The Big Law (1998)

by Chuck Logan

  He swung his slow eyes on Broker. "What did you think, you'd go in there tomorrow and get him to confess?"

  Broker was now curious. He leaned back as Garrison shot through the gauntlet of Christmas decorations that draped the light poles of Stillwater. As they turned right and blew across the old railroad bridge into Wisconsin, he wondered aloud, "Keith and the Russian mob?"

  Garrison stroked his chin, reached in his pocket and withdrew two horehound hard candies. He handed one to Broker. Garrison sucked on his and began to talk in a slow, deliberate cadence.

  "Well, you know, we Americans like to be entertained. We tend to get distracted. While we were having our play war in the Gulf and watching the O.J. Simpson trial some dramatic changes were going on—out there." He cast a big hand at the snow-covered Wisconsin horizon and the larger world beyond.

  Garrison chuckled. "We're about to start living some real bad B movies. Remember the old James Bond novels—SPECTRE, the international criminal conspiracy from hell. All those suspicious foreign fuckers with accents. Well, they're here. Goldfinger. Dr. No."

  Broker frowned.

  "You think I'm shitting you? When the whole shebang started to collapse over there in the late 1980s, all these forward-looking apparatchiks in the KGB heisted billions of dollars' worth of Communist party funds and pirated them out of Russia. Socked them away in Swiss banks. At the same time they emptied the Soviet prisons to raise an army of thugs. It's the perfect nightmare—veteran intelligence agents running nets of hardened criminals.

  "These guys have literally hijacked the Russian economy. Now they're branching out. So they're here, where the easy money is. 'Cause we consume so much dope. And we're so fat and stupid."

  They turned right on a county road, slowed for a small town named Claypool and followed the twisting two-lane past empty pastures, farmhouses, woodlots, and the stubble of snowy cornfields.

  Garrison continued, "But it isn't the dope, fraud, counterfeiting, or gasoline scams I worry about, uh-uh…"

  They topped a rise. Through a gnarled screen of barren oaks, higher than the nearest silo, Broker saw a golden onion dome crowned by the distinctive silhouette of a Russian Orthodox cross.

  38

  The St. Andrews Orthodox Church was tidy red brick with a white slat belfry culminating in the sectioned Kremlinesque dome. Atop that dome, the three-barred cross threw its long unusual shadow across a snow white cemetery lawn. Mature red pines sheltered the church. Arborvitae stood sentinel along the approach road and among the dark gravestones. The grounds were deserted.

  Garrison turned in and stopped the car across from the graveyard. The Russian cross was repeated in stubby stonework on the apexes of somber tombstones hewn in gray and black granite.

  "A little touch of the Byzantine among the Holsteins and snowmobile rabble," chuckled Garrison. He swung his door open. "C'mon, stretch your legs."

  They walked among the granite slabs: Liwisky. Born 1869. Died 1933. Brusak. Zema. At intervals, drab indestructible plastic flowers jutted from the snow.

  Garrison threaded among the graves, stopped, stooped and swept snow away from a headstone—Lorene Angland—1923-1996. He glanced up. "We all have mothers, Broker. This here's Keith's."

  "Keith's Russian?"

  "Half." Garrison pointed at the two larger grave markers that loomed over the headstone. "Her parents."

  Boris and Laura Kagin. "Not like he embraced it. Never spoke the language. The pastor told me the only time Keith ever walked into this church was the day they buried his mother. She grew up here. Moved to St. Paul and met Keith's dad."

  Garrison pushed on his knees with his palms and stood up. "Buried in July, two years ago." He reached inside his trench coat and pulled out a black and white photograph. The graveyard in summer. Broker imagined heat. Shiny shoe leather among tall blades of grass. Ants. Keith Angland stood among a crowd of mourners. Men with hands like sledgehammers protruding from the too-short sleeves of their dark suit coats. Women in black babushkas. Farmers from around here. Working people. A Russian enclave he never knew existed.

  The two men Keith was talking to weren't local clod kickers. One was short, balding, his ample middle wrapped in a double-breasted suit. He was introducing Keith to a gaunt very well-dressed man with short cropped hair. The photographer had caught them shaking hands.

  "Did you take this picture?" Broker asked Garrison.

  "Hell no. I've got too much time and grade to be low crawling through the woods over there with a camera. We have young guys—and, ah girls—for that. But because of this meeting in this graveyard Keith Angland's name was put on a list."

  "What list?"

  "They call it the Russia Squad. Not real original, but there it is." Garrison tapped the picture. "The short guy you've heard of, Paulie Kagin, a distant cousin to Keith's mother. Came all the way from Chicago for the funeral. And what's more natural than to introduce another old friend of the Chicago branch of the family. This guy shaking hands."

  "Who is?"

  "Victor Konic. Worth a couple hundred Kagins. He's

  an entrepreneur, I guess you'd call him. He runs a couple of banks, in Moscow and Chicago. He used to be a colonel in the KGB. Worked out of embassies and trade delegations, here, in the U.S. He specialized in recruiting American agents." Garrison squinted. "He still does."

