Glass House (24 page)

“A secretary. At one time, in any event. Got
herself in trouble with management, and we helped her find a way to
get herself out of that trouble.”

“By fucking me.”

“In a word.”

Rupert found his cigarettes again. He lit
one. He was patient, cupping the small flame of the match in his
hands, pulling the smoke in, shaking the match out. That, too, went
into his pocket.

He leaned against the wall, studying the man
on the bed.

“What do you want?” Ariacht asked when he
could take the staring and silence no longer.

“Peter’s pence.” Rupert’s voice was soft,
cut off a little. He was holding the smoke in, tasting it and his
words at the same time.

“What the devil is –”

“Tribute,” Rupert interrupted. He blew a
cloud out.

“Didn’t you get enough from me when you took
my shipment?”

Rupert smiled in the hanging haze from his
cigarette.

“I knew it was your doing,” Ariacht went on.
“I knew Laurentian was behind it, even before we heard fully what
happened.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, that was the point,”
Rupert replied. “We wanted you to know, and we weren’t hiding it at
all from you, because the shipment wasn’t to pay us,
Voorsitter
. We took it to send a message because you
didn’t
pay us. Just like we’ll take the next shipment, or
the one after that, or whichever one we choose, from you or anyone
else we want.”

“You’ll get nothing from me.”

The Laurentian superintendent smiled again.
“You’ve actually got nothing to give right now. But tomorrow or
next week? That’s a different story, with a different line no doubt
to come from you.”

“Nothing, no matter what I have. Hear me?
Not for you, not for Laurentian.”

Ariacht summoned his courage and rose from
the bed, wrapping the blanket around him and moving carefully. The
three armed men in the room adjusted their positions and sightings,
weapons not lowering.

Watching him, Rupert thought he looked like
a Roman, stepping up in the Senate to offer a speech. A Roman like
Caesar, perhaps, on that last day there.

“Your employer was nothing,” Ariacht was
saying. “You know it as well as I do. His own employers hired guns,
they couldn’t control them, and now they’ve lost the mine to the
very guns they bought. But I will not go like they did. I won’t go
the way of Dennis Sullivan. Whatever it was that you or anyone else
like these men” – here he offered a sweep of his arm at the
others in the room – “did with him.”

Rupert wasn’t listening. He was thinking of
the Renoir in the hall. For whatever reason, he was considering the
blotchy but beautiful figures of the women in the painting, the
darker figures of the men with them.

“Peter’s pence,” he said. “Your tribute is
due, and you’ll pay what we demand. Or you’ll pay the price for not
doing so.”

Ariacht was a seventy-year-old man, naked
and wrapped in his blanket, but he drew himself up to his full
height. His chest swelled.

“I’ll pay you not a goddamn thing.”

Rupert’s gaze didn’t leave him. The second
Rothman was gone, and he stubbed it out on the wall as well, in
another black blotch. It joined the burned-out refuse in his
pocket.

“Won’t your wife and daughter be proud of
you,” he said to the man standing before him, then he added to the
others, “Gather him up.”

The men descended.

Warrant

The man waiting in the federal courtroom had
a plain name, Thomas Smith, and a plain title, Assistant United
States Attorney. He was one of ten in his office, all assistant
attorneys to the U.S. Attorney, a political appointee who by his
own admission hadn’t seen a courtroom in fifteen years and, by
popular and likely-true rumor, had never seen one at all.

Smith wasn’t a lifer. Those were rare in the
outer environs of Justice Department offices, away from D.C. In
those non-District places, people took government positions to fill
résumés with impressive credentials they could take down the street
one day and cash in for starting salaries of six figures per year.
They didn’t sign up to change the world.

If you were par in the U.S. Attorney’s
office, you got your position either through stellar grades or
better-than-stellar connections. You would do your time, pushing
paper on most days and running your ass off on a lot of others.
You’d prosecute a handful of cases in your first year, step up as
your colleagues around you bailed out or those above you hit their
money opportunities, and get roped into too many pieces of criminal
or civil litigation to reasonably tend.

