An Engineered Injustice (Philadelphia Legal)

by Myers, Jr. , William L.

  The piece of stationery is blank except for a single line: “You’re a dead man. Bang, bang, motherfucker. Bang, bang.”

  What the hell?

  Erin stares at the writing, trying to figure out what it means. Because there’s only one page, Erin decides to photograph it with her iPhone rather than walk it to the copy room. Once she’s done, she returns the document to the center drawer and pushes it shut.

  “Erin!”

  Erin gasps as her heart stops. Standing in the doorway is Geoffrey Day. She tries to form words to answer him, but nothing comes out.

  “What are you doing?”

  Erin’s heart, stopped for an instant, now races like it’s going to explode.

  “I’m . . . I’m . . . Oh, this is so embarrassing. I’m . . . imaging.”

  Day glares.

  “It’s very important to set goals.”

  Day stands still as stone.

  “That’s what my life coach tells me.”

  He cocks his head at the term life coach, clearly not a term he’s familiar with. “What does that have to do with sitting at my desk?”

  “They call it ‘sitting on the throne.’” Erin says “throne,” but what she’s actually envisioning is Geoffrey strapped into the electric chair. “The idea is that you think of someone great, or heroic, and you envision yourself in their place. I thought . . . Well, I thought . . . Oh, I know this sounds corny, but you’re everyone’s hero. Not just in the firm. But the whole city. That’s what I want to be . . . someday.”

  Day’s glare softens to his normal disapproving gaze. “You can’t just go into someone’s office—especially my office—without asking. It’s an invasion of privacy.”

  Erin lowers her head, makes her lips pouty. The scolded child. “I know. But . . . Oh, I’m sorry. I have no excuse.”

  “You disappoint me.”

  “It’s unforgivable, I know.” Erin stands and walks around the desk as Day—eyeing her warily—takes his seat.

  She moves toward the doorway, but turns around before she reaches it. “Can I say something? It’s been on my mind for several weeks. The Amtrak crash is the firm’s biggest litigation. I’ve been with the firm for nine years, and yet you didn’t ask me to be on it. How am I supposed to learn if I can’t work side by side with you?”

  Day narrows his eyes, studies her. After a moment, he forms his mouth into an unconvincing half smile. “I’ll consider it. The case is fully staffed, but you are an exceptional attorney. Perhaps we could make room for you.”

  She’s about to leave when he raises a hand for her to wait, then asks why she’s in the office so early. On sheer instinct, she says she’s going to visit her parents for the weekend but needed to get some work done first. Her boss’s silence is disconcerting enough that Erin adds that she thought he was supposed to be on the West Coast over the weekend, to which he replies that he’s flying out a little later and had to pick up some files from the office.

  Erin thanks him for being so understanding and forgiving. Day gives her a curt nod, then abruptly dismisses her, eyeing her suspiciously as she walks out.

  Erin pretends to work for an hour, then turns off her computer and leaves her office. She walks straight to the elevator, pulling the small Tumi suitcase behind her. She’s nervous that Day will see her and demand to see what’s inside the suitcase. The elevator doors begin to close, and she breathes a sigh of relief. But just before the doors close completely, a hand juts inside and the doors open again.

  It’s Geoffrey Day, toting his own suitcase.

  “Going to the airport, right? I’ll give you a lift.”

  “That would be great.”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Reggie Frye squirms in the front passenger seat of the Buick Regal as it cruises down 476. Jack Bunting is at the wheel. Frye is restless, having been holed up in a little cabin in Pocono Pines.

  “This should’ve happened a long time ago, you ask me,” Reggie says.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” says Bunting.

  “I did everything you asked me to.”

  “You didn’t have much choice, seeing’s how I saved your job.”

  “I pretended to like Coburn, which wasn’t easy, seeing how I can’t stand him. He only had a month’s seniority on me, and he kept bumping me for better runs.”

  “So you’ve told me—a hundred times.”

  “If it wasn’t for me, you’d never have gotten that burner phone into his hands.”

  Bunting sighs, but Frye ignores him and presses on.

  “And what about me single-handedly moving that TracVac to Track 2 in ten minutes flat? And without throwing up signals that the track was occupied? That was some A-plus railroading, you ask me. But did I ever hear a thank-you?”

