Anne’s father took me by surprise. Parents had never been my strong suit—especially not fathers—and I’d figured to do even worse with a county sheriff. But I was wrong. Donald Stennis was smart and well read, with a sneaky chess game, a dry, laconic wit, and an unsentimental but generous—and surprisingly liberal—view of life. The Adirondack Atticus Finch, Anne called him. More surprising still was Donald’s trust in his only child, and his respect for her judgment. He made me welcome.
I lived in the apartment over the garage, cooking breakfast for Anne and Donald in the mornings, cleaning up when they’d gone to work, running and reading in the afternoons, playing chess with Donald in the evenings, and making love with Anne as quietly as we could after he’d turned in. It wasn’t a bad time—it was nice—but after two months, I needed to do something with myself. I was bored, adrift, and getting antsy. Then Donald took me for a ride.
He called it the sheriff’s tour of Burr County. We rode in his battered, unmarked Crown Victoria, across the length and breadth of his jurisdiction, down county roads and Main Streets and no-name washboard trails, through towns and hamlets and places that were little more than packed earth and rusted trailers. The air conditioning was broken, and we rolled down the windows. The car filled with the smell of pines and dirt, and with heavy midsummer heat. The whole time we drove, Donald talked.
His knowledge of the county, and the people in it, was vast. He knew where they lived and where they worked, where they went to church and where they went to drink, and if they drank too much, he knew that too. He knew who had married and who had divorced, who was cheating and who’d got caught, who’d beat his wife and whose wife was never coming home again. He knew the running buddies, and the ties of blood or marriage or schoolyards or jail yards that bound them together. He knew who’d gone to prison and who’d just gotten out, who’d gotten laid off and who’d come into sudden cash, who’d left town, and who would inevitably be back. He spoke of them with something close to affection.
It was a cop’s-eye view—of greed, grievance, and rancor, of poverty, boozing, and rage, of just plain mean and just plain stupid—and how they came together and boiled over into crime and violence. It was a hard view, and often sad, he told me, but it had its humor, and, once in a while, a glimpse of redemption. It had fascinated Donald for nearly thirty years. He drove and talked for seven hours, and we were covered in sweat and dust when we pulled back into his driveway. It was there he’d made his simple pitch.
“Sometimes, you can’t do much, and sometimes you can’t do a damn thing at all. But now and then, you can make all the difference in the world. It’s not for everybody, though. You can get used up—get sick from what you see, or angry, or sad about how little you can do. You can get tired, or mean, or, worse still, bored. It’s not for everybody.
“All my guys are good guys; I get rid of the ones that aren’t. But I haven’t had a deputy with a college diploma for going on two years now. You’re smart, you’re curious, you’re not a bully, and you don’t scare easy. And I’ve got a uniform that’s about your size. Give it a try. What the hell, if it’s not for you, you got cooking to fall back on.”
But it was for me.
Why is a tougher question. Some of my reasons were not so different from Donald’s—a fascination with the whole strange pageant; a desire to help, to make a difference. I liked the chase, too, and the puzzles—the who and the how and the why, especially the why. But I also liked knowing, at the end of each day, what I’d been able to do and what I hadn’t— and knowing it more certainly, more tangibly, than a P&L report could ever tell.
After Anne died, I quit this work, and a lot else besides. But after a while, I came back to it—for all those reasons, I guess, and for fear of that empty time when I’d stopped.
Jane had looked steadily back at me, silent amid the ER’s buzz and hustle. I’d looked at her, and thought about the answers, and told her all of it.
It was after three when I made a last circuit of the East Meadow and the Conservatory Garden. Then I gave up on Faith Herman for the day and took a taxi home. The windows in my building were dark. It was quiet inside and empty feeling, and my apartment was filled with a cold, gray twilight. There were no messages. I sat at the kitchen counter, in my coat, in the gathering dusk.
