Even When You Win... Read online

  “Zorro’s dream?”

  “Yeah, you never saw Tyrone Power in the Mark of Zorro? His last line of the movie?” He then tried to give it to me: “I’m going to ‘raise fat babies and watch my vineyards grow’ with the woman I’ve been visiting down there for twenty-five years.”

  “I get it, and I really appreciate your help here. You don’t think he’ll call the police, claim he was kidnapped?”

  “And then try to convince his business associates that he didn’t talk?” He shook his head. “Your part of the bargain requires you to finesse the information we got so there’s no way to trace it back to him. You think you can do that?”

  “I do. In fact, if I do this right, I won’t even have to talk with Mr. Dumont.”

  “That would be very good.”

  Chapter 38

  My plane landed in St. Louis just before two in the morning on Sunday – day three since Jan’s kidnapping – and I didn’t quite get to the short-term parking lot before two of Archie Richards’ pals were walking on either side of me.

  “Good trip, Mr. Stanton?” The young-looking agent to my left asked in a conversational tone.

  “Not bad, but I don’t fly well, so I’m glad to be back on the ground. And you boys, you been waitin’ all night for me?”

  “No. When your name popped up on the flight manifest in San Diego, we came down to meet you.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you, but unnecessary.”

  “Oh, not at all, sir,” the taller and older agent on my right said. “We just want to make sure that you’re available for a morning meeting with Agent Richards and some other folks interested in your wife’s safety.”

  “Any word on that front?”

  The guy on my left shook his head. “No sir, nothing.”

  We arrived at my vehicle, and as I pulled the key fob out of my pocket, the agent on the left took it from my hand, “Allow me, please. Agent Jacobs here will be glad to drive you. I’ll follow in our car. We’ve made arrangements for you to stay downtown again tonight.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Should you be?”

  “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “To sleep in a bed paid for by the U.S. Government? I wouldn’t think so, but feel free to call anyone you’d like.”

  “It’s like that, is it?”

  He nodded, handed the keys to his partner and watched as we got into my rental and pulled away.

  “So, Richards is angry at me?”

  The agent looked at me, “Should he be?”

  I thought about that for a minute, and decided that I really didn’t want to continue this any more. I shut up, and that seemed to suit the agent driving the car just fine.

  They escorted me to the same sixth floor room in the same hotel I’d stayed in before. They let me into the room, handed me my carry-on from my car, and turned to walk away.

  “My key?” I asked. “The younger agent looked at me with a scowl. “You won’t need it. We’ll call you at eight; pick you up at nine for the meeting. Sleep fast.”

  I did sleep fast, and awoke three hours later full of anxiety and a restless anticipation which I went to work on the only way I knew: Practicing my forms in the cramped confines of the room.

  I had a fine sheen of sweat working on my nearly naked torso by eight when the door opened and Andrea Hurst walked in with a coffee in one hand and another under her arm.

  I came out of a kick-roll and flipped over the bed to a landing crouched position just as she walked in.

  I couldn’t help but laugh at the expression on her face, and as I straightened up to a full standing profile, I realized just how insane I might look to someone who had brought coffee instead of a wake-up call.

  She set the first coffee on the night stand I’d pushed over to make more room for the bed I’d pushed against the window wall, looked around at the room and then smiled sweetly at me, “I’ll give you twenty minutes, then we need to go.” She turned and left the way she came. I grabbed the coffee she’d left behind and took a cautious sip.

  “Hmmm,” I thought. “She even remembered the cream.”

  Twenty minutes later she came back, held the door open and looked around. The bed was back approximately where I’d found it as was the rest of the furniture. I’d showered and shaved, and was sitting finishing my coffee.

  “That’s better,” she said, turned on her heel and left. I caught the door before it latched and followed her to the elevator. She had nothing to say as we made our way to the car. My rented SUV was nowhere to be seen.

