Marc Kadella Legal Mysteries Vol 1-6 (Marc Kadella Series)

by Dennis Carstens

  Howie had never before been to Marc Kadella’s office. He looked him up in the yellow pages and decided it was time to pay him a visit. Plus, he genuinely wanted a second opinion about the settlement offer. As he went up the long flight of stairs to the second floor he again thought about not calling ahead for an appointment and simply ignored the thought. He found Marc’s name listed by the door along with the other lawyers, lightly knocked and went in.

  Marc was at his desk working on a divorce case when the intercom sounded. He picked up the phone and heard Carolyn say, “Marc there’s a man here who says he’s an old client, Howie Traynor. He’d like a few minutes if you can spare it.”

  The instant he heard Howie’s name announced Marc’s immediate reaction was to wonder: Oh, God, now what?

  “Um, yeah, okay,” he stuttered. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Two minutes later he was again seated at his desk, the door closed and Howie Traynor in one of the client chairs.

  “I really appreciate you taking the time to see me,” Howie said for the second time.

  “It’s all right,” Marc answered a lot more casually than he felt. “What can I do for you?”

  “I, ah, just came from my lawyers and I’m, well,” he nervously began. “I was wondering if I could get your opinion about a settlement offer we got.”

  Traynor went on to give Marc a complete account of the entire meeting. Who was there, who was missing, who liked the deal and who didn’t. He made sure to tell him about Forsberg stomping out and that Parlow was ready to accept it up until Albright told them about the settlement being structured for a ten year payout.

  When he finished he leaned back, looked at Marc and said, “Well, what do you think?”

  After hesitating for a moment as if thinking it over, Marc replied, “Howie, I can’t really say if it’s good or bad. I don’t do these types of cases. I have no idea if it’s good or bad. Let me ask you this: What do you think of the offer?”

  “The more I think about it. The better it sounds. It wouldn’t make me rich but it would be a nice, steady check coming in every month. I don’t think the other guys will take it, though. Forsberg was really pissed. What an asshole he is thinking he’s worth more than the rest of us.”

  “I can see his point,” Marc softly said. “These things are normally based on how much earning power someone has. How much income he made before it happened. He was making a lot of money, according to the news reports. What about the fourth guy, what’s his name?”

  “Suarez,” Howie said. “I don’t know him. He wasn’t there. I did meet him once but I have no idea what he would do. I was thinking I’ll tell her I’ll take it. I don’t want to screw around for another two or three years. What do you think?”

  “I think Howie, to be honest, I’m a little surprised you would want my opinion,” Marc said.

  “Really? Why?” Howie asked.

  “Well, the first time we met your case didn’t exactly go too well and…”

  “Oh, that wasn’t your fault. That was some guy at some lab who screwed me and the other guys.”

  “Did you know he died?” Marc asked.

  “Seriously? He died? How?”

  “Cancer. It was in yesterday’s paper. He had terminal cancer and that’s why he came clean, or so I heard. He didn’t want to die with that on his conscience.”

  With a mildly surprised look on his face, Howie said, “Well, I guess I’m glad he confessed to what he done.”

  Howie stood up, extended his hand to Marc as Marc arose from his chair and Howie said, “Listen, thanks for seeing me, Mr. Kadella. I think I’ll take the deal, if I can.”

  TWENTY

  After leaving the meeting with Glenda Albright and her other two clients, Aaron Forsberg began driving out of downtown in an easterly direction. He was still steaming mad because of the paltry settlement he was offered. As he drove east on Eighth Street Forsberg mentally kicked himself for signing on with Albright in the first place. He should have known better than to attach himself to a self-promoting gasbag lawyer and the other three scumbags she represented.

  When he reached Eleventh Avenue, satisfied he was past the construction for the new stadium, he turned left on Eleventh to go the two blocks north to Sixth Street. At sixth he turned right and punched the gas to take the freeway ramp onto I-94 east to St. Paul.

