Goner House: The Return of Patience

Chapter 12 Sordid’s Weak Plan

  Chief Sordid was so late to work that Monday that he might as well not have come into his office at all. However, careful man that he was, he wanted to check on his computer. He had been very busy over the weekend, too busy and perhaps not as thorough as usual. When he had come into the office on Saturday morning to get the necessary things for his presentation at the Land Opportunity Picnic, he had been hurried and distracted. He was not entirely sure that he had turned his PC off before leaving. Ordinarily that would not much concern him, for the place was locked, but he had sent his briefcase and easel back here by way of some policeman. He just wanted to be sure that the cop, improbable as it might be, had not snooped through electronic files.

  When he sat down and moved the mouse, the screen remained blank. Good enough, he had not left the computer on then. Nevertheless, he powered it up, having decided that, as long as he was here, he would check just one key file. His computer was loaded with so much dirt on the citizens of the City, that if it had given off a smell to match, it would have rivaled the town’s landfill. Plenty of those files would be much worse than embarrassing to him if their existence were known, but only the one file could absolutely destroy him. He had printed the document and was carrying it in his suit jacket’s breast pocket. Wishing to eliminate any other evidence that the document existed, he had deleted the file but had forgotten to empty the Recycle Bin too. He had neglected to ‘make haste slowly’ and scolded himself for it.

  While the computer was powering up, he looked at his hands, noting dirt under his fingernails that he had not been able to completely wash away after a little adventure begun the previous evening, a mission that had kept him up all night. It was something the Mayor had wanted done and was the reason he had slept most of the day and had come in so late.

  When the computer was ready, and J. Edgar Hoover was staring grimly at him from the screen, he opened the Recycle Bin and found it ominously empty. Stubbornly, frighteningly empty. He was sure, quite sure, that he had not emptied it. His heart rate accelerated and he felt shaky. If the cop who had brought his things in had found the PC on and had taken that one key file off the computer by means of a thumb drive or CD before emptying the bin, then the rest of Sordid’s life would probably be all wretched misery but also, he mused, very short. He knew of no way to track whether a file had been stolen in that way.

  But what if the file had been printed? He turned to his printer. There was a way to make it cough up records of its use, he knew that much, and the record for Saturday ought to show no use at all. In a few minutes, he was staring at the record for Saturday: two sheets printed at 11:58 a.m. and nothing else all day. Someone had used his printer. The key file he dreaded losing consisted of two pages.

  Sweating and fumbling, he made the document reprint, and in a moment he had in his hands exactly what he had not wanted to see, the report that would destroy him. But not if he killed the cop first, he thought with building anger. He could ask Prevarica who she had given the key to! But no, best not to give her any hint that anything was wrong. Instead he returned to his computer and clicked his way to a program that would show him the man, always supposing he had not masked himself. Very few people knew that he had hidden video cameras in his office, but the police knew.

  A few minutes later he was watching two damned kids steal his file. Prevarica and the dark-skinned kid, the Heavenite. Yeah, Wisdom. What they had in common he had no idea, but this meant he would have to fight a pretty hopeless battle on two fronts. He would be visiting Guiles Leasing soon, that was certain, but could not just club him over the head and drag him away, not unless the memo and any copies of it were in his hands first. For Guiles and Prevarica would have been very cautious. Probably they had already sold the memo to the media, but if not, then Guiles would have arranged that it would be released at once if he were to disappear.

  As for the Heavenite factor, his only hope was that the harp strummers would not wish to get involved. The video, though without sound, clearly showed the girl taking the lead and that she had been the one who had left with the papers too. So maybe, just maybe, the memo would not hit the Heavenite websites or their sickening TV channel.

  He asked himself what steps he should take. He could not tell the Mayor that he had failed at security, so—so he must say, and say quickly, that the same, or nearly the same, content had been gathered by people other than the Leasings. Yeah, some dirty little City employees eager to sell secrets for lots of money. If he moved fast, he could choose the most likely suspects, other than himself, and arrest them even before the report would be leaked to the media. Yes, that was the only way to go, and weak as it was, it had this in its favor, that this theft had occurred before he had given the report to Power, so its wording could not be traced to him. It might also help that intelligence agent Null Ecks had committed suicide because he was so upset about some of the report’s contents. Ecks should be one of the gang of traitors. It’s easier to blame the dead.

  But it was weak, so weak. Never mind that the lost memo stated it was from him: that could be said to be a ploy of the traitors. But the memo referenced Lawyer Temptation concerning both the Mammon takeover and the dark, secret stuff about Therion and said these matters were known to Temptation’s legal partners. So to really complete the diversion of blame would require the arrest of someone who worked at the law firm. But who? Sordid knew who the insignificant underlings were who had access to all the secrets of the Mayor’s office and of the Land Development Office, but he had never been able to successfully infiltrate the premises of the City lawyers. So he would have to arrest one of the lawyers themselves, not an underling, and probably it should be Temptation.

