I t’s late April, and Nick stands out on the sidewalk with his hands thrust into the deep pockets of a belted trench coat he has worn on cool mornings ever since I’ve known him. He is out near the curb, fifty feet from the sign
over the door, big gold letters, each one larger than a tombstone, spelling out: EDWARD J. SCHWARTZ UNITED STATES COURTHOUSE.
Rush is the only lawyer I know who has never carried a briefcase. It is against his religion and might dispel the impression that he can do anything on the fly and off the cuff.
As I approach, he expels clouds of warm breath into the chilly morning mist. He sees me a block away and smiles, gives me a nod like “what’s up,” rocking forward and back, heel to toe to keep warm. It is cold for San Diego, the season of early morning fog. By afternoon people will be on the street in shirtsleeves.
Eight-thirty. We are meeting for a quick briefing over coffee so that I can hand off Metz. Nick is to meet with the client at nine. If I am lucky, I will be out of here before it happens. I have no desire to be drawn into this thing further. Nick will then have half an hour before he has to appear with Metz in front of a judge. Nick’s instincts were right on one point. Metz was never called before the grand jury. Six days after our conversation, he was indicted on multiple counts of money laundering and international currency violations. He is scheduled to appear for arraignment in federal district court this morning. My guess is that the feds are just warming up.
It is vintage Nick Rush, surfing the lawyer’s version of the pipeline in a typhoon, standing out on the tip with all ten toes over the edge. Doing everything at the last minute is a test of the man’s deftness and a measure of his ego.
He has operated his entire career on the notion that any lawyer who needs more than twenty minutes to get ready for anything in court should find another line of work. I have seen him kick the butts of ambitious young prosecutors who spent a year building a case only to watch it get flushed like Tidy-Bowl when Nick got loose in front of the jury.
It is the reason he is double- and triple-booked on his calendar. If you’ve embezzled a few million from your company’s accounts or you have half a ton of white shit under the floorboards of your house and get caught with grow lights sucking energy from the grid while a jungle of Mary Jane sprouts in your basement, the man to call is Nick Rush. Whether you’re cooking amphetamines or corporate books, his soothing words uttered in tones of divine confidence will ease your anxieties faster than a handful of Percocet.
Nick decided it wasn’t necessary to spend a lot of time with Metz as long as I’d prepped him. I warned him that Metz was dynamite on a stick with a short fuse up his ass, but Nick saw only the challenge. Besides, he told me it doesn’t matter what they have, Nick is pleading him not guilty and sorting it out later. According to Nick, he has disclosed his conflict with Metz over the phone, and Metz has signed a waiver that they have sent back and forth.
As I approach, he smiles broadly but doesn’t take his hands out of his pockets to shake. “I can now confirm Hemingway’s thesis-the sun also rises,” he says. He looks up at the fog-shrouded sky. “Though you wouldn’t know it from standing here.”
“Hemingway was too blitzed in the morning to know it himself. He took it from the Bible,” I tell him.
“That’s what I like about you. You know all the trivial shit you know.”
“It comes in handy when I have to deal with people like you.”
“And what kind of people am I?”
“People who deal only in the big picture,” I tell him.
He laughs, but it’s true. Nick doesn’t waste energy on details that aren’t essential to the grand picture, the task at hand at any given moment. He has an intellect like a vacuum. He can suck up the minutest details of a trial in three minutes, organize them in the order of importance, and march them out like an army to do battle in court while his opponent is still trying to get his briefcase open.
“I thought all the while you were doing these early morning court calls,” I tell him.
“That’s why God invented young associates,” he says. “If Dana wasn’t involved with this prick, he’d be dealing with the federal public defender.”
I warn him that after he hears what I have to tell him, he might want to reconsider taking the case. I suggest the cafeteria in the courthouse. Nick says he favors a little coffee shop around the corner and across the street, so he leads the way.
This is federal territory, the few blocks around the two United States courthouses-one reserved for bankruptcy proceedings, and the other for more serious stuff. Like the Indian nations of old, this part of town has different rules and a culture of its own. Here the cops are the FBI, IRS, DEA, and a dozen other alphabet empires, each striving to showcase their indispensable primacy in the public-safety pecking order.
