I was about five steps from the check-in when I saw Earl waving at me. He stood to the side of the door leading into the bar.
‘This place is a zoo,’ he said when I got to him. ‘We should have murders more often. No offense, but I’m getting rich tonight.’
Earl didn’t have much of a future in public relations. Good for him he was getting rich tonight. A man innocent of murder was getting lynched in the media and I was losing a vital campaign. But I needed Earl. ‘I’ll see what I can do for you. Pick out a couple of people and I’ll off them for you. I mean, since murders are so good for your business.’
I’d tried keeping my irritation out of my little joke but he picked up on my anger.
‘Hey, I said no offense, man. It was just a stupid joke, all right?’
‘All right. Now tell me about the man in the bar.’
Basically he went through what he’d told me on the phone. But this time he added, ‘He’s an official of some kind.’
‘How do you know?’
He touched his nose. ‘I can smell them. Cops, politicians, narcs. You can’t catch bells all the years I have and not be able to pick them off. All the guys can who’ve been at it for a while.’
‘And you’re sure he’s still in there?’
‘Unless he went out the back door, which almost nobody ever does.’
‘How about you point him out to me?’
‘Sure. And listen, it really was a joke I made.’
‘I know, Earl. Believe it or not, I can be an asshole sometimes.’
He handled it just right. He did a fake double take and said, ‘You be an asshole? I never woulda guessed.’
Earl was all right; he could put you down and make you smile about it.
We stood in the dark doorway of the crowded bar while he scanned the room. I didn’t see how he could find anybody in the packed drunken crowd. But then he said: ‘There. The tall guy talking to the little redhead.’ Almost as soon as he said it the redhead disappeared behind a surge of bigger people. But the tall man with the rimless glasses and the gaunt face could still be seen. He must have been six-five, at least.
‘He says his name is Michael Hawkins.’
‘Thanks again, Earl.’
For the next three minutes I pushed, twisted and sidestepped my way through a crowd of resistant bodies that smelled of perfume, aftershave, sweat, cigarettes and most especially alcohol. Hawkins loomed like a lighthouse above this wreckage, almost serene in his indifference to all the clamor of the people who were talking at him. He was just taking it in, like a recorder. Some kind of law, he had to be.
He didn’t hear me at first because I had to shout over the din. The third or fourth time I shouted, the green eyes behind the rimless glasses narrowed and then the gaze ran down his long, thin nose and settled on me. The briefest smile. He managed to say: ‘The coffee shop. Five minutes.’
Grateful we weren’t going to stay here, I turned and plowed and muscled my way back to the lobby. Earl wasn’t anywhere in sight.
The coffee shop had red leather booths and a small spray of fresh flowers on every table. The food and the coffee smelled warm and inviting. I took a booth next to the window. I ordered coffee and a tuna sandwich and sat watching people stream from the parking lot into the hotel. The wind was knocking them around; a few of the slighter women resembled toys being scrambled by the invisible hand of a girl playing dolls.
‘That bar is one hell of a place, isn’t it?’
Hawkins seated himself in parts; he was that tall. Now that I got a good look at him I saw he was in his forties, graying of hair and decent-looking in a stern, Latin teacher way. He wore businesslike blue pinstripes. He had that kind of quiet authority the good ones have.
The waitress came so quickly I didn’t even get a chance to tell him that I agreed — that the bar was indeed one hell of a place. He ordered coffee and a steak sandwich.
Long fingers then went inside his suit coat and retrieved the kind of small brown leather holder that contains badges. ‘Just so you know who you’re talking to, Mr Conrad. My name is Michael Hawkins and I’m an investigator for the US Attorney in this district.’
He showed me the badge and then the ID on the facing side. Since the ID contained not only his name but also his photograph, I had no doubt that he was who he said.
‘I was looking for you because I’m trying to locate a man named Howard Ruskin. I’ve never worked a political case like this one before but I do read the newspapers. Ruskin has quite a reputation.’
‘I’m not sure why you’d think I could help you locate him. I work the other side of the street politically.’
‘We have a warrant out for his arrest. We believe he’s been in our jurisdiction for over a month now but I haven’t been able to find him. This morning our office got a tip that Ruskin was spotted in town here. I was on my way before anything about this murder broke.’
‘Senator Logan did not murder her.’
He leaned back. ‘Believe it or not, Mr Conrad, I’m only interested in Senator Logan’s case as a spectator. I’m after Ruskin. I assumed that you might be assuming that Ruskin might be involved in your case in some way. I checked you out. Army intel and you’ve worked on criminal cases for a couple of your clients.’
Pretty impressive. He would assume that I would assume Ruskin was behind the murder — maybe even committed it himself — so I would be trying to track him down. So why not tap me for any information I’d already been able to pick up and save himself some time in trying to nail Ruskin?
‘If I had anything, I’d share it with you. I want to catch up with the bastard as badly as you do.’
He kept his elbow on the table until the waitress brought his coffee. The longer I watched, the more I saw a professor under the investigator. He was judicious in his words, almost ruminative. ‘I can’t tell you much about why we want him but I can say that it involves extortion.’
‘I’m surprised that it took till now to catch him at it. He’s made a lot of money and I always assumed he was shaking people down. But I still don’t know why you’d think I’d know where he is.’
‘As you say, Mr Conrad, you work a different side of the street. You may hear something I wouldn’t be privy to. So I’d appreciate you sharing anything you have with me.’
‘Of course. I want him caught.’
‘Then we’re on the same team.’
Our food arrived at the same time. Occasionally I glanced out the window at the men and women battling the invisible force of the wind, nearly getting knocked on their dressed-up asses for doing so.
The dialogue got rote — a little politics, a little sports and a little rote remorse about how pols so often went bad these days though, as I had to point out, we were living in a second Gilded Age and the first one had become the textbook the current plutocrats still used. In the 1880s and 1890s senators were so openly crooked some newspapers didn’t identify them by state; instead, they said, ‘The Senator from Oil’ and ‘The Senator from Railroads.’ These days we had public relations agencies working for senators to make them more palatable to the public.
Yes, Senator Gleason did indeed drunkenly run over an eighty-six-year-old woman in the crosswalk, but he was on his way to a cancer fundraiser. What a guy.
Toward the end of our conversation, he said, ‘I try to stay as apolitical as I can in my job. You know the US Attorneys took a hit a while back when they fired some lawyers for political reasons. I don’t want politics to get in the way.’
The Bush administration had fired a number of sitting US Attorneys because they wouldn’t carry out his political schemes. They had mostly been replaced by young graduates of Holy Shit University who came on with not only a political agenda but a religious one as well. They pretty much destroyed the integrity of the whole operation. I wasn’t the only one who was still skeptical. I wondered how many of them had actually been driven out.