“Some is better than none, Victor, any day of the week.”
“I think I’ll hold out for it all.”
“That’s fine. I understand Sam Guthrie has already drafted the complaint.”
“So I’ll counterclaim, then. Save me the filing fees.”
“You shouldn’t take it all so personally, Victor. It was only business. Actually, you were better in court than I expected. It’s too bad it had to conclude like it did. I’m sure we could have worked very profitably together.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “By the way, I’ll be shortly filing a motion to amend the complaint in Saltz v. Metropolitan Investors.”
“A little late, Victor. Trial’s in less than two weeks.”
“Oh, I think the judge will let me amend the complaint to add two new defendants.”
“New defendants?” he asked, the crow’s-feet around his eyes deepening. “Who?”
“Well, Billy, I told you I was out of town. Where I was, actually, was in Corpus Christi, Texas, with my partner, visiting the Downtown Marina. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
By the frozen expression on his face I could tell that he had.
“Well, it seems that our mutual accountant friend Frederick Stocker was docking his pretty new sailboat at that very marina. We showed up there just yesterday, Billy, and, in an amazing coincidence, we arrived at the marina pretty much at the same time as the FBI. And somehow in all the fuss of his arrest and my dropping a subpoena in his lap Mr. Stocker seemed to think that you were somehow mixed up in the Feds finding out where he was, though I haven’t a clue, really, as to how he got that idea, unless it was something I said. Do you think that might have been it?”
His whole face seemed to harden and contract, every muscle tensing one against the other. His blue eyes turned cold and steely but still he didn’t move.
“Well, anyway,” I continued, “he told a strange story about how the lawyer for the general partners in the Saltz partnership had an undisclosed interest in the deal and how, with the market turning against the project, he convinced the accountant to doctor up the numbers in the prospectus, promising him that no one would ever know. It was this lawyer who he says induced him to defraud my clients and then helped him hide away after he ran off with stolen money. And the funny thing, Billy, is he says that this lawyer fellow is you. Imagine that. Which is why, Billy, we’re adding you and your partners as defendants. Now I’m a realist and I figure a smart fellow like you will have shielded most of his assets, so you’re probably judgment-proof. I figure the best we can do with you is to pull your ticket to practice, send you to that lucrative hell for ex-lawyers where you’ll become a lobbyist or some other lowlife scavenger. But Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, why I’m betting that’s a damn deep pocket.”
His face had turned a whitish gray. “It’s too late to amend,” he said. “The statute of limitations has run.”
“Not technically. It stops running if information is denied to a party due to fraud, which your hiding of Stocker would constitute.”
“I’ll beat you in court. Any day of the week.”
I stood up. “Maybe so, but this Stocker is a very articulate man. I’m certain he’ll make a fine witness.”
I turned to walk out of his office, but just before I reached the door he said with a bravado as pale as the coloring of his face, “Victor, wait. Maybe we should talk some more.”
58
THE FADED BLUE CHEVETTE, liberally sprinkled with rust, was parked on Chestnut Street, waiting for me as I came out of One Liberty Place after my meeting with Prescott. Chestnut Street was closed to normal street traffic at that point and a uniformed policeman was leaning in the window of the car.
“You going to ticket this wreck?” I asked the cop.
The officer leaned back and grinned at me. “There’s not enough solid metal left to pin the citation to.”
“You pull back one of those windshield wipers,” I said, “and the rear bumper falls off.”
“Oh man,” said Slocum from inside. “You guys should be in vaudeville. Get in, Carl, you’re twenty minutes late.”
I ducked in the passenger door and the Chevette groaned forward. At 15th Street it turned right and then took another right onto Walnut, going west. “How did your meeting with Prescott go?”
“Just fine,” I said. “Six hundred thousand to settle a case that wasn’t worth a dime two days ago.”
“You going to take it?”
“Nope. I’m going to see him and raise him,” I said. “I appreciate you coming.”
“We’ll see what she has to tell us. I have my doubts.”
“Frankly, I was surprised to see you waiting for me.”
“Yeah, well, I’m surprised I came. By the way, don’t try to roll down your window. The thingamajig is broken and it collapses if you try.”
We drove past the University of Pennsylvania and then into West Philly, sagging old row houses with decaying porches, small grocery stores, a mattress outlet, seafood stores, a pool hall on the second floor of a crumbling tenement. We were in the middle of a stream of fine automobiles flowing through the synchronized lights on the one-way roadway, heading out of the city to the suburbs, where the taxes were low and the schools safe and the grass in the public parks cut biweekly.
“There are guys in the office,” volunteered Slocum, his voice soft and surprisingly serious, “who say that anyone can convict the guilty, but only a real prosecutor can convict the innocent. I’m not one of them. Last thing I ever want to do is fry someone who didn’t do it. If something smells I won’t cover it up and hope nobody notices as some poor fool rots in jail; it is up to me to find out what exactly is smelling and what I need to do about it.”
“What smells in your murder case against Concannon?”
“I had no choice but to drop the indictment against Councilman Moore,” said Slocum. “After the testimony of your brilliant witness the DA herself ordered the case dismissed. But I heard your little friend testify and if you ask me she was lying. The DA wants me to put her on the stand to hammer the last nail in your boy’s coffin. The thought of it makes me sick.”
“You should go into private practice,” I said with a bitter laugh, “where anything goes and there’s nothing to trouble your conscience except where to cash your checks. Maybe then you could buy yourself a car with a window that actually goes up and down.”
“Wouldn’t know how to handle all that luxury. Besides, the knife you gave me seems actually to have been the one that sliced Chuckie Lamb’s throat. There was blood on the spring. What tests we could do showed it matched his type. We’re holding Wayman right now. Someone sure did a number on him before we got there.”
“So you’re maybe starting to believe the stories I’ve been spinning?”
“I’m starting to listen. That’s as much as you’re going to get.”
“That’s all I want,” I said.
When Walnut Street ended he turned right onto 63rd Street, dipped under the tracks of the Market Street elevated, and headed north, alongside trolley tracks, past dark decrepit houses into the dark fall night.
“So what I’m saying,” he went on, “is that I’m willing to go this far with you because I think it’s my job to find the truth. But no further. I’m going to catch hell for this as it is when word gets out, which it will, and it might even cost me my job. My boss was an obscure common pleas judge before Moore put her up for DA. Now she thinks she’s going to be a senator.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
“I’m not doing it for you. I’m not even doing it for Concannon. But I’m not going in front of a jury to ask for death if I’m not sure.”
We were in Wynnefield now, still the city but there were no longer row houses along the dark wide streets, instead large stone homes with wide porches and peaked roofs. There were lawns and nice cars and, though it was all just a little shabby from age, even the shabbiness was a nice touch. Slocum pulled up in front of a large stone colonial with stained-glass windows across the front door. There were bright lights gleaming from the top of the house, illuminating the broad front lawn, and the windows were lit as if a party was roaring inside.