Shadow of Power (25 page)

It wasn’t a label but rather a yellow Post-it, a two-inch-square note, stuck under the clear plastic cover of the DVD’s jewel case. The Post-it had two names penned on it in blue ink: “Arthur Ginnis” and “Edgar Zobel.” Jennifer did the only thing she could. She had the DVD copied
by one of the evidence and property clerks, along with making a photocopy of the jewel case’s cover, showing the Post-it note.

Harry has been fielding text messages from her since two-thirty this afternoon, three of them, telling us there was something urgent waiting for us back at the office.

By the time we get there, it is almost seven. Jennifer is waiting at the office door, her forehead furrowed and her dark, oval eyes the size of teacups.

“You’re gonna wanna see this,” she says. She is so excited she’s almost crying.

We dump our briefcases on the floor just inside the door and follow her to the conference room, where the lights are on and there are voices. One of the secretaries and another paralegal are seated at the conference table hunched over legal pads and holding pencils. As soon as they see us, one of them says, “Start it over,” and the secretary punches a button on the remote.

A second later, just before the screen flickers to blue, I see the image and recognize the face.

I look at Jennifer. “Arthur Ginnis.”

She nods. “But there’s more,” she says. And now she does cry.

“What?”

Both of the paralegals and the secretary know that Harry, Herman, and I have been on a hunt for the Jefferson Letter for more than eight months, since before the trial started, wondering if it existed and, if it did, who had it and where it was.

She wipes away the tears and teeters on her tiptoes, wringing her hands in front of her like she’s going to break her knuckles. “We think it’s there, on the video,” she says.

“Punch it up,” says Harry.

For the next twenty-six minutes, the five of us sit around the table, our eyes glued to the television screen, watching the image of Arthur Ginnis talking to someone across a table in what appears to be a crowded restaurant—white linen tablecloth and crystal glassware, the clink of dishes and the cluttered sounds of conversation and laughter drowning out almost everything Ginnis says on the video. You can make out maybe every sixth or seventh word.

This is what they’ve been working on since midafternoon, the three women with pencils and pads, listening to the video over and over again, trying to write down words, partial sentences, trying to work out a rough transcript of what is being said on the video.

The curved end of Ginnis’s cane can be seen hooked over the edge of the table.

Every once in a while, he will laugh, and the intelligible few words that follow can be heard, but it’s just idle chatter. At one point he’s buttered a piece of bread when he laughs, throws his head back, and says, “I know. It was hilarious. I saw that on CNN.” Then his voice drops again, and his words are swallowed up in the surrounding noise.

Several times he leans with his elbows against the table and talks fervently to whoever it is on the other side. We can’t see the face of this person, just his right hand, the sleeve of his suit coat, and the starched cuff of his shirt where it sticks out.

Each time Ginnis leans against the table, the camera shakes. From this, and from the slight fish-eye wide angle of the video and the fact that he never once looks at the camera, it’s obvious: Ginnis doesn’t know he’s being filmed. I’m guessing that the lens on the camera was probably not much larger in circumference than the eraser on the end of a pencil. It was probably concealed in a small binder, a day planner, or the hollow case of a cell phone, good enough to capture thirty minutes, maybe an hour, of low-quality video and sound. You can buy one in any spy shop.

We are just over nine minutes into the tape when the camera shakes a little and the hand on this side of the table disappears from view. When it reappears a second or so later, it is holding a sheaf of paper, folded in thirds.

“There it is.” Jennifer’s pointing at the screen.

The hand comes back into view, and the papers are unfolded. They are stapled together at the top left-hand corner, what appears to be four pages. This is obvious because the forefinger of the other hand idly fans them at the bottom as if to show the camera the individual sheets.

“What do you think it’s worth?” The man holding the letter is speaking, and with the elevated volume of his voice you can hear it clearly. “The original, I mean.” This is even more audible.

Harry looks at me and mouths the words,
The firebug.

