The Lasko Tangent (13 page)

“I guess so. I seem to have backed into something that’s very strange and doesn’t know where it’s going.”

He smiled reflectively at his empty martini. “I know the kind.” I was curious about Lynette. But not curious enough to ask. We paid the bill and left.

“Have a good sleep, Chris,” he said when we reached the sidewalk. “I’ll probably know by nine which one of us is better off.” He roared off toward the evening in his Alfa-Romeo, silver-white. I dragged home in someone else’s Checker taxi, dirty yellow.

I locked the apartment door carefully, and stared at the messy bed and the borrowed shirt that Mary had flung on a bedpost. Two nights of half-sleep and three days with Lehman’s death caved in on me. I fell into bed and a black, bottomless sleep.

I woke up somewhere in the Netherlands Antilles, thinking about Lasko. The clock wrenched me into lucidity. 10:15. Robinson would already be in, looking at the Lasko documents. I took a quick shower, threw on blue jeans and a T-shirt, and looked out the window. It was sunny. I headed for the agency on foot.

East Capitol had stirred to life with young people, doing their Saturday things. Across the street a bearded type was carrying a bag of laundry. A short blonde girl came toward me, clutching a bottle of wine for tonight’s dinner. She nodded as she passed. Up ahead, rising between the trees, the Capitol dome gleamed in the sun. Tourists clambered over the Hill peeking and peering like archaeologists on a dig. I cut through the Supreme Court grounds, passed the Senate Office Building, and got to the office. I took the elevator and walked through the empty corridors, the slapping of my feet bouncing echoes off the wall.

Robinson was already there, sitting on the floor amidst brown cardboard boxes which had been ripped open—the financial data from Lasko, scattered all over. I apologized for being late and took my place among the boxes. “Find anything interesting?” I asked.

“Not really. Have any luck with Woods?”

“Wasn’t in.” I remembered Greenfeld’s informant. “Anything here on new foreign acquisitions?”

He pointed at a box. “There was something like that in there.”

“Think you can find it?”

He nodded and dug through the box. After a while he emerged with a clutch of papers. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You know what electronic chips are?”

“Sure. They’re little chips which are electronic conductors. Lasko would use them in his computers, stuff like that.”

He fiddled with his glasses, looking like a myopic professor puzzling over his notes. “Lasko has been importing most of his chips from Japan. Gets them from an outfit known as Yokama Electric, according to what I read here. About a month ago, he buys a little company called Carib Imports.” He pointed to the stack of papers near his feet. “The sales agreement is in here somewhere. You can look at it. The business of Carib Imports is importing electronic chips. Its location is some little island in the Caribbean—St. Maarten. That’s Dutch, isn’t it?”

“Yup, I think it’s in the Virgins.” I took a handful of documents and thumbed through them, stopping to read over the contract. I finished the rest with rising curiosity.

“Say anything to you?” Robinson asked.

“The whole thing is interesting. I can’t figure what a company on some two-bit island is doing importing computer chips. I don’t see why Lasko would buy it. There’s no business reason. He can probably get the chips from Yokama for less. And the timing of it is strange too. He bought it about one week after Sam Green acquired all that stock. And paid $1.5 million exactly. I’m wondering what the connection is, if any.”

“Maybe we should ask Sam. He’s due Monday.”

“I wouldn’t want to do that yet. It would just get back to Lasko.” I thought. “Who is this Peter Martinson?”

“The seller? You’ve never heard of him?”

“No.”

Robinson rubbed the back of his neck. “Neither have I.” He kept rubbing. “Slept wrong last night.”

“Any indication that Lasko had a piece of Carib Imports prior to sale?”

“Not according to the sales agreement. Incidentally, under the agreement Martinson stays on to run Carib at $100,000 a year.”

“Do we know when Carib was incorporated?”

Robinson shook his head. “Can’t tell from this stuff. Can’t tell much.”

“What do you think, Jim?”

“It’s a little peculiar. But St. Maarten’s Dutch. We’ve got no jurisdiction.”

My instincts picked up a faint message. “I think I should go down there and look it over. See Martinson. Find out when the company started, how it does business.”

Robinson’s smile was wintry. “Maybe Woods will advance you the money out of his own pocket.”

“At least it gives us something else to talk about.”

“I suppose it’s a waste of time to tell you that you’re looking for trouble again, going down there.”

“I guess you’ll have to count on Woods’ good sense.”

