Bearing Witness

by Michael A. Kahn

  That’s when it clicked.

  I opened my eyes.

  The Hyatt.

  Union Station.

  I was dumbstruck.

  “Rachel?” he said. “Are you still there?”

  “Uh, fine, Stanley. I’ll meet you there.”

  “You mean at the Hyatt?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m more than happy to come to you.”

  “No. The Hyatt.”

  “Well,” he said with a chuckle, “if you insist. Let’s meet in the Grand Hall. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “I’ll see you at ten.”

  “Excellent. You won’t regret it, Rachel.”

  I hung up and stared across the table at Benny. It was as if we were the only two in the room.

  “Nu?” he finally said.

  “Union Station.”

  He frowned. “So?”

  “Judge Wagner wants corroboration.”

  It took him a moment. “Ah,” he said with a smile. But the smiled faded. “You think it’s still there?”

  I shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Why not?” He shook his head. “Because they renovated the whole damn building.”

  “Not that part.”

  Benny leaned back with a frown and crossed his arms over his chest. “After all those years?”

  I smiled wearily. “You have any better suggestions, Professor?”

  The others were watching us closely.

  Benny studied me as he pondered the question. Finally, he gave me a wink and grinned. “What the hell, eh?”

  I nodded. “My point exactly.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The Grand Hall at Union Station is surely the most dazzling room in St. Louis. Carefully restored to its 1890s splendor, it now serves as the lobby and lounge of the Hyatt Hotel. There are sweeping Romanesque arches and a glorious barrel-vaulted ceiling six stories overhead. The walls and ceiling are decorated with gold leafing, bas-relief, Numidian marble from Africa, Vert Campagne green marble from France. Above the main entryway is a stained-glass mural depicting three seated women as symbols of the three great U.S. train terminals of the 1890s—New York, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Framing the stained-glass mural is the Arch of Whispers, so named because a soft whisper at one end of the huge marble archway can be heard at the far end.

  On other nights, normal nights, pleasant nights, I’ve sat in one of the easy chairs sipping a glass of wine, usually with a friend or a date, and imagined the wonder on the faces of railroad passengers of the 1920s as they stepped into the Grand Hall for the first time. But not tonight. Tonight, the Grand Hall could have been an abandoned airplane hangar, a rusted Quonset hut, a vacant warehouse. I had other things on my mind.

  It was ten o’clock. Benny and I sat facing each other across a low cocktail table in the middle of the huge room. There was a lounge pianist playing old show tunes off to one side. Standing alongside the piano was a jowly businessman in his sixties all gussied up in a blue blazer, gray slacks, and fresh tan. He kept the beat with a lit cigarette as he beamed down at the blonde at his side. She was young enough to be his daughter and seemed to be having trouble working up much enthusiasm for Mr. Wonderful or for the Oklahoma! medley on the piano. Scattered on couches and love seats throughout the room were small groupings—business travelers, conventioneers, sleek young professionals on dates. Benny and I looked out of place in our jeans and sweatshirts. I had on hiking boots, Benny his green Converse high-tops. We’d dressed for the task facing us after the meeting with Stanley Roth. Instead of a briefcase, I’d brought a backpack weighted with equipment.

  ***

  The waitress arrived with my cranberry juice and Benny’s Anchor Steam.

  “Does Ruth have a settlement number?” Benny asked.

  I shook my head. “Not after the tapes.”

  “What if she could clear a million?”

  “That’s exactly what I asked her. She said no.”

  Benny took a sip of his beer. “No to a million bucks? Does she realize that if Catherine excludes those tapes, the settlement value is going to plummet big time?”

  “I explained it all to her. She understands.”

  Benny glanced over and said, “Ah, here comes the bagman.”

  Stanley Roth was approaching from the lobby area of the hotel, moving with grim determination in his dark business suit and Burberry overcoat.

  “Hello, Rachel,” he said in his smooth, confident voice.

  I nodded. “Stanley.”

  Turning to Benny, Roth said, “And you must be Benjamin Goldberg.” He reached down to shake Benny’s hand. “I’ve heard fine things about you at the law school.”

  The strained chitchat ended when the cocktail waitress arrived to take Roth’s drink order, a sparkling water with a twist of lime. After she left, he turned to me and leaned forward, focusing those blue eyes like lasers.

  “I’ll get to the point, Rachel. Beckman Engineering has determined to put this case behind it and move forward. Rather than haggle and play games, I’ll give you my settlement authority. Under the qui tam claim, your client is entitled to as much as thirty percent of any recovery. My client is willing to stipulate to that percent.” He paused. “Beckman Engineering is prepared to pay three and a half million dollars to settle the case. Your client’s thirty percent share is one million fifty thousand dollars. In exchange, your client would sign a confidentiality agreement and turn over all documents and tape recordings. That way we’ll achieve genuine closure. Both sides will be able to walk away from this lawsuit and move forward without any baggage.” Another pause, this one underscored with a firm smile. “Well, Counselor? Do we have a deal?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “No?” He tried to remain affable. It was an effort. “Isn’t that a decision for your client to make?”

  “It is, and she has. We spoke earlier tonight.”

