Within the hour Marty was in my office.
Before retiring here, Martin Baumann had been a big-city lawyer in Chicago, corporate accounts, three-hour lunches, the works. To this day he only smiled when asked how or why, of all places, he picked this town, but once here, he soon discovered how desperately unsuited he was for leisure time and started taking the odd case. He and Val had worked together on more than one occasion, going from colleagues to friends in short order.
Marty just kind of appeared in the office, without fanfare, in that way he has. As though he'd been there for hours and was just now speaking up. "You have a guest, I understand, here at the B and B. Who has, of course, been advised of his rights, blah, blah."
Marty poured a coffee for himself and settled into Don's chair. Don was out on patrol. I'd been expecting to head to the cabin once he got back but now wondered if I might want to wait out the storm.
"What'd he do, anyway?"
I filled Marty in, and he shook his head. Took a slug or two of coffee. "Suckers wired money, you believe that? Right into my account, damn near by the time we got off the phone."
"Whatever's going on, these people do seem to be used to getting their way."
"Don't seem to be much up on how things work in small towns though, do they?"
"Neither were you, as I recall."
He shrugged. "Fast learner. What do we know about your sleepover?"
"That he's connected to someone who can wire money-"
"A lot of money."
"-fast."
"That's it? Okay. Guy I spoke to was an attorney-"
"Honor among thieves?"
"An associate out of Crafft and Bailey, in St. Louis. Basically a messenger boy, but with a hardball firm."
"Not to mention confidentiality."
"What confidentiality? I haven't even spoken with my client. How could confidentiality possibly apply?"
"Point taken."
"I'll ask, if I need it back." Marty did a quick rim shot on the desk edge. "I went looking. Amazing what you can find out these days with a sidelong glance. Crafft amp; Bailey takes up a full two floors in a downtown high-rise, one of those places full of hardwood panels and polished mahogany rails that serve no purpose. You go in, and there'll be this huge room full of desks and cabinetry and down at the far end of it, on the horizon, a single human being."
"You've been there."
"More times than I care to think about. Cities are full of them. Places you could put up four or five extended families and most of the city's homeless. Empty-except, of course, for the fine appointments."
Unsure whether or not that was a pun, I remained silent.
"Good old C amp;B's what the boys in the club like to call a full-service firm. One thumb in the insurance pie, defending corporations, another in plaintiff's litigation, raking it in on contingency fees. List of clients as long as the building is tall. That's the public face, and one wing of the thing. The other wing has maybe five, six clients."
"One of them being Mr. Herman."
He tilted his head in question.
"That's the name our… guest, as you call him… brought up when he made his call."
"Of course." Marty refilled his cup, tasted, then poured the coffee out and set to making a fresh pot. "Not one of them-all of them. In some guise or another. And not Herman, but Harmon. Larry, born Lorenzo, Harmon. Owns huge portions of St. Louis, Chicago, and points between."
"We talking Monopoly?"
"We're talking numbers, off-book gambling, unsecured loans, escort services, strong-arm security. Anything on the borderline between legal and otherwise, he runs it. Or his crew does. Man himself doesn't go near the action. Golfs, drinks coffee, visits his mother every morning. Two children, son about thirty, owns a ring of low-end apartments, furniture-rental stores, and the like-a very big ring. Named Harm, if you can believe it. Hard to say if the man's got a weird sense of humor or if he's just plain stupid oblivious. Daughter's-get this-Harmony. Word is she's so ugly everyone calls her Hominy."
"That's who the man in my cell tracks back to."
"Looks like."
"And you got all this off the Internet."
"Well, I may have made a call or two."
"We're a long way from St. Louis or Chicago. What's the connection?"
Marty poured fresh coffee for us both, set mine down on the desk. "Why don't I go talk to my client and find out?"
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ethics be damned, as Doc would say. As he did say, in fact, when he arrived that morning to check on our guest. I had a presumed kidnapping, a presumed murder, a presumed assault or two. Doc: "What you have is a mess." Nothing presumptive about that.
The man's name was Troy Geldin and he hailed from Brooklyn, the old Italian section right across the river from Manhattan, now well in thrall to gentrification but resisting. State called about the time Marty emerged, an hour or so before Doc showed. They'd run prints for us. No sheet, which meant Geldin was smart, lucky, or both, but he'd done time eating sand in the elder Bush's war and we had his prints as mementos.
To this day I've no idea what Marty said to the man. I was little more than halfway into the initial sentence of my spiel when Geldin spoke over me. "My lawyer has advised me to cooperate. After due thought and with promise of immunity, I am prepared to do so."
Prepositional phrases and "I am prepared" didn't sound much like Geldin's native language, but then, neither did much of what followed. At first I assumed that he'd been coached, by Marty, or by his contact during the phone call when he'd said so little. Later I came to think that, whatever the reason, something vital had shifted inside him. He had changed elementally, and something that he himself may not have suspected was there, something deep within, had begun moving to the surface. I'd seen it happen before, both in the jungle and in prison. A prickly, nervous man turns suddenly calm. The one who was always talking sits silent, smiling.
Thus it fell to me to wake Judge Ray Pitoski out of a sound sleep (albeit now almost noon), assure myself that he was sober enough to remember, and have him, as our factotum district attorney, agree to grant Geldin immunity in exchange for testimony.
That testimony came measured out in drams, like a seaman's ration. Every few sentences Geldin would pause and look from Marty to me, whether to gauge the value and effect of his testimony or to allow his next phrases to settle into place before he spoke, I couldn't tell.
Irregardless of what we thought, he was not, well, not… what we thought. In fact, he'd never done anything like this before. Sure, he'd lost his job a while back, after twelve years-but so had a lot of others, these days. And when his wife left, well, unlike the other, he'd seen that coming.
Hollis and he went way back, to grade school. He'd been the geeky kid back then, good grades, scrawny, out of step, always reading. Hollis was anything but, but he'd stepped in one day when the top bully, guy looked like a pug dog, had been beating on him. Not because Hollis had any feelings for him, mind you, or any sense of its being wrong, but because Hollis'd had his eye on this bully, figuring he was the one to take down. And here was his chance. Teachers came, it looked like Hollis was a hero, taking up for him. Not finessed-but sometimes finesse just happens, you know?
Anyway, that changed things for him. Year later, he was linebacker on the team. Still not fitting in, but he was good enough that they moved over to make room for him. Meanwhile Hollis went on getting into trouble, tiptoeing around this huge crater, shouting down into it. He was getting bigger, Hollis was shrinking. Took to cigarettes, got behind some serious drinking. Didn't see much of each Other for a long time then, but he heard things from time to time: Hollis was boosting cars, was on the run, was doing time.