Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

He cursed his stupidity for not having rented a car for the job, but who could have imagined he would be spotted? Maybe he could have it repainted. Black would be a good color with the maroon interior. No one would doubt that black had been the car’s original color. Except too many people knew the car came off the assembly line a silver gray. God knows, he’d showed it to enough colleagues. He’d bragged about it, even brought a Polaroid snapshot to the office. Repainting it, if he were found out, would point the finger of guilt right at his nose.

No, he would have to tough it out and find an alibi for that night. So far as he knew, the license plate wasn’t made. And the person quoted in the paper hadn’t seen the driver. If that was the truth. Goddamn it, anyway. He’d been so careful about everything else, why hadn’t he thought about the car?

He got in and thumbed the ignition, then triggered his garage-door opener. He slid the car into hiding and vowed not to drive it again until this whole thing blew over.

If it blew over.

Pace had blown the lid off, and he reveled in the feeling a reporter gets when he’s so far out ahead on a story nobody has a prayer of catching up.

He’d had two exclusive stories this morning, one on the disappearance of the chief material witness in the ConPac crash investigation, and a second, smaller story about the financial ties of Harold Marshall to the Converse Corporation.

Although Marshall’s holdings in Converse weren’t news in and of themselves, they made interesting reading when paired with reports that the senator intervened for the company with the NTSB during the original ConPac investigation. The story told how Marshall had sent an aide, who was not named, to talk to Vernon Lund on Converse’s behalf. That original investigation, the story pointed out, exonerated the engine on the strength of evidence now discredited.

Yesterday had been, in Paul Wister’s words, a career performance.

Pace had just shaved when the phone rang. It was the call he least expected.

“I’m back,” Kathy said. “Am I still welcome?”

“Kath!” The excitement in Pace’s voice was clear. “When did you get in? I thought you said you’d be gone a week.”

“Late last night. There wasn’t any reason to stay in Boston any longer.”

“Why? Was something wrong?”

She laughed lightly. “Sort of. Dad was kind of pissed off at me.”

“About what?”

“You.”

Pace was stunned. “Me? Why?”

“Well, let me see if I can quote him. It went something like ‘You’ve found a wonderful man who cares a great deal about you. If he offended your feminist sensibilities by going a little bit overboard in looking out for your well-being, you should realize he was doing so out of the best of motivations and not on some selfish whim.’ That’s close, anyhow.”

“Your father said that?”

“Uh-huh. And I agree with him. I should have been more understanding about the pressure you were under.”

“Well, maybe you could develop that understanding if you practiced.”

“I can’t practice from my house in Georgetown.”

Pace’s heart leaped. “You could move closer.”

“How much closer do you think I’d have to come?”

“It depends on how proficient you want to get. If you want to become an expert on me, I guess you’d have to live here.”

“Would I be welcome?”

“How fast can you get here?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“I’ll come by and help you with your things.”

“No, I’ll just show up. Maybe about dinner time. How’s that sound?”

“Could we have dinner right now?”

She laughed again. The sound thrilled him. “It’s too early. Besides, I’ve got a great idea for dessert.”

“When I was a kid, if I was real good all day, my mom sometimes would let me have dessert before we ate.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute. But tomorrow night we could make an exception.”

“Then again after we ate.”

“Possibly.”

“Hurry.”

Pace’s phone was ringing urgently when he reached his desk at the office. “You don’t know the half of it,” George Ridley said without preliminaries.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were writing about the Cobra? I could have helped.”

“I don’t have a Harold Marshall quota,” Pace replied. “I can write about him as many times as I have something to say.”

“I appreciate you not mentioning my name in the story, by the way, but you need to know I’m not the only one he sent to the NTSB.”

“Who else?”

“Chappy Davis, at least once. Chappy debriefed me before he saw Lund.”

“Did he say why he was going to Lund?”

“Yeah, sure. He said he was going to try to help Converse some more. It was right after Chappy went out there that Lund held the extra briefing where he said there wasn’t any reason to ground the 811s.”

Pace whistled softly. “Did Chappy ask for that?”

“Dunno. But I don’t believe in coincidence.”

“I guess I’ll call Mr. Lund and Mr. Davis and see what they have to say about all this.”

“I got something else for you, too.”

“You’re a bundle of information today, aren’t you, George?”

“I’m adorable, too. You been by the SEC?”

“Why would I be?”

“To check on Marshall’s holdings in Converse.”

“That’s not public information beyond what Marshall discloses in his Senate forms.”

“Yes, it is, you dumb shit, if he owns more than five percent of the outstanding shares of the company.”

“I never considered that. Where would a simple lawyer get—”

“Ask if the man’s ever filed a Schedule Thirteen-D. And, Pace?”

“Yeah?”

“Have fun.”

Behind the locked door of an office in the Russell Building, the three Democratic members of the Senate Ethics Committee met privately to discuss the matter of Senator Harold Marshall. They couldn’t make a decision for the whole committee, but they hammered out their own feelings so they could present a united front. Seats on the panel were divided equally between Republicans and Democrats so that whichever party ruled, the Senate could not use the committee for partisan politics. To have given the majority party more seats than the minority—as was the case with most other congressional committees—would have put in the majority’s hands a tool too tempting should anyone want to attack a disliked member of the minority on flimsy or outright bogus charges. Hugh Green, in whose office the committee members met, favored the even split. It meant committee investigations were the result of bipartisan decisions, much more palatable to the public than political decisions.

“We don’t want to leave ourselves open to charges we railroaded him,” Green said.

“You’re jumping to the conclusion we’re going to find him guilty of something, Hugh,” said Virginia Senator Stephen Hay Adams, considered among the more level heads in the Senate despite a confused genealogy. He was descended from the second and sixth Presidents of the United States, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, both federalists, and from John Hay, who was Republican President William McKinley’s third and last Secretary of State. That he called Virginia home was traceable to the Hay side of the family, which had originated in the District of Columbia. His generally liberal voting record was hard for many Virginians to swallow, but the senator, in his mid-fifties, was in his third term. He won initially by the narrowest of margins, with the liberal voters in northern Virginia and the blacks of Richmond and Norfolk slightly edging the conservative voters from the southern and western parts of the state. Adams proved adept at constituent service and won his second term with a six-percent plurality, his third term with an eight-percent margin. It seemed he could stay in the Senate for as long as he liked, or for as long as he tended dutifully to the myriad interests of the home folk.