Hard Rain

Thirteen

It was only 4:45, but night was falling along with the temperature. The sludge I’d seen on the horizon was now overhead and it smelt like snow, a fact the fingers in my cast were confirming with an ache more reliable than any weatherman.

Out on the sidewalk, Masters turned and waved at Doc Merkit ‘s nephew and said goodbye a third or fourth time — I’d lost count. Emir pulled up behind us, got out, raced around the vehicle and opened Masters’ door. If he had a tail, it’d be wagging. The guy was a human puppy dog.

I opened my own door and climbed in. The cab was warm and it reeked of tobacco smoke. Emir bounced in the front seat, clapped his hands together a couple of times, babbled something about Istanbul weather, and then lit the butt between his lips. I was tempted to ask him not to, but changed my mind. Everyone smoked around here. Maybe smoking was the Turkish national sport just like gridiron was ours. If they told us to stop playing football, would we listen?

‘You want to see Bremmel’s girlfriend now?’ Masters asked.

The woman wasn’t going anywhere, and I didn’t think she’d have much for us anyway. And I wanted to spend some more time going through Portman’s emails, phone recs — the boring but necessary minutiae of investigating. ‘Let’s do it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We can double it up with a look around the residence of Portman’s manservant. Meanwhile, what do you make of all that?’

‘All what?’ Masters replied.

‘What Doc Merkit had to say?’

‘I’m surprised you heard anything in there. You spent the whole time taking the woman’s clothes off. I thought you were going to jump on her when she leaned forward over the sugar bowl.’

‘Oh, right… And how about you? “Thanks so much, Nasor. The tea was wonderful. Do you know where I can buy some? I’ve never tasted anything so good. Maybe it was just the way you made it…” What would Colonel Wad say, hmm?’

‘Where would you like to go, please?’ Emir asked, leaning back.

‘The hotel,’ Masters snapped, the tips of her ears like hot coals.

‘The consulate-general,’ I said.

I put the difficulties about working with Masters out of my head and got on with the case. Thus, I found myself still up at three in the morning, going through Portman’s emails. I was reviewing them a little more thoroughly this time, especially the exchanges with Bremmel. I didn’t find anything I hadn’t already seen. The relationship was cordial, bordering on friendly. Each had a grasp of the pressures the other was under, and there was a fair bit of pressure. But there was nothing I could find that suggested the end they were both headed for.

I read the security file on Bremmel, looking for those patterns, and noted that both he and Portman had failed marriages in common. So? I said to myself, didn’t everyone?

I flicked through the Attaché’s phone records and found the number for his ex-wife, Lauren. I checked the clock on the wall and did the math. The West Coast was ten hours behind. That made it early evening in Van Nuys — the Valley. I dialled and listened to the ring tone, an echo on it. After eight rings, I was about to hang up when the call was answered.

‘Yes, hello?’ said a woman’s voice eventually.

‘Lauren Portman?’ I asked.

‘No, her sister. To whom am I speaking?’

The woman was older, and spoke with the hint of an English accent. I pictured a headmistress type with kneecaps like pork chops.

‘This is OSI Special Agent Vin Cooper, ma’am. I’m investigating the murder of Emmet Portman. If Mrs Portman’s at home, I’d appreciate asking her a few questions.’

‘The name is Morgan.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘After the divorce, Lauren reverted to her maiden name — Morgan.’

‘Mrs Portman hasn’t remarried?’

‘No, Ms Morgan hasn’t… Listen, how do I know you are who you say you are?’

‘What benefit would anyone derive from saying they’re me when they’re not, Ms…?’

‘Dorothy Morgan is my name, and I don’t know, but I felt I should ask. You never know these days.’

Her name was Dot. Figured. ‘Yes, ma’am, it can get tricky,’ I conceded.

‘So, three questions, Mr Cooper.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You said you wanted to ask a few questions. “A few” equals three. The point is, I think more than three questions would probably exhaust her. Lauren has taken ill as a result of this rather unfortunate turn of events.’

