“They were good customers. Or at least their customers were good customers.”
“They’re not sending you their offshore trust business anymore?”
“They didn’t like seeing their name and mine in the same Wall Street Journal article under the headline: ‘Cayman Island Accountant Indicted in U.S. Tax Fraud Conspiracy.’ ”
Gage raised his glass. “To loyalty.”
“Not much of it around anymore.”
“Have you thought about going back to Toronto and starting over?”
“I’m too old, and I let my Canadian license lapse.”
The waitress delivered a second martini to Norbett, then took their orders.
“You pick up any business at the conference?” Gage asked.
Norbett spread his hands and shrugged. “Did it look like I picked up any business?” He leaned back in his seat. “Okay. Enough foreplay. What are you on the prowl for?”
“Information.”
“About what?”
“A group of companies run by Leonard Quinton.”
“I haven’t worked with Quinton for ten, twelve years. Even then I didn’t get all his work. Most of it, but not all.”
“You doing anything with him now?”
Norbett lifted his martini. “What were you saying about loyalty?” He took a sip, then set it down.
“I’m looking into Pegasus Limited,” Gage said.
Norbett’s eyebrows narrowed. “Pegasus?”
“Did you do the accounting?”
“For all the companies?”
“Any of the companies. I went to the Company Registry. There were three companies that made up the group-”
“Four.”
“Four?”
“One is in Bermuda. That’s where the insurance company finally ended up. They figured out it was better if the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was really doing, or at least how they were doing it.” Norbett smiled. “The bank account was here, but the company was there.”
“Let me guess. Cayman Exchange Bank.”
Norbett spread his hands. “Who else does Quinton use?”
They fell silent as the waitress delivered their salads and walked away.
Norbett stabbed at a piece of spinach and then locked his eyes on Gage’s.
“How about we cut to the proverbial chase?”
Gage nodded. “What’s your hourly rate?”
“For accounting?”
“For what we’ll call research.”
Norbett drummed the table with the fingers of his left hand. “I would say… maybe… ten thousand as a retainer and two hundred an hour.”
“I take it the retainer would be nonrefundable.”
“Call it catastrophic medical insurance. Because if anybody finds out…”
Chapter 65
' I’m picking up drumbeats from all over,” Brandon Meyer told Gage in his chambers in the San Francisco Federal Building the next day.
Gage had responded to Meyer’s voice mail demanding he call back by dropping by an hour and a half after his flight from the Caymans landed at SFO.
“Good ears.”
“I haven’t had a thing to do with Pegasus since I left my law firm, and the worst anyone can say is that what we did was in a gray area of tax law.” Brandon pounded his desk with his knuckle. “The IRS never even published a notice prohibiting the practice until two years after I was appointed to the bench.”
“That’s not the question the drums were asking,” Gage said, from where he stood near the window overlooking the city and the Pacific Ocean beyond. “The question is whether you had anything to do with the payoffs to Wilbert Hawkins and Ray Karopian in TIMCO.”
“And I assume the next accusation is I had something to do with the deaths of those two and recruited John Porzolkiewski to poison them.” Brandon smirked. “That verges on the ludicrous.”
“I’m not making that accusation. But I’m also not sure Porzolkiewski did it.”
“There was enough probable cause to arrest him. Despite your rather jaundiced view of how some judges do their work, none of us would sign a search warrant unless the probable cause was convincing.”
“Aren’t you worried about how convincing the evidence might be? And who might be implicated?”
Brandon’s face twisted with anger. “There’ll be hell to pay if my name is in it.”
“Your name isn’t. Anston’s is.”
Brandon rocked himself out of his chair and walked over to the bar. He poured two fingers of bourbon into a highball glass. He didn’t offer any to Gage. He took a sip as he turned back.
“You don’t have a clue about the relationship between Anston and Palmer, do you?” Brandon asked.
“I know exactly what their relationship was.”
“I don’t think so. You think there was ever a time in the twenty-some years they worked together that Marc Anston called up Charlie and said, ‘Get rid of the witnesses.’ It’s the same on both sides. You think any DEA agent has to skirt the law by telling a snitch to go search somebody’s house and check if the drugs are there before the agent bothers to get a warrant? The snitch knows what to do.”
“It’s not the law that’s rough, it’s how some people practice it.”
Brandon turned away and walked toward his desk.
“I don’t know why we’re talking about this,” Brandon said. “You can’t prove what Anston does has anything to do with me.”
“We’ll see.” Gage rose to his feet. “Did you get your wallet back from SFPD?”
“Yes.”
“Everything there?”
Brandon’s face colored as he slid onto his chair.
“I believe so.”
“Including the-”
“I said everything was there.”
Gage persisted. “Including the Cayman Citibank credit card?”
“Yes, including the credit card.”
“How do you pay the charges?”
“I don’t believe it’s any of your business.”
“You’re right, it’s not my business, except to the extent it’s paid for by money you and Anston received offshore for making TIMCO and other cases disappear.”
“It doesn’t make any difference where the firm received legal fees as long as it paid taxes on the income. And as far I know that was always done.”
“I’m not sure anyone would call the money you got from TIMCO a legal fee.”
“That’s neither here nor there since I’ve received no compensation, directly, indirectly, or deferred since I left the firm.”
“The money had to come from somewhere.”
“Don’t play naive. There are few things judges may do to earn money beyond their salaries. Books, lectures, and investments. And I don’t write books and I don’t give lectures.”
