The Four-Night Run (22 page)

“The lot is now owned by Galloway,” said Surwin after Scrbacek retreated back into the car. “The husband tried to build on it once, but someone burned down his mobile construction office before he could start, and that was the end of that. Since his death, the wife’s done nothing to fill in the hole, despite orders by the city to clean it up. She owns so much of the city’s ruins, and has so many orders to clean up so many properties, that the city can’t afford to enforce any of them.”

“That’s as ugly a spot as I’ve ever seen,” said Scrbacek.

“Every once in a while, to great fanfare among his goons, Caleb Breest sponsors a dog shooting contest. Whoever brings to Dirty Dirk’s the bodies of the most strays gets a thousand-dollar bonus.”

“I heard about that,” said Scrbacek. “Joey Torresdale made it seem like good-natured civic-minded fun.”

“I bet he did. It’s illegal as hell, and the night is a terror for civilians in the worst parts of town, but the cops let it happen. Wild dogs are a problem in those neighborhoods, they figure, and the less roaming the streets, the better. And then, after all the beer, the boasting, the shots fired in celebration, after roasted pig is sliced and digested by all the hunters, they pile the stiff bodies of dogs and the pig carcass into a pickup truck, take them here, and toss them over the fence into the pit that was Migello’s. Twenty years after he packed enough dynamite in the sewer beneath Migello’s to level a small town, twenty years after he destroyed the Puchesi family and took control of the city’s criminal organization, Caleb Breest is still feeding the rats.”

Surwin parked the car across the street from a nicely maintained row of houses on a block with living trees and streetlights that glowed brightly.

“It’s a brothel, one of his better ones. You go in the door as if you’re heading into a simple narrow row house, but four of them have been gutted and combined into one grand sex palace. Many of the high rollers from the casinos end up here for a couple of frolics, and to get their pictures snapped.”

“Sounds kinky.”

“Oh, they don’t know about the pictures until they get an envelope in the mail.”

“How come it’s still there?”

“It’s licensed as an oriental massage parlor. But we’re getting ready to close it. We’ve closed others, we’ll close more. Even now he’s setting up another site for when this one shuts down. The girls get out of jail on bail, and he sends them to the new house. He keeps the younger ones, boys and girls, in a separate house we haven’t yet been able to find.”

“Maybe it’s just a rumor, then.”

“What I’ve found in investigating your client, Scrbacek, is that behind every rumor is a reality that is far, far darker.”

Surwin and Scrbacek were parked a hundred yards away from a street corner alive with lights and trucks and hordes of people, despite the late hour and the wet streets. Cars lined up to be greeted one at a time by a young runner, as if at a McDonald’s drive-thru.

Scrbacek didn’t have to get too close to recognize what he was seeing. He had spent enough nights waiting in line in his car—not at this corner, maybe, but others just like it—waiting in line with a desperate joyful anticipation, pulling up to the curb, the brief conversation with the young runner, the bills given, the runner strolling off to the stash beneath a stoop or under a rock, coming back without even a hint of concern and bringing with him the sweet little vials with their brightly colored caps.

“He runs corners all over the city,” said Surwin. “The price is low
enough that he gets customers from four different states. You can see it in
the license plates. He hires the youngest to deal with the customers—
you’ve surely defended some of them—but he has put in place an astounding number of levels between himself and the street. Less profit for himself, but more safety and more control. We’ve run up the chain a number of times, but it always stops one or two levels below the big man.”

“Are you sure then that he’s behind it all?”

“Not sure enough to get an indictment, but still pretty damn sure. Lately he’s been expanding—setting up new corners, lowering the price, as if he’s trying to hook the entire city. Whenever he sets up a new distribution center, the neighborhood in which he situates it goes straight to hell. It’s as if he’s purposely turning the city into one huge crack corner.”

“The story you’ve heard,” said Surwin, “of the guy with the Mercedes who won money off of Breest in a poker game and who was later steamrolled in his car?”

“I thought that was just an urban legend.”

“Well, there’s the lot where they found him,” said Surwin, “flat as a playing card.”

“This used to be one of the city’s prime employers,” said Surwin, in front of a burned-out hulk of a building, sitting low and squat, its edges black, its sign charred and crumbling. The air around the building still smelled of carbon, the ashes still sifted in the night breeze. “Like every place else, it was paying its city tax, its state tax, its federal tax, and its street tax. It had been paying the street tax, actually, for decades, from back when Luigi Puchesi was still running the show, but it was always a reasonable amount and the owners simply expensed it above the line. Except this year, suddenly, the tax was raised precipitously. It was like Breest was trying to ruin them. They argued and pled and tried to meet with the big man himself, but he refused to see them, and no one else could lower the demand. They had no choice but to come to us. We asked the owners to set up meetings, and they bravely agreed to let us wire them for sound. On the recordings we can clearly hear the threats and their pleas, and then fists smashing bone. The assault was so sudden it came before we could rush in and save them.”

