Firm Ambitions

by Michael A. Kahn

  Dan-not-Dan nodded his head rapidly. “I am most displeased with you, lady. My boss was quite extremely displeased at myself because of your talking me into this access that I permitted to you. No one without a warrant are his strict orders to me.” He turned to Detective Green. “I am sorry to report that this injunctive includes you, Your Highness.”

  Detective Green and I were at the entrance to Mound City Mini-Storage. Dan-not-Dan was on the other side of the gate. He adamantly refused to let us in without a warrant.

  “Sorry to bother you, little buddy.” Detective Green looked over at me and shook his head. “I’m out of here, lady.”

  I followed him back to his unmarked car. He went around to the driver’s side while I stood on the passenger side.

  “Let’s get a search warrant,” I said.

  He turned to me and took off his sunglasses. He was of medium height, with sleepy green eyes and a one-sided smirk, which he was giving me. “Pardon?” he said deadpan as he brushed back his thick brown hair. He looked like one of the upperclassmen you’d find on a beautiful Sunday afternoon holed up with a couple buddies in the darkened TV room of the fraternity house, sipping his sixth beer and uttering an occasional wisecrack as they watched a golf tournament.

  This time I said it louder and slower. “A warrant, Detective.”

  “A warrant?” he repeated incredulously. “Based on what?”

  “On what I’ve told you.”

  “Look, lady—”

  “My name is Rachel Gold, Detective Green.”

  He forced a smile. “Look, Miss Gold, all you’ve told me is that (A) you’ve got eight gals—excuse me, eight women—who were personal fitness customers of the decedent and whose places of residence were burglarized, and (B) you happened to see some stereo speakers, a personal computer, a VCR, and a broken figurine in the storage space rented by the decedent’s company. I already told you what I think of the first, quote, pattern, close quote. As for part B, I bet half the goddam storage spaces in that goddam facility have old goddam consumer electronic equipment in them. That’s not enough for a goddam warrant, Miss Gold.” He yanked open his door.

  I banged my hand on the hood. “Wait a minute, Detective. Quit jerking me around. Look, I wrote down serial numbers for the speakers, the VCR, and the computer. Why don’t you at least call them in? See whether any of the stuff has been reported as stolen. How long can that take? If you get a match, you’ll be a hero. If you don’t, well, you can get your rocks off yanking my chain.”

  I glared at him across the hood of his car. A hint of a smile formed in the corners of his lips. He looked heavenward and shook his head. “You have that information with you?” he said at last.

  I nodded. “In my car.”

  “Well, go get it. I’ll call in. If there’s a match, we’ll get a warrant. If not, you can save your goofy theories for when Poncho gets back.”

  ***

  It took close to two hours to find a judge to issue the search warrant, and then, on the way back to Mound City Mini-Storage, we got stuck in the early wave of rush hour, which added another half hour to what would otherwise have been a twenty-minute ride. By the time we pulled up to the computerized entrance gate, I could almost see the smoke curling out of Detective Green’s ears. Dan-not-Dan actually saw the smoke when Detective Green thrust the search warrant into his face. He read the warrant quickly, pressed the button to open the gate, and actually bowed when he said, “This way, Your Highness.”

  “Well, this has to be a first,” I said as we followed Dan-not-Dan out to the storage space rented by Firm Ambitions.

  “What?” Detective Green growled.

  “This time both of us hope I’m wrong.”

  He grunted. “Maybe.”

  The search warrant was premised primarily on the likelihood that I had made a mistake in copying down the serial number of the VCR. Although there were Bose speakers or Macintosh computers on several police reports over the past year, none of the burglary victims had had the foresight to record the serial numbers of their stolen items, and none had given the police any unique identifying characteristics of their items, such as a decal or a prominent dent. However, two of the five burglary victims who had lost the same Panasonic VCR model that I had seen in the Firm Ambitions storage space had been able to give the police the serial numbers of their VCRs. One of those serial numbers appeared on the police report of the burglary of the Zemel home in Creve Coeur. It so happened that Barbie Zemel was one of Andres’s personal fitness clients. Moreover, her VCR serial number was— with the exception of the seventh digit—identical to the one I had copied down: 3475GARW6344. My notes had R as the seventh digit while the Zemel VCR had B as the seventh digit. I could have miscopied the B as an R or the Zemels could have made the converse mistake when they copied the serial number, or at least that’s what we argued to the judge. In any event, the search warrant authorized Detective Green to seize the VCR; that way, even if I had correctly copied the serial number, the Zemels might still be able to identify it as theirs.

