A few more taps and I placed two hundred ounces (gold, not silver) on the Marines to win. If the Eighth Army pulled a rabbit out of the hat over the weekend, losing that gold would hurt, but it wouldn’t kill me. Like I told you, I’m not a gambling man. You always gotta calculate the odds. If you work with an insurance company for as long as I have without learning that you’re still pushing paper.
The phone beeped to tell me I had a couple of minutes to be on time. Then it rang and Joe’s ugly face (he’s my partner) appeared on the screen. “Where the hell are you?” he growled.
I looked to find out. “Just walking into the lobby of the building,” I told him. I turned the phone so he could see for himself.
He harrumphed, and his face disappeared from the screen. Joe was like that: didn’t waste any time on pleasantries. Wasn’t much good with small talk either.
I took my seat just before the judge walked in, followed by his staff. Adjudicator-in-Chief was his official title, but everybody called them judges.
When he was young, my granddad became a cop just before the tax revolt brought down the government and cops disappeared altogether. Here, anyway. I guess there are still cops in Colombia (or Venezuela) and other places which still have governments. What he told me about judges in his time bears no relation to adjudicators today. For a start, adjudicators are unbribable. Well, Chief Adjudicators. Offer one
In a way, I guess I’m following in my grandfather’s footsteps. Joe and I run San Francisco Investigations, one of the biggest agencies in the city. Occasionally we do some of the things cops used to do. Like today’s case: murder.
Judge Wainwright was pushing eighty, though you’d never have guessed it. He strode into the room with the walk and energy of a much younger man. That, and his full head of hair—even if it was gray—meant he could pass for fifty-something. I resolved once again to spend more time at the gym—his youthful look made me jealous. Hell, he looks younger than I am!
Wainwright commanded the highest fees in the business, such was his experience and reputation for impartiality. Any of the freshmen advocates from his firm could have easily handled today’s case. I’d expected one of them to be mediating. So why does All-Risk Insurance—they’re our biggest client—want to spend so much money when any junior could have taken his place for peanuts? It didn’t figure.
Wainwright sat down at the head of the table in the center of the room. Adjudicators’ hearing rooms are often highly personalized. This design was one of the more interesting.
The only way to know this table’s “head” is by where the judge sits. It’s almost, but not quite, circular. Look a second time and it seems triangular. It’s both.
Wainwright’s staff arranged themselves on one side of the circular triangle. The All-Risk team sat at another.
To any casual watcher on the web it should have been immediately clear why a junior adjudicator could have handled this hearing: the third side was empty. The defendant, Gerald Murdock—the murderer—wasn’t represented. And he hadn’t shown up. Not that anyone expected him to: he’d disappeared straight after the murder and no one knew—or was willing to tell—where he’d gone.
That’s why Joe and I were both here. Our firm had handled the case; we carried out the investigation, took the depositions, and so on. The moment the adjudicator ruled we were going to have to find the guy and get him to cough up what the judge was about to decide he owed.
Anyone who knew nothing about the killing of Randolph Ackerman had to be blind, deaf and dumb. With group sex, drugs, wife- and secretary-swapping, questionable business deals, not to mention nude bodies (one of them dead) and a murderer who’d done a disappearing act with bundles of money, the tabloids had a field day.
Last Saturday evening Gerald Murdock joined Randolph Ackerman for dinner and a group sex party at Ackerman’s penthouse on Nob Hill. Murdock’s secretary, Annabelle Pearson, Ackerman’s wife, Sophia, and her sister, Jude, were also there to join in the fun and games.
The two men had a few business interests together and over the last couple of years there’d been lots of friction and disagreement between them. Apparently, both of them felt their partner was getting more than his fair share of the profits. They’d come to a peace agreement, and the purpose of the dinner was to celebrate and cement it. Bury the hatchet, if you will.
After dinner, after several bottles of wine, tabs of cocaine and God knows what other cocktails, and lots of group groping, Ackerman and Murdock got into an argument over one of the women. The argument quickly degenerated into a vicious rehash of every accusation they’d ever made against each other.
Seemingly livid with rage, Murdock grabbed a gun from his jacket and shot Ackerman between the eyes. Waving the gun at the women he quickly dressed, ran out of the apartment, down the stairs and into a passing cab.
The women were so stunned—not to mention drunk and/or drugged—that they were slow to act. They first called an ambulance, which arrived just minutes after Murdock had left the building. Not that an ambulance was any help to Ackerman by then. Only after that did they call security. The place was crawling with armed guards (ours) just moments after the ambulance arrived. Just moments too late.
Both witnesses—Annabelle Pearson played mute—agreed with each other down to most of the fine details. And since they were both interviewed while the body was being taken away, still semi-naked, wrapped in sheets or towels, they didn’t have time to concoct any fairytales.
Ackerman’s hobby, however, made it an open and shut case. Seems he liked to record his sex parties with multiple holographic cameras and then edit them into home porn shows. He had hundreds of them. Someone bootlegged the files. The murder—along with Ackerman’s entire porn library—is readily available all over cyberspace. It’s the worst thing to hit Hollywood and the holo nets in years.
We tracked down the cab Murdock had picked up on Nob Hill. He’d gotten out at Union Square, and then his trail disappeared. We couldn’t find any trace of him. We figured he had a car parked there and a second identity already fixed up, probably with one of the sleazier insurance outfits.
By Monday it was obvious that Murdock hadn’t fired that shot in a moment of angry passion. Over the previous months he’d quietly sold all his business interests and closed his stock and bank accounts. He’d turned the last of his real estate into cash just the week before. All but one of his bank accounts were cleaned out. He’d even managed to skim some of the cash from his joint ventures with Ackerman just minutes before the banks closed on Saturday. Ackerman hadn’t suspected a thing.
One of his companies remained. The reason emerged when we asked the Insurance Association data bank for information on Gerald Murdock: he had no insurance cover whatsoever in his own name. One reason he wasn’t represented before the adjudicator.
His sole remaining company, GMR Holdings,was insured. With the Mafia Corporation of Washington, DC. They weren’t too cooperative. Never were: just the minimum level to ensure that other insurance agencies cooperated with them when they needed it. It was part of their heritage. At least according to their marketing, they were proud of their history as a private protection agency back when the government kept trying to put any competitor out of business.
As Mafia insured the
And on Monday Annabelle Pearson paid every remaining bill and proceeded to shut that company down too.
All the money was gone. Thousands of gold ounces.
Gerald Murdock’s legal identity had been tied to his company. His credit cards, bank accounts, agreements and everything else. Very clever. He could deal normally in our society and any trace would lead back to his company, not him.
It also meant there were no records of Murdock: no voiceprints, fingerprints or retina scans on file that we could access to help track him down.
We made a voiceprint from Ackerman’s holo of the party. We found fingerprints that were probably Murdock’s. We ran them through the data bank and—as I’d expected—drew a blank.
