The Attorney (20 page)

By now there are a half dozen people standing at the light.

Even at this hour Broadway is busy. I use the opportunity, maneuver so that I am facing the man as I poke around in my pocket and come up with several quarters, sneaking one quick glance at the car.

The driver I don't recognize: dark-complected pockmarked face, maybe Mexican or Middle Eastern. Next to him in the passenger seat is another man, a hulking shadow I cannot make out. The rear windows are tinted, so I can't see in. The car is a Mercedes, maybe ten years old with a good deal of wear. There's no license plate on the front.

The light changes. The guy hustling change lumbers toward the bus depot.

Two young kids, hand in hand, start across Broadway like they're shot from a cannon, the girl skipping to keep up. An old man with a cane starts the sojourn. Another guy, just drifting in the crosswalk, gets around him and fills in the middle.

At the last second I don't go. Instead, I turn left on the sidewalk and head up Broadway away from the corner. I can almost feel the agitation inside the car. It is palpable, like boom-box music and lifters, as if the car were bouncing around in place. Suddenly they have to make a left, through pedestrians crossing in front of them.

I move as fast as I can without breaking into a run. I cover a third of the block and end up in front of windows to the Greyhound bus depot, with doors set back off the street. I step into one of these, place my back against the edge of the building, and peek around the corner, just a sliver of my head, enough for one eye.

The driver is in the middle of the intersection, gesturing with his hands. The car is in fact bouncing up and down, but not from any lifters. Whoever is in the backseat is shouting at the driver, who keeps looking over his shoulder into the back, then this way. He's lost me.

His passenger is turned sideways, trying to act as spotter, but the driver's got him blocked.

I look at the shops down the way, the next block. At this hour everything is closed. Only the depot with a few people milling inside is well lit, its interior visible from the street, like a glass box.

I step inside, away from the door. The traffic outside heading west on Broadway starts to pile up at the light.

I make for a bench a few feet away, just inside the depot. Its back is to the windows on Broadway. In about as much time as it takes to fall, I sprawl facedown on the seat so that from the outside it looks like an empty bench. I lie there.

A woman sitting across the way, facing me, is giving me strange looks, the kind you see being flashed at people who talk to themselves on the street.

I smile at her. She looks the other way. With one eye I study my watch, feeling my heart pounding as the seconds tick away--thirty, forty-five--wondering if they've pulled up at the curb across the street to sit and wait or--worse--if they're coming inside.

Finally, I lift my head, take a peek over the back of the bench.

I don't see the car. I scan the street: traffic moving at a clip, nothing parked across the street.

I turn my head to look at the woman. It's then I see them. Not out on Broadway, but on First Avenue. The car with the single headlight has made the turn, taking a left up First, trolling slowly, the driver's head halfway out the window looking at the bus depot from the other side, scanning the windows. I drop back down on the bench, hoping he doesn't see me. When I look up again the car is gone.

First Avenue is one-way. He'll have to go two blocks, cross the trolley tracks at C Street, come back on B to get onto Front Street in order to make the slow loop back around onto Broadway for another pass. Unless he's setting land speed records I've got maybe a minute, ninety seconds at the outside.

Jack Flash, I'm out the front door. I don't go to the light at the corner, but instead cut across the street, dodging traffic to the other side of Broadway, then west at a full run to the corner of Front, across from the bus depot.

I move down Front Street maybe thirty yards into the shadows of an alcove that forms the entrance of a small photo shop; its lights are out. There are cars parked on the street, providing cover. A good place to sit and watch.

I wait a few seconds, looking north on Front across Broadway, up toward the jail two blocks away. By now Harry should have had plenty of time to get to his car. I wait, watching in the distance, looking at the luminous sweep hand on my watch, timing their lap.

Fifty seconds and I start to borrow problems. Maybe Harry stopped for that drink along the way. Their route would take them directly in front of the lot where his car was parked. If they saw us together on the street, talking in front of the jail ... My brain starts to fill in the blanks.

