Indefensible (6 page)

The idea of  Tamika Curtis stealing a puppy for her kids at Christmas has landed us all in a funk. So to lighten things up, I say, “Tina, here's a riddle: What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?”

Everyone stares at me.

“ ‘Make me one with everything!' ” I shout.

The assistants all laugh. Tina laughs. The furrows in her forehead smooth out, and I see the former gentler Tina. Maybe she isn't too far gone.

“Brief us on this meth enterprise,” I say.

“Well, it's one of Percy Mashburn's operations. Percy seems to franchise these labs, but we've been unable to reach him. Nobody will finger him. And every time we get something against him, he comes in and gives the Bureau lists of everyone else involved and
buys himself a walk. In this case, Tamika's on the bottom. She's the only one left. The only one facing real time.”

“Keep the pressure on,” I say. “The only way to break these things is to get the patsies to start talking.”

“Exactly.”

After case review, I call The Man Upstairs:
the
U.S. attorney. My boss, at whose pleasure I serve and who, in turn, serves at the pleasure of the U.S. attorney general, who serves at the pleasure of the president. His office, one floor directly above mine, is a real Taj Mahal. It is a corner office, like mine, but he has appropriated the adjoining office for an anteroom.

The Man Upstairs (TMU) is my fourth U.S. attorney. I've become adept at making myself indispensable because, while it would be difficult for TMU to fire me outright, it would be a small matter for him to ease me back into the ranks of practicing trial lawyers, replacing me with one of his own team.

“Do you expect much press?” TMU asks after I apprise him of the Zander Phippin matter.

“If this comes down the way we hope,” I say, “Jonsered will have a very good year.” This is a joke I've established between us. Jonsered is a Swedish chain-saw manufacturer. Chain saws cut down trees, trees become paper, paper becomes newspaper, newspapers print news of criminal convictions. Especially convictions in organized crime and drug trafficking. And whenever I can finagle it, TMU gets the credit.

He chuckles. “Always glad to help the Swedish economy.”

U
pton Cruthers and Tina come into my office at noon. Upton works organized crime and racketeering. We get Chip on speakerphone.

“Dorsey's guys are out in force,” Chip says. “They're stirring things up. And we've got an undercover team surveilling Scud. So far, there's nothing interesting from the body of the deceased; bullet fragments, but nothing to match them with. We also have some textile fibers; again, useless until we have something to test them against.”

Upton says, “So if the witness heard two voices, and we're assuming one was this Scud guy, any guesses about the other?”

“I wish,” Chip says.

“Have you heard from the agents surveilling Scud?”

“I just talked to one. He gave me several individuals we would like to speak with, but we're holding off a few hours. I figure as soon as we make a move, it'll be like, um . . . um . . .”

The line is silent for a second, so Upton says, “Turning over a rock.”

“Pardon?”

“Yeah,” Tina says to Upton, forgetting to talk loud enough for the speaker phone to pick it up, “turning over a rock. I used to do that with my kids.”

“Your kids?”

“Third-graders,” she says, switching from a scowly prosecutor into a bubbly third-grade teacher. “When I was teaching, we'd go outside and look for big rocks to turn over, and the bugs all scatter. But you've got a few seconds to catch 'em.”

“What the hell?” says Chip from the speakerphone.

“Sorry,” I say. “It's my staff. I'll fire them the second we're off the phone.”

“I'll hold if you want to do it now.”

“So summing up,” I say, “your surveillance of Avery Illman, aka Scud, shows promise and has delivered a couple of names, but you're letting it play out several more hours before moving?”

“Correct.”

“And the forensic team hasn't yet found anything of obvious interest, but it's still early. So, listen, Tina and Upton are on call for this if you have probable-cause issues or anything else, okay?”

“How much do we know about this guy Scud?” Upton asks.

“I got some stuff on him,” Chip says. “I'll put a file together if you want. Give me an hour. How shall we—”

“I'll send Kenny to the FBI building to pick it up,” I tell them. We end the call.

