The Big Law (1998) Page 15

  "Yeah, I think maybe he started out working on a story and ended up working on something else," said Broker.

  "Like what?"

  "What did Kit choke on?"

  "Hmm…," said Jeff.

  "It's about money," said Broker.

  The books were all read. The tippy-cup finished. He sat in the rocking chair with the weight of the child on his shoulder. Her vulnerable breath rose and fell against his throat, magically clean and innocent. Broker rocked and thought.

  On a night fourteen years ago, in this very room, which was smaller then, just a shack, Keith Angland showed up to go hunting without his gear. No rifle, no hunting clothes.

  "The strain is getting to her, you working all this hairy undercover stuff. You're never there. You never talk to her." And finally. "I love her and you don't," he'd said. "What you love is the action." And he'd been right. Then.

  In fourteen years, the world had turned upside down. Keith had been too rigid to bend with the times. He had cracked wide open and madness and murder had gushed out. And Broker…

  Broker rose slowly from the rocking chair, carefully balancing the sleeping baby on his shoulder, and walked the length of the spacious living room to the windows overlooking the lake. The cabin where he and Keith had their showdown over Caren was now a three-bedroom lake home.

  And it did resemble a mead hall, complete to the detail of the snarled dragon's head over the fireplace. One huge highpeaked room, pinned with beams, sited parallel to the shore. The wall that faced the lake was all thermal glass, banks of windows. Opposite the windows three bedrooms and a bath. The tall fireplace dominated one end of the long room, an open kitchen filled the other. He'd never used the big fireplace and was saving that for Christmas. Kit's toys, books, and a rocking chair sat next to an old Franklin stove raised on a dais of tile between the living room area and the kitchen. Where they lived, by the fire.

  His hideaway.

  By recent occupation, Kit's father was, by some accounts, a pirate.

  Now, like a pirate, he brooded from his granite point, down on the rising northwest wind that herded white-plumed six-foot waves into his rocky cove. When the lake whipped up, he fondly remembered illustrations in romantic books for boys: Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped or Treasure Island. Wind-swept crags. Tempest seas.

  Another issue Caren had with him. Never growing up. Chasing adventure.

  Two years ago, he had done exactly that. Now he paid his bills with a MasterCard drawn on a bank in Bangkok. For runaround cash he used a VISA attached to a numbered account at the Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong. Funds seeped via electronic interbank transfers into his account in the Grand Marais Bank, always less than $10,000 a transaction.

  Rebuilding this house called for real money, so, last year, he'd declared a half million in taxable income. Broker's nest egg was a ton of Vietnamese imperial gold bullion and ancient Cham relics, tucked in a bank vault in Hong Kong.

  Broker had found it, dug it up and smuggled it out of Vietnam. His treasure hunt had also turned up a mate. And a child. Had bought him freedom. Room to get away. But it hadn't stopped the world from coming in on him.

  He carried Kit to her crib, gently lowered her to her blankets and stuffed animals.

  What the hell. A man should be able to handle whatever was in front of him. Kill an enemy, field dress a deer, fix the plumbing, read a rectal thermometer and stay up, worried, all night, with a croupy baby.

  Back in the kitchen, he glanced at Nina's picture pinned to the bulletin board. You stayed on the Widow Maker without getting bucked off, this is your life.

  Across the length of the dark living room, the dragon glinted in tightly wound contortions against the chimney stones. And this too is your life. And there was room in his life to find out what really happened out there at the Kettle. He owed Caren that much. Two men could tell him: Keith Angland and Tom James.

  But the privateer in him counseled that something vital had been missing from the feds' news conference: Buried in this tragic human riddle there had to be a hell of a lot of money.

  28

  In the morning, after Kit was changed and fed, he dressed her in layers of Polarfleece, mittens, a scarf, hat and stuck her feet in lined, black rubber boots decorated with raised reliefs of chunky dinosaurs.

  Outside, the day was overcast, crisp. They barely cast shadows. The thermometer on the porch pointed to twentysix degrees. First, he carried her through the motions of filling the bird feeder with sunflower seeds.

  "Dees," piped Kit.

  "Right, gotta feed the dees." She liked to watch the chickadees zoom around the feeder he'd planted outside her bedroom window.

  Then, he opened the door to the workshop, let Kit waddle inside, shut the door, turned on the light and checked the bench and the floor for stray pieces of hundred-dollar bills.

  Nothing.

  Squatting, he tugged Kit's scarf down, so her face was more than an eye slit and said, "I don't suppose you want to tell me why Tom James gave you a hundred-dollar bill to choke on, do you?" Kit exuded a trickle of foggy breath. He picked her up and carried her outside.

  "Okay. Here's the thing. I dropped that chewed lump of money around here just before it snowed and we're going to find it. Ordinarily, I'd shovel the snow, but today we're going to do something different."

  Broker went into the garage and returned with a regular rake and a leaf rake. Kit sat down and began pawing at the snow. She raised a snowy mitten and tentatively touched it to her red tongue.

  Broker raked; he figured the piece of currency would look like a clip of frozen broccoli.

