The 500: A Novel (25 page)

“We’re not exactly the good guys,” Marcus said, “but we aren’t cold-blooded killers. It’s bad for business.”

“That’s what happened,” Henry went on. “I don’t need to tell you that the situation is dangerous for all of us. Your hands aren’t clean, Mike. There will be an extraordinary amount of attention. A circus like we haven’t seen since, I don’t know…Chappaquiddick? The Mary Meyer murder? The work you’ve done with Walker, with Radomir, would not look good under scrutiny.”

“I was in the dark on both of those cases.”

“Or you didn’t want to know. Money tends to dull one’s ethical curiosity. It’s only natural. You know well from your work with Marcus that he and I don’t do threats. I will tell you that, while every person thinks he’s the guy in the white hat, few individuals are. People think they’re honest, but that is only because they are never tested, never forced to pay the true price of honesty. I tell you this because I enjoy you. I see myself in you. And I can save you from a lot of pain.

“I knew about your history from the beginning, Mike. You were born to live in the gray. That’s why I took you in. I know more about your past than you do. Marcus and I would have preferred to continue taking our time grooming you, slowly introducing you to all the complexities of our work here, but I’m afraid things have accelerated. You’ve always been precocious. You can be great. You can be me one day. It’s your choice.”

He stood and moved closer to me.

“Now, tell me. In the house, did you talk to Haskins? Did he tell you anything? Did he give you anything?”

I felt Marcus’s eyes at work on me, taking in every blink, every tic, every drop of sweat. Even if I lied, my turncoat body would tell the truth.

“No,” I said.

Marcus kept up the stare.

“All right,” he said finally. I guess I passed.

“And we’re all on the same page about the weekend? Is that correct?”

Their play was good, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from Davies. He’d given me a cover story—they’d been trying to stop it and failed—just plausible enough to ease my conscience. No one is a villain in his own mind. I could see myself misremembering, replaying the evening in my head until what Henry said was true.

He made the yes sound so easy, just one more baby step like all the others I’d taken here at Davies Group. Each was so small that you barely noticed it. Then one day you turn around and can’t believe it, can’t do a thing about it: you’ve pawned your soul. His questions sounded like he was double-checking on dinner plans, not covering up a double murder and the corruption of the Supreme Court. It was so easy: just a yes. All eyes were on me once again.

“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”

“Excellent, Mike. And I’m sure you realize we reward loyalty here at Davies. Marcus, who’s the youngest to ever make partner here?”

“Collins. He was thirty-six.”

“You’re at the front of the line, Mike.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Now, take your time with this. Discretion is key, of course, but this needn’t be the last conversation we have.”

Davies gave me another twenty-five minutes or so, feeling me out. I played along as a good soldier, not showing the fear, though every word he spoke tightened my stomach until it pained me to talk.

“So we’re fine,” he said, finally.

“Yes.”

He passed me the tray. I gathered my things, and then he led me to the exit. Just before I left, Davies turned me around to face him with a hand on my shoulder.

“And if there’s anything you maybe forgot to mention, you should tell me now. I’m glad you’ve been here long enough to appreciate, without my having to underscore the point, the gravity of the situation. There will be an extraordinary amount of attention, and pressure. Come speak to us. Because if you decide to talk out of school, I’m sure you realize that we’ll know about it before you do.”

“Absolutely.”

They waited a decent interval for the payoff so it wouldn’t look like a quid pro quo. It was a quarterly bonus and a merit-based pay raise: all in all, it came to an additional $200,000 over the next year. Marcus let me know that there was a bit of a slowdown in cases. If I wanted to take any time off, I could have as much as I liked.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

JUST TAKE THE MONEY
and keep your mouth shut. If I had done that, things would have been so much easier. But despite my best judgment, I couldn’t sell my soul to Henry just yet. I wasn’t an evil corporate goon (though soon enough I was a wanted man, a notorious double murderer). Saying yes to Davies and Marcus was really the only way to handle the conversation. If I was going to run to Rivera or to the Feds, or if I planned, in a fit of suicidal pique, to find the evidence from Haskins and take down Henry myself, I had to pretend to play along with my bosses to buy time. What else could I do? Give Davies and Marcus a from-the-heart Jimmy Stewart–style stem-winder and then hold their hands while they confessed to the police? Not a chance. I could only play along or pretend to. I knew it, and I was fairly certain that Davies and Marcus knew it too and would be watching my every move.

