Dead Watch (32 page)

“It’s real,” she grunted. “Landers is crookeder than a hound dog’s leg. The whole bunch of them are crooked.”

The package was almost exactly that: a cardboard box that said Xerox on the side, and that had once held ten reams of 92-bright white printer paper. Inside the box was a stack of notebooks, some files, and three DVD disks in a Ziploc freezer bag.

“We hoped . . . ,” Levine said tentatively, as Jake began thumbing through the paper. “You know, my husband passed away three years ago. He had an infarction. I hoped that maybe because I helped out, you know, that I could get help getting a job. They took my husband’s pension away, those people at ITEM, those big shots, they said he elected to get more money early, or something like that.”

“We can talk about your help,” Jake said. “I think you’ll be okay. If you tried to get to the authorities.”

“I tried, Lord knows I tried,” she said. “I knew Al from when he was fund-raising, I knew he was well connected in Washington. I thought that was the best way to get this to the proper people.”

She put Jake in the living room to read, brought a package of Oreos and glasses of orange juice as he worked.

The package described a standard piece of corruption, notable only for the arrogance shown by the vice president and his friends, and the size of the return. The highway project involved reconstruction of about ninety miles of Wisconsin’s federal Highway 65, from its intersection with Interstate 94 a few miles east of the Minnesota line, to the town of Hayward in the north woods.

“Highway Sixty-five is the main road from the Twin Cities up to the Hayward Lakes resorts,” Levine said. “My husband worked on the project for six years, it was a big deal, you bet.” She dug around in the kitchen cabinet, found a Wisconsin road map, and traced the line of the highway with a finger. “The project was on the up-and-up. The project saved lives . . . It was only later that the trouble started. My husband was a comptroller on the project, and there was trouble right away with equipment. That’s all on disk one, the books.”

The general contractor, ITEM, subcontracted with several dozen smaller independent companies to do the planning, environmental studies, equipment and materials supply, earthmoving, and paving.

The key was in the heavy equipment. One of the companies, Cor-Nine, leased twenty-odd pieces of heavy equipment, mostly heavy dump trucks, along with a few graders, to ITEM over four years, for a total package price of $7.3 million. They also paid Cor-Nine $210,000 for maintenance and repairs.

“That’s what really made me laugh, when Ron told me about it,” Levine said. “The maintenance, that was hilarious.”

“Too much, or not enough?” Jake asked.

“I suppose you’d say too much, since the equipment didn’t exist,” Levine said.

“Didn’t exist.”

“Didn’t exist. Ron said you couldn’t see it, even at the time. The equipment could always be somewhere else . . . You’re only talking about one piece for every five miles or so of the road, and there were so many little contractors coming and going that nobody but ITEM knew who was doing what.”

“They did the whole highway at the same time? They didn’t just do ten miles at a time?”

“Normally, a project would be staged, maybe over fifteen years or so. To maximize the return, they had to do the whole thing while Governor Landers was in office,” she said. “They already had a two-lane highway going up, so they constructed another two lanes beside it, all at once. After that was done, they coordinated the old highway with the new highway in stages—essentially, cleanup work, building intersections. That was legitimate, too. It minimized the traffic and business disturbances in all these small towns along the way . . .” She tapped the small towns on the map.

“And Cor-Nine was Landers and his pals.”

“No, no. Cor-Nine was some people you never heard of, a bunch of Frenchmen.”

“Frenchmen?”

“Yeah. They were a French-based equipment-leasing corporation that, after you traced it to France, came back to the Bahamas and then disappeared,” she said. “If anybody asked, ITEM could say that all they knew was that they were leasing equipment at a good price. If the money disappeared, it was some kind of French tax-avoidance deal. Couldn’t blame ITEM for that.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Jake commented.

“I was a bookkeeper before I got married,” she said. “I know about money.”

“So how did the money get to Landers?”

“Through his brother. Sam.”

“The guy in Texas,” Jake said. The vice president’s colorful sibling, big hat and big boots, a lime green Cadillac with longhorns welded to the hood.

