It used to be you'd land at an airport in some far-flung city, someone would be there to meet you, thrilled that you had arrived. In fact, that was the reason you had flown in the first place-to actually see the people at the other end. Then age sets in, and with age comes responsibility, and with responsibility come the endless business flights to faraway places where no one particularly cares whether you've arrived in town or not. The only welcoming face is usually that of a reception clerk at the hotel, who asks for your credit card and sullenly punches your name into a computer before assigning you to one of the several hundred identical rooms upstairs. For me, it has gotten to the point that even when I arrive back in Washington from a long trip, there usually isn't even anyone who knows I'm coming home. It may not be a cruel world, but it can be a cold one.
I bring this up because as I stepped off the American Airlines flight from O'Hare to National at 8:30 P.m. Saturday and headed outside for a cab, a familiar female voice said from behind me, "Come here often?"
I turned slowly, not wanting to make a general jackass out of myself in case, as I suspected, the woman was actually talking to someone else.
There, walking two paces in back of me, was Samantha Stevens, special agent with the FBI.
"Only when I travel," I said. She flashed me a plastic smile and I asked, "You pulling into town or heading out?"
"Neither. I came to give you a lift." I must have looked a bit startled because she said soothingly, "I'm going to buy you dinner, whether you want it or not."
In fact, I did, even if she may have been the last person I expected to see, making the last offer I expected to receive. It seemed like a good idea. My mind was about to explode, there was so much going on in it. I needed to give it a rest before I briefed Havlicek and Martin the following morning. On the flight back to D.c." I had made a series of calls to lawyer contacts and some police detectives I knew from my days on the Boston crime beat. I didn't learn nearly enough, but what I did learn was interesting. Black, in the words of one veteran investigator, was a Tom Sawyer type, a gang leader who could convince the others to whitewash the fence while he sat back and watched. He had a college education and was widely known on the streets for his brains and his gregariousness-his ability to get along with crooks and to talk his way out of trouble with cops. He was believed to be without a gun on the occasion of the heist, which would perhaps explain why the feds granted him immunity, certain that he couldn't have been the triggerman. His lack of practice might also explain why he was such an awful shot at the golf course that day, assuming that it was him. And yes, he had brown eyes, just like the dead shooter at Congressional Country Club.
What I hadn't learned was where Black had gone and who he had become, and it didn't seem like I was about to. No one even acknowledged that he had disappeared.
That left me with one remaining option: find Paul Stemple. He was the link in this whole equation that I didn't yet understand-not that I understood any of it all that well. The problem was, it wasn't even remotely clear where I was going to find him, or even how I was going to find him. All of this is a longer than necessary way of saying, a friendly face, a piece of fresh fish, and an ice-cold beer seemed like just the quick fix I needed.
"How in God's name did you know I was coming in tonight?" I asked.
"We have our ways," she said, smiling. I made a mental note to check on those ways in the very near future.
"Well, name the place," I said.
"Kinkead's," she said. "Do you have your car here? I cabbed over."
"I do."
We made incredibly vacuous chitchat on the way to the restaurant-the exact kind of conversation I like most. Once inside, she settled gracefully into the booth, sliding her lean body in and then crossing her long legs under the table. She wore her black hair tied back in a low ponytail, scrunched at the end by a small nondescript band. I had never seen her with that look before, and I'm probably not the first to say that she looked ravishing. Put those feelings away right now, I told myself.
We ordered some seafood ravioli and a plate of Ipswich fried clams to start, and I suggested-actually demanded-that she try the pepita-crusted salmon, the signature dish of owner Bob Kinkead. She did.
More chitchat until we both fell quiet as she spooned some clams and a ravioli off the appetizer plates and onto hers. She took a bite, exclaimed her approval in a sound I hoped to hear someday in a different venue, and gave me a searching look.
Out of nowhere, she said, "The only point I want to make before we get too far into dinner is that we need to have a working relationship. I don't know how else to say it other than being direct, so here goes: what I want now is to work with you. That's all I want right now."
