Steve Martini - The Arraignment

“No, I suppose it’s not.” I can tell Adam would have rather I’d come up with that idea. It’s the kind of questions you see in transcripts of hearings before the bar, before they suspend your license. “And who suggested this course of action?”

“It’s the problem with physical evidence,” I tell him. “Sometimes it’s not what’s there, but what’s missing that gets you in trouble. We’d end up taking Ibarra’s prints off the letter. They’d wonder why they weren’t there.”

He looks at me, a pained expression.

“It’s all right. We’ll just tell them the truth. You knew I’d be curious. I was a friend of Nick’s. You wanted to know if I knew anything about it. So you gave me the letter to read. It just means the cops are going to have a lot more questions for me.”

“Yes. I suppose that’s always the best approach,” he says. “The truth. So, do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Know anything about it?” He picks the letter up from the table in front of me, this time carefully handling it from the edges, and gently folds it, putting it back in the envelope. All the while looking at me, waiting for a response.

“The letter, no. I’ve never seen it before.”

“I assumed that much,” he says. “Otherwise you would have told me, right?” What he means is just like I told him about Espinoza.

I dodge the question by taking a healthy swallow of ale, filling my mouth.

Adam is shrewd. Whether he’d thought about my prints on the letter or not, he is determined to screen every piece of information that comes his way so that none of the dirt flies up and hits the firm. He also guesses that I am holding back, as I assume he is.

“Have you ever heard of the guy before? This Pablo Ibarra?”

Now it would require an affirmative lie. “I’ve heard the name. Tell me, how long have you had the letter? Really?”

Adam smiles. “What difference does it make?”

“The cops will want to know.”

“I got it this morning,” he says.

“Tell me you didn’t go down and sweep the mail room the night Nick was killed?”

“Who’s asking, you or the police?”

“Maybe I don’t want to know.”

“Trust me, you don’t,” he says. “Where did you hear the name? This man, Ibarra?”

“Gerald Metz gave it to me.”

“Metz?” He thought I was going to say Nick. Now it comes out of left field.

“During my initial interview with him. He’d done some work with the sons. Said it was a construction job.”

“Right. Did he ever mention the father?”

“In passing.”

“Did Metz know him?”

“It depends on whether you believe Metz. According to him, he only knew the name. He’d never met him.”

“You didn’t tell me this before.”

“I didn’t tell the police, either. Like you with the letter.” Touche. “Piece of advice,” I tell him.

“What’s that?”

“If you’re going to take it to the cops with your story, I suppose your secretary will verify it?”

“Absolutely.”

“You might want to make sure she touches the envelope at least.”

He smiles. Adam’s already made a mental note.

“What else did Metz say about them?”

“He also said the father was upset about something. That’s why his deal fell through. If anything Metz said was credible.”

“Go on,” he says.

“That’s it.”

“If the papers get their hands on this, they’ll crucify us. They’ll be crawling all over the firm, demanding to know what Nick was involved in. Wanting to know if we’re being investigated, whether we’ve been shredding documents. Legalgate,” he says.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking the answer lies in Mexico. I’ve booked a flight for tomorrow, the earliest I could get there. I want some information. I’m not going to wait for it to come to me.”

“If you want to talk to Ibarra, you could just call him on the phone.”

“I thought about that. The problem is, for all we know, he may have killed Nick himself. I don’t mean pull the trigger. But he might have hired somebody. If he didn’t, he may come to the same conclusion we did, that his boys are involved. You think he’s going to talk to me about something like that over the phone?”

“Probably not.”

“I don’t think so either. Besides, if I call him, even if he’s willing to talk to me, he’s going to want me to come down there, and he’s going to want to set the terms and conditions, no doubt a meeting on his turf.”

“I want to get to the bottom of this as much as you do. When people start asking questions, I want to be able to tell them Rocker, Dusha and De Wine were not involved in anything illegal. If anyone says we were, they’re going to be looking at an action for business disparagement that will take their house, their dog, their wife, and their retirement, not necessarily in that order.

“I’m coming with you. The Gulfstream is already fueled, at the airport,” he continues. “It would take us about four, four and a half hours flight time. We can leave tonight. In fact, there’s a firm we do business with down in Mexico City, security and investigations. I’ve used them before. I could arrange to have their services available. One of the biggest drug rings in the world operates out of the Yucatan Peninsula. Hell, I’ve read that half the resorts in Cancun were built with drug money. Given the kind of people we are dealing with, I think it would be wise to have some extra ‘insurance.’ ”

This sounds good but incredibly expensive. “I don’t want to cost the firm a ton of money.”

“Nonsense. I may not be as adventuresome as you are, but I like to have an edge before I go sticking my nose in.”

He looks at his watch. “I think Cancun is Central time zone. We wouldn’t be able to do anything down there until tomorrow anyway. Say we meet at the airport in Carlsbad at nine o’clock tonight. McClellan-Palomar, that’s where we keep the plane. Do you know where the field is?”

“I’ll find it.”

The waiter brings our lunch. Adam picks up the envelope with Ibarra’s letter so it doesn’t get splattered with soup.

“In the meantime, I’ll have the secretary touch this a few times and have it delivered to the police by courier in the morning, after we’re gone.”

Three hours in and the sleek Gulfstream is knifing through the night sky on its way south. I gaze out the tiny oval window and listen to the drone of the twin jet engines as we skim above humid thunderheads, wondering where we are and what is beneath us.

Adam is asleep on the couch across from me, a seat belt loosely draped over his midsection and buckled on the outside of a blanket that covers him. Shoes off, his stocking feet are sticking out beyond the end of the blanket.

He is a man grown accustomed to the finer things. It’s what a life of privilege can do. He has no sense of airport security lines that look like a scene from Gandhi. If I told him they stopped serving meals on trays with real silverware, I don’t think he would believe me. If you suggested that security now prevents even the use of plastic utensils on airliners, his first question would be, “How are you supposed cut your steak?” Man out of touch with the world.

His mouth is open, sleeping like a baby. I suspect he is snoring, though with the sound of the engines, I can’t hear it.

I look at the stars, holes in the dark sky, and finally doze off.

The next thing I know, Adam is shaking me by my good arm. Fully dressed, his shoes back on, he is straightening his tie.

“We’re descending toward the airport in Cancun. You might want to freshen up.”

Twenty minutes later we’re on the ground, rolling down one of the taxiways toward a hangar with its yawning door open, all lit up inside. The pilot pulls right in and shuts the engines down.