“These kids! What momzerim,” said Skolnick and held up a thick finger. “They’re almost as bad as we were!” He laughed, very much the genial, bovine creature Robbie had described. He was portly and florid, with a large broad nose, and that majestic spume of pure white hair cresting in a high old-fashioned pompadour. Skolnick asked after Mort, whose father he apparently knew from some shared affiliation with a Jewish organization, and then, more gently, about Robbie’s wife.
“Ay, Robbie,” he said after Feaver finished his matter-of-fact rundown on the crushing grip of the disease. “My heart goes out. Truly. You’ve been a rock for this girl.”
“Not me, Judge. She’s the one who’s amazing. I look in her eyes every night and it’s solid courage.” Robbie’s voice curled around the edges, and Skolnick, while driving—and in the very center of the broadcast image—briefly touched Feaver’s hand. Watching across from me, Sennett scowled, apparently contemplating the effect of Skolnick’s tenderness on a jury.
Shaking off despair, Robbie reached into his briefcase and circumspectly removed the envelope the agents had prepared. Knowing the sight line of the camera in advance, he held the package against his chest so it was fully visible. Then with the stylized rigmarole these scenes apparently required, he let the envelope slip from his fingers to the seat and, not quite on camera, jammed it into the crevice under the backrest. Skolnick, who was supposed to remain blind to these maneuvers in order to have deniability later, predictably forgot his role. At one point he actually turned from the road to watch Feaver, although he was wise enough to avoid any direct comment.
“So, Robbie, what’s doing?” he asked neutrally. “I haven’t seen you in a while. I was surprised to see you called.”
“New case, Judge,” he answered, and described the matter which Kosic had transferred from Malatesta. Stan insisted Robbie had to ask for a favor now on that matter. If Robbie simply delivered a payoff on the first case, the one concerning the truck driver that had passed to Skolnick from Gillian Sullivan, a defense lawyer might attempt to characterize the payment as akin to a gift, inasmuch as Robbie had never spoken to Skolnick about the trucker’s lawsuit. Thus, Stan wanted to make sure that money changing hands was linked to a request for favorable action, albeit on another matter. Robbie told the story of the painter with cancer movingly. But he made it plain he was hoping to bamboozle his opponent.
“See, Judge, I gotta get a stay of discovery. The defense, this lump McManis, they’ve got no idea about the c.a., the cancer? If we start with deps and medical records, then boom bang bing, they find out. After that, the lost-wages component in my case? Out the window. ‘Sorry for your disability, but you’re gonna be dead anyway.’ So I need the stay, while I try to hondle with McManis. And the worst part, Judge, this poor bird’s a widower. So if I don’t bring home the bacon, we got three kids with no mother, no father, and not even a pot to pee in.”
“Oy vay,” said Skolnick. “How old, the kinder?”
“The oldest is eight,” said Robbie.
“Vay iz mir,” said Skolnick.
Sennett winced again at the last part. Robbie was making this up as he went, lying with his customary éclat, but by painting a bleak picture of the consequences to the family, Robbie was lending an element of humane justification to the misconduct he was requesting. Skolnick, in fact, was quick to explain that from his perspective the whole matter was rather routine.
“In my courtroom, Robbie, you know how it is, somebody makes a motion to dismiss, a motion for summary judgment, something that can dispose of the whole case, I stay discovery. Everybody else, these days, they want litigation to be like an express train. Who cares what it costs, so long as it moves fast? But I stay discovery. That’s my practice for twenty-six years. So you make a motion, say, for judgment on the pleadings, I stay discovery. That’s how it is. Nu?” Skolnick shrugged as if it was all quite beyond his control. “Now you want help with your judgment on the pleadings? Don’t talk to me. My angina will act up.” The judge quivered with laughter. A judgment on the pleadings would have declared victory for Robbie on the sole basis of his complaint and McManis’s answer, something that rarely occurred. Across from me, Sennett’s frown had deepened, as the judge had cheerfully outlined the bounds of propriety. Skolnick was suggesting he wouldn’t really do anything wrong.
