“Just that we all have skeletons in our closets. Even the bishop’s life isn’t an open book. I’m sure there were things in his life that’re better left unsaid.”
“Like what?”
“It’s just conversation.”
“You know something?”
“About what?”
“Jesus!”
“Are you always this paranoid?” Vail asked innocently.
“Paranoid? Who’s paranoid?” Shaughnessey answered, and changed the subject. “So you figure your client’s just a wacko, that it?”
“No, sir—I figure he’s innocent.”
“You’re really going with that defense?”
“I said ‘No comment.’ What I think is one thing, how I defend my clients is another.”
“Think Stenner’ll find a motive?”
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“Do you?”
Vail didn’t answer. He took another sip of his Bloody Joe.
“Know what I read?” Shaughnessey said. “I read that most people give up a fight just as they’re about to win it.”
“That’s probably true,” said Vail. “They either burn out, get scared, or fuck up. Can’t go that last ten percent. Kind of like the Cubs.”
“Incidentally, I was talking to Jane Venable the other day.”
“You don’t keep very good company.”
Shaughnessey smiled. “She says one of your tricks in a murder case is to low-rent the victim.”
“Did she really say that?”
“Actually she used the term ‘assassinate.’”
“Ah. That sounds more like her.”
“You’re not gonna bash the bishop, for Christ sake, are you, Martin?”
“Let me try one of those breadsticks, please.”
Shaughnessey passed the basket. “The man’s dead, Counselor. Don’t walk on his grave.”
“My man’s alive, Roy. I’ll dance on the bishop’s grave if I think it will do any good.” Vail crunched down on a breadstick. “I hear he had a drinking problem.” He said it as a joke, although Shaughnessey took it seriously.
“That’s a lot of crap,” he complained. “He was a two-scotch drinker. I ought to know; I spent more time with him the last few years than I did with my wife.”
Vail laughed. “Is that what this is all about? You think I’d try to taint the memory of the Saint of Lakeview Drive? Why worry?”
“He’s got a lot of important charity projects in place. You create the illusion of scandal, it could hurt. It could hurt the whole city. Hell, it could backfire, hurt you in the long run.”
“Wasn’t that the idea when Shoat dumped this case on me?”
“I told you, it’s a little wrist slapping. Be done with it and move on. You’ve got big things ahead of you.”
“Why is everybody so worried about Rushman’s charitable works?”
“He was a brilliant administrator. Everybody on his list is worried things’ll fall apart with him gone.”
“What kind of things?”
“Afraid the trustees’ll cut them out. Or the Charity Fund’ll dry up without him. The usual panic.”
“What are you worried about, Roy?”
“Me? Nothing. The Rushman Fund will live on. We’ll make it work.”
“Are you one of the trustees?”
“Now why would you ask that?”
“Just curious.”
“I’ve been a trustee of the Rushman Fund since he started it. Fact is, there’re at least half a dozen trustees in this room right now.”
“What’s a trustee do for the Bishop’s Fund?”
“Oversee the operation. Approve the gifts. Of course, the archbishop made most of the decisions.”
“Rubber-stamp board, huh?”
“Not exactly. We all had input. I think we all know how Richard felt about things. Which means I’m confident we’ll keep the faith.” He paused a moment and said, “You thought any more about what we talked about?”
“What was that?”
Shaughnessey’s manner turned slightly brittle. “Don’t play games with me, son. It’s bad for my digestion.”
“Did we ever get around to what’s in it for me?” Vail asked.
“You know damn well. Want me to say it again? You get on the right side of the fence, you can write your own ticket. Where do you want to go? The mayor’s mansion? Up to the capital? You want to change the world, son, change it from the inside. You get to be D.A., you can make changes.”
“Judges make changes, not lawyers. You know, a couple years ago I sneaked into your lecture to the Judge’s Association, when you were talking about malum in se and malum prohibitum. Pissed me off for a month.”
“How come?”