He stood and stretched. “OK, Chris. I’m going to take two aspirins and go home. Anything else?”

“Nope. I appreciate it.”

“Any time.” He smiled. “I hope Woods is as interested in this as you are. Whatever it means.”

He left. I picked up the pile and went home to do some research on St. Maarten.

St. Maarten turned out to be a flyspeck in the West Indies, east of Puerto Rico, with a French side and a Dutch side. My encyclopedia said it was 37 square miles, stuck on old volcanic rock, and turned out some salt, cotton and livestock. Population 6,540. The Dutch side had white beaches and the cruise ships stopped there in winter. Its capital was Philipsburg, for lack of competition. And Carib Imports was there, probably for the same reason.

My almanac added one more fact. St. Maarten was on the northern tip of the Netherlands Antilles.

Seventeen

Monday morning was hot, cloudy, and dense with exhaust fumes. The city felt and smelled like a locker room, and the ECC building looked dismal. There is almost nothing as grey as a government building on a dark morning. It matched my mood.

Woods was waiting for me in his office door. He whisked me past the receptionist before I could open my mouth. I looked around on my way in. Mary was nowhere in sight.

I took a seat. Woods walked to his desk with a purposeful air and sat, staring at me. It seemed to be a symbolic gesture, his desk the armor of rank and power. He spoke. “I think we’d better start with what happened with Lasko on Friday and work back to your dead witness.” His voice was cold with withheld anger.

“I’d rather begin with Lehman.”

He examined me, as if appraising a slide through a microscope. “If you think it will make any more sense.”

I began. “OK. Tuesday, Marty Gubner calls me and asks me to meet his unknown client. Gubner’s client turns out to be Alexander Lehman, who’s controller at Lasko. Lehman’s never heard of any stock manipulation, but says that he’s on to something else. Which he doesn’t explain. I arrange to talk with him about it that evening.” Woods’ eyes held a bright cynical glint. I went on, editing out the memo. “Lehman walks out of the Ritz and gets run down.” Suddenly I was angry at my own defensiveness. “You know, it’s fine to sit here as if I were rationalizing the loss of a chess game. Except you’re missing the flavor of the thing. Maybe I should dump Lehman’s body on your desk, so you could look it over.”

Woods leaned back in his chair, head tilted, as if to consider me from another angle. “All right, I wasn’t there. Go on.”

“The point is that I had to consider what it meant. Two questions occurred to me. First, why was he killed? Second, how did it get out that I was meeting with him? The last one concerns me a lot. Gubner swears that neither he nor Lehman told anyone. That leaves three people aside from Jim Robinson and me: Joe McGuire, Ike Feiner, and Mary Carelli.”

Woods had frozen somewhere in the middle of my speech. “Let’s make sure that I understand. Are you suggesting that Lasko murdered Lehman after someone from this agency warned him?”

“I’m suggesting the first. I’m considering the second.”

He stared at me, then half-raised his hands as if calling time out. The hands framed a thin, wry smile. “OK, Chris, you’ve been under a lot of pressure.”

I didn’t like the drift of that. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for civil commitment.”

He dropped his hands on his trousers with a slap, then leaned on his desk in a friendlier attitude. “Look, you’ve been in a hell of a mess. But you’ve got a long way to go before you convince me that anyone here is involved. You don’t know anything that even makes that kind of suggestion responsible.” His voice was rich in nuances; it conveyed loss of respect, and regret, all in one sentence. I wanted to reclaim his regard. But accusing McGuire wasn’t the way. I dropped it.

“As for the Lasko meeting, it caught me by surprise. All that I could think about was facing him down, sending him away with nothing. I didn’t think to tell you—it felt like my problem. I apologize for that.”

“What happened?”

“He came expecting to pick my brains. I asked him if he had killed Lehman. He said no. I sent him home.”

“Why in hell did you ask him that?”

“I’m not sure.”

Frustration burst through his voice. “I expect more from you than adolescent macho. You should have told me about the meeting. I could have cancelled it, or maybe insisted that it be done under oath. Instead, we’ve got a goddamned confrontation and a goddamned mess.” He stared angrily at the desk, as if the mess were sitting on it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and regretted saying it. It sounded pitiful.

He looked up, continuing as if he hadn’t heard. “The White House called me this weekend. They wondered if I knew what was going on here. Which I didn’t.” He leaned back. “You know, Chris, you’re on the way to becoming famous.”

“I’d just as soon pass it up.”

