The K Team, page 3
“I agree. But in the meantime we can try and figure out who that someone is.”
“Have we gotten the court records?” I ask.
“Marcus is on it,” she says. “We should have it in a day or two.”
“I would think Andy could help with it.”
“The Judge doesn’t want Andy involved and I think we should honor that. Although he did tell the court clerk that Marcus would be making a request, and that he’d appreciate them hurrying it.”
We will be looking at all of Judge Henderson’s cases for the last three years, with special emphasis on eighteen months ago, when the payments started. Our hope is to find something that the bad guys can claim Henderson handled unethically, maybe intentionally so.
It’s even possible that the entire case is about revenge for something the Judge did to some previous defendant before him. If the blackmail is for an alleged indiscretion in the Judge’s past, it’s possible that something will jump out at us that could appear suspicious.
“What about future cases?” I ask.
“According to Andy, there will be some that would automatically go to whatever judge might have been involved in it before, like appeals and issues with an earlier trial. The rest would go to Judge Henderson, who would decide which of the other judges to assign each one to. Of course, he would also decide which ones he wanted to keep for himself. A lot would depend on his schedule and the schedules of the other judges.”
“So that doesn’t tell us much,” I say. “It could be a case that would automatically go to our judge, or one that the blackmailers would insist he keep for himself.”
“Right. We need to tell the Judge to give us whatever information he already has in that regard.”
“That could be a problem; he may view it as confidential. You’d better be the one to ask him.”
“Why me?” she asks.
“You’re more persuasive and less abrasive than I am.”
She doesn’t argue the point, so she obviously agrees. “Okay, I’ll call him. And let’s get together with Marcus as soon as we get the court records. Following up on them will give us something to do.”
“That’s a plan,” I say, as a call-waiting signal tells me another call is coming in. I hang up with Laurie and answer it.
The voice is unmistakably Judge Henderson’s and I can hear the tension. “Get over here right now.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.” Click.
I call Laurie back. “Turns out we’ve got a new plan.”
The Judge is considerably more agitated than the last time we saw him.
He’s obviously not a person inclined to make small talk, but this time he takes that to a new level and says nothing at all in greeting. He leads us into the den, and we’re not even seated when he comes over to us with another piece of paper. “I got this in the mail.”
“Put it on the table,” Laurie tells him.
“What?”
“In case there are fingerprints on it. We don’t want to touch it unless we have to.”
Henderson nods and places it down. “I’m afraid I’ve held it without being careful.”
“You had no way of knowing what it was,” I say.
It’s a photograph of the Judge standing in an open doorway, kissing or being kissed by a woman who is probably forty years his junior. He is wearing what appear to be pajamas; she is decked out in a short skirt and a fairly revealing top. Without knowing all the circumstances, we can say with certainty that she has not arrived there straight from her job as a librarian.
The obvious perception from the photograph is that he opened the door to greet her, and they kissed.
The printed letters below the photo read, “Remember Eva Staley?”
“Tell us the circumstances,” Laurie says, “please.”
“It was a while back; at least a year and a half. I was at a judicial conference in Manhattan, staying at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square; that’s where the conference was held. There was a knock on my door one night after I got back from dinner, maybe ten P.M.
“It was a young woman.” He points to the photo. “No doubt that young woman, though I don’t remember what she looked like. She gave me a big smile and said something like ‘Welcome home.’ I can’t recall exactly … I was quite surprised. But it was something to that effect. Then before I realized what was happening, she kissed me.”
“What did you do?” I ask.
“Nothing. She immediately said that she was sorry, that she thought I was someone else, and she left. I closed the door and never thought about it again until today when this arrived.”
“Did you see anyone else?” Laurie asks.
“No.”
“Someone took that picture,” I say.
“Obviously. The entire thing was orchestrated. I am expecting you to tell me why.”
“At least part of the why is obvious. You are being blackmailed with incriminating information that has been carefully and expensively staged over a long period of time. We will learn what you are being asked to do fairly soon; I’m confident of that. At this point the more important question is who?”
“And what have you learned so far?”
Maybe it’s because I’m not used to having a client, but this guy is pissing me off. He seems to think we’re lawyers in his courtroom and that we have to kiss his ass. “In the two days we have been on the case,” I say, “we haven’t learned a thing. Nothing at all. Zero.”
“Perhaps you were the wrong choice for this assignment.”
“Not too late for you to change your mind.” I look at Laurie when I say this. I realize that I’m part of a team and that I’m speaking for more than myself. Fortunately, she nods her support to me.
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Henderson says. “In the meantime I suggest you go do the job for which you are being paid.”
Laurie and I leave, taking the photograph and message with us. We wait until we’re in the car to discuss what has just transpired. “That is one annoying guy,” I say.
“He’s scared but would never show it.”
“Even so, I shouldn’t have threatened to quit without discussing it with you first.”