  "What?" Broker pointed at the grave. "Here?"

  Garrison nodded. "Just making the initial connection. Keith is too good a prospect to pass up. And the link with Kagin makes it natural, them meeting."

  Broker felt like his carnival ride just left the Wisconsin State Fair and went global.

  Garrison blew on his hands, covered his red ears with his palms and stamped his wing tips in the snow. "Now, if you're coordinating a coast-to-coast criminal enterprise in a new country, and you're these guys, you make inroads into the local power structure. You need advice on how the law operates, their techniques and habits. Hell, man, Angland graduated with honors from the academy in Quantico. This was, you know, before he went into…decline.

  "Okay. You're Kagin and Konic and company—you want to recruit a believer. You want to gratify someone's deepest yearnings. Give them a home. What did Keith Angland want above all other things?"

  Broker studied the black tombstones against the snow. "He wanted to run things."

  "There you go. But the world took a giant dump on him. Unfair maybe, but it happened. So he starts screwing up, starts drinking, having problems with his wife. Along comes his long-lost relative. Remember me? We met at Lorene's funeral. Just a businessman setting up some new ventures in Minnesota. And they talk.

  "And the businessman says, you know, I can help you with these black kids from Detroit and Chicago, the ones running around with guns, who make you so nervous. The ones shipping that nasty crack cocaine into town.

  Suddenly all these gangbangers get popped, and Angland starts making big busts.

  "But then comes the dark side of the deal. Help us or we tell the cops how you got the information. Powder and heroin start mainlining into the suburban market. Almost like the Russians know the local game plan. And they did. Because Angland sold it to them. Then they give him a taste of power, and he likes it.

  "I brought in a snitch—Alex Gorski—the only goddamn snitch we have in the Russians—and he got close to busting Angland—he disappeared and the bastards sent us his tongue in the mail.

  "The problem is we don't speak the language. We only see the outside. We can't see in because we don't have an informant base inside their organization. And we need one real bad. And in a hurry. Keith fingered the only one we had."

  Garrison turned up the collar of his trench coat. "World's coming in on us fast. You got a kid?"

  "A daughter."

  Garrison nodded. "Then you should know about The Suitcase."

  "The suitcase?"

  "Yeah, back at Quantico there are floors full of people who worry about nothing but The Suitcase. And when it's going to arriv
e. We know for a fact the KGB adapted tactical nuclear weapons to be delivered in a suitcase. And right now, the Russian military establishment is not just up for grabs, it's for sale."

  Garrison squinted across the cold Wisconsin farmland and mused, "That bridge Clinton wants to build to the twenty-first century won't get there if some Russian scumbag peddles one of those satchels to Hamas or Hizballah. They tuck one of those babies in the parking ramp of the World Trade Center"—Garrison's hands sketched a mushroom in the air.

  Broker nodded slowly. It explained the sudden chill on the phone from former colleagues. Keith had gone beyond the pale, and Broker was the only one, besides a lawyer, he'd talk to. His eyes swept the graveyard. "The same old undeclared war with the Russians, huh?"

  Garrison nodded. "And Caren Angland was a casualty." In a quieter voice, "You should understand these things, you wore the uniform. You fought."

  Broker felt like he'd blundered back through time, into the muscular church of his youth.

  "What do you want, Garrison?"

  "It seems he wants to tell you something. Possibly he has remorse about his wife. If you can get him to talk about what they did with Gorski, tell him maybe we can work a deal for him. Especially if he can link Gorski's death to someone higher up than Kagin.

  "We found Gorski's car in the Saint Croix River, by an old ferry landing near Scandia. Somebody jammed the gas pedal and sent it out through the ice. We want to know if Gorski went into the river, too."

  "You and I have similar problems. It's a stronger case if you have a body," said Broker.

  "The thought has occurred to us," admitted Garrison.

  Broker stared across the gravestones, into the tangle of oak limbs across the road and asked, "Did you ever find the money?"

  "No. It was cash, in a suitcase. Easy to transport. Keith had plenty of time to sock it away someplace. Hell, down in Missouri, they're still digging up stashes of old bank notes the James gang buried. We'll probably never find that money."

  Since Garrison was in a generous mood, Broker asked, "How did Tom James get on to Caren?"

  "That's easy. She called him up from home. We checked the phone logs at the paper. And her phone bill. The time checks out. December 12, 10:33 A.M. James said the caller disguised their voice. We found a commercial voice changer at the house, in her bedroom."

  Broker couldn't see Caren calling a mediocre reporter. More likely, the feds, maybe even Garrison, had sicced the reporter on her to spook her into cooperating against Keith. And things got out of control.

  "Okay," said Broker, "I'll give it a try tomorrow."

  "Good," said Lorn Garrison. "I thought you'd do the right thing, once you were in the picture."

  39

  Over a late lunch at a Perkins in Amery, Wisconsin, Broker handed Garrison the hate letters. Garrison read them, handling them carefully by the edges. When he raised his pale blue eyes, Broker said, "I think those came from the same place that hundred-dollar bill came from."