‘Unfortunate turn of events’ was putting it mildly. I heard another voice in the background asking who Dot was speaking to. All sound was blocked off for an instant — a hand over the mouthpiece.

‘Hello?’ came a new voice.

‘Mrs Portman?’ I asked.

‘Speaking. You’re investigating my ex-husband’s death?’

‘That’s correct, ma’am. Special Agent Vin Cooper.’

‘Apologies for my sister, Mr Cooper. Dorothy’s only doing her best to shield me.’

Shield you from whom? I wondered. And then it occurred to me: from people like me. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs Portman,’ I began. The way Portman checked out would have been a hell of a shock to a spouse, even an ex.

‘Well… how can I help? If you’re going to ask me if Emmet had any enemies, or if there was anyone I might have known who could possibly have wanted to kill him, I can’t help you.’

‘You’ve just answered two of the big ones for me, Mrs Portman.’ Actually, it wasn’t the big one. I’d intended to wind into it with a little shallow chitchat, but she’d left me no choice but to be blunt. ‘What about your relationship with your husband, Mrs Portman?’ In other words, if you and your ex didn’t get on, there might be cause to be suspicious of you. I heard the woman breathing. She was going to hang up on me for sure.

‘Are you going to ask me where I was on the night in question?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Well, then, I guess that’s some consolation… Are you married, Special Agent?’

‘Divorced.’

‘Did you end up enemies?’

‘Ma’am, we don’t exchange Christmas cards, if that’s what you mean.’

The memory came back to me — the final straw with the former Mrs Vin Cooper: the shower scene. It didn’t have the same cutting power it once had, time having blunted the emotion to a point where it was just, well, water down the drain.

‘Emmet left me,’ she began. ‘I thought we had a reasonably happy marriage, given that I was an Air Force wife. And then one day he came home and said he didn’t love me anymore. In fact, he said he’d decided he hated me, and that the last thing he wanted was to have children with me. Said it just like that — no warning that anything was wrong. He wanted to hurt me.’

There was something here I wasn’t understanding. What was the business about him not wanting to have children? Portman was sterile — said so in his file. Maybe he just wasn’t aware of it at the time. And if he was, the colonel must have had his reasons for not letting the wife in on his sperm count. I decided not to pass on this information.

‘I was thirty-five, he was forty-five, Special Agent,’ Ms Morgan continued. ‘I had five years left before my body clock… you know… Well, we divorced soon after. He just walked away from our marriage; asked for nothing, took nothing… We kept in touch. I don’t know why — just did.’

I heard Dot in the background telling her sister to hang up the phone.

‘I loved my husband, Special Agent, only he didn’t love me — end of story.’

There was bitterness in her voice, but I couldn’t hear any murder in it. Not that I was expecting to. An interview with Portman’s ex was more in the loose-ends basket. ‘Mrs Portman, on a different subject entirely, do you know what your husband was working on when he died?’

After taking a moment to think about it, she said, ‘No, even when we were married I didn’t ask. I’m sure your ex-wife learned the same lesson.’

Yep.

I heard Dot in the background getting more insistent.

‘I’m sorry, Special Agent. I must go now. I —’

‘You obviously can’t count, can you? I said three.’ It was Dot. She’d hijacked the handset.

The line went dead. The damn woman had snatched the phone and then hung up on me. I was tempted to ring up again just so that I could return the compliment, but I let it go. Lauren Portman had nothing helpful to add, unless I was just asking the wrong questions. Maybe if the battleaxe sister had given me permission to ask four, I’d have hit the jackpot. I thought about the reason behind the Portmans’ separation. Children. My ex and I never got around to having them. Would she end up having them now with her new husband, her shower buddy and our former marriage counsellor? Last I heard, they were expecting a BMW.

Back to Portman’s inbox. I decided to concentrate on Ambassador Burnbaum’s emails to the Attaché, printing out the lot. An hour later, much of it spent sorting out my printer preferences on the network, I hadn’t found anything to change my mind about the association between the two men. They seemed to get on okay. I sent an email to the IT department to get me a stand-alone HP before my i-rage got the better of me.

