Who Let the Dog Out? (15 page)

“Yes, I’m fine. There are two gentlemen here to see you, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

That explains the good behavior; she’s trying to impress the agents. If she knew how, she’d probably make them coffee. “Tell them I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I’m going to have to handle this carefully. This is supposed to be an exchange of information, but hard information is something I really don’t have. I strongly doubt they’re going to be fine with a one-way street.

When I arrive, Agents Gardiner and Hernandez are standing near Edna’s desk, looking over her shoulder, as she continues her training for the crossword puzzle tournament. “You see? It fits perfectly,” she tells them. “You don’t fight the puzzle; you take what it gives you.”

I’m sure that’s wise counsel, but I have no idea what it means. The agents turn when they realize I’m in the room, and Gardiner says, “She’s amazing.”

“You have no idea,” I say. “Let’s go in my office.”

Once we’re in there and have all sat down, Hernandez says, “My hope is that we can do this without any bullshit.”

“It springs eternal,” I say. “I’ll start. The guy that was killed with Brantley, what is his real name?”

“Raymond Healy. But we do not want that name released to the public.”

“Who is he?”

“He
was
a diamond smuggler, but he murdered his contact in South Africa, and was temporarily short of product.”

“What was he doing with Brantley?” I ask.

“Why don’t you tell us?”

“I can only tell you what I think,” I say. “Brantley somehow got himself into the diamond business; it’s likely he made contacts on one of his trips abroad. I’m getting information on that now. But he hired a guy named Gerry Downey to steal his dog, and Downey had two nearly perfect uncut diamonds in his possession. I can’t imagine they came from anyone other than Brantley.”

“How did Brantley know Downey?” Hernandez asks.

“I’m working on that now; I’ll let you know when I know. Who killed Brantley and Healy?”

Hernandez doesn’t answer, and instead takes out a photograph and shows it to me. It’s hard to tell how big the man in the photo is, but I can tell that he is not someone I would want to know. Or talk to. Or be on the same planet with. “You know this guy?” he asks.

“No, but he looks like a barrel of laughs. Who is he?”

“He goes by the name of Alek. He’s Georgian.”

“I assume you mean the country, not the state,” I say. “Is he the killer?”

“Probably. He’s certainly
a
killer, and we have reason to believe he is in the country. He is as dangerous as anyone you have ever met, or heard about, or seen in the movies.”

“What does Georgia have to do with smuggled diamonds? I thought they mostly came from West Africa.”

“That’s where they start. But they wind up being used as currency to supply illegal arms all over the world. Those arms sometimes kill Americans. Alek and his friends have supplied the weapons that have killed a lot of people.”

“So Brantley and Healy died in a dispute over diamonds?” I ask. “Divac warned me that these were dangerous people.”

Gardiner seems surprised. “You talked to Alan Divac?”

I nod. “Yes, I wanted to learn more about how diamonds get into this country, and I was told he was the go-to guy. Why?” Clearly Gardiner knows Divac; it seemed to press a button when I mentioned him.

“Just gathering information,” Gardiner says. “What were you doing in Maine?”

“I found out Brantley was there, so I was going to try and get some answers.”

“To what?”

“I don’t believe the Downey murder is separate from all this.”

Hernandez shakes his head and interrupts. “Downey’s a bit player.”

“Maybe so,” I say. “But if I can tie his murder in, then my client walks. Simple as that.”

“You haven’t told us shit,” Gardiner says.

I shake my head. “That’s overstating it. But as I learn more, I’ll keep you in the loop, as long as it doesn’t jeopardize my client. I hope you’ll do the same.”

Hernandez smiles. “It springs eternal.” Then, “Maybe your client is guilty.”

“Hopefully you won’t be on the jury.”

It wasn’t until an hour later that I realized what Agent Hernandez said. When I brought up Gerry Downey’s name, Hernandez had described him as “a bit player.” He didn’t say that Downey wasn’t involved in the diamond smuggling, nor did he say that Downey’s murder wasn’t tied in. Instead he was saying that Downey wasn’t important. Of course, what’s important to the U.S. government isn’t necessarily what’s important to me and my client.