We have both heard Scarborough’s voice enough times from videos of appearances on his final book tour to recognize it.

The look from Ginnis is dour. You can’t hear his words, but you can read his lips: “Put it away.”

For almost fifteen seconds, you can see the reduced image of elegant handwritten script, something from another age, on the open page in front of the camera. If you froze the picture with the proper equipment, you could read it. Just on the inside margins of the page, you can see the shadowed line from the edge of the original document that was copied.

He tries to hand the letter to Ginnis, but the old man occupies himself with a piece of bread in one hand and the knife going for the butter in the other. He mumbles something.

“We think he said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’” says Jennifer. “We’ve listened to it a dozen times, but he’s leaning forward, his head is down, and we can’t make it out.”

There is some wobble with the camera, and when Ginnis settles back against his chair again, the letter is open, faceup, in the middle of the table. Scarborough’s empty right hand now lifts the crystal wineglass in front of him. The hand and the wine both disappear. A few seconds later and the glass is back on the table.

“When can I have the original? I need it before I can deliver.” Over the din of laughter and the clatter of dishes, you can hear this clearly. It is obvious now that not only is the volume of Scarborough’s voice elevated but that he is much closer to the concealed microphone.

Across the table Ginnis’s thin face shows the taut strings of flesh from his jawline down his neck. His face may wear the stress of recent illness, but his expression is the classic portrait of the furtive look—Gollum from
Lord of the Rings.
He is holding the buttered bread, but he is not eating. Swallowing nothing, yet his Adam’s apple is bobbing.

“Have you finished it?” Ginnis says. You can’t hear his words, but you can once more read his lips. The women all agreed. That’s what he said.

We cannot hear anything from Scarborough. He may have said something and we didn’t hear it, or he may have gestured, but it appears that he communicated something to Ginnis, because the old man smiles and says, “Good.”

Just like that, he is affable once more. He wipes the butter off both edges of his knife. Then he reaches out with the knife and lifts the letter just enough so that it slides back across the table toward Scarborough. He smiles. Nods a few times and says, “Put it away. You’ll have what…”

“‘Put it away. You’ll have’ what?” says Harry.

“What you need,” says Jennifer. “It took us three or four times, but we finally got it.”

Both hands come out once more, and the letter is folded. Within seconds it disappears, back where it came from, probably into the inside breast pocket of Scarborough’s coat.

Ginnis and Scarborough talk quickly now. One of the women flips her pencil into the air, and it lands on the pad in front of her. “We tried to get some of this, but his face is in his plate most of the time. At one point he says ‘good work,’ but that’s all we could make out.”

The video ends, and we turn off the set.

“It’s yeoman service,” I tell them. “Bonuses all around.” Even if I have to pay them out of my own pocket. “And you.” I look at Jennifer. “Don’t let anybody ever tell you that you’re not tenacious,” I tell her.

The party goes on for a while as they debrief and unwind all the details of the morning and afternoon since Jennifer returned with the disk and they first punched it up. Twenty minutes later Jennifer is the last of our staff out the door, walking on air, headed for home.

Harry watches her from the open door as she disappears under the arch and out to the street, and then closes it. “You know, it’s only a guess, but I would bet she’ll never forget this day.”

“No. I doubt that she will.”

“Not to diminish what any of them did. Hell, this morning we weren’t even sure that the letter existed. Now we have a picture of it,” says Harry. “For all the good it will do us.”

“I know,” I say. “There’s no foundation to get any of it in, unless we can produce the person who made the video, and he’s dead.”

“Did you see the look on Ginnis’s face when Scarborough dropped that letter on the table?” says Harry. “That old man is up to his teeth in this thing. There’s a lot of fear in that video.”

“That wasn’t fear you saw. That was anger.”

Harry shoots me a questioning look.

