The Shadow Cabinet (34 page)

“He raised a little money for the Republicans. He's got a piece of this Caltronics, I hear, a few other things.”

“So he made a little money out there; so have a lot of dumdums. Only how many of them decide to go big-time, set himself up in Washington with a federal job, like a Bel Air millionaire—maybe a clearinghouse for favors, a little respectability? So he kicks in a few thousand to a couple of congressional campaigns, gets a few of his companies to kick in too, like this Caltronics outfit. He gives a lotta bucks to this one Nevada congressman—a real dull family-type guy; O.K., so what if he is a Mormon turkey?—and he thinks he owns him. Same with a couple of campaign types out there he's mixed up with, one he cut into a real estate deal near Palmdale, where you've got all these Defense contractors and the B-l bomber crowd picking up options. He thinks he owns them too. But that's Kramer's mentality. The creep doesn't give, he buys.”

“To do what?” Wilson asked after a minute. “Just for a political appointment?”

“You figure it out. When all these rube politicians come riding in on Reagan's coattails, Kramer sends them letters here in Washington, trying to pick his slot. Something big, he tells them. He tries to put the heat on the transition committee, but Kramer doesn't exactly come across as a Harvard Law type, does he? Not if you're one of those PR smoothies working over there on Pennsylvania Avenue. So maybe they try to brush him off—some dinky job with the Small Business Administration, the Commission on Maritime, maybe GSA. But Kramer doesn't go for it. He wants to be up front, box seats all the way, like four years of the inaugural ball. Kramer wants to impress people, Wilson—impress them big.”

Footsteps passed along the corridor and Klempner paused to listen, eyes moving to the door. Dusk was falling across the quadrangle beyond the old bay window. The footsteps were those of his temporary secretary, going home. He got up to turn on the lamp, intrigued by Klempner's vehemence.

“Impress which people?” he asked as he sat back down.

“The big shots out in California and Nevada,” Klempner said, “the movie crowd, the Malibu society bums who never took him seriously—not him, not that Las Vegas hooker he married, not that houseful of lap dogs he keeps hanging around. You wanna know the kind of guy Artie Kramer is, Wilson? I'll tell you. He's the kind of guy who gives movie screening parties out at his place in L.A. and no one comes except his crummy pals. He's the kind of guy whose wife gives alfresco lunches at his beach house and no one shows except his crummy friends. What kind of guy are you these days if the only bums you can get to your fancy parties are your crummy friends, your gin rummy pals? You're nothing, Wilson, and that's what Artie Kramer is—a nothing social-climbing punk with nothing friends.”

“How do you know all this?” Wilson asked.

Klempner shrugged, stood up, and crossed the floor to drop his chewing gum in the wastebasket next to Dr. Foster's old desk. “I was three years in L.A. and I've got an acid-proof memory. It doesn't wash out. I know a guy who's still out there—the FBI office in L.A. We keep in touch. A couple of years back, Strykker and his buddy Kramer were dicking around trying to get a piece of a casino in Vegas and they made a book on them.” He smiled as he returned to the chair. “You wanna hear something funny, you should hear those wacko transcripts—a Marx Brothers movie.” He looked at his watch, took out a cigarette, and sat down, searching his pockets for a match. “You ever met Strykker?”

“Once. He was with Mrs. Kramer when she signed the contract on the house.”

“What'd you think?”

“I didn't talk to him much.”

“Don't kid yourself. Strykker's smart as a shithouse rat, take my word.” He lit the cigarette, filled his lungs, and sat back, gratified. “He used to be the brains, an accountant. A CPA, a ledgerbook magician, now he's out of his class. That's why they brought Pete Rathbone in. Strykker started out as a taxman after the war, a one-horse operation with a sign in his front yard, a desk in the parlor, and his first wife licking the stamps. All he wanted was an orange grove somewhere. Now he's got this big accounting firm, a securities company, and a piece of a couple of insurance outfits. He's spread coast to coast, but so is his paper. He can't catch up. Yeah, he's smart all right, big time, but they'll nail him one of these days. He's been cooking the books for so many of those companies of his for so long, he's got half the CPAs in California cross-eyed. You think I'm kidding?”

