Committee Chief.'
'It's started,' Crane said bitterly. 'Yesterday I had a closed-session meeting with the full committee. I finally got them to focus on getting this damned show on the road and outlined my approach. Those two old bastards must have been on the horn to the press the minute I walked out of the room.'
Which particular two old bastards Crane referred to, out of the many in Congress, was made clear by the article. Congressmen Peller and McClain expressed 'grave alarm' at the plans disclosed by the committee's chief counsel to use a variety of investigative devices, including phone taps, concealed taping, lie detectors, and voice stress analyzers, in the course of the investigation.
'Big on civil liberties, are they?' Karp asked when he was done reading.
'Don't make me laugh! Peller was some kind of hanging judge down in Alabama and McClain is an ex-Un- American Activities Committee lawyer. They wouldn't know a civil liberty if it bit off their left nut. No, there's something else going on. I mean it's unique; I've been blasted plenty in the press for things I've done, but I've never been blasted for things I might do. What it is, somebody's running scared and they're putting on the pressure. I wish I knew who it was.'
'I think I might have an idea who,' said Karp after a moment's thought, and he told Crane briefly about what was in the new CIA documents. Crane grew increasingly excited as the story unfolded. 'That's terrific stuff, Butch. It's our obvious line of inquiry. And you're right-somebody must have leaked to the committee that we've got something solid linking Oswald to the CIA.'
'So our next move is?'
'Subpoena the bastards. Helms and the rest of them down to the cipher clerks. Grill 'em. Wave their own damn documents in their faces.'
'Why won't they stonewall it, like they did in sixty-three?'
'Let 'em. We'll hit them with contempt citations. Somebody'll crack, when they're looking at jail time. Not the big boys maybe, but the little fish. This is great! We can start weaving a real net.'
'Um, I hate to bring this up, but with what for money? Weaving is fine, but I got no weavers. I need investigators in the field, with travel and phone and equipment budgets to support them…'
'That's coming,' said Crane irritably. 'Bea is working up the formal budget, and I'll submit it to Flores by close of business today. He'll read it over the weekend, present it to the committee next week, and I'd expect closure on it no later than a week from now. I've asked for six and a half million. That'll support nearly two hundred people for both assassination investigations.'
Karp was stunned. 'That's a lot of money,' he said, thinking that the typical homicide in New York was solved by two good cops with some minimal canvassing and lab work. The JFK business would need more, being spread around the country, but… Tentatively, he suggested, 'Will they give us that much? I mean, if we had just a little to start, we could make some progress and then go back for more.'
'That's not the way I work,' Crane said with some force. 'They asked me what I needed and I told them. If they don't want to shell out, it's on their heads.'
To which Karp generally agreed; still, his political warning lights, dim and unreliable bulbs though they were, had started to flash. Crane was supposed to be the political mastermind of the project, but even Karp understood that a time when you were in trouble in the press was not exactly the best time to ask for a huge shitload of money from a guy who didn't like you in the first place.
The thin man did not have to wait long at the landing strip. Just after the appointed hour, he heard a droning sound and the DC-4 broke out of the clouds over the mountain and landed in a cloud of red dust. He waited while some crates were unloaded and then entered the plane and strapped himself into an uncomfortable jump seat jutting from the bulkhead.
The flight to Guatemala City took forty minutes. He walked from the military section of the field to the commercial terminal. There was a ticket waiting for him under the name he gave the girl at the Avianca counter, and he took the regular evening plane to Miami.
There was a man there waiting for him outside of customs, a short Latin man in sunglasses (though it was night) and a flowered shirt worn outside his pale lemon trousers. They went to a blue van parked outside and drove from the airport down LeJeune Road to Eighth Street, Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana, where they turned left. In a few minutes, they arrived at the driveway of a house painted apricot with white trim. The thin man from Guatemala got out of the van and went into the house.
In the living room, a good-looking older man of about sixty rose from a sofa and extended his hand in greeting.
'Hello, Bill,' he said, smiling. 'Welcome to Miami. Long time.'
'Hello, Bishop,' said the thin man. 'Yes, a long time. Years.'
SEVEN
'I can't believe I did that!' cried Marlene in anguish. 'I yelled at a secretary. In public!'
She was in private now, in her tatty little office, with Luisa Beckett, her deputy. 'What happened?' asked Beckett.
'Oh, nothing, just stupidity. I was in a rush to get to court to answer motions on the Schaffter thing, People v. Melville, and I just reached into the drawer and grabbed the red-tabbed file that's supposed to have all the motions and responses in it and of course I didn't check it and when I got there I looked and found it was full of Q and A's. No motions.'
'Marva mixed up the tabs again.'
'Right. And so I got chewed out by the judge, who was fucking Hannegan, who hates me anyway, and I had to run back here and get the motions and run back and get there all sweaty like a kid on his first day in criminal courts. And of course got snickered at by all attending, and then I got back here, and Marva and Beverly were lounging around comparing nails, and I guess I just lost it. 'Good Christ! I called her a… a…'
'Not a dumb nigger, I hope,' said Beckett.
'No, a stupid bitch!' wailed Marlene, and pressed her face against her desk, with her arms wrapped around her head.
'She'll get over it,' said Beckett soothingly. 'Don't take it so hard. Everybody gets mad sometimes. You've been under a strain.'
Marlene looked up. 'Yeah, I have. So have you, so has everybody on the staff, so has fucking Marva, probably, but we don't all carry on like that. Face it, I'm losing my mind.'
'No you're not,' said Beckett automatically. Marlene stared at her more closely, searching her face for signs of the sort of patronizing looks people use to calm the loony down before punching 911. But Beckett seemed merely embarrassed. As well she might be, Marlene thought miserably. One of the very rare black female ADAs, and Marlene's protegee for the past four years, Beckett was a rail-thin, pale tan woman who might have been extruded from Kevlar, and who had never been observed to exhibit any emotion except fury at rapists. Marlene figured there was a personal story behind that, but she had never asked and Luisa had never volunteered. They were close comrades on the job, but not really friends.
Marlene swallowed hard and said with a sigh, 'Oh, I'm being a baby. I didn't mean to lay a trip on you. Just, lately-it's like someone's running fingernails over my blackboard all the time. I can't relax. I'm obsessive. Like this filing system that Marva screwed up. Did I really need it? I don't know-I sort of got on all right before I set it up. I mean, I was never famous for losing stuff. But lately, I feel everything's slipping away, that if I don't keep track of things, minutely, everything will sort of dissolve-I'll dissolve, or crack, or fall into little pieces…'
Her voice died away. Great! Now Luisa would be positive her boss was crazy. Marlene's face colored with embarrassment. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Beckett, looking at her impassively, as if waiting for this display of weakness to be over so that they could get down to business again. A good prosecutor, Beckett, but not much of a confidante.
Marlene cleared her throat and said, as briskly as she could manage, 'So. You came in here for a reason, right?'
The relief was clear on Beckett's face as she placed a file on the desk between them. 'Yeah, rape and