“Don’t worry about it; it was good that you set that boundary.” Then, “Whatever is going on, there has been a remarkable amount of advance planning for it. We are up against patient people.”
I nod. “Rich, patient people.”
“At least we have someone to look for now. Eva Staley. If that’s her name.”
“That’s her name,” I say. “They want us to look for her. They want us to hear what she has to say.”
“You think they even know there’s an ‘us’ that’s involved?”
I nod again. “Absolutely. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have the Judge under surveillance. If they’re going to put this much money into something, they wouldn’t skimp when it came to accumulating information.”
“I can have Marcus check that out; it’s a specialty of his. He can also find Ms. Staley; that’s still another specialty of his.”
I’m not thrilled with this; I don’t like to have to depend on someone else when the going gets tough. “Tell him it could be dangerous and to call me if he needs help.”
“I will. But of all his specialties, handling himself in dangerous situations is absolutely number one.”
As I expected, Eva Staley was easy to find.
Laurie tells me that Marcus has learned where she is and what she does for a living. She works on the streets of Paterson, and her career path is hooker. Just perfect for Judge Henderson to greet in his hotel room.
That she is from Paterson is interesting. Her meeting with the Judge was in a Manhattan hotel. I have to assume Manhattan has enough of its own hookers to cover the Times Square hotels, and Eva didn’t just accidentally wander into their territory. She was brought there specifically to get the photograph with the Judge.
None of this is surprising, but rather just further evidence of the remarkable planning that went into this effort. I suspect we’re going to be finding out the motive soon; there is no reason for the blackmailers to do all this now if they are not about to drop the bomb.
We decide that Marcus and I will question Eva Staley. Laurie wants to go as well, but that would be overkill. All three of us are the type who want to do everything ourselves, but we’ll be most effective as a team if we learn to divide up the work.
This will give me a chance to get Simon out of the house and back into at least some semblance of action. He’s been uncharacteristically quiet and sort of lazy lately, which I consider understandable. He was an active police dog for seven years, and now all of a sudden he’s out of a job with nothing to do. He doesn’t have any hobbies, although he likes to chew on sticks.
Marcus picks me up at 10:00 P.M. I hadn’t told him about my bringing Simon but he doesn’t seem concerned and doesn’t say anything when Simon jumps into the backseat. Marcus is not big on saying stuff.
We drive to downtown Paterson. All the retail stores are closed at this hour; Paterson is not to be confused with Manhattan. But the bars are open, and the street we stop on has four of them. We park in front of a fairly large outdoor parking lot, which is also closed, and which at this point has more humans in it than cars.
About a dozen people seem to be in the lot, and they can roughly be divided into two groups: women of the evening, and men who want to spend at least part of the evening with them. There are also one or two men who couldn’t more obviously be pimps if they were wearing sandwich boards that said I’M A PIMP AND PROUD OF IT.
It’s a depressing scene.
Marcus motions with his head toward the parking lot and says what sounds like “Blrrr.” I’m sure that’s not the actual word or words he planned to use, but it doesn’t matter; I know what he means. Eva Staley is in this parking lot.
We get out of the car and walk into the lot. We immediately attract attention and stares, most likely because of Simon. Not too many johns bring their German shepherds with them when they are looking for retail sex.
Another nod from Marcus tells me which one Eva Staley is, and in the dim light I think I recognize her from her photo in the hotel. I’m not sure how Marcus knew how to identify her, or where she would be, but I don’t dwell on it. According to Laurie, Marcus has ways that are not often capable of being understood.
We walk over to Eva, and I say, “Eva Staley?” She turns to see me, but gets momentarily frightened when she sees Simon.
“It’s okay, he’s harmless, unless I tell him not to be. He won’t hurt you. Now, are you Eva Staley?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Up close like this, a program is not necessary to identify the players. The half dozen women are of varying age and size, but all with similar dress. The two pimps, standing off to the side, supervise. At the moment the three customers are all staring at Simon and preparing to melt away.
They don’t know who we are or what to make of us, and uncertainty is not conducive to productive sexual shopping.
“We want to talk to you about the time you met a man in a hotel in Times Square. You knocked on his door, you kissed him, and you posed for a picture.”
At first she looks confused. “I don’t know what…” Then a light goes on. “Oh, yeah … I remember. But I didn’t pose for no picture.”
“What was the man’s name?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the one asking you the questions. What was the man’s name?”
“He was a judge. He told me his name, but I don’t remember it. But I’d know him if I saw him.”
One of the pimps comes over. “What’s going on here? They bothering you, Eva?”
Simon growls at his approach; he always could tell the good guys from the bad guys. The pimp stops in his tracks, even though I’m sure his original intent had been to come closer and impose his will on whatever situation was developing. “What is that dog doing here? Who the hell are you?”
“It’s okay, Rico. They here asking me about a guy. In New York.” Eva added the last part pointedly, as if Rico would understand what she meant.
