Personal injuries kc-5 Page 20

  "If you show up," Stan explained to Robbie, "that tells the judge that McManis won't settle. So if Skolnick denies the motion, he knows discovery starts and McManis finds out your client has cancer. You'll get nothing, the kids will get nothing-and Skolnick will get nothing." Stan was convinced he had the judge cornered.

  "You're missing one thing," Feaver told Sennett. "Barney isn't smart enough to figure all of that out."

  When McManis and Feaver arrived in court to argue the motion, Skolnick sat on the bench with his perfect judicial hairdo and his florid face scrunched down among his many chins. He seemed to understand nothing but the fact that a plaintiff's motion for judgment on the pleadings was virtually never granted. Just as Robbie had predicted, the judge swiftly denied his motion.

  Yet this setback proved only momentary. After ruling, Skolnick invited Feaver and Evon and McManis back to his chambers. He was entirely agreeable as he sat behind his desk, still in his robe. He offered coffee, told a few of his usual jokes, and then began mercilessly pressuring McManis to settle the case.

  "You got out of here with your gatkes today, Jim," he said, addressing McManis, who'd never been in Skolnick's courtroom before, as if he were a friend through the ages. "You know what that means? Rough translation, you got out with your boots on. But who knows about next time, when Feaver makes another motion? Not that I'm prejudging. I'm not. I'm keeping an open mind. Completely open. Believe me, after twenty-six years on the bench, that's one thing you learn to do. You have to learn all the facts and hear both sides. Next time, who knows, maybe I'll still lion. I very well could. I was about this far." The judge held up his thumb and index finger, which were not parted at all. "Then where are you, Jim? The insurance companies, I don't know why they like to hang on to their money so long. It's like those cartoons where the moths fly out of the wallet. A case like this. Does he have a family?" Skolnick asked Robbie innocently. "The plaintiff?"

  At the end, Skolnick stayed discovery another month to allow the parties to consider his remarks. He could not quite bring that off with aplomb; his eyes never left his leather desk blotter.

  The FoxBIte had captured the judge's song and dance perfectly. Sennett accepted congratulations without preening, knowing, as we'd all seen, that there was no end to the way things could yet go wrong. Skolnick still had to take the money, and the complicated equipment in the Lincoln had to function. On April 12, Robbie, having reported to Pincus that the painter's case was now settled, prepared to visit the judge again in his car.

  "We need this," Stan told Feaver before he departed from McManis's. Considerably shorter than my client, Stan laid his narrow hands on Robbie's shoulders and looked at him almost plaintively. The brotherly appeal, the fact that Stan was asking and not commanding, seemed to impress all of us, even Robbie. "JUDGE, I'M SHAVING YOU a little," Robbie said, almost as soon as he was on the nail-polish-red leather of the front seat. Feaver had seen the prior tape a number of times and had his mark exactly. He held the envelope containing the cash in his left hand and waved it in front of the lens. The picture today was noticeably better. Alf had added a signal booster, and at considerable expense, Sennett had requisitioned a second surveillance van from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which was also receiving the picture as a backup. Alf manned the dials feverishly, while Stan and McManis and I were belted to our little tin seats on the walls.

  "Hah?" asked Skolnick. The judge had been providing his own windy analysis of what the Clintons should do about health care reform and had seemed sincerely oblivious as Robbie prepared to deliver the payoff. Even with the camera, Feaver had to find some way to get Skolnick to talk about the money. If the envelope was simply stuffed into the seat unnoticed, a defense lawyer would argue Skolnick knew nothing about it. Thus, Feaver had employed a variation on the ruse with Walter.

  "Judge, you know, like I say, it's a little less, but to get this done, I had to undercut myself on the settlement. And I'd like to leave the family, the kids, with as much as I can. Only I don't want you to think I'm stiffing you."

  Skolnick's large face labored through the calculations inspired by this deviation from form. He finally looked straight down at the envelope.

  "Veefeel?" he asked quietly, meaning `How much?'

  "Eight. If that's okay."

  Skolnick laughed out loud. "My God, they should all worry like you. Genug. We're friends, Robbie. We've done a lot together. What you think is right, fine. Besides," said Skolnick, "you gave me last time. For nothing." Robbie played dumb and Skolnick added, "With Gillian."