  We stopped in front of the garage door to the Firm Ambitions storage space. Dan-not-Dan punched the combination into the electronic keypad one number at a time, checking it each time against the combination he had scribbled onto an index card. “Okay,” he said as he turned the lever and slid up the door.

  Shit, I silently groaned.

  Detective Green put his fists on his hips as he stared. “Jesus Christ,” he said as he shook his head in exasperation. He turned to me. “This is the perfect end to a perfectly fucked-up afternoon.”

  The storage room was completely empty.

  “I guess they came back and cleaned it out,” I said.

  “They?” he said incredulously. “Who are they?”

  “According to Dan here—”

  “Not ‘Dan,’ missy,” the Pakistani interrupted. “‘Dan,’ not ‘Dan.’”

  “Right,” I said. “According to him, there are three separate access cards for this space. That means that one of his accomplices must have come back—”

  “For chrissakes!” Detective Green said in disgust. “Accomplices? It’s probably some poor guy storing his stereo speakers and computer in here until he moved to a bigger apartment. Maybe a buddy of the stiff. They probably have some other spaces in here with three access cards. Isn’t that right?”

  Dan-not-Dan nodded his head. “I am not completely familiar with these numbers—”

  Detective Green dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “I’ve wasted enough time on this crap already. Do me a favor, lady. Next time you get one of these brilliant ideas, write it down and send it in to one of those police shows on TV. They love crazy shit like that. I don’t.” He turned to Dan-not-Dan. “Sorry we had to bother you with this, little buddy.”

  Dan-not-Dan raised his hands and smiled obsequiously. “Really it is not in the least amount to me a bother, Your Highness.”

  Detective Green shook hands with him and then turned and walked off without even a glance at me. I watched him get into his car and drive off.

  I turned to Dan-not-Dan. He frowned and shook his head at me. Although I was fed up with him, I still felt bad for getting him in trouble with his boss. He had believed me, and I had taken advantage of him.

  He waggled his finger at me. “I am saying again to you that I am most displeased with you, missy.” He pointed toward my car. “You now must leave.”

  As I walked back to my car, I tried to summon up some pluck from the reserve tanks. I checked my watch. Earlier that afternoon I had called Harris Landau from the police station while waiting for Detective Green to prepare the warrant papers. He hadn’t been in at the time. When I nonchalantly suggested to his secretary that Charles Kimball had assured me that Mr. Landau would have a few minutes for me, she admitted that his appointment calendar showed a meeting in the office at four o’clock, another one
at six, and nothing in between. I asked her to pencil me in for a short visit at five o’clock. She couldn’t agree to schedule a meeting without his permission, but she did agree to leave him a message with my request.

  If I called now to confirm the appointment, he would probably use my call as an opportunity to have his secretary blow me off. It was 4:40 p.m. As I headed north and approached Highway 70 I could see that the traffic heading east was flowing swiftly. I could be downtown in twenty minutes—thirty tops. There was a sign up ahead with an arrow pointing the way to the entrance to 1-70 East. I slowed. The worst that could happen was that he’d refuse to see me. He would hardly be my first rejection of the day. I put on my right-turn blinker and pressed on the accelerator.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The law firm of Landau, Mitchell & McCray occupied the thirty-seventh floor of the Metropolitan Tower in downtown St. Louis. The firm’s lobby decor was a tour de force of Anglophilia: framed English hunting prints on the walls; built-in bookcases filled with leather-bound sets of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and Blackstone; a receptionist with a British accent; a fake fireplace with an ornately carved oak mantel; heavy dark leather chairs and couches; three English butler tables of varying heights and widths, each with hinged leaves and polished brass hardware. It looked like the sort of place where Kentish country gentlemen gathered after supper for port and cigars—a facade that worked until you realized that the “fireplace” was on the thirty-seventh floor of a sixty-story steel-and-glass skyscraper.

