Meter Maids Eat Their Young (25 page)

“Rafe,” I said. “What's up, man?”

“Oh, Mr. Teller.”

“Yep,” I said, feeling a little irritated and not quite knowing why. “Why are you here, Rafe?”

“My car was towed.”

I considered this non sequitur for a moment, wondering if I'd heard him correctly, or if I was losing it from all the running around I'd been doing.

“Your car?”

“I love my car, Mr. Teller. It was my dad's.”

I'd love his car too: A '56 T-Bird, low mileage, mint condition. The thing had to be worth a fortune. Then I remembered I'd seen the car when I parked mine in the underground garage.

“I just saw your car, Rafe,” I said. “Down in the garage.”

His eyes grew wide, like a rabbit's staring at approaching headlights.

“I have to go now, Mr. Teller.”

“Why were you here to begin with?” I said. He started to shake and I started to feel guilty about grilling him. “Look,” I said. “Why don't you …” I looked around, spotted the trash can, “… why don't you, you know, take the trash can, or whatever you came here for, and go back to your office. Okay?”

His face brightened, lost that about-to-be-flattened look. “Yes, sir,” he said. “The trash can.” He picked it up and hurried out the office. I watched him walk away and then forgot about him.  I had one last thing to do.

A half hour later, I was climbing the stairs to HL's office. As I rounded the fourth floor landing, I stopped. The scent of English Leather was as thick as the miasma of a sick ghost. Rafe. I looked around but he was nowhere to be seen. Shaking off the creepy feeling that stole up my back, I continued on my way.

“He's waiting for you,” Felice said as I crossed her office. I didn't bother asking how he knew I was coming.

“Sorry,” I said, swinging open the oak door to HL's inner sanctum. “I got kind of tied up.”

“What are you sorry about now?” HL asked as I walked into the room.

I thought about telling him of my strange encounter with Rafe, but what was there to tell? That the guy was acting weird? Weird was normal for Rafe. “It's a long story,” I said, setting myself down in the chair in front of his desk.

“It always is,” he said. “Pity your articles aren't.”

“I'm working on it,” I said.

He looked me up and down, a look of concern on his face.

“Are you sure you should be out traipsing around?” he said. “You look like something the bulls might have left behind at Pamplona.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'm fine. I hate hospitals.”

“As do I,” he replied. “I managed to avoid one at birth and all the days since and I hope to avoid one when my final deadline arrives. So, what do you have for me?”

I glanced in the direction of Felice's office. How …? I shook my head. When was I going to learn not to combine ‘how' and ‘Felice' in the same thought?

I tossed the envelope on his desk, studying him closely as he picked it up and turned it over in his large hands. He looked up at me.

“Open it,” I said. “I think you'll find it interesting.”

He turned it over. The tickets spilled out on his desk.

“What are these?”

I explained what I'd found the day before.

“And you saw this with your own eyes?” HL said.

“Watched the whole thing, start to trashcan finish,” I said.

“And you were alerted to this by your … source?”

“Yes, sir.”

He removed a handkerchief from his pocket, removed his glasses and began rubbing at them while gazing absently up at the corner of the room. I knew what he was doing. I'd seen it enough times over the years. He was searching for the devil's advocate position.

“What if he was just lazy, didn't want to get in and out of the cart?”

“Then why did he walk the line of cars in the first place?” I retorted. “And why didn't he leave any of the tickets on the cars?”

“Were the meters expired?”

“Only a couple. I fed those before he got there,” I said.

He went back to rubbing his glasses.

“What about quota? They have some sort of quota, don't they? Have to write a certain amount of tickets each month?”

“They're already writing nearly the number of tickets written in DC last year,” I said. “And we have half the population.” I followed that with a brief description of my talk with Philo the day before.

“A hundred and twenty million dollars?” HL said.

“Probably more,” I said. “In meters and fines. That's Philo's estimate, anyway,” I added. “And it adds up if his figures are right. I can't verify that, though. Through official sources.”

“Why not?” he said. “That information should be available.”

So I told him what Lynn had found, minus the part about maybe hacking the DPE system to dig deeper. I wasn't sure what he knew about his research department, but I wasn't going to be the one to reveal it.

“This grows more nefarious by the moment,” he said.

“And crazy, too.” I told him my lost-ticket-notice-in-the-mail theory. “I mean, sure, it looks good politically to be shoveling that kind of money into the city coffers, but what's the gain versus the risk? It's not like Cooper is planning to run for office or anything? Leastwise not that I've heard.”

“Well, the man's weasel enough to be mayor, that's for certain. But I agree. And I've heard nothing to that effect either.”

“So what is it?” I said. “Weird Brownie points? It just doesn't make any sense.”

He rubbed his glasses some more, peered through them finally and set them back on his nose.

“What that meter maid did is patently illegal, of course, but if this was not a solitary act, if it is system-wide with covert sanctioning by the department itself, the implications are enormous.”

“That's why I didn't write it up right away,” I said.

