The Lasko Tangent by Richard North Patterson Read Free Book Online Page A

feel that way,” I said, with a voice too full of understanding.
    Feiner looked annoyed, as I had intended. His tone was didactic. “Cases like this should be handled at the top.”
    Maybe I should write that down, I thought. Instead, I left.
    McGuire was alone when I cracked open his door. He looked up with narrow eyes, as if surprised to see me. Then he remembered that he wanted to know what I was doing. So I told him about Sam Green, skipping my clash with Mary. McGuire cleared Green’s subpoena. Then I explained Gubner’s call. He propped his feet on the desk and folded his hands, listening.
    “That’s ridiculous,” he said, when I’d finished.
    I felt defensive. “That’s what I told Marty. But I either go or I don’t go. I want to push this thing to see what I get.”
    McGuire screwed his mouth to one side. “This business of sneaking around the Boston Common—,” he waved his arm in dismissal, letting the phrase speak for itself.
    I felt the chance slipping away. “Gubner’s not an idiot. And if this is a waterhaul, all we’ve lost is one day of my time.”
    “And the taxpayers’ money,” he retorted.
    McGuire was reaching. “I didn’t know you were an advocate of thrift in government,” I said.
    “We can’t be wasting the public’s money on things like this.”
    “Jesus Christ, Joe, if you really cared about that, you’d pass out cyanide tablets to half the civil servants in town. How do you seriously justify not doing this?” My suspicions of McGuire shadowed the words.
    “It’s not your ass if we look like fools.”
    At least that was closer to home, I thought. “If it were my ass, Joe, I’d do it.”
    McGuire clasped his hands again, then stared at them as if in prayer. He looked up. “OK. Let me know what you find.”
    I waited for more, astonished at the concession. There wasn’t any more. I felt as if I had just won Wimbledon by default. It was as though McGuire had been playing along, having already decided that if I pushed hard enough, I won. As he had known I would. I couldn’t figure it out.
    So I tried selling McGuire on a subpoena for Lasko’s financial records. The idea seemed to revive him. “That subpoena absolutely will not go out. There’s no justification for it.”
    McGuire gave me his determined Newsweek look, from which there was no appeal. I was both frustrated and relieved. The refusal at least fit with my suspicions. I told myself I had a compulsion to impose order on events. So I dismissed it, and fished for a way around McGuire. The plan hit me on the way out the door.
    I went back to the office and called Mary Carelli. She answered on the third ring.
    “Mary,” I said, “this is Chris Paget. What kind of apology would you like?”
    Seven
     
     
    Mary Carelli lived in Georgetown. So I walked home about a quarter to six, showered, and put on corduroy slacks and a faded blue work shirt. Then I got in my car and drove too fast through the Ellipse toward the Kennedy Center, mashing the buttons on my radio until I hit an FM station playing a Peter Frampton album. Then I reached under the seat to check the small cellophane bag of grass. Still there.
    The little ritual amused me; I was grasping at corners of my college identity like an old woman fondling a scrapbook. I wondered which of my friends were doing it too—leaving jobs at places they had scorned in college to put on blue jeans and blow some great Colombian dope they had cadged from the guy next door. Knowing that this shallow alchemy trivialized all the differences they had felt, the things they would do or never be, but seizing it to avoid the unpleasant truth: they were just like Mom and Dad. So I drove Mom and Dad up Waterside Drive and onto Massachusetts past the embassies. I turned up the radio and listened very hard to Peter Frampton all the way down Wisconsin. By the time I hit Georgetown, I was alone.
    Mary rented the basement of an old white brick three-story on R Street. It was a good