Sheer Gall

by Michael A. Kahn

  “What am I looking for?” Jacki asked.

  “Best-case scenario,” I said, “Cissy’s name. Otherwise, you’re looking for the names of all events mentioned and all people identified as attending. Then do the same for the Ladue News.” The Ladue News is a weekly paper that covers various high-society events.

  Jacki was jotting down my instructions. When she finished, she looked up with a puzzled expression. “Why?”

  “A hunch,” I said. “In a two-day period, Cissy Thompson spent more than five thousand dollars on a dress, a pair of shoes, and a purse. That’s a lot of money. The following week, she returns, or tries to return, everything. Now maybe Benny’s right. Maybe she just had second thoughts, but Vincent Contini is absolutely convinced she wore the dress. That gives us an alternative scenario, namely, that she bought the outfit specifically for an upcoming social event. If so, that means the event had to take place sometime between August twelfth, when she bought the shoes and purse, and August eighteenth, when she returned them and tried to return the dress.”

  Jacki was smiling. “I like it,” she said, nodding her head.

  “Check with Vincent, too,” I said. “If there was some big event that weekend, some of his other customers may have mentioned it.” I looked at Benny. “Well, you have any better ideas?”

  He shook his head. “Good luck.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jacki opened my office door, her eyes wide.

  “He’s here?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  I grinned. “Send him in.”

  A moment later: “Greetings and salutations, Miss Gold.”

  There in my doorway stood Melvin Needlebaum, pale eyes swimming behind thick lenses, thinning brown hair slicked back from his domed forehead. He was, as usual, outfitted in what can only be described as a Full Melvin: a wrinkled ill-fitting brown suit that did nothing to disguise a body totally untouched by physical exercise, including those trademark broad hips cantilevered toward his rib cage; a pair of scuffed brown wing tips the size of snowshoes; sagging navy socks; a phosphorescent tie; and an all-season short-sleeve white shirt, the tail of which was no doubt already hanging out at nine in the morning. To this ensemble Melvin had added the final clarifying Needlebaum touch: a pair of humongous briefcases, one in each hand.

  “Hiya, Melvin,” I said, standing to greet him. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Before we commence, Miss Gold, I must contact my adversary in this deposition. May I use your telephone?”

  “Sure. I’ll wait outside with Jacki.”

  “Excellent, Miss Gold, excellent.”

  I walked out to Jacki’s desk. She looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Wow.”

  I smiled. “He’s a classic.”

  Not an original, but a classic. Indeed, every significant law firm in America has at least one Melvin Needlebaum. But never more than three. Abbott & Windsor’s Melvin Needlebaum is actually named Melvin Needlebaum. You can look it up.

  Except among law-firm cognoscenti, Melvin Needlebaums are easy to misjudge. They remind some of the extra-chromosome types who were vice presidents of the audiovisual club and ran the movie projector in driver’s ed. They remind others of the geek in a Depression-era circus freak show—that manic wacko whose sole genius was the ability to bite the head off of a live chicken.

  But first impressions are misleading, as any attorney who’s had the misfortune of opposing a Melvin Needlebaum can testify. It’s not just that Melvin Needlebaums are brilliant workaholics, which they are. Nor is it merely their ability to crank out interrogatories, motions to compel, and fifty-page briefs at a speed that seems to defy the laws of human endurance. And it’s certainly more than their encyclopedic recall of even the most obscure judicial opinions and federal regulations. No, what truly distinguishes the Melvin Needlebaums of the legal profession is the astounding level of belligerence within their disheveled bodies. It’s a veritable witch’s brew of malevolence, and they focus all of it on the opposing attorneys in their lawsuits. They never lose that edge, either. For most litigators, a chance encounter with a former adversary is a time for shared laughter and reminiscence. But for a Melvin Needlebaum, there is no such thing as a former adversary. Every case is a blood feud.

  Moreover, and perhaps most important, they are extraordinarily profitable to their firms. They work twelve hours a day, seven days a week—and every minute of their time is billable to a client. When you multiply three thousand billable hours a year by a rate of $225 per hour, you tap into hitherto unknown reserves of tolerance among partners.

