The Arraignment (49 page)
Authors: Steve Martini
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Mystery fiction, #Legal, #California, #Legal stories, #Madriani; Paul (Fictitious character)
And how was Nick going to get the variance? What do you give to someone who has everything? What gift, what token can anyone offer to a man like Zane Tresler; what would lock him in? Nick had that answer too. You give him something to occupy a place of honor in the white, chambered nautilus, modeled under all that glass in his office. You give him the key to a lost language. You give him the Mexican Rosetta.
But Nick never got that far. He never saw the shadow looming up in front of him: the austere figure of Adam Tolt. Adam was not the kind of man to spend his life building a law firm and then allow Nick to steal it.
The relationship between them was one born of convenience and, I suspect, more than a little bad karma. In the end, Adam had to see Nick as his worst nightmare.
Initially he liked the fact that Nick made Rocker, Dusha a full-service firm. The addition of low-visibility, criminal law services fleshed out the partnership. He liked the money, and he was satisfied with the occasional advice Nick offered on cases. But most of all he liked the Chinese Wall Nick provided around the firm’s respectability. It kept everything clean and tidy. Whenever business clients ventured into crime land, or found themselves there by unhappy circumstance, Adam could banish them down the elevator with a friendly pat on the ass and still keep the revenue flowing. In this way, the firm’s most valued clients, the ones who didn’t have a grand jury giving the smell test to their stock transactions, wouldn’t have to wrench their backs, rubbing up against the expensive finish on Adam’s paneled hallways while trying to avoid contact with Nick’s untouchables.
As for Nick, he got to tie his wagon to a brighter star, a
major firm about to go supernova, with all the prospects that this seemed to present.
I say “seemed,” because my guess is that within a year, Nick realized it was an illusion. His position with Rocker, Dusha was a dead end. They’d put him downstairs for a reason. To keep his clients from sullying the dignified atmosphere of the real firm. No doubt Adam planned to move Nick lower once Rocker, Dusha expanded enough to inhabit the entire building. Nick could have his own private hell next to the furnace in the basement, where his clients could get credit for time served in purgatory. Adam made it clear. He didn’t want Nick doing anything other than criminal cases. The path to growth was blocked.
Even for someone like Nick, with an uncanny sense for the human condition, it couldn’t have taken long before Tolt started hearing murmurs. With a firm full of nervous partners, there had to be some who wanted to place bets on the back line, trying to cover both sides in case Nick came up short.
I can only imagine Adam’s state of mind when he started picking up the scent. A man closer to the end of his career than the beginning, with no place as lofty to land, facing an assault from a direction he’d never anticipated: the basement. His first thought must have been that Nick was out of his mind. Somewhere in the recesses of Adam’s frantic brain must surely have passed the thought that this was also history’s verdict of Hitler and Stalin, not a comforting thought given their initial success and the carnage that followed. Things must have looked even worse when he considered his options.
For a man with a Rolodex full of heady phone numbers, no doubt with the private line to the Oval Office topping the list, a man who had reached the zenith of a career most people would envy, all Adam could see were the stunning heights from which he could fall. Sure he had a name, a solid reputation of accomplishment, almost all of it in earlier decades. Important people would take his calls, as long as he was the senior partner at Rocker, Dusha.
As any enduring dictator will attest, when faced with the skirmish line of rebellion, the first rule of survival is to hang the leader. Adam must have stayed up nights trying to figure ways to force Nick out of the firm. But he had a problem. He was missing some vital information. He couldn’t be sure how long Rush’s revolt had been going on or how many of his partners had already signed on. It wouldn’t do to call Nick on the carpet and can him, only to find himself voted out of the firm the next morning.
Plan B wouldn’t work either. Adam couldn’t just pick up the phone and start calling partners, trying to divine if they’d been talking to Nick behind his back, measuring Adam’s throat for a good cutting. To do that would be to admit that he’d already lost control. Whether Nick won or lost, the partners would smell blood. Adam would be voted the position of partner emeritus, given a broom closet for an office and a book of crossword puzzles to occupy his time.
He could have waited for the revolt to erupt and then taken Nick and the rebels who followed him to court. But as every law firm knows, the last thing any client wants to hear is that his lawyers are all suing each other. The clients would bail and Adam knew it. What good is it to be a bull and own a field, if there are no cows and no grass in it?
Adam may have been the senior partner, but he wasn’t senile. It didn’t take him long to confront reality. He was a lawyer. Nick was a kamikaze pilot. If need be, Nick was fully prepared to bring himself down in flames, all over Adam’s finely polished decks. What tends to occupy your mind when you think about doing battle with someone in Nick’s situation is a lot of blood, most of it being your own.
