Dog Tags ac-8

by David Rosenfelt

  In Billy’s case there is even more downside than usual. I have already conveyed to the jury our claim that there was another man present, and that Billy wrestled with him. So Billy’s saying it, while having the advantage of being straight from the horse’s mouth, wouldn’t add very much to the record.

  Then he would have to suffer through a cross-examination by Eli that would not be pretty. Billy is an admitted thief; in fact, that’s why he was there that night. Eli would harp on this until Billy looked like Jesse James. Then he would turn to the grudge Billy had against Erskine, which others have already testified to.

  There is no question in my mind that the downside is greater than the upside. Laurie agrees with my assessment, and I call Hike to get his view. I have to take it with a grain of salt, since Hike is “Mr. Downside,” but he agrees as well.

  I’m about to leave for the prison to have a final discussion about it with Billy when Cindy Spodek calls. “You’ve got your meeting,” she says. “Special Agent Dan Benson is waiting for your call.”

  I’m not surprised. “The rhodium did the trick, huh?”

  “It was like telling Superman that you knew where a kryptonite mine was.”

  “You want me to bring you up to date about what’s going on?” I ask.

  “Not particularly, unless you need help. This seems like a need-to-know situation. Benson was already pumping me for information that I was glad I didn’t have.”

  “So he’s anxious?” I ask.

  “Let’s put it this way. It’s Saturday, and he told me to give you his cell phone number. An FBI agent giving a defense attorney his cell phone number… does that strike you as anxious?”

  I hang up and head down to the prison to talk to Billy. I call Benson on the way, and we set a meeting for early afternoon at his office in Newark.

  I lay things out for Billy. I tell him our situation is grim, for reasons we have gone over repeatedly. I go on to say that I think his testimony would make things worse, but that it’s his call, and I’ll support him either way.

  “But you’re against?” he asks.

  “I am.”

  “Then we don’t do it.” Billy is pretty much the ideal client, logical, unemotional, and realistic. I wish I could be doing better for him.

  I tell him the latest developments in our investigation, which cheers him up, since it’s obvious we’re making more progress outside the courtroom than in. “The FBI agent is meeting with you on a Saturday?”

  I nod. “As soon as I leave here.”

  “He needs something.”

  “So do we.”

  As I’m about to leave, he asks, “How’s Milo?”

  “Doing fine.”

  “It just hit me that I’ll probably never see him again.”

  “I’m nowhere near prepared to say that,” I say. “But either way he’ll be well taken care of, safe, and loved.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  FBI Special Agent Dan Benson is a tall, dignified-looking man, probably in his midforties, with a touch of gray starting at the temples, preparing to advance. He has the demeanor of a man who has seen everything there is to see, at least twice, which makes his anxiousness to see me all the more surprising.

  I thought I’d have to force my way into a meeting, and here they are laying out the red carpet. I think they would have sent a limo to my house.

  Once I’m settled in, Benson gets right to it. “You wanted this meeting.”

  I nod. “I did.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I want to see my client acquitted, and I think you know he didn’t murder Erskine.”

  “How would I know that?” he asks.

  “Seconds after the fatal shot was fired, three men were on the scene. One checked on Erskine, and the others ran after the shooter, a guy by the name of Jerry Harris. Based on the way they were dressed, they were either FBI agents or on their way home from a hardware convention.”

  I wait for him to respond, but he stays silent, so I push on. “Right after the murder, you were so interested in Milo that you intervened to have an armed guard stationed in front of his cage twenty-four hours a day. A few days later, I went to court to get him released, and you did absolutely nothing to stop me.”

  “And you read that how?”

  “Between those two events, Harris’s body was discovered. You had been tracking him; my guess is you wanted him to lead you to his bosses. But you lost him in the chaos after the murder, and when he was found dead, you covered it up. By then you needed something else to draw those bosses out. You were hoping Milo could do that, but he couldn’t do it in a guarded cage.”

  “It’s Saturday, and it’s been a long week,” he says. “Can you move this along?”

  “Sure. Your men know my client is innocent, yet you’ve let him sit in jail and face this trial. Using a technical legal term, that was a shitty thing to do. So you need to step forward and fix that.”

  I’m far from sure that I’m right in all the things I’m saying, but I learned a long time ago that in these situations it’s best to sound confident. That confidence is increasing because of the fact that he hasn’t thrown me out or laughed at me yet.

  Instead he changes the subject, though the two subjects are going to be related in any negotiation we might have. “You mentioned rhodium.”

  “I did.”

  “What about it?”

  “The mine explosion in South Africa and the explosion in Iraq were caused by the same people for the same reason,” I say. “To move the market and make money.”

  “Do you know who those people are?”

  I shake my head. “Not yet; not all of them. But I will.”

  “If you share with us what you know, and if it’s accurate, then we can use our resources to find out the rest.”

  “Did you forget the part where I said my goal is to get my client acquitted?”

  “This is the United States of America,” he says. “We can’t intervene in a criminal trial.”