“I hope that’s not why you’re monkeying with the seat,” Skolnick added. “Cause of this new case.”
Robbie was briefly drawn up short by the unexpected reference to the money. All of us were.
“No, Judge. That’s Hall. We got a great result after you stuffed them on their motion to strike my claim for punitives. I mean, that’s why I’m here.” In shadowy terms, Robbie reminded Skolnick of the first case about the injured truck driver whose brakes had failed. Skolnick searched his memory, his eyes thick with the effort. He concluded with a robust shake of his head.
“Neh, that’s Gillian, Robbie. She’d drawn the order when I got the case. We just filed it. You oughta see her, poor thing.” He gossiped sympathetically about Judge Sullivan’s battle with drink. Adroitly, Robbie promised Skolnick that he’d visit Sullivan, too, but Skolnick continued vigorously revolving his head. “Neh,” he said again, “take that there”—he dared to motion in the direction of the envelope—“take it home.”
“Oh fuck!” Sennett shouted. His scream shot through the van. Up front, Amari pounded the brake and jerked around to see what was wrong. Stan waved him ahead, but it was too late. We’d missed the next light. As Robbie and Skolnick cruised on, we watched the small screen waver and flicker and finally dissolve to snow. Then the sound began to break up, too, sizzling into static. Klecker spun the dials futilely as Sennett cursed, his hands and face twisted in anguish.
By the time Amari raced back into range, Robbie and Skolnick’s business was completed. There was no further reference to the envelope. Until he dropped Robbie off on a corner near the LeSueur, Skolnick instead regaled Robbie with a series of Jewish jokes. The best was about Yankel the farmer, who, years ago in the old country, went to buy a dairy cow. Two were for sale. One, the seller explained, was from Pinsk and would breed an entire herd; it cost one hundred rubles. The other, from Minsk, cost ten rubles but could be expected to bear only one calf. If anything, the cheaper Minsk cow looked better to Yankel than the Pinsk cow and Yankel decided to save his money. He bred the Minsk cow successfully once, but subsequently she kicked and bucked savagely whenever a bull tried to mount her. Baffled, Yankel went to consult the shtetl’s wise rabbi, who had something to offer in almost any situation.
‘This cow,’ asked the rabbi, ‘is it by any chance from Minsk?’
Yankel was astounded at the rabbi’s perspicacity. How did he know? The rabbi stroked his beard at length.
‘My wife,’ he said, ‘is from Minsk.’
Alf couldn’t restrain his laughter, but he popped a hand over his mouth in deference to Sennett. On his little fold-down seat, Stan was brittle with disappointment and rage. After Robbie had disembarked from Skolnick’s red Lincoln, Stan pointed at McManis and demanded to know how the hell Joe could have just stopped. No one was willing even to look in Stan’s direction. Sennett let his eyes close in their bruised-looking orbits and suddenly held up a hand which settled on his own chest.
“My fault,” he said. “All my fault.” He repeated that several more times. After close to thirty years, I knew Stan’s demands on others were second to what he required of himself. It would take him days to recover from screwing up. Frozen on the narrow seat, Sennett was what he became most rarely and least wished to be—someone for whom everybody felt sorry.
BECAUSE FEAVER WAS GOING TO RETURN to the LeSueur Building first, Evon had been assigned to await him in McManis’s office so she could turn off the FoxBIte. She sat there, knocking her thumbnail against her teeth, irritated by the suspense, until Shirley Nagle, the undercover agent who posed as the office receptionist, put a call in to the conference room from Jim. He was on t
he secure phone in the van and explained what had gone wrong. Amari had lagged behind Skolnick in the traffic, taking his time before getting close enough to turn off the camera, hoping that in the interval they might see Skolnick retrieve the envelope. But that hadn’t happened, suggesting—at least to a defense lawyer—that the money was no longer there.
“Don’t let Feaver know what’s wrong,” McManis instructed her. “But before you deactivate, you have to get him to describe in detail what went on. Then frisk him carefully. If he says Skolnick took the money, that’ll be our only corroboration.”
