Put a Lid on It (7 page)

15

S
HE HAD TWO
bags, and they were both heavy, even the one on wheels; especially the one on wheels, because the wheels were stuck. She stood next to the revolving luggage carousel, with its endless variety of parcels, far more various than the passengers waiting for them, and silently looked at Meehan, both bags at her feet. He hefted one, then the other, then looked around for a Buster. Catching one's eye—who did not want that eye caught—he gestured for the guy to come over, and when he did, glowering in Meehan's face as a way not to acknowledge the presence of Elaine Goldfarb, Meehan said, “These things are very heavy.” The Buster continued to look at him, so Meehan expounded: “If you and your pal shlep them, I won't run away.”

The Buster looked at the bags, and back at Meehan: “And if we won't?”

“We'll see who wins the marathon.”

Disgusted, the Buster gave the other Buster a wave, and when number two arrived he explained the situation in quick irritated fashion.

“Fuck it,” said number two. “No big deal.”

So each Buster carried a bag, followed by Meehan and Elaine Goldfarb, out of the baggage area and the terminal and through the sunshine toward their car. Midway, Jeffords caught up, hissing, “That is not in their job profile.”

“Mine neither,” Meehan said. “Elaine Goldfarb, may I present Pat Jeffords? He played you yesterday.”

“I wondered what happened yesterday,” she said.

Jeffords made a face. “A lot happened yesterday,” he said. “And I'm beginning to think it isn't over yet.”

The next question concerned seating in the car. Jeffords wanted to sit in back with Meehan and his lawyer, but Meehan said, “We're gonna have an attorney-client discussion back here. Ride up front with the muscle.”

Elaine Goldfarb said, “If we're operating here anywhere within the shadow of the umbrella of the law, my client is right. He and I have to talk, and I take it you don't have two cars, or a nearby conference room.”

“There isn't enough space up front,” Jeffords complained.

Meehan looked, and it was a bench seat up there, not buckets, so nobody would have to sit on anybody's lap. “Plenty of room,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Busters had stashed the luggage in the trunk and were waiting around to see what next. Exasperated, Jeffords said, “Very well. I sit by the window.”

So they did; the Busters and Jeffords presenting a solid wall of shoulder, slightly crumpled together, up front, while Meehan and Elaine Goldfarb luxuriated in all the room in the back seat. They remained silent back there awhile, he looking out at the scenery, wondering what he was doing here, wondering what the alternatives were, wondering why the only known alternative in the world was the MCC, while beside him she had taken out of the big saggy black leather shoulderbag she carried in addition to those two heavy suitcases a ballpoint pen and a small pad, in which she took the occasional note, meantime chewing the wrong end of the pen.

Once they were on the interstate, she leaned closer to him to say, “You're gonna have to tell me about this October Surprise.”

“All I know is—”

“Hold on,” she said, and leaned forward to where Jeffords had turned into one giant ear, straining toward them. Tapping the wet end of her ballpoint against the shoulder under that ear, she said, “Turn on the radio.”

The look he swiveled to give them was almost innocent: “Sure. What kind of music do you like?”

“Music you can't hear over,” she said.

He gave her a very-funny grimace, but leaned forward, displacing all those shoulders, to switch on the radio. Soon, nasal laments of untrustworthy lovers met in bars filled the car with the sorrows of trying to get through life while unutterably stupid, and Elaine Goldfarb leaned close again, to murmur beneath the anguish, “Go ahead.”

“They say it's a package of bad evidence that could hurt the president,” he told her. “A videotaped confession, and supporting documents. They wouldn't say what the topic was.”

“Videotaped confession.” She pursed her lips. “It's no traffic ticket.”

“I don't think so, no. And Jeffords and these people are part of something called CC.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “The Campaign Committee.”

“Whatever that is.”

“The campaign apparatus for the president. All his speech writers, planners, travel organizers, advance men, spokespeople, the whole crowd that goes to make up a campaign. And sometimes, like now,” she said, “the campaign has to do something a little off the books.”

“This is a little off the table completely,” Meehan suggested.

“Sure, but it's the problem they've got. And, given the circumstances, they're smart to come to you.”

“They said ‘outsource.’”