  “First of all, that’s bullshit; you can get the charges dropped if you want to. Second of all, that’s bullshit; your men were on the scene; they were eyewitnesses and can clear Billy with their testimony. Third of all, that’s bullshit; you know damn well that Jerry Harris killed Erskine. And fourth of all, that’s bullshit.”

  “Carpenter…”

  “Why do you care so much, anyway? You and the army whitewashed the Iraq report. I can’t imagine the South Africa explosion is a national security issue, and…”

  Just then it hits me why he’s so interested, and I can’t believe I didn’t realize it earlier. “… you care about what’s going to happen next. You think there’s a third shoe to drop.”

  “You don’t want this kind of blood on your hands,” he says, an almost direct admission that I’m right.

  “Here’s what I’ve got on my hands,” I say. “I’ve got a client who is depending on me. I am legally bound to represent him to the best of my ability, and right now that requires me to tell you to kiss my ass.”

  I turn and leave the office and go to my car. It takes me a few seconds to get the key in the ignition, because my hands are shaking so bad.

  CHAPTER 78

  “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO.” I make this admission to Laurie and Hike, gathered at the house for a Sunday-morning strategy session. “Usually I know what the right thing to do legally and morally is, and then it’s up to me whether to do it or not. But this time I don’t even know that.”

  “So he implied that there was going to be another incident, and that you could help prevent it?” Hike asks.

  “He did more than imply it; he beat me over the head with it. He said I don’t want to have this kind of blood on my hands.”

  “Let’s take it legally first,” Laurie says. “Am I right that your first obligation is to your client?”

  “In part; I have to defend him as best I can. I could be disbarred if I didn’t. But as a citizen, I also have the obligation to d
o my best to prevent a future crime from happening.”

  “You have no information about such a crime,” she says.

  “Benson thinks I do.”

  Laurie nods. “And two years from now you don’t want him saying it to some congressional committee, with the next day’s headline, ‘Carpenter Could Have Stopped Massacre.’”

  I’m floundering here. “So I need to cave and tell him whatever I know?”

  “I don’t think so,” Hike says. “He has the power to find out what you know by intervening in the trial. If he doesn’t, the blood is on his hands, not yours.”

  “Looking at it morally, it would be nice if we could stop blood from being on anyone’s hands,” Laurie says. “Including Billy’s.”

  We decide to hold off on making a decision for now, mainly because we can’t come up with a satisfactory one. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation like this before, and it’s scaring the hell out of me.

  I don’t want to turn on the television and see breaking news about some catastrophe that’s killed a bunch of people, with an imaginary graphic across the bottom saying “Andy Carpenter’s Fault.” But I also don’t want to wake up every morning for the rest of my life knowing Billy’s waking up in a seven-by-ten cell.

  For now, the only action I can take is to focus on figuring out what the hell is going on. To that end I call Sam, who says he is working on the phone numbers, and should have the people that Chaplin called on the cell phone in a few hours.

  “Good,” I say. “Then I’ve got another job for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know how you told me C and F positioned itself to profit from the oil and rhodium events? How they formed positions in it over some months?”

  “What about it?” he asks.

  “I want to know if it’s happening again; if they’ve put themselves in a similar position. And if they have, I want to know what commodity they’re looking to profit from.”

  “That’s not going to be easy, Andy. It’s a huge company operating in all different markets. And if I don’t know what I’m looking for…”

  “For now, limit it to the companies that bought the oil and rhodium. Only look at their trades. Does that make it easier?”

  “Much,” he says, relief in his voice.

  “Great. Call me when you have anything.”

  When I get off the phone with Sam, I go into the office, where Laurie is sitting at the computer terminal. She’s also on the phone, or at least she has it to her ear, though she’s not saying anything.

  Finally she says, “Thanks, Rob,” and hangs up. She turns to me. “Chaplin didn’t file a robbery report. The guy is definitely dirty.”

  “Or maybe he’s still lying in the driveway.”

  “If he’s not, he’s dirty. A guy gets mugged and robbed in the driveway of his house, in that neighborhood, and he doesn’t even report it? That’s a guy who doesn’t want the police anywhere near him.”

  When I get off the phone, I don’t do what I should do, which is prepare for my closing statement to the jury. Instead I obsess over the meeting with Benson, and the predicament it’s left me in.

  Benson is playing a game of chicken with me, and I feel like I’m losing. At some point I’m going to cave; my fear of being even indirectly responsible for mass deaths is too great. I’m not ready to do it yet, which I realize on some level is silly. The next disaster could come at any moment, and any delay could make me too late.

  Intellectually, I know that Benson is under at least as much pressure as I am. He has the power to find out what I know, which he believes could help avert a tragedy. Yet he is resisting doing so, just as I am resisting on my end.

  I hope he’s as scared as me.

  I finally get started on the preparation for my statement at nine o’clock, and Sam calls five minutes later. “I got something good,” he says, which is one of my favorite ways for a conversation to start.

