Worst Case Scenario (8 page)

Chapter Eleven

Michaelson's preference for print on paper over pixels on video screens verged on superstition. There were a lot of ways he could have gotten a look at
T/O: The United States Armed Forces Directory
, and the simplest would have been to punch some buttons on the computer that dominated a credenza behind his desk at the Brookings Institution. He chose instead to go to the Library of Congress, where he could secure a hard copy of the bulky tome and lug it to a desk in the reading room. Something about physically flipping through bound paper and looking at an entire page of text at a time seemed to stimulate thought in ways that electronic dots and screen scrolls didn't.

It took him until well into the afternoon to learn that Walter Page Artemus had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army after graduating third in his class at West Point in 1964. He had served three tours in Vietnam, receiving one citation for extraordinary valor displayed during the chaotic fighting that dominated the first two days of the Tet offensive. Emerging from the post-Vietnam military reorganization as a lieutenant-colonel, he had made full colonel in 1981 and become a brigadier general in 1985. His postings along the way had included a line command at Fort Bragg, a stint in “Procurement/Weapons and Weapons Systems (Major)” at the Pentagon, and a staff position at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

The promotion to brigadier had coincided with Artemus' assignment to the White House staff as a military aide. Duties otherwise unspecified. He had served in that capacity throughout President Reagan's second term. Then he had crossed the Potomac again, returning to the Pentagon to head a working group at POLF—Planning and Operations, Land Forces. This, however, had continued only until the summer of 1990, when he received a promotion to major general and almost simultaneously retired.

Retired. Under fifty.

Early retirement happened in the army, especially to flag officers who'd bumped against the ceiling in the course of the armed services' relentless up-or-out promotion system. Michaelson had seen the same thing happen to colleagues of his own under the equivalent winnowing process that prevailed in the foreign service. But retirement before fifty of someone with a record as solid as the one Artemus had built struck Michaelson as extraordinary.

A few months after Artemus retired, Michaelson noted thoughtfully, the United States was hip-deep in its biggest shooting war since Vietnam and was mobilizing reservists from New Jersey to Newport Beach. But if the entry before him was up to date, it apparently hadn't occurred to anyone to ask General Walter P. Artemus (Ret.) to jump back in and lend a hand for the duration. That, if nothing else, suggested to Michaelson that Deborah Moodie had been right about Artemus' last promotion: a going-away present to sweeten the pension, a charity star on the way out the door.

Michaelson wasn't sure as he cabbed back to Brookings whether to call Jeffrey Quentin or Scott Pilkington. He knew more about Artemus than he'd expected to at this stage, but he still had only an informed suspicion about what Artemus' actual job on the White House staff had been.

He hadn't resolved the issue by the time he was back at his desk, so he called Todd Gallagher instead. Gallagher came on the line with an alacrity suggesting that whatever he was working on had a lower priority than anything Michaelson might have to tell him.

Michaelson began by describing his meeting with the Moodies. He went over it in detail, not only replaying the conversation but trying to recapture the scene, the feeling, and intensity in the room.

“That stuff about why she picked the issue back up and escalated the attack in 'ninety-three doesn't ring true, somehow,” Gallagher said.

“I think it's true, I just don't think it's complete,” Michaelson said.

“It seems too pat.”

“If you'd seen the picture she still has displayed from her Vietnam days, you wouldn't doubt her sincerity on that score,” Michaelson said.

He described the photograph in detail—the eyes, the uniforms, the cigarettes, the faces, and the poses of the young nurses—trying to make Gallagher understand what had to be the searing intensity of Deborah Moodie's experience in Vietnam.

“Maybe so,” Gallagher said soberly when he'd finished. “Maybe we don't have all of it, but maybe what we have is true. What else you got?”

Michaelson quickly summarized Artemus' service record, venturing the assessment that it seemed rather impressive.

