“Oh, Mr. Carl, you have a message,” Ellie said as I passed by her desk. “Mr. Slocum called.”
I stopped quickly, put a hand on one of my bulging jacket pockets, turned my head, and searched behind me as if I had been caught at something. “Did he say what he wanted?”
“Only that he needed to talk to you right away.”
I thought about the FBI in the van outside the old woman’s house and the inevitable phone call once they found out who I was. “That didn’t take long,” I said.
“He emphasized the right away part, Mr. Carl.”
“Oh, I bet he did.”
When I reached my own office, I closed the door behind me, sat at my desk, and carefully pulled out the chains and the broaches, the heavy mass of jewelry, letting it all slip deliciously through my fingers into a small, rich pile upon my desk. In the bright light of the fluorescents, it all seemed a little less brilliant, tarnished, even. I supposed the old lady wasn’t into polishing her son’s ill-gotten gains. Just then I had no idea how much it all was worth, and I wasn’t intending to swiftly find out either. The last thing I needed to do was draw attention to the jewelry, being that my legal title to what was undoubtedly stolen property could only be considered dubious. No, I wasn’t going to let anyone, not anyone, know about what the old lady had given me.
There was a light tap on my door. I quickly shoveled the swag into a desk drawer, closed the drawer with a thwack.
“Come in,” I said.
It was my partner, Beth Derringer.
“What’s up?” she said.
“Nothing.”
She looked at me as if she could see right through my lie. She tilted her head. “Where were you this morning?”
“Doing a favor for my father.”
“A favor for your father? That’s a first.”
“It surprised me, too. An old lady wants me to negotiate a plea deal for her son.”
“Do you need any help?”
“Nah, it should be easy enough, or would be if the FBI wasn’t suspiciously interested in the guy.”
“Did we get a retainer?”
“Not yet.”
“And you took it without a retainer? That’s not like you.”
“I’m doing a favor for my father.”
“That’s not like you either. What’s in the drawer?”
“What drawer?”
“The one you slammed shut before I came in.”
“Just papers.”
She stared at me for a moment to figure out if it was worth pursuing, decided that it wasn’t, which was a relief, and dropped down into one of the chairs in front of my desk.
Beth Derringer was my best friend and my partner and, as my partner, was rightfully entitled to one half of the retainer given me by Zanita Kalakos. I wasn’t pulling a Fred C. Dobbs here, I had not been driven mad by the sight of gold and was intending to stiff Beth of her fair share. But Beth’s ethics were less flexible than mine. If she knew what Mrs. Kalakos had given me, and the likelihood of from where it had come, she would have felt obligated to turn it all over to the rightful authorities. She was that kind of woman. I, on the other hand, figured the jewelry had been stolen long ago from the rich, who had already been reimbursed by their insurance companies, and so saw no reason to fight against my Robin Hood tendencies. Isn’t that how he did it, take from the insurance companies and give to the lawyers? So the jewels and chains would stay safely and secretly in my desk drawer until I found a way to turn them into cash, and I already had an idea of just how to do that.
“I have a client coming in this afternoon that I’d like you to meet,” she said.
“A paying client?”
“She paid what she could.”
“Why don’t I like the sound of that?”
“Should we maybe discuss the retainer we didn’t get from your old lady?”
“No. Okay, go ahead. What’s her story?”
“Her name is Theresa Wellman. She hit a bad patch and lost her daughter.”
“Misplaced her, like under the bed or something?”
“Lost custody to the father.”
“And this little bad patch that caused such an overreaction?”
“Alcohol, neglect.”
“Ah, the daily double.”
“But she’s changed. She cleaned herself up and got a new job, a new house. I find her inspiring, actually. And now she wants at least partial custody of her daughter.”
“What does the daughter want?”
“I don’t know. The father won’t let anyone talk to her.”
“And we’re involved why?”
“Because she is a woman who has changed her life and is now fighting for her daughter against a man with power and money. She needs someone on her side.”
“And that someone has to be us?”
“Isn’t this why we went to law school?”
I glanced down at my desk drawer. “No, actually.”
“Victor, I told her I would do what I could to get her daughter back. I’d like your help.”
I thought about it for a moment. I didn’t like this case, didn’t like it one bit. I mean, who the hell can tell which is the best parent for a kid? Let someone else take the responsibility. But Beth hadn’t been happy in our practice for a while. She hadn’t said anything directly to me, but I could see the discontent in her. I was increasingly worried that she would end the partnership, find something more fulfilling, leave me in the lurch. I didn’t think I could keep the firm going all on my own, and, truthfully, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. The only thing that would keep me trying was the utter lack of anyplace else to go. So if helping out in one of her pity cases was a way to keep my partner on board, then I didn’t have much choice.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet her.”
“Thank you, Victor. You’ll like her. I know it.” She paused for a moment. “There’s something else.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It is.” She looked away with embarrassment. “I’m being evicted.”
“That is ominous. Playing your rock and roll too loud?”
