Violation

by Sally Spencer

  “Hostile to you?”

  Carrie shakes her head.

  “Not to me, he didn’t give a hang about me, one way or the other. I’d say he’s hostile to the world in general. He’s got failure written all over him.”

  “Sounds like just the man we need,” I say.

  *

  The man coming out of the Prudential Center is medium height and around 36 years old. He’s dressed in a lawyer suit, but it has seen better days – and even when it was new he couldn’t have worn it with Maxwell Tait’s style and confidence. I have already guessed that he is our Mr Colston – the man with failure written all over him – and when I glance across the street to where Carrie is standing, she confirms my guess with a rapid nod.

  Colston turns up Huntingdon Avenue and walks as purposefully as a camel which has scented water. I fall in behind him, and when I draw level with him at the end of the block, I tap lightly him on the shoulder.

  “Mr Colston?” I say. “Mr Arthur Colston?”

  He stops, turns, and looks me up and down. Today, I’m wearing a conservative blue suit – which was so expensive that it made even Marty’s credit card groan – and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Yeah, I’m Art Colston,” he says. “Do I know you?”

  “Stuart Bendix.”

  I hold out my hand, but he doesn’t take it.

  “Never heard of you,” he says sullenly.

  “I represent a professional recruitment company, and—”

  Zap. Firecrackers explode inside his brain.

  “You’re a head-hunter!” he gasps, like he can’t believe his luck.

  I frown at his choice of words.

  “Professional recruitment executive, rather than head-hunter,” I say. I glance around me. “Look, Mr Colston, couldn’t we talk somewhere more private? I don’t think it would be a good idea to risk one of the partners of your present firm seeing us together.”

  I lay emphasis on the word ‘present’ and it doesn’t go unnoticed – or unappreciated.

  “Private? … uh … sure,” Colston says. “There’s a bar just around the corner.”

  There is indeed a bar just around the corner – and Colston is well known in it. By the time we reach the stools, the bartender is already pouring him a highball. I wonder why everyone I meet in Boston seems to drink to excess. Maybe it’s got something to do with knowing Maxwell Tait.

  “Now the first question, Mr Colston, is—” I stop. “Would you mind if I called you Art?”

  “Sure, call me Art.”

  His tongue is hanging like an eager dog’s. He would let me call him Rover, if he thought it would help get him out of Tait, Walsh and Fineberg.

  “And you call me Stu,” I say. “Now the first question is – would you be prepared to move from your present position?”

  “Would I ever!”

  “Why?”

  The question seems to knock him off balance.

  Or rather, finding an answer does.

  He has plenty of reasons for wanting to move. He is the associate who gets given the cases that no one else wants. He’s the associate who a woman in a cheap check costume can see in the middle of the day – without even booking an appointment first.

  But he can’t tell me any of that.

  “It’s like this, Stu,” he says finally. “The firm’s been going to hell since Max Tait bought in.”

  “Let me see, that would be … seven years ago?”

  “Yeah. About seven.”

  “Isn’t that unusual?”

  “Isn’t what unusual?”

  “For someone to buy in as senior partner?”

  He is struggling for an answer again.

  “The firm was having some … uh … financial difficulties,” he admits. “It was nothing that the partners couldn’t have dealt with themselves, if they’d just kept their heads, but then along comes Tait, flashing his money, and they jump at it.”

  “The firm’s quite successful now though, isn’t it?” I ask. “We’re not in the habit of recruiting people from a sinking ship.”

  He is over a barrel and he knows it. He has to make the firm sound good, but at the same time he has to come up with a plausible reason for wanting to leave. The only way to do both things simultaneously is to bad-mouth Maxwell Tait.

  “The firm’s doing well,” he says, “but it’s never gonna get any better, because Tait has no class.”

  “He seems quite classy to me,” I say.

  “You know him?”