“Chicken colonel less than eighteen years out of the Point?” Gallagher exclaimed. “That's not impressive, that's walking on water. The absolute statutory minimum is thirteen and a half years, and we'd have to have an awful bloody damn war before anyone could even think about getting his eagle that fast. He must've made at least two grades below zone.”

“What does that mean?”

“Before he'd served the normal time in rank.”

“The citation might have given him a boost on one of them,” Michaelson suggested.

“Actually, one of the most impressive things to me in his whole record is that he only picked up one medal in three tours. Lifers from the Point got tin thrown at them with both hands. Junior officers out of ROTC like yours truly didn't worry too much about that kind of thing. Being too eager for a medal could get you fragged, for one thing.”

Michaelson closed his eyes at that grating word from the bitter, late-war era. “Fragged” meant having a hand grenade thrown into your tent by one of your own men.

“So if he was only cited for bravery once, that tells you he wasn't playing army politics in Vietnam?” Michaelson asked.

“That's right. Not just dropping in to get his ticket punched, and not using his men as chips in that cozy little poker game the Pointers had going among themselves over there.”

“His retirement seems a bit abrupt, especially against that background,” Michaelson said.

“If they thought he was anywhere near retiring, they wouldn't have sent him to POLF after he was through having his picture taken at the White House,” Gallagher said. “POLF is heavy-duty, big-time brass-hat action. Short of a combat command in an honest-to-God bombs-and-bullets scrap somewhere, it's about the best assignment someone in his position could have hoped for.”

“Thank you,” Michaelson said distractedly as he followed a train of thought that Gallagher's comment had started. “I'll get in touch again as soon as there's another development.”

His eagerness to follow up a provocative lead quickly pre-empting his preference for print, Michaelson flipped his computer on as soon as he'd hung up. He pushed the buttons required to summon the
Washington Post
's style and magazine sections to his screen. As Gallagher's offhand crack suggested, people who serve at the White House do tend to get their pictures taken. If that had happened to Artemus—and it should have—the photo ought to have shown up in one of the two places he was looking.

It didn't. That was when Michaelson decided to call Quentin instead of Pilkington.

It took him an hour to get a call back from the assistant to Quentin's secretary. She explained that Mr. Quentin's schedule was quite full and that an appointment anytime that week was out of the question.

“Would you mind very much putting in your message to Mr. Quentin that the subject of my proposed conversation is General Artemus, and that I think the topic is time-critical?”

“Certainly. If Mr. Quentin agrees, I'm sure he'll have me get back to you.”

“I'll be here all afternoon,” Michaelson said.

When Marjorie showed up for her three p.m. appointment with Leslie Davidson, the head paralegal at Hayes & Barthelt, she assumed that she'd be meeting a woman. She was surprised when a cherubic male wearing a bright red vest underneath a blue sport coat toddled out to greet her. He smiled from beneath a luxurious gray mustache as he shook hands with her.

“Fair warning,” he said. He pointed toward the wall at an elegant brass plaque with a black circle/slash over a lighted cigarette, subscribed with the prohibition smoking forbidden. “The sign in my office is very different.”

“I'm on notice,” Marjorie acknowledged as she followed him out of the reception area and down the hall.

They passed a frosted glass door marked lounge. The plaque on that door had the circle and the cigarette without the slash and proclaimed, smoking permitted. A left turn brought them to a small internal office with a cozy secretarial area outside it. A handmade cardboard parody of the earlier plaques showed a circle around an open lighter displaying a steady flame. The words underneath were smoking encouraged.

Finally, they stepped into Davidson's office. The cardboard plaque there showed an open pack of cigarettes inside its circle and sternly enjoined, smoking compulsory. Complementing the message was a sign beside the ashtray on Davidson's desk: thank you for minding your own business. The distinctive smell and taste of the room—for it had both—brought memories of the senior lounge at college flooding back to Marjorie. She was considering an allusion to Proust's madeleine when Davidson lit a Vantage and spun the pack across the desk toward her.