  On his way to St. Paul, Forsberg reflected on his current mental and emotional well-being. Before his wife’s murder and his subsequent trial he had been a relatively well-adjusted man; at least he would have said so. About the only anomaly to which he would admit was an overly driven need to succeed.

  Forsberg had graduated in three and a half years from Notre Dame with a degree in Business Administration. He then obtained a master’s degree in Finance from the Carlson School of Business at the University of Minnesota. While working on his MBA, he had gone to work for a large investment bank, Landon & Fletcher in their Minneapolis office. By the time he was thirty, he was married, a second child was on the way and his salary and bonuses would top a million dollars. Aaron Forsberg worked hard, put in a lot of hours and had a gift for sales and market analysis. His clients made money, his firm made money and he made money. Life was good.

  The only glitch was the more he made and the better he did, it never seemed to be enough. Aaron Forsberg was addicted to the opiate of greed and success. And because of that, he worked ninety to one hundred hours per week. Many nights he would simply sleep in his office. It was the best way to stay on top of foreign markets and the global economy.

  Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, he took a grand total of three short vacations with his family lasting barely one week each. Even then his phone and at least two laptops came with him. And yet he was shocked to find out his wife was having an affair.

  Prison life had taken a serious toll on Forsberg. Before prison, even though he was consumed by a drive to succeed, he was always a fairly affable man. His colleagues, the only friends he had, genuinely liked him and he got along well with them. During this time he even had a couple of harmless affairs. At least, he believed they were harmless. After all, he was killing himself at work to provide a lavish lifestyle for his wife and children. He deserved a little fling or two. Then it all came crashing down like an avalanche the night he found his murdered wife.

  Driving east toward downtown St. Paul he replayed it again. The arrest, trial and conviction for something he didn’t do, the years in prison and the loss of his family and his life. Now that he was free he looked back upon all of it as if it were a surreal bad dream. Except it wasn’t.

  Prison had hardened him as it does many people. Aaron had an edge, a cynicism and mistrust that were not there before.

  When he first arrived at the state prison in Michigan City, Indiana, the terror of where he was had taken two weeks to dissipate. He expected to be beaten, raped and sold for a pack of cigarettes at any minute. Once he realized that wasn’t going to happen, he calmed down and settled in. That is when he noticed it in other inmates; the convict attitude. Don’t let anyone get too close, don’t make friends and be very careful whom you trusted.

  Aaron Forsberg needed help and he knew it. He should be in counseling and probably drug therapy. Unfortunately, Aaron wasn’t interested. He liked being in the mental and emotional state that he was in and the edge he felt it gave him. Perhaps when everything was over he would seek treatment, but not yet.

  Forsberg exited I-94 at the Marion Street exit and drove the van straight ahead to pick up Kellogg Boulevard. He traveled on Kellogg into downtown and found a metered parking space on Kellogg just before St. Peter Street. Not bothering with the semaphores on the corner, Aaron ran across Kellogg and then St. Peter to get to his destination. He entered the Ramsey County Courthouse through the Kellogg entrance.

  This was Forsberg’s first time in the art deco style building and he walked past the elevators and into the ground floor hall. Not all of his education and appreciation for li
fe had been knocked out of him by prison. He could still enjoy the architecture and design of the twenty story limestone building built during the Great Depression. He took a quick tour of the ground floor, admiring the old-style workmanship and the building’s centerpiece, the thirty-eight foot, white onyx statue of the Indian God of Peace.

  Remembering why he came, he checked the directory and found the destination he wanted. A couple of minutes later he quietly opened the door for courtroom 1230 and slipped unobtrusively onto a bench in the back.

  A trial of some kind was taking place with a witness on the stand giving testimony to the judge. There was no jury and only a few spectators in the gallery. Forsberg sat silently watching the trial and the surroundings of the mahogany paneled room.

