No One Rides for Free Read online

  “What can I do for you? Name it, you have it.”

  “I want some information,” I said. Straightman lived in ellipses and could hear omissions ring the way most of us hear church bells toll. He understood there was no need to know what his left hand was doing.

  “Let’s get Willie on this one,” he said, taking me by the elbow and leading me to his left hand who had a connecting office. “I’ll let him know he’s to give you full cooperation. If he doesn’t give satisfaction, get back to me.”

  We smiled. Proud that we had handled so many delicate issues so quickly and discreetly and with so little said. He handed me over to Willie, repeating his full-cooperation routine.

  Willie greeted me with genuine enthusiasm. We were on the same level in a way. We did our deeds based on other people’s needs, particularly when they ran to the gray areas and beyond. Maybe the only real difference between us was that he was staff, I was free-lance.

  To Willie, someplace to talk meant someplace we could not possibly be overheard. We got into his car, but even that was not considered suitable, though I thought it was pretentious of him to think he was important enough for people to bug his car. The Watergate, of course, was not a place that anyone paranoid about listening devices wants to talk, so we ended up at the Jefferson Memorial, walking through the trees around the Tidal Basin.

  It had been raining when I left New York. In D.C. the sky was slate-gray, drifting between a dreary mist and drizzle.

  “The SEC,” I told him, “is taking testimony from a guy named Wood, Edgar Wood. What I want to know is simple. Where is he? What’s he saying?”

  “I have a friend over at Justice.”

  “No. Justice won’t be in on this one. There’s a glory shortage these days, and besides, keeping it in-house protects the investigation.”

  “How’s that?” he asked.

  “Wood is an attorney and he’s talking about his former client. If he were talking to somebody at Justice, or any other law-enforcement group, his testimony would be flat-out illegal. It would also be open to discovery and he could be deposed.”

  “Interesting. Very slick,” Willie said admiringly.

  The wind came from the east, throwing the rain at a slant. We edged around the sheltering curve of our tribute to Thomas Jefferson. When we were facing west the angle of the wind and wall gave us a dry spot. Willie took a “bullet” out of his pocket. He manipulated it around so that the cocaine in the bottom dropped into the little cup of the crossbar. Another twist and the cup faced up into an aperture at the top. A quick practiced set of gestures that ended with a deep snort. He repeated it for the other nostril. Balance.

  He offered me some.

  I wanted it. When I took it I would want more. No matter how much more there was, eventually I would have to deal with coming down. I concentrated on the ashes of coming down.

  “Thanks anyway,” I said. He shrugged and helped himself again.

  “Let’s say,” Willie said, chemically inspired, “let’s say I number among my friends a congressional aide whose boss likes to make an issue of corporate abuse. Without naming names …”

  “Of course.”

  “… let’s say my friend approaches the SEC. His congressman, he says, is interested in corporate abuses of securities regs. Even that, like he wants to strengthen enforcement capability. You know, he wants to start hearings, but he needs a juicy case, something ripe.”

  “It sounds real time-consuming,” I said.

  “In a rush, are we?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Go to hell, Willie. Find a way to do it. Waltz over, use your boss’s name. Over & East is a New York corporation; the Exchange is in New York; if it affects the Apple, it’s your business.”

  “The regulatory agencies are tough. They’re insulated. You gotta, you know, coax ’em.”

  “OK, I’ll give you an easy one. To start with. I want to know who’s on the investigation. A guy named Brodsky, Mel, he has his name attached to the press stories. Find out if he’s the man. If he’s not, find out who is.”

  “You got it,” he promised. “Gimme a couple of days.”

  “Let’s do this on New York time, shall we, not D.C. time. It’s not even lunch yet. Get it for me by me end of me day.”

  “Fuck off,” he said.

  “OK, how long, Willie?”

  “As the guy on the toilet seat said,” Willie said, “as long as it takes.”

  “Don’t make me push you, ’cause I will. It wasn’t so long ago you and your man had your asses in a sling. Do it before your bottle runs dry.”