  I heard an outraged squawk noise from my office. Melvin’s telephone call with opposing counsel seemed to be taking that all too familiar path. I gestured to Jacki to join me. Melvin was standing in front of my credenza, his back to me. We watched him from just beyond the doorway.

  “Patently absurd!” he quacked, his arms jabbing spastically.

  There was a pause as he listened to his opponent’s response.

  “Get real!” Melvin snarled. “Anyone with the brains God gave a goose would know that was patently absurd.” A pause, then another squawk of outrage. “You, sir, can assure your client that I shall make it an unforgettable deposition. By eleven hundred hours I shall be storming through the rice paddies and taking no prisoners.” Another pause, arms twitching in silence as he listened. And then, “You, sir, have launched the first missile. Prepare for Armageddon!”

  He slammed down the receiver and leaned forward to squint at my monitor screen. “Do you have WestLaw on this terminal, Miss Gold?”

  “Sure do,” I said, walking in. I signaled Jacki to join me. We each took a chair facing Melvin, who stood behind my desk.

  He turned to squint at Jacki. “Madam, are you conversant in the fundamentals of WestLaw?”

  “She is,” I said. “Jacki is going to law school at night.”

  Melvin nodded and flashed one of his goofy grins. “Excellent,” he said, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “I have a premonition that this deposition may become somewhat turbulent.” He turned to me. “In the event that I should suddenly require research on certain rules of discovery, Miss Gold, my firm’s client will be more than happy to compensate your secretary for her time. Speaking of which”—he paused to check his watch—“we should commence.”

  “Sally Wade & Associates,” I said.

  “Aha!” he barked, seating himself in the chair behind my desk, his eyes on fire. “The queen of southern Illinois chasers, self-appointed defender of the lumpen proletariat, champion of the congenitally clumsy, and, up until her dramatic departure from the active practice of the law, the target of the do-gooders at the Disciplinary Commission.” Melvin leaned back with a lopsided grin.

  I had to smile. Melvin was definitely a trip. “What is this,” I said, “a briefing or a celebrity roast?”

  Melvin winced. “A celebrity what?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Tell us why the commission was interested in Sally.”

  Melvin sat back, his eyes wild. Here we go, I thought. On a good day I could speak in complete sentences. Melvin spoke in complete paragraphs.

  “We shall begin with the supporting cast of characters. The so-called associates of Sally Wade & Associates. This rogues’ gallery consists of a marginal actress turned legal amanuensis by the name of Amelia Suzanne Chickering. The rest of the supporting cast is composed of three and perhaps as many as nine chasers prowling the highways of southern Illinois with police radios in their cars.”

  “What are chasers?” Jacki asked.

  Melvin’s eyes seemed to blaze behind the thick, smudged lenses. “The lifeblood of a personal injury lawyer’s practice, Miss Brand,” he explained, “especially in the era before the lower echelons of our learned profession succumbed to the siren call of a full-page ad in the Yellow Pages and the lure of a sleazy thirty-second spot on The Late Late
Show. Chasers, Miss Brand, are the bounty hunters of the personal injury trade, the sleazy mercenaries who find the prospective clients and haul them to the lawyers. For a fee, of course.”

  “But isn’t that illegal?” Jacki said.

  Melvin gaped at her. “Of course it’s illegal, Miss Brand. More precisely, it violates Section 2–103 (d) of the Illinois Code of Professional Responsibility, which provides, in pertinent part, that a lawyer shall not give another person anything of value to initiate contact with a prospective client on behalf of that lawyer.”

  “Oh,” Jacki said meekly.

  Melvin glanced at me with another lopsided grin. “Miss Brand,” he said, turning back to her, “when we are dealing with Sally Wade we are not dealing with the Sandra Day O’Connor of Madison County. Compliance with the Code of Professional Responsibility was hardly the decedent’s strong suit.”

  “Now, Melvin,” I said gently, “Jacki hasn’t been a law student long enough to become cynical.”

  Melvin squinted at me in confusion. “I beg your pardon, Miss Gold?”

  I turned to Jacki. “Under the code, Sally Wade violates the rules if she pays a chaser two hundred dollars for a case worth two grand in fees. Meanwhile, no one raises an eyebrow if a lawyer at Neville McBride’s firm spends five hundred dollars wining and dining a CEO in the hopes of landing a case worth fifty grand in fees.” I smiled at Melvin. “I, on the other hand, have been a lawyer long enough to be cynical.”

