Personal injuries kc-5

by Scott Turow

  "She's been hearing Special Motions in the Common Law Claims Division. Stay tuned. We're getting to the good part." Stan permitted himself a lean smile. It sounded as if Magda had gone back to writing at her desk, when her secretary announced a visitor. Mr. Feaver.

  "Robbie!" A happy full-throated greeting. He addressed her as `Judge' and made a joke with the secretary about the fact that he'd caught her eating a box of chocolates for lunch. When she departed, there was quiet padding, and a barely discernible click, which I instantly recognized as the door lock. I sickened as I realized what was happening: Robbie was about to fix a case with a judge we'd heard nothing about.

  There was precious little small talk.

  "Come 'ere, you," Robbie said. You could hear him shuffle nearer. The springs in her chair sang out, there was coarse rubbing of clothing, and, to my astonishment, Magda Medzyk emitted a rapturous little groan. I knew for re I'd guessed wrong when he told her she had the greatest tits in the world.

  Things progressed rapidly, to the usual percussion accompanying the human animal in heat-zippers, shoes hitting the floor, exerted breathing. Robbie and the judge eventually moved away from the phone, to a sofa I imagined, but their sounds remained telling. Magda was a groaner. As it developed, she was also wildly amused when Robbie employed certain Anglo-Saxon words. He could not have made a more explicit recording if it were a travelogue. As he described his forthcoming activities, unbounded fighter spilled from her. Big pink cunt. Big hard cock. to running brook of Magda's happy sounds was the only element that kept this from feeling entirely like a peep show.

  "Enough?" asked Stan.

  Plenty, I said. Klecker had his fingers over his mouth, but he jiggled with laughter. McManis, on the other hand, had turned away from the speakers as soon as the tape led. He'd spent most of the time staring at his thumb.

  "So?" asked Sennett.

  Odometer on his zipper, I reminded Stan. I didn't see big deal.

  "You know the definition of bribery, George? A benefit any kind intended to influence the action of a public official."

  I actually laughed at him. Prosecutors! Robbie sounded e the beneficiary to me.

  "The lady on that tape isn't going to launch a thousand ships, George."

  And he's not picky. I reminded Stan.

  "Look, George, you say what you like. Moira Winchell didn't have any problem signing the warrant."

  Stan had been playing on home court. Chief Judge Winchell, frosty and officious, would have been scandalized by this, especially as a woman entrusted with similar power. But I couldn't believe Sennett would actually prosecute, and I told him so.

  "I don't know what I'll do, George. But I do know this much"-with gunslinger eyes, Stan leaned over the Parsons-like conference table-"your guy's holding out on us. He's banging the lady judge and then appearing before her on motions. On which he has a stellar rate of success, I might add. I want to know what else he's holding back. I haven't gone to D.C. with this yet. And you know full well I don't want to have to roll the Project up. I'd like to present this as additional information developed in the course of the investigation. But I can only do that little dance step once. Next time, they'll shut us down and cart Robbie off to do forty to fifty-two months. So this is it, George. Amnesty day at the library. I want all the books open and on the table."

  I sat in one of the leatherette swivel chairs, confounded. I was long hardened to the dumb things clients would do. I was unsettled, rather, by a legal conundrum. No matter how supportive Chief Judge Winchell was, the law required probable cause, reliable evidence portending this supposedly corrupt encounter, before a bug could be authorized. Where had that proof come from? I asked Stan, and regretted it promptly, as he simpered.

  "You're supposed to be wondering that privately, George. The government's response to the question is none of your business. But I warned you. I told you we'd know."

  I groaned when the answer struck me: They'd bugged Robbie, too. Sennett was utterly stoic when I ventured this thought. He strolled to the electronic equipment in the cabinets and looked it over astutely, like a buyer in a showroom.

  I told Stan this was too low, to make a deal with a guy and then undermine him, whatever the madmen at UCORC were demanding. But it was a mistake being so direct with Stan, given our audience. The personal side of our relationship had not really been exhibited to the agents. Sennett felt required to defend himself, particularly because McManis's continuing silence telegraphed a deep uneasiness with present events.

