Collar Robber (13 page)

The Second Thursday in April

Chapter Thirty-two

Cynthia Jakubek

I picked up Davidovich's message at eight o'clock the morning. I was shouldering my way through a throng of drunks, wife-beaters, hookers, street-hustlers, first-offense (sure) shoplifters, and bar brawlers in the hallway outside Branch 2 of the City of Pittsburgh Municipal Court. I got the “it's important” part, but it wasn't as important to me as stalking a client, which is what had brought me to this Hogarthian hallway.

Not that I had any interest in Muni Court work. I'd do insurance defense before making a career out of that. George Fenzing, however, wasn't your average Muni Court defendant. A Pittsburgh cop had clocked him doing fifty-two in a thirty-five zone, and he'd find himself right on the edge of a license suspension if things went too far south this morning.

None of which mattered a whit to me. All I cared about was that his company, Shear Genius Precision Cutting Tools, Inc., had just had a high six-figure judgment entered against it in a suit by a distributor claiming wrongful termination. This morning I planned to bump into Fenzing, introduce myself, shake his hand, wish him luck, and scoot back to my office. That way, I could email him later in the day that I'd handle an appeal of the verdict on a straight contingent fee basis—no fee if I lost—without breaking the rule against solicitation, because I'd be contacting an “acquaintance” instead of making a cold call.

No Fenzing in the hallway. Nuts. Inside the courtroom I spotted him in deep conference with an early-fifties white male who was probably his lawyer and a mid-twenties African-American woman with all the earmarks of an overworked assistant city attorney. Talking plea bargain, no doubt, so I'd have to bide my time.

I decided to stay in the courtroom to keep my eye on him. Mistake. Judge Monica Childress promptly took the bench. Fenzing
et al
. adjourned to somewhere less public to continue their discussion. Childress' clerk called “City v. Washington” and a slight, aging African American male in clothes straight off the Goodwill rack stepped forward to answer a citation for “loitering or prowling.” Translation: a cop had decided Washington was up to no good when he wandered onto a parking lot. The clerk asked him how he pled. “Not guilty!” he shouted angrily. “And I wants a lawyer!” Not clear that he had a right to one, but Judge Childress didn't go in much for legal research. Gripping her gavel at the hammer-end like a pistol, she pointed the handle's tip straight at yours truly.

“Congratulations, Counsel, you just got a new client. Ten minutes to confer. Call the next case.”

No point in arguing. I took my client and a postcard-sized arrest report out into the corridor. Twenty seconds to read the card and another forty to get Clarence Washington's story: “I'm walkin' to the river, kickin' a can along the sidewalk, and the can go into this parkin' lot, see? I goes in to get it, an' I sees a pack o' cigs. Or I thinks it is. Turned out it was empty. Next thing I know Bull Connor in there is cuffin' me.” So I was ready for trial with nine minutes to spare.

“Got it,” I told Washington as I took my phone out to speed-dial Willy.

“You know who Bull Connor was?”

I tapped Willy's icon and glanced up at Washington.

“Sort of. Top cop in, what, Birmingham or maybe Selma during civil rights demonstrations in the early sixties…Hey, Willy, this is CJ.”

“Yo. What's up?”

“You think we gots a chance? 'Cause I can't pay no fifty dollah,” Washington said.

“Just a second, Willy.”

I turned my face back to my new client. I looked into eyes where rage, despair, and resignation fought losing battles with each other. I kicked myself in the butt for acting like an asshole.
This is your CLIENT! Treat him like one!

“The odds are ten-to-one against us, Mr. Washington. The judge already thinks you're guilty. We'll have to move her off that.”

“Can you do that?”

“Don't know, but I'm going to give it a shot.”

He gave me a decisive nod, as if this were good news. I went back to Willy.

“Sorry about the interruption, tiger. Here's why I called. Transoxana has keyhole peepers looking for the lady we discussed.”

“von Leuthen?”

“That's the one. We'd like to find out what they find out.”