A voicemail came from my cousin Doreen. She invited me out to her son’s first-communion party the next Sunday. I was about to delete it—I hadn’t heard from her in five or six years—but then she nailed me: she was making my mom’s beef stew.

As I said, the key to a successful con is to use the mark’s greed against him, and I missed that stew. The whole invitation reeked of a setup. I knew that a couple days before the event, she’d call me up to mention my dad might be there too and check to see if that was okay. I wouldn’t be able to say no without being the bad guy. My father was probably orchestrating the whole thing. Well, at the very least it was good to know the guy hadn’t lost his touch for setting people up.

I’d let him have this one. The fact was, I needed some time with the old crook. Right now I had the unsavory choice between, on the one hand, playing along with Henry and keeping my dream life, and, on the other, snitching to the police and facing down William  “I Know Nine Ways to Kill a Guy with an Envelope” Marcus. It was either honor among thieves or, like my mom had once begged my dad, just tell them everything. Now that my ass was on the line, the answer didn’t seem so clear-cut.

So I skipped over Doreen, called my father myself, and asked him to meet me.

“Great,” he said. “I’ll pick you up.” I’d thought I was throwing him a bone, but he didn’t sound like he needed much sympathy.

When he arrived, I saw that he’d gotten the Cutlass up and running and then some. At traffic lights, it felt like a plane taking off.

“I had to hone the cylinders,” he said.

“Add some volume?”

“Maybe,” he said with a guilty smile.

I gave him a look.

“I figured while I was in there, you know? It’s about four-sixty now and I managed to scrounge a five-fifty top-end kit.”

And off we zoomed. He’d straightened out Cartwright’s books and credit and saved the station about six thousand dollars a month. His jumpiness was gone, as was the cornered-rat look he’d been sporting right after his release.

I took him to the steak house I’d mentioned the first time we’d met up. He’d become rather chummy with a fellow on the Virginia Board of Accountancy.

“I Googled him,” my dad said.

Not bad. The upshot was that he might have a chance to take the exam if he kept his record clean for two years after probation. He’d aced his last sample test.

I didn’t give him a hard time about the usual shit. I mean, who was I to judge? I’d just gotten myself into a jam that made his burglary look like a jaywalking ticket. It took me a while to bring up what I really wanted to ask him, mostly because I kept hoping the whole awful situation would go away. But right after the coffee came, he got there first.

“What’s on your mind, Mike?”

“You can tell?”

He nodded. “You’re chewing your nails. It was one of your tells when you were a kid. I’m not going to…I mean, we can talk about whatever you want. I’m sorry things got so heated last time. I’m a little rusty. There aren’t a lot of heart-to-hearts down in Allenwood.”

“I wasn’t trying to break into any Sargent and Greenleafs, but you were right about the free lunch. I got myself into some trouble.”

His pocket started ringing.

“Shit, sorry. That’s me,” he said, and reached in to silence it. “Alarm. I’ve got to get home for my parole call.”

The guy had really caught up with the times.

We went back past the big former-liquor-store clown to his trailer behind the gas station, and he phoned in to the parole system. When he turned around, he found me looking over some construction plans he had tacked up on the trailer wall. Old and tattered, they showed a three-bedroom Craftsman-style house. They looked awfully familiar.

He watched me for a while as it sank in. I remembered where I’d seen those plans, and now I knew why that clown gave me the heebie-jeebies. My dad had taken me out to this spot in the woods before, when I was a kid, before there was a gas station. He’d had the plans back then, and he was showing me the land where he was going to build a house for me and my mom. It was right before he got sent away for the twenty-four years.

