Interface (53 page)

Shad himself spent most of his day out of the office, deeply
enmeshed in some kind of plot involving the Ramirez family.

By the time the sun rose on Friday morning, illuminating the
new headline:

"BIANCA: I WANT MY MAMA!"

nothing had really changed. Arapahoe Highlands Medical
Centre was going to release Bianca at 6:05
p.m.
By an astonishing
coincidence, this put her release just a few minutes into the local
evening news programs, making it an ideal candidate for live TV
coverage. Their new PR Director, who had been on the job for
five days and had already received a raise and a bonus, insisted that
this was just a coincidence and that the time of the release had been set for purely medical reasons.

He deserved his raise. From a media/PR standpoint, Highlands
had started out the week gut-shot and had made a miracle recovery
of their own until they now looked like archangels in white coats,
their arms brimming over with fuzzy stuffed animals. At 6:05, they
would roll Bianca Ramirez out into the horseshoe drive where
their uniformed valet parking attendants stood guard twenty-four
hours a day, and release her into the world. This would be good for
two reasons: it would cement their reputation as medical geniuses
and it would clear out the hyperbaric chamber so that heavily
insured middle-aged diabetics could get into it again.

The question was: who was going to take charge of Bianca when
her wheelchair reached the curb? The fact that no-one knew the
answer to this question turned the entire scenario into a certified Real-Life Drama and insured vast saturating media coverage.

Colorado was still trying to get a court order making Bianca a
ward of the state, but the Ramirezes' high-profile lawyer and his
team of young legal ninjas had thrown this action into a procedural
snafu that would take weeks to un-tangle. Barring any last-minute
action by the judicial branch, Carlos and Anna would still be
Bianca's legal guardians as of 6:05.

But Carlos and Anna were illegal aliens and the INS was still looking for them. As a matter of fact, the INS was right there at the hospital, and had been for three days, waiting for them to show up.

So if Bianca's parents actually showed up at 6:05 to take custody of their daughter, they would immediately be taken off to the slammer and someone else would have to step in to take care of Bianca. This would probably end up being Anna's sister Pilar, but there had been
rumours that the state might use the arrest of Carlos and Anna as a
pretext to seize Bianca, in which case the media could look forward
to a tearful three-way Solomonic showdown right there in the
horseshoe drive.

All the networks showed up, and as early as six o'clock on Friday
morning, twelve hours before the Big Event, Highland's new PR
man was already out in the horseshoe drive with a thick piece of
blue chalk, marking out camera position: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN,
CHAN 4, CHAN 5, CHAN 7, and more.

As one journalist could be heard remarking to another journalist
while they waited in the car-rental line at Stapleton Airport: "It's
got a coma baby. It's got a miracle recovery. Weepy parents. A
crooked senator. And it's even got a fucking cowboy!"

By itself, the story was plenty, but things got even better, if that
was possible, in the middle of the day, when rumours began to
circulate that one of Senator Marshall's staff members had
documents incriminating another staff member in the Lazy Z
Ranch grazing scandal that had triggered this whole mess, and that
she was going to be there this evening to lay the whole thing out
before the massed forces of the national press. And when this
rumour was embellished a little, to the effect that the woman in
question was the famous bag lady who had recently cut Earl
Strong's nuts off in public, journalists all over Denver had to put
down their drinks and breathe into paper sacks for a while.

Eleanor Richmond strode like a gunslinger into the horseshoe
drive at 5:55
p.m.
cradling a three-inch-thick stack of xeroxed
handouts. Before she said a word, she held out one of the handouts
up next to her face and stood motionless for a few seconds. She had
learned this from watching pros in action. It gave the video people a chance to adjust the white balance on their cameras so that she,
and everyone who followed her into the centre of the maelstrom,
would not look pink or green on television. At the same time, it
was a great pose for the still photographers. Dozens of motor drives
whined, clearly audible in the astonishing silence that had suddenly
fallen over this makeshift technological amphitheatre.

If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had chosen this
moment to gallop through the horseshoe drive on their fiery
mounts, the journalists would have chased them out of the shot
with verbal abuse, and possibly interviewed them later, after the
main event. The only figure who dared break into the frame was a
helpful reporter from the
Washington Post
who scurried up to
Eleanor, relieved her of the stack of handouts, and frisbeed them
wildly into the crowd.

"My name is Eleanor Richmond. I am the Denver health and
human services liaison for Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall. I have held that position for one month.

"When I began working for the senator I was convinced, based
on his past records and statements, that he was a racist. I am now
convinced that he does not have a racist bone in his body. I have never met a man more willing to judge people on their individual merits, or lack thereof.

"However even the most perceptive judge of human nature can
occasionally be fooled by ambitious persons who practice to
deceive. It is my unpleasant duty to report to you that several such
people have risen to positions of influence on the Senators' staff
and, unbeknownst to Senator Marshall, have abused the power of
his office for private gain.

"Going direct to the media is not the best way to handle this situation. I should have met with the Senator first. I have made
repeated efforts to try and reach him but he has been unavailable. Unfortunately I cannot wait any longer to release this information,
because it has a bearing on the matter of Bianca Ramirez, and if, by
inaction, I were to cause damage to her family, I could never
forgive myself. So I am releasing the information now and I am also
offering my resignation to Senator Marshall at the same time."

