“Reggie got reckless and made a bad mistake. He picked on somebody who has serious DC connections.”
“This Brenckmann guy?” Loretta queried. Nobody had cuffed her or read her rights, there were no cops or men in Homburgs and badly fitting 1950s suits in the room and now Vincent Meredith was dropping insider hints about the form of the runners and riders and giving her a glimpse of the lie of the land.
“His father is the new US Ambassador to the United Kingdom.”
Loretta blinked her confusion.
“The British Isles. The guy the President has picked to smooth over the waves with the British after we bombed them last month. The guy whose job it is to make sure we don’t get into another nuclear war any time soon.”
Loretta was not very strong on geography or politics of any description outside Los Angeles County; but she had extremely strong views about things like nuclear wars.
“Sam Brenckmann very nearly got beaten to death at San Bernardino two days ago. Almost certainly on the orders of your husband. He nearly didn’t make it.”
The woman visibly blanched at this.
“To cut to the chase,” Vincent said, hating himself, “I cut a deal with the guy in charge of the combined FBI and IRS investigation team assigned to Reggie’s case.”
“A deal?”
“Reggie is going to be facing an indictment for racketeering, perverting the course of justice, taking bribes on an industrial scale and frankly, God alone knows what other heinous shit the Feds and the IRS turn up in the next few months. The trouble is the way things look nobody is going to believe that you didn’t know exactly what was going on all the time. At best that makes you an accomplice before, during and after the fact and so far as prison time goes that’s ten to fifty in a Federal prison. If Reggie implicates you in a killing that becomes ninety-nine years.”
Loretta had gone as white as a sheet. Momentarily, she thought she was going to faint, and staggered.
Vincent caught her arm.
She steadied, raised her face and jutted her jaw at him as she threw off his support.
“What’s the deal?” She asked coldly.
“You turn state’s evidence in exchange for immunity from prosecution.”
“Just like that?”
“No,” Vincent Meredith confessed, somewhat more sanguinely than he felt. “No. Afterwards we both get to look over our shoulders the rest of our lives. Or disappear. Different names, different pasts, start over somewhere out of state, and make damn sure our faces never get to be plastered across a newspaper or on TV.”
Loretta’s thoughts were racing at impossible speeds and her head was a sudden cacophony of discordant white noise.
“We?” She demanded.
Vincent nodded.
“Once this thing breaks I’m going to be kind of a marked man around here,” his smile was rueful. “Reggie isn’t the LA PD’s only bad egg. Just the biggest and loudest. The Governor, the Mayor, the Chief of Police all need to be seen to be getting a grip. Things have drifted since the October War, people are starting to ask if California’s got its own Bellinghams up in the hills. The rebellion, or whatever it was, in DC has spooked everybody. Big business, the unions, the military, the FBI, and City Hall and the Governor’s Office are playing catch up. The state of emergency might have been lifted a couple of days back but a lot of people think they saw the shape of things to come; blanket bans on trade union activity, National Guardsmen outside every court room, the virtual suspension of states’ rights, and the jails overflowing with people who looked the wrong way at a cop or a GI. This thing with the Ambassador’s son is perfect for all those guys. They can make a splash, be seen to be cracking down hard. The only trouble is that little people like you and me tend to get caught in the crossfire.”
Loretta O’Connell had stopped circling.
“The war never got this far south,” she reminded the man.
“Didn’t it. We all breathe the same air.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she snapped irritably. “Things went on as normal down here after the panic was over.”
“How weird was that?” Vincent sighed. “Half of Washington State is a war zone, Chicago too, Boston and Houston got chunks taken out of them, Buffalo doesn’t exist anymore so nobody’s going to go to Niagara for a romantic weekend any time soon. The country was in trouble before the war, we just didn’t know how much trouble. There were riots in every big city in the South last summer, there probably will be again this spring. Riots and maybe worse, a lot worse. Even out here several of the passes through the Sierra Madre and the Rockies are blockaded by crazies, survivalists, gangsters and religious nuts of twenty different flavours. And what did our precious government do about all this? Diddly squat! That’s what JF fucking K did about it!”
Loretta had got over her shock at finding herself between a hard place and a rock. She had only married Reggie because she needed protection from the ‘agents’ and ‘managers’ who had saddled her with the sort of debts no honest working girl was ever going to pay off if she lived — and carried on ‘working’ — until she was collecting her pension. Life was not a very complicated thing when you really got down to what mattered; when a girl was in a tight spot she did what she had to do. If selling out Reggie was her ticket out of this tight spot she was not about to start shedding crocodile tears.
“If you feel so strongly about it maybe you ought to go into politics?” She declared acidly.
They both heard the cars drawing up in front of the house.
Brakes squealed, doors slammed shut.
“The guy I cut the deal with was J. Edgar Hoover,” the man said in an outrageously matter-of-fact way. “He almost took the fall for what happened in Washington last month. Right now he’s so eager to get back in favour with the Administration he’d probably cut his right arm off if JFK asked him.”
The bells was ringing at the front door.
Vincent Meredith quirked a smile at Loretta O’Connell.
“That will be the old faggot arriving now.”
Chapter 48
Sam Brenckmann opened his eyes very slowly and with extreme caution because his skull felt as if there was somebody inside it swinging a hammer against his temples. He squinted, waiting patiently for the world to come into sharper focus. Very, very slowly, he began to make sense of his surroundings. He was in a white-washed room and the stench of disinfectant was pervasive, over-powering.
“Ah, not dead after all, then,” a husky but comfortingly familiar voice observed with a mixture of relief and maternal irritation. “That fucking idiot Vincent didn’t tell me that if you had an allergic reaction that fucking Mickey Finn could kill you!”
Sam blinked myopically at Sabrina Henschal. Momentarily he was hopelessly disorientated. He had had an affair with Sabrina — who was easily old enough to be his mother — and it had been the most fun he had had in his whole life until he realized it was not forever. But that had been a while back and since then…
Everything flooded back in an instant. He might have fainted briefly; the world went black and silent for several seconds.
“Judy?” He croaked, aware that his throat was on fire.
“Judy’s fine. She’s back in the Canyon with Tabatha.” Sabrina was smiling, her eyes oddly misty and wet, opaque. A tear fell on Sam’s cheek as she leaned across him to nuzzle his brow. “Vincent slipped you a Mickey Finn to make it look like you were having some kind of a fit. Remember? He made a big scene when the guards came running in; shouting about brutality and all that crap and making crazy allegations. It didn’t work out so well but the bastards would never have let you out unless they’d thought you were going to die.”