Spinning Dixie (17 page)

Claudine and J.T. had moved into Rattle & Snap after graduation from Vanderbilt. J.T. had rapidly lost interest in Claudine, and she had reason to suspect he had gotten himself involved with women who belonged to their country club, which, Claudine pointed out, she never visited.

How—how do you cheat on a woman like this, I wondered? I would have never done that. I was angry. I felt my eyeteeth growing. I thought of that lunatic that smashed the
Pietà
years ago. Why? Because some men are smashers, I guess. It was hard to let Claudine off the hook though. I had seen my share of beautiful women being treated this way by gorillas over the years. In fact, this pattern had been the norm. There was free will in all of this.

After attempts at a variety of different arrangements, Claudine had asked for a divorce. J.T. had said no.

“I understand,” I said, not altogether sincerely. “What about the others in your family? I hate to ask.”

“Indy's gone, of course. Elijah died a few months after him.”

I nodded no, no, no, as if this should be a big surprise. “What about Six?”

“Six teaches Civil War history at Southern Methodist. He's writing a book about people in our family, our ancestors, Civil War legends…but he doesn't know what to do about these things.”

“These things, meaning J.T. stealing your ancestral home?”

“He's an academic, Jonah. He doesn't fight guerrilla wars.”

“But he teaches the Civil War.”

“Correct.”

I fingered my eyelashes. “We may need to reach out to him, Claudine.”

“What would you have him do?”

“I don't know yet. What about Petie?”

Claudine looked down at my shoes.

“Petie has Alzheimer's, Jonah. It's in the early stages. She fades in and out, and I can't start this up with her, partly because she's not well, and partly because the side of her that is lucid knows that she played a role in all this.”

“Claudie, but you played a role, too.”

“I know that, Jonah.” She was angry, but I wasn't sure at whom.

“Where is Petie? Is she in a special place?” I asked, like a reject from
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood
.
Sure, special friend, and why don't you cheat on your wife with Scarlett here, and then you can visit Petie in the nursing home. That would be special.

Petie was in the garden. She was well enough to live at home, but a nurse had begun to live in the mansion. Deedee had gone through this. Mickey, however, had been sharp until he died at almost one hundred years of age.

At first, Deedee's situation hadn't been hard, and we got spoiled after her initial diagnosis, which they never gave us straight out. She had been a yahoo before Alzheimer's, so why wouldn't she be a yahoo with the disease?

I followed Claudine outside. “Don't be hurt if Petie doesn't remember you, Jonah,” she said.

“It was strange with Deedee. She didn't recognize me after a while, but when I showed her pictures of myself when I was little, she'd say, ‘Oh, that's Jonah,' and start telling me all about myself.”

Petie's hair was cotton white, but her face was very much as it had been when I last saw her. She was holding a bouquet of flowers that she had picked from somewhere near the old trellis. A strawberry blond nature girl of about thirty stood beside Petie. I thought of a hauntingly gentle song by the British punk band the White Stripes called “I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother's Heart,” and quietly sang a few lines to Claudine as we approached. She elbowed me.

The nature girl, who upon second glance was quite good-looking, identified herself as Pepper, a nurse. Good Lord. She helped Petie take a few steps back to seat herself in a heavy iron garden chair.

“You're somebody, aren't you?” Pepper asked me.

Claudine became uncomfortable and shushed Pepper.

“Why he's the stable boy,” Petie said, holding the bouquet up to her nose. She removed a handkerchief from her pocket. I knelt at Petie's feet. Claudine and Pepper lingered a few steps back. She crinkled her eyes, and appeared to be happy.

“What a nice job you did,” Petie said.

“A nice job?” I asked.

“On the church. What a nice job you did.”

“Thank you, Petie. I tried.” I liked her all of a sudden and felt, wrongly of course, that she had always liked me. Time makes old friends of everybody.

Petie waved me over closer and put her finger up to her mouth in a hush gesture. Then she whispered, “Where did we go?”

“We're right here, Petie.”

She nodded her head shrewdly, no, no, no.

“We went away,” she said, wiping her eyes. “We all went away.”

“No, Petie.”

“Yes, yes. We all went away. What a nice job you did on the church. Will I see you at church?”

“Maybe sometime,” I said.

“Good. I prayed for thanks for the nice job you did. I prayed you would come back. You can stay in the house now. You don't need to stay out there anymore. You can stay and then we'll go to church. You are always so good to her.”

“Okay, Petie.”

Claudine tapped me on the shoulder again.

I kissed Petie on the cheek. I was angry with myself that I had ever seen her as my nemesis. I thought of her conspiring with J.T. and, for a second, a quick surge of frigid hate returned, but it went away again.

Claudine told me that she had read about my family in an online version of an article
The Washington Post
did upon my appointment as press secretary.

I showed her a picture of Edie and the kids that I carried in my wallet.

“Where did you meet Edie?”

“At Mickey's funeral. She was a klezmer musician. Still is, I guess.”

“A nice Jewish girl, huh?”

“No, actually. Methodist. She's one-quarter Lenape Indian.”

“Leave it to my Jonah to get his tribes mixed up. Tell me more about Edie,” Claudine asked.