His face was cold. “Listen, all I expect is some sense of responsibility. You’ve given Lasko the perfect excuse to snipe at us. Now we’ve got the White House on our ass. Without support from the Administration, Congress could slice our budget—hamstring us. The problem is a lot bigger than one case.”

“OK. That’s understood.”

“Good,” he said crisply. “Another thing. No more playing both ends against the middle. Any big discussion will include you, McGuire and Mary—or me. Whatever you and McGuire have going, I don’t want it to screw up this agency.”

I found myself staring at his books and paintings. His voice broke in, in a different tone. “OK, Chris, I’m not going to pull you off, in spite of what some people may want. I want to do it right, as long as we don’t ruin this place in the process.” His eyes held me, seeking trust.

It wasn’t much of an opening. But I took it, and told him about St. Maarten. His face held bleak amusement. “You’re not exactly dealing from a position of strength,” he said. “It also seems to me I just finished telling you not to go over McGuire’s head.”

“I know. But I’ve been looking for a reason for the stock manipulation and haven’t found any. There has to be a connection between the stock thing and Lasko buying this nothing little company. The timing is too perfect. Besides, Lehman didn’t die because of the stock manipulation. Something else killed him.”

“You’re just guessing. And we’re authorized to look for stock manipulation, not comb through Lasko’s affairs.” His voice turned dry. “Don’t you think we should keep our heads down a little? Besides, we’re running out of time on this one. Better to stick to what we know.”

I felt a little desperate. “Have you ever met Lasko?” I asked. He shook his head. “I have. He’s pretty close to the evolutionary tree. He may kill someone else if we don’t wrap this up.”

His face assumed a youthful gravity, the look of the boy genius faced with a tough exam. “We’re not the police.” He paused. “When did you want to leave?”

“As soon as possible.”

He shook his head. “I can’t see it. But I’ll ponder it and give you a final decision. One more thing.” He jabbed his finger at his desk for emphasis. “Calling Lasko a murderer is dangerous. We’ve no proof. If we ever do, I’ll take it to the proper authorities. That’s not your job. Understand?”

I nodded.

“OK,” he continued, “you’ve got Sam Green this morning. Go do it.”

I decided to leave on a higher note. “Thanks for your time.”

He gave a shrunken version of the lopsided grin. “Just keep out of trouble.” I left.

On the way out I ran into Mary. She was looking good, slim in tan cotton slacks.

“Good morning,” she said, as if she hadn’t seen me in a very long time.

“Hi.”

Her eyes seemed to appraise my mood. “Have time for coffee?”

“A minute or two.”

“Come on in.” I followed her in and sat.

The receptionist brought us two cups. Mary reached in her desk for creamer and sweetener. “How was your weekend?” she asked, looking at me for the answer.

“Terrific. I brooded over my sins.”

She handed me my cup. “Cream and sugar, isn’t it?” She had learned that Friday morning. A small spark of warmth lit her eyes. “I’m sorry about Friday afternoon.”

“So am I.” It occurred to me that we spent half our time apologizing. I told her so.

Her brows knit. “You know, I looked for you Friday after you left.”

“I had drinks with a friend. We concluded that women are difficult.”

She smiled. “Who is this misogynist?”

“Fellow named Lane Greenfeld.”

She sipped her coffee. “Doesn’t he work for the Post?”

“The very same. You know,” I added, “this place doesn’t help. It seems that our peachy professional relationship keeps interfering with the other, or vice-versa.”

She gave a small, helpless shrug. “I can’t help my job.”

“Nor I mine.” I looked at my watch and stood up. “I’ve got Sam Green in ten minutes. Let’s try communicating again in a couple of days. We might surprise ourselves.”

She smiled her good smile. “All right. I’ll look forward to it.”

I went to my office and asked Debbie to make St. Maarten reservations, for luck. Then I met Robinson back at the conference room.

I sat down and told him about Woods while we waited for Green. The shorthand reporter arrived to set up her machine. She was my favorite—face as bland as a baby’s and her eyes as glassy as marbles. I had seen lawyers screaming and swearing all around her, while she tapped on her machine, a dizzy half-smile directed at some inner space, getting it all down. Right on schedule, five days later, the transcript would arrive, all its threats and “screw you’s” neatly typed, recorded for posterity. In my fantasies, she left her machine at five and went home to a scruffy apartment where she sold smack and was known as the Potomac Connection. It was a nice theory.