Firm Ambitions

by Michael A. Kahn

  “But in the end the house always wins.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “Not in this country, my dear. Not in this country.”

  We stood in silence as the bobbing flamingos, now all synchronized, did their noisy conga-line routine again. Kimball glanced at his watch as the show ended. “I have certain matters to take care of, Rachel.”

  “Forty-eight hours, Charles.”

  “I understand the proposal.” Kimball paused and studied me with pursed lips. “Regardless of the eventual outcome, Rachel, I commend you for having the ingenuity to set it up and the sheer brass balls to carry it off.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Charles Kimball left first, which was good, because I don’t think I could have kept up my facade much longer. My legs were wobbly as I walked out of the Bird Cage.

  If Kimball was innocent, I said to myself, he would have been outraged, he would have denied everything. While he obviously wasn’t the one who put the cyanide powder into the pills, he hadn’t denied anything. Then again, he hadn’t admitted anything, either.

  Apprehensive, tense, frightened—those words don’t even come close to describing the way my mother and I felt on the drive home from the zoo. We checked the locks on all the doors and windows. Benny called from Chicago that night and went ballistic when he found out what I had done.

  “Are you fucking nuts?” he shouted at me. He insisted that I go to the police, which I refused.

  “Kimball can do it for us,” I told him. “He can get Ann off and get whoever’s hassling us to stop it. I’ve got to give him his forty-eight hours.”

  “Kimball? How can you trust that motherfucker?”

  We got into a big argument, and I terminated by slamming down the receiver. He called right back.

  “What?” I yelled at him.

  “Then get out of the goddam house, Rachel,” he said, a little calmer this time. “Someone already got in your house to stick a cat’s head on your goddam pillow while you were taking a shower. Don’t be an idiot. Get the fuck out of there.”

  Benny’s advice began to sound better later that night when my mother and I started getting ready for bed. Although Ozzie was strong, healthy, and loyal, he was only one dog and we were only two women.

  “So where can we go?” my mother asked as we both put our clothes back on.

  Neither of us knew the answer to that one. We had to improvise. I called an attorney friend who did some work for the Ritz-Carlton, and he put me in touch with the night manager.

  If the test of a great hotel is its ability to meet the most unusual needs of its guests, then the Ritz passed the test. By midnight, we were in a suite under assumed names on a restricted floor with an armed security guard posted outside our door. Two floors down, there was another suite—that one empty—registered under the names Rachel and Sarah Gold.

  Nevertheless, the only one who slept well that night was Ozzie. At three in the morning I got out of bed and went into the living room to make a stiff gin and tonic. I opened the French doors to the balcony, moved a chair out there, and settled in. I stared east toward the blinking red light on top of the Arch, which was barely visible in the distance. As I sipped my drink, the evidence I had amassed seemed flimsier and flimsier. How could I have seriously hoped to spook a premier criminal defense attorney like Kimball with a trick-or-treat bag of circumstantial evidence? Was he just going to ignore my threat? Call my bluff? Or was he making arrangements for the unfortunate “accident” that would take my life in six hours or six months or six years?

  The sun woke me at dawn. The hotel’s day manager personally brought up our breakfast and took Ozzie for a walk. I checked in with my office occasionally through the morning, but there was no word from anyone. At twelve-thirty, while taking a shower, I actually hyperventilated and almost passed out. At quarter to five I couldn’t stand it anymore. More than thirty hours had elapsed since my meeting with Kimball. What had seemed a daring but powerful gambit two days ago now seemed foolish and impotent.

  I felt like Dorothy as she stared at the hourglass, her dread rising as she watched the sand trickle down steadily, implacably. Except that I knew there was no Cowardly Lion or Tin Man coming to the rescue. Just my mother and myself and Ozzie in the role of Toto.

  “It’s not going to work,” I told my mother.

  She looked up from her book and sighed. “You don’t know that yet, sweetie. Give it time.”

  I did. And time ran out the following morning.

  “Mom,” I said, exhausted and frazzled, “it’s been forty-eight hours. I’m going to the police. You wait here with Ozzie. I’ll call you as soon as I tell them.”

  At 10:45 a.m., I walked through the entrance to the Clayton police station. The first person I saw inside was Detective Bernie “Poncho” Israel. He broke into a big smile when he saw me.

  “Rachel Gold, you must have ESP.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I just called your office. Your secretary said you weren’t in.” He shook his head in wonder. “We’ve had a remarkable development in the Andros homicide. It’s going to mean more work for us, but your sister’s about to become one very happy lady.”

  I was actually shaking. “What happened?”

  “Come on back to my desk. I’ll grab you a cup of coffee and tell you all about it.”

  I joined him and he handed me a Styrofoam cup of black coffee. He took a sip of his coffee and shook his head in wonderment. “You sister owes a special thanks to Charles Kimball,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “I spent the last hour in an interrogation room with Charles and one of his longtime clients.”

  “Who?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t need to know the name, and we don’t want it getting out just yet. Let’s just say he’s a gentleman who’s seen the advantages of cooperating with his local law enforcement officials.”