“You sold the lot to Cartwright?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We needed the money.”

“Did he chisel you?”

“About sixty percent of what it was worth. But I didn’t have much choice. I had to get it settled before I went in.”

The guy was pumping gas where he’d hoped to put up his little Mayberry.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not worth worrying about now.”

“I fucked up, Dad.”

He leaned against the counter next to me.

“That’s my area of expertise,” he said.

I remembered what Haskins had told me about how dangerous it was to know dirt about Henry Davies. By getting himself killed, the justice had only underscored the point. I didn’t want to involve anyone any more than was necessary, especially a parolee trying to get his life straight. So I gave my dad the radio edit of what had happened.

“My work. They want me to keep my mouth shut about some stuff they’re up to.”

“Bad stuff?”

I nodded.

“How bad?”

I looked over at the newspaper on his kitchen table. The stories about the missing Supreme Court justice had finally made their way onto the front page. The newsprint folks were way behind the curve, however. The online chatter had raced ahead to the most salacious possibilities, yet those rumors still had nothing on the sordid truth.

“The worst. I can’t say much more than that.”

He grimaced, then ran his hand back through his hair.

“Talk,” he said after a minute. “Like a magpie. Tell them everything. It’s the only way.”

Like most people, I tend to seek the advice I want to hear. I guess that’s why I was so hot to talk to my dad, a guy who was a living example of keeping your mouth shut. And then he went and encouraged this really troublesome do-the-right-thing habit I’d been trying to kick. My honesty was really starting to mess with my seeming respectability, my career at Davies.

Now this. What good’s a bad influence if he tells you to do the right thing?

“But you never talked,” I said.

“No, I didn’t.”

I sighed in frustration.

“Why do you think I kept my mouth shut all these years?” he asked.

“You know,” I said. “Don’t turn over. Protect your friends. It’s like…a code. Honor among thieves.”

“God, Mike.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have kept myself away from you kids, and your mother, for that. That’s what I was trying to get at last time we talked. My biggest mistake wasn’t trusting some crooks from the neighborhood; it was trusting the honest men.”

“What happened?”

“That doesn’t matter. It wasn’t about talking or not talking in the end. It was about doing the right thing. I didn’t go to prison to protect my accomplices. I went to protect the family. I had no other choice. Just trust me. These things never end well. Talk. Get out while you can.”

The full Haskins story broke early the next morning. A dozen TV reporters stood on platforms across the street from the Supreme Court so each could get a clean shot with the building in the background. Lined up under the floodlights, they looked like carnival barkers. News crews and trucks practically shut down the five blocks around the Capitol, completing the ambience.

It was the kind of circus only Washington could muster: pure tawdriness, but with a thin veneer of public importance so even the most respectable outlets could indulge in the peep show. The press had a squatters’ camp out in Paris, near the scene of the crime. The major networks preempted the prime-time schedule with updates, and the big four all broadcast the president’s statement on Haskins’s death.

By the next day, the news had become a standard conversational opener among strangers, constant background noise on the street:
I heard he killed her during. I heard before. Drudge says it was suffocation. No, bullets.

All that week, it was like nothing else in the world mattered except those deaths. I watched Davies’s cover-up slowly begin to establish itself as reality in the minds of millions, in the mouth of the president himself. All the early findings pointed to a murder-suicide. Henry must have taken care of every bit of evidence that contradicted his fiction, must have somehow gotten to whoever it was that the Supreme Court justice had been talking to on the wiretap. I couldn’t begin to imagine the sort of pull, the scope of backroom deals and whispered threats such an undertaking would require.

And I was going to take down the man behind it all? Not a chance.

The lies about who killed Malcolm Haskins and Irin Dragović were everywhere, inescapable, pressing in on me like deep water. I managed a passing similarity to my usual routine as the pressure built up, but finally I just wanted to stand in front of the White House with a piece of poster board and a Sharpie like every other maniac and start screaming the truth until the cops dragged me away.