Pleading Guilty (13 page)

So at io
:00
a
. M
. this Wednesday morning, Brushy and I and our client had arrived at the old school building where BAD is housed. Our presence in itself was a sign of defeat. At my client's urging, I'd employed various gambits to put this off for over two and a half years. Now the ax was certain to fall.

I stipulated to the Administrator's case, a collection of grand jury transcripts offered by Tom Woodhull, the Deputy Administrator, who years ago had been my boss. Standing up to rest his case, Woodhull appeared himself--unruffled, tall, handsome, and completely inflexible. I called Toots to the stand at once, hoping to appear eager to begin the defense.

"When did you become an attorney?" I asked my client, after lie had given a gaudy review of his war record.

"Was admitted to the practice of law sixty-two years ago, nineteen days. But who's counting?" He supplied the same corny smile he used every time we went through this.

"Did you attend law school?"

"At Easton University where I was taught contracts by the late Mr. Leotis Griswell of your firm, who was my conscience throughout my professional life."

I turned away from the panel for fear I might smile. I had told Toots to drop the Jiminy Cricket routine, but he did not take easily to correction. He sat in his chair with his walking stick against his knee, a little trail of spittle on his lips from all the heavy mouth-breathing, a bulbous tuber of a man, all belly and cigar, with woolly eyebrows that meandered halfway up his forehead. He wore what he always wore--a shocking-green sport jacket, somewhere in color between your lighter watermelons and a lime. I would wager a considerable sum that neither of the men on the panel owned a tie that bright.

"What has been the nature of your law practice?" I asked next, a tricky question.

"I would say I had a very general practice. I would say," said Toots, "that I was a helper. People came to me who needed help and I helped."

This was about as good as we could do, since Toots in sixty-two years as a lawyer could not name a case he had tried, a will he'd drafted, a contract he'd written. Instead, folks came to him with certain problems and their problems were solved. It was a very Catholic concept, Toots's practice. Who, after all, can explain a miracle? Toots helped many public officials too. There was someone in almost every significant public agency with whom Toots maintained a special friendship. There was a debonair Assistant Attorney General for whom Toots bought suits; a particularly important State Senator who'd had three additions to his home built by a contractor friend of Toots for the remarkably low cost of fourteen grand. This generosity had made the Colonel quite an influential fellow, especially since his methods were always understood. He relied first on his rogue charm. After that, he had other friends, guys from the neighborhood who'd smash your windows, torch your store, or, as happene
d o
nce to a club singer who got crosswise of Toots, perform a tonsillectomy without benefit of an anesthetic.

"Did you practice in the Tax Division courts?"

"Not at all. Never. If I was goin there today I'd need to ask directions."

I glanced down at Brushy to see how this was going. She was seated beside me, wearing a dark suit, trying to record every word on a yellow pad. She gave me a wee smile, but that was just being friends. She was too tough to hold out any more hope than I did.

"Now, did you know Judge Daniel Shea?" I asked.

"Oh yes, I known Judge Shea since we was both young attorneys. We was terrific friends. Like this."

"And did you, as the Administrator here alleges, pay the country club dues of Judge Shea?"

"Absolutely." Toots had not been quite as sure when the IRS asked him the same question a number of years ago, but he had cut the interview short; it would not prove too damaging when Woodhull began his cross-examination, which was guaranteed to be wooden in any event.

"Can you please explain how that occurred?"

"That would be no trouble at all." Toots grabbed hold of his walking stick and shifted, as it were, into forward gear. "In about 1978 I run across Dan Shea at a dinner for the Knights of Columbus and we started talking, as fellas do, about golf. He told me that he had always wanted to get into the Bavarian Mound Country Club, which was right in his neighborhood, but unfortunately for him, he did not know a soul who could sponsor him. I volunteered for that job with pleasure. Shortly thereafter that, the president of the club, Mr. Shawcross, called to my attention the fact that Dan Shea was having some trouble making his dues. Since I was his sponsor, I felt it was up to me to pay them, and that's what happened ever since."

