At seven I took a break to turn on the room’s flat-screen TV monitor and find a cable news channel. Kramer had told me the case had attracted media interest, and I knew that after the media frenzy surrounding the young woman from Mountain Brook who’d disappeared in Aruba in 2005, another missing young blonde woman from Birmingham would be irresistible to the piranhas of sensationalism who pass for today’s journalists.
I was not disappointed. One network featured a wolfish graying man who called himself a psychiatrist and specialized in diagnoses of crime victims and perpetrators he’d never met and never would meet. Another cable news platform offered a fat bleached blonde who alternated between gushing sentimentality and a practiced sneer at every comment offered by her guests, all of whom seemed to be either lawyers or psychologists. Disgusted and a little ashamed, I hit the Power button and went back to the documents.
It was still raining when I finished the last folder a few minutes before midnight. I closed the file, threw my zabuton on the floor, and sat for ten minutes. Then I undressed, took a quick shower, and lay down to a sleep without dreams.
CHAPTER FOUR
Monday January 23
When I woke up at four-thirty and pulled apart the curtains at the window, I could see light rain streaking past the streetlights in front of the hotel.
By five I was in the hotel’s small exercise room. I warmed up on a Schwinn Airdyne and then did a hundred sit-ups and three sets of reps on eight stations on the Universal machine. By six I was showered, shaved, and dressed, and I went down to the hotel dining room and ordered two scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. I ate in ten minutes and went back upstairs to finish preparing for the day.
I called Kramer around seven. He answered his cell before I heard a ringtone. “Slate. Come on out now. You know where we are?” He recited the address. “FBI is due here any minute. You may as well say hello to them. I’m sure they’ll be happy to meet you.” The sarcasm dripped from his voice.
Kramer lived in Mountain Brook, a wealthy enclave of hills and suburban forest a few minutes southeast of the city. The exterior of the house was stucco and brick, with timbered eaves, in what might be called English Arts & Crafts in a real estate brochure.
Across the street from the Kramer home, a CNN satellite truck and a truck from the local NBC TV station were illegally parked. I left the rental car in the driveway behind a black Ford sedan that could have worn a vanity tag with the initials FBI. I walked up the wet brick path and rang the front doorbell. My arrival did not launch any investigative journalists from their dry seats in the satellite trucks. I didn’t blame them. I wouldn’t get out in the weather for me either.
A thin boy about fifteen with acne and black hair in bangs so long they covered his eyes answered. I introduced myself, and he asked me to step inside the foyer. He closed the door.
“I’m Paul Kramer,” the boy said. “My father told me you would be here this morning. I’ll go and tell him you’re here.”
I waited less than a minute. Kramer bounded through the archway leading from a hall that appeared to provide access to the other rooms of the main floor. “Slate,” he said. “Glad you’re here early. FBI wants to talk to my son Paul right now, so it’s a good time to meet Susan. Come on back.”
Kramer led me through the hall and into a large kitchen with a central island encircled by barstools. In a nook at one end of the kitchen stood a massive leather and walnut booth worthy of a private club.
A woman with ash blonde hair, her face as smooth and unlined as a ten-year-old’s, sat on one of the barstools. She wore a black jogging suit with some sort of gold fabric belt. A heavy gold crucifix hung between her breasts. Her feet were bare except for black tennis footies. I wondered if I should have taken off my shoes before entering the house, but I noticed that Kramer was wearing his wingtips. Lawyers’ shoes.
If Susan Kramer was her husband’s age, she had engaged the services of an excellent plastic surgeon. Or maybe it was heredity. Or good bones.
“Slate,” Kramer was saying. “This is my wife. Susan. Susan, meet Mr. Slate. Mr. Slate has agreed to help us find Kris.”
“I see,” Susan Kramer said. She didn’t stand or offer her hand.
“Slate is here to help us, Susan.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. But FBI agents are here in the house. They have the resources of the government at their disposal. I trust them. I trust the police. And I place my ultimate trust in the power of prayer and in the power of miracles and in the Blessed Virgin. I just don’t see… .”
