The Shadow Cabinet (55 page)

Wilson sat in silence for a minute, looking again at the FBI certificates. “We were going to suggest a deal,” he said finally. “A trade-off. Something helpful to both of us.”

“What kind of deal?”

“You tell us what you've got on Combs, we tell you what we know about Caltronics, how maybe you can dish them, these hustlers you don't like. Maybe get Fred Merkle to reopen the case.”

But Klempner had shifted forward indignantly. “You bastards were gonna squeeze me!”

Buster Foreman looked at Wilson, who couldn't think of anything to say. “I suppose,” he conceded at last.

“You've got some goddamn nerve, Wilson. Some goddamn nerve, that's all I can say. A guy with your reputation. That really burns me. That really burns the shit out of me, Wilson, trying to squeeze me. Getting Fred Merkle a little sweaty under the collar about me taking a dive and then coming around here to cut a deal. I ought to throw you out of my fucking office.”

“I suppose so,” Wilson said. “High road, low road, like you said.”

“I'm really disappointed.”

Buster Foreman, who'd been leaning back in his chair, balanced on two legs, brought it emphatically to the floor. “Yeah. Now that we understand each other, let's cut out the horseshit.”

“What horseshit?” Klempner said. “I still ought to throw you guys outta here.”

“Chuck Larabee,” Wilson replied. Klempner turned in surprise. “You know him, don't you? I'll tell you about a funny conversation I had with him a month or so back, when he was fishing for information about what I was doing those days; then you tell me what you know. How about it?”

“It better be good,” Klempner said grudgingly.

“You're right. Larabee's a small-time hustler, not too bright,” Klempner began, finally satisfied. “Ex-Navy, like you said. A couple of years ago he comes to see me after I open the office upstairs. He's got a shopping list, surveillance gear he's trying to buy, claims he's doing the security work for a couple of California firms. He says he's got some close ties to some Navy lab people at China Lake out in California, the Navy testing center. He wants to get his hands on some underwater detection systems, protecting some kind of salvage operation off San Diego. He wants some other stuff too—radio-controlled fuses, low-light TV monitoring gear, some other systems he says they're developing out at China Lake. He claims this salvage operation is real sensitive, hush-hush cargo. He's gotta protect the operation. It sounds fishy, so we run a tracer on him and find out he's got some ties to an outfit that's peddling stuff on the embargo list to the Middle East and Latin America. We figure the end-user certificates will be phony, like the export licenses, and we can get an indictment. So I set it all up, working with Justice and Treasury, but he never shows his face again. Not until a few months ago.”

“You think he was warned off?” Wilson said.

“I think so,” Klempner said. “Maybe someone told him I still had some buddies over at Justice, at the Bureau. But I don't follow up. I hear his name around town, a small-time blowhard always trying to cut a big deal but's never made it. Then early this year, who should come walking in my office upstairs but Chuck Larabee. It's the same old shit—hush-hush, real sensitive, big security problem, real big contract, eighty grand up front, only he can't handle it alone.…”

The phone rang and Klempner switched the automatic answering lever and sat back.

“He says he's into security assistance programs now, everything opening up—Middle East, Latin America—all this military crud he's got a piece of. He asks me how business is and I tell him it's crummy, just me in the office and a couple of guys in the field, everybody cutting back. I had to lay off four of my old staff. So he says maybe he could move this big security contract my way. He's not set up to handle it. He says he can put me in touch with this California firm, a big computer software outfit that's getting bigger all the time. Big government contracts, some hot new algorithms they've designed for the Triton submarine fire-control systems. But they've gotten too big too fast. They're looking for a security consultant. All he wants from me is ten grand if I sign the contract, a finder's fee.”

“Oh, shit, yes,” Buster said.

“Typical,” Wilson muttered.

“Yeah, typical. I can't believe this guy, not when he tells me how he's heard I've got some real close ties with the government still and this would help me land the contract. So I tell him O.K., business is bad, sure I'll talk to them. I'll talk to anyone. I can hardly pay the rent on this big office I've got upstairs. So he says he'll set it up.”

