Trevayne (27 page)

Vicarson looked at his watch. It was almost four-fifteen. The Mark Hopkins was a twenty-minute taxi ride, and he wanted to allow himself time for a shower. That left him just about fifteen minutes for a drink at one of the waterfront bars.

That had to be on his wharf agenda.

As he looked up from his watch for a second time and increased his calculations, he saw two men standing perhaps fifty feet away. They were looking at him. They quickly turned and began talking to each other—too rapidly, too artificially. Then Vicarson realized what he’d just done. The San Francisco sun had caused a glare on his watch, so he’d turned to recheck the time in his own shadow; he’d made the movement at the last second. The men hadn’t expected it.

Vicarson wondered. Or was Trevayne’s constant reminder of caution causing his imagination to overwork?

A group of Girl Scouts accompanied by a large contingent of adult guides began filling up the base of the pier. They were preparing an assault march to the far end amid squeals of laughter and parental reprimands. They started out; the tourists backed away to let Troop 36, Oakland Brownies, pass through.

Vicarson headed into the group, loudly apologizing as he worked his way through. He reached the last rows under the critical eyes of several adults and emerged
within ten yards of the street. He dashed into the thoroughfare and turned right, entering the flow of human traffic on the waterfront side.

Two blocks south he saw a crowded café which advertised “Drinks on the Bay” and rapidly walked through the door. The bar was in the shape of a horseshoe, the open end by the front entrance, the bar itself following the odd contours of the building, extending out over the water.

“Drinks on the Bay,” indeed.

Vicarson positioned himself halfway around the horseshoe so he could observe both the north side of the dock and the street. He ordered a Fisherman’s Punch and waited, wondering if he’d see the two men again.

He did. Only when they came into view they’d been joined by a third man. A large, somewhat obese man in his fifties, or thereabouts.

Sam Vicarson nearly dropped his frosted glass of Fisherman’s Punch.

He’d seen the third man before; he wasn’t likely to forget, in spite of the circumstances of the meeting—perhaps because of them.

The last time—the only time—he’d seen the large man was on a golf course in the middle of the night three thousand miles away. At Chevy Chase in Maryland. This was the man who’d hammerlocked the drunken Congressman from California and slapped him to the ground.

Trevayne stood by the hotel window and listened to Vicarson’s description but kept his own counsel. The young lawyer had described Mario de Spadante. And if he was correct, if De Spadante was in San Francisco, then there were side issues coming into play with Genessee Industries that he hadn’t considered.

Mario de Spadante had to be scrutinized. The “construction boy from New Haven who, with hard work and the grace of God, had made good” bore immediate looking into. Trevayne hadn’t made any such connection before. There had been no reason to look for one.

“I’m not mistaken, Mr. Trevayne. It was the same man. Who the hell is he?”

“I may be able to answer that after a few phone calls.”

“No kidding?”

“I wish I were.… We’ll go into it later. Let’s talk about this afternoon.” Trevayne crossed to an armchair; Alan Martin and Sam sat on the couch, papers on the coffee table in front of them. “We’ve had time to mull it over, get a little perspective. What’s your opinion, Alan? How do you think it went?”

The middle-aged accountant glanced at his papers. He pinched the bridge of his nose and spoke first with his eyes shut. “Goddard was running scared but did his damnedest to conceal it.” Martin opened his eyes. “He was also confused. He kept pressing his fingertips on the table; you could see the veins working. Here, I made some notes.” Martin picked up a clipboard from the coffee table. “One of the first things that threw him was the Pasadena labor settlement. I don’t think he expected it. He wasn’t happy when Sam pushed his boys for the name of the AFL-CIO negotiator.”

“What was his name?” asked Trevayne.

“Manolo. Ernest Manolo,” answered Vicarson, looking down at his papers on the coffee table. “The contract wasn’t too rough from a local-conditions viewpoint, but if it’s used as any sort of national guideline, consider it a giveaway.”

“Will it be?”

“That’s up to Manolo and his crowd, I guess. Goose-and-gander reciprocity will be the issue,” replied Vicarson.

“You mean the AFL-CIO delegates that kind of authority to this … Manolo?”

“Manolo was a medium-paced starter, but he’s rising fast. Not much is delegated to him. He just takes. He’s a firebrand—crusader type. Like Chavez; but with the benefit of an education. Economics, University of New Mexico.”

