Collar Robber: A Crime Story Featuring Jay Davidovich and Cynthia Jakubek

by Hillary Bell Locke

  “So Zach versus Sean was no contest?”

  “Form held, as they say in the NCAA. I’m not putting you off with this frisky-fossil stuff, am I?”

  “Calling people your age ancient is for kids who still need fake IDs.”

  “Zach was pretty typical of what I call my B-S period—‘Before Sean.’”Abbey let an almost wistful smile slip across her face and disappear. “I don’t mean just sowing some wild oats. I mean giving Quakers and Ralston a run for their money.”

  “I hope the priest you get for your first confession isn’t fresh out of the seminary.” I smilingly imagined a fledgling cleric listening to Abbey describe her demolition of the sixth and ninth commandments. “His head might explode.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they’ve got some crusty old ex-military chaplain who’s heard it all with jam on top lined up for me. Anyway, enough foreplay. Down to business. Sean said that you and I should talk.”

  “Right. You up to speed on Tally Rand’s little stunt?”

  “Yep. Pure Tally. Anyone who says grass doesn’t impair judgment needs to tell me how someone with my brains got hooked by that weasel in the first place. He’d come back from his junior year abroad or whatever it was with some éclat that came across as pretty smooth out West, and he had a knack for standing up to cowboy wannabes who resented it. More muscular than he looks, and had a good right jab. Still, I should have smelled the shit even if it was in a silk stocking.”

  My ears pricked up at Pure Tally. Not my favorite lawyer for sure, but up to now I hadn’t stumbled over any hints about him bumping up against the criminal code.

  “You mean he’s pulled this kind of thing before?”

  “Depends on how broadly you cast the net. About ten years ago when I was going after an event-planning gig at the Museum, he hinted that my chances might improve if I gave him a tumble just for old time’s sake. After I got the gig—without sleeping with him, by the way—he suggested that I give the audio-visual subcontract to a company that I’d never heard of and that isn’t in business anymore. I smell kickback on that one. If he pulled that kind of small-time grift with me he must have tried it with others.”

  Interesting. Early on I’d pulled the Museum’s annual report from the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s online files. The Museum had paid Tally one hundred five thousand last year—down five percent from the year before because of across-the-board salary cuts. A nice piece of change for sure, but striplings only a few years out of law school were pulling down twice that much at firms like Calder & Bull—me, for example, before I abandoned Wall Street for solo practice in Pittsburgh.

  “If he’s a little bent,” I said, “that could actually help us with what Sean wants us to talk about.”

  “You mean the give-him-enough-rope thing?”

  I’m pretty good at poker faces but my eyebrows edged up a sixteenth of an inch at that one.

  “He’s already discussed it with you?”

  “I’ve practically convinced him it was my idea in the first place.” Big grin—Abbey is not good at poker faces. “The concept rocks, but I’ll need some help with the details. I have a middle name, and it ain’t finesse.”

  “Okay. Details.” I sat up straight, rested my forearms on my desk blotter, and folded my hands. “One, no private eye stuff. Surreptitious tape recordings, hidden cameras—forget about it.”

  “Nuts. I’d already started researching voice-activated digital recorders on the web.”

  “Two—and a lot more important—no hints. We can’t seduce Tally; he has to make the indecent proposal on his own initiative. He has to get the idea that you’re the back door to Sean. We hope that he’ll be less guarded with you than he has been with Sean so far—that he’ll say something more explicit about how if you get him into Sean’s next venture for free then you’re already halfway down the aisle.”

  “Right.” Abbey’s eyes flashed with enthusiasm that bordered on scary. “He does that, and then we ask him how much he enjoys practicing law.”

  “We’ll have to find an ethical way to frame that question. But that’s my department.”

