“I guess I don’t have to tell you both that the best chance Sanders has is if this is kept secret. If we haven’t heard anything in two or three days, a week at most, or if somebody gets wind of it, well decide then whether to open it up. I hope well have some kind of lead before then.”
Both of us nodded agreement and Creston and Phlager left us alone.
I took her hand. “Liz, I hate like hell to leave you here with this.”
Liz seemed calmer than she had been since last night. “I don’t like it either. I want to do something.” She paused. “But I guess this is what we ought to do. I can’t really think of anything better.
“You know, my mother used to worry about this kind of thing when Daddy was working in New York. It never happened, but he always knew it might and finally decided it was time to stop taking the chance. I was too young to realize what was going on, but I think the two years she had with him before the cancer started were her happiest in a long time.”
I decided to leave the car with Liz and asked Phlager for a ride back to the capital.
As we pulled out, Phlager turned to me in the back seat and said, “You know, Bob, this isn’t likely to be an ordinary kidnapping. The real reason we’re not going public is that we want to try to retrace Sanders’s steps. I’m going to contact the foundation he was working for and hope they’ll let us have any material he may have given them before this happened.
“He may be dead already, but if he isn’t, the only way we can get him back in one piece may be to nail the people he was chasing.”
“Christ, Bill, that could take months,” 1 said.
“Or never,” Phlager said.
CHAPTER 13
Not a hell of a lot was said on the ride back. Phlager did tell me that the effort to find whoever had set Kehler on Sanders wasn’t starting from scratch—that the attorney general’s office had been looking into the CR&P ownership at the request of the authorities in two of our neighbor states.
“So what have you found?” I asked.
“Well, not a gold mine. The approach in both cases was made on the basis of potential commercial code violations—unfair competition stuff. I didn’t get all the details, but my understanding is that somebody claiming to represent SNS Associates had been approaching supermarkets, convenience stores, drug stores, and other establishments in the suburbs of the major cities and offering unusually high fees for space to place daily newspaper vending machines and racks—but with the proviso that they provide space to no directly competing publications. The issue was a restraint of trade question, and we were asked only for background on SNS.
“They didn’t give us anything that indicated an organized crime connection and, to tell you the truth, we didn’t exactly put it on the front burner. Young Bruce Touhy was given the file and from what I’m told, he hasn’t developed much except a list of SNS Enterprises property holdings in the stave.”
“They have some other property?”
“I think so. I haven’t seen the file.”
“Boy, that’s weird. These guys show up one day, take over the second biggest paper in the state with money from God knows where, spend like oil sheiks, and nobody knows from nothing. Can’t you get into their bank account—subpoena the company records?”
“We may do that eventually, Bob. But before this happened, the case was strictly low-level, and Markham Lee was not entranced with the idea of provoking a fight with a newspaper by poking into its books. You know, publishers are like porcupines. One nudge they interpret as unfriendly and they spear you with the First Amendment. If we had Sanders’s papers, we might have something hard to go to a judge with, but even with the indication of kidnapping, the connection with the paper is hearsay. Unless we get something more, I don’t know how we’re going to get at Shiu and Swift and their backers. Maybe the guys in Chicago can pry something loose.”
He didn’t sound optimistic and we rode a while in silence. Then a nasty thought occurred to me.
“Listen, Bill, do you think these guys are going to come after Liz and me? It was my phone they tapped, and she talked to Frank about his project too. And how the hell do I deal with Swift and Shiu now?”
“Well, we’ve got her covered and you’ll have someone close, also. I don’t think Swift and Shiu are likely to blow their cover unless things really get out of hand. From what you tell me, there’s no real link between them and Kehler, except through the Bright kid and that hangs on what some people would call guilt by association. I’d say, just do your job like nothing happened—but if either gives you any funny sign, let me know.”
It was getting dark when we got back and I had Phlagcr drop me at home. The apartment, which used to be 1 kind of cozy for one person, now was lonely. I sat at the dining table sipping a beer and tried to think of something brilliant, but all I could think of was Liz.
I called Frank’s place and she answered on the second ring.
“How’s it going, honey?”
“OK. You gave me a fright. You’re the first to call.”
I heard a mumbling in the background. “The trooper here says it would be better if we don’t tie up the line, Bob. I better hang up.”
Great. I watched TV for a couple of hours, finished a six-pack and went to bed. I dreamed about Swift, fretting over a headline. “Campus Mystery! Teacher Vanishes!” He shakes his head and tries again. “U Prof Does Judge Crater; Cops Baffled.” Swift smiles and I wake up in a sweat.
I took a bus to work the next morning—a new experience. At least half the people with the papers had them turned to the sports page, and most of them didn’t appear to like what they were reading.
Behind me, a gruff-voiced man was telling his seatmate what he thought about the story.
“It’s a goddamn shame, this paper. This kid makes one mistake and they got him labeled for life. I don’t like these faggots, but this sounds like the kid isn’t really queer. Now he’ll probably have to leave town—his family, too. Just for a goddamn cheap story. This used to be a good paper, but they been turning it into a damn scandal sheet. I’m gonna cancel my subscription today.”
“Yeah,” said his companion. “Me, too. Just when the high school had a team that looted like maybe it could win a state championship, these guys gotta ruin it. I don’t know what’s wrong with that kid, but he was sheer hell going off tackle. Why the hell don’t they go looking for homos in Richfield? They got a team we would have had a hard time beating.”
The bus let me off around the block from the paper, and as i turned the corner, I ran into the fringes of a crowd that had filled the sidewalk and was spilling half across the street in front of the CR&P.
Actually, it was several crowds. The biggest group was high-school kids, milling around and yelling at everyone who came in and out of the building.
“Crap! Crap! This paper is crap! Clap! Clap! If you hate this paper, clap!” One knot of six boys and girls chanted—clapping hands sharply at each refrain.
In front of the building, about a dozen young guys in their twenties were picketing with hand-printed signs. “Stop Fag Bashing!” said one. “Homophobia Is What’s Sick,” said another.
To one side, a group of older men and women were gathered around a card table. I worked my way over to see what they were doing. “Boycott the Register & Press” the sign on the table said. “Cancel your subscriptions here.”
I ducked down the alley and went into the paper through the composing room door. The shop was relatively quiet, and I climbed the steps to the second floor, coming out just down the hall from Swift’s office.
The door was firmly closed, but I could hear Shiu. His words weren’t audible, but the tone was in the red zone between rage and fury. He was walking back and forth in front of Swift’s desk and gesticulating wildly. Through the window in the office wall, belt-high to people of average height, it looked like a disembodied head framed by flailing arms moving across the bottom of a TV screen.