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Chapter 23

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I just walked in,” Mooney said. He was shouting. An electric drill whined in the background. “How are things going at your end?”

“Confusing. We need to talk,” Haydon said. “Is Pete there?”

“No, he went right on out to Toy’s place after he left you this morning. We’re supposed to meet for lunch, though. Have you eaten?”

“I’m just finishing, but I’ll meet you.”

“Good deal. How about Grif’s, 1:00? No, wait, it’s almost 1:00 now. Make it 1:30. Pete was going to call me when he got on the Southeast Freeway, and there’s no note that he’s called in. It’ll be 1:30 at least.”

“I’ll be there,” Haydon said.

Grif’s Shillelagh Inn ranked among the top three of Mooney’s favorite lunch spots. It was a block off Montrose on a small narrow back street called Roseland and was so close to the consulate of the People’s Republic of China that you could hit it with a rock Grif’s was a comfortable place, tap beer, two televisions, and a clientele of weekend jocks who talked a good game, whatever game was in season.

Haydon got there first and walked inside the tall wood fence that protected the large, raised deck outside the entrance where they set up tables at night, when there was less danger of heatstroke. He went inside and claimed one of the wooden tables with benches by the front windows. He sat with his back to the windows so the light would be on Mooney and Lapierre’s faces and ordered a Miller beer he didn’t want.

When the two detectives came in about fifteen minutes later, Lapierre came over and joined Haydon while Mooney stopped off at the bar to say something to one of the waitresses, something confidential and humorous, judging from the look on her face, while one of his fat Irish hands rested casually on a portion of her anatomy that made the gesture dangerously close to a misdemeanor. He came over, still laughing, pulled a long piece of folded paper from inside his coat, and tossed it on the table as he climbed over the bench.

Mooney and Lapierre ordered from the same smiling waitress Mooney had spoken to, and she turned in their orders and brought their drinks as Haydon began telling them of his conversation with Thomas Herrick and his interviews with Langer and Alice Parnas. He gave them his impressions of the truth, or lack of it, in the latter two conversations.

By the time he had finished, the waitress brought the hamburgers. Mooney took a bite, chewed a few times, and washed it down with his milk.

“Sounds to me like this Toy is a real serious case,” he said. “He could be involved in all kinds of shit here. Guy with a background like that. Hand me that ketchup, Pete.”

“He doesn’t sound as weird to me as the guy who hires him to get the gory film,” Lapierre said, sliding the bottle across in front of him. “Nothing illegal in that, I guess, but it doesn’t sound nice.”

Mooney shook a thick paste of ketchup over his fries and said, “I’ll tell you. I think we ought to get ahold of that little slope and threaten to send him back to fuckin’ Mongolia if he doesn’t open up on what the shit’s going down here.”

“That’ll be hard to do,” Lapierre said, laying the uneaten part of his burger down in the plastic basket and wiping his hands on a paper napkin.

“Don’t tell me,” Mooney said, looking at him, a long red fry dangling from his fingers.

Lapierre nodded. “I got over there about ten thirty. His condo is on Greenbriar, not far off Holcombe. There’s almost a solid block of them in there, and Toy’s is inside a little drive, kind of a compound. I parked across the street and strolled over, looking for either the Audi or the Mercedes parked around the circle. I didn’t see them, so I walked around to the back drive and found Toy’s slot numbers in the garages. Nothing. It’s pretty private back there, so I went up to the door. It was closed, but it had been jimmied open and the latch had been mangled. It didn’t even catch. I pushed it open and went in.”

He took a sip of his Coors Light.

“Cabinet doors were standing open, some of the shelves were bare. Looked like pots and pans were gone. Most of the pantry goods were there, but it looked like it’d been gone through. I took a quick walk around to make sure I wasn’t going to get jumped. The closets in the upstairs bedrooms had been cleaned out, as well as most of the clothes chests. Personal effects were gone from the bathrooms. There were marks on the carpet downstairs where it looked like there’d been a television, and there was a square of dust on a bookshelf where there’d probably been a stereo turntable. And I could see where the records had sat too. Mail was piled up under the slot in the front door. I stepped outside and got the newspapers: Thursday’s through today’s.

“It looked like they’d made a fast move. Almost everything else was there. I started knocking on doors around the compound, but nobody knew anything until I came to one woman who said she was pretty friendly with the two Chinese girls. She said she hadn’t seen them in several days. They were usually around the pool. I tried to pin her down on how long it’d been since she’d seen them, and she decided the last time was Wednesday. A week ago. I didn’t have any luck with anybody else.”