  “You’ll get your thanks soon enough.”

  “Twenty-five thousand. It better all be there.”

  “Stop worrying. You’re getting your money and the passport.”

  “Are you sure this guy’s good?” asks Frye. “The one doing the passport?”

  “Best in the city.”

  “And he has my money?”

  “I have the money right in the trunk.”

  “Oh.” Frye perks up, sits taller in the seat.

  That shuts him up for the rest of the ride. An hour later, they park in front of a block of row houses. Frye follows Bunting to the back of the car, where Bunting opens the trunk and withdraws a black duffel bag.

  “That for me?” Reggie asks.

  “You’ll get it inside.”

  They walk up the pitted concrete steps leading to a wooden porch. The front door opens.

  “You the ones here for the passport?” asks Royce Badgett.

  “It’s for him,” Bunting says, angling his head at Frye.

  “Hurry on in. Some of my neighbors have prying eyes.”

  They stand in the living room, where Badgett nods at the black duffel. “Is that for me?”

  “You wish,” Bunting says. “This is for you.” He pulls a white envelope from his sport coat.

  Badgett opens the envelope so Frye can see what’s inside. He counts. “Fifteen hundred.” He turns to Frye. “Let’s go downstairs. The passport and driver’s license are ready to put the pictures on. The camera’s set up. I’ll snap off a few and finish up.”

  Reggie descends the narrow stairwell into the musty cellar. It’s dark, so it takes his eyes a few seconds to focus. Once they do, he’s confused by what he sees in addition to the furnace and hot-water heater. There’s an impressive array of handguns, bolt-action rifles, and automatic weapons hanging on the wall; a large work table littered with trays of upright empty brass cartridge cases; and various small devices and tools, including a Forster case trimmer, a powder dispenser, powder scale, calipers, a Lyman Turbo Sonic 6000 case cleaner, and a Hornady Lock-N-Load Auto-Progressive reloading press.

  What Reggie doesn’t see is a camera. Or any form of equipment that looks like it might be used to make passports or drivers’ licenses.

  The scene doesn’t make any sense to Reggie until he sees the hole in the basement floor. Not a hole, actually, but a concrete chamber embedded in the dirt floor. The chamber has a perfectly square, shoulder-width opening and looks like the vaults they slide caskets into at mausoleums, except that it’s vertical rather than horizontal. Reggie stares at the opening, suddenly understanding what he’s seeing.

  “Oh, man.” The last two words Reggie Frye will ever say.

  Tommy passes Royce Badgett’s house just as Jack Bunting and Reggie Frye are standing by the open trunk. He followed Bunting from his house to the hunting cabin and back to Philadelphia. It was tricky going, especially once they got to the Poconos. Traffic on 476 and 80 was heavy enough that he could find cars and trucks to hide behind. But once he got onto the back roads, he had to stay well back of Bunting’s Buick and almost lost him a couple of times.

  Tommy never actually saw Reggie Frye until he was standing behind the Regal in front of Badgett’s h
ouse. Once he did, he recognized the track foreman immediately from the photos he’d seen on the TV news.

  “Another piece of the puzzle,” Tommy says, turning the corner.

  Reggie Frye goes down like a puppet with cut strings when he’s hit with the dual prongs of Badgett’s X26C Taser. Quickly, Badgett binds Frye’s hands and feet with Safariland Double Cuff plastic restraints and wraps his mouth with gray duct tape. He has done this before.

  Badgett knew as soon as he saw Frye that he was going to have some difficulty stuffing the track foreman into the vertical, concrete-lined vault in his basement floor. Frye’s shoulders are broad, and Badgett strongly suspects they are wider than the diagonal span of the vault. Badgett’s concerns are confirmed when he drags Frye to the opening and lowers him feetfirst into the vault. Sure enough, the man’s shoulders wedge so tightly he gets stuck.