  "I don't really expect to find it. But if I did find it, and if I find Tom James, I'd show it to him and ask him how he thinks it got stuck in your throat."

  Kit pushed another handful of snow at her mouth. Broker paused and studied her round face.

  "It's called making a start," he explained. There was a person in there, but some of the books said kids didn't have memories from this age. She wouldn't remember choking. She wouldn't remember Tom James.

  When her mother came home at Christmas she probably wouldn't remember her, either. At least not right off. Broker went back to sifting and searching with his rake. Kit continued to eat snow.

  That's how Jeff found them when he drove up. He got out of his Bronco and said, "Why didn't I think of that instead of spending five hundred bucks on a Toro."

  "Very funny."

  "I give."

  "This is where she spit out that hunk of hundred-dollar bill."

  Jeff squinted. "As I recall, you were the lousiest investigator of the bunch. What you were good at was letting Keith talk you into carrying a raw steak into a den full of starving lions. That was more your speed."

  "I wouldn't have lost it except I had to run in the house when you started yelling."

  Jeff cleared his throat, walked over and picked up Kit. "This kid is freezing to death. Her lips are blue."

  "Don't change the subject. She's tough. Just eating snow."

  "So, what if you find it?" asked Jeff.

  "It's money."

  "Well, sure it's money," said Jeff.

  Broker stopped raking and stood up. "Keith is accused of doing some heavy-duty crime. Where's the motive? The Mafia doesn't give out merit badges. It had to be for a lot of money."

  "Hmmm," said Jeff.

  "And what did Kit choke on?"

  "I can only handle one hypothetical at a time," said Jeff. He turned, walked with Kit in his arms along the house, down to the end of the point. High waves had swept the snow from the ledge rock. Garlanded with lichens, the shiny black granite gleamed like the skulls of sperm whales. Broker came up behind him and said, "We have to find James."

  "We, huh?" Jeff repositioned Kit in his arms and said in her ear, "Once, a long time ago, your great-grandfather and my grandfather had a fishing boat and they shipped out of this cove. It was during Prohibition and times were pretty rough. Sometimes your great-grandfather would talk my
grandfather into sailing their boat up to Canada, to Thunder Bay, and picking up a load of contraband whiskey. Then they'd land it here and sell it to people who'd drive up from as far as the Cities.

  "They didn't smuggle all the time, just when times were hard. 'A little here and there,' Grandpa used to say. And it was always the Broker who talked the Jeffords into going on the little adventures. Like what your dad is trying to pull on me right now. That's how it goes, Kit. North of Grand Marais."

  He turned to Broker. "So where should we start?"

  Broker smiled. "People will talk to you. You have such an honest face. And nobody has ever heard you swear.

  Make some calls. Find out what's on that tape." "I can do that," said Jeff.

  Down the street from Grand Marais's one stoplight, Cook County housed its sheriff's department in a flat-topped, onestory cement bunker made of opaque glass brick and dirty cornmeal-colored cinder blocks. Like Truth or Consequences, the other tenant of the building was the Municipal Liquor Store.

  Broker, with Kit slung in the crook of his elbow, walked under the stark sign that said COOK COUNTY LAW ENFORCEMENT, opened the door and entered a grim antechamber. Wanted posters hung on a bulletin board. A brochure on a plastic chair invited: Join The Border Patrol.

  The smudged wall of bullet-proof glass that fronted the dispatcher's station was the only window you could see through in the whole place. An exhausted plastic Christmas wreath drooped in one corner of the window.

  Madge, the robust dispatcher, buzzed him in. He handed Kit to her. "Teach this kid to type will you, she needs to learn a trade to fall back on."

  "So you already got her college picked out, eh?" asked Madge.

  "You kidding. She's going to be a waitress in Two Harbors. Probably marry some strong-back guy who cuts pulp and lives in a trailer. That way I don't have to waste money on piano and ballet lessons."

  He continued down the cramped corridor and entered Jeff's office, which looked more like a storeroom: secondhand steel desk, industrial shelves piled with equipment and stacks of cardboard boxes.

  A topographical wall map of Cook County filled an open space between the shelves. The crude poster on the wall behind Jeff's desk was an early-generation computer graphic stamped out of a dot-matrix printer, the images formed by overprinted letters in the shape of a scoped rifle.

  The slogan under it announced:

  LONG DISTANCE: THE

  NEXT BEST THING TO BEING THERE

  RAMSEY COUNTY SWAT

  But Jeff never had the spit-shined swagger required for extended SWAT work, and the poster was more joke than nostalgia. Notations and telephone numbers were slowly filling it up.

  "God, at least paint this place," said Broker.

  Jeff grunted. "Why? The county board will only send over buckets of puke yellow paint. All they seem to have."

  "So what happened?" asked Broker.

  "John Eisenhower says hello."

  "How is John E?"

  "Keeping the beds in his new jail full. Keith's in one of them."

  Washington County Sheriff John Eisenhower had this new, overbuilt, twenty-first-century jail in Stillwater that boarded a lot of high per-diem federal prisoners.

