The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  Word of the museum has been in the papers two or three times in the last year, a thirty-million-dollar museum and gallery planned for a location somewhere near the waterfront, set to start construction in the next year or so.

  “Actually the museum is being named for his father. Zane, Senior.” Tolt is leaning forward, elbows on his desk, smiling at the verbal swordplay between Harry and me. “A combination of some public money, mostly federal grants, and matching contributions from the Tresler Family Foundation. The old man died back in the late sixties. There’s a son, grandson, and I’m told a great grandson.”

  “Which one is on the board of supervisors?”

  “Zane, Junior, the son. He’s been on the board twenty years I guess. As long as I can remember. He chairs the board’s courts committee. I know that much. The judges have to grovel in front of him yearly to get their heat turned on in winter and the air turned up in summer. He controls funding for staff, desks, pens, paper clips. He has more juice with the local courts than the appellate bench. I’d bring him into the firm as a full partner. He wouldn’t even have to come into the office,” he says, “but unfortunately he’s not a lawyer.” Adam makes it sound as if this might be only a minor impediment.

  “What does he do besides supervise?” I ask.

  “Not much. The grandson runs the family businesses now. Mitchell Tresler. He’s in his thirties. Not quite as quick as his father. I guess the genes have been watered down,” he says. “I’m told there’s a fourth running around out there somewhere, probably in grammar school. If I had a pretty little granddaughter, I’d send her to that school and tell her to make friends. The kid’s going to be rich someday.”

  “Where did the family money come from?”

  “Mostly real estate development,” says Adam. “They do large projects, malls, major subdivisions. That and give a lot of money to charities.

  “The family started in real estate back in the early part of the last century. Zane One put most of it together. I never actually met the man, but from what I’ve heard, you wouldn’t want to get in his way if there was a land rush. The wheel ruts in your body would be deep. And he was well connected. A friend of William Mulholland, the engineer who built the Owens Aqueduct. Anyway, the family ended up owning a good part of the eastern end of the county. This was back when it was nothing but sagebrush and jackrabbits. The Treslers bought it up for a song. Then the water project came through, the diversion from the Colorado River. Suddenly old man Tresler was sitting on a fortune.”

  “Funny how that works,” says Harry.

  “Isn’t it?” says Adam. “The rest is history. Zane, Junior, grew up with the county, and now he runs it. This year it’s his turn to be chairman of the board. He also heads the regional joint powers commission.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “The city, the county, and the port authority signed a joint powers agreement a few years ago. They formed a special regional powers entity to govern land along the waterfront and most of the commercial property downtown. They have the final word on development in that area. Tresler’s the chairperson. It gives him a huge hammer. What he wants he gets.”

  “That’s a little dicey, isn’t it?” asks Harry. “I mean sitting on a county governing body that settles zoning disputes when your family’s company is doing development?”

  “Tresler is a careful man,” says Adam.

  “And if you’re smart, you don’t ask questions, is that it?” says Harry.

  “Not if you want his vote on anything that’s important,” says Tolt. “And to be honest, I think you’ll find him above reproach. There’s nothing anybody can give him that he doesn’t already have—money, power, you put it on a list, Zane Tresler has it. They call it politics, and as I said, he’s a careful man.”

  Though many might not believe it, the most potent side of government resides at the local level in this state. Here things like contracts for picking up your garbage, down-zoning and obtaining variances to do as you please on your own land can make you a millionaire, or a pauper, overnight.

  Some county supervisors operate like feudal lords. They are untouched by the restrictions of term limits and largely ignored by the glare of the news media that is interested only in covering the A-list in Washington and the state capital. Supervisors in large counties in this state have constituencies larger than members of Congress. They reign over districts more vast than the Spanish land grants. And like the colonial dons of early California, some are in the habit of exercising unquestioned authority.

  In a state where many citizens don’t read, write, or speak English, where voters trudge through their daily existence like vassals, paying their taxes and asking few questions, a well-greased machine can maintain power for decades on nothing but its own perpetual motion. If you want your streets swept, your sewers unplugged, and the doors to your health clinic kept open, you’d better sign on to your local supervisor’s oath of fealty. In some shining communities, it has reached the level of Stalin’s utopian state. Here it no longer matters who votes. It only matters who counts the vote. It’s the old ward system, alive and well in sunny Southern California.

  “So our man Tresler is the common thread between Dana, Metz, and Fittipaldi. Their ticket to the arts commission. So what does it mean?” says Harry.

  “Probably nothing,” says Tolt.

  “You don’t think Tresler was in somebody’s pocket?” says Harry.

  “If it was anybody else, I’d say only up to his elbows,” says Adam. “But Tresler doesn’t need the money.”

  “The devil’s got a corner on sin, but he still wants more,” says Harry. My partner is a firm believer in the dark side of man.

  “He’s into power, yes. Taking bribes—you can look, but my guess is you’re wasting your time. The fact of the matter is he had to appoint somebody. Why not the people who gave him money for his campaign? Sorry to say, but I have given in that cause myself,” he tells us. “As well as a few others.”

  This doesn’t surprise either Harry or me.