  “Those two scenarios are not analogous,” Melvin protested.

  “They most certainly are,” I said, “but we’re not here to debate ethics. Tell us more about the Sally Wade investigation.”

  Melvin took off his glasses, tilted the smudged lenses toward the light overhead, and then put them back on. “The clients of Sally Wade & Associates,” he continued, “are primarily semiliterate blacks, Hispanics, and southern Illinois rednecks, brought to the firm by the chasers, usually within an hour of the automobile accident that has given rise to their sudden allure as potential clients. Either Miss Wade or her assistant has—or rather, had—the accident victim sign an attorney-client contingent fee agreement on the spot, pursuant to which the client agrees to pay the firm a hefty percentage of any recovery, plus expenses.”

  “I assume Sally’s alleged chasers were the focus of the commission’s investigation?” I asked.

  Melvin snickered. “Some focus. Those bumblers have been after her for years, but they could never put together the evidence to nail her. It drove them berserk.” Melvin shook his head in disgust. “Anyone with the brains God gave a goose knew how she got her clients.”

  Melvin shuffled through his papers. “I happen to be acquainted with two of the commission’s investigators,” he said, “and they slipped me some of the files. It’s great stuff, Miss Gold, great stuff. Listen to this one. It’s a letter to the commission from one of her clients. ‘Dear Sirs,’” Melvin read in a weird accent with no connection to any known race, creed, or geographic region, “‘I was hit by a pickup truck on Route 3 on November fifth of last year. After the police left a big black dude named Dice in a Buick Deuce-and-a-Quarter pulls over to the side of the road and tells me to get in ’cause I needs a good lawyer. I was bleeding from my ear and felt like I’d been slapped upside the head ’cause of that pickup, which really wasn’t my fault. This Dice drive me to Attorney Wade’s office and give me one of her cards and tell me to go see the lady, which I done. When I got to her office some pretty blond lady has me sign papers and now they won’t tell me what happened with my case which gets me angry ’cause I think I’m owed a lot of money and now I have to pay Dr. Hernandez who keep calling my home, which ain’t right ’cause it upset my mother. Please help.’ Signed, E. B. White.” Melvin looked up with a demented grin. “Not!” He burst into high-pitched cackles.

  “What happened?” I asked, trying to get to the point.

  Melvin slapped his hand on the table. “Not a thing! What buffoons. Mr. Dice denied the event, and the complaining witness failed to respond to further inquiries. Here’s another,” Melvin said, squinting at a document. “Ah, yes. Ramón Valdona. You’re going to relish this immensely, Miss Gold. This Hispanic chap contends he was transported to Sally Wade’s office directly from the hospital by—guess who?—the police officer at the scene of the accident, one Officer Annie McCarthy. Drove him there in her squad car! El Señor Valdona claims that Officer McCarthy was kind enough to give him one of Sally Wade’s business cards and advise him he’d get in big trouble if he didn’t go see her.” Melvin paused to give us still another lopsided grin. “As you can imagine, the commission was virtually rhapsodic over this claim. Alas, their enthusiasm nearly matched their ineptitude. They subpoenaed Officer McCarthy, who—surprise, surprise—denied it all under oath, as did the decedent, thereby leaving the commission with nothing more than a complaining witness who barely speaks English and doesn’t exactly have a Sears Die-Hard upstairs.”

  “Did they drop the case?” Jacki asked.

  “Excellent question, Miss Brand. Actually, this file was still open when the decedent died. As a matter of fact, there was some indication that they had approached Sally about a possible deal with the prosecuting attorney.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  Melvin grinned. “They proposed that Sally turn state’s witness against Officer McCarthy.”

  “Annie McCarthy?” I repeated, glancing over at Jacki. There were several entries for McCarthy on the nine-page handwritten columns of names we’d found in the safe deposit box.

  Melvin glanced at his documents. “She is a member of the Alton police force. According to the investigators, she has a boyfriend who works as a nurse in the emergency room of the county hospital. The investigators surmised that he was feeding his lady friend the names of accident victims who might need a lawyer.”