"Now did you mention these payments to Judge Shea?" "Never," he said. "I did not want him to feel embarrassed o
r u
ncomfortable. His wife, Bridget, was in very bad health then and the expense and trouble was weighing quite heavy on him. Knowing Dan Shea, I'm sure that he had meant to get to this and it slipped his mind."

"And did you ever discuss with him any of the business in his court that your firm had there?"

"Never," he said again. "How could I? The younger fellas in my office do any number of things. It never crossed my mind that they was in that court. There's so many courts these days, you know." Toots spread his arms wide and smiled, revealing the worn yellow stubs of what were left of his teeth.

Brushy handed me a note. "The cash," it said.

"Oh yes." I touched my tie to revert to role. "We've stipulated that when Mr. Shawcross was in the grand jury, he testified you made these payments in cash and asked him not to discuss them with anyone. Could you explain that, please?"

"That would be no trouble at all," said Toots. "I did not want it to become known among the members of the club that Judge Shea was having a problem with his dues. I felt that would embarrass him. So I paid in cash, hoping that the bookkeeper and all of them would not see my name on a check, and I asked Mr. Shawcross to very kindly keep this to himself." With effort, he cranked himself about to face the panel. "I was just trying to be a friend," he told them. I didn't notice anybody up there reaching for a hanky.

Woodhull spent about fifteen minutes stumbling around on cross-examination. Toots, who hadn't missed a word on direct, was suddenly virtually deaf. Woodhull repeated every question three or four times and Toots often responded simply with a vague, addled stare. About noon Mona called a recess. That was enough for today. Seven lawyers, we all got out our diaries to see when we could resume. We went through the mornings and afternoons clear from today to next Tuesday before everybody was free.

"How'd I do?" Toots asked on the way out.

"Great," I said.

He lit up childishly and laughed. He thought so too.

"Why does a guy who's eighty-three want to be disbarred?" asked Brushy after we'd put him in a taxi. "Why doesn't he just resign from practice?"

Toots's forty-year career as councilman for the South End had come to a conclusion in the early 198os, when it turned out that the city's Parks and Playgrounds Commission, which Toots controlled by appointments, had voted for a decade straight to award its refuse-hauling contract to Eastern Salvage, a company owned through various intermediaries by one of Toots's sons. Since then, Toots's life had been confined to his role as the man for desperate occasions. He needed his law license to lend his activities some air of legitimacy. I explained all this to Brushy as we walked back toward the Needle through the noontime crowds. There had been a light snowfall last night which had been ground to gray mush and crept over the toes of our shoes.

"There's no listing in the Yellow Pages for Fixers. Besides, it would stain his honor. This is a man who wanted to wear his medals to the hearing. He can't accept the public disgrace."

"His honor?" she asked. "He's had people killed. Those guys in the South End? He eats lunch with them. Dinner."

"That's an honor too."

Brushy shook her head. We entered the Needle and rose by elevator to G &G's reception area, where oaken bookcases had been erected and filled with dozens of antique books, bought by the gross, to lend the proper air. Our offices had been redecorated at Martin's direction a couple of years ago in the manner of an English hunting lodge. This main reception area was refurbished with planked pine and tufted leather chairs of royal maroon and little landscapes and hunting scenes on the walls, pictures in brass frames with broad green mats, second-rate decorative crap, but who was asking me? That kind of stage setting, though, made it easier to fall into some kind of fugue state--new faces every day, young people striding about wit
h u
rgent anguished looks, all this important stuff going on that didn't have a damn thing to do with me. Bonds issuing. Deals closing. You could see it all from a considerable distance: Men with phallic symbols around their necks. Women with half their legs exposed. What on God's green planet were they up to? Why was it that they cared and I didn't?

"I've told him we can't win," I said of Toots. "He kept asking me to get continuances."

"I see that." She thumped the file. "Two years four months. For what?" She was backing down the corridor. She had a meeting with Martin but reminded me about racquetball at six. "Time."

"What's he going to do with time?" asked Brushy.