  And when push came to shove on that one, the question for me wouldn’t be whether I’d do it but how. When I’d started at Calder & Bull, I’d decided that I’d give Wall Street four years, then make a go/stay decision. Around the end of year-three, a number of things said STAY. Most of them were money. True, I was working on cases with very high stakes but, when you get right down to it, reviewing documents on a computer screen and putting together witness files that people two or three years senior to me would use to prepare executives for depositions—well, that’s just as tedious if you have nine figures on the table as it is if you have five. I wasn’t helping clients, I was helping partners. I’d helped a client once when I was in the pre-C&B wilderness, and I missed it.

  Even so, I’m betting that, without Sean, I would have ended up staying past my four-year cut-off just out of inertia. Sean brought enough big-ticket stuff to the firm that they’d handle the plebian part of his business too, just to keep him happy. At least two layers of lawyers separated me from him, but I’d been allowed to meet him a couple of times, ostensibly because I’d grown up in Pittsburgh, where he lived. Mostly it was a way of patting me on the head and telling me what a good girl I was. We’d hit it off.

  Then C&B made the mistake bailing out of representation on an indie film that Sean was trying to get financed. The firm had bailed because a senior partner was afraid that an activist group would lower C&B’s favorability rating if it associated itself even obliquely with a film that the group wouldn’t like—and it for sure wouldn’t have liked this one.

  “Gutless.” That was what Sean called it when he took me to lunch afterward. He’d spoken the word in a cold, disgusted tone and with a sad shake of his head.

  “Not exactly a profile in courage,” I’d said tactfully (for me).

  “Let’s get down to the short strokes.” He’d actually blushed a little as he’d realized that the expression was a tad off-color. “How often do you think about blowing off the big-firm racket and opening up your own shop back in Pittsburgh?”

  “Three times a week.”

  “Have you run the numbers?”

  “In a half-assed kind of way.” I did not blush at that unladylike adjective. “I could sublet office space from a lawyer I worked with while I was on hold with C&B. I could live cheap in my dad’s house ’til I got on my feet. I have something like a hundred-thousand saved. That should be enough to buy a photocopier and a computer and see me through until I find out whether I can really build a practice or not.”

  “No.” He’d shaken his head firmly. “Don’t support your practice or yourself with your own savings. Put that money in a bank that will give you a line of credit for your practice. Always use other people’s money.”

  “Good advice.”

  “And don’t buy any office equipment. Lease. If something appreciates over time, buy it. If it depreciates, lease it.”

  “I’m convinced.”

  “Look, you’re smart as hell, and somewhere along the way you got slapped around a little by life—which is good. You’re not experienced enough for me to pay you to negotiate with regulators or restructure financings. But you’ve got guts. If you decide to make that jump, I can throw twenty thousand a year in business at you. Not scintillating stuff. Evictions, collections, enforcing noncompetes. But it’ll help pay the rent.”

  So now, here I was. In my thirteenth month of solo practice, doing it on nerve and bluff. And if you ignore the de facto rent subsidy from dad and my stepmom, actually breaking even. But Sean and Willy between them accounted for about a third of my billings, which is way too much for two clients. For the foreseeable future, Sean had to keep thinking that I had guts.

  My desk phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, so I ignored it. Abbey didn’t.

>   “That’s the number of the Vodaphone Sean uses as his mobile when he’s overseas.”

  Sure enough. In a couple of seconds I had him on speaker.

  “How’s the jet-lag, big guy?” Abbey asked.

  “Running on pure adrenaline, and praying that the eurocrats aren’t planning on one of their famous late-night suppers with schnapps in between courses of raw sausage. How are things going over there?”

  “I can’t say the cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river, but we’re getting there.” Abbey winked at me.

  “Really? What’s happened?”

  “Well, technically, nothing. Yet. But Cindy has just taken me through Entrapment for Dummies. When Tally calls I’ll be ready.”

  “If he calls.”

  “Oh, he’ll call, all right. Tally has never seen an angle he could resist playing.”

  “That reminds me,” Sean said. “Cindy, there’s something I have to tell you so you can yell at me.”

  “Namely?”

  “Willy Szulz and I ran into each other at the Monongahela Athletic Club yesterday morning. He mentioned that we had the same lawyer, and just like that I conformed to an ethnic stereotype. Ran off at the mouth. Told him more than I should have about our canon law matter.”

