Speaking in Tongues

  He nodded.

  "Is it loaded?"

  "Oh." He'd forgotten to look. He took it out and fiddled with the gun until he remembered how to open it. Five silver eyes of bullets stared back from the cylinder.

  "Yep."

  He clicked it shut and put the heavy gun in his pocket.

  "It's not going to just go off, is it? I mean, by itself."

  "No." He noticed Bett staring at him. "What?" he asked, starting the engine of the Lexus.

  "You're . . . you look scary."

  He laughed coldly. "I feel scary. Let's go."

  *

  Manassas, Virginia, is this:

  Big-wheeled trucks, sullen pick-a-fight teenagers (the description fitting both the boys and the girls), cars on the street and cars on blocks, Confederate stars 'n' bars, strip malls, PCP labs tucked away in the woods, concrete postwar bungalows, quiet mothers and skinny fathers struggling, struggling, struggling. It's domestic fights. It's women sobbing at Garth's concerts and teens puking at Aerosmith's.

  And a little of it, very little, is Grant Avenue.

  This is Doctors' and Lawyers' Row. Little Taras, Civil War mansions complete with columns and detached barns for garages, surrounded by expansive landscaped yards. It was to the biggest of these houses--a rambling white Colonial on four acres--that Tate Collier now drove.

  "Who lives here?" Bett asked, cautiously eyeing the house.

  "The man who knows where Megan is."

  "Call Konnie," she said.

  "No time," he muttered and he rolled up the drive, past the two Mercedeses--neither of them gray, he noticed--and skidded to a stop about five feet from the front door, nearly knocking a limestone lion off its perch beside the walk.

  "Tate!"

  But he ignored her and leapt from the car.

  "Wait here."

  The anger swelled inside him even more powerfully, boiling, and he found himself pounding fiercely on the door with his left hand, his right gripped around the handle of the pistol.

  A large man opened the door. He was in his thirties, muscular, wearing chinos and an Izod shirt.

  "I want to see him," Tate growled.

  "Who are you?"

  "I want to see Sharpe and I want to see him now."

  Pull the gun now? Or wait for a more dramatic moment?

  "Mr. Sharpe's busy right at the--"

  Tate lifted the gun out of his pocket. He displayed it, more than brandished it, to the assistant or bodyguard or whatever he was. The man lifted his hands and backed up, alarm on his face. "Jesus Christ!"

  "Where is he?"

  "Hold on there, mister, I don't know who you are or what you're doing here but--"

  "Jimmy, what's going on?" a voice called from the top of the stairs.

  "Got a problem here, Mr. Sharpe."

  "Tate Collier come a-calling," Jack Sharpe sang out. He glanced at the gun as if Tate were holding a butterfly net. "Collier, whatcha got yourself there?" He laughed. Cautious, sure. But it was still a laugh.

  "Was he driving the white van?" Tate pointed the gun at the man in the chinos, who lifted his hands. "Careful, sir, please!" he implored.

  "It's okay, Jimmy," Sharpe called. "Just let him be. He'll calm down. What van, Collier?"

  "You know what van," Tate said, turning back to Sharpe. "Was he the asshole driving?"

  "Why'n't you put that thing away so's nobody gets hurt. And we'll talk . . . No, Jimmy, it's okay, really."

  "I can shoot him if you want, Mr. Sharpe."

  Tate glanced back and found himself looking into the muzzle of a very large pistol, chrome plated, held steadily in Jimmy's hand. It was an automatic, he noticed--with clips and safeties and all the rest of that stuff.

  "No, don't do that," Sharpe said. "He's not going to hurt anybody. Collier, put it away. Be better for everybody."

  Jimmy kept the gun pointed steadily at Tate's head.

  Tate put his own pistol back into his pocket with a shaking hand.

  "Come on upstairs."

  "Should I come too, Mr. Sharpe?"

  "No, I don't think we'll needya, Jimmy. Will we, Collier?"

  "I don't think so," Tate said. "No."

  "Come on up."

  Tate, breathless after the adrenaline rush, climbed the stairs. He followed Jack Sharpe into a sunlit den. He glanced back and saw that Jimmy was still holding the shiny pistol pointed vaguely in Tate's direction.

