“I hope he’s giving you danger pay for this,” she said.
“Danger pay? I’m just grateful he’s feeding me lunch,” I said. Paula rose and took a mug from a cabinet and filled it with coffee from a carafe on the counter. She passed it to me and leaned her hips against the counter next to Mike. He’d finished with the bagels and now was taking strips of smoked salmon from a white paper package and laying them on a platter.
“Well, he’s good at that. And I hope you brought a few friends, ’cause there’s enough here for ten,” Paula said, and she was right. Besides the bagels and salmon, Mike had laid out a basket of muffins, a bowl of fruit salad, a plate of sliced onions and tomatoes, and a pitcher of orange juice.
“You always say John could use some meat on his bones,” Mike said.
“You too,” Paula said, and pinched him gently at the beltline. “I also say he could use a girlfriend. You got that covered yet?”
“First things first, honey,” Mike said, and took some plates from a cabinet. Paula put some salmon and tomatoes on one and refilled her coffee mug.
“Well, much as I enjoy eavesdropping on your sordid business, I have to go into an actual courtroom next week, so I’m going down the hall to pretend to work. Eat hearty,” she said, and she left.
Mike loaded up a plate. “Let’s sit in the dining room,” he said.
I took some of everything and followed him in. The dining room was square and cream colored, with wide windows that looked out onto the park and the river. The walls were hung with colored illustrations of fruits and vegetables, and in the center of the room was a round oak table covered with a white cloth.
I ate a little and talked a lot, about Kenneth Whelan, the Lenzis, Lisa Welch, Steven Bregman, and Bernhard Trautmann. Mike ate slowly and listened and did not interrupt. He was quiet when I finished, staring out the window.
“You think Lenzi was in the same boat as Bregman?” he asked, after a while.
“Pretty much. My guess is when the squeeze came he didn’t pay, and he got burned because of it. Lost his job and a lot of money. But he’s just as angry as Bregman, and just as scared. He’s just as nuts, too.” Mike nodded.
“And Welch? Did you buy the insurance guy’s story?” he asked.
“Kulpinski. And I did buy it. It was pretty compelling, even if it was all circumstantial.”
“Not compelling enough for the cops or the Coast Guard, though.”
“Kulpinski couldn’t come up with a motive for Welch’s suicide.”
“Blackmail’s not a bad one,” Mike said.
“A perennial favorite,” I said. “According to his wife, Welch had turned his life around when they married. He’d left behind his wicked ways and discovered the virtues of hearth and home, and got reborn as Ozzie Nelson. In which case, it might’ve been pretty stressful to have his ugly past come up and bite the ass of his idyllic present. If that happened, in the form of blackmail, then staging an accident might’ve seemed like the best option to him. It put him beyond the reach of the blackmailer, left his family whole financially, and left them with untainted memories. It’s more tenuous than Lenzi and Bregman, but my gut tells me Welch was squeezed too.” Mike nodded again, slowly.
“And Whelan?” he asked.
“Hard to say. He took my call pretty quick, but we shouldn’t read too much into that.” Mike drank some coffee and looked out the window. I tore a corner off a bran muffin and ate it. Mike took a deep breath.
“A question mark by his name, then,” he said. “But we know a few things now. We know this business with Rick isn’t a one-shot deal. He seems to be the latest in a string of victims. How long a string, we don’t know. And it looks like whoever is doing all this is using Nassouli’s files.” I nodded agreement.
“We know some other things, too,” I said. “Whoever this is has been at it for a while now, a couple of years at least, and hasn’t gotten caught. Which means he’s not completely stupid. And he’s had a chance to practice, a chance to get good at it.” Mike grimaced.
“Which brings us to the question of who,” he said.
“I know I’m not behind it, and I guess I’d be willing to vouch for you in a pinch, but beyond that, I’m not so sure,” I said. Mike smiled a little.
“Trautmann’s not at the top of your list?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s easy to like him for blackmail, or just about any other evil thing you can think of. But that has more to do with Trautmann being a psycho scumbag than with proof.”
“How do you interpret yesterday’s high jinks, then? You think he just attacks people for the fun of it, and yesterday was your lucky day?”
“It’s fun for him, no question about it, but that’s not the only reason he jumped me. He wanted to find out who my client was, and he wanted to scare me off.”
“His methods were kind of extreme,” Mike said.
“ ‘Extreme’ is his style, I think. It’s certainly a big part of his management technique.”
“Wanting to scare you off would indicate he’s got something to hide,” Mike said. He went into the kitchen and came back with the coffee carafe. He filled my mug, and his too.
“I’m sure he’s got a lot of things to hide, but nothing you can scare out of him. You come at this guy with anything less than rock-solid proof-smoking gun, pictures, and all-and he’s going to file his nails and laugh in your face. He may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. He’s a genuine hard case.”
“But is he a blackmailer?” Mike asked.
“He’s capable of it, and from what Burrows said, he knew about Nassouli’s files. He also fits Faith Herman’s description of the guy who paid her to send the fax…”
“I’m waiting for the ‘but’ here.”
“… but there are pieces of this that I just don’t think are his style,” I said.
“For instance?”
“The handling of Bregman’s payment, through the Luxembourg account. That’s a big step up from kicking ass at the mall.” Mike thought about it and shook his head.
“That doesn’t convince me. You said Trautmann isn’t dumb. He worked for Nassouli and MWB for a lot of years. You don’t think he picked up any handy skills along the way?” he said.
“How about the way Bregman was played? One fax with bad news, the next one with worse news, then a couple of weeks to stew before the squeeze. To me that seems too subtle for Trautmann.” Mike shook his head some more. His brow wrinkled.
“Or the items in Pierro’s fax,” I continued. “Would that stuff look incriminating to just anybody off the street? I don’t think so. You need to know something about banking, about how credit is extended and how loans are arranged, for that stuff to mean anything. You think Trautmann picked that up hanging out with Nassouli?” Mike tapped his chin with a finger.
“Point taken,” he said. “But if not Trautmann, who?”
“I keep coming back to Nassouli’s files. They didn’t make it into Brill’s document system, and we’re working under the assumption that they weren’t shredded. That means someone walked off with them. Who was in a position to do that? And who had the expertise to use them?”
“You know my vote goes to Nassouli himself,” Mike said.
“But there are other candidates-someone from the investigation, maybe, or from the liquidation team. They had access, and most of them would have the knowledge,” I said. Mike shook his head.
“No one had easier access to those files than Nassouli, and no one would know better how to exploit them. And he could be very strapped for cash, out there on the road,” he said. He looked at me. “You still have reservations?”
“Nassouli looks good on paper, but I just can’t get over what a big fucking risk it would be for him.”
“I go back to what I said last week-maybe he’s got help. Maybe from Trautmann,” Mike said.
“Maybe, but that’s risky in a different way. A partner like Trautmann could be awfully dangerous for a guy on the run.”
Mike thought about it for a while. “Everything we’ve heard about Nassouli says he was a risk taker. And how nervous would he really be about Trautmann? The guy did his dirty work for over twenty years. Trautmann already knows where all the bodies are buried. Why should Nassouli start worrying about him now?” I shrugged. Despite what my gut told me, Mike was right. A good case could be made for Trautmann and Nassouli as partners.