Oh, my. There were about a million ways to read that little declaration, and being a guy, I probably wasn't in an effective position to properly interpret even one of them. My first take was that this was good news. She flatly stated that she wanted a working relationship, and she had a better understanding of the ground rules under which I work, meaning she needed to continue to bring something valuable to the exchange. This was good. My second take was that she seemed to be saying she wanted no personal relationship, given the way she specifically emphasized working relationship. That said, third, she indicated she only wanted a working relationship right now, which could be her way of saying we should get this investigation out of the way before we go off and have sex like two angry wolves in the snowy Montana wilderness. Or something like that.
"I'm all for working together." I was obviously playing this safe, never having been one to foreclose prematurely any options.
"Good," she said. "I hear you have some interesting stuff, and by my count, you owe me from the last time."
"Really? What is it you hear?"
She gave me a smile that I wasn't sure how to read.
"Word in our shop is that you and your colleague are on the verge of springing another major story. There's a lot of speculation over what it might be, though I don't think anyone pretends to know for certain."
She paused and eyed me, searching, I'm sure, for reaction. I didn't betray any, so she continued.
"Of course, the hope is that you guys do a story that might answer the question of who the Secret Service shot that day at the golf course."
I still didn't say anything. This was an odd turning of tables for me.
Usually, I'm the one prodding, evaluating, trying to elicit any reaction. After years of watching people squirm across from me, I think I came equipped with at least some idea how to carry myself right then. I tried not to bat an eye.
I said, "We're working hard, Havlicek and me. We're getting some leads, and we're following them. But we're not where we want to be yet. Right now, we don't have a story, just a lot of ideas."
I know I was starting to sound like all those jackass cops I had covered all those years, the ones who would say of a sensational quadruple murder case, "We're assembling the forensic, eyewitness, and circumstantial evidence and continuing to pursue further leads. We will solve this case on our timetable, not yours."
We locked eyes for a long moment, not in any intimate fashion-this was, after all, the renewal of a working relationship, as she herself had said-but in an attempt to size each other up. To that end, I contorted my mouth ever so slightly to project the aura of sincerity.
She said, "Well, you boys better put a move on it, or you're going to let a whole bureau of federal agents down." She smiled, and so did I.
I regarded her for another moment. Samantha Stevens looked outright elegant, in an unfailingly wholesome kind of way-an athlete who will forever retain her physical grace. She had barely a trace of makeup on the perfect lines of her cheeks. The bags under her eyes, as I've said, betrayed that she had nary a worry in the world about the ravaging affects of age. Every other characteristic screamed eternal youth.
She seemed unusually poised on this Saturday night, confident, comfortable, able to enjoy the food and the company and still try to accomplish what I was learning was her goal: to leave with more information than she had when she arrived. Looking at her, I had the inclination to rest my hand on top of hers, even for a moment.
Instead, I pulled a piece of crusty homemade bread from the basket, took a bite, and said, in a manner intended to goad, "Why don't you tell me what you have?"
She smiled at that, too. "By my calculation, it's your turn."
"I think you've miscalculated." As I talked, she took a piece of bread from the basket herself and playfully bit into it. "Sam, we're actively pursuing a story. I've told you that. We have what we hope are some good leads, but I don't know yet if they're going to pan out.
My sense is, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you're not in as active a stage as I am, so it might be better if you helped me rather than vice versa, or at least went first in this exchange."
Truth is, I have no idea about the fundamental logic of this argument.
The salient fact to take away is that it marked the first time since I'd known Samantha Stevens that I addressed her as Sam, and that, to me anyway, meant that a significant bridge had been crossed, even if I was yet to learn where exactly that bridge had taken me. Score one for Jack, even if no one was actually keeping score.
She seemed to think all this over, perhaps even the Sam part. I don't know. As she stared at points unknown, our waiter arrived with our entrees and set them down before each of us. Sam looked her salmon over carefully.
"I guarantee you'll like it," I said. "If you don't, I'll take you home and microwave up some Swedish meatballs."