  "George," Sennett said, "you may like this guy. But to me he's a Trojan horse with a body recorder, that's all. He might as well be a robot. I need two things to win these cases: Dead-bang recordings. And proof that the government held him to his bargain and didn't let him just bag the judges he hates. If a jury thinks that happened, then they may well cut everybody loose rather than let a creep like Robbie play favorites. And frankly, from what I hear, that seems like it's happened."

  But bugging him, I insisted. A deal to cooperate didn't authorize this kind of gross intrusion into his private life.

  "We're legal," Stan shot back. Like every prosecutor, he resented the suggestion of abuse. "We're completely legal. That's all I'll say." He bulleted me with one more angry dark look and put on his coat, which had been slung over a chair.

  "No, I'll say something else, George. Because I resent your sanctimony. Your beloved client is what people have in mind when they use the word `lawyer' as a pejorative. He treated a profession which you and I are both proud to be a part of as if it's tantamount to pimping. And he got rich doing it. And when we caught him, he made a deal to tell us the whole truth and nothing but, a deal which he doesn't seem to be living up to. And you and he both better understand that I'll do whatever I have to within the limit of the law to protect these prosecutions. Because I have to, George. Because the people on the other side, your client's buddies, the Brendans, the Kosics, they're a law unto themselves. For them, there are no limits. These are ruthless men, George." My friend Stan Sennett stared from the door, his eyes now hidden in the shadow of his snap brim hat. He was pointing at me, a gesture meant to indicate he had no present use for courtesy or any of my other pretenses.

  "And if I'm not willing to be as tough as they are, to seize every advantage allowed-if I'm not willing to do that, something terrible will happen, George. They'll walk away. And they'll do all of this, again and again. They'll win, George. And we'll lose. You and me. And the profession we're proud of." He looked back from the threshold. "And I don't want to lose." FEAVER PACED in my office and raged.

  "Is that corrupt?" he asked. "Letting a lonely woman have a little affection?"

  According to the recording, I offered, it wasn't so little. The locker room humor, an effort to soothe him, drew a fleet smile, but he barely changed stride.

  "So I'm her jocker. So what? This is a lady, a person for Chrissake, she's a great person. You think she was looking for this? I was whispering sweet nothings in her ear for years. Do you know who Magda is? She was a novice, she lived in a convent until she was nineteen. She's still in an apartment with her eighty-eight-year-old mother. And we fuck in her chambers because she'd rather die than be seen coming out of a hotel room with a man. This lady, George, didn't have sex with anybody until she was forty, and then just because she couldn't stand thinking of herself as a virgin. So she got keelhauled and let the super in her building have at her one day while Mom's visiting an aunt. Quite a story. This guy wooin her a mile a minute in Polish, not a word of which she happens to speak, and smellin, so she says, a little European. And then, of course, she was so embarrassed she moved out the next month. I mean, she's pretty goddamned funny about it. Did you know Magda was funny?"

  I'd had a four-week trial in front of Judge Medzyk when she sat in the Felony Division, and I didn't remember a moment that warranted more than a momentary smile. She had good demeanor and better-than-average ability, but for Robbie's purposes and mine there was only one thing about h
er that mattered-she was a judge, before whom he had appeared often over the years.

  "I like Magda, for Chrissake. I really like her. We have a great time together. I'd like her whether she ruled for me or not. And she doesn't rule for me all the time. I get this little tiny smile and a shrug when it goes the wrong way, like, What can I do, this is my job?"

  She had no business ruling either way, not in these circumstances. It was shame, I could see, that had been her undoing. She hadn't recused herself from Feaver's cases because she would have expired if she were ever called upon to explain the reasons to the Presiding Judge.

  "So they're gonna put her in the penitentiary for getting laid?"

  Probably not. There was no mention of any case on the tape I'd heard, and Robbie insisted there never had been. But that didn't obscure Sennett's larger message that Bobbie was not entitled to pick and choose whom he'd talk about.

