Pleading Guilty kc-3

by Scott Turow

  Still, you wonder, why'd I do it? Not because of Jake, God knows, not even because my old man and my ma'd have been ashamed to think I wouldn't look after a friend. No, I suppose I was thinking of Woodhull and his minion, who confused ethics with ego, those judgmental prigs, my colleagues, one more team I didn't want to play on, one more group I would not allow to claim my soul. Same reason I did it to Pigeyes, then lied, unwilling to play for either side.

  Jake took me out to lunch the week after the results were mailed. He was pleased as a puppy. He slobbered all over me and I wouldn't say a thing. I congratulated him when he told me that he passed. I shook his hand.

  'You think I'm going to forget this, but I won't,' he said.

  'No comprendo. Thank yourself. You took the test.'

  'Don't give me that bull.'

  'Hey, Jake. Practice makes perfect. You passed. Okay? Give us both a break.'

  'You're all right. You know, after my performance last time -1 got sick. I thought to myself, A cop, for Chrissake. You talk like that to a guy who was a cop.'

  His look said everything. Us pals. Us guys. That smug fraternity thing Jake over the years has never lost. His life now is country-club golf courses and screwing around behind the back of his third wife, but there, twenty-one years before, I could see I'd restored the central faith of his life: we were special people who could outwit harm if we stuck with each other. I wanted to spit in his eye.

  'Forget it, Jake,' I said. 'Everything.'

  'Never,' he answered.

  And I knew it was a curse.

  B. Your Investigator Visits Herbert Hoover's America

  Waiting for Jake, I sat in reception on 44, TN's Executive Level, feeling inferior. There is a jazzed-up air of self-importance here that routinely deflates me. Someday someone will explain to me why this system of ours that is supposed to glorify diversity and individual choice becomes instead the vehicle by which everybody ends up choosing the same thing. With its airlines, banks, and hotels, TN did business last year with two out of every three Americans who make more than 50 g's. Many of those folks think of TN as nothing better than a kind of flying bus, but in a mass society it turns out that even a trivial connection to twenty-five million lives, especially prominent ones, imbues an institution with an extraordinary aura of grandiosity and power.

  Jake's secretary steered me back and His Handsomeness rose to make me welcome. The office is so vast that when I walked in he actually waved. Once we were alone, Jake sat on the corner of his desk, one foot on the rich carpet. You could not help thinking it was a pose he'd seen in some ad in a magazine. He had his jacket on. His hair was perfectly combed. To fill air time, Jake usually likes to talk to me about the old neighborhood, guys from high school, our place among the generations. But today he came to the point directly. As I'd feared, he had Bert on his mind.

  'Look, old chum, I have to admit I'm playing catch-up. What in God's name is going on down there?'

  'I wish I could tell you, Jake.'

  'And you,' he went on. 'You're not helping much. I understand you went to see Neucriss.' Word travels fast.

  'He was on the phone to me before your elevator had reached the ground floor,' said Jake, 'wanting to know what was wrong. Can I ask what in the world you were doing?'

  'Hey,' I said amiably. I never offend Jake. I had all those years watching my old man kiss the fire captain's ring. 'You know, I'm playing hunches. We can't figure what the hell Litiplex is. Maybe the plaintiffs know. I didn't realize that Martin had already tried the same thing with Peter.'

  Jake took that in levelly. He was assessing me. 'Yes, but he had. And when you showed up, you really began ringing bells. We can't have this kind of fumbling.'

  Neucriss, on the phone, had obviously had a great time: These klutzes you employ at three hundred an hour. Get a load of this. Two of them busy forwarding the mail. Ho, ho, ho. Jake had felt the needle and I was paying the price.

  'Look, Mack, my friend, let's review the bidding.' Jake is a master of these phrases, the corporate idiom, one more style he is on top of. It softens the edges, but he's still as ham-fisted as his father and I knew him well enough to see that no matter how fashionably, he was about to be coarse. 'He' — Jake pointed to the door of the chairman's adjoining suite; he had lowered his voice — 'the Polish gentleman next door. He likes me, he doesn't like me. Who knows day to day? Let's assume he's not president of the fan club. All right? Let's say he thinks I use the wrong lawyers and I pay too much to the ones I choose. All assumed. But he's going to put up with me. Do you know why?'

