“Maybe you’d like to guess that too? Pick a number.”
“A thousand?” I say.
“Try ten,” he says.
This sits me up in my chair. No wonder Tresler knew his name.
“And to get around the giving limits,” says Harry, “he set up a PAC. Citizens for County Government.”
Harry is talking about a political action committee, people with a common interest pooling their money for effect.
“They gave in five-thousand-dollar increments over two years. All of it to Tresler. Nick shows up as the treasurer. He gave to the individual max, two hundred and fifty dollars each year.”
“Let me see that.” Harry hands me the computer printout. I scan down the list. I don’t have to go far to find the PAC. The donors are listed in the order of the amount given, large contributors at the top.
Harry can tell by my look that this is not something I had expected.
There are twenty names on Nick’s PAC, a separate list for each year, but the names are pretty much the same. Some of them are out of county. Two are out of state.
“Did you ever know him to get involved?” asks Harry.
“Nick didn’t have a high interest in civics,” I tell him.
“That’s what I thought. But I checked it anyway. He didn’t give to anybody else. I looked for local, state, and federal, under donor names. Not a single hit for Nick, except on Tresler. So what do you think he was after?”
I shake my head. Not a clue.
“We can assume,” says Harry, “that this would be a lock, ten thousand, to put his wife on this commission. But you’d have to admit it’s a bit of an overkill. Especially for a guy who’s missing house payments.”
I settle back in my chair, still studying the list of names underneath Nick’s.
“There was no hint from Tresler when you talked to him, right?”
“No.”
“Maybe you should go back and ask him.”
“He’d just tell me what every politician tells anybody who asks. ‘I’m above all that. I never look.’ He’d act surprised and tell me that Nick must have been a follower of his philosophy-senile belligerence,” I tell him. “That’s if I got through the front door. By now Tresler probably has my name on the list under ‘cranks and the demented’ with security in the lobby. Still he didn’t try to hide the fact that he knew Nick.”
“It’s good to know that at least Nick’s money bought him a little recognition, even if it was posthumous,” says Harry. “We’re no better off now than we were before.”
The phone on my desk rings.
“Except now we have more questions.” Harry finishes the thought as I answer the call.
“Hello.”
“I don’t know any other lawyers answer their own phone.” I recognize the raspy voice on the other end. “Joyce here,” she says. “I bet you thought I died and went to hell.”
She tells me she and Benny checked out the neighborhood, the drug dealer’s house last night. “But not to worry,” she says. “Benny had his gun. Double-barrel shotgun, both of them loaded. We had to make sure of the address,” she says.
“You didn’t trust me?”
“We’re professionals,” she says. “Like to do it right.”
I can see her up on the porch with one of those flashlights that takes a battery the size of a bread box, with a notepad writing down the names off the mailbox, while Benny sat in the car at the curb with his blunderbuss, ready to blow the shit out of the front of the place if anybody walked out the door. There are at least three felonies here that I can count. It’s the problem with Joyce. I know mobsters with more discretion.
“What did you find out?”
“Your man. It’s one Hector Saldado,” she says.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. We got him dead,” she says. “Trus’ me.”
“Just a second.” I grab a pen and some Post-its from the holder on my desk.
“Spell it?”
She does. “Not only is he the only one with a cell phone lives there,” she says. “You know, of the other names you gave me?”
“Yes.”
“But he makes regular calls down to Mexico.”
She can tell by the silence coming from my end that this is something of note.
“I thought you might be interested,” she says. “There were a lotta them. These calls. At least three or four almost every day. None of them long. You know, a minute, maybe two. But how long can it take to order up some drugs? I mean, less time than a pizza, I’m sure. There’s no special toppings.”
“You have his cell statement?”
“I tol’ you I’d get it, didn’t I? You want it all? It’s pretty long. You know, a minute here, two minutes there. A lot of the same phone numbers too,” she says. “I checked it. The country code and area. Mexico,” she says.
“Where? Do you know what part of Mexico?”
“Just a sec,” she says. “Let’s see, I got it here someplace.”
I can hear her hand muffle the mouthpiece, papers shuffling.
“Here it is,” she comes back on. “Cancun. Quin-tan-aroo? Is that right?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I tell her. It’s the area Metz visited when he did business with the two Ibarra brothers. “Listen. I have another job for you.”
This afternoon I am pressed for time. I have a flight north at four, business in Capital City with an errand on the way. I should be at the airport by three, but I am stuck doing lunch, Adam style, in the private dining room next to his office. Tolt sits on one side, me on the other, a table the length of a runway. It is covered by a linen tablecloth and two candles in sterling silver holders. They match the silver chargers resting under the eggshell china dishes in front of us.
The firm retains a chef for special occasions, as well as a company that sends waiters in white livery whenever they are needed to work from the kitchen that is through another door. Everything you need to run a five-star restaurant.
“You handled it very well,” says Adam. “Under the circumstances, I don’t think anyone could have done better. You played the hand you were dealt, and you got a good result.”
“For who?”
“For your client,” he says. He reaches across with his butter knife and stabs one of the little squares in the dish, takes it back, and spreads it on a warm French roll that he’s plucked from the linen-lined basket on the table.
“I know what you think, that I snookered you by using the settlement to cover the money she took. The fact is…”
“The fact is you recovered your money,” I tell him.
“Right.” He smiles. “What can I say? Sometimes things just work out,” he says.
I have a feeling they work out for Adam a little more than they do for the rest of us.
The occasion is the receipt of the check in settlement from the insurance carrier. Dana has compromised her portion and authorized me to deliver payment, a check made out to Rocker, Dusha to cover the missing funds from the firm’s trust account. All of this with interest. This now rests in an envelope on Adam’s desk as we break bread.
“So that you know, she has no basis for complaint. I trust you told her that.” What he means is with money in the bank instead of jail time over her head.
The waiter brings out the main course, poultry braised in red wine, with long grains of wild rice, a medly of roasted vegetables, and a new selection from the vintner, five different wines to choose from.
“Piece de resistance,” says Adam. Another waiter follows with assorted side dishes, stuffed mushrooms and asparagus in a glazed butter sauce, fare rich enough to give a poor man the gout.
“The pheasant is roasted in Madeira,” says Adam. “I first tasted the dish on a trip to Portugal. I guess it was
