Final Judgment (2 page)

Fish didn’t want to know the answers to any of these questions, certain that he was better off not knowing. It had nothing to do with him anyway. The body in the trunk was his bad luck. That’s all.

He had to be downtown in fifteen minutes and he was thirty minutes away. He couldn’t leave his car in the parking lot without arousing suspicions at the synagogue. He couldn’t leave his car at home and take the bus downtown because he didn’t know where to catch the bus or even which bus to take if he did.

As he considered his options, the idea of parking his car with its decaying cargo at the Federal Courthouse wasn’t as bad as he first thought. The parking lot was across the street from the courthouse. It was secure, regularly patrolled by the U.S. Marshals’ deputies who were responsible for courthouse security. No one was going to break into a car in that lot. It was cold enough and the corpse was fresh enough that the body hadn’t started to smell.

Mason had told him that the meeting with the U.S. attorney shouldn’t take too long, though he could expect some fireworks as the attorneys postured for one another, doing their peacock dance. Fish hoped the meeting was more a formality than anything else.

Good
, he thought to himself. Things work out if you give them a chance and work the right angles. That had always been his philosophy. He took a deep breath, put the Cadillac in gear, and tried not to think about the body in the trunk.

TWO

Fish was in sales. Buy, sell, trade. He didn’t always own what he sold. He didn’t always pay for what he bought, and he didn’t always have what he traded. These were business risks that he managed through the next buy, sell, or trade.

His entire life had been a teetering Ponzi scheme in which he had to make the next deal just to stay a step ahead of the last one. Not that he was in Bernie Madoff’s league, not by a long shot. Now there was a
gonif.
Fish admired Madoff for his balls, but even he had cringed at the scope of the devastation Madoff had caused, rationalizing his own crimes as minor offenses that had left a few people short a few bucks, nothing they couldn’t recover from.

The U.S. attorney had indicted Fish for mail fraud stemming from a vacation time-share scam. Fish had assembled a loose network of third-rate condos in Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale, promised below-market prices for theme park and cruise packages, and bundled the pitch in a slick, glossy, four-color brochure. He bought a mailing list of likely marks and mailed them his solicitation. He got so many takers that the properties were oversold and double-booked. People complained that they couldn’t book their time-share or that, when they did, their unit was already occupied when they arrived.

He made a killing, using the proceeds to pay off the most vociferous of the complainers, until one outraged customer told the story to his next-door neighbor, who happened to be a secretary at the Kansas City office of the FBI. And the rest was commentary.

It wasn’t difficult or sophisticated. A good scam never was. It depended on people who would jump at deals that were too good to be true. Fish counted on them to forget the flip side of the axiom that such deals almost always were.

For Fish, life was a game in which everyone was a free agent. Winners anticipated the responses of the other players. Winners took advantage of better information. Winners made hard choices.

Losers reacted based on imperfect information and wimped out when their losses got too high. That’s why most people who complained about their time-shares settled for getting less than one hundred percent of their money back. Fighting harder wasn’t worth the effort. Fish knew that.

He was reconciled to being the loser in the game with the U.S. attorney. He admired Mason for not conning him. The government’s case was solid. The feds had been sniffing after him for years. They were going to take him down. Cutting a deal wasn’t wimping out. It was the only rational decision.

The body in the trunk presented an entirely different problem. He had no idea how to get rid of it without being implicated in a murder he didn’t commit. He could stop at police headquarters and invite a homicide detective to take a peek. Given his present circumstance with the Justice Department, he doubted the cops would buy his “beats me” answer to the questions they would ask.

He could tell his lawyer, but he knew what Mason would tell him. Go to the cops. Maybe good advice for another day, but definitely not today.

By the time he pulled into the courthouse parking lot, Fish was convinced of two things: He had to get out of there with a signed deal as fast as he could, and then he had to take care of the dead body on his own.

He’d have to get a new car as well. He couldn’t take the chance that a latent hair of the murder victim would one day be scraped out of the trunk while he stood around shrugging his shoulders like the old Jew in the joke about why Jews have such short necks. “I don’t know,” Fish said to no one, shrugging and smiling to himself. Don’t lose your sense of humor, his mother always told him. He pictured her for a moment as he walked toward the courthouse, smiling without reason.

