by Andrew Grant
The guy said he knew where and when the treacherous deal was set to take place, and begged for help to stop it. A couple of the recruits took his pleas at face value and showed up, ready to save the day. They were rewarded with a paintball between the eyes and a one-way ticket to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for reassignment. They complained that this treatment was too harsh, since verifying the engineer’s information via other, improvised means wasn’t part of the brief. Their whining didn’t get them very far. Our instructors took the view that you can teach a skill—how to pick someone’s pocket, clone their cellphone, bug their office, follow their car in heavy traffic—but you can’t teach an instinct. And you can’t teach initiative. You either have those things, or you don’t.
I wasn’t one of the recruits who got reassigned. It’s not necessarily an attractive characteristic, but I guess I was born naturally distrustful. So the next morning I didn’t rush to do what Detective Atkinson had asked me to. Instead, I started by making a couple of phone calls.
* * *
—
The AirTrain system had been little more than a line of semi-completed concrete columns sprouting between the lanes of the Van Wyck Expressway the last time I was at JFK, so after checking out of the hotel I decided to give it a try. The Federal Circle station was clean and bright and I was happy to see a train already waiting at the platform when I arrived. I took a spot in the corner and looked down on the lines of traffic creeping along and choking in a pall of gray-blue exhaust fumes as we swept past high above them on the elevated track. It was a great vantage point for watching the planes—so elegant in the sky as they roared away from the earth or came in to land; so cumbersome on the ground as they crept between the runways and the terminals—for the few minutes it took to reach Howard Beach. Then I had to change to the subway. I was disappointed that the new trains didn’t go all the way to Manhattan. I was sure I remembered talk of a new terminal being added for them at Penn Station. I guess it must have been canned to save money. At least I was traveling on my own, and only had my army duffel to carry. I was glad not to be caught up in one of the ragged knots of slow-moving tourists, weighed down with incomprehensible amounts of luggage and zombified by jetlag.
I emerged at Chambers Street to find that the bright fall sun I’d enjoyed in Queens had given way to gray clouds and drizzling rain. I hurried past the library and city hall, cut between Foley Square and the courthouses, and found my way to the district attorney’s office on Hogan Place. It was a pale building with smooth, elegant stonework and plenty of restrained art deco detail, spoiled only by a rash of air conditioners sprouting from every window.
I told the frowning receptionist that I was there to see ADA Sonia Dixon. She glowered at me over her steel-framed glasses and gestured toward a woman standing just inside the doorway. I’d noticed her hurrying along the street a few yards behind me. She was pushing six feet tall even in her flat shoes, and had been holding a plastic document folder over her head to keep the worst of the rain off her deep red hair. I hadn’t realized she was going to follow me inside, or that she was the person I wanted to meet.
Ms. Dixon waited for me to sign in, then led the way to her office. It was on the second floor. She took the stairs, moving with the purposefulness of a person who doesn’t like to waste time. Something about her manner reminded me of Marian—the second time something had in two days. Marian had talked of becoming a lawyer, too. I wondered if she’d done it. She’d tried to persuade me to go to law school with her. I was hit by a sudden flash of what life could have been like if her campaign had been successful. The two of us could have come to work together. Met for lunch. Maybe ended up opposing each other in some high-profile trial. That would have been something. As things were, it was just another what if. I was starting to hate what ifs. I hadn’t encountered one for years, but all of a sudden they were coming at me from all sides.
The last office I’d been in was Colonel Linn’s, four thousand miles away. It was about the same size. It also had a single window. But that’s where the similarities ended. His was so antiseptic you could have used it as an operating room. Dixon’s felt like a graveyard for office furniture and fixtures. Her blind was stuck halfway down at a drunken angle with several of its slats caught up in its grimy, twisted cord. Not that it made much difference to the amount of light entering the room, the window was so filthy. Dog-eared folders were heaped up on the windowsill. There were dozens more on the row of mismatched metal filing cabinets that were lined up against one wall. There were still more balanced precariously on the battered wooden desk. It struck me that if the Pardew file really was missing, it could easily be in this office. Papers could be lost in here for years. Unless she’d developed a bizarre method for organizing everything not previously understood by science.
Dixon walked around to her chair and sat down. I noticed that the desk wasn’t lined up straight with the walls. Was that deliberate, I wondered, or was she just too busy to fix it? The law school certificates hanging on the wall behind her were perfectly level. So was a row of twelve playbills from college productions of Shakespeare plays.
“So.” Dixon indicated that I should sit on one of a pair of visitors’ chairs and took a yellow legal pad from her top drawer. She leafed through it until she found a blank page and secured the rest with an elastic band. “Mr. McGrath, you have information about the Alex Pardew case?”
“No.” I shifted my weight on the metal-framed chair. It was hard to find a comfortable position. “Not me.”
“You said you did.” Dixon’s pen was poised in the air above her pad. “That’s why I agreed to see you right away.”
