A Champion for Tinker Creek, page 13
“I suppose,” she said. “But I have to tell you, this really shook me up, Lyle. I mean really.”
“Really? But you’re a veteran war correspondent. You’re used to this sort of thing.”
“Lyle.” She sounded exasperated. “Don’t you know the phrase ‘context is everything’? When I was in a war zone or where there was an insurgency, of course I was used to such things. But this is home, and you are my friend.”
“I understand. Of course you’re right. I was trying to make light of the incident.”
“Well, enough of that for now. How is the rest of your life? I guess we’re not going out for two months while you heal up?”
“I’m not sure we’ll be going out for a while—at least not hunting.”
“Why not? What did the doctor say?”
“It’s not the doctor,” I said.
Then I told her about Manny and all that had happened since I met him the last time we had gone out. She listened quietly until I paused, and then I heard her chuckle.
“I thought it might happen someday,” she said.
“What?”
“Someone managed to get past the barbed wire and steel facade into the fortress you call a life. That it’s a reporter who managed to pull this off is even more extraordinary.”
“Very funny. You’re not helpful.”
“Okay. How can I be helpful?”
“I don’t know what to do. My common sense says cut him off. No more communication. What’s done is done and all that.”
“You know, I’ve never been a big fan of this American common sense,” she said. “Often people bring it out to justify doing stupid things. What does your gut say?”
“Get to know him better. Keep spending time with him. Hell, when I was kicking him out this morning, a part of me felt about a matchstick away from proposing, for Christ’s sake. Which would have been crazy.”
“I agree, that would probably have been crazy. But kicking him out of your life would be just as crazy, in my opinion,” she said firmly.
“Why?”
“Because like John Donne wrote, ‘No man is an island.’ Lyle, you have always been the most magnificently lonely man I have ever known. Your ability to incorporate it into yourself as a strength amazed me, but now you finally have a chance to move away from it. Take it.”
“What happened to my friend Eva the Cynic?”
“Eva the Cynic is still right here, but don’t forget she is much more cynical about words than she is about actions,” she said. “If he brought you food, stayed to help you with your dressings and your pain, and did not invite himself into your bed, your wallet, or your liquor cabinet, the man is worth considering as a possible saint. Or at least a mensch, from the Jewish side of my extended family tree.”
“What’s a mensch?”
“A doer of good deeds.”
I considered her thoughts. For admittedly the short amount of time I had known him, Manny definitely seemed to fit into the category of doers of good deeds. But talking about all this had worn me out. “Well, actually he may be that,” I said.
“So, here’s my advice. Don’t make any decisions about him now. Your voice sounds a little tired. I already know you’re not in the shop because I haven’t heard a pneumatic tool even once. Chill out. Get some sleep. Get better. Just remember that later I am going to want to meet this paragon.”
“Ha! I’ll take your advice, and thanks for listening.”
“Of course,” she said. “Just remember, my advice is only worth what you pay for it.” And she rung off.
* * *
After Tommy and I walked back from the restaurant, I settled in to start pulling my beat together. I had just begun the job when my office phone rang. “Manny Porter,” I answered.
Silence.
“Hello?” I heard a sound of traffic and then the voice resumed.
“Mr. Porter, my name is Pierre Chamell. We used to go to Bethesda Academy at the same time. You probably don’t remember me. I was two years behind you.”
My mind flashed back to a skinny, blond middle-school kid. “Pierre! Of course I remember you! It’s been a long time,” I said, trying to sound friendly.
“It has been,” he said. “I heard from Tommy Kingsbury that you were back home and working for the Record.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I don’t have much time,” he said. “I wondered if you…” The sounds of a city bus drowned out his voice.
“Pierre, I’m sorry. I lost the end of the last sentence. Where are you anyway?”
“At one of the Tourist Aid phone booths on Washington Street. I couldn’t call you from my office.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“I wondered if I could meet you later today. Maybe after work?”
“I don’t know about tonight, but—”
“Please! It has to be tonight! I have something very important to give you about the Tinker Creek thing.”
“Okay, where?”
“Do you know the Memorial Fountain in MLK Park?”
“No, but I can find it.”
“I’ll be there at six thirty. I’ll wear an Atlanta Braves hat and sit at one of the back-to-back benches. Sit on the bench behind me so we can talk and not look like we’re talking.”
“Okay.”
“Please! It’s very important not to tell anyone about this. Not even Tommy.”
“I won’t.”
“See you then,” he said and hung up.
At precisely 6:27, I stepped left off Washington Street, past the gigantic stone lions guarding the park gate, and down the short path to the memorial fountain. Shadows had begun to creep across the space, mostly empty now except for a few people cutting through the park on their way home from work.
