The Great Divide (18 page)

Logan halted. Midstride, midbreath. Just stopped.

“It was absolutely the worst judgment call of my entire professional career.” Randall extracted a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and mopped his brow. “Terrible.”

Through the fog of his rage, Logan saw his surroundings for the first time. He checked the way Randall was seated, the open curtains, the watching throng. And understood.

“As a result, I have held you up for public ridicule,” Randall went on. “It was a calculated risk. One that backfired horribly.”

Logan’s rage drained away. He nodded. Public ridicule demanded public contrition. Which Randall had skillfully arranged. This was not a conference room. It was a stage. Logan was
expected
to rant and rage. Word would get out, both of how he cowed the big man, and how Randall then begged him to stay on. All on Randall’s terms. Word had to spread. A young partner from another firm blows in and publicly demolishes Randall Walker? Within the Carolina legal fraternity, this was headline news. Word would get back to Judge Willoughby. Logan’s standing would be restored. Blame would fall upon Randall Walker.

Which meant there was a purpose behind this carefully orchestrated performance.

Logan inspected Randall, took in the dramatic precision of his expression, the carefully disheveled appearance, the crumpled handkerchief, the abject tone, the contrite way he said, “What a chaotic mess I’ve made.”

Logan stalked around the table and pulled out a chair next to the man himself. Moved in close. Knees almost touching. And said simply, “All right. The show’s over.”

Randall jerked back as far as his chair would allow. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.” Logan settled one foot behind Randall’s chair leg, locking it in tight. He felt Randall try to push away, saw the uncertainty flash across those polished features. Spotted the instant Randall realized he had lost control. Felt the first bit of pleasure since the debacle in the magistrate’s office. “Question one: Did you arrange this to get me off the case?”

Randall sighed his acceptance of the new situation. “Absolutely not.”

Logan felt the eyes still on him. Good. This was now his aria. The rest had just been the warm-up. “You hired me to go after Marcus. Does that still stand?”

“Most definitely.” Randall’s voice had lost its abject tone. And his expression had altered. Logan realized it was the first time the man was treating him not as a tool, but as an equal. “That is our express goal.”

“All right. Here’s how it’s going to work.” Logan moved closer still, until his knees struck the corners of Randall’s chair. “From now on you are going to walk the straight and narrow with me. Clear so far?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” There was no need for volume. Nor a need to laden this ultimatum with doom. Logan had his own theatrical tools, honed before hundreds of juries and hostile witnesses. “You are going to supply us, your defense team, with everything we need to prepare and win this case. Starting with the absolute truth.”

“Yes.” Randall tried to push his chair away. “All right.”

Logan halted the motion by setting his hand upon Randall’s armrest. “And you are going to present to me one of the senior board members of New Horizons. Not just some PR dodo. Somebody who has full signatory powers.”

Randall stilled. “That is not going to be possible.”

“Why not?”

“The board is meeting in Geneva.”

It was Logan’s turn to back up a fraction. “Geneva, as in Switzerland?”

Randall gave a tight nod, then chose his words carefully. “The international division of New Horizons is incorporated in Switzerland. They oversee all twenty-nine foreign operations from there. Once each year, the entire board gathers in Geneva for a detailed overview.”

“When are they returning to this country?”

Randall met Logan’s gaze square on for the first time since he had drawn himself up close. “They are in Switzerland.”

T
HE CONVERSATION
between Randall Walker and Hamper Caisse, which began immediately after Logan’s departure, did not go well. “What do you mean, you didn’t find anything?”

“That’s not what I said.” The little gray man droned so softly and subtly it was easy to believe he had nothing to hide, nothing whatever to do with anything evil. “I’m telling you there is nothing to find. Nothing.”

Only today Randall was not willing to slide under the man’s quiet spell. “Well, is that a fact.”

“That’s what you pay me to deal in. Facts.”

The wrath and the frustration Randall had been forced to absorb from Logan emerged now in heaving breaths and thumping rage. “Then I guess we can all just wrap ourselves up in our warm fuzzy blankets and nestle down deep in our beds. ’Cause Hamper Caisse has gone out and made the world safe for democracy.”

