The Knowland Retribution (2 page)

There were, as Walter recalled, two reasons most soldiers ran away, which was all that AWOL really was—running away, escaping jail, dashing to imagined safety somewhere. Either they went temporarily nuts—from the combat, from the drugs, from the simple unrelenting madness of what was going on—or they went over; defected. American MPs in Saigon took little joy in finding the nutcases. They followed the drugs; followed the girls. They usually found their AWOL soon enough. But after a week, if the missing soldier wasn't found, he became a “motherfucker,” a political deserter. MPs got off on them because the reward for becoming political could be death. The order of the day was no longer “find and return,” but “dispatch.” More AWOLs turned up as combat deaths than anyone talked about.

When Freddy Russo—a hard drinking, drug using, pussy-chasing Chicago hitter—took off, the MPs searched for a week but couldn't find him. Walter knew they'd kill him when they did. Walter and Russo had hardly spoken, but an odd, insistent impulse moved him to see his CO and request permission to find the man before headquarters issued its next order. On the spur of the moment Walter lied. He told the CO that Russo had saved his life one night in a very notorious bar. In truth, no such thing had ever happened. Freddy was no friend of his, but Walter knew they would kill him and he knew he could prevent it. He asked for two days, certain he wouldn't need that much time. Walter did not think of himself as especially well organized. His mother, however, always marveled that her son, so unlike most children, never lost anything. And if something—a pair of socks, a jacket, a book, or a toy—was missing, Walter always found it. Should his mother misplace her purse she called for Walter. As a teenager he never “forgot” where he parked the car or lost his keys or his wallet, and his knack of finding other people's lost belongings became a mysterious aspect of his personality. Walter thought too much was made of it.

He found Russo the next morning—never said how—happily lounging in a ditch behind the whorehouse where Russo had never saved anyone, where in fact, he once watched coolly, smirking, while Walter talked his way past two drunk Navy Seals bent on mayhem. Russo was covered in God knows what, still drunk, and narrowing his eyes to work the last quarter inch of a joint that smelled like buffalo dung. Walter returned the ungrateful Freddy to his platoon. The CO covered his ass by sending the MPs a report saying there had been a mistake, that Specialist 4th Class F. Russo had been injured while off duty and had thus been unable to contact his unit until that morning. The written report credited Pfc. Walter Sherman with the “rescue.”

Walter's Vietnam was an evil funhouse with no sense of proportion and few secrets. Everyone soon had a version of the event—and the Locator tag was born. Two weeks after, Walter's CO received an order assigning Walter to Headquarters Company. Now he was to find someone else—not an AWOL, not a political. This one was a bona fide POW. They airdropped Walter in the middle of fucking nowhere and he cursed himself all the way down. Still cursing, he trudged alone into the buggy jungle to find a captured American helicopter pilot. The officers who sent him on this mission and the helicopter crew that delivered him never expected to see Walter Sherman again. He turned up three weeks later with a gangrenous toe and identifiable fragments of the pilot's body. Walter was soon a sergeant and his only job after that was finding people. Sometimes he looked for Americans, other times Vietnamese. He found them more often than not, mildly bemused that others could not. Then Walter went home to civilian life, too old and too wise for college.

When the Colonel called, Walter was working whatever hours he could for a food distribution warehouse. He pushed boxes of fruit juice from here to there and loaded cases of canned vegetables onto trucks. Some weeks he worked seven days and overtime. Other weeks he had no work at all.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked the Colonel.

“Find her. Bring her home.”

“Well, I got a job now, and I have to work—”

“I'm not asking favors, son. I have money and I'll pay you whatever it is.” That sound again.

“Okay, sir,” said Walter. And so saying he stumbled onto the path that brought him a better life.

He found the Colonel's daughter four days later in Panama City, Florida. She was over her head in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, and not always rock ‘n roll. He didn't clean her up. He just took her home. The Colonel paid Walter a thousand dollars. During much of the flight to New York he kept his hand in his pocket, on the money.

Locator
.