  "Who would I be holding out on?" he asked. "Really?"

  Mort was my first answer. Robbie jolted. I'd scared him or caught him, perhaps both. My continuing worry was that Sennett and I would someday be having a heart-to-heart much like today's, but one where it was Morty on the tape, up to his ears in all of this. I told Robbie that the train was leaving the station. Anything that should be said about Mort or anyone else had to be heard now. He insisted, as always, that Mort was clean.

  "Don't you believe me?" His dark face was a beacon of baptismal innocence.

  Conveniently, my phone rang. Even before summoning Robbie, I'd called a private investigator named Lorenzo Kotrar, whom I'd represented some years before when he was charged with violating the federal wiretapping statute. Poor Lorenzo had gotten the goods on his client's cheating husband, a police captain, but the captain took more than his pound of flesh when Lorenzo went off to the Federal Correctional Institution at Sandstone for sixteen months. When Lo was released, he found the notoriety of his case had led to significant demand for his technical expertise. He now worked the other side of the street, so to speak, sweeping and debugging, usually for major corporations, but also for persons wary of snooping by spouses and partners, not to mention the government. He was calling from Robbie's office, to which Feaver had admitted him before coming to see me.

  "It's clean," Lo told me, but he could not say that Sennett hadn't shut down, anticipating the sweep. Klecker had had such free access to the line cabinet in the building that it might have been no more than a matter of throwing a switch. Lo offered to do Robbie's car and house next, but Feaver was certain his two calls to Magda had come from the office.

  I looked out to the river below, where the city lights swam on the currents. It remained possible that Sennett had tapped Magda's chambers for other reasons. Perhaps Bobbie had wandered into a trap set for someone else. But he found that idea laughable.

  "Magda's a quality person. She wouldn't even know how to be a crook." So where? I asked, Where did Stan get probable cause for the bug?

  Feaver's black eyes were still, but if he knew, he wasn't telling me.

  CHAPTER 18

  McManis phoned Evon at home that night. He had never done that before and he stayed with the cover, telling her he hadn't received a copy of Feaver's brief in a case in which his reply was due the next day. He insisted, cordially but firmly, that she bring it to his office right now.

  He unlocked the door himself. Past 8 p.m., the LeSueur Building had a ghost town feeling. A cleaning man ran a floor buffer down the corridor, but aside from the security guards, he was the only person she'd seen about. Somewhere, young lawyers were toiling, but they were confined like secrets, given away only by the occasional scattered lights visible from the street.

  McManis told her the story in bold strokes. Her heart rippled at one point when she thought he was about to play her the tape, but Jim proved too old-fashioned for that. Shame was her predominant reaction anyway. It felt as if someone had poured battery acid into her veins. She had been placed in Feaver's office to prevent, or detect, episodes exactly like this.

  "So I look real good on this thing," she said when Jim finished. From experience, she'd have expected something forgiving from McManis, his usual faint, silent smile. But his light eyes were still as he studied her. Jim had his tie down, his sleeves rolled. Two cartons of Chinese were at the end of the long conference table, one of them emitting an overpowering odor of garlic.

  "And you had no clue on this?" he asked. "No idea about this judge?"

  'Clong' was the agent term, the rush of shit to the heart when you suddenly saw you'd screwed up. Sure, she knew. There was that remark about messing around with a judge which Feaver had made after the first time they'd seen Walter.

  "Anybody else hear about that?" McManis asked. He was fully focused, intent. She drummed her fingers. She had told Alf, who had a persistent lurid curiosity concerning Robbie's catting about.

