The Judgment (3 page)

“Aren’t those things audited?”

“Not this one. It’s all cash. We use it to pay informers. The city has been after us for years to have their auditors take a look.”

“And you resisted, obviously.”

“Sure I did. That would open a whole list of informers
for the mayor’s inspection.” He smiled. “Hell, the first thing he’d do is sell that list to the highest bidder. We’d have bodies all over the street and no one would ever give us the time of day again.”

“You must have some procedure for keeping track?”

“I did. My own auditor. The Mouse. Remember him?”

It would be hard to forget the Mouse. He was a policeman but looked like a mountain. Six and a half feet and three hundred pounds. He had played one year for the Green Bay Packers but injured his knee, probably in someone’s throat, an injury that cut short his football career. He had become a Detroit cop and had attached himself to Conroy and had become his very large shadow, his aide, and possibly Conroy’s only friend.

“The Mouse any good at keeping track of money?”

He chuckled softly. “He may look stupid, but he isn’t. He kept books, in code, but every dime is accounted for.”

“Well, if that’s the case, you don’t have anything to worry about.” I paused. “If you’re honest.”

He nodded. “I’m told the Mouse is going to be the chief prosecution witness against me.”

I whistled. “That puts a different color on the horse.”

“I’m also told the mayor is arranging everything, like the producer of a Broadway play. He’ll select the judge, the prosecutor, everything except the color of the courtroom walls.” He paused. “He’d like to select the defense attorney, too, if he could. Short of that, he’ll try to get to whoever defends me. This is one case he doesn’t want lost. Pick a good man, and the mayor won’t touch him.”

“Wally Figer is one of the best. He wouldn’t be able to get to Figer.”

Conroy’s eyes began to glitter once more. “That shows how out of touch you’ve been. Wally is the mayor’s personal attorney.”

“Really?”

“Anybody who’s any good has some connection with His Honor. Power and money pulls you in like a magnet. I want to be able to go to trial without wondering if this
is the day my own lawyer makes a small but intentional mistake that will send me to prison. Like I said, I need an honest man.”

“Someone unlike yourself?”

He raised an eyebrow.

I continued. “How much did that suit cost? Or the shoes? You must have several thousand dollars on your body. That’s not the kind of clothing one associates with an honest, hard-working cop.”

He chuckled, plucking at his suit. “So you think this is drug money?”

“It’s a short jump to that conclusion.”

He shrugged. “Do you know how much the city pays me in salary?”

“No.”

“Ninety thousand a year. On top of that, I teach as an assistant professor in criminal justice. Part-time. That brings in another twenty thousand. My wife is a commercial artist, a good one. Pick up any fashion magazine and you’ll see her work. She brings in another hundred thousand plus. We have no children, Sloan. I can afford the clothes, plus a Mercedes, if I wanted one. I spend on clothes, and that’s about all.”

“Have you ever dipped into the fund?”

He shrugged. “Once or twice. But it always went back the next day. And the Mouse always knew about it. He handled the money, physically. I left all that to him.”

“How about his books?”

“He explained the code to me. Every so often we’d go over how much we had. Informers don’t come cheap anymore. Other than that, I had no connection with the money or with the books.”

“Just the Mouse.”

“Yeah.”

“If you’re on the level, the Mouse must have been stealing.”

“I doubt it.”

“You do? Even if he’s going to testify against you?”

He looked past me again. “That’s the part that’s screwy. The Mouse controlled the books and the code. Even if he was looting the damn fund, no one would know, not even me, and certainly no one could prove it. Why he’s testifying I don’t know.”

“The case will be a circus, you realize that?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Frankly, I don’t want the case. I’ve had enough of these courtroom circuses to last a lifetime.”

He shrugged. “I can’t blame you, I suppose.”

“Have you talked to the Mouse?”

“No. He’s disappeared. I put some of my best people out on the job of finding him. He doesn’t want to be found. Like I said, he may look like a dumb mountain, but he’s smart, street-smart.”

“Obviously, you know the game plan. When are you supposed to be arrested?”

“Tomorrow morning, at Police Headquarters. I’m supposed to surrender there with a lawyer. They’ll take me to Recorder’s Court and set bond.”

“Who told you all this?”