Fish met Mason in the hall on the eighth floor. He was leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest, when Fish got off the elevator. Fish hurried toward him, hands outstretched.

“I’m sorry I’m late. The rabbi grabbed me after services this morning. Everything with him is another sermon. He wouldn’t let me go until I told him he’d have to call the FBI and tell them I hadn’t jumped bail.”

Mason shook his hand. “Don’t worry. Samuelson is running late too. His secretary said he’d be another twenty or thirty minutes. There’s a lot of hurry up and wait in the practice of law.”

Fish pulled off his topcoat, and laid it across his arm. He looked out the eighth-floor windows at the panoramic view to the south, focusing on the parking lot below. He spotted his car tucked into a space at the back of the lot. Someone parked next to his Cadillac, got out, and walked toward the courthouse without so much as a backward glance. Fish exhaled loudly, unaware that he’d been holding his breath.

Mason asked, “Are you okay, Avery? I’ve got mold in my refrigerator that looks better than you do.”

Fish wiped his brow. More sweat. “How should I look? I work all my life and I’m about to get the penitentiary instead of a pension.”

“There’s a bathroom down the hall. Splash some water on your face. Straighten your tie and pinch your cheeks for some color. You look like death warmed over. I want Samuelson to see the grandfather not the
gonif
.”

Fish smiled. That’s why he liked Mason. No bullshit and a sense of humor. It didn’t hurt that he was a member of the tribe, a fellow Jew. When it was crunch time, his people always took care of one another.

Forty minutes later, they were ushered into a conference room by Samuelson’s secretary, who apologized again that her boss had been delayed by an emergency in another case. She apologized a second time that there was no coffee, closing the door and leaving Fish and Mason alone.

The conference room was small and had no windows. Pinpoint beams of light aimed at them from miniature floodlights buried deep in ceiling canisters. Mason sat in one of the black leather chairs ringing a circular table. Fish paced, brushing his hand along the surface of the table.

“Samuelson,” Fish said. “He must be a young guy.”

“Around thirty, I’d say. How did you know?”

“This conference room. It’s for minor leaguers. You want to impress somebody with the might of the federal government, you get the big room with the picture of the president on the wall and a couple of flags in the corners. Maybe one of those big bronze seals with the eagle on it. I’d say Samuelson doesn’t carry a lot of weight around here if this is the best conference room he can get.”

“Don’t be insulted that you didn’t get the big-shot treatment. There’s a price for that, and it’s paid in jail time and money. Better to be a low-profile defendant in a low-profile case with a young guy still learning his way around.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Fish smoothed the lapels on his suit jacket, hiking up his pants and tugging at his shirt collar. “If I’m right, then why is he keeping us waiting? What’s with this baloney about an emergency in another case? I know it’s the government we’re dealing with here, but don’t they have to try to run on time for Christ’s sake?”

“Avery, you got someplace else you’ve got to be today? Something more important on your schedule than this? Sit down, take a breath, and relax. These things always take longer than they should. We’re going to get a deal you can live with. It may not be perfect, but it will beat the hell out of taking this case to trial. Trust me.”

“Don’t get me wrong.” Fish sat heavily in one of the chairs, leaning back, then forward, gripping the table with one hand, drumming his fingers on the surface with the other. “I’m not looking for a trial. I just want to get this over with and get out of here.”

THREE

The door opened and Pete Samuelson breezed in, dropping his file on the table. He was tall, thin, and bald with a shiny forehead that jutted out like the granite face of a cliff, his eyes chiseled out of the rock like half-hidden caves kept in perpetual shadows regardless of which way he turned. He may have been thirty, but there was no exuberance of youth in him. He was a grinder. A humorless lawyer committed to working endless hours rigidly enforcing the law. He was a perfect prosecutor.

“Busy day?” Mason asked.

“Yeah,” Samuelson answered, biting the word and his lower lip at the same time. He opened Fish’s file, picked up a sheet of paper, and studied it for a moment as if he were the only one in the room.