The federal courts are realms of limitless marble and gray-haired marshals in blue blazers standing like men in livery. It is more refined and genteel than anything at the local level. It speaks of limitless budgets and the boundless tax reach of the federal government whose hands are in everyone’s pockets and moving now from the elbow up to the shoulder. It is a world I do not often frequent; instead I confine myself to the lowly and somewhat disheveled state courts where those who set policy cannot print their own money.
Nick thrives in all of this. He will go toe to toe with the most austere members of the local federal bench and on occasion walk the fine line of contempt.
As if to reinforce this, he takes me to the seedy coffee shop at the street level under the old Capri Hotel.
“I’ve been having coffee here for twenty years. Every morning,” he says. He leads me down a flight of stairs, chipped plaster and peeling paint. The handrail on one side is missing. Some vagrant must have borrowed it.
“I used to know the guy who owned the place,” Nick says.
I follow him through the door to the coffee shop. We get inside and I stop. The place is a dump.
“I didn’t know you were so well connected,” I tell him.
“It looked better back then,” he says. “It’s gone downhill in recent years.”
“You’re kidding. I would never have known.”
The walls in the coffee shop are that dingy brown color you know is not paint. The stainless steel hood over the grill in the kitchen is impregnated with enough grease that the cook could open his own tallow works.
“Best of all, it’s quiet.”
“I can see why.”
I’m afraid to ask him about the hotel upstairs. Any little shake, and it may visit us while we’re sitting here.
“The owner’s name was Wan Lu Sun. Chinese,” he says. “Good businessman. But he died a couple of years ago. His kids have the property now. Not like the old man. The new generation. They have no sense of values. Americanized,” he says.
“If you say so.” I’m still taking it all in, trying not to inhale for fear the dust particles floating in the isolated ray of sunlight that’s managed to penetrate one of the encrusted windows might be asbestos.
“The developers are lined up like vultures ready to whack the place with their wrecking balls,” he says.
“This isn’t the place you’re…”
“Yeah.” Nick smiles at me.
“Tell me it’s not true.”
“It’s true,” he says.
I’ve been reading about it in the papers for almost a year. A group of community preservationists have launched a campaign to save some downtown structures they claim are historic. Every few months Nick’s name pops up in print, leading the charge.
“Take my advice,” I tell him. “This place needs a good wrecking ball.”
“Stick around. It’ll grow on you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. You must have better things to do than this?”
“I do, but I figure I owe it to the old man,” he says.
“What old man?”
“Lu Sun,” he says. “Hell, if he was around, developers wouldn’t get near this place. Not unless they posted their first born as collateral. The old man would have gotten an arm and a leg for the land.”
Nick has tilted at a few windmills in his time, but this is a stretch even for him.
“I knew you were stirring the embers of discontent,” I tell him. “But this is a side of you I’ve never seen. Your passion for preservation.”
“I’ve come to it late in life.” He smiles, then winks at me. “Actually, between you and me, I just like to stir the shit.”
“I would have never guessed.”
“The firm gives us time to devote to community activities. I had to find something to do. Besides, I don’t like walking two more blocks down to Starbucks just to make an executive decision on what kind of beverage I want in the morning. Here I got the place to myself. Have a seat. The booth over there in the corner is mine. It’s the one without holes in the Naugahyde,” he laughs.
Nick knows the waitress by her first name. She looks as if she’s worked here since the hotel’s grand opening.
“Two coffees, Marge. We’ll take them at the booth.” He passes on menus and grabs some Equal from what appears to be a private stash under the register.
“Hate the Sweet’n Low,” he says as he waltzes me toward the booth. “It leaves a taste.” We sidle into the bench seats, something out of the fifties, probably the last time the place was remodeled.
“You have to admit it has a certain ambiance,” he says. “All it needs is some drunk to drive a Cadillac with fins through the front wall, and it would be chic.”
Marge comes over with her glass pot and pours. He asks her how she’s doing. They chat.
No doubt my senses are colored by the odor of smoldering grease from the kitchen, where nothing in particular is being cooked unless the cook is eating it, but the coffee seems to slide out of the pot, instead of pour. Some of it is fluid, but there are a lot of black lumps like tar.
