and said, "I have to go. You'll be hearing from me soon, okay?"
I thought her expression looked bleak and abysmally lonely and I didn't really want to leave. What I really wanted to do, I won't go into. I asked, "You sure you should be staying here? With him?" I pointed a finger at the ceiling to show I meant you-know-who.
She gave me a forced smile and replied, "It's the best place for us. He believes in protecting his brood, and that's what the kids and I most need."
Wrong. What she and the kids needed most was to turn back the clock a dozen years, a different husband, a different father, and so on.
But, this being America, when fate deals you a crappy hand, there is one other thing you need--a lawyer. And so, here we were.
CHAPTER THREE
GIVEN THAT EDDIEhad a several month head start, speed was going to count for everything at this stage. I pulled over at the first gas station and used a pay phone to call my legal assistant, whose name, title, and all that crap is Sergeant First Class Imelda Pepperfield. She answered on the first ring, as that's her way with everything, prompt to the point of preemptive.
I said, "Hey, Imelda, me. You know that Morrison case that's splashed all over the news?"
"I heard of it."
"It's ours. Morrison asked for me, and his wife is a, uh, an old chum and she, uh, she sort of, well . . . twisted my arm."
Imelda's about five foot one, 160 pounds, a fiftyish black woman with a pudgy face, frumpy build, gold-rimmed glasses, and slightly graying hair. People who observe her only from a distance immediately lump her into that harmless grandmotherly category, one of those late-middle-aged women who use their spare time to knit mufflers and sweaters for their nephews and make chicken soup for sickly friends. One could more safely confuse an atomic bomb with a firecracker.
Imelda was raised in the mountains of North Carolina, where she acquired the affectations of a poorly educated backwoods hick she has long since outgrown, yet milks to this day to persuade suckers like me that there's some tangible reason she's supposed to salute and call me sir. What lurks behind that wicked camouflage are a razor-sharp mind, two master's degrees, and the moral ambiguity of a Mack truck. She's spent nearly thirty years in the Army, seeing law practiced and malpracticed in all its gritty varieties, and offers her seasoned advice whenever it's asked for--or not--usually the same way a ballpeen hammer helps a tent peg find its way into the ground.
"This a bad idea," she finally replied.
"Why?"
" 'Cause you don't know diddly-squat 'bout espionage cases. 'Cause you over your head."
Not many people can say "diddly-squat" and still be taken seriously. But then, I don't know anybody who doesn't take Imelda seriously. I take her very seriously. I assured her, "It's like any other criminal case. Different actors and setting is all."
"Horseshit. This 'cause of his wife?"
"Imelda, she's just an old friend. This isn't personal, it's professional . . . and please recall that herhusband asked for me."
Without replying to that point, she asked, "You heard who the prosecutor is?"
"Golden. So what?"
"You takin' this case 'cause you hot for the wife of the accused traitor, and you goin' up against Golden, in something you don't know shit about. And now you askin' me so what?"
Imelda has a maddening habit of developing her own opinions, which can be annoying, but then I have my annoying habits, too, so it all balances out. I replied, "I'm not hot for Mary. And regarding Eddie, I'll blow him out of the courtroom." Getting back to the business at hand, I added, "I'll look into hiring an associate, and I need you to arrange a satellite office at Leavenworth."
"You better find a damned good one . . . You gonna need it."
"Thank you for your confidence in my abilities."
"Didn't say I was confident in your abilities."
She was right, however, and I next placed a call to the JAG personnel officer and asked him to run a computer search for all the Army lawyers who spoke Russian.
He called back a few minutes later with two names, one being Captain Karen Zbrovnia, previously committed. And a guy named Jankowski, whose Polish was flawless, but whose Russian was rated just shy of marginal.
This wouldn't do; I needed someone who could speed-read a Tolstoy novel in Russian without missing a single fractured nuance, assuming the Russians