  "Alf?" McManis looked to the fake grain of the conference table as he pondered. Behind the steel door, the night sounds of the city were held at astonishing distance. "Somebody backdoored me on this," Jim finally said. "Alf must have let it slip. Maybe to the local agents on the surveillance. But Sennett knew. And he went around me. He handed me a signed warrant on Friday morning, told me to get Alf to do the installation. No details. He must have used the IRS guys to nail down the probable cause. I didn't understand what he was ticked about." McManis flexed his hand, on which the fingers were slightly clubbed. His usual comfortable manner had worn down. If he was from D.C.and his comments over the weeks had largely confirmed that-he'd been through this before. You ran with the big dogs in that town. Got crackbacked and bushwhacked and cut down at the knees. Still. It wasn't Jim.

  "He was sending us a message," Jim said. "Me. And you. About staying on our toes. He wants you inside this guy's shirt from now on. He already said as much. You're with him whenever he leaves home."

  Her impulse as always was to defend herself. Robbie had made it sound as if the relationship was long over.

  "Then learn the lesson. Anything like this in the future, some mention of other judges, any hints, you better let me know." The rebuke was mildly spoken but it burned through her. "And when he starts talking-" McManis weighed what he was saying. "You've got to try to draw him out. More. See if you can. God knows what else there might be like this."

  More. Evon nearly laughed. More and she'd need to borrow a couch from a shrink. Or somebody's wet suit. But McManis's expression allowed no room for humor. Jim's mouth worked around what he was going to say next.

  "This isn't the nicest part," he said and looked at her directly, so she didn't miss the meaning. She considered the advice in the strange hush of the building and tried not to shake her head. "It's not easy," Jim said. "UC is the hardest. And you know, Feaver-" Jim shrugged. "I've sort of gotten to like the guy. In his way."

  "In his way," she agreed.

  McManis smiled. "I like him-" He checked himself there and gave his head, and his boyish do, the tiniest shake. There was a leased car for her in the basement garage, McManis told her. She'd see Feaver in and out the door to his house every day now.

  As she drove home, she felt her emotions collecting in a familiar way, sliding into humiliation. She felt hammered down by it, more ponderously now that she was alone. When it came back up again, by the time she'd closed the dead bolt inside her apartment, it had made its inevitable transformation to anger, her ferocious companion. She'd been played! Played by Robert S. Feaver, future felon and full-time slimeball. She was even enraged with McManis, who was doing what bosses do in bad situations, sending her in two different directions at once, asking her to be warier at the same time she was supposed to lead the guy along. They had the wrong girl for that. There wasn't that kind of art to her. If she didn't respect McManis so much she'd have told him so.

  "Fucking Sennett," she said aloud. Game player. Powermonger. "I hate that shit." Playing the Mormon girl, she'd reverted for months to the vocabulary she'd used in high school. The curse words resounding aroun
d the apartment struck her as childishly amusing. Fucking Sennett. She laughed then. She'd just realized what it was McManis was going to say. About Feaver. At the end.

  He was going to say, I like him more than Stan.

  At 6 A.M., she was parked outside Feaver's house, blocking the driveway. He didn't ask why. He knew it was coming. For cover, though, they'd still travel in the Mercedes. Settling in, she slammed the door with a powerful heave. He did not look her way as she frumped around in the seat.

  "I'm gonna be out here every morning now, bucko. And I'm gonna be seeing your wandering behind through the door every night. And I'm calling every two hours to make sure you've stayed put. I'm even tying a string around your ankle when you go to the potty."

  He flirted with a smile, then apparently reconsidered under the circumstances.

  "Do you have just the smallest clue how bad you made me look?" she asked.

  When he turned, his expression-its harshness-was shocking.

  "Cut the crap. I know you dimed me out on this. I know you went right to Sennett when I said I'd had a thing with a judge."

  "I only wish I had, Robbie."

  "Did you listen in on my phone calls, too?"

  "Sure," she said. "Absolutely. I record them on that wire I'm wearing. Sennett's up all night listening to the output."

  They were driving. There'd been a frost again last night and the windshields of the cars at the curbs were glazed with what looked like large snowflakes. He made a bitter remark: Everything with her was business.

  "You're not gonna do this," she said "You're not gonna embarrass the hell out of me and then try to make me feel bad cause you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar. You're not going to do that, Feaver."