“Does a guy named Derek Manley, who owns part of the club, come here much?”
“Asshole.”
“Who, me?”
“Him. Manley. Every time he walk by he think he entitled to squeeze.”
“I guess he’s a hands-on owner. I’m looking for his car.”
“What are you, repo?”
“Of a sort.”
“Well, if it’s that asshole’s car chou looking for, there’s a bunch of locked up sheds in the back.”
“Keys?”
“Hanging in the office.”
“And the back door.”
“Through the office.”
“Thanks. You don’t happen to be Esmerelda, do you?”
“That’s me.”
“The Brazilian Firecracker.”
“Chou know my work?”
“Absolutely. By the way, nice shoes.”
“Really?”
It didn’t take long to find the office, a cheesy little place with thin wood paneling and a cat calendar. What kind of strip joint owner has a cat calendar hanging on his wall? Made me wonder what was hanging at the SPCA. Rothstein was on the phone and he stood up and waved his arms like a traffic cop when we entered, but we ignored him. I walked past Rothstein to the back door, popped a jumble of keys off a hook, tossed them once in my hand, and headed outside.
There was an alleyway behind the club with a bunch of sagging garage sheds on either side. Beth and the tow truck were there, waiting.
Rothstein followed us out. “I’m getting my lawyer on the phone,” he said. “He’s in a meeting right now.”
“You owe him money, right?” I said.
“How’d you know?”
“And you got tax problems?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Then take my word, it’s going to be a long meeting.”
I stepped to the shed closest to the club, fiddled with the keys, found one finally that fit, turned the lock. I reached down and pulled up the door: a bunch of old tables, a couple of sagging, stained couches, dented metal beer kegs, a pile of trashed speakers, mops. I didn’t even want to imagine what the mops had mopped. I pulled the door closed.
I strode over to the shed next to the first and fiddled again with the keys. I reached down, pulled open the door: a busted-up motorcycle, cardboard boxes with water damage, four decrepit mattresses leaning one against the next. It was amazing how much junk people saved for that one time when they might just have four moldy guests who needed four moldy mattresses.
“The club rents these out,” said Rothstein. “We only use the first one you opened. There’s nothing in the rest but crap. It’s a nation of crap. You’re welcome to it, but it ain’t what the paper says you can take and it ain’t worth a hundred thousand dollars, no way no how. All together it ain’t worth six bucks.”
I turned another lock, reached down, pulled up another door: mannequins, naked mannequins piled high in the middle of the space, arms and legs in a strange geometric confusion like a plastic orgy without genitalia. And on the side, neatly stacked, dozens of boxes with advertising printed on their sides. I looked closer. VCRs. Camcorders. DVD players. Stereos. Computer monitors. Not so kosher, whatever it was, but not a clue who they belonged to and not a car. I yanked the door down. It slid closed with a roar.
I took two steps toward the next shed and stopped. Something Earl Dante had said sparked in my memory. Manley sent his trucks all over the northeast, said Dante, delivering to department stores. Department stores. And what do they have in department stores but mannequins and DVD players. It wouldn’t be out of character for Derek to boost what he could from the shipments. I turned back and lifted that door once again.
There it was. Right there. What I hadn’t noticed before. Behind the wild pile of plastic limbs was a black covering. The mannequins weren’t just lying all over one another, they were lying atop something covered by the black tarp. I stepped forward, reached through legs and arms, past dazed faces and pointed toes, and grabbed hold of a piece of the thick black cloth. I yanked it aside.
A headlight.
“You’ll hear about this,” Rothstein said.
“I suppose I will.”
“Derek won’t be happy.”
“I suppose he won’t.” I thumbed at the boxes. “Are these yours?”
Rothstein looked at the stacked boxes and his eyes blinked a bit as he did the calculation of how connected he wanted to be to a load of stolen electronics. “Never saw them before in my life,” he said finally.
“Then we’ll take them too, is that all right, R.T.?”
“It’s your seizure,” said R.T.