  Ignoring the participants he finally turned his attention to the judge. The man’s hair was thinner and completely white and the face was more lined. His former lawyer, Julian Segal, was not aging particularly well. Forsberg guessed his age to be about sixty and he looked at least seventy. But there he sat up high on his throne. The longer Forsberg stared at him, the higher his blood pressure went. There sat the one man who could have kept him from prison if he had done his job. If he had been more forceful, more demanding and fought the admission of the DNA test harder, Forsberg would have been acquitted. Or so he believed.

  Before twenty minutes was up Forsberg decided he couldn’t take another minute of the judge and the last thing he needed was to draw attention to himself. He quietly stood up and left the courtroom.

  Forsberg turned off Kellogg on his way back to the freeway and onto Summit Avenue. Summit was old money Minnesota. It was lined block after block with very large, old, multi-room homes stretching from the St. Paul Cathedral several miles to the bluff of the Mississippi River. Forsberg had found Segal’s address and curiosity got the better of him. About two miles down Summit he found the house he wanted and pulled over to the curb. He sat across the street from it, a brick two-story sporting four fireplace chimneys. He stared for ten minutes then put the van in drive and slowly drove off.

  Gene Parlow casually strolled through the crowd of his favorite bar, Whiskey World. It was mostly a biker bar located off the West Bank of the University of Minnesota campus on the downtown side.

  There was a minimally talented country band on stage doing their best Lynard Skynard interpretation. On the dance floor was a decent sized crowd doing a group line dance that Parlow didn’t recognize.

  Parlow got a shot and a bottle of Pabst at the back bar then took a seat by the pool table. He tossed down the shot of Jack then worked on his beer while watching his brother, Troy, shoot pool. Troy was not a particularly good pool player although he thought he was. A couple of minutes after Gene sat down the game ended. Troy opened the large, brown leather pouch he had chained to himself, removed a twenty dollar bill and paid his opponent. The next player was racking the balls while Troy took the chair next to Gene. The meth business being what it was, the twenty he just lost wasn’t a big deal to Troy.

  It was obvious the two men were brothers. Except for Gene’s citizen haircut, they looked alike and were dressed basically the same. T-shirt, leather vest and motorcycle boots which made them indistinguishable from the other one percenters in the bar.

  “Hey, bro,” Troy began after a fist bump with Gene. “I think I found a bike for you. A Harley that’s a little warm but should be ready in a day or two.”

  “What about a job? Am I in or not?” Gene asked referring to the meth business.

  “I’m working on it. Relax. It’ll happen. You check out your old lawyer?”

  “Yeah,” Parlow answered his younger brother. “She’s still around.”

  “Well?” Troy asked.

  “Well, what?”

  “No bitch would ever get away with fuckin’ me up the way she did you,” Troy said.

  Gene turned his head away from the pool players and looked directly at his brother. “Don’t worry about it and keep your goddamn mouth shut,” he whispered. “You hear about what happened to that lawyer the other day?”

  “Yeah, I did. Did you know her?”

  “She was the prosecutor that sent me away,” Gene continued still looking directly at Troy and speaking very quietly. “She got what she had coming.”

  “Did you do…”

  “Shut up, dummy. Don’t ask questions I ain’t gonna answer.”

  Chloe Winters got off the elevator on the sixth floor. She was in the same parking ramp in downtown St. Paul where she parked every day. She walked quickly toward her car on the almost empty floor, the only sound coming from the clicking her shoes made on the concrete surface. It was almost ten o’clock at night and she was tired, hungry and in a hurry to get home after another long day. Trial preparation could be exhausting.

  As she approached her two-year-old Camry, she was a little surprised to see a beat up Ford van parked next to it. The van wasn’t there when she had arrived in the morning. For a sparsely populated downtown parking ramp, it looked decidedly out of place.

  She hit the unlock button on her key fob to unlock the car. As she was opening the driver’s door, the side door of the van flew open and before she could move, he was on her.

  Instead of panicking, Chloe knew exactly what to do. Her assailant had her in a choke hold and was starting to squeeze when she hammered the heel of her right shoe down on the instep of his foot. She then reached back with her right hand and grabbed and squeezed his testicles as hard as she could.