“Damn right we would.”

“So the game is I'll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. What dope can we give them in exchange for theirs? If whatever you wanted to see her about is off the table, what else can we tell them that they don't already know?”

Long pause, accompanied by the sound of a lengthy exhale.

“I don't know,” he said at last. “I'll have to think about that.”

“Can you think about it between now and…let's see…ten-thirty?”

“Sure. Your office?”

“Yes. And bring Amber.”

Reholstering my phone, I returned my attention to Clarence Washington.

“What was the can?”

“Wha'?”

“The can you were kicking. What was it?”

“They wants us back in the court.”

He pointed to an open door where a bailiff was gesturing to us. I grabbed the threadbare serge coat that had once been half of a suit.

“Can, Mr. Washington. What was the can you were kicking?”

“Oh. Sprite, I guess. Yeah, thass it. Sprite.”

Okay.

“Nice of you to join us, Counsel,” Judge Childress said thirty seconds later as we strode up to the bench.

“Ready for the defense, your honor.”

She scowled over at the assistant city attorney who'd drawn Clarence Washington's case.

“Call your first witness.”

The arresting officer stood to the city attorney's left, facing the judge. No witness stand in this courtroom. He took the oath and said he'd spotted the defendant casing cars in the fenced-in parking lot of a private company and had arrested him because he couldn't give a plausible reason for being there. Feeling Washington's eyes on me, I leaned a little to my right so that I could look the officer in the face while I cross-examined him.

“Mr. Washington identified himself to you when you asked him to, officer?”

“Yes.”

“And he gave you his correct name?”

“Yes.”

“He did give you an explanation for being in the parking lot, didn't he?”

“He tried one on me.”

“You just didn't buy, it, right?”

“You got that right. In my professional judgment based on seventeen years as a law enforcement officer, he was there casing cars.”

“By the way, this ‘fenced in' parking lot had openings in the fence so people could walk in and walk out, right?”

“Yes.”

“You didn't have to open a gate or climb over the fence to get in, did you?”

“No.”

“Hurry it up, Counsel,” Childress said impatiently. “This isn't Trial Practice One-Oh-One.”

“When you arrested Mr. Washington, you searched him, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Reviewing your report, I don't see any mention of a slimjim or a tire iron or a heavy wrench that someone might use to break into a car. Did I miss something?”

“No, I didn't find anything like that.”

I glanced at Washington to draw the judge's eyes to him so that she could try to imagine the smallish man breaking a car window with his bare hands.

“Did you look for an empty soda can?”

“I didn't see one.”

“My question was did you look for one.”

“Not specifically.” He looked a little nervously at the judge as she bristled.

“One more question, Counsel,” she said icily.

“Very well, Officer, one more question. In your seventeen years as a law enforcement officer, how many well-dressed white men have you arrested for ‘loitering or prowling'?”

“All right, that's it,” Childress said. “The witness is excused.”

Washington then told his story. He even remembered to say he'd been kicking a Sprite can. The city attorney was new at trial work, so his cross-examination consisted of having Washington repeat the story. Childress instantly found Washington guilty, making some crack about how, “the game here wasn't kick the can but liar-liar-pants-on-fire. Forty-dollar civil forfeiture. You have—”

“Waive reading of appellate rights.” I snapped that instead of just saying it. “We'll file an appeal for trial
de novo
in the Court of Common Pleas and a jury demand by nine o'clock.”

Childress gave me a look that could strip chrome from a semi's bumper.

“Counsel, you realize that the appellate filing fee is fifty dollars, right?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“And that it is non-refundable, even if you win?”

“Yes.” Oops. Actually, I hadn't known that. But I was in way too deep to back out now.

“Why are you going to spend fifty dollars to try to overturn a forty-dollar fine?”

“On the record or off the record, your honor?”

“Off the record. I want to hear this.”

“Because your ruling pisses me off.”

