Tower of Babel

by Michael Sears

  “But anybody can just come along and claim this?”

  “No,” Ted said. “That money belongs to someone. In this case, this Miller lady, if she’s alive.”

  “So how do you get paid?”

  “More research. I track down the person who’s owed that money and convince that poor soul to pay me a cut for getting him or her some cash he or she didn’t even know was there. Once I’ve got their signature on paper, I petition the court for release of funds and wait. It takes about six months for the judge to sign off and the checks to get cut.”

  “You get the court to hand over the money? You’re a lawyer?” Lester asked.

  “No.” Ted still hated answering that question, and he got it all the time. “I used to practice, and if you ask around, someone will tell you why I don’t anymore. But no. I write up the contracts, the petition to release the funds, all of that, but I’m not a lawyer. My landlord is a lawyer. He also does my taxes. I pay him a few bucks to file the paperwork, and if he has to show up in court, I pay him a few bucks more, though I usually show up with him.”

  “Sweet. You’re a fixer. A finder. What’s the catch? There’s got to be one; it’s too easy.”

  “Right,” Ted said. “The catch is that a lot of people don’t want to be found or can’t be found, or when I find them, they tell me to get lost or just say ‘Thanks’ and go get the money on their own.”

  “But you must do all right.”

  Ted could see that the million plus was still having an effect on Lester. A change in venue was in order.

  “Let’s take a break.” After a half hour hunched over the terminal, Ted needed to stretch—and he wasn’t about to share his financial status with this stranger. “We’ll meet down in the file room in ten minutes. Next thing we need to do is get the case file. The physical file. It’ll tell us who all the players are and whether I have a chance of getting paid.”

  Ted made a quick trip to the bathroom and stopped at the water fountain when he came out. He was bent over swallowing cool water when a tall woman with severely cut blonde hair walked out of the women’s restroom six feet away. She strode past quickly—impatiently—without taking notice of him. But Ted recognized her, his whole body tensing. Jacqueline Clavette. She hated being called Jackie. The woman who was married to his ex-wife. She had survived the firm’s purge years ago—the purge that had none too gently ushered Ted out the door. The first step in his fall. She still worked there, handling estates, trusts, and real estate. Her wedding four years earlier had made the front page of the Style section in the Sunday New York Times. jackie and jill, had run the banner over the picture of the two women holding hands while posing in front of Turtle Pond in Central Park with Belvedere Castle in the background. Both brides wore white. Both were stunning.

  Ted watched her disappear down the hall. There was no reason to be surprised at her presence in the courthouse; she was a lawyer, one of scores, no doubt, in the building at that moment. But seeing her there while he was researching a case that had her name on it felt like more than happenstance. At some point, if he was going to continue following this case, he would have to have a conversation with her. The thought threatened to give him a migraine.

  Jackie Clavette was a tough, infighting opponent. He’d seen her in action. He needed to know a good bit more before confronting her.

  -7-

  Ted beat Lester to the file room by a long five minutes. Lester smelled like he had spent at least part of his break sucking on another breath mint. As it turned out, there was no reason to hurry. The line at the counter was barely moving, and the clerks seemed slower than usual.

  “Hey, people! Listen up, everybody. I’m gonna say it again. No more than three case files per request. We are shorthanded today—everybody gets the flu on the same day for some reason.” The speaker was a bearded clerk who must have weighed in at 350 plus.

  “They’re supposed to let you take five at a time, but it’s not worth pushing it,” Ted said. “The clerks will never be your friends, but it’s very easy to become their enemy.”

  Lester nodded. “I’ve dealt with them before.”

  “So you know.” Ted was becoming more comfortable with the decision to have Lester work for him. The man was quick and confident.

  Ted filled out the request form with name, address, and the case file number, and they shuffled along together as lawyers, litigants, and investigators of all stripes took the blue-covered files from the clerks and retired to the long tables to examine them. The records of every civil case in the borough were held in this room. If you were suing, being sued, divorcing, or representing a party involved in any of the above, you could find all the pertinent details here. A cross section of the demographics of Queens was present, some people with hope, some with desperation, and many with boredom.

  When these dogged searchers found, or despaired of finding, the nuggets of information hidden in these court reports, they dropped the files into a wire box at the end of the counter where another clerk returned them to the stacks. No files left the room unless a judge requested them. Two guards sat on stools at the door checking briefcases as people exited. The process was neither efficient nor satisfying. It had not been designed to be either. The stacks were a cemetery for hopes, dreams, disputes, mistakes, and failures. A museum of unhappy events that, more often than not, had left some poor soul in tears.

  Finally, Lester and Ted were first at the counter.

  “Edward Molloy. Do I know you?” the bearded man asked, reading the top line on the request form, beginning the foot-dragging dance of the practiced bureaucrat.

  “Everybody knows me,” Ted said, handing over his driver’s license. “I used to date Paris Hilton.”

  Lester leaned in and whispered conspiratorially: “Ask him about the tattoo.”