“You know, on second thought,” I tell her, “I think I’ll have tea.”
“All we got is Earl Grey,” she says.
“That’ll be fine.” As long as I can see the bottom of my cup through the hot water.
She leaves to get it.
Nick catches me looking at his cup as he loads three little packets of pretend sugar and stirs in cream. “What’s wrong?”
“I just don’t like to use purification tablets this early in the morning.”
“Hey, this is the real shit,” he says.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Actually, if you want to know, the real shit is in London. I was reading this article the other day.” This is vintage Nick. Everything reminds him of a story, even on a deadline with a case in less than a hour.
“They’ve got this stuff over there they call Crappuccino. People pay through the nose. It’s brewed from some kind of coffee berries that pass through monkeys.”
“Nick. I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“You wanna eat? I’ll have her bring a menu.”
“No!”
He laughs.
“Yeah, I’m not kidding. Five hundred dollars an ounce and you have to use toilet paper as a filter. They say it has a very earthy taste.”
“No wonder the Brits drink tea,” I tell him.
“Really, the coffee here is fine,” he says. Still, he’s looking off in the distance as if maybe he’d like to try this Crappuccino someday.
“Time is getting short,” I tell him. “Do you want to know about Metz or not?”
“Not to worry. The arraignment’s only a first appearance. You know,” he says. He’s looking around again, taking it all in, his private dining room. “You have any idea what this place is probably worth? I don’t mean the building. I mean the location?”
I shake my head. “But I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
He takes out what looks like a cell phone. Lately Nick has been playing with this gadget. I call them all PalmPilots. He calls this one a Handspring, every electronic device imaginable in a package the size of a deck of cards.
He slides the little stylus out of its holder on the side and starts tapping the screen.
“What, you’re not going to call somebody now?”
“Just working the calculator.”
“Nick, listen. I’ve got work waiting for me back at the office.”
“Keep your shirt on. Relax. Why are you so uptight all the time?”
“I’m not uptight. I just have better things to do.”
This is the Nick I know, putting me on the defensive while he kills my morning musing about downtown real estate prices.
“Figure you can get it for eight million, maybe eight and half,” he says.
Metz is probably wearing out shoe leather right now, out in front of the courthouse, wondering if he will be sleeping in his own bed tonight or in one of the bunks at the federal lockup.
“And it’s outside the corridor, the approaches to Lindbergh Field. That’s important,” he says. “You wanna know why?”
“Not really, but you’re going to tell me, I’m sure.”
“Because outside the corridor, you can go as high as you want, as long as you get a variance. You know, get around the current height restrictions.”
“Are you becoming a realtor?”
“No, but I ought to,” he says. “Some developer’s gonna come in here, buy the place cheap, go to his friendly planning commissioner or a county sup, and multiply his investment by a factor of four overnight. All he has to do is get a variance to go up higher. He wouldn’t even have to do anything with the property. Just turn it over. Make a cool what, twenty, twenty-five million? And these assholes call our clients crooks.”
“That’s business,” I tell him.
“Yeah. The business we ought to be in.” Nick smiles. “But we’re too honest,” he says. He’s back to bullshit. “And besides, I like to preserve the past. Dana has her causes; I have mine.”
“Now can we get back to Metz?” I ask.
“Are you sure you wanna give this thing up?”
“What?”
“Metz.” He looks at me as if I’ve been off on some other track. “I mean, it could be an opportunity.”
“I’m sure.”
“We could do it together,” he says. “After all, you are the only person I’ve ever shared one of the few true secrets of my life with.”
“What’s that?”
“Laura.” Nick is stone serious when he says this.
I had almost forgotten. I thought Nick was too far into the sauce to remember the night he let it slip over drinks after a bad day in court. He was feeling a failure, even with a sassy new wife. Laura is the mystery in Nick’s life-and probably the only female he will ever truly love.
“Have you seen her lately?”
“Last week,” he says. “Only for a few minutes. Listen to me. Metz is good for a sizable fee.” Nick is good at changing the subject. Especially if it’s something he doesn’t want to talk about. “He wouldn’t be involved with the arts if he didn’t have money.”
I laugh.