Reputations grow most quickly in sensitive lines of work. Walter had a talent made for an apparently insatiable market. The sons and daughters of notable people—rich ones, celebrities, public figures; mostly, in fact, the daughters—were opting for the AWOL life in very impressive numbers. Almost all of the younger ones, the kids in their early teens, were into sex and drugs. Once they had some of either they couldn't get enough. For the older ones, the college kids, it was parents driving them over the edge, and they just had to get away. Rarely did any have any idea of how to avoid being captured. Their survival skills amounted to a credit card and a Holiday Inn. They were easy for Walter, if not others, to catch.

He found wives who'd slammed the door and peeled off in the Mercedes and forgotten the way back. There were endless embarrassing family members, the boozy, brawling brother-in-law, the loving husband gone deep underground, the off-kilter auntie who thought the better of coming home from the club one day. It might be the CEO taking a breather from heterosexual pretense, so much in love that he failed to notice the passing of the time. It might be his horsehide-happy spouse. The kinkier the sex, the more anxious the contracting party; the more the client was more than willing to pay.

Famous, wealthy, and public people, Walter quickly discovered, can be embarrassed by almost anyone close to them. When those close disappeared, when they went
missing
or
lost
, and especially when they seriously intended to stay that way, Walter was the man their protectors found to find them. He much preferred the droll situations, the high-priced peccadilloes. It was the melancholy Walter could do without, the hard-core human interest.

He made it his business to offer his clients the commodity they held most precious: privacy. He didn't start a firm. He didn't promote himself. He did not become
Walter
Sherman, P.I
. He didn't print cards, open an office, have a secretary, or even a phone. He worked only by referral. You couldn't get to him unless you knew someone who knew someone who knew someone else. Consequently, he did not do this work often, and for another year continued his shifts at the warehouse. But that, his mother pointed out, was how to really advertise discretion.

Back then, if you did your due diligence and actually managed to talk to Walter Sherman, you did so on his mother's line. And before he stepped foot out of her house, you'd had someone hand-deliver a box full of fifties and hundreds.

St. John

“Off the rack?” asked
the old black man sitting at one of Billy's tables, the square, chronically creaky one nearest the front. “I don't think so!”

He was short and thin like an old broom handle. He wore a close-cut white beard and had almost no hair under a pink baseball cap sporting the red bulldozer logo of a construction company on St. Thomas. His small, delicate, deeply creased face always seemed to be smiling, and maybe it was. The smile showed a full set of wonderfully large and strong-looking yellow teeth. Ike had to sit near the front because he smoked cigarettes one after another and Billy hated smoke. That particular dislike struck Walter as a singular disadvantage for a man who owned a bar. But there it was.

“Tailor made,” said Walter.

Ike nodded contentedly. “New York or Hong Kong? I'll say Hong Kong. They make a lot of suits over there in Asia.” Ike nodded again, this time definitively.

“Italy.” Walter told him.

“Italy?” Ike half-whispered, half in agreement, half not. “What you think, Billy?”

Billy Smith wasn't his real name—William Mantkowski was—but the locals laughed at that jumble of sounds and divided it into five parts, with witty pauses between each and prolonged laughter at the end. After a month on St. John, William Mantkowski rechristened himself Billy Smith. He bought a bar called Frogman's and, once in charge, changed absolutely nothing except the name on the sign out front. No one on St. John asks a white man where his money comes from. That was eleven years ago. Walter had been a regular at Frogman's, and, like the furniture, stayed.

“New York,” said Billy, leaning back on the other side of the bar opposite Walter at the far end. His skinny, ostrich-skinned elbows rested on the faded gray formica liquor shelf behind him. He stood there, tall and bone-white, almost as white, it seemed to Walter, as his ugly rugby shirt, shaking his head like he had some great wisdom he was about to impart. “Italian tailor, maybe, but the suits are from New York. Where exactly, who knows. But New York.” He meant that he couldn't specify where in Manhattan this New York tailor tailored. He jutted his thick, black-stubbled jaw.

“They all from New York?” Ike squinted as he pursued the investigation, absently blowing smoke from his mouth into his nose.

