The Blackmail Caper, Ch. 8

Three weeks later, I was pulled over by a uniformed cop driving a marked car. It was two in the morning; I was five blocks from Haupmann’s home. He came up alongside my car and asked for my license, registration and proof of insurance. I gave them to him. He went back to his car and pulled out the microphone for the radio. He had turned his roof-mounted light bar off after he stopped me. Only the standard emergency flashing lights were on. I guess he didn’t want to upset the residents.

Ten minutes later, he came back to my car. He didn’t hand back the papers.

“Is there a problem, Officer,” I asked.

“What do you have in the trunk?

“Spare tire, jack, first aid kit, some bags of trash, a change of clothes.”

“Lemme see,” he demanded.

“OK, I’m going to reach down and pull the release.”

“Go ahead.”

I popped the release, the trunk lid swung up a little. The cop went back and shined his flashlight into the trunk. I could hear him shift a few things around.

He came back up to the side of my car. “Why are you driving around with bags of garbage in the middle of the night?”

I looked up at him. It was hard to tell, since he was shining his flashlight in my face, but he appeared to be a white guy in his mid-twenties, maybe. “Why, is it illegal to have garbage in a car, now?”

“If you’re going to dump it somewhere. You don’t live around here.”

Fuck this, I thought. I asked: “Are you arresting me?”

He stepped back. “Get out of the car.”

I did.

“Turn around.”

I did.

He handcuffed me and put me in the back of his cruiser. Ten minutes later, I was sitting in a holding cell at the police station. The young cop took me out of the cell, booked me on a charge of “suspicion of illegal dumping”, and put me back in.

Two hours later, I asked one of the other cops walking by if I could see the duty sergeant. The cop was suspicious, but I told him that I only needed thirty seconds and it would be worth the sergeant’s time.

Ten minutes later, a sergeant came to the cell. He didn’t have a nametag on his uniform. He was a white guy, a bit overweight, greying hair and he had an attitude of having to bear too much of the world’s burdens. He looked at me and said: “Whaddaya want?”

I handed him my PI license.

He looked at it and gave it back. “So, what?”

“Watch,” I said. I put my hands to my left leg and pulled up the trouser leg. That exposed an ankle holster, complete with a Smith & Wesson Centennial revolver.

The sergeant’s eyes widened. “Holy fucking shit. You, don’t do nothing. I’ll be right back.” He turned and all but ran away.

I let the trouser leg slide back down.

Five minutes later, the sergeant was back with his lieutenant. The sergeant had some papers in his hand.

“Show the lieutenant what you just showed me.”

I gave the lieutenant my PI license. After he handed it back, I pulled up my trouser leg.

The lieutenant looked, then turned to the sergeant. “What was he arrested for?”

“Says here ‘suspicion of illegal dumping’. The arresting officer reported that he had four bags of trash in the trunk of his car.”

“And where’s his car now,” the lieutenant asked.

“Impound lot.”

The lieutenant thought it over. “OK, get him out of here, right now. Take him over to Impound and give him his car back, free of charge. Take care of it personally, sergeant. If those fuckers say or do anything other than giving this man back his keys, I want to know about it and you tell them that I’ll deal with them if they don’t. Make it happen. And make this arrest go away. I don’t want any record of it, anywhere. Shred the fingerprint card, the booking photos and the negatives.”

The sergeant waved over another cop and ordered him to open the cell door. That cop went to get the keys.

The lieutenant took the papers from the sergeant, glanced them over and looked at me. “I apologize for any inconvenience, Mr. Hawkins.”

“Once I’m on my way, Lieutenant, as far as I’m concerned, this never happened,” I assured him.

He nodded. “Good.” He reached into a pocket, pulled out a business card and handed it to me.

I tucked the card away without looking at it. The clear implication was that as long as I kept my mouth shut, I had a favor owed to me. I liked it when cops owed me a favor.

The one officer came back with the cell door’s keys. He let me out. The sergeant drove me to Impound and got my car back for me. He didn’t say anything, he only nodded with I thanked him.

By six that morning, I was sitting in a diner, having breakfast and coffee. I yawned and almost dislocated my jaw. I had had maybe three hours of sleep before I had driven over to Haupmann’s place to switch out the trash. And I still had to go home and sort through the bags. That was a job that didn’t get any less pungent for postponing it.

The worst thing about it was that after all of that brouhaha with the Alexandria cops, I didn’t find anything in Haupmann’s trash that even remotely resembled a clue. I rebagged his trash, then I went upstairs and took a nice hot, long shower. I’d toss Haupmann’s trash into the restaurant’s dumpster on my way into the office.

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On a side note, once I've run through the chapters that I've written of this story, then I'll be done. Writing for me was an enjoyable way to pass the time, but it's not any more. It's more like work.

The Blackmail Capter, Chapter 7

I have a friend who owns a restaurant. I gave her the boxes of garbage bags. Each Monday night, I would stop by and pick up four full bags of garbage. Then I would, anywhere between one and five in the morning, drive up the alley behind Haupmann’s house. I took his garbage and put the restaurant garbage into his cans. If there were only two bags of garbage, I’d leave two. There never were five bags. After one of them leaked and soaked the floor mat of my car’s trunk, I bought some large plastic containers to put into the trunk. The containers were originally too tall to close the trunk lid, but that was easily fixed with a power saw.

