Hostile Witness Part 13

"Hey, Larry, can you believe this stuff?" said Detective Griffin. "Listen. These idiots were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g on a subway track in New York and like, what do you expect, but the train runs over them. Now their lawyer's suing the Transit Authority. Can you believe that? Lawyers are such pigs."

"How you doing, Doug?" Sloc.u.m asked the detective. "You look beat."

"I'm fresh off last out," said Griffin. "All night at a crime scene. Nothing new. The perp's wife was squawking at him about his drug use, so he shoots her, takes her upstairs, and shoots her again just to be sure. Sells the gun for a hundred bucks, buys more crack, and sets himself up downstairs, smoking, watching TV, eating takeout Chinese while the wife is up there bleeding. Took her three days to die."

"Jesus," I said. "That's brutal."

Detective Griffin stood, hiked up his pants, and groaned. "s.h.i.t like that happens every day. Look, I got to take a dump."

"I'll watch him," said Sloc.u.m.

"What about those crack vials they found on Bissonette?" I asked after Griffin had left.

"Ruffing says they found them every night in the bathrooms."

"At a high-cla.s.s joint like Bissonette's?"

"The drug doesn't care how much money you got," he said. "But Bissonette wasn't using or selling. His blood was clean and the vials were empty, but had traces of the drug in them. Sellers don't keep the vials, they go with the drug."

"What's this second box?" I asked.

"Stuff from Bissonette's apartment. Check it out, you'll love it."

I opened the box and suddenly understood why Bissonette was such a favorite of the fans. At least some of the fans. What I pulled out of that box was enough to make Hugh Hefner blush. There were all manner of s.e.x toys, appropriately bagged and numbered. There were shackles and ropes and d.i.l.d.os of varied lengths and widths and surfaces, there were vibrators, there were belts of leather and underpants of leather, there were strange harnesses, there were s.a.d.i.s.tic metal instruments that looked like something out of an alien dentist's office. Not bagged were the videos and s.e.x magazines and photographs from a Polaroid camera.

"Our Mr. Bissonette got around," I said.

"Anyone you recognize?" asked Sloc.u.m.

"Not likely," I said, though I did review the photographs one by one. They were blurred and the shots were off center; the camera had been set above and behind the bed and obviously operated by remote control. They were all of a well-built man, ponytailed, with the familiar ballplayer's face, having s.e.x with women, sometimes just one, sometimes more than one. In many the heads of the women were obscured, showing only long legs, thin arms, bustiers, a tangle of swollen body parts. And in some there were other men.

"Didn't know he was a switch hitter, did you," said Sloc.u.m.

"It wasn't on his baseball card," I said, still looking through the photographs. One caught my eye, a long pale woman with dark hair stretching her body across his, her back arched, her thin b.u.t.t riding high as Bissonette worked from below. She was reaching back with her arm and squeezing his b.a.l.l.s. There was something familiar, tasty about the woman.

"Maybe it was a jealous husband who did him in," I suggested.

"Give it up, Carl," said Sloc.u.m. "No jealous husband here. The murderer was too careful for a crime of pa.s.sion. Besides, we have the IDs."

Quickly I shuffled the photos so it wouldn't look like I was concentrating too long on any one. In my shuffling I brought back the picture of the long pale woman. This time I saw it clearly, what I had missed before. I shuffled the pictures again and put them back.

"If you take away Ruffing's testimony," I said, "all you got is a black limousine and some guy about Concannon's height."

"And if you take away the Atlantic we could walk to London. We have motive, we have opportunity, we have eyewitness identifications, we have two convictions here."

"What's this?" I said as I pulled out the final object in the carton, a wooden box the size of a head, painted black with Chinese designs inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

"That's his love chest," said Sloc.u.m. "Open with care."

Slowly I lifted the lid.

"Jesus," I said. "He might not have been a boy scout, but he was sure as h.e.l.l prepared."

