Saving Grace (20 page)

“I know I’m being investigated,” Jonathan said. “But as far as I know I haven’t been indicted.”

Leeds’s tonsured head nodded gravely. “You will be.”

“How do you know?”

“I know a few people. After you called, I took the liberty of contacting them.”

Dusk had fallen and the room had grown dim, but neither Jonathan nor Lily moved to switch on the lights. Jonathan cleared his throat. “What will I be charged with?”

“Conspiracy. Extortion. Bribery. Racketeering. Influence peddling.” Leeds’s face grew longer with each word. Jonathan had a fleeting vision of a Seder he had attended as a small boy. At the head of the table sat an old man who dipped his finger into a goblet of wine and shook one red drop after another onto his plate. “Blood,” he’d intoned. “Boils. Locusts. Darkness. Death of the firstborn.”

Jonathan walked to the bar and stood for some time with his back to the others. He poured some Chivas into a glass and raised the bottle inquiringly to Leeds and Lily. Both of them shook their heads. He carried his drink back to the sofa. “I’m innocent of those charges. That’s where it starts and that’s where it has to end. I have done nothing to be ashamed of.”

Christopher Leeds nodded politely.

“I’ve gone against the tide all my life,” Jonathan said. “There are people who hate my guts politically. But no one has ever questioned my integrity.”

Leeds bridged his hands and rested his chin on top. “Of course, I don’t know what the U.S. attorney’s office thinks it has in the way of evidence,” he said. “But these kinds of charges generally fall into a kind of twilight zone. This is what I meant by the need for adjustment. You spoke of integrity. Integrity is a moral value that is outside the purview of the court. For the coming months, you, I, and the prosecution will be concerned solely with appearances and evidence.”

“Both can be deceptive.”

“They can be deadly. Everything depends on the construction placed upon them.”

“If Jonathan really is the grand jury’s target,” Lily cut in, “why hasn’t he been called to testify?”

 
Both men looked at her in surprise. Lily touched a plate on the wall and the recessed lights came on. She came forward and took a seat beside her husband.

“It’s not a good sign that he hasn’t,” the lawyer said. “It may mean they’re saving him for last because they want as much ammunition in hand as possible before questioning him. But it doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?” she asked.

Leeds opened his soft, plump hands, unadorned but for a plain gold wedding band. “Because he won’t testify.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Jonathan demanded. “You’re talking as if indictment is a
fait accompli.
Testifying before the grand jury might be my last hope of preventing it.”

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Grand juries almost always return whatever indictments the prosecutors ask for. Even if we got use immunity, and I doubt they would agree to that, your testimony would only serve to give away valuable information about our defense to the prosecution. At this point, the less said to anyone, the better.”

Lily gave him a measuring look. “Mr. Leeds, did your friends tell you anything about Michael Kavin?”

“We didn’t discuss Michael.”
 

“Can you find out if he’s cooperating with the U.S. attorney?”

“That would be difficult.”

“I think you’d better try. My husband has a date to play golf with him this Sunday.”

“My wife,” rasped Jonathan, “has contracted an acute case of paranoia.”

Leeds’s eyes, magnified by his glasses, were deep, lucid pools. “In this sort of situation, Jonathan, there’s no such thing as paranoia. The fact that Mr. Kavin has not yet been indicted is cause enough for speculation.”

“Put it out of your head. There’s no way Michael would ever turn on me.” But even as he spoke, Jonathan remembered Michael’s uncharacteristic obtuseness on the phone, mentioning Solly’s name, then harping on his disappearance.

“A wild animal in a trap will gnaw off its own leg to free itself. Mr. Kavin is trapped. One cannot be sure what a person will do under such pressure. But this is mere speculation. I shall try to find out.”

Lily said, “We also have to deal with the press. It’s impossible to stay silent any longer about the Probe’s accusations.”

“When the time is right—”

She interrupted him. “The time
is
right. Every day that goes by without a refutation makes us look worse.”

Christopher Leeds and Jonathan exchanged a look, which was not lost on Lily. “I’m afraid the publicity will get even worse before it gets better,” Leeds said gently. “But eventually it will get better, if we lead with our brains and not our hearts.”