  Across from me, Sennett rattled his fist in the air, but issued no sound. He'd learned better. In the Lincoln, Skolnick's garrulousness had overtaken his caution.

  "See, you know, you hear stories, some of my brethren, they're like bandits with pistols, really, what they do, it's a stickup. Here, with me, it's good for you, okay, so it's good for me. I'm not for grudges. I appreciate what you do. And if you did nothing, it would be the same, you know that."

  "I do," Robbie said. Sennett recoiled, but Feaver quickly sent things in the proper direction. "It's just this time, you really went out of your way, Judge. You know, when you denied that motion, I was--:'

  "I could see," said Skolnick. "You looked like I had my finger in your kishkes. Right? Come on. I could see. You were thinking, What's this guy doing to me? Am I right? I could see that."

  "Well, you know, Judge, I just saw this guy, his kids. But what you did, in chambers. That was brilliant. Really. That was just terrific. That scum-sucker, McManis, he wouldn't have come up with a nickel if you hadn't given him a poke."

  "Well, thank you, you know, when I saw that look on your face, I said, So what can I do so this works out like it should? Same as always really, this isn't different from some other case, you talk to the two sides, you tell them to be sensible. That's what I did."

  Stan was still making faces-Skolnick's continuing insistence that he hadn't behaved improperly would be a small impediment-but the fact was the judge had annihilated himself. He was already driving back toward the LeSueur, but he detained Robbie in order to finish another joke, this one about a priest and a rabbi who have a collision. After a cautious start, each agrees that he's partly at fault. To cement their amicable resolution, the rabbi offers the father a drink from the sabbath wine which he happens to have in his trunk. The priest takes a long draught, then offers the rabbi the bottle.

  "'Right after the police get here,' the rabbi says." Skolnick reddened further as he roared over the punch line, and even in the van there was a current of suppressed laughter. Robbie departed the Lincoln chuckling, but Amari continued to follow Skolnick's car. Given the results of the first recording, Stan had persuaded Judge Winchell to expand her order slightly, allowing the camera to remain activated for an additional ten minutes to see if Skolnick retrieved the envelope from the front seat. The second surveillance van was by now in the Temple parking garage, near the section reserved for judges where Alf had punctured Skolnick's tires five weeks before. We stayed on the street, where, despite Alf's apprehensions, the picture was clear.

  Alone, Skolnick used his car phone to call his wife about a set of race cars he was supposed to pick up for his grandson's birthday. Afterwards, as he circled up the ramp, the judge actually began quietly singing "Happy Birthday to You," wagging his large head on the beat. Parked, he turned off the motor, which sent a jolt of static across the picture. The camera would remain on only for another two minutes, as it automatically powered down once the ignition was off to avoid draining the battery. But that figured to be long enough.

  For a troubling instant, Skolnick started squeezing out from under the steering wheel without the money. Then he rammed himself in the head. "What a draykopf," he complained about his absentmindedness. He squinted through the windshield and looked up and down the dim structure, then grunted audibly as he twisted around and heaved. The envelope came out like a weed he'd uprooted. He held it aloft, only inches from the camera, then jamme
d it into an interior pocket of his raincoat. With that, he grabbed the rearview mirror where the lens was secreted and angled it down so he could look himself over. His large features swelled across the screen as he straightened his tie. The pores on his nose were distorted to craterlike dimensions and he ran his tongue over his teeth. The the poor bastard smiled with all his empty-noggined good humor and again began humming to himself, "Happy Birthday to You."

  All the UCAS gathered to watch the tape. Evon briefly stole away from the office to join them. It was, as Klecker said, more fun than the movies. Afterwards, Sennett addressed the group. Today's success made Stan seem more determined, more vital. He stood straight in his white shirt under the recessed spots.

  This was a great achievement, he said, a relief of a kind and a tribute to the enormous hard work and sacrifice each one of them had made, to the months away from their families, and the strains they'd endured in living undercover. None of them had to worry any longer about saying it was all for nothing. They had put together a case Skolnick could never defend, and another one, on Malatesta, that would soon be at the same point.

