The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  Adam aims and fires again. I hear the same thud as the bullet hits home. This time Herman goes down on one knee. He drops his pistol and it clatters down several steps. I can see Herman’s face pumped with blood, the veins bulging on his neck. He’s holding his side with one hand.

  The small Walther is out of my pocket. I pull the slide and cycle a round into the chamber, aim at Adam, and squeeze. Nothing.

  The safety is on. I bring it back, fumble with the tiny lever, click, and it shows red.

  Adam has the Glock up, taking careful aim at Herman’s back as he struggles to reach for his pistol on the stairs.

  I squeeze off a round. The little Walther torques in my hand and the bullet catches Adam in the arm, jerking his body just as he pulls the trigger. His shot goes wide.

  He turns and looks at me, his eyes like two eggs sunny-side up in a platter, wondering where I got the gun. Adam missed it when he frisked me. The small pistol was underneath, inside the pocket of my zippered jacket as I lay on the ground. He failed to check the front when I got up.

  He has the Glock lowered at his side, the muzzle pointed down at the stone as he stares in disbelief at the gun in my hand.

  If he raises the Glock, Adam knows I will shoot him again. Instead he looks at me, smiles, then shakes his head as if he is daring me to do it. He turns toward the motion on the stairs.

  Herman is reaching for the automatic.

  Adam takes aim.

  This time, with the crack of the Walther, it barely moves in my hand. Tolt’s head snaps sideways as a tiny red dot appears on his temple, followed by blood like someone tapped a barrel. His knees buckle. His ass hits the stone. For an instant his torso sits upright. Then gravity takes it sideways. When I blink he is gone, over the edge of the platform.

  EPILOGUE

  Harry is out of the hospital, his memory and faculties intact, and Herman is in.

  Surgeons removed one bullet that lodged in the muscle of Herman’s chest, up high near his clavicle. The other passed through his side, piercing what Herman called one of his love handles. He is talking about decorating it with a diamond stud, a conversation piece for the ladies that he can flash above his trunks whenever he struts the beach.

  As for Adam, a Mexican medical examiner picked up pieces of him with a sponge from a rock outcropping five stories below the top of the Noche Mul. I suppose you could say that Adam was a victim of his own management style.

  Adam had wounded Nick’s ego in ways he probably never understood. Some lawyers, unhappy in their position at a firm, might take a client or two, like candy from a dish, on their way out the door. But not Nick. He wanted it all, right down to the gold ashtrays and Persian carpets.

  Nick was making a run, trying to peel off partners like a monkey stripping fruit from a tree. His plan was not only to take the best part of Rocker, Dusha’s talent, but as many of the firm’s major clients as he could scoop up in a single pass, swinging from the branches. A new firm with his own name on the letterhead’s top line.

  Like every palace coup in the making, this one could ruin careers if those on the move were caught in the act. The other players, some of the partners upstairs, key people in the other offices, stayed in the shadows while Nick set the munitions at Rocker, Dusha for self-destruct.

  Adam’s obsession with empire, his constant expansion onto turf for more offices, was cutting into his partners’ take-home. These were fertile grounds of discontent for Nick. He planted the age-old seed of every revolution: Nick offered them a better deal.

  When he was killed in what looked like an accident, a drive-by aimed at a client, there must have been some damp carpets in the firm’s executive suites—and it wasn’t from crying. The people involved in his coup had to wonder what careless notes Nick might have left behind.

  He was the one taking all the chances. Of course, he had nothing to lose and the most to gain, the kind of odds Nick would like—managing partner, overnight, in one of the largest firms in the state. It was the kind of edgy action that would give a normal person peptic ulcers. To Nick it was the etching acid of independence, the stuff of which new beginnings are made. Revolution in a banana republic.

  What he needed to pull it off was a source of ready cash. Partners in an established firm don’t jump ship en masse, unless somebody with a healthy line of credit is standing ready to bankroll the new venture. It was one thing to move to a new office. It was another to give up your Lexus.