  He studied me, his eyes narrowing. “Are you saying that Ruth Alpert is prepared to walk away from a million dollars?”

  I nodded.

  After a moment, he leaned back in his chair with an annoyed frown. “Okay, let’s hear the counteroffer.”

  “Don’t have one.”

  His face reddened. “That’s—that’s absurd. How can you reject a million dollars without a counter?”

  “Because we know your client won’t agree to one of our terms.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Which is?”

  I gazed at him calmly. “A signed confession.”

  He snorted. “For God’s sake, Rachel, are we back to my crazy uncle’s paranoia?”

  “You mean your murdered uncle?”

  He shook his head in irritation. “I am surprised at you—and disappointed. You’re trying to turn this into a crusade—some lofty battle between good and evil. Well, that’s not what it is. It’s just a lawsuit, young lady—an ordinary commercial lawsuit, and one of dubious merits at that. I suggest you get down off your white charger and start considering your client’s best interests.” He leaned forward, his eyes flashing. “We are offering a million dollars. A million dollars! My God, how can you possibly—how can you responsibly advise her not to accept it?”

  “I didn’t. She made the decision on her own. Ruth Alpert has a lot more guts than you and your client ever imagined.”

  “Guts?” he said caustically. “More like greed. Foolish greed.”

  I shook my head. “You still don’t understand, do you, Stanley?”

  He stood up and glared down at me. “I understand plenty,” he snapped. “I understand that your client is going to be bitterly disappointed. I understand that even if you somehow pull off a sleazy emotional victory before the jury, your client will never see a penny of it. Beckman Engineering will fight you at every level of the judicial system, and they’ll fight
that war with resources you couldn’t even begin to imagine. We will grind her into the ground.”

  “You know what, Stanley? They had a name for the Jews who helped the Nazis run Auschwitz. They called them capos.” I stood up and moved in close, dropping my voice. “You’re nothing but a capo in a three-piece suit.”

  He stared at me, the vein in his temple throbbing. “I feel sorry for your client, but not for you. Never.” He turned and strode off.

  A moment later the waitress arrived with his sparkling water.

  ***

  “You really think so?” Benny asked.

  We were standing in the darkness behind the fountain sculptures across the street from Union Station. The frolicking mermaids and spraying river gods were frozen beneath a dusting of snow. We were facing the front of Union Station, known as the Headhouse. It covered two city blocks.

  The Headhouse was modeled after the walled medieval city of Carcassonne in southern France. There were massive turrets and a heavy limestone facade and Romanesque arches and a maroon Spanish tile roof. No less an authority than Frank Lloyd Wright had described it as “a noble structure—full of vitality and dignity.”

  At the eastern end of the Headhouse a clock tower soared 230 feet into the night sky. The illuminated clock facing us showed the time as 11:05. Rising just above the slanted roof of the clock tower was a slender, peaked turret—a minaret that seemed to sprout out of the northwest corner of the tower.

  As we stared up at the clock tower and the little minaret, Herman Warnholtz’s words echoed in my head. I told him if anything bad ever happens to me, I got a man with orders to turn ’em over to the cops. Those records were my life insurance policy, you see? Except I don’t need no life insurance anymore.

  “But why there?” Benny asked.

  “Because that’s where his brother worked. He was a janitor at Union Station. You heard what he said. He said his brother knew all the nooks and crannies, the best places to hide things.”

  We studied the structure in silence.

  “It’s been, what,” Benny said, “forty years? What are the chances?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Jesus, Rachel, how the hell are we supposed to get up there? It’s like a goddamn fortress.”

  He was right. From where we stood, Union Station looked more like a medieval castle in France than a train station in Missouri. But if it looked like a castle, perhaps it was built like one, too, with lots of corridors and passageways and cubbies. I surveyed the upper levels of the Headhouse as I tried to picture the inside of the structure. It had originally contained—in addition to the Grand Hall, the hotel, and the restaurant—dozens and dozens of specialty rooms: ticket offices, waiting rooms, telegraph and telephone centers, offices for various railroad companies. I could see lots of darkened windows, which probably meant lots of rooms and corridors beyond the public areas.

  A pair of massive turrets flanked the main section of the Headhouse. They stood nearly as tall as the steeply slanted roof. Set in the curved outer walls of each turret was an ascending spiral of tall, narrow windows, which presumably tracked a spiral staircase inside. I thought of the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the Grand Hall. With any luck, the spiral stairs reached that high. I’d read somewhere that the ceiling of the Grand Hall, so solid and substantial in appearance from below, was actually a separate structure suspended from the roof. If so, that meant that there had to be access to the crawl space above the ceiling for maintenance of the suspension cables and stained-glass skylights.

  The clock tower was at the far left end of the main structure. Although there was no public access to it, someone had to have access to it, if for no other reason than to perform routine maintenance on the clocks. If we could find our way into the passageways above the public areas we might be able to find an entrance to the clock tower.

