“I’m glad to hear that. How about Bernie Shapiro?”
“Wellll … I’ll be straight with you, Freeman. My rule is to never discuss my clients’ identities or business with anybody. Ever. You know that.”
Freeman McNally stood and walked around the room, looking at this and that. “You got a lot of nice stuff here,” he said softly.
T. Jefferson Brody made a modest gesture, which McNally missed.
McNally spoke with his back to the lawyer. “Bernie Shapiro is in with the Costello family. They’re moving in on the laundry business. Gonna cost me. And I don’t like to pay more money for the same service.”
Brody said nothing.
McNally came over to the desk and sat on the corner of it, where he could look down on T. Jefferson Brody. “Tee, I give you some advice. You’re a good lawyer for what I need done. You know people and can get in places I can’t get into. But if I ever hear, ever, ever, ever hear that you told anybody about my business without me giving you the okay, you’ll be dead two hours after I hear it.” He lowered his face to look straight into Brody’s eyes. “You understand?”
“Freeman, I’m a lawyer. Everything you say to me is privileged.”
“You understand me, Tee?”
“Yes.” Brody’s tongue was thick and he had trouble getting the words out.
“Good.” Freeman got up and walked over to the window. He pulled back the drapes and looked out.
After ten or fifteen seconds Brody decided to try to get back to business. He had been successfully handling scum like McNally for ten years now, and though there were rough moments, you couldn’t let them think you were scared. “Are you and Shapiro going to do business?”
“I dunno. Not if I can help it. I think that asshole killed the guy who was washing my dough. And I think he killed the guy who owned the check-cashing business. Guy named Lincoln. Shapiro paid off a broad, a grifter named Sweet Cherry Lane who was servicing the guy, and she set him up.”
Bells began to ring for T. Jefferson Brody. “What does this Lane woman look like?” he asked softly.
Freeman turned away from the window. He came back and dropped into the client chair. “Sorta chocolate, huge, firm tits, tiny waist, tall and regal. A real prime piece of pussy, I hear tell.”
“If someone wanted this bitch taught a lesson, could you do a favor like that?”
A slow grin spread across Freeman’s face. “Lay it out, Tee.”
“She robbed me, Freeman.” Brody swallowed and took a deep breath. “Honest. Stole my car and watch and a bunch of shit right out of my house — and she stole the $400,000 that Shapiro paid for that check cashing business.”
“Naw.”
“Yes. The goddamn cunt pretended to be the widow, signed everything, took the check, slipped me a Mickey and cleaned me out.”
“What the fuck kind of lawyer are you, Tee? You didn’t even ask to see some ID before you gave her four hundred Gs?”
“Hey,” Brody snarled. “The bitch conned me. Now I want to slice some off her. Will you help me?”
The grin on Freeman McNally’s face faded in the face of the lawyer’s fury. He stood. “I’ll think about it, Tee. In the meantime, you get busy on those senators and congressmen. I’ve paid a lot of good money to those people, now I want something. You get it. Then we’ll talk.”
He paused at the door and spoke without looking at Brody. “I try to never get personal. With me it’s all business. That way everybody knows where they stand. When you get personal you make mistakes, take stupid risks. It’s not good.” He shook his head. “Not good.” Then he went out.
Brody stared at the door and chewed on his lower lip.
Ott Mergenthaler returned from lunch at two-thirty in the afternoon with a smile on his face and a spring in his walk. Jack Yocke couldn’t resist. “Back to the old grind, eh, Ott?”
Mergenthaler grinned and dropped into a chair that Yocke hooked around with his foot. “Well, Jack, when you’re the most famous columnist writing in English and you’ve been in the outback for a week or so, the movers and shakers are just dying to unburden themselves of nifty secrets and juicy tidbits. They can only carry that stuff so long without relief and then they get constipated.”
“A tube steak on the sidewalk?”
“A really fine fettucine alfredo and a clear, dry Chianti.” Ott kissed his fingertips.
“Who was the mover and shaker, or is that a secret?”
“Read my column tomorrow. But if you can’t wait that long, it was Bob Cherry.”
“Cuba, right? Did you tell him to read my stuff?”
“That car-bus wreck and the Bush initiatives. God, what a mess! Half the country is screaming that Bush is overreacting and the other half is screaming that he hasn’t done enough. He’s getting it both ways, coming and going. Why any sane man gets into politics, I’ll never know.”
“Any line on who the ten pounds of dope belonged to?”
“No, but funny thing. Cherry implied that the government knows all about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he’s on the Oversight Committee and presumably has been briefed, and he just shrugged off the question of how the investigation is going. Muttered something like, ‘That’s not an issue.’ ”
“What d’ya mean, that’s not an issue? They know and aren’t telling?”
“Yeah. Precisely.” Ott Mergenthaler raised his eyebrows. “Normally you gotta watch Cherry like a hawk. He likes to pretend he knows everything, has a finger in every pie. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Now at lunch today he didn’t say so directly, but he left me and the other two reporters with the impression that the feds had a man on the inside. And he knew that was the impression he was creating and he could see by our reaction that we thought this was very important.”
“On the inside. Undercover?”
Mergenthaler nodded.
“You’re not going to print that, are you?”
“I have to. Two other reporters were there.” He named them. “They’ll use it. You can bet the ranch on that.”
“You can’t attribute this to Cherry.”
“That’s right. But this is an answer of sorts to a legit question. What is the federal government doing to bring to justice the people who indirectly caused eleven deaths in the heart of Washington? Cherry’s answer — that’s a nonquestion.”
“And if Cherry has said that to three reporters, who else has he said it to?”
“Precisely. Hell, knowing Cherry, he’s … And I know him. What I can’t figure out is, did he spill the beans on his own hook or was he told to?”
“If you knew that,” Jack Yocke mused, “you might get a better idea of whether or not it’s true.”
“Wonder what the government’s told the Japs.”
“Call the Japanese ambassador and ask.”
“I’ll do that.” Mergenthaler made a small ceremony of maneuvering himself out of the chair and strolling off toward his office.
Jack Yocke watched him go, then jerked the Rolodex around and flipped through it. He found the number he wanted and dialed.
One ring. Two. Three. C’mon, answer the damn phone!
“Sammy.”
“Jack Yocke. You alone?”
“Just me and Jesus.”
“Your phone tapped?”
“How the fuck would I know, man?”
“Ah, what an affable, genial guy you are. Okay, Mr. Laid Back Bro, a U.S. senator just hinted to one of our columnists that the government knows all there is to know about that car-bus wreck. Our guy was left with the clear impression that the feds got somebody undercover.”
“Give me that again, slower.”
Yocke repeated his message.
“That’s all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Who was the senator?”
“Bob Cherry.”
“Thanks, man.”
“It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper. Just thought you’d like to know.”