Internecine (2 page)

I mean, what would
you
do?

I volunteered to collect Katy Burgess at LAX on Tuesday afternoon because: (1) Katy is undeniably attractive, (2) Katy is competent and fun, (3) I sensed a work-related entanglement that I want to toy with avoiding, and (4) as an excuse to stop thinking about the locker key.

Yes, Katy is the co-worker that interested me, despite myself.

Yes, I was baiting myself with the proximity of the airport.

Yes, I was already aware that I had whomped up a wicker basket of lies as perforated as a sieve—a desperate cover story that any intelligent scrutiny could smack to pieces—but at this stage of our budding relationship, Katy would be professionally polite enough not to question it. I told her that when I had gone to Pittsburgh, I remembered I was carrying a pocketknife, so I stowed it in a coin locker rather than risk a public panic, an evacuation, and a lockdown of the airport when the metal detector revealed me as a potential terrorist. Don’t laugh; this kind of childish, overreactive shit happens all the time (and usually gets on the news).

With this backstory in position, I had an excuse for reaching inside locker #202. If I did not like what I saw—a human head in a trash bag or something like that—I could withdraw my hand, palming the knife I’d already brought along.

When I saw the flank of the Halliburton, I pulled it out, casually said, “my briefcase, too,” and stashed my decoy knife in a single smooth move. Misdirection works. Katy assumed the knife in question was on top of the briefcase; she wasn’t more inquisitive than that. Airport security guys watched me approach the bank of lockers. They saw a
business-looking guy remove a business-looking case. Normal, almost dull. No platoon of gun-wielding DEA agents sprang forth.

Katy and I strolled out looking like the most boring couple in the world. Then I did something more difficult: I locked the case in my trunk and tried not to think about it for the next six hours or so.

Why did I even have to lie to cover this? Good question. Apart from the justification that I lie for a living, this was the only moment in this entire process that I could try to contain a possible future spill. It was a note of unexpected excitement, and I wanted to keep it to myself until I learned more. My excitements, up to this point, had all become predictable and dull. This was new, and I didn’t want to share.

“Katy” is a collapse of “Katerina,” and is pronounced
KAH-tee
, with the accent on the first syllable. Get that wrong and you don’t have a chance at conversation of any sort. People sometimes try to curry intimacy by calling me Connie; I can’t seem to stop them. Katy runs sales for Kroeger; we’re like chessmen of equal value inside the company. She likes Bombay Sapphire martinis and never gets tipsy with co-workers (that I’ve ever seen). As we walked to the car, she indicated that a recreational beverage or two was just the thing she needed to unscrew her spine from the flight, ex–New York after a full workday on the far end of the country. We could plot strategy and swap mild professional gossip. Then I could drop her off at her condo in the Marina.

The lounge we went to was one of those places redolent of “yuppie flu” run epidemic: too much brass, wood, and foliage, all fake, with high stools posted at little round tables, like pedestals. When she scooted up to her seat I noticed she was wearing stockings, not panty hose, and I felt a little tug inside my rib cage. I thought,
Caution. You wouldn’t be so instantly randy if she were wearing a revolver strapped to her hip. In this business, wardrobe is often a weapon.

Without the Blahnik heels Katy was probably five-foot-eight, with a lot of wavy brown hair she usually wore down, reminding me of forties movie sirens in soft focus. She had slender hands with long fingers, like porcelain sculpture, and frank blue-gray eyes with a thin, natural brow arch. She didn’t use a lot of makeup; she didn’t have to, and knew exactly where the line was to be crossed. Subtle gloss was all she wore—lipstick would have been overdoing it. Small fine teeth and a body full
of promise. You’d never know she was a hotshot in the field, and ruthless at her job, which is what I really liked about her, in addition to the obvious.

Come to think of it, she’d probably look
more
sexy wearing a gun; who was I kidding?

We had tacitly agreed to buy the persona each of us was selling to the other. That’s the first step in any relationship, right? You buy the vision, then deal with the reality later.

Katy’s big deal, today, was our impending acquisition of a PR package for a hotshot politico named G. Johnson Jenks. He had the California governorship in his sights after emerging from private industry and logging the usual community service time as a councilman and ecological paladin up north, where people still get uppity about topics like old trees, or ozone. Kroeger Concepts was in the running to sell Mr. Jenks to the voting public in a salubrious fashion. Katy was the point person on the deal, and brought all this up because she wanted my assurance that I would be onboard, armed with enthusiasm and ideas, if we actually did score the gig. We’d have to pull long hours, “in close and tight,” as she put it.

I dropped smoothly into work mode, admiring myself because I now had a secret and was comporting myself extra-slick. Jenks’s opponent in the gubernatorial slapdown was an equal-but-opposite talking head named Theodore Ripkin, and our task as good Kroeger soldiers was to demonstrate Mr. Jenks’s vote-worthiness and overall moral superiority. In other words, anticipate every single gob of mud that might be hurled against our gladiator, and emplace damage-control strategies while hunting for the one subterranean factoid that might knock Theodore Ripkin right off his high-ass horse. Put another way, employ the usual misdirection and surgical strikes. Votes matter in theory but not in practice; what matters is grabbing the gold in the big popularity contest. All’s fair!

The Jenks campaign was well-heeled enough to promise all of us a lot of pull and cash flow; the sort of thing that almost always spins me to attention and a full salute. But I had not become involved enough yet to bring myself up to speed on the actual personalities involved in the campaign. That was more Katy’s jurisdiction, and thus we had plenty
of aboveboard excuses to huddle. Beyond that, I wanted a chance to beguile and amuse her.

She spun off anecdotally enhanced details. When you’re about to plunge into an intimate client-provider relationship for money, the first phase is deep background and research, the same as basic coursework for a final exam or rehearsal for a performance. The ongoing data stream of a client’s history, as it evolves, is frequently incomprehensible to outsiders who might eavesdrop in midconversation. It begins to sound like a foreign language. Katy had that brightness in her gaze that said she was about to dive, and dive deep.

My brain caught up with her in midsentence.

“The real prize seems to be Jenks’s campaign manager,” Katy said as she killed her second Martian. “You might have to talk to your guy about her. The ferret guy.”

“The Mole Man,” I interjected. He was a slightly shady broker of information I sometimes used in my pursuit of Kroeger greatness. “Why?”

“Because past a certain date I can’t get any background on her. She seems to have sprung fullblown from the forehead of Zeus or something.” She paused for effect. “Just like Jenks.”

“Whoa, wait a minute. Candidates are supposed to have nothing to hide.”

“Mm-hm. . . . And it is our sacred job to find out otherwise. Don’t get me wrong—Jenks has a personality file that goes back three generations. But there’s something fishy about it, and it didn’t occur to me until I checked his campaign manager, who doesn’t seem to exist on paper before 2003. Could be something like Jenks legally changing his name a few years back and then covering it up. Fair enough. Might be innocuous. Might be a minor scandal in the woodpile. Any public profile can survive a minor scandal if it’s twirled correctly. But if so, what is there to hide? And now his prime mover’s history hits a brick wall at almost exactly the same time. As if the storytellers fabricated a watertight pocket history for Jenks but were less discriminating with his accomplices, do you see?”

“What’s her name?” I said.

“Alicia Brandenberg . . . apparently.”

No bells rang then; I hadn’t yet opened the briefcase.

Katy was good. Right out of the gate she had unearthed a bit of suspicion. It took on the zest of a serial and made anticipation of next week’s chapter more exciting. “All I’m saying is that if they’re making up backstories, we have to know. If they’re covering something up, we have to know, before we get in deeper with them, agreed?”

“Absolutely.”

“And if Jenks isn’t being straight with us, why’d he pick us to publicize his campaign?”

“That’s too much to wrap my brain around right now,” I said, indicating my drink, as though it was to blame, although we both knew better.