  “Well, consider yourself scolded. Willy gets about seven good ideas a day. Generally at least one of them is dangerous. The trick is figuring out which one it is. I’ll call him and say something about the virtues of discretion.”

  “I’m sure you’ll come across as your usual persuasive self. I’ll touch base tomorrow if I get a chance.”

  So, exit Sean and, a few minutes later, exit Abbey. Time to call Willy. It didn’t strike me as urgent or anything, but no sense putting it off, either.

  “Hey, Willy here,” his recorded voice said. “I’ll be away from the office for a few days, with limited access to voice-mail and email. Really wanna talk to you, though, so leave a number and I’ll get back to you fast as I can.”

  Limited access to voice-mail and email. Hmm. I got a little tingle from that one. Not a real belly-drop, just a hint of a shiver. Willy’s a big boy, but he gets a kick out of skating close to the line. He was now mixed up in two legal messes intersecting at C. Talbot Rand—and I wasn’t sure where the line was on either of them.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jay Davidovich

  Seven o’clock sharp in Vienna and I got out of bed. Hungry. Simple as that. Nine o’clock would find me even hungrier and with less time, so I figured I might as well bite the bullet. Cold water splash on the face, comb through my hair, good to go. On my way out of the room I dug up a web page that Rachel had printed for me about Frank’s American Bar & Restaurant in Vienna. What I was hungry for wouldn’t pass for schnitzel with noodles.

  I told a clerk at the front desk where I’d be in case Herr Nesselrode came calling before I returned. I didn’t see any way I’d be late getting back, but just in case. He nodded and smiled. After I gave him five euros of Transoxana’s money, he nodded again and smiled again and fetched a Valkyrie type who could speak English. Another five euros, a decisive nod from Her Aryan Highness, and I figured there’d be floggings all ’round if the staff managed to miss Nesselrode.

  Here’s my key travelogue take-away from downtown Vienna at night: bikes. Coming out of the hotel to look for a taxi, I saw gently weaving white lights coming toward me like midget cyclopses, moving too slowly and rhythmically for car headlights. And I saw small, flickering red and green lights that made me think of drunken fairies describing clumsy up-and-down ovals as they moved away from me. I had to stare at the scene like a moron for four or five seconds before I got it: bikes. The white lights were headlamps and the colored ones were leg-lights, wrapped around riders’ calves. Full dark for going on two hours now, and still way more bicycles than cars filling the street.

  The taxi took close to half-an-hour to get me to Frank’s American et cetera. Longer than I’d expected. I guess it takes time to dodge all those bikes. If I managed to get lost wandering around this strange city, getting back to the hotel by ten could turn into an adventure. So I over-tipped the cabbie and asked him to pop back here at a quarter of nine to pick me up. Wasn’t at all sure we’d communicated until he said, “Twenty-forty-five, Mac, got it,” and grinned.

  A little snag getting seated. Frank’s apparently didn’t specialize in parties of one. Finally got it done. Ordered my New York strip medium rare, my onion rings, my Miller Genuine Draft and, while I was dining, picked up snatches of tourist conversation. Mostly in American English, with an occasional Brit accent thrown in. A lot of sports chat, because the NCAA basketball tournament was still going on back home, but some local color stuff in the mix as well.

  “Right here. Almost five hundred years before 9/11. Stopped the last Islamic invasion of Europe right at the walls of Vienna. No wonder Bush and Obama didn’t impress them. When they discuss jihadists they know what they’re talking about.”

  Okay. Pretty sure I didn’t know that. Interesting.

  “You kidding? My bracket busted in the first round.”

  Yours and mine both, brother.

  “So Napoleon tells the general, he says, ‘Look, if you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna.’”

  Yeah, first time I heard that one it came from a second lieutenant.

  “Four most beautiful words in the English language: ‘Pitchers and catchers report.’”

  Ah, old school. Gotta love it.

