Steve Martini - The Arraignment

“Maybe his time is valuable,” he says.

“And maybe his two Mexican partners wanted to cleanse some revenue from illicit activities?”

Nick clears his throat. “Doesn’t mean he knew about it.”

“On top of all of this, unless I misjudge the man, I think you’re going to find currency violations and probably tax evasion.”

Nick lifts one eyebrow, rubs his chin, and looks at me with the kind of expression I might expect from an appraiser who’s being told the diamond ring he just told me to buy is melting ice.

“If you check, I think you’re going to find that he used friends and neighbors to move his fee back into this country in order to do the limbo under the currency limits. And if he did that, I suspect he may have gone just one baby step further in forgetting to report any of it on his tax return.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“I thought I’d leave that one to you.”

Nick nods, his knowing and understanding nod. This is practiced, refined from years of listening to sordid deeds, so that by now nothing particularly arouses or discourages him.

“What did he say about the account in Belize? Why did he set it up?”

“I didn’t ask that either. I wouldn’t want to cut into your options for maneuver.”

He laughs, tips his cup to me.

I have often suspected that Nick is not above performing surgery on the facts in a case once the curtain is pulled and he and his client are safely behind it. It is the reason I have refrained from getting into these details with Metz, so that I don’t end up as Nick’s scrubbing nurse.

“Did you ask him why he kept the money? The two hundred K?” Nick is hoping beyond hope.

“Unfortunately I did, and his answer was not encouraging, or believable.”

“What did he say?”

“Consulting fees.”

“That sounds fair to me,” he says.

“Especially if you can get your hands on it for legal fees,” I tell him.

“See, you’re learning already. Let’s start looking at the upside.” Nick would have to be a stone monument to optimism to find even a tin foil lining in this particular cloudburst.

“None of the major money came into the U.S., right? I mean the two million. It went from Mexico to Belize and back again, is that correct?”

“Except for Metz’s fee.”

“Forget about that for the moment. What we have here is perhaps some financial sleight of hand. But it all takes place outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Right?”

“That’s one way to look at it. The other way is that you have a U.S. citizen facilitating currency violations in two foreign countries.”

“So? Let them charge him there. You and I aren’t licensed to practice law in Mexico. That’s somebody else’s problem.”

“Ask Metz if he wants to take his chances on serving the next millennium in some dung heap in Mexico.”

“You think the Mexican government would actually bring charges?”

“I think that if the feds are trying to squeeze your man to find out what he knows, they may well threaten him with extradition south. They could probably get the Mexican government to lend their cooperation. The last time I looked, the two countries had a treaty.”

Nick ponders this problem, scratching his chin with the back of his fingers while he grins at me from across the table. “I guess I’m gonna have to talk to my wife about the company she keeps.”

“Answer one question for me,” I say. “Tell me you didn’t suspect this was drug related.”

He looks at me and hesitates only a second. “Sure. I still don’t,” he says.

The words are there, but they are not convincing. The fact that he says it with a smile undercuts the effect even more. If Nick didn’t know, his demeanor tells me that he had strong suspicions. He thanks me for taking the time as he finishes his coffee and I study the water in the little stainless steel pot. Nick looks at his watch.

“I guess I’m gonna have to go,” he says. “Unless of course you want to do a favor for a friend.”

“Don’t push it,” I tell him.

“I understand,” he says. Then slides out of the booth. “I’ll give you a call this afternoon. Let you know what happened.”

“Not unless you want me to bill you for my time,” I tell him.

He laughs, then heads for the door. “Marge. My friend will catch the bill. Put a good tip on it,” he says.

Before I can turn to say anything, he’s out the door.

It’s the thing about Nick. He can screw you twenty ways from Sunday, but he lives on the sunny side of optimism so it’s hard not to like him.

I give him a good head start, playing with the tea bag, not because I want to drink it. I have no desire to run into Nick with Metz out in front of the courthouse on my way back to the car.

Marge comes with the bill, slaps it unceremoniously on the table, and takes Nick’s coffee cup away, the sludge still in the bottom. Two minutes later, I get up from the booth, peel some singles from folded cash in my pocket, when I see it. Lying there against the worn red plastic of the bench on the other side of the table is Nick’s little handheld device. For a man with a cerebral vacuum, who can suck up the most abstract details in a courtroom, Nick is missing the gene that keeps him attached to physical possessions. As long as I have known him, he has left things behind. Like my teenage daughter, if he owns it, he’ll lose it.

I pick it up, slip it into my coat pocket, and pay the bill.

Outside I make tracks. Maybe I can run him down before he finds Metz. When I get to the corner, I look down the street toward the courthouse where Nick is supposed to meet his client. There is a mass of humanity between me and the front of the building, people walking on the sidewalk, but I don’t see Nick.

I cross over and start down the other side of the street, hoping I catch his eye before he hooks up with Metz. I’m a third of the way down the block before I see him. Nick’s hands are again buried in the pockets of his coat as he hustles down the sidewalk a hundred feet ahead of me, with four lanes of traffic between us. I cup my hand over my mouth to holler, but a city bus gets between us. Belching fumes, its engine drowns any hope of being heard. By the time it passes, it’s too late. Nick is standing on the sidewalk in front of the walkway leading to the courthouse. He is talking to Metz.

I take my hand from my mouth, pat the little device in my pocket, and continue on toward my car a block away. I’ll have to call him later and make arrangements to get it to him.

As I walk, I can’t help but toy with the possible angles he has been playing. I suspect that he knew all along that Metz was up to his ass in laundering money. If so, he also knew I wouldn’t take the case. So why would he try and refer it? One possibility, he wanted to shield himself from a close-up inspection of the particulars until I had filtered them for him. My interview with Metz. This way he could shade his eyes, take a more artful approach at sculpting the facts in his initial discussions with the man. In this way Nick could lead Metz to tell him stories that would be more helpful while avoiding a flat-out suborning of perjury. It is the kind of Machiavellian mental coil I might expect from Nick.

But there is another possibility, one that is more likely. This one involves Dana. From what Metz told me, if I believe anything, it is that Dana knew the broad outline of his problem, that it could be drug related. If she is, as Nick says, hot to clean up his practice, Dana wouldn’t want him handling this, particularly with a client in her own social orbit.

Knowing Dana, her first concern would be that it could splash on her, that some enterprising reporter from the society section might pick up on the fact that Metz served on the commission with his lawyer’s wife, all of this while she was striving to steer Nick toward more genteel clients and climb the social rungs of the city’s arts community.