by Reason of Sanity

by Gene Grossman

  The five seconds it takes her to make her mind up seems like five minutes. She finally agrees.

  “Yeah, what the hell. Will they do it on a Saturday? I don’t want to see one of our M.E.s lose hours of valuable time from an already overloaded workweek.”

  “Not to worry. A Saturday it is. I’ll have my office make all the arrangements and we’ll have the autopsy place make an appointment to pick up the merchandise.”

  “Okay Peter, but no funny stuff. I’ll have one of our guys looking over their shoulders. And say hello to Suzi for me.”

  Good, it’s a done deal. She went for it. I don’t know why I’m so happy. Maybe because it’s probably the only small victory I’ll ever get in this crazy loser of a case. Nevertheless, the wheels have now been set in motion.

  The private autopsy place coordinates their schedule with the county morgue and an off-duty medical examiner and the examination is set for the Saturday after next. They invite me to attend. I explain that the true definition of a lawyer is ‘a college student who can’t stand the sight of blood,’ and I respectfully decline. That adds ‘autopsy’ to my list of ‘do not go to,’ events, along with bullfights, opera, hockey games and ballet.

  When we were married, Myra was always bugging me to take her to the opera and to see a ballet. It was always me who was backing out for one reason or another. This time, it’s her turn. When I asked her if she was going to the autopsy, she told me she couldn’t make it – she was having her hair done that day. Me too.

  The thought of having over a week with nothing to do is too tempting. Usually, when I try to take only an hour or two off to do some reading, some emergency pops up. I’m afraid to think of what could happen if I actually plan on taking a whole week off. Maybe an earthquake or some other natural disaster.

  While I’m sitting up on the boat’s flybridge trying to imagine what situation will destroy my week off, good friend Stuart calls and provides the answer to my question. He desperately wants me to meet him at the Pacific Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. Vinnie’s been arrested.

  16

  I

  meet Stuart, who has already had Fradkin Bail Bonds post the five thousand dollars to get Vinnie released. When Vinnie comes walking out to the lobby he’s dressed in a two-tone gray police costume, complete with one of those over-the-shoulder leather straps that attaches to his belt, like a school crossing guard. He’s also wearing a badge and a holster and there’s a stain on the front of his trousers.

  Something tells me that I don’t want to hear this story, but it seems unavoidable. Stuart starts. “Remember that great idea I had to convert an old Brinks truck into a funeral armored thing?”

  I think back a ways. Yes, he did mention that crazy idea. “You mean the ‘He’s taking it with him’ armored truck for stingy dead guys?”

  “Yeah Pete, that’s the one. Well, I promised Vinnie a hundred for each funeral he did and today was our first job.”

  “Okay, no problem with that, but where did the uniform come from?” “Oh, you like it huh? I thought it would be nice touch, so I went to a military supply house and bought the whole thing for Vinnie. He’s supposed to be the ultimate armored car guard.”

  “What about the empty holster on Vinnie’s belt?”

  “That’s one of the problems.”

  At this point the story looks good enough for me to make an offer to buy the screenplay rights. Little do I know that it gets even better. Vinnie tells the next part.

  “Well Mister Sharp, we get this nice funeral job. All I gotta do is be at the funeral home at one in the afternoon, put the truck in the procession and go with them to the cemetery, about five miles away.”

  “That sounds straight enough Vinnie. So how did you wind up in jail?”

  “Well, Stuart told me that the air conditioning in the truck wasn’t rebuilt yet, so I brought along a cooler full of colas. When we got to the cemetery, the guy directing traffic had us pull up so close together, that I wasn’t able to get the truck out of there and had to wait until the whole funeral was over.

  “Anyway, I had about five cokes and really had to take a leak, but there was no toilet in sight.”

  I have a weird feeling what’s coming next. Vinnie proves me right.

  “So, I walked a couple a hunnert feet away from where all the people were and saw a real big tree behind a bush.”

