The Pardon

Chapter 25

Jack woke the next morning with the memory of his conversation with Manny still vivid. He ran all sorts of hypotheses through his head but was unable to explain why his father would be involved with Goss. It just didn’t make sense. He needed to find some answers, and he knew they wouldn’t come to him if he sat around the house.

So, after showering and downing a quick cup of coffee, he threw on a jacket and tie and headed for the police station. He arrived at the document section around ten o’clock and asked the clerk to pull the investigative file on State v. Swyteck. He wanted to see for himself what this business of an “extraneous footprint” was all about.

Only the police, the prosecutor, the defendant, or the defendant’s attorney can pull the file in a pending murder case, but Jack had done it so many times as a lawyer with the Freedom Institute that he didn’t even have to show his Florida bar card to the clerk behind the counter. He just signed his name in the registry and filled in his bar number. Out of curiosity, he checked to see who else had been reviewing his file. Detective Stafford and his assistant, of course. . Manny had been there twice, as recently as yesterday. . and someone else had been there: Richard Dressler, an attorney.

He had never heard of any attorney named Richard Dressler, so he checked with the file clerk to see who he was.

“You putting me on, Mr. Swyteck?” said the young black woman behind the counter. She had large, almond eyes and straightened black hair with an orangey-red streak on one side. Other than Jack, she was the only person in the busy station who wasn’t a cop, and she was the only person he’d ever seen with ten different glittering works of art on two-inch fingernails of curling acrylic. “Richard Dressler’s a lawyer,” she told Jack, looking at him as if he were senile. “Said he was your lawyer.”

Jack was stunned, but he put on his best poker face. “You know,” he shook his head with a smile, “my head counsel has so many other young lawyers helping him on this case, sometimes I can’t keep track of them. Dressler. .” Jack baited her, as if he were trying to place the man. “Tall guy-right?”

She just rolled her eyes. “I don’t know what he looked like,” she said, fussing with a little ornamental rhinestone that had loosened from her thumbnail. “I got five hundred people a day coming through here.”

Jack nodded slowly. He definitely wanted to know more about this Richard Dressler, but the last thing he wanted to do was make an issue out of it in the middle of the police station-deep in the heart of enemy territory. He had an idea. “I changed my mind,” he said as he slid the file back over the counter to her. “Thanks anyway. I’ll check it out later.”

“Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug.

He left the police station quickly and headed for a pay phone at the corner. He dialed the Florida bar’s Attorney Information Service and asked for some basic information on Richard Dressier.

“Mr. Dressler’s office is at five-oh-one Kennedy Boulevard, Tampa, Florida,” the woman in the records department cheerfully reported.

A hell of a long way from Miami. “And what kind of law does he practice? Does he do criminal defense?”

The woman checked the computer screen before her. “Mr. Dressler is a board-certified real estate attorney. Would you like a listing of criminal defense lawyers in that area, sir?”

“No, thank you. That’s all I need.” He slowly replaced the receiver and leaned against the phone, totally confused. Why would a real estate attorney from Tampa come three hundred miles to look at a police file in Miami? And why would he pose as Jack’s criminal defense lawyer? Jack could think of no reason-at least no good reason. He shook his head, then walked back to his car. He started thinking about the extraneous footprint that had drawn him to the police file in the first place. He wondered if Dressler had also been curious about Wiggins wing tips.