“No.” Kramer cut her off. “No, you don’t see.”
“Now who’s being rude?”
“Folks, maybe this is a bad time. I can come back later.”
“No, Slate,” Kramer said. “Susan, I’ve watched this man’s career. He’s a smart lawyer, and now he takes on situations like ours. I’ve seen the FBI screw up too many kidnapping cases. The two members of my law school class who joined the FBI could not have gotten a job in the county DA’s office. I’ve hired him, and he stays.”
Susan Kramer stood and said, “I’ll be upstairs. Father Kelly is waiting in the salon. We will pray together. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Slate.”
“Whatever,” Kramer muttered to her retreating back. “Sorry, Slate. Susan handles stress with anger and sessions with the priest. And I’m the one with high blood pressure. Let’s go in the library. Maybe the fibbies are finished interviewing Paul.”
One room on the front of Kramer’s house jutted past the remainder of the house’s facade. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered one wall. An antique writing desk of dark wood with painted Oriental figures sat under the double windows facing the street. Paul Kramer sat near the bookshelves in a wing chair covered in solid red fabric. Facing the boy, the two FBI agents, a man and a woman, occupied the ends of a couch covered in a red fabric that appeared to be silk.
Kramer walked in and stood over the couch. I hung back near the door. “Not finished yet?” Kramer asked the room in general.
“Almost.” The female FBI agent glanced up at Kramer. “Paul was just telling us about going with his mother to pick up Kris from school.”
“And that’s all I can remember,” the boy said. “May I go now?”
“Yes,” Kramer and the female agent said simultaneously. Paul got up, and the two agents both stood and shook the boy’s hand. He nodded to me as he walked past.
“Agent William Alston, Agent Patricia Sanders, meet Mr. Slate. Mr. Slate is a lawyer, and I’ve hired him to help with the effort to locate Kris.”
The two FBI agents turned toward me as I followed Kramer to the center of the room. Both had been issued straight from the twenty-first-century federal law enforcement handbook. The man, Alston, about six-three, 205. Dark thinning gray-blond hair, trim, cheap suit, black cap toe shoes with thick soles. Probably an ex-jock. The woman, Sanders, probably five-seven, 135, wore her brown hair shoulder-length and pulled back with a shell clasp. Dressed better than the man: dark blue suit, pink shirt, probably Brooks Brothers or Ann Taylor. Odd eyes: one green, one brown. Heterochromia iridium. Anna used to tell me I read too much.
I shook their hands in turn. “It’s just Slate.”
Agent Sanders nodded. “Slate, then. You were retained to advise the family on legal issues related to Kris Kramer’s disappearance?”
Before I could answer, Kramer spoke. “The fact that Slate has been retained is not privileged. But any question as to the nature of any legal advice he may offer falls squarely within the privilege.”
“And the fact that you find it necessary to retain counsel when your daughter is missing raises interesting issues,” Sanders said.
“Well, I’m sure what Agent Sanders means is that it is a little unusual for a family with a missing child to hire counsel this early when law enforcement has no reason to suspect a family member might be involved,” Alston said. He turned to Sanders. “I’m sure Mr. Kramer is just being thorough and careful, and after
all, he is himself a well-respected attorney. Natural for him to retain counsel during any difficulty.”
“Does your practice include criminal law, Attorney Slate?” Sanders asked.
“No,” I said.
“Media law?”
“Nope.”
“Domestic relations?”
“Missed again. Sorry. No more guesses. Three strikes.”
“You’re out,” Bill Alston said.
Patricia Sanders rolled her eyes. “Why is it that the testosterone levels and the sports metaphors multiply geometrically when the number of men in a room increases arithmetically?” Sanders asked.
“That is a mathematical conundrum on par with Fermat’s Last Theorem,” I said.
“Well. Way too much of both in here for me,” Sanders said. “I’m going upstairs to speak with Mrs. Kramer.”
“She’s with the priest,” Alston reminded her.