I spotted him in his Braves hat and sat behind him on the bench. I noted he positioned himself so he sat facing outward, presumably to watch for anything suspicious, whereas I sat toward the fountain.
“Thank you for coming.” he said. “And for being on time.”
“You’re welcome. What did you want to talk about?”
“Yesterday an injured man came into my office wanting help using a database.”
“What office is that?”
“I’m the assistant city clerk,” he said.
A slight thrill ran through me. It must have been Lyle, I thought.
“He wanted to query one of the public datasets we have. The one called the PSD. I needed some forms for the query, so I went to get some. My boss asked me what the man wanted, and when I told him, my boss told me he would do it.”
“And did he?”
“No. He lied to the man and told him he had to fill out a GORA request to get what he wanted when he really didn’t. Do you know what that is?”
“I am familiar with the law,” I said.
“He wanted to know all the property owners in the city who received a notice of condemnation in the last ninety days. I helped the man fill out the request, and I took a screen shot of the application before submitting it.”
“Why?”
“I had a hunch,” he said. “And I was right. My boss put a hold on the request.”
“How do you know he did that?”
“I can see the GORA request queue. The man’s request doesn’t move. Only my boss has the authority to do that.”
“Okay.”
“If you look to the right of where you sit, you will see a crack in the wood that starts small but gets wide,” he said. “If you run your finger along this crack where it gets wide, you will find something.”
I looked to my right, and sure enough, a crack that started as a hairline under where I sat grew in width. Running my finger down the crack, I found the usual bits of trash and leaves but also something significantly larger. It took me a moment to lever it out and to discover a sleek black flash drive.
“Is this from you?” I asked.
“Yes. Nobody else knows I made it.”
“What’s on it?”
“It’s everything the injured man requested. Plus some extra.”
“What’s the extra?”
“I took the data from his request and put it against census tract data so you can see which owners in Tinker Creek are being targeted.”
I carefully slipped the drive into my jacket pocket and zipped it shut. This could be explosive, but I wasn’t sure yet if I would, or could, use it.
“Why did you do this?”
“Two reasons,” he said. “My boss, Mr. O’Hara, lied to that man. He should have walked out of our office on that day with what he wanted.”
“And the second reason?”
“Mr. O’Hara is a bad man. He’s taking money from people. Bribery!”
“You’re very brave to do this. What would happen if you were caught?”
“They’d fire me.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because I know you. And because we went to BA. I love BA, and I remember the motto.”
“One more question. I’ll never tell anyone it was you who gave me this, but if I write a story about this, won’t they realize it was you who did it?”
“Not at all,” he said scornfully. “I used a terminal that they don’t even know is on the system. They think their networks are secure, but I hacked them years ago. I own their system, pretty much.”
He looked around. The shadows had grown, and they closed the park at dark.
“We should go,” he said, standing up.
I stood up too. “Can you get home okay from here?”
“I live close. Good night, Manny.”
“Good night, Pierre,” I said as he set out across the park to the Freedom Street gate. I returned up the short path to the Washington Street gate. My heart went to my throat for a second when I saw it was shut, but it opened easily when pushed from the inside and then locked securely behind me.
I hailed an eastbound cab on Washington and pondered the impact our experiences in high school can have on us. I appreciated the education I got at Bethesda Academy, but I can’t say I loved it then or treasure it now. But it clearly had a deeper impact on Pierre. I remembered the cadence of the school’s motto, but not the words, so I looked it up on my phone.
It was from former Irish statesman and British parliamentarian Edmund Burke. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for enough good men to do nothing.” That, I reflected, may be the most concise statement of Pierre Chamell’s motivation as I would find anywhere.
The next morning, I dropped by Bernie Sluice’s office at the Record. Bernie is the company’s IT guru and computer guardian. By order of my father, Bernie had to check every piece of hardware that came into the building before it connected to any of our existing terminals, drives, peripherals, or network.
My father’s confidence in Bernie stemmed from their relationship of more than two decades. But my idea of an IT guru and computer wonk ran a lot closer to Pierre Chamell.
Whatever misgivings I had about Bernie, if I wanted to see what was on Pierre’s flash drive, I had to get Bernie to approve it first. At 8:15 a.m., I made sure to stand exactly in the middle of the large X Bernie had installed in red tape on the corridor floor in front of his office door. I reached out and pushed the large gray button on the wall.
“Well, well, well.” Bernie’s voice came out sounding tinny from the poorly mounted speaker. “The prodigal finally deigns to descend to Hades. Whose account do you suppose we must thank for this unexpected visit?”
“Good morning, Bernie,” I said, trying to sound as perky as possible. “May I come in, please?”
There was a blare of trumpets, and a heavy door clicked and cracked ajar. I pulled it open and stepped inside before it could close on me. Bernie came forward toward me, yawning.