“Ginnis’s face on that video brought back something that Trisha Scott told me months ago, when I met with her in Washington. She said Ginnis despised Scarborough and that he wouldn’t have anything to do with him. It was her way of trying to get me to leave Ginnis alone.”

“Yeah, and as I recall, she lied to you about other things, too,” says Harry.

“I’m not so sure.”

“Well, you just saw them sitting there on that video, or are my eyes deceiving me?” says Harry. “I grant you they may not have been all warm and fuzzy over each other. But apparently there’s enough commercial avarice between them to bridge any troubled waters.”

“I also read the book,” I tell him.

“What book?”

“The one Scarborough wrote about the Supreme Court,
Case of the Century,
about the presidential election and the razor’s-edge balloting decided by the Court.”

“How can anyone forget?” says Harry.

The election was nearly twelve years ago, the administration long gone.

“I ordered the book from Amazon. It’s been on my nightstand for four months.”

“Not a lot of leisure for nighttime reading, is what you’re telling me,” says Harry.

“I finally got around to it last weekend. It’s a real page-turner.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense,” he says.

“In it Scarborough does for the Court what Martin Luther did for the Catholic Church. He excoriated the nine of them. But he saved the bitterest bile for Ginnis,
the swing vote
in the big case. According to Scarborough, Ginnis handpicked his own president.”

“Lucky man! Still, somebody had to do it,” says Harry. “As I recall, after all the lawyers showed up, the two candidates were no longer willing to pitch pennies for the post.”

“Scarborough called Ginnis a party hack, and that was among the more gracious things he had to say.”

“Sour grapes,” says Harry.

“No, not sour. Poisonous,” I tell him.

Harry looks at me.

“The real cross Scarborough left Ginnis to carry was the charge that the justice had committed ethical violations. Scarborough claimed that Ginnis engaged in private, out-of-court communications, ex parte, during the case with some of the lofty lawyers representing the soon-to-be-anointed president. And Scarborough said there was a point to all this talking. Ginnis was lobbying for another judicial post, and he was doing it from a point of leverage.”

“Something higher than the Supreme Court?” says Harry.

“Chief justice!”

This draws a pair of arched eyebrows from Harry.

“According to Scarborough, Ginnis wanted to head up the Court.”

“I don’t remember that. I remember when the position came open, chief justice,” says Harry. “That was a few years ago. But I don’t remember Ginnis being mentioned as a candidate.”

“That’s the point. He wasn’t. Trisha Scott told me the charges were a lie. She may have been right. I don’t know. But it didn’t matter. When the position of chief justice fell vacant two years after the razor-sharp election, Ginnis didn’t even make the short list.”

“Maybe he was too old,” says Harry.

“No. That wasn’t it. It wasn’t in Scarborough’s book either, but it did make
Newsweek,
a tiny one-column article at the time. A source in the White House—unnamed, of course—said Ginnis was the president’s first pick for chief justice. The problem was, they couldn’t put him on the list because of Scarborough’s book and the charges he’d made. To nominate Ginnis would lend credence to the charges, and the administration, Ginnis’s handpicked president, didn’t want the heat. How’s that for having your career capped?”

“The top of the pyramid is always slippery,” says Harry.

“And I’ve been told that time heals all wounds. But you do have to wonder,” I say. “The two of them sitting there breaking bread.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Without the Jefferson Letter, the only evidence we have is that video. That means we don’t have a choice,” I tell him. “We’ve got to find Ginnis, track him down and serve him. Shackle and drag him if we have to, but get him here, and get him into court.”

H
arry called Herman in Washington at the crack of dawn this morning and asked him if he had his passport with him. It seems Herman never leaves home without it. The man has been chasing leads on cases long enough to know he can never be sure where the next one will have him stepping off.

As I’m heading downtown, to Quinn’s ten o’clock court call, Herman is winging his way to Miami for a connecting flight south to Curaçao.

