Firm Ambitions

by Michael A. Kahn

  The police were gone by the time I arrived at the hospital. My first thought had been Pete Ricketts and his battered Ford Econoline van with Illinois plates. But unfortunately, the accident had happened too fast for my mother to notice the make or color of the van or the number or color of the license plate.

  On the way home, we talked about the roses-are-red note.

  “If it was supposed to be a warning,” I said, “I figure we still have at least a day or so for whoever it is to decide whether we’ve backed off. That’s all we need. I’m getting close, Mom, and I’m not going to back off.” I told her the outlines of the plan that had been forming in my head ever since the two of us had listened to the microcassettes that afternoon.

  “I agree,” she said when I finished. “Maury has the police driving by the house all night anyway. See first what you can learn from that man in Chicago.”

  “By the way,” I said nonchalantly, “there was a message from Maury on the machine. He called to see how things are going.”

  We drove in silence for a while.

  “I’m not going to tell him until he gets back,” my mother said.

  “Maury?”

  She nodded. I drove on in silence, waiting.

  “He means well,” she finally said, “but the answer isn’t John Wayne sleeping in our living room.” She looked over at me. “I’m an adult. So are you. We’re not in the little house on the prairie.”

  I glanced over at my mother and winked. “Welcome home, Annie Oakley.”

  A police cruiser was parked across the street from our house when I pulled up. The officer got out of the cruiser and came over as I helped my mother out of the car.

  “Need any help, ma’am?”

  “We’re okay,” I told him.

  He walked with us up to the front door. “We’ll be keeping a closer watch tonight,” he said when we reached the front porch. “After the accident and all. We’ll send a car by three or four times an hour.”

  Knowing that the police were keeping watch outside helped ease our skittishness a little. Nevertheless, my mother and I slept together in her bed with Ozzie asleep on the bedroom carpet. I had a restless night as my emotions shifted from fear to cold rage over what someone had tried to do to my mother. Although it was certainly possible that she had been the victim of a reckless driver, the roses-are-red note had me convinced otherwise.

  As I turned in bed, I rearranged the pieces of the puzzle for what seemed like the two hundredth time. If I was as close as I thought, then Leo Beaumont was right: the tapes were the key to Andros’s death and the lever for getting Ann cleared. I smiled at the irony. Ann had begged me to represent her best friend in a divorce, and Eileen may have unintentionally repaid that friendship by grabbing the Lands’ End bag holding the tapes.

  All of which meant that the person unwittingly holding the final piece of the puzzle was Bruce Billings at Leuwenhaupt. The trick was to get him to give it up without realizing what he was doing. To accomplish that, I’d need a convincing sales pitch. When I finally drifted off to sleep around four in the morning, I had my speech roughed out.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Fortunately, my sales pitch worked.

  “The problem is,” I had explained to Bruce over the phone that morning, “I’m dealing with lawyers and accountants. You know the type: conservative, risk-averse, easily impressed by brand names. The first thing I’m going to hear from each one of them is: ‘Leuwenhaupt? What’s that?’ The second thing is: ‘Who else uses them?’ Bruce, these guys want to be part of the herd. What’s going to sway them is knowing that you have plenty of other customers in St. Louis.”

  “I understand, Rachel. Let’s see.” I could hear paper rustling. “Here we are. I’m looking at our brochure on the 6400 Series. Page two. Listen to this. ‘With more than ten thousand Model 6400 microrecorders currently in service around the world, Leuwenhaupt—’”

  “Bruce, this is St. Louis. In this town, when someone asks where you went to school, he doesn’t mean college, he means high school. That’s how it works down here. We don’t care what people are doing in New York or Chicago. I need St. Louis names, Bruce. In fact, I need the names, addresses, and products sold to each of your St. Louis customers for the past five years.”

  There was a pause. “Well, I don’t know if I can do that. My company is kind of paranoid about its customer lists.”

