by Reason of Sanity

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by Reason of Sanity Page 18

by Gene Grossman


  “Sorry to disappoint you Lieutenant, but we’ve already got this one. Those prints were lifted off of a dead guy.”

  “You mean there’s no one to go out and arrest?”

  “Not today Lieutenant, but stay tuned… we’re still working on the case.”

  If the victim wasn’t Mike Drago, then who the hell was he? That last name isn’t a really common one, so they’re no doubt related. If I have to make an educated guess, I’d say that Vlad is Mike’s brother. I tell Jack B. to check the immigration records to get their family’s history in this country. There are very few reasons to assume someone else’s identity, and if you aren’t doing it to get some new credit cards on someone else’s dime, then you really must be up to no good.

  I check out Interpol’s website and learn that they’re the largest international police organization in the world, set up in 1923 to facilitate cross-border criminal police cooperation. They now have 181 member countries spread over five continents. They support and assist all organizations, authorities and services whose mission is to prevent or combat international crime, and now that I’m an official Crimefighter, I suppose that Interpol will help me out on future investigations.

  Jack B. is a pretty smart guy. He contacted Special Agent Snell at the FBI. Snell knows we’re probably working on getting more members of the gang and wants to get on television again. Jack convinced him that it would be in everyone’s best interest if the feds would check with immigration. It would be much easier for them to do it than someone outside the government.

  Bin go. The immigration check comes back with some information for us. Vlad and Mike were just two of five Drago brothers who were brought to the U.S. when they were children, because their parents wanted to get out of Serbia. Vlad had a string of brushes with the law, but his brother had a clean record with only one minor problem He was killed by a stray bullet during some gang shoot-out that no doubt involved his big brother Vlad.

  Vlad probably figured that assuming Mike’s identity would give him a clean slate, so that if he got arrested again no priors would show up on his record. I guess he forgot about fingerprints, but there aren’t many career criminals who are members of MENSA, so it’s understandable he’d make one or two mistakes along the way.

  Now that we know who he is, I think my hunch about the heavy thing in his coat is probably right on the money. Drago was carrying a gun when he slipped and fell in the bank. I have another phone call to make.

  “Victor, it’s Peter Sharp. I have a question to ask you about Drago and those ribs he broke when he fell in the bank.”

  “Ask away Mister Sharp, I’ve seen the video footage of his fall, and I’ve got some questions of my own about those broken ribs.”

  “Okay Victor, here goes. Is it possible that his ribs were broken by something big and hard that was inside his suit coat?”

  “That’s what I was thinking, but the police didn’t find anything. I still say that broken ribs like that shouldn’t have happened. I saw his fall on videotape and it looked like he landed on his ass. Our autopsy confirmed a bruised coccyx, so there must have been something else that put pressure on the ribs when he fell.”

  “Same thing I was thinking. What if he had a big handgun in the inside pocket of his suit jacket… could that have done the rib damage?”

  Victor confirms my hunch. Drago was armed when he was in the bank. Now I ask myself, if a person goes into a bank where he has no account, no money to deposit, no checks to cash, and no loan to apply for, why does he go in there armed with a big gun?

  Even the dog should be able to figure this one out. Drago was there to rob the bank. He’s part of the gang, along with Harold – and what looked like him writhing in pain on the floor of the bank after his fall was actually a struggle to get the gun out of his suit coat pocket and into his trench coat pocket, where it would be less likely to be discovered later.

  The pieces of the puzzle are slowly starting to come together. They were going to take the bank down that morning until Drago slipped and fell. That threw them off of their plan for a while but they didn’t want to give up the score, so they went back later and finished the job. An hour after I got the case assigned to me and visited the bank.

  I’ve got to hand it to Blitzstien. He confessed to being a member of the gang but wouldn’t rat out Drago. That’s loyalty, but of a strange kind. I guess in the twisted minds of those criminals it’s okay to try and kill someone, but snitching on them is a nono. Now I can understand why Harold wouldn’t talk directly to the feds. He told me he didn’t want to have a reputation of being a snitch.

  More questions have been answered, but I still don’t know how to put it all together. All I know for sure is that Drago’s status has just dropped from invitee to trespasser.

  With respect to land occupiers’ responsibility and liability to people who come onto their property, the lowest classification of visitor is the Unknown Trespasser. Now that I can probably establish that Drago is in that bottom category, there’s a possibility that the bank’s exposure can be minimized to practically nothing.

  But what the hell am I even thinking about this for? Indovine’s fired me from the case. Nevertheless, I feel duty-bound to at least call and let him know this new information. Maybe this will rehabilitate me in his mind and he’ll hire me back. The odds are slim, but I’ve got to try. I call his private line. He answers the phone and it sounds like he’s in the men’s room of the Titanic, so he’s obviously on the speakerphone.

  “Hello, Indovine here.”

  “Mister Indovine, this is Peter Sharp and I’ve got some new information on the Drago case that may help your client.”