  “I’m ready.”

  “This guy uses his cell phone a lot. He made two hundred and fifty-eight calls in the last six days. A lot of the calls were to the same number, so he called a hundred and sixty-one numbers.”

  “You’ve got a printed list?” I ask.

  “Sure. More than half of the numbers he called were companies, and they went through the company switchboards, so I can’t know who he talked to. And of course, there’s no way for me to know exactly who he spoke to when he called personal phones; more than one person could answer, you know?”

  The Declaration of Independence has a longer preamble than this. “What happened to the I’ve-got-something-good part?”

  “I’m getting there. There are three phone calls to a phone registered to Alan Landon.”

  Alan Landon is a very prominent investor-financier, and evidence of that prominence is the fact that I’ve heard of him. That is not a world that I understand or have much familiarity with. Even with Freddie’s help, I haven’t become wealthy by investing. I’ve done it the old-fashioned way: I rolled up my sleeves and inherited it.

  “You’re sure it’s the Alan Landon?” I ask, though it makes sense. Chaplin is a major player in that world; Landon is someone he could be expected to talk with at least occasionally. For all I know, Landon could be a client.

  “Positive. And the Alan Landon is the person that Chaplin called four minutes after you left his office. They talked for fourteen minutes, and then again the next morning for seven.”

  “Sam, you’re a genius.”

  “You’re just figuring that out?”

  Sam gets off the phone to get back to work on studying C&F’s recent trades, and I relate the information he gave me to Laurie. She is even more excited by it than I am, which is really saying something.

  “So you meet with him, he’s on the way to a black-tie dinner, and you scare the hell out of him. Then you leave, and he immediately makes a fourteen-minute phone call.”

  “It could have been a call he was making for business,” I say. “It might have had nothing to do with me.”

  “That’s true,” she says. “That’s what he might have done if he was innocent. If he’s guilty, he’d be doing something to protect himself in those moments. Even if it meant just sitting and thinking of a way out of the problem you created for him. Or if it meant calling someone he thought could help him.”

  “If Chaplin were innocent, he would have reported the mugging,” I say. “We know too much about him at this point to believe he’s innocent.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “And under the you-have-to-have-money-to-make-money principle, Landon fits perfectly. He’s a guy with the resources to make those kinds of investments in oil and rhodium.”

  “We’re getting somewhere with this, Andy.”

  “We’d better hurry up. The world could blow up any minute.”

  CHAPTER 79

  “THERE ARE MANY, MANY VICTIMS IN THIS CASE” is how I start my closing statement. “There have been at least twenty-one deaths of people drawn together by fate or bad luck. Probably more. Most of the victims were innocent. Some were not.

  “Mr. Morrison has told you that you should be focusing on only one of those deaths, that of Mr. Erskine, and he is partly right. That is the crime you are here to rule on, to decide beyond a reasonable doubt whether Mr. Zimmerman is guilty.

  “But common sense requires you to look further. Because eighteen people died in the explosion that cost Billy Zimmerman his leg. And at least three people were murdered after Mr. Erskine, while Billy was sitting in a jail cell. If you know that others killed twenty of those people, how can you believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Billy Zimmerman killed the twenty-first?

  “I said it in my opening statement, and I’ll say it again. Billy is not perfect; he committed three thefts. But balance that against all the good he has done, as a decorated police officer and a combat veteran. And while you’re doing the balancing, throw in the shameful way that we as a society treated him after he protected us f
or so long. After he lost his leg in the horror that was Iraq.

  “We may never know who pulled the trigger in front of the bar that night. We may never know the identities of the men who appeared mysteriously after the shot was fired, only to run off and never be seen again. The police decided they had the killer and looked no farther. They may have been well intentioned, but they were hasty, and they were wrong. It is a wrong that you have the power to right.

  “In the interests of justice, please right that wrong.”

  I sit down at the defense table, and Billy leans over and says, “Outstanding.” Hike hands me a note that says, “You’re as good as Kevin said you were.”

  But I’m not paying attention to what they are saying, nor am I doing what I usually do after my closing statement. I ordinarily obsess that I haven’t done enough and panic at the fact that there’s nothing left for me to do. There is nothing I hate more than when a case goes to the jury’s hands, and that’s what is happening now.

  This time, however, I’m thinking of something different, something I realized when I was talking about the men running onto the scene of Erskine’s murder that night.

  I had been assuming that the men were FBI agents, following Harris but losing him in the chaos after the murder. The way Billy described the scene, though, three men came out of nowhere, as if they had been lying in wait.

  I can’t imagine the bureau would have the inclination or manpower to have three people following a guy like Harris, nor do I know how they would have known to follow him in the first place. Pete described him as a hired gun out of Philadelphia; M likely employed him on a freelance basis.

  To use that much manpower, and to have them in place as they did, must mean that they were watching Erskine. And there is a damn good likelihood that Erskine knew they were there. That he even planned for them to be there.