  Panic crosses Colston’s face. Maybe I am a friend of Tait’s, he is thinking. Maybe all this is just an elaborate game to get rid of an unwanted associate.

  “I met him once at a party,” I say. “Can’t honestly say I liked the man, but he seemed a fairly classy operator – preppy, Ivy League, all that sort of stuff.”

  Reassured, Colston shakes his head.

  “He may look like that now, but it’s all a façade. You should have seen him when he bought into the firm – the man was a rube. And I’ll tell you something else. He’s supposed to be a corporate law expert. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I agree.

  ‘Well, Seven years ago, he knew jack-shit about corporate law.”

  Weird!

  I thank Colston for his time, pay for the drinks, set up a second one for him, and promise to keep in touch. It’s true what they say about one thing leading to another – only a couple of days ago I forced two cops off a cliff, and now I’ve sunk to lying. By tomorrow I’ll probably be stealing from the cookie jar.

  30

  It is just after midnight when we hit Tait’s neighborhood. Carrie is behind the wheel, and I am in the front passenger seat, dressed in black sweats. I look out at the houses we are passing. A few living rooms are illuminated, but most of the lights we see are coming from upstairs.

  “We’ve timed it just right,” I say.

  Because the way I have it figured, it is the middle of the night when people expect robbers to strike, not when they are lying in their beds watching Letterman.

  “You sure this is a good idea?” Carrie asks.

  Hell, no, it’s a lousy idea – but it’s the only one I have.

  Tait’s house is just ahead of us, and we synchronize our watches.

  “Come back for me in exactly two hours,” I say. “Give me thirty seconds to appear – and if I don’t, get out of town as quick as you can.”

  “I won’t leave Boston without you,” Carrie says.

  “What good will it do you, me or the investigation to have both of us getting caught?” I ask her.

  “I won’t leave without you,” she repeats firmly, as she pulls into the side.

  “Be reasonable, Carrie,” I plead.

  “There isn’t time to argue,” she says.

  She’s right. I get out of the car and close the door quietly behind me. Carrie moves off immediately and I am left alone on the street – a man dressed in black, carrying tools that can have no other purpose but burglary.

  For perhaps two seconds I am out in the open – exposed – then the trees which screen Tait’s driveway swallow me up.

  I work my way round to the back of the house. Tait has been in Harrisburg for the last few days, and immediately before that he was in Europe, so it is far too much to hope that he has left a window open – but I check anyway. All the windows are tightly shut. But at least there are no bars on them, because bars look far too ugly for the owners of neat suburban houses to ever contemplate installing them.

  I survey the back yard. I can see one or two lights through the trees, but nothing more. And if I can’t see the neighbors, they can’t see me.

  Or so the theory goes.

  The window I select is made up of several small panes. I shine my torch inside – another risk, but one I have to take – and locate the contact point of the alarm system at the left-hand edge of the sill. It is quite a cool night, but as I cover the window with adhesive tape, I realize that my hands are sweating.

 
I pull a small hammer from my belt and tap gently on the glass. Nothing happens. I try again, harder this time. The pane breaks with what I know objectively to be no more than a tinkle, but which still seems – to this very nervous burglar – to be as loud as a cannon being fired in a confined space.

  I quickly check over my shoulder. I can see no new lights coming on through the trees. I hear no neighbors complaining about the noise. I tick Stage One of the operation of my mental list.

  Stage Two is going to be more difficult. If I blow this I will end up in the pokey, and then back in Harrisburg – and then dead.

  I raise the window gently, easing a flat piece of plastic against the sill sensor at the same moment as the window sensor loses contact with it. With my free hand I unwrap a little more tape and start to attach the plastic permanently to the sensor. If the alarm is pressure-sensitive, this is when it’s going to start complaining. As I wait for the flashing lights and ringing bells, I am – for some inexplicable reason – holding my breath.

  Nothing happens. As long as there is something touching it, the sensor is happy. I open the window further open and slide through the gap.