  Royce steps back and tries to figure out what to do. He faced a similar problem with the seventy-two-year-old truck driver in the second vault, the one who’d broadsided the Chrysler minivan with his BP tanker truck, wiping out a family of four. The boss secured a $30 million settlement when the trucker testified in his deposition that he’d been distracted because he was watching porn on his cell phone. Happily, the man, though broad-shouldered like Reggie Frye, was so old and decrepit that Royce was able to shove him into the vault by simply pushing down on his shoulders. The old fart’s clavicles splintered like chicken bones. The ill-fated Frye is younger, so Badgett knows it’s not going to be that easy.

  Badgett is wrenched from his thoughts by Reggie’s sudden squealing. The track foreman is awake now, in pain, and fully cognizant of what awaits him. Needless to say, he is not taking it well. Badgett has heard the squeals before, seen the pleading eyes. It’s old hat. He considers explaining this to Reggie Frye, telling him not to waste his time trying to beg his way out of it. But he doesn’t bother. Instead, he walks to his work table and retrieves the instrument of Frye’s demise. It’s not a gun or a knife. Either of those would spray blood all over the floor. Rather, it’s a clothespin.

  Badgett kneels down to the level of Frye’s head and places the clothespin over his nose. With his mouth already sealed shut by the duct tape, there is no way for Frye to breathe. He shakes his head violently, trying to dislodge the pin, but it’s a sturdy, old-fashioned wooden number with a galvanized steel spring, and it goes nowhere. Reggie’s eyes bulge and his squealing increases in volume until he runs out of steam—actually, air—and stops. Badgett waits until the show is over, then calmly positions himself above the body. He raises his hands above his head and grabs hold of a small-diameter pipe running along the ceiling. He uses it to steady himself as he jumps up and down on Reggie Frye’s shoulders, slowly pounding him deeper into the vault. He stops when his head is three inches below the level of the opening.

  27

  SATURDAY, JULY 26

  The late-night meeting of Vaughn, Tommy, Laurie, and Erin in Erin’s apartment is tense. Laurie Mitzner’s fear is palpable. She fights hard against the idea of searching Balzac’s office, but finally agrees when Erin convinces her that if they are right about the crash video and the websites and the complaints and the drone, then Benjamin Balzac and Geoffrey Day are mass murderers, and it’s worth risking their careers—and maybe more—to bring them to justice.

  “I just took the same risk at my own firm,” Erin says. And what a nerve-racking fiasco that turned into. She hadn’t been able to avoid accepting Day’s offer to drive her to the airport, so she ended up sitting next to him in his Lexus LS 460, making up details—time, terminal, carrier—of her imaginary flight and praying that her boss didn’t later pull up the airline on his cell to see whether there actually was such a flight. The worst part was when Geoffrey lifted her suitcase—containing the drone—first into and then out of his trunk. Her heart was racing so fast she thought she might pass out. She was saved, in the end, only because Day was flying out of Terminal A while her own fictitious flight left from Terminal C, so she was able to separate from him before ticketing.

  “So, let’s agree on what we’re going to be looking for,” Vaughn says, wrapping up the meeting. “First, the crash video Laurie pulled up on Balzac’s computer. We need to find the video and then retape it, capturing Balzac’s office.” When Laurie had initially taped the video, she didn’t include any footage corroborating that she’d taped it off Balzac’s computer. This time, after the recording ended, the cell-phone camera would pan out to include Balzac’s computer, desk, and office. This would prove that Balzac himself had been in possession of the crash video. It would also arguably make the video self-authenticating, meaning that it could be introduced into evidence without Laurie having to testify—a long shot, but one Vaughn might have to take should Laurie develop cold feet.

  “The second thing we’re looking for,” he continues, “is the inward-facing locomotive video. Of all the possible evidence, the inward-facing video will likely go the farthest in explaining what happened to cause the crash. It would show what was happening inside the engine with Eddy leading up to, and through, the wreck.” Of course, there was always the risk the video would inculpate Eddy, but that was a chance he’d have to take. Either way, he’d know the truth about what happened.

  “Don’t forget the ‘bang, bang note’ I found in Day’s desk,” Erin interjects. “I’d love to find a copy of the same thing in Balzac’s office. Or something explaining what the hell it means.”

  “Absolutely,” Vaughn agrees. “So, that’s number three. Number four is anything linking Balzac or Day to Reggie Frye. Or linking Balzac’s friend Bunting to Frye. Number five would be rough drafts of the website language, like Erin found in Day’s office.”