"Die," I said, before turning away.

Chapter
IX. TOUGH CUSTOMERS A. Slave Queen of Accounting

Like the engine room of an oceangoing vessel, where soot-spotted hands shovel coal into great fires, the firm's Accounting Department burns on
below decks
. On 32, between an investment banking operation and a travel service, the location has a sub-basement feel, because it is cut off from the three other floors we occupy. Yet in many ways this is the heart of G &G: to Accounting our billable hours are reported on a daily basis; from Accounting our statements for services go out every month. Here the great
profit making
motor of the law firm whines away at high
RPM
's.

One of the most peculiar things about going from BAD to G &G was getting used to a world where money--which as a cop and then a public lawyer I regarded as inherently evil--is, instead, the point of axis of an entire universe. Money's why the clients hire us--to help them make more or keep what they have. God knows, it's what we want from them. It is what we all have in common. At this point in the calendar, when our fiscal year concludes, the firm takes on the air of a campus before the Big Game. We have partnership meetings about collectin
g t
hat can't be easily distinguished from pep rallies, where Martin, and especially Carl, make speeches designed to give us the stomach to demand our clients actually pay our bills. It was one of Carl's many clever innovations to move the close of our fiscal year back a month to January 31, in order to give clients the chance to book our fees in either calendar year. On February z, Groundhog Day, after the receipts are totaled, the partnership meets in tuxedos, while the Committee announces each partner's "points"--our percentile share of firm income.

Accounting is housed in a couple of rooms, garish with fluorescence, nine women in an environment of white Formica. Their figures are reported daily to the Committee and various CPAs. The staff supervisor, the resident person in charge, is Glyndora Gaines. When I came in she was on her feet, studying a clipping torn from the newspaper. The paper itself was spread on her desk, the only thing there besides a framed photo of her son. As soon as she saw me, she walked away.

I was in my overcoat, on my way out to see Peter Neucriss. I'd called Glyndora three or four times now without response, and I asked if she'd gotten my messages.

"Busy," she said, the gal who'd just been reading the Tribune. I followed her around Accounting while she slammed through cabinets.

"This is important," I added.

I got a look that could have smelted lead.

"So's what I'm doing, man. We're
in
percent below budget and looking for ways to reallocate every expense we got. Don't you want to make money?"

Boy, this is a lady with an attitude--capital A--one of those powerhouse African-American women whose chief regret seems to be that she has but one life to fume over the indignities of the last few centuries. No one gets along with her. Not the attorneys, the paralegals, the staff. During her years as a secretary Glyndora worked with half the lawyers in the firm. She couldn't cut it with another woman and lasted only a week with

Brushy. She'd been far too intimidating for Wash--and many others. In all the ensuing scrapes Glyndora's been protected by--guess who?--Martin Gold, patron saint of the local eccentrics. He seems to find her amusing and, as I knew well, is inclined to forgive every sin except sloth for the sake of ability. Able Glyndora is. That's the problem. She resents the way she's been enslaved by circumstance. She had a kid at fifteen, whom she raised on her own, with no chance after that really to make her way.

Recognizing that Glyndora could not resist the chance to prove how capable she is, Martin had ultimately teamed her with Bert, the lawyer for whom she'd worked longest. Glyndora filed his motions, kept his schedule, wrote the routine correspondence, filled in the blanks on the standard interrogatories, made excuses when he took a powder, even went to court for him in a couple of emergencies. (And had an income about
in
percent of his, if you'll excuse the son of a union man.) The only problem was that about a year ago they began to fight. Here I am not being euphemistic. I do not mean occasional cross looks or even one or two sharp words. I mean standing in the hallway bellowing. I mean papers flying, clients in the doorways of the conference rooms staring down the halls. I mean Scenes. Finally, someone who must have been in the army or on a police force got the right idea: promote her. Glyndora was less a tyrant as a _boss than she had been as an employee and she clearly enjoyed having a universe of her own. Bert, naturally, carried on like a baby when they took her away. And Glyndora undoubtedly enjoyed that too.