Scores

by Blutrich, Michael D. ;

  Each morning when presented with this choice, I was confronted with the frenetic split personalities with which I live my existence. Did I feel like being a lawyer or a businessman? Which came first that day: contracts and trials, or tits and ass?

  Quickly deciding the morning’s action would best lie to my right with the law firm, I turned and opened the doors to the plush reception area. Noting that Lillian Montalvo, our longtime paralegal and receptionist, was busy on the phone, I just waved and turned left to pass through a second set of security doors.

  “Michael, can you wait a moment, please?” Lillian called after me.

  I reactively removed my hand from the doorknob. When Lillian disconnected her call, I said, “And how was your weekend?”

  “Just fine thanks, but listen, Mr. Seavey asked that you drop by and see him the moment you arrive. He sounded worried.”

  “Oh, OK.” I hesitated. “I might as well do that now before I get swamped.”

  I diverted to a door directly behind Lillian’s desk. She reached under the lip of the desk for an internal release switch and, when I heard the electric buzzing tone, I pushed my way through the door into the anteroom beyond.

  The “Seavey” section of the firm was physically isolated. All of the desks in the space were empty this day, signaling the staff hadn’t yet arrived or weren’t arriving at all. In fact, the entire wing seemed dark and deserted but for the unmistakable booming voice of Robert Seavey. I poked my head into his office and, when I caught his attention, he gestured for me to sit.

  As I waited for him to conclude his call, I carefully watched the elderly bespectacled gentleman who’d been so much a part of my law firm’s glory days. Back in the early eighties, Bob Seavey had been firmly established as one of Manhattan’s true real estate moguls, quietly owning more residential apartment buildings and commercial properties than anyone suspected or he would ever admit. In the crowning moment of his civic service, he was appointed as chairman of the massive downtown Battery Park City housing project located across from the World Trade Center.

  When my law firm was created, after Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo lost a gubernatorial primary to New York City Mayor Ed Koch, it was planned that Cuomo would join the new firm as its senior partner. But then, in a quirk of fate, Cuomo stunned the experts and was elected governor, leaving his new firm without its “rainmaker.” Some quick shuffling of partners took place and, with the governor’s blessing, his son Andrew soon joined the firm in his stead.

  Concerned about the firm’s viability because of the disconcerting youth of its partners, Cuomo persuaded Seavey to resign from the Battery Park City appointment and become a part of the firm, or as Cuomo aptly put it, “to put some snow on the firm’s roof.” The arrangement had worked well for years, but now Seavey was the only remaining vestige of the Cuomo legacy.

  As Seavey replaced the receiver on the phone, he stood up stiffly, grabbing his cane, and without a word, motioned for me to follow. The usually gracious and gregarious gentleman maintained silence, and I had a sinking feeling something was terribly wrong as I followed him out the front door. In all the years of our relationship, Seavey had never acted mysteriously.

  Upon entering the outer hallway, he turned right for a few paces and then left into the service elevator loading area. He picked a spot and turned.

  “Michael, so sorry about all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. When I arrived this morning, one of the maintenance guys pulled me over to a corner of the lobby. He told me that workmen were in our space one weekend in mid-June going into our ceilings with wires. They were very secretive and he didn’t recognize them. And worse, he never got authorizing paperwork from the landlord as he usually does. He couldn’t tell me before because I’ve been away. Do we know anything about this?”

  I was, to put it mildly, stunned. Trying to appear composed and unconcerned, my mind started revolving with unhappy possibilities. Was this the FBI investigating my personal problems in Florida over an insurance fraud? Could it be the state police looking into mafia activities at Scores? Any chance it was just our own project? I made eye contact with Seavey. “This is news to me, Bob. I guess I’ll call the landlord and check out what they know.”

  “I would. It’s just the maintenance guy seemed very antsy, almost like he knew more than he was saying but was afraid to speak his mind. Also, who would be working over a weekend for double-time union rates?”

