Firm Ambitions (27 page)

Kimball nodded his head. There was more than a hint of tightness at the corners of his smile. “And the point of all this?”

“The point of all this is cut the crap, Charles.”

“Okay.” The smile faded, the voice grew more assertive. “Why don't you tell me the purpose of your presentation?”

“My sister.”

“Explain.”

“Simple. You either had my sister set up or you know who did. Un-set her up. I want all charges against my sister dropped. Period.”

“And?”

“No ‘and.' That's all.”

His confusion seemed genuine this time. “And what about us?” he asked.

I couldn't resist. “We'll always have Paris.”

“I am serious, Rachel,” he snapped.

“So am I, Charles. When the charges are dropped, our business is concluded.”

“I don't understand,” he said, clearly off balance.

I let him teeter for a moment. “You don't understand what, Charles?”

“What about all that garbage in the safe deposit box?”

“When all the charges against my sister are dropped, I won't need it anymore.”

He squinted at me skeptically. “And that's it?”

“Yep.”

“But what about the person who killed Andros?”

I leaned against the railing and looked down at the flamingos. “A wise attorney told me back in law school that only an incompetent defense lawyer tries to solve the crime.” I turned to him. “I assume that's still good advice?”

Kimball pursed his lips. “It is.”

“I'm not Marshal Dillon, Charles, and I'm not Philip Marlowe. Someone stole jewelry and fancy toys from some very rich people who no doubt had plenty of insurance coverage for their losses. Let the police catch the burglars if they can. It's their job. Someone killed Andros. He was a slimy, despicable man who exploited a lot of women. Let the police catch his killer if they can. That's their job. Mine is to get the charges against my sister dropped and, in the process, to get whoever has been trying to terrorize my mother and me to back off for good. I know you can make that happen, Charles. But it has to happen fast. I'll give you forty-eight hours. If it hasn't happened by then, I go to the police with what I have, which includes everything in the safe deposit box.” I turned to look down at the flamingos, a few of whom were starting to bob their heads again. “I won't ask if we have a deal,” I continued in a lower voice, “because I know you won't acknowledge that there's anything to make a deal over.” I turned to him and spoke firmly. “But I will ask you if you understand my proposal.”

Charles Kimball scratched his neck as he studied the flamingos. He nodded silently, a frown on his face.

The meeting was over, but there was another mystery that had been bothering me. As he started to leave I said, “Charles.”

He turned to face me, and I was surprised by his transformation. He had become an old man. Even his shoulders slumped.

“You were one of the reasons I became a lawyer,” I said.

He looked at me with weary eyes.

“You were one of my heroes.” I shook my head in disbelief. “I even had a photograph of you in my college dorm room.”

He leaned against the rail with both hands and peered into the trees near the walkway inside the Bird Cage. An orange-and-black bird fluttered out of the branch directly in front of him and flew past at eye level. He glanced over at me with a wistful expression. “I had three heroes when I was a young man. They all turned out to be charlatans. Heroes are rarely what they appear to be.”

“But how did you change from what you once were to what you are now?”

He gestured toward the flamingos with a sad smile. “Just the way Darwin predicted: gradually, and over time.”

“But why?” I persisted.

“Why not?”

“That's no answer,” I said angrily.

He stared at me. “Why do you believe you are entitled to an answer?”

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Because you were once my hero, Charles Kimball.”

He sighed and shook his head ruefully. “You expect your world to make sense, Rachel. It's one of the fallacies of youth. Let me assure you that the world makes no sense. You expect people's actions to fit into some coherent grand plan, like one of those nineteenth-century English novels. Let me assure you, Rachel, life is not a novel.” He leaned against the railing. “Have you read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography?”

“Back in college.”

“He became a complete vegetarian in his youth for strictly moral reasons. He believed it was wrong to kill animals for food. Admirable sentiments, I suppose. But young Franklin had a slight problem: he craved seafood. Well, one day, while walking through the city, he found himself overcome by the smell of a fillet of fried cod. As his mouth watered, as his desire for a piece of fish nearly overwhelmed him, he suddenly recalled that when he had seen cod cleaned in the fish market, smaller fish spilled out of their bellies. Ah ha, he reasoned, if fish eat one another, then it isn't immoral for people to eat fish. From that day, Franklin started eating fish again. Just as important,” he said as he looked at me with a smile, “he claims that experience taught him an important lesson of life.”

“Which is?”

“Which is, as Franklin wryly observes, that it's convenient to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to come up with a reason for anything one decides to do.” He ended the story with a chuckle and a shake of his head.

“So what's yours?”

Kimball shook his head. “Rachel, you are assuming several facts not in evidence.”