  “I understand. Listen, I have to be in Chicago today for a meeting on LaSalle Street at noon. I’ll swing by your offices at three o’clock. You show me the list confidentially and that way I’ll at least be able to assure my people that I’ve personally seen it. How’s that sound?”

  “Well, I don’t know if I—”

  “Bruce, last month the Panasonic sales rep gave me a complete list of their St. Louis customers—everyone from Peat Marwick to the legal department at Monsanto. Where’s the harm in letting me see your names?”

  He eventually agreed, and I caught the twelve-thirty flight to Midway.

  Unfortunately, as I remembered the moment I pulled the rental car onto the expressway near Midway, the first signs of spring in Chicago are, quite literally, signs. Road signs, that is. CONSTRUCTION AHEAD. MERGE LEFT. RIGHT LANE ENDS 500 FEET. SLOW AHEAD. They had sprouted all along the Eisenhower Expressway and the East-West Tollway. At the pace traffic was crawling, I knew that the seventeen-mile trip from Midway to the Leuwenhaupt offices would take roughly as long as the 287-mile flight from Lambert to Midway. I had a little over an hour to cover the distance, and I would need every minute.

  At 3:15 p.m., I pulled into the parking lot of the suburban office complex that housed Leuwenhaupt’s Chicago sales group. Bruce greeted me with a wet handshake and a blast of bad breath that would have stunned a charging lion. He had a lopsided Popeye smile in a face that looked like it was pressed up against glass. I assumed he did most of his sales work over the phone. He was wearing an ugly brown suit and had an angry red shaving rash on his neck. To top things off, as I quickly discovered once he ushered me into his little office, he had an irritating habit of staring at my chest while he talked to me. But he did have a copy of the metropolitan St. Louis customer list in his office, which, given the circumstances, went a long way toward transforming him into my Prince Charming.

  “These are happy campers, Rachel,” he said as he handed me the computer printout of the customer list. “Happy, happy campers.” He had a nasal, almost grating voice.

  I flipped through the printout, which was twenty-three pages long, with about eight to ten entries on each page. “How is this thing organized?” I asked.

  That seemingly innocuous question touched off a ten-minute, eye-glazing disquisition on the industry groupings system used by Leuwenhaupt and how that system differed from the industry groupings used by the last consumer electronics manufacturer he had represented and how the Leuwenhaupt system was based loosely on a proposed system to be used by the Internal Revenue Service and why that was a wise decision, ad nauseam.

  “That’s interesting,” I said when he paused for air.

  He started rummaging through his desk. “Ah, here we are.” He held up a list. “These are your industry codes. You’ve got your one hundred series: that’s your retail outlets. You’ve got your one-twenty series: that’s your accounting services.” Et cetera. He was the world’s most boring manufacturer’s sales rep. No question.

  Finally, mercifully, the telephone rang. Bruce handed me the code sheet as he picked up the phone. He answered it in his hail-fellow-well-met mode, but immediately downshifted. I glanced up and saw him actually cringe as he listened. From the servile tone of his response, he was talking to either an angry boss or an irate and important customer.

  While he groveled on the phone, I found Firm Ambitions under the code number for Athletics/Sports. According to the customer list printout, two years ago Firm Ambitions had purchased on
e Series 5400 microcassette recorder and a box of twenty microcassettes. It had not purchased a microcassette transcriber.

  Bruce hung up, clearly agitated. “I have to, uh, go back to the warehouse to check on a few items. It’s sort of an emergency. It may take half an hour.”

  “No problem,” I said cheerfully. “I’ll wait for you. If I get through the list before you get back, I’ll leave it on your desk. We can always talk some more after I talk to my people.”

  “Uh, sure.” He was obviously distracted. “Sure. We’ll talk later.”

  ***

  I don’t know if or when Brace returned. What I do know is that it took me just five minutes to find the name. I found it on page eight of the customer list. It took fifteen more minutes of studying the rest of the list to convince myself, by process of elimination, that the name I found had to be the name.