“Ike, that shit will kill you,” Billy growled. “Yeah, they're all from New York, and the suits too. Right Walter?”

Walter shook his head. “Made in Italy.”

“Hong Kong,” mumbled Ike.

“Write it up, Billy,” said Walter, confirming closure.

Billy shambled to the center of the bar, grabbed a blue chalk stub from beside the fifty-year-old cash register, and carefully printed several more words onto the four-foot-square rimless blackboard propped against the streaked and pitted mirror. They were: “New York/Hong Kong/Italy.” He was confident New York would garner the most votes.

“Walter, you know the problem with New York?”

“No, Ike, what's the problem with New York?”

“Too big,” the old man said gravely. “Too damn big.”

In that instant Walter's thoughts alighted again on Tom Maloney and the substantial possibility that by bedtime he'd have in hand just the type of assignment he liked best—one involving excellent money and minimal human interest—which caused him to surprise his friends with a sweetly incongruous smile. “And too fucking cold in the winter,” he said.

Atlanta

“Sorry, no time,” said
Leonard Martin.

Nina turned to him, disappointed.

“Harvey just called. He wants me there. You know he wouldn't bother me if he didn't have a reason.”

Nina's frown stayed put. He knew what she was thinking and took her unspoken point. “He's not imagining things. It's a difficult deal. He spoke with the client last night. The old man's in a mood.”

She gave him the smirk that never changed, narrowing her left eye—clear and hazel-bright as ever—bunching up the smooth, curved lips that still held their exquisite shape. Through it all, he'd loved her skepticism.

“Did Harvey tell you that?”

“Not in so many words. He hates to admit he can't handle it. But he said he'd like me there. And I bet that's what it is. But you make the decision. I can have breakfast with you and the kids, and I'd really love to do it. But if something goes wrong with this big ol' deal, and something or other falls through the cracks, and it's all 'cause an old client's gout is making him act difficult . . .”

She turned to the bowl of batter she'd been fixing. They'd had a good night, the first in a while. She was feeling happy and too unsure to risk his eyes going distant. “Then get your big ass to wherever you're going.” She turned her head back for a kiss and said, “I'll tell the boys you're making millions to build a basketball court behind their house.”

“I'll do it, too,” said Leonard Martin, “and don't you think I won't.”

His daughter pulled into the drive as he closed the front door behind him. The boys poured out of the van.

“Where you going, Grandpa? Ain't you having breakfast?” Mark, the eight-year-old, grabbed him around the waist. Mark's younger brother Scott hung back. Scott was thinner, quiet as an infant, reserved and grave as a child—very much his father's child, and far more deeply affected when his father moved out. Leonard told his grandson he had to skip breakfast and added, loud enough for Ellie to hear, “Tell your mom not to pay much attention to anything your nana might say about basketball courts.”

“See you later, Daddy. We're going to go shopping. Why don't you come home for lunch?” She kissed his cheek and gave his belly a pat. He stood in the driveway, listening as the three of them bustled inside.

It was eight forty-five on a beautiful Thursday morning in June. From the driveway he could see bright sunlight pouring into the high kitchen windows. The still, cool air shifted gently. The doors to the back deck were open and he imagined the air slipping through the house and into the kitchen, bringing with it the sounds around him, the early morning bird calls, the voices of golfers already on the second fairway not thirty yards from the house.

And they had a fine breakfast without him. Nina and Ellie threw apple chunks into the scratch batter in the bowl, and they heaped each plate with Georgia's Own pork sausage, honey-sweet and dripping with country flavor, grilled on an open skillet, filling the house with the scent of heaven itself. The boys gulped milk and the women sipped cappuccino from the coffee machine Leonard forced his wife to buy on the last day of their last trip to Milan. Harvey Daniels had been right. This client was in a mood. It wasn't that the deal would go bad. They were all too committed for that. But when any client starts picking at legal language, delay was in the cards. He did it to satisfy some inner need, very likely to make whatever his ailment behave, and nine times out of ten it was mistaken for conscientious representation.