For one thing, Edie tells me she loves me.

I didn't say this. I suddenly missed my wife. Actually, I had begun missing Edie when she became pregnant.

“Edie is the last romantic.”

“How do you define that?”

“Romantics marry men who have nothing, and carry their underwear up and down the steps to the laundry room year after year with no tangible payoff. Lasting romances aren't very romantic.”

“We do what we have to do.”

“Yes, we do. If you want to keep this place, you'll have to fight like a rebel.”

“I know it.”

I put my arm around her in a studied way—supportive, not amorous.

“You are either the most naïve woman in the world or the genius of geniuses. With you, I never particularly cared.”

Claudine scowled like Colonel Will.

“It's not an insult, Claud. I wish I could have gone for as long without knowing such things.”

Claudine stroked her eyes shut and opened them wide, blinking. When she blinked, she looked eighteen again.

“Is Smoky Hilliard still alive?”

“No.”

“Hmm. That could make things trickier.”

“Why?”

“Because he was smart, that's why.”

We walked toward the Polk family graveyard. We passed a corral where a few dozen horses were grazing. Claudine said that three of them were Shpilkes's descendants. It hurt to look at them, so I didn't. Indy Four and Elijah rested beside one another in the Polk graveyard. I found two small stones, and placed them on their tombstones, explaining to Claudine that this was a Jewish tradition, a way of letting others know that the dead had not been forgotten.

We sat by the graves. I peppered Claudine with questions about Six. She became uncomfortable, sensing correctly that I had shifted into business mode. She wanted to protect him, which may have been the core pathology in the Polk family's current predicament. The more she told me, the more opportunities emerged in my professional brain, which had become molded over time into a template for dramatic narrative. I picked up a dandelion and held it up to Claudine's lips. She remained still until I said, “Go ahead,” whereupon she let out a puff of air that turned the fluffy plant into a stalk.

“Do you have a cell phone number for J.T.?” I asked.

“Why, do you plan to call him?”

“Not exactly.”

I handed Claudine a scrap of paper from my pocket and a pen. She wrote down J.T.'s phone number. “Would you add his full name and date of birth, please?” There was a what-did-I-get-myself-into fear in her eyes. Good.

I flipped the dandelion stalk into my mouth, cowboy style, and said, “Now, let's call your brother.”

The Panamanian sat on an iron chair on the brick patio outside of the kitchen. He had his laptop open, probably blowing up a cave in Pakistan. I handed him a piece of paper with J.T.'s full name and his cell phone number. He glanced at it. “The husband,” he said.

“Right. Can you get an interrogation profile on him?”

“Would you like me to hook electrodes to his privates, too?”

“Sure, we'll do a whole barbecue.”

“Looking for anything specific?”

“You know how it is, Marcus. Everybody in detail is revolting. Vulnerabilities. Psych workup. I'd also like to get a handle on the land around here. I know J.T. owns the mansion, but I remember Mickey telling me that his old man bought a lot of the other property around here.”

“I'll look into it. Did you hatch a plan with your old flame yet?”

“Not yet. I've got a few ideas cooking.”

“Like what?”

“I'm toying with doing something with her brother.”

“Is he here?”

“No, we're trying to get ahold of him.”

“Let me know when you do,” Marcus said. I turned to go away, but Marcus stopped me. “Jonah, are you okay?”

“I know what you're asking, Marcus. Yeah, it's personal now.”

Marcus closed his eyes. “Have you given any thought about how you're going to tell Edie, your kids?”

“For the time being, my approach is denial.”

“How the hell do you find yourself in these situations?”

“The original Jonah asked God a similar question.”

 

In the war on terror, we want to get the bad guys, but if we can't, we get what's gettable. Case in point: what I—a former high-ranking government official with serious access in the intelligence community—can do to find out about a dude I don't like. While I was on my phone arranging a focus group in Nashville, the Panamanian learned a lot.

Through J.T. Hilliard's name and date of birth, we get his driver's license number. From that, we obtain his digital photograph from the Tennessee Department of Motor Vehicles computer. We match it to the facial image that appears multiple times on a security camera in a Nashville condominium. J.T. enters this condo roughly four times a week, after work, and emerges, a little disheveled, before the eleven o'clock news.

Via Nashville public records, we determine that one of the residents of the condo is twenty-eight-year-old Patricia Evers, who runs an events planning firm, Hermitage Occasions, which has Hilliard Valley Energy as a client. We pull up the photo ID of Evers.
Sweet.
Electronic banking transactions indicate that Hilliard's company deposits $3,000 in Hermitage/Evers's corporate account each month, and just under $2,000 is debited from this account one day later by Evers's condo mortgage company.

J.T. is Patricia Evers's sugar daddy.

Through J.T.'s credit card, we learn he had purchased a zinc-based vitamin cocktail that promises greater sexual energy. He dines out a lot, usually at the same places. His tab during the past several years, however, has gone up. Closer examination of the credit card receipts, which are shared by a private data-collection firm in Arkansas that has a contract with the government under the PATRIOT Act, reveals that the “delta,” or change, in the check amounts can be attributed to an increasing bar tab, versus food allotment.