“Derek won’t be happy,” said Rothstein.
“I suppose not,” I said. “The name’s Victor Carl. Carl with a C. Derek will know how to get hold of me.”
Chapter
24
WHERE SIT THE honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court?
Any place they want to.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a lovely chamber in the statehouse in Harrisburg, with fine leather chairs and murals on the walls and a great stained-glass dome, but who the hell wants to sit in Harrisburg? So there is a courtroom in Philadelphia and a courtroom in Pittsburgh and satellite chambers in each of those cities, and the honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court can pretty much work anyplace they choose. Which is why Justice Jackson Straczynski spent most of his time in his hometown of Philadelphia.
It’s not a bad life, the State Supreme Court life, the pay is high, the perks many, and the justices get to wear those boss robes. A lot of lawyers have their eyes on that particular prize and there is only one small requirement for getting your very own seat: enough votes. Aye, there’s the rub. It takes not merit to rise to Pennsylvania’s highest court, just politics.
What do you get when you mix justice and politics?
The Marx Brothers starring in Duck Soup.
I don’t mean to paint the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as a bunch of vaudeville clowns honking horns and making wisecracks to Margaret Dumont, but then I don’t have to, they do a good enough job themselves. And I’m even not talking here of their legal decisions, which are generally considered boneheaded at best and venal at worst. The court is infamous for charges of ethical violations, countercharges of case fixing, vulgar insults hurled from justice to justice in the public press. One guy got impeached for sending his employees out to buy Valium and jockstraps. I’m not making this up. He used the subterfuge so his enemies wouldn’t suspect he was crazy. They suspected him anyway when he wore the jockstrap on his head. No, the honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have not covered themselves with glory. All except for Justice Jackson Straczynski.
Justice Straczynski was the most respected jurist to ever sit on that court, a brilliant legal scholar who used economic theory to slice through the Gordian knots of the most difficult legal problems. His great legal treatise, The Economic Laws of Constitutional Interpretation, once a fixture only on the bookshelves of the most conservative law student and right wing legal activist, had become, with the rightward tilt of the U.S. Supreme Court, a staple desktop reference for every constitutional scholar in the country.
After a stint making policy at the Department of Justice for Ronald Reagan, and a period teaching law at the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater, Straczynski was tapped by the Republican Party to run for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He wasn’t much of a campaigner, his speaking style was likened to that of an aardvark on Quaaludes, but it just so happened that during the campaign he published a much-publicized article interpreting the Second Amendment to protect the unequivocal right to buy and bear anything with a trigger. Two things are wildly popular in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, guns and funnel cakes, both are tasty, both are deadly, but if the state’s denizens had to pick one, well, you can’t kill an eight-point buck with a funnel cake, now can you? Straczynski won his election in a walk and now he sat on the state’s highest court,
writing uncompromising decisions of uncompromised brilliance and waiting for that call from Washington. The pundits all said it was coming.
“So we agree, right, Kimberly,” I said, as we sat side by side on the beige couch in the justice’s wood-lined waiting room, “I’ll do all the questioning, you’ll just sit quiet and watch the show.”
“Whatever.”
Kimberly glanced at the stern-eyed secretary with the high gray hair manning the desk in the middle of the room. “But remember,” Kimberly said in a hushed voice, “Mr. D definitely wants his name kept out of this.”
“Mr. D?”
“Sure. He was very clear about it.”
“Okay.”
She sat for a moment, something obviously bothering her. “What if a question sort of pops out of my mouth on its own?”
“Gosh, I hope it doesn’t. He might not want to tell us his favorite boy band.”
“Excuse me?”
I looked her up and down. She was dressed like quite the career woman, so long as the career was taking place in the early 1960s, bright green faux-Chanel business suit, matching heels, and small clutch.
“You look like a bowl of Jell-O in that getup,” I said.
“We’re visiting a judge, right? This is my government outfit. Mint green, get it?”
She gave a little smile, but the way she bit her lower lip with nervousness made me feel like a jerk. She had that way, did Kimberly.
