“I suspected,” I said. “He seems to be concerned that there’s a lot of money he can’t account for, money that seems to have disappeared.”
“Only a quarter million,” said Slocum. “But Eggert’s concerned about more than just that. The murder evidence is pretty tight but there are other holes that he hasn’t yet filled and he knows it. They overreached in their indictment.” He rubbed his mouth for a moment and then said, “I assume, Carl, that you are now making a formal discovery request.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“And in view of extenuating circumstances you are seeking to receive the information immediately or the prosecution of a major racketeering case will be delayed, inconveniencing the court and all parties, including the Assistant United States Attorney, and delaying the swift and sure execution of justice.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“And these extenuating circumstances will be detailed in a letter that will be hand-delivered to this office first thing tomorrow morning along with a formal petition.”
“My secretary is typing it up this very instant,” I said.
“I’ll check upstairs and let you know by early tomorrow if I can free up a detective to sign out the evidence.” He rubbed his palm across his mouth again. “You know, Carl, my guess is you’re in way over your head.”
“Most likely,” I said.
“We are not lifeguards in this office,” he said. “Whatever trouble you get into, don’t be looking to us for help. My only goal here is to make sure that Jimmy Moore and Chet Concannon pay the steepest possible price for killing that man.”
“I understand,” I said.
“That’s good, Carl. You see, if I have to use you for a stepping stone as you flail about in the water, I don’t want you thinking you’ll get anything more from me than the bottom of my shoe on your face.”
12
I WAS IN MY OFFICE, on the phone to Dr. Louis Saltz, when she called. It was after hours, and Ellie was strictly nine to five, so I had to put Saltz on hold to answer the other line. When I realized who it was I felt the briefest moment of panic. “Hold on a moment,” I told her and then switched back to Saltz.
“Listen, Lou, something has come up. I have to run.”
“We’re set for tomorrow then, right?”
“Four-thirty in my offices,” I said.
“I got hold of the others and most will be there. I still have my doubts. You’re going to have to do some convincing to get me to agree, but I’ll wait for the others.”
“Lou,” I said. “Believe me when I tell you, this offer’s a gift. We should take it and be giddy.”
“Be good, pal,” he said and then he was off.
I sat at my desk for a moment, the light on my phone blinking to indicate a caller on hold, and thought about how much trouble that call could be, how disastrous it could turn out if I took it, but then, smack in the middle of my sensible thoughts, I punched her line. “Ho,” I said. “I’m back.”
“Mr. Carl? Jimmy told me to call you if I had any more troubles with my landlord,” said Veronica Ashland.
“I really don’t do much real estate work, Miss Ashland,” I said. “Maybe you should find someone else who knows what he’s doing. I could refer you.”
“I’m sure this isn’t too complicated for you,” she said. “It’s just that my landlord wants to evict me.”
“Have you been paying your rent?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, that’s sort of the problem, I guess,” I said. “Landlords generally want their rent paid on time.”
“I’ve noticed that. They get very picky if you miss a payment.”
“They learn that in landlord school,” I said.
“That must also be where they learn to turn the heat on in the summer.”
“And that sixty-two degrees is plenty comfortable in the winter,” I said. “And how much money they save by turning off the water periodically for mysterious repairs.”
“Maybe you should come over and see what you can do,” she said.
“Now?”
“I told you,” she said. “My landlord is trying to evict me.”
“Did he leave an eviction notice on your door?”
“No, that’s not what he left. He’s an old Greek, he doesn’t know about eviction notices.”
“So what did he leave?” I asked.
“A dead cat,” she said.
13
OLDE CITY PHILADELPHIA is one of those strange, hybrid places that could only have been conceived in the fevered imagination of some Senate subcommittee charged with finding tax loopholes for the financially deranged. It started out two hundred years ago as a residential district, where our founding fathers worshipped at Christ Church during their deliberations over the Constitution, but swiftly devolved into a manufacturing and distribution area where the sugar shipped to Philadelphia from the Caribbean was refined and the iron ore shipped down the Delaware River was smelted and the wood shipped from the South was turned on a lathe into fine and not so fine furniture. Fifteen years ago it was a tidy little area of small factories and wholesalers and restaurant supply warehouses filling the whole of the suburban restaurant market with bar stools and formica tables and huge copper pots. But then some senator slipped a loophole into the tax code allowing tax breaks for renovations of historically significant buildings, and a whole new real estate scam was born.
The clever guys bought up all the old and rotting industrial buildings in Olde City and syndicated them in a series of limited partnerships in which the limited partners badly overpaid for the opportunity to get a piece of the tax break. With the limited partners’ money in hand, leveraged with high-interest mortgages, the clever guys converted all these decrepit buildings into fancy condo units, setting high enough prices for the units so that the limiteds could get a decent return. It all would have worked just fine except that no one wanted to live in an industrially zoned corner of the city with no restaurants or stores or nightclubs and the clever guys couldn’t unload their high-priced condos at a high enough price to pay the mortgages. One by one the partnerships collapsed into insolvency, including the partnership owned by Dr. Saltz and his fellow investors, and with insolvency came tax recapture and sheriff sales of the buildings. After the clever guys had run off with their commissions and fees, what was left were the lawsuits and hundreds of luxury units interspersed among seedy wholesale outlets, serenaded daily by the rumbling of factory machines coming through filthy block windows.
I found a spot outside a shoe store with a hand-lettered sign, WHOLESALE ONLY, in its sooted window and parallel parked my little Mazda between a van and a pickup truck. Like all men, I believed I was the world’s greatest parallel parker, and I banged the pickup only once as I squeezed into my space. Veronica had said she lived in one of the rehabbed Olde City buildings on the same street as Christ Church, so I followed the tall white spire to Church Street and continued on through the narrow cobblestone alley to her building. It had been a sugar refinery in its more authentic days, but now windows had been knocked into its high brick walls and an elevator rose up and down a large steel and Plexiglas tube appended to the side. There was a parking lot and a courtyard in front and stores had been planned for the lower level, but the plate-glass windows were papered over. The whole look of that empty plaza and its vacant stores was one of desolation. I found her number on the security board and she buzzed me up.
The cat lay on the carpet in front of her door, its head sodden with blood.
I kneeled down beside the corpse like a homicide detective in a bad movie and dipped two fingers in the puddle of blood around the cat’s head. I don’t know why I did that, it is just something that homicide detectives who lean over corpses in bad movies always seem to do, and I regretted it immediately. The blood was still damp. I was just about to wipe my fingers clean on the cat’s fur when she opened the door.