Opening her eyes wide in horror at the idea, she said, with mock panic,
"I'm sure I'll like it."
After her first bite, she did that exclamation thing again, saying,
"Oh, my God. This is unbelievable."
"You like?" I asked.
"I love."
Bob Kinkead stopped by the table in full chef's regalia, telling me he'd been watching me on television, and I didn't look as bad as he would have thought. After he left, I gave Stevens a nod, as in, Let's continue.
She said, "Here's what I'm learning about Drinker. He answers only to the director, while I still answer to about two other layers of management. Drinker doesn't speak to my bosses. I can't speak to the director. Drinker barely speaks to me." She hesitated for a second, then said, "And here's the interesting part. I know he and the president talk on the phone all the time-almost every day. I saw Drinker's call logs."
"Would that be so unusual, an investigating agent talking regularly to the victim of the crime?"
"Well, this is no normal crime, and no normal victim. I'll concede, we've only had two presidential assassination attempts since JFK was killed-Squeaky Fromme shooting Ford in seventy-five, and Hinckley shooting Reagan in eighty-one. So there's not exactly a lot of precedent or an FBI manual on how to handle this. But come on, you don't think it's bizarre, an agent and the president talking regularly about the investigation?"
I said, "You know, I was in the Oval Office last week when Hutchins got a call on a line that said "FBI." He was pretty abrupt with the caller, said he'd talk to him later. In retrospect, it could have been Drinker. But why wouldn't they speak regularly?"
"Well, they might. But put this in perspective. The president's a busy guy. He's trying to win an election. He doesn't need constant contact with the investigator on the case. If he did want regular updates, he'd be more likely to get them from the FBI director. We're pretty big on the chain of command over there. And it's not like this has been a textbook investigation, I seem to remember reading a few stories on the front page of the Boston Record that indicated we were fucking this thing up nine ways from hell."
There's that profanity thing again that turns me on. We both fell quiet, thinking about what Stevens just said. By now, the entrees were done and our waiter had delivered two orders of chocolate dacquoise with cappuccino sauce, and two glasses of port, which he pronounced to be a twelve-year-old Cockburn. Very nice.
I said to Stevens, "Okay, I concede the point. It is unusual those two would be talking as much as you say they are."
She took a bite of the dacquoise and declared she was on her way to heaven. She looked rail thin, yet packed down food like there would be bread lines come morning. She'd make a wonderfully expressive bedmate, I thought, if her partner could live up to the standard set by Bob Kinkead.
She said, "Not to force the issue, but let's put work aside for a while and see if we can chat like two regular human beings."
Truth be known, I still wasn't 100 percent confident that this wasn't some scheme, that Drinker and my new friend Sam weren't conspiring to set me up, playing off each other to learn the existence and the identity of my anonymous informant. I was either getting a remarkable window into the inner workings of a major FBI investigation, or rather an FBI civil war, or I was being played for a farm animal again.
"That sounds good, but just one more thing," I said. "Does Drinker ever bring up this point about the phone call in the hospital room anymore?"
"No, though I have to admit, I'm still curious."
Interesting answer. I decided to take a modest risk. "The name Black mean anything to you in this investigation?"
She looked at me blankly. Either it meant nothing, or she was one terrific actress. She shook her head thoughtfully and said, "Not a thing. Should it?"
My question was designed to accomplish two goals: first, see if, in fact, I did get any response, and second, to gauge in the future whether she had gone and passed this information to Drinker.
I said, "Probably not. Just scratching at dirt."
"No, really. What do you have?"
"Really, nothing solid," I said.
We both sat in silence for a while, sipping our port, collecting our thoughts. She began making small talk, about her first Thanksgiving since her divorce, her driving desire for a Caribbean vacation, her raves about my four-legged blond friend Baker. It became all very casual, breezy, floating on the surface, like a water lily, making no waves, just how I usually like it. Still, here I was, looking for meaning within, and this conversation exposed none of it. We tossed down another glass of port before I paid the bill with my trusty Record'-issued Visa card. I briefly thought of Martin checking the bill, asking me if the clams were fried in liquid gold. We made our way down the stairs.