I was tired and sore. My feeling of unassailable solitude had faded in the bleak, fading light, replaced by worries about Monday and the sense that the whole case had spun away from me. Maybe Shelly DiPaolo would take care of all that. Maybe after tomorrow there’d be no case. I shed my coat and flicked on some lights. I put a pot of coffee on and made myself a tuna sandwich. I called Mike Metz. No one was home, so I left him a message about coming up empty in Brooklyn and in the park. Then I pulled a volume of Andre Dubus stories from the shelf and read until the words stopped making sense.
Chapter Twenty
Sometime in the night a wind started to blow, clouds moved in, and a cold, slanting rain began to fall. It was falling hard by morning, overwhelming windshield wipers, coursing down gutters and over curbs, and washing the streets in reflected neon. It was falling harder still at nine o’clock, when Mike Metz, Tom Neary, and I walked into the sixthfloor conference room at One St. Andrews Plaza, the offices of the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York. It was raw and miserable outside, but it was nothing compared to the weather in there.
The conference room was narrow and stark. There was a long window on one wall, covered with metal Venetian blinds. The center set was pulled up, giving a shadowy view onto the backside of One Police Plaza. Rain beat at the glass, and everything outside was the color of wet pavement. The other walls were dingy white, adorned only by framed color photos of the president and the attorney general. The metal and plastic conference table was surrounded by a dozen swivel chairs, covered in worn, brown tweed. They clashed violently with the powder blue carpet. Fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed overhead.
Three men sat facing the window. One of them was Fred Pell. The other two were strangers to me. They were laughing loudly when the receptionist opened the door, but went dead quiet when she ushered us in. We took seats opposite them, Mike in the center. All three of us were suited up today—in navy blue with white shirts and dark ties. We could’ve been IBM salesmen. Or feds.
Pell sat closest to the door. He was dressed in a double-breasted blue pinstripe, and his skin looked gray under the fluorescent light. Next to him was an empty chair, and on the other side of that was a big, doughy guy in shirtsleeves and a red bow tie. He was in his mid-thirties and had thinning blond hair, cut short, pink cheeks, and twinkling blue eyes. Next to him was a smaller, wiry guy, also in his thirties, with unruly black hair and dark, quick eyes set in a bony face. He was in shirtsleeves too, but his were blue and his tie wasn’t bowed. In front of each of them were a yellow legal pad, a pen, and a cup of coffee. Pell had a small tape recorder, too. No one stood; no one shook hands. They gave us silence and cold, hard looks, and even Mr. Bow Tie did it pretty well.
Neary gave them back the dead-fish look—deader than any of them. I tried for boredom, and studied the president and the AG closely. Mike gave them a relaxed cordiality, introducing himself, handing out business cards, greeting Pell like this was a garden party and Mike was Martha Stewart.
“Special Agent Pell, it’s been a long time since I saw you upstate. Three years ago or so, wasn’t it? You’re looking very well.” Pell said nothing and tried to glare more. It made him look like he had gas. The other two identified themselves tersely. Mr. Bow Tie was Paul Conaway, and the wiry guy was Scott Katz, both assistant U.S. attorneys, working for Shelly DiPaolo. There were still no handshakes. Conaway told us that Shelly would be in momentarily. And then it was silent again.
I listened to the thin buzz of the lights and the muted sound of rain and wind outside. My hands felt cold, and my stomach was churning. It was nerves, the same kind of nerves I used to get at depositions or when I had to testify in court. I glanced
at Mike. He had his game face on and looked a million miles away. Neary was looking more and more like a slab of granite. Then the door opened.
When I think “assistant U.S. attorney,” I don’t usually think “sexpot,” so Shelly DiPaolo took me by surprise. She was short, no more than five foot one, though her frosted blond hair added three more inches, and her black, spike-heeled pumps another four. Her small, curvy body was packed tight into a steel gray suit with a short skirt. Under her jacket she wore a scoop-necked silk blouse in cherry red, the same color as her nail polish and her lipstick.