Returning to the business at hand, I noted there were at least a hundred social exchanges with old Air Force buddies, particularly with pilots from the Grim Reapers, both serving and retired. Quite a few emails had bounced around between Portman and a Lieutenant Colonel Chip Woodward, call sign ‘Block’. From these I gathered Portman had flown with Block and his squadron on several training missions, something I was expecting would be confirmed by Andrews once they stopped playing inter-office Doom (or whatever was soaking up their time and bandwidth) and responded to my enquiry.

I saw that Stringer and Portman had been out for drinks on a few occasions. Other arrangements between them had been postponed or cancelled due to work pressures. Nothing there, though I wondered what the two of them would have talked about. I found myself wishing I had that damn corrupted diary of Portman’s to cross check. Padding out the remainder of the electronic communications were dozens of miscellaneous emails from various people and companies — including spammers peddling the usual crap — that had nothing to do with anything relevant that I could see.

I moved on and reread the forensics report on the Portman crime scene, hoping for a revelation. None came. Then I switched to the phone records — and absolutely zip leapt out of there too. So, in short, all I managed to do was convince myself I’d missed several hours of sleep for no good reason.

I woke up on the office couch. My tongue felt furry, but that had as much to do with there being a cushion pushed into my mouth as anything else. I got up slow and glanced at my watch. I’d slept in. It was nudging 8:30.

I had time to visit the head and wash my face and hands before Masters breezed in, by which time I was gazing out the windows waiting for my brain to clear. It was grey outside. Snow had fallen overnight. Not much of it, just a dusting. An oil-green tanker glided down the Bosphorus towards Istanbul, dirty black smoke chugging from its exhaust stack and blowing forward across the sprawling deck. A small rust bucket bounced around in its wake, heading north in the opposite direction, towards the Black Sea. It looked cold out on the water, probably because it was.

I tried not to notice the fragrance of lavender soap mixed with arabica beans as Masters strolled past with coffee for us both.

‘Consider this a peace offering, okay?’ she said, setting the mug on my desk.

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On who you think won last night,’ I said.

Her hands were wrapped around the mug to soak up its warmth. ‘Oh, right. Well, actually… to be honest, I think you won,’ she replied.

‘Really?’

‘Vin, you push my damn buttons. And you know you do. You joke about pretty much anything, mostly to annoy me, I’m sure. Anyway, I figured it out.’

‘Figured what out?’

‘I keep wanting you to get bogged down like the rest of us. I want you to get stressed out, hit a brick wall, come across something that gets under your skin. But it rarely seems to happen. And when it does — you joke about that, too!’ She peered at me, at a spot between my nose and ear. ‘Hey, there’s the shape of a button pressed into the side of your face. Did you sleep here on the couch?’

‘It was more comfortable than the floor,’ I said, rubbing my cheeks. Masters knew that I wisecracked about things that got under my skin. She’d already learned that from prior experience. No, something else was going on here — this mood swing of hers into the agreeable zone. ‘So what’s going on?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The whole capitulation thing.’

‘Nothing’s going on.’

‘No, it’s definitely something.’ And then I remembered. ‘That’s right. You’re in a good mood because a certain Colonel Wad is coming to town today.’

A plug blew off her steam vent and heat flooded her features. One hand went to her hip, the other stabbed at the air in front of me. ‘No, Vin. Here I am trying to smooth things over with you and… Jesus, I don’t know why I care. He came last night, not that it’s any business of yours. And you’ll be pleased to know, so did I — several times.’

I felt something tighten inside. The door to the office opened before I could respond and an unfamiliar head popped in. ‘Busy?’ the head asked.

Masters whirled around. ‘Darling!’ she exclaimed. She then cleared her throat, checked herself, and continued in a more inferior-officer tone of voice. ‘Colonel, I thought you were going to stop by later.’

‘My meeting got pushed forward, so here I am.’

The head had a body attached and all of it decided to come on in. I read the name off the tag on the chest, not that I needed to. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Wadding,’ I said.

