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

by Hillary Bell Locke

  While reviewing the complaint I left a voice-mail for Sean, telling him that I thought we had the annulment thing nailed and wondering when he and Abbey could stop by to discuss it. I knew I’d be talking to them before lunch.

  Then came an answered prayer. Jerry Lysander, a senior assistant DA who actually knew writs from Shinola, called. He had drawn Tally’s case. Sorry about the short notice, but could I possibly skip lunch and pop by over the noon hour? That would be yes.

  “Good. The Taser confetti shows it was the same as the one used in the attempted Museum heist. Rand’s prints are on the Taser and yours aren’t. So he’s basically screwed and you’re officially on the side of the angels.”

  That sounded sweeter than a choir of Franciscan nuns singing Evensong.

  “I’m glad to hear that. Do you need a complete rundown—?”

  “Yeah, eventually, but I’d rather get that in writing, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “I’ll get it to you by close of business tomorrow.”

  “Should be plenty of time. Rand has flown the coop, of course. We couldn’t find a computer in his house or office, and it looks like he used a lot of paper files for a bonfire, so he’s guilty as hell of something. It’s just a question of tracking him down. He’s an amateur, so it shouldn’t take long, even with the head start the lazy fuck downstairs gave him.”

  “So what do you need from me at noon?”

  “I want you to think about how you’d defend this thing if you were his lawyer. No one has defrauded either the Museum or Transoxana yet. The annulment thing ain’t exactly a textbook crime: ‘Pay me or I won’t disclose truthful information that would help you.’ Not sure that one fits the matrix.”

  “Well, there’s Willy.”

  “Yeah, haven’t talked to him yet. Still in critical condition.”

  “So aside from the Taser, that leaves slapping me around and trying to take me someplace against my will.”

  “Right.” Lysander sighed. “It leaves that. Think about how you might defend him.”

  Translation: Tally is going to claim, what? Oh that I tried to extort money from him with some crazy-chick/bent-lawyer story about art fraud and Catholic divorce or something. When he blew me off I pulled out the Taser, which I’d been handling with gloves or a handkerchief or something, but I dropped it and he picked it up to keep me from threatening him with it. Then my low-rent client with a police record helped me break Tally’s wrist and he had to run for his life. What about the wild chase? Let’s see. Got it! What chase? No one saw it, did they? Tally and I were walking through the church, earnestly discussing my shakedown effort, and then just after I got outside I pulled the Taser on him.

  What Lysander wanted to know was whether I was ready to handle that. Sit up on the stand and tell my story, knowing that some prince (or princess) of the Pittsburgh criminal defense bar was going to try to make me look like every crooked shyster in popular culture, starting with Saul from Breaking Bad.

  Hmm. Interesting question. Answer not clear. There’s brave—and then there’s stupid. Plenty to think about between now and lunch.

  After four-tenths of a billable hour of sustained work, Sean called. Could they come up at eleven? Clock check: nine-oh-two. Yes they could, subject to a ten percent chance of a conference call still being in progress at that point. I keyed the appointment into my computerized schedule. Damn! Suddenly my calendar was filling up, almost as if I were a successful lawyer with quality clients demanding my attention.

  I joined Shear’s inside counsel on the conference call at nine fifty-eight. Shear’s current outside counsel didn’t sign on until ten-oh-three, so inside counsel and I got to exchange small talk for five minutes. Part of the exchange made me very happy.

  “What’s your standard retainer?”

  “I don’t require a retainer for a quality client like Shear Genius.” I could tell he liked the sound of that.

  Outside counsel joined at that point. I recognized the condescending voice of the chap I’d met outside muni court after picking up Washington’s case. Not so condescending now. For roughly thirty-five minutes we had a little back-and-forth. The term “embedded jurisdiction doctrine” came up as a way of forcing the case into federal court. I got the impression that current outside counsel didn’t have an intimate relationship with that arcane notion. The last thing inside counsel said before we ended the call was that he wanted me on the case as co-counsel—not second chair, co-counsel.