Her red lips were full—bee-stung—and her chin was sharp, with a little dimple in it. She had high cheeks, a small, sharp nose, and big, brown eyes, made bigger still by a lot of well-applied makeup. She wore heavy gold earrings, several gold chains around her neck, and a thin gold chain around her ankle. There was lots of jewelry on her hands and wrists, too, but no wedding ring. Her perfume was powerful and expensive. I put her age at around forty, but I had to look close to do it.
“Debby, get me a coffee, will you?” she called into the hall. Her accent was heavy Brooklyn. She turned into the conference room, ignoring us. “You guys need a refill?” she asked her people. They shook their heads. She glanced at us and called into the hall again. “Just the one, Deb, black with sugar. Thanks, hon.” She shut the door and took the vacant seat next to Pell. Conaway whispered to her briefly, and she looked at us as she listened, then she nodded almost imperceptibly. Conaway spoke.
“We’re pretty busy around here, gentlemen, as you might imagine. So we want to make this short. It has come to the attention of this office that you are making private inquiries”—he had a faint Boston accent, and he made “private inquiries” sound like “practicing necrophilia”— “into matters directly related to an active federal investigation. We are naturally quite concerned about this. It can’t have escaped you that this office has a keen interest in Gerard Nassouli, and we take a dim view of anyone interfering with our witnesses, or potential witnesses. We’ve called you in today for two reasons: first, to ascertain your interest in this case, and second, to instruct you to cease your inquiries immediately.” I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to answer him or applaud his diction, but before we could do either, DiPaolo spoke.
“Let me offer you guys a little advice—no charge.” She drummed her red nails on the tabletop. Her hands were small but strong looking. “What you just heard is as nice as we get here. You answer our questions, we stay nice. You don’t,” she shrugged, “we try something different.
“I’ve found out enough about you guys to know that that probably doesn’t sit too well.” She turned to Neary. “Tom, I’ve known you for a while, and I know how you get when you think you’re right—how stubborn you can be.” Pell snorted, and DiPaolo shot him a silencing look. She turned to Mike. “Counselor, you I don’t know, but I asked around and learned a few things. Heard you were very smart, very . . . inventive, and that you hate to lose. Okay—you and me both.” Then she turned to me. “And you, what can I say? You got great press, buddy. Depending on who I talk to, I hear that you’re either a smart guy, a little arrogant maybe, but good at your work, or that you’re some kind of fucked-up rich kid, couldn’t cut it in the family biz, and now you’re playing at detective, or that you’re a cowboy, a showboat, and a screwup who should be doing time for murder-two.” She shook her head.
“The point is, I understand that each of you, in your own special way, is a real hard-on. Victims of that old testosterone poisoning. Shit, I know how it is, boys. I know how it screws up your little brains. I’ve worked with guys like you so long, I sometimes think I picked up a case of it myself. But you got to get over it—here and now. Take a minute before you answer. Think it over.”
We were all quiet for a while. Debby came in with coffee. DiPaolo blew on it and sipped some and looked at us. Mike spoke.
“We understand your concern, and we want to help you as much as we can. It’s certainly not our wish or intent to have anything to do with an active investigation.” Mike spoke softly and evenly. Except for DiPaolo, everyone on the other side of the table started taking notes. Katz looked at DiPaolo, and she nodded to him slightly.
“Yeah, that’s nice. Why don’t you start by telling us why you’re asking around about Gerard Nassouli.” Katz’s accent was also heavy Brooklyn.
“Sure,” Mike said. “Mr. March is conducting an investigation for me, as part of work that I’m performing for a client. In the course of this investigation we’ve come across what we believe may be a blackmail scheme, carried out by a person or persons, unknown. We think the scheme targets individuals who may have done business with Gerard Nassouli some time ago—fifteen years ago or longer—and that the perpetrators make use of documents that Nassouli would have had access to. Hence our interest in Nassouli.”
The three federal prosecutors had pretty good poker faces, but Pell put it all out there. Surprise, puzzlement, and anger played across his fat face.
“You’re making the right cooperative noises, counselor,” Katz said, “but you’re not actually telling us much. Let’s get specific here, starting with the name of your client.”
