Hostile Witness (38 page)

I HAD BEEN INSTRUCTED
to be at the bar of the Doubletree Hotel at 10:30
P.M.
and to wait there for little Sheldon. The Doubletree was a modern cement and glass structure just south of City Hall. The bar there was open and airy, with rows of tiny tables, a ring of circular booths on a riser around the edge, and glass doors looking out at the hookers on Broad Street. A two-man band played on the tiny stage, a short guy in a tux on guitar and a tall good-looking woman singing and playing synthesizer, standards like “I Will Survive” and “Cherish,” the Madonna version, but no one was dancing. As I sat at the bar, waiting for little Sheldon Kapustin to come and get me, I wondered what he would look like. Small, round, a young Morris but maybe skinnier, hopefully skinnier. He would have to be skinnier, having made it through two years in the Israeli army, but it wouldn’t take too many pastrami sandwiches to beef him up again. My image of Sheldon was not exactly comforting, young, small, fat, a computer nerd. “Give him a chance,” Morris had asked and give him a chance I would because I didn’t have much choice, but I hoped giving little Sheldon his chance wouldn’t land me in jail.

Morris had told me to draw up a rough plan of Prescott’s floor and I had, very rough. It was folded in my jacket pocket. Prescott’s office was on the fifty-fifth floor. I wasn’t quite sure how to get up there. I hoped Morris had worked out a plan. I also didn’t know how to get in the
office door if it was locked, but Sheldon was a locksmith, so he would have to take care of it, as well as the desk and file cabinets, which might also be locked. And if I couldn’t find the actual document, it would probably be somewhere on the computer, which Sheldon would have to hack his way onto. Already, I realized, I was too dependent on little Sheldon, and if little Sheldon was even only twice what I expected him to be, I would be lost. I ordered a beer while I was waiting and, on a spur, also a gin and tonic. This was not a night to get drunk, but it was a night for calm, natural or chemically induced, so I drank the G&T quickly and then the beer and ordered another of each.

“Mr. Carl?”

I turned around and immediately flinched. Behind me was an enforcer type, big, solid-necked, arms like legs, a real bruiser with curly black hair and a weightlifter’s pinched nose. He wore a hat, a gangster’s fedora raffishly cocked forward. He held a little leather briefcase in his right hand. It was another Raffaello summons and that briefcase, I thought, was a nice touch in the hotel. “What now?” I asked.

“Is there a problem?”

“I’m sick of it, is all. I’m sick of being dragged into cars for little chats with big-time mobsters. I’m sick of being whipsawed in your boss’s little fights with Moore and the feds.” Maybe I had drunk too much, or maybe my renewed resentment was getting the best of me, but it felt fine sounding off against this lug. “Tell your boss I’m busy, that tonight’s not a good night, that if he wants to talk to me he can just call me on the phone like everyone else. Tell him that.”

“I don’t understand, Mr. Carl.”

“Just tell him what I told you to tell him. You don’t need to understand. That’s not what you’re made for, understanding, is it? Brawny boys like you are made for something else. Just tell him.”

“Maybe some other night would be better.”

“Yeah, sure. Tell him to have his girl get in touch with my girl and we’ll set something up. We’ll do lunch. I know an Indian place.”

“I’ll tell him, Mr. Carl, but my father won’t be too happy about it.”

“Your father, huh? Funny,” I said. “I thought you were dead.”

“Not yet. I’ll give Morris the message.”

“So you’re little Sheldon,” I said. I looked him up and down. “Tell me, Sheldon.” It was the first thing that popped into my mind. “Your mother, Rosalie. I don’t mean to be rude, but your mother is she by any chance a big woman?”

“She can be imposing.”

“I bet. I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else. Sit down. Can I get you a drink?”

“A ginger ale.”

I waved down the bartender. “A ginger ale and another beer.”

“Make that two ginger ales,” said not-so-little Sheldon Kapustin. When the sodas came he took his and led me to a booth in the rear, where we sat across from each other.