  'The board?'

  'The board, that's right, the board. Because there is a faction there, a number of members who believe I fly without wings. And do you know why that is?'

  'Why?'

  'Because I — and the lawyers I chose — handled a $300 million disaster for this company, a litigation mess where we'd reserved $100 million to pay for our share and we — I, your firm, Martin — we handled that and actually made money for this company. Almost $20 million. Every dollar left in that trust account is a badge of pride. For all of us. And a point on the scoreboard. All right?'

  I nodded. 'Sure,' I said. I had to sit still for this, tutored like a child, simpering and pretending he was inventing cold fusion.

  'Now let's look at this supposed business with Bert. Very disturbing. Frankly, personally, I don't even believe it. If I did, I'd be more alarmed. But in the end, if we're patient about getting to the bottom of it, perhaps review the accounting, I think it may develop that something else is going on. But it appears as it appears — Fine, investigate. Look into it. That's the responsible thing to do. But, old man, let's keep our eye on the ball. If you go out and rile up the plaintiffs' lawyers so that they want a bean counting before we distribute next month — if you do that and fellows like Neucriss catch wind of the fact that we're running a surplus, they're going to do their utmost to lay hands on every dime. Not to mention our co-defendants. So no matter what you think has happened with Bert, all that would be far, far worse for us all. Okay? So let's move ahead carefully. I told you the other day. Be discreet.'

  More or less on cue, Tad Krzysinski, Board Chairman and CEO, poked his head through the side door. In a perfect world, this guy would be somebody you could comfortably hate, a prig like Pagnucci, a wild fucking success drunk on ego. He is nothing like that. No more than five foot four, he is a sunny little fellow, and in every room he enters it feels as if somebody has suddenly installed a compact nuclear reactor, a force so vital you half expect to be blown back through the walls.

  'Hack,' he greeted me, and advanced to pump my hand. He is a musclebound former gymnast with an engaging eye. I took a moment to wonder, as usual, about what gave between Brushy and him, but he always seems so goddamn cheerful there is no way to tell.

  'Tad,' I said. The guy holds no brief for proprieties, never anything but who he's first to tell you he is, the son of a plumber, one of eight kids, now with nine of his own, a three-hours-of-sleep guy who by his own admission cares only about his family, his God, and increasing the wealth of the people who've put their faith in him by plunking down their dough to buy TN's common shares. You could see that just nodding and shaking hands he scared Jake to death. They were the two sides of ethnicity, the Americans, once excluded, who since the sixties have found their way in corporation land — Jake, a deracinated wimp who aspired to everything vain the upwardly mobile envisioned, and Krzysinski, who accepted like Holy Writ all that stuff the immigrants believed about hard work, fortitude, and the capacity to alter the face of the world. I stood there uneasily between them, with a sudden recognition that this was an impossible match. Jake had powerful boosters on TN's board, but Krzysinski had to hate him. Which was what Jake meant about the 397 surplus being his lifeline.

  'Well, I see you here, Hack, we must be in trouble again.' Tad pounded my shoulder good-naturedly and laughed at his own joke and then talked to Jake about a problem they had in Fiji. TN of course owns hotels e
verywhere. Tokyo. Paris. But they got to the Far East ahead of everybody else, which in these lean times means those operations have become particularly important. Many days Tad is far more concerned about Prime Minister Miyazawa than Bill Clinton. Somebody ought to sit down and think about this, because your corporate types are soon going to be a stateless superclass, people who live for deals and golf dates and care a lot more about where you got your MBA than the country you were raised in. It's the Middle Ages all over again, these little unaffiliated duchies and fiefdoms, flying their own flags and ready to take in any vassal who will pledge his life to the manor. Everybody busy patting himself on the back because the Reds went in the dumper is going to be wondering who won when Coca-Cola applies for a seat in the UN.

  As Tad at last disappeared, Jake darted a nettled look at his back.