“I don't know Strykker. I've heard Caltronics belongs pretty much to him. How'd it get started?”

“Strykker. Ten years ago it was a two-man operation, going broke—two young computer engineers designing software systems out of their garage. Strykker was doing their tax work, saw a good idea going nowhere because these kids didn't have any business smarts, so he raised some money and bought into it. A couple of years later, he took control, bought them out, and the company started to roll. Maybe two hundred million last year. Yeah, Strykker's smart all right, a real hustler, only he's a heavy loser at the tables, real heavy—heavy enough so he doesn't watch it, it's going to bury him, nothing but lead in his pockets. He's been lucky so far; Caltronics is his gold mine.”

Slouched deep in his chair, Klempner gazed sleepily at Wilson, studying his reaction.

“You've been keeping your eye on them,” Wilson said. “I hear you've got a hunting license these days, working for your old friends.”

“Me?” Klempner smiled, like a man who didn't want to be believed. “Someone's been pulling your leg. Can I use your phone?”

“Go ahead. You've got an office next door to Caltronics. If you had a hunting license, that would be pretty convenient, wouldn't it?” He watched him cross the floor to the desk.

Klempner was still grinning. “I was next door because they wanted me there—security work. They got some hot new software designs—algorithms, they call them. A whole new breakthrough, they say. I had a contract.”

Wilson listened as Klempner called a downtown garage and asked about his car. It wasn't ready. He called a local cab company, but the dispatcher told him he wouldn't have anything for thirty minutes.

“Why did Caltronics close that office at Potomac Towers?” Wilson asked as Klempner wandered back to the bay window. The winter darkness had settled over the grounds outside and the lights had been extinguished in most of the offices.

“It wasn't working out,” Klempner said, hands in his hip pockets, rocking slowly on his heels. “It was supposed to handle government contracts, government relations, but the people running it didn't know what they were doing. It was just a place where Strykker and a few other of the higher-ups could hang their hats, keep their appointment books—a goddamn valet service.” He went back to the chair and sat down. “So they turned the account over to this big law firm over on K Street. It cost them a bundle—a hundred and fifty grand a year, someone told me. They shipped the staff back to California—all but one, anyway. That was another reason they closed that office. He cleaned out the local bank accounts and disappeared; almost a hundred grand, I heard. Did Merkle tell you about that?”

Wilson hesitated, unwilling to concede an advantage.

“A guy named Morris,” Klempner continued, taking out a package of cigarettes, but then he refrained and put the package back. “He disappeared. Did Merkle tell you about this court order?”

Again Wilson hesitated, wondering if Klempner was more interested in learning what Fred Merkle had told him or in identifying Wilson's own interest in Caltronics.

“He said a district judge had refused the extension of the legal surveillance—closed down the wiretaps.”

Klempner sat forward, shoulders hunched. “Sure he did. They were trolling for big stuff, a fishing expedition—don't let Fred kid you they were just setting it up with this bribery rap, but the goddamn judge smelled a rat.” His voice had dropped and now, conscious of it, he sat back again. “This is sensitive stuff and this place is too quiet, Wilson. I can hear the fucking walls listening.”

“It's me,” Wilson said, “trying to figure out what this is all about.”

“You shouldn't worry; it's not your problem. Me, I'm buttoned up. If it leaks, it's my ass. I'm just trying to do you a favor, keep you from getting burned.” He reached for his hat and coat. “Hey, which way do you go home—out Chain Bridge Road?”

Driving out Whitehurst Freeway, the two men discovered they had something in common. Klempner was from Philadelphia. His mother ran the lunchroom for a parochial school and he'd gotten an accounting degree from St. Joseph's. He was drafted in 1954 and after basic training sent to the army criminal investigation school at Fort Holabird in Baltimore.

Wilson told him that he'd gone to counterintelligence corps school at Fort Holabird.

“So you know what it's like,” Klempner said. “It was the CID that got me interested in the FBI. After I was discharged, I went back to La Salle, got a law degree, and joined the FBI. Shit, you shoulda seen me in those days—dark suit, skinny tie, buttoned-down collar, shined shoes every morning. FBI, right? I was starched right down to my asshole.”