“Yes, but that’s not it.”
“I’m sure we can scrape up a partnership distribution to get any back rent paid.”
“It’s nothing like that. I’m actually up-to-date in my rent, believe it or not. It’s just that the real-estate market has picked up. The landlord wants to gut the building, redo each floor into luxury lofts, and sell them off at obscene prices. I’m in the way.”
“What about your lease?”
“It’s up in a month. He mailed me an eviction notice.”
“When?”
“I got it a month or so ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it then?”
“I don’t know, I guess I hoped if I ignored the letter the whole thing would go away. Except it didn’t go away, and the date’s getting close.”
“What about the other tenants?”
“They’re all getting ready to leave. But I don’t want to leave. I like my apartment, and I couldn’t bear to move. Is there something I can do?”
“We can fight it. There are all kinds of screwy landlord-tenant laws on the books. We’ll tie them up for months, bollix the whole condo deal, make their lives an utter misery. Making the lives of corporate types an utter misery is half the fun of being a lawyer.”
“What’s the other half?”
“I haven’t found it yet. Give me the eviction letter and I’ll file something.”
“Thank you, Victor,” she said as she stood. “I feel better already.”
“Don’t worry, Beth. It will be fine.”
At the doorway she turned and gave me a wan smile. “I knew I could count on you.”
Poor thing, I thought as she stood there with a hopeful expression on her face. She was going to have to find herself a new place.
When she closed the door behind her, I opened my desk drawer again, just to get another peek. Then I screwed up my coura
ge and called Slocum.
“You have stepped in it now, Carl,” said K. Lawrence Slocum, the chief of the Homicide Division at the district attorney’s office.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.
“The FBI called our office in a panic, trying to find out who you are. According to the FBI, you apparently visited a Mrs. Kalakos this morning.”
“Did I?”
“Don’t be cute, it’s unbecoming.”
“How are they so certain it was me?”
“How are they certain? Let me count the ways. First, they took a picture of you from the surveillance van. Then, while you were inside, they found your car and ran your license plate. Then they traced a cell-phone call that had sent a team of uniforms to check on their stakeout.”
“Oh.”
“What are you up to, Carl?”
“Nothing, really. I’m as innocent as a lamb.”
“Why do I suspect that you are lying?”
“You had a difficult childhood, you never learned to trust.”
“What did you and the old lady talk about?”
“Attorney-client privilege prohibits me from disclosing the details of my conversation with Mrs. Kalakos.”
Pause. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“But I would be interested in hearing what you know about her son.”
“Charlie the Greek?”
“No need to start throwing around derogatory ethnic labels, Larry.”
“That’s his name in the gang. Charlie the Greek.”
“Gang?”
“The Warrick Brothers Gang. You ever hear of it?”
“No.”
“A local crew, named for its leaders, two psychopathic icemen.”
“Icemen?”
“Jewel thieves. They were quite sophisticated, responsible for a plague of robberies and burglaries, including a series of spectacular jewelry heists from upscale mansions running from Newport, Rhode Island, to Miami Beach. They were stationed here and in Camden, which is why they were on our radar.”
“They still around?”
“The brothers are out of commission, one is dead, the other in prison in Camden. But there are still some members floating around that are active in all kinds of criminal activities in the Northeast part of the city. We can’t seem to put them away.”
“But why is the file on homicide’s desk?”
“It seems every time a witness shows up who might have something to say, the witness ends up floating in the river or dead in his car. One guy opened his trunk and got a faceful of steel from a rigged shotgun.”
“Nasty.”
“The whole investigation, including the murders, is still open.”
“What was Charles Kalakos’s connection?”
“He was one of the original gang members. He was arrested on a host of charges fifteen years ago, but he somehow made bail and disappeared before trial. We haven’t heard a peep from him since.”
“That doesn’t explain why the FBI is so hot on his trail.”
“There’s a federal prosecutor name of Jenna Hathaway who is apparently out to clean up the Warrick gang once and for all and who believes Charlie the Greek is the key. But my sense is that this Hathaway, for some reason, is hot to get a hard charge on Charlie to squeeze something else out of him, something not related to the Warrick case at all.”
“That’s peculiar.” The little prank? “Any idea what?”
“None, but she gives me an uneasy feeling. There’s too much interest here for it to be small-time. Anyone caught between Charlie and this Jenna Hathaway is going to get crushed, trust me. You might want to think twice about taking up this loser’s cause.”
I thought about what he was saying. Then I opened the drawer and peeked in.
“To tell you the truth, Larry,” I said, “I don’t have much choice.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“I’m only doing this as a favor.”
“A favor?”
“To my dad.”
He laughed. “Now I know you’re lying.”
When he hung up, I took another look at the plunder in the drawer. Yowza. This must be how Trump feels when he stands at the window in his penthouse apartment, with his model wife by his side, and surveys all the buildings he owns. Maybe not, but to me it still felt pretty damn good. I now had a better idea of where the jewelry had come from: the mansions of Newport, seaside getaways in Miami Beach. Yeah, I knew where it had come from, and I knew where it was going, too. I searched my key chain for the desk key, found it, and locked the drawer tight.
