The Poet (47 page)

“You ever heard of the Painted Desert, Jack?”

I looked at him, my eyes squinted in confusion.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

“Been there?”

“No.”

“Well, if you’re with Rachel, then you’re there now. She’s the Painted Desert. Beautiful to look at, yeah. But, man, once you’re there, she’s desolate. There’s nothing there past the beauty, Jack, and it gets cold at night in the desert.”

I wanted to hit him with some kind of comeback that would be the verbal equivalent of a roundhouse punch. But the depth of his acid and anger stunned me into silence.

“She can play you,” he continued. “Or play with you. Like a toy. One minute she wants to share it, the next she doesn’t. She disappears on you.”

I still said nothing. I turned and looked out the window so I wouldn’t even have him in my peripheral vision. In a couple of minutes he said we were there and he pulled into the parking garage of one of the downtown office buildings.

After consulting a directory in the lobby of the Fuentes Law Center, we silently rode the elevator up to the seventh floor. To the right we found a door with a mahogany plaque set to the side of it that announced the law offices of Krasner & Peacock. Inside, Thorson placed his opened badge and ID wallet on the counter in front of the receptionist and asked to see Krasner.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “Mr. Krasner is in court this morning.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. He’s in arraignments. He won’t be back until after lunch.”

“Down here? Which courthouse?”

“Down here. The CCB.”

We left the car where it was and walked to the Criminal Courts Building. Arraignments were held on the fifth floor in a huge, marble-walled courtroom heavily crowded with lawyers, the accused and the families of the accused. Thorson approached a deputy marshal sitting behind a desk at the first row of the gallery and asked her which of the lawyers milling about was Arthur Krasner. She pointed to a short man with thinning red hair and a red face who was standing near the court railing talking with another man in a suit, undoubtedly another lawyer. Thorson headed toward him, mumbling something about his looking like a Jewish leprechaun.

“Mr. Krasner?” Thorson said, not waiting for a lull in the conversation the two men were having.

“Yes?”

“Can I have a word with you out in the hallway?”

“Who are you?”

“I can explain in the hallway.”

“You can explain now or you can go out to the hallway by yourself.”

Thorson opened his wallet, Krasner looked at the badge and read the ID, and I watched his small porcine eyes move back and forth as he thought.

“That’s right, I think you know what it’s about,” Thorson said. Looking at the other lawyer, he said, “Will you excuse us now?”

In the hallway Krasner had regained some of his lawyerly bluff.

“All right, I have an arraignment in there in five minutes. What’s this about?”

“I thought we were past that,” Thorson said. “It’s about one of your clients, William Gladden.”

“Never heard of him.”

He made a move to go past Thorson to the courtroom door. Thorson nonchalantly reached out and put a hand on the other man’s chest, stopping him dead.

“Please,” Krasner said. “You have no right to touch me. Don’t touch me.”

“You know who we’re talking about, Mr. Krasner. You are in serious trouble for hiding this man’s true identity from the court and the police.”

“No, you are wrong. I had no idea who he was. I took the case at face value. Who he turned out to be was not my concern. And there is not one scintilla of evidence or even a suggestion that I knew otherwise.”

“Never mind the bullshit, Counselor. You can save it for the judge in there. Where is Gladden?”

“I have no idea and even if I did I-“

“You wouldn’t say? That’s the wrong attitude, Mr. Krasner. Let me tell you something, I’ve gone over the record of your representation of Mr. Gladden and things don’t look good, if you know what I mean. Not kosher is what I am saying. This could be a problem for you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“How did he come to call you after his arrest?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Was it a referral?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“From who?”

“I don’t know. I said I didn’t ask.”

“Are you a pedophile, Mr. Krasner? Is it little girls or little boys that turn you on? Or maybe both?”

“What?”

Little by little Thorson had backed him up against the marble wall of the hallway with his verbal assault. Krasner was beginning to look spent. He was holding his briefcase in front of his body now, almost as a shield. But it wasn’t thick enough.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Thorson said, bearing down on him. “Of all the lawyers in this town, why’d Gladden call you?”

“I told you,” Krasner yelled, drawing looks from everyone passing in the hall. He continued in a whisper. “I don’t know why he chose me. He just did. I’m in the book. It’s a free country.”

Thorson hesitated, allowing Krasner to say more but the lawyer didn’t take the bait.

“I looked at the records yesterday,” Thorson said. “You had him out two hours and fifteen minutes after bail was set. How did you make the bond? The answer is you already had the money from him, didn’t you? So the real question is, how’d you get the money from him if he spent the night in jail?”

“Wire transfer. Nothing illegal. We talked the night before about my fee and what the bond might be and he had it wired the following morning. I had nothing to do with it. I … You can’t stand here and slander me in this way.”

“I can do whatever I want to do. You fucking disgust me. I checked you out with the locals, Krasner. I know about you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you don’t know now, you’re going to know soon enough. They’re coming for you, little man. You put this guy back on the street and look what he did. Look what he fucking did.”

“I didn’t know!” Krasner said in a whine that pleaded for forgiveness.

“Sure, nobody ever knows. You have a phone?”

“What?”

“A phone. A telephone.”

Thorson slapped an open hand against Krasner’s briefcase, a move that made the little man jump as if shocked with a cattle prod.