“Your philosophy that malum prohibitum is the way society defines the limits of acceptable behavior. As a lawyer I disagree with that theory—it’s absolutely prejudicial.”
“I didn’t say I agreed with it, I said it’s the way the system works,” said Shaughnessey casually.
“What you’re saying is that justice is doled out by social status. That’s what it boils down to, right?”
“White-collar crime has always been dealt with as a kind of popular law. Look, eight, nine years ago, the Supreme Court legalized abortion. The law changed. But mark my words, in a few years it’ll swing the other way. God knows what the country’ll be like after Reagan. A lot of laws can change once that bunch gets in office.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that judges interpret the law. They also swing with the mood of the country. Malum prohibitum laws are the way society defines behavior. So if everybody in the country wants to drink booze and booze is against the law, the law gets changed. But malum in se never changes. If everybody in the country suddenly went kill-crazy, they wouldn’t legalize murder.”
“So a banker or a stockbroker screws a lot of people out of their savings, the judge slaps his wrist because he wears the right color tie and gives him six months in some country club prison. That’s malum prohibitum. On the way out of the courtroom, some poor slob goes ballistic because his life savings have been wiped out, blows away the banker, and ends up doing hard-time life because his offense is malum in se.”
“That’s about the sum of it. Look, you get to be D.A., you can put the banker away for ten to twenty and go lenient with the little man who got wiped, how’s that.”
“That’s a damn perverse argument in favor of public service.”
“It’s a perverse world, son, and money makes the rules. You found that out ten years ago when you took on Tidy Chemicals and Good Earth Petroleum and the rest of that bunch downstate. You want to change it, change it from the inside. What the hell, you could even be a judge.”
“That’s fat bait, Mr. Shaughnessey,” Vail said.
“I’m after a big fish.”
“You know, I had a feeling you were on a fishing trip but I figured you were snooping for Venable. Or Shoat.”
“I know better ’n that. Nobody bluffs you. You don’t talk about your cases to anybody—half the time you don’t even confide in your own staff.”
“Maybe I don’t want them to know how dumb I am.”
“Bullshit.”
“I appreciate your confidence.”
“Just don’t kick the bishop around, okay? We got a lot of people waiting for their annual contribution.”
“I play ’em the way they fall. If Archbishop Rushman has some nasty little malum prohibitum secret in his closet and I think it will help save my client’s life, I’ll pump it up like a hot-air balloon and float it all over the state.”
“Don’t go off half-cocked, I’m not even implying there is anything, Martin. I’m just asking you not to go on a bashing expedition. If there’s a little smoke somewhere don’t fan it into a goddamn forest fire, that’s all I’m saying.”
“I’m not going to screw up your charity works, Roy.” Vail leaned back, smiled and took his gamble. “Not u
nless he chased little boys and girls or something weird like that.”
Shaughnessey looked horrified, then rolled his eyes. “Jesus, don’t even make jokes like that,” he said with a hollow chuckle. “I got all the problems I need.”
Vail continued smiling. “Why is it when we get together, I always come away feeling like the affairs of state are in such sturdy hands? I always feel reassured, Roy.”
“No kidding?” Shaughnessey answered sourly. “Why is it when we get together, I always feel nervous?” And he wasn’t smiling.
The day before, Naomi Chance had found a slip of paper Vail had given her just after the case began. She had stuck the slip of paper in a file and forgotten it. It was a notation Vail had jotted down from Bishop Rushman’s date book: “Linda 555-4527” and the date, March 9. She was embarrassed. Goodman had been trying to track down Linda for weeks and this was possibly the lead they had been looking for. She had dialed the number and a receptionist answered: “Good afternoon, the Berenstein Clinic, can I help you?” Naomi had cradled the phone.
The Berenstein Clinic? Was it possible Linda was in the snobbish Berenstein Clinic? Was that why she couldn’t be located? Dr. Simon Berenstein was the Gold Coast gynecologist, his patients limited to the Rolls-Royce trade. No one got in the door without a triple-A Dun & Bradstreet rating. A gossip columnist on the Trib had once remarked to Naomi that Berenstein had felt up every debutante in the city—and all their mothers.