Inside the box were hundreds of loose condoms in different colors and shapes, lubricated, unlubricated, some of genuine goatskin. The little packets glistened in their foil wrappers and looking at them was a little like looking at a display window of a candy store. Beneath the layers of condoms were stacks of casino chips, heavy, in black and gold colors. There were hundred-dollar chips from Bally's and Trump Plaza and Resorts, over a thousand dollars' worth, and a series of heavy gold and green chips without a casino's name printed on them, just the head of a wild boar embossed in gold. There was a small pot of ointment that smelled of sweet and spice, like liniment, with pictures of tigers on the outside. And there were little pipes with screens and a gla.s.s tube and, most interesting of all, a goldenrod colored paper slip with the words "Property Receipt" on top and a date stamp. It was signed by our Detective Griffin and indicated that the lab had been given one gla.s.sine bag of a chunky, off-white substance.

I lifted up the property receipt. "Now why didn't the feds tell us about this?"

"It's not relevant," said Sloc.u.m.

"It's not Brady?" Brady v. Maryland was a Supreme Court case that required the prosecution to turn over any evidence that would tend to exculpate a defendant. "It seems to me that knowing the victim was a drug user could show that the crime was drug related."

"His blood was clean and he had no drug priors or drug history. You know what that little bag was?" said Sloc.u.m, gesturing to the property receipt. "That was his last chance aphrodisiac. Any hunter in this town knows enough to pack some c.o.ke if he's really looking. If all else fails, you'll always pull in something with free jam."

"What about these casino chips without a name, just a wild boar's head?"

Sloc.u.m shrugged. "Maybe some casino out of the area."

"Seems to me there are a lot of maybes about this guy."

"What's not a maybe," he said, "is that he's dead."

Detective Griffin waddled back in and dropped into his chair.

"I got to get to court," said Sloc.u.m. "But hurry it up, Carl, so we can get the detective some sleep."

"Just a few more minutes," I said.

I started going through the doc.u.ments as quickly as I could, checking for anything I didn't already have, when I caught Griffin dozing off into his paper. His neck drooped, his head dropped lower, then lower still, until he snapped it up and looked at me with surprise on his face.

"Tough shift?"

"Up all night and then Sloc.u.m drags me in for this," said the detective.

"Want me to get you some coffee?" I asked sweetly.

"No, just hurry it up, all right?"

I continued going through the papers, all the time keeping an eye on Detective Griffin as he kept a tired eye on me. He blinked a couple of times and then opened his eyes wide. His neck again began to droop and slowly his head fell off to the side until his cheek rested on his shoulder.

Out of the love chest I quickly grabbed one of the boar's head casino chips and one of the condoms for good measure, stuffing both into my inside suit pocket. Then I took hold of the pictures and shuffled back to the photograph of the long pale woman. It wasn't only the body that I recognized. On her arm, the same arm that was reaching back to get a solid hold on Zack Bissonette's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, were two thick gold bracelets, stamped with runes and encrusted with diamonds. I considered taking that picture, too, taking it to protect her, but thought I might need it in Sloc.u.m's possession if things turned out like I now suspected they might.

The photographs were back in the box and I was looking through one of the file folders when Detective Griffin snapped awake with a gasp. He blinked at me and grunted and turned back again to his paper.

"Hey," he said after a few moments. "Can you believe this new stuff about Roseanne? Jesus. Listen to this."

I listened. I figured I owed him that.

15.

"MAYBE I'M NOT A LAWYER," said Dr. Louis Saltz. "But it seems to me that until we find that crooked accountant, Stocker, we can't really know the value of our case." Saltz was a tall, gangly man with a long face and hairy arms who had a way of seeming to have figured out everything, which I guess is good in a doctor but which just then I was finding annoying.

"That's true to a point," I said. "Stocker collated the figures and made the projections that we claim were fraudulent. If we could put him on the stand and if he testified that the defendants told him to cook the books, we'd win for sure. We'd get punitive damages, too."