You worked seventy-hour weeks at a minimum,
and seventy hours would turn into 120 without your even realizing
it. You’d eat like crap, slugging down coffee and fast food more
often than not. You wouldn’t sleep nights because your work would
catch you in the middle of a dream and shake you by the neck to
remind you of the mountains of paper that were waiting when you got
to the desk at six-thirty the next morning.

And at least once a month, for a period from
two to five days, depending on how crazy the world was at the
moment, you would spend your time running search warrants to the
United States District Court for the District of – in Smith’s
case – Kansas, whenever the enforcement divisions asked you to
do it. Just as the plain-named Tom Smith waited now, you’d sit
until you could ask the judge to sign the stack you had, then get
back to the office just long enough to collect a few more and march
to the court again.

Sixty-one. That was Smith’s personal record,
a Roger Maris number he hoped wouldn’t be broken. At least not by
him.

He did that over four visits in a single
day, handing the five-plus dozen warrants one-by-one to the federal
judge, who dutifully cast an eye on each for a few seconds, as
though he could read the pages in a blink and comprehend them
flawlessly. Sixty-one signatures over that day, until the judge
finally told him to go the hell away.

And Smith did. He brought the next
twenty-two the day after. They were signed. He went the hell away
again, at least until the next month the task fell to him.

The AUSAs did work like that, and all the
rest of it, and then they took their shots at private practice.
They tacked the real benefit of their government time – that
plain label of “Assistant United States Attorney” – onto their
records so everyone could see it and be duly impressed. And they
collected some dough for a change.

Smith’s plan was two more years. He’d be in
for five by that time, overlapping two different U.S. Attorneys.
That’d show he had legs and could survive change.

“Two years,” he whispered to himself.

He was slouched in a bench behind the bar in
the courtroom. The room, in a beige, Kansas City federal courthouse
that was relatively new but that looked like a Soviet-era bunker,
stretched as grandly as its post-modern age could manage.

Two more years of this.

He only had seven warrant requests today, a
light load. An hour ago, and he’d only had six, but the seventh was
dropped on him on his way out the door.

That one sat on the top of his small stack,
and he was flipping through it again. The request was from the FBI.
They wanted a search warrant on a business in Lawrence, and on any
other day, Tom Smith might be worried about his ability to get
it.

A warrant request isn’t a trial. It’s not
even a hearing. There’s no parade of witnesses or array of
questions. No collections of exhibits to pass around for people to
examine and nod over.

A warrant request is a one-sided asking for
a judicial signature that will allow some specific criminal
enforcement division of the United States government to go into a
home or car or business or locker room at the health club
because – to put it simply – they think they’re onto a
bad guy. Someone immoral or corrupt, wicked, an evildoer for some
reason, and they think they’ll find what they need to prove it if
only someone will allow them to nose around a bit to check out a
thing or two.

The government needs probable cause for a
warrant. When Tom Smith or anyone else asks for a search warrant,
he’s supposed to identify something that convinces the judge that
the feds are probably right about the bad people, and the something
he identifies is supposed to have a little concreteness to it.

The search warrant request at the top of
Smith’s set sought evidence related to potential charges for the
murder of a federal agent in South Africa, and the affidavit of the
supporting and requesting Bureau agent threw out hints of
conspiracy and extortion along with it. There were facts – a
mess of them – but the affidavit was light in its buttressing
of those. The story was just spilled out onto the pages, signed,
and notarized at the bottom, as though stating the tale made it
true.

It was an “information and belief”
affidavit, the kind of sworn statement that was more assertion than
proof, and a judge who had either a keen eye or a bad day could
tear it apart on a whim. Smith read through it again, trying to
find hard points to support the soft. The previous discoveries
cited to prop up a request for this warrant. The informant’s tips.
The witness statements. Something to hang his hat on.