“It’s true. I’ve never seen one of those people yet didn’t have money. Lack of taste, maybe, but they all have bucks. It’s a precondition. Otherwise they don’t get into the fraternity. You don’t get on the A-list for the auctions and fund-raisers. Get your face on the social sheet in the Trib and the Times.”
“Is that how you did it?”
“I did it through my wife. She has class and taste,” he says.
“And your checkbook.”
“That too.” He drinks some coffee, and I have to divert my eyes. “What else are you gonna do for fun when you get old and flatulent?”
“I’ve never viewed art auctions as that much fun,” I tell him.
“I wasn’t talking about art.” He’s talking about Dana. “Come on. Why not? You can hold Metz’s hand and I’ll do the trial. We’ll lift him by the heels and shake him, see what’s in his pockets.”
“You might not be prepared for what falls out,” I tell him.
“That bad?” he says.
Nick and I haven’t talked since our conversation four days ago. I played telephone tag with him for a week before I finally caught him in his office, and then he didn’t want to discuss the details over the phone. It’s the nature of Nick’s practice. You can never be sure whether your phone is tapped.
“You want my honest opinion?”
He nods.
“All of the pieces are in place, including the transfer of large sums of cash and the laundry fee.” He listens as I fill him in.
“If your man’s to be believed, he took two hundred thousand dollars while he parked two million of his partner’s money in an account in Belize.”
None of this unnerves him. “Go on.”
“He calls his part a consulting fee, but it never shows up on his company’s books.”
“So we have an accounting error,” says Nick.
“He tells me the money was actually intended as security on heavy equipment he was supposed to ship south to do a job. Except that none of the equipment was ever moved. According to Metz, the deal never got off the ground. He took one trip down to Mexico that lasted maybe a week, and for this he charged a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fee.”
“Maybe his time is valuable,” he says.
“And maybe his two Mexican partners wanted to cleanse some revenue from illicit activities?”
Nick clears his throat. “Doesn’t mean he knew about it.”
“On top of all of this, unless I misjudge the man, I think you’re going to find currency violations and probably tax evasion.”
Nick lifts one eyebrow, rubs his chin, and looks at me with the kind of expression I might expect from an appraiser who’s being told the diamond ring he just told me to buy is melting ice.
“If you check, I think you’re going to find that he used friends and neighbors to move his fee back into this country in order to do the limbo under the currency limits. And if he did that, I suspect he may have gone just one baby step further in forgetting to report any of it on his tax return.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
“I thought I’d leave that one to you.”
Nick nods, his knowing and understanding nod. This is practiced, refined from years of listening to sordid deeds, so that by now nothing particularly arouses or discourages him.
“What did he say about the account in Belize? Why did he set it up?”
“I didn’t ask that either. I wouldn’t want to cut into your options for maneuver.”
He laughs, tips his cup to me.
I have often suspected that Nick is not above performing surgery on the facts in a case once the curtain is pulled and he and his client are safely behind it. It is the reason I have refrained from getting into these details with Metz, so that I don’t end up as Nick’s scrubbing nurse.
“Did you ask him why he kept the money? The two hundred K?” Nick is hoping beyond hope.
“Unfortunately I did, and his answer was not encouraging, or believable.”
“What did he say?”
“Consulting fees.”
“That sounds fair to me,” he says.
“Especially if you can get your hands on it for legal fees,” I tell him.
“See, you’re learning already. Let’s start looking at the upside.” Nick would have to be a stone monument to optimism to find even a tin foil lining in this particular cloudburst.
“None of the major money came into the U.S., right? I mean the two million. It went from Mexico to Belize and back again, is that correct?”
“Except for Metz’s fee.”
“Forget about that for the moment. What we have here is perhaps some financial sleight of hand. But it all takes place outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Right?”
“That’s one way to look at it. The other way is that you have a U.S. citizen facilitating currency violations in two foreign countries.”
“So? Let them charge him there. You and I aren’t licensed to practice law in Mexico. That’s somebody else’s problem.”
“Ask Metz if he wants to take his chances on serving the next millennium in some dung heap in Mexico.”
“You think the Mexican government would actually bring charges?”
“I think that if the feds are trying to squeeze your man to find out what he knows, they may well threaten him with extradition south. They could probably get the Mexican government to lend their cooperation. The last time I looked, the two countries had a treaty.”
