Personal injuries (6 page)

I CALL HER EVON, because that's what she called herself She once told me that as a teenager she'd undergone a period of religious passion, in which her complete devotion to God seemed to remove her from normal life, as if she'd acquired the power to levitate or leave her body behind. And now she felt something akin, a limitless stake in being Evon Miller. She'd burned the details into herself. Thirty-four. Mormon family. Born in Boise. Three years of college at Boise State. Married to her high school sweetheart, Dave Aard, a flight mechanic for United with whom she'd moved to Denver. Divorced since 1988. She'd collected a hundred particles of an imagined past with which to spice offhand conversations. When she talked to herself, she called herself Evon. She ate the food Evon Miller liked, she window-shopped in the stores favored by Evon, whose tastes for shorter skirts, brighter colors, bigger earrings were, blessedly, just a little more daring than hers. And at night, she was certain, she dreamed Evon Miller's dreams.

Six weeks ago, the ASAC, the Assistant Special Agentin-Charge of the Des Moines Division, Hack Bielinger, had called her into his office. It was not really an office but a cubicle with a door. In his stubby hands he'd held a Teletype, on pulpy yellow paper. Bielinger was like a lot of the Bureau supervisors she'd had, hard to like, a guy who had moved up because he really wasn't cut out for the street and who still tended to resent the agents he oversaw who were good on the pavement. He was a small, fussy man-people always speculated that he'd fudged the height requirement -a born-again who didn't get what was wrong with bringing up Jesus at lunch.

"Got something interesting for you," he said.

Reading the Teletype, she felt as if somebody had hitched a generator to her heart. The message was from the DD, the office of the FBI's Deputy Director.

PLEASE ADVISE RE WILLINGNESS REFERENCED SA TO ACCEPT ASSIGNMENT IN

ORIGINATING UCO. K CTY DIV. TERM INDETERMINATE, EST. 6 MOS - 2 YRS. DEEP

COVER.

Bielinger wasn't smiling. In fact, he was tense. The DD wanted this, so he had to deliver. That was Bielinger. He said he'd had a call a week ago, kind of unofficial. He'd told them she'd be good.

"They need somebody who's trained as a paralegal." Bielinger shrugged. Why was a mystery to him. But it meant he must have asked, Why her? What's so special about her? The men in the Bureau always had the same reactions: chicks these days get first lick on every lollipop. The agent who was going to run the op had flown out to meet her. He said to call him Jim, no last name, everything on this deal was strictly need-to-know. But she liked him. Smart. Sober. Quiet. Somewhere on the sunny side of fifty. He was good-looking, despite some chunkiness as he steamed into his middle years, with big glasses and a full head of graying hair that dropped in a boyish sweep over his forehead. He didn't say where he was from, but she figured D.C. He had an HQ finish, and knew all the right names. From the breadth at his shoulders, the way he filled up his shirts, she could see he'd been a jock at some point in his life. She took that as a bond. He had that contained aura of well-being, an aspect of sporting success she'd observed in so many others, especially men, but which somehow had never settled in her.

"It's hard," he said about what he was proposing. "I was under almost a year once." He described the case. He had worked on Wall Street. He was supposed to be a bad guy who ran the back office operations at a big brokerage house, a quiet, sullen suit who manipulated the box count and fenced stolen securities. It was a big sting. They rolled up three LCN-La Cosa Nostra-capos. One more nail in the Gambinos' coffin. "I'm proud of what we did. And on Friday night other agents will always treat you like a hero, especially if you're paying for the beer." A droll grin lit up and passed, a momentary indulgence subject to quick discipline. "But it was hard. And lonely. And dangerous, People's lives depend on whether you get made, and so you're paranoid every minute, every hour. It wears." He repeated that. It wears.

She tried to take that in respectfully, but she told him what she knew she was going to before they started: she was ready. He wanted to know why.

"Forty-four caliber adrenal glands?" she answered. He'd probably already read that in her personnel jacket: first hand raised to help out on a bust, weekends, evenings, even with the local cops; still addicted to the instant of unthinking reaction she first experienced on the playing field.