This was clearly not the tone Hamper Caisse was used to hearing. He had a lifetime’s reputation for being the best. The man nobody saw. “We’re not on the same wavelength here.”

“Buster, we’re not even on the same planet. Do you know what just happened to me? Well, sir, I’ll tell you. I’ve just endured the worst day of my entire professional career.” The power of his ire lifted Randall from his padded leather chair. “That lawyer you called no-account, the one you claimed couldn’t find his own front door without a guide dog and a compass, remember him?”

“Marcus Glenwood, sure.”

“The very one. He marches into the federal magistrate’s chambers armed with nothing but what that little spiky-headed blond gave him. You know who I’m talking about, sure you do.”

“I was the one who told you Kirsten was making the trip down. But—”

“Wait, now, you just hold on! It gets way better.” Randall knew his voice was loud enough to echo down the outside corridor and ring the marble tiles of the reception-room floor. Which perversely made him feel the best he had felt all day. He had already endured a public shaming, the worst since he had hung up his law degree in an office
so tiny he and a broom couldn’t have fitted in there together. Randall Walker had come a long way in his climb to the top of the legal dunghill. And the top was where he intended to stay.

He took a breath big enough to carry the shout one notch higher. The effort crouched him down over his polished walnut desk. The red-hued reflection that stared up at him was not a pretty sight. “So, does that no-’count lawyer roll over and play dead like you predicted? Noooo sir! Not him! He uses the machete that spiky-headed girl handed him, the one you said she didn’t have, and he proceeds to disembowel my lawyers!”

“That can’t be.”

“Don’t you tell me that! You didn’t have to sit in my conference room and listen to how our attorney got skinned alive!”

“No.” A hint of nerves entered that drab voice. The first Randall had ever detected. “I mean the information must have come from somewhere else.”

“You want to tell me where? Gloria’s momma?” The shouts served a second purpose, in that others would now know someone else had been responsible for Randall’s debacle. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had. “Then why didn’t the woman give it to the first lawyer? The one we could control! Or maybe you think this Glenwood managed to sift through three years of confidential in-house corporate memos and ferreted this out himself?”

“No. You’re right. It had to be the roommate.” A pause. “He was armed with confidential memoranda dating back three years?”

“Longer.” Randall collapsed into his chair. His heart felt like it was going to explode.

“Maybe she put the information in her trunk earlier. You know, before our first search.”

“You want to take that risk? Worry maybe she’s got another trick up her sleeve we don’t even know she’s got?”

“But I’m telling you that place of hers was
clean.”
For the little man, it was a desperate plea. “Not only that, I’ve been listening to her conversations ever since she got back up here. And I’m telling you Kirsten Stanstead is clueless. She’s a spoiled rich kid putting in her time with a Washington charity. She talks about guys. She talks about who’s been invited to what cocktail party. She talks about
Cosmo
articles and—”

“We’re missing something here.”

“I don’t see how. I’ve got every room of the house wired. And now her car’s bugged.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” Randall Walker pulled out his handkerchief, grimaced at the need to use it a second time in one afternoon, mopped his face. The problem was he didn’t know what he meant either. “Get back in there and look again.”

“All right.” Resigned now. “But it’ll be riskier now that she’s back.”

“You said yourself she puts in time with that charity. Do it then. Tomorrow. Tear the place apart. Look for trapdoors, hidden safes.”

“I already have.”

“Then look again.” Randall swiped his face again. “My gut tells me we’re missing something major.”

O
ATHELL WAS DOWN
to the county lockup. Again. There to bail out his younger brother, Darren. Again. Darren had called him at ten minutes past the midnight hour and begged him to come get him out. Again. Darren didn’t dare call their momma. Darren knew his momma wouldn’t pay any mind to his pleas of innocence. She’d thrash him and trash him. Kick him out of the house. Been promising it ever since Darren hit that man in the bar and broke every bone in his face. Didn’t matter that the man had come at Darren with a bottle in one hand and a chair leg in the other. Darren had no business being in that bar in the first place. One more time in trouble, their momma had warned Darren, just one, and the boy wouldn’t have a home to come home to. Which was why Darren had woken him up. Again.