  “OK, OK, you want it, you got it.” .

  “I’m at the Watergate,” I told him. “And get me addresses, phone numbers, all that.”

  “I’ll move it as fast as I can,” he promised and shook my hand as if it meant a lot. I turned and walked away. He called out, “Hey, don’t you need a ride?” But I kept walking.

  “Take care of yourself,” he called wistfully.

  I waved over my shoulder without turning and walked down toward the river. The sky was muddy and the muddy gray river was coated with scum. The job could be routine. Not really so different than planting a little listener to prove that the unloving and unloved spouse was doing a rub-a-dub-dub and a humpty-bumpty with anonymous strangers so there would either be lots more or lots less alimony. Or than finding out the thief was inside and was the son-in-law. Or locate the runaway to find out that she should have gotten the hell out of where she ran from.

  But it could get closer to the line. I hated prisons. I understood Edgar Wood’s panic. I understood every punk in the world who sold out his friends to stay on the outside. Something ached in me to play touch and go with the line that had bars on the far side. It was the same yearning ache that lurched inside me when Willie Contact offered me the cool white cocaine. It was in my testicles and lower bowels. There was a sensation, as if the devil stood behind me. When I turned to look, there was nothing there, not even my own shadow.

  4

  THE LINE

  “THE WORKING TITLE OF my book, the new one,” Sandy explained, “is Over the Line, but only the title seems to be working at the moment, so, yes, take me away from my typewriter and tell me about Edgar Wood and I’ll help you look in restaurants.”

  The subject of her study, an inevitable one for a shrink in Washington, was why someone who had everything would risk it all committing grossly illegal acts just to attain what he obviously already had. Wood definitely fit that category. It was a wonderful coincidence. Now both of us had a completely justifiable desexed rationale for being together.

  “A question like that presupposes,” I said, “that man is rational, that crime is an aberration. That aberration is an aberration, and it’s not. It’s the real norm.”

  “Is it?” she asked. “You go over the line. But I think you do it to find out where it is. And it puts you in conflict. In a way it helps you to identify with the people you’re after. But it hurts you, because when you bring punishment, you think you should be punished too.

  “But, I bet, not your Mr. Wood. He thinks his prosecutors are persecutors. The kind of people I’m studying are people who are really making it. The eminently successful personality who, it would seem, has, or can get, everything without crossing the line. One thing that marks them: David Begelman who was head of Columbia Pictures and stealing nickels and dimes; or John Mitchell; or Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan who’s been named by Genovese family bagmen; or Ed Meese who rewards the people who lend him money with government jobs, is that none of them sees the line. Even when they’re caught, their viewpoint is that they were merely doing business as usual.”

  “You can hear that same old song from every two-bit con at Rikers or Attica, it’s no big thing.”

  “The way you go over the line,” she snapped, “most often is with women. Maybe because that’s where you don’t know there is one. But that’s boring and you’re not
the type I’m interested in.”

  Some of that wasn’t true. But I didn’t argue, a sign of wisdom and maturity.

  “Another thing,” Sandy said, still trying to transform simplicities like greed into the complexity of a personality profile, “is that they’re all overachievers. Watch out for over-achievers.”

  “Your husband,” I said. The psychologist psyched, the Freudian had slipped and it showed. We always understood each other too well.

  “We always understood each other too well,” she sighed, smiling. “Maybe I should have let you marry me.”

  “That’s why you didn’t.”

  Lawrence Choate Haven had provided me with photos of Wood. A Washington cupping service had photos of Mel Brodsky from his promotion to litigator. Sandra had made a list of the capital’s twelve most ostentatious restaurants based on my theory that no man making the kind of money Wood earned gets into a position where he has to steal $8 million unless he has the most obvious and ostentatious tastes. The maître d’ at the Four Seasons recognized Wood. I tipped what I call lavishly. He did not appear impressed.