“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Leeds.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Mrs. Fleishman.”

“Despite what my husband just told you, it’s obvious to me that you’re building your defense on the premise that he’s guilty.”

“No, ma’am. But I do believe that in this imperfect world, the innocent are in no less need of protection than the guilty.”

“Assuming,” Lily heard her new, irrepressible voice say, “the innocent can afford it.”

* * *

Ten more minutes, Barnaby told himself, and I’m out of here. What a goddamn waste of time, shlepping all the way up to Eastborough on the strength of a single cryptic phone call. And then the bastard doesn’t even show.

Unless Tortelli was already there, sizing him up. Barnaby looked around the bar. Some effort had been made to tart it up Polynesian style; the drinks came with little pink-and-purple parasols stuck in them and the waitresses, all well past their sell-by date, wore grass skirts. He saw a few solitary men sitting at the bar, but none that matched his image of the owner of the gravelly voice that called itself Tortelli.

Chances were the guy was phony. When you shook a tree as big as Fleishman, all sorts of nuts fell out. But the art of investigative journalism begins with triage, and Barnaby had always prided himself on his ability to weed out real informants from grudge-holders and attention-seekers. Tortelli had sounded on the level.

He had phoned Barnaby at the
Probe.
Gave his name, said he was a printer in Eastborough. “I read your story about Rencorp and Fleishman. It was good as far as it went. But you only got half the story.”

“Yeah?” Barnaby said. “So what’s the other half?”

“That ain’t for the phone,” Tortelli said. “You want to know, come talk to me.”

“Hey, buddy, you want me to schlep all the way up to Eastborough, you got to give me something more to go on.”

“You don’t know the whole story behind how Rencorp got their sweetheart lease. I do. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

Rationally Barnaby should have let it go. What could a printer in Eastborough know about Rencorp or Fleishman? His time would be better spent following up more solid leads, like tracking down the elusive Solly Lebenthal. But there was something in Tortelli’s voice…

“Where and when?” Barnaby asked.

It took sixty minutes by subway. He’d have taken a cab, but if nothing came of this, Hasselforth wouldn’t reimburse him, the cheap bastard. Another ten minutes to find the bar. And then he sat for thirty more, cooling his heels.

At eight-thirty he signaled the waitress, paid his tab and headed for the door. Just as he got there, it opened, and a burly man with blue fingers entered.
 
“You Barnaby?” the man asked.

“Me Barnaby. You Tortelli?”

The man grinned, and a gold tooth gleamed. Tortelli was older than Barnaby had expected, somewhere in his sixties, tall, dark-complexioned, and still handsome, though gone a bit jowly. You could see he’d been a lady-killer in his day and probably still kept the secretaries hopping. He wore a tweed sports jacket and a white shirt, but no tie. “Sorry I’m late. Got held up in the office. Lemme buy you a drink.”

“What’s the story, Mr. Tortelli?” Barnaby said when they were seated in a corner booth.

“The story is, I’m the guy got kicked out to make room for Rencorp,” Tortelli said.

Suddenly Barnaby recalled Arthur Speigel saying that Rencorp had taken over the premises of a printer. “Didn’t I hear you went bankrupt or something?”

Tortelli glowered. “No way. I was a couple months behind on rent, but that’s not why they evicted me.”

Barnaby had a feeling a tape recorder would spook the printer. He took out his notebook instead. “I’m listening.”

“It was the first time in eight years we’d missed a payment and it was no big deal. I worked the whole thing out with GSA. They agreed to let me pay off the debt in installments, no problem—in fact, they was decent about it. I made the first two payments on time, and then outta the blue I get an eviction notice.”

“Why?”

“Because Fleishman wanted that building for his buddies at Rencorp, and what Fleishman wants, Fleishman gets.”

“Is that your opinion or can you prove it?”

“I can’t prove it, but it figures.”

Barnaby laid down his pen with a sigh. Man with a grudge. Garbage run. “Why?”

“Because they warned me something bad would happen. ‘Fleishman giveth and Fleishman taketh away,’ they said.”

“Who said?”