“Go ahead, Al.” Trevayne took an envelope out of his pocket.

“I think you fuzzed Goddard when you didn’t pursue a number of Genessee’s underestimates. He had the files on the Pittsburgh Cylinder Company; the Detroit armature run; the alloy steel—also Detroit; the Houston laboratories; the Green Agency, advertising, New York; and God knows what else. He was ready to throw volumes at us,
justifications.… I did get the design-unit head, though. In Houston. His name never appeared in any of
our
files before. Ralph Jamison. Goddard couldn’t figure that one out; a lousy lab man behind a one-hundred-and-five-million-dollar conversion.… Then he practically put his fingers through the table when we asked for the Bellstar projections. That’s understandable; Genessee had antitrust problems with Bellstar.”

“Speaking as the most brilliant practicing attorney here,” said Sam Vicarson with a grin, “if the Bellstar decision had been rendered by anyone but old Judge Studebaker, it would have been challenged months ago.”

“Sam, why do you say that? I’ve heard it before.”

“Oh, Lord, Mr. Trevayne, ask any trust lawyer who knows his books. The Genessee-Bellstar brief was filled with holes. But Joshua Studebaker was given the case. Old Josh is a little-known bench tradition, but a tradition nevertheless. He might have gone farther, but he prefers to sit in his chambers up in Seattle. He’s a quiet, up-from-slavery legal diamond. He’s black, Mr. Trevayne. When you talk about little kids being whipped, and rickets, and scratching the ground for a potato that’s divided, you’re talking about old Josh. He’s really been there. Even Justice would rather not challenge him.”

“I never realized that.” Alan Martin was fascinated by this newly acquired information. “I never heard of him.”

“Neither did I,” said Trevayne.

“It’s not surprising. Studebaker’s assiduously devoted to being a private person. No interviews, no books; articles involving only the most complex legalistics in superacademic law journals. He’s spent forty years or so complicating and uncomplicating legal decisions.… Some say he’s slipped in recent years—they’re beginning to understand him.”

“You’re saying he’s untouchable?” Trevayne asked a question.

“For a number of reasons. He’s a genius; he’s black; he’s eccentric-in-his-fashion; he’s got a positively frightening grasp of legal abstractions; he’s black. Do I draw a picture?”

“He’s black and he made it,” said Alan Martin with resignation.

“To the very-most top of the mountain.”

“You’re leaving out a pretty important piece of information … or judgment,” said Trevayne.

“Why did he render the decision?” Sam Vicarson leaned forward on the couch. “I told you his rep is in legal complexities … abstractions. He used the phrase ‘mass human endeavor’ in balancing, then overriding, obvious Genessee irregularities. He justified certain questionable economic relationships by ascertaining the necessity of ‘compatible motives’ in large-scale financing. Lastly, he threw the hooker: in nothing words, the government hadn’t proved the need for viable competition.”

“What does that mean?” asked Alan Martin, his eyes betraying a complete lack of understanding. “Other than that you read the goddamn papers?”

“Nobody else had the loot.”

“Which has nothing to do with the legality of the situation,” said Trevayne.”

“Conclusion?” Sam leaned back on the couch. “Either old Josh wandered back through the legal gymnastics to the essential truth with all of its human imperfections, or he had an ulterior motive. Frankly, I can’t subscribe to the latter. No … ‘compatible motive,’ to use the judge’s own words. Lastly, he’s a stand-up legal encyclopedia. Even though a lot of us are convinced there are holes, he might just be able to fill every one.”

“So much for Bellstar.” Trevayne wrote a note to himself on the back of the envelope in his hand. “What else, Alan?”

“Goddard was angry—I mean he blinked and smiled and damn near tore his fingernails on the wood—when you skirted the question of Armbruster. The Senator’s off-limits with him. I don’t think he knew what you were driving at. Neither did I, to tell you the truth.… Armbruster’s been a thorn to big corporations, especially monoliths like Genessee. He couldn’t understand your question about Armbruster being consulted about employment statistics.”

“Because Armbruster wasn’t consulted.
He
did the consulting.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“The liberal Senator did some rather illiberal cogitations during the last election.”

“No kidding?” Vicarson’s eyes were wide.

“I wish I were,” answered Trevayne.

