“We’re closed,” he shouted. “What do you want?”
“We have to talk,” I shouted back.
He looked at his watch. “It’s after eleven. We’re closed. Who are you, anyway?”
“Victor Carl.”
He cocked his head to give me what looked like an evil eye and then twisted open the lock on the door.
Tony Baloney was a tall man with the face of a walrus, the belly of a bear, and the tiny feet of a ferret. His outsized suit pants were cinched to his stomach by a thin belt, his pink shirt open at the collar without a tie.
“That’s right,” he said. “I recognize you now from the evening news.” He glanced at his office and stroked his thick mustache. “My apologies, but we’re closed. Whatever it is, we can discuss it at length in the morning.”
“We’ll talk about it now,” I said as I marched past him and started down the hallway to his office.
“Wait, Victor. Stop,” he said as he rumbled after me as quickly as his leg would allow. He grabbed an arm and said, “What the hell are you doing?” but I shrugged it off and kept going.
The hallway was lined with legal books, Pennsylvania Digests, Federal Reporters, fully updated, I was sure, with pocket parts right in place because Tony, I was sure, took in enough cash up front to keep his books current. Past the hallway was a partly open door, through which the light had been streaming. I pushed it open and found myself in Tony Baloney’s office.
It was big and rather simple, with a white couch and a huge desk. Bookshelves climbed halfway up the wall, filled with even more legal tomes, digests, hornbooks, compilations of decisions by ancient British courts. Between the books on one wall was a television set. The rest of the walls were painted blue and covered with artwork, good stuff, too, by the looks of it, colorful abstracts and bright impressionistic oils. No doggies playing poker on Tony Baloney’s walls. And then, so motionless I almost missed her, sitting on the couch was a startlingly beautiful woman, dark and small, in a tight white dress, her legs crossed and the veins in her dangling foot pulsing out of a white high heel.
Tony finally made his way back into his office. “What in fucking hell is going on, Carl?” he said between gasps.
“I thought your client was going to be a good boy.”
“Who? The landlord? Giamoticos?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Well, Spiros flunked his probation.”
“What are we talking about?”
I took the plastic bag over to the desk, littered with stacks of papers and files, and dumped its contents onto the desktop.
“God, man,” shouted Tony. “Jesus Christ. Now what did you have to go and do that for?”
What lay now on Tony Baloney’s desk was a dachshund, Oscar I think its name was, owned by a woman in my building, the dog chocolate brown and very dead, its neck snapped, its belly slit open, its intestines oozing out like thick glossy eels. I had found him on my doorstep that night when I had straggled home after an evening with the Bishops and knew immediately from where he had come. Veronica’s landlord, Spiros Giamoticos. He must have picked my name off the motion I filed and was trying to scare me off from helping Veronica. I thought old Tony should see firsthand the crap his client was pulling. From out of the dog’s entrails a dark viscous liquid was puddling over Tony’s papers.
I looked over at the woman on the couch, wondering if I had gone too far, but she wasn’t screaming, she wasn’t even flinching. A smile appeared on her dark pretty face and between her painted lips I could just glimpse an array of twisted brown teeth. Her smile was scarier than the dead dog. I turned away from her as soon as I saw it.
“Giamoticos left this for me on my doorstep,” I said.
“On your step?” asked Tony.
“That’s right,” I said. “You were going to keep him under control, remember? You vouched for him, remember?”
He looked at me closely, like he was looking for something, then he loosed a sharp, quick stream of Spanish and the woman on the couch stood up and walked out the door. On her way out she grabbed hold of the bottom of her dress and yanked it down.
“A client,” said Tony Baloney with a shrug. “‘So lust, though to a radiant angel linked, will sate itself in a celestial bed, and prey on garbage.’ Hamlet’s ghost.”
“Cut with the quotes,” I said.
“Look, take a seat.” He gestured to the couch.
“I’ll stand,” I said.
“Well, I’ll sit, if that’s all right,” he said, dropping onto the couch. He carefully leaned his cane beside him. “These late-night conferences consume much of a man. Now, how shall we clean up that mess?” He casually gestured at his desk, as if a carcass lying on its top was not an unusual sight.
I held out the plastic bag still in my hand and dropped it onto the floor. “Use this if you like.”
“No, you’ll clean my desk, Victor,” he said.
“Not in this life,” I said. “Do something about Giamoticos and make sure it sticks.”
“You know, this whole sorry chain of events, Victor, is putting me in a difficult position. There are attorney-client considerations that are putting me in a very difficult position. Not to mention my obligations to the bar. Come on. Sit down.”
I remained standing. “What are you going to do to stop Giamoticos?”
“I shouldn’t have taken the case,” he said as if to no one in particular. “My daughter calls me and right off I know what the story is. And it’s just getting more complicated.” He raised his head to me. “You’re an esteemed member of the bar, Victor. Let’s do a hypothetical.”
“I’m not here to play law student.”
“Humor me,” he said. “A simple hypothetical, like in the ethics exam we all cheated on. Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, we are representing a client accused of doing something deeply nefarious.”
“Like a Greek accused of killing cats.”
He pointed at me like I had guessed a word in charades. “Exactly so. Hypothetically, of course. And we also have another client who has nothing to do with the first. And this other client tells us, with the full protection of the attorney-client privilege, that he does as a practice what the first client is wrongly accused of doing. See where I’m going here?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Been feeling a bit sluggish lately, darling? Any troubles concentrating? No sinus clogs?” He sniffed loudly twice. “No sniffles?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s expand our hypothetical a bit. Struggle to keep up, if you can. Now let us say a lawyer shows up accusing the first client of doing something to him, something which we figure was not done by the first client but by the second client. Right-o? And now we have a problem. Because if it was done by the second client then in all likelihood the lawyer is involved in activities that he shouldn’t be involved in. Activities that can impinge upon his fitness to stand before the bar. Now tell me, Victor. Do we have a duty to inform the bar association about this lawyer?”
“What kinds of activities?” I said, starting to get the horrifying idea behind Tony Baloney’s hypothetical.
“You don’t see me chairing any bar association committees, do you, Victor?” he said in a calm, quiet voice. “They don’t take my photograph two-stepping at the Andrew Hamilton Ball with the other high-flying members of our bar. I’m an outcast. And you know why, Victor, don’t you? It’s my clientele. Can you guess now what type of activities this hypothetical second client is involved in? I’ll make it very simple for you.”
He leaned forward, smiled at me, and shouted, “DRUGS!”
I jumped back at the shout.
“You see,” he continued, “we, hypothetically, have one client who has a wide distribution network. When he distributes on credit, and bills aren’t paid, he leaves what he calls his calling card. And that calling card happens to be dead animals. Furry little things generally, with their necks snapped and their bellies slit. And then, funny thing, he generally gets paid what he’s owed. It’s so much more effective than a dunning letter, wouldn’t you say? So in all likelihood, it is not a hypothetical Greek landlord leaving these little calling cards. It is a hypothetical drug dealer and he’s leaving these calling cards for his hypothetical drug addict clients.”