  “He confessed to the murder?”

  Poncho chuckled. “Don’t I wish. No, it won’t be that easy. But he’s given us some vital information that’s completely changed the focus and theory of the homicide. Our John Doe is in the drug business. He’s a chemist—the guy who tests and cuts and processes the raw materials that come in from South America and East Asia. As such, he has access to a wide variety of chemicals ordinarily available only to licensed professionals.”

  “Such as cyanide?”

  “Exactly.”

  “He was the one who got the cyanide?”

  Poncho nodded. “Not for his own use, though. But the man who had him get it, and the people that man works for—well, these are not the kind of folks your little sister will ever meet in her lifetime. Even if she had wanted to hire someone to kill Andros, she would never have gotten anywhere near these folks.”

  “The mafia?”

  “That’s what they call them in Hollywood. Let’s just say that the man who had our John Doe obtain the cyanide is an employee of a criminal organization that has a regional headquarters in Kansas City.”

  “Why would they kill Andros?”

  “Your hunch was the right one.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I talked to Curt Green. He was the detective who met you out at that mini-storage facility while I was on vacation.”

  “The one who thought I was a dumb broad.”

  Poncho gave a hearty laugh. “He’s had his comeuppance, Rachel. I’ve seen to that. Anyway, you were right all along. Andros was using that place to store stolen merchandise. Apparently, the Kansas City organization is not a great believer in competition, and Andros’s little operation was directly competing with theirs. They had warned him several times, according to what John Doe heard. When Andros refused to back off, they had him killed.”

  “I thought they got rid of people by shooting them.”

  “Generally yes, e
specially when they’re dealing with other members of organized crime. This one is a bit unusual, but I’ve seen ones far kinkier than that.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to talk to other sources, we’re going to keep our ears to the ground. The best we can hope for is an opening somewhere down the line. Could take two weeks. Could take two years.”

  “And my sister?”

  “All charges are being dropped as we speak, Rachel. We’ve already notified the press. Your sister’s been cleared.”

  “And that’s it?” I asked, in thrilled disbelief.

  He gave me a broad smile as he reached over to shake my hand. “Rachel, that’s it.”

  We shook hands. “Thank you, Poncho.”

  “You make sure that sister of yours thanks you.”

  As I stood up to go he said, “One more thing.”

  He opened his desk drawer and removed an envelope. “Charles Kimball told me to be sure to give you this.”

  I took it from him. Scrawled on the front of the envelope were the words “For Rachel Gold. Personal and Confidential.”

  I stopped in the corridor and tore open the envelope. Inside was a folded sheet of paper from a yellow legal pad. I unfolded it and read the handwritten message:

  Dear Rachel:

  Perry Mason would have been proud. And like any good episode, it was solved just in time. I would be honored to close our deal with a sequel to our last dinner together. As I recall, you still have a rain check. Please call me.

  Warmly, Charles

  Chapter Thirty

  Detective Israel was true to his word. All charges were dropped, and the official announcement was made in time for the five-o’clock news. My mother, my sister, and I went out to celebrate. It was Girls’ Night Out, with Richie staying home to babysit.

  I awoke the next morning with an all-world hangover and a tongue made of tree bark. The three of us had had way too much to eat and way too much to drink. My last clear memory of the evening was around two in the morning in a smoky, funky dance club somewhere down in the Soulard area: Ann and I had been leaning against each other, laughing and swaying our hips and clapping our hands in time to the reggae music as we watched my mother out on the dance floor getting down with a three-hundred-pound black man in a gold lame jumpsuit and storm-trooper boots. “Stick with the judge,” I told her when she rejoined us after the song ended.

  By noon the hangover fog had started to lift from my brain and I struggled into the office. I felt like I could have used one of those aluminum walkers. As I came into my office my secretary told me she had Harry Raven on the phone.

  He was charming and somewhat apologetic. “Jes’ to tie up any loose ends,” he told me, “I got Mrs. Maxwell to make a copy of her files on that dead fella. There ain’t much of interest in there, but Mrs. Maxwell’s gonna messenger ’em over to you today. Don’t want there to be no hard feelings, Miss Gold. You still have questions after looking at them documents, you jes’ feel free to give me a call, you hear?”

  Later in the afternoon, my mother called from Ann’s house, where she had ordered Ann and Richie to go somewhere romantic for the weekend. We agreed that they needed some time alone after all the strain and craziness and hurting—time to start the healing process. The night before I had given Ann the name of a romantic bed-and-breakfast inn an hour’s drive outside St. Louis in the Missouri wine country, and she had made reservations for the weekend.

  “I told them you and I would take care of the children,” my mother said. “I’ve already packed my bag. I can move in tonight.”

  “I can, too. After work. It’s supposed to be a beautiful weekend. Maybe we can take the kids on a hike in the country.”

  I spent the rest of the day trying to bring order back to the chaos of my practice before the weekend began. There were letters to answer, court papers to prepare, clients to call, depositions to schedule—two weeks’ worth. My secretary stayed late. I signed the last letter at eight-thirty that night. Leaning back in my desk chair, I called my mother at Ann’s house.