Nick ponders this problem, scratching his chin with the back of his fingers while he grins at me from across the table. “I guess I’m gonna have to talk to my wife about the company she keeps.”
“Answer one question for me,” I say. “Tell me you didn’t suspect this was drug related.”
He looks at me and hesitates only a second. “Sure. I still don’t,” he says.
The words are there, but they are not convincing. The fact that he says it with a smile undercuts the effect even more. If Nick didn’t know, his demeanor tells me that he had strong suspicions. He thanks me for taking the time as he finishes his coffee and I study the water in the little stainless steel pot. Nick looks at his watch.
“I guess I’m gonna have to go,” he says. “Unless of course you want to do a favor for a friend.”
“Don’t push it,” I tell him.
“I understand,” he says. Then slides out of the booth. “I’ll give you a call this afternoon. Let you know what happened.”
“Not unless you want me to bill you for my time,” I tell him.
He laughs, then heads for the door. “Marge. My friend will catch the bill. Put a good tip on it,” he says.
Before I can turn to say anything, he’s out the door.
It’s the thing about Nick. He can screw you twenty ways from Sunday, but he lives on the sunny side of optimism so it’s hard not to like him.
I give him a good head start, playing with the tea bag, not because I want to drink it. I have no desire to run into Nick with Metz out in front of the courthouse on my way back to the car.
Marge comes with the bill, slaps it unceremoniously on the table, and takes Nick’s coffee cup away, the sludge still in the bottom. Two minutes later, I get up from the booth, peel some singles from folded cash in my pocket, when I see it. Lying there against the worn red plastic of the bench on the other side of the table is Nick’s little handheld device. For a man with a cerebral vacuum, who can suck up the most abstract details in a courtroom, Nick is missing the gene that keeps him attached to physical possessions. As long as I have known him, he has left things behind. Like my teenage daughter, if he owns it, he’ll lose it.
I pick it up, slip it into my coat pocket, and pay the bill.
Outside I make tracks. Maybe I can run him down before he finds Metz. When I get to the corner, I look down the street toward the courthouse where Nick is supposed to meet his client. There is a mass of humanity between me and the front of the building, people walking on the sidewalk, but I don’t see Nick.
I cross over and start down the other side of the street, hoping I catch his eye before he hooks up with Metz. I’m a third of the way down the block before I see him. Nick’s hands are again buried in the pockets of his coat as he hustles down the sidewalk a hundred feet ahead of me, with four lanes of traffic between us. I cup my hand over my mouth to holler, but a city bus gets between us. Belching fumes, its engine drowns any hope of being heard. By the time it passes, it’s too late. Nick is standing on the sidewalk in front of the walkway leading to the courthouse. He is talking to Metz.
I take my hand from my mouth, pat the little device in my pocket, and continue on toward my car a block away. I’ll have to call him later and make arrangements to get it to him.
As I walk, I can’t help but toy with the possible angles he has been playing. I suspect that he knew all along that Metz was up to his ass in laundering money. If so, he also knew I wouldn’t take the case. So why would he try and refer it? One possibility, he wanted to shield himself from a close-up inspection of the particulars until I had filtered them for him. My interview with Metz. This way he could shade his eyes, take a more artful approach at sculpting the facts in his initial discussions with the man. In this way Nick could lead Metz to tell him stories that would be more helpful while avoiding a flat-out suborning of perjury. It is the kind of Machiavellian mental coil I might expect from Nick.
But there is another possibility, one that is more likely. This one involves Dana. From what Metz told me, if I believe anything, it is that Dana knew the broad outline of his problem, that it could be drug related. If she is, as Nick says, hot to clean up his practice, Dana wouldn’t want him handling this, particularly with a client in her own social orbit.
Knowing Dana, her first concern would be that it could splash on her, that some enterprising reporter from the society section might pick up on the fact that Metz served on the commission with his lawyer’s wife, all of this while she was striving to steer Nick toward more genteel clients and climb the social rungs of the city’s arts community.