For the rest of time, I'll always remember precisely where I was when the events of the next few minutes began to unfold all around me.
Actually, it's not as glamorous as it sounds. I was standing right in front of the coat check. I had just found my stub and handed it to the woman when Samantha, who was behind me, suddenly wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed her mouth against my ear.
My first thought was that the second glass of port had kicked in, inspiring an understandable fit of passion, such that she couldn't keep her hands and lips off me. Then I heard her whisper something, and my second thought was to tell her, "Huh? I can't hear you." Good social graces kept that thought in check as I replayed her words in my mind:
"Eric-you're my boyfriend."
An agile mind is an amazing thing. Take, for example, mine. I couldn't figure out why she was suddenly calling me Eric, and when exactly I had become her boyfriend-not that I was complaining just yet. I was confused. Then, amid my mental calisthenics, it struck me, within seconds, that her ex-husband, Eric, was probably in the restaurant, and she wanted to do a little role-playing. Well, so much for her fit of passion, but I'd take whatever I could get.
"Eric," she called out. "How are you?" She kept one arm wrapped tightly around me, such that when the nice coat check woman delivered our coats, I had to maneuver my arms around Samantha to accept them.
My back was still to all the action, but I heard a somewhat nasally voice say, "Hey there, Sam. God, this is so great to see you."
I turned around to see a pretty-looking man with blow-dried hair and a dapper red pocket square in a navy blue suit come walking over, his white teeth blazing all over the room. He was tan in November, which explains more than I can describe. He looked to be the type of guy who always got along better with women than men.
"Eric, this is Jack. Jack Flynn." As she said this, she rubbed the back of her hand affectionately against the side of my arm. I thought she was overdoing the lovey-dovey act a bit but didn't think it was my place to say anything. I held out my hand cheerily to shake Eric's, and he gave me an oddly limp-wristed shake. I held in check my desire to call him a pussy.
"Very nice to meet you," I said.
"Same," he said, somewhat dismissively, his eyes drifting back to those of his former wife. I'm not precisely sure why, but I had the urge to punch him in the mouth. Worry not: good manners prevailed once again.
Meanwhile, Samantha was now running her hand up and down my back as we all stood there. Eric turned away for a moment and said, "Hey, Julia, Julia sweetie. Look who's here. Come on over and say hello to Sam."
Up walked an extraordinarily attractive blonde in a skirt so short I wasn't sure if I had accidentally been transported into some sort of adult entertainment lounge.
Eric again: "Sam, do you remember Julia? Julia, this is Sam. You guys met at Nordstrom's that day."
As I stood there, Mr. Manners didn't bother introducing me, and I wasn't sure if it was by intention or stupidity. Finally I stuck my hand out and said, "Julia, I'm Jack Flynn. Nice to meet you." Then I took my hand and softly ran it down Samantha's cheek, the very feel of her skin making my head go light.
Samantha took my hand in hers and kissed it softly. Here I was, thinking I was doing good. I was certainly feeling good. Samantha pulled my hand down to her side, squeezing it with what I first thought was sincere affection. Then I felt her sharp nails dig into my skin, and I almost yelped and jumped in pain. Luckily, I have the discipline of a Marine, and I maintained my smile.
"Coming or going?" I said to Eric.
He just kind of looked at me as if he had forgotten I was there. Maybe the complexity of the question caught him off guard. Julia said, "Just coming. We're going to get a bite to eat at the bar." She seemed nice enough, if not a little daffy, which is maybe what I mean by nice enough.
Samantha absently leaned into me, her body feeling warm and wonderful against mine, even if I was now gin-clear on what a charade this was.
She said to Eric, "We don't want to hold you up. We just had a great dinner upstairs and are hurrying out. I'll see you around." She laughed and said, "Seems like we're doing more and more of that."
Proper, mature farewells were made, though I'm not sure if Eric ever addressed one to me. Julia did, though, andwitha smile, creating a kind of bond as the two appendages in this little scene. Outside, on the sidewalk, I said to Samantha, "You almost scratched the skin off my hand."