  Earlier tonight, after the call from Stanley Roth, I’d toyed with the idea of contacting Jonathan to have him try to get a search warrant, but I decided not to. I didn’t know whether a tape recording of a dead convict constituted probable cause for a warrant; nor did I know whether Jonathan would be tainted if I sought his advice on the subject. If there was something important concealed in that clock tower, I didn’t want to give any criminal defense attorney a basis to exclude it on a technicality. If it was really up there, Benny and I could bring it to the law enforcement officials in our capacity as private citizens.

  I turned to Benny. “Let’s check it out.”

  ***

  The best place to check it out was from the arcade, which was an arched passageway that overlooked the Grand Hall one floor above the main level. Although the time was nearly midnight, we weren’t as conspicuous as I’d feared. The promise of dramatic views of the Grand Hall had lured others up to the arcade. There was a trio of businessmen ahead of us, an older couple in tourist attire across the way, and an elderly man with a cane behind us. We tried to blend into the sparse night-owl crowd, although a close observer would have noted that we were concentrating on scenery far different from the other strollers. Specifically, we were searching for doorways and passageways.

  Eventually, we peeled off from the others to head west down one of the corridors above the hotel registration area. There were doors along the way. Many were marked NO ADMITTANCE, all were locked. I wasn’t discouraged. This was a big structure, and the folks who’d normally be moving around the back corridors were maintenance workers and members of the building trades, not security specialists and Secret Service agents. We saw painting equipment—tarps, two stepladders, paint cans—along one hallway. Another had a large floor polisher leaning against the wall. I knew that it was just a matter of time before we found an open door.

  I was right. As we moved along a dimly lit corridor at the western edge of the Headhouse, we found a stairwell door propped open. Benny took one of the flashlights out of my backpack and handed it to me. I led the way. The top of the stairs opened onto a narrow hallway with several doors. The first door on our left was unlocked. Inside was a tiny room filled with cleaning supplies and mops. The second door on our right was also unlocked. Inside were wall lockers and a deep sink. We took another flight of stairs up—this one much steeper—and opened the door at the top.

  There was a noticeable drop in temperature as we stepped into what at first appeared to be an enormous, unfinished attic. The air was chilly and musty. I paused to get my bearings. A wooden walkway ran the entire length of the room along the wall to our left. To our right was an immense object that seemed to swell up out of the floor in the middle of the room like the sloped, ridged backside of a huge sea serpent—so massive that it blocked our view of the other side of the room. The nautical image was reinforced by the twenty or so steel cables tethered to it like hawser lines, and by the series of narrow catwalks, one every twenty feet or so, that ran up the side of the thing from the wooden walkway. I pointed the flashlight overhead and moved the beam along the steepled underside of the roof. There were cables anchored up there as well, which confirmed what I had assumed. We were standing above the Grand Hall, and the massive thing suspended to our right was the top side of the barrel-vaulted ceiling.

  We moved down the walkway along the entire length of the ceiling, pausing to note that the stained-glass “skylights” had powerful fluorescent bulbs suspended above them that mimicked sunlight for those in the Grand Hall below. At the far end of the room we passed through a doorway, down a long flight of stairs, along another corridor, down another flight of stairs, and into what appeared to be the dilapidated remains of a old ballroom. The floorboards were dusty and warped, the walls were exposed brick, and there were rusted support beams standing at odd intervals throughout the area. I swept the flashlight beam around the room slowly, trying to get my bearings. We had started west of the Grand Hall, moved east over it, and were now even farther east. We had to be getting warm.

  We wal
ked to the far end of the room and went down another set of stairs.

  “Over there,” Benny said.

  I aimed the flashlight to where he was pointing. The beam illuminated an archway cut into the side wall. I moved toward it cautiously. As we got closer, I could make out a metal stairway through the arched opening.

  “I think we found it, Benny.” I could hear the excitement in my voice.

  We stopped in the doorway, and I pointed the flashlight upward. The metal stairway zigzagged along the interior walls like the stairs on a park ranger lookout tower.

  I swept the beam across the ground. “Yech.”

  There were dead pigeons on the floor—dozens of them. Some obviously dead for years—just feathers and bones. Others more recent. I picked a careful path through the corpses over to the ladder. Benny followed.

  I pointed the beam upward again.

  “What is that?” I asked, squinting.

  About two-thirds of the way up the tower there was a large roundish metal object that filled up most of the interior space. It was difficult to make out details this far away with just a flashlight. “Some sort of water reservoir?”

  “Maybe,” Benny said. “Could be this thing used to double as a water tower for the building.”

  I lowered the beam and stared at him for a moment. “Well?” I was grinning.

  He tilted his head back and studied the stairs for a while. Then he looked at me and winked. “You have a fascinating law practice, Counselor.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  It was indeed a water reservoir—rusted and neglected, long since abandoned. The stairs snaked around it, and the air above it was much colder than below. We climbed past narrow windows, more like slots cut in the thick walls. The wind whistled through them. I paused to peer out of one. It looked north over Market Street and the immobile fountains across the street. Another quarter turn up the stairs, another open window, this one looking west over the maroon tiled roof of the Headhouse.

  Behind me, Benny was gasping. “Time-out,” he wheezed, slumping onto a stair. “Christ, my heart sounds like a tympani drum.”