The firm of Stevenson, Daniels, Martin, had long ago learned that client whims meant time lost sprinting in circles. They'd also discovered the remedy: Leonard's patented, “Fuck with us Jim or John or Joan and it all goes down the crapper” speech, delivered in a corner, in a serious, menacing tone, but always accompanied by a semi-friendly poke or elbow-squeeze.

Harvey had tried it once. The client took offense and nit-picked all the more fiercely. None of them ever considered Nick Stevenson for the role. This time the ploy worked especially well; Jim allowed that Honest to God he had no
serious
problems. The papers got signed and another developer staked his claim to fifty more acres of doomed Georgia pine.

Leonard Martin, Harvey Daniels, and Nicholas Stevenson partnered in 1973. Lenny and Harvey, novice attorneys, were part of Atlanta's late sixties population explosion. They'd come for jobs at the same big downtown firm. Every time it snowed in New York or Chicago, two dozen lawyers applied for a job in Atlanta. That was the office joke. There were kernels of truth in the gag and they didn't try to deny it; Atlanta was warm and wonderful.

Lenny and Harvey bought pricey new homes in the growing northern suburbs. They were among the first to join an exclusive North Fulton golf club. A partner joked that the club was so far north that they should have done it right, found one in Tennessee. They were also among the first to see the riches that real estate law had to offer down the road. Atlanta was growing so fast, so many people were moving in, so many homes were being built—and so few lawyers were even half awake—that they took one good look and made the leap. They approached Nicholas Stevenson, a laid-back Southern gent with a one-man real estate practice out in Dunwoody. Stevenson was a few years older and the butt of collegial humor concerning his ethics. He was considered obsessively honest. He agreed that the boom was only beginning. They formed Stevenson, Daniels, Martin, Attorneys at Law, and set their sights on closing more real estate deals than any firm in Atlanta.

Five years later they were in six locations. By 1983 they had eleven—in Fulton, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties. The next ten years took them farther north—into Cherokee county, Forsyth, and Hall. Now they had sixteen offices, all doing upscale residential work—from sleek, modern condos in Buckhead, to million dollar retreats up on Lake Lanier, to old-boy mansions down in the wool hat country around West Paces Ferry. But their focus remained on Atlanta's astounding northern sprawl. They soon got into commercial transactions, helping to turn north metro into a land of office towers, convention hotels, and mall developments everywhere. When they celebrated their twentieth year, each of the three was earning eight hundred thousand dollars plus.

Leonard and Nina vacationed in Europe and week-ended at their beachfront condo on Hilton Head Island off South Carolina. They educated Ellie in Atlanta's top private schools, then sent her off to Duke, the school everyone in their circle called the Princeton of the South. When Ellie came home she married a systems analyst, Carter Lawrence. Leonard and Nina helped them buy a house in nearby Roswell. When, after Scotty was born, Ellie lost interest in her marriage, they tried to turn her around. But she'd done nothing very exciting at Duke and wildness took hold of her ten years late. While they could not keep Ellie and Carter together, they did keep Carter close. Now that she was quieting down, Leonard hoped they might try again, but Nina had her doubts. Carter never found anyone else,
and
the boys were his only real interest,
and
he'd set himself up as some kind of consultant,
and
seemed to be making a go of it . . .
and
Leonard had his hopes.