What was the elusive Linda doing there?
Actually Berenstein was more than a gynecologist. Mr. Banker’s little girl gets knocked up at the Lake City Club dinner-dance? Never fear. His little boy gets some unacceptable waitress in Boston in a family way? No problem. Had a bad day at the club, need a valium? Old Si will fix you up. Need a little tuck here or a transplant there, call your friendly surgical cosmetologist. All very legal, of course, and Si Berenstein didn’t keep any embarrassing records and he didn’t talk out of school.
So, while Vail was being entertained at lunch by Roy Shaughnessey, Naomi took a cab through a cold, early spring drizzle to the Gold Coast—a half mile of the most valuable property in the state. Jacked-up taxes and development predators had squeezed out the individuals who had once dominated this area, tearing down monumental old mansions and city landmarks and replacing them with sterile condominiums and office buildings. Having destroyed beauty and heritage in the name of progress and growth, the scavengers, like a pack of hyenas, had moved on, seeking other areas of charm and grace to destroy.
Waterview Towers was a masterpiece of cold sophistication, an impotent twelve-story glass-and-brass office building with a mini shopping mall in the lobby. Mauve and brass with a gray marble floor lined with oblong brass flower boxes thick with living white mums, it vaunted a flower shop, an upscale toy store, a gift shop, a bookstore and a sprawling pharmacy. The resident list beside the bank of elevators in the rear of the lobby included several prestigious law firms and half a dozen doctors. The Berenstein Clinic occupied floors nine through twelve—enough space for a small hospital.
Naomi took the elevator to twelve and stepped out into a waiting room roughly the size of Rhode Island. White leather furniture and smoked-glass tables covered with current issues of Town and Country, Vogue, Vanity Fair and Smithsonian dominated the big room. An array of expensive perfumes had scented it, and a solitary Degas painting commanded one wall. Far below the floor-to-ceiling windows, a solitary sailboat struggled against the wind and rain on the lake while a thick bank of lead-gray clouds hovered claustrophobically just above the windows.
The receptionist would have been more appropriate in an interior decorating salon. She was in her late forties, her hair fashionably frosted with gray, and was dressed in a black Chanel dress adorned with a single strand of pearls. She looked at Naomi through hooded eyes, appraising her from top to bottom.
“Yes?” she said icily.
Naomi laid her card in front of her.
“I’d like to speak to Dr. Berenstein, please,” she said brightly.
The receptionist frowned at the card. “You don’t have an appointment.” Her tone implied that Naomi’s mere presence in the room was some kind of affront.
“This won’t take long.”
“That’s impossible. The doctor has consultations, examinations. What is this about?”
“It’s confidential.”
“Just what is a paralegal?” The receptionist continued her third degree.
“I’m a trained lawyer but I haven’t passed the bar yet,” Naomi explained.
“Oh. Kind of like a legal chiropractor?”
“Just a minute,” Naomi said, cutting off the insults. She took back her card and wrote on the back—“Re: Linda and the bishop”—and returned it to the receptionist. “Just show him the card—both sides. I’ll wait.”
“It won’t do any good. If you were the president you couldn’t get in today without an appointment,” the receptionist snapped contemptuously.
“Well, lucky me,” Naomi said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not the president,” Naomi said, smiling sweetly.
The receptionist left and came back a few minutes later. “Follow me,” she said curtly, and led Naomi across the waiting room to an office in the comer. “Wait in here, please,” she said, and pulled the door shut behind her.
The office, like the waiting room, was bordered on two sides by floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Naomi checked the doctor’s framed credentials. Choate, Princeton, Harvard Med. The perfect pedigree. Berenstein came in a minute or two later, an impressive man in his mid-fifties and well over six feet tall, trim as an athlete, with wavy, pure white hair, hawkline features and a tennis tan. He had the patronizing attitude of a man who expected respect and thrived on control.