“Okay,” I said. “Ask what you want. But my advice would be to say as little as possible to this guy. He’s not your usual drunken frat boy.”
Just as I said that a tall man in a black suit came into the waiting room. “Mr. Carl, Ms. Blue,” he said, his voice gilded with an Island lilt. “My name is Curtis Lobban,” said the man. “I am Justice Straczynski’s file clerk.”
Curtis Lobban stood straight and tall, with the deep voice and dignified manner of a dignitary, his dark suit, broad shoulders, and the gray at his temples all added mightily to the effect. He held in himself the same hush of serious purpose that pervaded the entire suite of offices and he looked down at me with a gaze of thinly veiled contempt that made me feel every inch the two-bit hustler invading some grand temple of the law. I jumped to standing at the sight of him, fighting the urge to salute.
“Pleased to meet you, Curtis,” I said. “We talked on the phone, I believe.”
“Yes, we did,” he said slowly.
I reached out a hand to shake, but Curtis Lobban, his face as somber as his outfit, refused the proffer. Pleased to meet me too, obviously.
“The justice, he is sorry to have kept you both waiting and is ready to see you now. Follow me, please.”
He turned and led us out of the waiting area into a large library, its walls lined with huge sets of law books. State reporters, federal reporters, U.S. Supreme Court reporters, digests of all sorts. Two young lawyers, a man and a woman, were hard at work at a conference table, books piled around them, legal pads thick with notes. Gnawing at the pylons supporting the Bill of Rights like hungry termites, I figured. They both gave Kimberly a long look. Kimberly always drew long looks, especially dressed in mint green, but the clerks barely noticed my presence, and why should they? Only the best and brightest clerked for Justice Jackson Straczynski, and I was neither. They only paid me enough notice to wonder what the hell I was doing there. What the hell indeed?
It’s not so easy to get close to a Supreme Court justice, even a State Supreme Court justice, so I hadn’t expected much when I called that morning before running off to seize Manley’s Eldorado. I mentioned my name, I mentioned Tommy Greeley, I waited on the phone a bit. And then it was this Curtis Lobban who came on the line. “What is the purpose of the inquiry?” he asked in his deep somber voice. “It is personal and I can’t say anymore,” I said. “Hold on for a moment please,” he said. I waited, and when he came back on the phone I was told, shockingly, that the justice would see me that very afternoon.
So here we were, Kimberly and I, passing by the serious young law clerks, headed for a visit with their august boss, Tommy Greeley’s old college pal.
“Right through here,” said Curtis Lobban, courteously holding open a door at the far end of the library. We stepped through the doorway and into a Moorish fantasy.
Most judges go for the tree and tome look for their offices, you know what I mean, dark wood paneling, bookshelves filled with thick legal texts, tree and tome, all designed to give the office a sheen of serious scholarship so often lacking in the robe’s wearer. But Justice Straczynski’s office was nothing of the kind. The walls were a rich red, pillars of golden fabric fell from iron pikes, the ceiling was patterned with octagonal indentations painted in a riot of colors. Ornate arches rose above each window, the arches covered with intricate paintings of vines and flowers, and the wooden floor was covered with piles of oriental carpets. Dark wooden furniture scattered across the room was accessorized with plush pillows, maroon and gold, intricate geometric shapes in the weave. The justice’s desk was less a workplace than a fantastically carved piece of oriental sculpture straight from the Ottoman Empire. The whole place, scented lightly with sandalwood, was like the official chamber of a pasha’s grand vizier.
The justice was hunched over at his desk, his back turned, on the phone, and so I took the opportunity to examine his strangely exotic office. I walked around, dazed by the beauty and strangeness of the room. There was no ego wall in the office, no pictures of the justice with presidents and senators and movie stars. But there was, carved into one corner, a series of shelves with ceremonial objects. Tiny Japanese statuettes carved of ivory and jade, fertility fetishes from India, masks from Africa. There was a frame made out of Mayan slate surrounding a picture of a very young woman taken from the neck up, a lovely woman with a heart-shaped face, downcast eyes, and shy smile, her shoulders bare, her head held in an overly dramatic pose. And something out of place among the splendors of the distant world, a garish and tall fencing trophy with a golden swordsman on top captured in the midst of a lunge.