  Anyway, I’m feeling just fine for a jet-lagged Yank wearing the only suit he owns. Steak not bad, MGD pretty good, onion rings long gone; okay on time. Then I picked up another conversational tidbit, from over my right shoulder.

  “I feel like the guy who invested all his money in brothels ’cause his broker said he should have a broad-based portfolio.”

  The voice rang a bell. Not just the voice but the genial smartass tone of the crack itself, the edgy little chip-on-the-shoulder subtext. Yeah, this is the way we talk in Jersey. So what?

  I don’t really do discreet very well, but I took a stab at it, glancing cautiously in the direction of the voice. I saw a waiter’s back and the outside frame of a booth. Before I could take my investigation further, a different voice ringing a different bell came from my left.

  “May I join you, Mr. Davidovich?”

  Nesselrode. Quick, nervous glance at my watch as I mumbled “Sure.” Just past 8:15. Hmmm.

  “I’m early.” Nesselrode slipped into a chair kitty-corner to mine on my left. “The trail-blazing went faster than I expected.”

  “So should we be making tracks?”

  “Finish your steak.” He glanced around and gestured discreetly toward a waiter. “Our friend will be engaged in the Gürtel area until around twenty-one-thirty. Sorry, nine-thirty. When things fell into place so quickly I got the brilliant idea of meeting him at the place where he’ll be engaged instead of at his flat forty-five minutes later.”

  “What’s the Gürtel area?”

  “A place you wouldn’t want your wife or your mother to know you’d visited.”

  A waiter appeared.

  “Hacker-Pschorr Weisse,” Nesselrode told him.

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, the waiter pivoted toward me.

  “Another draft, sir?”

  “No, thanks. It’d be like taking your girlfriend to a super models’ convention.”

  I’m not sure the waiter got it, but he bowed and strode away.

  “Did he actually click his heels?” I asked Nesselrode.

  “No, that’s just your imagination.”

  “So. Who’s our friend?”

  “I know him as Abba Ertel, but I’m betting his mother calls him something else. Sort of like Saul of Tarsus. When he was talking to Jews he was Saul. Put some goys in the audience and he suddenly morphed into Paul. Same
idea.”

  The waiter came up with a frothy stein and set it in front of Nesselrode. The beer looked much darker than my MGD. I’d run into a fair number of beer snobs in the Army. Lifers who’d served a tour in Germany and acted ever since like they could barely choke down Miller or Bud and would puke if they accidentally swallowed some Coors. Nesselrode went to work on the beer and made what looked like a quarter of the stein disappear on the first gulp. I saw a chance to squeeze in a question.

  “And Mr. Ertel has a line on the genuine painting?”

  When Nesselrode put the stein back down as he got ready to answer my question I blinked. I thought I saw a watch with the hands at twelve on his wrist. Then I realized it wasn’t a watch. It was a tattoo—a tattoo of a watch showing midnight. In the center of the black face, right where “Movado” would have appeared on a real watch, I read “Masada.” Whoa. Masada. The Judean fortress where nearly a thousand Jews died rather than surrender to the Romans. They didn’t die to the last man. They died to the last man, woman, and child. Hoo-boy. Might be more going on with Dany Nesselrode than I’d imagined so far.

  “Mr. Ertel has an interesting story. Seems Gustav Wehring had a copy of Eros Rising painted when he realized he’d have to sell it to keep the Nazis from grabbing it. Wehring then hid the original and sold the copy as cover. Ertel has some papers that he says back this up.”

  “But not the real painting itself?”

  “He claims he knows where it is and can get access to it.”

  I leaned back in my chair and stretched my legs out under the table. I was really feeling the steak—a good feeling—and I’d still be tasting the onion rings when I went to bed.

  “So our job tonight is to find out whether Ertel’s story is true.”

  “Not exactly,” Nesselrode said. “Our job tonight is to figure out whether it’s a hundred percent bullshit or only eighty percent. Because if it’s only eighty percent, we might actually have a commercial proposition on our hands.”