  Where was Nick going to get that kind of money? Actually, he told me, that morning over coffee, but I wasn’t listening. It was one of Nick’s character flaws, unfortunately not his worst: the irresistible compulsion, if not to crow, at least to hint of victories, before they were won.

  The money would come from the old Capri Hotel itself, Nick’s watering hole with its coffee shop in the dismal basement where he and I had our last conversation.

  The hastily formed limited partnership, the seemingly defunct Jamaile Enterprises had only one asset. It owned the property on which the hotel sat.

  All the pieces snapped together like a puzzle. Nick had leveraged the purchase of the hotel with a multimillion-dollar mortgage. He would have amortized this over a short term. He didn’t plan on holding the property for long. It was where all of Nick’s money went, the hefty fees he was taking home from the firm, the money Dana was no longer seeing to pay for the house and the car, to support her in the style to which she had become accustomed. Nick was busy plowing all of it into servicing the debt on the mortgage for the rundown hotel, meeting the payments each month like a miser, while he plotted revolution.

  How do you maximize an investment like that? Nick revealed that as well. But again, I was tuned out.

  It was easy. First you buy the land. Then you get a variance to build above the current height restrictions. Suddenly the land was worth three or four times what you paid for it. Nick had it all figured. There was nothing to prevent him from going higher, except the whim of local government.

  And who had the power to grant such a variance? The joint powers of authority, the same authority that controlled most commercial property downtown: the super-zoning kingdom chaired by Zane Tresler.

  It was why Nick’s name showed up so prominently on Tresler’s list of campaign donors. Not because Nick thought he could buy the man. Tresler wasn’t for sale, at least not for money. Adam was right about that. Nick gave generously for one reason only, to get Tresler’s attention, to buy access. The closer on this deal would come later, after the Mexicans, the two Ibarra brothers, delivered on their part.

  That was where Metz came in. His name on the limited partnership documents, coupled with the mortgage on the hotel property in the name of Jamaile, was a critical part of Nick’s plan, one that he couldn’t have been comfortable with, but over which he had no control.

  I could never figure how a streetwise lawyer like Nick could be so slow as to do business on paper with a client who turned up a player in a criminal probe. What I didn’t realize is this: Metz’s name on the partnership was the required security the Mexicans demanded before they performed their part.

  The Ibarra brothers had done business with Metz before. They trusted him. For a decade, they had been looting archeological sites in the Yucatán, southern Mexico and Guatemala, selling their finds to rich gringos and posh galleries in Europe and the U.S.

  It was why they needed the stolen visas found by the feds in Espinoza’s closet when they searched his apartment. These would be valuable in bringing carloads of artifacts across the border.

  Metz provided a convenient cover with his construction company. He also offered an outlet for laundering money. This is what the feds turned up, thinking they had drugs. Looting ancient sites was beginning to pay better than narcotics—and with less risk. Even if you got caught, you generally didn’t do life in a penitentiary for stealing someone else’s cultural heritage.

  Under Nick’s scheme, Metz would take a chunk from the profits of the Capri property once the vari
ance was granted and the land was sold to some got-rocks corporation. Metz would then pay off the Ibarra brothers.

  It was why Nick tried to palm Metz off on me, to handle the arraignment. Since he was doing business with the man, an appearance next to him in court would only serve to heighten Nick’s profile. Figuring the feds were checking Metz for drugs, as soon as they realized this was a dry hole, Nick knew they would settle for a fine to cover the cost of their time, this on the illegal transfers of cash into the country by Metz. They would slap his hand. A deal like that would be a cakewalk, even for Nick’s buddy Paul who shied away from drug cases.

  By then everybody would be happy. Metz would have more cash than he’d ever seen in one place before. And Nick would have the money to finish the law firm coup, Rush and Company, no doubt with a flashy new corner office for himself overlooking the bay and the blue Pacific.

  And how was Nick going to get the variance? What do you give to someone who has everything? What gift, what token can anyone offer to a man like Zane Tresler; what would lock him in? Nick had that answer too. You give him something to occupy a place of honor in the white, chambered nautilus, modeled under all that glass in his office. You give him the key to a lost language. You give him the Mexican Rosetta.