  "Say again?" Garrison squinted.

  Broker's turn to narrow his eyes and lean forward. "The bill? We found it in the glove compartment of the rental car Caren drove up north. The Cook County sheriff called your St. Paul office, they said send it certified mail."

  "When?" The Kentuckian wasn't faking.

  "Before Christmas."

  "I was hitting those pizza joints," he mumbled.

  Patiently, Broker explained the sequence of events. James coming to his house, not saying a word about the tape, refusing to reveal where Caren was, the fight with Keith, putting James and Kit out of the way in the workshop. The choking incident.

  "Why didn't you say something about this?" Garrison asked.

  "Because you guys never asked me."

  "I'll personally make sure they go over these letters. I know the exact machine to match them to," Garrison promised.

  Then, patiently, he answered questions about James—how James had said Caren wanted him along to buffer her approach to Broker. How she wanted advice about how to proceed with the tape.

  "Because of what was on the tape, she didn't trust anyone Keith worked with. She didn't even trust us. She wanted you to be her advocate," said Garrison.

  And how she panicked when she found out Keith was at Broker's place. So James volunteered to go ahead, to make sure Keith was gone before bringing her forward. So, yeah, he was probably being manipulative, going along for the ride, to get the scoop.

  "If he'd a been a trained man he wouldn't have left her alone in that lodge. But he wasn't trained. He was just a reporter, in over his head. Then it went to hell and he got shot. Which scared him shitless. So he made the best deal he could to get free."

  Garrison paused, making no attempt to disguise the speck of doubt in his pale eyes. "But he never said anything about a baby choking, or seeing money in the car. And I'd think, for a reporter, that would be pretty hard to forget."

  Broker drove to his motel on Highway 36 in the rush hour twilight, anonymous in the stop-and-go accordion of headlights and taillights.

  He called Sally Jeffords, who told him that Kit was fine. Jeff wasn't home yet. Was there a message. No. Not yet. Broker hung up and paced. He chewed an unlit cigar. The walls were too thin, he could hear people in other rooms talking, hear the traffic on the highway.

  Garrison clearly did not take being left out of the loop lightly. Something was funny, and Broker needed to fill in the blanks. Experience had taught him to trust a woman's powers of observation over a man's. Just that a woman would give him about two hundred more details than he needed. But a trained woman, who'd broke his bed sixteen years ago…

  He called the St. Paul Police switchboard and asked for Mary Jane Cody's extension. No one answered phones anymore. He got the answering machine. Janey's voice sounded the same, except for a slight infusion of rank-weighted gravity. Captain Mary Jane. And that made it slightly dicey because, like his old partner, J.T. Merry-weather, Janey had scored lower than Keith on the captain's test and had been promoted over him.

  "If you need to reach me in an emergency," said Janey's recorded voice, "page me at…"

  Broker hung up and punched in the page.

  He paced for a few more minutes. Decided it was a long shot. The phone rang.

  "Who paged this number?" Janey's no-nonsense voice sounded slightly out of place with a tidal surge of classical music in the background.

  "Janey, it's Broker."

  "Aw shoot."

  "What's that in the background?"

  "Aw shoot. The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I'm at a concert."

  "What's wrong with this picture," said Broker.

  "Hey, screw you—when we worked the streets, our snitches hung out in bars. Now they hang out in the mayor's office and at the symphony."

  "I appreciate you calling back."

  "I didn't know who I was reaching. Now that I do, hey, Broker—I can't talk to you. I heard J.T.'s having lunch with you tomorrow, and I advised him not to. This thing with Keith is so dirty, it's got like—yuk—tentacles going everywhere…"

  "C'mon, Janey, it's me."

  "Right. Who is on Keith's visiting list. Look, we arrested a lot of crack dealers after Keith came back from the FBI Academy. Big busts. Now the word is, some slimy lawyers are getting hot to reopen those cases because of the rumors coming out of the U.S. attorney's office—that we went after people based on illegally obtained information. Keith's new pals went around torturing people. They pull tongues out.

  "There's another thing, when I got promoted I protested in writing, strictly on the merit of passing over Keith. Now that's been twisted around somehow. Sometimes I think I'm under suspicion."

  "That's just nuts."

  "Broker, there's talk about huge amounts of money being thrown around, everybody is scared and paranoid. We've never had a scandal like this before."

  "Okay, what about Keith?"

  "What about him, he went nuts. He killed Caren—I'm sorry Broker, I should have said someth
ing earlier…"

  "No, I understand."

  "No you don't. We all saw it start to fall apart. She stopped talking to everybody. Should have known when they bought that haunted house in Afton. We knew about his drinking and that she was seeing a shrink. I heard she lost it after her last miscarriage, when she found out Keith went and got snipped."

  "A vasectomy?"

  "Right. Look, he went nuts, okay. Then the booze just made him unstable. He'd be trashing the chief, and Dobbs would be twenty feet away, getting on an elevator. We all started avoiding him. Talk had already started about doing an intervention. But, I don't know, he'd run over so many people—everyone sort of wanted to see him take a belly flop…"