Tuchio spends the next couple of days combing his list for witnesses to fill in some of the cracks. He calls his psychiatric witness and lays out in more detail the elements and driving mental characteristics that can detonate rage in the commission of a homicide. Among the inventory of motives the psychiatrist cites is social and political animosity, particularly the kind grounded in racial hostility. Since we haven’t put Carl’s mental state in issue, via a plea of insanity or diminished capacity, the state’s witness was not able to interview, test, or examine Carl. This is no doubt a plus for our side. There has never been a realistic hope of mounting a defense on these grounds, so exposing him to examination by a state’s expert would most likely result in a finding that Carl meets all the criteria for the commission of this kind of crime. It’s the problem with putting Carl on the stand. Tuchio would eat him for lunch, pepper him with questions about Scarborough and his book. He would turn
down the lights and show Carl videos of the author in provocative interviews, and when the lights came back up, there’s no telling what might be the first words out of Carl’s mouth.

On Wednesday morning I’m climbing the courthouse steps and see a small convention of bikers, lots of leather and denim across the street. People riding Harleys today could be a clan of executives from IBM, but not these guys. I count maybe twenty of the outriders from the fabled Aryan Posse, badasses all of them.

Associates and members are estimated at close to seventy-five on the street and roughly twice that number in prisons around the country. It’s not the size of the organization but its deep roots within the Aryan prison community, where the racial divide is deep, sharp, and violent, that have the attention of authorities.

The reason they’re here this morning is Tuchio’s main attraction, his witness of the day, Charles Gross. He is one of their own. I’m guessing that the state is bringing Gross on now in order to sandwich him between other witnesses so that the rough edges don’t look so bad.

As I clear security on the courthouse main floor, I can see fifteen, maybe more, uniformed officers moving quickly toward the stairs at the back of the building. Something is happening, but I can’t tell what.

When the elevator door opens onto the corridor upstairs and I step out, I notice four of the Posse members down the hall, at the door to Quinn’s courtroom, each trying to get a ticket of admission.

After leaving thirty pounds of chain, dangling Nazi Iron Crosses, metal skulls, and other symbols of evil in a box downstairs at the security check, they still can’t get inside.

As I draw closer, I can hear why.

“Court dress code,” says the deputy. “No messages. No signs.”

They are all wearing leather vests, the uniform of the day, no shirts underneath, enough hair on their chests and in their armpits to build an entire condo complex of nests for a flock of crows. In an arc across their backs in leather, in various colors and assorted fonts are the words
ARYAN POSSE.

“I been in court before. I wore this.” The one talking is six feet and
well muscled, with frazzled blond hair to his shoulders, frayed and brittle enough to have been fried in a Chinese wok. He could make a good living as an extra doing Conan the Barbarian movies.

“That was then, this is now,” says the officer. “You can’t get in wearing that, not here, not today. Take it outside,” he says.

“Fuck that shit!” This comes from the Norse god who’s in the deputy’s face, in a voice loud enough so that everyone in the corridor has stopped moving, including me.

The deputies are standing in the airlock between the two sets of double doors leading to the courtroom, the outer doors are open. The inner doors look like they’re closed.

“You’re just doin’ this because of who we are. You know it, and I know it.”

His three buddies in biker boots and frayed jeans are bunched up behind him, all nodding, discrimination being a terrible thing.

“You can’t even see it if we’re sittin’ down. Hell, it’ll be up against the back of the chair.”

“Hey, I told you. I’m not gonna tell you again. No exceptions. No signs, no messages,” says the deputy. He and another officer are wedged in the door like a stone wall.

What I saw downstairs now becomes clear. By now the small army of uniforms is probably standing just on the other side of the closed door in the stairwell about ten feet behind Conan and his buddies—no doubt getting ready to play jack-in-the-box with cans of pepper spray and nightsticks if things get pushy.

The bikers move a step or so away to confer, then Odin is back in the deputy’s face. “Fine, we’ll take ’em off.”

“Excuse me?”