  “Don’t tell me Vinnie, I’ve already seen this movie. You were peeing against the tree, weren’t you?”

  “Well yeah, but that wasn’t the problem. All of a sudden there were about ten cops surrounding me with their guns out. They shouted that I should put my hands up, so I did. That’s when I soiled these pants. I was right in the middle of peeing. I’m sorry, Stu, I’ll pay for the cleaning.”

  “Vinnie, where did all the cops come from?”

  Stuart has the answer to that one. “The dead guy was an older cop who was the watch commander at one of the local precincts. He died of a stroke, so there were plenty of cops at the funeral. His ex-wife was cut out of the will and she was mad at the deceased. She’s the one who hired us.”

  Vinnie has the rest of the answers. “Yeah, there were a lot of cops there. I guess one of the cemetery’s groundskeepers saw me peeing and didn’t know I was the armored car driver, so he told the cops that there was a guy with a gun behind a tree. He fingered me.”

  As usual, whenever Stuart and Vinnie are involved, there’s a fantastic story. I don’t think that Jimmy Breslin or Dave Barry could create anything better than this. Maybe Donald Westlake, but he’s the only one.

  “Vinnie, do you have anything against regular bathrooms? You know, if a person gets arrested for petty theft, the first time it’s usually just a misdemeanor. If they get arrested for it a second time, it can be charged as a felony and it’s called ‘petty with a prior.’ In your case, we’ve already had one case with you peeing on a tree. This time, they might be justified classifying it as peeing with a prior.”

  They are not amused. Vinnie is charged with one count of carrying a weapon, and one count of lewd conduct. In mitigation, Stuart tells me that the gun isn’t real. It’s one of those replicas they sell that look and weigh like the real thing. I remind him that in most of the catalogs I’ve seen, they don’t ship those things into the state of California. Stuart tells me that he had a friend out of state get it for him.

  I don’t know what to tell him on this case. At first I think that maybe I can get the gun charge dropped because it isn’t a real one, but it’s also a violation to expose a replica. California Penal Code section 417 covers the drawing and exhibiting of any deadly weapon, whether it’s a loaded or unloaded gun, or any other deadly weapon. They call it ‘brandishing.’

  In Vinnie’s case, the only weapon he was exhibiting wasn’t his gun, but he was still wearing one.

  There’s even a law covering security guards that specifically prohibits the carrying of an “…inoperable, replica, or simulated firearm.”

  The bottom line is that police are really down on people who have replica guns. The only thing that Vinnie has going for him in this case is that the replica was holstered and not being used in any attempted crime, unless ‘peeing while armed’ is now against the law. I’ll have to check the Internet for that one. The only break we’ve gotten so far is that the Sierra Club hasn’t been bringing any actions against Vinnie for his treatment of trees.

  If a criminal attorney can get to the City Attorney before charges are filed, he can sometimes explain away what’s been interpreted as criminal behavior. I don’t know if it’ll work in this case, but the facts are so outrageous that I have to give it a try. I call an old classmate who works at the City Attorney’s office and make an appointment to come in and meet with the head deputy in charge of filing complaints. The police were nice enough to provide me with a copy of the ‘incident’ report, so I’ve got more than just my word to offer as to exactly what went down.

  I also get Stuart to sign an affidavi
t to the effect that he bought the costume and replica weapon and hired Vinnie to wear them both – and supplied him with the cooler full of cokes. Next, we take some pictures of Vinnie in uniform standing next to the armored truck and I get Stuart to have a port-a-potty installed in the truck. A copy of the receipt for its purchase and installation is included in my presentation package. All of this, along with the argument that because the truck can be mistaken for a real armored vehicle, Vinnie should be allowed to wear the holstered replica as a crime deterrent, should get me either a laugh, a dismissal, or both. Vinnie suggests adding a picture of the tree to my presentation package… I pass on that one.