  “Well, well, of it isn’t the crime-fighting lawyer. Too bad you didn’t study law as hard as you read detective stories. As a matter of fact, our client is here in the room with me right now and we’re really not interested in anything you have to say about the Drago case. Thanks to you we’re in the process of making a seven-figure settlement with his family’s lawyer, so please don’t call this number anymore.”

  “Wait Charles, don’t hang up, I’m begging you not to settle. If the information I have is correct, your client may not have to pay out any money at all on this case.”

  “That’s enough, Sharp. Neither my client nor I are interested in your desperate attempts to be reassigned to this case. The grown-ups are handling it now, so I’ll bid you a good day.”

  With that bit of humiliation, he hangs up the phone and all I’m left with on my end is a dial tone. He shouldn’t have done that because now I’m really going to make an effort to show how wrong he was. Ignorance alone is a bad enough trait, but when combined with arrogance the result is really terrible – and Indovine did one of the best jobs of combining the two that I’ve seen in quite a while. Well, what goes around comes around.

  The only small tasks I’m left with now are getting Myra elected as the new District Attorney, proving that Drago and Harold were part of the gang, earning some extra reward money, and getting that million-plus back for the insurance company. No problem.

  21

  Myra has only two declared opponents in the pcoming race for District Attorney. One is a guy named Seymour, with the same seniority and experience that Myra has. He’s been the acting

  District Attorney since his predecessor was forced out of office not too long ago. The other candidate is some pony-tailed activist who promises to legalize drugs when he gets elected.

  I’ve never been up against Seymour in court, but word has it that he seems competent. Not too quick on his feet, but competent. I really think that Myra would make a better D.A., so getting her elected won’t give me any pangs of conscience. The other attorney running doesn’t stand much of a chance, because the people who would like to see drugs legalized for the most part have already had their right to vote taken away because of a felony conviction.

  Seymour’s starting to run some negative campaign ads on local television stations, and his main thrust i
s that Myra lost the Blitzstien case. What a putz this guy is turning out to be. Harold may not have been a nice guy, but he was one hundred percent innocent and any prosecutor with an ounce of ethics would have done the same thing that Myra did. She got out of my way and let me prove it to the court. No excuses afterwards, no blaming her loss on unfair trial tactics, surprise, or technicalities, she just kept her mouth shut and accepted her loss like a real pro. I admire her for that, so I intend to make up for all those times I destroyed her by getting her elected. I just don’t have the slightest idea how.

  At least I’ll have a good laugh along the way, because Jack B. tells me that he drove by the fast food place, and that they do in fact have some security cameras mounted on the outside of the building, pointed directly down at where the famous Olive-Harold incident took place. I drive over there to try and talk them out of some copies of the videotapes.

  The manager has a typical fast-food place complexion and starts out being pleasant. I explain to him what I want, and his first response is the typical “no way.” I decide that some creativity is required here.

  “Listen, I’m working with the police on this matter. As you probably remember, there was a squad car involved in the incident and the behavior of the officers is being called into question. Now you wouldn’t want to see some of your customers get a bad rap would you?”

  “ If they’re cops, I couldn’t care less. In the past couple of months they’ve stuck my wife’s car with over a dozen parking tickets and I don’t think it’s fair.”

  At this point I don’t think it would do any good to try and explain that uniformed officers in squad cars don’t usually write parking tickets, but I’m not here to educate him, I’m here to get those tapes.

  “Okay, you’re right. It’s probably not fair. Tell you what… why don’t I take those parking tickets with me and show them to the parking ticket boss and explain how unfair it is. If I can get him to wipe out those tickets, would you let me borrow that tape to make a copy?”

  He thinks about this for a minute. “You mean it won’t cost me anything? The tickets will be taken care of, one way or another?”

  I assure him that they’ll be taken care of ‘one way or another.’

  Thirty minutes later I’m at the Van Nuys courthouse standing in the ticket-paying line just off of the first floor lobby. Four hundred and twenty dollars later, the tickets have been taken care of - one way or another. I go back to the fast-food place, show him the dismissal receipts and pick up the cassette starring that famous team of Olive and her trained corpse.

  Watching the video confirms my hunch that if it wasn’t for the fact that Olive’s underwear was around her ankles, this footage could definitely win some award on a reality-type of television show that solicits video footage of zany events from viewers.

  If I’m going to have some meat, it’s not going to be at a fast-food place. I like high-class restaurants and my definition of high-class is any place where the napkins are not on the table in a dispenser. To reach five-star level in my mind, the napkins should be cloth, the booths should be upholstered, and there should be a rug on the floor. If there’s no spoon in the place setting, then I know the place is out of my price limit. Only the stratospheric joints leave out the spoon… you’re brought whatever type of spoon is required for the type of food you’re eating.

  This is much better than watching video of people falling or getting murdered. This is enjoyable. I think I’ll offer it for sale to Christopher Guest or Larry David, to include in one of their next projects. Aside from me, they may be the only two guys I know of with a weird enough sense of humor to find this incident amusing.