‘And you’re Special Agent Cooper, of course,’ he replied with a refined Southern accent, some of the vowels clipped, others extended.

We shook on the fact that I was me and he wasn’t. Eye to eye, I noticed the Wad was slightly taller than me, as well as being slightly older, slightly better looking in that incredibly clichéd Men’s Health kind of way, and, of course, a rung further up the promotion ladder. His hair was dark brown and vaguely foppish, cut in a way that goes with a riding crop, a country-club membership and a score of slaves to pick the cotton. His eyes were clear and light blue to grey in colour, his skin tanned which, given that we were now just into February, was probably from a solarium. The guy looked every inch the successful attorney, like he’d been delivered into this world ready to take a deposition in the event that the attending obstetrician slipped up.

‘Anna told me a couple of your lawyer jokes last night when we were lying in bed. Very funny.’

We were lying in bed… I wondered what Masters had told Wadding about our history. And why were they both so keen to inform me they’d been climbing the hairy pole recently? Whatever the reason, Masters’ fiancé obviously wanted to come out fighting from the bell. Who was I to deny him a round or two? ‘I’ve got a short one you might appreciate, Colonel,’ I said.

‘Bring it on. I think I can take it,’ he said. The smile was attached to his face, locked in place, even before I began.

‘So there’s an old lady having her will drafted. The job done, the attorney charges her a hundred bucks. She agrees, gives him a C-note, but fails to notice another hundred-dollar bill stuck to the back. On seeing the two bills stuck together, the attorney puts the ethical question to himself, “Hmm… Do I tell my partner?”’

Wadding chuckled without a shred of warmth in his face, that fop of his bouncing around like a skunk with a broken back. If I had three wishes, I’d have used up one just to give him hair plugs. ‘Yes… That’s very funny, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘If I laughed any harder I’d be coughing up lung,’ I replied, deadpan.

I caught sight of Masters standing slightly behind him. She wasn’t happy. She mouthed the word ‘Enough’ at me, but I wasn’t finished.

‘Colonel, Special Agent Masters tells me you’re heading up the DoD’s depleted-uranium class action defence. That must be a pretty tough gig.’

‘Tough? Well, no, not really. Like many of these things, mostly it’s just a case of rampant opportunism on the part of a small percentage of people with too much time on their hands.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘I heard there were more than a thousand of those so-called opportunists lining up to take a swing at the department, and more joining in every day. One of them is a buddy of mine.’

‘What’s his name?’ he asked. ‘I might know him.’

‘Tyler Dean.’

‘Dean… Dean…’ Wadding appeared to be having trouble placing him.

‘You would’ve heard of Tyler, Colonel,’ I said. ‘He drove an Abrams M1A2. Went to Iraq with the 1st Armoured. Slept with DU ammo for most of his tour. Twelve months ago they took half his insides out. He used to bench-press 220 pounds; now he does a crap and barely has the strength to lift up his pants.’

Wadding’s smile had gone on vacation and left a nasty frown to house-sit. ‘I think if you reviewed the evidence that’s readily available, Special Agent, you would come to think, as most reasonable, informed people do, that depleted uranium ammunition is perfectly safe and not in the least harmful to human life. There is no evidence to support your friend’s assertion that DU is the reason for his affliction. Have you read the Capstone report on the subject, by the way?’

‘Hasn’t everyone?’ I said, making a mental note to find out who the hell this Capstone was and what he’d said in this report.

‘Then you know the score. There are probably other reasons for your buddy’s troubles. He could just have been unlucky genetically.’

Wadding and I looked at each other. The smile was back, a hint of victory in it.

‘Richard, I might have to catch up with you later,’ Masters interrupted, before I could regroup. ‘Special Agent Cooper and I have a witness to interview.’

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Well, pleasure to meet you, Special Agent.’

I wouldn’t have called it that.

There was a knock on the door. It was a lardy clerk type pushing the IT equivalent of a gurney, on top of which sat an old beige box with its leads hanging out. ‘Special Agent Cooper?’ he asked. ‘Did you request a printer?’ He put the question to the most authoritative-looking person in the room — Wadding.