Mike smiled a genial, faraway smile. He looked at Katz and DiPaolo. “My client is very concerned with confidentiality. I’m sure you understand.”
But Shelly DiPaolo did not look understanding. Her dark eyes got hard and narrow, and her full lips drew back over small, white teeth.
“Fine, counselor,” she said, “you made your choice. You want to play it this way, that’s okay.” She turned to me. “You, you want to tell me who you’re working for and who you’ve been talking to?”
I looked at Mike. He nodded. “I’m working for Mr. Metz, and I’ve been informed by him that everything I’ve done or discovered in the course of my investigation is considered attorney work-product, and is to be held in the strictest confidence.”
Katz responded. “Did Mr. Metz tell you that the legal ground under that assertion is pretty fucking thin when it comes to keyhole peepers like you? That it might just open up under your feet and swallow you whole? How’d you like to add contempt or obstruction charges to your résumé?”
I looked at the president’s photo. He had a nice tie on, and it went well with his suit. Mike answered for me. “I don’t think the legal ground is all that shaky, Mr. Katz.”
Katz looked pale, and his thin mouth was set in a hard frown. “Fine, we can roll the dice and see how a judge feels about it,” Katz said, then he looked at me. “But you should know, March, it’s your ass he’s gambling with. Attorney-client confidentiality protects him just fine. You’re the one that’ll take the fall on this. Think about it.”
“And perhaps Mr. Metz hasn’t mentioned,” Conaway chimed in, “that a client’s name is not itself protected information under attorney work-product confidentiality. Indeed, counselor,” he turned to Metz, “it’s not covered under broader attorney-client protections, either.”
Mike looked at DiPaolo without expression. DiPaolo turned to Neary. “Speaking of gambling . . . how’re you doing in all this, Tom? As far as I can see, you’ve got no protection against anything. You know who this client is?”
“Nope,” Neary said.
DiPaolo looked at him more and shook her head. “How about the blackmail victims—know any of them?”
“Nope.”
“So what’d they want from you?”
“A look-see at procedures and systems—how documents get handled, how the liquidation teams work, a tour of the offices. We’ve done it before, for other Brill offices, outside investigators, even some government types—the standard busman’s-holiday tour.”
DiPaolo turned back to Mike. “What’s your interest in that stuff?”
Mike smiled again. “Our working hypothesis is that the blackmailers are using documents that Nassouli would’ve had access to. But we believe it’s possible that others may have had access to those documents. Someone on the liquidati
on team, for example, or someone in the investigation.”
The prosecutors were stony faced, but Pell was looking apoplectic. He was sputtering, and his face was getting maroon, and he couldn’t contain himself.
“What kind of crap . . .” DiPaolo gave him another icy look, and he shut up. She was quiet for a while.
“That’s one hell of a theory, pal. Really great. It could call our whole chain of evidence into question. A fucking exculpatory wet dream for defense counsel. Maybe somebody thinks up a damages suit, too, and who knows what else. It’s the kind of inflammatory, irresponsible crap that can trash an investigation. Do wonders for Brill’s reputation, too.” She looked at Tom. “That why you gave them the tour?” she asked him.
“Yep,” he said.
“Find anything?”
Tom paused. “My understanding is they’re looking for things from Nassouli’s personal files. As far as I know, we’ve never had any of that stuff,” he said. I thought a look of relief flitted over DiPaolo’s face, but it was gone before I could be sure. If she was relieved, Mike quickly rained on her parade.
“We’ve discussed the possibility that someone on the liquidation team or in the investigation might have kept those documents out of the system altogether,” he said.
“And your theory is based on . . . what?” she asked him.
Mike looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, but—”
Shelly cut him off. “Cut the crap, counselor. You’re screwing with my witnesses, spouting this irresponsible shit that can fuck my investigation big time, then you and Bruce Wayne here,” she gestured at me, “you hide behind attorney-client protections. Except you won’t name your fucking client! You can’t be this stupid, Metz. You must know the shit storm that’s going to come down on you.”
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