Would Callie?
I closed my eyes, breathing the sensation swirl of paranoia-the phantom smells of English Leather and too- strong coffee, Frank sunk in his chair, that grainy Zapruder footage playing across his impassive face. Had Frank damned himself with a thousand small decisions?
An overheard message pointing to Firebird. An agent showing up at my condo to urge me onto the phone with the president. Frank and Charlie calling each other late at night just before Frank's murder. The Voice in the Dark, spinning tales of extortion. The facts were colorful, and they fell into different patterns depending on which way I twisted the kaleidoscope. There were more variables than I could pin down. So, of course, I called Induma.
She picked up after a few rings, her voice rough from sleep. 'Yuh?'
'Hi. Sorry. I..
'What? Nick?'
'I need your help.'
'Okay. I'm here alone.'
'Alejandro's not spending the night?' I regretted asking the minute it left my mouth. Between Kim Kendall's deception, braining Callie's husband, and my latest round of dirty hypotheses, I was irritable, out of sorts. I made a fist, pressed my knuckles to the wall.
But she answered evenly. 'No. He's out clubbing. With club people. You know how I like club people. Now what's going on?'
I'd already called her, after I'd left Callie's, to give her Charlie's possible last names, but she'd been tied up and couldn't talk at length. So now I shorthanded everything that had happened since I'd seen her last and the theory I'd managed to work out about Charlie's extorting Caruthers to get money for his son. Then I asked if she'd dug anything up on Wydell and Sever.
'Just that they've both been in the L.A. office for years,' she said. 'Wydell for six, Sever for five.'
'You couldn't find out which protection details they were on before that?'
'I'm an open-source-software geek with a few police connections through the crime lab, but I can't do everything. I've called in a handful of favors, but what you're asking for is too sensitive, Nick, for obvious reasons. It's not like they list this stuff online.'
'Did you find out whether the Service was at the Culver City house with LAPD for the shoot-out?'
'I couldn't. That operation would've been run through LAPD's counterterrorism unit, which is as close to airtight as it gets.' She sensed my frustration and said, 'Look, I don't have to tell you, this is all mirrors and shadows. Given that you're risking your ass, it's probably worth asking: Are you willing to pursue this even if it proves that Frank was dirty?'
'Frank could've been killed for not going along,' I said, a bit too quickly. She let the silence work on me. It made a more effective argument than I had. I thought of the Voice, coming at me out of the darkness, asking if I knew what it meant to owe someone after he was dead.
'That's not an answer,' she said.
I pressed my teeth into my lower lip until I felt the sting. 'I have to know what happened. Whichever way it goes. I have to know what got Frank killed.'
'He's dead. It's not like he has a name to clear.' Induma waited out the pause. 'Maybe it's time to start taking care of people who are alive.'
She didn't often get judgmental. I stood quietly, thinking of Callie and what this could do to her if it proved to be as ugly as I feared.
Induma asked, 'If he was dirty, would that change who he was to you when you were a kid?'
'It's who he is to me now. That didn't die on the living-room floor. So maybe you're right. Maybe this isn't just about Frank. Maybe he made his own goddamned bed. But he wasn't the only one affected by his choices. And if all that went down for no good reason, or worse..'
We were silent for a while, together. 'Okay,' she said softly. 'I spent a good amount of time plowing through databases after you called earlier. I can't get clearance for a lot of them, obviously, but I'm strong on financials.' An uncharacteristic hesitation. 'I checked federal pension records, and I can't find a Charlie Jackson or Johnson in the Secret Service back then. In fact, there were only three Charlies and Charleses and Chucks even in the Service in a two-year span around Frank's death. Two were black guys, and the third was fifty-two years old then.'
'What does that mean?'
'Look, this kind of search? Where I have access to a federal pension database? If I can't find him in there, the guy doesn't exist.'
'I saw him.'
'I'm sure he told you he was Charlie-'
'My mother met him. He had a tattoo. The mouth. Not a face you forget. He exists. I have a picture of him.'
'Now you tell me you've got a picture?'
'That helps?'
'Of course. I can take a run with some facial-recognition software, see if it picks anything up on the other California and federal law-enforcement pension databases. It's not a lock, but it'll help the search criteria. I'll come pick it up.'
'It's not safe for you to come here.'
'They won't mess with me if they don't know who I am. And once they do their homework and figure it out, they really won't want to bother with me. I'm high-profile, and not a little politically connected. Dragging me-or my corpse-into this will only complicate whatever they're trying to get done.'
'Still, why take the chance?'
'Fine.' A silence, and then, convincing herself, 'Fine. Put the picture in an envelope, tape it beneath the lid of the Dumpster at that corner mart by your place. I'll get it in a few hours. Let's meet at Starbucks at noon tomorrow. Free Internet.'
'The one on Montana?'
'The other one on Montana.'
After she hung up, I shut the phone and held it at my side. I closed my eyes but didn't like what I saw there either. Leaving aside the photograph and the slip with the pager number, I gathered together the items on my mattress, stuffing them back into Charlie's rucksack. It fit snugly into Evelyn's giant pasta pot in the kitchen cupboard.
I grabbed my keys, left, and walked the few blocks, stopping occasionally at windows and newspaper vending boxes to check behind me.
Homer was sleeping off a drunk, slumped against the convenience-store wall, one leg flung over a parking space's bumper block. A car pulled in right in front of him, headlights glaring into his face. He raised an arm against the light, wagging sluggishly. The driver hopped out, chatting on his cell phone, and scampered inside.
Homer was cursing and rearranging himself. He looked like a brown puddle. He got nasty when he boozed hard, not like the affable bums you see in movies. His eyes were bloodshot and sinister, his crow's-feet white lines in his dirt-caked face. I thought about what Kim Kendall had told me about his wife and kid, how he'd let his past run him into the ground. I seemed to be on a pretty good course for the same destination.
'Hey, Homer,' I said. 'Did you talk to anyone at the VA for me about tracking down those soldiers?'
'… ffffuckin' think you are…,' he said, in a dry-throated mutter. 'Leeme the hell alone.'
I stepped past him into the shop. When I laid two more throwaway cell phones on the counter, Hacmed leered at me. 'You start a telecommunications company, Nicolas?'
I set down some cash and went outside. Homer was out cold on his back, his mouth a ragged oval. His head was shoved up against the bumper block. I did my best to move him, but his girth and odor outmatched me. I finally managed to roll him onto his side, his forehead clunking to the asphalt. I wedged a folded piece of cardboard beneath his sweaty cheek and left him snoring prodigiously.
The corner mart's rear wall, papered with flyers for independent films and sex-caller lines, abutted a rank alley with a Dumpster. I taped the picture of Charlie and Frank beneath the lid, then studied the slip of paper with the pager number.
Ten digits on ripped paper. My sole channel to the Powers That Be.