  Sharpe--wearing navy-blue polyester slacks and a red golfing shirt--was now all business. No longer jokey.

  "What the fuck's this all about, Collier?"

  "Where's my daughter?"

  "Your daughter? How should I know?"

  "Who's driving the white van?"

  "I assume you're saying that somebody's been following you."

  "Yeah, somebody's been following me."

  When Tate had seen the Liberty Park sign he'd remembered that his clients in that case had complained to him last week that private eyes had been following them. Tate'd told them not to worry--it was standard practice in big cases (though he added that they shouldn't do anything they wouldn't want committed to videotape). "Same as somebody's been following my clients. And probably my wife--"

  "Thought you were divorced," Sharpe noted.

  "How'd you know that?"

  "Seem to remember something."

  "So if you were following us--"

  "Me?" Sharpe tried for innocence. It didn't take.

  "--you've been following my daughter too. Who just happened to disappear today."

  Sharpe slowly lifted a putter from a bag of golf clubs sitting in the corner of his study, addressed one of the dozen balls lying on the floor and sent it across the room. It missed the cup.

  "I hire lawyers to fight my battles for me. As you well know, having decorated the walls of the courtroom with their hides recently. That's all I hire."

  Tate asked, "No security consultants?"

  "Ha, security consultants. That's good. Yeah, that's good. Well, no, Collier. There ain't no private eyes and no see-curity consultants on my payroll. Now, what's this about your daughter?"

  "She's missing and I think you're behind it."

  Another putt. He missed the cup again.

  "Me? Why? Oh, I get it. To take you outta the running at the oral argument next Thursday down in Richmond, right?"

  "Makes sense to me."

  "Well, it don't make sense to me. I don't need to do that to beat you. You know, I fired those half-assed shysters you reamed at the trial. I got the big boys involved now. Lambert, Stone and Burns. They're gonna run right over you. Don't flatter yourself. They'll burn you up like Atlanta."

  "Liberty Park, Sharpe. Tell me. How much'll you lose if it doesn't get built?"

  "The park? It don't go through? I don't lose a penny." Then he smiled. "But the amount I won't make is to the tune of eighteen million. Say, ain't it unethical for you to be here without my lawyer being present?"

  Tate said, "Where is she? Tell me."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Come on, Jack. You think I don't know about defendants harassing clients and lawyers so they'll drop cases?"

  Sharpe ran his hand through his white hair. He sat down beneath a picture of himself on the eighteenth tee of the Bull Run Country Club, a place that proudly had not a single member who wasn't white and Protestant. Male too--though that went without saying.

  "Collier, I don't kidnap people."

  "But how about some of those little roosters that work for you? I wouldn't put it past a couple or three of them. That project manager of yours. Wilkins? He was in Lorton for eighteen months."

  "For passing bad paper, Collier, not kidnapping girls."

  "Who knows who they might've hired? Some psycho who does kidnap girls. And maybe likes it."

  "Nobody hired nobody," Sharpe said, though Tate could see in his eyes that he was considering the possibility that one of his thugs had snatched Megan. But five seconds on the defensive was t
oo much for Jack Sharpe. "Running outta patience here, Collier. And whatta I know--I'm just a country boy--but if I'm not mistaken isn't that slander or libel or some such you're spouting?"

  "So file suit, Jack. But tell me where she is."

  "You're barking up the wrong tree, Collier. You're gonna have to look elsewhere. You're not thinking clear. You know Prince William as good as your grandfather did before you. If you do a deal like Liberty Park you play hardball. That's the way business works in these parts. But for Christ's sake, this ain't southeast D.C. I'm not gonna hurt a seventeen-year-old girl. Now it's time for you to leave. I got work to do."

  He sank the next putt into the small cup, which spit the ball back to him.

  Tate, chin quivering with rage, stared back at the much calmer face of his opponent.

  From the doorway, Jimmy asked calmly, "You want me to help him outside?"

  Sharpe said, "Naw. Just show him to the door. Hey, so long, Counselor. See you in Richmond next Thursday. Hope you're rested and comfy. They're going to rub every inch of your skin off. It's gonna be pretty to watch."