“What happened to the enforcers?”

“They’re out on bail, waiting for the trial. Cirilio Vega’s representing them. They’ve said nothing about who they were talking for. It’s clearly Breest, but I don’t know how to connect the dots for a jury unless the enforcers talk, and they’re simply not talking. And the day after the arrest, before the enforcers were back on the street, despite the guards we had stationed around the building, the fire started. There was nothing left of the inventory, of the machinery, of the records. Nothing but rubble.”

“Are the owners rebuilding?”

“Not here. They sold the property to Galloway, took the insurance money, bought a plant in South Carolina with the promise of all kinds of tax breaks. There’s no employment left in the city except in the casinos. And the dealers and bartenders and cocktail waitresses, they either live in Casinoland or outside the city. Crapstown is dying, fast, and for some reason your client wants to speed up the process.”

Surwin slowly pulled the car away from the burned-out factory, and as he did, Scrbacek turned to take one last look. From this angle, he could see the charred sign and just make out the letters burned like a negative into the wood:

K
EEPING THE
R
AIN
O
FF
Y
OUR
P
ARADE
.

EVER-DRY.

35

C
ALVARY

“I should have my head examined,” said Surwin, driving slowly through the misty Crapstown night. “We’re preparing a racketeering indictment against the whole organization, top to bottom, and here I am spilling what we know to Caleb Breest’s attorney.”

“Former attorney. Apparently, I’ve been replaced by Cirilio Vega.”

“On a temporary basis, so they say. Vega came in the day after the acquittal and the bombing, his briefcase stuffed with motions and legal authority. We offered to continue the probation revocation hearing until you showed, or until Cirilio could bring himself up to speed, but he wanted none of it. Filed his notice of appearance, sat right down in your seat, handled himself like he had been there all along.”

“He’s crackerjack, Vega. And he’s Breest’s attorney now, not me.”

“Still, if the Bureau knew what I was doing with you, it would mean my job.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

Surwin looked at Scrbacek for a moment and then back through the windshield. After a moment, as if in response, he parked the car on a deserted street and killed the engine. “Let’s take a walk.”

Surwin led Scrbacek down the street and then into an alleyway, dank, stinking of garbage and piss, wet with rain, infested by rodents, inhabited by one person, of indeterminate sex and age, curled inside a cardboard box.

“Help for the homeless?” said the person in the box.

“Not tonight,” said Surwin. “You recognize this place, Scrbacek?”

Scrbacek looked around and shook his head. “Should I?”

“I expect you were here once, just to case it out, but I’m not surprised you don’t remember it. It’s not very memorable without the blood and shattered brain on the walls, or the chalk outline of a figure drawn on the asphalt, but still I thought this an important stop on our tour. This is where your client beat the life out of Peter Malloy.”

Scrbacek didn’t say anything, just kicked at the wet blackness at his feet.

“Malloy’s wife is doing as well as could be expected, in case you’re interested,” said Surwin. “I suppose she doesn’t have much choice but to keep going, what with four daughters. I talk to her regularly, and the sadness is overwhelming. It seems to run in a current over the wires, from her house to my office, bleeding through the phone into my gut. She still asks one question over and over again:
Why?
I don’t have an answer.”

Scrbacek turned to stare at Surwin. “That was why I was able to get Breest off.”

“I gave the jury the best motive I had.”

“But it wasn’t the right one. The crap about Malloy trying to clean up the labor union never rang true.”

“You have a better one?”

“Not yet,” said Scrbacek. “But it’s out there. You shouldn’t have brought the case before you found it.”

“I had the DNA. I had the fingerprint.”

“But it wasn’t enough, was it? You’ve been giving me nothing but shit for winning my client an acquittal—the underlying theme of the whole night has been ‘See what you’ve done, asshole’—but you were the prosecutor who lost the case. You were the prosecutor without all the answers. You were the man who was so certain about everything but couldn’t prove out his case. All I did was widen the hole in your proof and lead my client through it as the Sixth Amendment requires.”

“Is that what the Sixth Amendment requires, that you spread lies and falsehoods to get a criminal off?”

“Absolutely.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s easy enough to sit back in the County Prosecutor’s Office with an untroubled heart because you decide who to investigate, who to indict, who to try to kill. But it’s not so simple on the other side of the bar. Not everyone you accuse is guilty. Not everyone you want to kill deserves to die. Someone has to represent the human being in the dock.”

“But it wasn’t Amber Grace this time, was it?” said Surwin. “This time you were representing Caleb Breest.”

“You think I should stand in judgment of my client?”

“Yes.”

“You think I have a responsibility to society beyond doing whatever the hell I can to get my client off?”

“As an officer of the court, you have a responsibility to see justice done.”

“My old law professor would disagree,” said Scrbacek. “He would say that since we are merely human, we can’t know what true justice would really entail. He would say that only God can make that determination. All we can do is perform our roles and hope for the best. I did my job. If you have a problem with what happened in that courtroom, look in the mirror.”

