Until Proven Innocent (21 page)

“
Mister Schwartzman, are you acquainted with a man named Joey the Flange?”

Stuart doesn’t answer. He just sits there, frozen.

“
The reason I’m asking if you know him, is because we found your name and number in his personal belongings. To be quite honest, Mister Schwarzman, Mister Flange is the name of a dead person who was discovered in the trunk of a car parked outside of Dodger Stadium - a car trunk that had stolen New Jersey license plates on it. Now we all know that a car trunk isn’t usually where a person who dies of natural causes would be, so the location of his final resting place, along with the small caliber bullet hole in the back of his skull has led our top notch lab technicians to believe that there may have been some foul play involved in his untimely death. So, I repeat, are you acquainted with him?”

I didn’t think it was possible, but Stuart is now whiter than he was when first coming into Snell’s office. With so much blood drained out of his face, I’m afraid he might pass out any time now, so I interrupt the friendly chat.

“
Stuart, you don’t look so good. Why don’t you come over here and relax on the couch?”

Snell knows exactly what I’m doing, because he also noticed how white Stuart was getting. As much as the FBI loves publicity, I don’t think they’re looking for the kind that they’d get if a witness dies in their office as the result of a stroke that occurs during a friendly chat. Snell motions for his assistant to get Stuart a glass of water and then makes the smart decision of directing the rest of his conversation directly to me.

“
Sharp, people in law enforcement don’t like coincidences popping up, and there have been so many in this case, that they’re just impossible to ignore. First, we have reason to believe that Mister Flange was involved in some illegal activity in his office building, like the selling of drugs, or bookmaking. Second, his phone records show quite a few calls to your client’s office, as well as numerous calls to a certain individual in Gardena, who is a known bookmaker.

“
We pulled your client’s phone records, and see that there are numerous calls to Mister Flange’s telephone number, and also the same number of calls to a telephone in New Jersey. The east coast telephone number is registered to a man who lives in a small apartment near the Newark Airport, and for some strange reason, he has six telephones there, which leads us to believe that he is also involved in illegal bookmaking.

“
The main difference between the bookmaker in New Jersey and Mister Flange out here, is that Mister Flange neglected to pay his ‘union’ dues, and was therefore in violation of the illegal gambling industry’s regulations.

“
Ordinarily, most of the bookmaking offenses are only misdemeanors, as far as the legal system is concerned, but the illegal gambling industry has a different set of rules. Let’s just say that their punishment for violations is a little harsher than ours.

“
The way it looks to us, your client has been making quite a few bets with both of these bookmakers, probably playing them against each other by arbitraging the odds, and that’s not a nice thing to do. In fact, because he was using the telephone and U.S. Mail, we tend to frown upon his actions.”

I don’t like the way this conversation is going. Snell can’t do anything to Stuart on the murder case, but he might try to force Stuart to testify against the New Jersey bookmaker, and that might cause injuries not covered by Stuart’s Blue Cross.

“
Snell, why don’t you have your assistant escort Mister Schwarzman out to his car and let him go home to rest? You and I can finish this conversation after he’s gone.

Snell looks at me for almost a full minute, and I can almost hear the gears spinning in his brain. He then tells his assistant what both Stuart and I want to hear: “Please help Mister Schwarzman outside to his car. He’s free to leave, and I don’t think we’ll have any further need for his assistance.”

Stuart looks like a guy who just got a reprieve two seconds before they were ready to pull the switch. Some color comes back into his face and he follows Snell’s assistant out the door. He looks back at me with a tremendous look of relief on his face. I hope he knows that the meter is still running. Once the door closes behind Stuart, Snell looks at me with an expression that lets me know it’s my move.

“
I know you’ve got better things to do than chase after bookmakers, and the police are hungrily waiting for you to give them this homicide case back, so why don’t we get right to the commercial here?

“
In your infinite wisdom, you agreed to let my client walk, so it’s time for me to pay my dues. You’re still interested in the film piracy operation aren’t you? Okay, I’ll take your silence as consent, so here’s what I’m going to do. One of my other clients is charged with murder, and because he’s a twenty-year police veteran, a group of his friends have been doing a thorough investigation into anyone who might lead them to who the real killer is.

“
These guys are not interested in film piracy. All they want to do is find a killer and clear their friend, so the information they get, including photos of the film piracy gang, is of no use to them.

“
We haven’t finished sorting out all the details yet, but we have a pretty good idea of who did the killing, and it looks like it all centered around control of the piracy gang. My client’s trial is coming up soon, and if you and your gang want to show up there, I think that there may be a present waiting for you.”

This gets his attention.

“
Are you telling me that you’ll be turning the piracy gang over to me on the day of your client’s trial?”

“
That’s the way it looks. But don’t worry, I’ll give you some leads in advance, so that when you make the bust, you can legitimately tell the press that you’ve been investigating the case for a while and knew that the conspirators would all be in the courtroom during this trial. It’ll be just like the last time. You’ll make the bust, and get all the credit.”

“
What kind of clues can you give me now?”

“
I can tell you the address that the operation works out of, but we still don’t have the final proof of who did the killing we’re interested in. I’ll give you some information, but you’ll have to give me your word that you won’t barge in and screw up our investigation just to get some advance publicity. This gang is operating all over the world, and we’re still in the process of following the money trail. Also, there’s a possibility that the people we’re looking at are only the laborers, with some higher-ups actually calling the shots.

“
If you can just work on the part of the case that I ask you to, and use the tools at your disposal to find out things that we have no way of learning, then I think there’ll be a happy ending to both of our cases.”

“
Okay, Sharp, where do you suggest we start?”