“No.” I shook my head and tried to pull a disarming smile. “I said I’d heard you needed information about that case, and that I wanted to talk about it. I’m sorry if that led you to the wrong conclusion.”
Dixon threw down her pen. “You know where the door is. If it hits you in the ass on your way out, I’ll take that as a bonus.”
“Don’t be like that, please.” I held up my hands. “I’m sorry if I misled you. I’m not myself right now. I’m not thinking straight. I’m way behind the curve. You see, Alex Pardew was my father’s business partner, and my father’s dead. I only found out yesterday. I was in the military, serving overseas. We had some stupid beef between us, going back years. I came home to reconcile with him, but there was some communications problem because the army—it doesn’t matter. Last night the police came to my hotel. They told me that Pardew had been arrested, but then got let off somehow before he was convicted of anything. I don’t understand what happened. If he had something to do with my father’s death…? I was hoping, if you could spare two minutes, maybe you could bring me up to speed?”
Dixon retrieved her pen and set it down next to her legal pad. “Thank you for your service, Mr. McGrath. I’m sorry for your loss. Since you’re here, I’ll try to answer your questions. But I must warn you, there’s probably not much I can tell you.”
“As I understand it, my father was suing his partner for some reason?”
“What?” Dixon leaned forward in her chair. “Who have you been talking to? No. What happened is that your father discovered that Alex Pardew was engaged in fraudulent activities. They argued, which seems to have led to your father’s collapse. That brought in the police, who uncovered the extent of Pardew’s criminal activities. He was on trial for financial crimes, which was a slam dunk. I was also going for felony homicide, though that was a lot harder to prove. I had a medical expert ready to testify that the stress of the fight triggered a previously undiagnosed heart condition, but that part’s not entirely clear-cut. It would have been a lot easier if Pardew had killed him with a knife or a gun.” Dixon’s eyes flickered from side to side as if she were reading something on the wall behind me. “Oh, I’m sorry! That’s a horribly insensitive thing to say.”
I kept my expression neutral. “What kind
of fraud was Pardew into? Only give me the layman’s version, OK?”
“OK. It was like this. Pardew had signed an agreement with your father to buy his company at a price set by a formula. He was attempting to reduce that price by using illegal accounting maneuvers.”
“You said the case was a slam dunk. So you liked your chances?”
“Oh, yes.” A hungry smile spread across Dixon’s face, but she quickly chased it away. “Of course, nothing’s ever guaranteed when a jury’s involved. But the case was running like clockwork. I was expecting his lawyer in my office any day, trying to plead it out. And then—a file containing some critical evidence disappeared. Didn’t the police mention that?”
“You didn’t keep copies?”
“Working copies, yes. But they’re inadmissible as evidence. There’s no chain of custody, and unless documents are original or certified copies, the defense could argue reasonable doubt that they’re altered or faked.”
“So do you think there’s a connection between the ice under Pardew’s feet growing thin and the file disappearing? It seems like very convenient timing.”
“Mr. McGrath, I’m an officer of the court.” Dixon closed her eyes for a moment. “Even if I thought that, I couldn’t start throwing accusations around without solid evidence.”
“But it was a fortunate coincidence, from Pardew’s point of view?”
“Certainly. And while this is also not admissible, it’s not the only time Pardew’s skated on solid-looking charges. Six months before your father died—so a year ago, now—Pardew got in a car accident. He was breathalyzed at the scene and found to be DUI. But a judge ruled out the evidence on some bogus technicality. The defense claimed the BAC kit could have been subjected to excessively low temperatures in the officer’s squad car due to a freak cold snap there’d just been, so the calibration couldn’t be guaranteed to be accurate. Now, I know the cop. He’s been on the job twenty years. There’s no way he’d screw something up like that.”
“So it was another coincidence?”
“I couldn’t say.” Dixon shot me a wry smile. “But first evidence is ruled out, and then evidence disappears? Do you like baseball, Mr. McGrath? A hitter gets walked in consecutive at bats? You’ve got to wonder if that’s intentional. And if it’s not, we need to find Alex Pardew on the double and get him to tell us his lottery numbers.”
“Sounds like a plan. But tell me. Does evidence disappear from the courthouse often?”
“Not often, no. But it does happen.”
“So the file could have gone missing by accident?”
“It could have.” Dixon crossed her arms. “And Elvis could have moved into my grandmother’s basement. He could be running rock ’n’ roll classes for seniors. Teaching them to gyrate, so they wouldn’t need physical therapy after getting their hip replacements.”
“What an image. But back to the courthouse. How could anyone get Pardew’s file out of there? Wouldn’t that be a big risk? Don’t they have pretty tight security?”