She could have told Metz to take his problems elsewhere, but that wouldn’t prevent him from calling Nick on his own. Supporter of the arts he may be. But knowing Dana, she was looking for a sure way to sidestep a possible embarrassment. Nick’s story of a conflict with Metz and the ease with which he disposed of it seems a little too convenient to be believed. Nick decided he would refer the case elsewhere.
So who does he call? The one lawyer in town he knows who will not touch a drug case. And kazam, poof, it bounces back to him. Now he is not only able to take the case, he is able to tell Dana that he had no choice. He will take care of her friend, but she will pay the price. That brain would be doing double time with the thought that this would not only give him chits in his marriage but latitude in his practice. How could she complain when it was she who brought this particular client to his doorstep? And after all, he had tried to get rid of it.
By the time I reach the end of the block, I am smiling to myself, convinced that I have untangled the sordid intrigue of Nick’s marital machinations. I am savoring this little victory so that I fail to hear them as individual reports but instead as a continuous burst, like a loud zipper being opened. The shots resonate off the concrete walls of the buildings around me and echo off the four-story government offices that span Front Street. My arms go up, and I crouch against a wall, the instincts of survival taking hold.
It isn’t until I hear the sound of screeching rubber on the roadway behind me that I turn. A small dark sedan leaves a cloud of exhaust and burned rubber as it peels away from the curb in front of the courthouse. I can hear the engine hammering on eight cylinders, the raw power of an engine pushed to the limit as the car slides through a left turn onto Broadway. The cross traffic braking, screeching to a stop to avoid hitting it, horns honking. Before I can focus entirely, the car disappears around the corner.
I look back across Front Street to the main entrance of the courthouse. Two women are crawling on their hands and knees on the sidewalk. A guy helps one of them up, only to have her hands fly up to her mouth as she screams. I can hear it, a piercing high note, even half a block away. She is looking down at something behind her on the sidewalk.
The gathering crowd has blocked my view. One of the marshals in his blue sport coat exits the courthouse door on the run. He disappears behind the small sea of onlookers, I suspect gone down to one knee.
Within seconds, two other men in dark uniforms join him, both coming out of the courthouse door on the run. They have guns drawn. One of them is talking into a small microphone clipped to the shoulder epaulet of his uniform.
Traffic has slowed on Front Street as drivers stop to rubberneck. I weave between cars, horns honking, as I cross over and make my way along the sidewalk toward the front of the courthouse. Other people are running in the same direction now, everybody with the same thought, to see what has happened.
As I come up behind the throng, I try to edge my way through, shoulders sliding sideways until I find a crevice in the crowd where I can see. There on the ground lying in a river of blood is a body. A man, dark hair, his face turned away from me on the concrete, part of it bloodied and gone. He’s wearing a sport coat gone sideways on his upper body as he hit the ground. His gray slacks are soaking up blood, legs tangled as if he were trying to flee as he was cut down.
I look for Nick, but I don’t see him. By now at least a half dozen marshals are assembled, trying to gain control, pushing people back, making a path for the EMTs whose ambulance I can hear in the distance. Two city patrol cars pull up in front, their light bars flashing. One of them has a semiautomatic drawn. Then he realizes it’s over, and reholsters it, clipping it down with the snap strap before he starts pushing people back to clear a path.
People are stumbling, being pushed. An old woman in a long coat and bandanna, nearly goes to her knees. A guy reaches out and grabs her. A look of confusion as she has no idea where these saving hands have come from. Delayed panic ripples through the crowd as stunned silence turns to agitation and people regain their bravado. Curiosity sets in. They press in for a look, and the cops push back, holding the line.
“Did you see it?”
“No. I heard the shots.”
“Anybody hurt?” One of the cops is calling out.
“Over here.” A man’s voice.
A city traffic cop, still wearing his cycle helmet, cuts a swath through the crowd. It isn’t until then that I realize it’s not one gathering but two, each orbiting like constellations around their own black hole. There on the sidewalk I see Nick, sitting, his heavy-lidded eyes fixed in a half-closed sightless stare cast at the rivulet of his own blood running down the sidewalk and over the curb. There are little dark dots seeping into the fabric of his coat, too many for me to count. The bullet holes in his chest run downward diagonally across his body, not disappearing until they reach his waist. The impact has blown him back against a concrete planter box, where his body sits slumped like some child’s discarded puppet.