“Right. Sam Landers goes down to Texas, a hot real-estate market for retirees—no state income tax, warm weather. He sets up a development company. The vice president and his friends own about seventy-five percent of it and Sam has the rest. The key thing, though, is the financing. The Landers family had no money—but Sam managed to get financing for his Padre Island apartments from . . .”

“A Bahamas bank,” Jake said.

“Yes. He builds the apartments—they are quite nice, I understand—repays his loans, and walks away with a nice profit. A very nice profit. The profit is nice because the Bahamas money is buried in the construction. For the money he supposedly puts into them, the apartments should sell for $450,000. But, because he’s not actually repaying the loans, he’s building $550,000 apartments. Nothing else can compare. And they’re snapped up by retirees who can see the deal they’re getting, but which is invisible on paper. He pays his taxes—no state income tax in Texas, remember—and the money is back in the United States, all legal and tax-paid.”

“But they lose forty percent to the feds.”

“Not really. They actually made some profit on the construction. They came out of it with probably five to six million. And then, with a perfectly good development company, and with some experience and a track record, they started doing real projects. They’ve been making money ever since. The vice president is probably worth fifteen million. Maybe twenty.”

“How did your husband know about all the different parts of the deal?”

“He watched the whole thing get set up. There’s a man named Carson, Ron’s boss, he told Ron to keep his nose out of it. That stuff goes on in any big state project. But Ron knew there’d be trouble sooner or later, and he didn’t want to be the one who went to jail, so he made copies of everything. On the sly. Carson’s still one of the big shots at ITEM. He held Sam Landers’s hand through the first couple of apartment projects. And he kept books, on the computer, you know, and Ron made copies. Those are the DVDs.”

They spent an hour sitting on the front-room couch, looking at paper, loading the DVDs into Jake’s notebook, going through the notes, the records, the bank documents, the real estate titles, and tax documents. Altogether, the package was as devastating as advertised. If true.

“If true,” Jake said.

“Well, Al Green said that the thing is, everything here has a public record behind it. Records that the Landerses can’t dodge,” Levine said. “It’s all visible, but nobody could ever tie it together without inside knowledge.”

Jake looked at his watch. “I gotta get you out of here.”

Now she was nervous again. “What’s going to happen?”

“I think, because of what happened in Madison, that you should take a trip,” Jake said. “Do you have any place that you can go? A friend’s, or a sister’s, that’s away from here? Somebody who doesn’t have the same name?”

“I have a sister in Waukesha.”

“Would she put you up for a few days?”

“I’m sure she would,” Levine said.

“Then you should go. Right now—I’ll wait until you’re ready. Leave me a phone number and I’ll get back to you. I’ve got to talk to some people back in Washington.”

“The president?’

“I don’t actually talk to the president that much,” Jake said. “But I’ll talk to some people and see what can be done. If you’ve been straight with us.”

“I’ve been straight,” Levine said. “I knew it was going to cause trouble, but . . . after they took Ron’s pension away, I have no money. I mean, we had some in Fidelity, but it’s mostly gone now. I need to get a job. I can’t work at Wal-Mart, that’s the only thing I can get here, there aren’t any jobs. I might have to sell my house . . .”

Tears were running down her cheeks; Jake wanted to pat her on the shoulder, but he didn’t know quite how to do it. “Let me get you out of here, and get this package to Washington. We’ll figure something out. This is gonna work for you, one way or another.”

She took forever to get dressed and pack: more than an hour, by Jake’s watch. Jake suggested that she call her sister from outside the house.

“You think I’m bugged?”

“I don’t want to take any chances with anything,” Jake said.

When she was ready, she got her dog, a nervous gray whippet, and Jake helped wedge it into a carrying case and carried it down to the tuck-under garage and put it on the front seat of her car.

He carried three more suitcases down, told Levine to give him a week.

“You’ll hear from me, or from somebody with the federal government, in no more than a week. We have to get experts to evaluate the package—you can understand, this is really, really sensitive stuff.”

