I Fought The Law and The Law Won
Clark couldn’t stand waiting for people. He couldn’t understand why people were late for anything, much less to work or to important appointments. He’d never been late for a class, from kindergarten to college, and he’d never missed a deadline to turn in a story or been late to meet a publisher or a potential employer.
So he was half-frantic at Linda being late for their afternoon meeting. She was supposed to meet with Johnny Taylor, tell him she was ending their relationship, then get out and get away from him before he did anything she’d regret. But she hadn’t come out of Johnny’s office, and now Clark’s extra shift was over and he had the entire evening off. He’d planned to spend it with Linda, supporting her in whatever choices she made, but he couldn’t afford to be seen just hanging around the club.
He decided to wait for her in the alley across the street. Surely she’d be out soon, whatever she was doing. Surely she was smart enough not to drink anything else that Johnny gave her. Surely she –
“Sir, you need to come with us. Please.”
Clark spent a brief moment berating himself for not paying attention to his surroundings, then he surrendered to the inevitable and slowly turned around. The rugged-faced older man who’d sneaked up behind him was accompanied by a short but serious-looking stout black woman who stood a few feet behind the man and off to one side. They both wore badges on chains hung around their necks.
“Where am I going?” asked Clark.
The man smiled abruptly and Clark got the momentary impression that his face might break if he pushed the smile too far. “Just step this way, please. We’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“Am I under arrest or something?”
“No! No, of course you’re not under arrest, sir.” The man put his hand on Clark’s upper arm and squeezed slightly. “If you’ll come with us, we’ll explain everything.”
Clark realized that this guy wasn’t going away, so he nodded and allowed himself to be herded down the alley and around a corner to an adjoining alley. There he saw that same dirty white van that he’d seen before, parked beside a doorway and out of sight from the Metro Club entrance but within easy walking distance. And anyone who peeked around the corner and stayed in the shadows could see the front and side entrances to the club without being seen from the club itself. It was a good place from which to eavesdrop.
The FBI surveillance team, thought Clark. He looked at the man’s badge again and verified the lettering. And now they were going to question him about the Metro Club. They were involved in a Federal investigation.
Terrific. Perry would hit the ceiling and then land right on top of Clark when he came down.
The woman opened the back door of the van and motioned for Clark to enter, so he stepped up and in. The two men inside the van glanced at him once and turned their attention back to their consoles.
The older man with the craggy face motioned to a short bench beside the rear entrance. “Please have a seat, Mr. Kent.”
Clark was halfway down when he realized how the man had addressed him. “What did you call me?”
The man’s face hardened into something Clark recognized as a ‘you-have-no-secrets-from-me’ expression. “Your real name is Clark Kent, you’re a reporter for the Daily Planet, you and your partner Linda King are currently working under cover at the Metro Club as a bartender and sound tech for the house band. My spies tell me you’re pretty good, too.”
Clark finished sitting and cocked his head to one side. “Pretty good as a reporter, a bartender, or a sound tech?”
The man smiled, and this time it looked real. “Reporter and sound tech. Bartender, not so much. You make your martinis too dry and you put too much soda in the mixed drinks.”
Clark chuckled. “I’ll work on that, Mister – “
The man put his hands on his hips. “Just call me Agent Jones.”
“I see. So I can’t identify you, right?”
Jones’ face didn’t change. “No. Because my name really is Jones. This lovely young thing – “ he indicated the tough woman behind him “ – is Tiffany. The boys in the front are Billy and Mouse.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “Don’t ask about that last one. He’s a little touchy about his nickname, you know, tends to overreact.”
“Oh.” Clark nodded. “Okay. So why am I here?”
“Partly to keep you from making our subjects nervous. Gangsters don’t like people who loiter in the shadows outside their headquarters.” Jones waved vaguely in the direction of the two men monitoring the equipment. “We’ve been staking out the club for a little over two weeks now, and we’re close to getting some Federal warrants for these upstanding citizens. We’re especially interested in Johnny Taylor and his sister Toni. Care to tell me anything about them?”
Clark took a slow breath and thought furiously. If Jones and his associates had been watching the club for that length of time, they knew more about its operations than he did. And if they thought he was withholding evidence, both he and the Daily Planet could get in to a lot of trouble.
On the other hand, if they didn’t have that much and were taking him on a fishing expedition, he didn’t want to be their pipeline into the club. After all, he and Linda were still working on the story, even if Perry wanted to pull Linda off the operation.
That reminded him of his erstwhile partner and also gave him a chance to change the direction of the conversation. “Hey, you guys haven’t seen Linda lately, have you?”
Jones turned to the front of the van and called out, “Mouse, you track Linda King? Undercover reporter, blond, using the name Linda Wannamaker.”