  He let out a sharp, short scream and eased up on his choke hold. Chloe hammered the back of her head into his face and drilled him squarely on the nose. She pushed him back hard and slammed him into the van. He released her and she spun around to face him. With both hands, she gave him a hard shove just as his fist struck her on the side of her face.

  Chloe went down onto the concrete floor between the two vehicles. Her shove was enough to make her attacker fall backwards, trip and go down himself. After years of prison food and weight lifting, the man was small and wiry but also quick and strong. He was back on his feet and coming at her again in less than a second.

  When Chloe hit the ground she was still clutching her purse in her left hand. She quickly reached into it as the Hispanic looking monster stood up and started toward her. The first bullet hit him in the stomach, the second in the chest and the third squarely in the forehead. He flew backwards and his head made a sharp cracking noise as it hit the concrete floor and this time, he wasn’t getting up.

  Chloe’s oldest sister, Ann, had been brutally attacked and raped almost fifteen years ago. The man who did it had never been caught. This had happened when Chloe was a teenager living in Kansas City with her parents. From that moment on, Chloe became determined to never let anything like that happen to her. She worked so hard at self-defense that she eventually became an instructor for other women. When she moved to Minnesota for work one of the first things she did was obtain a conceal-carry permit for a handgun. She always made sure if she had to work late, her 9 mm automatic was in her purse. And as her assailant would testify to if he could, she was a very good shot.

  A few days later the St. Paul police told her the man she killed, by an amazing coincidence, was the man the Kansas City cops believed had raped her sister and was suspected of at least a dozen more. That night Chloe and Ann shed a lot of tears of joy on the phone and a dark cloud was dispersed from over their family.

  Angelo Suarez, the fourth client of Glenda Albright in her tampered DNA case, was not going to rape another woman ever again.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The morning after his meetings with Glenda Albright and Marc Kadella, Howie Traynor left St. Andrews at 10:00. One of Tony’s retired cop pals, Tommy Evans, was on duty and he followed Howie south on Central Avenue. On Twenty Second, Howie turned into the lot for the Northeast branch of the Hennepin County Library. Evans pulled over to the curb on Central and watched as Howie went into the library building.

  A half hour went by a
nd Howie had not come back out. Realizing this was an unusual event, Evans called Carvelli on his cell to report in. He quickly filled him in about why he called.

  “He’s at the library? What the hell could he be up to at the library?”

  “Maybe taking out books?” Evans wisecracked.

  “You see this guy as a big bookworm do you? Give him another half hour then slide in there and see what he’s up to,” Tony replied.

  “You got it,” Evans said.

  The first thing Howie did when he went inside the building was to go to the help desk and apply for a library card. The older woman behind the desk pleasantly helped him fill out the form and used Howie’s driver’s license to confirm his address. Ten minutes later he had a temporary card to use until the permanent one was mailed to him.

  He found an open computer and spent the next forty-five minutes online researching the trial of Aaron Forsberg. Never having met the man and knowing nothing about the case, Howie wanted to learn what happened to him. Halfway through the reporting he found it did jog his memory. Even though he was in prison at the time, Forsberg’s case had generated quite a bit of interest, at least locally. When he finished and knowing there was someone following him, he went over to the library’s fiction section.

  Howie spent three or four minutes roaming through the aisles more or less randomly selecting books. He found a few authors he had actually heard of and when he had gathered four books, he checked them out and left.

  Less than five minutes before he was going to go in looking for him, Evans saw Howie leave the building. He noticed Howie was carrying several books then watched him get in his car. Evans ducked down in his seat to let Howie go by after he exited the parking lot. Howie was headed north on Central, probably on his way back to the church. Evans watched him in his side mirror until Howie had gone a full block. After a few seconds, the traffic cleared and Evans did a U turn in the middle of the block. Barely five minutes later, Howie was back in the church’s parking lot. Tommy Evans parked his car and called Carvelli again to bring him up to date.