“Pete,” Mason began, stopping when Samuelson raised his hand.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Samuelson said, putting the page back in the file and closing it. “Your guy is dead-nuts guilty. We’ve got his promotional pieces promising people they’d get everything but laid. We’ve got wiretaps of the owners of the vacation properties telling him they couldn’t handle anywhere near the number of time-shares he was selling and him telling them it didn’t matter so long as he collected the money from the dumb schmucks.
Dumb schmucks
is a direct quote, by the way.”

Mason leaned forward across the table, cutting the distance between him and Samuelson in half.

“My guy’s name is Avery Fish and he’s sitting right here, in case you hadn’t noticed. He’s not a terrorist or a dope dealer or a bank robber. He’s a grandfather and an active member of his synagogue who’s never been convicted of a crime. We’re not here to argue about your case against him. We’re here to make a deal.”

Samuelson turned to Fish. “Mr. Fish, I meant you no disrespect. I just want you to know that I can put you away for a long time, maybe the rest of your life depending on your health. You’ve got a good lawyer, but not even he is good enough to keep you out of the penitentiary if we don’t make a deal right now in this conference room. Do you understand that?”

Fish had a sudden image of Pete Samuelson wrapped in plastic in the trunk of his car. “I’m an old man, Mr. Samuelson. Don’t worry. You scared me. Talk to my lawyer.”

Samuelson nodded and reopened his file. He took out the page he’d already studied and slid it across the table to Mason. “Eighteen months, two hundred fifty thousand in restitution and a fine for another two-fifty.”

Mason ignored the page in front of him. “Let’s go, Avery,” he said, standing.

Fish looked at Mason, eyes wide. “Go? Where? We aren’t done. We haven’t made the deal.”

“We haven’t made the deal, but we are done. Mr. Samuelson is too proud of his case. He thinks he can bully you into taking a deal that’s no worse than you’d get at trial, where he’s got no better than a fifty-fifty chance at a conviction. He’ll be lucky to get the wiretaps into evidence, and I’ll bet when we start digging, we’ll find out that he made a sweetheart deal with those people in Florida to testify against you in return for their own time-share out of jail. Let’s go.”

Fish didn’t move, but he did sweat. A moist layer that bubbled onto his brow as his skin paled. His breath came in quick bursts. “I want to make a deal. Now,” he managed.

Mason had told Fish that this could happen when they met the day before. He predicted that Samuelson would come on hard and that they would respond by walking out, counting on Samuelson to back up rather than tell his boss that he blew the negotiations. The government’s case was strong but not invincible. Mason bet that Samuelson had been given orders to get rid of the case. No one liked sending old men to jail. Fish was supposed to follow Mason out the door, not fold and beg.

“You’re a smart man, Mr. Fish,” Samuelson said, the first hint of a smile leaking from the corners of his narrow mouth.

“Fortunately, he’s got a smarter lawyer,” Mason said. “If you want to negotiate, we’ll negotiate. But you can save the take-it-or-leave-it crap for somebody else. If my client wants the deal you put on the table, he’ll have to get another lawyer, and you know as well as I do, no lawyer is going to tell him to take that deal. I’m not selling him out. Avery, get your ass out of that chair!”

Fish pushed himself away from the table, still holding on to it. He rose, picking up his coat, his round shoulders sagging as Mason opened the door.

“Okay, Mason,” Samuelson said. “You made your fee speech. Everybody sit down and you tell me what you’re looking for.”

Mason nodded at Fish, who collapsed into his seat. Mason remained standing, one hand on the doorknob. “No jail time. Twelve months suspended with probation. A hundred thousand in restitution and a seventy-five-thousand-dollar fine.”

“You’re not sitting down,” Samuelson said.

“Not until I know if we’re in the ballpark.”

Samuelson ran his hand over his bald head, Mason catching the glow of sweat from his shiny pate. He had been right to call Samuelson’s bluff.

“Same ballpark, but still a long way from home plate. Sit down. I can’t do probation.”

“He won’t pay what you want without probation. That’s not negotiable.”