Steven Gore - Power Blind

“He’s just like all the shrewd crooks,” Gage said. “Build your defense around what you can’t deny and what’s sure to be found out anyway.”

“Well, I’ve got something else he won’t be able to deny.” Gage heard Spike shuffle papers on his desk. “I just received Porzolkiewski’s cell phone records. It has calls to the Mariner Hotel where Viz had followed Boots Marnin. Four calls during the week after Charlie got shot. We can’t trace them to his exact room, but the jury won’t care. If Marnin had worked a little smarter in India, there could’ve been a third body.”

The gears caught again. Porzolkiewski had claimed he sold the wallet for ten thousand dollars to two men claiming to represent Meyer. Maybe the calls to Boots were the negotiations, and maybe there was evidence to confirm it.

“Have you gone over everything seized from Porzolkiewski’s house?”

“Not yet. The prize was the sodium monofluoroacetate from the store. In fact-more shuffling-“the evidence sheet shows the officers only took flour containers from the house and cleaning powders from the garage.” Spike paused. More shuffling. “Beyond that, only some indicia to prove in court he had control of the house: telephone and electric bills, and his wallet.”

“Porzolkiewski’s wallet? That doesn’t sound right. He would’ve had it with him at the store.”

More shuffling. “There’s a wallet listed on his jail property sheet, too. Let me call you back.”

S pike called back fifteen minutes later.

“You may want to drop by. I’ve got two wallets sitting on my desk and one of them doesn’t belong to Porzolkiewski… and there’s some really strange stuff in it.”

Lunge and parry. Lunge and parry.

Landon Meyer felt a yawn rising, and forced it down. To the millions of viewers watching the confirmation hearing of Judge Phillip Sanford, Landon knew he appeared serious and senatorial, even presidential.

In fact, he was bored.

“May I have another five minutes, Mr. Chairman?”

Landon looked down the curving dais at Democratic senator Andrea Quick and nodded.

“With no objection.”

The seventy-year-old Quick fixed her eyes on Judge Sanford. Her coiffed hair was as frozen in place as her belittling stare.

“Let me understand where your argument takes you, Judge.”

Sanford gazed up at Quick; his elegant features and earnest expression had been a form of armor no other Democrat had been able to penetrate.

Landon smiled to himself. Jimmy Stewart couldn’t have appeared more wholesome and invincible; then his internal smile faded as he wondered why there were no actors like that anymore, nor even an America like the one Stewart lived in. But then he felt a wave of uncertainty, wondering whether that old America could be restored by someone as young as Sanford, experienced in law, but not in life.

“Doesn’t your free speech argument lead us down a road toward the eventual overturn of entirety of McCain-Feingold and every other piece of legislation restricting corporate contributions directly to political candidates and-”

“Madam Senator-”

Quick wagged a finger at Sanford. “Don’t interrupt me, young man.”

Sanford’s face reddened, then he grinned like a schoolboy trying to deflect a teacher’s discipline.

“I was about to say…” Quick reddened, too, then stiffened.

Landon watched the slow recognition sweep across the room that Sanford had derailed her train of thought.

Quick scanned the notes her staff had prepared.

Lunge and parry, Landon said to himself. Lunge and parry.

“With all due respect, Madam Senator, I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to comment on a matter that may come before the Court.”

Sanford had rescued her from the embarrassing moment by suffocating the issue, and everyone in the audience and watching on television or online had recognized it also.

By Landon’s count, it had been the twenty-third time he’d executed that question-strangling ma-neuver.

Landon understood the confirmation hearing wasn’t about Sanford alone. It was also about how effectively the Democrats could take shots at President Duncan. For them, Sanford was both a nominee to be defeated and a surrogate to be whipped, but so far the rawhide had been missing its target and snapping back into the Democrats’ faces.

But, in a way, Landon felt as though the whip’s popper was just missing him or maybe just pricking him, for it reminded him of an internal tension that had vibrated within him since college. Was the conservatism he believed in composed of tradition or of ideology? Was he an Edmund Burke defending what the country had been and therefore what must be, or a Thomas Hobbes creating a Leviathan out of the chaos of competing wills and constraining everyone for their own safety? Was he a man who believed that the American was at heart a yeoman farmer who should be left to plow his fields as he pleased, or was he a man who believed Americans were merely impulse-driven juveniles whose lives-from their bedrooms to their doctors’ offices-must be monitored and managed?

Landon knew who Brandon wanted to be, but in the twinges of conscience he sometimes felt, he wondered about himself.

He thought of the summer intern who’d misunderstood his biblical reference to the Leviathan, and now wondered whether he’d somehow misunderstood it, too.

Quick looked up from her notes.

“Is there anything that might not come before the Court, anything you feel you are free to comment on?”

Sanford displayed a bland smile and shook his head.

“I’m sorry to say, Senator, we live in a litigious society.”

W here do we stand?” Brandon Meyer asked his brother as they sat in Landon’s office in the Dirksen Building.

The Senate Judiciary Committee had just completed a party-line vote to send Sanford and Heller’s nominations to the full Senate.

Brandon had flown to Washington to meet with members of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“About seven Democrats are only pretending to be undecided,” Landon said. “And we have two of ours who are truly sitting on the fence. They’re not sure whether they can buy their way back from an affirmative vote.”

“So they’ve got fifty against and we’ve got forty-eight in favor. If we can swing our two, then we’re at fifty-fifty and the vice president breaks the tie.”

“It won’t be pretty,” Landon said, “but it’ll be done.”

Brandon examined his tally sheet lying on the edge of Landon’s desk, then asked, “How much more will it take to bring over those last two?”

“There’s a prior question,” Landon said. “How do we get it to them?”

“You just tell me what they need. I’ll figure out the rest.”

I just keep hearing this grating in the back of my mind,” Gage told Faith as they hiked up the hill from their house toward the pine- and oak-lined trails of the regional park early on Saturday morning.

Gage hoped the perspective of distance and high places would help him discern a pattern in what seemed contradictory and incongruous.

“Maybe it’s just Porzolkiewski lying all the time,” Faith said.

“That’s part of it, but not all. I’ve got this peculiar feeling I’m doing someone else’s work.”

“You mean helping someone frame Porzolkiewski?”

“You should’ve seen the way he broke down at the end of the recording of my interview of Wilbert Hawkins. I don’t think he was faking.”

“How do you know it wasn’t just relief he’d killed the right guy? Maybe he had a lingering doubt about what happened, then you proved the company was guilty and Charlie was part of the cover-up.”