  With the customer list in hand, I poked my head out of Brace’s office. No one was in the hallway. Pretending to search for the rest room, I wandered the corridors until I found the copy machine. I made photocopies of two pages from the customer list and hurried back to Bruce’s office. I scribbled a short thank-you note, paper-clipped it to the customer list, placed the list in the center of his desk, and left the building.

  Like any decent trial lawyer, I immediately started scrutinizing my evidence. It was, after all, an entirely circumstantial case—a chain of facts no stronger than its weakest link. As the plane lifted off for St. Louis, I carefully examined each link, studied it, tapped on it, held it up to the light, tried to pull it apart. Although the chain was still holding when the plane touched down on the runway at Lambert at seven-thirty that evening, several links had me worried.

  As I pulled my car out of the airport parking garage and onto the highway, I thought back to the message from Benny that had been waiting on the phone recorder when my mother and I got home from the hospital last night: “Got some interesting news for you two. Called my office after I got to Chicago. Had a message from large Marge at Southwestern Life. Called the Margemeister back. She couldn’t find anything on Coulter Designs or Laurence Coulter. However, after she extracted a promise that I would perform acts on her person that may no longer be legal under the Rehnquist Court, she laid the following on me. Check it out. Nine years ago, Arch Alarm Systems of St. Louis took out a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar key-man life insurance policy on one George McGee. Southwestern didn’t issue the policy, but had a piece of it through a reinsurance pool. The beneficiary was Capital Investments of Missouri. No word on who the insurance agent was on that one.”

  His message had not only confirmed my suspicions but reminded my mother of a life insurance scam at the center of a big St. Louis murder trial many years ago. She had decided to spend some time at the library searching for the story on microfilm.

  When I got home I showed my mother what I had photocopied from the Leuwenhaupt customer list. She nodded grimly and then showed me the microfilm photocopy of a news story that appeared on the front page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat eighteen years ago on September 12:

  SECOND BRANDT MURDER TRIAL

  ENDS IN SECOND HUNG JURY

  Third Trial Unlikely,

  According to Sources

  On the sixth day of jury deliberations, the second trial of insurance broker Arthur L. Brandt on charges of first degree murder and insurance fraud ended in precisely the same way the first trial ended last spring: a frazzled jury announced that it was hopelessly deadlocked and unable to reach a verdict.

  Clearly frustrated by the jury’s announcement, Circuit Judge Thomas O’Neill declared a mistrial and stormed from the bench into his chambers. O’Neill’s frustration was mirrored in the face of Assistant City Attorney William Ramsey, who prosecuted the first trial as well as this one. He silently packed his trial bag and left the courtroom by a rear door, refusing to comment.

  By contrast, the defendant’s side of the courtroom was a scene of jubilation, as Brandt, 56, embraced his defense attorney, kissed his girlfriend, and triumphantly shook hands with dozens of well-wishers who crowded forward after the verdict was announced.

  “We are extremely pleased,” said Harry Raven, a Belleville attorney and a longtime friend and adviser of Brandt’s. Raven initially represented Brandt in the first trial but was forced to step aside when it became likely that he would testify at the trial, which he did. “Arthur hopes he’ll finally be allowed to put this behind him and move on with his life,” Raven said.

  A more pointed assessment was offered by Brandt’s defense attorney in the second trial, Charles Kimball. Referring to his courtroom adversary as the Great Ramses, Kimball stated, “This has gone from prosecution to persecution. The stench of prosecutorial misconduct taints this sorry spectacle. Let us all hope that the Great Ramses allows this ugly chapter in our legal history to come to an end. To paraphrase what a predecessor of mine said to another Great Ramses, ‘Let my client go.’”

  If this is indeed the last trial, it will close the book on an unusual case that began last November with the indictment of Brandt, a South County insurance broker, on charges of murder and insurance fraud in connection with the shooting death of Herbert Scroggins, an eccentric inventor who had moved to St. Louis sixteen months earlier to head up Ingenuity Ltd., a small company specializing in the development of new products.

