Jail Coach

by Hillary Bell Locke

  “Maybe.” I shrugged. “You’re remembering you were going to tell me when Chaladian got back in touch with you, right?”

  “Hasn’t happened.” He managed to look me in the eye, but I could tell it was an effort. “Look, there’s something I need you to understand about that.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Have you ever heard of my dad? Sydney Wellstein?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “He’s made a sort of a name for himself in some parts of the industry by raising money for movies that can’t get conventional financing. You know?”

  “No, I don’t know. I don’t have the faintest idea.”

  “You put together a limited partnership or something, shares at, say, ten thousand each. Get a few dozen lawyers and doctors and dentists who wanna feel like big shots to chip in—you can actually make a halfway decent indie flick with that kind of dough. They tell their wives they’re doing it for the tax loss, then they write the check and start having fantasies about starlets and casting couches.”

  “‘Lawyers and doctors and dentists’?”

  “And businesspeople. Entrepreneurs. You know.”

  “Yeah, I think I do.”

  “Anyway, dad managed to raise over two-million bucks for Mars Implies/ Venus Infers, this art-house flick that Trow made last year to buff up his I’m-a-Serious-Actor cred. Five hundred thousand from one group alone.”

  “Was the group named Chaladian?”

  “He was a go-between. He ended up holding the paper.”

  “And Stan the Armenian didn’t take kindly to having half-a-mil go down the crapper, I’m guessing.”

  Wells’ face paled. He wasn’t looking me in the eye anymore.

  “Chaladian said it was a con and demanded that dad pay him back. He’s been bleeding him—five thousand one month, two thousand another. A few weeks ago he told dad it had to go up to ten thousand a month.”

  “And then Mr. Ten Percent came to you.”

  “Right. He said if I planted the coke and the bust went down, he’d back off of dad.”

  “Pretty expensive promise.” If he was going to keep it.

  “I guess he just really hates Trow.”

  “Why?”

  “Can’t be sure. Maybe he blames Trow for the flick tanking.”

  I thought that over for a few seconds. Say Chaladian tried to put the squeeze on Trowbridge; Saul Levitt tells him what he can do with it and blusters about putting a contract out on him; so Chaladian decides Trowbridge and Levitt have to be punished. Meanwhile, all Wells knows is that dad is hanging out to dry. What would you have done, Jay Davidovich? Don’t know. You never know until you have to make the choice.

  “Okay, buddy.” What did he want from me? Hell if I knew. “You’re not a shit. You did what a lotta people would have done. Maybe me, for all I know.”

  “Okay.”

  “Eight to one you hear from Chaladian again. When you do, you call me. That’s the deal. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Fast forward over the next ten hours or so. Replay of Omaha. All I got out of it was that being a movie star is a lot like work. Actually, I got one other thing. I got ten minutes alone with Trowbridge. Heading to the day’s last radio interview he said he wanted to drive the Buick. Faked a little diva stuff to back everyone off, and managed to get himself and me alone in the car.

  “If you were me,” he said as we cruised along, “and making Katrina fall for you were the most important thing in the world, what would you do?”

  I was not ready for that question. I clicked into improv mode and tried to come up with something that wouldn’t be complete bullshit.

  “I don’t have a silver bullet for you. But let me tell you about a conversation I overheard this morning.” I fed him the word-of-honor story.

  “No shit? Seriously? Really?”

  “No shit. Seriously. Really.”

  “That’s so, so—”

  “Retro?”

  He laughed at that. Fairly decent laugh, but just a little nervous.

  “She can’t go back to LA with you.” Seemed like a good time to get that one on the table. “Maybe later, but not now. Nothing to do with you, nothing to do with commitment or ‘we’re-so-different’ or ‘I’m-just-not-ready’ or any chick-shit like that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “There’s a bad guy looking for her. She’s scared of him—and he beat the living crap out of me, so I don’t blame her.”

  “Holy bombshell, Batman! Who is it?”