She grinned. “That's right, you're an outsource. So your job is just to go where this package is hidden, and get it, and bring it back.”

“Right.”

“Well, that's fine,” she said. “What you're doing is technically illegal, but it isn't a major felony, so I think we can—” She peered at him. “Am I missing something?”

“Um,” he said.

She pointed the glistening pen-end at him. “I am an officer of the court,” she told him. “Do not tell me if you plan to commit anything
really
illegal.”

“Count on it,” Meehan said.

16

T
HIS TIME, THERE
was no problem getting through the gate. Pointing at the sign, Meehan said, “NPS?”

“National Park Service,” she said.

“Ah.” So this CC wasn't exactly government, but it could use government stuff. Not bad.

When they got out at the same building as before, there was a brief pause while the Busters got the luggage from the trunk, during which Meehan managed to sidle close to Jeffords and, from the corner of his mouth, mutter, “We don't need to talk about antiques.”

Jeffords gave him a surprised smirk. “Wheels within wheels,” he said.

“Whatever.”

They went into the building, and while the Busters stomped upstairs with the bags Jeffords led the way down to the big office at the end of the hall where Meehan had had breakfast with Benjamin, who was there again, standing from the desk as they entered, smiling his avuncular stockbroker smile, saying, “Ah, all went well.”

“So far,” Jeffords said.

Benjamin came around the desk toward Elaine Goldfarb, hand out: “Bruce Benjamin.”

“Elaine Goldfarb.”

“And you have agreed to represent this scalawag. Very warmhearted of you.”

“But softheaded, you mean,” she said, returning his smile and his hand.

“Not at all.”

Meehan said, “She gets paid.”

“Well, of course,” Benjamin said, and Jeffords said, “By the State of New York, isn't it?”

“By your CC,” Meehan told him. “You were gonna get me a lawyer from Washington, right? Who was gonna pay
him?
”

Benjamin said, “Yes, Francis, I take your point. Ms. Goldfarb, we will certainly pay you for your time in this matter.”

Meehan said, “The lawyer from Washington; how much would he have charged?”

Jeffords, outraged, said, “Oh,
really!
”

Laughing, Elaine Goldfarb said to Benjamin, “Apparently, Meehan and I represent each other.”

“So it would seem,” Benjamin said. Jeffords was the excitable one, but Benjamin remained calm.

Meehan said, “How much?”

Benjamin gestured to Elaine Goldfarb. “I defer to you.”

“Well,” she said, “if they brought in a lawyer from Washington on this, he'd certainly charge three hundred dollars an hour, probably more.”

“Agreed,” Benjamin said. “Shall we say a retainer for twenty hours?”

“Sounds good,” she said.

“Give me your Social Security number and so on when we finish here,” Benjamin told her, “and I'll have a check cut for you. Now, if we could sit and get to the topic at hand.”

So they sat, where they'd had breakfast, and Jeffords said to Benjamin, “We don't have to worry about any antiques here, just what we want from Francis.”

“Understood,” Benjamin said.

Elaine Goldfarb looked brightly around at everybody. Meehan told her, “Don't worry about it, it's nothing.”

“Fine,” she said. She had her yellow pad and ballpoint pen out of her leather bag; holding both, she said to Benjamin, “From what Meehan told me on the way down, you have a certain sensitive object you want him to retrieve for you, in return for which you propose to make his current legal problems go away.”

“Exactly,” Benjamin said.

“How?”

Benjamin nodded. “Fair question. We can do it one of three ways. The records can simply disappear—”

“Too many,” she said, shaking her head, making a note, “in too many places.”

“You may be right. Option two is to proceed to trial, making the evidence disappear and guaranteeing dismissal. This would of course require a return to custody.”

“The MCC,” Meehan said.

“Afraid so.”

Elaine Goldfarb said, “And number three?”

“Witness protection program, new identity, transfer to Arizona or some such.”

Meehan said, “Out of the MCC and into the frying pan. I'm a New Yorker.”

Elaine Goldfarb said, “It doesn't seem to me you have an adequate procedure to make good on your representations to my client.”

“Make a suggestion,” Benjamin offered.

“A presidential pardon.”

Jeffords began to bob around, saying, “No no no, that would raise far too many questions.”