She laughed in a distracted way and said, "You seemed to be taking advantage in my moment of need." She wasn't quite as flustered as I thought she might have been. Actually, she seemed to be relieved that things had gone this well, especially after that Nordstrom's debacle she had described.
I said, "Sorry about that." I left the intention of my apology vague, whether it was for her running into her former husband, or for my somewhat coarse attempt at physical engagement.
"Apology declined." She said this as she stood facing me, unusually close. The night was cold, the street crowded with cars, the valets bustling back and forth-all of it creating a blur of peripheral motion, even as my eyes focused hard on Samantha, standing in front of me, her face cold and pink and shiny. I could never precisely explain the hints I got, whether they were from her words, her tone, her posture, or her proximity, but inexplicably I placed my hand on her forehead, brushed her hair softly, then let my fingers run down her cheek. She glided closer to me without ever seeming to move, and before I could even think about what was happening, she placed her warm lips fully against mine and kept them there for what could have been an eternity. She pulled back slightly, and I opened my eyes to see hers still closed, her face inches away. So I put my lips on hers again, a kiss that was hard and soft, passionate and affectionate, all at the same time.
Then she pushed me away gently in an almost helpless manner and said,
"There's a cab right here. It's better if I just leave." She turned and walked slowly to the curb. As she settled into the taxi, she looked back and gave me an odd, even goofy wave and a smile. I stood on the sidewalk until all I could see were the taillights of her car driving down Pennsylvania Avenue, and I thought, my God, this finally feels like something called home.
As I pulled out my keys on my darkened front stoop, there was a noise from inside the house that I wasn't used to: the sound of someone talking. I froze and strained to hear, but all I could decipher was a low, barely audible mumble. I leaned over the railing to look in the window, but the shutters were drawn closed, as I had left them this morning. I could see a light was on, but that would make sense, given that Kristen had been supposed to drop Baker off earlier in the night.
I strained harder to hear, thinking it might be Kristen inside, but it sounded more like a male voice.
Another voice filled my mind. There are people who would kill rather than see you get to the bottom of this story. You are in danger.
Imminent danger.
A good warning. In the past ten days I had been struck by gunfire, shot at unsuccessfully, punched, and stalked. It was coming up toward eleven-thirty. The only sound was the gentle rustle of crinkled leaves in the chill wind of a late autumn night. There were no passersby, no moon, no lights on in any of the neighbors' houses. Inside mine, the sound droned on.
It could be a stereo, but it certainly didn't sound like it. Kristen may have left the television on for the dog, though she had never done that before. I admit, I had no idea what it was. I just knew it was something unusual, and right now, the unusual was not going to be good.
You are in danger. Imminent danger.
I thought about slipping back toward my car and calling the police from my cellular telephone. This being Washington, though, it might be a while before they arrived. And it struck me in a wave of panic that if Kristen had dropped Baker off as she said she would, then he was inside with God only knows who. And if the police arrived, it seems one of the first things they always do is shoot the dog. So standing there in frozen silence on the stoop of my own house, I realized I had to handle this myself.
The mind, as I've said, is a funny thing. Miraculously, I remembered that I had left a pair of old pruning shears beside the stoop, in my little patch of a garden in front of my house. I slowly, silently walked down the two stairs, hunched down in the dark, and found them protruding from a pile of ancient, soggy leaves. I at least had a weapon now-maybe not something the NRA would be proud of, but a weapon nonetheless.
With the shears in hand, I stepped cautiously back up on the stoop. I pushed the key into my lock, moving with what I pictured to be the precision of a German surgeon. I strained to hear the voice, making sure it didn't waver or get closer, and I could detect no movement or change. It was a goddamned monotone. What the hell it was, I had no idea. The key pushed all the way in. All I had to do was snap the lock open and burst into the door.