  But Nick never got that far. He never saw the shadow looming up in front of him: the austere figure of Adam Tolt. Adam was not the kind of man to spend his life building a law firm and then allow Nick to steal it.

  The relationship between them was one born of convenience and, I suspect, more than a little bad karma. In the end, Adam had to see Nick as his worst nightmare.

  Initially he liked the fact that Nick made Rocker, Dusha a full-service firm. The addition of low-visibility, criminal law services fleshed out the partnership. He liked the money, and he was satisfied with the occasional advice Nick offered on cases. But most of all he liked the Chinese Wall Nick provided around the firm’s respectability. It kept everything clean and tidy. Whenever business clients ventured into crime land, or found themselves there by unhappy circumstance, Adam could banish them down the elevator with a friendly pat on the ass and still keep the revenue flowing. In this way, the firm’s most valued clients, the ones who didn’t have a grand jury giving the smell test to their stock transactions, wouldn’t have to wrench their backs, rubbing up against the expensive finish on Adam’s paneled hallways while trying to avoid contact with Nick’s untouchables.

  As for Nick, he got to tie his wagon to a brighter star, a major firm about to go supernova, with all the prospects that this seemed to present.

  I say “seemed,” because my guess is that within a year, Nick realized it was an illusion. His position with Rocker, Dusha was a dead end. They’d put him downstairs for a reason. To keep his clients from sullying the dignified atmosphere of the real firm. No doubt Adam planned to move Nick lower once Rocker, Dusha expanded enough to inhabit the entire building. Nick could have his own private hell next to the furnace in the basement, where his clients could get credit for time served in purgatory. Adam made it clear. He didn’t want Nick doing anything other than criminal cases. The path to growth was blocked.

  Even for someone like Nick, with an uncanny sense for the human condition, it couldn’t have taken long before Tolt started hearing murmurs. With a firm full of nervous partners, there had to be some who wanted to place bets on the back line, trying to cover both sides in case Nick came up short.

  I can only imagine Adam’s state of mind when he started picking up the scent. A man closer to the end of his career than the beginning, with no place as lofty to land, facing an assault from a direction he’d never anticipated: the basement. His first thought must have been that Nick was out of his mind. Somewhere in the recesses of Adam’s frantic brain must surely have passed the thought that this was also history’s verdict of Hitler and Stalin, not a comforting thought given their initial success and the carnage that followed. Things must have looked even worse when he considered his options.

  For a man with a Rolodex full of heady phone numbers, no doubt with the private line to the Oval Office topping the list, a man who had reached the zenith of a career most people would envy, all Adam could see were the stunning heights from which he could fall. Sure he had a name, a solid reputation of accomplishment, almost all of it in earlier decades. Important people would take his calls, as long as he was the senior partner at Rocker, Dusha.

  As any enduring dictator will attest, when faced with the skirmish line of rebellion, the first rule of survival is to hang the leader. Adam must have stayed up nights trying to figure ways to force Nick out of the firm. But he had a problem. He was missing some vital information. He couldn’t be sure how long Rush’s revolt had been going on or how many of his partners had already signed on. It wouldn’t do to call Nick on the carpet and can him, only to find himself voted out of the firm the next morning.

  Plan B wouldn’t work either. Adam couldn’t just pick up the phone and start calling partners, trying to divine if they’d been talking to Nick behind his back, measuring Adam’s throat for a good cutting. To do that would be to admit that he’d already lost control. Whether Nick won or lost, the partners would smell blood. Adam would be voted the position of partner emeritus, given a broom closet for an office and a book of crossword puzzles to occupy his time.

  He could have waited for the revolt to erupt and then taken Nick and the rebels who followed him to court. But as every law firm knows, the last thing any client wants to hear is that his lawyers are all suing each other. The clients would bail and Adam knew it. What good is it to be a bull and own a field, if there are no cows and no grass in it?

