David Ellis - Breach of Trust

“Chris,” I said, “you missed a spot on your face.”

He drew back. He fought every instinct to wipe at his face. “What?”

“You still have a little egg on your face from blowing the Almundo case. I mean, that’s what this is all about, right? You’ve had a hard-on for me ever since the not-guilty.”

Moody didn’t crack, not for a second; he had way too much of an upper hand here. Instead, he smiled. “If it eases the pain, Kolarich, go ahead and fantasize. But I wouldn’t want to be you right now.”

I looked away, my mind racing. I found a picture of my wife and child on the bookcase and stared it a long time.

“Looks like I’m going to have to beat your ass in court,” I said. “Again.”

Moody’s eyes did that rapid-blink thing I remembered. He thought for a moment and nodded. “Hope you can say the same for that partner of yours-what’s her name, Agent Tucker?”

“Tasker,” said the FBI agent. “Shauna Tasker.”

“Right, Shauna Tasker. Sounds like she got a taste of that Hauser Construction work, too.” He scratched his chin in mock contemplation. “What do you think, Jason? Does that make her a co-conspirator?”

I steeled myself, kept my voice low and even. “Keep her out of this. She has nothing to do with this.”

“She does now.”

We locked eyes. This was the highlight of Christopher Moody’s year, putting the screws to me. He wasn’t even trying to hide it.

Shauna. I thought I was paying her back, for once, by including her in some legal work I had drummed up. Instead, she was possibly in the soup along with me. I wasn’t sure of that, and neither was Moody, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that he could dirty her up without even prosecuting her. The same day he slapped the PCB with a federal subpoena, he’d hit Shauna with one and make sure the newspapers didn’t miss the connection. And if he had any kind of a good-faith basis to do so, he’d indict her and effectively ruin her career. Whether she was guilty or innocent would be a lost detail. He knew all of this, and he knew I knew, too.

“Keep her out of this, Chris,” I said.

He shrugged. “That decision isn’t mine. It’s yours.” He looked at the other agents in the room. “Let’s give Jason some time to think about this, guys.” He pushed himself out of the chair. The lot of them moved toward the front door. Moody stopped at the edge of the living room and flipped a business card in my direction. “But I better be hearing from you tomorrow, Jason,” he said. “Or you and your girlfriend will be hearing from us.”

I didn’t even try to sleep that night. I did laps around my townhouse, pacing everywhere, even taking a long walk outside in the below-freezing temps. Throughout it, I kept telling myself that I should be afraid. Afraid of prison. Afraid of losing my law license. But I wasn’t. With each passing hour, I only grew angrier. Angry at myself, for dipping a toe into that cesspool and then being surprised when it came out dirty. But most of all, angry at Charlie Cimino. He had given me instructions to do things I shouldn’t do, and when I refused, he’d doctored documents and misrepresented my words.

The federal government wasn’t flying blind here; this was no bluff. Clearly, they’d placed eavesdropping devices in Greg Connolly’s office and on someone’s phone-either his or Charlie Cimino’s. They were Title III intercepts, meaning the government was intercepting these conversations without the knowledge of any of the participants. That’s hard to do. It’s an easier task when one of the parties to the conversation consents to wearing a wire, but when the feds want to eavesdrop without anyone’s knowledge, they have to go under Title III and get the approval of the chief federal judge as well as the top levels at the Department of Justice. They have to clear about ten different hurdles. They have to already have a pretty solid case.

And I was their gift-wrapped package, the insect that walked right into the spiderweb.

Maybe you’ll be the one guy at the table who walks. Those words from Christopher Moody, more than anything else he’d said or shown me, were the essence of my problem. The evidence he had on me, at this point, wasn’t that great. And if he really thought I was dirty, he would have waited for more. He could have waited weeks, months, to catch me deeper in the soup. But he didn’t do that, because he knew I wasn’t part of this thing. Maybe he even knew I was on the verge of quitting, after getting a sniff of the stench. Maybe that’s why he was here tonight, before I got out. He was scooping me up before I left the sandbox.

But none of that changed the fact that he had a basis for charging me, and that I would be one of several defendants sitting at the defense table, when the prosecution tried a multiple-defendant case featuring scumbags like Charlie Cimino and Gregory Connolly. I’d be part of the conspiracy. And I’d be trying, probably in vain, to separate myself from these other pieces of garbage, trying to persuade the jury not to flush me down the toilet with the lot of them. By the time the jury got down to me on the verdict form, they’d be so disgusted that they’d just check “guilty” and hand the slip to the bailiff.

The one guy at the table who walks. It was possible, sure. But guilt by association is a cliche for a reason. It happens all the time, which is why the prosecution likes to try defendants together in these cases. And this is to say nothing of the very real possibility that some of these assholes would plead out and, in exchange for a lenient sentence, point the fingers at everyone they could. Cimino surely would swear that I advised him on how to evade the public-bidding requirements for the bus contract. He and Connolly and Patrick Lemke would be happy to swear that I wrote up a memo disqualifying the obviously qualified bidders who beat out Higgins Sanitation, and they would probably throw in a little bonus fabrication-like how I demanded getting outside legal work from Higgins’s partner, Jack Hauser, in exchange. I would tell the jury that I had no idea that Jack Hauser came to me as part of a kickback, but after hearing months of testimony about sordid dealings from the likes of Charlie Cimino and Greg Connolly, would a disgusted jury believe me?

Advice of counsel. It’s what all of them would say. We’re not lawyers; we relied on Kolarich to tell us what to do.

And even if I did manage to beat the rap, I was looking at a good twelve, eighteen months under the federal spotlight, my reputation ruined, my career shattered. People don’t equate “not guilty” with “innocent.” The burn heals with time, but it leaves a real nasty scar that I would wear forever. I would just be the guy who got away with it.

And then, for the kicker, there was Shauna. Would Chris Moody go after her, just to hook me in? I had no doubt that he would. When the government wants you, they get you, whatever it takes. She would get hauled in for questioning, her one-person law firm hit with a federal subpoena, and I couldn’t rule out the possibility of an indictment. All because she gave an office down the hall to an old friend, and I just happened to invite her to that meeting with Jack Hauser.

I couldn’t let that happen. I just couldn’t.

Moody had me, and we both knew it.

I met Paul Riley at the Maritime Club, where only about a week ago I’d had lunch with Jon Soliday, who had warned me not to go near the Procurement and Construction Board. I longed for a do-over where I took Jon’s advice and tried a different angle for discovering who killed Adalbert Wozniak and Ernesto Ramirez. But I hadn’t, and now I was dealing with the mess.