  “What about Eddy’s car crash and criminal records?” asks Tommy.

  “Yes,” says Vaughn. “Especially if there’s something showing that Balzac had the records before they were reported on by the press.”

  At this point, everyone falls silent for a while. Finally, Laurie says, “Do you really think the judge at the preliminary hearing is going to let you get any of this into evidence?”

  Hearing the question posed that way makes Vaughn’s heart sink. His whole plan is a long shot, he knows—that the judge will let him blame the crash on two of the city’s most prominent members of the bar, attorneys fighting for the victims and their families. “It’s Eddy’s only hope. If he gets held over for trial, if we fail to be convincing that Eddy didn’t cause the crash . . .” Vaughn trails off; he doesn’t want to complete the thought.

  But Erin picks it up anyway, just as Tommy had when Vaughn met with him and Mick and Susan. “Convincing to whom? I’m guessing it’s not only the judge you’re worried about.”

  Vaughn turns to Erin and simply says, “We have to make this work.”

  Twenty minutes later, just before ten o’clock, Tommy, Vaughn, and Erin are in Tommy’s F-150 crew cab. The pickup is parked in the alley behind the Balzac Firm’s office building on Delancey Street. Laurie Mitzner arrived at the firm fifteen minutes earlier to make sure no one else was in the building. The plan is simple: Vaughn, Erin, and Laurie will search Benjamin Balzac’s office as swiftly as possible while Tommy remains in the truck, in case Balzac shows up. Laurie said that Balzac uses the alley to access his personal parking space behind the building, so Tommy will wait on the cross street that Balzac would have to use to access the alley.

  Erin’s cell phone rings. It’s Laurie. “Coast is clear,” Erin says.

  “Let’s go,” Vaughn says, opening his door.

  Laurie lets Vaughn and Erin in the back door, then leads them through the firm’s kitchen and down the hall to the broad stairway. Balzac’s office is a suite of rooms on the second floor. There’s an outer office shared by his secretary and his personal assistant, a small conference room, and Balzac’s private office and bathroom.

  Wordlessly, the three pass from the outer room into Balzac’s office and get to work opening drawers, or trying to. Most of B
alzac’s desk drawers have locks, as do the drawers built into the wall shelving. The only drawers that can be opened are the center drawer of the desk—a glorified junk drawer—and those on the minibar.

  Frustrated, Vaughn turns his attention to the papers on the desktop. All he finds are some legal briefs, the “Super Lawyer” edition of Philadelphia magazine, and a highlighted appellate decision addressing issues of admissibility in a products-liability case.

  Erin and Laurie aren’t having any more luck, and in short order they all find themselves standing around Balzac’s desk, staring at his closed laptop. Vaughn glances at Laurie—who looks like she’s about to faint—and then to Erin. Then he leans forward, opens the laptop, and presses the “Power” button. The computer boots up to the opening page, which asks for a password.

  “Shit.” Vaughn says. Then he looks at Laurie. “Any ideas?”

  Laurie shakes her head no, but leans forward and starts pressing keys. The computer informs her that she’s entered the wrong password.

  “What’d you type?” asks Erin.

  “Balzac.”

  Laurie tries a number of variations on her boss’s name: Benjamin Balzac; B. Balzac; Balzac Firm; The Balzac Firm; and so on. To no avail. She even types in the names of her boss’s two hellhounds, Thor and Loki. Again, it doesn’t work.

  “This is making me nervous,” Laurie says. “What if his computer sends him an e-mail that someone is trying to hack into it?”

  “Is your firm’s system programmed to do that?”

  “I have no idea. Balzac is pretty secretive about the computers.”

  “And everything else, apparently,” says Erin, pulling on one of the locked desk drawers. “Come on, we should get out of here. We’re not going to find anything.”

  Vaughn starts to protest, but realizes Erin is right. “All right, let’s go.”

  Back in the truck, the mood is pensive. Everyone knows the stakes. Everyone hears the clock ticking on Eddy Coburn. And everyone’s thoughts revolve around the same two words: James Nunzio.