David Ellis - Breach of Trust

Hauser nodded, like that rang a bell. He still hadn’t answered my question.

Shauna said, “The joint venture shouldn’t be a problem. I did one last year for Ralph Reynolds. We’ll just have to be careful with any local business preferences.”

I didn’t follow very much of what Shauna was saying, but it was clear that Jack Hauser did, and he seemed to like what he was hearing.

“Okay. Well, you’re hired, obviously,” he said.

I didn’t understand what was so “obvious” about that, but I wasn’t going to complain.

“So, what do you charge?” he asked, preparing himself for the bad news.

“Three hundred an hour,” I said. If it was low enough for the state, why not Jack Hauser, too?

He didn’t seem to see it that way. He winced like I’d stuck him with a hot needle. “Any chance we can work on that?” He held out his hands. “I mean, okay, fine, I’ll hire you, but-any way to knock that number down?”

We settled on two-fifty, which was still a decent chunk of change. He showed me the complaint the city filed, left me a retainer, and gave me some basic information on the case. Before the end of the day, I had signed an appearance to enter the case as counsel for Hauser Construction, which Marie took to court to file.

Maybe, I thought, hanging a shingle in private practice wasn’t as hard as I’d thought. Shauna, dutifully impressed, offered to take me out to dinner of my choosing. “Doubling your clientele in ten days is cause for celebration,” she said. Actually, zero times two was still zero, but I didn’t want to pass up the chance to pick the restaurant, where I ordered two racks of barbecue ribs with extra vinegar and sweet-potato fries.

I had three glasses of their homemade brew-a red ale-and then Shauna and I had the wonderful idea of staying out a bit longer. We found a tavern down the street, I switched to vodka, and sometime around midnight, I found myself staggering out of a cab. I was bloated and dizzy and thinking about Talia, but otherwise I felt great.

Great, that is, until I saw the car parked in the driveway of my townhouse.

They got out of the sedan in tandem, all four of them, moving in sync, smoothing out their coats, heads darting side to side-all they were lacking were the trademark sunglasses, as it was midnight.

“Jason Kolarich?” One of the four men, from the driver’s-side rear door, approached me. He didn’t need to bother with the credentials. I’d made them before I had two feet out of the cab. “Special Agent Lee Tucker, FBI.”

“How nice for you.” I kept walking to my door, trying to mentally steel myself through my intoxication.

“We’ll need a minute of your time, sir.”

“Not now. I promised my hamster a bath.”

“It’ll have to be now,” said the man behind him. I recognized the voice, and as he approached, his soft Irish features came into focus. It was Christopher Moody, lead prosecutor on U.S. v. Hector Almundo. These were serious customers, all four of them, most of all the humorless Moody, but I swore I saw the seeds of a smile cross his face.

The Federal Government had descended on my living room. Four agents, all of them straight-faced with faux solemnity, when underneath it all this was what they loved most about the job. A standard deployment, two to the right, two to the left, as I sat on the couch, staring at a laptop computer resting on an ottoman in the center of the room.

When Chris Moody hit “play” on the computer, dialing up the disk drive, the volume popped too loudly, and he quickly adjusted it. The first voice I heard was easy enough to recognize. It was Charlie Cimino, coming in loud and clear in a conversation that had been intercepted by the FBI:

“Okay, what’s next. . oh, the bus contract. Board of Education. That’s the one for Lenny Swift. Okay, here’s the problem with that one. The kid-the new guy, Hector’s lawyer-he says there’s no way to say this is a sole-source and just give it to Lenny’s company. No way to claim there’s something unique about buses. So what he says is, the only way to get around the requirement of competitive bids is to break the contract into pieces, so each piece is small enough to stay below the ten-thousand-dollar threshold.”

“Very creative,” Chris Moody commented as the tape continued.

I didn’t answer. My internal thermometer was rising, but I wanted to see Moody’s entire hand before I said anything.

“How do you do that? ” came a second voice over the recording. “How do you take a hundred-thousand-dollar contract and break it down to increments of ten thousand?”

“That voice is Greg Connolly,” said Chris Moody. “The man you met today,” he added, letting me understand how deeply the feds had sunk their fingers.

Cimino’s voice again:

“Break it up by school, the kid says. Give each school a separate bus contract, instead of going through the Board of Ed.”

I shook my head. Cimino was trying to reassure Connolly by invoking my name-the lawyer had said it was okay. The thing was, I hadn’t.

“Yeah, we could do it by school. That would work.” It was a third voice, and it was unmistakable. It was Patrick Lemke. “It would be, like, a dozen contracts, all under ten thousand.”

“Then we’ll do it that way, by school,” said Cimino. “And Lenny gets all of them.”

“He’s talking about Leonard Swift,” said Chris Moody. “Swift Transportation. The same Leonard Swift who’s donated more than thirty thousand dollars to Governor Snow in the last twelve months.”

“I didn’t give Cimino that advice,” I said. “I never said anything about breaking the contract up to circumvent the law.” I was at the boiling point, and without a clear head-I knew better than to be talking to the feds without a sober brain, or a lawyer. My mouth had gone painfully dry, and the buzz I had been enjoying was now an annoying migraine that prevented me from fully focusing on the problem at hand.

Chris Moody, who was now leaning casually against the bookcase, looked at me with amusement. The other agents sat stone-faced on the couch.

Moody nodded to the agent who was now manning the laptop. One click and we were listening to the second installment of my nightmare.

“Next is this thing with Marymount. The prison contract.” Cimino’s voice started the second tape as well.

“Yeah, the, uh, what’s it-sanitation?” said Greg Connolly. “Janitor work?”

“Right, right. Bobby Higgins’s company,” said Cimino.

“Yeah, and what was the deal there? Someone outbid him?”

“Two companies were lower,” said Patrick Lemke.

“Right, but the kid, Kola-what’s it, Kolarich, right?” Cimino asked.

“Jason Kolarich,” said Lemke.

“Yeah, Kolarich.” Cimino coughed loudly, a prolonged, phlegmy gag. “Yeah, the kid did a number on ’em. DQ’d both of ’em.”

Bullshit again. I didn’t disqualify either of those bidders. I wrote a memo doing just the opposite, for God’s sake. It was all I could do to sit silently, fists clenched, struggling to keep my legs still.

“This Kolarich is the one-this was Hector’s lawyer?” Connolly asked.

“Right, right. Sent the G packin’,” said Cimino. “Why?”

“No, I’m just saying,” said Connolly. “This is a pretty smart kid, right? He did a good job on this thing for Higgins. I mean, he could be useful, is all I’m saying.”

“Remains to be seen. Smart enough, yeah, sure. I mean, he pulled Hector’s head out of his ass, and we know how hard that can be.”