“You planned it all from the day you hired me.”
“From the day Pete McCrae died, yes. Pete we knew we could trust but with his inconvenient death, well, then we needed you, or someone like you. It was too big a case to count on luck. We had all kinds of strategies and contingency plans but in the end we needed something dramatic to win it, and you certainly gave us that, Victor.”
“In fact, you had been setting up Concannon even before the indictment. It was you who told Jimmy to open the bank account with Chester’s name on it.”
“Now you’re guessing,” said Prescott.
“It was the amount of the deposits and withdrawals that clued me. Federal regulations require cash transactions of over ten grand to be reported to the Treasury Department. Which means you knew all along that Jimmy was giving the money to Goodwin, capitalizing a drug dealer to set up a steady stream of funds for his rehabilitation projects. That’s why Goodwin killed Chuckie, to keep him from telling me about it, and why Goodwin tried to stop Veronica from testifying. It must have been Henry who told Goodwin where Veronica was hiding. Goodwin sent his henchmen after her, fearing she would disclose the arrangement, not knowing all the time that she was in your pocket.”
“I’m certainly not going to confirm such scurrilous accusations,” said Prescott. “One never knows who is taping what, hmmm? But if it all were true, think of the beauty of it. Drug consumers are going to buy drugs no matter what. It is an inelastic demand. But with just a little venture capital, effectively applied, a piece of the profits of the sales would go to helping victims and to drying up the market. The more successful the marketing venture, the more active it would be in sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Pure pragmatism, Victor, a free-market solution to a previously intractable problem.”
“And the kids dying from stray bullets as Goodwin battles to expand his turf?”
“Collateral damage,” said Prescott. “Unavoidable.”
“Jimmy is preying on the weak, profiting from murder to salve the wound of his daughter’s death,” I said. “It’s immoral.”
“Morality is a mere luxury in this world, Victor,” said Prescott. “It is the enemy of achievement, the last bastion of the failed. Learn that and someday you might learn what it is to be a lawyer.”
“If that’s what it takes I’d sooner cut lawns.”
“As you wish. But I’m actually glad you’re here, Victor. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I’ve been out of town.”
“I can understand. The embarrassment. I’ve talked it over with CUP and, with the trial finished, they’ve decided that they won’t sue you for the retainer so long as you give up your claim to any additional fees.”
“That doesn’t even cover half of what I’m owed.”
“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.