  Walking through the City Attorney’s office, package under my arm, at each desk I pass, someone is smiling at me. Is my fly open? Would that deserve a smile? When I get to the Chief Deputy’s office, I see that they’ve got six people in there. They invite me to sit down at the conference table. I think I’ll keep my mouth shut for a minute or two and let them start the meeting for me.

  The chief starts. “Peter, this is an interesting case that the Pacific Division detectives brought to us. Do you think we should file on it? And if so, what charges would be best here?”

  I know what they’re all in there for – to have a good laugh at Vinnie’s expense. And because I’m there on his behalf, the laugh will be on me too. I didn’t practice law for over twenty years to be humiliated like this, but it’s difficult to see how to avoid it today.

  “Gentlemen, I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to come in here and make a fool out of myself and I’m sure you’re all waiting for a good laugh at the expense of my client and me, but all I have for you is some statistics on deaths of armored car guards. If you want to laugh about that, then please be my guest.

  “As for my client, he was just working for a living. I noticed on the way in here that there were several restrooms out in the hall. My client didn’t have one, so that’s another reason for you to laugh. If you can stop laughing long enough to give an honest, hard working guy a break for taking a leak when he had to, then I’d be grateful. If not, then I’ll just have to go to court and face a jury with twelve hard working stiffs, just like my client, who found himself in an embarrassing position while at work and took care of it the only way he could.

  “As for the brandishing, the weapon wasn’t real and it was holstered – not waved or exhibited in a menacing way. The only time he exited the vehicle was when he felt that nobody was watching him, so I don’t think any fair-minded person would consider that to be a rude and threatening exhibition.

  “I’ll leave all my data he re for you guys to go over and if you decide to file on this case, I’ll be very disappointed. In my past twenty years of doing business with this City Attorney’s office, I’ve found it to be a responsible, professional group of lawyers who don’t look forward to wasting the taxpayers’ money with frivolous prosecutions. I hope you’ll continue to uphold that reputation.

  “If you don’t have any questions, then you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got a capital case coming to trial next week and there’s a lot of preparation work to finish.”

  I stand up and wait for a few seconds. The chief speaks. “Thanks for coming in Pete, we’ll see what we can do on this one.”

  I thank them all again and make my escape, feeling that my integrity is still intact. I don’t hear any laughter coming from the room as I exit their department. No smiles from the people at the desks either – it wouldn’t surprise me if they had the meeting piped through the public address system, as a form of office entertainment. I hope they were disappointed.

  Because the Drago and Blitzstien cases still are connected in my mind, I’ve got to figure out why. The sequence of events is simple to see. First, Mike Drago slips and falls in the bank. Second, he’s brought to the hospital. Third, the bank gets robbed. Fourth, Mike Drago gets killed by Harold. What’s wrong with this picture? Let’s see – we have a slipand-fall, a hospital admittance, a bank robbery and a murder. If this were a puzzle of some sort, I would separate out two pairs of happenings: the slip-and-fall and the hospital… then the bank robbery and the murder.

  I already know about three of the four items in our chain of events. The only thing I don’t know anything about is the bank robbery. The fact that it took place in the same bank where Mike Drago slipped and fell, and on the same afternoon, is just too coincidental to be random. I send a dog-mail message to the kid, telling her to pull some strings and get a copy of the police report on the bank job. The local cops handled it for the first day until the Feds stepped in, but I should still be able to get copies of reports, security videotape, interviews, or anything else that our locals have.

  It takes a few days, but the kid comes through and I’m given a bunch of pages from the police files that smell like chow mein. Hmmmn… I wonder what restaurant could have been the ‘drop zone’ for this stuff.

  From the police reports, witness statements and notes taken from viewing security cameras outside the bank, it looks like this gang is composed of two or three guys who make no getaway. That’s interesting. If you’re going to pull a bank robbery, I would think it’s nice to have a getaway strategy – some way to take the fruits of your crime away from the scene of the crime. But not here. No getaway, no getaway car, no getaway driver, no nothing. The bank robbers and their loot simply disappear into thin air.