Even though it’s a violation of the Pimpian Code to allow one of his employees to engage in a conversation with men that does not involve money, Rico suddenly seems strangely sanguine about this one. He looks us over, as if judging us, then nods his assent. “Make it quick.”
“See you later, Rico. Come back anytime,” I say. Then, to Eva, “Why were you there that night?”
“Some guy picked me up and took me there.”
“Who was the guy?”
“I don’t know, but he was rich, I can tell you that.”
“How do you know?”
“He paid me three thousand dollars.”
“Why would he do that?”
She shrugs. “I‘m not sure. All I know is he said the guy in the hotel had done him a big favor, and he was paying him back. He said I was the guy’s type, so sending me was one of the ways he was paying him back. Whatever … you know?”
Suddenly there is a noise, then a woman’s scream of pain and some fear. I look over and it appears that the non-Rico pimp has hit one of the women across the face, for some unknown transgression.
Marcus has been standing silently next to me, then suddenly he is not. I swear I never saw or heard him move, but all of a sudden he is not here. He’s standing in the pimp section.
He has his hands on the non-Rico pimp and does something I’ve never seen before. I wish I were watching it on television, so I could DVR it and run it back a few times.
Marcus looks like he is going to slam the guy into the car that he’s been standing against, but that’s not what he does. Instead he lifts him off his feet and tosses him up and over the car. The guy clears the top of the car by at least eighteen inches; his ass faces the ground as he sails backward, as if he is an Olympic high jumper.
In an ordinary circumstance, if such a thing were possible in this situation, the non-Rico pimp would land on the ground on the other side of the car. That doesn’t happen here because the car is parked against a building’s brick wall. So the flying pimp instead crashes into the wall and bounces back onto the top of the car, where he lies prone and silent. Rico, apparently lacking pimp team spirit, chooses not to intervene.
“Holy shit,” Eva says, and I suspect it’s the first accurate thing she’s said since we got here.
Trying to get this back on track, I ask Eva if she remembers anything about the guy who set the whole thing up.
“Nope.”
“Was he the one who took the picture?”
“I told you, I don’t know anything about a picture.”
“So you just kissed the guy in the hotel room and left?”
“Are you kidding? I was there all night. You know, I never told anybody about this, but I would. For money, I mean.”
“Maybe you should be really careful who you are dealing with, Eva. Whoever is really paying you is dangerous and doesn’t care about you.”
“I can handle myself. Been doing it long enough.”
“Good luck with that.”
I signal to Marcus, who has been watching the non-Rico pimp remain still on top of the car. Marcus nods, and then he, Simon, and I get back into the car to leave.
“She was obviously part of the setup,” I tell Laurie.
Marcus and I have come back to her house to fill her in on the evening developments.
“She wasn’t surprised to see us and was prepped on what to say. She almost immediately knew what I was asking about, and believe me, she has had enough encounters with men for that one not to have been top of mind. Even her pimp was in on it.”
“He didn’t cause you any trouble?”
I shake my head. “No, backed off immediately when he realized who we were. Another pimp caused a bit of a problem, not related to us, but Marcus successfully dealt with him.”
“I can imagine,” Laurie says.
Marcus just sits silently, not even blushing.
“Eva Staley will come forward if they tell her to and tell whatever story they want her to tell about Judge Henderson. And she’ll have the picture to prove it.”
“She might have a tough time explaining why someone was there to snap the shot,” Laurie says.
“Maybe, but that won’t matter. The public wouldn’t be looking for nuance; they’d latch on to the scandal and the damage to the Judge’s reputation would already be done.”
She nods. “And all of this, Eva Staley and the Caymans account, were all done more than a year in advance by people who knew what they would want and when they would want it.”
“You think they’re done? Do they have more bullets to fire?”
“They might,” she says. “But anything after this would be overkill. If the Judge was going to do what they ask, this would already be enough to persuade him.”
“I’m thinking that Eva Staley is not about scaring Henderson with a sex scandal. First of all, he’s not married.” The Judge was widowed a few years ago. “Does he have any family?”
“Andy said he thinks he has a son in California, but didn’t know any more than that. But hiring a prostitute would be a disaster for the Judge’s reputation, married or not.”
I nod. “True, but that’s not the main reason I don’t think this is about a sex scandal, or even about prostitution. Eva Staley said that somebody paid her a lot of money and sent her to Henderson to partially repay a favor. The Caymans money would account for the rest of the payback. They are going to claim that the Judge already did something illegal. That’s what they’re threatening him with.”
Laurie nods. “Which is why we have to get those court records. Marcus, you’ll have them tomorrow?”
“Yunnh.”
“Good. Because if they’re claiming that the Judge fixed a case for them, we have an approximate time frame based on when the money started flowing into the Caymans, and when Eva Staley went to the Judge’s hotel room.”
“She didn’t provide a date,” I say.