  Damn! I might have to hire a law clerk.

  Sean and Abbey showed up promptly at eleven. I gave them the good news. The letter alone might not be enough, but the letter told us there had to be other documentation: a baptismal certificate, a confirmation record, first communion, application to the seminary. And some of those records would be old-fashioned paper filled out in Palmer Method longhand, still gathering dust in pre-digital age folders in an antique filing cabinet somewhere. Just a question of time, now. And money.

  “We have plenty of that. I’d rather spend five hundred thousand on archival research than give that low-life a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of the Woodshed Project.”

  “How’s that going, by the way?” I asked.

  “I came up with a hook.” Abbey blushed with unwonted modesty. “A gotcha. Something to grab initial interest, so that the food can sell itself from then on.”

  My desk-phone burred into this jollity. The caller ID box showed ALLEGHENY CTY DA. Lysander.

  “Excuse me. Sorry.” I picked up.

  “Never mind our noon meeting. We just found Rand hanging from the top arm of an abstract sculpture by someone named Yaacov Agam. Time of death between one and four this morning.”

  “Can you excuse me for just a minute, Jerry?”

  “Sure.”

  Cupping my right hand tightly over the phone’s mouthpiece, I glanced up at Sean and Abby.

  “Never mind searching for Tally’s baptismal certificate. Sacramental or not, the marital bond doesn’t survive death. The only document we’ll need now is a death certificate.”

  “So he’s burning in Hell,” Sean said with what I thought was unbecoming satisfaction.

  “Let’s not be judgmental, dear,” Abby scolded him. “Perhaps he’s burning in Purgatory.”

  I uncovered the mouthpiece.

  “Murder or suicide?”

  “Not sure yet,” Lysander said.

  “Describe the knot.”

  “Nothing special, judging from this screenful of digital shots. I’d call it lumpy but serviceable, like a beginning Boy Scout might tie before they teach him the square knot.”

  “Murder,” I said.

  The Fourth Tuesday in April

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Jay Davidovich

  “Abort. Terminate the project.” A rare redundancy from Proxy, so she must be either excited or pissed off.

  “Fine by me, but why?”

  “Don’t you read the local papers?”

  “Only if the headline has ‘Israel’ or ‘nude’ in it. Plus, I’m not even in Pittsburgh yet. Rachel and I just got to La Guardia, complaining to each other about having to take separate planes to different places. What’s up?”

  “The Eros Rising exchange thing just went blooey. Officially toxic. Rand either killed himself or was murdered, and the first round of back-story facts pretty much take him out of the running for patron saint of lawyers. The Museum has its hands full of damage-control. That painting will stay where it is.”

  “Ergo no chance to sell exchange insurance, so why should we care about bad guys skulking in elevator shafts and hacking into computers?”

  “Bingo.”

  “I haven’t felt this elated since the last time I did something that’s none of your business. Great news, Proxy. After I get to wherever I end up going next I’ll circle back to you on the semina
ry hacking thing.”

  “Not clear yet, but it looks like that may have gone away too.”

  “Better and better. Let’s talk this afternoon.”

  Since Sunday afternoon Quindel and I had been trading phony emails about my supposedly seeing von Leuthen in Pittsburgh on Tuesday—today. We did this on the assumption that Halkani was reading our mail. What Proxy termed “the project” called for me to come to Pittsburgh today and drive around for four hours. Two other Transoxana loss-prevention guys would follow in a chase car about a hundred feet behind and equipped with one of those tracking things. I’d stop at various plausible meeting places and move on after, say twenty minutes. Sooner or later, in theory, we’d smoke Halkani out. If we could grab him and then persuade the local guys in white hats to cuff him and charge him and hold him without bail—four gigantic “ifs”—then we could dramatically cut the premium for the exchange insurance we wanted to sell the Museum.

  Yeah, I didn’t think much of it either. Quindel, though, is your basic bottom-line guy, and a million bucks is a million bucks. Now it was zero bucks any way you slice it, so ‘abort’—YESSS!