Upton stands and takes one slow-motion stride, then swings his leg in an impressive arc, the sole of his well-shined shoe just tickling the carpet on its way through the vertical and up to where it hovers briefly at eye level. He stands watching for a second, then his arms shoot up for the field goal, and he prances around in a circle. “Prediction,” he says. “We are about to rain down some major shit upon the disrupters of our urban utopia.”

Upton Cruthers was an NFL kicker. “Best job in the world,” he tells people. “Money, babes, celebrity, travel, and a bench pass to lots of great games. And all this in exchange for about a half hour's worth of work per year.” His professional football career was brief. I've seen footage of the fateful game. It was a playoff of some kind, Upton standing alone on the twenty-second-yard line, watching as the ball wobbled to the left and missed the goalposts by an easy twenty feet. The commentator was apoplectic, the crowd bellowing in rage and grief. A home game, of course. And Upton dejectedly walked off the field.

Upton is my favorite of the assistants. We're close to the same age, and he's a shrewd and confident lawyer, which is no surprise. It must take the same kind of confidence to walk onto the gridiron in the last thirty seconds and to become, with one quick kick, the hero or the goat.

Upton started as an intern during my first year here, and I hired him officially as soon as he was out of law school. He'd already played football for several years by then, so he was older and more worldly than most of the lawyers who come knocking on my door with résumé in hand. I had to pull some strings to get his application approved because DOJ flagged it; Upton had a juvenile record of minor offenses—vandalism, assault, minor-in-possession. That's why we connected from the start, because whatever drove his youthful rebellion had left him feeling like a pretender in the conventional world of law enforcement. And I was fresh from a personal tragedy in my own life, leaving me with a similar sense of separateness. We were both local boys and both kind of surprised to find ourselves representing the government.

After Tina and Upton leave, I call Kenny's cell phone. “Where are you?”

“In my office,” he says without irony.

I walk to the law library and find him at his usual table, where he can keep an eye on who's coming and going and where he can chat with the librarian. They're good friends, Kenny and Penny, and I haven't given up hoping they might someday lock the library door and create a little vortex to stir the dust that lies so heavy on all those dreary shelves. They would have to adjust their standards, though; Penny is a potato-shaped young woman hoping for a man of erudition; Kenny is an intellectually incurious young man hoping for a supermodel. But they're both good-hearted.

“Quick job for you, Kenny,” I say. “I need you to pick up some documents from Chip over at the Bureau.”

“Well, I got all this copying to do,” he says, not complaining so much as making sure I don't think that all he does is sit around all day—which is exactly what I think.

“Lizzy's still up north,” I say. “I'll probably pick up a pizza and be stony-lonesome tonight, if you want to come over and split it with me.”

“You going to rent one of those boring movies you like to get?”

“You mean no car chases or buildings getting blown up?”

“Yeah, right, no chases, no nothing,” he says. “
Sex Life of the Oyster; Moss-Growing World Championship
.”

“Yes,” I say, “I'll probably rent one of those.”

“I don't think so,” he says. “Sounds like a yawn-fest.”

“Well, I'd love the company.” Maybe he'll change his mind at about six-fifteen tonight, grab a six-pack, and drive over to pass the evening with me.

•  •  •

Everyone is excited about this Phippin case: Chip, Dorsey, Upton, me. We're expecting something big. We have a huge tactical advantage because the perps don't know we know. There are four agencies involved: the U.S. attorney's office, the FBI, the state troopers, and now the state attorney general, with dozens of smart people working hard on it, from the forensic scientists on Zander's body, to computer whizzes, to field agents and detectives. This investigation is in the air like ozone before the rain.

Another hour passes with no developments. I walk to the men's room, and I sense staff eyeing me as I pass their cubicles. Also, there are more than the usual number of workers standing in gossipy pods along the hallway. They fall silent as I pass. But on my way back, one young woman, an administrative aide named Kimba, stops me outside my door.

“We're confused,” she says with an excited and obsequious tilt of her neck. “Was it your daughter or your ex, or both, who actually witnessed the murder?”