He was right, of course. Kimball was not prepared to admit to any wrongdoing. Accordingly, special rules governed my line of questioning. To violate those rules would terminate our discussion.

“Fair enough,” I said. “What do you think could be a reason for someone to get involved in this kind of scheme?”

“Hypothetically speaking?”

“Of course.”

“Well, perhaps this person needed money. That's always a powerful motivator.”

“Not enough of a motivator.”

He gave me a look of admonition. “Never underestimate the power of greed, Rachel. It is the single greatest motivator in the history of man. But let us assume that greed wasn't enough in this case. Or, taking a lesson from Ben Franklin, let us assume that greed was not an acceptable ‘reason.' Perhaps this person, especially if he was a criminal defense lawyer, saw his involvement as a chance to play Robin Hood— especially if he could use his cut to help fund the defense of indigent clients. That's certainly a better reason than greed.”

“What's the real reason?” I said persistently. I wasn't going to allow him to wiggle out that easily.

He rubbed his chin. “Hard to say. Perhaps our hypothetical man doesn't even care about reasons anymore. Perhaps he realizes, as Franklin did, that reasons are little fictions we use to sanitize our actions. Maybe he just plain enjoys the risk. Addiction to risk is a common enough personality flaw in trial lawyers. You have a touch of it yourself, Rachel.” He seemed to think it over. “Makes sense, eh?” he said with a nod. “After all, the burglary scheme you described is basically a high-stakes rolling crap game with the government as the house.”

“But in the end the house always wins.”

He laughed and shook his head. “Not in this country, my dear. Not in this country.”

We stood in silence as the bobbing flamingos, now all synchronized, did their noisy conga-line routine again. Kimball glanced at his watch as the show ended. “I have certain matters to take care of, Rachel.”

“Forty-eight hours, Charles.”

“I understand the proposal.” Kimball paused and studied me with pursed lips. “Regardless of the eventual outcome, Rachel, I commend you for having the ingenuity to set it up and the sheer brass balls to carry it off.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Charles Kimball left first, which was good, because I don't think I could have kept up my facade much longer. My legs were wobbly as I walked out of the Bird Cage.

If Kimball was innocent
, I said to myself,
he would have been outraged, he would have denied everything
. While he obviously wasn't the one who put the cyanide powder into the pills, he hadn't denied anything. Then again, he hadn't admitted anything, either.

Apprehensive, tense, frightened—those words don't even come close to describing the way my mother and I felt on the drive home from the zoo. We checked the locks on all the doors and windows. Benny called from Chicago that night and went ballistic when he found out what I had done.

“Are you fucking nuts?” he shouted at me. He insisted that I go to the police, which I refused.

“Kimball can do it for us,” I told him. “He can get Ann off
and
get whoever's hassling us to stop it. I've got to give him his forty-eight hours.”

“Kimball? How can you trust that motherfucker?”

We got into a big argument, and I terminated by slamming down the receiver. He called right back.

“What?” I yelled at him.

“Then get out of the goddam house, Rachel,” he said, a little calmer this time. “Someone already got in your house to stick a cat's head on your goddam pillow while you were taking a shower. Don't be an idiot. Get the fuck out of there.”

Benny's advice began to sound better later that night when my mother and I started getting ready for bed. Although Ozzie was strong, healthy, and loyal, he was only one dog and we were only two women.

“So where can we go?” my mother asked as we both put our clothes back on.

Neither of us knew the answer to that one. We had to improvise. I called an attorney friend who did some work for the Ritz-Carlton, and he put me in touch with the night manager.

If the test of a great hotel is its ability to meet the most unusual needs of its guests, then the Ritz passed the test. By midnight, we were in a suite under assumed names on a restricted floor with an armed security guard posted outside our door. Two floors down, there was another suite—that one empty—registered under the names Rachel and Sarah Gold.

Nevertheless, the only one who slept well that night was Ozzie. At three in the morning I got out of bed and went into the living room to make a stiff gin and tonic. I opened the French doors to the balcony, moved a chair out there, and settled in. I stared east toward the blinking red light on top of the Arch, which was barely visible in the distance. As I sipped my drink, the evidence I had amassed seemed flimsier and flimsier. How could I have seriously hoped to spook a premier criminal defense attorney like Kimball with a trick-or-treat bag of circumstantial evidence? Was he just going to ignore my threat? Call my bluff? Or was he making arrangements for the unfortunate “accident” that would take my life in six hours or six months or six years?