“But what happened wasn’t justice—you know it as well as I do—and leaving the determination to a higher authority is a cop-out. Do you know what medicine Caleb Breest takes for his oversize heart? Digitoxin, nitroglycerin, and Lasix. Digitoxin keeps his heart beating like a machine, nitroglycerin is an explosive, and Lasix is what they give to racehorses to make them run faster. Caleb Breest is an inhuman predator and you were his knight-errant.”

Surwin backed up, took a deep breath, and turned away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Scrbacek.

“Get in the car,” he said. “I have one more place to show you.”

“I could take you to Dirty Dirk’s,” said Surwin. “Show you your client in his natural cesspool, but I don’t suppose that would be the healthiest spot for you to show your face. So I’m taking you somewhere else instead.”

“Dirk is in league with the guys who are after me,” said Scrbacek. “But what I still can’t figure is why the hell they want me dead in the first place.”

“It’s not too hard to puzzle out.”

Scrbacek didn’t say anything, just turned his head and stared at Surwin.

“We went into your office after the fire. All your files had been burned beyond recognition.”

“My file cabinets were supposed to be fireproof.”

“They forced the locks, pulled out the drawers, spread a homemade napalm over everything. They did the same to your computers. There wasn’t a piece of data remaining in your whole building. And they would have burned the files even if the car bomb had killed you as planned. They need you dead, because in the course of your representation of Caleb Breest you learned something they can’t afford to have revealed. There’s something going down in Crapstown, and you know what it is.”

“But I don’t know anything. They’re wrong.”

“They’re not wrong. You learned something—you just don’t know its importance yet. What you need to do is tell me everything you learned while representing Breest, and we’ll figure it out together.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“They’re trying to kill you, Scrbacek.”

“But I don’t know who
they
are. And I won’t violate the attorney-client privilege just because you have a theory.”

Surwin sighed with disgust. “Only conversations between you and your client are covered by privilege. From what I understand, most of your meetings were with Joey Torresdale.”

“That’s right.”

“Anything Torresdale told you is fair game.”

“Don’t you think I’m in enough trouble?”

“I’m trying to help here, Scrbacek, but you need to throw me a bone.”

Surwin pulled the car to a stop at the edge of a seedy business district, with a dusty old grocery, a fishmonger’s storefront, a clothier with yellow and brown suits in the window. In front of the stores was a shuttered newspaper shack, and from behind it came a woman, ratty and thin, hunched over, black scraps of wet cloth hanging from her limbs.

She stepped closer to the car and swayed on her heels. “Are you two boys looking for—?”

Surwin pulled out his credentials and flashed his badge. The woman stepped back unsteadily and then slinked behind the shack.

Surwin pointed to a row of windows on the second floor above the clothier. Painted across two of the windows were the words:

T
RENT
F
ALLOW
I
NVESTIGATIONS

“Trent Fallow, PI,” said Surwin. “That’s his office and, as best we can tell, his living space, though it’s not zoned residential.”

Scrbacek looked up at the filthy office windows. “Doesn’t say much for his lifestyle.”

“He was your investigator on the Breest case.”

“That’s right.”

“How’d you meet?”

“Joey Torresdale introduced us one night at Dirty Dirk’s. Why?”

“Fallow is one of Breest’s primary errand boys. Those pictures from the whorehouse sent to powerful high rollers? It’s Fallow who sends them and works out the payment. The young kids who fill the secret brothels? It’s Trent Fallow who hangs out at the bus stations and kiddie parks, recruiting the loners who wander free. Word is, if there’s a scut job that Breest needs doing on the sly, he sends Fallow. What did you and Fallow talk about?”

“When we first met, it was just small talk. You know, ‘Hi, how you doing? Let me buy you a drink.’”

“And then what?”

Scrbacek shook his head. “I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“Why do you care, anyway?”

“Because he’s just the kind of low-life, low-level fixer who ends up knowing more than he should about everything. And then ends up dead. I’ve been sort of expecting him to bite the dust for a while now, but it turns out that it’s you, not him, who’s getting chased all through Crapstown. He might be the connection.”

“I don’t see how,” said Scrbacek.

“That’s because you’re not looking.”

Scrbacek lowered his head and closed one eye in thought. Aboud had told him Fallow was looking for him. He had thought the PI was just after the reward, like everyone else in Crapstown. But maybe it was something else. He peered again at the windows, thought about their meager interactions. “Son of a bitch.”

“What?”

“Son of a bitch.”

“What’s going on, Scrbacek?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Tell me what you think.”

“I can’t.”

“What the hell do you mean, you can’t?”

“First, because I honestly don’t know anything yet. And second, because I can’t tell you anything he told me. Half our conversations were about his work on the Breest case, which makes it attorney work product. I’m not allowed to disclose that.”

“And the other half?”

“Well, I can’t reveal anything about those discussions either.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because it turns out that Trent Fallow, that son of a bitch, is a client of mine, too.”