“Our jackets. You don’t like ’em, we’ll take ’em off.”

“Fine, take ’em off, take ’em outside, get a shirt, and come back,” says the cop.

“Where the hell are we gonna get shirts? By then all the seats’ll be taken.”

“That’s your problem. But you can’t enter the courtroom without a shirt.”

The blond one says, “Shiiit.” His arms are flexed, he’s leaning in like
maybe they can just blow past the two cops, into the room, and grab seats. This has all the dynamics of a budding brawl. The guy’s ego is way out to there; he’s wearing it on his chin. A hundred people in the corridor watching it. You can feel it in the air. He’s not going to back off.

It is at this instant that a small patch of gray sticks her head out from behind and under the flexed elbow of one of the deputies in the door. Before he can move, she slips past him. She must be eighty-five and can’t weigh much more than that in pounds. She’s holding a small water cup in her hand. One of the courthouse regulars, she has picked this moment to go take her meds. Standing in no-man’s-land, she is stopped in her tracks, her eyes just at the level of the blond guy’s belt. She looks up at him and smiles.

His fighting gaze locked, he’s staring at the deputy, snorting bull breath.

She tries to squeeze through between the open door and Armageddon, but he has her blocked.

The deputy leans faintly forward as if he wants to reach out and pull her back. But he knows if he moves, it’s going to trigger a brawl, and the old lady, frail as a bird would be crushed in the middle.

She looks up one more time and says—and you can hear it clear as a bell in the silent corridor—“Excuse me.” This tiny little voice.

Like “open sesame,” something from a Stooges movie. The four bikers, their heavy boots taking baby steps in unison as if they were all connected at the hip, give her just enough room to get by. As she squeezes through, the four of them are left standing there, watching as she trundles past. Just like that, an instant of diversion and the moment passes, the time for action melts.

You can almost hear the cops in the stairwell bouncing cans of pepper spray off the walls and jumping on their hats.

The old woman heads for the water fountain, looking around in wonder at all the people standing in the hallway staring at her like statues.

As she gets up on tiptoe at the fountain with her cup, I’m thinking we need to clone this, package up all the parts, and ship boxes to the Gaza Strip, Beirut, and downtown Baghdad.

Then, like stop motion, people start moving again. The Posse passes me going the other way, toward the elevator. I can hear a few “goddamn”s
and “kick his ass”es as they go by. They’d better watch it or the Gray Missile may get into the elevator with them.

Whether they’re here in support or measuring their friend Mr. Gross for a box after he talks, one thing is certain. Unless they have a supply of long-sleeved dress shirts in the saddlebag of one of their choppers—or they can sprint down to Nordstrom at the speed of light—they won’t be getting into Judge Quinn’s theater of thrills this morning.

Inside the courtroom I pass through the gate at the railing. Tuchio is standing at his table talking with his assistant, Harmen. She glances up and sees me.

“Good morning,” I say.

She smiles and returns the greeting.

Tuchio looks at me, a near-death stare. He doesn’t say a word. His head goes back down, and he’s talking to Harmen again. He is still stinging from the meeting in chambers and the loss of his federal agent.

As I slip into my chair at our table, Harry has already caught this.

“Man’s positively furious.” Harry is busy lining up his three pencils and a pen along one side of his legal pad. Then he reverses them and puts them on the other side. “Which looks better to you?” he says.

I smile and ignore him.

“Good news,” he says, “from the East. One of our process servers tagged Scarborough’s editor, Jim Aubrey, with the subpoena just before noon, New York time. One down, two to go,” he says.

There is still no word on Bonguard or Trisha Scott.

“In case you’re feeling bad, he treated me the same way,” says Harry.

“Who?” I’m busy looking at notes, a summary of Charlie Gross’s statement to the cops.

“Tuchio. When I showed up this morning, I said hello. He was like dry ice, frozen solid and still smoking.” Harry abandons his Monopoly game with the writing implements just long enough to bring his closed fist gently up to his chest in the region of his heart. “And I have to tell you, it hurts.”