  Chapter Sixteen

  Rhetoric, Plato wrote, is the universal art of winning the mind by argument.

  Tate Collier, at eleven years of age, listened to the Judge recite that definition as the old man rasped a match to light his fragrant pipe and decided that one day he would "do rhetoric."

  Whatever that meant.

  He had to wait three years for the chance but finally, as a high school freshman, he argued (what else?) his way into Debate Club, even though it was open only to upperclassmen.

  Tournament debating started in colonial America with the Spy Club at Harvard in the early 1700s and opened up to women a hundred years later with the Young Ladies Association at Oberlin, though hundreds of less formal societies, lyceums and bees had always been popular throughout the colonies. By the time Tate was in school, intercollegiate debate had become a practiced institution.

  He argued in hundreds of National Debate Tournament bouts as well as the alternative-format--Cross Examination Debate Association--tournaments. He was a member of the forensic honorary fraternities--Delta Sigma Rho, Phi Rho Pi and Pi Kappa Delta--and was now as active in the American Forensics Association as he was in the American Bar Association.

  In college--when it was fashionable to be antimilitary, antifrat, anti-ROTC--Tate shunned bell-bottoms and tie-dye for suits with narrow ties and white shirts. There he honed his technique, his logic, his reasoning. If . . . then . . . Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. Knocking down straw men, circular logic and ad hominem tactics by his opponents. He fought debaters from Georgetown and George Washington, from Duke and North Carolina and Penn and Johns Hopkins, and he beat them all.

  With this talent (and, of course, with the Judge for a grandfather) law school was inevitable. At UVA he'd been the state moot court champion his senior year at the Federal Bar Moot Court Open in the District. Now he frequently taught well-attended appellate advocate continuing-ed courses, and his American Trial Lawyers' Association tape was a best-seller in the ABA catalogue.

  When he'd been a senior at UVA and the champion debater on campus the Judge had traveled down to Charlottesville to see him. As predicted, he'd won the debate (it was the infamous pro-Watergate contest). The Judge told him that he'd heard someone in the audience say, "How's that Collier boy do it? He looks like a farm boy but when he starts to talk he's somebody else. It's like he's speaking in tongues."

  No, there was no one Tate Collier would not match words with. Yet the incident with Sharpe had left him unnerved. He'd let emotions dictate what he'd said. What was happening to him? He was losing his orator's touch.

  "I blew it," he muttered. And told Bett what had happened.

  "Did he have anything to do with it?"

  "I think he did, yeah. He was slick, too slick. He was expecting me. But he was also surprised about something."

  "What?"

  "I think something happened he hadn't planned on. It's true. I don't think his boys would kidnap Megan themselves. But I think they hired somebody to do it. Oh, and he knew we were divorced and that Megan was seventeen. Why would he know that if he hadn't looked into our lives?"

  "Are you going to tell Konnie?"

  "Oh, sure I am. But people like Sharpe are good. They don't leave loose ends. You follow the trails and they vanish."

  She picked up the pistol, which he'd set on the dashboard. She slipped it in the glove compartment distastefully. "Aren't we a pair, Tate? Guns, private eyes."

  He said, "Bett, I'm sorry. About before."

  She shook her head. "No," she said firmly. "There was truth in what you said."

  They drove in silence for several moments.

  She sighed then asked reflectively, "Do you like your life?"

  He glanced at her. Responded: "Sure."

  "Just sure?"

  "How much more can you be than sure?"

  "You can be convincing," she said.

  "What's life," he asked, "but ups and downs?"

  "You ever get lonely?"

  Ah, there's a question for you. . . . Sometimes the women would stay the night, sometimes they'd leave. Sometimes they decided to return to their husbands or lovers or leave him for other men, sometimes they'd talk about getting divorced and sometimes they were single, unattached and waiting for a ring. Sometimes they'd introduce Tate to their parents or their cautious-eyed children or, if they had none, talk about how much they wanted youngsters. A boy first, they'd invariably say, and then a girl.

  They all faded from his life and, yes, most nights he was lonely.

  "I keep pretty busy," he said. "You?"

  She said quickly, "I'm busy too. Everybody needs interior design."

  "Sure," he agreed. "Things working out well with Brad?"