  The maître d’ at Leone d’Or, though a little haut for my taste, put the two photos together as dinner companions. Which told me that Wood was in the D.C. area and that Brodsky was at least one of his interrogators. When I called Mr. Brodsky at the SEC he was not in, but they offered to take a message. I asked if he would be in later. They didn’t know. Tomorrow? They didn’t know, but they could take a message. I concluded that Mr. Brodsky was off, wherever they kept Wood, merrily deposing.

  Sandy drove me back to the Watergate. I expected to be dropped off, but she climbed out and let the valet take the car.

  The elevator was crowded and warm. Sandy opened her coat. In Miami, in August, the mangoes come into season. Their erotic shapes hang so heavy the branches curve down, they’re so rich and ripe, that it’s possible for a man to get an erection looking at a tree. Sandy’s breasts remind me of mango season, or vice versa, and the three middle-aged, midwestern men in the elevator practically turned corners with their eyes in a desperate search for cleavage. They had three wives who were not fruit fanciers.

  “I’ve never seen you in action before,” Sandy drawled; “you have some good moves, and I’m looking forward to more.” She topped it off with an extra swing in her walk when we stepped out. She was angry about something.

  Her anger stayed with her while she waited through my phone calls. Willie Contact had Brodsky’s address and phone number, in suburban Maryland. Willie acted like he was a hero to come up with so much.

  I called Joey D’ in New York. The man might be old, but he moves on New York time, and he would get me more by the hour than Willie did by the day. I asked him to find out what kind of wheels Brodsky had, the plate number, and his credit status. He asked me if I had seen Sandy.

  “Yes,” I admitted, looking at her.

  He grunted.

  “She’s happily married, or at least thoroughly married, and has no interest in me.” She mouthed the word “liar,” and I continued, “But she has been of great help, strictly in the investigative sense.”

  He promised to get what I needed by five and hung up.

  “A great scoundrel has reformed,” Sandy said bitterly, “and the women of the world don’t know what they’re missing.”

  “In all the time we went together,” I replied, “I never saw you angry.”

  “You never saw me married.”

  “I can understand my marriage going wrong,” I said. “I blamed it on her, of course, but I don’t think any woman would have been entirely satisfied with my attitude. You know, when she would ask which was more important, her or my work, I would actually say work. Then she would ask if I would always be true. I would say, I don’t know. Just because they were honest answers is no excuse.”

  “A great scoundrel sees the error of his ways! Da-dum da-dum!”

  “But you’re smarter than I am, and any man who got you is lucky to have you.”

  “The man that got me,” Sandy said, “sometimes thinks that marriage is a prison.”

  “Prison,” I said, “is not a metaphor. There is nothing that is like a prison.”

  “And he thinks freedom is anything under twenty-five with quick-release pants.” She glared at me. “You should understand that. That’s not far from your style.”

  “Is it gonna help if I go to bed with you,” I slapped back, “or is it gonna help if I don’t?” Then I was sorry and said, “Would it help if I told you you’re one of the most marvelous women I’ve ever met? Special. Lovely. That I want you desperately. That when you talk, I listen because I trust your intelligence. That when you left me it was ashes in my mouth. Because that’s all true. That’s the way I think of you.”

  She nodded “yes,” then she said, “Have you ever noticed that life is a damned cliché? Frankly I’m insulted by that; I thought I was too good to live a cliché.”

  “Sandy, life is worse than a cliché. It’s a country-and-western song.”

  5

  COWBOYS

  MEL BRODSKY HAD A wife, Priscilla, and two children, ages two and four. He had a six-year-old Buick and a one-year-old diesel Rabbit. The Buick was blue; the Rabbit was yellow, and he still owed money on it. He lived in an attached townhouse in a development just outside Gaithersburg, Maryland. $78,000 was still due on that.

  If he wasn’t a stay-at-home guy, he was in big trouble.

  The development was called River Oaks. I assumed that meant that it had neither, but I was wrong; there was one oak by the sign marking the entrance. The development also had a school, supermarket, rec center with two pools. It was its own little world of commuter living with a choice of garden apartments, townhouses or tract homes. It was only ten or fifteen years old, and aside from that one oak, there wasn’t a tree thicker than my thigh.