“Did anybody around there besides that one woman know Toy or the girls?” Mooney asked. He had finished his hamburger and was using his toothpick while he lazily finished off the fries. In the light from the window, Haydon noticed that the little crimson spider veins in Mooney’s nose and cheeks had gotten worse. His face was taking on the raw, tender look of a perpetual sunburn. His Irish ancestors should have stayed away from Texas.

“No. But there are eight residences around the circle there, and I only talked to five of them. I didn’t get any response from the other three. Those people might know something.”

“Thursday’s paper,” Haydon said. “And the door had been jimmied.”

“I’d guess maybe Toy’s got the tapes in question,” Mooney said. “And he knows somebody else wants them. What do you suppose the little turd’s up to?”

“Pete,” Haydon said. “We need to get the licenses of those two cars out to the patrol units as soon as possible. Seal off Toy’s condo and go back and try to talk to those last three residences. Ed, why don’t you go through the place again and see if you can’t find something that will give us a lead. Anything. Get Dystal to let you have someone who can start checking the airports and bus stations for Asian names departing within the first three days after last Wednesday night. And let’s check the car rental agencies, too. If Toy stays in the city he might not want to drive around in the Mercedes or the Audi.”

Lapierre nodded and made a few notes.

“You got the list of clients from the agency?” Haydon asked Mooney.

“Right here.” Mooney unfolded the piece of paper he had tossed on the table and handed it to Haydon.

“It’s pretty interesting,” Mooney said. “Guess who’s on there. Mrs. Harold Wilshire and Mrs. George Ginsberg. Can you believe it? Society ladies hiring a PR agency.”

“Happens all the time,” Haydon said, looking down the list. “Next few months it’ll be someone else.”

Mooney looked at Lapierre and opened his eyes wide. “Well, there’s politicians on there too. That was easier to take. Those turds need all the help they can get. Lots of big companies. A hell of a lot more out of state accounts than I expected. Langer’s got a big-deal company there.”

“You have a copy of this for your files?” Haydon asked. “Sure do.”

“I’m going to try to get an interpretation of this,” Haydon said. “I don’t know what Multicorp is. I don’t know what Synco is, or Inter mark, or TechGroup, or United Mercantile, or half a dozen others. I don’t want to go to anyone at Langer’s for information because it’ll get back to him.” He looked at Mooney. “You did take precautions in getting this.”

“Yeah. The little gal who sneaked it out for me thinks her religious silence on this matter is the only and absolute hope of catching the mad killer that’s stalking Langer Media. She’s going to be saying ‘What list?’ for the rest of her life. She’s recruited.”

~

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FRANK SIDDONS LOOKED at the computer printout on his desk and smiled. He was enjoying having a privileged inside look. One of his earliest pleasures as a young lawyer had been the realization that the confidentiality assured by the attorney-client relationship would open up to him a world of secrets, both pure and profane, and that because of it people requiring his services would be inclined, even compelled, to tell him things they would be hesitant to whisper even in the holy isolation of the confessional. Secrets were wonderful things. He enjoyed them immensely; he even enjoyed keeping them.

This was not the same thing, of course, but still he liked being privy to information that wasn’t rightfully his. It reinvigorated him. He had identified most of the corporations, explaining their business, speculating on the contacts Langer had made and massaged in order to get the contract to represent them. A large independent oil company, a young and burgeoning computer firm, a major bank, an electronics firm, a trucking corporation, an airline, a real estate firm, an industrial construction company, a home builder, a textile mill, a lumber company, dozens of retail firms. Langer was strong, stronger than Siddons had suspected.

But the smile had been reserved for the discovery of two specific accounts. He didn’t know there would be two of them, but he knew there would be one at least. He took the unlit cigar from his mouth and held it in his left hand while the knobby jointed index finger of his right hand tapped once at each name.

“There you are, Stuart. The telltale signs of the gentleman across the way.” He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder at the mirrored building of Roeg International. “Multicorp and Synco.”

“He owns them?”

“Multicorp, yes. It’s an electronics firm in Denver.” Siddons sat back in his old chair. “A few years ago the U.S. military provided our Israeli friends with a new kind of weapon that we wanted them to try out first time they got the chance. Since the Israelis were then in the process of that astonishing drive into Lebanon to rout the PLO, it just happened that they had the opportunity to use this weapon right away.

