“I still don’t…” Atkins said, frowning.
The tape went silent. Then a burst of static. The sound of a car door opening. Frank pressed the Pause button.
“The first voice is Skeeter Hodges.”
“How you doin’?”
It was a cruel, sly voice of arrogance and condescension.
Frank pressed the Pause button again.
Atkins stared at the tape deck, seemingly hypnotized.
Frank reached for the Play button, waited, and looked into Atkins’s eyes. “And the next voice is yours.”
“You called about a deal.”
“Yeah. You want Juan Brooks?”
“Yes.”
“You know who I am?”
“You’re James Hodges. You give me Brooks… what do you want?”
“I walk. Me, my friends Martin Osmond, Pencil Crawfurd.”
Frank punched the Stop button. Atkins had a thousand-yard stare-a man who’d seen a wished-away hell suddenly reappear, yawning open at his feet.
“You and Skeeter cut the deal,” Frank said, dispassionately, even sadly. “He’d turn in Juan Brooks. You’d get the publicity. And he’d inherit Brooks’s outfit.”
“And then Skeeter kept helping you.” Jose’s tone was less sympathetic, a tone borrowed from his father’s pulpit. “Skeeter would finger his competition. You’d shut them down. You’d put another notch in your badge, Skeeter’d add another piece of turf.”
Atkins sat emotionless, rocking ever so slightly in cadence, matching what he was hearing against some internal master record.
“You kept the heat off Skeeter,” Frank said in a hoarse whisper. “Warned him whenever the posse was saddling up.”
“Skeeter didn’t do the glitz that Juan Brooks did,” Jose said. “Even so, as he got bigger, it got harder for you to keep the heat off him.”
Frank leaned forward sympathetically. “Two years ago, Gentry and Osmond almost broke it open.”
Atkins nodded, a stricken, haunted look on his face.
“But you and Skeeter managed a last-minute save,” Frank continued almost soothingly.
Jose jumped in. “What happened then, Brian? Skeeter and Pencil get too ambitious? Too grabby?”
“You decide to take them out?” Frank followed closely.
“You screw up and don’t get Pencil,” Jose tacked on.
After the staccato buffeting, Frank and Jose sat silently for a second or two. Atkins brought his hand up and rubbed his eyes.
Jose picked up. “Pencil’s alive. You know you have to get him, and you know you have to get control of the case.”
“So the Colombian connection,” Frank continued. “Part was already there… Gentry’s time in Bogota, his Agency connection. You added the necktie and bomb touches.”
“And you killed Pencil’s woman when she came in on you tossing the house,” Jose said.
“Looking for this.” Frank touched the Eject button and held up the cassette.
Atkins stared at it, then into Frank’s eyes.
A chance to top off a career as more than a midlevel agent. Years of watching others catch the brass ring. And then the chance to take out Juan Brooks. To get your portrait in the director’s corridor. What would have happened, Brian Atkins, if you hadn’t taken the deal?
Atkins finally spoke. “We’ve been in this business a long time, the three of us,” he said, talking like he’d just joined two friends at a bar.
“Yes,” Frank said, “yes, we have.”
“They want us to clean the sewers for them.” Atkins spoke with a mix of sadness and resentment. “And we do. We go about it the best way we know how. We make a profession of it… cleaning the sewers. And sometimes… sometimes in the sewers one finds a diamond in the shit.”
Slowly Atkins got to his feet. Silently, he held his hands out. Frank locked on the cuffs.
“You’re going to have to make a helluva case,” Atkins said in an almost jovial, professional manner.
“I think we have enough, don’t you?” Frank was working to be equally professional about it.
“You got most of it down,” Atkins admitted.
“Most?”
Atkins grinned as if enjoying a private joke. He shook his head. “Most,” he repeated, adding, “except… I didn’t shoot Skeeter.”
EPILOGUE
With difficulty, Frederick Rhinelander managed a welcoming smile. “Mayor Tompkins!”
Tompkins nodded curtly and, without invitation, took his seat in one of the chairs facing Rhinelander’s desk. Tompkins held a leather portfolio in his lap.
Rhinelander looked past the mayor to Marge, who was leaving. Rhinelander wanted her to turn so he could send the private eye-signal to extract him after a minute or two. But she closed the door behind herself without a backward glance.
The unhappy congressman turned his attention to Tompkins. He cleared his throat. “The trial… a shock… Brian Atkins.” Rhinelander shook his head and got a profoundly perplexed look. “Who would have thought?”
Tompkins didn’t answer right away, and his silence and stony gaze intensified Rhinelander’s sense of dread.
“Who would have thought?” Rhinelander repeated.
“You should have thought, Mr. Chairman.” Tompkins’s tone was that of a priest administering last rites.
Rhinelander’s mouth worked silently through several cycles. “Should have thought what?” he finally managed.
“Oh,” Tompkins said, “you should have come out with the truth.”
Rhinelander stared speechlessly.
“You see,” Tompkins continued, “Kevin Gentry was working for you when he began investigating Skeeter Hodges’s operation.”
“But,” Rhinelander protested, “I didn’t know everything Gentry was doing.”
“You knew he had recruited an informant inside Skeeter’s organization, and you knew he was paying that informant.”
“No!” Rhinelander’s voice rose.
“Yes.” Tompkins said quietly. He reached inside his portfolio for a sheaf of papers, which he tossed onto Rhinelander’s desk. “Photocopies of payment authorizations. A hundred and twenty thousand dollars in subcommittee payments to Martin Osmond.”
Rhinelander made no move toward the papers, yet eyed them as if a snake had suddenly materialized on his desk.
“You’ll find your signature on each payment authorization.”
Rhinelander started to say something, but Tompkins held up a restraining hand. “The original authorizations