“When was this?” said the justice, still on the phone. His voice was deep, sharp, and slow. Like, well, like an aardvark on Quaaludes. “And what did he take?”
Something moved beside me. I backed away. There was a long dark divan covered with pillows by the shelves and in the space beneath the divan crouched a cat, purely white. It stared at me for a long moment and then stepped arrogantly past me. In the darkness behind the first cat, two green eyes glittered.
“Yes. I see. I will do what I can. But you knew this could happen.”
In front of his desk were two chairs with brilliant golden upholstery. I joined Kimberly standing behind them and waited.
“Be patient. I will talk to him and try to find out what is happening, but calm down. Getting so upset doesn’t help anything.”
He turned around, saw us, startled for a moment at the sight of Kimberly, and then smoothed the features of his face back to his basic bland. He motioned us to sit in the chairs and we did. He was a thin, elegant man, wearing his suit coat even in his office. His hair was blond and wispy, his face was round and youthful, though slightly askew.
“I know you’re angry and scared,” he said, still on the phone. “So am I. But we have to deal with this the right way. Now I have some people in my office. Yes. Of course. I’ll talk to you later. Don’t do anything hasty that you will later regret. Yes. Bye now.”
He hung up the phone and gave us an awkward, almost embarrassed smile, as if he had been caught at something. “My mother,” he said. “She’s been complaining of dizziness so she went to the doctor. Now she’s complaining about all the tests the doctor has taken and about his communication skills. And when he tells her she is perfectly healthy she’ll be complaining about that too.”
“This office is like, oh my God,” said Kimberly.
“My wife designed it.” He raised his brows, the time-honored dismissal of a wife’s eccentricities. “I gave her carte blanche and as usua
l she exceeded her limit. I believe I recognize you, Mr. Carl. Have you been before the Court?”
“I’ve never had the honor, no. But some of my cases have been notorious. Maybe you’ve seen me on the local news.”
“I don’t watch television,” he said. “Do you perhaps have artistic talent?”
“None,” I said, cheerfully. “Not a lick. I am as artistic as a brick.”
“That’s a relief. My wife seems to collect artists. I am inundated with artists. So we haven’t met?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Just as well. And you, Miss Blue”—he paused and examined her closely for a moment—“are you a lawyer too?”
“No. Please. I’m a vice president.”
“Really? Excellent. Is there perhaps a school for vice presidents at the University of Pennsylvania? I didn’t know. Did you get a graduate degree in vice presidenting?”
“Not really. They just sort of hired me.”
“Who hired you?”
Kimberly didn’t answer.
“What’s the matter, Miss Blue? You’re suddenly silent.”
Just then the white cat jumped atop an ash can and then the desk. It strolled across the desktop and dropped into the justice’s lap. The justice curled one of his arms around it and bowed his neck as he stroked its head. The cat stretched its back and gave me a victorious sneer.
“Did you eat Miss Blue’s tongue, Marshall,” he said to the cat. “Naughty boy. Give it back.” He laughed a high, ugly laugh.
Kimberly blushed. I wondered how he had known she had gone to Penn.
“Miss Blue works for a client, which wishes to remain anonymous at this point,” I said.
“Of course it does,” said the justice. “Do you like cats, Mr. Carl?”
“Not especially.”
“You’re a dog person then.”
“I prefer fish. With a beurre blanc and a glass of Chablis.”
He glanced up at me in disapproval and then back to his cat. “I like cats. I like their softness, their independence. Their discretion. I like that they don’t crap all over the place. Shall we now discuss the weather, or maybe sports? Do you want to discuss baseball, Mr. Carl?”
Past Due Page 16