  I nodded. “All right. Let me call the landlord and check with Andrew. He did mention he was going to network the computers between the law firm and Scores. Maybe that’s all it was.”

  “Michael,” Bob interrupted. “When you talk to the landlord, don’t mention our inside guy. Let’s keep the information flowing. I don’t like the way this smells for you guys.”

  When I finally reached my private office, I was surprised to find the secretarial station deserted. Opening the office door, I discovered my longtime secretary, Casey Crawford, seated behind my desk, busily reorganizing multiple piles of stacked papers. Despite the appearance of mountainous desktop madness, Casey and I had spent years creating an organizational flow that blended my legal, business, and personal matters into a filing system only the two of us understood. It was ugly, but it worked.

  “What’s up, kid?”

  “Just the usual. Working on mail.”

  “Anybody call yet?”

  “Let’s see,” Casey feigned mulling for an answer. “Are you kidding? Everyone called. And of course, Mike Sergio called screaming about Andrew bouncing another Scores check to his son. He’s driving down for dinner to straighten it out.” Picking up a thick stack of telephone message slips, she added, “Here’s the whole pile.”

  I frowned and, as was my wont at such times, gazed at the ceiling in an impotent cry for heavenly assistance. “Case, just leave it all; it’s gonna take me all day. Is Andrew here yet?”

  “Haven’t seen him or heard any noises from the other side. Want me to check?”

  “Nah. What you can do for me is call the landlord’s office. Ask them if they authorized or know anything about any construction or wiring work in our suites on a weekend in mid-June.”

  Casey nodded and looked back quizzically as if expecting more information about the odd question. Receiving none, she simply retreated.

  Engrossed in reviewing the incoming mail and phone messages, I jumped when an unwrapped Cuban cigar landed in the middle of my desk. When I looked up, Andrew was sitting in one of the red leather chairs facing me. We each wore our customary variation in dress: I was in a Brioni suit, Brooks Brothers shirt, Hermès tie, and black wing-tipped shoes; Pearlstein in a striped button-down Polo shirt, tan Dockers, and suede penny loafers.

  “I hear you bounced another check to Steve Sergio.”

  “Not true,” Andrew countered laughingly. “I stopped his last check to drive him crazy. There’s plenty of cash in the account.”

  “Why do you do this, Andrew? The guy’s father is the senior Gambino mobster assigned to Scores and now we’ll have him here for hours going nuts. Do we really need more aggravation?”

  “It’s not aggravation, Michael, it’s fun. Just watch what I do. Someday you’ll come to understand there’s pleasure in sly, meaningful revenge. Also, if you bounce checks every once in a while, people are so happy when their checks clear, they never ask for a raise. In the meantime, let me enjoy myself.”

  I stood up. “Whatever. You have fun and I have Mike Sergio in my face relishing the thought of ripping out your entrails. Deep down you must know you’re completely nuts. Take a walk with me.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Maybe.”

  We silently walked through the small private bathroom that connected our offices, through Andrew’s office, and out the Scores reception area into the hallway. We made an immediate right turn and then a left through a metal fire door into a cavernous stairwell.

  We assumed our normal positions: Andrew seated on an upward-bound stair, me pacing o
n the landing. Adopting attorney mode, I meticulously recounted my conversation with Seavey. Andrew responded that he knew absolutely nothing about wiring work in our ceiling over the past month.

  “I think it’s a problem,” he quickly added. “Seavey’s right, it doesn’t pass the ‘smell test.’ But we need to find out.”

  “I thought we could hire one of those spy stores on Lexington Avenue to check the offices for bugs.”

  “I know someone in the business.”

  “Great!”

  We lumbered back to Andrew’s office, and he dialed the number of his “debugger.” He placed the call on speakerphone and recounted the day’s disturbing surprises.