“Are you drunk, Mr. Carl? I’ll be frank, I’m not going up with you if you’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk at all,” I said.

“You sounded drunk back there at the bar.”

“Fortified is what I am.”

“Let me see your floor plan.”

I pulled out the sheet of paper on which I had sketched the hallways and offices, as best I could remember, of the fifty-fifth floor of One Liberty Place. In the corner, as big as I remembered it, was Prescott’s office. I had drawn in the couch, the desk, the oblong table. He looked at it for a while.

“Which way is north?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you remember the view out the window?”

I closed my eyes and saw the rivers of row-housed streets leading to Veterans Stadium, and catercorner to it the Schuylkill and Franklin Field. “I think this was south and this was west.”

Sheldon nodded and stared for a long time at my little map. The band was playing the theme from
Beverly Hills Cop.
A waitress came to give us a wooden bowl of tiny pretzel fishes and asked if we were all right and Sheldon said we were. When she left he reached into his briefcase and pulled out what looked to be a road map, but when he unfolded it, one sheaf at a time, it turned out to be a detailed schematic of the fifty-fifth floor.

“How did you get that?”

“My father has friends everywhere. You’d be surprised.”

“I don’t think I’d be surprised by anything about Morris anymore.”

He spun the schematic around. “All right, based on what you are telling me, this is Prescott’s office.”

“That looks right.”

“And this then would be the closest freight elevator.”

“If you say so. I can’t tell.”

“And this here is probably the custodian’s closet. See how it abuts the HVAC system, so they can change filters and do any needed repairs.”

“Okay,” I said, willing to go along.

“And fortunately,” said Sheldon, “the custodian’s closet isn’t but ten yards from the entrance to Prescott’s office.”

The custodian’s closet was small and dank, with the hum from the floor’s HVAC unit pushing vast quantities of air in and out like a giant lung. There wasn’t really enough room for the two of us, but as long as we staggered our
breathing we were all right. We were both in overalls, with caps that read “Robinson Cleaners,” all supplied by Sheldon.

It was Sheldon who had picked the lock to the freight elevator and gotten us onto the fifty-fifth floor. I had thought the offices would be quiet, as dead as my office after five o’clock, but it wasn’t dead at all. There were associates still working, secretaries still typing, copy machines still whirring in the distance. This Talbott, Kittredge and Chase was a billable-hour machine and I guess, like the best-oiled machines in the world, there was no reason to shut it down for a silly thing like nightfall. For a moment I wondered if Prescott was still there, hard at work, but Sheldon had called him before we left the Doubletree Hotel bar and he was gone for the day, not at meetings or out to dinner, but gone. Just to be sure the coast was clear, we followed the hallway past Prescott’s closed door and into the custodian’s closet. On the way I had seen light coming from associates’ offices and I feared that maybe one of those hard successes would recognize me. The first office I passed I instinctively glanced into, spying at a desk a woman whom I had fortunately never seen before. “Don’t look,” whispered Sheldon, and thereafter, for the rest of the walk to the closet, though my hackles were raised, I successfully fought not to glance into those productive little offices. When we reached the custodian’s closet beside the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system on the fifty-fifth floor, Sheldon opened the door and entered and then yanked me inside.

“His door was closed,” I said.

“That’s good. Hopefully it’s locked.”

“Hopefully?”

“So long as it’s locked we know he’s not expecting anyone to use it. If he leaves it unlocked, one of his people might be planning to step in and pick something up.”

He reached into his briefcase, took out a stethoscope, and proceeded to listen through the door.

“Giving it a checkup?” I asked.

He put his finger to his lips and I shut up.

After a long moment he said, “All right, Mr. Carl, you ready?”

“Sure.”

“You just follow me and keep quiet if anyone sees us.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t go wandering around without me.”

“Don’t worry.”

“And take that with you,” he said, pointing to a bucket with a dirty rag laying over the edge.