"Exactly," said Saltz, with a rich smile directed around the room. "We'd wipe the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds out."

We were in the conference room shared by all of Vimhoff's tenants, the same ratty little place in which I had deposed Mrs. Osbourne and ruined Winston Osbourne's life. In the room was a narrow formica table and walls of cheap particleboard bookshelves stocked with accounting journals and tax codes and sets of law books now out of date. Ellie used to spend hours each week updating our sets from West Publishing, from Collier, from BNA, replacing the pocket parts, slipping in the new pages, lining up the most recent volumes, making sure our Shepard's Citations were absolutely current. But after Guthrie left and invoices went unpaid, one by one our contracts were cancelled and the updates stopped coming. A legal library falls out of date with a startling quickness. The fear of having our crucial arguments trumped by a recent case not in our now dated law books sent us scurrying to the Bar a.s.sociation library, where for five dollars a day we could wander like ghosts around the a.s.sociation's volumes with the rest of those second-rate lawyers too poor to own their own books. We could have sold what books we had for a small amount, but we kept them out of vanity - to the untrained eye these volumes gave the conference room a lawyerly sheen. Of course, when we met with other lawyers we always arranged to meet in their offices because to another lawyer, familiar with the volumes, our incomplete sets proclaimed with utter clarity our financial despair. But it wasn't other lawyers I was meeting with that afternoon, it was Saltz and five of his fellow limited partners, there to discuss the settlement offer bestowed upon us by the good graces of William Prescott III.

"The problem, Lou," I said, "is that we aren't going to find Stocker before the trial. We're not the only ones looking for him, there's also the FBI and the IRS. The guy skipped town with other people's money and his only goal in life now is not to be found."

I looked at Saltz and then turned my gaze on the other men in the meeting. They were all white, middle-aged guys with so much money they couldn't keep from throwing it away, which was exactly the state to which I aspired. Along with Saltz were another doctor, an owner of a plumbing supply company, a jewelry seller named Lefkowitz, and two partners in some sort of import/export thing that I never quite could figure out. There were two other plaintiffs who couldn't make the meeting but had given their proxies to Saltz. I was trying to convince them all to accept Prescott's settlement offer. Prescott had told me the check was already cut. If my plaintiffs said yes that afternoon, I could have the forty thou in our account by Tuesday.

"And even if we find Stocker," I continued, hammering home my point, "we don't know what he'll say. He could bury us."

"No way," said Saltz. "The guy's crooked as a corkscrew."

"Can't we just say how dishonest their accountant was?" asked Benny Lefkowitz, the jeweler. "Isn't that enough to prove they lied on their projections?"

"What he did in other situations doesn't prove he cooked the books here," I said. "The judge will never let the jury hear it."

"Let's cut through the bulls.h.i.t," said Leon Costello, one of the import/export guys. He was a fat, well-dressed man with some sort of dragon ring on his left pinky. "What are you thinking here, Victor? I mean, with your percentage you got the most at stake, right? What do you say we do?"

"My gut says jump at it," I said. "If we go to trial now, we'll probably lose. When they were only offering five grand I was ready to roll the dice. But now they've put some real money on the table."

"If their position is so strong, why offer anything?" asked Lefkowitz.

"It's the way big firms work," I said. "They bill the h.e.l.l out of a case until it gets near to trial and then they settle. That way they suck out all the money they can without ever risking a loss."

"I don't think we can make this decision until we find Stocker," said Saltz. "Or at least give it one more shot. What's to lose? If we don't find him by the trial we'll just take the money."

"If we don't agree quickly, Lou," I said, "they're going to pull the offer."

"What was that?" said the other doctor, a podiatrist.

"They are offering us this amount so they don't have to spend the money to prepare for trial," I explained. "If they have to spend that money, then they might decide to screw the offer and try the thing. And if they do, I believe they're going to beat us."