  After listening to the tale, his friend, identified only as Daniel, commented, “I can’t believe there could be a legal wiretap of a law firm. Do you understand how rare that would be? How much proof it would take?”

  “We agree with you, Daniel,” I quickly answered. “But it could also be an illegal intrusion.”

  “Or it could be nothing,” Andrew added.

  Nodding my head in hopeful agreement, I stood and picked up a phone in the corner of the office and dialed Casey’s extension. “Case, did you get through to the landlord?”

  After listening to her reply, I hung up the phone, nervously placing my hands in my pockets. “Casey says the landlord claims to know nothing about any recent work in our space.” I looked up and stared at Andrew. “So much for nothing.”

  Daniel jumped back into the conversation. “I’ll get over there as soon as possible.”

  “Not as soon as possible,” Andrew shot back. “Today.”

  By three in the afternoon, I’d plodded my way through the day’s barrage of phone emergencies and mail. I was about to place another call when my door opened and Andrew came bounding through followed by a man in a brown suit who was sweating profusely.

  “Mike. Meet my buddy Daniel.”

  As I extended my hand, Andrew continued as he took a seat, “I explained to Daniel what else we’ve learned and what we suspect. He was on another job but he came over without equipment just to take a look around for us.”

  Daniel cleared his throat. “Andrew tells me the law firm space begins here in your private office, and the Scores space starts on the other side of the far wall. So let’s start here, in the direct middle. I’ll go up into the drop ceiling. Now I won’t find anything really small or well hidden, but if there’s something up there that obviously shouldn’t be, I’ll spot it. And if I find something, we’ll follow where it leads. And if I don’t, I’ll be back tomorrow with my men and electronics.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Andrew said.

  “OK, if you guys will leave, I’ll start poking into the ceiling and see what we got.”

  Less than fifteen minutes later, the conference room intercom speaker chirped with Casey’s voice. “Are you in there, Michael?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, I think you two better come here now.”

  Reaching my office, I found Daniel standing on a desk in the middle of the room, his head hidden in the ceiling. Andrew and I gingerly walked around a black object, covered in tape, ominously dangling from a hole directly above the door.

  As we formed a semicircle around the hanging package, Daniel jumped down from the chair. He was covered in sweat and dust.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Daniel took a deep breath. “It’s a surveillance camera, the only one in the ceiling. I’ve also found at least three microphones up there. I can’t be 100 percent sure, but it looks like more microphones are running into the office on the other side of the wall.”

  “This is unbelievable,” Andrew muttered in obvious shock. “How does it work?”

  “Actually, it’s an old piece-of-shit camera nobody uses anymore. It needs electricity and, as far as I can tell, they’re tapping into the telephone system for power.” As he was speaking, Daniel stepped out of my office. “The camera wire and the telephone wires are running together down this hallway toward the firm’s front door. Probably running to the central telephone box. Where is that?”

  “Follow me,” Andrew said as he set off down the blue-carpeted road.

  All the telephone wiring for the floor was gathered in a closet in the common area directly outside the law firm’s front door. As our group arrived at the closet, I stopped short. “Wait a second. The closet is always locked and only the landlord’s people have keys.”

  “Not today,” Daniel said as he pulled the closet door fully open. Peering into the closet, he took on the air of a teacher on a field trip. “You guys see these wires here?” he asked, pointing to a group of batched wires entering the closet from the right side of the ceiling. “Those are the law office’s normal telephone connections. Now you see the thick blue wire coming along with the group? That’s the wire running from the camera in your ceiling.”

  “Are they tapping the phones?” I asked.

  “Nope. It seems like they just followed along the phone cables as a guide for power.”

  Pearlstein stepped into the closet. “Daniel, where do the wires go from here?”

  “Don’t know yet,” he answered. “Let’s look.” He studied the wires for a minute. “OK, they split off here and go into the wall there.” Daniel stepped out of the closet and pointed to a thick blue wire jutting out of a hole above the door. The wire snaked up the wall to where it intersected with the ceiling, and then headed around the corner toward the elevators. “We have to find out where that goes.”

