“Size thirteen,” Cimino said. “What are you—six-three? Six-four?”
“Somewhere in there.” Six-three, two hundred thirty in college, when measurements mattered. I hadn’t weighed myself in years.
“You were an athlete?”
“Played some ball in college.”
“What college?”
“State.”
“What position?”
“Wide-out.”
“No shit?”
I closed my locker. “Is there a lock or something?”
He shook his head. “This is the Gold Coast Athletic Club.” Apparently, that was supposed to mean that no locks were necessary. Rich people don’t steal? In my experience, they do it more than anyone.
I was handed a racquet, and I followed Cimino onto a court. It was clear from the outset that he knew how to play the game—he was rather adept at hitting the ball low against the front wall so it bounced twice before I could reach it—but he was pushing fifty years old and he was overweight and, it appeared, was not very athletic even during his heyday. It wasn’t really a challenge. I didn’t hit with the same strategic precision, but I could chase down most balls and force him to run a lot, which he didn’t like doing. It occurred to me that if I worked him hard enough, I could induce cardiac arrest, kill him, and get the feds off my back.
It also occurred to me that Lee Tucker, were he here, would have counseled me to let Cimino win. Keep me on his good side, that kind of thing. But I wasn’t wired that way. Put me in a competitive sport, and you better keep your hands away from the cage.
It felt good. I used to be a workout fanatic, but I had dropped off after everything happened with Talia and Emily. I hadn’t gained weight—if anything, I’d lost some—but my muscles felt loose and flabby and I didn’t have much wind.
“Enough. Fuck. Enough.” Cimino’s gray shirt was plastered to his chest with sweat. He ran a hand towel over his face and then wrapped it around his neck. I followed him back to that reception area, where we drank orange juice and Cimino ate a plate of cantaloupe.
“That was fun,” I said, putting the cool glass against my forehead.
“For you, fuckin’-A it was.”
A man in a sport coat and slacks approached him. “Mr. Cimino, hello.”
“Hey, Rick, how are you?” He shifted upright, with some discomfort, and shook hands.
“Very well,” the man said. He gave Cimino a knowing nod. “Everything’s great.”
“Great, Rick. Good to see you.”
The man left us, and Cimino seemed to focus on me awhile. He finished off his plate of cantaloupe, devouring them with the same enthusiasm he probably brought to any moneymaking scheme he could get his hands on.
“All right, Jason Kolarich,” he said. “Now it’s time we talk.”
34
“SO YOU WERE A PROSECUTOR,” CIMINO SAID. “WHY’D
you quit?”
I rubbed my thumb with my index and middle fingers, the universal sign for money. “Tired of struggling to make ends meet.”
He watched me. I thought of this as an audition. I wasn’t completely lying about my reason for leaving the county attorney’s office, but this was the answer he wanted to hear.
“Okay, so you hit it big at a fancy law firm, and then you left. Now you’re all by yourself at a rinky-dink law firm and you want to work for a state procurement board?”
I thought about that for a moment. “I wanted more flexibility,” I said. “Being my own boss, I can do whatever I want. Nobody’s looking over my shoulder.”
He nodded. But I had only given half an answer.
“But you know something?” I went on. “They don’t knock down your door quite as much when you’re not working alongside Paul Riley and those other lawyers. They want someone with gray hair. They want experience. So I figured, I needed to branch out more. Make some connections, meet the right people, show them what I’m capable of. I’m betting that when I show what I can do, people will notice. Maybe one day, I’ll have one of those 911s in my garage.”
I was feeding him red meat. He’d done the same, after all, probably after working under other people. My law firm was nothing compared to Ciriaco Properties, but the concept was no different.
Work hard and the money you make goes into your pocket, not the guy’s above you. And I didn’t have to take anyone’s shit. I worked as hard as I wished. It was hard to imagine any other way now. It would feel like a small defeat to go back to working for someone else.
“You got family?” he asked.
“My mother died a few years back from cancer. My old man’s in prison.”
“For what?”
I had a feeling Cimino already knew all of this. “Fraud,” I said. “He’s a grifter. A con artist. And a shitty one. A drunk.”
“You get along with him?”
“No.”
“Why not? He offended your moral sensibilities?”
Actually, he did. I was always ashamed of my father’s chosen profession, to the point that I repeated his lie—that he worked in “sales”—to everyone at school and quickly tired of trying to justify his actions to myself. But I didn’t think it made sense to show Cimino my sense of moral outrage. It wasn’t exactly a job requirement here.
“No, it wasn’t that.” I took a drink of orange juice. “I had two problems with him. One, he didn’t do it well. He was lazy. You know how he got caught the first time? He scammed some old guy on some bogus time-share thing, got a nice down payment from the guy, but it turns out this guy’s brother was retired FBI. So the brother gets the G to follow my dad around, and it took all of about two days to pinch him. He was too damn lazy to scout out his target.”
Cimino seemed to find this interesting, maybe even surprising. “And what was the other reason?” he asked me. “You said two things.”
“The worst part was that he didn’t look out for us. He didn’t provide. We were dirt poor, and he spent half of his loot on booze. He ignored my mother, and he took swats at my brother and me. You know, the beatings, I could’ve handled, if he put food on the table. If he took care of Mom. You take care of your own, or you can’t look at yourself in the mirror.”
Now this part was coming from the heart, but I wouldn’t normally have shared all of this. I was trying to create an image for Cimino, an image that reminded him of himself. I didn’t know the details of Cimino’s life, but I assumed from the wedding band that he was married and he probably had kids. And no doubt, guys like him, they tell themselves they’re doing it for their family. They wrap themselves around the dual justifications of familial obligations and past difficulties—a poor childhood, perceived inequities—to rationalize their criminal behavior. There are all sorts of players in their little game, but the bad guy is never them.