"Eleanor!" shouted all of the journalists at once, raising their
hands.

"Excuse me, excuse me, but I think that I should be given an
opportunity to speak," someone said, coming up behind Eleanor.

She turned around and looked directly into the face of Shad
Harper.

And then she hesitated. She had her back to the lights and
cameras now; he was facing them, every pore in his face exposed to
their pitiless illumination. She felt like an interrogator as she stood
there staring into his face, weighing the situation, trying to make
up her mind.

He didn't look good. Shad was just a boy, after all, not very well
seasoned, and although he had a few on-camera skills, he was hardly
a master of the game. And right now, he was really, really upset.

She knew that if she let Shad talk, he'd cut his own throat. He'd
do it because he was a man and he had been conditioned. All his
life, to deny his fear, to act before thinking, to get in over his head.
A women, or an older man, would have backed off, thought it
over, chosen the right time. Not Shad; Shad had to confront her right now, he couldn't let her win even a single skirmish.

"Be my guest," she said, and stepped away from the microphone.

"I'm Shad Harper," he said, his voice cracking. "BLM liaison for
Senator Marshall. And since I'm still on his staff, unlike Eleanor
here, who has apparently resigned - and if she hasn't resigned -
which I can't say for sure either way, since I have not seen and do
not have any independent knowledge of any letter by which she
might have resigned - if she hasn't resigned then she will probably
be fired, and in any case no longer speaks for Senator Marshall, if
indeed she ever did - I do speak for Senator Marshall and so, since
it appears that very damnable allegations are being made about him
that I should step up and say something."

"She's not making allegations about the Senator," one of the journalists shouted, glancing through the handout. "She's making allegations about you personally, Mr Harper."

Harper's mouth fell open. "Well, I haven't seen these alleged allegations yet, but-"

"Is this your handwriting?" said another journalist, a woman
from the
L.A. Times,
holding up one page of the handout.

It was a photocopy of a sheet of stationary printed, at the top,
with the words FROM THE DESK OF SHAD HARPER. It was
covered with handwritten notes.

"I'd have to take a better look-

"Let me just read you some of this and maybe you can explain
why you were writing some of these things down," the woman
said. "'State of Washington versus Garcia 1990.' That sounds like
a court case."

"I don't remember," Shad said.

"I looked it up," Eleanor said. "It was a case in which some
children died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the back of a
pickup truck and the state of Washington successfully took custody
of the surviving children on the grounds that their parents had
neglected them."

"Why were you looking up that case, Shad?" the woman from
the
L.A. Times
said. "How does that relate to your job as BLM
liaison for the Senator?"

"First and foremost, I am a servant of the people," Shad said. The
protestors gathered off to one side hooted derisively. The sound threw Shad off balance and he stumbled for a moment. "Uh, I'm entitled to look up court cases in the privacy of my own office."

"You were trying to assemble material with which to blackmail
Anna and Carlos Ramirez," Eleanor said. "By threatening them
with the loss of their only remaining child, you could coerce them
into silence, and reduce the intensity of the spotlight on the cozy
arrangement between you and Sam Wyatt - which never drew any
attention in public until a freak accident exposed it to public view."

"This is just, just - a terrible thing you are saying."

"What is terrible is to live in a time when saying things is
considered worse than doing them," Eleanor said.

"You seem to be forgetting here that people in this state, and in
this country are damn tired of these unemployed welfare mother
illegal aliens coming into this country and stirring things up!"

"Why don't you call them spies and wetbacks, the way you do
when you're speaking on the telephone to Sam Wyatt?"

"That
 
is
 
a
 
totally
 
unprovable
 
allegation!"
  
Shad yelped.
  
He
looked shocked, horrified, to hear these words spoken in public, as if he and Sam Wyatt had invented the words for their personal use.
"Listen. I am not a person with any kind of ethnic bias or bigotry.
I limit my concern to those people, of whatever ethnic group, who
take advantage of the system. Who are like parasites on the
prosperous economic system that has been built up over the years
by the hard work of productive citizens the likes of Sam Wyatt."

"Sam Wyatt," Eleanor said. "Sam Wyatt, who grazes his cattle
on Government-owned land. Land that was occupied by Native
Americans until the Government paid soldiers to come out here
and kill them. Sam Wyatt, who irrigates his ranch with water from
a Government-built dam. And you think that Anna Ramirez is a
welfare queen? I've got news for you, cowboy. Everyone in the
state of Colorado is a welfare queen. We all live and feed off the
largesse of taxpayers in other parts of the country. It's just that some
of us, like Sam Wyatt, have been here longer than others, and have
had time to pile up more government welfare checks in their bank
accounts and funnel more of that money into big campaign
contributions. So don't stand here in Denver, a metropolis built on
a creek, the capital of Colorado, a state that would dry up and turn back into a prairie without the continuing help of the government,
and bray about the bad moral qualities of welfare queens. Because
these people who come north across the border may not have gel
in their hair and may not have ostrich-hide cowboy boots, but
unlike you, they have something a lot more important. They have
values."