  Jeff said, "John E feels lousy about Caren. Like everybody. He also said he talked to the marshals who brought Keith over. And this marshal said he talked to an FBI guy who talked to a lawyer in the U.S. attorney's office who saw the tape."

  "Ah," said Broker.

  "Yeah, well; it's two million bucks. The guys on the tape gave Keith two mil. Hundred-dollar bills in a suitcase. Keith apparently has been running interference for huge cocaine shipments. He also gave them a picture of an FBI snitch who'd penetrated the Russian mob. And Keith's on the tape saying he'll get rid of the snitch. That Gorski guy. The one the feds say had his tongue mailed to the Federal Building. Good sound, clear pictures. Caren hid a video

  camera in her laundry room pointing out to Keith's den in the basement."

  "Anybody hear what happened to the money?" asked Broker.

  "Nope."

  "Anybody have any idea why Caren was coming to see me with the tape?"

  "No again."

  A cry in the hall interrupted them. Madge walked in and handed an aromatic Kit to Broker, who still had the diaper bag over his shoulder. "Sorry," said Madge. "Don't do diapers at work." She left the office.

  Broker laid Kit down on Jeff's desk, removed her boots, snow pants, unsnapped her Onesie, positioned a fresh Huggies under her and pulled the tabs on the sodden one she was wearing.

  "Fierce green poop," admired Jeff.

  "Peas. She ate a lot of them last night."

  "Or Kermit the Frog met an awful fate in there," said Jeff.

  Gingerly, Broker tucked the overflowing diaper into a plastic bag, put it in the diaper bag and rigged Kit's clothes. Then sat her on his lap. She grabbed the first thing within reach, a Vietnam Era forty-millimeter grenade launcher round, used as a paperweight.

  "So, what about Tom James?" asked Broker.

  Jeff cocked his head to the side. "You remember that agent who ran the show up here, Garrison?"

  Broker nodded. "Old-style G-man."

  "I called him up, and he's at least up front about it. He says, 'Oh yeah, that guy. We don't have him. Don't even need him for chain of evidence. This Sporta flipped. And Sporta live on the stand is better than some tape. We turned James over to the U.S. Marshals Service.'

  "So I call the U.S. Marshals in Minneapolis, and these guys have no sense of humor at all. They just say, 'We're not authorized to discuss our caseload.' They gave me the number of their PR office in DC." Jeff exhaled. "Sounds like James went through the looking glass."

  "Funny, don't you think? Most reporters would kill to write a story like that. He goes into Witness Protection."

  "Most reporters don't stop a bullet. Maybe getting shot made a believer out of him," said Jeff.

  Broker scratched his chin. "But how the hell did a zero like James get on to Caren in the first place?"

  "Don't know."

  Kit dropped the grenade round. As it clattered to the floor, both men flinched. Broker picked it up, handed it to Jeff, who put it out of sight, in a drawer.

  Broker sat up in his chair. "That gray Subaru Caren drove up here. What happened to it?"

  Jeff shrugged. "Towed it in. Have it parked out back. Hertz is supposed to send somebody to pick it up. No one showed yet. Probably the holidays. Never got the keys." Jeff opened his top drawer, dug around, held up a door slip.

  The station wagon was just outside the back door. Jeff inserted the slip and unlatched the driver's side, reached over and popped the passenger door. Broker placed Kit in the back and began looking into cracks, under seats, feeling in the cushion crevices in the seats. Shards of Caren's pill bottle were scattered on the floor carpet. He picked up a triangle of plastic with the prescription label attached. Read the doctor's name: Dr. Ruth Nelson. Slipped the label in his pocket.

  Jeff opened the glove compartment. "No way," he said.

  The unwrinkled hundred-dollar bill lay on top of a neat plastic folder containing rental information. Jeff removed it and showed it to Broker.

  "This James guy seems to leak hundred-dollar bills," said Broker.

  29

  Tom traveled in a black velvet casket. That's what the inside of the U.S. Marshals Chevy van resembled; it was totally masked with black material to shut out light and sound. Part casket, part birth canal. Tom James was going to burial. Danny Storey was being born.

  Lorn Garrison and Agent Terry had said good-bye and wished him luck. The farewell was hasty, the agents were rushed; off to join the raid being mounted against Red, White and Green Pizza Parlors throughout the Twin Cities.

  Tom was touched when Agent Terry gave him his bag of workout equipment. The canvas satchel contained hand weights, leg weights, a jump rope and two hand squeezers. Tom sat in the plush van and pumped a hand spring in each fist until his forearms ached.

>   Two U.S. marshals were driving him to his intake interview. They were polite young men with short haircuts, of a lean body type; ex-military, Tom thought. They didn't wear suits like the FBI but dressed like normal people, except for the big Glock pistols under their jackets.

  The van's front seat was sealed off from the locked rear compartment physically but not visually. The marshals sitting in front could watch Tom through a pane of two-way mirror. Tom had a low camp bed, magazines, a

  CD player, earphones and a rack of CDs. A plastic cooler was stocked with ice and cans of pop. At intervals a hatch would slide open next to the mirror and one of the marshals asked how he was doing. Did he need to use the john?