Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

“Did you have any trouble getting in?” I ask.

Herman shook his head. “As long as you pay the cover, they open the door,” he says. “Top of the stairs they got a steel door thick as a safe, speaker system, and a camera. You talk nice, they let you in. Inside’s like an air lock. Once the door closes, they own you. They frisk you with a metal wand, check your ID, look you up and down and see if they smell a cop. If not, you pay and they let you in.”

“How much?”

“That’s the rub,” says Herman. “A hundred bills.”

I look at him in disbelief.

“They take a credit card,” he says. “I guess they figure, you can pay, you must be a gentleman. You get two drinks and you can talk to the girls. Anything more, the sky’s gonna be the limit,” he says. “I’m only guessin’, of course.” He smiles at me as he says it.

“You’re sure she works there?” I am talking about the girl we know as Ben, the one who invited Alex Ives to the party and the fiery crash afterward that he can’t remember.

“Yeah. I talked to one of the girls who works there, showed her the picture I got from the tattoo shop owner, and the gal ID’ed her. Says her name is Crystal. Stage name, of course. None of them use their real names at work. Said Crystal works the evening shift, four to whenever things go slack. They try to catch the guys going home from work. Noon until two or three in the afternoon, and then four thirty until closing.”

I look at my watch. It’s twenty past four. “She should be there,” I say.

“Give her a few more minutes,” says Herman. “If the shift starts at four thirty, she’s probably backstage getting ready. Don’t wanna appear too anxious. I already rented a room at the hotel down the street.” He points.

I see the blue neon sign.

“Room number seven.” He hands me the key. “We need a quiet place to get her to talk.”

I take his lead on this. Herman is streetwise. He certainly has more experience in this realm than I do. We sit in the car.

“We need to think this out. What we’re going to do,” I say. “Why don’t you approach her, figure out how to get her to the room. Once she’s inside we can both talk to her.”

“She’s more likely to go with you. Oversize black guy with a shiny shaved dome is more likely to put her on edge.”

“Statistics show that most serial killers are middle-aged white guys.”

“Be that as it may,” says Herman. “You keep the key. We approach her inside the club, start talking about Ives and the accident, she’s liable to wanna go to the ladies’ room, powder her nose,” says Herman, “and disappear. That’s if things go well.”

Herman gives me a briefing on what the place looks like inside, dark with a lot of mirrors, colored smoke, and laser lights. Cocktail tables and booths with a bar along the far wall. An elevated stage with a pole out front for dancing.

“I didn’t see any muscle. Nothing at the door. But you can be sure there’ll be some,” he says. “Chances are if there are problems they won’t be calling the cops.”

“You’re saying a frontal assault is not the height of prudence.”

“I don’t know about Prudence, whoever she is, but if the one we know as Ben makes a stink it could get damn ugly,” says Herman. “We’ll be up to our armpits in bulging bouncers, or worse, the business end of a sawed-off shotgun.”

Herman is thinking we need to get her on neutral turf before we start to talk about the business at hand, and then we pay her for the information, her time and trouble. He’s suggesting we go in separately so they don’t know we’re together. Sit at separate tables. That way we don’t overwhelm her.

“Makes sense. One thing bothers me, though,” I tell him. “We’re assuming that the minute we tell the cops that we have a witness who can put him at the party and that she was paid to do it, they’ll drop the charges on Ives.”

“It’s what we’re hoping,” says Herman. “Makes sense to me.”

“Yeah, but you’re not a prosecutor. If they find out we paid the girl for the information, and they will find out, they’re going to say we paid her to lie. To give Alex an out. If they force us to trial on a reckless charge, vehicular manslaughter, I put her on the stand, the first thing the D.A.’s gonna ask is whether we gave her anything in return for her testimony. They’ll impeach the hell out of her. That and the fact we found her working in a strip club and I offered to hire her for sex to get her to the hotel. They’ll impeach both of us. Her testimony won’t be worth a damn and I’ll be wearing a scarlet letter branded across my forehead during closing argument.”

“You’re the lawyer,” says Herman. “But what other alternative do we have?”

Herman has me there. The cops have no evidence of drugs in Ives’s system, yet he can’t remember anything and he was clearly unconscious at the scene and for some time after. If we put our own medical expert on the stand to tell the jury what we already know, there is only one set of drugs we know of that causes memory loss like this and disappears from the bloodstream that fast-the date rape drugs. How are these normally used in criminal cases? Dropped into one drink, what Ives said he had, without the drinker’s knowledge. The police have no way to explain an accident that killed a prominent lawyer. We hand them the answer. It wasn’t a DUI. Our client was drugged against his will. Used as cover for a murder. That bumps it all up. A much bigger case for them. “Her testimony works. I just don’t like the idea that we’re paying her.”

“You can ask her to testify out of the goodness of her heart,” he says, “but I doubt it’s gonna work.”

He’s right. I look at my watch. “Let’s do it.”

OK, what do we have?”

“Are you on a secure line?”

“No. So let’s keep it cryptic.”

“We have overlapping objects on the matrix. One of them in a vehicle outside. He was joined by someone else about six minutes ago. Right now the two of them are just sitting there. The girl is in the building.”

“How close?”

“Less than eighty meters.”

The man gripped the tarnished eagle and moved his hand slowly over the smooth oxidized surface of the cane’s handle as he thought. “It could just be a coincidence,” he said.

“Possible, but not likely.”

The loose ends were multiplying. “Any idea who the other man is in the vehicle?”

“We’re working on it. Nothing yet.”

“How much time do we have?”

“We’re not sure. Depends when she leaves and where she goes. Assuming her usual ride, her boyfriend, we are four by four. Positive nav system is breachable.” In a word they were ready to go. “What do you want to do?”

The Tarnished Eagle thought for a moment. “We sit tight and wait. Don’t do anything until you clear it here. If she exits the building, I want to know it. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“If either of them make any effort at contact, call me at this number. Do we have a cage over the twitter, hers and his?”

“Affirmative.”

This meant that if either of them tried to contact the other by cell phone, the call would be picked up and recorded. There was no reason to believe that either of them had the other’s cell phone number, or that they had ever communicated or met. Still, how did they find her? It hit him like a bolt out of the blue. “If you have a cage up, you have his number?”

“Correct.”

“Is he on the grid now?”

“Negative.”

“Can you turn him on?”

“Just a moment.” Several seconds passed. “Yes. We have him.”

“Copy it. Everything. Even if it’s not clear, copy it all!”