  “It’s hard to tote your load without greasing the skids,” says Adam. “We all pretend it’s not extortion, just the exercise of our First Amendment rights. Still there are times when most of us would rather not engage in that form of expression.”

  “Maybe we should see who else gave?” I say.

  Tolt gives me a “What do you mean?” expression.

  “Check Nick, Dana, Metz, our friend Nathan Fittipaldi. There should be disclosure statements filed someplace.”

  “My guess is it won’t tell you anything you don’t already know. Everybody who is anybody is likely to show up on Tresler’s list,” says Adam.

  “All the same, we’ll take a look.”

  It will tell me one thing: whether Dana gave in her own name. She told me that she didn’t know Tresler. Now I want to know if she told me the truth.

  Harry makes a note on the back of one of Adam’s business cards, snatched from the little holder on his desk.

  “What I can’t understand,” says Tolt, “is why Nick would enter into a business arrangement with Metz?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. But it does seem that Metz was obsessed with getting Nick on the hook for legal work.”

  This sets a few more wrinkles in Adam’s forehead. “That’s the part that bothers me most. It has a connection to the firm, and I don’t like it. It seems to me this would only make sense if this business, this Jamaile whatever it was, was intended as an import-export conduit for drugs. In which case Nick’s services would be a major asset.”

  He looks at me to see if I have any other theories. I don’t.

  “I like to think Nick got cold feet,” he says. “That he thought about it and either decided not to, or that if he got involved, the better angles of his nature asserted themselves, and he wanted out.”

  “Maybe that’s why they killed him?” says Harry.

  “That was an accident, remember?” says Tolt.

  “O
h. Right,” says Harry.

  The room falls quiet as we consider scenarios of what might have happened in Nick’s life. Only the ticking of the antique regulator clock on the wall breaks the silence.

  “There is a possibility,” says Adam. He is still deep in thought, fingers now steepled, forefingers touching his lower lip as his brain tries to untangle the human equation.

  “Of course it’s only a theory,” he says. “It wouldn’t do to talk about it, especially right now with the question of insurance and accidental death in the air.” He looks at Harry and me, looking for agreement on a vow of silence.

  “What’s one lawyer’s theory, but a guess?” I say.

  “Right. But consider for a moment. What if Metz was drawing Dana in, trying to get her involved, let’s assume for the moment anyway, without her knowledge, in some extralegal activity.”

  “To what purpose?” says Harry.

  “In order to gain leverage over Nick,” he says.

  “She says she didn’t know Metz that well. They’d only talked a few times,” I tell him.

  “Yes. But it would explain Nick’s efforts to palm Metz off on you, wouldn’t it?” he says. “To put some distance between himself and this man, while protecting his wife.” Adam is a man well studied in human motivations.

  “Go on.”

  “If the two men weren’t getting along,” he says, “Nick might threaten to blow the whistle. If that’s what happened, Nick could have become a very real threat to them, to the people who killed them.”

  “You mean the people on the other end of the drug connection?” says Harry.

  Tolt nods.

  “I just don’t think Nick would have ever gotten involved in drugs,” I tell them.

  “I don’t like to think of one of my partners doing it either,” says Adam, “but stranger things have been known to happen, human nature being what it is. And you have to admit, from all appearances, the Rushes must have been having some financial difficulties.” He glances down at the spreadsheet from Nick’s client trust account on the desk in front of him.

  It’s one of the unanswerable questions. Where did all the money that Nick made over the years go? Without an audit, canceled checks from his accounts, credit card receipts, we will never know.

  Adam sits up from his brief reverie. “In any event, for the time being it wouldn’t do to engage in too much idle speculation about victims. Especially now that a certain insurance carrier is getting ready to dip its pen in the ink pot and put its signature to a check.”

  “Point well taken,” says Harry.

  “What are we going to do about this other thing?” says Tolt. He means the forged trust account checks.

  “Let me talk to Dana.”

  “Fine. Just don’t take too long.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I take I-5 south from the Coronado bridge and accelerate into the middle lane, past Logan Heights. At National, I take the freeway off-ramp and head east. In my rearview mirror I can see the giant vapor lights from the naval shipyard as they infuse their eerie orange glow into the looming cloud deck that hangs over the bay.

  It is nearly nine o’clock. Midweek traffic at this hour of the night is light. A fine mist covers my windshield.

  The streets are empty except for a few souls wandering aimlessly. The only businesses lit up at this hour are liquor stores and a few taverns.

  It takes twenty minutes to find the street Espinoza mentioned during our last conversation at the federal lockup. I have confirmation that at least this much of what he told me is true.

  The neighborhood exudes the kind of aura picked up by a sixth sense that lingers and lifts the hair on the back of my neck. It is not a place I’d want to walk my dog at night unless the pup has sharp teeth, likes red meat, and can outrun a bullet.

  I see lights at the next corner, so I slow down. As I get closer, I see some teenagers, one of them in a dark hooded sweatshirt leaning into the passenger window of a car stopped in the middle of the street halfway into the intersection. The car is rocking to the beat of salsa jive from a sound system that vibrates the roots of my teeth whenever it hits bass.