  I shine my torch around the room. I can see a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, a desk with an expensive-looking PC sitting on top of it, and a couple of filing cabinets.

  This, then, is Tait’s study – which is as good a place as any to start my search.

  What I’m hoping to find is something which will tell me exactly what Tait was doing before he appeared from nowhere, seven years ago, and bought his way into one of the oldest law firms in Boston.

  I look at the bookcase. It is filled with row upon row of heavy books on the subject of corporate law.

  ‘He’s supposed to be a corporate law expert. Right?’ Art Colston said to me in the bar near the Prudential Center. ‘Seven years ago, he didn’t know jack-shit about it.’

  I open one of the books.

  ‘Originally published 1977,’ I read. ‘This edition published 1987.’

  I glance through the front-pieces of several more. None of them predate Tait’s arrival in Boston.

  I go through the desk drawers: yellow legal pads, pencils, a sharpener …

  The bottom drawer is locked, and I feel a tinge of excitement as I force it open, but all it contains is a check book and household utilities bills.

  There are no certificates on display – no degrees, written out in Latin, to invite my admiration.

  I have never known a lawyer – or a doctor or a dentist, for that matter – who didn’t like to show off his qualifications, so perhaps all his certificates are hanging on the wall of his office in the Prudential Center.

  Or perhaps not.

  He didn’t get to be senior partner because of his expertise, I remind myself. He was voted into the position because the firm was strapped for cash, and he was the man who could provide it.

  “Maybe that’s the key to Tait,” I say aloud.

  Maybe he’s got no qualifications at all – and is just faking it!

  And maybe Mayor Pine found out about it, which is why he can make Maxwell jump through hoops.

  I move on. Just as the study looks exactly like the perfect lawyer’s study should, so the living room seems to have come straight out of Bloomingdale’s showroom.

  I search for something to connect Maxwell Tait with the outside world – to a past of some kind.

  A Star Trek magazine, so I can ring the Membership Secretary. ‘Max Tait? Yeah. He’s been a Trekkie for ten years now. He joined when he was living in LA.’

  A customized set of golf clubs, with the name of the craftsman who created them proudly displayed on the shaft. ‘Mr. Tait still got them old clubs? Must have made them for him fifteen years ago, about the time he was running that used car business down in Houston.’

  A letter, a signed photograph, an antique which must have been bought from a specialized dealer – anything will do.

  But there is nothing. Everything is tasteful and expensive – nothing is unique. The place has absolutely no stamp of the man’s personality about it. It’s almost as if he’s some kind of reverse Dracula, only really existing during the daytime.

  I hit the bedroom next:

  – immaculate, conservative suits, hanging in a neat row in the closet

  – monogrammed silk underwear

  – a drawer full of socks, all midnight black

  – subdued, discreet neckties, none of which identify him as belonging to the Fort Lauderdale Orchid Growers’ Club or San Antonio Rifle Association.

  I check my watch and see that it is nearly three o’clock. Shit! In fifteen minutes, Carrie will be back.

  But even that is not certain! Yes, she will be here in fifteen minutes if everything goes as planned, but what will happen if the police, seeing a young woman driving alone down deserted streets, pull her over?

  Because that is all it will take – a routine stop-and-question – to undo us quite.

  As a fugitive, she won’t dare to show them her driver’s license or any other form of ID. So what will they do? They’ll take her down to the nearest precinct, and run her fingerprints. And once they’ve done that, it’s all over.

  “I shouldn’t have let her bring me,” I tell myself. “I should have driven here myself and taken a chance on parking outside.”

  Instead, I’ve allowed her to run one hell of a risk.

  And for what?

  So I can look through Tait’s underwear?

  I go back to the study and look at my watch again. In seven minutes, I’m out of here. There has to be some way I can make good use of those seven minutes – some way in which I can justify to myself the danger I’ve put Carrie in.