J.T. drinks more than he used to.

The health-care records for Hilliard Valley Energy, which are housed in a database in Nebraska, betray that at the turn of the millennium, J.T. had been prescribed Claritin for allergies. He also had three prescriptions filled by a Columbia internist named Burns for Klonopin, an anxiety medication, Ambien to help him sleep, and Viagra, presumable for the delicious Miss Evers.

We can track J.T.'s movements through his mobile phone, which he uses often. In fact, the call volume is so extensive when compared to his home phone (in a large colonial in Columbia) that it appears he conducts most of his business while on the go.

Through a corporate debt database, we learned that Hilliard Valley Energy was indeed a successful company; however, like any commodities business—magnesium, phosphates, fertilizer ingredients, natural gas—it experienced downturns. The company had shifted its disbursements several months ago from a thirty-day cycle to a ninety-day cycle. The company also had recently extended its line of credit by $25 million, for which J.T. had signed personally.

Maury County records showed a gradual purchase of Rattle & Snap lands by different entities from the late 1970s to the present day. The transactions were handled by a law firm that had set up the purchases through various trust mechanisms. Marcus said he was still digging into this. The mansion, along with twenty acres immediately around it, hadn't transferred to J.T.'s personal ownership until 2003. Interestingly—and consistent with what Claudine had said—the mansion itself had gone from Claudine's family trust into J.T.'s name directly. He wanted there to be no ambiguity about who owned Rattle & Snap.

Along the Dulles Corridor outside of Washington, D.C., there is a nondescript cinderblock building that houses purchasing records for some of the nation's leading online retailers. It also uses cookies, or digital footprints, to monitor search-engine queries. We know from J.T.'s online book purchases that J.T.'s literary interests are limited to fiction and nonfiction dealing with the exploits of the Delta Force and other paramilitary he-men. The most frequent search-engine terms that turn up on our printouts from his home and office computer are “Navy SEALs,” “Delta Force,” “Army Rangers,” “Green Beret,” “Mossad,” “Special Forces,” “sniper,” “Jonah Eastman,” “Mafia,” and, of note, repeated “welcome back” greetings from the landing page of
www.maximumbooty.com
.

The Panamanian and I decided that for strategic purposes, it was important to inspect this last Web site, which featured women of Asian, Hispanic, and African descent with protuberant rear ends.

“When will we stop being amused by this stuff?” Marcus asked me.

“I don't know, Marcus, I still laugh at the word ‘fiduciary.'”

“Precisely. Now, shall I click on ‘the Incan Delinquent,' or this nice young lady in the cowboy hat, ‘Butt Masterson'?”

“Why choose?”

“Oops,” Marcus said, flicking his mouse. “Ms. Masterson requires a credit card. Adieu, sweet princess.”

With the exception of two regressed middle-aged men ogling naked women, this other high-tech activity probably seems farfetched. Good, keep thinking that. When we are alone, we
feel
alone, and this illusion of solitude trumps analysis. The fact is, every piece of data gathered on J. T. Hilliard was done without the mobilization of “human assets”—in other words, it all came from a massive data infrastructure that did not exist last time I was at Rattle & Snap. The challenge was determining whether any of this information could be exploited.

“What did your psych profiler say?” I asked the Panamanian.

“He said that psych profiling isn't an exact science.”

“C'mon, Marcus, no equivocation. J.T.'s a threat to national security,” I winked.

“My guy said that, in many respects, J.T.'s not so unusual. Lots of guys balance Conan the Barbarian artistic tastes with sexual insecurity. He clearly has a mistress, but J.T. and Claudine are estranged, so that's not a big shocker. His prescriptions and alcohol increase coincide with a downturn in his business commodities, so his business worries are genuine. Still, his company has huge assets, so he's got plenty of room to maneuver.”

“And lots to lose.”

“Sure.”

“How do we play a guy like this?”

“I don't think we know enough yet to say for sure.” An evil expression descended across the Panamanian's face.

“What? What is it?”

“I'd like you to have a meeting with J.T. at his offices. You'll have a camera in your lapel. While you're there, screw with his head, but don't emasculate him if you can avoid it. Get him seesawing between wondering if you're a nut, or if you could really hurt him. Give him something to work with on both ends of the spectrum. On one hand, build up his ego by letting him think you're a fraud who's in above his head, but then do something that'll make him wake up sweating. Keep looking for something that could destroy him, but even if you find it, leave him with an escape hatch.”

“I can't back this guy off by dangling a Viagra prescription in front of
The New York Times
.”

Marcus kicked a pebble. “Aw, shucks, the Jonah I know doesn't back losers. My Jonah bets on winners. Help me help you. Once I get a look at his office setup, I'll go in to see what else I can find.”

“You seem confident you'll find more, Marcus.”

“My Jonah wouldn't waste his time down here if he thought this guy was just looking at naughty Internet sites. What else do you know, Riptide?”

“I'm not sure I know anything?”

“But you've got memories.”

“Yes, I've got memories.”

“What are they, man? Help me help you.”

“I need you to look into something else.”

“Sallie's birth records?”

I nodded.