  The kid in the sweatshirt and his two friends check me out as I drive by. Maybe I’m a customer or maybe I’m undercover. They lose interest as I head down the street.

  I’m moving slowly, looking for street numbers. The drizzle and the lack of streetlights make it impossible. I check the scrap of paper on the console next to me, the notes I’d made following my meeting with Espinoza at the lockup earlier in the week. This is the place. Espinoza was cryptic, but he did give up some information.

  According to him, the man Jaime had an alternate hangout whenever he was in town. He had gone there several times for meetings and on two occasions did not return at night. Espinoza told me that he drove Jaime to this place once, just before he left San Diego for Mexico. Espinoza dropped him off and said the number was either 406 or 408, he couldn’t remember. But he told me that he saw the man that Jaime met. The guy was tall, over six feet, and skinny. Like a pole, according to Espinoza. The man was Hispanic and had a straggly dark beard, black hair, and wore a dirty gray felt hat. He watched this man talk to Jaime for a few seconds out in front of the house before the two of them went inside and Espinoza drove off. The only other thing he could remember was an older-model Chevy Blazer parked along the side of the house. He said he remembered it because the large window in the back was smashed in and someone had covered it with a large piece of black plastic wrapped in duct tape around the window frame.

  I drive past kids’ toys on the sidewalk. Over the front door on a house near the end of the block, I see what appear to be three rusted metal numerals nailed to the frame in the shadows. I squint, trying to penetrate the darkness. It looks like 486.

  I drive on, and this time I turn at the corner, pull a short distance up the cross street, and park at the curb, turning off my lights.

  I had changed from my suit and tie at the house. I’m wearing an old pair of jeans, a navy blue slipover shirt, and a faded denim jacket I use for outdoor work. On my feet are a pair of running shoes.

  I step out of the car, lock the door, then check my watch. It’s almost nine-thirty.

  It takes only a few seconds to make my way back to the corner and head down the street. I stop two doors down at the house where I saw the street number over the door. The drizzle has turned to a light mist, so in the dark I cannot see rain falling. Still I can feel wet pin pricks of moisture on my forehead and the back of my neck. I turn the collar of my jacket up and walk down the street. Moving slowly on foot, and being closer to the house, up on the sidewalk, I now have no difficulty making out the number over the door. As I approach the bottom of the steps, the tin numbers 486 are clearly visible above the front door. Even numbers are on this side of the street. Unless Espinoza has sent me on a goose chase, the house I’m looking for is on this side.

  I hear the hot salsa and see the red taillights from the vehicle a block and a half down still stopped in the intersection. I move quickly down the sidewalk until I’m two doors from the end of the block, when suddenly a beam of light bounces off the wet pavement in the center of the street. The headlights are coming from behind me and moving fast. I skip across a damp patch of grass in front of one of the houses and duck under the front stairway. I have no desire to be silhouetted from behind for the crowd around the car, now just a little more than a block away.

  I take a deep breath and settle under the stairs for a couple of seconds to get my bearings. Just as I’m about to step out, I look behind me. There on a door leading to a ground-level apartment is the number 406A. It is stenciled in faded block letters. I can hear the muted sounds of a television from somewhere inside, either upstairs or beyond the door behind me.

  I step back out to the sidewalk and check the car with the salsa crowd still in the intersection at the end of the next block. Another vehicle has now joined them, pulling up behind the first car. The guys on foot have
now divided forces, talking commerce through the open windows of both vehicles.

  I look back at the house. There’s a large bush against the front. Behind it partially concealed is a ground-floor window through which I can see the flickering translucent blue light of a television reflected against the pulled-down shade inside.

  I look to my left at the house next door, and notice that there’s a ground-level apartment under its front staircase as well. Running in from the sidewalk and dead-ending against this other house is a double strip of concrete each a little wider than the width of a car tire. Between them is a little gravel and what is now wet, packed hardpan with a light rainbow sheen of motor oil floating in the puddles. This driveway dead-ends into the front of what used to be a garage, now finished off as the exterior wall of a downstairs apartment.

  I step across the two strips of pavement, through the grass and look at the door under the stairs of the second house. It is numbered 408A.

  I walk back out to the sidewalk and check 406. There is no driveway on the other side. Here the long blades of grass on both sides of the stairs stick up like spikes. I’m not a gardener, but it doesn’t take an expert to tell that these weeds and crabgrass have not been crushed under the wheels of a heavy vehicle anytime recently. Nor is there a ramp through the curb to the sidewalk.

  If Espinoza was telling the truth, and his memory wasn’t clouded as to the Blazer with its broken rear window and where it was parked, I’m betting that 408 is the address for the man with the beard and the felt hat.

  I look over again. The downstairs apartment appears dark, as least as much of it as I can see through a small side window on the house. I back away, all the way to the sidewalk, and check the action in the intersection to my right one more time. There’s a regular traffic jam there now. Enough cars that I can’t count them all. A land office business, some coming, some going, music and the sound of voices, what passes for the commerce of the night in this neighborhood. I check my watch. It’s now after ten.