  But no one should forget these were simply first steps. Men like Skolnick, Sennett said, weren't the deepest problem. They could roll up dozens of Skolnicks, and with luck they would. But the Skolnicks had been born into this system. They went along with no ability to change it. Altering things permanently meant reaching the people who were in command, who willed this to continue as a matter of personal privilege and gratification.

  "Tuohey," Sennett said, and let his determined look tick over each of them. "When we get to Tuohey, all of your magnificent efforts will have culminated not just in stats or headlines or stroke letters from D.C., suitable for framing"-there was appreciative laughter-"but a lasting change in the life of this community."

  Evon felt high from all of this, the success with Skolnick and Sennett's address, but she found Feaver in a decidedly different mood when they drove home an hour later. The aftermath of these wired showdowns was beginning to assume a pattern. Much as Robbie enjoyed the moment, it demanded an intensity, a state of high alert and toe-dancing nimbleness, which left him depleted and also somewhat depressed as he confronted the results.

  "Sometimes I sit up at night and think about all the people I'm fucking over," he said now. "It's starting to be a lot." As the number of solid prosecutions mounted, Feaver often seemed caught between warring impulses of self-congratulation and loathing. She understood in a way. You couldn't hate Skolnick. Even for her, there was no rush at the thought of him in a cell. But she felt no regrets.

  "He knows what he's doing," said Evon.

  "Do you? I mean, bringing out the worst in people and making them pay the price? You really think that's okay?"

  "Necessary," she answered. She didn't think what they were doing was terrible. There were good deeds and bad, like the two different sides of the highway with a stripe in between. And once people crossed over, they could just keep going. That was the sorry lesson of experience.

  "I wouldn't mind," Robbie said, as the big car galloped up the ramp onto the highway, "but I know damn well you're gonna scoop up the small fry and never land Brendan." It was a jolt hearing that on the heels of Sennett's halftime speech. But Robbie nodded to cement his opinion. "Never," he said. "And I'm not saying anything about me. We get there, I'll march in a straight line, do like I'm told. Stan's got me by the short ones anyway. But Brendan's way beyond crafty. He'll see your shadow in the dark. My prediction is you guys aren't gonna get close."

  "We get em all, Robbie," she said.

  "FBI's like the Mounties?"

  "You betchum." She meant it, too. Inspired by Sennett, she felt starched by pride. People asked all the time, A nice girl like you, FBI, huh? And the truth was that she was hard put to say where it came from, being an agent, Effin Be I. The end of field hockey was like falling into a hole. Most of her Olympic teammates planned to be coaches. Life for them would remain the field: green Astroturf wet thoroughly before game time, the continual sharp crack of the. ball on the stick, and thinking about how great they were when they were young. For her it was done. Because somehow the illusion that had gone with it had been exposed. She was twenty-four years old. She'd been to the Olympics. And there was still no place in the world where she felt right.

  Just to look at options, she'd done the paralegal course at the law school at Iowa while she was finishing the degree requirements for her B.A. In the same kind of mood, she went to a job fair in the field house. Behind a folding table, sitting around with the recruiters from places like RJR Nabisco and American Can, were two guys from the Bureau in gray suits and government-issue glasses, types if they'd ever existed. But it clicked. Her mother's father had been the Sheriff. He was a lifelong deputy who got the top job when his boss died on duty, buried in an avalanche he'd brought down on himself trying to blast loose a cornice that was threatening a road. Valiant. That was the word her grandfather used in mourning his friend. Like the prince, she thought, with his beautiful pageboy that resembled Merrel's. It had become, in the tangle of things inside a little girl's head, improbably large. The Sheriff's star, a heavy gold medallion twice the size of what the deputies wore, looked to her as though all the power and obligation were pinned right there on her grandfather's chest. She was halfway through Quantico when she found out that she wasn't going to get a badge. Hoover never wanted the national police force to look as if they were police. That's why they wore suits instead of uniforms, and carried credentials instead of a shield. But she still longed for a star of her own now and then.

