BLIND TRIAL
Brian Deer
famousfiction.net
Unit 50712 P.O. Box 6945
London W1A 6US
Copyright Brian Deer © 2021
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-8382832-0-9
Follow Brian on Twitter @deerbrian
briandeer.com
FRIDAY JULY 18
One
THEY AGREED last night the location for this meeting: “Twelfth Street at New York Avenue.” They agreed on the time: “eight-thirty in the ayem.” They agreed: “punctuality is critical.” But waiting on the corner, four blocks northeast of the White House, Ben Louviere—senior marketing assistant at BerneWerner Biomed—could see no sign of his employer’s general counsel: Mr. Theodore Hosea Hoffman III.
Behind a blue-and-yellow tie and white cotton business shirt, sweat trickled from his chest to his navel. He’d only run eighty yards from the Marriott at Metro Center but, even with the temperature barely nudging 70°F, the exertion fused with the capital’s humidity to express his emotions in his skin. His palms felt damp. His shorts clung to his genitals. A stain the size of Lake Michigan soaked his back.
So, where’s Mr. Hoffman? He promised to be here. He promised he would help. We had a deal.
Ben, twenty-six, arrived at 08:22, and for a while held together his coolest act. He was the six-one big dick, the college baseball catcher, posing, deltoids straining inside a navy Donna Karan suit, smiling looks for beard trimmer commercials. Bristling hair so black, flashing eyes so blue, and boasting a JD degree from Loyola, Chicago, the manufacturers of recombinant vaccines, interferons, and colony stimulating factors had never been so lucky as the day they discovered him and volunteered to pay his way through school.
But twenty minutes later, he was losing it. Bigtime. He was a seven-year-old abandoned at the mall. He was rubbing his neck, hanging toes off the curb, darting pigeon-quick glances up the street. He was fingering his Samsung, fighting the urge to call home. He was sure Mr. Hoffman wouldn’t show. All the jokey camaraderie, backslaps, shoulder-hugs, were just phony office politics bullshit. So much for the theory they shared a special bond or met in a previous life.
Hands in pockets, Ben paced in the shade of polished black granite: the American Association for the Advancement of Science building. Traffic choked the avenue, now in rush-hour mayhem, and sporadic pedestrians hurried from a subway exit to the National Museum of Women in the Arts. On a square of clipped grass across a wide, divided intersection, a panhandler folded a tarp.
So, where’s Mr. Hoffman? He was meant to be the man. He’d said, “Come to me with your problems.”
But then—thank Christ—a car surged into view. He felt like mom kissed him on the forehead. Two hundred feet south, turning left from H Street, swung a silver Ford LTD Crown Victoria. Styled for the seventies, but vintage 1986: a classic four-door, classic cop. Razored horizontals, chrome trim, double headlights, and a grille with enough edge to dice cheese.
That Ford: he knew it. Or at least one like it. Mr. Hoffman drove an ancient Crown Vic. In Ben’s forty-seven days, including weekends, on the staff, he’d seen such a vehicle almost daily. Most often she was parked before 09:30 each morning in the BerneWerner Building garage in Atlanta. He’d even snagged a ride in her four years back after his interview for the company scholarship. She was the Last Great American Full-Size Sedan. Or so Mr. Hoffman said at the time.
By a vacant meter bay, the car slopped to a halt like an aircraft carrier in custard. Behind the wheel sat Mr. Hoffman: a kind of Black Bill Clinton, as big, smart, and smooth as a Bentley. Fitter than his age, which people guessed was fifty-something, it was said he could pop a beer can with a stare.
The general counsel jerked an arm, and the car jumped forward. Then back and forward, back and forward, until positioned a foot-and-a-half from the sidewalk.
“YOU THINK of my ride?” Mr. Hoffman slapped the steering wheel. “Five point eight. V-8. Seventeen to the gallon. Tell me this ain’t some lady.”
“One hell of a car, sir.” Ben climbed into the shotgun. “I like it. One hell of a car.”
“You know the dream died when they quit building these.”
“I like it. One hell of a car.”
The weird thing about it was the legal chief said the same thing—the exact same thing—four years back. Ben remembered the euphoria of being told he’d gotten the scholarship and the conversation switching to the Ford. “You know the dream died when they quit building these.” It wasn’t an easy line to forget.
“What this lady’s short of, an F-16’s missing. See, we got the electric windows.” Mr. Hoffman opened and shut them. “We got the electric seats.” He powered the split-bench back and forth. “We got enough draft to freeze the Hollywood Bowl.” He flicked the aircon off and on. “We got the illuminated glove box. We got the red vinyl interior. And we got zero to sixty in nine point six seconds.”
“And sixty to zero?”
“About an hour.”
Ben patted the red vinyl, hardly believing this meeting was proving as schmoozy as the interview. The truth of it was, when they summoned him to Atlanta, he feared they’d mixed him up with someone else. He was no dope, sure. But an attorney? Get out of here. He’d been planning to make it big with his band. But the company took him on, stumped up the dough for school, and promised him a fulltime job.
“One hell of a car sir,” he repeated. And meant it. “Deeply cool. One hell of a car.”
The Black Bill Clinton glanced in the mirrors, checked his watch, and reached for the ignition. “So, what’s the story then. Huh? What you call me for then? Huh? I drove six hundred miles to this convention of clusterfucks, and you got me here talking cars? We got a move on the vaccine before the NASDAQ closes, and then we’re up at FDA with InderoMab.”
Ben reached for an envelope inside his jacket pocket. It was clearly time to cut to the chase. “You know when you