“So you want to send him a sympathy card?”

“You joke, but I haven’t felt this bad since my dog died of rabies,” says Harry.

“You don’t have a dog.”

“I know, but if I had one and he died of rabies, I can imagine that he might look a lot like Tuchio does right now. I’ve been thinking. The next time we screw him over, maybe we should try to be a little more polite. When a prosecutor starts foaming at the mouth, you have to begin to wonder what he might do if he really got mad.”

When I glance over at Harry, I get the sense that perhaps he’s only half joking.

Tuchio brings on his witness of the day, Charles “Charlie” Gross.

When the jury is in the box and Carl is planted in his chair between Harry and me, Arnsberg gives me a strange look when he sees the witness, as if to say,
Who’s that?

Gross, if he is to be believed, is one of the charter members and the chief financial officer for the Aryan Posse.

According to an investigative report, Gross keeps track of the group’s beer and booty fund as well as the accounts receivable from meth and other pharmaceuticals they sell, often jotting down numbers in ink on the palm of his hand. That way he figures if he gets busted, sweat will dissolve all the evidence. I guess if the IRS wants to see the Posse’s books, they’re just going to have to cut off his hand. It’s thinking like this that got Gross right to the top in the organization.

If you saw any of his mug shots, you’d have to admit that Tuchio has done a crackerjack job of cleaning the witness up for today’s appearance. Gross looks like they’ve put him through a car wash and had him detailed.

Gone are the long, sparse, stringy strands of dirty blond hair that hung down below his shoulders from the craggy, bald summit of Half Dome. The state probably spent forty bucks having the hundred or so hairs on the top of his head styled and clipped. The back and sides of his head are as neatly trimmed as if Suki ran his mower over them.

This morning Gross is wearing a pair of dark blue cuffed slacks
with a sharp crease to them, a maroon polo shirt, and a watch that looks like a Rolex, probably a knockoff from Taiwan out of the police property room. The tasseled loafers are a nice touch. No doubt Gross’s feet haven’t seen the inside of anything that wasn’t steel-toed, flapped, and hooked for lacing and that weighed less than ten pounds since he came out of the womb.

Looking at him on the stand, you might swear that you saw him playing the back nine at the village country club yesterday afternoon.

When the feds spring their trap and his pals go looking for Gross to shoot him because he was the idiot who recruited and sponsored the FBI agent, there will be no need to put him in witness protection. Tuchio’s transformation of the man is so complete the Posse will never recognize him. I’m almost wishing that Conan and his friends had gotten in. By now they’d be sitting out in the audience and asking, “Where the hell is Charlie, and who the fuck is that?”

Since he looks like your average accountant on his day off, when they asked him to raise his right hand to be sworn and Gross lifted the left by mistake and then the right, I took a good look at both palms. I wanted to see if he was still keeping books. Unfortunately, it appears as if the scrubbing must have started with the hands.

Unless I can get Gross to take off his shirt, raise his arms, and turn a pirouette, displaying the story of his life ingrained in the graffiti on his body, it’s hard to imagine how the jury is going to get the full flavor of the man.

Tuchio uses a good deal of finesse here. He moves carefully through the witness’s background, covering everything except his three felony convictions and the fact that he has spent almost thirteen years of his life in prison. This is out of bounds under the deal we cut in chambers. Tuchio knows I can’t get at it on cross-examination, so he’s free to ignore it.

But he does not try to hide the fact of Gross’s long association with the Aryan Posse. He explores this in detail, because he knows if he doesn’t, I will expose it on cross, making it look as if they were hiding it.

He takes more than twenty minutes, hitting all the possible low points in Gross’s life, including two divorces, problems with drugs, and the fact that he’s had difficulty holding jobs.

Then Tuchio makes clear his tactic with the witness: The world loves a reformed sinner.