  The chase was on. With the air of a desperate scavenger hunt, the group followed the blue cable. It went past the elevators, around another corner to the fire stairwell, and disappeared through a hole above the stairwell door.

  Andrew opened the door to the stairs and stepped onto the landing. “It tracks this way.”

  Following Andrew through the door, we stood in silence staring at where the thick blue cable reappeared through the wall and tracked up the staircase toward the upper reaches of the building. Every twenty feet or so, the wire was tacked to the wall with plastic ties and nails.

  I turned to Andrew. “Can you believe we were sitting in here this morning and didn’t notice any of this?”

  “I noticed it. I just didn’t think about it.”

  Several floors later, panting and running on pure adrenaline, our group reached the end of the stairs at the apparent top floor of the building. The blue wire whisked through a punched hole at the top of the wall and Daniel opened the door to continue the hunt.

  When I stepped through, I was awed by the unexpected sight before me. The top floor was as large and expansive as an airplane hangar. Heavy equipment was everywhere, machines I’d never seen before, but not a soul to whom we could pose a question.

  Our shoes echoed through the space, and we squinted to follow the wire as it reached high up into the indoor sky. After traveling at least seventy feet straight in the air, the suspended cable traveled to the center of the hangar, where it turned left and traversed the space on its way to an outer wall.

  Sprinting to the end of the space, struggling to keep an eye on the blue cable dangling overhead, we ended up at the building wall, where the cable made a sharp downward spiral and disappeared through a hole above a munchkin-sized door.

  “This is the final destination,” Daniel said, as he twisted the doorknob to reveal the truth. But the door didn’t budge and we all stared at a large padlock barring our entry.

  “Let’s just break the door down,” I reacted.

  “Not yet,” Andrew countered. “Daniel and I will go see the landlord. Michael, please wait here.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  How Did I Wind Up Here?

  Once I was alone, I realized I’d become disoriented and desperately tried to digest the day’s extraordinary events. My mind was spinning, and I hugged a wall to steady myself. I glanced at the locked door one last time and pulled a wooden crate over to sit down. The gravity of my situation had started to sink
in. No matter who had covertly slipped into my life to spy, no matter the motive or the gambit, any sane man would have recognized life was never going to be the same; it had tilted beyond the skill of any healer. As I sat down on that filthy crate, a part of me had to have known control was slipping away. I was being carried against my will into unwelcome waters, waters that would bludgeon and dismantle my world. The obvious rush of reality dictated that the puppeteer had become the puppet, although it would take some time to discover who was now pulling the strings.

  My remaining rational self wanted to begin focusing on crucial issues: Who’s doing this? What’s the best counter-strategy? Are we in a fight or is it time to turn and run? Can the mafia help us or are they responsible?

  But I couldn’t bring a single one of these questions into focus. I was neither prepared to acknowledge the patent depths of my problems nor accept there would be no wiggle room to preserve the status quo. So instead of charging into the reasonable, my thoughts slipped into the comfortable, in this instance, how I’d ended up sitting there, waiting for someone to break down a locked miniature door so I could uncover our spy.

  My first law-related job was as a summer intern in the office of the Manhattan district attorney, but my dream of being a criminal lawyer and a part of our system of justice quickly died on the vine. I hated the work, hated the system more. Hundreds of cases each day on the calendars of dozens of courtrooms; thousands of faces; no time, no justice, no humanity. After a while, everyone seemed like a victim—even me. The thrill of personally knowing every arrested prostitute in Manhattan quickly began to lose novelty.

  After graduation from Georgetown University Law Center the next year, I quickly changed direction and accepted employment with a small midtown law firm specializing in textiles and arbitration. To be honest, if someone had whispered to me I would be spending my life fighting over yarns and fabrics instead of changing the world, I probably would have applied to journalism school.