Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [95]
“Intimidate him?” Hackbart said. “Lady, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
“Mr. Caldwell,” Susan said, “the smuggling charge against my client won’t stick. He’s no more of a smuggler than you or I. Aside from that, are you prepared at this time to charge Mr. Vaughn with any other offense?”
Caldwell didn’t answer her directly. He was back to looking at me again, and it was obvious from his expression that he wasn’t too thrilled with what he was seeing. After a moment of serious staring, he held up the envelope with the CD again.
“How did you come by this information, Mr. Vaughn?” he asked.
“Vivian gave it to me.”
“The Colonel’s daughter?”
“That’s right.”
“Why would she hand this over to you?”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you know where the girl is now?” Caldwell asked.
“No.” The lies were stacking up like a house of cards and one wrong move would send them all scattering across the big mahogany desk.
Hackbart leaned forward in his chair like a man about to dive out an open window. “Just how stupid do you think we are?” he asked.
I had an answer for that, but the ice was too thin for comedy.
“Mr. Caldwell,” Susan said, “from what I’ve heard here this morning, you don’t have enough evidence to implicate my client in any way in your investigation. On the other hand, he’s provided you with what is, by your admission, some very valuable evidence in the Patterson case, a case far more important to everyone in this room than my client’s breaking out of the Krome Detention Center the other day. No one here is interested in Mr. Vaughn, and the fact that he has connections with several of the players is due to the nature of his job, which brings him into contact with a good many people, including, I might add, myself.”
“Lucky you,” Hackbart said.
Caldwell was silent for a long moment. I could see the set of scales inside his mind doing a seesaw act, with my ass in one pan and his investigation in the other. At last he looked up. He stared at me and almost smiled. Then he turned to Susan.
“Very well,” Caldwell said. “We’ll proceed, then. We have here a very strange situation, Mr. Vaughn, but my colleagues and I, as well as other government officials, believe that the situation can be resolved with a minimum of difficulty, depending on what you say here today. By all rights, Mr. Vaughn, you should now be sitting in a jail cell for any one of several serious offenses, including obstruction of justice, and that’s just the beginning. These are all serious charges, and under normal circumstances you would most certainly be indicted. As you no doubt realize, Mr. Vaughn, you could spend the better part of the next ten years in prison. Are we clear on that, Mr. Vaughn?”
“Very clear,” I said. I happened to glance outside through the floor-length window. The overgrown turkey buzzards with the serrated wings that fly around the courthouse were still circling in the bright morning sky, but I was no longer sure they were looking for me.
Caldwell threw me one last hard stare, picked up the crimson folder and showed it to me, then set it down again. “We’ve assembled a little dossier on you, Mr. Vaughn. For the benefit of the others, I’d like to review certain aspects of your biography. You have a problem with that?”
“My life is an open book, sir,” I said.
Susan kicked me hard enough to make me wince. Caldwell saw it and allowed himself the slightest of smiles.
“You were born in Ithaca, New York, after which your family moved to Manhattan. Married once, divorced once. You attended St. John’s University on a partial football scholarship and majored, oddly enough, in comparative literature. Your older brother, Matt, was shot down over Laos in 1972. For a time you taught English at a private school in Manhattan. In 1995 you became a police officer. You received a whole slew of commendations, were generally well liked by your superiors, but were prone to flippancy. Despite that, you were on the fast track to detective when you shot another officer in a stairwell up in the projects. He fired first. It was dark, and he was