Jake also gave her a thousand dollars from his stash. “Personal loan,” he said. “Pay it back when you can.”

He followed her out to the Wal-Mart that she didn’t want to work at, watched as she made the call to her sister, then waved good-bye.

The package was in the back of the SUV. He called Gina again and said, “It’d be really helpful if you could get me a ticket back. From Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee, or the Twin Cities.”

“Just sit right where you are,” she said. “We’ve got a plane on the way.”

On the way to the Eau Claire airport, Jake stopped at a Kinko’s, spent a half hour making a duplicate of the package, and FedExed it to himself in Washington. His next stop was at an OfficeMax, where he bought a cheap plastic briefcase and stuffed the original copy of the package inside. The plane was due at twelve-fifteen; Madison called promptly at noon.

“I talked to the FBI this morning. Your friend Novatny. I didn’t tell them that Howard killed Linc. I was afraid to,” she said. “Although, I think they know. I gave them some names, including Howard Barber’s. I called Howard from a pay phone after I talked to you last night, and told him that the FBI doesn’t know about the package.”

“Okay. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ve been thinking about it,” Jake said. “Can you come to my place tonight? Bring an overnight bag? I’ve got a guest room.”

“Well . . . Why?”

“I don’t want you staying at your house, alone, but I need you in Washington,” Jake said. “I’d rather explain it to you face-to-face. Try to settle this.”

“Then I’ll do it. What time?”

“I ought to be there by seven or eight. Say, eight o’clock. If I can’t make it, I’ll call you,” Jake said. “Madison: don’t talk about anything sensitive in your living room. Don’t use that phone in the hallway, by the kitchen. Just don’t.”

“You think? I’m bugged?”

“It’s a definite possibility. Keep people around you, don’t get isolated. If you call me, call from a pay phone. When you come tonight, just bump up to the back gate, the way you did last time, and I’ll let you in.”

The jet was assigned to the Department of Homeland Security. It wasn’t fancy, but the turnaround was quick. Jake spent the air time reviewing the package, putting together a presentation. Every once in a while, he’d look out at the countryside below: most of the time, he saw the eyes of Green’s blond secretary.

They flew into National at four o’clock in the afternoon and taxied down to a government hangar. Jake found a driver, from the White House motor pool, waiting on the tarmac, and followed him out to a nondescript Daimler station wagon that smelled of onions and motor oil. He walked into the Blue Room a half hour after the plane touched down.

A navy lieutenant was waiting to escort him up to Danzig’s office. Inside, Gina waved him through.

Danzig was standing beside his desk with his hands in his pockets. He looked like he’d been doing nothing but waiting.

“Did you get it?” Danzig was usually intense; now he was actually vibrating.

Jake nodded, dropped into a chair, his briefcase on his lap. Tired. Stress beginning to bite at him. “The only question is whether it’s real. I’m almost sure it is. I think research will prove it. But I’ve gotten tangled up in a murder investigation, and to tell you the truth, my statement to the FBI and the Madison cops wasn’t exactly complete.”

“How not complete?”

Jake patted the package. “This thing is involved in the killings. We’ve got to give it to the feds as soon as we can. We don’t have more than a few days. I can already feel an obstruction charge out there.”

“If you deliver it to them, the most they can say is that you were late,” Danzig said.

“Yeah, bullshit. If they want me, they can get me,” Jake said. “What I’m going to need is the silken breath of the president blowing down somebody’s back. Words like
national security, Someone’s ass is grass,
like that.”

Danzig nodded, avoiding Jake’s eyes: “Anyway.”

“Yeah.” Jake started unpacking the cheap briefcase. “Here’s the stuff. Here’s how it worked. . . .”

Danzig wanted to review each piece of paper, to crawl through the books on the DVD disks, to find inconsistencies. They took two hours, the longest time Jake had ever spent in Danzig’s office. They found inconsistencies, but they appeared to be paperwork mistakes, rather than logical errors that would suggest a fraud. When they were done, Danzig stood up, walked around the room in his stocking feet, sighed, and said, “Shit.”

