'Did you practice in the Tax Division courts?'
'Not at all. Never. If I was goin' there today I'd need to ask directions.'
I glanced down at Brushy to see how this was going. She was seated beside me, wearing a dark suit, trying to record every word on a yellow pad. She gave me a wee smile, but that was just being friends. She was too tough to hold out any more hope than I did.
'Now, did you know Judge Daniel Shea?' I asked.
'Oh yes, I known Judge Shea since we was both young attorneys. We was terrific friends. Like this.'
'And did you, as the Administrator here alleges, pay the country club dues of Judge Shea?'
'Absolutely.' Toots had not been quite as sure when the IRS asked him the same question a number of years ago, but he had cut the interview short; it would not prove too damaging when Woodhull began his cross- examination, which was guaranteed to be wooden in any event.
'Can you please explain how that occurred?'
'That would be no trouble at all.' Toots grabbed hold of his walking stick and shifted, as it were, into forward gear. 'In about 1978 I run across Dan Shea at a dinner for the Knights of Columbus and we started talking, as fellas do, about golf. He told me that he had always wanted to get into the Bavarian Mound Country Club, which was right in his neighborhood, but unfortunately for him, he did not know a soul who could sponsor him. I volunteered tor that job with pleasure. Shortly thereafter that, the president of the club, Mr Shawcross, called to my attention the fact that Dan Shea was having some trouble making his dues. Since I was his sponsor, I felt it was up to me to pay them, and that's what happened ever since.'
'Now did you mention these payments to Judge Shea?'
'Never,' he said. 'I did not want him to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable. His wife, Bridget, was in very bad health then and the expense and trouble was weighing quite heavy on him. Knowing Dan Shea, I'm sure that he had meant to get to this and it slipped his mind.'
'And did you ever discuss with him any of the business in his court that your firm had there?'
'Never,' he said again. 'How could I? The younger fellas in my office do any number of things. It never crossed my mind that they was in that court. There's so many courts these days, you know.' Toots spread his arms wide and smiled, revealing the worn yellow stubs of what were left of his teeth.
Brushy handed me a note. 'The cash,' it said.
'Oh yes.' I touched my tie to revert to role. 'We've stipulated that when Mr Shawcross was in the grand jury, he testified you made these payments in cash and asked him not to discuss them with anyone. Could you explain that, please?'
'That would be no trouble at all,' said Toots. ‘I did not want it to become known among the members of the club that Judge Shea was having a problem with his dues. I felt that would embarrass him. So I paid in cash, hoping that the bookkeeper and all of them would not see my name on a check, and I asked Mr Shawcross to very kindly keep this to himself.' With effort, he cranked himself about to face the panel. ‘I was just trying to be a friend,' he told them. I didn't notice anybody up there reaching for a hanky.
Woodhull spent about fifteen minutes stumbling around on cross-examination. Toots, who hadn't missed a word on direct, was suddenly virtually deaf. Woodhull repeated every question three or four times and Toots often responded simply with a vague, addled stare. About noon Mona called a recess. That was enough for today. Seven lawyers, we all got out our diaries to see when we could resume. We went through the mornings and afternoons clear from today to next Tuesday before everybody was free.
'How'd I do?' Toots asked on the way out. 'Great,' I said.
He lit up childishly and laughed. He thought so too.
'Why does a guy who's eighty-three want to be disbarred?' asked Brushy after we'd put him in a taxi. 'Why doesn't he just resign from practice?'
Toots's forty-year career as councilman for the South End had come to a conclusion in the early 1980s, when it turned out that the city's Parks and Playgrounds Commission, which Toots controlled by appointments, had voted for a decade straight to award its refuse-hauling contract to Eastern Salvage, a company owned through various intermediaries by one of Toots's sons. Since then, Toots's life had been confined to his role as the man for desperate occasions. He needed his law license to lend his activities some air of legitimacy. I explained all this to Brushy as we walked back toward the Needle through the noontime crowds. There had been a light snowfall last night which had been ground to gray mush and crept over the toes of our shoes.
'There's no listing in the Yellow Pages for Fixers. Besides, it would stain his honor. This is a man who wanted to wear his medals to the hearing. He can't accept the public disgrace.'
'His honor?' she asked. 'He's had people killed. Those guys in the South End? He eats lunch with them. Dinner.'
'That's an honor too.'
Brushy shook her head. We entered the Needle and rose by elevator to G amp; G's reception area, where oaken bookcases had been erected and filled with dozens of antique books, bought by the gross, to lend the proper air. Our offices had been redecorated at Martin's direction a couple of years ago in the manner of an English hunting lodge. This main reception area was refurbished with planked pine and tufted leather chairs of royal maroon and little landscapes and hunting scenes on the walls, pictures in brass frames with broad green mats, second-rate decorative crap, but who was asking me? That kind of stage setting, though, made it easier to fall into some kind of fugue state — new faces every day, young people striding about with urgent anguished looks, all this important stuff going on that didn't have a damn thing to do with me. Bonds issuing. Deals closing. You could see it all from a considerable distance: Men with phallic symbols around their necks. Women with half their legs exposed. What on God's green planet were they up to? Why was it that they cared and I didn't?
'I've told him we can't win,' I said of Toots. 'He kept asking me to get continuances.'
'I see that.' She thumped the file. 'Two years four months. For what?' She was backing down the corridor. She had a meeting with Martin but reminded me about racquetball at six.
'Time.'
'What's he going to do with time?' asked Brushy. 'Die,' I said, before turning away.
IX
A. Slave Queen of Accounting
Like the engine room of an oceangoing vessel, where soot-spotted hands shovel coal into great fires, the firm's Accounting Department burns on below-decks. On 32, between an investment banking operation and a travel service, the location has a sub-basement feel, because it is cut off from the three other floors we occupy. Yet in many ways this is the heart of G amp; G: to Accounting our billable hours are reported on a daily basis; from Accounting our statements for services go out every month. Here the great profit-making motor of the law firm whines away at high r.p.m.'s.
One of the most peculiar things about going from BAD to G amp; G was getting used to a world where money — which as a cop and then a public lawyer I regarded as inherently evil — is, instead, the point of axis of an entire universe. Money's why the clients hire us — to help them make more or keep what they have. God knows, it's what we want from them. It is what we all have in common. At this point in the calendar, when our fiscal year concludes, the firm takes on the air of a campus before the Big Game. We have partnership meetings about collecting that can't be easily distinguished from pep rallies, where Martin, and especially Carl, make speeches designed to give us the stomach to demand our clients actually pay our bills. It was one of Carl's many clever innovations to move the close of our fiscal year back a month to January 31, in order to give clients the chance to book our fees in either calendar year. On February 2, Groundhog Day, after the receipts are totaled, the partnership meets in tuxedos, while the Committee announces each partner's 'points' — our percentile share of firm income.
Accounting is housed in a couple of rooms, garish with fluorescence, nine women in an environment of white Formica. Their figures are reported daily to the Committee and various CPAs. The staff supervisor, the resident