“It’s called the vacuum bomb. The Israelis took it up and dropped it over a building where they claimed Yasir Arafat was hiding. He wasn’t. The way the thing works is, you drop it from an aircraft and detonate it directly over the target. The thing explodes and the air rush implodes the building, killing everything inside but causing practically no damage at all to surrounding structures. That was what it was designed to do, and that was what it did. They killed nearly three hundred people proving the vacuum bomb was a successful weapon. They’re going to make more of those, and Multicorp Electronics makes the detonator. Roeg’s got a lucrative contract with the government.”

“And Langer has an equally lucrative contract with Multicorp,” Haydon added.

“Certainly,” Siddons said. “And that mostly consists of defensive PR. Left wingers love to hassle government financed ‘munitions dealers,’ and Langer’s firm just tries to help Multicorp keep a low profile. They’d make them invisible if they could.”

“Okay. What about Synco?”

Siddons grinned. “Synco’s a little more interesting and requires a lot more work from Langer Media. Synco, Stuart, is a dummy company. It’s a front for a CIA disinformation operation in Central America. Specifically El Salvador. For the U.S. government, which wants so much to get itself thoroughly involved down there, El Salvador poses an enormous PR problem. The corrupt military factions we support down there, the right wing death squads that seem to be aligned with the government, the increasing buildup of our military presence, the mysterious civilian deaths, all this and more has to be made palatable to the American public so the public doesn’t get on its high horse and force Congress to back out of there. There’s a hell of a lot that can be done to adulterate the reportage that gets back to the States regarding these distasteful subjects. Langer has a whole gaggle of CIA-trained people working down there trying to control that sort of thing.”

“Why doesn’t the CIA do it themselves?”

“Well, the CIA’s getting fat again, you know. I mean, they’re making a comeback. But Congress still puts a lid on them. They can only go so far. Yet they want to be just a little fatter. So they farm out the stuff they can’t do directly for themselves. Disinformation and media control are two areas where this has worked successfully. The CIA says, here’s a fake company, here’s the names of some boys we’ve trained but no longer employ, here’s a job we want done, here’s a contract.”

“It works?”

“Very well. Better than the American public ever suspects. And it works two ways. These Synco people down there also try to defuse the anti-American sentiment by Salvadorans. They’ve got their hands full.”

Haydon reached over and turned the printout around to face him.

He studied the list while Siddons chewed on his cigar.

“Then Langer has contacts in El Salvador. People who know the ropes down there and could take you wherever you wanted to go to see whatever you wanted to see.”

“Oh, yeah. Most of them are Salvadorans, Central Americans. The CIA uses them just like they’ve used the Cubans. Always use the natives for covert activities. They’d know their way around all right.”

“Thanks, Frank,” Haydon said, folding up the paper. “You’ve been a great help.”

“My pleasure. I enjoyed looking over your list.” He grinned. “You getting this thing worked out, Stuart?”

“I’m closer than I was.”

The old man nodded, rotating the maduro in his mouth with wrinkled, waxy fingers, his calm eyes resting on Haydon.

Haydon paused before he stood. “Feltner told me that none of those executives close to Roeg, or those who had been close to him, would open up about what it’s really like to work with him. Talk about his personal quirks, his eccentricities.”

“That’s what I understand.”

“I need to find someone who will.”

“Maybe you ought to just drive out there and talk to him,” Siddons suggested.

“Not yet.”

“You got something specific in mind?”

Haydon thought it over before he spoke.

“Wayne Powell was processing video tape in Langer’s laboratory at night,” he said. “Not as a part of his regular work. Moonlighting. His girlfriend said the film was taken by a former combat photographer who had been hired by ‘a man’ who paid him to go to all the hotspots of the world to get combat footage, the bloodier the better. A lot of them came from Central America. Langer pretends not to know about this, says he was letting Powell use agency facilities as a condition involving blackmail. He doesn’t know what Powell did in the laboratory at night and doesn’t care.

“I think he was processing video tape the night he was killed and that it was the subject of that film that got him killed. The combat photographer has disappeared, and someone has broken into his place and gone through it.”

Haydon could almost feel the old man’s nerve endings reaching out, cautiously probing the electricity in the air like the antennae of an otherwise motionless insect.

“Langer could be telling the truth,” Haydon added, “and whatever was going on with Powell and the photographer is a completely separate operation. But I don’t believe Langer’s story about Powell blackmailing him. That opens up, in my mind, at least, very complicated possibilities that could easily include Josef Roeg.”

After a moment Siddons said, “You feel pretty sure about this?”

“I don’t know enough to be pretty sure.”

Siddons looked at him. He had taken the cigar out of his mouth, his pale and age puckered hands resting on the dark lustrous wood of his desk. “Jack Feltner may not have been entirely correct,” he said.