“No, thank you,” said Marjorie, who preferred a somewhat less fanatical ambience for the two dozen or so cigarettes she still consumed each year. “I think that actually having one in my mouth would be superfluous.”

“Sharon Bedford,” Davidson said then, settling into the amply cushioned chair behind his el-shaped desk. “Good kid. That's really why I agreed to talk to you. I don't want to let go of her. When I heard she was dead, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. Left me feeling empty, you know?”

“Yes,” Marjorie said.

“Sharon was top notch at what she did. She could have been a real paralegal if she'd wanted to be, and she might have become absolutely world-class.”

“‘Could have been'?” Marjorie asked.

“She wasn't a paralegal when she died, she was only a deposition summary freelancer,” Davidson said, raising an index finger to emphasize the fine point.

“What's the difference?”

“A deposition summary freelancer is what it sounds like. A paralegal is somewhere between a glorified secretary and a frustrated lawyer. A paralegal does a lot more than summarize depositions.”

“So Sharon had a very narrow specialty but excelled at it,” Marjorie prompted.

“Deposition summaries are an art form and hers were beautiful,” Davidson said with a dreamy glance at the ceiling, like an old Washington Senators fan remembering Camilo Pascual's curveball. “She'd capsulize six pages in four lines, I'd check it over, and there wouldn't be one important fact left out. Then she'd take three-quarters of a summary page to cover two transcript pages, I'd check it, and there wouldn't be a word I could delete.”

“I guess she was a smart girl,” Marjorie said.

“You bet. I kept trying to talk her into other things: indexing documents, drafting simple pleadings, checking court records, interviewing witnesses—you know, halfway interesting stuff. No go. She didn't want to do anything but summarize deps. She wouldn't let me move her up in the profession.”

“I didn't realize paralegals could entertain such a broad range of career aspirations.”

“Are you kidding?” Davidson demanded. “Ninety percent of what paralegals do is stuff that lawyers did twenty-five years ago. It doesn't take a Harvard graduate to pull a removal petition out of the form file and fill in the blanks. These days they even have us doing basic legal research. We work a lot cheaper than young lawyers, and they never have to make us partners.”

The tincture of bitterness coloring the last sentence suggested to Marjorie that a new topic might be in order.

“Did any of the depositions that Sharon worked on involve unusually sensitive matters?”

“Nah,” Davidson said dismissively as he brushed tobacco flakes from his lapel. “This is your basic bread-and-butter practice: the machine didn't work, the broker churned Aunt Millie's account, the supplier cut off my dealership contract without good cause. You're never going to see a case from this firm on the front page of the
Post
.”

“Would it be possible for information in one of your cases to have serious implications for something really important—or someone really important—that wasn't directly involved in the case?”

“Sure, in theory. But it'd be hard for anything to be a state secret by the time it got to Sharon. Before it can be in a deposition, a witness has to know it and then he has to say it. As soon as he says it, at least two lawyers and a court reporter hear it. We're not talking about the Pentagon Papers here.”

Marjorie paused for a moment in frustration. She found these answers extremely inconvenient and aggravatingly plausible.

“Look,” Davidson said, “I know where you're going with this. I had the same reaction when I heard about Sharon dying alone in a hotel room: ‘I don't want this to be suicide, and I don't want it to be some kind of a screwed-up drug deal gone bad.' I mean, she was just too neat a person to die like that. If she has to be dead, I at least want there to be something significant about her death.”

“Exactly,” Marjorie said.

“But it just ain't there,” Davidson said, turning to face her head on and planting his elbows on his desk, his face a picture of earnest resignation. “At least from this end. You just can't get there from here.”

Before she could answer, Marjorie became aware of someone waiting none too patiently in the doorway behind her.

“Sorry to interrupt, Les,” a young male voice said in a tone which made it clear that the apology was strictly
pro forma
, “but I need something quick and half the office is in court or at a closing.”

“Shoot,” Davidson said.