“The last thing I put down—I left the legal stuff to Sam—was the downright evasions they all gave us, in unison, on the aircraft lobby. They were primed on this one. By their percentage figures they’re accountable for a maximum of twenty-two percent of the lobby’s funding. Yet according to the lobby’s own stats, Genessee’s responsible for twenty-seven percent that we know about, and probably another twelve that’s buried. If I really ran a subsidiary check and pulled in the Green Agency in New York, I swear I’d find an additional twenty percent. I know goddamned well Genessee plies a minimum of seven million into the lobby, but they refuse to admit it. I tell you, they’ve got more labels for public relations than Sears Roebuck has in a catalog.”

Labels. A nation of labels
, thought Andrew Trevayne.

“Who runs Green in New York?”

“Aaron Green,” answered Sam Vicarson. “Philanthropist, patron of the arts, publisher of poetry at his own expense. Very high type.”

“A co-religionist of mine,” added Alan Martin. “Only he came from Birmingham’s ‘Our Crowd,’ not from New Britain, Connecticut, where us yids ate Kielbasa or got rapped by Polack knuckles.… That’s all I wrote down.”

Labels, a nation of labels
.

Andrew Trevayne unobtrusively made another notation on the back of the Mark Hopkins envelope. “Grade A, pass, Rabbi Martin. Shall we bar-mitzvah young Sam?”

“After all my erudition? You’re a hard man, Mr. Chairman.”

“We grant you’re erudite, don’t we, Alan? We also grant your exquisite taste in gifts.” Trevayne picked up his shark lighter from the lamp table and pressed the dorsal fin. No light appeared in the mouth. “You owe me a battery.… Now, what has the learned counselor deemed to provide us?”

“Crap.… Funny, I don’t even like the word, but I use it a lot. Now, it fits.” Vicarson rose from the couch and walked toward the hotel television set and fingered the top.

“What’s the crap?” asked Trevayne.

“The term is
no-volotore
. At least it’s
my
term.” Vicarson turned around and faced Martin and Trevayne. “Goddard had a lawyer there this afternoon, but he didn’t know what the hell was transpiring.
No-volotore;
he couldn’t
offer
anything. He was there to make sure no one contradicted himself legally—that’s
all
. He wasn’t allowed to know much of anything. It’s one hell of a position.”

“Christ, I’m repeating myself,” said Martin, “but I don’t understand.”

“Dumb yiddle.” Vicarson lobbed an empty ashtray at Martin, who caught it effortlessly with his left hand. “He was a front. A surface front who watched both sides like a biased referee. He kept picking us up on phrases, asking for classifications—
not
on substance, only on verbiage. You dig?… He made sure some future record was clean. And take my word for it, there was nothing said this afternoon that anyone could use in court.” Vicarson leaned against the back of a chair and feigned a push-up on it.

“All right, Mr. Blacks tone. Why does that disturb you so?” Trevayne shifted his position so he could give young Sam the benefit of his full attention.

“Simple, my leader. No one puts a lawyer, especially a
corporate
lawyer, in that kind of position unless he’s frightened out of his tree. You
tell
him something!… That man didn’t
know
anything. Believe me true, Mr. Trevayne, he was in a much darker area than we were.”

“You’re employing Judge Studebaker’s tactics, Sam. Abstractions,” said Trevayne.

“Not really; that’s for openers.” Vicarson suddenly stopped his juvenile gyrations and walked rapidly back to the couch. He sat down and picked up one of the pages on the coffee table. “I made a couple of notes, too. Not so elaborate as Al’s—I was dodging the evil people—but I figured out a few things.… For a first raise, what would you say to collusion?”

Both listeners looked at each other, then at Vicarson.

“I thought nothing was said this afternoon that could be used in court.” Trevayne spoke while lighting a cigarette.

“Qualification—not by itself. In conjunction with other information, and a lot of digging, there’s a good possibility.”

“What is it?” asked Martin.

“Goddard dropped the fact that he—‘he’ being Genessee Industries—hadn’t been apprised of the steel quotas set by the President’s Import Commission in March of last year before the official release date. The fact that Genessee had an armada of Tamishito ingot shipped from Japan just under the wire was ascribed to favorable market conditions and an astute purchasing board. Am I right?”

Trevayne nodded; Martin toyed with his grotesque little flashlight. “So?” he asked.