I laugh. “Ahh, the rumor mill.” I step back into my office, close the door, and stand for a few seconds in light-headed disbelief. Somehow this has morphed into the misperception that not only was there an actual witness to the gangland execution, but that the witness was either Lizzy or Flora. I make my way to the desk and watch my fingers find Upton's extension on the phone.

“Yes, boss?” His comforting baritone voice fills the room, and my eyes fill with gratitude.

“Upton,” I say, “I think I need your help.”

I
t was Upton's idea to put Tina on the whirlybird with me. “You might need a
real
lawyer,” he said, making a joke of it to soften me up. What he meant was someone to keep an eye on me, especially if things up north are ugly. The 'copter is Dorsey's, so to speak, a Bell 407 Ranger, chosen over the Bureau's because it was on the pad and ready to fly. It lighted on the roof of the federal building just long enough for Tina and me to sprint in under spinning blades, and then, with one shiver, it was in the air again.

From the air, I watch as we move from the grid of urban streets to the green threads of tree-lined suburban avenues and into the tattered quilting of the outlying farmlands and forests. It is all a work of staggering intricacy.

It makes me sad.

“I've got to get out of this business,” I shout to Tina, who sits beside me. Her answer, instead of a shout, is to put her hand on my knee. She means it as a comforting gesture, and it works. She doesn't just pat my knee. She rests her hand there for several seconds. And I feel that much more comforted.

Tina and I sit facing backward, and across from us is a trooper. I put my hand out and yell my name. He does likewise. We shake, but I can't make out his name. And he's hard to get a fix on visually. He wears a Smokey hat and looks like a dentist or bank officer; he has an any-guy look.

I lean toward Tina. “It's Kenny,” I yell. She shakes her head and leans in closer. “Kenny,” I repeat, not shouting because I'm right in her ear. “He's the leak, probably blabbing to anyone who sets foot in the library, telling just enough for them to make the wrong conclusions.”

She nods. Then she has her mouth at my ear: “But he seems so sweet.”

“Not malicious,” I yell. “Never malicious. Just foolish.”

We'll have answers pretty soon. Agents arrived to question the staff before Tina and I were even off the roof. Poor Kenny. I'll have to fire him, and what will he do then? I can probably set him up with something. Maybe a lawn-care business.

The pilot hands me a headset, and I put it on.

“Can you hear me, Mr. Davis?” the pilot asks.

“Loud and clear.”

“I'll need you to guide me in once we're close. Think of someplace I can land.”

I watch out the window. It's mostly woods, and I catch sight of our shadow riding the contours of the land like a roller coaster.

From way up here, it looks like the mills and factories might still be running, the homes might be kept up, and the jobs might not be gone. We've taken such pains building and improving all of this: society, infrastructure, government, economy. The whole shebang. It ran with the gentle hum of oiled parts spinning at a blur, until everything went to hell in the seventies and eighties. The last of the mills closed, and the disrupters, as Upton calls them—the bad genes, the pathogens, the criminal element without whom it might all be so simple—thrived.

“It should all be so simple,” I yell cryptically, and the hand comes back to my knee.

Realistically, there's not much to worry about, because even if Kenny's injudicious blab was early this morning, it needed to work its way along the gossip tree—morphing into the misperception that Lizzy or Flora actually witnessed the grisly deed. Then it had to find its way to whatever hypothetical traitor delivers it to the dark side, and then they, the evildoers themselves, would have to track down Lizzy and her mom—no easy feat, especially with the two of them at the lake for the week. And finally, anyone wishing to pay Flora and Lizzy a visit would have to drive several hours north, because it's unlikely they'd have access to a jet Ranger like we do.

Tina is watching out her window, and I know she's worried, so I lean in close to her and explain my reasoning of how it's all okay.

She gives me a perplexed look for a couple of seconds, then comes back and puts her mouth against my ear. “But Nick, Kenny was back in the office Friday afternoon. Remember? You were gone all day at the reservoir, but he and your daughter came back just after lunch. What if he committed the indiscretions then? They've had all weekend.”