But Oathell had a soft spot for the boy, always had. And there’d been something in Darren’s voice, something other than the panic of being held by the Rocky Mount police. Or at least Oathell wanted to believe there was.

The county lockup was attached to the back of the central police station. Which, like everything else bought and paid for with tax dollars in Rocky Mount, stood on the Nash County side of the Tar River. It didn’t matter that 60 percent of the town’s population lived east of the river. No. The only things you could buy on the Edgecombe County side of Rocky Mount were burgers and booze. The biggest grossing Hardees in the whole United States was located two
blocks from Oathell’s home—a statistic that Hardees managed to bury deep.

The lockup was grim as grim could be, a series of metal cages with no interior walls, none at all. Just big old cages built inside what had been a tobacco warehouse. The building’s north wall still bore the old name,
SMITH BROTHERS AUCTIONEERS, SINCE 1887
. The din, even inside the police-station waiting room, was just plain awful. Oathell leaned his head on the brick wall behind his bench and pretended to a patience he did not feel. Almost all the people in uniform were white, almost all the people waiting in that decrepit hole were black.

Darren was not a bad boy. Oathell truly believed that. Otherwise he would have given up on his younger brother a long time ago. The problem was that Darren wasn’t smart enough or ambitious enough to get what Darren wanted, which was
out
.

Oathell turned his head, and straightened in alarm. For who should walk through the police station’s front doors but Deacon Wilbur. And with him was that grim-faced white lawyer Glenwood. They walked straight over and sat down before Oathell could even manage to get his jaw shut up proper.

The reverend asked, “How you doing, son?”

“Okay.” Oathell glanced back toward the doors, expecting to see his momma come storming through any minute now.

“She doesn’t know we’re here,” Deacon said, understanding him perfectly.

Oathell relaxed a fraction. “How’d you find out about this mess?”

“Friend on the force.” Deacon sighed long and hard. “Don’t know why I didn’t call your house. Not sure I did right there.”

“Don’t tell her nothing. Not a thing.” Oathell looked over to where the white man sat on the reverend’s other side. Weird. Guy was dressed for Raleigh downtown in a nice suit and silk tie. In a Rocky Mount jail. At two o’clock in the morning. “What you doing here, man?”

Deacon answered for him, “Marcus is here because I asked him to come. My friend said Darren might be accused of something he didn’t do.”

“They haven’t told me a thing. I been sitting here over an hour and I still don’t know nothing.” Oathell was too tired and too angry to try for nice as he asked the white lawyer, “What you so dressed up for?”

Marcus rose to his feet. “Sometimes a suit helps to get things moving. You know who’s in charge here?”

“That man with his gut hanging over his belt. Sergeant Richards.”

Marcus studied the policeman, who in turn was pretending he had not noticed any change in the waiting room, although every other cop in the place had been casting wary glances in Marcus’ direction. Marcus asked, “Is there anything about your brother I ought to know before I talk to the officer?”

Something in the way the man spoke, soft yet strong, distant yet right there with him. Not talking from the mountaintop like a lot of the white managers at IBM. No. This white lawyer was all right here, right now. Just like on the fishing boat. Nothing superior about this man. So Oathell was able to say, “Darren is about the biggest man you’ll ever meet.”

“Stands close on six foot fourteen,” the pastor agreed. “And strong. Played ball until his knee gave out, when was that, his junior year in high school?”

“Naw, it was his senior year.” To Marcus, “Darren’s never gone looking for trouble in his life. He’s a good man. Real good. But he knows how to fight and he don’t take nothing from nobody. That’s a problem ’round these parts.”

“And he stutters,” Deacon said.

“Yeah, but he’s so quiet most people don’t know how bad he talks.”

“All right.” Marcus walked over and said to the man by the desk, “I’d like to speak with my client, please.”

Sergeant Richards was known to be the Piedmont’s ugliest man, and dumb enough to take pride in the fact. Oathell watched the pockmarked face shift around, the dull brown eyes widen as though he were finally spotting this white man. “Your client?”