After a final moment of listening through the stethoscope, he stuffed it in his briefcase and pulled out a clipboard. One deep breath and he was out the door. Bucket and rag in hand, I followed.

Slowly, calmly, we walked down the hall to the office and made our way around the desk used by Prescott’s secretary, Janice. Sheldon tried the knob and it turned. He opened the door. I looked around quickly, saw no one, and scooted inside. Sheldon closed the door behind me and immediately turned on the light. It was as I remembered, the wall of photographs, the gilded desk with piles of papers, the conference table in the middle covered with files, the wraparound couch and grotesque boxing painting and coffee table with papers atop in a neat pile. Behind the desk was the low and long wooden credenza.

“Go to it,” he said.

“Where do I begin?”

“This is your gig, Mr. Carl. Just be quick about it. I don’t like that the door was unlocked.”

The first place I hit was the long conference table in the middle of the room, covered with thick maroon folders packed with documents. There were titles on the folder dividers that let me know these were indeed Moore and
Concannon files, but the system was based on numbers with which I wasn’t familiar, so I was forced to search through them one by one. There were transcripts, there was correspondence, which I went through carefully, there were documents from the councilman’s files. Much of this stuff I had seen, on many of the letters I had been copied, but there was also much I had never seen before. I especially concentrated on correspondence between Prescott and Bruce Pierpont, the jury expert. I had hoped a copy of Pierpont’s report would be in the correspondence file, attached to the cover letter, but though the cover letter was there, the report was not. As I searched, Sheldon glanced around Prescott’s desk.

“Anything?” he asked in a worried whispered voice.

“Not yet. Why don’t you check the desk?”

“It’s locked,” he said.

“Well, open it.”

“If someone comes in and I’m fiddling around inside his locked desk, that’s trouble.”

“If someone comes in we’re in trouble anyway.”

He looked doubtful and then pulled his picks out of his pocket and went to work on the desk’s lock. It yielded to him in less than a minute.

Though I wasn’t finding the jury report I had come for, I was learning much I hadn’t known. There was a bill from Bissonette to Moore for money owed for club expenditures. There was also a stack of bank receipts showing a series of cash deposits to Veronica’s checking account, all in the high four figures but none for more than ten thousand dollars. And then I found a file, number 716, which stopped me cold.

Inside was a copy of the
Martindale-Hubbell
report on Guthrie, Derringer and Carl. Inside was a copy of my law school transcript and the pathetic letter I had sent off seven years before seeking a job at Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. Inside was a copy of my apartment lease, a copy of my car
insurance application, listing my father’s address as my own to get the reduced suburban rate, a list of all transactions for the last two years on my credit card, copies of my bank statements, copies of my delinquent payment statements from the Student Loan Marketing Association, a copy of my deficient credit report. And then, sitting there like a ghost from my past, a transcript of my deposition of Mrs. Osbourne. I paged through it quickly. One section was highlighted in orange.

So my ability to be bought wasn’t writ large on my face after all. It was documented in my paper trail, in all of my records, in each step I had taken in the shallow depths of my past. The sum total of my years, the ledgers of my true worth were in that file, all I had wanted, how low I would
stoop to get it, how little I had achieved no matter how low I stooped. My chest ached at the very thought of it. I put it down carefully, as if it were a fragile flask filled with the vilest of liquids.

I turned away from the table in disgust. “Anything in the desk?” I asked Sheldon.

“Not yet, just firm memos, phone bills.”

“We’re looking for a jury report, or anything marked Attorney Work Product over the top. I’m going to check the credenza.”

The credenza behind the desk was wooden, a piece of fine furniture really, low like a table. One wooden door, the length of the piece, swung up, revealing files arranged horizontally. Kneeling down, I started going through the files one by one. I hurriedly determined the subject matter of each, checking file tabs, looking inside to make sure the papers corresponded to the tabs, and then moving on. I was finding nothing, and growing frustrated, when the office door opened and I heard a gasp from the woman who entered.