  Our ride lasted less than five minutes, and she parked in the official lot of the U.S. Federal Building. We went in through an “employees only” door that latched behind us, and rode in an elevator that had no buttons for up or down. It was just standing there, open and waiting for us.

  We got off the elevator in a silent hall, walked to the first door on the right and went in. The meeting room had a long table with a white board on one end and at the other end was a console that I was sure would avail anything I could imagine in terms of high-tech audio and visual contraptions.

  She pulled a chair out halfway down the table, and motioned me into it. “Want another coffee?”

  “Sure. You want me to fly?”

  She gave me a little smirk, picked up a phone and pushed a number. “We’re here. We need two more coffees; yes, me and him. That’s right. I don’t know. Let them know we’re here; they’ll decide ... yes, that’s correct.”

  She walked around the table and sat facing me. “Richards and some others are on their way. You have questions?”

  “This seems a little, you know, melodramatic?”

  “Like taking some slob out into the desert and threatening to neuter him?”

  I looked at her and realized for the first time just how angry she was and how hard she was working to control it. There was a tiny muscle twitching in her jaw, back under her right ear.

  “You’re angry.”

  “Bet your ass I am.”

  “You want to explain?”

  “Not my place.”

  The door clicked open, and I turned to see Richards with a coffee in each hand followed by three other men. The oldest of the three looked to be in his 60s and he too was carrying a coffee in each hand. The other two were the two men who had met my plane. I smiled at them, but neither of them acknowledged my greeting.

  “’Morning, Jim,” Richards said as he set a coffee down in front of me.

  “Hi, Archie. What’s up?”

  “The jig, what else?” He said with a small smirk. “Please meet Special Agent Arnold, a senior FBI field agent specializing in anti-kidnapping strategies. He’s on special assignment here today from Quantico, just to meet you and help get Jan back.” He stopped and looked closely at me, leaning over the table, “You are still interested in getting Jan back, aren’t you?”

  “What the hell kind of crack is that supposed to be?”

  He ignored my retort, and turned to the two agents, “You know these two who provided escort service last night. They’re field agents from my division in the suburbs. Agent Davis and Agent Jacobs are pleased as we are that you could be here this morning. Of course, they’d rather be working on their own pressing cases, but you kinda put them on hold, didn’t you?”

  Arnold took over the meeting, standing at the whiteboard with a laser pointer and a digital switch in either hand. He clicked a button on the switch and the image of Aaron Sawyer appeared on the board which served as a screen. The lighting in the room had dropped so the image was clear.

  “San Diego Police Detective Lieutenant Aaron Sawyer,” Arnold recited in a monotone, “retired. Do you recognize him, Mr. Stanton?”

  “Of course; I served with him in the Navy back in the early nineteen seventies,” I said.

  “Yes, he was your commander in a top secret special forces experiment, wasn’t he?”

  “I can’t say what his role was, or if there was any such experiment,” I deadpan
ned.

  “Oh, yes, you can, sir. In this room you have the least clearance of anyone; there is nothing you can know that we can’t know. Do you understand me?”

  I got just a whiff of the same kind of anger emanating from Arnold that I’d felt from Andrea Hurst and Archie Richards. I decided to play prisoner of war.

  “You turned your back on your friends and your wife and went cowboying out West with a retired policeman. You participated in kidnapping, assaulting, and torturing a U.S. citizen. You put your wife’s life and the lives of the Sweets’ grandchildren in jeopardy by that stunt. Have you any explanation that would keep us from prosecuting you to the fullest extent of the law?”

  I looked around the room and swallowed back the first three insolent, smart-ass remarks that came to mind. “I doubt anything I could say would blunt your obvious anger.”

  “Well, you could tell us what you learned, for starters,” Arnold said.

  “Why, you know everything that happened, you must have gotten Sawyer’s take on the interview.”

  “I didn’t ask for Sawyer’s take, and yes, we did have a conversation with him. He’s in the wind and we’re happy to have him gone south of the border. We do, however, have a real interest in your take on this escapade.”