Tortelli didn’t answer, and Barnaby didn’t push him. A waitress hobbled over and set two beers on the table. Under her grass skirt she wore support hose and orthopedic shoes.  
After she clomped away, Barnaby asked Tortelli why he’d been late paying his rent.

“I lost my biggest account.”

“Who was the customer?”

Tortelli pulled at his beer and didn’t answer.

Barnaby glanced at his watch. “Look, man, you called me.”

“Maybe I’m having second thoughts.”

“Not after dragging me way the hell up here, you don’t. Why’d you call me, Tortelli?”

Tortelli took out a cigar and lit it. He studied his hands, gnarled and blue-ridged like a map of his life. “I was mad,” he said. “Mad don’t come close. When I read your story about Rencorp paying that pissant rent and getting all them minority tax breaks, I was like, I don’t care what happens to me as long as I get those bastards. Lemme tell you something. I was paying more than twice the rent Rencorp pays, and every guy in my shop I hired local. They was all blacks or Puerto Ricans, except one Jewish guy does the books, but it’s not a ‘minority business’ cause I ain’t a minority. Never mind that; I never asked for nothing. But these bastards went after my business, and it’s not just me they screwed. What about the guys I had to lay off and their families—who’s looking after them?”

“Sounds like a sad story, Mr. Tortelli, but I don’t see how it ties in with Fleishman.”

“ I’m gonna tell you how it ties in. I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, and what I figure, it all comes down to good old American greed. You asked who the customer was who dumped me? It was the Eastborough Democratic party.”

Barnaby suddenly felt very smooth, as if he were skating alone in the center of a frozen pond. “Why did they fire you? Did they have a problem with your work?”

“Fuck no! We never had a single complaint.”

“So what was the problem?”

“They wanted kickbacks,” Tortelli said simply. “I wouldn’t pay.” He sighed a long, shaky sigh, and Barnaby knew then he had him: the dike was down, and suddenly the printer was talking so fast that Barnaby had to switch to shorthand to keep up.

It all started with a visit two and a half years ago from Michael Kavin, Tortelli said. Kavin told him that the Brooklyn Democratic party was shopping around for a printer.

“He tells me his friend Jonathan Fleishman recommended me,” Tortelli said, puffing on his cigar. “He tells me Fleishman says I’m not only a good printer but also a solid, public-minded citizen.

“Now, I’m as public-minded as the next guy, which ain’t much, so already I’m thinking: What’s with this guy? Plus what, they don’t have printers in Brooklyn? But he’s talking a lot of work, big bucks, so I’m not about to contradict the man. Sure, I tell him, I’m real public-minded. So he goes on bullshitting about how important it is to him and his buddy Jonathan that businessmen who take from the city give something back, through charity or political contributions; but all the time he’s talking I see him doodling something on a piece of paper, the same thing over and over: a dollar sign followed by an eight and three zeros.”

I’m being set up, Barnaby thought. This is too good to be true. But he didn’t believe it. Tortelli was real.

“I’m staring at this paper,” Tortelli said, “not really taking it in, ‘cause this is like outta the blue; and then Kavin takes it, crumples it up, sticks it in the ashtray, and lights it with a match. And then uses a second match when it don’t burn completely. Then he looks up at me and finally he shuts up; in fact he don’t say a word till the silence gets so thick you could choke on it. It’s clear he’s waiting for me to say something, so I says, ‘I understand,’ and he says, ‘Good,’ and he leaves. And the next day they send Lebenthal to me.”

Barnaby looked up, slack-jawed as a rube at a county fair. “Solly Lebenthal?”

“Yeah, that was his name. Measly little guy, wears fancy three- piece suits, but every time I see him he’s got egg stains on his lapels. Anyway, he shows up the next day and says Mr. Kavin sent him to collect my donation to some Jewish cultural foundation. Now, I don’t know this guy from Adam, you understand, so I says to him ‘What donation?’ and he says ‘Eight thousand bucks.’ ‘What the hell,’ I says to him, playing dumb, see, ‘I mean, no offense, but I’m not even Jewish.’ So he says, ‘Mr. Fleishman and Mr. Kavin will be very disappointed,’ and I says, ‘Mr. Fleishman knows I give good value for money and always have.’