cool what, twenty, twenty-five million? And these assholes call our clients crooks.”
“That’s business,” I tell him.
“Yeah. The business we ought to be in.” Nick smiles. “But we’re too honest,” he says. He’s back to bullshit. “And besides, I like to preserve the past. Dana has her causes; I have mine.”
“Now can we get back to Metz?” I ask.
“Are you sure you wanna give this thing up?”
“What?”
“Metz.” He looks at me as if I’ve been off on some other track. “I mean, it could be an opportunity.”
“I’m sure.”
“We could do it together,” he says. “After all, you are the only person I’ve ever shared one of the few true secrets of my life with.”
“What’s that?”
“Laura.” Nick is stone serious when he says this.
I had almost forgotten. I thought Nick was too far into the sauce to remember the night he let it slip over drinks after a bad day in court. He was feeling a failure, even with a sassy new wife. Laura is the mystery in Nick’s life-and probably the only female he will ever truly love.
“Have you seen her lately?”
“Last week,” he says. “Only for a few minutes. Listen to me. Metz is good for a sizable fee.” Nick is good at changing the subject. Especially if it’s something he doesn’t want to talk about. “He wouldn’t be involved with the arts if he didn’t have money.”
I laugh.
“It’s true. I’ve never seen one of those people yet didn’t have money. Lack of taste, maybe, but they all have bucks. It’s a precondition. Otherwise they don’t get into the fraternity. You don’t get on the A-list for the auctions and fund-raisers. Get your face on the social sheet in the Trib and the Times.”
“Is that how you did it?”
“I did it through my wife. She has class and taste,” he says.
“And your checkbook.”
“That too.” He drinks some coffee, and I have to divert my eyes. “What else are you gonna do for fun when you get old and flatulent?”
“I’ve never viewed art auctions as that much fun,” I tell him.
“I wasn’t talking about art.” He’s talking about Dana. “Come on. Why not? You can hold Metz’s hand and I’ll do the trial. We’ll lift him by the heels and shake him, see what’s in his pockets.”
“You might not be prepared for what falls out,” I tell him.
“That bad?” he says.
Nick and I haven’t talked since our conversation four days ago. I played telephone tag with him for a week before I finally caught him in his office, and then he didn’t want to discuss the details over the phone. It’s the nature of Nick’s practice. You can never be sure whether your phone is tapped.
“You want my honest opinion?”
He nods.
“All of the pieces are in place, including the transfer of large sums of cash and the laundry fee.” He listens as I fill him in.
“If your man’s to be believed, he took two hundred thousand dollars while he parked two million of his partner’s money in an account in Belize.”
None of this unnerves him. “Go on.”
“He calls his part a consulting fee, but it never shows up on his company’s books.”
“So we have an accounting error,” says Nick.
“He tells me the money was actually intended as security on heavy equipment he was supposed to ship south to do a job. Except that none of the equipment was ever moved. According to Metz, the deal never got off the ground. He took one trip down to Mexico that lasted maybe a week, and for this he charged a two-hundred- thousand-dollar fee.”
“Maybe his time is valuable,” he says.
“And maybe his two Mexican partners wanted to cleanse some revenue from illicit activities?”
Nick clears his throat. “Doesn’t mean he knew about it.”
“On top of all of this, unless I misjudge the man, I think you’re going to find currency violations and probably tax evasion.”
Nick lifts one eyebrow, rubs his chin, and looks at me with the kind of expression I might expect from an appraiser who’s being told the diamond ring he just told me to buy is melting ice.
“If you check, I think you’re going to find that he used friends and neighbors to move his fee back into this country in order to do the limbo under the currency limits. And if he did that, I suspect he may have gone just one baby step further in forgetting to report any of it on his tax return.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
“I thought I’d leave that one to you.”
Nick nods, his knowing and understanding nod. This is practiced, refined from years of listening to sordid deeds, so that by now nothing particularly arouses or discourages him.
“What did he say about the account in Belize? Why did he set it up?”
“I didn’t ask that either. I wouldn’t want to cut into your options for maneuver.”
He laughs, tips his cup to me.
I have often suspected that Nick is not above performing surgery on the facts in a case once the curtain is pulled and he and his client are safely behind it. It is the reason I have refrained from getting into these details with Metz, so that I don’t end up as Nick’s scrubbing nurse.
“Did you ask him why he kept the money? The two hundred K?” Nick is hoping beyond hope.
“Unfortunately I did, and his answer was not encouraging, or believable.”
“What did he say?”
“Consulting fees.”
“That sounds fair to me,” he says.
“Especially if you can get your hands on it for legal fees,” I tell him.
“See, you’re learning already. Let’s start looking at the upside.” Nick would have to be a stone monument to optimism to find even a tin foil lining in this particular cloudburst.
“None of the major money came into the U.S., right? I mean the two million. It went from Mexico to Belize and back again, is that correct?”
“Except for Metz’s fee.”
“Forget about that for the moment. What we have here is perhaps some financial sleight of hand. But it all takes place outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Right?”
“That’s one way to look at it. The other way is that you have a U.S. citizen facilitating currency violations in two foreign countries.”
“So? Let them charge him there. You and I aren’t licensed to practice law in Mexico. That’s somebody else’s problem.”
“Ask Metz if he wants to take his chances on serving the next millennium in some dung heap in Mexico.”
“You think the Mexican government would actually bring charges?”
“I think that if the feds are trying to squeeze your man to find out what he knows, they may well threaten him with extradition south. They could probably get the Mexican government to lend their cooperation. The last time I looked, the two countries had a treaty.”
Nick ponders this problem, scratching his chin with the back of his fingers while he grins at me from across the table. “I guess I’m gonna have to talk to my wife about the company she keeps.”
“Answer one question for me,” I say. “Tell me you didn’t suspect this was drug related.”
He looks at me and hesitates only a second. “Sure. I still don’t,” he says.
The words are there, but they are not convincing. The fact that he says it with a smile undercuts the effect even more. If Nick didn’t know, his demeanor tells me that he had strong suspicions. He thanks me for taking the time as he finishes his coffee and I study the water in the little stainless steel pot. Nick looks at his watch.