  Adam may have been the senior partner, but he wasn’t senile. It didn’t take him long to confront reality. He was a lawyer. Nick was a kamikaze pilot. If need be, Nick was fully prepared to bring himself down in flames, all over Adam’s finely polished decks. What tends to occupy your mind when you think about doing battle with someone in Nick’s situation is a lot of blood, most of it being your own.

  Confronted by the situation, it is easy to imagine the desperation that might drive someone like Adam to excess. In Tolt’s mind there had to be a way, something more direct, with a quick and certain result, some action he could take, and finish, before his partners started running for the doors. Even to those with mental powers not nearly as subtle as Adam’s, there is little in life more definitive than death.

  The opportunity presented itself in the risky nature of Nick’s practice. It might have been any of a number of Nick’s seedier drug clients who could have gotten the nod, to be standing next to him on the street that morning.

  It requires surmise to plug a few of the gaps, but I suspect that Adam picked Metz for a reason. Lawyer’s intuition tells me that Margaret, Nick’s ex, had lied to me when I talked to her with Susan. She had known about Jamaile Enterprises. Her lawyers would have turned it upside down, looking for hidden assets during the divorce. But timing is everything in life. Nick was lucky. He was still working on the loan papers to buy the hotel.

  Adam would have been cultivating Margaret in hopes of gathering dirt on Nick’s vices, even the ancient ones. She turned out to be a wellspring of information. She told him about Jamaile, Metz.

  Adam must have thought he’d found the grail. What better to get the cops salivary glands going in the morning than a criminal defense lawyer gone bad, turned to the dark side and doing business with one of his own drug clients. It was a prosecutor’s wet dream. Adam had to figure they would look neither hard nor long at any other theories or, for that matter, waste a lot of time chasing after the shooters.

  Tolt had no idea what Jamaile really was or what Nick and Metz were up to in Mexico. It is only my guess, but I think Adam actually believed Nick was involved in drugs. If nothing else, it would have served to cement his resolve, convinced him that he was fighting the good fight, and provided the consolation that no matter how dark his deed, he was doing it for the firm, saving it from the devil. If
he had looked more thoroughly at Jamaile, he might have picked someone other than Metz as the patsy. Had he done that, it is likely no one would have been able to connect the dots and find Adam hiding at the end, all the pieces lacking, as they were, reference points like the hieroglyphs of the ancient Maya.

  And so Nick Rush left the firm, feet first. Adam’s gamble very nearly paid off. With no general to lead it, the troops scattered, and the coup died with Nick, so by the time I started nosing around, it was history. Why would anyone place their career in my hands, confiding to me their part in a revolution that never happened? It was why Dolson didn’t want to talk when I met with him in San Francisco and why the office building at the address in Nick’s handheld was empty, available for lease. Nick was looking for new office space. It’s what you need when you’re opening a firm.

  Even if the thought had dawned on any of Adam’s partners that Nick’s move might be the motive for murder, there was absolutely nothing on their radar scope to link Adam to the shooting. After all, the cops were all looking under other rocks, assuming, as I did, that Metz was the target.

  If that wasn’t enough, there was the rock-solid evidence that Nick’s death was an accident, with an insurance check approaching four million dollars conceding that fact. I will never know how many arms at the insurer’s home office were twisted off at the shoulder by Adam on that one. What I do know is that he used every opportunity to boast about my victory, especially in the firm, even to the point of putting out his piece in the firm’s monthly newsletter and making sure it got dropped on every partner’s desk.

  It was the thing that started me thinking. Why? It was unlike Tolt to go out of his way to embarrass a carrier after what everyone agreed was a generous settlement. It was also Adam who single-handedly fought off their demand for secrecy regarding the amount paid, a virtually uniform secret in every such settlement. I couldn’t figure what his reason was. How better to cover your tracks? An insurance company doesn’t pay that kind of money unless they are sure it was an accident. Adam’s partners would know that. It would kill any suspicion that might be lingering in their minds.