Bitter Truth (3 page)

“So what I want,” she said, “is for you to find out who killed her and get them to stay away from me. I thought with your connections to this Jimmy Vigs and the mob it would be easy for you.”

“I bet you did,” I said. “But what if it wasn’t Jimmy Vigs?”

“He did it.”

“Most victims are killed by someone they know. If she was murdered, maybe it was by a lover or a family member?”

“My family had nothing to do with it,” she said sharply.

“Jimmy Dubinsky is not a murderer. The mere fact that your brother owed him money is…”

“Then what about this?” she said while she reached into her handbag.

“You did it again, dammit. And I wish you wouldn’t keep putting your hand in there.”

“Frightened?” She smiled as she pulled out a plastic sandwich bag and dangled it before me.

I took the bag from her and examined it. Inside was a piece of cellophane, a candy wrapper, one end twisted, the other opened and the word “Tosca’s” printed on one side. When I saw the printing my throat closed on me.

“I found this lying on her bathroom floor, behind the toilet, when I was cleaning out her apartment,” she said.

“So she had been to Tosca’s. So what?”

“Jackie was an obsessive cleaner. She wouldn’t have just left this lying about. The cops missed it, I guess they don’t do toilets, but Jackie surely wouldn’t have left it there. And tomato sauce was too acidic for her stomach. She never ate Italian food.”

“Then someone else, maybe.”

“Exactly. I asked around and Tosca’s seems to be some sort of mob hangout.”

“So they say.”

“I think she was murdered, Mr. Carl, and that the murderer had been to Tosca’s and left this and I think you’re the one who can find out for me.”

I looked at the wrapper and then at Caroline and then back at the wrapper. Maybe I had underestimated the viciousness of Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky, and maybe one of my clients, in collecting for my other client, had left this little calling card from Tosca’s at the murder scene.

“And if I find out who did it,” I said, “then what?”

“I just want them to leave me alone. If you find out who did it, could you get them to leave me alone?”

“Maybe,” I said. “What about the cops?”

“That will be up to you,” she said.

I didn’t like the idea of this waif rummaging through Tosca’s looking for trouble and I figured Enrico Raffaello wouldn’t like it much either. If I took the retainer and proved to her, somehow, that her sister actually killed herself, I could save everyone, especially Caroline, a lot of trouble. I took another look at the wrapper in that plastic bag, wondered whose fingerprints might still be found there, and then stuffed it into my jacket pocket where it could do no harm.

“I’ll need a retainer of ten thousand dollars,” I said.

She smiled, not with gratitude but with victory, as if she knew all along I’d take the case. “I thought it was five thousand.”

“I charge one eighty-five an hour plus expenses.”

“That seems very high.”

“That’s my price. And you have to promise to throw that gun away.”

She pressed her lips together and thought about it for a moment. “But I want to keep the gun,” she said, with a slight pout in her voice. “It keeps me warm.”

“Buy a dog.”

She thought some more and then reached into her handbag once again and this time what she pulled out was a checkbook, opening it with the practiced air you see in well-dressed women at grocery stores. “Who should I make it out to?”

“Derringer and Carl,” I said. “Ten thousand dollars.”

“I remember the amount,” she said with a laugh as she wrote.

“Is this going to clear?”

She ripped the check from her book and handed it to me. “I hope so.”

“Hopes have never paid my rent. When it clears I’ll start to work.” I looked the check over. It was drawn on the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. “Nice bank,” I said.

“They gave me a toaster.”

“And you’ll get rid of the gun?”

“I’ll get rid of the gun.”

So that was that. I took her number and stuffed the check into my pocket and left her there with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I had been retained, sort of, assuming the check cleared, to investigate the mysterious death of Jacqueline Shaw. I had expected it would be a simple case of checking the files and finding a suicide. I didn’t know then, couldn’t possibly have known, all the crimes and all the hells through which that investigation would lead. But just then, with that check in my hand, I wasn’t thinking so much about poor Jacqueline Shaw hanging by her neck from a rope, but instead about Caroline, her sister, and the slyness of her smile.

I took the subway back to Sixteenth Street and walked the rest of the way to my office on Twenty-first. Up the stairs, past the lists of names, through the hallway with all the other offices with which we shared our space, to the three doorways in the rear.

“Any messages, Ellie?” I asked my secretary. She was a young blonde woman with freckles, our most loyal employee as she was our only employee.