In any event, dismissing someone as unimportant implies a familiarity with that person. Customs agents wouldn’t be familiar with Downey because he knocked over a jewelry store, or even because he got himself murdered, unless he had something to do with a case they were investigating.

Hernandez’s comment reinforces the need for me to tie Downey and Brantley together. I know the link exists, because Brantley told Stephanie that he hired someone to steal Zoe, and I know that Downey was the one who committed the theft. But I need to prove it to the jury, and I need to prove that it relates to whatever the hell is going on with the diamonds.

I can go back to Hernandez and press him on it, but I feel like I should wait until I have more information to trade. When I need crucial information about murder victims, I turn to the obvious people for help: Hilda and Eli Mandlebaum.

Under Sam’s supervision, Eli and Hilda, as well as Leon Goldberg and Morris Fishman, have been going over the names on Downey’s phone records. It’s basically been a fishing expedition, since, as Sam described it, they are just names.

But I’ve been thinking of Downey as a victim, and while he is certainly that, he is also a “player,” bit or otherwise. The more I can learn about him, the greater the chance I can discover why he was killed. That might be the key to understanding who wanted him dead, and obviously got what they wanted.

I call Sam, and he tells me that the team is with him at the office, and they can tell me what they’ve learned. “It isn’t much,” he says. “Or at least if there’s anything important here, I don’t know what it is.”

I head down to Sam’s office to get a look at it myself, and it’s quite a sight. Eli, Hilda, Leon, and Morris are hunched over computers, although the truth is that they could be standing up and still look as if they’re hunched.

Sam sits at his own desk, peering at his workers like a lazy factory foreman. He’s also drinking coffee and eating what look like small pastries. “They’re called rugelach,” Sam says. “Hilda made them; they’re unbelievable.”

Since I see myself as a hands-on attorney, I eat a half dozen of them, and they are truly fantastic. Once Sam and I have polished off all of them, I ask to see what they’ve got.

It’s amazing what can be learned using a computer, especially when those using it have no qualms about entering sites they have no legal right to be in. What Sam’s team has is impressive, whether it proves meaningful or not. Not quite as impressive as the rugelach, but that would be asking a lot.

What they have is a list of everyone whose phone was connected to Gerald Downey’s phone in the last month of Downey’s life, whichever phone made the call. There is also information about each of those people, including address, occupation, family status, financial data, arrest and criminal records, and everything else available online.

If it weren’t so fascinating that they could put this together, it would be scary. Privacy is a quaint little concept that no longer has any relevance in the modern world. The other scary thing is that Hilda and Eli Mandlebaum, both born during the Hoover administration, know more about the modern world than I do.

There are three phones that Downey was in contact with that were the kind you buy in stores without a contract, so there are no names attached to them. Sam’s gang was able to identify where the phones were purchased, but not who did the purchasing.

Sam gives me a folder with printouts of all the information, and it actually consumes twenty pages. I’ll take it home and read through it, which is not something I particularly look forward to. With the trial looming, I still have to spend a lot of time familiarizing myself with all the evidence.

“This is great, guys,” I say.

“There’s more,” Sam says, handing me another, thinner folder. “It’s Eric Brantley’s travel records. Where he went, when he went there, the purpose of the visit, where he stayed, what airline he took, all of it.”

“You guys are amazing.”

He nods. “Yes, we are.”

There isn’t that much I like about my job. I don’t want anyone to think being a trial lawyer is terrible, because it isn’t. There are worse things I could be doing. I don’t work outside in ten-degree weather, I don’t toil in the field picking crops in the heat of summer, and I’m not an usher at the opera.

Probably the thing I like most about lawyering is cross-examination. My absolute favorite is to catch an adversarial witness in a lie, and beat him over the head with it. When I have that kind of witness on the stand, I love to badger, humiliate, and verbally torture him. Other than that I’m really quite sweet.

