A Plague of Secrets (28 page)

It was an old-style apartment building, four stories. The lobby shimmered under dull ceiling fluorescents, their coverings yellowed with age and neglect. Ruiz tried the front door.

Which was open.

How Jaime found these places, he didn’t know.

A large gray cat sat in a litter box just under the mailbox and from the smell, Ruiz was pretty sure it wasn’t the only animal that had relieved itself nearby. Maybe even some humans.

He was looking for 3F, so he pressed the single elevator button, but it didn’t light up. He only waited twenty seconds or so before he gave up and turned for the stairway. The second floor was dimmer than the lobby, but somewhat to his relief the third was brighter. Sweating now with nerves and the exertion of the climb-he
had
to get going making his own garden grow-he turned out of the stair-well and walked back to 3F, where he knocked twice, then once.

Spy shit. He chuckled at it. Ridiculous.

And in a moment the door opens and here is Jaime, happy as ever, slapping his five, mellow, without a care in the world. Ruiz took a last look behind him on the landing, then stepped in and Jaime closed the door behind them, threw the dead bolt.

An adequate apartment, if a little small-maybe one of Jaime’s girlfriends’. Living room, dining room, kitchen. Furnished in Goodwill, but not bad. Tasteful.

Their usual protocol was they had a beer or two and caught up, exchanged money for product, made sure they were good for the next week, and said good-bye, and this is what they did now. The whole thing took twenty minutes, tops.

And then they were saying their good-byes. Jaime was throwing back the dead bolt, starting to open the door, when suddenly it exploded in on them and they were being backed up by two guys in big parkas. Each carried a gun, pointed straight at Jaime and Ruiz. Both guns had extensions on their barrels.

The two parkas advanced, but didn’t back up their targets for long, maybe a step or two.

Then they opened fire.

“
I know you’re awake. Pick up.
”

It was still dark out, 5:42 A.M., and Hardy was having his morning coffee and reading the front-page story in the paper about his day in court yesterday, when Jansey Ticknor had implicated his client in a long-standing and, he was sure, completely spurious affair with Dylan Vogler. For not the first time-and though he already had some marginally serviceable answers-he was asking himself why she had perjured herself so thoroughly and wondering if he had anything to gain by calling her back to the stand and taking her head off.

But at the sound of Glitsky’s voice, these cogitations fled and he leaned over and grabbed the receiver. “This isn’t what we call a reasonable time.”

“You’re in trial. I know you’re up.”

“Frannie’s not in trial.”

“I didn’t call that phone.”

“You’ve got all the answers.”

“Got to. I’m a cop. People depend on me.”

“Actually, I’m glad you called. I was going to check in with you today about Lori Bradford.”

“I figured you would someday, but that’s not what I called about. Do you know who Eugenio Ruiz is?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Diz. Don’t play games with me, please. Of course you know who he is, right?”

“BBW. The new manager.”

“Right. Except now he’s the new dead manager.”

“Oh, my God, poor Eugenio.”

“I don’t know, Maya. Maybe not so poor.”

“So what does this mean?” she asked him. They were next to one another at the table in the glass-block-enclosed attorney visiting room. It was still a few minutes short of eight A.M. “Besides that, after this, now we’re definitely closing the place down. We should have done it before, but Joel wanted to make a stand against Glass. So you’re telling me they were still selling dope out of there.”

“It looks like it. At least Eugenio was.” Hardy shrugged. This was by no means the most important issue of the day, nor the most unexpected. “Dylan had the whole system set up, everybody who worked there probably in on it. It makes sense somebody kept it going.”

“Do they have any suspects? I mean for who shot him.”

“No. It’s way too soon for that.”

“I hope Joel has an alibi. If he found out that Eugenio was dealing again after all we’ve been through, he would have killed him.”

“Let’s not mention that to anybody, okay? But it wasn’t Joel, even without an alibi. There were two different-caliber bullets, so it looks like two shooters. What it looks like, classically in fact, is a dope rip. Somebody followed somebody to where the money and the dope changed hands and just started blasting away.”

“That happens over marijuana?”

“Every day, Maya. Every day.”

“It seems so strange. Remember when we were younger?”

“I wasn’t young when you were, but I know what you mean.”

“It’s so hard to imagine. I mean, a little grass was like nothing, no big deal at all, and now these people are dying over it.”

“It’s illegal. So it’s prohibition all over again.”

“They ought to just legalize it.”

“That’s a different discussion which I’d love to have with you someday. But let’s not make the argument when you get on the stand. How’s that?”

The comment clearly offended her. “I’m not stupid, Diz.”