  “Skip it. Point is, you can’t change that. The bad-news gent is a fact. So if I wanted to impress her, I’d be a man about it. ‘Okay. I understand. Whatever it is, when you get it taken care of, I’ll be waiting.’”

  “Those lines are for shit, man.” He looked straight through the windshield. “Where did you come up with that script?”

  “Can’t remember, but it probably starred Rhonda Fleming.”

  He shot me a surprised little smile. Surprised and little, but a smile.

  I don’t know whether the Tucson Airport has a special entrance for people flying on charter planes, but if it does the limo didn’t use it when the tour was ready to leave Tucson. It pulled up to the loading area in front of the main terminal. As people started to pile out, a Ford F-250 with a license plate that had CHIHUAHUA across the top pulled around it and parked right in front of it. Trowbridge and company headed for the door, screened for about five seconds by the pick-up. And when they weren’t screened anymore, Thompson and Luci were no longer with them. Slickest move I’d seen in two years.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “Stanislav Chaladian was born in Odessa, Georgia on July 16, 1963. The old Commie Georgia, not the one here.” I figured this was Andy Schuetz’s idea of a joke and I chuckled, but the other five people at the table didn’t. “He got what Europeans call a ‘licentiate’ from something called the Novribisk Preparatory Institute in Odessa at eighteen. Then he went into the Red Army. Drafted.”

  I like Schuetz. Weathered face, sparse, gray hair, and the hard eyes that you often see on guys who used to put people in handcuffs. Retired from the FBI at fifty, now in his tenth year at Trans/Oxana, go-to guy if you need a data dump on someone ASAP. But why was I sitting in a gray and white conference room in Hartford, Connecticut listening to Schuetz instead of reading his report on a computer screen in my apartment? This was the Wednesday morning after Thompson and I had parted company in Tucson. So far I hadn’t heard anything worthy of more than an email.

  “Made sergeant six months in.” Schuetz glanced at his notes. “Rooskies thought people from Georgia were natural-born sergeants, so if they found one with any brains they fast-tracked him. Deserted less than nine months before his five-year hitch would have been up.”

  “Political?” Proxy asked this question without looking up from her laptop.

  “Not hardly. He’d been stealing gasoline from his base to sell on the black market. He was about to get busted for it, so he got out while the gettin’ was good. Iced a couple of guys on the way. One of them was a KGB agent. Just goes to show there’s a little good in everyone.”

  A puzzled frown marred Proxy’s poker face. She was still skipping rope and playing jacks when the Cold War ended. I wasn’t all that much older, but I had Ukrainian parents, so Schuetz’s crack didn’t puzzle me.

  “When did he reach the US?” I looked past Proxy to the far end of the table, where Don Quindel had asked this question. Quindel says “metrics” a lot.

  “First record we have is ninety-three, when he enrolled at the University of Georgia. That being our Georgia this time. Came in on a student visa from France. Visa expired but he didn’t leave. If the Feds ever catch him, overstaying his visa will be, like, count thirty-seven in the indictment.”

&n
bsp; “What makes him so hard to track down?” This question came from Dennis Stepanski, who called Proxy “Foxy Proxy” the first time he met her and has called her “Ms. Shifcos” ever since.

  “No one is trying all that hard to catch him, and he’s good at what he does. His crimes aren’t priority offenses. He started off as a con man with muscle. He’s not running drugs or robbing federally-insured banks or helping terrorists. The guys in the Hoover Building have more important thugs to worry about.”

  “So mostly nonviolent crimes, then?” Quindel again. “Leaving aside his recent interaction with our Mr. Davidovich here?”

  That was definitely supposed to be a joke. Everybody at the table laughed—except Schuetz, who answered with an absolutely deadpan expression.

  “Four murders that we know of. But the victims were all thugs. N-H-I.”

  The only other woman at the table looked up. Veronica Galliano. Assistant General Counsel.

