Чак Хоган - The Standoff

Banish showed him some distaste then, nodding. “As for that note,” he said, “we’ve seen it before. We also know that Ables disassociated himself from the White Aryan Resistance. He rejected them as too moderate. Anything else?”

Blood stood there. “Guess not,” he said.

Banish set aside the sheaf of papers then, and Blood saw photographs underneath, grade school portraits of the Ables children. Banish picked them up and was looking at them intently, which Blood took to mean that it was time for him to leave. He lingered another few moments in case it was another of the agent’s games, but Banish was truly absorbed in the photographs and seemingly oblivious to Blood’s presence.

On his way back out through the main tent, as he neared the telephone switchboard, Blood saw the agent there acknowledging something through his headset and throwing a series of switches. The woman agent from the entrance noticed this too and discreetly got up from behind her desk and crossed to the switchboard, her badge flap hanging off her skirt belt. “What did he want?” she quietly asked the switchboard agent.

“An outside line. He told me to turn off the recorder.”

Whatever was going on, Blood was already at the exit and could stall no longer. He stopped a good distance away outside to think. There was a wide anthill on the ground by his foot, a herculean effort fashioned of sand of a lighter color than the dirt base it was founded upon. Blood leveled it with a soft swipe of his boot toe. He watched the ants dig out and race around in circles, then he started back down the mountain.

Frank Dewey looked at the telephone on the third ring. The other four lines were already lit up. He had wanted to get away in time for his son’s afternoon football practice, but his partner was off on an extended trip to Vegas, mixing business with a little pleasure, and the office was swamped. Dewey had seventeen employees under him, and two part-timers, which was a lot for a Cincinnati professional investigation firm. But business was absolutely booming.

Dewey and Stone Associates specialized in peace-of-mind investigations. In the age of AIDS and personals ads, people were running scared. Courtship was fast becoming a thing of the past. People wanted facts and they wanted them now, and a comprehensive background check in many cases revealed more than years of a relationship ever would. In a matter of days or even hours, Dewey and Stone could distill a person’s social, financial, and health status into a concise two-to-three-page report. Five hundred dollars for a simple background check, or seventy-five dollars per hour per operative for a comprehensive investigation, was a small premium to pay for insurance against a relationship ending in disillusionment or even tragedy.

Example. A young woman, the daughter of a friend and business associate, had come into the office two days before requesting a background check on her new boyfriend. There were now two pieces of paper on Dewey’s desk. One was a copy of the boyfriend’s San Francisco rap sheet, showing two separate arrests for heroin possession in 1989, a year and a half before moving to Cincy. The other was a copy of a recent outpatient receipt from a local clinic that had forwarded blood samples under the boyfriend’s Social Security number and a dummy name to a serology clearing house in Philadelphia. The results of the tests were to be mailed back directly to the dummy patient’s home address, which was listed as a mail drop two blocks away from the boyfriend’s apartment.

The young woman was due in Saturday morning at nine. It satisfied Dewey’s personal law of averages: Ninety-five percent of the time, if they’re suspicious enough to hire a private investigator, they’re probably right.

He checked his watch under his starched blue sleeve cuff, then heard the phone ring again and pressed the button and grabbed up the line. “Dewey and Stone Associates,” he said.

“Mr. Dewey.”

Dewey recognized the voice immediately. He sat back from his glass-topped desk and folded one leg neatly over the other, adjusting his sleeve cuff back over his gold watchband. This client interested him. Dewey couldn’t say why, but he felt a sort of kinship with the guy, one of the few cases he still personally oversaw.

“Mr. Banish,” he said. “You’re two days late. I thought maybe something happened.”

“Something came up.”

This guy never missed his twice-monthly call. He never missed a payment. The money was transferred to Dewey and Stone from a local bank account in Cincinnati, but correspondence was mailed out from the firm to a General Delivery address somewhere in the middle of the state of Montana.

“Look, Mr. Banish,” said Dewey, sitting forward again, opening a side drawer and fingering through files. “We got to take you off billable hours here. You’re a regular client, it’s not hard work. I think we could settle on a monthly fee.”

“Whatever,” Banish said. “Go ahead.”

He was impatient and that was unusual. This Banish was a strange guy. Something told Dewey he was ex-cop.

“She’s broken it off with her beau,” Dewey said, flipping open the file. “We don’t know exactly what happened, or why, or how, but they’re through. She was back at the piano bar again three nights ago. She requested two songs to be played and stayed about an hour, drank two Manhattans. She left alone.”

Banish said, “Good.” He said it without much emotion, but it seemed a reasonable enough response regarding one’s former wife.

“The downside is, she’s smoking again. And not the filters. There may have been more riding on this relationship than we originally thought. Also, she’s seriously considering giving up the condo for something smaller.”

“Smaller?” said Banish. “What about Nicole?”

Dewey laid it out straight. “Well, that’s the thing right there, Mr. Banish,” he said. “The big news is that it looks like your daughter is getting married.” He opened the file on his desk. “The same guy, the one who works at the radio station. A half-carat.” He picked up a copy of the credit card bill. “Just under three grand on his Visa, mail-ordered from Tiffany’s in Chicago on the twenty-fifth of July. He signed for delivery on the twenty-eighth.”

Dewey sat waiting for a response. Even he couldn’t help feeling for the guy. Here was Dewey, a total stranger to these people, and he’d seen the couple together countless times, in fact from their very first date up till now, whereas by all indications Banish hadn’t seen his own daughter in more than two years.

So it seemed important to say something here. “He proposed in a restaurant,” Dewey said. “One knee, all that. People at the other tables clapped.” Nothing came back right away. “Look, Mr. Banish,” he said. “I don’t ask, because it’s not my place, and because my clients are always right. Always. And that hasn’t changed. But maybe you could go see them now. Maybe you could at least try giving them a call.”

Banish said, “That is not possible.”

Again Dewey waited for Banish. And Frank Dewey was not a man normally made uncomfortable. But, whether ex-cop to ex-cop, or father to father, he felt as though he knew this guy. Something here got to him. He thought of his own twelve-year-old son, and football practice, and what Dewey himself stood someday to lose. He sat forward in his chair, checking his watch again. He would get away right after this call.

“You want the usual package?” he said. “Pictures, phone tapes, transcripts?”

After a good long while Banish’s voice said, “Just the pictures.”

[PARASIEGE, p. 35]

Therefore, it must be assumed that SA Banish willfully and knowingly disobeyed the Press Service Office’s command.