"Must be something besides that," the man whom she now knew as McManis had said. "You're gonna be putting yourself through a lot." They were in a drab little conference room in the Des Moines Division, his quiet way somehow a contrast to the phones and commotion just beyond. His eyes, pale gray, didn't leave her. In the Bureau, they were always trying to get inside your head. When she'd taken the qualifying test after college, there was a psychological portion and one question still reared up at her at times out of the murky turbulence of nightmares. Ìf your mother and father were both drowning, which one would you save?' Someday, she'd have to find out the right answer.

She shrugged off his scrutiny now. It was tough to name any grand motive. She wanted it. Who knew why? But his response had rung something inside her.

"My bet,' he said. "is you'll find out."

CHAPTER 6

IN HIS INITIAL DEBRIEFINGS, ROBBIE HAD confirmed what the government had already detected, namely, that at any one time there were only a few judges in Common Law Claims with whom he could `talk.' This seemed peculiar to Sennett, since Tuohey had veto power over all assignments to his division. Robbie regarded it as characteristic of Brendan, who had an exquisite instinct for avoiding being exposed. Tuohey wanted Common Law Claims to be known for its cadre of highly capable and unhesitatingly honest judges. Their reputations would armor him with an aura of integrity, while the few exceptions could be passed off as the typical Party debris inevitable with an elected judiciary.

Of the dozen judges to whom Feaver had passed money over the years, most were gone now, retired or transferred to other divisions. If Petros ran perfectly, Robbie would try to secure evidence against them as part of the endgame. But to start, the focus would be on the four judges currently sitting in Common Law Claims with whom Feaver was still doing business. With them, there would be a chance to stage bribes, which, when recorded, would provide the government with the best opportunity to leverage those judges against Tuohey.

When the names of the four judges emerged from Bobbie, I'd been shocked about two, because I knew both men. Sherm Crowthers had been one of the best defense lawyers in this city when I entered practice, a ferocious, angry advocate who, if not always liked, was deeply admired both for his abilities and for the obstacles he'd surmounted as a black man. Hearing Sherm's name had sunk my heart.

Silvio Malatesta, the other judge I knew on Robbie's list, inspired simple disbelief. Malatesta was a donnish, bespectacled Magoo, who never seemed to leave the universe of his own head, through which various elevated legal notions were always tracing like shooting stars. It was amazing to me that he even experienced the material appetites that led to corruption.

As for the other two names, I probably would have guessed them on my own, if I ever had the gumption to speak such slanders aloud. Gillian Sullivan was a lush who'd been coming on the bench loaded in the afternoons for at least a decade and about whom we'd received constant complaints during my term as Bar President. Wandering through her alcoholic wilderness, Sullivan probably thought little about right or wrong. Barnett Skolnick, the last, was the brother of the late Knuckles Skolnick, a former intimate of the departed County Executive, Augustine Bolcarro. Barney was the kind of old-time Party flunky who in my mind was typecast for envelopes of cash. The threshold problem Stan faced in mounting these prosecutions was that except in the case of Skolnick, who might be tempted to take money from Robbie directly, all the others dealt strictly through intermediaries-a clerk, a relative, a paramour. In the ideal, Sennett would tape several payoffs to these bagmen, confront them, make a deal, and get them to record the delivery of money to the judges. But these go-betweens had each been chosen because they'd demonstrated the loyalty of Gunga Din, and it was far from a sure thing that any of them could be turned. If not, Petros might yield nothing but the convictions of a number of small-timers.

To counter this, Sennett initially hoped to design the `contrived cases,' these imaginary plaintiff's lawsuits, so that the judges would be called upon to make a series of far-fetched rulings in Robbie's behalf. That way, even if the bagman didn't roll, Stan could still go forward against the judge by calling a bevy of expert witnesses to testify that no honest jurist could possibly have made these decisions. But Feaver adamantly insisted that approach would never succeed.