“Not even close, Maya.” He pushed his chair back a little from the table, crossed one leg over the other. “But you asked me what the killing of Ruiz meant for us. I’d like to pretend that Braun or maybe Stier will see this as the next step in a turf war that began with Dylan and Levon, and one that you couldn’t have been involved in, so they’ll just decide this whole prosecution and trial is a mistake and let you go. But unfortunately, that is not happening, not in a million years.”

“So. What’s left?”

“What’s left is a guy named Paco, who Eugenio maybe could have identified, and now definitely can’t.”

“Paco?”

“Ring a bell?”

“Well, actually, yes.”

Hardy sat back with a little thrill of surprise and pleasure. “Tell me you know him and where he lives and you could pick him out of a lineup.”

She bit her lip. “None of the above, I’m afraid. But I do know that name. He was a friend of Dylan’s. And Levon’s, too, for that matter.”

“All dead guys now, you notice. When did Paco know them? Back in college?”

She nodded. “Sometime back there. Evidently they were all kind of the in crowd before I became part of it. You know, Dylan and his pals always doing this crazy, dangerous stuff. And this kind of legendary guy named Paco.”

“So what happened to him? You never met him?”

“No. He was supposedly gone by the time I showed up.”

“Dropped out, transferred, what?”

“No idea, really. Maybe he wasn’t even in school with us, was just kind of a hanger-on. Except, you know, I’m pretty sure Paco wasn’t his real name. It was more like a nom de guerre. Sometimes I got the feeling it was somebody we all actually knew. I mean still knew, and still hung out with. It was just like Dylan to wrap it all up in a mystery and be the one keeping the big secret. Sound familiar?”

“You think Dylan might have been blackmailing him too?”

“I don’t know. I kind of doubt it.”

“Why?”

“Well, I think first, he didn’t need to. He had me. And second, if you don’t have a weak and guilt-ridden person like me you’re dealing with, blackmail can be a little dangerous. I mean, you’d better know your mark. You threaten to expose the wrong thing about the wrong guy, and the guy goes, ‘Uh, no. I think I’ll kill you instead.’ You know what I’m saying?”

“I do. And Paco wasn’t weak or guilt-ridden?”

“Evidently not. His toughness was why he was legendary. He was a real player. He used to go out with Dylan and Levon, like I did later, but was… well, he wasn’t just a tagalong. They supposedly hit this liquor store once and the clerk pulled a gun and Paco shot him dead.”

“This was a different robbery than the one Dylan and Levon went down for?”

“Yeah. Before I’d even met them. But when Dylan told me about it, I thought he was just bragging, making it sound like they were such romantic studs, sticking up places, these fearless kind of Robin Hood guys, getting money from these liquor stores and buying our dope with it, which they shared with everybody. How did I ever get involved with people like that? I just don’t know how that happened.”

“Maybe by doing robberies with them?”

“You make it sound way worse than it was. It wasn’t anything strong arm. It was more just intimidation to get stuff we wanted. Three or four of us putting the press on somebody, that’s all. It was mostly just other kids and their dope.”

“You just took it from them?”

She didn’t answer, looked down at the floor.

“At gunpoint?”

“No! Never with a gun. Dylan wouldn’t use a gun after Paco. Said you couldn’t predict what would happen and didn’t want another mistake.”

“Dylan thought it was a mistake, then? Using a gun.”

“Oh, yeah, definitely. He saw it as the reason Paco stopped hanging with them. And that really bummed him out. One less guy he had power over.”

“So Paco checked out because…?”

“Maybe he grew a conscience about the guy he shot. The way I heard it was Paco hadn’t planned to kill anybody. It was all kind of a lark that suddenly went bad.” She looked askance at Hardy. “That’s the way it happened with Dylan. You started messing around with him and doing crazier and crazier things until you did something awful that you didn’t mean to do at all. Just one moment of frailty falling in with these guys, and then somehow later you are in just completely the wrong place you never really meant to be. Me and what happened with Tess. Levon. Maybe this guy Paco, I don’t know.”

It appeared that Stier wasn’t going to let himself be sidetracked by the discovery of Lori Bradford or the murder of Eugenio Ruiz. He had three other witnesses tentatively scheduled to appear whose testimony, Hardy knew, closely adhered to that of Cheryl Biehl’s about Maya’s collusion with both Dylan and Levon in the marijuana business in college.

But since Stier had skipped from Biehl straight over to Jansey Ticknor, Hardy thought he was probably going to abandon any more discussion about Maya’s distant past. Everybody in the courtroom probably believed by now that his client had dealt drugs in college. What Stier had to get to next was her current involvement in Dylan’s operation, and to that end, as soon as Braun had taken the bench, he called Michael Jacob Schermer.

