, maybe the Senate or a lucrative private practice. A twenty-five- or thirty-year plan—with options.

  One important element of any such plan was always to remain on the right side of the people who hold the jobs above you.

  The D.A. had a kind of permanent half smile, the corners of his mouth pleasantly upturned, and Smolo wondered if he’d had surgical help for that. You could have that done now, Smolo had read somewhere—get your smile shaped. Jesus. He’d heard you could also “live your life out loud and online,” in social media. Apparently, some people thought you had to look the part, too, or get enhanced to look it. Everyone had become their own personal casting director. However Burdick’s mouth got that way, the man had a great-to-see-ya kind of grin that Smolo immediately disliked.

  He walked through the elevator pitch about why he was there—working for Upton, scrubbing her in case of an offer for the vice presidency. Burdick nodded with interest, happy to learn the secrets of the big game; an enthusiastic “glad to help” and a lot of “uh-huhs” and “yeps.”

  “We’re running down the story that you quashed a drug case against Emily Upton after getting a call from her sister’s people. Made the case go away.”

  Burdick’s demi grin vanished. “You said you worked for the senator. If you’ve wormed your way in here under false pretenses, all to make outrageous accusations, you best turn around and go.”

  “I do work for the senator.”

  “Then what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “What I’m paid to. Getting to the bottom of the worst things that might come at her.”

  Burdick gave a powerful man’s stare: “Look, every case is a judgment call. A balance of resources of this office, chance of conviction, significance of the crime, strength of evidence.”

  “We heard this was a strong case, especially against the bartender.”

  The little wheels in Burdick’s brain spun. It couldn’t be that hard for him to figure out who Smolo had been talking to. “I stand by this call as much as any I’ve ever made in this office,” the D.A. declared. “That doesn’t mean every cop or assistant D.A. will understand or agree.”