“I see your point,” he said. “What if it
were
only that one meter maid, operating on his own, without any kind of sanction? We bring down the heat with a story, where does it get us? What does it get us? One meter maid. And there is more to this whole affair than one, rogue meter maid.”

“There is a possibility, though,” I said, switching roles and taking the devil's position, “that if we did write this up, it would draw out some people. Jog some memories. Put more heat on the department.”

“True, true, and more heat would be good,” he said. “But I'm not sure whether that heat would bake them more than us.”

“Us? Why would we catch flak? If nothing else, we'll have exposed an illegal ticket operation. How could that hurt us?”

“As I told you during our last conversation,” he said. “The DPE is a powerful force in this town. I'm getting a lot of pressure to back off. To make you back off. This … I don't know. I'm not convinced this ticket thing is big enough. Yet. We lack sufficient information. These are litigious times we live in, Teller. The era of shoving the hand in any deep pocket one can find. We publish a story like this, people will indeed come forward. But why will they be coming forward?”

“Because they were ripped off?” I suggested.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But with no proof on their part, or ours, regarding further involvement of the DPE, what will be the perception? No one likes parking tickets. The parking issue was a hornet's nest before you returned and you've been batting at the nest further with your articles. My instinct tells me that if we publish this now, it could backfire on us and we are too off balance at the moment to withstand that. No. We need more information. I think it best if we sit on this for the time being.”

As reluctant as I was to sit on a story, I had to agree with his reasoning.

“Okay,” I said. “I've got some more questions for Philo. And the Mangler is still out there. And I still have that gut feeling Harrison's murder is tied up in there somewhere. I'll shake something loose.”

Rising from his chair, HL moved over to the window, peering out toward the Admin building and the park.

“The crowds grow more restless every day,” he said. “Every day. They're already gathering when I arrive here. Small in the morning and afternoon, no more than a hundred, I'd say. Not bad for a workday, though. At the lunch hour, the crowd swells, spilling out onto the sidewalks. People actually eat their lunch there on the lawn, as if at a picnic.”

He turned and faced me, surprising me with his next words.

“Perhaps another go at Cooper might prove productive.”

“What makes you think that?” I said. “All we ever get from him is a refusal or a ‘no comment.'”

“I wasn't thinking of an official interview request. More like something impromptu, spontaneous, show up on his doorstep kind of thing. If this meter maid acted alone, at best you'll get the cold shoulder from Cooper. However, if there is something deeper going on, and if he is involved in it, surely he knows you have the tickets. The unfortunate incident last night proves that someone knows. One way or another, a sudden visit on your part could be telling. And, if not, what have we lost compared with what we might gain?”

I smiled. In-your-face interviews had once been my favorite method of shaking the information tree. It had been a long time since I'd indulged myself with one.

“I like it. And now seems as good a time as any.”

He turned and looked back out at the crowd gathered on the Admin steps.

“I would agree,” he said.

I rose from my chair and was almost to the door when he spoke again.

“Be careful, Teller,” he said. “I have no desire to lose you now that I've coaxed you back.”

“Don't worry, sir,” I said. “I'll watch my back.”

“See that you do,” he said.

I stood outside the newspaper building, looking up at the clear sky. I felt good about having taken the tickets to HL and thought his perspective on them was a good thing. And I especially liked his idea for an impromptu interview with Cooper.

As I walked toward the Admin building, I scanned the street as surreptitiously as I could in search of my friend. Though I doubted he'd be making a public appearance any time soon ‒ not after what the cats did to him ‒ I didn't want to be taken by surprise.

As it was the beginning of the lunch hour, the crowd near the Admin steps was growing. In the time it had taken me to leave HL's office and get this far, it had nearly doubled in size.

I waded through the crowd, passed through the double doors and stepped into the dim, cool, quiet lobby. My footfalls echoed off the marble walls and it occurred to me that I hadn't been here since my first interview with Cooper soon after I'd arrived back in town, just before my first article on the DPE hit the newsstands.

The interview had gone well enough then, but there was something about the man that made alarms go off in my head. He had a lawyer's smile and a politician's way with words, both of which, according to his CV, he was; but there was something different with him, something darker,  just behind the soft smile and hardy handshake.

After the first article appeared, the department assigned a PR hack to deal with the press, to deal with me specifically. After the Mangler entered the scene, they stopped giving interviews at all and started trying to quash my stories. I was more than ready to rattle some cages and Cooper's cage was at the top of my list.

The DPE offices were on the fifth floor. I merged with a couple of business types coming back from an early lunch, sauntered past the guards and stepped on the elevator. The suits got off on four. I rode the car up to six. Slipping down the fire stairs, I emerged at the end of a long, deserted hallway.

It took me a moment to find my bearings but my innate sense of direction kicked in and I remembered how to get to Cooper's office. I made my way to the end of the hall and peered around the corner. The floor was empty. A stern-faced woman sitting at a round desk barred my way to Cooper's inner sanctum. Taking a deep breath, I turned the corner and walked past her.