Pleading Guilty (12 page)

I made her flip the screen back so I could look again at Bert'
s m
essage. Three weeks ago, the NFL playoffs had laid waste to my weekend.

"These are games," she said. -1 think he's betting one side of the spread or the other." She looked at me to see how she was doing, which was fine. "It makes sense," she told me. "Franklin and Grant--they're on money, right? I mean bills. I don't quite get Cleveland."

"Grover Cleveland's on the thousand."

"He is betting," she said. "Heavy too. How's he covering his losses?" An addict, Lena had an ingrained view: For sin you pay sometime.

I considered her question. Betting between five and ten grand a day, Bert had the look of a man likely to steal.

"I can't figure what this means," she said, "Kam's Special?" I had no idea.

"And who's Arch?" she asked.

That one was inure obvious to me.

"A bookie." Actuaries, of course, are oddsmakers in white shirts. Archie, I guess, couldn't resist plotting probabilities on something more amusing than mortality tables. It was a funny thought, some buttoned-down type making book in one of these steel towers.

"Look," I said to Lena, "if this character Archie had my guy's account number and the name Kam Roberts, he could call in and take bets out of the mailbox. Right? And he could do that with dozens of other people too, if he had the same kind of arrangement with them."

"Why would he want to?"

"Because bookmaking is illegal and it's a better business if he doesn't get caught." Even when I was on the street, before wiretapping got so big, guys kept a book on the run. Somebody with no nose would knock on a door in a poor neighborhood and offer to rent an apartment for a month, three grand, no questions asked. They'd use the place for four weeks, then go somewhere else, hoping to stay ahead of the feds. But these days, no matte
r h
ow they do it, when they're taking bets over the phone there's the chance the G is listening. Archie took calls from no one. You could scout out the Sportsline and leave your bets for Archie in your Infomode mailbox. Archie was an electronic tout, man of his times.

Which also explained the reference to Arch Enterprises on the Kam Roberts bank card statement. Archie had solved the bookie's age-old dilemma--how do I collect without giving the
leg breakers
a call to knock 6 for 5 out of you by Friday? This was clean, professional. It was all charged to the credit card. Wins and losses. Probably once a month a debit or credit memo went through. For a winner, it was as good as cash--you could wash your airline tickets, dinners out, a suit, a tie, everything you charged. If you lost, Arch got paid by the bank. No doubt everybody employed intermediate devices. In all likelihood Arch Enterprises was the subsidiary of some holding company owned in turn by a trust. Maybe created in Pico Luan?

"What's this case about?" Lena asked. "Can I work on it?" Better than bond indentures and coverage claims.

I thanked her at length, then took the bill back to my office, somewhat saddened by myself. As usual, I had let my lurid imagination get the better of me. Archie was not Bert's lover. He was a bookie. Even so, there was a lot of this that didn't fit. I still didn't know what Bert had to do with Kam, and I couldn't figure why Pigeyes and his pals were chasing him. It wasn't for gambling, which would be a vice investigation. Pigeyes and Dewey were working this out of Financial Crimes. But this information did do one thing. It made my wee-hours theory look even better, and I said it to myself again out loud, if quietly: "Bert's dead."

Icicles of steely light drifted out on the river. You had to consider Bert's situation with what I call cop logic. Look for the simple explanation. The gentleman in the Amana had not tied a fishing line around his neck by himself. Bad People had a point to make. And given the location of the body, it seemed tha
t p
oint had something to do with Bert. And now Bert had disappeared, and I find out, to boot, that he was in the middle of some off-the-wall gambling scheme, just the kind of scene where people end up sore over money and who shorted who, subterranean disputes that get settled with bloodshed, since you can't file a lawsuit. I wondered if Bert had another fridge in his basement.

One thing for sure, I wasn't going back to check, especially now that I'd sent Pigeyes in that direction. It would have been enlightening to take a peek at what was on the computer I'd seen in Bert's living room, to see if there were more references to Kam, his specials and his life. Settling for second best, I visited Bert's office down the hall. The door was locked--that was Bert, manic and jealous of his clients' secrets, not to mention his own. They'd moved his secretary to another station while her boss was AWOL, but I knew where she kept the key and I let myself in.

