Kindle County: Pleading Guilty Part 9

'Better be no next time. He'll tear off your head and s.h.i.t down your neck. From what I hear, he skins his knees he still mentions you. I think what it is is his feelings got hurt.'

'That must be it.' I had some idea to ask if Al knew what Gino was investigating, in hopes of getting a little more info on Kam, but all in all, I'd probably pressed my luck already.

'Yeah,' said Al, just filling in, hitching up his trousers, which dropped six inches every time he rocked on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet. 'You got a lot to watch out for,' he told me.

That part wasn't news.

XIII. WHO SAYS LAWYERS AREN'I TOUGH?

A. Toots's Walls I was received in Toots's law offices with the air of ceremonial grandeur undoubtedly lavished on every guest. Stumbling along on his cane, his cigar extinguished but comfortably couched inside his jaw, he introduced me to each secretary and half his partners, the greatly renowned Mack Malloy, who was helping out the Colonel on that ethics thing. Then he showed me into his office and propounded a lengthy commentary on each memento on the walls.

Toots's office should have been moved intact to a museum somewhere, if not as a monument to twentieth-century political life then to one individual's capacity for self-appreciation. It was a virtual Colonel Toots Nuccio shrine. There were of course signed photos of the Colonel with every Democratic President from FDR forward, and two with Eisenhower, Toots in uniform in both. There were plaques from B'nai B'rith (Man of the Year), Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Kindle County Art Museum. There was a special award from the symphony, a clarinet cast in bronze; religious relics received from grateful clerics; and a lengthy salutatory letter from the Urban League, perhaps the only compliment Toots had received from people of color in the last thirty years, but which nonetheless had been framed. There was a gavel he'd been given from the City Council upon his retirement, his years of service engraved on the bra.s.s hand that circled the mallet head, and scores of photos of Toots with sports stars and political luminaries, some so long gone that their names had vanished from memory. At the absolute focus of attention, mounted immediately above his ponderous old desk, were his medals, aligned in a gla.s.s-doored case with a separate little high-intensity lamp that trained on Toots's silver star, which was pinned to black velvet. I spent the required instant marveling at it, wondering as I always would if it had been awarded for real bravery or as part of one of Toots's inevitable deals. Within these walls, one tended to realize that self-congratulation, the collection of banners and ribbons, was far more real to Toots, far more important than the events they were intended to commemorate.

'So,' he said, finally seated, 'I didn't figure you made house calls.'

'Occasionally. There's something I want to talk to you about.' 'This here hearing?'

I told him it was something else and hiked my chair a little closer.

'Toots. Can a fella ask a question? Between friends?'

He gave me the usual fulsome stuff, for me anything. I replied in kind, saying he was the only person in the tri-counties I knew who might be able to answer this. He smiled, deeply pleased by any compliment, without regard to its sincerity.

'I wondered if you might have heard something around town. There's an insurance guy, an actuary, who the papers say is missing. Vernon Koech.e.l.l. They call him Archie. What I have to find out is if you know any reason for somebody to pop him.'

Toots laughed quite merrily, as if I had made a saucy remark just within the borders of good taste. The shrunken old face showed not a sign of even vague offense, but I noticed that he had drawn back on his walking stick and within the milky elderly eyes was perhaps lodged a trace of something lethal.

'Mack, my friend, can I make a little suggestion?'

'Sure.'

'Ask another question.' I stopped on that.

'See, Mack, I got a rule for life. Always followed it since I didn't even have hair on my chin. I known you a long time now. You're a smart fella. But let me share my thinking with you: Don't talk about other people's business. It's their business and it's for them to worry about.'

I received this advice solemnly. Looking at me, Toots winked.

'I hear you, Colonel, but I've got a real problem.'

'Whatsa matter? He rate you on your policy or what?'

'Here's how it is, Colonel. I have a partner missing, a guy named Kamin. Bert Kamin. Where he's gone, I haven't the foggiest. But this guy Archie, he's got a white shirt on and a nice tie, but he's keeping a book. And my guy Kamin's laying bets with him. At least that's the way it looks.' I peeked up at Toots. I had his attention.