*****

This meeting is a success. Not only is Stuart off the hook, but I’ve also got Snell talked into working for us. The one thing his guys can do that our guys can’t, is access income tax returns, bank records, and other information that we would never be able to get a subpoena for. One of Tony’s investigators got the license number off a truck that made an evening delivery to the Venice Soundstage. This was obviously a load of blank VD stock that Renaldo needed for production of the pirated copies. I ask Snell to run the plates and get a copy of that truck’s recent dispatch records, to see how much blank recording stock has been delivered to Renaldo, when the deliveries were made, and how they were paid for.

The odds are strongly against Renaldo and his people reporting the income from their pirated copies. Knowing how many copies they ran, along with the knowledge that each one brought in at least twenty dollars of profit, can lead to the forming of an educated estimate of how much income they hid, and didn’t report to the IRS. This alone would give Snell grounds for an arrest. During the days of prohibition, a gangster named Al Capone did a lot of things, including murder. When he was finally arrested and sent to jail, it was on the only thing that they could definitely prove against him: avoiding paying income tax.

My suggestion to count the blank recording stock delivered to Renaldo isn’t a new one. For many years IRS auditors have estimated the volume of business that houses of prostitution have conducted by a similar method: they would count the number of towels sent in each week to the laundry service, presuming that each towel represented one ‘trick.’

As I pull out of the Federal Building’s parking lot, I hear a car horn tooting. In my rear view mirror I see that it’s Stuart. I pick up my cell phone and call him, letting him know that I’m going to the Charthouse for an early dinner, and now that he’s a completely free man above suspicion, he will be allowed to pick up my dinner check.

Stuart is all ears and won’t be satisfied until he hears a complete report of the conversation I had with Snell, after he left the room. I can appreciate his anxiety, especially after he sat in his car for a half hour, waiting for me to leave the Federal Building. I don’t want to go into details about the piracy operation, so I politely tell Stuart that the only way to get him off of the hook on the gambling thing was to give Snell some information on another federal crime that was accidentally uncovered during our investigation of Tony’s murder case.

All that Stuart is really interested in is my assurance that he has absolutely nothing to worry about concerning his now-defunct gambling operation. The thing that was most surprising was how that scam had grown. Now that it’s all over, Stuart confides in me that his interests also included football and basketball games in which competing bookmakers would offer different point spreads and make it easier to place bets, or ‘get down’ locally, without worrying about money traveling from coast to coast.

I tell Stuart that if he really wants to leave the gambling business with a clean slate, he should calculate exactly how much he won over the entire period of time he was gambling, and be sure to declare the extra income on his next tax report. I think he finally realizes that the only way to get out clean with no future liability is to do it my way. I tell him that all he has to do is claim that he won it in one weekend trip to Las Vegas. The IRS won’t argue with him. They’ll be glad to accept his tax money.

*****

After dinner I take a leisurely walk back to the boat, mentally calculating how many hours I can bill Stuart for. Let’s see… he called me before one in the afternoon, and it’s now a little after five. I guess that four hours at one-fifty each would be fair. The thing I really like about this six hundred that’ll be coming in is that the kid has no way of glomming onto it and turning it into a ‘firm’ fee.

Back at the boat, I see that there are a couple of garbage bags waiting to be taken out. There are one or two chores that have been assigned to me, so in addition to lugging huge bags of dog food from her electric cart onto the boat, taking out the garbage is the other. There are a couple of attractive Rubbermaid trash containers that are placed near each one of the boat docks. Unfortunately, they open from the top, and the kid can’t reach high enough to open them. She’s already got the dog trained to stand on his rear legs, use a paw to pull open a mailbox door, and drop mail from his mouth down into the mailbox. If she can get him to do that, I don’t see why she can’t get him to take out the garbage too.

While dumping the ‘recyclable’ bag, I notice some empty envelopes from the IRS, several major movie studios, and the Motion Picture Association. As usual, I have absolutely no idea of what’s going on, but I hope it has something to do with us finding the real killer because at this point, I still have no defense for Tony’s murder case that can be supported by any evidence. It’s still all just a theory

A popular television courtroom drama utilized what the actors called their ‘plan B,’ which consisted of directing guilt away from their own client and trying to get the jury to believe that another person may have committed the crime their client was charged with. It would be nice if we could bring up all the film piracy stuff at Tony’s trial and get the jury to think that someone in Renaldo’s gang killed Joe for stumbling onto the criminal enterprise. Unfortunately, in real life, you can’t get away with that. In order to bring in evidence of completely unrelated crimes and start finger pointing in other directions, you must have some shred of evidence that the direction you’re going in is actually true, and not just a theory. Now all I’ve got is my theory that Renaldo had Joe killed to get him out of the way and stop him from going to the authorities.

Whenever I think about blaming someone for a crime I always like to see what possible defense they could come up with, and in this case I’m afraid that Renaldo would walk away with an acquittal, because he was at work when the murder was committed, and there’s nothing we have to connect him with anyone who’s a likely shooter.

In addition to our problems with Tony’s case, the kid is in an especially bad mood because not only has her good friend Myra subpoenaed her as a witness, but Suzi was told that she couldn’t bring the dog to court with her. I don’t know what bothers her most - being subpoenaed or not being able to bring the dog.

On a previous case we worked on, the kid managed to bring her dog into the courtroom by using a devious deception, and only got away with it because officially, the court wasn’t in session at the time. I hope she doesn’t try another trick like that this time.

*****

Tony’s investigation teams are still covering the Venice Soundstage from dusk to dawn, and a new report has come in about another truck delivery. The alley surveillance guys counted two cartons being unloaded from the truck. They then followed the truck back to its garage in Chatsworth, where it pulled into a large warehouse.