“What do you think?” Jake asked.

“They’re real. I’ve seen stuff like this before, and they have the feeling of reality about them. The grit. A few pieces are missing, but that’s what you’d expect if it was real. The inconsistencies are consistent with reality.”

“I agree. You could get somebody else, maybe, to do some specific checks on the public records, to nail it down.”

Danzig nodded. “Of course. We’ll start that tomorrow. Tonight, if we can, maybe some of the stuff is online.”

“I’d want to see the actual paper, where it exists . . .”

“So would I,” Danzig said. Then, “Okay. You wait here for a minute. I’m going to get the boss.”

“There’s another thing, somewhat related,” Jake said. “And it’s about to pop. Lincoln Bowe was gay. His death was a conspiracy that Bowe set up himself, carried out by a close friend, or a few close friends, in an effort to embarrass Goodman.”

Danzig’s face didn’t move for a moment, as though he hadn’t heard. Then he said, “Holy shit.”

“I had to tell the feds. They’re now investigating Bowe’s gay friends. It’s gonna leak in the next day or two, and the whole investigation is going to lurch that way, away from the package. But it’ll come back.”

Danzig ran one hand through his oily hair and then said, “You’re a hell of a researcher, Jake. I hope you never come after me.”

Danzig padded out of the office, returned five minutes later, trailed by the president. The president was a tall, white-haired Indianan, a former governor and senator, a middle-of-the-roader chosen to lead the ticket when the Democrats decided to get serious. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt, without a tie, and like Danzig, was in his stocking feet. Jake stood up when he walked in.

“Hey, Jake,” he said. They shook hands and the president asked, “What the heck did you drag in this time?”

They spent another twenty minutes combing through the package, and finally the president said to Danzig, “I believe it. What do you think?”

Danzig glanced at Jake, then back to the president, who said, “Go ahead. He’s in deeper than we are.”

“We’ve got to do some verification and then we talk to Landers,” Danzig said. “He’s in town. We’ll get his ass over here, stick this thing up it. Come to some kind of agreement.”

The president looked at Jake. “You say there’s another copy?”

“At least one more—probably in the dead man’s safe-deposit box,” Jake said. “The FBI will get to it sooner or later. Probably sooner, since Novatny’s working the case.”

“I don’t know him,” the president said.

“He’s pretty good, sir. Also, there are quite a few other people who know about it, know enough details to cause trouble, even if they don’t have the package. It’s possible that the package could be replicated, at least a good part of it, from public records. If the Republicans talk to the
L.A. Times
, and they put a couple of investigators on it, they’ll hang the vice president; and maybe get us in passing.”

“All right,” the president said. To Danzig: “Get Delong and Henricks here tonight. We want to get this taken care of, and I want to turn this over to the FBI by the end of the week. I want Jake to do it. We need to cover him.” Delong was Landers’s chief of staff; Henricks, the president’s legal counsel.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Danzig said to the president. He was tense, but seemed happier than he usually was. He liked an outrageous problem, Jake decided. And this would make a hell of a scene in a what-really-happened book, five years after the president left office.

“We do,” the president said. “We don’t need Jake to do that.”

“Mr. President, I do have one thing to suggest,” Jake said. “When you’re talking about the other stuff, don’t spend too much time thinking about Arlo Goodman as a replacement for the vice president.”

The president nodded, but asked, “Why not?”

“Because there are strings floating all over this mess and I suspect some of them lead back to Goodman. Maybe even to the murders in Wisconsin.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” the president said.

Jake went out the White House gate, stood in the street for a moment or two, then walked down a block, flagged a cab, and went home.

He was home at seven-thirty. He took a shower, shaved again, just to feel fresh, brushed his teeth, put on clean jeans, a black T-shirt, and a sport coat. Then he went down to the study, pulled some books out of a shelf, found the green-fabric pistol case, took out the .45, slipped a clip into it, and dropped the gun in his jacket pocket.