  I thought about it for a few seconds, considered their point of view and realized if the tables were turned, I’d be hot too. So I talked.

  “A local hood named Alvin Cartwright and two of his goons accosted me in San Diego last Sunday. At that time he told me a friend of a friend of his had a financial interest in the Sweets and he was giving me a message to butt out.

  “After Jan was taken, I decided that I could call on my old Navy friend to help me find out who had made that request of Cartwright. I called Sawyer, he agreed to help. I flew out there, we had the conversation with Mr. Cartwright, and then I flew back here expecting to drive back to Elliotsville and tell agents Richards and Hurst what I’d learned, and see if they wanted to pursue that line of thought.”

  “He told you what, exactly?” Arnold asked. The rest of the people were sitting absolutely still. I could hear no breathing or anything else in that room. I checked my heart rate, my breathing... I forced myself to a new level of calm.

  “He said the call came from Elvis Dumont, the street bookie who has been doing a lot of business with Eugene Hastings, who by all accounts has a gambling problem.”

  I saw Arnold’s eyes flicker to Richards on my left, and I saw an almost imperceptible nod before Richards spoke, “Jim, let me get this straight. Cartwright told you that Dumont called him and said he had a personal interest in the Sweet fortune?”

  I turned to look at him, “That’s not what I got out of it. I got that some friend of Dumont’s called Cartwright and that friend told Cartwright that Dumont had a personal interest in how the Sweet family divvied up the money.”

  “And you believed Cartwright?”

  “Yes, I did. I still do.”

  “You don’t think he just told you what you wanted to hear to make the pain stop?”

  “What pain? I don’t know what Sawyer did to him before he was with me in the car, but I can tell you nobody did anything – well, I did pinch his left arm pain center for a second when I thought he was going to launch an attack at Sawyer, but that was just a second of pain to stop any attack; it wasn’t any kind of torture.

  “Hell, at the end, when he told us about Dumont, we were just sittin’ around like old friends shootin’ the bull.”

  “You didn’t hold a knife to his gonads?” Andrea asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “You didn’t threaten to strip him and stake him out in the sun?” She asked again.

  I didn’t even bother to deny that. “Sawyer got his attention and convinced him that Sawyer was capable of all kinds of things and would do any of them to get Jan back unhurt. After that, he just answered every question we could think of.”

  “And you believed him?” Arnold asked again.

  I nodded. “I know he believed Sawyer, and so he told us nothing other than the truth and walked away.”

  “Where’s Sawyer today?” Arnold asked.

  “I have no idea. He told me I wouldn’t be seeing him again when we said good-bye, but he never told me where he was headed.”

  “He didn’t tell you about the Mark of Zorro?” Richards asked.

  “He did,” I said. “But I am not familiar with that movie and told him so. He said I should rent it, and laughed.”

  Richards turned several pages in his notebook and then looked directly at my eyes. “So, how were you thinking you’d use this new information? You have some wild ass plan for getting alongside Dumont and forcing him to give Jan back to you?”

  “No, I do not have that or any other plan as yet. My intention was to drive back to Elliotsville, meet with you, Andrea and the Sweets and tell what I’d heard.

  “My thinking was, and still is for that matter, that we needn’t approach Dumont at this point, but we need to talk with Cindy and Gene Hastings. I’m gonna bet Gene Hastings has no knowledge of Mr. Dumont’s financial interest in the prize money, and he can settle that once and for all with Mr. Dumont.”

  “And you’re prepared to do that, regardless of the impact that might have on the Sweets?” Richards asked.

  “I do care about Ed and Rita and their kids and grandkids, but Jan’s not something that might happen, she’s being held someplace by somebody, and I can’t just sit back and let it work itself out as it will... I just can’t.”

  “Well, we can’t just let you ride roughshod over the civil liberties of Americans, even ones like Mr. Cartwright or Dumont,” Andrea Hurst said. “There’s a right way to go about these things, and your way in San Diego is what we’re fighting against. It doesn’t much matter to me what the motive might be, kidnapping and torture are the evil we fight every day.”