  Yet she'd never regretted the Bureau. She could lecture you until the next Flood about what was wrong, all the dumb acronyms that made them sound as if they were speaking in tongues, or the callous way women were treated. At Quantico, during training, she had the highest firearms scores in three years; the instructors would take her over to FATS-Firearms Automated Training System, where the guns fired laser beams, not bullets-and marvel at her reaction times. But they wouldn't let her come out there as a full-time instructor because somebody was convinced women couldn't handle.45s. She was lucky if every eighteen months she got to teach a two-week in-service, a training session for cops or other federal agents, most of whom were there for a boondoggle.

  But being the Bureau meant being the best. They told you that at Quantico, so loudly and so often it seemed to echo from the rolling hills. And it was true. There was McManis, and Alf and Amari and Shirley Nagle to prove it. And her too. She believed every word about mission and duty. She lived it and liked it and liked herself for doing a good job right. And they'd get Brendan. Together. The FBI.

  "That's fine with me," Feaver said when she repeated that prediction. "You put Brendan behind bars, I'll take photos and frame them. I won't feel bad for a minute. I mean, maybe I should. The guy's always treated me like gold. On account of Mort, and his ma, and my ma. I'm in Brendan's in crowd. Which is why Sennett thinks I'll have such a good shot at putting a knife in his back." He shook his head again over his current life's work of betrayal. She gave him the line, the shopworn agent's special, for whatever comfort it offered.

  "He'd do it to you, Robbie. Don't worry."

  "Brendan? Never. Sennett came to Brendan's doorstep,, a moth can't beat its wings as fast as he'd have told Stan to hit the road. Brendan kneels to no man. That's like a credo. I can say a lot of bad stuff about Brendan, but these tables would never turn."

  "So what do you have against him?"

  Robbie screwed up his face the way he did when he thought she was being difficult. But after a second he seemed to yield to her point.

  "Meeting Brendan the first time," he told her, "you'd say he's charming. Likable. Poised. Humorous. Especially if you've got any power. Reporters, politicians, celebrities, anybody who can do him some good, he'll bark like a seal if he thinks it'll make you beholden. But when you get down through the layers, Brendan is an absolute fuck-hole of a human being. Here, this'll tell you som
ething. I mentioned Constanza, didn't I?"

  Tuohey's secretary. Evon remembered.

  "To this day, she's sitting right outside his office. Beautiful little lady. But listen how Brendan got his mitts on her. All this time, twenty-some years now, Constanza's married. Constanza had better English than her husband, Miguel. She made it through secretarial school, but Miguel, you know, he's a busboy and, after all that time working around all the liquor he can steal, he's also a drunk. The world beats him and he beats Constanza. And she's pouring out her woes to her boss, of course, Judge Brendan. He's touching her bruises and pretty soon other parts, but you know, Constanza is a Catholic girl of great virtue, Miguel is the hand God dealt her, she can't be bad with Brendan and look her husband in the eye at night.

  "Brendan, naturally, acts very understanding with all of this. `Well, we'll just have to make Mike a better man. He needs a fresh start, a new job, a chance to feel some pride in himself.' And Brendan gets him into the jail as a fry cook, standing behind the griddle suddenly, not carrying the slops. Miguel is muy contento. And then bad news for Miguel. He's been riffed. All the Department of Corrections can offer him is a transfer downstate to Rudyard. `Oh, but that's three hundred feefty miles from mi familia.'A pity, they say. Of course, there's a three-thousand-dollar raise, and a travel allowance. A travel allowance for a fry cook, right? Needless to mention, when Miguel gets there, he finds that his two off days are Monday and Thursday. He can go home maybe once a month. And never seems to notice his side of the bed is still warm. To this dayhe's the head of Food Services by now in the penitentiary, and, by magic, they keep extending his retirement datewhenever he sees Brendan, he actually kisses his hand. And Brendan, the fuck-" Robbie stopped to shoot the finger at a hard-looking fellow in a pickup who'd cut off the Mercedes. "Goddamn Brendan lets him. How can you not hate a guy like that? Whenever Miguel comes by chambers to pick up Constanza, Brendan's number one thrill is to call her in for a little late dictation and get her to honk his horn while her hubby's on the other side of the wall."