“Yes, yes, I have a phone. You don’t have to-“

“Good. Get it out, call your receptionist and tell her to pull the wire transfer records from your file. Tell her I’ll be there in fifteen minutes for a copy of it.”

“You can’t take-I have an attorney/client relationship with this individual that I must protect no matter what he’s done. I-“

Thorson slapped a backhand off the briefcase again, which shut Krasner up in mid-sentence. I could see Thorson received a genuine sense of accomplishment from pushing the little lawyer around.

“Make the call, Krasner, and I’ll tell the locals you helped out. Make the call or the next person to die is on you. Because now you do know who and what we’re talking about here.”

Krasner slowly nodded and began opening his briefcase.

“That’s it, Counselor,” Thorson said. “Now you see the light.”

As Krasner called his receptionist and issued the order in a shaky voice, Thorson stood silently watching. I had never seen or heard of anyone using the bad cop routine without the good cop counterpart and still so expertly finesse the information needed from a source. I wasn’t sure if I admired Thorson’s skill or was appalled by it. But he had turned the posturing bluff artist into a shaking mess. As Krasner was folding the phone closed, Thorson asked what the amount of the wire transfer had been.

“Six thousand dollars even.”

“Five for bail and one for you. How come you didn’t squeeze him?”

“He said it was all he could afford. I believed him. May I go now?”

There was a resigned and defeated look on Krasner’s face. Before Thorson answered his question the door to the courtroom opened and a bailiff leaned out.

“Artie, you’re up.”

“Okay, Jerry.”

Without waiting for further comment from Thorson, Krasner began moving toward the door again. And once again Thorson stopped him with a hand on the chest. This time Krasner made no protest about being touched. He simply stopped, leaving his eyes staring dead ahead.

“Artie-can I call you Artie?-you better do some soul-searching. That is if you have one. You know more than you’ve said here. A lot more. And the more time you waste, the more there’s a chance that a life will be wasted. Think about that and give me a call.”

He reached over and slid a business card into the handkerchief pocket of Krasner’s suit coat, then patted it gently.

“My local number is written on the back. Call me. If I get what I need from somewhere else and find out you had the same information, I will be merciless, Counselor. Fucking merciless.”

Thorson then stepped back so the lawyer could slowly make his way back into the courtroom.

We were back out on the sidewalk before Thorson spoke to me.

“Think he got the message?”

“Yeah, he got it. I’d stay by the phone. He’s gonna call.”

“We’ll see.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Did you really check him out with the locals?”

Thorson smiled by way of an answer.

“The part about him being a pedophile. How do you know that?”

“Just takin’ a shot. Pedophiles are networkers. They like to surround themselves with their own kind. They have phone nets, computer nets, a whole support system. They view it as them against society. The misunderstood minority, that kind of bullshit. So I figured maybe he got Krasner’s name on a referral list somewhere. It was worth the shot. The way I read Krasner, I think it hit him. He wouldn’t have given up the wire records if it didn’t.”

“Maybe. Maybe he was telling the truth about not knowing who Gladden was. Maybe he just has a conscience and doesn’t want to see anybody else hurt.”

“I take it you don’t know that many lawyers.”

Ten minutes later we were waiting for the elevator outside the Krasner & Peacock law offices, Thorson looking at the wire transfer receipt for the sum of $6,000.

“It’s a bank out of Jacksonville,” he said without looking up. “We’ll have to get Rach on it.”

I noticed his use of the diminutive of her name. There was something intimate about it.

“Why her?” I asked.

” ‘Cause she’s in Florida.”

He looked up from the receipt at me. He was smiling.

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“No, you didn’t tell me.”

“Yeah, Backus sent her out this morning. She went to see Horace the Hypnotist and work with the Florida team. Tell you what, let’s stop in the lobby and use the phone, see if I can get somebody to get this account number to her.”

38

Very little was said between us on the way out from downtown to Santa Monica. I was thinking about Rachel in Florida. I couldn’t understand why Backus would send her when the front line seemed to be out here. There were two possibilities, I decided. One was that Rachel was being disciplined for some reason, possibly me, and taken off the front line. The other was that there was some new break in the case I didn’t know about and was purposely not being told. Either choice was a bad one, but I found myself secretly choosing the first.

Thorson seemed lost in thought during most of the drive, or perhaps just tired of being around me. But when we parked out front of the Santa Monica Police Department, he answered the question I had before I even asked it.

“We just need to pick up the property they took from Gladden when he was arrested. We want to consolidate it all.”

“And they’re going to let you do that?”

I knew how small departments, in fact, all departments, tended to react to being bigfooted by the Big G.

“We’ll see.”

At the front counter of the detective bureau, we were told that Constance Delpy was in court but her partner, Ron Sweetzer, would be with us shortly. Shortly to Sweetzer turned out to be ten minutes. A period of time that didn’t sit well with Thorson. I got the idea that the FBI, in the embodiment of Gordon Thorson at least, didn’t appreciate having to wait for anybody, especially a small-town gold badge.

When Sweetzer finally appeared, he stood behind the counter and asked how he could help us. He gave me a second glance, probably computing how my beard and clothes did not jibe with his image of the FBI. He said nothing and made no movement that could have been translated as an invitation back to his office. Thorson responded in kind with short sentences and his own brand of rudeness. He took a folded white page from his inside pocket and spread it on the counter.

“That’s the property inventory from the arrest of William Gladden, AKA Harold Brisbane. I’m here to accept custody of the property.”