  The bearded face scrunched up in distaste. “That’s okay,” the clerk said. “I’ll pass. Wait here.” He made a note of Ted’s driver’s license number and lumbered off to retrieve the file.

  “Tattoo?” Ted asked.

  “First thing that came into my head,” Lester said with a shrug.

  “Well, it got him moving.”

  “All part of the service.”

  The clerk was back in two minutes.

  “File’s out,” he said, handing back the form.

  “Really?” Ted was surprised. “Can you see if it’s signed out to a judge?” If a judge had requested the file, it could mean that someone else was already working the surplus-money angle. He needed to see the file to be sure, but there would be no urgency. Judges and their clerks could sit on files for months—or years—with no repercussions.

  “We’re a little busy, my friend,” the clerk said.

  “If it’s out to someone here in the room, we’ll wait for it.”

  The man blew out an aggrieved sigh, causing his whiskers to flutter in sympathy. “Give me a minute to look it up.”

  Ted explained to Lester, “Sometimes the judge’s clerk requests a file for one reason or another. Usually not on a case that’s already gone to auction, though. That would be unusual unless—someone has beaten us to this one. We wait and see.”

  The clerk returned with a thin blue folder. “Got it. Someone must have just turned it in.”

  Ted turned to see who was leaving the room. Two black-frocked Hasidim were being given the full treatment by the guards. A young woman in jeans and a Mets jersey waited her turn. None of them looked familiar. Ted realized that the person he was looking for might already be long gone; the clerks were running well behind.

  He took the file to a table, surprised at how thin it felt—and soon found out why.

  “Look at this!” Someone had sliced out page after page from the court record. He ran a finger over the cut. It was sharp and fresh. Razor sharp. You couldn’t get a knife past the metal scanners at the entrance, but a small, thin blade
might pass if it were tucked into a briefcase. The guards upstairs looked for weapons, not miniature tools.

  The damage was not random. The court record of motions and proceedings had been gutted. It was impossible to determine from the remaining pages what the main points of contention had been in the case—if any. The names of all participants, other than the presiding judge, the plaintiff, and the defendant, were gone. The Honorable M. Mandel, New York Bank v. Barbara Miller. No lawyers for either side. No information at all. What was left was a cover sheet, a description of the properties involved, and a copy of the tax map for the area with some scribbled numbers in one corner.

  “Someone sat right here in the records room, with a couple of dozen lawyers surrounding him, two uniformed guards and who knows how many other citizens looking over his shoulder, and took a razor blade to this whole file.”

  Lester’s face did not register the same outrage that Ted felt. Lawyers, even the defrocked ones, maintained a reverence for documents that was not always shared by other members of society.

  “This is wrong,” Ted said. The arrogance of the act floored him. Distracted him.

  “I can see there’s pages missing, but what’s left must tell you something,” Lester said.

  “Yes,” Ted said, forcing patience. “Only it’s bare bones. I can see that this woman, Barbara Miller, was sued for nonpayment of taxes by New York Bank, the proxy for the city. What we don’t see is who represented her, what motions they made, the judge’s rulings, and all the meat that might explain why Miss Miller lost her property.”

  “This is that thing Richie was all in a lather over?”

  There were other copies of the file. The lawyers for the bank would have a complete record. It wouldn’t require much more research to find out who they were, but they would never hand over a file containing client information to Ted. That left only the lawyer for this Miller lady. And the one thing Ted remembered from his momentary glance at Richie’s copy of the file was the name Jacqueline Clavette. And he had just seen her leaving the building.

  The vandalism was bizarre. Criminal. Was he being played? Conned somehow? The thought that finding Lester had been much too easy—too perfect—came again.

  “He was working this on his own,” Ted said. “What are you thinking?”

  Lester shrugged again. “People talk. Everybody knew Richie was on to something big.”

  Lester was holding back—Ted could feel it. He looked down at the useless papers and slammed the folder shut. “Hand this in. We’re out of here.”

  The bottom line was that Ted was in violation of his own rule. The big ones were always a waste of time.

  Lester put a hand on his arm. “Hold up. We can’t turn in the file like this. You’ve got to report it.”

  Ted stood. “I want nothing to do with this. This case was bogus from the get-go. It’s cursed.”

  “You have to report it. Otherwise you’re the last one to have the file. If somebody else takes it out, you get the blame.”

  Ted sat down again. Lester was right and had saved him from possible embarrassment—at the least. A fine and a harangue from an outraged judge would have been equally as likely. “Of course. Thank you.” Ted relaxed, his fears of Lester’s true intentions fading—for the moment.

  “Yup. Be cool. Go up there and complain, but don’t get up in their faces about it. See if you can find out who had the file last.”

  Ted thought it through. There might be a way to finesse it. “And what will you be doing?”

  “I’ll see what I can get out of the guards. We can meet up outside.”

  The heavy bearded man wasn’t at the counter when Ted stepped up, cutting the line and braving the outraged looks. A harried-looking woman in a turtleneck and winged eyeglasses gave Ted the kind of scrutiny made to make a mendicant feel like a sinner. It worked. He considered abandoning the plan and simply leaving the file in the returns box.

