Indefensible Read online

  “Those’ll kill you,” Scud says. He smirks and Chip smirks, stubbing out his cigarette, because they both know Chip lit up only to get Scud to light up, to make him comfortable and put him off his guard. But comfortable doesn’t seem to be a problem for this guy Scud, who is rocking back in his metal folding chair, arms folded on his chest, looking like a day at the beach.

  “Anyhow, now the son of a bitch has bolted, and it kind of makes us look bad,” Dorsey says. He’s imitating Chip’s easygoing manner, but it doesn’t fit him.

  “So?”

  “So, we thought you might be able to help us.”

  “We’re reaching out,” Chip says, grinning, and the three of them chuckle at the lovely preposterousness of the idea that good guys and bad might put away their differences and pitch in to locate the missing Zander. Sparky hums some more.

  “You talking to everybody? Every ex-con who’s trying to make an honest go of it?”

  “Maybe so,” Dorsey says.

  “You gotta love these guys,” Sparky says, and I do love them: I love their shrewdness and scheming, their elegant understanding of human nature. Interrogation like this is probably harder than cross-examination in court. In cross, they can’t get away from you, so you simply wear them down or trip them up. Here you have to outsmart them; just one wrong move, and they clam up or lawyer up, and it’s all over.

  After several more minutes of aimless questioning, Chip shifts uncomfortably and eyes Dorsey, then leans in toward Scud. “Okay. We’ll level with you. We got a little bird who says you or people you associate with were with this kid. Like maybe you even helped him pack his travel bag.”

  “Normally, we wouldn’t give a damn,” Dorsey says. “I mean, he’s a minnow in the scheme of things, right? But he hurt our feelings, you know? We tried to cut him slack, and now he’s screwed us. So if you know anything about this kid . . .”

  “You scratch our back, we’ll scratch yours,” Chip says.

  “Maybe my back don’t itch.”

  “Maybe it’ll itch tomorrow.”

  “Who’s the bird?” Scud asks.

  “Birds don’t have names,” Chip says. “Suffice it to say, the word on the street is that you’re the one to see.”

  Scud shrugs.

  “Do you even know this guy?” Dorsey asks.

  “Zander? He go by anything else? I know lots of guys. Zander don’t ring a bell.”

  Chip takes a photo from the file and slides it to Scud, who studies it, making a convincing show. “Nope, don’t look familiar.”

  “Do us a favor,” Dorsey says. “If you hear anything, give me a call.”

  Chip loosens his tie a bit and unbuttons his collar. “Is it hot in here?” he asks.

  I walk around to stand outside the door, trying a few facial expressions until I get one that feels convincingly annoyed, then I walk in. Chip and Dorsey both stand. Chip introduces me.

  “I’ve been watching through that window,” I say to Scud, “and we got this discrepancy wherein our source says you know quite a bit, Mr. Illman. But you tell us you don’t know anything, and we have to figure out who to believe.” I turn to Chip. “What have you charged this guy with?”

  “Mr. Illman came in voluntarily to help us out. He’s not accused of anything,” Chip says. “We’re just gathering information.”

  “Looks to me like you ain’t gathering shit,” I say to Chip. “So, Mr. Illman, we got ourselves a predicament. See, this Phippin kid got himself into some trouble. So first we came down real hard on him, because we figured if we didn’t, the press was going to say the kid got special treatment just because he’s a lily-white, moneyed boy from a connected family. It kinda makes us look bad, you know? But now he’s gone missing, and if he never turns up at all, or turns up dead, know what they’ll say? Here’s a nice kid from a good family who might have gotten into a bit of trouble, and we screwed him; threw him to the wolves. That kinda makes us look bad, too. Am I right? So you know what, Mr. Illman? You’re in a position to do us a huge favor if you know anything, and our intelligence says you might know quite a bit.”

  Scud shrugs helplessly. I step around to face him across the table. His eyes, like the ends of Dorsey’s mustache, are drawn down at the outside as if he’s wearing a wry smile. But since this hasn’t changed since he walked in, it’s probably his natural expression. I suppose, depending on what you do in life, it can either help or hurt to have people thinking you’re perpetually amused. I can’t pigeonhole the guy, and I wish we could just ask him why he was driving eastbound into the city at about eight-thirty Friday morning. Maybe he has a legitimate reason.