She handed me a pile of slips. “Nothing exciting.”

“Is there ever?” I said as I nodded sadly and went into my scuff of an office. Marked white walls, files piled in lilting towers, dead flowers drooping like desiccated corpses from a glass vase atop my big brown filing cabinet. Through the single window was a sad view of the decrepit alleyway below. I unlocked the file cabinet and dropped the plastic bag with the Tosca’s candy wrapper inside into a file marked “Recent Court Decisions.” I closed the drawer and pushed in the cabinet lock and sat at my desk, staring at all the work I needed to do, transcripts to review, briefs to write, discovery to discover. Instead of getting down to work I took the check out of my pocket. Ten thousand dollars. Caroline Shaw. First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. That was a pretty fancy banking address for a punkette with a post in her nose. I stood and strolled into my partner’s office.

She was at her desk, chewing, a pen in one hand and a carrot in the other. Gray-and-white-streaked copies of case opinions, paragraphs highlighted in fluorescent pink, were scattered across her desktop and she stared up at me as if I were a rude interruption.

“What’s up, doc?” Beth Derringer said.

“Want to go for a ride?”

“Sure,” she said as she snapped a chunk of carrot with her teeth. “What for?”

“Credit check.”

4

W
HERE ARE WE off to?” asked Beth, sitting in the passenger seat of my little Mazda as I negotiated the wilds of the Schuylkill Expressway.

Short and sharp-faced, with glossy black hair cut even and fierce, Elizabeth Derringer had been my partner since we both fell out of law school, all except for one short period a few years back when I lost my way in a case, choosing money over honor, and she felt compelled to resign. That was very much like Beth, to pretend that integrity counted for more than cash, and of all the people I ever met in my life who pretended just that same thing, and there have been far too many, she was the best at pulling it off. Beth was smarter than me, wiser than me, a better lawyer all around, but she had an annoying tendency to pursue causes rather then currency, representing cripples thrown off SSI disability rolls, secretaries whose nipples had been tweaked by Neanderthal superiors, deadbeats looking to stave off foreclosure of the family homestead. It was my criminal work that kept us solvent, but I liked to think that Beth’s unprofitable good deeds justified my profitable descent into the mire with my bad boy clients. In today’s predatory legal world I would have been well advised to jettison her income drag, except I never would. I knew I could trust Beth more deeply than I could trust anyone else in this world, which was not a bad recipe, actually, for a partner and which explained why I hitched my shingle to hers but not why she hitched hers to mine. That I still hadn’t figured out.

“I found us a new client,” I said. “I want to see if the retainer check clears.”

“You smell like a chimney.”

“This new client is a bit nervous.”

“Why don’t you just have Morris do a background check for you?” she said, referring to Morris Kapustin, our usual private detective.

“This isn’t big enough yet to bring in Morris.”

A brown Chevette cut in front of me on the expressway and I slammed my horn. The guy in the Chevette swung around into a different lane and slowed to give me the finger. I gestured back. He shouted something and I shouted something and we jawed at each other for a few moments, neither hearing a word of what the other was yelling, before he sped away.

“So tell me about the new client. Who is he?”

“
She
is Caroline Shaw. Her sister, one Jacqueline Shaw, killed herself, apparently. Caroline doesn’t believe it was a suicide. She suspects one of my clients and wants me to investigate. I’m certain it’s nothing more than what it looks like but I figure I can keep her out of trouble if I can convince her. My clients don’t like being accused of murder.”

“That’s rather noble of you.”

“She gave us a ten-thousand-dollar retainer.”

“I should have figured.”

“Even nobility has a price. You know what knight-hoods go for these days?”

A maroon van started sliding out of its lane, inching closer and closer to the side of my car. I pressed my horn and accelerated away from the van, braking just in time to avoid a Cadillac, before veering into the center lane.

“It’s not the sort of thing you usually take up, Victor. I didn’t know you had an investigator’s license.”

“She paid us a ten-thousand-dollar retainer, Beth. If the check clears, I’ll buy a belted raincoat and turn into Philip Marlowe.”