"You guys still don't get the play," Feaver told Sennett. "We got judges making ninety grand and lawyers making millions. Figure how you like, say it's a tip, or tribute, or insurance for next time, but I got cases I oughta win, and I wanna make sure the judge doesn't get confused. Maybe I get a little help when things can go either way. But if I walk in with some mangy dog and ask the judge to act like it's Lassie-which in ten years, I swear to God in heaven I have never done-if I do, the best I get is that the judge won't talk to me again. Worst case, Brendan gets hinky and sends somebody to knife me, and the only thing left to do in The Law Offices of James McManis is run the vacuum and kill the lights. This may be a little mindblowing to you guys, but everybody over there realizes you're out here. They do something ridiculous, they know damn well that one of you"-the word àssholes' was halfway to Robbie's lips when he managed to stifle it; he took a second to improve his posture and pulled on his shirt cuffs so that an inch of white emerged over his dan gling i.d. bracelet "the Judicial Commission, or the Bar Association, or you guys, one of you is gonna be humping them from behind."

Thus each complaint-a summary of the facts the plaintiff said entitled him to damages for his injury-had to be constructed so it fell in that borderland where victory for Robbie was reasonable, but not required. In the first suit filed, Robbie's firm supposedly represented Peter Petros. Peter had indisputedly become drunk as a lord at a Hands basketball game. In the course of an obscene tirade at the referees, he had fallen over the balcony railing. His survival was accountable only to his state of inebriate relaxation and the fact that he had hit the canopy of a hot dog cart, before bouncing to the concrete stadium floor. Petros sued the fictitious railing manufacturer, Standard Railing, claiming that because of the inherent danger of balcony seating, Standard was automatically liable for not building a product that prevented Peter's injuries. In behalf of Standard, The Law Offices of James McManis immediately filed a motion to dismiss, contending that even if everything Peter said was true, under the law he had no case. The legal arguments had been designed so that the decision on the motion was a toss-up.

On January 12, Evon went with the other paralegal, Suzy Kraizek, and filed the complaint at the Kindle County Courthouse, a normal procedure. It was the next step, getting the case to what Robbie referred to as a `good' judge, which represented the first deviation. To do that, Robbie left a phone message at the office of Sig Milacki. Milacki, Brendan's old partner from the Police Force, was now assigned as the police liaison to the sheriff's deputies who acted as courthouse security. Robbie simply asked for a case number on a new matter,
Petros v. Standard Railing
. What happened then had never been spelled out to Feaver, and he had no reason to ask. Over the years. though, it had become apparent that Milacki passed the message to Rollo Kosic, Chief Bailiff to the Presiding Judge, who somehow overrode the court's computerized system for random case assignments. When Evon returned to the courthouse on Monday to pick up a file copy of the Petros complaint, Judge Silvio Malatesta, one of Robbie's unholy foursome, had been assigned. We met again in McManis's office, where the government personnel began preparing to ensnare Malatesta and, before him, his bagman, an ill-tempered docket clerk named Walter Wunsch. According to the well-ingrained custom that ruled these matters with the firmness of religious practice, Robbie would not deliver a payoff to Walter until the end of the case. But both Stan and McManis wanted to get a recording earlier. McManis thought Robbie should have experience wearing a wire in a less pressured situation than passing money; Stan was eager to develop live evidence, since UCORC had him on a standing thirty-day review, which meant they could fold the entire Project whenever they were unsatisfied with its progress. Robbie agreed that in the ordinary course he might pay a visit to Walter when he filed his response to McManis's motion to dismiss, just to make sure that Malatesta recognized the merits of plaintiff's position. With that, arrangements began for Robbie to go out wired for the first time as soon as the motion and response were filed, in about two weeks.

After the meeting, Robbie and I went up to my office. I left to speak to my secretary for a moment, and when I returned, I found Robbie in a reflective pose in front of the large old windows, taking in my view of the Center City skyline. The new steel-shelled structures, sleek as airliners, mingled with the buildings of the twenties, which were usually topped off by some impression of bygone architectural styles-Gothic spires, Italianate cupolas, or even one that had a glimmering helmet of cerulean tile, an al lusion to a Middle Eastern mosque. To the west, the river's waters were smoke-colored and mysterious under the wintry midwestern sky. The bleak season had started; these days it seemed like living under a pot lid.

I asked Robbie if the arrangements for the recording had sounded okay.

"I suppose," he answered. I thought it was the fear of detection that had made him subdued. But as it turned out, his concern was elsewhere. "I'm going over the bridge," he told me when he looked back my way.