  My elation carried me through the tedium of changing tickets and the purgatory of the security and boarding processes. Still floating on it during the flight down to Reagan National, and feeling the same vibe from Rachel. The glow lasted until we were about three fourths of the way through our drive home. That’s when my mobile phone rang. I answered it, halfway expecting Proxy. It wasn’t.

  “Mr. Davidovich, this is Sue Ann from the Blenheim Security call center in Hendersonville, Tennesse. We have an alarm report from sector six of your home.”

  Funny thing, that didn’t bother me too much. Probably a false alarm, right? Still…

  “Sector six is the sliding door from the deck to the sun room, right?”

  “That’s correct, sir. Do you want us to notify the police?”

  The sliding door is a wobbly thing, so a really strong wind could have moved it enough to trigger the alarm. But better safe than sorry.

  “Yeah, you better go ahead and call them.”

  “Very good, sir. Calling D.C. Metropolitan Police.”

  “No! Not D.C. Metro! Alexandria! Alexandria, Virginia!” I smacked the dashboard in frustration. D.C. Metro would answer a call in Cleveland, Ohio before it got around to Alexandria.

  “Yes, sir. Checking the listing. Your home is listed as ‘D.C. area.’”

  “There must be seventy-five police departments in the ‘D.C. area’! Baltimore is in the ‘D.C. area’, for crying out loud! Just—” (For the record, my voice sounded like exclamation points because of exasperation, not panic.)

  “Yes, sir, calling Alexandria Police Department…Sir, confirmed that APD is dispatching to your address.”

  “Thank you. Let’s hope they get there before the burglar gets away with the kitchen sink.”

  “Actually, sir, I think police are already on scene.”

  “Now I’m worried, because that’s way too fast.”

  “No, I mean before. We called your home number first. A man answered. He said he wasn’t the homeowner but a police officer who’d been called to the scene by a neighbor who heard the alarm.”

  “Thanks.”

  I ended the call and got ready to smack the dashboard again. Rachel laid a soothing left palm on my right bicep.

  “Take a deep breath before you say something that you’ll have to put four hundred dollars in the swear jar for.”

  “Since when have we had a swear jar?”

  “We don’t technically have one yet, but we’ll have to start one as soon as our baby comes.”

  “I guess that’s right.” Brave little pinpricks of sunshine pierced the storm clouds lowering in my head. “But we’re changing security systems first thing next month.”

  The cops beat us to our home, but not by much. Two of them. They’d made their way in through the sliding door the burglar had jimmied but they hadn’t gotten through to Blenheim Security to turn the alarm off yet, so I turned it off myself. When I told the older one about the burglar posing as a police officer already in the house, he nodded with world-weary resignation. I nodded right along with him. I mean, how can that trick possibly work?

  “I’m surprised he bothered,” the cop said, turning his r’s into uh’s, Southern style. “Looks like it was just a quick hit. You hear the alarm, you figure you’ve got five to ten minutes, so you grab the first couple of things you see and beat it. Looks like he made you for a couple of items that used to be plugged in under your TV. Didn’t even bother with your desktop computer, sitting out there in plain sight in your kitchen.”

  Belly-drop. I mean big-time. ‘Cheap-ass electronics to make it look good.’ ‘Didn’t even bother with your computer.’ Suddenly I remembered the look in Halkani’s eyes when he’d said, “Fuck with me and I’ll kill you.” Eight-to-one that Halkani saw the sudden cratering of the Eros Rising exchange project as me fucking with him.

  Foreboding shadowing every step, I sidled to the elegantly compact work table in the dining room where Rachel keeps the desk-top computer that she uses only for her legal work. Still there, but that didn’t surprise me. I opened the right-hand drawer. I saw what looked like half a pack of computer paper, and two replacement ink-jet cartridges, but I didn’t see the thing I desperately wanted to see: the notebook where she writes down every blessed code and password we have. She knows she shouldn’t do it. I know she shouldn’t do it. Hell, everyone knows you shouldn’t do it. But I’ll bet that almost everyone except Proxy does do it.