“I'm afraid Pat's right,” Benjamin said, looking sad.

“Then a governor's pardon, State of New York.”

“Similar problem.”

Everybody was stuck. Meehan saw it and heard the silence and, remembering a stunt he'd heard about, a friend of a friend, in a different context, used it to get out from under a falling safe, said, “Switch it to juvenile court.”

They all looked at him. Jeffords said, “For one thing, your voice has changed.”

“I bet you could do it,” Meehan said. “It's all in the bureaucracy, right? Switch me to juvenile court, closed session, I plead guilty, time served.”

Elaine Goldfarb said, “Which is how long?”

“If we count today,” Meehan said, “twelve days.”

Jeffords said, “Why would we count today?”

Meehan looked at him. “What am I, free to go?”

Elaine Goldfarb said to Benjamin, “What have you done about the paperwork at this point, his whereabouts?”

“Pat knows that,” Benjamin said, and Jeffords said, “The MCC thinks he's in Otisville, and Otisville thinks he's in the MCC.”

“So he's still serving time,” she said. “And if you could transfer his case to juvenile court, to a judge who wouldn't make difficulties, he could first release Meehan into my custody, I undertake to assure his presence at a hearing in chambers, probably early next week, he pleads guilty, he's remanded into my custody again in lieu of parole, and we could very easily make the paperwork look kosher.” Smiling at Meehan, she said, “Good thinking.”

“Already,” Meehan said, “I feel like a kid again.”

17

M
EEHAN AWOKE WITH
a smile on his lips. He didn't even mind the
bzzt-bzzt
of the phone, nor the chirpy voice telling him it was oh eight hundred hours. Life, which only two days ago had looked like a horror story, in which the MCC had only been the preview to someplace even worse, like Leavenworth, now seemed sweet.

Elaine Goldfarb had come through like a champ. She was going to get him out from under that lousy federal hijacking rap, she was making it possible for him to return to the world a free man, and she'd even managed to negotiate him a thousand bucks in walking-around money, which he was to receive in cash this very morning, when they would leave for the flight back from Norfolk to LaGuardia, in New York City. All he'd have to do then, other than keep an appointment some time soon in juvenile court, was put together a string of guys he knew—he was already thinking of some likely possibilities—and go visit an antique firearms collection. Jeffords had given him phone numbers so he could arrange to drop off the incriminating package once he got hold of it, and then he was completely and totally out from under. Not bad.

Humming, which he did badly because he had very little practice at it, Meehan got out of bed and went over to raise the venetian blind and look out at a sunny day. Of course it was a sunny day, they were all going to be sunny days from now on. Soon he would shower and have his breakfast and be on his way, loose as a goose.

Gazing out at the clipped lawns of this Park Service enclave, little people in olive drab uniforms moving this way and that like an animated model for the real thing, Meehan made himself slow down, slow down, and forced himself to think. Didn't one of the ten thousand rules cover this situation?

Yeah; don't count your chickens.

After breakfast in the cafeteria, Jeffords took Meehan away for what he called a “briefing,” telling Elaine Goldfarb, “We'll just be a few minutes, and then we'll head for the airport.”

“Fine,” she said. “I'll have another coffee.”

Bruce Benjamin wasn't around today, so it was just Jeffords and Meehan in the seating segment of the big office, where Jeffords produced a road map of Massachusetts, a small notepad, and a pen. Giving all these of Meehan, he said, “You should write it down, so it's just your handwriting.”

“Right.”

“The man's name is Burnstone.”

“I knew that,” Meehan said.

“You don't know his first name, or his address.”

“Fine.” Meehan poised pen over pad.

Jeffords said, “His name is Clendon Burnstone the Fourth.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The address is Burnstone Trail, Ashley Falls.”

Meehan looked at, but didn't unfold the map. “Where's Ashley Falls?”

“Southwest corner of the state, near both Connecticut and New York. Burnstone doesn't actually live
in
Ashley Falls, but on an estate near it.” Taking a folded slip of paper from his shirt pocket, he read, “Route Seven-A north, left on Spring Road, left on Burnstone Trail.”

Meehan wrote, then stopped. “That's it? No pictures of the house, floor layouts?”

“We're leaving that to the professional,” Jeffords said.