  I start to compare the police notes on the other three robberies that this gang pulled off since starting their career a month or so ago. None of the banks were in freestanding buildings of their own. Each bank was on the first floor of a large office building.

  Okay, that can answer one question. They didn’t have to drive away – they just melted into the scenery of the building. Maybe they used the elevator and went up to an office. Wrong. The witnesses had them carrying sacks of money out of the bank, but lobby cameras in each building show nobody getting into any elevator carrying anything like that.

  We’re still at square one. No wonder so many crooks get away with things. It’s tough for us armchair detectives to sit here and figure how they did it.

  Rex Stout created Nero Wolfe, the original armchair detective. He rarely left his brownstone and instead sent his legman Archie Goodwin out to do the fact gathering. Wolfe would then summon all the usual suspects to his home, and at the end of the story in true black-and-white-movie style, he would conduct the ‘show down,’ during which time an antagonistic police inspector would stand there and watch while Nero Wolfe explained his solution to the mystery and named the culprit.

  Unfortunately I don’t have an Archie Goodwin. I do have a Jack Bibberman, but he doesn’t even come close to Archie’s talent level. Jack has to write things down. Archie had a photographic memory. Archie carried a gun; Jack carries a cellphone and a small pepper-spray, to protect him from dogs when he serves papers on people. The comparison could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I’m no Nero Wolfe and Jack B. is no Archie Goodwin.

  Therefore, without the pairing of such talented detectives, it’s unlikely that I’m going to solve these bank robbery cases. The phone rings. It’s Stuart, in another panic. Vinnie’s been arrested again, but not for peeing on a tree. The Feds have him and they think he pulled off the bank robberies!

  17

  T

  he FBI has a nice suite of offices in the West Los Angeles Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard and Sepulveda, just off the San Diego Freeway and Stuart is waiting for me in the lobby as I get off the elevator on the tenth floor.

  “Pete, this is terrible. They think Vinnie did the bank robberies and they’ve seized my armored truck. I think they’re going to arrest me too. I don’t know what to do.”

  There’s no calming him down, so I just let him babble on for a minute or so and then walk away, go over to the receptionist, show my State Bar card and ask to speak to the senior agent in charge of the bank robbery detail.

  After a few minutes, Special Agent Bob Snell comes out to greet
me. If you look up ‘FBI Agent’ in the dictionary, you should see a picture of him. He’s about six-foot-three, full head of straight silver hair, conservatively dressed in a dark suit with a white button-down shirt, shoes with laces, and he’s got a square jaw with a dimple right in the middle of it. If you saw him on the street you would immediately place him as either an FBI agent, politician, or an airline pilot. He asks me to follow him back to his office. Stuart starts to follow us, but when he gets cold stares from both Agent Snell and me, he retreats to a chair in the lobby.

  O nce in his office, Snell tells me that the only information he’s at liberty to disclose is that Mister Vincent Norman was arrested outside of a supermarket with a bag of stolen currency in his hand. He was putting it into the rear of his own armored truck. Snell was surprised at the level of sophistication that Vinnie achieved. He said that he’s never encountered a bank robbery gang with their own armored truck.

  There are only two kinds of people in this world those who think that Vinnie is sophisticated and those who have already met him.

  I’m shocked, but not like Claude Rains was shocked when he found out that there was gambling in Humphrey Bogart’s club in Casablanca. What really surprised me was his thinking that Vinnie was sophisticated. I mean, I like him a lot, but of all the words in the English language, the one that just doesn’t apply to Vinnie is ‘sophisticated.’

  I tell him tha t there just has to be some mistake here and let him know about Vinnie’s ‘peeing with a prior’ incident. It doesn’t work. He assures me that their case is solid and if I’m representing Vinnie, he’ll send me copies of the report. I ask to see my client and Agent Snell tells me that he’s still being processed, but I can visit with him tomorrow at the Federal Detention facility on Terminal Island. That’s a nice little facility the feds have near San Pedro, a few miles from the Port of Los Angeles.