Steve Martini - Undue Influence

I bite my tongue. I want to tell her about my conversation with Laurel, but disclosure has implications. As absurd as it might seem, at this moment Laurel could claim that she was just traveling, some urgent mission with a purpose, unaware that the cops were after her. I am the only one who knows from her own lips that this is not the case. For the moment I must keep it that way.

‘They haven’t charged her with anything,’ I say. ‘If she turns up, what then? There could be a logical explanation for her disappearance.’

Some pained breathing on the other end. Gail Hemple trying one more time to muster the sand to say no.

‘Vega’s getting ready to turn a paper blizzard,’ she says. ‘And right now he’s got a monopoly on all the wind machines. If she came back today maybe, with a good story, I’d have time to prepare. After that, anybody appearing on the merits is nothing but a punching bag. There would not even be a basis for the slightest compromise,’ she says. ‘In a way she might be better off unrepresented,’ says Hemple. ‘If she beats the criminal charges, or they don’t bring them, a court on review might be more sympathetic revisiting custody.’

I have no answer for this.

‘If you hear from her before five, and she has a good one’ — Gail means a story — ‘give me a call,’ she says and hangs up.

The State Capitol building is a showcase, historic rooms preserved on the main floor like museums and gilded elevators with live operators, at least when the Legislature is in session. The hundred and twenty men and women officed here live like rajas, with personal attendants to cater their every whim. There is no money for schools or hospitals, but austerity is not part of the decorative scheme here. As the boundless party-line goes, the dignity of the people demands that their elected leaders operate in opulence. The political class of this state are about as out of touch as the fops of yore whose heads rolled from the guillotine.

To get to Jack’s office I run the gauntlet of a rogues’ gallery, framed oil portraits the size of small houses, spaced along the walls leading to the rotunda. These are pictures of former governors, mostly robber barons from the last century who bought respectability with their public office. Mixed in with these are the feckless oily smiles of a few contemporaries, actors and the sons of political nobility, official portraits of men bearing expressions of constipation, straining to look like they belong to the ages.

What Jack wanted to talk about when I returned his call could not be discussed over the phone. I trek to his office in the Capitol, more from curiosity than anything else, the thought that any information, even that which Jack wants me to have, is better than none.

His receptionist offers me coffee and a chair to cool my heels while Jack holds forth behind the closed door of his office. I can hear the rumble of voices, men belly-laughing.

As a chairman of a standing committee, Vega rates a suitable office and a battalion of publicly paid minions, mostly young, each striving to look more important than the other, and all off on their own urgent mission to prop up the world.

Twenty minutes go by and the door to Vega’s office finally opens. I hear Jack’s voice, but it is lost in a well, behind a bull of a man who fills the doorway. The guy’s back is to me. There is nothing fat about him, just big, more cloth on his suitcoat than the Graf Zeppelin . The guy’s shaking Jack’s hand, talking the jargon of this place, something about legislation, a ‘juice bill,’ meaning there is money in it. The wonders of politics in the free-market world.

The man doesn’t see me sitting here, and Jack’s view is blocked by the hulk in front of him.

The guy tells Jack it’s time to go see the ‘guv, down in the corner office. Not the big place out front, the little office in the back, where the real deals are cut,’ he says.

Jack wishes him luck.

‘No need for luck when it’s wired,’ the man says. What every lobbyist would have you think, that his hand is up some elected official’s ass, making the mouth work.

Clinton Brady is one of the better-known members of the third house, the unofficial, but many would insist most powerful branch of government, the six hundred or so registered lobbyists in this town.

He pats Jack on the shoulder and turns to leave. In a blue serge suit with sleeves an inch too short, Brady looks like something that climbed down from the beanstalk. He straightens up, noticing that strangers are in earshot, and cants his head to one side in order to clear the transom over Jack’s door.

Brady represents insurance interests the way the Führer represented Germany, a lot of blitzkrieg and scorched earth to any who oppose him. With his contacts and high profile he has become more important than the interests he represents. He owns whole committees and sells his services to clients like the mob sells protection. He has by now learned that giving money to Jack and his ilk is like feeding fish to seals. Word has it for the last decade that Jack has been living in one of Brady’s pockets. At this moment the lacquered grin on Vega’s face would do little to dispel this thought.

‘Clint needs some copies. Clint needs to make a call. Clint needs this. Clint needs that.’ Jack is Clint’s own gofer, doing his own form of the soft-shoe between Clint and the secretary. He takes a pile of papers from Brady and hands it to his secretary to be copied. The woman moves with the flash of lightning, like her job depends on this. Brady’s then ushered down the hall to some subaltern’s office, a detour to make a few phone calls before heading off to see the ‘guv’ — no doubt a telephone request to his clients to wire more cash. Politicians in this state don’t accept reasoned argument, and they don’t take American Express.

Jack gives me a wag of his head and no greeting. I follow him into his office, where he closes the door behind us.

Though the consumption of alcohol in the Capitol is a misdemeanor, Jack maintains a rolling liquor cabinet in a walk-in closet, more jingling glass than the dime toss at a county fair.

‘A drink?’ he says.

I decline. He would probably have me arrested.

The office is hot, the product of an hour of deal-making behind a closed door. I take off my jacket, hold it in my lap as I sit in one of the chairs on this side of the desk.

Jack is sweating like a bull, but still wearing his coat. He compensates with a tumbler of iced scotch, and dances toward the business side of his desk, where he finally lands in cushioned leather and swivels to face me.

‘Been talking to my lawyers,’ he says. ‘They told me to stay away from you.’ Jack’s contempt for lawyers has him ignoring his own.

The wall behind him is covered with political mementos, plaques and resolutions of appreciation from business and civic leaders in his district. These are mostly people trying to get where Jack is, who figure that planting their nose up his ass can’t hurt. There are three large trophies centered on his credenza. Perhaps things other people let him win, little bronze men embedded on marble pedestals with a single arm outstretched. I can read Jack’s name engraved on the brass plate of one of these.

He holds up a few papers from the center of his desk, letter-sized, looking like receipts.

‘Dealing with the funeral home,’ he says. ‘Gonna have to be closed casket.’ He looks at me to see if I will ask why.

‘Her head,’ he finally says, shaking his own. ‘One shot to the head. The morticians couldn’t do much.’

The willfulness of this, a shot to the head, not some heedless act of instant provocation, has its effect on me.

‘I suspect there are a lot of things you don’t know,’ he says. ‘She was executed. There are pictures,’ he tells me.