Runaway Heart

THIRTEEN

When Herman walked in, Melissa King was sitting behind the huge oak desk in her office at the Federal Courthouse like a turret gunner about to flame some enemy aircraft. Volumes of the U.S. Court Reporter with mustard-yellow leather and gold bindings decorated three of the four office walls, giving the room just the right sense of awesome power. In those books was the gift of legal wisdom.

Judge King had decided not to dress up for the meeting, wearing no makeup and a blue-and-white muumuu printed with white Hawaiian flowers. She looked like Hilo Hattie in rehab. Her stringy blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail and held back with a rubber band. Her complexion was mottled with the heat rash of a third-trimester pregnancy. Her eyes were what scared him. They were as cold and deadly as two gun barrels-and they were sighting in on Herman over half-glasses perched on her nose.

He was back in his 'Number 4' court ensemble, his heart about as sound as the Canadian dollar-looking tired, but oh so presentable. Not that it mattered.

"Let's not waste a bunch a time on this, Herman," Melissa King started without preamble. "I know you don't have a million dollars."

"That's correct, Your Honor. Very perceptive."

"So how we gonna get this done?"

"Well, Your Honor, I was hoping to prevail on your sense of fair play, given our long legal relationship."

"Relationship? Let's review that. Two years ago you appeared before me on that silly MK Ultra mind control case against the CIA. Accused them of trying to brainwash people using broadcast television to create photosensitive epilepsy in viewers. Wasn't that the drill? Remember that one?"

"Judge, I'm not here to argue that case again. Obviously, you failed to see the merits there."

"Merits? Merits, Herman? What merits?" She shifted on her flat, bony ass to get more comfortable, then ripped her glasses off like she was getting ready for a fistfight. "You drag the CIA, CBS, NBC, Fox, and two animation companies into court and accuse them of conspiring to devise ways to hypnotize the American population with subliminal flashes during TV programs. Some case! Like the public is gonna go brain-dead from watching The A-Team. Not that I don't think that might do it, but did you have a shred of evidence?"

"Yes."

"No."

"Because you limited the scope. Cut me down. Kept most of it out."

"Dammit, Herman, the system is crowded. We've got scheduling calendars that look like rainy-day traffic reports. People wait years to get to trial, and you're wasting court time on all this hopeless bullshit!" She was glowering at him. "Okay. So you have anything to say before I impose this monetary sanction?"

"Your Honor, if I might, I'd like to please try and convince you that a fine of a million dollars is excessive, and I really think this problem with the amended complaint doesn't deserve a Rule Eleven penalty. It's not about the validity of the lawsuit." She was scowling angrily and he was beginning to sweat. His forehead felt damp, so he took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, folding it afterwards, then putting it carefully away, trying to look like Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, instead of a fat, sweating mouthpiece about to get reamed.

"Your Honor…" he cautiously went on. "Using Danaus Plexippus really didn't cause substantial harm, because anyone can pursue the public interest in preserving monarch butterflies. I could have used anyone as a plaintiff, so it's of no real merit that the plaintiff foundation wasn't precisely as advertised."

"That's not the point, Herman, and you know it," she growled. "I bifurcated the injunction and the case for damages, then let you put them on together. Now it turns out that in order to finagle yourself a jury trial at public expense you ginned up a phony foundation with bogus damages and lied about it in court. You've done that for the last time. The fine stands at a million dollars."

"I don't have anything close to a million dollars," he said.

"Then you'll have to raise it. Sell something."

"Judge, nothing I have even comes close to that. I hate to reveal this to Your Honor, but my practice does not make much money. We do a lot of very important work, but much of it is pro bono."

"Herman, let's cut to the chase. I'm not reducing the amount, okay? So, you'll appeal and I'll prevail. In the meantime, I want to set up a payment schedule."

"Your Honor, I need time. You're going to throw me into bankruptcy."

"We certainly don't want that, now, do we?" She looked at her calendar, picked up a pencil, did some long division, then looked up. "Let's say, ten thousand dollars a month for the next eight years. How's that sound? I'll give you a break on the cost of money-we won't compound the interest."

"Even if I spend half my time doing paid speaking engagements I couldn't raise that."

"Who do you speak to, Star Trek conventions?" She was smiling now.

"I know you're enjoying yourself, Melissa, but this isn't funny to me. Just because you don't see the value in my legal actions doesn't mean they don't have value."

"Yeah, right. Okay, then. That's the deal. It's settled. I'll give you until the end of the month. That's four days to get the first payment in. The money will be distributed amongst the defense counsels to cover their legal fees for this joke of a case you filed against them. Once their expenses are met, the remainder will go to the circuit court."

"I'll have to sell all my office equipment."

"If that's what it takes, so be it."

He looked at her, realizing that he had hit a wall. He was afraid if he didn't get out of there his heart was going to take off on him again, so he nodded his head. "All right, I'll do my best."

"Always nice to see you, Herman," she said sarcastically, then pushed a button on her phone. The bailiff opened the door and stood waiting.

"Make sure Mr. Strockmire gets his parking validation. He's gonna need to save every cent he has."

Herman turned and walked to the door, but he paused there and looked back at her. "Some time in the future, you're going to see that I was right," he said.

"Four days," she reminded him.