  “Watcha got, hon?” Having won the stare down, she softened ever so slightly.

  He showed her the butchered file. “The other guy gave me this a couple of minutes ago. Who would have vandalized records this way? Who had it out last?”

  “Oh, jeezy-peezy. I don’t have time for this today.” She turned away and shouted over the filing cabinets: “Hey, Jimbo! Get out here. We got a problem.”

  The bearded face appeared around the end of an aisle. “What?”

  “Come look at this!”

  “What?”

  “I said come heah!” The accent may have been Queens, but the authority was regal.

  The man shuffled up to the counter. “What?”

  “Show ’im,” the woman ordered.

  Ted held out the damaged file.

  “What’s this?” Jimbo asked.

  “You just gave me this file,” Ted said. “Look at it. I want to know who had this out last. This is obscene.”

  Jimbo turned to the other clerk. “I didn’t let this go out this way

  “Oh, for the love of Pete. Go find the paperwork.” She faced Ted and fake smiled a brush-off. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We’ll take care of it.”

  Ted took a strengthening breath and fake smiled in return. “I’d like to know who was responsible.” The line behind him was beginning to grow again.

  “We don’t give out that information,” the woman said. “Who’s next?”

  He was saved by the return of the bearded clerk, who held a stack of request forms. “Give me a minute. It’ll be in here.”

  The woman’s attention was split between dealing with Ted and the twentysomething title investigator with an eyebrow ring and studs in his cheek. She glared in frustration while Jimbo sifted the forms.

  “Here it is,” Jimbo said, pulling one out and placing it on the counter.

  She shot a hand out and covered it. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, stressing the last word to remind him who was in charge. “I told you, we do not give out that information.”

  But Ted had already read—upside down—the name on the file request form: Barbara Miller.

  -8-

  “What did you find?” Lester was waiting in the hall outside.

  Ted didn’t want to talk there. He was spooked. “Let’s get outside first.” He needed space to think. It wasn’t merely the vandalism that had him reeling; it was the audacity of it and what that might mean in terms of scope. Someone had taken a great risk, one that could be easily discovered, if not connected to the perpetrator. That someone was protected. And protection meant power.

  Lester took the lead going up the stairs, climbing them two steps at a time. Ted followed, matching his urgency as they sped out past the police and metal detectors in silence. The small group of protestors on the sidewalk chanted, “Keep the light! Kill the spike!” They carried signs: stop the tower. An earnest young woman with a wild mane of red hair blocked Ted’s way and thrust a flyer at him.

  “The developers are at it again, and we are the ones who will pay. Your neighbors are being evicted to make room for luxury condos. Again!” She was fired up and speaking much too fast, but she had a voice like a young Lauren Bacall. Or Barbara Stanwyck. Ted almost stopped to hear her say something else. A voice like that worked directly on the more primitive parts of his brain.

  He forced himself to keep going. Beautiful women were a distraction at the least and potentially dangerous. He stuffed the flyer in his pocket.

  “Hey. Where’re you going?” she asked.

  “Sorry, I don’t speak English.” Her mouth dropped open. He stepped by her before she could close it. “Let’s go, Lester.” Ted took his elbow and propelled him down Sutphin Boulevard.

  “If you’re not part of the solution,” she yelled after him, “you’re part of the problem!”

  A bodega near the corner was doing a good business in Powerball tickets. A half-dozen belie
vers were queued up for the window on the street. The faces, though ranging in color from pale white through various shades of tan and brown to deep black, all shared the same expression—stony acceptance of defeat combined with the anxiety of hope. Ted passed them and pulled Lester aside outside a stationery store that specialized in leases, deeds, wills, legal forms.

  “Where did you come from?” Ted asked, pushing Lester back against the building. “Who the hell sent you to me?” Ted didn’t know exactly what to believe at that point, but finding Lester was no coincidence.

  “Take your hands off me,” Lester said, though after the initial push, Ted had kept his hands at his sides.

  “Answer me,” Ted said, leaning in and over the smaller man.

  “Nobody. I heard about this deal Richie was working, and I wanted in. That’s it.”

  “Who tipped you to it?”

  “Are you kidding? Richie bragged to anyone who would listen. He was finally hitting a homer, he said.”

  Ted backed off. It made perfect sense. That was exactly what Richie would have done; he had always talked a better game than he played. And Lester? Ted couldn’t blame him for having the balls to insinuate himself once Richie was gone.

  And Lester had already shown he had potential. Ted needed him. He made a decision.

  “I’ll pay a hundred a day—that’s a lot more than Richie ever cleared—and if there is a payout at the end of this, I’ll see you get a cut. Don’t ask me how much, because I don’t want you wasting time calculating it in your head. Odds are, we work this and end up with nothing. Are we good?”

  “You pay expenses.”

  Ted smiled. Exactly what he had told Cheryl. “Agreed.”

  “We’re good,” Lester said. He stepped away from the wall and shrugged the tension out of his neck and shoulders. “And one thing. You don’t ever put hands on me again. Clear?”