Pleading guilty

GAGE amp; GRISWELL

Office Memorandum

20 November To: Glyndora Gaines, Supervisor Accounting Section FROM: Robert A. Kamin 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 Marsden case some years back, when Neucriss in closing referred to Bert as 'the attorney from the fourth dimension' and got a laugh out of the jury. It would make sense, I supposed, to talk to Neucriss too, although that was never a welcome prospect.

'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. '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.