Leonard had two hobbies. He played golf, badly. Unlike most
men, however, he really enjoyed it. He cared nothing about the score. “You're the only one I ever play with,” Harvey told him, “who doesn't cheat.” Why should he? Four, five, six, whatever—it didn't matter. Leonard liked getting up early and going out to the course while the grass was still wet and you could see the steam and haze all the way down the fairway. He liked riding in those silly golf carts, racing up hills, taking the turns too fast, always scaring Harvey, who seemed in constant fear that they were about to crash. Most of all he liked hitting the ball. Where it went was secondary. He was thrilled by the feel of the metal clubhead against the cover of the ball. The tension in his arms and legs. The sound—the hoped-for sharp click. The divot. The flight of the ball even when it went into the woods. Leonard had a wonderful time playing golf. Aside from his family, his business, and golf, Leonard's great passion was reserved for acting. He joined the North Georgia Community Players soon after he and Nina moved to Alpharetta. “Go on,” she'd urged him when he mentioned it one day. He did some acting in college. He was in a few plays and Nina knew he loved it. In his thirties he often played the male lead, the romantic lead if lucky, or the featured male role, the best friend, partner, sidekick, even villain. In his forties his frame got heavier and his parts got smaller, but his years of experience seemed to bring a deeper understanding to all his roles than they usually received in community theater productions. His biggest success was as Lenny in
Of Mice and Men
. The play was such a hit that the company brought it back, by popular demand, every two or three years. No matter who played the other roles, Leonard Martin was always the slow-witted, vulnerable Lenny. His friends kidded him about it, pretending to be a little retarded themselves, and Leonard's real name didn't hurt his association with the role. “You really are Lenny,” was something he heard many times. He considered it a compliment.

Barbara Coffino joined the company when Leonard was at the height of his
Mice and Men
popularity. She was an artist, a jewelry designer with her own studio in Dahlonaga, a thriving arts and crafts village complete with a town square surrounded by antique shops, art galleries, and a scattering of coffeehouses and restaurants. Originally the town had been the site of the great gold rush that hit the Georgia Mountains years before anyone thought there might be gold in the west. Although many Californians would hate to know it, the famous call “there's gold in them thar hills” referred to Dahlonaga, Georgia. The dome of the Georgia State Capitol on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in downtown Atlanta shines brightly in the southern sun coated with pure Georgia gold. Every ounce of it came from Dahlonaga. Barbara Coffino used some of that gold to make her jewelry.

She was a little older and just a little heavier, but she was often told she looked like Debra Winger. She certainly had some of the actress's sexy, self-confident attitude. Leonard did a Chekhov play with her during her first season with the Players. She played a Russian woman of high nobility, and her costume was a flowing gown with a high waist, plunging neckline, and significant cleavage. One night she came off stage and whispered in his ear, “You have to stop looking at me like that—or ask me out.”

Their affair began that night. He and Nina had been together for so long, since college. It's not that they had grown apart, but the spark was not much more than an ember and the heat was on low flame. He couldn't help himself. He wanted Barbara and she wanted him. Barbara was divorced. Leonard, of course, had a wife and family. That fact seemed to bother him more than her. Barbara was content to spend time with Leonard as the opportunity arose. She led a busy, independent life. She made no demands on him that he was unable to fulfill. She had no intention of breaking up his family or of ever marrying Leonard Martin or anyone. They didn't sneak around. Leonard never told Nina he had to meet someone for dinner or go out of town on business. He was always home for dinner. He was his own boss, answerable only to his partners. He made his own schedule. He would drive the forty-five minutes to Dahlonaga, spend a morning or an afternoon with Barbara, then drive back. Sure, he told the small lies. He'd say to Nina he had to get going early for a morning meeting. Sometimes, when Nina would call to see if Leonard could meet her for lunch, he would beg off, using the excuse he had to be somewhere else or that he just couldn't get away. Most of the time Nina thought he was looking at a piece of real estate for a client or for some other purpose. At least Leonard believed that was what she thought and she never gave him reason to believe otherwise. So he told the little lies, nothing big, nothing specific. He had no trouble telling them. If she didn't know, she couldn't be hurt. He almost convinced himself he was doing the noble thing. When he refused breakfast this morning it was not because he was driving to Dahlonaga. At least not until later. He hadn't seen Barbara in more than a week. He looked forward to spending the morning in bed with her.

As Ellie and others were fond of observing, middle age brought unwanted physical change. Leonard's waistline had grown apace with his escalating net worth. Throughout the Reagan boom and into the Clinton years his stock investments and property interests thrived. Each year brought larger bonuses and shame-faced trips to the tailor.

All in all, Leonard and Nina Martin thought they had a bit more than most—certainly more than folks who didn't like work, or had
no get-up-and-go. They enjoyed their church, and loved their friends, and though neither was ignorant, or dense, or callous, both considered themselves the most average of Americans.