'Anyway, Archie, he's quite dead. That's a fact. Something I know. And pretty soon, any minute now, the coppers are going to show up to talk to me about that. And I'm frankly not interested in getting myself in Dutch with the wrong folks. So that's why I ask. I gotta know what's doing here, because I may have to do some fancy steppin'.' I tried to look hangdog and sincere, reverencing one of the many powers that dominated Toots's life. He wasn't really buying it.

'You a straight shooter, Mack?'

'As much as the next guy.'

Toots laughed. He liked that. He removed the cigar and in the gloomy light of the room considered the mangled end. It looked like a hunk of seaweed pulled up on a line.

'You understand with bookies,' he said.

'Not everything.'

'See this here - Guy makes a book, you know, he's got to lay off, right?'

'Like insurance companies. He doesn't absorb all the risk. I understand that much.'

'This guy, he had some very good luck. Somehow he always had laid off his losing action.'

I waited.

'How could he lay off only losing bets? Doesn't he lay off beforehand? I mean, before the event. The race, the game, whatever?'

'That he does,' said Toots.

I was on very delicate ground. Toots worked lovingly on his cigar.

'You mean he knew how these events were going to come out? Is that what you're saying? He knew these games were fixed?'

'You see,' said Toots, 'you share risks, you share no-risks. Capisc'? A fella's gotta look out for his friends. Otherwise he don't got friends, he got enemies. Right? That's how life is, right?'

'That's how it seems to be, Toots. There are no victims.'

Toots liked that one. No need to explain it to him.

'So you see,' he said, 'you asked a question, you asked another question, you told me some things, I told you some things, we had a talk. Okay? Somebody asks, some things you know, some things you don't know. Right?'

'Right.'

'Sure,' said Toots. He gave a quick, smug, frightening little laugh. 'So. We gonna win this hearing?'

'I wish I could tell you yes, Colonel. The hill's pretty steep.'

He shrugged, here in his element capable of seeming worldlywise, ripened by life.

'Give it your best. I ain't gonna get the death penalty, right?'

We agreed on that.

'And who's there, you or the skirt?'

'The skirt's good,' I told him.

'They say,' said Toots. 'So they say. Bit of a punchboard, I hear.' I'd known he would check her out. 'Woman of the world,' I answered. 'A big world,' he said.

'I'll try to be there, Colonel. I have to worry about this too. Archie. Bert.'

He understood. Sometimes a fella got himself into a spot. He walked me to the door.

'Remember my rule.' He pointed with the cigar. Don't talk about other people's business. I had it firmly in mind.

B. Accounting Secrets On the way back into the Needle, the elevator stopped at 32. No one got on, but I felt destiny beckoning and I jumped off and trod the hall to Accounting. When I came through the door, the unit manager, Ms Glyndora Gaines, was sitting right there.

I took a seat beside her. Her desk was completely clean, windswept but for one file she was examining, a state of order which added to the usual impression of a dominant, unremitting soul. Glyndora continued to look over the file, determined not even to acknowledge me. Maybe there was a trace, a vapor, of a smile being willed to oblivion.

'Glyndora,' I said quietly, 'just as a matter of curiosity, not saying I'm gonna do it, but you know, what if. What if I go tell the Committee the way you've been s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g me around? What if I act like I'm one of your bosses, instead of a chump?'

I was trying to sound sort of reasonable, maybe not pleasant, but calm. In the big room out the door, a dozen people were whizzing around, overwhelmed by the year-end rush, adding machines chugging out tape and phones giving their little electronic chirp. Checks were at a number of desks in colorful stacks.

'You gone talk to the Committee? Then tell them this.' She rose up in her chair as she took a surveying glance toward the doorway. 'Tell them you come to my apartment, you pounded on the buzzer causing all kind of commotion, talking all kinds of jive about Bert, and when I let you in, man, there wasn't barely one little word about Bert. The next thing, dude's got one hand on my t.i.tty and the other on my a.s.s, and the only way I got rid of his rasty old self is cause this boy talkin all that A A s.h.i.t went out to buy something to drink. Tell that to the Committee.'

She smiled in her way, tight like she was fastening down a bolt or a screw, and sized up the effect all this had. With Glyndora everything is a contest and she knew she had me beat. My side of the story was going to sound weak. Worse than that, ridiculous. n.o.body would believe I was just posing with my hand on her breast. And if they knew I had been drinking again, my time as Deadeye d.i.c.k, Private Detective, would probably be over, not to mention my employment.