  Oak View Lane was a curlicue up a hill that ended in a cul-de-sac. Three separate flanks of attached townhouses formed a U around it. Two parking slots were assigned to each of the twenty-two homes with six extras assigned to visitor parking. It was the sort of place where a stake-out would blend into the background like a Hassid at the College of Cardinals.

  Fortunately, all the little lanes with arboreal names gathered together into one main street, and that street was the only way out. It led to the state highway. The far side was, as yet, undeveloped scrub growth.

  The next morning I was back at 5:30 A.M. with a pair of cheap binoculars, a poncho and a thermos of the strongest coffee I could get. I found myself a homey spot on a high rock hidden in the trees.

  The false dawn came at 6:30 and with it, the rain.

  I pulled the hood of my poncho up over my head as the fat drops began to drip through the branches. First they were intermittent. Then they became regular and steady. Plop, plop. Plop, plop, little thwacks on the top of my hood. Then faster and irregular. Plonk, plop. Plop, plop, plop. Plonk.

  I didn’t mind that somehow, gradually, a small puddle was gathering inside the poncho where I was sitting and that I felt like a wet-diaper baby. I didn’t mind too terribly that my shoes were not exactly waterproof and I was growing a squish inside my socks. I could live with an occasional enterprising droplet that evaded the poncho and found my eyes or neck. I was even willing to find it amusing when I had to urinate, holding up the poncho with my elbow, holding my urinator in one hand while keeping the binoculars up and pointed to the road with the other. But the plops on my head turned seconds into minutes, minutes into hours.

  Brodsky was a lazy bastard; the yellow Rabbit didn’t come out of the warren until 9:30, and I hated him for every one of the plopping 14,400 seconds of the 4 hours.

  He made up for it, slightly, by being an easy tail.

  He took 270 to the Beltway like he was going to the District but continued around the city, then took us southeast on 66 and 28, into Virginia.

  About fifteen or twenty miles out, he turned off the interstate and onto a country road. The landscape
was downright rural. I lost him around a curve and down a hill. When it straightened out and I should have seen him, there was nothing but Rabbitless road. I raced ahead, but after ten minutes all I found was a sense of being lost and too many places where he could have turned.

  There had been one narrow turnoff in the section where I lost him. I went back to it. Fifteen minutes down that road and I came out four miles from where I came in. But a detective must be dogged and determined. They didn’t call Bulldog Drummond “Bulldog” because he was short and squat. No sirree bob!

  I took the cutoff again. There were six lanes or driveways off it. The trees were thick along the shoulder and I could see only two houses. Neither of them had a yellow Rabbit.

  One of me lanes was overgrown. I turned and went cautiously into it. Hidden behind the trees was the shell of a farmhouse that had been gutted by fire, then finished off by vandals and the weather. My rental car was nicely hidden there, and I decided to check the rest of the area on foot.

  Thirty minutes and four houses later, I found the yellow Rabbit. It was nestled in beside a sleek green Jaguar with New York plates.

  The light of the day had a lean blue-gray cast. It made the yellow-tinged light from the incandescent lamps indoors seem warm, inviting and homey. It was a solid old two-story house built of stone and wood. A whiff of smoke drifted from the big stone chimney. It was a nice place to hide, and a long, long way from Attica.

  I drifted around the house, staying close to the trees. They told me, in grade school, that Indians could walk through the woods without ever, ever making a sound. Not even the crack of a dead twig underfoot. Not even a squish as they pulled their moccasins back after they sank to their ankles in the mud. Back in grade school I believed them.

  I made my way, squishing and twig snapping, up to the house’s blind side, then around under the windows to the living room.

  Wood sat hunched over. He spoke haltingly as a small tape recorder turned languid reels on the table. He sipped from a large crystal brandy snifter. After each sip he stared into the glass, looking for an answer that he knew wasn’t there. Eventually the staring took over from the talking. He sat silent. Water dripped from the eaves down my back.