  Such an arrest, of one of the leading men in town, would be cataclysmic, impossible to keep secret, thundered in the media for weeks. Power and Therion would not even allow him to do it without first looking into the matter carefully, and then all four of those astute City attorneys would find every hole in his story, would almost certainly trace the leaks back to him.

  Nevertheless, he would have to try to arrest Temptation, since the alternative was swift, utter defeat, but he would not proceed with that particular arrest until the memo would actually surface. In the meantime, he could always hope to somehow eradicate every trace of the memo before it came to light.

  The first thing to do was to create a phony document and claim that the three traitors, who he was already mentally selecting, had written it together. This document would include most of the leaked memo but certainly nothing to link either himself or the City lawyers to it, nothing about the plot against Mammon Enterprises or about the Mayor. Next he would have his three dupes arrested. Then call the Mayor and Mr. Power with a sad and awful tale to tell. Then hang on and hope for incredible luck.

  Just an hour later he was one of a very select group hastily gathered to consider a heart-stopping security leak that it had been his duty to report. In the Mayor’s Office, all standing and most drinking, were Mayor Therion himself, Mr. Power, Sordid, all four of the City lawyers, and Councilman Fear. A wall-mounted television was on and, without anyone saying so, they were awaiting the dreaded announcement of a special news report. It would not be long now.

  “But did you have to lock up my secretary?” grumbled Power, straying from the main subject which they had been hammering out.

  Sordid had shown them the phony memo on City letterhead, with all its revelations about the City’s intended sale of worthless land, the debt to Hell, the Heavenite threat, and the geological shift of the City. He had told them the memo, which was ‘To Whom It May Concern’ and from ‘Friends of the Media,’ had been the work of three traitors: agent Null Ecks, Power’s secretary Miss Abject, and a man in Development named Dan Scapegoat. Ecks was of course dead, but Sordid had quickly arrested the other two to keep them from being interrogated by anyone but himself. Actually, he had not had time to do anything but stuff
them in cells, but no one needed to know that. As time permitted he would extract from his prisoners the confessions he claimed already to have.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said to Power, with a look of grim professionalism on his moustached face. “After we arrested Scapegoat of the Development Office, he told us Abject was in on it. She’s admitted everything, including that agent Ecks was the ringleader.”

  “If he weren’t dead…!” Power roared, meaning that he would have liked to have had the chance to kill Ecks himself.

  “I’ll second that, sir. Scapegoat and Abject say Null sold the memo to someone in the media yesterday evening—they don’t know who—and that he was due to be paid a bundle. They were supposed to get part of the money but haven’t seen any of it. We haven’t located the payoff money yet but expect to soon. We’re having Ecks’ apartment searched.”

  “So why did he kill himself?” asked Lawyer Snare pointedly.

  Sordid was keenly aware that the slightest slip at this point, and there were plenty of ways to slip, would turn suspicion his way. He cleared his throat.

  “Either conscience stricken or thought he’d be found out,” he answered firmly.

  “Of course, of course,” said the little man. “To save time, let’s consider that talked through for ten minutes and to no purpose. But now other questions should occupy us, such as, what brought together such an odd trio? How did they find out about each other? Isn’t it remarkable that they not only all decided to sell out at the same time but that they did it as a team?”

  Sordid looked at him with feigned contempt. “Ecks recruited the other two,” he said. “He put the idea in their heads.”

  “Undoubtedly,” Snare said coolly, “though he already had plenty to sell and risked exposure by bringing in accomplices.”

  “So what’s our damage control?” Power said, speaking thickly as if the words were squeezed out of him.

  “For the most part, we can claim they made it up,” said Sordid. “Good City folk are used to laughing off reports about Heaven and Hell, and the geological plate shift we’ll call pseudo-scientific hooey.”

  “That’s right,” said old Pitfall. “So of all the points in the memo, only the land sale can be readily exposed. Hell, it was always a tough one to put over. Now I say the sale had better not begin.”

  “Right,” agreed Trial. “Not one acre. If we don’t offer any land for sale, we can’t lose on this. Nobody gets anything to complain about, and the issue just dies.”

  “But people are crazy to buy!” Temptation said. “I tell you, after the huge publicity push we’ve made on this, the issue won’t go away. Half the people in town are ready to pawn their grandmothers to get some of that land. Tell them they can’t have any, and they’re going to automatically believe that the memo really explains why. They’ll believe it and raise hell.”

  Trial and Pitfall, both older men, looked disturbed at this but did not attempt to argue. They even nodded sadly.

  “So if people want land, why not give them land?” Snare said brightly. “What can we offer as a substitute?”

  “Yes, what is there?” Temptation said enthusiastically.

  A huge map of the City was on a wall of the office. He walked over and, tilting up the edge of a lamp shade, brought the lamp’s light to bear on it. The other men gathered behind him, all of them looking at it as if they had never seen a map of the City before. Though everyone stared hopefully, they saw little in the way of the green coloring that indicated open areas. Nevertheless, Temptation pointed an elegant finger decisively.

