Dog Tags

CHAPTER 78

“I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO.” I make this admission to Laurie and Hike, gathered at the house for a Sunday-morning strategy session. “Usually I know what the right thing to do legally and morally is, and then it’s up to me whether to do it or not. But this time I don’t even know that.”

“So he implied that there was going to be another incident, and that you could help prevent it?” Hike asks.

“He did more than imply it; he beat me over the head with it. He said I don’t want to have this kind of blood on my hands.”

“Let’s take it legally first,” Laurie says. “Am I right that your first obligation is to your client?”

“In part; I have to defend him as best I can. I could be disbarred if I didn’t. But as a citizen, I also have the obligation to do my best to prevent a future crime from happening.”

“You have no information about such a crime,” she says.

“Benson thinks I do.”

Laurie nods. “And two years from now you don’t want him saying it to some congressional committee, with the next day’s headline, ‘Carpenter Could Have Stopped Massacre.’”

I’m floundering here. “So I need to cave and tell him whatever I know?”

“I don’t think so,” Hike says. “He has the power to find out what you know by intervening in the trial. If he doesn’t, the blood is on his hands, not yours.”

“Looking at it morally, it would be nice if we could stop blood from being on anyone’s hands,” Laurie says. “Including Billy’s.”

We decide to hold off on making a decision for now, mainly because we can’t come up with a satisfactory one. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation like this before, and it’s scaring the hell out of me.

I don’t want to turn on the television and see breaking news about some catastrophe that’s killed a bunch of people, with an imaginary graphic across the bottom saying “Andy Carpenter’s Fault.” But I also don’t want to wake up every morning for the rest of my life knowing Billy’s waking up in a seven-by-ten cell.

For now, the only action I can take is to focus on figuring out what the hell is going on. To that end I call Sam, who says he is working on the phone numbers, and should have the people that Chaplin called on the cell phone in a few hours.

“Good,” I say. “Then I’ve got another job for you.”

“What’s that?”

“You know how you told me C and F positioned itself to profit from the oil and rhodium events? How they formed positions in it over some months?”

“What about it?” he asks.

“I want to know if it’s happening again; if they’ve put themselves in a similar position. And if they have, I want to know what commodity they’re looking to profit from.”

“That’s not going to be easy, Andy. It’s a huge company operating in all different markets. And if I don’t know what I’m looking for…”

“For now, limit it to the companies that bought the oil and rhodium. Only look at their trades. Does that make it easier?”

“Much,” he says, relief in his voice.

“Great. Call me when you have anything.”

When I get off the phone with Sam, I go into the office, where Laurie is sitting at the computer terminal. She’s also on the phone, or at least she has it to her ear, though she’s not saying anything.

Finally she says, “Thanks, Rob,” and hangs up. She turns to me. “Chaplin didn’t file a robbery report. The guy is definitely dirty.”

“Or maybe he’s still lying in the driveway.”

“If he’s not, he’s dirty. A guy gets mugged and robbed in the driveway of his house, in that neighborhood, and he doesn’t even report it? That’s a guy who doesn’t want the police anywhere near him.”

When I get off the phone, I don’t do what I should do, which is prepare for my closing statement to the jury. Instead I obsess over the meeting with Benson, and the predicament it’s left me in.

Benson is playing a game of chicken with me, and I feel like I’m losing. At some point I’m going to cave; my fear of being even indirectly responsible for mass deaths is too great. I’m not ready to do it yet, which I realize on some level is silly. The next disaster could come at any moment, and any delay could make me too late.

Intellectually, I know that Benson is under at least as much pressure as I am. He has the power to find out what I know, which he believes could help avert a tragedy. Yet he is resisting doing so, just as I am resisting on my end.

I hope he’s as scared as me.

I finally get started on the preparation for my statement at nine o’clock, and Sam calls five minutes later. “I got something good,” he says, which is one of my favorite ways for a conversation to start.

“I’m ready.”

“This guy uses his cell phone a lot. He made two hundred and fifty-eight calls in the last six days. A lot of the calls were to the same number, so he called a hundred and sixty-one numbers.”

“You’ve got a printed list?” I ask.

“Sure. More than half of the numbers he called were companies, and they went through the company switchboards, so I can’t know who he talked to. And of course, there’s no way for me to know exactly who he spoke to when he called personal phones; more than one person could answer, you know?”

The Declaration of Independence has a longer preamble than this. “What happened to the I’ve-got-something-good part?”

“I’m getting there. There are three phone calls to a phone registered to Alan Landon.”

Alan Landon is a very prominent investor-financier, and evidence of that prominence is the fact that I’ve heard of him. That is not a world that I understand or have much familiarity with. Even with Freddie’s help, I haven’t become wealthy by investing. I’ve done it the old-fashioned way: I rolled up my sleeves and inherited it.

“You’re sure it’s the Alan Landon?” I ask, though it makes sense. Chaplin is a major player in that world; Landon is someone he could be expected to talk with at least occasionally. For all I know, Landon could be a client.

“Positive. And the Alan Landon is the person that Chaplin called four minutes after you left his office. They talked for fourteen minutes, and then again the next morning for seven.”

“Sam, you’re a genius.”

“You’re just figuring that out?”

Sam gets off the phone to get back to work on studying C&F’s recent trades, and I relate the information he gave me to Laurie. She is even more excited by it than I am, which is really saying something.

“So you meet with him, he’s on the way to a black-tie dinner, and you scare the hell out of him. Then you leave, and he immediately makes a fourteen-minute phone call.”

“It could have been a call he was making for business,” I say. “It might have had nothing to do with me.”

“That’s true,” she says. “That’s what he might have done if he was innocent. If he’s guilty, he’d be doing something to protect himself in those moments. Even if it meant just sitting and thinking of a way out of the problem you created for him. Or if it meant calling someone he thought could help him.”

“If Chaplin were innocent, he would have reported the mugging,” I say. “We know too much about him at this point to believe he’s innocent.”

“Yes, we do.”

“And under the you-have-to-have-money-to-make-money principle, Landon fits perfectly. He’s a guy with the resources to make those kinds of investments in oil and rhodium.”

“We’re getting somewhere with this, Andy.”

“We’d better hurry up. The world could blow up any minute.”