There wasn’t much there. It was a great
story, but it wasn’t much besides that.

His hope rested on the judge. The Honorable
Albert Graydon was getting near senior status, and any spunk he’d
once had was fading fairly thoroughly, but in truth, it wasn’t ever
much there in the first place, as far as being a judge was
concerned. He’d been an old time plaintiff’s attorney at his best
and was a federal judge at his worst, and it showed in a way that
looked to be saving the Bureau’s warrant request today. Graydon
was, after all, the judge who’d signed sixty-one for Smith, with
only a glance at each of them, and Smith held out hope in that.

The clerk stuck her head through the door at
the rear of the courtroom. “Judge Graydon will see you now,” she
said. Her words were soft, but the room’s size magnified them into
a kind of shouted whisper.

Smith stood and buttoned his coat. He
grabbed his briefcase, and, warrant requests in hand, he headed
back into Judge Graydon’s chambers for a little
rubber-stamping.

A
Little Independent Investigation

A day and a half after their meeting at the
law school, Megan and Finn were in Megan’s Chrysler, driving toward
the house where Lora Alexander’s mother lived. It was the first
time Megan had hit the road like this, outside the city and on a
highway, in months. Since she’d come back from her lost year, in
fact.

But the car rode as smoothly as ever. Its
great, swooping high-finned length glided along and handled the
bumps and sways with a gentle lift that didn’t exist in anything
newer. Megan rolled the window down a half inch and listened to the
crisp air whistle a constant, droning pitch.

She felt like she’d never left off driving
in many ways. She only took a brief layover, one a little longer
than most. Parked the car for a piece, worked a stretch more than
usual. Then got going again. She’d pointed the front bumper
somewhere and found herself looking forward to what that somewhere
turned out to be.

The only difference was that Finn Garber sat
in the passenger seat, where no one at all had sat during the year
she was gone. Megan’s elbow was propped on the window frame, hand
at her head and the other one holding the chrome-lined steering
wheel, just as it had too many times to count. But Finn was beside
her, silent and mostly unnoticed, and each time she glanced his
way, she was reminded that this time she had a particular place
ahead of her. She wasn’t simply driving, and she wouldn’t be
stopping when she got tired of doing that or ran low on gas or saw
a motel she thought she might like.

His presence actually surprised her at one
of those glances. An hour out of town, with the nose of the car
aiming west and somewhat south into Kansas farm country, Megan was
intent on the road as her mind drifted through thoughts she
couldn’t quite catch and hold, and she took a look to her right,
jolted by the sight of the man sitting there beside her.

For a second she thought he was Ben. That’s
when Megan really noticed the depth of Finn’s silence. He hadn’t
offered meaningful words of any kind, even in response to things
she thought might prompt him. Mention where they were going, and he
looked at her and nodded an acknowledging but wordless
okay
.
Tell him they’d go to Claire Alexander’s, then work back by
Chilcott’s, and Garber managed only a soft,
That’s fine
.

So Megan started talking without expecting
him to answer her. She went back to the beginning and reported on
Jeremy Waldoch and the case he brought to her before, the first
case, running out everything Lora Alexander had alleged and the
things Waldoch said about it.

When she hit the point of the verdict and
Waldoch’s victory, Megan cruised right through. She didn’t stop to
find out if Finn was getting it. She didn’t even stop to find out
if he was listening. She didn’t tell him anything that was
privileged, and she didn’t have to. The end result of Alexander’s
lawsuit didn’t matter in the course of a drive to talk to the
woman’s mother. What mattered was the Landry case, Waldoch’s
deposition there, and the questions and answers about Lora
Alexander and the car crash that killed her.

As the Imperial bounded and its passengers
watched the rolling, eastern Kansas country change over the second
hour, then the third, to the drier, flatter plains of the central
part of the state, Megan told Finn Garber what she knew. She told
him what she wanted to find out.