  “How old is your stepkid?” I ask.

  Eyebrows rise and lower in thought, nose crinkles, eyes narrow, and for a moment they lose their amused cast. He doesn’t like the question. He looks at the ceiling, lips mouthing his calculations. We wait. “Eight,” he says finally, but his smile isn’t back yet.

  “What the hell,” I say. “I’m just making conversation here, it’s not a trick question or anything.”

  He shakes his head. “I couldn’t remember if he’d had his birthday yet, you know. It’s this month.” The unintentional smile creeps back.

  “Eight-year-old boy, eh? Is he a good kid?”

  “Yeah, he’s a good kid.”

  I can’t think of what else to ask. There’s something in my mind, which, when I focus on it, is the recollection that I’m supposed to act annoyed. I don’t want to act, because I’ve got the beginning of something here. A connection. I had a boy once, I could say, lucky you, Mr. Illman: You married into a whole family, that’s nice. But Dorsey and Chip are relying on me, and here I am, thinking this Scud guy is probably not guilty at all. Maybe he manages rental units in one of those rural town-house clusters west of town; had to go unclog a toilet that morning. Or maybe he was dropping the kid at hockey.

  I get right up into Scud’s face, and I say, “I think you know more than you’re telling us, Mr. Illman. I think you know lots more. So Agent d’Villafranca here, and Captain Dorsey and me, we’re going to make your life as miserable as we can until you see fit to tell us a few things.” I walk out and slam the door.

  “You’re killing me,” Sparky says in the observation room. “That was awesome.” He hums.

  Chip and Dorsey are all hangdog. “Sorry about that,” Chip says.

  Dorsey clears his throat and timidly hands Scud a business card. “So if you hear anything, you’ll give us a call, okay?”

  “Sure,” Scud says with his wry, sorrowful smile. “I’ll call you.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Scud leaves, and then Dorsey leaves. “How about a drink?” Chip says to me.

  “Give me a minute.” I go into the men’s room to call Cassandra, but she’s not in. “Religious persuasion,” I say to her answering machine, “I’m an optimist. Call me when you can.”

  Up in Chip’s office, we open a couple of beers. “To your health,” I say, and we clink bottles. He nods with a satisfied look, amounting to a whole conversation in itself. He’s a year into his divorce, and he hasn’t called me for a late-night soul-baring in nearly two months. For a while he was calling almost every night. Lizzy tells me that Chip now calls Flora sometimes in the evening, so I’m assuming she’s taken over my role of late-night confidant. Truth is, I kind of miss hearing from him. Sitting here with him now, I can see he’s doing well: The end of his belt has gotten longer to where, whenever he stands up, it flops down beside his fly like a vestigial necktie. I’m sure he leaves it long as a way of bellowing to the world, See how much weight I’ve lost!

  “You’re looking good,” I say.

  “I’d like to be an animal trainer,” he answers. “Think of the purity of that interaction; man and beast. No lies. No shadows on the meaning of words. No punishment. Just positive reinforcement and redirection—that’s how they do it, you know. Reinforcement and redirection. I imagine you get into a kind of dance; a blending of the spirits and all that. Doesn’t it
sound nice?”

  It was a bad divorce.

  When I leave, he gives me a hug. This is a new habit that started around the same time as the late-night phone calls.

  • • •

  Monday mornings we have case review in the criminal division. I sit at the head of a conference table with nine other lawyers. I start with the guy at my left. “Whatcha got, Ed?”

  Ed Cashdan works in financial crimes. He opens one of his case files, but before he can speak, Tina Trevor, who works in drug crimes and crimes against children, cuts him off. “I’ve got a hearing in a half hour,” she says. “Let me go first. I’ve got this Tamika Curtis case and—”

  “And you were also working on that Phippin case,” I interrupt, “so let me just bring you all up to speed on this. Zander Phippin is dead.” I brief them on the Phippin murder. “The Bureau is handling this. We’ll stay current. But for now, it’s hush-hush. Breathe not a word. Tina, I’d like you and Upton for a conference with Agent Chip d’Villafranca at noon.”