With the key in the lock and the breeze blowing on my neck, I briefly weighed my options one more time. I knew, inherently, that charging into my own house with a garden tool as my only shield was probably not the smartest thing I would ever do. Hopefully it wouldn't be the last.
My mind raced through what I might find inside: some shadowy mastermind of a presidential assassination attempt. Perhaps Assistant Director Drinker. Maybe, in the best case scenario, my anonymous source. Probably some nameless thug ready to carry out someone else's dirty work. But I knew, standing here, that I really had no choice. I wasn't going to leave a helpless dog inside to fend for himself. I had brought myself into this whole situation. The dog was just an innocent bystander.
So without more thought, and perhaps without enough thought, I snapped the lock, threw the door open, and burst inside, holding the shears ahead of me in a way that would allow me to stab anyone in the neck who posed any danger. For a fleeting moment of dangerous glory, I felt like Don Johnson.
"Freeze," I yelled.
The warm air of the house hit me in the face. So did the unmistakable smell of Fritos. Sitting on my couch with his feet on the coffee table and my telephone up to his ear, Steve Havlicek calmly said, "Hold on one second, honey." To me: "Boy, am I glad I'm not some overgrown bush."
At the same time, Baker bolted up from a sound sleep, squinted toward the rear of the house, and ran into the kitchen, barking at the back door. Wrong way, pal. I made a mental note to get his ears flushed out.
I let the shears fall to my side, closed the door behind me, and said breathlessly, "What the flying fuck are you doing in here?"
Havlicek said into the phone, "Honey, I'm sorry. I've got to run.
Jack just got in. Seems a bit out of sorts. Yeah. Yeah. I'm at his place. Yeah, we just have to have a chat. Tell Mary I said I'll make it back for her playoff game. Good. Yeah. I love you too."
He hung up the phone, pulled a few Fritos out of the bag beside him, took a sip from a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and said, "Howaya, slugger?"
"How am I? Jesus Christ, I'm almost dead from a fucking heart attack.
How the hell did you get in here?"
"Just a little trick I learned from my days growing up in Dorchester.
You don't have a deadbolt on your back door. You might as well just leave the thing open with a sign that says "Come on in, but bring your own beer.""
By now, Baker had trotted back out into the living room with a confused look on his face. I knelt down and rubbed behind his ears, relieved that he was all right.
"You scared the hell out of me," I said to Havlicek.
"Sorry about that. Hey, before you sit, grab yourself a beer. I've got some Pabst in the fridge. We've got to talk." As I walked into the kitchen, he called after me, "Grab me another too."
I didn't think anyone drank Pabst anymore, though I noticed I was now the owner of a case of it. Of course, I didn't think anyone outside of grade school ate Fritos either, so I guess I had a lot to learn.
As I slumped down into a chair with a can of beer, Havlicek held out the bag of Fritos in front of my face.
"No, thanks," I said.
"No, really, try some. I bought the pounder."
"No, really, I don't want any."
"You eat dinner?" he asked.
"Where do you think I'm coming from?"
"Good point," he said. He seemed to consider this for a moment, opened his fresh beer, though I don't know if you can ever really call a Pabst fresh, and said, "We've got to talk."
My heart was still pumping, which might explain my frustration. I said, "I thought that's why you were here."
"Right. I'm dying to know what you learned."
Given all the bullets flying around over the last week or so, I didn't particularly like his description. But I put that aside and walked him through every crucial detail of my trip. I told him of the Pigpen, of my discussions with Sammy Markowitz, of the cryptic remarks by Diego Rodriguez, of my deduction about the federal witness protection program, and the confirmation that Markowitz provided.
"So we've got an armored car robber by the name of Curtis Black in the federal witness protection program," I said. "We're told we need to find out his relationship with the president that was just shot.
Black's a fellow crook of a guy by the name of Paul Stemple. Stemple's pardoned by the president in the middle of a campaign season."
That summary was followed by a moment of thoughtful silence. Well, almost silence, and probably not all that thoughtful. Havlicek kept crunching on Fritos and swigging his beer. Baker was on the floor between us, snoring. I mulled over our immediate future.