  On the drive downtown I had prepared myself for Harris Landau refusing to see me. But to my surprise, no more than five minutes elapsed between the time I gave my name to the receptionist and the time Landau’s secretary appeared to greet me in the lobby and usher me back to his corner office. She told me he would be in in a moment.

  It was an enormous office. The initial east wall was glass and looked out on a dramatic view of the Old Courthouse, the Arch, the Mississippi River, and the riverboats moored to the cobblestone levees along the St. Louis shoreline. A tug pushing four barges moved slowly under the Eads Bridge on its journey upriver.

  “Hello, Rachel. I’m Harris Landau.”

  I turned, expecting to see an older version of Tommy—heavyset, thick eyebrows, angry eyes. Instead, I saw a slender, debonair gentleman—a dark-haired version of David Niven in The Bishop’s Wife, except that under his conservative three-button suit there was a crisp white shirt and a dark striped tie instead of a clerical collar. He had a white handkerchief poking neatly out of the breast pocket of his suit.

  All we had time for was a handshake and an advance apology for a telephone call he was expecting from Washington, D.C. “Senator Bond’s office left word earlier today that he wanted to have a word with me at five-fifteen,” he explained. “If he does call, I’m afraid I will have to take it.”

  Just then the phone rang. We both paused, waiting for his secretary to answer it. She did, and buzzed him ten seconds later. “Senator Bond on line one, Mr. Landau.”

  “Please have a seat, Rachel,” he told me as he reached for the phone. “This won’t take long.” He lifted the receiver. “Hello, Kit,” he said in a friendly, low-key voice.

  If I was supposed to be impressed, I was.

  Senator Bond seemed to do most of the talking. Other than an occasional “I understand, Kit” or “I certainly agree,” Harris Landau listened.

  So as not to seem an eavesdropper, I stood up and went over to look at the awards and memorabilia on the wall. In addition to his diplomas from Princeton and the University of Chicago School of Law, there were plaques commemorating his service on various local and national organizations and a framed picture of Landau and his thin blond wife posed on the deck of a large sailboat. The remainder of the wall space was devoted to Landau family history. There was a mounted display case containing the gavel his father had used on the Missouri Court of Appeals and a signed copy of his opinion in an appellate decision that I was not familiar with. Next to the display case was a formal portrait photograph of the Honorable Bernard Landau in his judicial robes. His Honor had an austere look, close to a scowl. With his dark straight hair cut blunt above the ears and brushed to the side, he bore a striking resemblance to his grandson Tommy. Given Tommy’s dark view of his grandfather’s corpus juris, the strong family resemblance was ironic.

  Next to the Judge Landau tableau was a display devoted to Abram Landau, the founding father and by far the most interesting member of the Landau clan. Shortly after I had agreed to represent Eileen Landau in her divorce proceedings, I spent an hour on the telephone with Muriel Goldenhersh, a friend of my mother’s who is a walking, talking almanac of juicy gossip on prominent members of the St. Louis Jewish community, living and dead, especially the Briarcliff Country Club crowd. If you want to know when, where, and how the late Harold Blumberg met his lovely second wife Cynthia, Muriel has the answers: the when was 1975, the where was in his Reno hotel suite, and the how involved the payment of $500 for the performance by Cynthia of an act that Harold’s first wife, Helene, had steadfastly refused him for all twenty-seven years of their marriage. If you want to know whether the settlement of all partnership dissolution issues between Robert Romberg and Donald Stein (nè Rothberg-Stein Realty) included any undisclosed terms, Muriel will be delighted to tell you that it did indeed: Romberg, who was on the membership committee of the exclusive Briarcliff Country Club, agreed not to blackball Stein, whose membership application was pending at the time. That one-sentence covenant in the settlement agreement cost Donald Stein at least $1 million, a fair price in the eyes of his socially ambitious wife.

  Naturally, I had assumed Muriel would have plenty of information on the Landau family, and she did. Abram was the star of the story, and what she told me was enough to lure me into the Missouri Historical Society a few days later over what became a three-hour lunch break.

