“ ‘He didn’t shoot nobody,’ ”I said, quoting Ramirez.
“He was speaking well of his friend. Doesn’t mean he has any information. A dead end, kid,” Joel pronounced. “Mr. Ernesto Ramirez doesn’t know anything.”
Maybe. But I thought differently. Joel was pretty good with these things, but I thought he’d made a misstep. I thought Ernesto was about to tell us something back there, before Joel had invoked a name that clearly upset Ramirez and knocked him off the rails.
Joel kicked his Audi into gear and drove off. I looked back at Liberty Park.
Ernesto Ramirez was watching us drive away.
2
I reached over with bleary eyes and took a good whack at my alarm clock. My head sank back into the pillow until I got a nudge in my rib cage.
“It’s five, babe.”
I rolled over and peeked up at my wife, Talia, who was sitting up in bed, wide awake.
“Can’t sleep?” I moaned. “Your back still?” I nestled up against her warm body and moved my hand onto the hump of her belly. Technically, the due date was ten days away, but Doctor Waite said it could be anytime. “Hurry up, Emily Jane. Daddy’s big trial is starting soon. I want to see you as much as possible before-She kicked.” I popped up in bed. “I felt her.”
Emily Jane-we’d already named her-had made an art of kicking for her mommy but never for me.
“She’s been doing that for over an hour.” Talia ran her hand through my hair. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked.
“A few hours.” I was trying to get as much done for the Almundo trial as I could before I had to take some time off for the arrival of Emily Jane. Her due date was five days before jury selection.
There were all sorts of reasons for me not to work as second chair on the Almundo trial, given Emily’s impending arrival. But there were even more reasons for me to take the assignment. Starting with this: Every single associate at Shaker, Riley and Flemming would give a major organ to be in my position. This case could make my career if it went well. And it was the chance to work alongside Paul Riley, our senior partner and, by most people’s accounts, the best trial lawyer in the city. I was new to Shaker, Riley and to private practice in general when Hector Almundo walked through the door and hired Paul to defend him in one of the biggest public corruption cases the city had ever seen. I don’t know what I did to catch Paul’s attention. I’d handled a few projects for him but nothing huge. Maybe he’d asked about me at the county attorney’s office, where I’d cut my teeth before landing at the firm. I didn’t know and didn’t care. I said “yes” to this assignment before it was out of Paul’s mouth. I couldn’t have known at the time that my wife and I would be expecting our first child just as the trial opened.
I warmed up a couple of breakfast sandwiches in the microwave and brought them up to Talia before I left for work. Last week, these sausage-and-egg biscuits would have made her gag; this week she couldn’t live without them. “I miss coffee,” she told me. She’d forsworn it, even though her doctor told her she could have a little caffeine now and then. This was our first, and Talia was taking no chances.
Even sleep-deprived and uncomfortable, my wife was a classic Italian beauty. I wiped her flattened bangs off her forehead and kissed her there, then her nose and cheeks and soft, warm mouth. “I miss sex,” I told her. “Unless-”
“Sorry, mate. If you touch my boobs, I’ll scream.” She pulled on my tie. “Get home early, okay?” By early, she meant some time before she went to bed.
“And keep that cell phone handy,” she added.
3
“The tapes, the tapes, and the tapes,” said Paul Riley, his feet up on his desk and his tie pulled down. “That’s what it comes down to. Hector’s own words caught on tape.”
“And Joey Espinoza,” said our investigator, Joel Lightner. Joey Espinoza was Senator Hector Almundo’s chief of staff. The feds, who had caught wind of the Cannibals’ shakedown scheme as early as February of 2005, liked Espinoza for one of the ringleaders. Thus, one early morning in April of 2005, as Joey Espinoza carried a mug of coffee and briefcase to his car, FBI agents stormed his garage and did what FBI agents do best-they scared the shit out of him. They told him his life, as he knew it, was over. They had him cold. His only chance of survival? Wear a wire and help them nail his boss, Senator Hector Almundo.
Joey eagerly complied and covertly recorded four conversations with Hector before Adalbert Wozniak’s murder in May. At that point, the feds made the call that they couldn’t continue to lie low and risk more bloodshed, so they closed in, arresting eleven gang members, fourteen co-conspirators, and the illustrious Senator Almundo.
“Joey’s not the problem,” Paul argued. “He’s a scumbag, but that doesn’t change what’s on the tapes. Hector still said what he said.”
Hector’s words on the tapes were pretty damning, instructing his chief of staff, Espinoza, to continue working with the Columbus Street Cannibals and their extortion scheme. We didn’t have much to refute it, other than to argue that Joey was really calling the shots, and Hector was an absent-minded leader who didn’t sweat the details. That wasn’t the easiest sell, however, when he was on tape telling Joey to keep doing what he was doing with the street gang.
“So find a way to refute it,” Lightner said.
“Oh. Thanks, Joel.” Paul turned to me. “You get that, Jason? Lightner says we should find a way to refute it. You can’t put a price on those pearls of wisdom.”
Paul and Lightner went back to the eighties, during a mass murder in the south suburbs, when Paul was the prosecutor and Joel the cop. Lightner left the job fifteen years ago and opened a private investigation agency that has benefited mightily from its association with this law firm.
“Jason,” Lightner said to me, “you’re new, so you may not know-when Paul gets frustrated, he takes it out on poor underlings like me. What he really means is he appreciates my contribution to this case. Also, I don’t know if he told you yet, but as a condition of working on this case, you have to name your child after Paul.”
“Jason’s child is going to be a girl, Lightner, which you would know if you didn’t start drinking before noon every day,” Paul replied.
“Okay, Paulina, then. Paulina Kolarich.”
This usually happened at the end of the workday, these two getting on each other before they went out for steaks and martinis that night. They were both bachelors, Paul once-divorced and Lightner twice. They could be pretty amusing when they got going. Their deliveries were so dry that it still took me an extra moment to separate sarcasm from sincerity.
“And I don’t start drinking until three o’clock, at the earliest,” Lightner protested.
I felt something pull at me, a clearing of some clouds in my head. Maybe. .
“What kind of a name is Kolarich, anyway?”
Could that work? Was it that simple. .?
“He’s in a state of shock,” Lightner went on. “He’s so mesmerized by your intelligence, Riley, that he can’t speak. You’re gonna have a long career at this place, Jason. Just repeat after me: Paul, you’re so brilliant. Paul, you’re so brilliant.”
I looked at Lightner, then at Paul. Riley nodded at me out of curiosity.
I cleared my throat and gave it one more thought.
“Hang on,” Lightner said. “I think he’s about to say something.”
“Yeah, I am,” I said. “I think I know how to defend this case.”
4
As the second chair on the Almundo defense team, I had to serve dual roles. I had to be prepared for my portion of the trial work, less than Paul’s but still significant. Then I had to oversee the other lawyers on Team Almundo-six lawyers, six paralegals, and four private investigators-ensuring that all operations were humming along in synch. We had meetings twice daily, first in the morning and then at five o’clock, confirming that the documents had been cross-referenced accurately in the database; that all motions in limine had been drafted; that drafts of direct and cross-examinations had been prepared. We were two weeks out from trial now, and all those assignments that looked like we had plenty of time to finish suddenly seemed desperately incapable of timely completion.