  Melvin had to leave shortly, so he and Jacki went to the file room to make photocopies of the materials he’d gotten from the Disciplinary Commission. While they were in there, one of my cocounsel in a trademark case called to discuss strategies for an upcoming settlement conference before a federal magistrate judge. As he rambled on, I idly doodled the names Dice and McCarthy on my legal pad. When the call ended, I jotted a note to myself to call Amy Chickering. Jacki poked her head in the office. I looked up and smiled. “Is Melvin off to war?”

  She nodded and came in, holding a document. “He may be strange but he is definitely sharp. I showed him this BCS list of numbers,” she said, handing it to me.

  It was the single sheet of paper that had been in the manila envelope in Sally’s safe deposit box—the one with the initials BCS and four rows of numbers handwritten in blue ink:

  BCS

  011-41-22-862-1823

  108-795-2581-3883

  111385

  11787

  “Don’t tell me he recognized a bank account number,” I said. Jacki had so far drawn a blank in her efforts to turn up an account number that matched any of the numbers on the sheet.

  “No,” she said, “but he recognized the first number.”

  “You must be kidding.”

  “Well, not so much the number as the sequence. He says it’s a phone number.”

  I stared at the first row: 011-41-22-862-1823.1 looked up at Jacki. “Overseas?”

  “That’s what he said. The first three numbers—zero, one, one—are for overseas, and the next two are the country code. Melvin says that forty-one is the country code for Switzerland.”

  “He’s amazing.” I pressed the speakerphone button. “Let’s check it out.” I punched in the number.

  We stared at the phone as we waited for the call to go through. It took a while, but we finally heard the short, quick rings of a foreign telephone service, and then the click as it was answered.

  “Allo,” an accented male voice said. “Banque Crédit Suisse, Customer Inquiries. Your acco
unt number, please.”

  I glanced at Jacki, momentarily flustered, and then looked down at the sheet of paper and read off the second row of numbers.

  “A moment, please,” the voice said. There was a short pause, and then he said, “Your personal identification code, please.”

  I looked at Jacki, shrugged, and read off the third row of numbers.

  “A moment, please.” Another short pause, and then, “Your password number, please.”

  I read off the last row of numbers. “One, one, seven, eight, seven.”

  “A moment, please.” Another pause.

  I looked up at Jacki. She had her fingers crossed.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Wade,” the voice said. “How may we be of assistance today?”

  I winked at Jacki, who was covering her mouth to stifle her excitement.

  “Can I have my account balance, please?” I said.

  “Certainly. Account number 011-41-22-862-1823 has a present balance of 114,835 francs.”

  I looked at Jacki and pressed the mute button. “Swiss francs?” I whispered.

  She shrugged.

  I took my finger off the mute button. “Sir, how much is that in American dollars?”

  “At today’s exchange rate, 114,835 francs equals…147,225 dollars.”

  I wrote the number down. “Thank you very much.”

  “You are quite welcome, Ms. Wade.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  When I called that morning, the desk sergeant told me that Alton police officer Annie McCarthy was not scheduled to come on duty until late that afternoon. Accordingly, I moved Junior Dice to the top of my chaser list and shifted Officer Annie to later in the day.

  The fact that I had a chaser list suggested that I also had a coherent plan of attack. I didn’t. All I knew was that Officer McCarthy and Junior Dice were two people who dealt with Sally on at least a semiregular basis and, moreover, were two people who, for different reasons, had cause to be unhappy with Sally.

  Amy Chickering’s description of Junior Dice made him sound dangerous, and the brief bio in the Disciplinary Commission files confirmed her description. Reginald “Junior” Dice, born and raised in the East St. Louis ghetto, was in his late thirties. He listed his profession as boxer, and still fought occasionally in club matches in Moline, Centralia, Decatur, and other Illinois towns. Back in his early twenties, Junior Dice had served eighteen months in Joliet on a manslaughter conviction for killing a man with his bare hands in a barroom brawl. In the space of a year after his release, he was arrested twice on rape charges. The first was dismissed; the second was reduced to simple assault in a plea bargain that resulted in a six-month suspended sentence. Since then, he had remained clear of the law except for a few traffic violations, including an arrest two years ago for going 115 in a 55-mph zone.