'Glyndora, you know exactly what's going on here.'

She leaned forward against her arms, making her frontal equipment prominent in a blouse of orange flourishes. A layer of purple shadow lay thickly on her lids like pollen.

'Here's what I know, Mack. You are weak, sucker.' She was leering again, amused by the thought that she knew my secrets. But I'd been there too and learned some of hers. I pointed.

'And you like white guys.' I let that out and nodded myself, maybe imitating her. Even so, I regretted it. She stiffened; she reared back. We were headed where we always headed - me beats you, hah hah. One more contest. The Dozens, some kind of phony signifying. It was nothing I wanted, and I did what seemed under the circ.u.mstances somewhat daring and reached out to grab one of her hands. The touch, my big pink hand on her brown one, was shocking to us both. And that was the point.

'Hey,' I said, 'you know, I'm like you, I work here. I'm not trying to be your lord and master. Have I ever done that? Call me callous, I'm crude, et cetera, et cetera. But have I ever gone out of my way to do some kind of job on you? These guys tell me "Find Bert" and I wanna find him. I'll tell you the truth - it's something I need to do. So just give me a break, okay? Be a person.' In the bleakness of the tone I'd a.s.sumed, I suddenly heard a confession to myself. All along, I'd talked about this whole escapade, tracking down Bert, as a boondoggling effort at life reform. But that was kidding around, teasing myself with fantasies of running away with the money or earning my partners' esteem. Yet somehow I'd staked a lot more on this venture than I had admitted. Maybe my life was on its last legs. Maybe my chances were few. But I saw now that I'd promised myself that I was not coming out of this funhouse the way I'd gone in. Somebody within me believed that and was connected to what even in this meager, glimmering form you'd have to call hope.

And in admitting that, I was doing to Glyndora the one thing she tried to warn everyone against - being vulnerable, hanging it out for her to tromp on. She stared, disbelieving, insulted, and not altogether happy with the physical approach. She withdrew her hand from mine and slid her chair back so she could view me from a more distant perspective as we continued sizing each other up. Glyndora has her routine, the Hey-I'm-a-tough-black-b.i.t.c.h number, and she does it on autopilot, a piece of racial rhetoric that's as much mask and cipher as Steppin Fetchit onstage. Oh, I know she means it. I know she's tough. Like Grou-cho, who would not want to be a member of any club he could join, Glyndora wants to be the first one to reject you. Mission accomplished. But swimming through her eyes on occasion is some misgiving, a recognition that she's someone else. I don't know if she gets caught up in crackpot fantasies about how she is being poisoned by aluminum pots or whether she is a secret reader of the Koran. But there is more to her than she lets on. And that's the final insult she hurls at most of us. That she'll never let us in. Yet Glyndora has her secret place. He says with confidence, a denizen of his own secret places. Somebody who'd been there briefly with her the evening before and was knocking on the door again now. 'I need to find Bert,' I repeated.

Finally she leaned toward me and spoke in a softer tone, maybe an appeal of its own.

'No, you don't, Mack. You just gotta tell them you looked.' That was a message. Glyndora was playing the role of medium, of oracle, but even so, I wasn't sure if I was being beseeched or warned.

'You have to give me more, Glyn. I'm clueless. Who are you fronting for? I mean, at least tell me about the memo.'

Her posture became rigid again, her face hard. It was like watching a book slam closed.

'You're asking too much, man.' It wasn't clear if the excess was on her end or mine, if I wanted information I wasn't ent.i.tled to or if it came at a cost she wasn't willing to pay. But the answer, whatever, was no. She stood up and walked past me. She was running for cover. I thought about what I ought to do. I could demand her keys and toss her office. I could hire a service and get thirty temps to tear through the files. But I'd just made a deal. Without turning, I spoke before Glyndora could get far.

'One thing,' I said. Her heels stopped clacking, so I knew she was hanging there by the threshold. 'I never put my hand, not once, on your behind.'

When I looked back, she was smiling a little, something like that. I'd gotten that much. But she wouldn't give any actual ground.

'Says you,' she told me.