  'Let's take a walk.' Jake headed down the hallway and I followed, acknowledging the people I knew. For me, a visit up here called for a lot of glad-handing, trying to remind folks on the counsel's staff I was neither drunk nor dead. When we reached the elevator, a messenger, one of the members of that minimum-wage cavalry that slams through the Center City traffic on bikes, came charging out, wearing an optic-orange vest over his worn parka. Jake and I stepped in, now alone.

  'I want to be sure we're singing from the same hymnal,' said Jake. He jammed the button labeled 'Doors Close' and turned to face me when they had.

  'Bert?' I asked.

  'That matter,' he replied.

  The elevator began to move and Jake pumped the button for the floor below.

  'You know what I want — make this tidy,' Jake said. 'And if Kamin really doesn't turn up?'

  'Yes?'

  He took a step so that he was no more than a foot from me, his finger still anchored on the door-close button as the car slowed.

  'No one up here has to hear any more.' He looked at me solemnly before the doors peeled back slowly and he stepped again into the brighter light.

  XII

  TELLING SECRETS

  A. Boys and Girls Together

  'SOS,' I said as I poked my head into Martin's office. His secretary was gone and I'd given a quick knock and leaned in from the hall. Glyndora was standing there with him.

  'Oh shit,' I said. It just sort of popped out and they both stared. It was an odd little moment. Glyndora shot me a look that might have contemplated my death, and my first thought was that she was here complaining about my investigative technique. That was one of Martin's many roles, Mr Fix-It, in charge of the disgruntled, the waylaid, the weak. Our first year can't cut in practice, a partner flips out or has a problem with substance abuse, Martin takes care of you. You'd say compassion, but there's no there-but-for-the-grace; it's more his Olympian thing. I'm here, the mountain.

  But Martin seemed unconcerned when he saw me. He actually smiled and casually waved me into his office with all its funny overstated objects. He said something about Glyndora showing him yesterday's numbers on cash received, the Managing Partner and the head of Accounting measuring our progress at year end. Somehow, though, I remained struck by the pose in which I'd initially found them. Nothing untoward: she was at a distance from him, a few feet from his chair. But she was on his side of the desk, and Martin was facing her and the milky light coming from the broad windows behind her, sitting with his legs outstretched, hands on his tummy, relaxed, open to her in an uncharacteristic way, less our Martin, ever on alert. Maybe, though, it was just the shock of seeing Glyndora, who was still charged up for me like a magnet.

  Martin, at any rate, said they were about done, and with that hint she arranged herself and strode past me in the door without so much as turning my way. I admit I was disappointed.

  'I just had a conversation with Jake,' I told Martin when she was gone. 'Troubling?'

  He could see it in my face, I imagined. My heart was still skittering around like a squirrel. Jake in his own way had given off quite a sinister air. I began to describe my encounter with Jake, and Martin listened, absorbed. When you actually study him, Martin has distinct ethnic looks; he's one of those hairy darklings you'd expect to see loading a truck, with a dense beard that lends his face a bluish cast. His father was a tailor who cut the clothes of various gangsters and Martin refers now and then to his upbringing when it is availing to charm a client of humble roots or to worry an opponent; he has a number of racy stories about delivering tuxedos to the famous Dover Street brothel in the South End. But unlike me, Martin takes no refuge in the past and allows it to make no claim upon him. He evinces the airy noblesse of a fellow who grew up summering in Newport. He is married to a graceful, tall British woman by the name of Nila, whom you sort of picture in a garden with a Pimm's Cup the minute you see her. Large hats and shirtwaist dresses, with petticoats. He is thoroughly the man he decided on being, and that fellow showed little reaction to what I related, except that something abruptly caused him to interrupt.

  'Better save this,' he said. 'My colleagues and I should probably hear it together.' He meant the Committee. 'Carl is in town again today.'

  Martin proposed a meeting at four and left me to arrange it. I went back to Lucinda to ask her to make the calls, though I tried to reach Pagnucci, since I wanted a word with him myself. Then I stood over my secretary's desk for a moment, examining the list of my credit card issuers she'd reached. It struck me for the first time that the Kam Roberts card had been in my wallet too. I had no idea what to do about that.