"That's not fair," said the podiatrist, a stricken look on his face. "They offer us a hundred and twenty thousand, that's what we should get."

"The only way to make sure we get it is to agree to the settlement now."

"How much time do you think we have?" asked Lefkowitz.

"Not much, a few days, maybe a week. But they could pull the offer at any time."

"All right," said Costello. "I heard enough."

"Maybe we should talk a bit privately, without you, Victor," said Saltz. "Is that all right?"

"Sure," I said, standing. "You're the clients."

I stood in the hallway outside the room and again mentally spent the settlement money. With the fifteen-thousand-dollar retainer for the Chester Concannon case we were almost current with our bills and had paid Ellie what we owed her. We had even gotten Vimhoff off our backs by paying rent. My share of the forty thousand would be enough to start getting my financial life in order, to almost bring me current on my student loans, to even start paying back my father. Down the line there would be more money from CUP for my defense of Concannon, not to mention the fees I would make on the Valley Hunt Estates deal with the Bishop brothers, from whom that very day I had accepted the outside counsel spot, with enough work promised to keep Derringer and Carl going for half a year. Oh man, yes, things were looking up.

I had played the meeting perfectly, I thought. Saltz was my biggest problem, seeking as he was the big hit, but I figured the others would each take the ten thousand and run. As soon as I told them of the offer, I knew it was as if the money was already in their pockets. Then, at the end of the meeting, I raised the possibility of the offer being withdrawn, as if a pickpocket were reaching into their wallets and pulling out ten one-thousand dollar bills. These guys didn't build their fortunes by giving back ten grand here and there. At last I was starting to learn the secrets of the rich: whenever you have a chance for money grab it, quickly, clutch it to your chest as if it were life itself. That's how the rich got rich and that's how I would get rich too. Their signed releases were my first step. I had already instructed Ellie to prepare the doc.u.ments so as to waste as little time as possible and they were now in the conference room, in a maroon folder, sitting in the middle of the table like a glorious centerpiece.

It was Saltz who came out to get me.

"We've reached a consensus," said Saltz when I was seated back at the table.

"We're gonna accept the offer," said Costello.

"Terrific," I said, reaching for the file with the releases.

"But not just yet," said Costello.

"We want you to try one more time to find Stocker," said Saltz.

"There's a private investigator I use," said Lefkowitz. "The diamond business is full of swindlers and you get taken now and then no matter how careful you are. This guy always comes through for me."

"We're going to give this guy three weeks to find that accountant son of a b.i.t.c.h," said Costello.

"We'll cover his cost," said Saltz. "We think the offer will still be good in three weeks."

"And if it's not, they can go to h.e.l.l," said Costello. "We don't like being pressured."

"If he comes up empty," said Saltz, "we'll take the hundred and twenty grand. But if he finds him, we'll nail those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to a cross."

"Frankly, Victor," said Costello. "We're all in agreement. Ten thousand dollars plus or minus is not going to change our lives. But these guys took us for a ride and now if we can make them pay big time, it's worth the risk. This goes way beyond money."

"It's the principle of the thing," said Saltz. "And we know you'll want us to stick to our principles."

"Do you have a piece of paper for me?" said Lefkowitz. I reached into the file and took out one of the unsigned releases. He turned it over and scribbled on the back. "This is the name of my guy. I'll call him tonight and set up a meeting for you tomorrow. Tomorrow's Friday, so sometime early is better. About ten? Fine. He'll be here at ten."

He slid the release back to me. I read the name out loud. "Morris Kapustin? What kind of private eye has a name like Morris Kapustin?"

"He's tougher than he sounds," said Lefkowitz. "Morris is something special."

"Give him the three weeks," said Costello. "If he c.r.a.ps out then take the money, quick. We don't need another meeting."

"Is that all right?" asked Saltz.

"I don't have much choice, do I?" I said.

"That a boy," said Saltz.