"I know a thing or two about the witness protection program, having covered some issues within it a couple of years ago," Havlicek said.
"It's a hell of a well-run government operation. It began about twenty-seven years ago when the feds were trying to bust La Cosa Nostra, and they couldn't break the code of silence. It ends up, it wasn't that these mob underlings were so loyal. It's just that they were scared for their lives. Since then, the marshals have protected about 7,500 witnesses, most of whom, like Curtis Black, are themselves criminals. It's not a squeaky-clean process. It's not even a pretty one. But everyone familiar with it tells me it works."
Havlicek was on a roll and kept going. "The way it goes is, if you have something worthwhile, you cut a deal with the FBI to enter the program. Before a trial, you're given intense protection, typically in some safe house or a hotel suite. You're brought to the grand jury or to court with an army of agents around you. Once you do your thing, or once the other side pleads guilty because they know you're waiting in the wings to testify, that's it, you're given your freedom and a different identity, and you go off and become someone entirely new."
Havlicek looked at me. "Literally, Jack Flynn would cease to exist.
Your house would be sold along with just about everything in it. Your dog would be given a new home. You'd pack up a few personal things, some clothes and the like, and the marshals would cart you off in some armored van to a national complex over in suburban Virginia. You get to pick the region of the country where you want to move. They'll help you buy a new house or pay for a new apartment. They might help you with some job retraining and the like so you can get work. They'll get you started on getting new identification, like a Social Security card and a driver's license. You come up with your own personal history, some story of who you are and where you're from. And that's it, suddenly you're out on your own, a whole new person. I'm told that only about three people in the entire marshal's service ever get to learn your new identity-that's how closely held the secret is."
"So the odds of us learning who Black became and where he went are not exceedingly good," I said.
More crunching. He said, "Except for the obvious. Suppose Black is actually dead now. Suppose he's the one sitting in that morgue, the unsuccessful assassin. Suppose it looks like the feds gave a free pass to some armored car robber more than twenty years ago, supplied him with money and a whole new life, and he turns into some sort of presidential assassin."
"The damned question is, why does some robber flunky from Chelsea, Massachusetts, end up shooting at the president, especially after he's taken a ride on the federal gravy train. How does point A lead to point B? And what's the role of Paul Stemple?"
Havlicek replied, "Maybe it was a hired hit. Maybe the guy's in the program. He's settled into his new life. He's working in some menial job, not making the money he was used to making when he was hitting banks and Brink's trucks back in the early eighties. And along comes this offer. Or maybe he seeks it out. You know, calls his old contacts. Maybe it's so good it makes him rich for life."
From the limited knowledge I had of Black, it didn't sound like him.
Here was a guy who was always the ringleader, always gliding above the fray, letting others do the dirty work, telling them how to do it but never doing it himself. He was smart, savvy, even worldly. No, he wouldn't be the type to pick up an automatic rifle and take that kind of risk at Congressional just for the cash. He was smart enough to find another way.
"He's too sharp," I said. "He's a chief, not an Indian. He's not going to get his hands dirty like that for the cash."
Havlicek washed down most of a mouthful of corn chips with a pull of beer and said, "Well, maybe he really wanted this president to be dead for some reason."
"That's what bothers me," I said. "And that's what gets to the point of my anonymous friend, who seems to think that if we find out about the relationship between Black and the president, we'll know why this shooting occurred. That's the crux right there, isn't it? And it seems like stating the obvious to say it must have something to do with Stemple, or Stemple's pardon must be some way involved, no?"
Havlicek nodded.
I said, "I know this is all conjecture, but if you play this out a little further, can you assume that the FBI is covering up the identity of the shooter out of raw embarrassment that one of their witnesses went off and made a mockery of them by trying to kill the president? I mean, if something like that gets public, they're going to have the news media and congressional oversight investigators up one side of the program and down the other, and their secrecy is pretty much blown forever. Maybe the program itself is even lost in the media maelstrom.
"So our immediate mission now," I concluded, "is to find Paul Stemple, and find him fast. There's an election at stake in this, and that gives us two days. We find him, we get some answers."
