River. It has white stone trim, a long, green awning, and a wood-paneled lobby with a wide fireplace. A fire was burning briskly in it when I arrived. The doorman greeted me by name and tactfully ignored my damaged face. He called upstairs and sent me through to the elevators. I got out on eleven. Mike’s door was ajar.
“In here,” he called. I walked through the book-lined entrance foyer, down a book-lined hallway, and into the kitchen. It was a long room, with white cabinets, stone counters, and steel appliances. At the far end was a windowed breakfast nook with a steel-topped table and wooden chairs. Paula Metz sat at the table, drinking coffee and sorting through mail. She wore a black T-shirt, and snug jeans on her long legs. Her bare feet were propped on another chair, and her thick, dark blond hair was tied back. Mike stood at a counter, slicing bagels. He looked vaguely academic in khakis and a gray sweater.
“Jesus, Michael, he looks like shit. You didn’t say he looked like shit.” Paula brushed a ribbon of hair from her cheek with long fingers, and wrinkled her face in a sympathetic wince.
“He neglected to mention it in his message,” Mike said. “How are you feeling?”
“Pretty much like shit,” I said. I crossed the room, pecked Paula on the cheek, pulled off my jacket, and took a seat. Paula noticed the gun and raised her eyebrows.
“A little paranoid today?” she asked.
“Appropriately vigilant,” I said.
At rest, Paula’s face is too medieval looking to be usual-prettyit’s too pale and bony, and too long in the nose; the brown eyes are shadowed and too narrow, the brows too heavy, and the wide mouth is naturally downturned. But set in motion, animated by a keen interest in people, a wry sense of humor, and an intellect that made her the youngest name partner in the city’s biggest patent law firm, her features lose their severity, and Paula is lovely. She sighed and drained her coffee mug.
“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?