  “So how did this witness find—”

  “No questions about the witness. The person’s identity and further details are need-to-know only, and you don’t need to know. Because even though this individual really only discovered the body, circumstances could lead to a conclusion that he or she is in a position to identify the perps. Then she becomes the target—she or he, I mean.”

  Tina waits a respectful few seconds, then says, “Now, about Tamika Curtis. She’s the last defendant in a meth enterprise. We’ve got a trial date, and it looks like it’s going forward. Kendall Vance is the lawyer.”

  “Poor you,” I say. “Good luck with Kendall. Have you made an offer?”

  “The best I can,” she says. “We have her, slam-dunk, and I’ve already dropped a level on quantity.”

  “Out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “No. I mean we could make the case for a full kilo, but it’s dodgy, so at this point we’re just claiming half a kilo, which, right out of the gate, saves her a couple of years. The base sentencing level for a half kilo is ninety-seven to a hundred and twenty-one months. Eight to ten years, give or take. The mitigators and aggravators are a wash; we bump her down a couple levels as a minor participant in the enterprise, then bump her back up for obstruction.”

  “Obstruction how?”

  “She offered the whole narcotics team blow jobs if they’d forget about it.”

  One of the assistants whispers, “I should have gone into enforcement,” and we all chuckle.

  “Plus, she was on probation at the time of the current offense, for another two points. This puts her up in the hundred twenty-one, hundred fifty-one months range. Ten to twelve and a half years.”

  “Probation for what?”

  “Theft,” Tina says. “So cutting her some slack here and there, I’ve gotten her down to seventy-eight to ninety-seven months. Basically, six and a half to eight years. That’s a savings of up to four-plus years if she’ll plead. I’m being generous here. But Kendall was all pissed. He called me a fascist and ranted about leaving Tamika’s three daughters motherless. So I guess I’m going to trial, and all deals are off. Maybe I’ll go ahead and make my case for the full kilo. She’ll be in for fifteen years and have Kendall to thank for it.”

  “That probation for theft,” I say. “What did she steal?”

  Tina flips file pages. “Let’s see, it was last December. The officer’s report reads: ‘The store manager noticed suspect carrying her jacket with something concealed inside. The manager approached defendant, who attempted to flee but was quickly apprehended. On examination, her jacket was found to contain the puppy which defendant had been ‘getting to know’ in the pet store’s preadoptive Getting to Know You Room.’ ”

  “She stole a puppy?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Refresh my memory, Tina. What is Curtis’s family status?”

  Tina flips to the front of the file: “Twenty-four years old, single, her father is unknown, she lives with her mother. She has three children by three different men.”

  “Ages?”

  “Nine, six, and three.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” I ask, “what day in December was the great puppy heist?”

  Tina scans the page again. “December twenty-third,” she says. “Why?”

  We’re all silent for a few seconds.

  “Oh, geez,” Tina says, “maybe I’ll give her a pass on that prior.”

  Tina is an up-and-comer. She went to the right law school, got the right grades, and clerked in the right courts. She is ambitious. The convictions she wins, the years in prison she totals up, they’re rungs of a ladder for her to climb into the stratosphere of legal practice. When I hired Tina, she was kittenish in a Meg Ryan kind of way. But she’s taken on a pugnacious and scowly look. Her new hairstyle angles from nearly shorn at the back of her neck into a menacing wedge at her chin. She walks with her hands bunched into fists. I’ve seen this happen to assistants. Some of them never get the knack of maintaining emotional distance. In trying to get convictions, they begin to absorb the rage and sorrow of the victims. It eats them up. I wish I could think of a reason to fire Tina, because I’ve become a bit fond of her. I don’t want to watch the kittenish Tina morph into the embittered prosecutor.

  The idea of  Tamika Curtis stealing a puppy for her kids at Christmas has landed us all in a funk. So to lighten things up, I say, “Tina, here’s a riddle: What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?”

  Everyone stares at me.

  “ ‘Make me one with everything!’ ” I shout.