“Miss Chance?” he said in a deep, explicit voice. “I’m Dr. Berenstein.” He regarded Naomi down the length of his equine nose. “You’re a very impatient woman. What’s so damned important?” He looked at Naomi’s card, motioned for her sit down and sat opposite her behind his desk.
“I work for an attorney, Doctor. I need to ask you a few questions. It shouldn’t take long at all.”
“Today’s impossible. Absolutely impossible.”
“I can wait until the end of the day. We can chat on the way to your car.”
“Absolutely not. I’ll have Miss Thomas set up an appointment for next—”
“Sorry, Doctor, that’s unacceptable.”
“Your attitude’s offensive. I don’t like that,” Berenstein snapped.
“You don’t have to, it’s not a requirement,” Naomi said nonchalantly.
“I think you’d better leave right now.”
“You can answer my questions angrily,” Naomi said. “You can be surly. You can even write the answers down if you don’t want to say them out loud. But you are going to answer my questions, Doctor.”
Berenstein chewed on the corner of his lip and snapped the business card back and forth across his fingertips several times.
“Perhaps next week,” he said finally.
“That won’t do.”
“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to!” Berenstein demanded. His lips began to tremble with anger. He stood up suddenly, his eyes reflecting his barely controlled rage. “I think you better leave before I call the police,” he said.
Naomi looked up at him for a few moments and said quietly, “Okay. The man you’ll want to talk to is Lieutenant Abel Stenner. Want to know what he’ll tell you? He’ll tell you that I’m fully licensed and doing my job. Then he’ll probably show up to find out why I was here. He’ll also tell you that you can either talk to me now or I’ll be back with a subpoena and you can talk to my boss. His name’s Martin Vail.”
Berenstein seemed to deflate a trifle when he heard the name. The fire went out of his eyes and his mouth went slack. He unconsciously smoothed the back of his hair down and snapped back his shoulders. He looked down at Naomi’s car
d again.
“Am I supposed to know what this means?” he asked. “My people make dozens of appointments for me. Who are Linda and the bishop? Linda who? And who’s this person, Bishop?”
Naomi shook loose a cigarette and lit it. She leaned back and said, “Why don’t I make this real easy and go straight to the main course. We’re investigating the Bishop Rushman murder case.”
“That has nothing to do with me.”
“It has to do with Linda.”
“Linda who? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Linda is a possible material witness. She was living at Savior House until a few weeks ago so we don’t know her last name. You know the policy, I’m sure.”
“I repeat, I don’t know any Linda.”
“The bishop made an appointment for her here on March ninth. It’s in his book, Doctor.”
“As I told you before …”
“Dr. Berenstein, if the bishop called here on behalf of Linda whateverhernameis, he didn’t talk to that sphinx at the desk or some other receptionist. Bishop Rushman talked to you.”
“I don’t recall—”
Naomi held up her hand and silenced him. “Here’s what I’d like you to tell me. What Linda’s last name is—I’m sure it’s on your records—where she’s from, when you saw her last, where she is now, and why the bishop sent her to you. That’s all. Five answers and I’m out of here.”
“You’re crazy, Miss Chance. Even if she were a patient her file is confidential—”
“Or I will get a subpoena and you can talk to Mr. Vail—probably in court. Which way’s easiest for you, sir?”
Berenstein, a man who knew when to cut his losses, pondered the options for a minute or so, then unlocked a deep file drawer in his desk. He fingered through the folders, finally drew one out and laid it on the desk.
“I have to check on a patient,” he said, “I’ll be back shortly. I trust you’ll be gone by then.” He left the room. Naomi opened the folder, took out the file and started reading. Then she started taking notes.
She beat Vail back to the office by ten minutes, excited with her news.
“How was the lunch?” she asked as he entered the office.
“At first I thought it was a fishing expedition. But I think it was more than that.”