I step out of the alcove onto the sidewalk, start walking, then a slow jog toward the corner, not sure exactly what to do. Maybe the jail.

There are cops there on duty.

I'm ten feet from the corner when the sweep of the cyclops nails me dead in my tracks. The ominous single headlight swings around the corner two blocks away. It barrels toward me down Front Street at full bore, bouncing across the tracks on C. I find myself backpedaling toward the shadows, out of the light, wondering if the driver's seen me. Within seconds I'm crouched in the alcove again, nowhere to run. The car makes the stop at the corner across Broadway. I can't see anybody inside, glare on the wind shield. The vehicle has only a single headlamp, but this is on high beam.

The traffic light changes. The car doesn't move right away but sits at the intersection, nothing behind them, the driver considering his options, probably getting instructions, like a rudder being jerked with wires from the backseat.

Finally, the Mercedes slides forward across the intersection, the beam of its light rising then falling with the crown at the center of the road until the shaft of light slides down the sidewalk like a snake stopping a foot from where I am huddled. They start the turn onto Broadway, taking it wide so that by the time they finish, they end up at the curb on the corner, the Mercedes stopped.

It sits there motionless for several seconds, its engine a low grumble, tail end sticking out just a little into the right traffic lane on Broadway.

Finally the passenger door opens and a guy gets out. He's short, stocky, dark-skinned, with hair cut long on the sides, short on top.

What is left of it is orange, something from a bottle that didn't work right.

"You wan me check ova there? Ova here?" The guy's shrugging, leaning into the car as he talks.

"La estadon." The command voice comes from the backseat.

The car doesn't move. The hulk does. He slams the door, skips the crosswalk, and heads instead toward the front of the vehicle where I lose him, line of sight behind the buildings on the block.

I am now trapped in the alcove. All I can see is the tinted rear window of the Mercedes, wondering if its occupant is looking my way. It seems to take forever, probably three or four minutes. The car parked at the corner, its motor running. The orange-haired hulk finally comes back, opens the passenger door, and gets in. But he leaves the door open.

"Old lady inside sez she saw him. He run out this way. Cross the street.

You wan I look for him?"

"No." Hulk slams the door and the car starts to ease its way out into traffic, a sharp left into the slow lane so that for a half second both taillights are visible, along with the license plate, green numbers on a white background. One of the states, I don't know which one, but not from here. The plate is Mexican. I kill five minutes huddled in the shadows, praying they don't come back.

chapter fifteen.

"can you Take saran For a while?" I'm Talking to Susan on the phone, sweeping graphite dust off the surface of my desk with a sheet of paper, like shoveling black snow. "No, I can't tell you why right now." Floyd Avery is standing in the doorway to my office watching Harry as he wades through paper on the floor up to his knees, and steps around the splintered wood splayed all over the floor from one of the drawers of my credenza.

"Trust me on this one. Right now it would be best if she wasn't around the house for a few days. I'll explain tonight. Can you pick her up at school? Great. I owe you one," I tell her.

She tells me I owe her more than one, then gives me a smooch of a kiss for a good-bye. I don't return the gesture with Avery watching. Instead I just hang up.

"Should at least tell the girl you love her," he says. "Kiss like that."

I can only hope he didn't hear her voice enough to recognize it.

"Remind me not to hire your janitor," he says. "Fortunately, it's not my jurisdiction. But if you want my advice, I wouldn't be touching things.

Not if you want any chance of getting prints."

"They dusted already," says Harry.

Avery looks at one of the windowsills. "Thought it was ant shit," he says.

"Yeah, I suppose your guys would save that to use in law-office break-ins," says Harry. "They didn't bother doing the front door.

Guess they figured that's the way they came in, seeing as the wood's splintered all around it."

"Probably figured you don't get much off the bottom of a boot that kicks your door in," says Avery.

"All I know is it's gonna take the cleaners a month to get all that black crap off the windows that were locked." Harry picking through papers on the floor.

"Missing anything?" asks Avery.