C. The Devil Himself 'It's a pact with the devil.' Thus spake Pagnucci as Carl, Wash, Martin, and I sat in the same paneled conference room where we had encountered each other at the start of the week. There was a moment of rare winter sun, a part of the circle escaped from the clouds like something hanging out of a pocket. The heavy drapes had been permanently sashed by the decorator and the long walnut table was bright with the glimmer of the late light, thick as caramel. I had found the three of them waiting for me and quickly reviewed my conversation with Jake Eiger that morning. I skipped Bert's memo and my trip to Neucriss. Glyndora had made me shy of both subjects, and I wasn't eager to take on Martin, whose motives remained perplexing to me. He and Carl gravely received the message I'd brought, but Wash was slower on the uptake.

'He's telling us that if we can't put this crime right, it will go unreported,' Martin said to him. 'Jake is concerned about Jake. He can't go to his Chairman, to Krzysinski, with this without endangering his own position. After all, who put Bert in charge of the 397 escrow in the first place? He wants us to keep our mouths shut.'

'Ah,' said Wash, who did a poor job of hiding the fact that he was quite pleased. 'And where do we end up with Jake?'

'In bed, I would say,' said Martin. 'Holding dirty hands. He can't very well cut us off, can he? He's our hostage.'

'And we're his,' said Pagnucci, invoking by his remark a pointed silence.

'But,' said Wash, continuing to muddle it through, 'we've reported the matter to the client. We've done our duty. If he chooses not to do his -' The back of his elegant white hand traveled off to the land of moral oblivion. Wash was already sold. A tidy solution. Five million gone and a secret forever.

'Jake says he doesn't believe it, actually,' I offered. 'He says that he's hoping that an accounting will prove it's not true.'

'That's horses.h.i.t,' said Pagnucci. 'He's posturing. We know the client isn't really informed. If we go along with this, it's the same thing as having said nothing at all.'

With the only difference of course that there was a far lower risk of detection. Auditing of the escrow account from which the money had disappeared was under Jake's direction and control. He'd cover us in order to cover himself. That was the meaning, I realized now, of that remark he'd made to me this morning about an accounting.

We were silent again, all four of us. Throughout this session, my attention remained on Martin. Wash had already set his course down the path of least resistance, and for Carl the problem-solving method was equally apparent, a question of benefits and costs. In his head, the pluses and minuses were already totaling. But Martin's calculations, in line with his character, figured to be more complex. Like an Aristotelian figure, his eyes were raised to heaven in the course of higher contemplation. Martin is your veritable Person of Values, a lawyer who does not see the law as just business or sport. He's on one million do-good committees. He's against the Bomb, the death penalty, and damage to the environment, for abortion, literacy, and better housing for the poor. He's been the chairman for years of the Riverside Commission, which is devoted to making the river clean enough to drink or swim in, goals that frankly will not be achieved until long after we have colonized Mars, but he'll still take you for a walk along the tangled, littered banks, soft with prairie gra.s.ses, and describe out loud the bike paths and boat piers he sees in his head.

Like any Person of Values who is a lawyer, Martin is not in it for goodness alone. These activities make him prominent, help him attract clients. Most of all, they invest him with the same thing that knowledge of the law imparts to us all: a sense of power. Martin gets off with his hand on the throttle. When he talks about the $400 million public offering we did for TN two years ago, his eyes glow like a cat's in the dark. When he says, 'Public company', he says it the way the priest pa.s.sing out wafers says, 'The body of Christ.' Martin has a grasp of the way business runs America and he wants to help be in charge.

Yet it's not just the sense of being important by attachment that excites him. It's also what his clients want to know: right or wrong, allowable or no. He's the navigator, the person with the compa.s.s, the man who tells the high and mighty, if not about morals, then at least about principles and rules. His clients can go out in the vineyard and get their boots covered in muck. He's back in the office, charting their course by the stars. When Martin goes to sleep at night and asks G.o.d's blessing, he tells the Lord that he helped his clients move with grace and speed through the difficult and ambiguous world He has made for us. Though perhaps not even Martin can tease out the logic, he believes that he is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally good.

Listening to this, I'm sure you're humming 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' and marching in place. All right. I'm just trying to tell you how it is. But don't sneer. It's easy to be a poet sitting behind the gates of a university or a monk in a monastery and feel there is a life of the spirit to which you are dedicated. But come into the teeming city, with so many souls screaming, I want, I need, where most social planning amounts to figuring out how to keep them all at bay - come and try to imagine the ways that vast unruly community can be kept in touch with the deeper aspirations of humankind for the overall improvement of the species, the good of the many and the rights of the few. That I always figured was the task of the law, and it makes high-energy physics look like a game show.