“We’ll stick a pin in it for later,” she said, graciously relenting, and allowing me my chance to be charming and funny. Katy even reached over to touch my hand, several times, to make a point or to mock some lame in the bar. And you know what? Past that, I don’t remember a thing we talked about, because all I could think of was that briefcase, sizzling away in the trunk of my car. I acquitted myself dazzlingly, which means I hung on for an hour past the time we had originally allotted for our pit stop. The plateau of our gestating relationship beyond our mutual jobs was broadening, and she seemed willing, but cautious (which was very smart) . . . and it was all pointless because I knew what I really wanted to do. I guess she was a little confused when I dropped her off.

File it for later. We mutually promised to “do this again, soon.”

I knew I was lying, but not because I wasn’t attracted to her. A stronger attraction refused to vacate my brain.

After another paranoid moment wasted in thinking about suitcase bombs, I went ahead and opened my prize, in private.

If it had blown up in my face, I might have been better off.

The dossier inside the briefcase was a detailed look at the daily movements of the aforementioned Alicia Brandenberg, current campaign manager for G. Johnson Jenks, Kroeger political client, and possible phony-baloney. The kind of detail that suggested not merely rich resources, but enemy surveillance.

Every other item inside the Halliburton presented myriad possibilities. It seemed like a toyset for contract killing, as least as far as I understood such things from espionage fiction. But what was it for? Attack or defense? Was Alicia Brandenberg a target or a player? Maybe she was supposed to pick up the kit? Maybe the guy on the phony FBI card was supposed to kill her? Or shield her? Were the cellphone numbers for one, or both of them? If I called one of the numbers, would I tumble into some sort of bureaucratic panty-twist? The guns were dense and compact, their heft testifying to their serious reality. Real guns, real bullets—hollow-point bullets, in fact—dropped off at the airport with no more concern than a FedEx envelope full of invoices.

I’ve been on a shooting range once or twice but don’t own any firearms. Toying with them, now, was a queer, macho thrill.
Take that. You’re history. You talkin’ to me?
I played to my reflection in the window glass, trying to stand tough. If you don’t know how to entertain yourself, or enjoy your own company, then nobody else will like being around you, either.

(I thought only cops could buy hollow-point ammo in the state of California; it turns out ordinary citizens can, too. I checked. Being detail-biased is part of my job. People who don’t sweat the small stuff, in my book, are called “unemployed.” I don’t have much sympathy for people who are content to slide by, with minimum effort, toward the easiest way out. They become the voyeurs of
other
people’s lives.)

The itinerary for Alica Brandenberg was specific enough to suggest that she employed handlers to keep her dance card jam-packed. Visits to a gym or a salon were shoehorned between public appearances and inner-sanctum think-tanking:
Address assoc. hotel managers
+
reception. Meet researchers for update on Cal Pablo landfill/reclamation. Lunch w/Ripkin rsrvs. Bistro Garden 12:45
P.M.

Full stop.
Ripkin,
as in Theodore Ripkin, our political nemesis in the Jenks campaign? Rewind: Ripkin, as in our current lieutenant governor, noted by papers and newscasts as being in our fair town for most of the week? I knew he owned a house down here, somewhere expensive and private.

And apparently he was having lunch with the campaign manager of his opponent.

Guns, ammo, Alicia Brandenberg. Add Ripkin, however peripherally. Stir, shake, pour intrigue. Better: This might be the hangnail-edge of something that could be turned against Mr. Ripkin, for the benefit of all of Burt Kroeger’s employees, not to mention his opponent, Mr. Jenks. A peek behind the curtain only I knew about, so far.

I had to give Katy Burgess a peek at this stuff, at the first opportunity.

Unless it was a setup. A trick, a trap, a gag, an advanced marketing scheme, or maybe one of those advertising role-playing games. There are some people I would not put this past, but I hoped Katy was not one of them.

Pedicure/private session w/Molly.
Molly might also have been a masseuse; either way, Alicia’s schedule bespoke plenty of loose petty cash to make all her running around more convenient. She was being chauffeured from gig to gig, too:
Confirm BLS pickup 7:30
A.M.
(310) 576-0020.
BLS was a high-end livery service, and it looked like the car and driver were Alicia’s for the entire day, at $120 per hour, less tip.