David Ellis - Breach of Trust

He paused, momentarily choked with emotion. The room was utterly silent. The tick of the clock on the wall was like a chime.

The man raised his snow-colored head upward. “Governor, I know this young man. I love him and I respect him as much as anyone I’ve ever met. And killing this young man? Killing him would just be another. . another crime. ”

Nobody spoke for a good minute. The lawyer put his hand on the cleric’s shoulder and whispered to him. Then he thanked us for our time. The governor rose and shook their hands again, as he had when they entered. “I have some hard thinking to do,” he told them.

I shook hands, too, but didn’t speak. I wasn’t sure what would come out if I did.

“I thought that was pretty good,” Governor Snow said to Peshke, once the door had closed behind the people. “Hey.” He turned to me. “What did the lawyer mean when he said he didn’t mean to shoot those people?”

I explained to him the wife and child caught in the cross fire between Otis and the pawnshop owner, and how the law conclusively presumes intent to kill anyone hit by an intentionally fired weapon.

“Oh, okay. These guys are talking and I’m sitting here thinking, ‘If the gun just accidentally went off or something, why would they give him the death penalty?’ Okay.” The governor pointed at Peshke. “I think what you have written is fine. What’s next?”

“Fundraiser up in Highland Woods,” said Peshke. “Jed Barker?”

“Right, right.” He clapped his hands together. “Hey, Jason, come by tonight, when we’re winding down.”

He didn’t wait for my answer. He was out the door, on to his fundraiser, not two minutes after the clemency hearing had ended.

After the clemency meeting, I went back to suite 410. I was pretty stirred up about what had just happened, but it was the furthest thing from the minds of Lee Tucker and Christopher Moody. They wanted to know about my meeting with Judge George Ippolito. As eager as Tucker was to hear the news when I walked in, he made himself wait until he could locate Moody by phone. He spoke softly into the receiver and I got the hint: I wasn’t supposed to know where Moody was. When Tucker got him on the phone, he hit the speakerphone button so we could all talk together.

“Ippolito didn’t come out and say it,” I told them. “But he might as well have. We didn’t discuss a single substantive thing. We killed about ten minutes, and then Ippolito asked if he could see my written recommendation for him once it was finished. I mean, he clearly knows it’s a fix for him. But there wasn’t a direct admission.”

Lee Tucker worked the plug of tobacco in his cheek and played the whole thing over in his mind. He was booting up the conversation from FeeBee on his computer.

“Pretty obvious, you think, in context?” Chris Moody asked me over the speakerphone.

“It was clearly a sham interview. I mean, he didn’t even try to hide it.”

“And you’re back with them tonight?”

“Right. I’m meeting someone for dinner and then I’ll hook up with them.”

“And you’ll talk about Ippolito?”

“I’ll try.”

“Try to talk about the other stuff, too. Cimino’s stuff and the pro-choice groups paying up.”

“I never would have thought of that, Chris. Your direction has been invaluable.”

On one of the walls, Tucker had taped up makeshift diagrams of the various scandals and the players involved. One sheet of paper was entitled UNION JOBS, meaning our efforts to evade veterans’ preference laws to get that union guy’s cronies on the state payroll in exchange for one union’s endorsement. Madison Koehler and Brady MacAleer were listed. Rick Harmoning, the head of SLEU, was listed with a question mark next to him. Presumably, they didn’t have him on tape yet agreeing to the illegal deal. SUPREME COURT APPOINTMENT was another sheet of paper, involving Madison and Mac as well, with union boss Gary Gardner and Judge George Ippolito as question marks. HOUSE BILL I00 concerned the abortion bill and the governor’s mention of payout money from the pro-choice groups in exchange for a veto. It was the one place where the name Governor Carlton Snow appeared. It was the only thing they had directly on Snow, and nothing had even happened yet.

I could almost smell the palpable hunger in Christopher Moody’s gut. He wanted the governor. But he didn’t have him. Not yet.

But I could sense what was happening now. They wouldn’t tell me, but I had no doubt that the moment Christopher Moody heard that tape of the governor suggesting a shakedown of the pro-choice groups, he was drafting affidavits and preparing applications for Title III intercepts all over the place. It’s not easy to place a bug in someone’s office, or to tap their phones-to eavesdrop without anyone’s knowledge. If one party consents-like me wearing FeeBee-it can be done quickly. But any time the overhear is done without anyone’s knowledge, the process is rigorous. Chris Moody could very well be in Washington, D.C., right now, making his case at the various levels of the Department of Justice to allow him to tap the phones of the governor, Madison Koehler, Brady Mac, and others, and to bug the campaign headquarters and even their homes. Presumably, one day soon the U.S. attorney general himself-ironically, Carlton Snow’s predecessor, former governor Lang Trotter-would be listening to the tape that I procured of the governor.

Things were moving fast. Probably they wanted to make arrests before George Ippolito could be seated on the supreme court. Possibly, out of some sense of conscience that I might attribute to people over Moody’s head-but not to Moody himself-they wanted Governor Snow exposed before the primary, before the voters bestowed on him the nomination heading into the general election. Regardless, soon enough, they would have a lot more than me as weapons in their search. They would be listening in on all sorts of conversations to which I wasn’t privy.

The question was whether “soon” was soon enough. If they had the primary election and the Ippolito appointment as deadlines, they were pushing it. I didn’t know exactly how long this process took to secure the Title III warrants-through the various levels of the Justice Department and then to the chief federal district judge in our city. Five days? Twenty? They might not have enough time. I might be their only source of information.

“I’ll do my best to raise the topics,” I said. “Obviously I can’t force it.”

“I notice you’re steering your former client, Senator Almundo, away from those topics,” Moody said to me, static from the speakerphone punctuating his words.

Right. I knew that conversation wouldn’t be lost on Moody, when Hector asked what I’d been up to and I stiff-armed him.

“Emphasis on ‘former’ client,” he continued. “You don’t owe him anything.”

“It’s not just me,” I noted. “No one seems to talk to Hector about this stuff. Besides, Chris, if you reindicted Hector, you’d look spiteful.”

“Is that your problem or mine?”

“Hector’s a hanger-on. The governor likes having him around but he’s not the brains of the outfit. Hell, he wasn’t even the brains of his own office, back when he was senator. Your good friend Joey Espinoza was the one who really called the shots in the senator’s office. Remember?”

Lee Tucker made a face and slashed a finger across his throat. Abort. Bad idea.

He was probably right. And we were done, anyway. I didn’t need Chris Moody to tell me that I should try to get incriminating statements on tape.

“Good luck,” Tucker said to me, tossing me another F-Bird.