The First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line was a surprising choice for Caroline Shaw’s checking account. It was a stately white-shoe bank with three discreet offices and a huge estates department to handle the peculiar bequests of the wealthy dead. The bank’s jumbo mortgage rates were surprisingly low, the rich watched every penny with a rapaciousness that would stun, but the bank’s credit checks were vicious, kicking out all but those with the littlest need for the institution’s money. It catered to the very wealthy suburban crowd who didn’t want to deal with the hoi polloi when they dug their paws into their piles of gold and laughed. The bank didn’t discriminate against the not very rich, of course, but keep just a few hundred dollars in a checking account at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line and the fees would wipe out your principal in a breathtakingly short time. Keep a few hundred thousand and your Yves St. Laurent designer checks were complimentary. Wood-paneled offices, tellers in Brooks Brothers suits, personal banking, ads in
The Wall Street Journal
proclaiming the soundness of their investment advice for portfolios of two million dollars or more. Sorry, no, they didn’t cash welfare checks at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line and the glass door was always locked so that they could bar your entry until they gave you the once-over, as if they were selling diamond tiaras.

Even though I was in a suit, and Beth was in a nice print dress, we had to knock twice and smile gamely before we heard the buzz.

“Yes, can I help you?” said a somberly dressed young man with a thin smile who greeted us as soon as we stepped inside. I guessed he was some sort of a concierge, there to take the rich old ladies’ coats and escort them to the tapestry chairs arranged before willing and obsequious personal bankers.

“We need to cash a check,” I said.

“Do either of you have an account here?”

I looked around at the portraits of old bankers tacked onto the dark walnut of the walls, gray-haired men in their frock coats staring solemnly down at me with disapproval. Even if I was a Rothschild I don’t think I would have felt comfortable in that bank and, believe me, I was no Rothschild.

“No,” I said. “No account.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t cash checks for those without accounts here.” He whispered so as not to embarrass us, which was very considerate of him, considering. “There is a Core States Bank branch down the road a bit, I’m sure they could be of assistance.”

“We’re being sloughed off,” said Beth.

“It’s policy, ma’am,” said the concierge. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ve been sloughed off by worse places than this,” I said. “But still…”

The concierge stepped to the side and opened the door graciously for us to leave. “I hope we can be of service another time.”

“But the check I wanted to cash,” I said in a loud voice, “was drawn on this very bank.” And then I raised my voice even louder, not in anger, my tone still kindly, but the voice high enough and the syllables distinct enough so that I could have been heard in the rear of the balcony, had there been one. “You don’t mean to say that you won’t honor a check drawn on this bank?”

Heads reared, a personal banker stood, an old lady turned slowly to look at me and grabbed tightly to her purse. The concierge put a hand on my forearm, his face registering as much shock as if I had started babbling in Yiddish right there in that gilded tomb of a bank building.

Before he could say anything else a wonderfully dressed older man with nervous hands and razored gray hair was at his side.

“Thank you, James,” the older man said, his pale blue eyes fixed on my brown ones. “I’ll take it from here.” The young concierge bowed and backed away. “Follow me, please.”

We walked in a column to a desk in the middle of the bank’s dark-carpeted main room and were seated on the tapestry seats of claw-and-ball chairs. Atop the desk was a bronze name plate that read: “Mr. Jeffries.” “Now,” said the impeccably dressed Jeffries with an impeccably false smile, “you said you wished to cash a check drawn on an account at this bank?”

I reached into my jacket pocket and Jeffries flinched ever so slightly. Not the main man in this bank, I figured, if he was flinching from so minimally an imagined threat. From my jacket I pulled out Caroline Shaw’s check, unfolded it, read it once again, and handed it over.

Jeffries’s eyes rose in surprise when he examined the check. “And you’re Mr. Carl?”

“The very same. Is the check any good?”

There was a computer on his desk and I expected him to make a quick review of the account balance, of which I hoped to grab a peek, but that’s not what he did. What he did instead was to simply say, “I’ll need identification.”

I dug for my wallet and pulled out my driver’s license.

“And a credit card.”

I pulled that out, too. “So the check is good?”

He examined my license and MasterCard. “If you’ll just endorse the check, Mr. Carl.”

I signed the back. He compared my signature to the license and the credit card, making some notations beneath my signature on the check.

“And how would you like this paid, Mr. Carl, cash or cashier’s check?”

“Cash.”

“Are hundreds satisfactory?”

“Perfectly.”

“One moment, please,” and then with my license and credit card and check he stood and turned and walked out of the room to somewhere in the rear of the building.

“Your Miss Shaw seems to be known in this bank,” said Beth.

“Yes, either she has a substantial account or she is a known forger and the police will be out presently.”

“Which do you expect?”