  I wasn’t in any mood for a philosophical discussion about wrongs and rights, but her evident ardor for her work pulled me up short.

  “She’s pretty eloquent when she gets going, isn’t she?” Richards said to me. “We have all seen the worst of it, and it really doesn’t matter how righteous your motives might be, it’s not the way we operate or a way we can tolerate, much less, endorse.”

  “So, how do you use my information?”

  Arnold spoke up, “I find a lot to like in your reasoning about approaching the Hastings to ascertain if there’s any connection between your wife’s abduction and their bookie. I think we might make that work without resorting to intimidation and violence.”

  Jacobs, the taller and older of the two agents who’d met me at the airport the night before said, “I might not be so opposed to some violence involving Mr. Dumont.”

  That brought a chuckle from the other agents. Arnold looked at me, “Agent Jacobs has a long and troublesome history with Mr. Dumont.”

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “I’ve been trying to get that bum off the streets for almost twenty years; yeah, I know him, his folks and his brothers, sisters and cousins. They’re all crooked, violent and nasty of disposition.”

  “Does kidnapping sound like something he’d be part of?”

  “I hafta admit that’s not something I’ve ever heard of him doing, any more than I’ve heard of him wagin’ war on little kids.”

  “How would that make you feel?” Hurst asked me. “Trample all over Cartwright’s rights only to get information that leads to you trample on Dumont’s rights only to find out that he’s not the guy? That’s the risk of vigilante tactics.”

  “All the same, if I could rule him out or in, it’s all the same to me,” I said looking around at the others. “I’d be just as happy to know where not to look as I would be to identify a real target.”

  “I’m not critical of your motives, Mr. Stanton,” Hurst said. “I deplore your tactics.”

  “I understand, and if I had all the time in the world – like if it was your husband we were looking f
or – I guess I might want to stay on the straight and narrow too.”

  “I hope my ethics on this kind of thing wouldn’t fluctuate with the situation, but then again, I’ve never been where you’re sitting...”

  “I think we’ve beaten Mr. Stanton up enough over his San Diego adventure,” Arnold said. “Let’s firm up a strategy on how to deal with the Hastings or Dumont.”

  Richards cleared his throat. “And, let’s not forget that our adversary has yet to communicate a new demand or set of ground rules; we only know that he has promised to take a kid at the next sign of FBI involvement.”

  “That’s right,” Arnold agreed. He turned to me, “That means we’re going to disappear, but we’re not leaving the scene. Whatever we decide to do, you’re going to be on point. Can you do that without further compromising our sworn duties to uphold the law?”

  “If it amounts to doing something other than sitting on my ass and stewing, I’m in.”

  We talked then for a half hour before Arnold called the question.

  “What are we thinking? Around the room, keep it on point. Mr. Stanton?”

  I took a few seconds to compose my thoughts, check my center and focus. “I think I should go see Cindy and Gene. Tell them what’s happened and what’s at risk. Explain that Dumont is in the picture somehow, and the connection, albeit probably in all innocence, is Gene’s gambling habit.

  “I ask Gene then to make a meeting with Dumont and he and I go see this guy. I lay out the possibilities and try to gain a reading on his level of involvement.”

  “You think he’ll agree to the meeting or talk with you?”

  I shrugged, “People always do; I listen well, pick up on things and build some immediate rapport... I can’t explain it, but it’s always worked before.”

  They went on around the room, but everyone, it seemed, liked my idea the best. There were details to be worked out, and I was outfitted with a device that would allow the agents to listen in on all my conversations.

  “What happens if I go off the air?” I asked.

  “You’ll have five to ten minutes to show yourself before the calvary comes to the rescue depending on the nature of the conversation before you went off the air,” Richards said. “We don’t mind reining in your instincts a bit, but we have no plan to sacrifice you to the bad guys either. Don’t be confused by our concern for the civil rights of these folks; we recognized they’re all bad, bad people.”