David Ellis - Breach of Trust

“Besides,” she said, “I need someone more. . talented.”

More creative, she meant. More ethically flexible. Better able to take something illegal and give it the appearance of legality. Apparently, I’d come highly recommended in that regard. Quite the name I was making for myself.

“You and Charlie-you can still work with him, but I would take priority.”

I threw her words back at her. “You’d do well to be clear with him on that point.”

“Don’t worry about what I tell Charlie Cimino,” she snapped. “You worry about what I tell you.”

Sometimes I smile when I’m not pleased. This was one of those times. “I don’t recall accepting the offer to work for you. So you might want to take caution in your tone.”

She raised her chin and stared long and hard at me. “Charlie mentioned the attitude.”

“Did he? Good.”

“How long do I have to wait before you say yes?”

Now I was smiling because I admired her brass. “And why am I going to say yes, Madison?”

“You’re going to say yes,” she said, gathering her purse, “because Governor Carlton Snow will make you rich and powerful.”

She had no idea what she was doing. She didn’t know what I represented. She didn’t realize that she was inviting the federal government into the inner circle of the governor’s office.

She slipped a card out of her purse and left it on the bed. “Oh, and one more thing,” she said on her way out. “What happened here tonight? That doesn’t leave this room. Nobody can know about this.”

She didn’t want anyone to know about the sex? Fair enough. Wasn’t my style to kiss and tell, anyway. And since I wasn’t wearing a wire to this event tonight, not only would the feds not know what we did between the sheets, but they also wouldn’t know that she just asked me to work for her, either.

Not unless I decided to accept her offer. That one would require some thought.

I got back home after midnight. I couldn’t sleep. My limbs were tingling from the reintroduction to sexual intercourse. I wasn’t interested in television. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.

I didn’t know what to think about Madison Koehler’s offer, either. I’d gone after the PCB to learn about Ernesto Ramirez’s murder, and I worked with Charlie initially for the same reason. I was trying to catch a killer. And then Charlie and Connolly and the rest of them screwed me over with the doctored memos and handed Chris Moody a golden opportunity to pinch me, so my conscience didn’t bother me one bit in helping the government make a case against them.

But neither reason-solving a murder or payback-had anything to do with Madison Koehler, at least as far as I could tell. I didn’t know her. I had no agenda with her. If I accepted her offer, and the job was anything like what she’d subtly suggested, she was going to get into trouble as well.

I decided I would hold on to the idea for the time being.

Nothing better to do, I took a look at the documents I had taken from the state office regarding Starlight Catering. I figured I might as well make myself productive.

I knew two things about the company: They’d won a major contract with the state after Adalbert Wozniak’s company was disqualified, and Charlie Cimino had left them off the list of companies we were targeting. There was no chance it was a coincidence.

After I went through the documents, I knew a third thing about Starlight.

I knew the name of the owner.

Starlight Catering was a corporation whose sole principal officer was a man named Delroy Bailey. He had checked the box for “African American” in the form the state made you fill out to determine whether you qualified as a minority business enterprise. Sure enough, Agent Tucker had been right. Starlight Catering was an MBE.

But I didn’t recognize the name Delroy Bailey. I looked up the name on my laptop’s Internet and got a lot of hits, as the company had a website and had also catered some big events. There was a photo of him at one of the parties. He was a handsome, young, skinny black guy, which didn’t help me one way or the other, but hooray for him.

Here was another hit: Delroy Bailey and his wife, Yolanda, at a fundraiser for some alderman named Diaz. Yolanda looked a little older than Delroy, and she was Latina, not African American. Again, that didn’t really help me.

I froze. Wait. Yolanda.

I went to my bag and retrieved the computer that Paul Riley had lent me, with the database from the Almundo trial. The more I thought about it, the surer I was, but it took a few minutes to find the right spot on the computer, the background workup on the prosecution’s star witness, Joey Espinoza.

“Will wonders never cease,” I mumbled, something my mother used to say.

Joey Espinoza had a sister named Yolanda Espinoza Bailey.

Starlight Catering was run by Joey Espinoza’s brother-in-law.

“So how’d it go last night?” Lee Tucker had a pinch of tobacco in his mouth and his feet up on the table. I’d barely walked through the door to Suite 410 in my office building before he was asking.

“It went.” I took a chair across from him.

“Anything good?”

I made a face. “A roomful of greedy jerk-offs.”

“You make any good contacts?”

“It was a pretty boring affair.”

Tucker watched me for a moment. “That it? Nothing else?”

“The martinis were good.”

He let that comment hang for a long time. Slowly, he nodded. “Okay, then.”

“Okay, then.”

His feet came off the table. “Today you have number sixteen.”

“Right. Hoffman.” Using our code, Charlie had identified the contractor denominated “16” on his master list, Hoffman Design and Supplies, as the next target on the list.

“Okay, and I’ve got the text,” he said, checking a box. The feds were downloading all of the text messages Charlie sent me. The texts were their lifeblood. It was how your basic, stateside fraudulent scheme became a federal offense.

He looked up at me. “So, if that’s it, then I guess you’re good to go.” He handed me the F-Bird recording device.

“Great. It’s been dreamy.” I pushed myself out of the chair. Sometimes these meetings took a while, but we were becoming much more efficient.

“Nothing at all from last night?” he asked me. “You meet the governor?”

“No.”

“Learn any useful information?”

“No.”

Tucker nodded for a long time. He looked disappointed. “Well, that’s too bad,” he said.

Charlie was in a rare good mood today. I didn’t know what market-driven event had lightened his capitalistic heart-maybe landing an anchor tenant on one of his commercial properties-but I thought it would be good to take advantage.

“Missed you last night,” he said. The Porsche was humming down the interstate to the south side.

“I was there.”

“Yeah? Well, that place was a mob house. So who are we doing today? Hoffman, right? Eric Hoffman?”

“Right,” I said.

“We’re blowing through that list.”

It was true. Knowing Charlie, he had the whole thing charted out. Someday, he might want to compare his chart with the one on a conference room in the U.S. attorney’s office.

“Hey, I was noticing,” I said. “I saw on the list that one of the companies didn’t have a number next to it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Starlight Catering. Any particular reason we’re leaving them alone? Or was it an oversight?”

He didn’t answer right away. He was thinking about his response.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

Charlie grew quiet. I had snapped him out of his uncharacteristically good mood back to the angry, aggressive one. That told me something right there.