"And on that point," Havlicek said, in a newly dramatic tone, "we're in some luck."
I shot him a curious look. He pulled out his ancient wallet, shuffled through a collection of cards and old papers, and pulled out a small sheet. He flicked his finger against it and added, "When you first told me about Stemple and the pardon last week, I did a little research on him. I don't like coincidences. I suspected his name might come back into this story."
"So what do you have?" I asked, impressed and embarrassed that I hadn't thought the same way.
"Well, I had to go to hell and back to get this, but I think I have a line on where Stemple is living now, and I think it's right here in D.c. I got ahold of his Social Security number through a contact I have. I used that to nail some of his bank records. I found out that he made some recent withdrawals in Washington. I got some gnome in the Pentagon to tell me he was a Korean War vet, and that he stopped at a local VA hospital last week. I canvassed some short-term real estate brokers on Capitol Hill, where one of the withdrawals was made, and one guy told me he rented an apartment to him. Some skill, some luck." He made a motion to stand up, first placing the nearly empty bag of Fritos from his lap onto the coffee table. "So next stop: his house."
As he stretched his back, Havlicek added, "Jesus Christ. We have a member of the federal witness protection program, Curtis Black, who is in some way involved in an assassination attempt. We have someone taking shots at you. We have a senior FBI official providing us information devastating to his agency. And we have some anonymous source who seems to have all the world's information in the palm of his hand. One quick question: who plays me in the movie?"
I replied, "I don't know. Ernest Borgnine?"
"Screw you. He's about fifty pounds heavier than me. And isn't he dead?"
He ambled off to the kitchen with a few empty cans, calling out, "Give Martin a quick call and let him know you're all right. The guy was a train wreck today."
The hour was late, but Martin picked up on the first ring, as if once again he had been waiting by the phone. I gave him the update on my trip and progress, let him know we were heading out, and told him we'd gather in the morning.
"Boston's all over me to get something good in print," he said, referring to the editors. "Concentrate on a quick-but good-turnover.
Meantime, I'll hold them off as long as I can, until we know we're ready to pop."
On his point about Boston breathing down our necks, there is a tendency in this business for the editors back at the main office to think that all us overpaid layabouts down in the Washington bureau are doing little more than waddling over to the Palm for lunch and Morton's for dinner, and in between tapping into the capital's vast public relations machine to be spoon-fed press releases on the latest triumphs of our elected officials. These same God-fearing editors believe that any time we choose, we can simply call up the White House and get the president on the line, or trundle over to the J. Edgar Hoover Building and have FBI commanders invite us into their offices and open up their active case files for us to peruse, all in the name of the public's right to know. Well, Washington reporting is hard work, and what we needed now was persistence and patience-two qualities that Martin understood, God bless him.
When I hung up, I looked at the clock and saw that it was edging past midnight. My day had begun long before dawn. I wasn't so much tired as physically and mentally demolished. My ribs hurt, and so did my head. Yet it was time to forge on. I was not going to be the guy to hold up this story. Quite the contrary, if Havlicek had a lead, I wanted to follow it.
As we gathered some notebooks and coats, Havlicek asked, "You ever think about what you'd do if you suddenly came into a couple of million dollars? Would you stay in the business? Would you work late at night like this, go through all the deadline stress that we have, all the thankless bullshit? Or would you just kick back and live a life of leisure?"
"What, you just find out you're an heir to the throne of Poland, and they want you to come home and live in the castle?" I asked.
He gave me a look out of the corner of his eye, otherwise ignoring my question. He said, "I get two million bucks, I wouldn't change anything. This whole thing is too much fun." They were the most introspective words I had ever heard him say. Then he added, "Let's go."
"I'll drive," I said.
On the sidewalk, he said, "De Niro."
"What?" I asked.
"De Niro. I bet they get De Niro to play me."
I said, "What, you on heroin? Try Leslie Nielsen."
He smiled and shook his head, this man unlike any other I had ever known.