Feaver sailed into the conference room a few moments later. When Evon asked how it had gone, he raised both thumbs in his cabretta gloves, but signaled toward his back, where the recorder was still rolling. One of the protocols Feaver attempted to follow with mixed success was to avoid idle chatter while wired. Even the most innocuous remark could come back to bite him on cross-examination.
“Today we need to talk.” Evon promised to explain later.
Robbie said he had simply waved off Skolnick’s suggestion to take back the money. There had been a few quarreling gestures between them, but in time Skolnick had succumbed with an elaborate shrug.
She then asked him to stand. “I have to frisk you.”
His eyes narrowed with an odd light, veering between disbelief and lechery, but he came to his feet with his arms thrown wide. All yours.
She had frisked men before, of course. Regs didn’t favor it. But when you were first to the subject on an arrest, you didn’t twiddle your thumbs waiting to see if he’d pull a six-inch switchblade. But she’d never frisked someone she knew. It was strange. As when they’d wrestled, he seemed larger and more solid than she imagined. She squeezed her way up his pants legs, turned out his pockets, and passed as quickly as she could over the crotch. She had a sudden fear he’d try something awful, hold her hand there or boost his hips forward. At that moment, she realized she should have asked Shirley to be here. But Robbie did not react. He had enough stage sense to realize how bad he could make both of them sound on the recording. She was the one who was tense. She turned him around and repeated the procedure from behind. At the end, she searched his briefcase and his overcoat, then described all her findings, before grabbing the remote and turning off the FoxBIte.
“Was it as good for you as it was for me?” he asked then.
“Listen, buster, I nearly said I found absolutely nothing in this boy’s trousers.”
He clutched his heart but he was smiling. The insinuations, the joking. She knew he felt he had her going his way.
He had figured out by now that the camera had not worked. McManis had asked her to listen immediately to what the FoxBIte had captured and to let them know in the van. Robbie pulled the mike back through his buttonhole and removed his shirt, and happily unhitched the unit. His back was sore from sitting against it. Klecker by then had left instructions with Shirley about how to load the recording magazines in the computer. Shirley, a curly-headed woman in her late forties, helped, and the three of them listened together. At the critical point, as Feaver and the judge had exchanged their dueling gestures about the envelope, there were a few words—both of them, in fact, said “Come on”—but nothing clearly indicated what had become of the money. The only direct proof that Skolnick had accepted would be Robbie’s word. From the start, Sennett had known that an admitted felon against a judge was a losing contest before most juries.
“Figures,” said McManis, when Evon called him. “Everything that can go wrong will.” He asked to speak to Robbie so he could tell him he’d done a great job.
Afterwards, Feaver, who’d draped his shirt unbuttoned around himself, took it off again and asked for Evon’s help removing the FoxBIte harness. It had been secured with yards of tape circling his abdomen.
“Pull the tape fast,” he told her. “It’s going to hurt like a bastard.” He was right about that. Unruly black hair stretched densely over his upper body, gathering to the thickness of a pelt across his chest and down the medial line of his stomach. He looked like a lemur or something else you might want to pet. Klecker had suggested shaving, but McManis said no, it could lead to too many questions at the haberdasher’s, or the doctor’s office, or the locker room of the health club where Robbie still appeared occasionally on weekends.
“I lived my life pulling off adhesive tape,” she told him. She cut through it with scissors, then peeled back the ends, making an opening right over his hipbones where the flesh became soft. She was standing inches from him, close enough to take in all his cosmetic scents and his body heat and his size, the coarse feel of all that hair on his upper body. Beautiful people—women and men—knew it. Pride, a sense of attention, and confidence in his effect radiated off Robbie Feaver at all times. With him half-unclothed, it was as if some lead vest containing that emanation had been removed.
“Ready?” she asked.
He put his hands on her shoulders to brace himself. “Tell me you’re not going to enjoy this.”
“Mommy brought me up not to lie. Hold tight.” She squared her knees against his for leverage. There was a pulse of something at that moment. Perhaps he shuddered, or his grip on her shoulders tightened. It lasted only a second and she avoided his eye. Then she pulled off the front layers with a single heave, amazed by the vigor, the sheer wildness of the laughter that raced through her as he emitted a half-stifled outery of pain.
