Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“It sure was.”

“What did he say, or is it privileged?”

Pace smiled at her and stroked her face. “Not privileged. Your boss is about to hear from him. He wants a hearing before the Ethics Committee. He wants it public.”

“No kidding?” Kathy propped herself up on her left elbow, and the sheet dropped away from her, exposing part of her right breast.

“No kidding,” Pace said as he reached over to cup the exposed flesh. “And, thanks to him, we have an extra hour to ourselves this morning.” He bent to kiss her.

“Oh, no,” she said, pulling back. “This isn’t the movies, dear boy. There will be no kissing before mouthwash.”

He fell back on his pillow. “Hey, kid, wanna share the same glass?”

“You are so naughty.” She giggled and left their bed for the bathroom.

At the office several hours later, Pace got an urgent phone call from Clay Helm. “Sometimes we’re too lucky to live,” the police captain said. “The courts were about to kick Davis free for lack of charges, but the fates were on our side.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You ever hear of a little town in the Tidewater area named Deltaville?”

“No, I don’t think so. The name sort of fits the area, though.”

“Yeah, doesn’t it? Last evening I got a call at home from the Middlesex County sheriff’s department. They found Elliott Parkhall.”

Pace’s pulse jumped. “No fooling. Are they holding him?”

“In a manner of speaking. He’s dead.”

“Oh, no,” Pace groaned. “I don’t suppose it was natural causes.”

“Not unless it’s natural to die of a heart attack caused by two bullets in the head.”

“I guess that wouldn’t qualify, no.”

“It was pure luck. Whoever snuffed him dumped his body in a mud bog—they call them sinkholes down there. The mud is thick, but Parkhall’s decomp created enough gas in his abdominal and chest cavities that he popped to the surface and became buzzard bait.”

“Spare me the gory details,” Pace pleaded.

“They’re gory all right. Some kids happened upon the rather grisly scene. They were so scared one wet his pants. There wasn’t much left of the man’s face, but the medical examiner was able to pull a good set of prints. After that, the ID was easy.”

“How does that implicate Chappy Davis?”

“Remember I told you we were checking gasoline credit-card purchases on Davis’s accounts for late on the night of the 19th or early morning on the 20th?”

“Sure. And something came up, right?”

“Right. Davis stopped for gas in Tappahannock about 1 A.M. on the 20th. That’s right on the way to or from Deltaville. In this case, probably from. We found the attendant who made out the charge. He remembered Davis’s car clearly, and he remembered Davis because—these are the attendant’s words—‘he looked kinda sick.’ He also recalled that Davis was alone. All this is going to be announced at a press conference at 3:00 this afternoon in the commonwealth attorney’s office here. Davis is being held officially for extradition to Virginia on charges of first-degree murder.”

“Oh, man, it’s all coming unstuck, isn’t it?”

“These things have a way of doing that.”

Paul Wister sent Glenn Brennan to cover the Virginia press conference, leaving Pace free to pursue the ramifications of his early-morning conversation with Harold Marshall. Pace agreed grudgingly to the plan.

“You hate to let any piece get out of your hands, don’t you?” Wister asked.

“You think that’s selfish?”

“No, I think it’s both admirable and understandable. But there’s too much happening on too many fronts to heap it all on your shoulders.”

“I guess so,” Pace acknowledged.

Wister plucked notes from his desk. “Let me tell you what we’re up to for tomorrow,” he said. “I hope to hell nothing major happens anywhere else in the world because we’ve got a very full agenda for A-section just covering the Marshall story. The plan now, and this could change, is to give you and Glenn the top of the page. Your story will be on your interview with Marshall and any reaction you can get from members of the Ethics Committee. Yours will be the lead story. Glenn’s piece on the press conference will be the off-lead. Jill Hughes is working on profiles of both Marshall and Davis. One or both will start on One-A, depending on available space, but we might also open up some inside pages if we’re snowed under with copy.

“Suzy O’Connor assigned a reporter, and I’m not sure who it is, to go down to Deltaville and interview the two kids who found Parkhall’s body. Eddie Balsiero is going along to take photos of the kids and of the bog where the body popped up. He’s also going to try to get a photo of the attendant who IDed Davis at the Tappahannock gas station. We’ve got a Maryland police reporter working on the Davis extradition. Since the discovery of Parkhall’s body and the extradition won’t be announced publicly until 3:00, I think we’ve got a leg-up on all the Deltaville and Tappahannock material, maybe even on the Maryland angle. We owe Clay Helm a big favor for giving us the advance notice.”

“For a lot of other things, too,” Pace said.

“I know, although I don’t imagine he’d want them publicized.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t.”

Wister tossed his notes back on his desk. “What’s your best guess about the way this all came down?” he asked. “Given all you know, who are the bad guys here?”

Pace perched on a corner of Wister’s desk. “The most likely scenario is this: When Converse was out on the West Coast, it was a company with a lot of promise and very little cash. Its expenses were enormous. It had a lot of great ideas and superior engineering capability, but it lacked the resources to get those ideas out of the drafting stage.”

“Do you know all this to be true or are you conjecturing?”

“I know it’s true. I have a huge file on Converse.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“Well, along comes Harold Marshall, who arranges major financial incentives, including huge tax abatements, if Converse will relocate to Youngstown, Ohio. The company makes the move. All that is a matter of public record. Marshall’s a civil lawyer, without great personal income or family money. My theory—and this is theory—is Converse slipped him enough money to buy the 50,000 shares of stock. It was his payoff for his help. I assume that sort of thing’s illegal.”

“Wouldn’t the IRS notice something like that?” Wister interrupted.

“Then? Maybe, maybe not,” Pace said with a shrug. “But I bet they’ve noticed now. Anyhow, after the ConPac crash, Marshall recognized if the Converse engine were to blame, his stock, and perhaps Converse itself, could go down the tubes. The company has most of its immediate future tied up in that engine. So he unloaded his stock and wound up using part of the proceeds to pay for the cover-up.”

“There’s no way he could have acquired the stock on his own, bought it with his own money?” Wister asked.

“Not with his limited resources.”

“That’s the way it looks to me, too.” Wister paused. “Could he have had income from a source not obvious to us?”

“I guess, but I don’t know what it could be. He came into the Senate already owning the Converse stock; it’s on his first financial disclosure. There is no other major source of income listed for that or any year since. If it existed, it ended when he was elected, and we couldn’t find out what it was without his tax records.”

Wister shook his head. “My caution light is blinking,” he said, “and I haven’t the faintest notion why.”