  "Oh, Brad's a dear. He's a real gentleman. You don't see many of them. You were one. I mean, you still are." She laughed. "You know, I keep expecting to see you on Court TV," she said. "Prosecuting serial killers or terrorists or something. Channel Nine loved you. You gave great interviews."

  "Those were the days."

  "Why'd you quit practice?"

  He kept his hands at ten to two on the wheel and his eyes straight ahead.

  "Tate?" she repeated.

  "Prosecuting's a young man's game," he said. Thinking he was the epitome of credibility.

  But Bett said, "That's an answer. But not the answer."

  "I didn't quit practice."

  "You know what I mean. You were the best in the state. Remember those rumors that you'd get that job you wanted?"

  Solicitor general--the lawyer who represented the government in cases before the Supreme Court--the most important forensic orator in the country. Tate's grandfather had always hoped his grandson might get that job. And Tate himself had for years had his sights on that job.

  "I wanted to spend more time on the farm."

  "Bullshit." Well, this was definitely a new Bett McCall. The ethereal angel had come to earth with muddy cheeks. "Why won't you tell me?"

  "Okay. I lost my taste for blood," he explained. "I prosecuted a capital case. I won. And I wished I hadn't."

  Bett had been deeply ashamed that while they were married Tate had sent six men to death row in Jarratt, Virginia. Her horror at this achievement had always seemed ironic to him for she believed in the immortality of souls and Tate did not.

  "He was innocent?" she asked.

  "No, no. It was more complicated than that. He killed the victim. There was no question about that. But he was probably only guilty of manslaughter at best. Criminally negligent homicide, most likely. The defense offered a plea--probation and counseling. I rejected it and went for lethal injection. The jury gave him life imprisonment. The first week he was in prison, he was killed by other inmates. Actually"--his voice caught--"he was tortured and then he died."

  "God, Tate."

  What a man hears, he may doubt . . .

  "I talked him t
o death, Bett. I conjured the jurors. I had the gift on my side, not the law. And he's dead when he shouldn't be. If he'd been out of prison, had some help, he'd be alive now and probably a fine person."

  But what he does, he cannot doubt.

  He waited for her disgust or anger.

  But she said only, "I'm sorry." He looked at her and saw not pity or remorse but simple regret at his pain. "They fired you? The commonwealth's attorney's office?"

  "Oh, no. No. I just quit."

  "I never heard about it."

  "Small case. Not really newsworthy. The story died on the Metro page."

  Staring at the road, Tate confessed, "You know something?"

  He felt Bett's head turn toward him.

  He continued, "I wanted to tell you about what happened. When I heard that he'd died I reached for the phone to call you--before anybody else. Even before Konnie. I hadn't seen you in over a year. Two years maybe. But you were the one I wanted to tell."

  "I wish you had."

  He chuckled. "But you hated me taking capital cases."

  There was a long pause. She said, "Seems to me you've served enough time over that one. 'Most everybody gets a parole hearing, don't they?" As Tate signaled to make the turn for Bett's exit she said, "Could we just drive a bit? I don't feel like going home."

  His hand wavered over the signal stem. He clicked it off.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tate piloted his Lexus back through Centreville, which some of the redder of the rednecks around these parts disparagingly called New Calcutta and New Seoul--because of the immigrants settling here. He made a long loop around Route 29 and turned down a deserted country road.

  The sun was low now but the heat seemed worse. The sour, sickly aroma of rotting leaves from last year's autumn was in the air.

  "Tate," Bett asked slowly, "what if nothing happened?"

  "Nothing happened?"

  "What if nobody kidnapped her? What if she really did run off? Because she hates us."

  He glanced at her.

  She continued, "If we find her--"

  "When we find her," he corrected.

  "What if she's so mad at us that she won't come home?"

  "We'll convince her to," he told her.

  "Could you do it, do you think? Talk her into coming back home?"

  Can I? he wondered.

  There's a transcendent moment in debate when your opponent has the overwhelming weight of logic and facts on his side and yet still you can win. By leading him in a certain direction you get him to build his entire argument on what appears to be an irrefutable foundation, the logic of which is flawless. But which you nonetheless destroy at the same time as you accept the perfection of his argument.