Speaking in Tongues

is.”
    “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Collier. You’re gonna have to look elsewhere. You’re not thinking clear. You know 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.”

Chapter Sixteen
    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 Ladies 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 honoraryfraternities—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 tie-dye for suits with narrow ties 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 himunnerved. 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 Bett 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 know 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.