Confronted by the situation, it is easy to imagine the desperation that might drive someone like Adam to excess. In Tolt’s mind there had to be a way, something more direct, with a quick and certain result, some action he could take, and finish, before his partners started running for the doors. Even to those with mental powers not nearly as subtle as Adam’s, there is little in life more definitive than death.
The opportunity presented itself in the risky nature of
Nick’s practice. It might have been any of a number of Nick’s seedier drug clients who could have gotten the nod, to be standing next to him on the street that morning.
It requires surmise to plug a few of the gaps, but I suspect that Adam picked Metz for a reason. Lawyer’s intuition tells me that Margaret, Nick’s ex, had lied to me when I talked to her with Susan. She had known about Jamaile Enterprises. Her lawyers would have turned it upside down, looking for hidden assets during the divorce. But timing is everything in life. Nick was lucky. He was still working on the loan papers to buy the hotel.
Adam would have been cultivating Margaret in hopes of gathering dirt on Nick’s vices, even the ancient ones. She turned out to be a wellspring of information. She told him about Jamaile, Metz.
Adam must have thought he’d found the grail. What better to get the cops salivary glands going in the morning than a criminal defense lawyer gone bad, turned to the dark side and doing business with one of his own drug clients. It was a prosecutor’s wet dream. Adam had to figure they would look neither hard nor long at any other theories or, for that matter, waste a lot of time chasing after the shooters.
Tolt had no idea what Jamaile really was or what Nick and Metz were up to in Mexico. It is only my guess, but I think Adam actually believed Nick was involved in drugs. If nothing else, it would have served to cement his resolve, convinced him that he was fighting the good fight, and provided the consolation that no matter how dark his deed, he was doing it for the firm, saving it from the devil. If he had looked more thoroughly at Jamaile, he might have picked someone other than Metz as the patsy. Had he done that, it is likely no one would have been able to connect the dots and find Adam hiding at the end, all the pieces lacking, as they were, reference points like the hieroglyphs of the ancient Maya.
And so Nick Rush left the firm, feet first. Adam’s gamble very nearly paid off. With no general to lead it, the troops scattered, and the coup died with Nick, so by the time I
started nosing around, it was history. Why would anyone place their career in my hands, confiding to me their part in a revolution that never happened? It was why Dolson didn’t want to talk when I met with him in San Francisco and why the office building at the address in Nick’s handheld was empty, available for lease. Nick was looking for new office space. It’s what you need when you’re opening a firm.
Even if the thought had dawned on any of Adam’s partners that Nick’s move might be the motive for murder, there was absolutely nothing on their radar scope to link Adam to the shooting. After all, the cops were all looking under other rocks, assuming, as I did, that Metz was the target.
If that wasn’t enough, there was the rock-solid evidence that Nick’s death was an accident, with an insurance check approaching four million dollars conceding that fact. I will never know how many arms at the insurer’s home office were twisted off at the shoulder by Adam on that one. What I do know is that he used every opportunity to boast about my victory, especially in the firm, even to the point of putting out his piece in the firm’s monthly newsletter and making sure it got dropped on every partner’s desk.
It was the thing that started me thinking. Why? It was unlike Tolt to go out of his way to embarrass a carrier after what everyone agreed was a generous settlement. It was also Adam who single-handedly fought off their demand for secrecy regarding the amount paid, a virtually uniform secret in every such settlement. I couldn’t figure what his reason was. How better to cover your tracks? An insurance company doesn’t pay that kind of money unless they are sure it was an accident. Adam’s partners would know that. It would kill any suspicion that might be lingering in their minds.
This morning, as I lean back in my chair and read the paper, my loafers crossed on top of my desk, I can’t help but smile at the story Harry has circled on page three. Not because it is news. I heard it on the radio in the car last evening on my way home, one of the local stations.
It is the final touch, the ultimate irony that even Nick, at his most calculating, could not have anticipated.
The federal government has flexed its muscle. It has exercised its powers of eminent domain and condemned an empty lot with its cavernous hole that was once the site of the old Capri Hotel.
The General Services Administration announced yesterday that it plans to build a new federal courthouse at this location.
I lower the newspaper, close my eyes, and hold my breath. Sitting here motionless, I listen, and I can hear it. Faint as a distant whisper, it lingers in the air, just at the edge of the human auditory frontier. The familiar pitch that became the signature finish to a thousand yarns of combat in court. Somewhere beyond my mortal horizon, I can hear Nick, and he is laughing.