  Strangely enough though, there’s more interesting stuff here. I also enjoy looking at the characters that use this drive-thru facility for their nourishment. You can actually see how popular French-fries really are. It’s amazing how many people enjoy shoving that fried grease down their throats. It’s also enjoyable seeing the people in the cars and how they relate to each other. The guys asking their female companions for money, the looks they get when it’s given to them… wait a minute, there’s a kiss going on in a car parked two or three spots in line behind the squad car. That’s nice. Love in bloom. Oh-oh, another minute or two later, as the cars pull up to pick up their food from the cashier, I see that the kiss took place between an older guy and a younger man. Well, it takes all kinds. That’s their business. It was probably a father kissing his son. I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

  Good news. The reward money has come in from our now famous cracking of the bank robbery cases. I’ll be getting my yellow Hummer, the four Asian boys will finally be getting their own onebedroom apartment with indoor plumbing, Jack Bibberman is going to start night law school, Stuart is planning a cruise, Suzi is not telling anyone what she’s doing with her share, and Vinnie is getting married to Olive.

  That therapy must ha ve really helped him, because Olive finally said yes. Of course the reward probably didn’t have anything to do with it.

  Stuart tells me that they’re going to have the ceremony at a little church in North Hollywood, with the reception later that day at our favorite Mexican place, Pollo Meshuga. Patròn margaritas, here I come!

  I call Myra and let her know about it and talk her into being my quasi ‘date’ that day. We might as well spend a little time together, because we haven’t got much of it left. After we get back from Hawaii, she’ll be busy running for District Attorney, and after that it will be awkward for us to be seen together if I continue to practice criminal law. It just wouldn’t look good for the District Attorney to be seen socially with a criminal defense attorney – especially one that she used to be married to. There’d be too many chances for people who oppose her policies to take potshots at her because of her social life. Maybe we can sneak around a little.

  In between calls from Stuart, who’s constantly in a state of desperation trying to help make plans for Vinnie’s bachelor party and wedding, I try to do some research on Drago’s case and discover that it’s a lot harder to do legal research when you’re not getting paid for it.

  If I’m going to be able to do a ny good I’ve got to put a stop to the settlement before it reaches the final disbursement point. If it goes through, the probate court will probably want to be responsible for distributing the funds, making sure that debts of the estate like medical and funeral expenses are paid. That should give me at least a couple of weeks to get the goods on him, so that the court can freeze the funds and possibly return them to the insurance company. As a last resort, I can put a kibosh on the entire probate procedure by proving that the deceased isn’t Mike Drago, but is actually his relative, Vlad. That would not only stall the entire probate, but might also give the insurance company a reason to allege fraud in the claim – especially if that lawyer knew that it was Vlad and not Mike.

  Before getting too in volved in getting the insurance company’s money back, I’d better talk to Special Agent Snell again. The last time we spoke, it was to discuss the possibility of some additional reward money for establishing the identities of other members of the gang who haven’t been arrested yet. I didn’t get into too much detail with him then because at that time I wasn’t aware of the fact that both Drago and Harold were members of the gang.

  Now that I know who the other two gang members are, I’ve got to make some arrangement with Snell so that even when he finds out that they’re both dead, my reward claim will still work. I call him up to discuss it and tell him I know the identity of the other two, but my main concern is the part that says ‘information leading to arrest and conviction.’ I don’t want my reward money depending on the authorities’ ability to arrest and convict. Snell agrees that if the other two are outside the United States, it might be difficult to find them, even with Interpol’s help. I decide to offer him a deal he can’t refuse.

  “Agent Snell, I’ll tell you what. If we can agree on a fixed amount right now, I’ll provide you with the na
mes of the other two members of the gang, along with their pictures and a local address where each one can be found. And if the current address isn’t correct and you can’t see each one of them, then I’ll give up any right to a reward.”

  “You’re serious about that? You’ll give us addresses to go and pick them up?”

  “I’ll give you the addresses. You’ll have to make your own decision whether or not you want to pick them up.”

  “How much money are you looking for on these two?”

  “Well, considering the fact that this will make you an even bigger hero for closing the file on that whole gang, I think that twenty-five thousand for each isn’t unreasonable.” There’s silence on the other end of the line. He doesn’t know that I’ll jump at anything over five grand for each of them.

  “That’s a little high for a head-count reward, but I think I can swing twenty-five for both of them. That’s twelve-five for each. I’ll fax the agreement over to you first, so you can feel safe about the terms.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll fax you an agreement to sign… and the twenty-five K total will work for me. What do you want first, the addresses?”

  “That all depends. Are they on the move?”

  “Not at all. In fact, I can tell you with complete certainty that they haven’t the slightest idea they’re under suspicion, and that they are definitely not on the move. They’ll be at their present locations for a minimum of another month or so and they never go outside.”

  “They’re really lying low, aren’t they?” “You could say that.”

  “Okay, first we’ll need their photo-graphs…”

  I cut him off on that one. Once he’s got the pictures, the game is over. He’ll know that they’re both dead and I’ll be screwed out of the reward money. I’ve got to change the ground rules here. “Oh yeah, the pictures… they’re not immediately available, but I guarantee you won’t have any trouble picking up the wrong people… I’ll give you complete descriptions of them.

 

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