“So if you were following us-”

“Me?” Sharpe tried for innocence. It didn’t take.

“-you’ve been following my daughter too. Who just happened to disappear today.”

Sharpe slowly lifted a puller from a bag of golf clubs sitting in the corner of his study, addressed one of the dozen balls lying on the floor and sent it across the room. It missed the cup.

“I hire lawyers to fight my battles for me. As you well know, having decorated the walls of the courtroom with their hides recently. That’s all I hire.”

Tate asked, “No security consultants?”

“Ha, security consultants. That’s good. Yeah, that’s good. Well, no, Collier. There ain’t no private eyes and no see-curity consultants on my payroll. Now, what’s this about your daughter?”

“She’s missing and I think you’re behind it.” Another putt. He missed the cup again.

“Me? Why? Oh, I get it. To take you outta the running at the oral argument next Thursday down in Richmond, right?”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Well, it don’t make sense to me. I don’t need to do that to beat you. You know, I fired those half-assed shysters you reamed at the trial. I got the big boys involved now. Lambert, Stone and Bums. They’re gonna run right over you. Don’t flatter yourself. They’ll bum you up like Atlanta.”

“Liberty Park, Sharpe. Tell me. How much’ll you lose if it doesn’t get built?”

“The park? It don’t go through? I don’t lose a penny.” Then he smiled. “But the amount I won’t make is to the tune of eighteen million. Say, ain’t it unethical for you to be here without my lawyer being present?”

Tate said, ‘Where is she? Tell me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on, Jack. You think I don’t know about defendants harassing clients and lawyers so they’ll drop cases?”

Sharpe ran his hand through his white hair. He sat down beneath a picture of himself on the eighteenth tee of the Bull Run Country Club, a place that proudly had not a single member who wasn’t white and Protestant. Male too-though that went without saying.

“Collier, I don’t kidnap people.”

“But how about some of those little roosters that work for you? I wouldn’t put it past a couple or three of them. That project manager of yours. Wilkins? He was in Lorton for eighteen months.”

“For passing bad paper, Collier, not kidnapping girls.”

‘Who knows who they might’ve hired? Some psycho who does kidnap girls. And maybe likes it.”

“Nobody hired nobody,” Sharpe said, though Tate could see in his eyes that he was considering the possibility that one of his thugs had snatched Megan. But five seconds on the defensive was too much for Jack Sharpe. “Running outta patience here, Collier. And whatta I know-I’m just a country boy-but if I’m not mistaken isn’t that slander or libel or some such you’re spouting?”

“So file suit, Jack. But tell me where she is.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Collier. You’re gonna have to look elsewhere. You’re not thinking clear. You bow Prince William as good as your grandfather did before you. If you do a deal like Liberty Park you play hardball. That’s the way business works in these parts. But for Christ’s sake, this ain’t southeast D.C. I’m not gonna hurt a seventeen-year-old girl. Now it’s time for you to leave. I got work to do.”

He sank the next putt into the small cup, which spit the ball back to him.

Tate, chin quivering with rage, stared back at the much calmer face of his opponent.

From the doorway Jimmy asked calmly, “You want me to help him outside?”

Sharpe said, “Naw. Just show him to the door. Hey, so long, Counselor. See you in Richmond next Thursday. Hope you’re rested and comfy. They’re going to rub every inch of your skin off. It’s gonna be pretty to watch.”

16

Rhetoric, Plato wrote, is the universal art of winning the mind by argument.

Tate Collier, at eleven years of age, listened to the Judge recite that definition as the old man rasped a match to light his fragrant pipe and decided that one day he would “do rhetoric.”

Whatever that meant.

He had to wait three years for the chance but finally, as a high school freshman, he argued (what else?) his way into Debate Club, even though it was open only to upperclassmen.

Tournament debating started in colonial America with the Spy Club at Harvard in the early 1700s and opened up to women a hundred years later with the Young Lathes Association at Oberlin, though hundreds of less formal societies, lyceums and bees had always been popular throughout the colonies. By the time Tate was in school, intercollegiate debate had become a practiced institution.

He argued in hundreds of National Debate Tournament bouts as well as the alternative-format-Cross Examination Debate Association-tournaments. He was a member of the forensic honorary fraternities-Delta Sigma Rho, Phi Rho Pi and Pi Kappa Delta-and was now as active in the American Forensics Association as he was in the American Bar Association.

In college-when it was fashionable to be antimilitary, antifrat, anti-ROTC-Tate shunned bell-bottoms and lie-dye for suits with narrow lies and white shirts, There he honed his technique, his logic, his reasoning. If…then…Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. Knocking down straw men, circular logic and ad hominem tactics by his opponents. He fought debaters from Georgetown and George Washington, from Duke and North Carolina and Penn and Johns Hopkins, and he beat them all.

With this talent (and, of course, with the Judge for a grandfather) law school was inevitable. At UVA he’d been the state moot court champion his senior year at the Federal Bar Moot Court Open in the District. Now he frequently taught well-attended appellate advocate continuing-ed courses, and his American Trial Lawyers’ Association tape was a best-seller in the ABA catalogue.

When he’d been a senior at UVA and the champion debater on campus the Judge had traveled down to Charlottesville to see him. As predicted, he’d won the debate (it was the infamous pro-Watergate contest). The Judge told him that he’d heard someone in the audience say, “How’s that Collier boy do it? He looks like a farm boy but when he starts to talk he’s somebody else. It’s like he’s speaking in tongues.”

No, there was no one Tate Collier would not match words with. Yet the incident with Sharpe had left him unnerved. He’d let emotions dictate what he’d said. What was happening to him? He was losing his orator’s touch.

“I blew it,” he muttered. And told Bell what had happened.

“Did he have anything to do with it?”

“I think he did, yeah. He was slick, too slick, He was expecting me. But he was also surprised about something.”

“What?”

“I think something happened he hadn’t planned on. It’s true. I don’t think his boys would kidnap Megan themselves, But I think they hired somebody to do it. Oh, and he knew we were divorced and that Megan was seventeen. Why would he how that if he hadn’t looked into our lives?”

“Are you going to tell Konnie?”

“Oh, sure I am. But people like Sharpe are good. They don’t leave loose ends. You follow the trails and they vanish.”

She picked up the pistol, which he’d set on the dashboard. She slipped it in the glove compartment distastefully. “Aren’t we a pair, Tate? Guns, private eyes.”

He said, “Bett, I’m sorry. About before.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “There was truth in what you said.”

They drove in silence for several moments.

She sighed then asked reflectively, “Do you like your life?” He glanced at her. Responded: “Sure.”

“Just sure?”

“How much more can you be than sure?” “You can be convincing,” she said.

“What’s life,” he asked, “but ups and downs?”

“You ever get lonely?”

Ah, there’s a question for you… Sometimes the women would stay the night, sometimes they’d leave. Sometimes they decided to return to their husbands or lovers or leave him for other men, sometimes they’d talk about getting divorced and sometimes they were single, unattached and waiting for a ring. Sometimes they’d introduce Tate to their parents or their cautious-eyed children or, if they had none, talk about how much they wanted youngsters. A boy first, they’d invariably say, and then a girl.