Then he was out of her chambers standing in the cold marble hallway under a vaulted ceiling.

"Are you okay, Mr. Strockmire?" the bailiff asked. Herman had gotten to know him during jury selection. He was a nice, gray-haired old man in a federal marshal's uniform assigned to the courthouse until next year, when he would get his forty in and retire.

"Yep, I'm just great," Herman said, taking a deep breath. "Wonderful-tip-top, yes siree."

He walked down the hallway to the phone bank. His cell phone was out of service and all four pay phones were in use, so he sat on the bench across the hall to wait and consider what had just happened. She was right. He could appeal, and of course he would; but he would probably lose. The circuit court judges who heard his appeal would all have their own "Herman the German" stories. He didn't have many friends on the federal bench. Certainly it was wrong of Melissa to have thrown out his case, but he had fudged on the amended complaint and lied in front of her in court, trying to slide it past her. So, there it was-he was screwed.

He sat there and thought about his life: how his dreams had all been lost, how the things that he really cared about were just jokes to other people. Since she brought it up, he thought about his MK Ultra suit that Melissa had thrown out of court four years earlier. Yet, two years after she pitched it, a group of schoolchildren in Tokyo watching the Japanese cartoon program Pikachu had suddenly gone into convulsions. Some were hospitalized with a condition doctors diagnosed as very close to epilepsy. The Japanese government stated that it looked as if some sort of experiment in mind control had occurred in which children had been used as guinea pigs. When they examined the cartoon at slow speeds they discovered that the eyes of the animated character, Pikachu, flashed at high frequencies. Everybody finally admitted that this had caused a form of low-grade epilepsy. It was odd, they said. Odd to everybody but Herman, who found out that the cartoon had been designed in the United States, not Japan. He had traced its animators back to the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

Okay, to be perfectly honest, there was some hearsay there, so he couldn't use it in court yet, but he was still working on the case, getting ready to refile. No less a magazine than U.S. News amp; World Report had stated after the Japanese incident that: "U.S. information warfare experts conclude that there are no longer any technological hurdles to developing a mind control weapon that could be delivered by computer, television, or film." Such a weapon, they said, "would produce effects similar to the recent Pikachu-induced spasms."

There it was-almost an admission of what Herman had accused the CIA of doing, but Melissa had thrown it out. Even now, if he showed her this new research, including the facts of the Pikachu incident, she would just snort at him and tell him it was all bullshit. Some people just didn't have an inspired view of what was really going on in the world, and Herman had been dragging that fact behind him like a cross that he'd soon be hung on.

When one of the phones finally cleared, he got up, shuffled over, and dug into his pocket. He pulled out Sergeant Lester Cole's card and dialed the number in San Francisco, rubbing his thumb across the fancy embossed gold police shield on the lower-left-hand corner while he waited for the call to go through.

"San Francisco Police Department," a woman's voice said.

"I'd like to talk to Lester Cole in Homicide." He was transferred, then heard the steady beep alerting him that the call was being recorded.

"Sergeant Cole, Homicide Desk," a familiar voice answered. Herman pictured the short sergeant with the weightlifter's body and tired eyes.

"Sergeant, this is Herman Strockmire Jr. We talked last evening at the hospital in L.A. "

"Yeah. How you feeling?"

"Oh, much better… very well, thank you."

"You remember something else?"

"Well, no. No-that isn't why I'm calling."

"Okay," Cole was disinterested now.

"Uh, Sergeant, I was wondering… when is your medical examiner planning on releasing Roland's body for burial?"

"Why?"

"Well, I talked to Roland's mother, Madge Minton, and she is very upset. She's trying to plan a service, and they wouldn't give her a date. She needs closure, and of course she wants the body flown back to Washington where she lives. I told her that I would get Roland released."

"Y'did, huh?"

"Yes, sir. Is that gonna be a problem?"

"Well, could be… the way it all ended up."

"Really?" Herman took a deep breath. "What way is that, Sergeant?"

"It ain't our case anymore. So you're talking to the wrong Indian."

"Whose case is it?"

"Federal government. They swooped in here first thing this morning, just after I got back from L.A. Took over the entire investigation-body, crime scene, ME reports, the works."

"No kidding? Isn't that a little strange?"

"They're feds. You ask me, everything they do seems strange."

"Well, I mean… how's it a federal crime? Roland was not on federal property. He wasn't a federal employee, so why would the federal government take it over? What's their legal authority? It's a local homicide, pure and simple."

"Only one reason," Sergeant Cole said.

Herman could hear coldness in his voice that matched the disgust he'd seen in Cole's eyes when the sergeant was standing at the foot of his bed. "What's that?" Herman asked.

"Somebody in the big bureaucracy don't agree. The case must have major federal implications, otherwise they wouldn't be here."

"Yeah-I see what you mean," Herman said and hung up the phone. He stood in the hallway feeling something close to vindication. He realized his theory, the one he dared not express to anyone, could in fact be true.

One thing he knew for sure, he couldn't go back to the hospital and be out of commission for two weeks. Not now, not with this going on. Herman had to move fast. He had to figure out what Roland had found in the Gen-A-Tec computer that was so important that it had gotten him ripped apart.

There was no doubt in Herman Strockmire's mind that whoever was investigating Roland Minton's murder also knew who killed him.