  Brandt was the sole shareholder of Ingenuity Ltd. and admitted that he had personally recruited Scroggins to move to St. Louis to join the company. Scroggins, a bachelor and self-described loner, was killed in his south St. Louis apartment one year later, apparently the victim of an armed burglary. Brandt was the sole beneficiary of a $1 million “key-man” life insurance policy taken out on Scroggins. The policy was issued by the Royal Assurance Company of Indiana.

  In both trials, the key witness for the prosecution was Billy Ray Peterson, 23, of Hillsboro. Peterson claimed that Brandt offered him $1,000 to stage a burglary of Scroggins’ apartment and, in the process, kill Scroggins. Brandt denied the accusations and claimed that Peterson made up the story out of spite after Brandt’s agency canceled his auto policy.

  The Royal Assurance Company had refused to pay the $1 million death benefits to Brandt pending outcome of the trial. Efforts to reach an insurance company official for comment were unsuccessful.

  Stapled to that article was a short news story from the Post-Dispatch six years later stating that “insurance broker Arthur L. Brandt, 62, of Sunset Hills” had been killed when his automobile rammed into a parked car on Lindell Boulevard at approximately two in the morning.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Twenty-four centuries after it was built, the Parthenon still stands as evidence of the glory of ancient Athens. So, too, the Colosseum remains a stirring reminder of the power and the spectacle of the Roman Empire. But in less than a year after the last of its twenty million visitors had departed, only a skilled archaeologist could have found much evidence that St. Louis had been the site of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The huge, ornate palaces celebrating the new gods of progress, the floral clock with a minute hand seventy-four feet long, the Ferris wheel that stood 264 feet high and seated sixty passengers in each of its thirty-six cars, the French Pavilion that included a full-scale reproduction of the Grand Trianon at Versailles, the entire villages of natives imported from South America, Africa, and Asia and plunked down in replica villages on the fairgrounds—all had been quickly dismantled and carted off, with the exception of the gargantuan Ferris wheel, which was literally blown apart with dynamite.

  By the spring of 1905, there was little left of the largest single event in the history of St. Louis, a fair that had introduced the world to ice cream cones, frankfurters, and iced tea and would eventually be memorialized in the Judy Garland musical Meet Me in St. Louis. Indeed, aside from the occasional chunk of twisted metal unearthed by the grounds crews that maintain the golf course in Forest Park, little today remai
ns of St. Louis’s brief turn on the world stage except for the Bird Cage.

  The Bird Cage sits along the northern edge of the zoo. Built by the Smithsonian Institution and bequeathed to the city when the fair ended, the Bird Cage is a huge aviary, the largest of its kind ever constructed. Still home to dozens of species of birds, it is a Victorian oasis within the modern world, with a sky of black metal screen suspended over towering iron ribs. Enclosed within are trees, ponds, a stream, and an elevated walkway that allows visitors to move from one end to the other, observing the birds above and below.

  While the Jungle of the Apes and the Big Cat Country and the Living World lure the crowds when they first arrive at the zoo, those who spend the day eventually find their way down to the Bird Cage, where almost all succumb to its charm. But the allure it held for me that morning was quite distinct from the attractions it held for the children and young mothers and older couples who were strolling along on the elevated walkway past me. To a lawyer with precious little experience in arranging a potentially dangerous rendezvous, the Bird Cage seemed a uniquely advantageous meeting space. It was an enclosed public space with excellent visibility and nowhere to hide, inside or out. Someone approaching the Bird Cage from any direction would be clearly visible, and anyone approaching me would have to do so along the one elevated walkway. Almost as important, I was clearly visible to anyone outside the Bird Cage—a reassuring thought as I glanced at my mother. She was in her car, which was parked on the street that ran along the northern perimeter of the zoo and thus along the northern side of the Bird Cage. Her videocamera was resting on the car window. The car was idling so that the cellular phone was ready for dialing 911, just in case.

  I checked my watch. It was nearly curtain time.