“They do. But you wouldn’t need to remove the file. Have you ever been to the courthouse? It’s a massive, rambling old place. You could hide any number of files there, if you had the access. That’s what I’d do. It’s like when I dated a detective, right when I was starting out in the department. He had a case where a car was stolen, and it got used in a kidnapping. They found it burned out under the Williamsburg Bridge a few days later. I thought he’d be pissed, but he wasn’t. It was the opposite. He told me they’d got lucky. The forensics guys could still harvest all kinds of evidence, despite the fire. And it showed them that the perps they were looking for were amateurs. He said the pros would have dumped the car in long-term parking at JFK. It would have stayed there for months on end before anyone noticed. I’ve dealt with criminals for years since then, and I’ve learned he was right. Good ones don’t draw attention to themselves.”
“So you think the file’s still at the courthouse somewhere?”
“I have no idea.”
“But if you were a betting woman?”
“That’s where my money would be, yes.”
“How would you go about finding it?”
“I don’t know if it can be found. The police already tried. They came up empty. It might be a question of waiting for it to turn up on its own.”
“That’s one approach.” I stood and held out my hand. “But who knows? There may be others.”
Chapter Six
I must have been in the neighborhood of the New York County Courthouse dozens of times when I was a kid, when I only had eyes for skyscrapers. It must have been one of the buildings I passed on my way to meet ADA Dixon the other day, but I didn’t pay much attention because I was hurrying to get out of the rain. That was a shame, because it’s a magnificent structure. The kind of building that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the center of Rome.
It looked like an ancient temple with a flight of solid stone steps, maybe a dozen feet high, stretched across its whole width. Above them, a parallel row of ten massive Corinthian columns rose up to support a symmetrical triangular pediment, complete with classical sculptures and a neatly carved inscription. Taken altogether, it could be the Pantheon’s younger, smarter brother. But when I paused in the center of Foley Square for a moment and closed my eyes and listened, I knew the only place in the world I could be was Manhattan.
I was surrounded by the urgent drumming of footsteps on the sidewalk. The pulsing of car engines as the morning traffic stuttered and surged through the clogged arterial streets. The angry, blaring horns. Taxi doors slamming closed. Tires squealing as drivers vied for the smallest gaps between other vehicles. Sharp staccato outbursts from commuters who got blocked off as they rushed to work. Softer, part elated, part exhausted exclamations from tourists who were desperate to tick off one more landmark before their vacations came to an end. The rhythm was unique, like a manic, hyperactive heartbeat. And even after all the time that had passed since I was last there, it still sounded like home.
Behind me a TV crew was setting up to record an episode of a cop show. Fraught twenty-somethings were bustling around in black clothes, barking questions and commands into handheld radios. Bored security guards were scanning the area for unruly fans to hold back. A pair of real cops looked on, unimpressed. A lawyer with a wheeled briefcase that was almost as big as my army duffel was struggling across the uneven stone surface.
Everywhere I looked people were rushing and hustling, except for one other guy. He was standing on the other side of Centre Street, right in front of the courthouse, gazing up at the statues. He was leaning on a cane. It was made of aluminum, and was adjustable like the temporary kind people borrow from the hospital. The guy turned and shuffled away. Then he stopped, turned back, and paused again. It was like he wanted to start up the steps but an invisible force was preventing him. I watched him for another few moments, then crossed the street and almost got hit by a guy on a bicycle. There were way more of them in the city than I remembered. Maybe the rash of bike lanes that had appeared since my last visit was encouraging them.
“That one’s Truth.” I paused on the sidewalk next to the old guy.
“What?” He shook his head and squinted at me, as if coming out of a dream.
“The statue.” I point up to the tip of the pediment. “The one you were staring at. I read about it, once. He’s Truth, and his friends are Law and Equity. I guess they put them up there so you know what you can expect, inside.”
“Are you going inside?” He sounded suspicious.
“I have to. I work here.”
“What’s it like?” His eyes narrowed. “I’ve never been in a place like this.”
“I’m not totally sure.” I shrugged. “It’s my first day, actually. But I doubt there’s anything to worry about.”
“So what are you?” He took a step away from me, l
ike he’d detected a foul smell. “A lawyer or something?”
“Me?” I smiled. “No. I’m just a janitor.”
* * *
—
I helped the old guy up the steps and along to the main door, then left him to join the security line and made my way around to the back of the courthouse. If you could strip away the ornamentation, you’d see the building was really a series of geometric shapes. The front was a rectangle with a triangle on top, and the main section was a hollow hexagon with a circle in the center, joined by six narrow rectangles like the spokes of a wheel. The entrance I’d been told to use was at the rear of the hexagon. I had to go down a flight of steps to reach it, not up, and then head through a pair of glass doors. One of the doors was boarded up with a sheet of coarse plywood. I wondered what had happened to it. Had there been a break-in? Had someone been fired and then taken out their anger on the glass? Or maybe a prisoner had escaped? I asked the guy manning the security station about it, but he just shrugged.