But to be able to experience that intense pleasure, I have to do the thing I hate the most about my job, which is to study. I have to be completely familiar with every piece of evidence, no matter how seemingly insignificant it might be. Because the key to effective cross-examination, and for that matter to effective lawyering, is to have a total grasp of the facts, and to be able to instantly summon them.

That is why I spend every night in the pretrial and trial phase going over and over the relevant documents. Most of it is tedious and dry, but it’s essential to have a complete command of it.

Sometimes I can read a document for the fifth time and suddenly see something significant that I missed the first four. But that is a rare happening, and tonight is unfortunately not one of those nights.

I take a break from my reading to put Ricky to bed. Once I get to his room, he holds up a pair of my socks, ones that I have given him just for this purpose. His holding it up is a silent challenge to engage him in my favorite sport growing up, sock basketball.

“I’m going to destroy you,” I say.

Ricky just nods his annoyingly confident nod. “Bring it on.”

The idea is to shoot the rolled-up socks onto the ledge above the door. We don’t dribble, since socks are not dribble-able, but we pretend to. I’m five-eleven, and Ricky is probably four-something, so I have a fairly significant height advantage. I also outweigh him by at least a hundred pounds.

The energy and stamina advantages are his.

We don’t keep track of wins and losses, but a good guess would be that I’ve lost probably fifty games in a row. I’ve been close in some, but he always seems to come through at the end. I am the Washington Generals of sock basketball.

Tonight we’re tied with five seconds to go in the game, and he has the sock. He takes a shot and misses, and calls a foul.

“Foul?” I whine. “Are you crazy?”

“You hit me on the arm,” he says, and casually hits the game-winning foul shot. “Sorry, Dad,” he says, the same thing he says at the end of every game we play. “You almost had me.”

“I’ll get you next time, Rick” is always my response.

I tuck him in and kiss him on the forehead. “I love you, Dad,” he says. He doesn’t say it every night, but when he does, I am always stunned by how good words can feel.

“I love you, too, son,” I say. Bedtime is the only time I call him son; all other times it’s Rick or Ricky. I’m not sure why that is, and I really don’t care very much. It feels right.

I head into the den, passing Laurie on the way. “You lose again?” she asks.

I nod. “I should have won. Ref made a bad call.”

I go back into the den to continue reading, then realize that I left some documents on the dresser in Ricky’s room. As I tiptoe in to retrieve them, I hear a strange noise.

The strange noise is Ricky crying in bed. My instinct is to run and get Laurie, but I fight it off. “What’s the matter, Rick? What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

I’d love to leave it at that, but I can’t. “Come on, something’s bothering you. Maybe I can help make it better.”

“No … you can’t.”

“Try me,” I say.

“I miss my dad.”

“I know you do, Rick. And you’re right: I can’t make that better. I wish I could, more than anything.”

“I’m starting to forget things about him. I remember stuff, but then it goes away,” he says.

“What’s important is to remember that he loves you, and that you love him. And your mom and I love you, too.”

“Okay,” he says, but I don’t think he agrees with my assessment of what’s important. He thinks what’s important is that his real father is dead, and he’ll never see him again.

I may be learning what it’s like to literally ache for someone. “You want Mom to come in?” I ask.

“I want to go to sleep.”

I kiss him goodnight and go into the den. Laurie is in there, and I tell her about the conversation with Ricky. She’s had a number of them, and reassures me that I did okay. I’m not sure I agree with her.

She pours me a glass of wine, which is on the table next to my recliner chair. I sip it as I go through the documents; with any luck, I’ll fall asleep in the middle of my reading.

The materials are just as dry and boring as they were earlier in the evening, but I stay awake. Eventually I switch over to the information that Sam and his team have given me about Downey and his recent contacts.

The names of the people on the list are just names to me, and the information that Sam’s team has gathered about each of them doesn’t really bring them to life. Very little about them piques my interest; even those with criminal records are small-time, and their crimes don’t really relate to this case.

All of that is true until I get to Gino Parelli. By the time I reach his name I am in skimming mode, and I almost go right past it. And it may not mean anything, but his occupation, listed as “Customs Official, Port Newark,” jumps off the page at me.