16
HAVING PROMISED D.C. A JUDGE AND HAVING failed to deliver Skolnick, Sennett turned his attention to Silvio Malatesta. Stan told us he had proposed bugging Malatesta’s chambers, but Judge Winchell would not approve an overhear that risked prolonged eavesdropping on innocent judicial functions. She wanted proof, just as she’d had before the camera went into Skolnick’s car, that a specific criminal incident was about to take place.
Thus, the only way to get direct evidence against Malatesta was if Robbie had a wired encounter with the judge. Outside court, Feaver had never had a conversation with Silvio Malatesta that lasted longer than thirty seconds, and he regarded the idea as far-fetched. But Sennett felt that without a judge, D.C. could pull the plug within a few weeks, at the next review. The case against Walter was solid, but there was no certainty he’d roll on Malatesta. If not, there wouldn’t be enough evidence against the judge to charge him if the Project was cut short. Therefore, Sennett reasoned, it was better to send Robbie in against Silvio now. McManis reluctantly agreed, even though Feaver continued to predict it would be fruitless.
Amari began round-the-clock surveillance on Malatesta, but it showed that the opportunities for a chance meeting between Feaver and the judge were limited. Aside from work, Malatesta seldom left home without his wife on his arm, a miniature human being four foot eight or nine, who minced along on huge high heels. Amari referred to her as ‘Minnie Mouse,’ and Minnie Mouse was omnipresent. She was with her husband when they went to church, when they visited their daughter and her children, when they attended concerts at the symphony. Minnie was a harpist and Judge Malatesta was observed hauling her instrument to and from their ancient station wagon several times a week. Most evenings, he accompanied her to her performances at weddings or other large events where her gentle playing was usually lost in the clatter of china and voices. Silvio sat unobtrusively, studying briefs and memos and applauding demurely at the end of every selection.
After a week, Amari concluded the one moment to accost the judge was when he taught. Now an adjunct professor at Blackstone Law School, where he’d previously been full-time, Malatesta continued to meet a single Torts class. Each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, he trudged the two blocks from the courthouse to Blackstone’s seventy-year-old building. Head lowered as he recited today’s presentation in his mind, he passed beneath the law school’s elaborate concrete façade into the interior of dark oak. Outside his classroom, Amari said, Malatesta invariably observed the habit of many older gentlemen and took a moment in the rest room. And it was there Robbie wou
ld get his chance. In order to prevent intrusions, Klecker would play the role of janitor, barricading the entrance with the little yellow plastic signs used by Blackstone’s regular service, whose crews actually visited each day at 4 p.m. Klecker was certain no one would think much of somebody swabbing the floor in the john. There were a hundred ways this could fail, especially if another person followed Malatesta in, but the risks were viewed as tolerable. If questioned, Alf would answer in Polish and go on his way, while Robbie made small talk with the judge.
I have mused now and then on the ubiquitousness of men’s rooms in public corruption prosecutions. From the time I entered the so-called white-collar practice, where bribery cases are a staple, there was at least one case a year where some matter of consequence took place in the john. Why two fellows would choose to pass cash as they stand at the urinal has continued to puzzle me. Because they have only one free hand and no one can reach for a gun? Because they are, so to speak, exposed? Because all know this is truly dirty business? There must be something deeply symbolic. Whatever the reason, it happens with sufficient frequency that a bribe case which is largely hopeless for the defendant is routinely shorthanded as ‘folding money in the men’s room.’ Jurors are inevitably unwilling to believe the parties were up to anything good.
So at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, March 18, Robbie was wired and marched off to Blackstone. He had gone to law school there and, if need be, would explain his presence as related to alumni activity. Evon was along as a witness, again to corroborate that Malatesta was the only other person to have gone in and out of the facility and, accordingly, that his was the other voice on the recording.
Feaver came to a standstill as they entered Blackstone’s Gothic front hall. There were fusty odors of floor wax and deteriorating plumbing, and he surveyed the surroundings right up to the ribs of the buttressed arches. He hadn’t been back, he told her, in years.