RE: 397 Check Requisition + Litiplex, Ltd.
Per the attached, re agreement with Peter Neucriss, please draw for my signature separate checks to Litiplex, Ltd. in invoice amounts as indicated.
I read this over four or five times. Finally, when I'd made as much sense of it as I could, I printed it. 'Hey.'
I started. I hadn't heard the door open over the printer's whine. It was Brushy. She was standing with my coat and hers and the file on Toots's case all bundled in her arms.
'It's ten to. We're just going to make it.' I guess I had some telltale look, because she came straight up to Bert's desk chair where I sat. I had a thought of fending her off so she couldn't read Bert's little memo over my shoulder, but on the whole I was too pleased with myself and my skills of detection to make much of an effort at that.
'Holy smokes,' she said. 'What's 'the attached'?'
'Hell if I know. I searched — there's no other mention of Litiplex. I suppose I'll have to go ask Glyndora. I've been meaning to talk to her anyway.'
'You said the Committee told you there wasn't any paperwork to cover the checks.'
They did.'
'Maybe this memo is phony,' she said. 'You know, so Bert had something to show if anybody asked why he signed the checks.'
That was possible. It even made sense. The odds against Bert reaching any kind of 'agreement' with Peter Neucriss approached the level of mathematical certainty. Neucriss is Kindle's number-one personal-injury lawyer, a portly little demon whose commanding ways and courtroom successes have led him to be called 'The Prince' to his face, with 'of Darkness' added when he turns his back. He and Bert haven't exchanged a civil word since the
'Will you tell me what happens,' she asked, 'when you talk to them?'
'Sure,' I answered, 'but no blabbing. You know: attorney-client. I don't want this getting around before I figure it out.'
'Come on, Malloy,' she said. 'You know me. I always keep your secrets.' She gave me her own special smile, whimsical, flirtatious, tickled with herself and her hidden adventures, before she rushed me out the door.
B. The Colonel
'State your name please and spell your last name for the record.'
'My name is Angelo Nuccio, N, u, c, c, i, o, but since I'm a kid folks like to call me Toots.' The Colonel, as he is generally known, displayed a grand showman's smile for the members of Bar Discipline Inquiry Panel D arrayed beside him at a long table. We were trying our case, such as it was, before them, a three-member jury of other attorneys, volunteers with a part-time yen to sit in judgment of others. In response to Toots, the chair, Mona Dalles, yielded something, but the two men at either side of her maintained expressions of utter self-imposed neutrality. Mona is at the Zahn firm, G amp; G's biggest competitor, and is known as amiable, level, bright — qualities that were not helpful on Toots's case if you looked at it from the perspective of the defense. What we needed was somebody certifiable. A large reel-to-reel tape recorder spun in front of Mona, preserving, for those who might care to listen in the future, the final stage of one of the county's most vivid public lives.
Colonel Toots is eighty-three years old and a physical wreck. His bowed little legs, one of which had been shot up at Anzio, are brittle with arthritis; his lungs are smoked out, curled up, as I imagine them, like dead leaves, so that he has developed a wheezy little breath that punctuates every word. He has diabetes which is imperiling his sight, and various circulatory ailments. But you have to give it to him, the guy is still full of it — Colonel Toots has been running on premium all his life. He is a man of the city who has been a bit of everything — a soldier in three wars, and a ludicrous chest-thumping patriot; a pol; an accomplished clarinetist who on two occasions has rented the entire Kindle County Symphony to back him when he did a not-bad run-through of a Mozart number for clarinet; a mobster; a lawyer; a friend of whores and gunmen and virtually anyone else in the tri-cities who common sense taught him might count. When I was a copper twenty years ago, he was still in his heyday, an elected city councilman from the South End who, when not politicking, was fixing judges, selling jobs, or, so it was claimed, killing a fellow or two. You could never tell for sure with Toots. He was an absolute stranger to the truth. But a storyteller such as might have beguiled Odysseus, charming even when he recounted matters that better sense told you were absolutely revolting — how he bought votes from 'shines' for turkeys ('November is a good month for elections') or once shot the knees out of some dunce who refused to pay a poolroom debt.
At eighty-three, Colonel Toots has survived just about everything but BAD, which has fired at him an even half dozen times over his career and is still reloading. During a recent federal investigation, it developed that Colonel Toots for fourteen years running had paid the country club dues of Daniel Shea, the chief judge of the county Tax Division, a court where Toots' firm was especially prominent. Judge Shea had wisely died before the US Attorney's Office could indict him on various income tax charges. The government couldn't prove that any matters in Shea's courtroom had been influenced, so there wasn't much of a case on Toots. But the payments violated a number of ethical provisions and the Justice Department had referred the matter to BAD, where my former colleagues, beetle-browed do-gooders, knew at once they had Toots's number, eighty-three years old or not.
So at 10:00 a.m. this Wednesday morning, Brushy and I and our client had arrived at the old school building where BAD is housed. Our presence in itself was a sign of defeat. At my client's urging, I'd employed various gambits to put this off for over two and a half years. Now the ax was certain to fall.
I stipulated to the Administrator's case, a collection of grand jury transcripts offered by Tom Woodhull, the Deputy Administrator, who years ago had been my boss. Standing up to rest his case, Woodhull appeared himself — unruffled, tall, handsome, and completely inflexible. I called Toots to the stand at once, hoping to appear eager to begin the defense.
'When did you become an attorney?' I asked my client, after he had given a gaudy review of his war record.
'Was admitted to the practice of law sixty-two years ago, nineteen days. But who's counting?' He supplied the same corny smile he used every time we went through this.
'Did you attend law school?'
'At Easton University where I was taught contracts by the late Mr Leotis Griswell of your firm, who was my conscience throughout my professional life.'
I turned away from the panel for fear I might smile. I had told Toots to drop the Jiminy Cricket routine, but he did not take easily to correction. He sat in his chair with his walking stick against his knee, a little trail of spittle on his lips from all the heavy mouth-breathing, a bulbous tuber of a man, all belly and cigar, with woolly eyebrows that meandered halfway up his forehead. He wore what he always wore — a shocking-green sport jacket, somewhere in color between your lighter watermelons and a lime. I would wager a considerable sum that neither of the men on the panel owned a tie that bright.
'What has been the nature of your law practice?' I asked next, a tricky question.
'I would say I had a very general practice. I would say,' said Toots, 'that I was a helper. People came to me who needed help and I helped.'
This was about as good as we could do, since Toots in sixty-two years as a lawyer could not name a case he had tried, a will he'd drafted, a contract he'd written. Instead, folks came to him with certain problems and their problems were solved. It was a very Catholic concept, Toots's practice. Who, after all, can explain a miracle? Toots helped many public officials too. There was someone in almost every significant public agency with whom Toots maintained a special friendship. There was a debonair Assistant Attorney General for whom Toots bought suits; a particularly important State Senator who'd had three additions to his home built by a contractor friend of Toots for the remarkably low cost of fourteen grand. This generosity had made the Colonel quite an influential fellow, especially since his methods were always understood. He relied first on his rogue charm. After that, he had other friends, guys from the neighborhood who'd smash your windows, torch your store, or, as happened once to a club singer who got crosswise of Toots, perform a tonsillectomy without benefit of an anesthetic.
