“Didn’t you think that was a little strange?” says Harry. “A girl you just met handing out invitations to a party to strangers on the street?”
“She looked like the kind of girl who would have rich friends,” says Ives. “When I got to the party, I realized I wasn’t exactly dressed for it,” he says.
“What do you mean?” says Harry.
“I mean, there were guys there wearing tuxes, women in expensive dresses and a lot of jewels. And they were all older. Gray hair everywhere I looked. I felt out of place, like maybe she should have warned me. I went looking for her. My first thought was maybe there was a younger crowd somewhere in the back. It was a big place, a lot of ground in the yard. Chinese lanterns lighting everything up. She was right about one thing. Whoever owned the place was part of the one percent,” he says. “A lot of money.
“When I didn’t see her or anyone our age, I decided to leave. That’s when he came by.”
“Who?” says Harry.
“The waiter with a tray of drinks. They didn’t have any beer, but they had champagne. I took one glass, and that’s it. That’s all I can remember until I woke up in the hospital.”
“Do you remember what he looked like, the waiter?”
“Not a clue. Didn’t even look. It was crowded. There were people everywhere. I grabbed the glass and that was it.”
“Do you remember what the girl looked like?” I ask him.
“Yeah. You couldn’t forget her. Asian. Beautiful face. Great smile. Long straight black hair down to the middle of her back. Dark eyes. Bronze skin. About this tall.” Ives puts his hand flat on edge as if drawing a line across his upper body about nipple high.
“What are you saying, about five five, five six?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’d say that’s about right.”
“Was she slender, heavy? How was she built?”
“Yeah.” Ives gives me a kind of quick sheepish grin, the college jock. “I’d say she was pretty well built. You know what I mean?”
“Tell us.” Commander Lust, Harry wants all the details.
“Well, you know. . showing some good cleavage. It was a nice sunny day. Summertime. A lot of the women, secretaries, come out of the buildings into the plaza showing a lotta thigh, short skirts. Hers was right up there. You couldn’t miss it,” he says. “As I remember, she was wearing a blue print dress of some kind, tight, a lot of curves, all in the right places, and. . oh, yeah, she had a tattoo.”
“Yes?” I look at him.
“It looked like the tail of a dragon, blue and red; it was a colorful thing. It was on the inside of her left thigh. Fairly high up. By the way she was dressed I could only see the bottom part of it. But you could bet I wanted to see more.”
“Looks to me like she was waiting for you,” says Harry. “Everything but a pole with a lure on it.”
“With that kind of a lure, she didn’t need the pole,” I tell him.
This thought is not lost on Ives. “I’ve wondered about that.”
“Do you think you could have been drugged at the party?” I ask.
“I’ve thought about that, too,” he says. “I guess I’m pretty stupid. But they didn’t rob me. They didn’t take any money, my watch, my phone, nothing.”
“Any idea how you got way out to the accident site?” says Harry.
“I’m not entirely certain where that was,” he says.
“Try sixty miles out of town,” I say. “East, out in the desert.”
He shakes his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. You think I could have driven all the way out there, gotten into an accident, totaled two cars, killed somebody, and not remember anything?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “The only connection from what you’re telling us is your job, this story you were working on.”
“She was part of it,” says Ives. He’s talking about Serna.
I sit there looking at him, waiting for him to fill the nervous void. “Just give me some clue,” I tell him.
“In general terms?” he says. “What it’s always about when it comes to politics and business. What do they say? Follow the money. What the Swiss bankers call Ben and Bin.”
“What does that mean? Ben and Bin?” says Harry.
“In international financial circles, Ben is a hundred-dollar bill. Bin is a five-hundred-euro note,” says Ives. “Follow the money. It’s always about the money.” Then he suddenly gives us a distant stare as if he’s looking right through the cement wall in the cubicle. “That’s it!”
“What?” says Harry.
“Her name. The girl. The one who invited me to the party. Now I remember. Her name was Ben.”
THREE
Cletus Proffit, the managing partner of the Mandella law firm, looks a lot like one of the characters from an old Hitchcock movie. It was the cadaverous assassin in a tux, brandishing a pistol at the Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much. The title, if you put it in the present tense, would have made a fitting moniker for Proffit’s business card. Though at the moment he was more worried about what he didn’t know.
“Clete,” as his associates call him, was an up-from-the-bootstraps lawyer, a graduate of Harvard Law, originally out of the Midwest, a man who kept climbing his entire life and never looked back. His father had been a store clerk in a small town in Iowa, a fact that Proffit spent most of his life trying to forget. You could mark the significant waypoints in his career by the scandals he had sidestepped and the bodies he had climbed over along the way.
He had spent a few years in government, but never as a civil servant. Clete always believed in starting near the top; undersecretary of defense in the waning days of one administration and special assistant to the president in another. He was rumored to be on a short list for a Cabinet spot, perhaps attorney general, as soon as his party was back in power. Poster boy for the revolving door but always, in the end, back to the firm. It was the chair that was always there whenever the music stopped.
Quiet, in the same way a leopard is before he jumps you, Proffit was always the last to speak on any controversy at a meeting. Not because he was shy but because he was searching for qualities of leadership in others. Leading from behind was the best way to identify competitors so you could sink your canines into the back of their neck while they were still moving forward.
The firm’s headquarters were located in Los Angeles, though Proffit spent much of his time skipping like a stone off the stratosphere between there and Washington, D.C. He had spent too much of his life getting his hand on the spigot of power to let go now. Increasingly, that elixir and the people who were under its delirious effects resided in Washington, as did the mounting threat to Proffit’s future and his continued leadership of the firm: Olinda Serna.
“She’s gone now. You can relax,” said Fischer.
“There’s everything to worry about.” Proffit froze Fischer with an icy glance. “You don’t kill a vampire in a car crash. That requires a silver bullet or a wooden stake. Take your pick. And even then you can’t be sure she hasn’t left toxic entrails behind.” He was curious as to details of how she died. According to the sparse reports, the accident happened on a deserted road some miles from San Diego. What was she doing there? He had already told his secretary back in L.A. to get a copy of the accident report as soon as it was prepared.
Proffit hated Serna in a way that left its mark on the core of his very being. They both prayed at the altar of progressive politics, and in a public fashion that no one could miss. Proffit did his time on the board of the ACLU and took his share of high-profile pro bono cases for the poor, minorities, the oppressed, and every other needy group.
Serna wrapped herself in the body armor of women’s rights as protection against the male lawyers who dominated the firm. She served on the board of directors of several women’s organizations and carried the banner of liberation like a cattle prod. She poked Proffit in the ass with it enough times to remind him that electricity could hurt. The last thing you ever wanted was an injured woman coming out of the woodwork screaming sexual harassment when your name was on the short list for power player of the week in a rising administration. To those in the glass bowl of power it was all a matter of perspective. If your heart was in the right place and your behind was on the correct side of the political divide, such claims would wither in a desert of disregard. But woe unto those in the wrong party, or worse, who had made enemies in the activist camp. For them the ninth circle of hell would provide a refreshing interlude from the pounding they would take before Senate committees in confirmation hearings. Tales of pubic hairs on cans of cola were mild compared to the nuclear crap that would rain down on you from the cloud and the Internet, which had a habit of breeding other victims and cloning new complaints. All of this could be yours if you fell into the cross hairs of the wrong activist group, something that Olinda Serna could guarantee if you got on her wrong side.