“The prosecutor. I don’t think he’s in on any of this, but it’s his office that’s bringing the charge. Like he said to me, he’s just doing his job.” Conroy sighed. “I’m to be released on personal bond. I will be given a leave of absence without pay until a jury makes the final decision.”

“It sounds like they have a pretty good case.”

“You think I’m guilty?”

“What I think doesn’t matter, does it? It’s up to the jury.”

“You have any suggestions about who I can get to be my lawyer?”

“Are you interested in making a deal?”

“I told you, they won’t go for anything. Nor will I, for that matter.”

“I don’t mean with the court, I mean between you and me.”

“What kind of deal?”

“If I take the case, I can drop it anytime if I think I want out.”

His eyes bore into mine, and he paused before replying. Finally, he nodded. “Okay.”

“My services won’t come cheap.”

“I know that.”

“I’ll need a ten-thousand-dollar retainer.”

He took a checkbook from his inside pocket and quickly scribbled out a check and then handed it to me.

“You still don’t like me, do you, Sloan?”

“If you want love and affection, you’re at the wrong store.”

He laughed. “I got the right store. Can you be at my office at eight in the morning?”

“Sure,” I said. “Oh, one more thing. Wear your dress uniform and don’t say anything. From here on in, I’ll do the talking.”

He got up and walked to the door, then turned. “I feel better already,” he said. “Thanks.”

Then he was gone.

I looked at the check and wondered why I had taken the case. I didn’t like him, and the case sounded like a loser, a big, public loser.

Still, defending people was what I did for a living. I stuck the check in my wallet.

M
aybe Conroy was right. Perhaps my office did look like it should be lighted by gas lamps. But I felt comfortable in it, and most of my clients didn’t care if I practiced out of the back of a truck. They had far too much trouble in their lives to even notice what kind of furniture their lawyer owned.

But my office, decrepit and a bit musty, had a feature that compensated for any shortcomings. You couldn’t beat the view. The office had been built, almost as an afterthought, on top of a squat marine insurance agency building located on the river, hence the outside wooden stairway was the only way up.

My window looks out on the magnificent St. Clair River, the connector between Lake Huron and Lake St. Clair, part of the Great Lakes waterway chain. On the other side of the river is Canada, but not the pretty part. It is a Canada of chemical factories, miles of them, looking like a set for a science fiction movie. I tend to ignore that far shore—it is the river itself that I enjoy, nearly half a mile wide, providing a waterway for everything from canoes to ocean-going freighters.

I swung around in my slightly tilted office chair and looked out upon my private view.

I tried to think of how I might defend Conroy, but I was distracted by a large ore carrier as it approached, tossing
a white plume in front of its huge prow. It was coming from Lake Huron and I was surprised to see that part of its superstructure was covered with ice. Soon the Great Lakes shipping season would come to a halt. It was the beginning of November, that month when ships would be in the greatest danger from winter storms on the lakes. Things could get very deadly when, as the song goes, the witch of November went riding. It seemed that the huge ship would be immune from any force of nature, but it only looked that way. Nature, like fate, unpredictable, played according to its own laws.

Reluctantly, I turned from the window. I had things to do. One of which was to call Sue Gillis and find out what time I should pick her up.

I’m not married, not at the moment, anyway. If the institution of marriage paid veteran’s benefits, I would have done all right, having been married three times. All to beautiful drunks who managed to sober up long enough to take me for everything I had at’ the time. Then it didn’t matter, the money just kept rolling in, so I waved goodbye to each wife and fortune, knowing a new wife and fortune would be just around the corner. But eventually alcoholism and near ruin had been waiting around that corner.

My first marriage produced my daughter, Lisa, raised until recently by her mother. Lisa, a drunk like dear old Dad, is also a member of the double-A club now. I was proud of her. Having taken honors at the University of Pennsylvania, she is a student at Columbia Law School. Lisa was living with a fellow student, a boy whom I had yet to meet. A test marriage, I guess you’d call it. I never asked. She was an adult. It was her business.