“So you go see your friends down the street,” Wilson said.

“I end up with Fred Merkle and he tells me about this Caltronics firm, how they've got big problems with the U.S. Attorney's office in L.A., with the Labor Department, with the FBI. He gives me the brief, Merkle-style. But they haven't made the cases yet. They're still working on them, but it looks like a dead end.”

Larabee had set up the meeting with the Caltronics agent in from California to locate an office. He and Klempner met at the Hyatt Regency for lunch. Larabee was also supposed to be there, but didn't show up. The Caltronics representative was a young man named Morris—cocky, aggressive, and something of a smart-ass, according to Klempner, who'd spent most of the two hours listening to Morris describe his sales exploits, how many government contracts he'd landed for Caltronics since he'd joined the firm. “The guy bugged me, for some reason,” Klempner said. “Too flashy, too much talk—a goddamned latrine lawyer. He told me how much money he'd made the last ten years since he got back from Vietnam, every year his commissions bigger. He sold insurance for a while, then took a year off to study computer science, but even then made more money on the side than he'd made the year before. He was a manipulator, the kind who thinks he can hustle anyone, including me while he's sitting there drinking Cold Duck, giving me all this shit. Maybe it was all that money he made, I don't know, but he pissed me off.…”

They'd ended up back at Potomac Towers, where Morris had looked at a suite of offices available on the fourth floor. He'd looked at Klempner's office on the floor above.

“We're standing up there in my office,” Klempner said, “in my goddamn office, and this Morris kid, twenty-four hours in Washington, tells me I'm getting ripped off on the rent I'm paying. Then he takes me downstairs, down to this manager's office, the same cheapskate I've been knocking heads with for five years, hustles this dude for that suite next door at a knockdown price, negotiates a contract on these two rooms if I want it, we sign and walk out. I've never seen anything like it. When this Morris tells me he's going to be a millionaire by the time he's thirty-three, I believe him.…”

“A real hustler, then,” Wilson said.

“Hustler! This guy Morris could sell warts at a beauty contest. You can't believe the kind of nerve that kid has.”

“So it was his idea you move next door?”

“Not his idea, it just happened. I mean, he just wanted to show me he could do it. Afterwards, he said it would help swing the contract with Caltronics if I was interested, but that was just talk. That kid could make you believe anything. That's why I was surprised when I found out that Morris was the Caltronics agent suspected of bribing that GSA contracting officer.”

“People like that have to succeed,” Wilson offered. “They can't fail, ever. Go ahead.”

The Caltronics office opened a few months later, with Morris in charge. Klempner did a few small jobs for them as the office was being set up, on a straight fee basis, and Morris told him that the Caltronics lawyers in Los Angeles were drawing up a longer-term contract. “A couple of times we talked about the long-term contract. He asked me about a price, what I got when I was handling those pharmaceutical companies, and said I should go for something bigger. He says this is going to be a special contract. Real special. A complete study of Caltronics' security situation—that's what he called it, ‘security situation'—all of it wrapped up in this big report I was to do for them. Then one day at lunch, he tells me what he's got in mind. Eighty thousand up front when I file an outline and fifty to follow when the final report is in. Can you believe that shit?”

“I think so,” Wilson said. “What kind of report?”

“What else?” Klempner asked.

Morris wanted to buy the status of the government's case against Caltronics—wiretaps, FBI logs, summaries, anything in the dossier. He thought Klempner could get it for him.

“He tells me it'll take a week to get the money together, the eighty grand, only he's not saying how he's going to make delivery. He's slick, cagey, real sharp, not a guy who's gonna make a mistake. All he tells me is that I'm to get this outline together and have it ready in five days. I'll get a call on the fifth day, maybe late, maybe seven o'clock, and he'll tell me where to drop the outline and where I can pick up the briefcase.”

“He trusts you by then?” Wilson said.

“I'm his buddy. Hell, yes, he trusts me.”

“Does he ask you whether anyone in Washington is working the case?” Wilson continued.