“Oh the police,” I said. “I have found it is always safest to expect the worst. Anything else is mere accident.”

It took a good long time, far too long a time. I waited, first patiently, then impatiently, and then angrily. I was about to stand and make another scene when Jeffries finally returned. Behind him came another man, about my age, handsome enough and tall enough and blond enough so that he seemed as much a part of the bank as the paneling on the walls and the portraits in their gilded frames. I wondered to which eating club at Princeton he had belonged.

As Jeffries sat back down at the desk and fiddled with the paperwork, the blond man stood behind him looking over his shoulder. Jeffries took out an envelope and extracted a thick wad of bills, hundred-dollar bills. Slowly he began to count.

“I didn’t know cashing a check was such a production,” I said.

The blond man lifted his head and smiled at me. It was a warm, generous smile and completely ungenuine. “We’ll have this for you in just a moment, Mr. Carl,” he said. “By the way, what kind of business are you in?”

“This and that,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Our loan department is always on the lookout for clients. We handle the accounts for many lawyers. I was just hoping our business loan department could be of help to your firm.”

So that was why they spent so much time in the back, they were checking me out, and he wanted me to know it, too. “I believe our line of credit is presently sufficient,” I said. “Miss Derringer is the partner in charge of finances. How are we doing with our loans, Beth?”

“I’m still under my MasterCard limit,” said Beth.

“Now you’re bragging,” I said.

“It helps if you pay more than the minimum each month, Victor.”

“Well then, with Beth under her limit, we’re sitting pretty for the next month at least.”

“How good for you,” said the blond man.

Jeffries finished counting the bills. He neatened the pile, tapping it gently first on one side, then another, and proceeded to count it again. There was about Jeffries, as he counted the bills with the blond man behind him, the tense air of a blackjack dealer with the pit boss looking over his shoulder. They were taking quite a bit of care, the two of them, for ten thousand dollars, a pittance to a bank that considered anything under a million small change.

“What type of law is it that you two practice?” asked the blond man.

“Oh this and that,” I said.

“No specialty?”

“Not really. We take pretty much whatever comes in the door.”

“Do you do any banking work? Sometimes we have work our primary counsel can’t handle due to conflicts.”

“Is that a fact? And who exactly is your primary counsel?”

“Talbott, Kittredge & Chase.”

“Of course it is,” I said. Talbott, Kittredge & Chase was the richest, most prestigious, most powerful firm in the city.

“Oh, so they would know of you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very well.”

“Then maybe we can do some business after all.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. They had checked me out all right, and it was interesting as hell that they were so interested, but their scouting report was old. I might have gone for the bait one time or another, given much to garner the business of an old and revered client like the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line, but not anymore. “You see, we once sued Talbott, Kittredge & Chase and won a large settlement. They hate me there, in fact a memo has been circulated to have their lawyers harass me at every turn, so I don’t think they’d agree to your giving me any work.”

“Well of course,” said the blond man, “it’s our choice really.”

“Thank you for the offer,” I said, “but no. We don’t really represent banks.”

“It’s sort of a moral quirk of ours,” said Beth. “They’re so big and rich and unkind.”

“We sue them, of course,” I said. “That’s always good for a laugh or two, but we don’t represent them. We sometimes represent murderers and tax cheats and crack mothers who have deserted their babies, but we will only sink so low. Are you finished counting, Jeffries, or do you think Ben Franklin will start to smile if you keep tickling him like that?”

“Give Mr. Carl his money,” said the blond man.

Jeffries put the bills back in the envelope and handed it to me. “Thank you for banking with us, sir.”

“My pleasure,” I said as I tapped the envelope to my forehead in a salute. “I’m a little surprised though at how much interest you both seem to take in Miss Shaw’s affairs. She must be someone very special.”

“We take a keen interest in all of our clients’ affairs,” said the blond man.

“How wonderfully Orwellian. Is there anything about Miss Shaw’s situation we should know?”

The blond man stared at me for a moment. “No. Nothing at all. I hope we can be of further service sometime, Mr. Carl.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said, certain he never wanted to hear from me again.

James, the young concierge, was waiting at the door for us after we left the desk. As soon as we came near he swung the glass door open. “Good day,” he said with a nod and a smile.

Beth was already through when I stopped in the door frame. Without turning around, I said, “Thank you, James. By the way, that man standing behind Mr. Jeffries, staring at me with a peculiar distaste right now. Who is he?”