"Yeah. We're gonna give you an inventory," says Harry. "Soon as we're done counting up the missing confessions to murder, notes on current drug deals, and the list of who did jfk. Hell, you could just dip into the pile and close all the pending cases in your department."

"I wouldn't mind," says Avery.

"I'll bet you wouldn't. Man's wading through our claim and he wants to get his pan in the water," says Harry.

"Your partner has a hair trigger," Avery tells me.

"What brings you this way?" I ask him.

"I heard 'bout the break-in. Thought I'd come by. See what happened."

"What you thought is that it had something to do with Jonah Hale."

"Did it?"

"You should learn to trust your instincts. If you'd followed them earlier, you would never have arrested Jonah for Suade's murder."

"Other people callin' those shots," says Avery.

"So you're not committed to the case?"

"Fortunately, I don't have to lay odds. But I wouldn't be feelin' too comfortable if I was your client." Harry's still grumbling. "Only prints they're gonna find are yours and mine," he says.

"We could get lucky. Nail one of your clients," says Avery.

"Maybe one who's got a history of burglary. You should look at it as a horizon-building experience. You get to see things from the victim's point of View." Harry gives him the expressive equivalent of spit.

"You got any ideas might narrow down who broke in? Or why?" says Avery.

"Probably the same people who followed Paul from the jail last night."

Avery gives Harry a look, then says, "Bad people hang out there. Though most of 'em are inside."

"No, it wasn't jail guards followed him," says Harry. "Car full of Mexicans. At least the car had Mexican plates."

"what kinda car?"

"Older-model Mercedes, SL. I think. You'd have to ask a German mechanic.

Those things confuse me. Too many different letters."

"Maybe it was a disgruntled client," says Avery. "You know. A felon with a consumer complaint."

"Nobody I know," I tell him.

"You tellin' me all your campers are happy?"

"I didn't say that. But it wasn't a client, present or former. Still, there may be a connection."

"What's that?"

"With Hale." Now he perks up.

"Not the father. The daughter," I tell him.

Avery's in the doorway leaning against the jamb, wondering if he really wants to ask. "Why is it I smell the simmering aroma of a cooking defense?" he says. "I know I'm gonna regret it. But I'll bite. What do these people following you have to do with Hale's daughter?"

"They're looking for her."

"Everybody's looking for her," says Harry. "The woman's a virtual map to buried bodies."

"She see her old man kill Suade?" says Avery.

"Only if she was hallucinating," I tell him.

"Then we're not looking for her," he says.

"Maybe you should be."

"And why is that?"

"Because I think maybe she knows more about this thing with Suade than you or I."

"What exactly?"

"Perhaps if I knew, my client wouldn't be in jail."

"Did you get a look at these guys? The ones in the car with the Mexican plates?" I can't be sure whether he believes these people exist or not.

"Two of them."

"And?"

"One of them had a stocky build. Mexican. Bottle-blond hair turned orange. Hired muscle. The driver had a mustache, dark hair."

"Why would they want the daughter?" He may not believe the story, but he's hooked.

"For the same reason the feds are beating the bushes as we speak. You should talk to them," I say.

"And which feds might these be?" He takes his notebook out, waiting for a name.

"Bob." He writes it down. Looks up.

"His friend's name's Jack."

"These people saving space on their business cards?"

"That's all they gave me. But I would check with DEA." He raises an eyebrow. "Your client running drugs?"

"No. But I couldn't give the same testimonial for his daughter."

"I know she has a record. Checked it out," says Avery. "But even if all of what you're tellin' me is true, you got a problem," says Avery.

"What's it have to do with Suade's murder?"

"These people are desperate to find Jonah's daughter; they might go visit Suade."

"Might. Coulda. Maybe. Interesting theory," he says, "but where's the evidence? Let me guess. The man, this Ontaveroz, he wants to whack her because she knows all about his business."

"How'd you know that?" says Harry.

"Saw it on TV. Old rerun of Ironside," says Avery. "What I can't figure is why these people come looking in your office to find Hale's daughter."