Wash finally interrupted this extended silence by posing the question that no one had been willing to ask: 'How would anybody ever find out?'

Martin actually smiled and without saying more looked to each of us, ducking his chin in a brief, suggestive way. The gesture by itself, his mere acknowledgment of what was held within the room, was vaguely shocking. The next step would be to dip a pen in blood.

'Where would you say Bert went?' I asked. 'There are three hundred people here asking already.'

'Say that, so far as we know, he's in Pico Luan,' answered Pagnucci. 'Retired from the practice. That'll pa.s.s the red-face test. Forward his mail to the bank there. None of that is what bothers me.'

'Retired?' I asked. 'Just like that? He's forty-one years old.'

'There is not a soul who knows Bert Kamin well who wouldn't believe him capable of something so impulsive,' said Wash, waving his pipe around. He had a point. Bert had done stranger things half a dozen times in the last five years. 'This is doable,' said Wash, 'quite feasible. And as to your concerns, Carl, about Jake ignoring our report -' Wash filled the pipe bowl with fire from his lighter. I personally do not believe Jake Eiger would lie.' It was something of a non sequitur but we all saw what Wash was up to. If it ever proved that the secret had not held, we could say that we had placed our faith in Jake - to be honest, reverent, and true, to protect the best interests of TN, to tell what-all must be told. The silence upstairs we took to reflect TN's desire to save face and to protect the settlement fund from raiding by the plaintiffs' lawyers. We would express shock about Jake. In the face of calamity, Wash, who had placed Jake at TN like a spore years ago, would trot out his protege for drowning.

But Martin saw through Wash instantly.

'If we go that route,' said Martin, the man I love, a fellow who could make Keats think twice about whether beauty is truth and vice versa, 'and the day comes that we have to explain, we'll all lie. You'll hear four different versions of what went on in this room.' His look panned each of us and settled on me.

'Lest I repeat myself,' he said now, 'I hope you find Bert.'

tape 3 D. The Head of Finance Pagnucci said, 'That was troubling,' as we headed toward my office after the meeting, strolling down the book-lined corridor. Martin and the decorators have decided that it is the right touch to fill the halls with the gold-spined federal and state reporters, though it's h.e.l.l on the a.s.sociates, who never know where to find the volumes they need.

Carl was in town from DC for the second time this week. Eager to please TN, and to minimize their dealings with other large firms, we had opened the Washington office fifteen years ago to handle matters before the FAA and CAB. When airline regulation went the way of white tennis b.a.l.l.s, we had about thirty lawyers with nothing to do. Enter Pagnucci, a former Supreme Court law clerk to Justice Rehnquist, with six million dollars in annual billings, thanks to Ronald Reagan, who in 1982 made Carl the youngest member ever of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The saying about law firms is that there are finders, minders, and grinders, referring first to people like Carl and Martin and Brushy who find big-time, big-money clients to employ them, then the service partners, guys like me, who make sure that skilled work is carried out by supervising the third group, the young toilers laboring in the library amid the ghosts of dead trees. The sad fact is that there are far fewer finders than minders and the finders increasingly demand more of the pie. Carl left his former firm because they were not contemporary enough, meaning they did not pay him what he thought he was worth, and his very presence among us on those terms means we have to make sure the same thing does not happen here. There are only so many ways to do it. Maybe you can get the a.s.sociates to stay another quarter hour past midnight, or pile on charges for ludicrous extras -fifty cents a page for running sensitive doc.u.ments through our shredder - but in the end the best way for the top guys to stay ahead is if they have fewer people to share with, fire a few minders and give Carl their points. Lots of people around G & G claimed we'd never do it, but the pressure's there, and Carl, who heads the subcommittee on firm finances, has never expressed the same resolve. No doubt he thought that's what I wanted now - to lobby him about next year's pay - and as soon as my door was closed he raised another subject.

'So what's the latest from the Missing Persons Unit?'

'Gaining a little ground,' I said. 'Still no sight of our man.'

'Hmm,' said Pagnucci. He allowed himself a bit of a frown.