“Late night?” I asked, trying to avoid stepping on anything or knocking over a waist-high pile of keyboards.
“Warrior World III.” He yawned again. “Against some fiends in Japan. The gaming is awesome, but the hours are hell. What’s going on?”
I dug into my pocket, pulled out the drive, and handed it to him.
“Hmm,” he said. “Very sophisticated. A Four-Box, double V. I’ve actually not seen very many of these. They are much more popular in Europe than they are over here. Where did you get it?”
“A source.”
“Confidence?”
“Pretty high, but not perfect. That’s why I brought it to you. That and the rule, of course.”
“Of course. Well, let’s see what we’ve got.”
He stepped to a terminal on the far side of the small room and slid the drive into a USB port. The machine whirred, and a screen came up with two separate blank icons on it. Bernie frowned, bent down and hit some buttons, and the device hummed again, but the images didn’t change.
“So, the good news is that there are no recognized viruses or malware on this drive,” he said.
“That means there’s bad news.”
“Not really bad, but curious. I can’t read these files.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can see two files. I can tell, generally, that they are large. But that’s it. What are they?”
“Data files. As far as I know, Excel files or some other database system.”
“Well, they might be that,” he said. “But fucked if I can tell.”
He tried to shift them onto the computer’s hard drive. The machine whirred and the screen blinked, but the files did not move.
“Do me a favor, would you?” he said as he dismounted the drive and removed it from the computer. “Log in for me on that machine over there.” He pointed to another terminal on the other side of the room.
I sat down and logged in. He handed me the drive. I inserted it into the USB port. The computer whirred and a box appeared like before, but on this screen both files clearly bore the image of Excel.
“See that?” he said in an excited voice. “Now, where do you want them?”
“On my desktop, I guess.”
“Go ahead and move them.” I selected both files and moved them. The machine whirred while a box appeared that tracked the record being copied. Then it was finished.
“Dismount it,” he ordered. I did so. Excitement and a kind of manic look flushed his face.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I am not sure I do either,” he said. “But somehow the drive was programmed to only open for you, no one else.”
Bernie begged me to bring him back the drive when I was done with it, but all I would do was promise to talk to Pierre about it. It occurred to me Pierre must know what he had in the drive, particularly if he had hacked and manipulated this one to personalize it to me. But since I was still knee-deep in another story, the drive matter would have to wait.
When I got back to my post, I phoned my dad’s and got Rosa.
“Arthur Porter’s office.”
“Rosa, it’s Manny. Is my dad around?”
“He is, but he’s on the phone now.”
“Ask him to give me a call when he gets off. I need to run a story by him. Oh, and what’s his schedule like today?”
“Pretty tight.”
“Do me a favor and try to find five to seven minutes I could see him face-to-face, please?”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, and she rang off.
I locked the door to my office and settled down in front of the computer. There were actually three files, not two. The largest was a database of all the property owners who had been sent condemnation notices in St. Michael’s Harbor during a ninety-day period this year. While a few places received announcements in other parts of town, particularly where there had been a fire or some kind of damage, the overwhelming majority were in the part of Tinker Creek that was within three or four blocks of the beach.
Further, the second database took those addresses from the first and put them against the most recent census tract information tracking race, ethnicity, and income. This data set made it starkly clear that if you received a notice the city was moving against your property, you were almost certainly a person of color or an immigrant and without a lot of wealth.
Rosa rang back.
“I carved out a few minutes for you before he leaves for a lunch meeting,” she said. “Be up here at twenty after twelve.”
But when I walked in at the appointed time, I found Dad relaxed on the big leather sofa in his office.
“Whoa. I thought I was going to have to brief you on your way to your car,” I said.
“And if you were anybody else, that’s what I would have done. But for my son and my newest business reporter, I can find some time. What have you got for us?”
So I sat down with him and laid out what I had. The meeting at the church, the condemnations in the near-beach Tinker Creek, the tie-in between resistance organizers and the car bomb, and the most recent, the city’s own data showing that it had aimed its efforts almost overwhelmingly at non-white property owners. He listened, taking notes, then started the questions.
“Why hasn’t Smalls reported the bomb link?” he asked first thing. Smalls had covered the police and justice beat for the paper for almost a two decades.
“You would have to ask him, but I imagine they have played down any link and asked him to do the same. Also, that line has been easier to hold since one of the victims remains in a medically induced coma and the other is media shy.”
“Have you interviewed any of the property owners yet?”
“Not yet. I wanted to get a feel for how big this story might be before I went more granular with it.”
“Well, don’t put that off any longer. I think perspectives from homeowners should lead at least one of the reaction stories we carry. Where and how did we get the city data?”
“A confidential source in city administration leaked it to me.”
“Who?”