“First straight answer I've gotten from a lawyer in six months.” She shook her head. “Submit a chit and I'll sign off on half-an-hour for your work this morning. I don't think your appeal has substantial merit, though, so good luck with getting a
per diem
on that one.”

Well, if I end up handling it pro bono it'll be a thousand years off my time in Purgatory—and I can use it.
I managed not to say that out loud.

As I was showing Washington out into the hallway, I spotted Fenzing and company in back of the courtroom, presumably waiting to tell the judge about their plea bargain. Judging from his expression, Fenzing didn't think much of the deal his lawyer had cut. Introducing myself to him right now looked like a low-percentage play. Washington had a major glow on, but it was wasted on me.

Even so, I let him get it out of his system—“Man, I gots
Perry Mason
up there! How'd she rule against us, anyhow?” I told him what the whole appeal thing meant. The main thing it meant to Washington for the moment was that cops couldn't run him in for not paying an outstanding fine just because he struck them as an unsightly blot on a downtown sidewalk some afternoon.

I gave him my card and we parted company. I turned back toward the courtroom and waited for Fenzing and his lawyer to come out. When they did, Fenzing looked like an eight-year-old who'd just been spanked in public. A world-class chewing out from Judge Childress can do that. Some survival-of-the-fittest instinct must have alerted his lawyer to what I had in mind. He moved smoothly in between me and Fenzing.

“Nice job in there playing a tough hand. Call it a moral victory.”

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I decided to go provisionally with the ten percent chance that this guy was a genuinely empathetic professional colleague instead of a condescending prick.

“Thanks, but I'm not a great believer in moral victories. If a case goes to decision you win or you lose. So far I've lost, but the fat lady hasn't even warmed up her voice yet.”

Fenzing brusquely pulled his lawyer out from between us.

“Do you handle all kinds of cases, or just stuff like this?”

“General corporate and commercial trial and appellate work and counseling.”

“Do you have a card?”

“Sure.” I handed him one.

“Thanks. Before much longer I might be looking for a lawyer with some balls.”

Chapter Thirty-three

Jay Davidovich

Father Utica and I were wrapping up his call-back when the shysterette's call came in. I figured Jakubek really wanted to talk to me and the
padre
was mostly being polite, so I decided not to cut our conversation short.

“It doesn't particularly surprise me that the Vienna police had my name,” he said as the shysterette went into voice-mail.

“Why is that?”

“I spent a term at a school in Linz called Katholisch Theologische Privatuniversitad, taking advanced scriptural studies. German scriptural scholarship is world renowned. For almost fifty years, the seminary where I'm rector now has been sending promising students there if they have a little German.”

For some reason the university name sounded familiar, and I couldn't think of any reason why it should have. I had a witness to locate, though, so I went on with my conversation.

“Your studies there had to be quite a while ago.”

“Well over thirty years. But Austrian police are very thorough.”

I shook my head. I'd give you six-to-one under a full moon that the Vienna cops had gotten Father Utica's name from something they'd found on or near Ertel's body, not from a local college's foreign student records. No sense arguing with a source who's trying to be helpful, though, and I thought Utica was.

“Thanks, Father. Listen, would you mind texting me the name of that university?” Including a phonetic spelling that would look like gibberish in the report I sent Proxy would ruin her day. Might even cause her to indulge in an extra carrot stick as comfort food.

“Certainly, Mr. Davidovich. I'll get it to you within the hour. Please feel free to call me again if I can be of further help.”

I thanked him again and hung up. Something he'd said was tickling an overworked neuron somewhere in my brain. I was anxious to talk to Jakubek, though, so I couldn't fuss with it right then.

“Thanks for calling back,” I said when I reached her. “von Leuthen is an interesting lady. I'd like to have a little heart-to-heart with her. Any idea how I can get in touch?”'

“Nope. I've got something else for you, though, if you're willing to tell me what's so interesting about her.”

“Sure.” I yawned and stretched. “You go first.”

