accustomed. Nick was busy plowing all of it into servicing the debt on the mortgage for the rundown hotel, meeting the payments each month like a miser, while he plotted revolution.
How do you maximize an investment like that? Nick revealed that as well. But again, I was tuned out.
It was easy. First you buy the land. Then you get a variance to build above the current height restrictions. Suddenly the land was worth three or four times what you paid for it. Nick had it all figured. There was nothing to prevent him from going higher, except the whim of local government.
And who had the power to grant such a variance? The joint powers of authority, the same authority that controlled most commercial property downtown: the super-zoning kingdom chaired by Zane Tresler.
It was why Nick’s name showed up so prominently on Tresler’s list of campaign donors. Not because Nick thought he could buy the man. Tresler wasn’t for sale, at least not for money. Adam was right about that. Nick gave generously for one reason only, to get Tresler’s attention, to buy access. The closer on this deal would come later, after the Mexicans, the two Ibarra brothers, delivered on their part.
That was where Metz came in. His name on the limited partnership documents, coupled with the mortgage on the hotel property in the name of Jamaile, was a critical part of Nick’s plan, one that he couldn’t have been comfortable with, but over which he had no control.
I could never figure how a streetwise lawyer like Nick could be so slow as to do business on paper with a client who turned up a player in a criminal probe. What I didn’t realize is this: Metz’s name on the partnership was the required security the Mexicans demanded before they performed their part.
The Ibarra brothers had done business with Metz before. They trusted him. For a decade, they had been looting archeological sites in the Yucatan, southern Mexico and Guatemala, selling their finds to rich gringos and posh galleries in Europe and the U.S.
It was why they needed the stolen visas found by the feds in Espinoza’s closet when they searched his apartment. These would be valuable in bringing carloads of artifacts across the border.
Metz provided a convenient cover with his construction company. He also offered an outlet for laundering money. This is what the feds turned up, thinking they had drugs. Looting ancient sites was beginning to pay better than narcotics-and with less risk. Even if you got caught, you generally didn’t do life in a penitentiary for stealing someone else’s cultural heritage.
Under Nick’s scheme, Metz would take a chunk from the profits of the Capri property once the variance was granted and the land was sold to some got-rocks corporation. Metz would then pay off the Ibarra brothers.
It was why Nick tried to palm Metz off on me, to handle the arraignment. Since he was doing business with the man, an appearance next to him in court would only serve to heighten Nick’s profile. Figuring the feds were checking Metz for drugs, as soon as they realized this was a dry hole, Nick knew they would settle for a fine to cover the cost of their time, this on the illegal transfers of cash into the country by Metz. They would slap his hand. A deal like that would be a cakewalk, even for Nick’s buddy Paul who shied away from drug cases.
By then everybody would be happy. Metz would have more cash than he’d ever seen in one place before. And Nick would have the money to finish the law firm coup, Rush and Company, no doubt with a flashy new corner office for himself overlooking the bay and the blue Pacific.
And how was Nick going to get the variance? What do you give to someone who has everything? What gift, what token can anyone offer to a man like Zane Tresler; what would lock him in? Nick had that answer too. You give him something to occupy a place of honor in the white, chambered nautilus, modeled under all that glass in his office. You give him the key to a lost language. You give him the Mexican Rosetta.
But Nick never got that far. He never saw the shadow looming up in front of him: the austere figure of Adam Tolt. Adam was not the kind of man to spend his life building a law firm and then allow Nick to steal it.
The relationship between them was one born of convenience and, I suspect, more than a little bad karma. In the end, Adam had to see Nick as his worst nightmare.
Initially he liked the fact that Nick made Rocker, Dusha a full-service firm. The addition of low-visibility, criminal law services fleshed out the partnership. He liked the money, and he was satisfied with the occasional advice Nick offered on cases. But most of all he liked the Chinese Wall Nick provided around the firm’s respectability. It kept everything clean and tidy. Whenever business clients ventured into crime land, or found themselves there by unhappy circumstance, Adam could banish them down the elevator with a friendly pat on the ass and still keep the revenue flowing. In this way, the firm’s most valued clients, the ones who didn’t have a grand jury giving the smell test to their stock transactions, wouldn’t have to wrench their backs, rubbing up against the expensive finish on Adam’s paneled hallways while trying to avoid contact with Nick’s untouchables.