  “I’ll be there in a couple hours, Mom. I’ve got to stop by the house, pack some clothes, get Ozzie—”

  “I have Ozzie here. I brought his food, but I forgot his bowls. I left them on the front porch.”

  “I’ll bring them. Kiss the kids for me.”

  ***

  For two weeks I had been running on a high-octane mix of tension, worry, and adrenaline. For the past twenty-four hours, beginning the moment Poncho Israel told me that the charges against Ann were dropped, I had felt myself winding down. The last two hours in my office had been a real struggle. By the time I got out of my car in front of the house, I was almost numb from exhaustion.

  Ozzie’s two bowls were on the front porch. The house was dark. I clicked on the light in the front hall, hung my purse on the closet doorknob, heaved my briefcase onto the couch in the living room, and walked toward the stairs. Out of habit, I glanced into the breakfast room on my way past. Sure enough, the red light on the telephone answering machine was blinking. I looked up the stairway for a long moment and then back at the blinking red light. It could wait. I clicked on the hall light and trudged up the stairs.

  I can usually pack my overnight bag in under five minutes, including toiletries. This time it took almost a half hour. I seemed to keep finding myself shuffling between the bedroom and bathroom, once carrying a toothbrush, the next time carrying one jogging shoe.

  As I packed, my mind wandered back again to Charles Kimball and his mystery client, John Doe. The story sounded more credible to the police than to me, but that was because I knew something the police didn’t, namely, the key-man life insurance policies. That fact gave others a motive to kill Andros. Then again, it was always possible that the insurance policy was literally that—insurance in case Andros happened to die rather than insurance for when they killed him. If legitimate operations could buy key-man life insurance for entirely prudent reasons, surely illegitimate operations could nevertheless buy key-man life insurance for entirely prudent reasons, too. For all I knew, there was a multimillion-dollar key-man life insurance policy on Don Corleone himself.

  I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. The charges against Ann had been dropped. She was free. That’s what counted. Whether John Doe was telling the police the truth or a story Kimball cooked up didn’t really matter as far as Ann was concerned. If and when Kimball and I had our dinner, I could decide whether to push the issue with him. Right now I had barely enough energy to push my closet door closed.

  I clicked the lights off one by one as I left my room, came down the stairs, and reached the front door. Then I remembered the blinking red message light. With a weary sigh, I set the overnight bag on the hall floor and walked back to the breakfast room. The answering machine was on the counter that separated the kitchen from the breakfast room. I pushed the replay button and sank into one of the chairs at the breakfast table.

  The first message was from my mother: “Rachel, darling, I forgot my slippers. I’m telling you, if my head wasn’t screwed on I’d have left that, too. Thanks, sweetie.”

  The second was from Benny Goldberg: “Hey, my first day of testimony and now I think these wusses are going to settle. The judge adjourned for the weekend right in the middle of my direct. The lawyers have been talking settlement ever since. You would have been proud of me, Rachel. I was awesome on the stand—a combination of the Shell Answer Man, Mr. Wizard, and Phil fucking Areeda. Call me at the hotel tonight.”

  There was a beep, and then the next message started: “Ma’am, this is Donny from Ace Thermal Windows. We’ll be in your neighborhood this weekend and wondered if we might stop by….”

  As Donny rambled on, I noticed that there was light shining through the space at the bottom of the basement door. I had gone down to the basement that morning to get something out
of the dryer. Had I forgotten to turn off the light? Maybe my mother had gone down there later and left it on.

  I forced myself to stand and walk into the kitchen as the message from Ace Windows came to an end. There was a beep and then another message started as I reached for the basement door:

  “Hey, Rachel, Bob Ginsburg at Bear Stearns. I tried calling you at the office, but you were already gone. I’m leaving on vacation tomorrow. I’m going on one of those backwoods fishing trips up in Canada—flown in by plane, Indian guide, no phone, the works.”

  I opened the basement door. The light at the bottom of the stairs was on. It was the kind with a pull cord. I started down the stairs as the message continued:

  “I’ll be gone for ten days, and then things’ll get hairy when I get back. Anyway, I finally got that information you were looking for. You owe me big-time, woman. We’re talking dinner for two at Lutèce, on you, next time you’re in New York. Don’t even ask what I had to do to get this info. I deserve an honorary membership in the CIA.”

  I was halfway down the basement stairs when the floor creaked above me. I spun around just as Tommy Landau stepped into view at the top of the stairs. He had a large handgun and he was pointing it at me.

  The voice on the tape continued as we stared at each other:

  “Here’s the scoop. There are four shareholders of Capital International Limited. Three of them are islanders—a lawyer down there, his secretary, and his paralegal. They each own one share. That’s typical. Local corporate laws and all. Anyway, the rest of the ten thousand shares are owned by a guy from St. Louis. His name is Thomas Landau. Hope it means something, Rachel. Give me a buzz next time you’re in the city so I can collect on my dinner. Take care.”