  “N-H-I?”

  “‘No humans involved.’ Not the kind of thing a cop skips a donut for.”

  “Four is a pretty high body count for a con artist,” Stepanski said.

  “He’s moved on to other things. Call him a broker. That’s where the ‘Mr. Ten Percent’ alias that Jay picked up comes from. You want a genuine snuff film, he’ll find someone who sells them and handle all the details. You want exotic sex with people it’s illegal to have sex with and you don’t want a record of it on your computer, ditto. And if you want a hit man who’ll take out your ex-wife while you’re playing golf with the mayor, he could probably handle that for you as well.”

  “How about if I want a DUI charge to go away?” Quindel grinned.

  “No, that’s off the table,” Galliano said, not grinning.

  “Joke,” Quindel sighed.

  That’s why this was a face-to-face meeting instead of an email exchange. We were going to talk about things that were off the table.

  “Did Chaladian’s proposition sound like a joke to you, Davidovich?” Stepanski asked, mispronouncing my name ‘David-OH-vich.’

  “He’d be happy to take the money if we were dumb enough to throw it at him. He wasn’t joking about that. Whether he could deliver is a different story.”

  “Do you think he could deliver?” This from Quindel.

  “No idea. But it’s irrelevant.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re not going to do it,” Galliano said.

  No one else at the table paid the slightest attention to her. They all fixed their eyes on me.

  “Because if we did somehow accidentally do it, and Chaladian actually brought it off, he’d just find another risk we’d insured and extort another million or so from us anytime he ran short of ready cash.”

  Quindel glanced down at an Xcel spreadsheet he had on the table in front of him. Stepanski snuck a look at it too. Quindel looked back up at me.

  “Let’s get some metrics. What’s your assessment of the loss-risk?”

  “I’d say we have a halfway decent chance of not having to pay on the policy. I’ve tracked down two professional penal consultants and sent Proxy a report on them. We can hire one of them to fill in any gaps in the little seminar Thompson has already given Trowbridge. Plus, he’s not a cream puff, and he can stay clean and sober if he’s motivated to. So, like I said, halfway decent chance.”

  Quindel and Stepanski looked at me like I’d been speaking Yiddish. Without making any sound, Stepanski mouthed ‘halfway decent chance’ while rolling his eyes. Proxy elbowed me.

  “They want a number, Jay.” I shrugged. I could tell that she was shrugging too, but she was doing it mentally.

  “I’d put the odds at four to one in our favor. So call it eighty percent that we don’t write a check.”

  Quindel found the calculator app on his mobile phone and attacked it. He showed the number to Stepanski.

  “Seven-point-two million.”

  My dad could have computed twenty percent of thirty-six million in his head without missing a pitch at a Red Sox game. I didn’t mention that.

  “Not necessarily,” Galliano said. “We don’t automatically have to pay the policy limit if Trowbridge craters. We just have to pay whatever loss New Paradigm Studios can prove—and Trowbridge has already made one of the three pictures.”

  Stepanski swiveled toward Galliano.

  “If Prescott Trail ends up netting, say, sixty million, then New Paradigm could argue that it lost more than the policy limit on each of the unmade movies.”

  “Right. But if Prescott Trail tanks, claiming that New Paradigm lost anything at all would be a tough sell. I’ve prepared a pro forma exposure analysis.”

  She passed a chart around the table. It had three columns: dollar amounts, percentages, and lower dollar amounts, with a total at the bottom of the third column. But I didn’t pay any attention to it because ‘pro forma’ meant it was just Fun with Numbers—assumptions plus arithmetic. The important thing I’d just learned wasn’t anywhere on Galliano’s chart. It was that Trans/Oxana Insurance Company should be very happy if Prescott Trail became a colossal flop. Stepanski has your basic glass head. I could practically see the pieces of the puzzle falling into place as he turned his gaze to Proxy.

  “Ms. Shifcos, what are the movie’s prospects?”

