Morris was waiting for me outside the courtroom. He had agreed to drive with me to the office, my protector now that I was under attack. The thought of Morris protecting me was oddly comforting. I was going straight to the office because I had decided to skip Chuckie’s funeral, decided for the best of all possible reasons: naked fear. Together Morris and I walked down the hall to the elevator.
“You could have told me what Gardner’s testimony would be at the first,” I said
“So where would be such fun in that?”
“This isn’t fun. I’m dying here and you’re talking about fun.”
“Such kvetching. You drew it out of him in the end. A lawyer as grand as yourself, Victor, I knew you would be getting to the bottom of what he had for the telling.”
I looked around the hallway. “Where’s Beth? Have you seen her?”
“I sent her off on a little errand,” said Morris.
“To pick up your dry cleaning?”
“That too needs doing,” he said. “Now quiet please, I have news for you from Corpus Christi.”
“You found Stocker?” I asked.
Morris stopped walking, took out his glasses and little notebook, and searched through the notebook’s pages and the scraps stuck inside those pages for his notes. “Aaah, yes. Here it is.” He pulled out a piece of envelope with a tight scrawling over it and began walking again, squinting through his glasses all the while at the tiny print. “It seems there is a Mr. Cavanaugh at the Downtown Marina on a Bay Shore Drive in Corpus Christi that bears a striking resemblance to our Mr. Stocker. This Mr. Cavanaugh is in a thirty-six-foot sailboat. He sailed over from the west coast of Florida. He is renting his berth at the marina by the week. He has no visitors, no friends, he drinks like a carp, and talks of sailing to South America. And this Mr. Cavanaugh makes calls from the marina’s pay phone, which just happens to be the same number that has placed calls to that Mr. Prescott whose office you burgled like a cat.”
“And you think Cavanaugh is Stocker?”
“Of course I think that, such a dorfying you are sometimes, Victor. Why else am I telling all this to you?” We reached the elevators and Morris pushed the down button. “But whether it is so or not, we can only know by going down and finding out.”
“So go,” I said.
“No, thank you,” said Morris. “Where would I eat in Corpus Christi? You think they got a kosher deli in Corpus Christi? You think they got pastrami in Corpus Christi?”
“You’re not going down?”
“After this trial, maybe, you and Miss Beth can make the trip.”
“Why not now?” I said. “It doesn’t do us any good if you find out that it’s him and then he sails away to Paraguay.”
“From what we know it doesn’t look like he is going anywhere too fast,” said Morris. “Besides, he can’t be sailing off to Paraguay.”
“And why not?” I asked.
“There is no seaport in Paraguay,” said Morris. “It is in the mountains.”
“So now you’re the geography wizard?”
“I had reason to be searching once for criminals in Paraguay.”
“What, Morris, you were a Nazi hunter?” I asked through my laughter. “You were searching the mountains of Paraguay for wayward German colonels?”
“Yes,” said Morris in a cold voice that shut me up quick. We stood there in an awkward silence while Morris stared at me until I began looking down at the scuffs on my shoes. The elevator came, breaking the moment, but before I could enter it Eggert grabbed hold of my arm and yanked me aside.
“Are you still interested in a deal?” he asked.
“What are you offering?”
“Plead guilty to extortion only, testify against the councilman, we’ll recommend minimum jail time. I’ll even talk to the U.S. Attorney about probation.”
“Gardner’s testimony shook you up a little, hey, Marshall?”
“Not at all,” he said, but his hand was in his pocket and his change was jingling out a very different tune. “It’s inconclusive at best.”
“Maybe. But your taxi driver witness said the limo he saw flashed his brights, like a signal, as if it were hoping to be noticed. And now we know that Ruffing, who collected the insurance on the property, was tooling around that night in a black limousine. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see the connection. Your arson just disappeared from the case, and so, probably, did the racketeering charge. Now you want my client to plead to the only real charge left.”
He sniffed twice. “It’s a good deal, Carl.”
“This trial has come down to either or. It’s either Moore or Concannon. The only way for you to get both is for one to plead and rat out the other. Sit tight, Marshall. We’ll talk after my witness tomorrow. If she is all I expect, tomorrow you’ll be offering immunity and be damn glad to give it.”
I walked away, not waiting for a response. A week before I would have jumped at his offer, leaped at it like Charles Barkley leaping for a rebound, but it wasn’t a week before anymore. I was back in the game, I was on a roll, and tomorrow I was going up for the winning score.
53
IT WAS A COLD GRAY MORNING, a winter morning at the tail end of the fall. My breath fled in wispy clouds as I walked from the underground parking garage beside the courthouse to the Society Hill Sheraton, where Veronica was hiding out. It was a peculiar place to hide, a large but not tall brick building with a wide and active lobby, from which guests in tracksuits flowed out through the glass doors and around the courtyard to run along the Delaware River. Morris told me he would be in the gray Honda, waiting for me. I spotted it resting at the end of a long line of cars parked across the wide cobblestone street from the front of the hotel. All the cars but Morris’s faced the curb; Morris had backed the Honda in so he could see the front of the lobby without twisting.
“Anything?” I asked.
“You didn’t bring mine coffee?” said Morris.
“I forgot, I’m sorry.”
“The first rule in surveillance, Victor, the very first rule. Never forget the coffee.”
“I’ll get you some coffee.”
“Stop, don’t be worrying yourself. It is the first rule, but it is maybe not such a very good rule, because once it goes in it has to go out, which is very inconvenient, believe you me, in the middle of a following. When are you wanting her in the courtroom?”
“This morning, ten o’clock.”
“Does she want to go?”
“I’ll talk to her, she’ll come. All right, let’s go get her.”
“Hold your horses,” said Morris.
“Hold your horses?”
“Yes, hold your horses. That’s a very fine expression, I think. What, I couldn’t have been a cowboy? I would have been some cowboy.”
“Have you ever ridden a horse, Morris?”
“What’s to riding a horse, you tell me? I can sit, I can hold onto the straps, I can say go and stop, I can ride. Look over there, by the front driveway.”
“The silver BMW?”
“Such a car I should own. Beautiful, no? Except for that it is German it is a wonderful car.”
“Why are we admiring a car?”
“Because it has been parked there all morning. Just sitting there, but for when one of the men left for a few minutes and came back with coffee.”
“You think they’re watching the lobby entrance?”
“The coffee was what gave it away to me,” said Morris. “Already you’re forgetting the first rule of surveillance.”