  I open the bottom drawer of the desk and take out a phone bill. There are a few local calls listed, but most of them are toll. I recognize most of the area codes – New York, Washington, LA – all the kinds of places a successful corporate lawyer would be expected to ring.

  But there’s one code I don’t recognize – and Maxwell Tait seems to have called it nearly every week.

  I know it will probably lead me nowhere, but I pick up the phone and dial the number anyway.

  I hear the ringing tone, and start to count, slowly.

  One … two … three … four … five …

  I have reached twenty when a sleepy voice says: “That you, Harvey?”

  A woman – somewhere in late-middle aged, I would guess and, from her accent, probably uneducated.

  “That you, Harvey?” she asks again, and now she sounds worried. “Somethin’ wrong? It’s the middle of the night.”

  I hang up. Whoever she is, she was not expecting a call from Maxwell Tait.

  I have just started writing down the number – so I can check out the address in the morning – when the phone rings. I hesitate for a couple of seconds, then pick it up.

  “Hello?” says the same woman. “Did you just ring me, Harvey? On’y somebody called and din’t say nothin’. Can you hear me, Harvey? You in some kinda trouble with Mr Tait? Can you hear me, son?”

  I put down the phone again, and try to make sense of what I’ve just learned.

  Harvey is close to Tait – he makes his calls from Tait’s house, and when his mother wishes to contact him, this is the number she rings. So maybe drunken Lucy from across the street is right about Tait, and Harvey is Maxwell’s secret lover.

  But even as the thought is crossing my mind, I dismiss it, because I simply cannot picture Maxwell sweating and groaning as he approaches orgasm. He is, quite simply, not the kind of man to have a secret male lover – or a secret female lover, for that matter.

  As I make my way back towards the window, my mind is racing. Up until a couple of minutes, I’d never even heard of Harvey, but already my instinct is telling me that he not only plays an important part in Maxwell Tait’s life, but is central to my investigation.

  I leave through the same window I entered by, and use the trees in the driveway as cover until I see Carrie�
�s lights approaching. Then I step out into the road so that when she stops I am ready to open the door and fling myself into the vehicle.

  Yes, I think, as Carrie pulls away, I’m sure Harvey is central to the investigation, but I still haven’t got a clue exactly where he fits in.

  31

  It is morning, and we are on the road again.

  We follow Interstate 90 until it begins to climb into the Berkshire Hills, then turn off and head for the town of Macclesfield. This is vacation country, but, unlike most other towns in the area, Macclesfield has no lakes, no nature trails or history trails, no music or theatre festivals, no famous sons – nothing at all to interest the tourist. But that’s okay because we’re not tourists – we’re fugitives from justice. And Macclesfield is of great interest to us because Mrs Martha Dillworth lives there.

  Mrs Dillworth’s address, according to the BCL’s Reverse Telephone Directory, is 31 Broad Street. And what makes her so special is that the phone number we checked to get her address is the same one I dialed from Tait’s house last night.

  We pass isolated farms – crops ripening in the fields, cows grazing peacefully. Then the houses start to come closer together and we see the sign that says:

  ‘Welcome to Macclesfield, home of the famous Macclesfield Pure-Maize Biscuit.’

  “I knew I’d heard the name before!” Carrie says – and she starts to sing:

  ‘Got a load of hunger?

  Feel the need to fix it?

  You could do a whole lot worse

  Than a Macclesfield Maize Biscuit.’

  “How can they say nobody’s writing great songs anymore, when there are tunes like that around?” I ask.

  “Haven’t eaten one of those since I was in the academy,” Carrie says nostalgically. “They were the newest thing in health food back then and everybody was crazy about them.” She laughs. “Imagine that – the actual home of the famous Pure-Maize Biscuit. It’s like finding the end of the rainbow.”

  I laugh too, but only to keep her company. I am hoping that this is the end of the rainbow – because if it isn’t, I don’t know where else to look.