  “Improving. New Paradigm added some scenes over the weekend and had another test screening last night. Much better numbers. We have to assume grosses will triple costs after foreign and digital distribution are factored in.”

  Americans like chick fights. Who knew?

  “I guess that brings us to Citadel Re.” Quindel said this to Stepanski as if they were the only two people in the room. Proxy reminded them that they weren’t.

  “What does Citadel Reinsurance Company have to do with anything?”

  “Citadel Re has offered to take everything over ten million off our hands.” I think the thing that Quindel then did with his lips and teeth was a smile. “For a two-point-six million dollar reinsurance premium.”

  “That guarantees a loss on the policy, even if there’s no payout at all.”

  “True.” Stepanski nodded earnestly. “But I didn’t sell the policy.”

  “Or rate the risk,” Quindel added.

  A quick rap on the conference room door drew my eye to it just in time to see a dark-haired woman stick her head into the room.

  “Mr. Davidovich? There’s a call for you.”

  Rachel? Again? Screw it.

  “Take a number and tell her that I’ll call back as soon as I can.” I snapped that without meaning to, so I added “please” as an afterthought.

  “It’s him, not her. A Mr. Chaladian. He says that it’s urgent.”

  “Send it in here,” Quindel said before I could open my mouth. “Put it on speaker.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “Good morning, Jay Davidovich! Thank you for taking my call. Who’s in the room there with you?”

  “You don’t need to know that, Mr. Ten.” I paced back and forth between the conference table and the credenza. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I follow up on my proposals. You have a problem. For ten percent I will make this problem go away.”

  “I have a lot of problems. One of them is getting feeling back in my left arm after the kick in the shoulder I got from your buddy Marcus.”

  “I do not apologize for that. An apology would insult you. That was an operational necessity. Like shooting prisoners in the first hours after D-Day. Katrina said that you were tough and determined, so I knew you would follow us if you could. Therefore I had to make sure you couldn’t, at least for the rest of the night. You’re a professional, you understand this.”

  “I’m not sure Marcus understood it. He aimed that kick at my head. I think he had somet
hing more permanent than the rest of the night in mind.”

  “Perhaps so. Marcus is not a precision instrument. Even so, no hard feelings, I hope. Now, what about my proposal?”

  No hard feelings I hope? I took a look around the room, hoping for hints about where to go with this. Stepanski nodded. Galliano looked down at her legal pad. Schuetz shrugged. Proxy gave me a thumbs up and a smile. Quindel came through. He put the thumb and index finger of each hand together in front of his chest and then pulled his hands apart until his arms were stretched out full length: Keep it going, draw him out.

  “Three things about that proposal, Stan. First, you’re way high. We figure there’s only ten million really at risk, and only a ten percent chance of losing that.”

  “Jay Davidovich, this is bullshit and you know it. But I like you. That was a good right jab you rocked me with. So I offer my special discount for people with good right jabs. One million dollars. I know, I give in too easily. I bargain like a pussy. But I like you.”

  “Second, there are a couple of red flags on your resumé. Like killing people.”

  “This I deny. But if I had killed anyone, it would only have been because this was absolutely necessary—or, at least, a really good idea under the circumstances. Not my business model. I’m not some two-bit Russian pig from Brooklyn.”

  “Which brings me to third. Felonies aren’t Trans/Oxana’s business model either. When I asked you how you were going to fix the problem, your answer was, ‘Who cares how?’ Not good enough. We need to know what the plan is before we sign off on anything.”

  “Jay, Jay, Jay. This is what I do. I arrange things. I don’t know how I’m going to do it when I start, but I find a way. A legal way, I promise. Suppose you wanted a date with Ellen DeGeneres. How would I arrange that? No idea. But I would do it somehow, with no one under arrest at the end.”

  “One, I don’t want a date with Ellen DeGeneres. Two, she’s a lesbian.”

  “There are no lesbians. There are only women who haven’t met me yet.”