  “Here! Other than the airport, it’s the last big open area in town.”

  “It’s not much,” growled Pitfall.

  “No,” said Snare, “it’s small. But consider that, unlike the annexed areas, this land has real value. It could actually be built on.”

  “Damn it all, we don’t intend to be honest!” the older man fumed.

  “No, of course not, so the sales will be stopped before they’re final. But in the meantime, we get what we wanted: high morale, because it will look as if enough money will be made from the sale to fix City finances. We’ll have people thinking that their streets will be repaved and their sewers repaired. That’ll carry us through the election.” He nodded to Mayor Therion. “It should be represented as an improvement on the Mayor’s original brilliant plan. Not a change but an enhancement. The land outside the City will be discovered to be quite flawed, but who can argue with parkland? OK, a few ecology nuts maybe, and maybe some historical site fanatics, but we can deal with that.”

  “Prospective buyers will look at all those big trees,” Trial said, “and tell themselves it’s too much trouble and expense to clear them out.”

  “When was the last time you visited Founders Grove?” Snare asked him. “Guiles Leasing cut down and sold off all the biggest trees. Illegally, of course, but he really thinned things out. That still left a lot of second rate timber that would have been expensive to clear, but then that fire came along, the arson that the police haven’t solved, and took out many more trees. Quite a piece of luck that.”

  “If not for the fire, I’d not have suggested the Grove,” Temptation said. “It was perfect. Burned just enough to clear the thickest of the wood and leaving only what can be cleared easily. And it cost nothing! It couldn’t be better if we had planned it.”

  Several of the other men were beginning to make cautiously approving comments, but Trial again spoke up gloomily.

  “The Grove is legally untouchable, gentlemen. You should know that, Temptation. The City doesn’t control it; it’s managed by a citizen-Marshal who is pledged to protect it forever as a parkland.”

  “And the Marshal is Dignity,” Power said darkly, “a converted Heavenite! And he’s appointed for life. He’d like nothing better than to thwart anything we propose.”

  “Not a problem,” Temptation said. “Founders Grove is a bankrupt corporation, unable to pay taxes, so why not seize it?”

  “Takes too long,” Trial rumbled. “We have to move fast.”

  Temptation reluctantly agreed. “Guiles Leasing was Marshal until recently,” he said musingly, “and we fired him.”

  “Yeah, but his hand was in the cookie jar right up to the elbow,” Pitfall said. “He deserved to be fired. If we fire Dignity, we have to have something as good as that against him, or at least a pretext.”

  “Yeah, what can we pin on his rear?” said Power. “Sordid, you got any dirt on him?”

  Sordid did not answer. The Heavenites were well known to be model citizens. Besides, if Ambassador Grace had received the real memo from that boy Wisdom, any move against a Heavenite would only push the old man to use it.

  “If you don’t, just invent something,” Power said. “How hard can it be to make it look like he’s a meth cook or a pervert or something?”

  “It would take a little time,” Sordid said so quietly that Power could not hear and called for him to repeat himself.

  During this exchange, Snare had been answering his smart phone and now laughed lightly and unexpectedly. “Here’s our answer, gentlemen, and what timing! Let me just put this on speaker phone. Lawyer Means, will you repeat what you just said to me? Some people here would like to hear it.”

  “Gladly,” said a cheerful male voice. “My client Mr. Dignity is Marshal of Founders Grove and is worried about his liability for accidents since it’s uninsured. He’d like to arrange to make Founder’s Grove a gift to the City.”

  “Thank you,” said Snare. “Let me put you on hold for a moment.”

  As he was pressing the mute button, Power slapped his meaty hands together. “Grab it!” he said.

  Everyone present quickly agreed to this. Dignity’s lawyer was answered affirmatively and told that the filing of the paperwork would be expedited. When he was off the phone, they said among themselves that Judge Hate-Good should be called immedi
ately and instructed to oversee the transfer. If only no one involved would raise any objection—not Lawyer Sarcasm, who was getting no pay for her Grove work, or Guiles Leasing, or the Grove Corporation’s members, or most of all, the Corporation’s creditors…! Mr. Power then said that no one would object, because he personally would see to it that no one would. The Mayor, speaking at last, said he would arrange the change in publicity for the City land sale. From now on, every citizen would know that Founder’s Grove was the red-hot opportunity that he had been promised.

  Considering what they had been dealing with, it could hardly be expected that anyone left the room feeling happy, but almost all of them felt that things were at least under control. The special news report they were expecting had not yet come on the TV screen, but when it would come, they had something to fight it with. So they all would sleep that night, that is, except for Chief Sordid, who knew that he had found his way through just the first quagmire of a hundred deadly swamps. He still could not forget Lawyer Snare’s pointed questions. Neither, he knew, would Snare.