The taller of the two men shifted his headphones. “Yeah. She left in a cab a little before two o’clock, then came back around four-thirty. Left again in a different cab about ten till five.”
“What!”
Jones looked at Clark. “Looks like she stood you up, kid.” He lifted his hand to forestall any further outburst from Clark. “Hang on, slick. This gal is probably on a courier run for Johnny. Mouse, you track that cab?”
“Guy dropped his fare off at Metropolis International Airport. She took the evening flight to Miami. Ticket said round trip, coming back on the morning red-eye. Should land about ten-thirty. Paid for by credit card issued to Thomas Smothers.” Mouse snorted. “It’s one of Johnny Taylor’s aliases. He thinks he’s being funny.”
Jones shook his head in obvious mock sadness. “She wouldn’t be the first otherwise honest woman to be corrupted by the Metro Gang.”
Stunned, Clark sat back against the bench. He’d known that Linda was willing to take dumb risks, but this one was huge. She could serve real prison time for whatever she was doing at the moment. And he didn’t think he could help her.
He looked up at Agent Jones. “Do you know what she’s carrying?”
Jones’ eyebrow went up. “I guess that means you don’t already know about it.”
Clark frowned at him. “No. I don’t know what she’s carrying.”
“Didn’t think you did. She’s either carrying a kilo or so of cocaine or heroin, or she’s ferrying some documents one direction or the other, we’re not sure yet. May even be both. But we do know that your girlfriend is in some – “
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Figure of speech, kid. The young lady dove head first into some very hot water as of the moment she agreed to carry anything out of the state for Johnny Taylor. That puts her in our crosshairs.”
Clark blew out a long breath. “I kinda figured that part out by myself.”
“Now that that’s settled, what do you want from us?”
“From you? You invited me here, remember?”
“That’s right, I did. You don’t know we have this.” Jones turned to the front again. “Billy, bring me that blue folder beside your left elbow, will you?”
The shorter man stood and silently handed a blue folder to Jones, who glanced inside it and handed it to Clark. “This is a dated photograph of Johnny Taylor coming back to his club the night Christie Baldwin was killed. It was taken with a state-of-the-art night vision camera. Notice the timestamp?”
Clark looked and nodded. “Two-fifty-two am. So?”
“Look at the transcript under the picture.”
Clark began reading. He wasn’t three sentences in when he realized that it was a record of a conference call between Toni Taylor and a mob operation in Miami. They were talking about setting up the contract murder of a woman named Cordelia MacDougal, apparently because she’d given Wanda Detroit some information about the east coast mobs. The man on the Miami end of the line was irritated because Johnny Taylor was supposed to be in on the call but wasn’t. The transcript also listed the time, date, and duration of the call – during the time Christie Baldwin had been killed.
Clark looked up at Jones. “This is explosive stuff. But why are you showing it to me?”
Jones looked pointedly at Tiffany, who stalked to the front of the van and put on a pair of headphones. When she was seated beside Mouse, Jones leaned down and put his hand on Clark’s shoulder. “Kent, did you know that there is no Federal statute against murder?”
“Yeah, but there are Federal laws against planning a contract murder across state lines.”
Jones nodded approvingly. “Very good. You’re right, there are such laws, but we can make our case against the Metros without that particular violation. What we want you to do is to sic the Metropolis PD on Johnny Taylor for the murder of Christie Baldwin.”
Clark’s eyebrows rose. “Really? That’s very generous of you.”
“Generous?” Jones smiled woodenly and stood up. “No, not really. We want to get the Metros distracted and tied up fighting a local case so we can sneak up behind them and take them all down with our Federal case.”
“I see. So Johnny didn’t really murder Christie?”
“We can’t prove it, but we think he did, and those two photos and the wiretap transcript are pretty convincing, even if they are circumstantial.”
“Huh? Two photos?”
“Look under the last page of the transcript.”
He did. Sure enough, there was another night-filtered photo of Johnny with the same date as the first one, but with a time of two-twenty-six am. In this one, he was climbing either up or down a fire escape near the street level. The picture had enough detail to identify Johnny’s face, but it was a wide enough shot to show the building address.
It was Christie’s apartment building.
Clark slowly closed the folder. “So he was there that night. He has a history of violence, he had the opportunity, he knew where the victim lived, he had a stormy relationship with her, and he may have had a motive.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Clark stood. “Thanks for the information, Agent Jones. I assume I can take this folder with me?”
“Sorry, slick, but that’s property of the FBI. I can’t give that to you.”
“What? But you put it in my hand and told me to look at it.”
“I never said you could keep it. Now you just wait here beside this open door in the van while I go make sure Billy and Mouse are behaving themselves with Tiffany up there distracting them.”
