Stephen Cannell - The Plan

He took Matt's elementary school class ring off his little finger. . It was his most prized possession and it had only cost twenty dollars-a powerful example of how meaningless his climb to wealth and power had really been. He slipped it on her finger and they looked at each other for a long time, celebrating their engagement without words.

One evening at the end of August, Cole got the call that changed everything. He was just coming through the door of his Georgetown rooming house when the phone rang and a thin-voiced man from the Phoenix Medical Group spoke to him.

It had been Kaz's idea to check out old-age medical plans in warm-weather states, like Hawaii, Florida, Arizona, and New Mexico. Older people, Kaz said, tended to migrate to warm climates because their skin had gotten thinner and their circulation slower. Something that Cole of course knew, but it was a worthwhile thought when you were down to a few hundred dollars and contemplating the problem of contacting medical insurance plans in fifty states. They were looking for a man who seemed to be out of the system and could very possibly be dead. They had to narrow the search somehow.

"Is this Mr. Harris with Medicare?" the voice said, with a distant twang.

"Yes it is."

"I got your letter and I'm responding about David Robb."

Kaz had dummied up a letterhead for. Medicare, using the letter canceling his own federal policy as the prototype. They tapped Carson Harris for the two hundred dollars it cost to get letters and envelopes printed. "This is it, Cole. I can't keep loaning you money," his frustrated brother said. So Cole and Kaz hocked their rings and watches.

Kaz had written a short letter saying that David Robb's account was being reviewed by Medicare, and asking the medical plan to contact them at the enclosed number. They had five hundred copies of the bogus letter printed and sent it off, hoping nobody would notice that the envelope was mailed with a stamp instead of a government franking mark. They'd sent the letter to medical plans in warm-weather states and had received no responses until the call from Phoenix.

"Is this your home?" the voice inquired.

"Private extension," Cole said, trying to move the man along.

"I'm a little confused about your letter. You're doing some kind of check on David Robb. .?"

"Who's calling, please?"

"This is Dale Dennison, Southwest Age Benefit Program. We're connected to Medicare and we hold the current policy on Mr. Robb."

Cole had a pen in his hand and was fumbling in the drawer for a piece of paper. "Just to make sure we're talking about the same Mr. Robb, would you mind giving me his current address?"

"Our information lists him at the Wild Oaks Retirement Home in Phoenix."

"Could you give me his age, his underlying carrier and his social security number?" Cole said, figuring it was a possibility this was another David Robb.

"What is this about?"

"We're doing a demographic realignment so that the actuarial shift in benefits won't affect the baseline average for sixty-plus men on Medicare drawdowns," Cole said, hoping some elaborate gobbledygook would sufficiently mystify Mr. Dennison so he'd stop asking questions Cole couldn't answer.

"Oh, I see," the confused voice said on the other end of the line.

"You were going to give me his age and underlying carrier and his SS number."

"Uh, right. Well, he's a federal employee on the Blue Cross Plan. . He's eighty-six and his Social Security number is 568-52-2713."

Kaz got home at eight. He'd been trying to find David Robb through the War Department and had been shut out. He was in a foul mood when he walked in, but when he heard that Cole had succeeded, his mood changed abruptly.

The retirement home was a low, one-story building on Route 357, the highway that ran through Phoenix.

Kaz and Cole paid the cab from the airport and went inside. What they found depressed them.

Wild Oaks was a vegetable garden where old people did a Thorazine shuffle under the prison-guard stares of attendants. Kaz introduced himself to a stout Navajo nurse named Arleen Cloud, who looked at them with open suspicion.

"I'm Joseph Robb; this is my brother Don. We're David's cousins from Altoona," Kaz said to the woman, who wasn't buying it.

"Who do you two guys think you're kidding? I've got David Robb's file; he doesn't have any relatives. He's outlived the whole clan."

" 'Cept for his uncle," Kaz said.

"Which uncle?"

"Uncle Sam." Kaz pulled his old federal badge and flashed it. "So keep the attitude coming, Nurse Cloud, and I'll drop an obstructing justice charge in your mailbox."

David Robb had tubes sticking out of every conceivable orifice and one or two that had been created for him-like the one in the center of his neck so a ventilator on a timer could pump oxygen into his lungs at four-minute intervals. He had bed sores and couldn't have weighed a hundred pounds. He was in a private room with one window. The best thing about David Robb were his eyes. They were deep brown and still held the light of intelligence. Kaz moved over to him, pulled up a chair, and sat down.

"Mr. Robb?" The man looked at him and nodded his head.

"I'm Solomon Kazorowski; this is Cole Harris." He held up his FBI badge for the man to see. "We need to talk to you about Gavriel Bach. Can you speak?"

The man nodded, then slowly opened his mouth. "Yes." The word seemed fished up from the bottom of a dusty well.

"You talked to him in 1971 about Meyer Lansky. You gave him some material. Is that right, sir?"

Again, David Robb hissed his reply, nodding his head slightly for emphasis.

"Sir, what did you give him?"

David Robb looked at them for a long, heartbreaking moment; his withered eyelids blinked across beacons of despair. He licked his lips, but put no moisture on them.

"Sir. . what was in the suitcase?"

"Wiretaps," he said in a sandpaper whisper. "Conversations with the underworld."

"Illegal taps?"

David Robb nodded his head in response.

"Sir, do you remember who was on the tapes? Was Joseph Alo on the tapes?"

The old man looked at them and said nothing. Then he closed his eyes for almost a minute. When he opened them again, he looked at Cole.

"So long ago. ." The ventilator turned on and hissed and sucked as the accordion pump went up and down in aglass tube, forcing fresh air into the old man's sunken chest.

"Where are the tapes now?"

"Gay took the tapes, never returned." He closed his eyes and started to breathe heavily. Kaz and Cole looked across the bed at one another as the old man began to snore. As if to emphasize that the interview was over, the ventilator abruptly shut itself off.

"I don't believe this," Kaz said "Two months and all we get is, 'Never returned.' Gavriel Bach is dead."

"Gavriel Bach was sort of a lone wolf in the Israeli prosecutor's office. I remember that from when I covered the trial. He had that suitcase on the prosecutor's table the day the verdicts were read. He didn't leave it with the justices. I can't see him giving the tapes to the Israelis. Besides, once Meyer's case was over, what use would the Israelis have for any of that stuff? It was about U. S. criminal activity."

"What're you trying to say?"

"One of two things happened to them. He kept them or threw them away. You're a cop. Would you ever throw away evidence, regardless of whether you thought you'd ever need it again?"

"Of course not."

"So maybe he held on to it. Maybe that suitcase is in an attic someplace."

"In Israel?" His eyes rolled like an Atlantic City slot. "We're down to our last ten dollars. How the hell we gonna get to Israel?"

"I'll do the heavy lifting. You work on tactics," Cole said.

"Oh really?"

"Isn't Ryan Bolt loaded? Maybe we take him aboard, let him bankroll this pilgrimage."