“Good. I’ll speak with him too. We’ll take all the help we can get.”
Don Kramer and Agent Alston spent the next fifteen minutes explaining the avenues of investigation they were pursuing: speaking with Kris’s friends and teachers, interviewing her family, reviewing posts on social media. The FBI treated all such disappearances as possible kidnappings until proven wrong, but so far no communications from kidnappers had surfaced.
Agent Sanders’ footsteps on the stairs prompted Alston to check his watch and to suggest that it was time for them to head back downtown. Sanders and Alston shook Kramer’s hand. Alston clapped him on the shoulder. I followed them into the hall. Kramer opened the door for the agents; they looked back, nodded to me, and walked out into the rain. One media cameraman in bright red rain gear hustled out of his van and filmed them getting into their government sedan and driving away. That footage would make for scintillating television.
Kramer led me back into the library. “I apologize for Susan earlier,” he said. “She’ll come around. She always does. She just has to understand things are moving too fast for me to consult with her every thirty seconds.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “But I do need to speak with her about that afternoon when she picked Kris up at school. So I hope she comes around soon.”
“Count on it,” Kramer said. “How’s the reading going? Draw any conclusions?”
“It’s clearly a good lawsuit. But most good lawsuits don’t drive defendants to commit criminal acts before they’re filed. What makes this one different?”
“It’s different because one defendant, or group of defendants, is the New Orleans Mob.” Kramer nodded. “Same bunch twenty years later. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”
After the meeting with Kramer, I spoke briefly with Paul Kramer about the afternoon he’d last seen his sister. That conversation revealed nothing useful. Kramer gave me a little more background on the relator in the qui tam matter and why he’d placed the notes in a sealed envelope. I returned to the hotel, spent the afternoon reviewing my notes and reading the file, and ate a passable dinner of broiled red snapper and steamed vegetables downstairs in the hotel restaurant.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tuesday, January 24
By midnight the rain had slowed to a drizzle. The streets of the city were wet, and in the weak light from the streetlights three stories down from my hotel room, they looked almost clean.
I took the little bronze Buddha out of my suitcase and placed it on the nightstand, lit a stick of incense, unrolled my zabuton, placed my bolster in the center, and just sat, astride the bolster in seiza posture, for fifteen minutes. Thoughts came, and I acknowledged them, then allowed them to float away.
For a year after the accident, when I meditated, all the images and thoughts floating up to consciousness were of Anna or David, their faces, a phrase, how they moved and breathed; or sometimes of twisted metal and smoking airbags. Then an occasional thought of work or chores or a conversation with someone else would come. By now the mix of images and thoughts approached fifty-fifty.
I rolled off the bolster, stretched my stiff legs, then tossed the bolster and the mat onto a chair and went to bed.
At two in the morning, my cell phone rang. I was in that half-sleep when dreams begin, and I lay still for a moment to let the jangle of the bell clear my head.
I answered on the sixth ring.
“Slate,” the caller said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s Grubbs. Not asleep, were you?”
“Of course not. I was evaluating my investment strategy for the transition to the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency.”
Leon Grubbs’s little sister Tasha had worked for me at my old law firm as a paralegal in the early nineties. From eighty-three to eighty-five Grubbs had started at weakside linebacker at Grambling and made second-team All-Southern conference three consecutive times.
Grubbs had also majored in criminal justice and made academic All-American twice.
I knew a couple of people who’d seen Grubbs play football. Running backs didn’t get to Grubbs’ corner, and he didn’t need support from the defensive backs. When Grubbs hit a ball carrier, the guy stayed hit.
Back home after school, Grubbs made one of the highest scores ever recorded on the Birmingham police entrance exam and rose up the ranks like an ebony rocket.
Eighteen months ago he’d made captain and the same day got appointed to his dream job, at least until he made chief – Deputy Chief of the Investigative Operations Bureau of the Birmingham Police Department. Chief of Detectives.
Middle-of-the-night calls from Leon Grubbs were not likely to convey good news. “What’s up?” I said.