At his behest, I elaborated, telling him about my brother, Pete, who was still trying to get a grip on himself. We briefly touched on my wife and daughter—“Hector told me,” Cimino said, sparing us both the morbid details. He was probably wondering how the loss of Talia and Emily factored into everything. Did it make me more reckless? Would I be unsteady? Unpredictable?
I was wondering some of those things myself.
Some time passed. Cimino got another glass of juice and some more fruit. A couple of old guys, one of whom was a judge I once tried a case in front of as a prosecutor, wandered in and out.
Cimino bit at a cuticle on his thumb. “You know, kid, you’re right about one thing. There’s a lot of opportunity out there. This thing here. This thing, there’s a lot of room for everyone to make money. This could be one big happy fucking family. But you know what the catch is?”
I shook my head. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch is that this
isn’t
one big happy fucking family. There’s risk everywhere. And I don’t like risk, kid. I do not like it.” He popped a slice of orange in his mouth. “I need a guy like you. I’ve been looking for a guy like you. Hector says you’re as good a lawyer as he knows. Me, I haven’t seen anything that tells me different. So that part, we’re okay.”
So far, so good. Cimino shifted in his chair and turned to me. “You’re with me or you’re against me. There’s nothing in between. You understand that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You remember that, I’ll make you rich. But you cross me, kid, you’ll be sorry you ever met me. I take care of the people around me and everyone else—everyone else—” He made a noise. A smile crept across his face. He looked over his shoulder and then leaned into me. “A guy named Dick Baroni. B-A-R-O-N-I. He could tell you something about being with me and then against me. He
could
tell you, but he won’t. You could cut off his dick, he wouldn’t tell you about Charlie Cimino. Not anymore.”
He gave me a moment to think about that. He’d even spelled the guy’s name out for me, so he obviously wanted me to follow up, to look into it.
“What I’m doing right now,” he continued, “I’m taking a risk. I’m taking a risk on you. I’m letting you in. So here’s your chance to walk away, kid. You’re having second thoughts, go have ’em on someone else’s time. No hard feelings. But you work for me, you work for me. Are we clear?”
I don’t think he could have possibly been clearer. “We understand each other,” I said.
“Okay, then.” He dropped his hand flat on the table. “Your job isn’t to tell me what I can do. Your job is to make sure I can do what I wanna do. You see the difference?”
I chewed on that a moment. “If you want something,” I said, “then my job is to want it, too. My job is to see if there is any conceivable way to get you what you want. And I’m aggressive. I’m competitive. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’ll find a way to argue that what you want is legal. But that one time out of a hundred—you’ll have to listen to me. We have to make sure that what we do survives an audit.”
“An
audit
.”
I gave him a look. I leaned in closer. “We both know what I mean. Neither of us is worried about someone filing a lawsuit over what the PCB does. We’re worried about those cocksuckers with trench coats and sunglasses and grand jury subpoenas. The ones who put my father in prison.”
The mere mention of the federal government eliminated some of the color from Cimino’s face. But all I did was say out loud what was already on his mind. Charlie Cimino didn’t avoid cell phones and faxes and emails because he was opposed to twenty-first-century technology.
“And you’re going to steer me clear of those cocksuckers,” he said.
“I am. You’re relying on my advice, Charlie. If something the PCB does gets a hard look, who do you think gets the
hardest
look? I’m the one with his ass on the line here. So if I say it can’t happen, Charlie, you’re going to say, ‘Thank you, Jason, for making sure I can sleep well at night, knowing that you’ve got my back.’ ”I drilled a finger into the table. “And Charlie, no fuckin’ foolin’, you tell me right now if you see it differently. I’m giving
you
the chance to walk away.”
I thought it helped to show a little spine here. That’s what he needed, even if he didn’t like it, and I was counting on him realizing that. It wasn’t until a short laugh burst out of him that I knew he had.
35
AFTER MY WORKOUT AT THE GOLD COAST ATHLETIC
Club, I returned to my law office. I knew it was only a matter of time before “David Hamlin” would be ringing me to pump me for information. I spent the time on Google, looking up “Dick Baroni,” the guy Cimino had mentioned—someone who supposedly had learned the difference between being “with” Cimino and “against” him.
It didn’t take me long to find that Richard Baroni was a real estate developer who had had a few balls in the air during the housing bubble in the late nineties. I didn’t see anything that mentioned Charlie Cimino, but there were plenty of mentions of Mr. Baroni’s office going up in flames, with him in it, in 1995. He’d managed to escape with a severely broken leg, a few superficial burns, and surprisingly no idea who might be responsible for the fire.
How nice of Cimino to relate that quaint little anecdote.
Tucker called me on my direct line, avoiding my receptionist, Marie, because we figured repeated phone calls from “David Hamlin” would prompt too many inquiries from the ladies in my office. He said he was going to order food from the downstairs diner and to meet him at Hamlin Consulting in Suite 410.
When I knocked on the frosted glass door, a little late, Tucker showed me in. He had a cheese omelet open in a styrofoam container and, across from him at his desk, a Reuben and hash browns with a sweaty bottle of water for me.
“So how did it go?”
“How it went,” I said, settling in, “is I’m glad I wasn’t wearing a wire. We got in his car and went to his club for racquetball.”
“Yeah.” Tucker shook out a bad thought. “Okay, good, then. He was probably checking you.”
“Probably? I left my clothes, wallet, phone, everything in an unlocked locker. We play racquetball for an hour, then we’re hanging out in a lounge area, and he doesn’t say shit to me until some ‘acquaintance’ of his walks up to him and says, ‘Everything’s great, Mr. Cimino,’ and suddenly Cimino opens up to me.”