Steve Martini - The Arraignment

Adam had wounded Nick’s ego in ways he probably never understood. Some lawyers, unhappy in their position at a firm, might take a client or two, like candy from a dish, on their way out the door. But not Nick. He wanted it all, right down to the gold ashtrays and Persian carpets.

Nick was making a run, trying to peel off partners like a monkey stripping fruit from a tree. His plan was not only to take the best part of Rocker, Dusha’s talent, but as many of the firm’s major clients as he could scoop up in a single pass, swinging from the branches. A new firm with his own name on the letterhead’s top line.

Like every palace coup in the making, this one could ruin careers if those on the move were caught in the act. The other players, some of the partners upstairs, key people in the other offices, stayed in the shadows while Nick set the munitions at Rocker, Dusha for self-destruct.

Adam’s obsession with empire, his constant expansion onto turf for more offices, was cutting into his partners’ take-home. These were fertile grounds of discontent for Nick. He planted the age-old seed of every revolution: Nick offered them a better deal.

When he was killed in what looked like an accident, a drive-by aimed at a client, there must have been some damp carpets in the firm’s executive suites-and it wasn’t from crying. The people involved in his coup had to wonder what careless notes Nick might have left behind.

He was the one taking all the chances. Of course, he had nothing to lose and the most to gain, the kind of odds Nick would like-managing partner, overnight, in one of the largest firms in the state. It was the kind of edgy action that would give a normal person peptic ulcers. To Nick it was the etching acid of independence, the stuff of which new beginnings are made. Revolution in a banana republic.

What he needed to pull it off was a source of ready cash. Partners in an established firm don’t jump ship en masse, unless somebody with a healthy line of credit is standing ready to bankroll the new venture. It was one thing to move to a new office. It was another to give up your Lexus.

Where was Nick going to get that kind of money? Actually, he told me, that morning over coffee, but I wasn’t listening. It was one of Nick’s character flaws, unfortunately not his worst: the irresistible compulsion, if not to crow, at least to hint of victories, before they were won.

The money would come from the old Capri Hotel itself, Nick’s watering hole with its coffee shop in the dismal basement where he and I had our last conversation.

The hastily formed limited partnership, the seemingly defunct Jamaile Enterprises had only one asset. It owned the property on which the hotel sat.

All the pieces snapped together like a puzzle. Nick had leveraged the purchase of the hotel with a multimillion-dollar mortgage. He would have amortized this over a short term. He didn’t plan on holding the property for long. It was where all of Nick’s money went, the hefty fees he was taking home from the firm, the money Dana was no longer seeing to pay for the house and the car, to support her in the style to which she had become accustomed. Nick was busy plowing all of it into servicing the debt on the mortgage for the rundown hotel, meeting the payments each month like a miser, while he plotted revolution.

How do you maximize an investment like that? Nick revealed that as well. But again, I was tuned out.

It was easy. First you buy the land. Then you get a variance to build above the current height restrictions. Suddenly the land was worth three or four times what you paid for it. Nick had it all figured. There was nothing to prevent him from going higher, except the whim of local government.

And who had the power to grant such a variance? The joint powers of authority, the same authority that controlled most commercial property downtown: the super-zoning kingdom chaired by Zane Tresler.

It was why Nick’s name showed up so prominently on Tresler’s list of campaign donors. Not because Nick thought he could buy the man. Tresler wasn’t for sale, at least not for money. Adam was right about that. Nick gave generously for one reason only, to get Tresler’s attention, to buy access. The closer on this deal would come later, after the Mexicans, the two Ibarra brothers, delivered on their part.

That was where Metz came in. His name on the limited partnership documents, coupled with the mortgage on the hotel property in the name of Jamaile, was a critical part of Nick’s plan, one that he couldn’t have been comfortable with, but over which he had no control.

I could never figure how a streetwise lawyer like Nick could be so slow as to do business on paper with a client who turned up a player in a criminal probe. What I didn’t realize is this: Metz’s name on the partnership was the required security the Mexicans demanded before they performed their part.

The Ibarra brothers had done business with Metz before. They trusted him. For a decade, they had been looting archeological sites in the Yucatan, southern Mexico and Guatemala, selling their finds to rich gringos and posh galleries in Europe and the U.S.

It was why they needed the stolen visas found by the feds in Espinoza’s closet when they searched his apartment. These would be valuable in bringing carloads of artifacts across the border.

Metz provided a convenient cover with his construction company. He also offered an outlet for laundering money. This is what the feds turned up, thinking they had drugs. Looting ancient sites was beginning to pay better than narcotics-and with less risk. Even if you got caught, you generally didn’t do life in a penitentiary for stealing someone else’s cultural heritage.

Under Nick’s scheme, Metz would take a chunk from the profits of the Capri property once the variance was granted and the land was sold to some got-rocks corporation. Metz would then pay off the Ibarra brothers.

It was why Nick tried to palm Metz off on me, to handle the arraignment. Since he was doing business with the man, an appearance next to him in court would only serve to heighten Nick’s profile. Figuring the feds were checking Metz for drugs, as soon as they realized this was a dry hole, Nick knew they would settle for a fine to cover the cost of their time, this on the illegal transfers of cash into the country by Metz. They would slap his hand. A deal like that would be a cakewalk, even for Nick’s buddy Paul who shied away from drug cases.

By then everybody would be happy. Metz would have more cash than he’d ever seen in one place before. And Nick would have the money to finish the law firm coup, Rush and Company, no doubt with a flashy new corner office for himself overlooking the bay and the blue Pacific.

And how was Nick going to get the variance? What do you give to someone who has everything? What gift, what token can anyone offer to a man like Zane Tresler; what would lock him in? Nick had that answer too. You give him something to occupy a place of honor in the white, chambered nautilus, modeled under all that glass in his office. You give him the key to a lost language. You give him the Mexican Rosetta.

But Nick never got that far. He never saw the shadow looming up in front of him: the austere figure of Adam Tolt. Adam was not the kind of man to spend his life building a law firm and then allow Nick to steal it.

The relationship between them was one born of convenience and, I suspect, more than a little bad karma. In the end, Adam had to see Nick as his worst nightmare.

Initially he liked the fact that Nick made Rocker, Dusha a full-service firm. The addition of low-visibility, criminal law services fleshed out the partnership. He liked the money, and he was satisfied with the occasional advice Nick offered on cases. But most of all he liked the Chinese Wall Nick provided around the firm’s respectability. It kept everything clean and tidy. Whenever business clients ventured into crime land, or found themselves there by unhappy circumstance, Adam could banish them down the elevator with a friendly pat on the ass and still keep the revenue flowing. In this way, the firm’s most valued clients, the ones who didn’t have a grand jury giving the smell test to their stock transactions, wouldn’t have to wrench their backs, rubbing up against the expensive finish on Adam’s paneled hallways while trying to avoid contact with Nick’s untouchables.