“Yeah. I tell him me. Just me and a bookkeeper down at the Justice Department, that's all. The U.S. Attorney's office out in L.A. may have a few people nosing around, but they're on a cold trail.”

“When he makes his pitch, did he say why he picked you, why Signet?”

“He said he heard Signet was an FBI front and civil service salaries are lousy. Yeah, I know, that sounds stupid, but not when this kid Morris is talking.” Klempner got up from behind the desk. Wilson got up too and they moved through the door into the outer office, where Klempner turned on the coffee machine. “I think it was Larabee that fingered me for Morris.”

“He didn't say why he wanted the Justice Department investigation, did he?”

“No, he just said he wanted the whole bag, not just the Justice Department case, not just the bribery case—I mean all of it, everything the Labor investigation unit had turned up, these two insurance companies, this skim that was going on. You figure what he wanted it for.”

“So what happened?”

Klempner shrugged. “I never got the telephone call. I was waiting here, right over there at the bench, rebuilding an old telephone tap. I waited until nine, I think it was. I never got the call. I figured Morris must have gotten cold feet or couldn't get the money together. The next thing I heard, he'd disappeared with the eighty thousand. The lawyers next door were claiming a hundred, that he'd cleaned out the local Caltronics accounts. They were claiming embezzlement, conversion, I heard, but they don't file charges.”

Wilson paused at the workbench, piled with electronic equipment, pressure sensors, and an exotic-looking device for reading an electric typewriter's impulses. He turned to the telex machine, turned it on, heard the circuits come alive, and then turned it off again.

“What about the Caltronics teletype?” he asked. “Were you reading that too?”

“Yeah, but they didn't use it much.” Klempner turned the dial of a cabinet safe and pulled open a lower drawer. He removed a sheaf of telex messages from a binder.

“Do you remember a telex to Rita Kramer from the West Coast, from her husband, Artie, warning her that I was a fed?”

Klempner didn't remember. “The first time your name came up was when you walked through the back door over there.”

The snow was still coming down in the dimming light beyond the window, a furious whiteness battling the air. Wilson could sense his breath on the air, as if he were just entering a dark, cold house. “When was the eighty thousand to be delivered?” he asked. “On a Monday night?”

Klempner turned. “Yeah. Why?”

“You say you don't know how or where the money was to be delivered, whether Morris was to deliver it himself or use a bagman?”

“He didn't say. How come?”

“I think he had a bagman in mind. Morris to pick up your outline, someone else to deliver the briefcase.” He stood looking toward the window and then turned. “A Marx Brothers movie, like you said once. It was a heist—a two-way heist. Pete Rathbone was going to heist the Justice Department cases against Caltronics through the front door, using Artie Kramer to do it, perfectly legal all the way, in broad daylight, while Strykker was trying to burgle the safe, find out just how much they had on him. He was nervous. Maybe he didn't trust Rathbone. Maybe Morris just sold him a bill of goods. Morris is slick, all right, a very convincing talker.”

“You know Morris?” Klempner asked.

“The night Morris was to make the delivery, he got a telephone call downstairs,” Wilson said without answering the question. “Someone warned him off. Whoever it was told him the feds were just waiting to break the case wide open, that you were lying when you told him you could handle it.” He looked at the telex. “He even told him I was a fed, maybe trying to entrap Artie Kramer the way you were trying to entrap Morris. So he told him to hold up, not do anything until they could check it out some more, find out what we were up to. Lie low, just like Pete Rathbone told Artie Kramer. They were falling all over themselves. They still are.”

“Who called him?”

“I'm not sure,” Wilson said. “Probably Larabee knows. I think he lets Strykker use his telex. That's probably where the message was sent telling Rita Kramer I worked for the Justice Department.”

In Klempner's office, Wilson called Fred Merkle at home.

“Bernie Klempner and I want to talk to you, Fred. Could we get together at eight?” He listened and turned toward Klempner. “Tomorrow may be too late,” he said. “Tonight, O.K.? A U.S. marshal and a warrant.