“I think I know the type.”

“Straight arrow all the way, Mr. Clean, a Catholic kid from Philly still trying to polish up the rough edges. After I joined the Bureau, I kept at it—took public speaking at GW, a couple of economics courses, a little philosophy. You know the drill: anything that looks good in your file.” He laughed again and dropped his cigarette out the window. “When they send me down to the Atlanta field office, I'm still wet behind the ears. I still had the Philly accent down there with all those Peachtree Street secretaries, all of those broads with the soft mouths and the warm tit, but I'm not making out, not me. That might give the office a bad name. So I'm trying to live up to the John Q. Public image, Hoover's G-man, learning to play golf, joining the Lions Club, polishing the apple with the JCs.”

“This was when—the fifties?” The old station wagon rumbled over the potholes, the exhaust pipe banging.

“The fifties, right. Big troubles down there. But that was the first time. I was twice in the Atlanta office. The second time was in the sixties. Anyway, this first time an old inspector comes through from Washington one day and he takes me to lunch down at this club where he always hangs his hat. He's got a voice like a gravel pit, this old guy, a face like a slag heap, tough as scrap iron, you know what I mean; but he's married to the Bureau, just like an old soldier, like Hoover—no family, nothing. He's been through the wars—Crime, Incorporated, up in Brooklyn, Dutch Schultz and that crowd, Philly, Chicago—only now he's an inspector and they're gonna retire him. He's got a little bungalow down near Hialeah near the track, not far from a golf club, right on a boat canal. He's gonna play the ponies and watch the flamingos, shoot a little golf, grow a little garden, pull in the bass off the boat dock. You've heard guys like that who have it all worked out.”

“A few.”

“So he takes me to lunch. It's the second time he's been through, a Saturday, half day, and we have a couple of belts. ‘Listen, Klempner,' he tells me, ‘I've been watching you, the way you're going, but you're not gonna make it that way.' Me, I don't know what the shit he's talking about and I'm too scared to ask. So we drink some more and he finally tells me, ‘Listen, Klempner, you take your choice,' he says, ‘the high road or the low road—the soft-collar lawyer the way you've been playing it or the grungy bastard the way you are. High road or low road.' I figure the guy's got X-ray eyes and knows something, only I play dumb. So we have some more brews. He's loaded up this time, so am I. ‘The low road's tough,' he says, his eyes beginning to wobble around, ‘and it's slower, and when the other guys get the kudos and their wives take home the roses, you'll still be standing down there in the crowd, looking up their skirts, but that's just for the choirboys. You'll be seeing pussy while the rest are smelling roses. That's what we all come home to at night, not roses but pussy, and that's what you like—isn't it, Klempner?—pussy.' And he gives my leg a squeeze under the table and when he does, I've got his number. I know what this old fart is—a fruit, like Hoover was, only he's not getting any, either, married to the Bureau like that, an old fruit gone dry to the bone, nothing left but a leg squeeze under the table now and then with some kid like I was. All of a sudden I got sick to my stomach, real sick, but I got a lot of things cleared up that day.…”

They drove along the canal, carried along by the outward-bound traffic. “The poor bastard,” Wilson said after a minute.

“Yeah, that's what I thought. The poor bastard, but he wised me up. This old guy had seen it all and so had I, but I was faking it, pretending I hadn't, trying to forget the way I grew up, how tough it was. I knew what he was telling me—I was listening to my own conscience talking. Like my old man, talking to me from the grave. So I drove him out to the airport that afternoon and when I got home I threw away the fucking choirbooks. From that time on, when I'd work a case, whether it was a white-collar CPA, a Peach Street blonde, or some dimwit redneck from the Klan rolling over the state line with a trunkful of industrial dynamite, headed for some civil rights sit-in, I'd work them from the bottom, low road all the time. Maybe the promotions didn't come as fast, but it paid off. I got more ass than the Georgia Tech campus. Maybe that held me back some too. I got married late.” He laughed crudely and lit the cigarette he'd been holding for five minutes. “But I'm almost fifty now and ask me whether I'm sorry, even after they busted me. Christ, no. That's why I know this town the way I do, why nothing in it's ever going to change.…”