“You and me. I’m down in the railroad yard. Morris Avenue and Twenty-First. Not far from your hotel.”
In the background I heard static from what could only be a police radio approach closer to Grubbs and his cell phone, then Grubbs’ muffled voice mingled with more radio static and the voice of another man.
“Just a second,” Grubbs said. The line went silent while I wondered how Grubbs knew I was in town.
When he came back on the line, he seemed to have heard my thought.
“Yeah, I know where you are. Get your butt down here now. I’ve got a murder victim in an expensive suit. He’s carrying one of your business cards in his shirt pocket.”
I told Grubbs I’d get there when I could, went into the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, and rubbed the skin hard with a clean white towel.
I pulled on a red Marines sweatshirt and a rain suit with a hood, strapped on the Glock, and walked the six plus blocks in the cold rain down to the rail yards that divided the north side of Birmingham from the south side.
Most Birmingham citizens would have advised against that walk, but cold rain keeps the gangs indoors too. I could have driven the Taurus, but the walk in the cold wet air slowed my arrival, helped me think, and, mostly, woke me up.
Down past Morris Avenue between Twenty-first and Twenty-second Street North, a dozen cops moved slowly over and across the tracks, surrounded by four black-and-white units with blue lights turning, too bright in the semi-darkness of the city night, and one ambulance, the attendants sitting in the front seat out of the rain while the police did their work.
Grubbs was chewing on a wet cigar and talking to another detective and a couple of uniforms, their hats wrapped in plastic.
Grubbs finished with the uniforms before he cocked his head toward me and gestured with the cigar. “Come over here,” he said.
I followed him across three railroad tracks, the wet iron rails glistening in the artificial light.
Grubbs was just over six feet, and even now, just shy of fifty, the shoulders and waist made a V. He looked like he could still shed the defensive end and nail the tailback.
But this was no night for games. A dark plastic tarp covered a shape that was unmistakably a body.
Grubbs motioned with his thumb. I bent over the tarp and lifted a corner near what appeared to be the head.
Kr
amer was on his back. The hair was soaking wet and plastered against the scalp. There was blood on the back of the head and a deep bruise on the left side of the face.
Raindrops fell steadily into the open sightless eyes, but the dead man didn’t blink.
“Looks like a nine-millimeter in the back of the head,” Grubbs said. “Know him?”
I eased the tarp back over the face and stood up. “His name was Kramer. Donald R. Kramer. He’s — he was a lawyer here in Birmingham.”
“Any idea why he was carrying your card?”
I shook my head. “Lots of lawyers have my cards.”
Grubbs nodded. “Let’s hope they don’t all end up lying dead in the rain.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That would be good. Okay if I go back to bed now?”
Grubbs looked down the tracks for a minute as though he were thinking about taking the next train out of town. Finally, he turned back to me. “Sure,” he said.
I turned and began stepping over the wasteland of wet tracks, careful to place my feet on the heavy dark cross ties.
“Oh, Slate,” Grubbs called. “Call me if you remember anything about this Kramer. Got me?”
I waved without turning around. Grubbs was a guy who needed to have the last word.
At a quarter after six in the morning, running at about eight-minute pace, I was two miles down First Avenue, across the viaduct over the old Sloss Furnace, past the waterworks office with its perpetual wall of water, in a neighborhood of warehouses and wholesalers, heading in the general direction of the airport.
The morning air was cold and damp, last night’s rainwater turning the asphalt streets into cold air humidifiers.
When I hit two and half miles, I crossed the street and headed back. Uphill now; I had to slow down.
I was not twenty anymore. And I didn’t want to be.
Back at the hotel, I showered and changed into a white shirt with gray slacks, tasseled loafers, blue Brooks Brothers blazer and rep stripe tie.
I took the elevator down to the lobby, picked up a copy of the Birmingham News at the counter, pushed through the double doors of the hotel restaurant and ordered blueberry waffles, two eggs and coffee.
Cold Winter Rain Page 3