The sun woke me at dawn. The hotel's day manager personally brought up our breakfast and took Ozzie for a walk. I checked in with my office occasionally through the morning, but there was no word from anyone. At twelve-thirty, while taking a shower, I actually hyperventilated and almost passed out. At quarter to five I couldn't stand it anymore. More than thirty hours had elapsed since my meeting with Kimball. What had seemed a daring but powerful gambit two days ago now seemed foolish and impotent.

I felt like Dorothy as she stared at the hourglass, her dread rising as she watched the sand trickle down steadily, implacably. Except that I knew there was no Cowardly Lion or Tin Man coming to the rescue. Just my mother and myself and Ozzie in the role of Toto.

“It's not going to work,” I told my mother.

She looked up from her book and sighed. “You don't know that yet, sweetie. Give it time.”

I did. And time ran out the following morning.

“Mom,” I said, exhausted and frazzled, “it's been forty-eight hours. I'm going to the police. You wait here with Ozzie. I'll call you as soon as I tell them.”

At 10:45 a.m., I walked through the entrance to the Clayton police station. The first person I saw inside was Detective Bernie “Poncho” Israel. He broke into a big smile when he saw me.

“Rachel Gold, you must have ESP.”

“Why's that?”

“I just called your office. Your secretary said you weren't in.” He shook his head in wonder. “We've had a remarkable development in the Andros homicide. It's going to mean more work for us, but your sister's about to become one very happy lady.”

I was actually shaking. “What happened?”

“Come on back to my desk. I'll grab you a cup of coffee and tell you all about it.”

I joined him and he handed me a Styrofoam cup of black coffee. He took a sip of his coffee and shook his head in wonderment. “You sister owes a special thanks to Charles Kimball,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I spent the last hour in an interrogation room with Charles and one of his longtime clients.”

“Who?”

He shook his head. “You don't need to know the name, and we don't want it getting out just yet. Let's just say he's a gentleman who's seen the advantages of cooperating with his local law enforcement officials.”

“He confessed to the murder?”

Poncho chuckled. “Don't I wish. No, it won't be that easy. But he's given us some vital information that's completely changed the focus and theory of the homicide. Our John Doe is in the drug business. He's a chemist—the guy who tests and cuts and processes the raw materials that come in from South America and East Asia. As such, he has access to a wide variety of chemicals ordinarily available only to licensed professionals.”

“Such as cyanide?”

“Exactly.”

“He was the one who got the cyanide?”

Poncho nodded. “Not for his own use, though. But the man who had him get it, and the people that man works for—well, these are not the kind of folks your little sister will ever meet in her lifetime. Even if she had wanted to hire someone to kill Andros, she would never have gotten anywhere near these folks.”

“The mafia?”

“That's what they call them in Hollywood. Let's just say that the man who had our John Doe obtain the cyanide is an employee of a criminal organization that has a regional headquarters in Kansas City.”

“Why would they kill Andros?”

“Your hunch was the right one.”

“I don't understand.”

“I talked to Curt Green. He was the detective who met you out at that mini-storage facility while I was on vacation.”

“The one who thought I was a dumb broad.”

Poncho gave a hearty laugh. “He's had his comeuppance, Rachel. I've seen to that. Anyway, you were right all along. Andros was using that place to store stolen merchandise. Apparently, the Kansas City organization is not a great believer in competition, and Andros's little operation was directly competing with theirs. They had warned him several times, according to what John Doe heard. When Andros refused to back off, they had him killed.”

“I thought they got rid of people by shooting them.”

“Generally yes, especially when they're dealing with other members of organized crime. This one is a bit unusual, but I've seen ones far kinkier than that.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“We're going to talk to other sources, we're going to keep our ears to the ground. The best we can hope for is an opening somewhere down the line. Could take two weeks. Could take two years.”

“And my sister?”

“All charges are being dropped as we speak, Rachel. We've already notified the press. Your sister's been cleared.”

“And that's it?” I asked, in thrilled disbelief.

He gave me a broad smile as he reached over to shake my hand. “Rachel, that's it.”

We shook hands. “Thank you, Poncho.”

“You make sure that sister of yours thanks
you
.”

As I stood up to go he said, “One more thing.”

He opened his desk drawer and removed an envelope. “Charles Kimball told me to be sure to give you this.”

I took it from him. Scrawled on the front of the envelope were the words “For Rachel Gold. Personal and Confidential.”

I stopped in the corridor and tore open the envelope. Inside was a folded sheet of paper from a yellow legal pad. I unfolded it and read the handwritten message:

Dear Rachel:

Perry Mason would have been proud. And like any good episode, it was solved just in time. I would be honored to close our deal with a sequel to our last dinner together. As I recall, you still have a rain check. Please call me.

Warmly, Charles