As for Nick, he got to tie his wagon to a brighter star, a major firm about to go supernova, with all the prospects that this seemed to present.
I say “seemed,” because my guess is that within a year, Nick realized it was an illusion. His position with Rocker, Dusha was a dead end. They’d put him downstairs for a reason. To keep his clients from sullying the dignified atmosphere of the real firm. No doubt Adam planned to move Nick lower once Rocker, Dusha expanded enough to inhabit the entire building. Nick could have his own private hell next to the furnace in the basement, where his clients could get credit for time served in purgatory. Adam made it clear. He didn’t want Nick doing anything other than criminal cases. The path to growth was blocked.
Even for someone like Nick, with an uncanny sense for the human condition, it couldn’t have taken long before Tolt started hearing murmurs. With a firm full of nervous partners, there had to be some who wanted to place bets on the back line, trying to cover both sides in case Nick came up short.
I can only imagine Adam’s state of mind when he started picking up the scent. A man closer to the end of his career than the beginning, with no place as lofty to land, facing an assault from a direction he’d never anticipated: the basement. His first thought must have been that Nick was out of his mind. Somewhere in the recesses of Adam’s frantic brain must surely have passed the thought that this was also history’s verdict of Hitler and Stalin, not a comforting thought given their initial success and the carnage that followed. Things must have looked even worse when he considered his options.
For a man with a Rolodex full of heady phone numbers, no doubt with the private line to the Oval Office topping the list, a man who had reached the zenith of a career most people would envy, all Adam could see were the stunning heights from which he could fall. Sure he had a name, a solid reputation of accomplishment, almost all of it in earlier decades. Important people would take his calls, as long as he was the senior partner at Rocker, Dusha.
As any enduring dictator will attest, when faced with the skirmish line of rebellion, the first rule of survival is to hang the leader. Adam must have stayed up nights trying to figure ways to force Nick out of the firm. But he had a problem. He was missing some vital information. He couldn’t be sure how long Rush’s revolt had been going on or how many of his partners had already signed on. It wouldn’t do to call Nick on the carpet and can him, only to find himself voted out of the firm the next morning.
Plan B wouldn’t work either. Adam couldn’t just pick up the phone and start calling partners, trying to divine if they’d been talking to Nick behind his back, measuring Adam’s throat for a good cutting. To do that would be to admit that he’d already lost control. Whether Nick won or lost, the partners would smell blood. Adam would be voted the position of partner emeritus, given a broom closet for an office and a book of crossword puzzles to occupy his time.
He could have waited for the revolt to erupt and then taken Nick and the rebels who followed him to court. But as every law firm knows, the last thing any client wants to hear is that his lawyers are all suing each other. The clients would bail and Adam knew it. What good is it to be a bull and own a field, if there are no cows and no grass in it?
Adam may have been the senior partner, but he wasn’t senile. It didn’t take him long to confront reality. He was a lawyer. Nick was a kamikaze pilot. If need be, Nick was fully prepared to bring himself down in flames, all over Adam’s finely polished decks. What tends to occupy your mind when you think about doing battle with someone in Nick’s situation is a lot of blood, most of it being your own.
Confronted by the situation, it is easy to imagine the desperation that might drive someone like Adam to excess. In Tolt’s mind there had to be a way, something more direct, with a quick and certain result, some action he could take, and finish, before his partners started running for the doors. Even to those with mental powers not nearly as subtle as Adam’s, there is little in life more definitive than death.
The opportunity presented itself in the risky nature of Nick’s practice. It might have been any of a number of Nick’s seedier drug clients who could have gotten the nod, to be standing next to him on the street that