Now all I had to do was figure out how to bring sweet Charlie home. Nothing I couldn’t handle, I figured, which was not the last time in that case I would be very, very wrong.
4
“I’ve changed, Mr. Carl,” said Theresa Wellman. “You have to believe that.”
But why? Why did I have to believe that? Because she was pretty and well dressed and her print dress fit tight around her hips? Because her trim hands were wringing one another with sincerity? Because her eyes and voice were pleading with me to believe every last word out of her delicate little mouth? All very compelling, I must admit, but not enough to assuage my qualms.
I had grave doubts, just then, about the possibility of anyone past adolescence truly changing in this world. We were, all of us, prisoners of our character, unable to alter our true inner natures. When we said we had changed, what had only really changed was our luck. Put us in the same circumstances as our previous folly and suddenly we’d revert, all of us, to what we were. That’s what I believed, which meant I didn’t quite believe Theresa Wellman.
“I made mistakes in the past, I admit,” she said. “But I have changed, and I am my child’s mother, and she belongs with me.”
We were in our rather ratty conference room. Beth was sitting beside Theresa Wellman at the table, leaning forward, offering support. I was standing in the corner with my arms unhappily folded. I suppose you could say we were playing good lawyer–bad lawyer, except we weren’t really playing.
“Why don’t we start at the beginning, Theresa,” I said. “Tell us about your daughter’s father.”
“His name is Bradley Hewitt. I met him when I was twenty and I was working in a Toyota dealership. He came in looking for a Lexus, chatted with me while he waited for the salesman, and called me up that afternoon. I wasn’t supposed to go out with a customer, but I couldn’t say no. He was tall, handsome, he had money and liked to spend it. It was thrilling just to be with him.”
“So it was his inner beauty that attracted you.”
“I was young, Mr. Carl, and I had never before dated anyone like him. The way he spoke, the way he dressed, the way he touched me, both gentle and firm. He was older, he knew things, he wore suits as expensive as a car. At the time I was living at home, sheltered by my parents and fighting them tooth and nail. Bradley seemed like a way out. He set me up in a nice place, helped with the rent, and things were wonderful for a while, until they weren’t anymore.”
“That’s usually how it goes,” I said.
“We partied almost every night with his friends, drinking, dancing. We took fabulous vacations with his old college buddy. His crowd were all big spenders. Champagne and lobster and, yes, drugs, but not crazy drugs, nothing in excess. Just fun. Bradley was fun and charming, except when he was angry and violent. I didn’t see much of that side of him at first, but after a while it became more and more apparent. Occasionally, angry at something, he would lash out, sometimes verbally in front of everybody and sometimes, when we were alone, with the back of his hand.”
“Did anyone ever see him hit you?”
“No, Bradley was too careful for that. And he was always sorry afterward. He was quite charming when he apologized.”
“What kind of business is he in?”
“He’s in construction, but not like a construction worker. He wears suits and makes deals with the help of his college f
riend and gets projects off the floor. He earns a piece of the entire project for putting things together.”
“Nice job if you can get it.”
“It had its ups and downs. Whenever he had a business problem, I learned to stay away from him, or I’d be putting makeup over the bruises for a month. I was still having fun, living like I had never thought I could live, with a man I thought I loved even though he wasn’t always good to me. And that’s the way it was with us, calm and settled and a little dangerous, until I got pregnant.”
“How did Bradley react?” said Beth.
“He didn’t really react much at all. He just expected me to get an abortion. He set up the appointment, took care of the money. But I didn’t want an abortion. I wanted the baby.”
“Why?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“To keep Bradley around? To keep his money flowing? Why did you want the baby, Theresa?”
“I don’t know. It was a baby. I had always wanted a baby and wasn’t willing to get rid of this one, like an old sweater or something.”
“Okay,” said Beth. “I understand.”
I looked at my partner. Did she really understand that kind of longing? Was that the reason she looked despondent these days, or was I just being a jerk to think the explanation was that easy?
“Go ahead, Theresa,” said Beth.
“He tried to convince me, he yelled and even hit me some, but I was determined, and there was nothing he could say. When he finally realized it, he just stopped.”
“Stopped trying to convince you?”
“Yes, and stopped seeing me, too. He stepped out of my life. I was good, I quit drinking, I took care of myself, and with my family’s help I had a beautiful baby girl, Belle. And for a while we were happy.”
“Did Bradley pay child support?” I said.
“He used to give me some money for Belle now and then, when I called and complained, but it wasn’t enough. I was still in my place, which was more than I could afford, and I had a hard time showing up at work while taking care of the baby. When they decided to let me go at the dealership, things got tougher. I didn’t really have many skills. So I did the most desperate thing I could think to do.”
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