Bert's home had that fly-about look, but fitting his compulsions, the office was crazy clean. Every object dusted and in its place. Lawyers' furnishings are pretty standard: diplomas on the walls, pictures of the family, and a few discreet mementos that nod toward the high points of their legal career and are likely to impress clients. Wash, for example, keeps the reminders of certain big deals in one bookcase--announcements from the Journal preserved in little Lucite blocks; deal "bibles" in which the thousands of closing documents, all on foolscap, are bound in leather with the name and date of the transaction etched in gold on the binding. Even I have a framed sketch, done by one of the local TV station's artists, of me arguing a big jury case for TN concerning their firing of a pilot who'd been hired as John and later took on the name and genitalia of Juanita.

Looking around Bert's office, all you'd know is this guy's sports-crazy--game memorabilia were wall-to-wall: autographed baseballs, a Hands jersey, signed in indelible marker by every member of the '84 championship team, which was framed an
d h
ung from one of the concrete pilasters. Nothing else was visible he cared about, except the huge goofy water cooler in the corner. Working on 397, I learned all Bert's passwords on the network, and I popped on the computer and cruised through the directories, pressing the buttons to glimpse different documents in the hope that there'd be more signs here of what was doing with Kam Roberts and Archie. But there was nothing. Instead, I started looking over Bert's endless correspondence, sort of idly poking for clues but also, I admit, enjoying some of the twisted thrill of the snoop, surveying old Bert's life as a lawyer. His odd ways have held Bert back with clients and he's brought in few of his own. He is what they call a "service lawyer," like me, somebody who does the work that one of our hotshot partners has been hired for. But with that limit, the Committee loves him. Bert clocks a good twenty-five hundred hours every year, and with his own fierce methods gets great results in court. Every case is a full-bore commitment. Got a client with a small problem, say, falsely representing that night is day, Bert will defend him without blinking. He is one of those lawyers who agrees with the other side about nothing. Everything leads to correspondence. Move the dep from two to one, Bert will send you a letter. Which bears no resemblance, by the way, to the conversation it claims to record. I say my client's having open-heart and Bert's letter says the guy can't appear because he scheduled a doctor's appointment. With stunts like that, Bert's made enemies of half the trial lawyers in town. In fact, that's why I started working on 397 in the first place, because Jake can't be bothered with 15o plaintiff's attorneys, and most of those guys want to turn on a tape recorder before they're willing to say so much as good morning to Bert.

Out in the hallway I heard my name being repeated on the paging system, asked to dial Lucinda's extension. That meant it was time to go to Toots's hearing. I was about to turn off the p
. C
. when I saw a name in Bert's letter directory that struck sparks off my heart: Litiplex.

I fiddled with the buttons to call up the file. I was nervous, sure that I'd hit the wrong key and obliterate the whole thing, but I didn't, although there was not much to see, just a short little cover memo.

CAGE & GRISWELL

Office Memorandum

ATTORNEY WORK-PRODUCT

TO Glyndora Gaines, Supervisor

Accounting Section

FROM : Robert A. Kamin

RE: 397 Check Requisition--Litiplex, Ltd.

Per the attached, re agreement with Peter Neucriss, please draw for my signature separate checks to Litiplex, Ltd. in invoice amounts as indicated.

I read this over four or five times. Finally, when I'd made as
much
sense of it as I could, I printed it.

"Hey."

I started. I hadn't heard the door open over the printer's whine. It was Brushy. She was standing with my coat and hers and the file on Toots's case all bundled in her arms.

"It's ten to. We're just going to make it." I guess I had some telltale look, because she came straight up to Bert's desk chair where I sat. I had a thought of fending her off so she couldn't read Bert's little memo over my shoulder, but on the whole I was too pleased with myself and my skills of detection to make much of an effort at that.

"Holy smokes," she said. "What's 'the attached'?"

"Hell 0'1 know. I searched--there's no other mention of Litiplex. I suppose I'll have to go ask Glyndora. I've been meaning to talk to her anyway."