I wonder at my own reluctance about marrying again. Sue Gillis, a cop, had her own apartment. So did I. Most nights we slept together, either at her place or mine. She was in charge of sex crimes for the Kerry County Sheriff’s Department. Looking much younger than her forty-plus years, she had the pep of a blond and bouncy cheerleader
and was just as cute. Almost. Once, she had blown the brains out of a robber and that had earned her within the department the kind of respectful awe the people of Dodge City used to show Wyatt Earp.

We had talked of marriage. Those talks seemed to be increasing in frequency lately. I was the one balking, although I wondered why. She had become a very important part of my life. We liked the same things and we enjoyed each other. Disagreements were rare. My resolve, I knew, was slowly crumbling. I think she sensed that, too.

Our only real problem was my line of work. Cops work hard to take felons out of society. Sue had reservations about someone who worked equally hard, in her view, to put them back in business. Her idea was that I should run for county prosecutor. Fat chance.

Other than that, we were especially at ease with each other.

Tonight was my night for dinner. I could cook it or take her out. Since frozen dinners were my level of expertise, we always went out when it was my turn.

I picked her up after work and we drove to Port Huron, the “big city” in these parts, and only ten minutes away. Port Huron wasn’t exactly the Left Bank, but it had more restaurants than Pickeral Point. We had come to favor an Italian place near the Blue Water Bridge, the big bridge over the St. Clair River to Canada.

The food was Italian although the owner and cook was Hungarian. The place was decorated like a Hungarian’s idea of a Lake Como villa.

We ordered our favorites, Sue favoring the veal and I, the spaghetti. The cook made spaghetti like my mother used to do, sloppy and spiced to the eyeballs.

Sue ordered wine and I had my usual Diet Coke.

“How was your day?” she asked. It was her standard opening when she really wanted to unload about what had happened to her.

“Not bad,” I said right on cue, “and yours?”

She had been the arresting officer of a retarded young
man who had raped his grandmother. It was a sordid case involving a sordid family. She described them as she might in court, formally and factually, but what came out was a story about animals. And definitely not the cuddly kind. Grandma had been badly hurt and if she didn’t make it, the charge would escalate to murder.

Sue had another glass of wine when the food was served, and she seemed calmer, as if she had managed to purge herself of the sights and sounds of the day.

“That was my day,” she said, sipping the wine. “Can you match it, Charley?”

“I wouldn’t even try. I did, however, pick up a couple of clients. One of whom you’ll read about tomorrow.”

“Who?”

“Mark Conroy, Detroit’s deputy chief of police. He’s surrendering himself, in my company, for arrest on the charge he stole from a special police fund.”

Her eyebrows raised in surprise. “I know Conroy, or at least I’ve heard him speak. He’s all cop. I doubt if he’d do such a thing.”

“From what he tells me, they seem to have a pretty good case. It looks like it might be a tough one to win, maybe impossible.”

“Any possibility of a plea?”

“He says he’s being framed. He says he’s innocent and a plea is out of the question. This one will go to the jury.”

“You like that, anyway.”

“Maybe. The other client is someone who plays in your ballpark.”

Her eyes widened in horror. “Not the retarded kid!”

I smiled. “No.” I paused to slurp up some of my sloppy spaghetti. It was not a pretty sight. By meal’s end I would have destroyed a multitude of napkins and the composure of any diners nearby.

I wiped away the evidence and took a swallow of my Diet Coke.

“My other client is a priest. He was accused of fondling
a boy who later withdrew the charge. Now his parents are threatening civil suit.”

“The Evans kid?”

“I don’t even know the name yet. I haven’t talked to the priest.”

“Father Chuck,” she said.

“Bingo. Father Charles Albertus, alias Father Chuck. You know the case?”

“Sure. It was my case, if you could even call it that.”

“Can you tell me about it, Sue? You know, ethically?”

“No reason not to. It’s closed. I’m surprised his parents have the balls to even think about suing Father Chuck.”

“Why?”

“Charley, I view these clergymen as being guilty until proven innocent. I shouldn’t, I know, but there is so much of it, or so it seems. Altar boys, choir girls, kids of both sexes, adults of both sexes. Once these guys start going wrong, there’s no limit. Look around you. It’s become almost a national epidemic. Priest, minister, rabbi, it really makes no difference. So when they get to me, they already have two strikes against them. I know that isn’t fair, but that’s how I see it.”