I also began following him. That was harder than one might think, for even though the alleys were barely wide enough for a single truck to drive down them, they weren’t officially one-way streets. If I got close enough to the alleyway to see his garage, I was easily within spotting distance. Fortunately, most people are creatures of habit and Haupmann was no exception. He always entered the alley from one cross-street and left it from the one on the other end of his block. After several days of watching, I saw that everyone else drove the alley the same way. Even the garbage truck did. So while the alley wasn’t a one way road, it was by custom.

Haupmann was kind of boring in his routine. He left his home at a quarter `till eight each day, varying by no more than five minutes. He took the same route to the embassy. I was able to fall back some distance and still keep a tail on him. He had enough rank to park in the embassy’s lot. Some days he had meetings or conferences at office buildings in the city center. A couple of times, he went into one of the Senate or House office buildings. When he went on those trips, he took a cab. That put me at a disadvantage, as he could just hop out while I had to find a place to park my car.

After work, he normally went home. Sometimes, he’d go to restaurants. A few times, I was able to see him and his dinner mates. A few I recognized. When I got into this case, I looked up who were the power players in the regulation of foreign capital and banking matters.

If I could have gotten closer, I might have been able to see who picked up the check. That’s a good indication of who wants what in this town, for those asking for something always pay the check. Politicians never do. It’s probably a union violation for a senator to pay for a meal at any place other than Chuck-e-Cheese’s Pizza. And it’s hard as hell to find out afterwards who paid, as the restaurants are notoriously closed-mouthed about that. If their patrons found out that the staff had been indiscreet, the restaurant’s business would have disappeared in very short order. You would have better luck finding out which politicians boarded private jets at National Airport. I sometimes wondered why reporters never thought about checking into that angle.

Haupmann’s garbage, so far, wasn’t yielding a lot of clues. From the food garbage, it seemed that somebody was a decent cook, if only because of the lack of takeout containers, pizza boxes and tin cans. He had some concern about personal security, for most of the papers in his trash had been run through a cross-cut shredder. Maybe the feds could have pieced them back together. I didn’t have the ability to do that.

What I could see is that either Haupmann was so boring that he could have been a spokesman for Wonder Bread or, if he was doing something bad, he had the skills to hide it. Or he was just lucky, for I couldn’t sit on him every damn hour of the day. If he snuck out for a few hours in the middle of the night, I was going to miss it.

I called Hauger and asked to meet him. He agreed, but he didn’t want me coming to the embassy. Fine with me, we met about 7:30 the next morning at a coffee shop near the Rosslyn Metro station. He looked indistinguishable from the rest of the businessmen who were buying their cup of morning joe. Except for his eyes, for he quickly glanced at everyone who came bear our table. He probably could have described them all to a police sketch artist. I told Hauger what I had done to try and find out what Haupmann might be up to. That took a lot longer than giving him the results.

He sipped his coffee. He didn’t say anything.

After a few minutes of silence, I said: “Any thoughts on the prospects of bringing a major-league ball club to RFK Stadium?”

Hauger said nothing.

“If they do, what do you like for a name? The old team was ‘the Senators’, but I think they should come up to the times and be called ‘the Lobbyists’.”

“All right. What do you recommend?

I spread my hands. “How far do you want to take this feeling of yours?”

Hauger looked at me. “I still think there is something wrong.”

“Yeah, but what? You’ve seen his financials, he gave you disclosure forms. Does anything show up?”

“Nothing other than what you’ve already discovered.”

“Are you satisfied that his background is good?”

Hauger nodded. “We checked him out pretty thoroughly. He’s not a plant.”

“I can’t wiretap his home. I can’t get the Post Office to monitor his mail. I might be able to get copies of his phone records from C&P Telephone, which will be illegal as all hell, if you care.” “I don’t.”

“OK. Can you at least get a log started of when he arrives at the embassy, when he leaves and if he goes out for lunch or meetings?”

“That may be possible,” Hauger allowed. “It may be time for the embassy to begin a formal check-in and out process.”

“That would help. I can continue checking his trash. As for tailing him, that’s hit or miss, unless you want me to bring in help. Do you still want me to put a priority on being covert?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So, that means I can’t go check out his house and search his home office,” I mused.

“I would prefer that you stay as discreet as possible.”

“What’s going on that bothers you? Unauthorized use of copiers? Classified documents are missing for short periods of time, only to be found again? Somebody found film boxes or canisters in the trash?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Then like what, Mr. Hauger? Come on, you’re killing me, here.”

He smiled at that. “I know that this is, as you say, like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

I shook my head. “No, it isn’t. At least I’d know I was looking for a needle. This is more like a snipe hunt.”

“What is a snipe hunt?”

“Looking for something that isn’t there. You’re asking me to prove a negative, that Haupmann isn’t dirty.” I drank some of my coffee. “Hey, let me ask you this: When did you stop beating your wife?”

Hauger looked offended. “I have never hit my wife.”

“But that’s not the question and how would you prove, sitting here, that you’ve stopped beating her?”

“I take your point.”

I looked right at him. “Just to be clear, Mr. Hauger, I have no problem with taking your money and following this guy around, or using some of your money to have other people follow him around some of the time. While rummaging through other people’s garbage isn’t my idea of fun, it’s part of the job. But if there’s nothing to find, there’s nothing to find. And even if there is, I don’t have the resources to have eyes on him every minute of every day. Catching him doing something wrong’ll be a combination of luck and a misstep on his part.”

“I understand. Please keep working on this task,” Hauger said. He stood up and left the coffee shop without another word.