"You said the Committee told you there wasn't any paperwork to cover the checks.-

"They did."

"Maybe this memo is phony," she said. "You know, so Bert had something to show if anybody asked why he signed the checks. -

That was possible. It even made sense. The odds against Bert reaching any kind of "agreement" with Peter Neucriss approached the level of mathematical certainty. Neucriss is Kindle's number-one personal-injury lawyer, a portly little demon whose commanding ways and courtroom successes have led him to be called "The Prince" to his face, with "of Darkness" added when he turns his back. He and Bert haven't exchanged a civil word since the Marsden case some years back, when Neucriss in closing referred to Bert as "the attorney from the fourth dimension" and got a laugh out of the jury. It would make sense, I supposed, to talk to Neucriss too, although that was never a welcome prospect.

"Will you tell me what happens," she asked, "when you talk to them?"

"Sure," I answered, "but no blabbing. You know: attorney-client. I don't want this getting around before I figure it out." "Come on, Malloy," she said. "You know me. I always keep your secrets.- She gave me her own special smile, whimsical, flirtatious, tickled with herself and her hidden adventures, before she rushed me out the door.

B. The Colonel

"State your name please and spell your last name for the record." "My name is Angelo Nuccio, N, u, c, c, i, o, but since I'm a kid folks like to call me Toots." The Colonel, as he is generall
y k
nown, displayed a grand showman's smile for the members of Bar Discipline Inquiry Panel D arrayed beside him at a long table. We were trying our case, such as it was, before them, a three-member jury of other attorneys, volunteers with a part-time yen to sit in judgment of others. In response to Toots, the chair, Mona Dalles, yielded something, but the two men at either side of her maintained expressions of utter self-imposed neutrality. Mona is at the Zahn firm, C&G's biggest competitor, and is known as amiable, level, bright--qualities that were not helpful on Toots's case if you looked at it from the perspective of the defense. What we needed was somebody certifiable. A large reel-to-reel tape recorder spun in front of Mona, preserving, for those who might care to listen in the future, the final stage of one of the county's most vivid public lives.

Colonel Toots is eighty-three years old and a physical wreck. His bowed little legs, one of which had been shot up at Anzio, are brittle with arthritis; his lungs are smoked out, curled up, as I imagine them, like dead leaves, so that he has developed a wheezy little breath that punctuates every word. He has diabetes which is imperiling his sight, and various circulatory ailments. But you have to give it to him, the guy is still full of it--Colonel Toots has been running on premium all his life. He is a man of the city who has been a bit of everything--a soldier in three wars, and a ludicrous chest-thumping patriot; a pol; an accomplished clarinetist who on two occasions has rented the entire Kindle County Symphony to back him when he did a not-bad run-through of a Mozart number for clarinet; a mobster; a lawyer; a friend of whores and gunmen and virtually anyone else in the tri-cities who common sense taught him might count. When I was a copper twenty years ago, he was still in his heyday, an elected city councilman from the South End who, when not politicking, was fixing judges, selling jobs, or, so it was claimed, killing a fellow or two. You could never tell for sure with Toots. He was an absolute stranger to the truth. But a storyteller such as might have beguiled Odysseus, charming even when he recounted matters that better sense told you were absolutely revolting--how he bought votes from "shines" for turkeys ("November is a good month for elections") or once shot the knees out of some dunce who refused to pay a poolroom debt. At eighty-three, Colonel Toots has survived just about everything but BAD, which has fired at him an even half dozen times over his career and is still reloading. During a recent federal investigation, it developed that Colonel Toots for fourteen years running had paid the country club dues of Daniel Shea, the chief judge of the county Tax Division, a court where Toots' firm was especially prominent. Judge Shea had wisely died before the U
. S
. Attorney's Office could indict him on various income tax charges. The government couldn't prove that any matters in Shea's courtroom had been influenced, so there wasn't much of a case on Toots. But the payments violated a number of ethical provisions and the Justice Department had referred the matter to BAD, where my former colleagues, beetle-browed do-gooders, knew at once they had Toots's number, eighty-three years old or not.