  Brushy came ambling by in her sturdy fashion and did a double-take when she saw me.

  'Jesus, Mack, you look horrible.' No doubt that was true. Jake had stirred my adrenaline but it still felt like my heart was pumping motor sludge. 'You sick?' she asked.

  'Maybe a touch of the flu.' I turned away, but she followed me into my office out of concern. 'Could be I'm depressed.'

  'Depressed?'

  'From our conversation yesterday.'

  'Hey,' she said, 'you know me, spirited Mediterranean type. I say things.'

  'No,' I said, 'I thought you had a point.'

  She looked herself, little chopped-down hairdo, big pearl earrings, honest face, solid and peppy like she could step out of her heels and give you a good block.

  'Maybe I did.' She sort of smiled.

  'Yeah,' I said, ‘I even went out and had a minute last night where I thought I might practice my hokey-pokey.'

  I could have filled in her dental chart.

  'And?' she demanded.

  '"And" what?'

  'And?' she said once more, Ms Mind Your Own Personal Business.

  'And I ended up getting rolled.'

  She actually laughed out loud. She asked if I was okay,

  then sang, far off-key, a few bars of 'Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places'. 'You don't have to gloat.'

  'Why should I gloat?' she asked and laughed again.

  I turned my back on her to look through the mail. More memos from the Committee about the lagging pace of collections; the Blue Sheet. I heard her close the door, and the click of the bolt gave me a weird little amorous thrill, some vagrant inspiration from our conversation and the last twenty-four hours, an idling recall of what happened when men and women were alone. Brushy, however, did not have anything like that on her mind.

  'Did you see the paper?' she asked. Apparently there'd been another small piece this morning about Archie, basically just saying he still hadn't been found. She described it and asked, 'Do you think that's the guy? The one they talked about at the steam bath?' She never missed a detail.

  ‘I think,' I said, and then, not quite understanding myself, added, as I thumbed through the mail, 'he's dead, by the way.'

  'Who's dead?'

  'Him. Archie. Vernon. Dead-dead.'

  'No,' she said. 'How do you know?'

  So I told her. 'Bert has a problem in his refrigerator that baking soda will not help.' She took a seat on my worn-out sofa, threshing her fingers through her short hair as I described the corpse.

  'How
could you not tell me this?' she asked.

  'Hey, get real. The better question is why I tell you anything at all. This one's attorney-client, no kidding. The coppers'll sweat me if they find out I was anywhere near that body.'

  'Did Bert kill him?'

  'Maybe so.'

  'Bert?'

  'Your idea,' I said. 'Never.' 'Probably not.' 'So who?'

  'Somebody else. Probably the heavy-cuff-link crowd.' 'Those guys don't do that anymore, do they?' 'Don't ask me,' I said, 'you're Italian.' 'Come on,' she said. 'I mean to regular people.' 'This guy wasn't regular people, Brush. If you make book you've got to be connected.' 'Why?' she asked.

  '"Why?" Because this is their business. Coast-to-coast. And these guys don't believe in competition. You keep a book, fine and dandy, but you give them a share — they call it paying the street tax. Otherwise you suffer physical harm or they snitch you out to their favorite law enforcement type Besides, they provide many valuable services. You got a customer who's slowpay, these guys can hurry em up, believe you me. You can't do business without them.'

  She stared. She still didn't see why.

  'Here,' I said, 'it's like your insurance client. What's the name?'

  She reminded me, a fair-sized outfit that sent her their coverage litigation in the Midwest. A significant piece of business, and even saying the name she had a hard time managing her pride.

  'Let's say they have four billion in property and casualty coverage in California,' I told her. 'How do they make sure that they don't go under when the hills burn?'

  'They reinsure.'

  'Exactly. They find a few large, reliable companies and literally insure their insurance. And bookies do the same thing. A good bookie isn't a gambler. Any more than your insurance client is. Bookie makes 10 percent vig on your bet, if you lose. You bet 100, you owe him 110 when your team comes up short. That's where his money is. On any given game, he wants you to bet the loser and me to bet the winner. He gets $110 from you, keeps $10 vig, and gives ioo to me.' Brushy interrupted.