“The Taser used in that elevator job was stolen from my client's condo.”

“What?” I sat up straight in a hurry.

“It gets better. The guy who stole it was bidding on the bill of sale that Transoxana ended up buying.”

“And who is this guy?”

“No name, but a description. Amber, you're on.”

“Okay,” a different female voice said. “So. I surprised him while he was doing the place. He busted me one, but I got a look at his head. Black hair cut real short, like a soldier's, and brownish skin. But not real dark brown like a black guy's skin. 'Cause his face looked like a white guy's face, not like a black guy's, you know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“And there's one more thing. He'd gotten a pretty good clop in the chops not long before. His nose was swollen and bandaged, and he had a black eye. I mean, someone clocked him a good one. You know what I mean?”

“Yes.” Someone like me, for example.

Amber's description could have covered the wheelman who'd picked up Ertel after I'd relieved him of Proxy's attaché case. Of course, it could have covered a thousand other guys as well. But I didn't see any way Amber or Szulz or Jakubek would have known about our little dust-up, and no one ever went broke betting against coincidence.

Fair's fair. I told Jakubek and Amber (and, I assumed, Szulz) what I knew about Frau von Leuthen.

“She sounds interesting more in a
Letters to Penthouse
sort of way than in a fine arts hustle kind of way,” Jakubek said.

“I don't think she high-tailed it to Geneva when she did to get a watch fixed. Do you see an innocent-bystander explanation for that?”

“It doesn't leap out at me.”

“Me, either. I'm developing a theory. I know there are things you can't tell me, so why don't I just spin it out as a hypothetical and see where we are?”

“Go ahead.”

“First point: if Taser-guy in the elevator was bidding for the bill of sale, then he had a partner. That partner happened to pass away just before I could talk to him in Vienna, and just after von Leuthen left. Second point: I'm ninety-eight percent sure your client was in Vienna that same night. Third point: your client has to be on pretty thin ice, what with a cop getting nailed with his Taser.”

“Where are we going with this?”

“I'd like to know why your client was in Vienna and whether it has anything to do with Alma von Leuthen.”

“Tell you what,” Jakubek said, “can I put you on mute for a few minutes?”

“Sure.”

A few minutes is a long damn time on a silent telephone. I put the muted phone on speaker so that I could tell when Jakubek came back on, and started reviewing emails. Nothing worth opening until I got down to one from Proxy that led to an extended dialogue:

Status on AVL contact? PVS

Nothing yet. JD

Leads? PVS

Negative. Not really going the leads route. JD

What route are you going? PVS

I replied with an eight-line response that explained the magnet theory: you get several different people sending out feelers on her from different angles, sooner or later it gets back to her—and when it does, you have a fifty-fifty chance that she contacts you just to get it over with and make the searches stop.

Okay. Keep me posted. PVS

Will do. JD

Hearing an upsurge in white noise over my speaker I picked the receiver back up.

“Okay,” Jakubek said, “I'm going to go the hypothetical route with you, just like you did with me.”

“Fine. I'm betting your hypothetical starts with, ‘If Willy was in Vienna.'”

“If Willy was in Vienna that night, it would have had nothing to do with
Eros Rising
. His interest in Alma von Leuthen, if he had any, would relate to an entirely different matter.”

“And I'm taking his word for this, right?”

“Well, you can verify it by talking to von Leuthen, if you can find her.”

“I suppose I could.”

“So I've got a deal for you. We'd both like to talk to von Leuthen. Let's agree that if you turn her up, you'll cut us in on the deal, and if we turn her up, we'll cut you in.”

I felt like a rube in New York City being offered a Rolex for fifty bucks. Alarm bells went off in my head, but that watch sure looked shiny.

“I'll need to think about that one,” I finally said.

“Fine with us. While you're thinking about it, let me finish my hypothetical.”

“Sure.”

“If Willy had been in Vienna that night, there's a pretty good chance he would have seen C. Talbot Rand there too. Have a pleasant day.”