Schermer, in his mid-sixties, might have been an athlete in his earlier life, or even still a long-distance runner in this one. Tall, thin, white-haired, and very well dressed for the courtroom in a light green Italian suit, he projected a quiet confidence as he took the oath and went to the witness chair.

“Mr. Schermer,” Stier began, “what is your profession?”

“I’m an accountant.”

“And for how long have you been in accounting?”

Schermer, genial, sat back to enjoy the experience of testifying, which he’d clearly done many times before. He broke a small smile that he shared with the jury. “About forty years.”

“And have you developed a specialty over these years?”

“Yes, I have. It’s called forensic accounting.” Again, bringing in the jury. “It’s kind of like a superaudit, with a lot of computerized analysis and other bells and whistles, if you want to put it in lay terms.”

“And you are licensed in this field?”

“Yes. I am licensed and accredited as a CFE, or certified fraud examiner.”

“And what do you do in this line of work?”

“Well”-Schermer shrugged-“as the name implies, I’m basically trained to identify fraudulent business practices or financial transactions, embezzlements, misappropriation of assets, questionable bankruptcies, and so on.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Well, it gets a little complicated.” Here he paused for the jury and gallery to chuckle with him. “But basically I analyze both physical and computerized accounting records to document I and E to-”

“Excuse me, Mr. Schermer, what is I and E?”

“Oh, sorry. I live in a world of jargon, I’m afraid. I and E is income and expenses. So I basically analyze I and E and movement of assets. I also reconstruct I and E to find hidden or illicit income. Stuff like that.”

“Money laundering?”

“Yes. That’s more or less my subspecialty.”

“Good. Thank you. Now, Mr. Schermer, have you had occasion to examine the financial records of Bay Beans West for the six months ending November first of last year?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And did you discover accounting irregularities?”

“I did.”

Hardy, sitting back in his chair, knew that this was not going to be a high point for the defense. His only early hope had been that the financial testimony itself would be so dry and technical that the jury’s interest would flag after five minutes or so. But Schermer’s chatty and agreeable style looked like it was going to trump the material itself. A quick glance at the jury verified this view.

“Could you summarize these irregularities for the jury?”

“Well, there wasn’t just one kind.”

Hardy thought he might as well get in a lick or two if he could, and he objected. “Nonresponsive, Your Honor.” And much to his surprise Braun sustained him. Irrationally buoyed by the tiny decision, he straightened in his chair, pulled his yellow legal pad over in front of him, perked up. But only slightly.

Stier turned back to the witness. “Starting from what you consider the most significant irregularity, can you tell the jury what your analysis uncovered?”

“Well, I always start in this kind of a retail business with the cash register, since it will have a record of the primary sources of income.”

For most of the next two hours Schermer put on a pretty compelling course-complete with charts and graphs and regressive analyses of cash flows-that to Hardy’s perspective, and he was sure to the jury’s, proved that BBW was not run, to say the least, according to strict adherence to established accounting procedures. It wasn’t simply the personal checks that Maya had written to cover expenses or the lack of traceable reimbursables. During the course of his testimony, in the six months before Dylan Vogler’s death, Schermer identified no fewer than sixty-seven individual transactions-cash in or out, payroll discrepancies, simple checking errors, food and beverage cost, and use analysis-that painted the business, and of course Maya as its owner, in at best an unflattering light.

And at worst, of course, as a sophisticated criminal.

And all this before it got personal. “Mr. Schermer.” Stier had put away the latest graph and now stood again in front of the witness in the center of the courtroom. “At the time of Mr. Vogler’s murder, what annual salary was he drawing as manager of BBW?”

“Ninety thousand dollars.”

Though jurors had heard about the salary before in Stier’s opening statement, still this number seemed to nearly knock a couple of the jurors out of their chairs, and sent a ripple of noise through the gallery as well.

Stier, knowing he was on to some juicy testimony, pressed ahead. “And what was the approximate gross income of the coffee shop over the past fiscal year?”

“Well, going on the tax records the business filed, the shop brought in, gross, four hundred sixty-one thousand ninety-two dollars and fourteen cents.”

“Now, Mr. Schermer, was the salary of Mr. Vogler typical of other employers working similar jobs in the same business?”

“No. It was approximately double the city average.”

“Double. And were other employees at BBW similarly compensated, in terms of multiples of the city’s average pay for those jobs?”

“No. They made about the norm, which was essentially an hourly rate slightly above minimum wage.”

“Let’s take the assistant manager, for example, Mr. Schermer, an employee named Eugenio Ruiz. Did he work for an hourly rate, or was he on salary?”

“He was hourly, making twelve dollars and eighty cents an hour, plus tips. About five hundred dollars a week at forty hours.”

“So two thousand a month, about twenty-four thousand dollars a year? As opposed to Mr. Vogler’s ninety thousand dollars?”