  The assistants all laugh. Tina laughs. The furrows in her forehead smooth out, and I see the former gentler Tina. Maybe she isn’t too far gone.

  “Brief us on this meth enterprise,” I say.

  “Well, it’s one of Percy Mashburn’s operations. Percy seems to franchise these labs, but we’ve been unable to reach him. Nobody will finger him. And every time we get something against him, he comes in and gives the Bureau lists of everyone else involved and buys himself a walk. In this case, Tamika’s on the bottom. She’s the only one left. The only one facing real time.”

  “Keep the pressure on,” I say. “The only way to break these things is to get the patsies to start talking.”

  “Exactly.”

  After case review, I call The Man Upstairs: the U.S. attorney. My boss, at whose pleasure I serve and who, in turn, serves at the pleasure of the U.S. attorney general, who serves at the pleasure of the president. His office, one floor directly above mine, is a real Taj Mahal. It is a corner office, like mine, but he has appropriated the adjoining office for an anteroom.

  The Man Upstairs (TMU) is my fourth U.S. attorney. I’ve become adept at making myself indispensable because, while it would be difficult for TMU to fire me outright, it would be a small matter for him to ease me back into the ranks of practicing trial lawyers, replacing me with one of his own team.

  “Do you expect much press?” TMU asks after I apprise him of the Zander Phippin matter.

  “If this comes down the way we hope,” I say, “Jonsered will have a very good year.” This is a joke I’ve established between us. Jonsered is a Swedish chain-saw manufacturer. Chain saws cut down trees, trees become paper, paper becomes newspaper, newspapers print news of criminal convictions. Especially convictions in organized crime and drug trafficking. And whenever I can finagle it, TMU gets the credit.

  He chuckles. “Always glad to help the Swedish economy.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Upton Cruthers and Tina come into my office at noon. Upton works organized crime and racketeering. We get Chip on speakerphone.

  “Dorsey’s guys are out in force,” Chip says. “They’re stirring things up. And we’ve got an undercover team surveilling Scud. So far, there’s nothing interesting from the body of the deceased; bullet fragments, but nothing to match them with. We also have some textile fibers; again, useless until we have something to test them agai
nst.”

  Upton says, “So if the witness heard two voices, and we’re assuming one was this Scud guy, any guesses about the other?”

  “I wish,” Chip says.

  “Have you heard from the agents surveilling Scud?”

  “I just talked to one. He gave me several individuals we would like to speak with, but we’re holding off a few hours. I figure as soon as we make a move, it’ll be like, um . . . um . . .”

  The line is silent for a second, so Upton says, “Turning over a rock.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Yeah,” Tina says to Upton, forgetting to talk loud enough for the speaker phone to pick it up, “turning over a rock. I used to do that with my kids.”

  “Your kids?”

  “Third-graders,” she says, switching from a scowly prosecutor into a bubbly third-grade teacher. “When I was teaching, we’d go outside and look for big rocks to turn over, and the bugs all scatter. But you’ve got a few seconds to catch ’em.”

  “What the hell?” says Chip from the speakerphone.

  “Sorry,” I say. “It’s my staff. I’ll fire them the second we’re off the phone.”

  “I’ll hold if you want to do it now.”

  “So summing up,” I say, “your surveillance of Avery Illman, aka Scud, shows promise and has delivered a couple of names, but you’re letting it play out several more hours before moving?”

  “Correct.”

  “And the forensic team hasn’t yet found anything of obvious interest, but it’s still early. So, listen, Tina and Upton are on call for this if you have probable-cause issues or anything else, okay?”

  “How much do we know about this guy Scud?” Upton asks.

  “I got some stuff on him,” Chip says. “I’ll put a file together if you want. Give me an hour. How shall we—”

  “I’ll send Kenny to the FBI building to pick it up,” I tell them. We end the call.

  Upton stands and takes one slow-motion stride, then swings his leg in an impressive arc, the sole of his well-shined shoe just tickling the carpet on its way through the vertical and up to where it hovers briefly at eye level. He stands watching for a second, then his arms shoot up for the field goal, and he prances around in a circle. “Prediction,” he says. “We are about to rain down some major shit upon the disrupters of our urban utopia.”