Agent Jones stepped forward and left Clark at the back of the van. He leaned over and started talking quietly about the upcoming week’s college football games. After a few seconds, he lifted his head and glanced back at Clark. “You still here, young man? Go home. And be sure and leave that folder here.” Then he leaned down again and resumed his conversation with the other agents.
Clark finally realized that officially Jones couldn’t give him anything, so he was doing it unofficially and with plausible deniability. If his superiors complained about Clark having that evidence, Jones could truthfully claim that he hadn’t given it to Clark, nor had he given his permission for the folder to leave the van. He could just blame the folder’s loss on an enterprising young reporter.
It was time to go. Clark slipped out the back door and jogged to the corner of the alley and the street. As he turned to head towards the Planet, he heard Jones call out, “Oh, drat, that young man has done gone and made off with Federal property. Evidence, even. Tiffany, please go see if you can get that folder back from him.”
“Remember my surgically repaired knee, boss? Can’t move very fast yet.”
“Aw, that’s right. Well, you just do your best, but don’t hurt yourself, okay?”
Clark smothered a laugh. The man was obviously used to doing things his own way. He wondered if Jones ever got out of his supervisor’s doghouse.
He remembered just in time that Agent Jones had tracked Linda to the airport. There was probably an agent or two watching him at that moment, so he had to be sure he didn’t do anything “special” while he was carrying that folder. In fact, he probably would have to watch himself as long as he was undercover at the club. The last thing he needed right now was for someone to find out about his special abilities, particularly someone in the Federal government.
He hoped that he hadn’t already betrayed himself.
*****
He strode onto the newsroom floor in hopes that Perry was still there. This information shouldn’t wait until morning.
He was standing in the doorway to his office. “Chief?” called Clark. “I have something very interesting for you.”
Perry turned his head and finished shrugging into his overcoat. “Make if quick, Kent. I’m meeting my wife for dinner and I’m not going to be late tonight. I want Alice to be in good mood when we get home.”
“Oh, I think you’ll want to see this.”
Perry grunted and took the folder. Clark watched his boss’s eyes open wide and focus as he read the transcript and looked at the pictures. “Is this verified? The dates and times and all?”
“The FBI trusts it. In fact, that’s where I got it.”
Perry’s head jerked up. “You what?”
“Don’t worry, Chief, I didn’t steal it. Well – not quite, anyway.”
Perry sighed. “I don’t think I want to know exactly how you didn’t quite steal this stuff.” He slapped the folder shut. “My next question is, do you want to hold on to this or take it to the police?”
It was Clark’s turn to lift his eyebrows. “My choice?” Perry nodded. “Wow. Uh, it would make a great story, yeah, but if we print it all, it might make it impossible to use it as evidence. I’d really hate for Johnny Taylor to get away with this murder because I screwed up, assuming he actually did it.”
Perry smiled. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say, son. Tell you what, I’ll call Bill Henderson and ask him to come here at seven tomorrow morning. Can you be here at that time?”
“Uh – yeah, I’ll be here.”
Perry frowned. “Why the hesitation? Do you have another appointment, something more important than this?”
“Not – more important, maybe the same importance level.”
Perry waited a long moment, then lifted his arm theatrically and made a show of checking his watch. Clark blew out a long breath and said, “Okay, sorry, I know you have someplace to go. But you need to know this, too. The FBI guys who gave – who had this folder also told me that Linda flew to Miami tonight for Johnny Taylor.”
Perry’s jaw fell open. “She – she did what?”
Clark rushed to tell the rest of it. “They said she was probably carrying documents or drugs or both one way or the other. Johnny has some connection in Miami and he sent Linda to meet him. Or her. And she’s supposed to come back on the early morning flight tomorrow.”
Perry stood silent in thought for another long moment, then checked his watch again. “What do you think she’s doing, Clark? Is she chasing the story, has she really started working for Johnny, or is she just being completely stupid?”
Clark pursed his lips for a moment, then said, “I think she thinks she’s gathering evidence for the investigation. And – I know you’ve known her longer than I have, Perry, but I’m not real sure she told us the whole truth about her little encounter with Johnny Taylor.”
Perry shook his head. “I hope you’re wrong about that, son, but I can’t tell you that you’re not right. She’s always bent the rules, usually when she didn’t have to, but this time she’s crossed the line. When this is all over, she and I will have to have a very interesting and informative meeting.” He clapped Clark on the shoulder. “But we can’t resolve any of that right now. I have a date with my very attractive wife, and you need to get some rest – after you write up everything you’ve told me.”
“Will do, Perry. Uh – about Linda?”
“Yes?”
“If we can finish with Henderson early enough tomorrow morning, I’d like to meet her at the airport and have a talk with her.”
“Gonna give her a piece of your mind, eh, son?”
Clark frowned. “Maybe a few pieces. She seems to have lost hers completely.”
