This morning Harry’s on a roll, newspaper in hand, feet propped on the edge of my wastebasket, uttering suppressed profanities, little whispered vulgarities mixed with what for Harry when talking politics passes for reason. Harry hates all things official, with a special fetish for politicians and their hangers-on. He is not a Republican or Democrat. Harry is of his own affiliation, a party conceived under the tree of distrust for government and fueled by a zealot’s devotion to a creed. He is what I would call a ‘social contrarian.’ Harry is largely against everything.
Lately he’s gone into the clipping services, taping articles from the morning papers to various areas on my desk. It is his effort to enlist the apathetic. Each day I find a new batch of these, his musings penned on square-inch Post-It notes, the travails of the world, all the things Harry can do nothing about but bitch.
His interests are eclectic — world trade; the national debt, which is too big, and the nation’s defenses, which are too small; the environment, which is overly protected, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when it seems the polar hole in the ozone has its effect on Harry. On those days he joins the Greens. Never let it be said that Harry is bewitched by the forces of consistency. And always there is a side to him floating just above the waterline of humor, when you never know if Harry is truly on the level.
Without even saying hello, Harry is reading to me, a dateline from Lexington, Kentucky. It seems the federal government has sold two truckloads of used computer equipment for forty-five dollars. Harry bitches about the price, the dousing of taxpayers, until he discovers further on that the government wants the equipment back. In an instant, less time than it would take to squeeze a trigger, Harry has chained himself to the bulwarks of free enterprise, shouting the battle cry: ‘fucking Indian givers.’
Another paragraph and Harry discovers why the government is reneging. These particular computers contain confidential information, the names and addresses of hundreds of federally protected witnesses, carted away for their own safety, information which a government technician has failed to adequately erase before selling the computers. Questions of political theory land in the dustbin as Harry sees a wedge of opportunity.
‘Can you imagine all the puckered assholes?’ He says this with a wicked gleam in his eye, like a schoolboy who’s discovered a treasure map.
‘You know,’ he says, ‘we should hang this on the bulletin board in the county jail. Your government at work for you. A snitch’s worst nightmare.’ Then he giggles in the pitch of a cheap tenor.
This is the Harry I know. He can go every direction at once, with the only true course change coming on the winds of opportunity. The notion of some prosecutor whose case would be creamed because his ace witness suddenly grew legs and walked, or suffered a bout of terminal laryngitis on the eve of trial, these are thoughts destined to catch Harry’s fancy.
After all things are said, Harry is a defender, dyed-in-the-wool, sworn to the cause of the underdog. He views any commitment to the objective processes of the law as its own form of treason. In trial before the bar, Harry takes no prisoners. He will seize and hold tenaciously any edge that is offered by circumstance. It is just that Harry’s idea of happy circumstance can at times be a little skewed.
For the moment I leave Harry in his negative nirvana, uttering the party mantra over the sacred scrolls.
I pick up the phone to call Clem Olsen, a friend at police dispatch. Clem and I went to high school together. He has always been a straight shooter. When he can he will talk, little musings like the oracle on Delphi — he will tell me what is wafting on the airwaves of the police band.
I get him after two rings.
‘Clem,’ I say. ‘Paul Madriani here.’ Light-voiced, I make it sound like a social call.
‘Hey, baby.’ Clem has called everyone he knows ‘baby’ since the tenth grade. I have heard him on tapes do homicide calls like the Wolfman, while frantic citizens scream hysterical gibberish about blood and bullets on the nine-eleven number.
Clem never made it to college, instead he did the woodshop routine and left school without a clue, until the Army got ahold of him in the Vietnam draft. They taught him how to kill, and later radios. From these Clem found his own way to the police department.
‘You gonna make the reunion?’ he says. This affair, it seems, occurs every five years now, where Clem, for one shining night, rises to the level of some higher aspiration as class MC.
‘Gonna try,’ I say.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You remember the girl, the blonde from homeroom our senior year, the one with the hooters like two dead cone-heads? Do you remember her name?’ he says. ‘Can’t find her on the mailing list.’
This, a girl’s form from twenty-five years ago, is something Clem would etch in his mind like the inscriptions of the Commandments in stone.
I tell him I can’t remember. I don’t puncture the illusion that nature has by now probably worked its will, and that gravity has no doubt taken its toll. I could tell him to look at his own love handles, which now sag like sodden saddlebags from his hips. But with Clem, memories of the past are always more valid than images of the present.
‘Listen, I got a favor to ask.’
‘If I can,’ he says.
‘Last night there was a shooting — a legislator’s wife out in the east area.’
He cannot have missed this. Melanie’s death, while too late to make the first-edition papers, has hit the a.m. news shows, both TV and radio, with all the cheery dignity of checkout-counter journalism. The video cameras panned the body all the way into the coroner’s van. The reporters with their mikes and plastered hair did everything but zip open the body bag to see if she was wearing her nightie.
‘I heard,’ he says.
‘If you can tell me,’ I say, ‘have there been any APBs? Anybody they’re looking for in connection, maybe for questioning?’
A long pause, like he knows but is not sure whether he should tell me.
‘Wouldn’t be you got a client?’ he says.
Clem is a friend, but he has never been close enough to climb my family tree. He has no sense of my kinship to Laurel, or for that matter her former relationship to the grieving legislator.
‘Not at this time.’ I won’t lie to him, but I shave the edges of truth a little.
‘I’d have to check the overnight dispatches,’ he says. ‘Can I call you back?’ Clem wants to make discreet inquiries to determine exactly how much he can tell me.
‘Sure thing. I’ll be here all morning.’ I give him the backline number so he can call direct, around my receptionist. On items like this Clem doesn’t like to talk through middlemen.
Harry’s into another incantation, with more gusto now that I am off the phone, still chanting from behind his curtain of newsprint.
‘Health-care reform by the same crowd who gave us tax simplification,’ says Harry. ‘Why don’t I believe it?’
I ignore him and hope it will go away.
‘You know they will exempt themselves,’ he says.
I don’t know who he’s talking about, and I don’t want to ask. But Harry volunteers.
‘Fuckers in Congress,’ he says. ‘They wanna be able to roll their asses over to Bethesda at the first sign of a sniffle, for the red carpet treatment. A private suite with hot and cold running Navy nurses,’ he says. ‘That’s so they can have a good grope and get saluted at the same time.’
Harry fans a page and looks for more grist for his mill.