  I studied the three framed black-and-white photographs of Abram Landau on Harris Landau’s wall: a wedding portrait, a shot of him in his fifties on a golf course, and a newspaper photo on his seventieth birthday scooping the first shovel of dirt at the ground-breaking ceremony for the Abram Landau Elementary School in north St. Louis. None offered any clue to the real man, whose American story began on July 3, 1886, the day the paddle wheeler City of Louisville docked at the port of St. Louis just south of the Eads Bridge and a twenty-eight-year-old German immigrant named Abram Landau walked down the gangway onto the cobblestone levee of what was then the fourth-largest city in America. He had come to America seven years earlier and settled in Louisville, where he became an itinerant linen peddler in the small villages along the steamboat route down the Ohio River to the Mississippi. Sensing that the emerging railroad industry would soon eclipse the steamboat era, he waited for the right moment, sold his route to a less perceptive immigrant, and bought a one-way passage on the paddle wheeler bound for St. Louis.

  Within a few years, the Landau Linen Supply Co. was providing clean linens and towels to a growing list of downtown St. Louis hotels. Before long, he expanded the business into a related industry and became the principal supplier of clean bedsheets and towels to several of the St. Louis brothels. Shortly thereafter, Abram Landau vertically integrated this newest division of his operations by inducing Miss Eloise Hampton to transfer title to Eloise’s Dance Salon, which at the time was the city’s most popular whorehouse. By 1895, he owned the three finest “dance salons” in St. Louis and his patrons included the financial, social, and political power elites of St. Louis, along with visiting dignitaries from throughout the nation and the world. He became a fixture in booth one at Faust’s Restaurant on South Broadway, then the most popular dining place in St. Louis. On any given night, he might be seen dining with Joseph Pulitzer (publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), Chris von der Ahe (owner of the St. Louis Browns), Sam M. Kennard (founder of the powerful St. Louis Business Men’s League), or even William McKinley (who had come t
o St. Louis for the 1896 Republican Convention, which nominated him for the presidency).

  In 1897, Abram Landau married Malka Iskowitz, the daughter of a Russian immigrant, in a small ceremony at Temple Shaare Emeth—the first and only time Abram Landau set foot in a Jewish house of worship in America. At his insistence, Malka changed her name to Mary a year later, just before the birth of their only child, Bernard. Forty-five years later, when the Honorable Bernard Landau delivered the eulogy at Abram’s funeral service at the Ethical Society, he spoke of accompanying his father to the opening ceremonies of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a/k/a the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. He recalled his father’s joy at those ceremonies. Bernard was only six at the time—far too young to understand the economic basis for that joy: the lure of a world’s fair and the Olympic Games and the Democratic National Convention (all in St. Louis that year) held the promise of a financial bonanza for the proprietor of the three largest brothels in the city. The promise was kept. Indeed, on opening night alone the guests at Eloise’s Dance Salon included Pierre Chouteau (great-grandnephew of St. Louis founding father Auguste Chouteau), ex-governor David R. Francis (president of the Exposition), and John Philip Sousa (whose band had opened the festivities earlier that evening by playing “Hymn of the West,” the official song of the fair).

  But the story of Abram Landau grows murkier after the World’s Fair. By 1910, he no longer owned any brothels, at least according to the official records, and his involvement in the business of Landau Linen Supply seemed diminished. It was no longer clear just who or what Abram Landau was. Under one version (put forward by Dr. Taylor Armstrong in an essay published in a 1941 issue of the St. Louis Historical Review under the title “The St. Louis Underworld: 1880 to 1930”), Abram Landau controlled all racketeering activity on the north side of St. Louis, recruiting Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to serve as enforcers. Under the other version (favored by the newspaper editors of his era), he was a savvy, well-connected entrepreneur who had the good sense to close his linen supply business before the mob squeezed out all competitors in St. Louis. Whichever version was true, from the end of World War I until his death in 1943 at the age of eighty-seven, the public Abram Landau was untouched by scandal and increasingly touched by the sorts of honors and amnesia that big money can purchase. At the age of eighty-two, he received an honorary doctorate of law from Washington University in recognition of generous contributions over the years.