Personal injuries

CHAPTER 45

When our law school friend Clifton Bering was prosecuted for the bribe he'd accepted in that hotel room, Stan not only withdrew from Clifton's case but appeared as a witness in his behalf at his sentencing. It was a dramatic gesture, fond and forgiving, and I always admired Stan for it. But it also burnished the patina on his statue. It was important to Stan, the racially sensitive Republican, to be seen as Clifton's friend. The same, I realized, could not be said about me.

Sennett was sitting on the hood of my car when I got back to the garage under the LeSueur after my meeting with Stern. As I subsequently learned, agents had been out looking for me. When one of them had noticed me trudging down Marshall Avenue, Sennett had been called and he'd relieved the G-man who'd been staked out on my BMW. There was another agent at the door to my office and a third waiting a discreet distance down the block from my home.

I greeted Stan by telling him to get off the car. He didn't move.

"I want the tape," he said.

I had spent quite a bit of time by myself in Stern's club, sorting things out. It's said that a lawyer who litigates against a friend is likely to end up one friend short. I'd always known that. And I'd never had illusions about Stan's nature when he was on the job. As had once been joked at the Bar Show, Stan was the true Hobbesian man: nasty, brutish, and short. I didn't mind that he'd kept Mort's secret; he was obliged to, having promised him complete confidentiality. And he'd warned me from the start that Robbie was lying, and was thus at his own peril for saying that Mort knew nothing of the payoffs. All of that was rightfully as it should have been. But I knew our friendship was over, nevertheless.

I clicked the remote to open my car. At this hour, close to 9 p.m., the garage was nearly empty. The light was murky from the naked sixty-watt bulbs hanging intermittently from porcelain collars in the concrete abutments overhead. The air was unpleasant with exhaust fumes and the lingering smoke of the tobacco exiles who snuck down here on break.

"Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, George. It's grand jury day tomorrow, remember? Everybody's been served. And when Robbie gets in there, I'm asking the jackpot question: Where's the tape? And don't think I won't land on him with both feet if he perjures himself."

Moving toward the car door, I told Stan I was sick of his threats.

"It's not a threat, George. I'm advising you of consequences. There's a difference."

I had a consequence or two of my own to acquaint him with, I said. Raise the issue of that tape before the grand jury and I'd go straight to the Chief Judge, Moira Wmchell with a motion to suppress.

He sneered. "You can't make a suppression motion in front of a grand jury."

But he was wrong about that. There's a single exception in federal law in the case of an unlawful electronic interception of private communications.

"There was nothing illegal about making that tape."

No? I asked. Show me the consent form. Show me where Robbie provided the authorization the government needed before it could overhear his conversation with Brendan Tuohey. There was surely no warrant, as there had been with Skolnick.

It was always an odd moment when I outsmarted Stan Sennett. It happened rarely, but he appeared so flummoxed and defenseless at those instants it was hard not to feel sorry for him. But not tonight. Tonight, I had a good time watching him sputter.

"It's implied. His consent is implied. He turned on the car.,,

Only for heat, I answered.

"He had a deal and a duty to cooperate, George. Given all the circumstances, Moira's going to find his consent was implicit."

I wasn't worried about that anymore, I told him. No court would ever find that Robbie's consent was fully informed-or that he had any further duties under his deal. Not after the U.S. Attorney had engaged in attempted homicide.

"Hom-icide!"

Attempted manslaughter, at least I said. He had sent Robbie out to the Public Forest believing to a moral certainty someone was going to try to kill him on Brendan Tuohey's behalf.

Something in Sennett went into retreat. Seated on the hood, he became a narrow, smallish man, unable to still a faint nervous flaring of his nostrils.

"He was completely covered. The surveillance, the protective detail couldn't have been tighter. And he knew he was at risk, George. He knew what he was getting himself into."

On the contrary, I answered. The setting was frightening. But as McManis had explained, logic-based on what the rest of us knew-said Thohey and Kosic wouldn't share secrets with Robbie at Attitude, only to kill him a week and a half later.

But watching Rollo on Monday, when Robbie displayed the subpoena Evon had served, Stan had finally accepted that Feaver was not going to get close to Tuohey again. And so he'd decided he would have to nab Brendan another way. On Tuesday he'd sent Mort to betray Robbie to Brendan, carrying a message calculated to lead Thohey to but one conclusion: they had to kill Feaver before he started to talk. And Brendan obliged Stan. Sitting at the table, Tuohey had tied a noose. And then Stan let Robbie go to the Forest to make sure the government had an ironclad casefor conspiracy to murder a federal witness. He might as well have painted a target on Robbie's back. And Stan had told no one any of that. Not because of need-to-know or his promise to Dinnerstein or any similarly flimsy rationale for manipulation. He'd kept silent because he realized that if anyone else understood his plan, it could falter. Bobbie almost certainly wouldn't have gone out there. Nor would McManis have let him.

"I made judgments," said Stan. "On the fly. Under pressure. I see how you're looking at this, George, but these are evil people. Truly evil. They have messed with this city far too long."

In many respects, I still regard Stan Sennett as a great man. A great public man. He believed in the right things. And if improving the world is the measure of a human's ultimate worth, he will forever be deemed a better person than I am. His commitment to vanquish wrong and restore justice was as powerful as Superman's. Yet military strategists will tell you about replication, an inviolate principle which says that organizations which oppose each other tend, over time, to become alike. In that light, it was no surprise that fighting evil, as Stan put it, tempted him to evil. But if self-respect couldn't restrain his crudest appetites, his zeal and his ambition, when they led him into darkness, why, I asked, didn't he at least feel some obligation to me? It was a sad conclusion after a couple of decades to find he lacked even a minimal desire to preserve our friendship, especially when it might have preserved his decency as well.

"Georgie, for Godsake. Don't be histrionic. We've had a tough day, you and I. We've had them before. Life will go on."

No, I said. No.

Still on the hood, Stan pondered me over his shoulder in the grimy light. A floor above, tires squealed on the rubberized paint applied to the ramps.

"Revenge, George, personal spite, that's not a good reason to let someone like Brendan Tuohey walk away. It isn't and you know it isn't. What do either one of you get out of that? You or your client?"

I had always yielded to Stan. That was our history. Not that I ever sold a client short or failed to challenge Sennett's positions in court. Yet I'd long let all matters resolve on the basis that he held the high ground of moral conviction; I swam, as defense lawyers do, in the brackish waters of compromise. I'd decided to represent Robbie Feaver to find out if there were absolutes I could cling to with the same tenacity as Stan, hoping that would provide me some comfort. And it did. At the moment.

I told Stan that whether or not he got that tape had nothing to do with me. Were it my call, I'd probably throw it in the river Kindle. But the decision was Robbie Feaver's.

You'll have to ask him for it, I said. You'll have to ask him, knowing he's got every legal right to say it should never see the light of day. You'll have to appeal to him, Stan. Maybe beg him. And I'm glad that's going to happen. Because it will remind you of something you've completely forgotten: what it feels like to be at another person's mercy.

I got in and started the engine. He scooted off the hood quickly enough to reflect some concern I might damn well drive away with him still on it. I'm not sure Stan had ever been frightened of me before. Needless to mention, the moment provided me with no small measure of satisfaction.