  I palmed the cops off on Rachel as soon as I decently could and speed-dialed Proxy’s number. I had a problem. As I counted the rings I started tabulating the arguments I could use to convince Quindel that my problem was Transoxana’s problem. By the time Proxy answered, I was up to none. So I tried something else.

  “Shifcos. What’s up?”

  “Listen, Proxy, even with the exchange program off the table, the heirs’ claim that the Museum doesn’t legitimately own the painting is still in play, right?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “So that’s not just a million-dollar opportunity cost, it’s a fifty million-dollar out-of-pocket risk for us, right?”

  “Where are you going with this, Davidovich?”

  “Quindel was ready to absorb eight hundred bucks a day times three for loss-prevention personnel, plus the cost of two rental cars and three plane tickets. Suppose I email Quindel that I’ve completed the von Leuthen contact and we can pick up the asset at such-and-such a place this weekend. Quindel will know the email is a fake, but maybe Halkani won’t.”

  “Are you just making this up?”

  “Not completely. Unless I miss my guess, Halkani has gone to a lot of trouble to re-establish the computer tap that Transoxana tech support probably spent most of the morning negating.”

  “‘Asset’ being the real painting?”

  “Yes—or so Halkani will think.”

  “So he shows up at the such-and-such a place, ends up under arrest, and our fifty million-dollar risk looks a lot safer.”

  “You’ve convinced me, Proxy.”

  Silence. That meant Proxy was actually thinking this idea over. When she finally spoke, I heard skepticism in her voice.

  “Huge cost-factor here, Davidovich. By picking a place, we make it a target. So we can’t just go for, say, the Hays-Adams hotel in D.C. Has to be isolated so innocent bystanders don’t get clipped in the cross-fire if the plan works. It’ll have to have a top-of-the-line security system. And it will have to pass the smell test.”

  “How about the model home outside Vegas?”

  Transoxana Insurance Company is the largest single residential property owner in the State of Nevada. Not by choice. Back in the go-go days before the bubble burst we had invested lots and lots and lots of money with de
velopers building new single-family homes in larger and larger semi-circles outside Las Vegas. Then came the crash. The contractors went broke, the developers went broke, the developers’ banks went broke, the banks’ banks went into receivership, and Transoxana Insurance Company suddenly had hundreds of empty, mostly finished houses on its hands.

  We’d love to sell them wholesale to a speculator, but if you can find a non-mob speculator in Vegas who still has two nickels to rub together, you’re better at it than the two guys and one gal we have on the job. So we’re trying to sell the damn things one at a time. We rigged up one as a model home, with running water and functioning electricity and boomer-bait furniture. Ever since, we’ve been waiting for lightning to strike.

  “That could actually work,” Proxy said. “Do you think Quindel will bite?”

  “Selling this to him will be so easy I’ll be ashamed of myself after I do it.”

  I figured Proxy had only one possible answer for that one. I was right.

  “Go for it.”

  The Fourth Friday in April

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Jay Davidovich

  Paperwork.

  One Declaration of Unloaded Firearm(s) in Checked Luggage, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Form ATF-06-1978, disclosing inclusion in baggage to be loaded aboard Delta Flight 0870 from Reagan National to Las Vegas, Nevada, of one unloaded and dismantled Remington Model 870 12-gauge shotgun for use by passenger at destination.

  One authorization for guest admission to Crosby Trap and Skeet Shooting Range in Pender, Nevada, for the one-week period beginning the next day, together with a receipt for the three hundred-fifty dollars Transoxana had paid for the thing.

  One Transoxana Corporate authorization for occupancy by J. M. Davidovich of the Model Home in Lot 23 of Plat 8 in the Kroft Development outside Las Vegas for the same one-week period, plus tonight.

  I had exchanged all of this documentation by email, ostensibly with Quindel, to give Halkani a chance to read it. In other words, we’d created a paper trail so wide a blind man could follow it. We might as well have posted billboards up and down the East Coast: COME ON, PUNK: HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT.