Bearing Witness (25 page)

I met his stare. “I know about the Death's Head Formation. I even know about San Carlos de Bariloche.”

He studied me. “How?”

“I just do.” I shrugged. “But I don't know the whole story. I know that Conrad Beckman was active in the Bund before World War II. I know that he did a major construction job down in San Carlos back in the fifties, and I know that he did it with one of his competitors.”

“Who?” Warnholtz asked in his hoarse voice.

“Who?” I repeated, unsure.

“Which competitor?”

“Eagle Engineering.”

“Eagle?” he repeated in a whisper, searching his memory.

“Down in Memphis,” I explained. “Max Kruppa owned the company.”

“Max.” He nodded, a faraway look in his eyes.

“You knew Max?”

He seemed to contemplate me for a moment, and then closed his eyes. “Long time ago,” he said. “Who cares anymore?”

“I care. I think it might hold the key to my lawsuit.”

His eyes still closed, he asked, “Who are the others?”

I told him about the bid-rigging conspiracy and the names of each of the company founders.

He listened in silence. I waited. Eventually, he opened his eyes and turned toward Billy Dillard. “I'll talk to her. Alone.”

Dillard shrugged. “You sure, Herman?”

He nodded and turned toward Benny with a frown.

I shook my head. “He's my colleague, Mr. Warnholtz. I need him to stay here.”

He mulled it over. “Fine.”

He waited until Dillard had closed the door behind him. Then he turned to me, his eyes narrowing. “I never was a snitch.”

I nodded, not sure where this was going but not wanting to derail it by saying the wrong thing.

“I did my time,” he said after a moment, his voice still hoarse but now more forceful. “I never said a thing. Not even to that madman Lindhoff.” He paused. “But he let me down.” There was bitterness in his voice. “He promised he'd take care of my wife and son. But when my wife died in 1964…” His voice trailed off. His eyes seemed to lose their focus. “Pretended he never made that promise. Pretended he didn't even know who I was. He let them put my boy in the state mental hospital.” He shook his head. “Not a damn thing.”

He squeezed his eyes closed, as if the memory were too painful to bear in the light. I waited. When he finally opened them, they were moist. “That was wrong,” he said in a whisper.

I nodded, feeling a tug of compassion in spite of myself.

He looked up at the ceiling, as if he were addressing God. “He broke his promise,” he said, his voice stronger. There was more color in his face now. He leveled his gaze at me, his eyes burning. “So I'm breaking mine. I'm a dying man. I'll answer your questions.”

“Who broke his promise?” I asked.

He seemed to grit his teeth, as if gathering the resolve to clear this first hurdle. “Conrad Beckman,” he said, his voice laced with anger.

“I see,” I said, keeping my expression neutral. I gestured toward the chair along the side of his bed. “Would it be okay if I sat down?”

He nodded.

As I came around the bed and sat down, he turned his head to watch me. I was close enough to hear the raspy strain in his breathing. I set my briefcase on my lap and opened it.

“May I take notes?” I asked as I removed a legal pad and a pen.

He nodded.

I held up my portable dictation machine. “May I use this as backup, in case I can't read my notes?”

He nodded again.

I set the dictation machine on the nightstand and pressed the Record button. I glanced back at Benny, who had moved into the far corner of the room. He was leaning motionless against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, his expression solemn. I turned to Warnholtz, who was gazing up at the ceiling again.

“Mr. Warnholtz, I'm going to ask you some questions about Conrad Beckman and his company. How long have you known Mr. Beckman?”

He turned to me. “We grew up in the same neighborhood. Back in the 1920s.”

“Okay. That's one of the subjects we're going to talk about. I'm also going to ask you about Mr. Beckman's relationship with the men who ran the five other companies that we believe were co-conspirators with Beckman Engineering.”

He shook his head. “That might be a waste of your time. I been inside for forty years.”

“I understand that, sir. I'm interested in the period before your incarceration.”

He gave me a curious look and raised his eyebrows. “How far back?”

“That depends, sir. How far back does your knowledge about those men go?”

He considered the question. “Well, pretty far. For some, even before Die Spinne.”

That name again.

“Who was he, Mr. Warnholtz?”

“Who?” He frowned.

“Spinne, sir. Who was he?”

“Who?” he repeated, puzzled. “You mean what.”

Now I was confused. “Wasn't Spinne a person?”

He stared at me for a moment, and then his face broke into a smile. As I stared at him, at that grinning bag of bones, the rib cage visible beneath the sheet, the neck a gristly stalk, the sudden awful irony made me shudder. In his final days Herman Warnholtz had become the mirror image of one of those haunted Auschwitz survivors.

“Why are you smiling?” I finally asked.

“You don't know German, do you?”

“No, sir. I don't.”

He nodded, amused. It was an awful grin, the skin stretched paper-thin over his skull, the thin lips pulled back from brown, crooked teeth worn down to stumps. A death's head grin.

Chapter Twenty-six

I got home at twelve-thirty. At two o'clock I was still wide awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, my mind racing. I almost called Ruth to tell her about the interview. Instead, I played part of one of the tapes again to reassure myself that it hadn't all been a dream. I finally drifted off to sleep somewhere around three and awoke with a start at five-ten. I was so antsy I threw on my jogging clothes and took Ozzie for a brisk thirty-minute run.

I was at my desk at six-fifteen drafting my application for a writ of
habeas corpus ad testificandum
, a mouthful of legal mumbo-jumbo that, if granted, would compel the superintendent of the Potosi Correctional Center to transport Inmate #2574312 to the courtroom of the Honorable Catherine Wagner the following morning to give testimony in the matter of
United States ex rel. Ruth B. Alpert
v.
Beckman Engineering Co
. If, however, Herman Warnholtz was too ill to travel, the habeas application requested that I be allowed to take a videotaped deposition at the prison to show to the jury.

I had it in hand when Judge Wagner summoned us into her chambers at 9:00. a.m. to go over the morning's schedule. “Are you done with Mr. Beckman?” she asked, shuffling through some papers.

“I have a few more questions for him, Your Honor. Depending upon other testimony, I may call him again.”

“I hardly think so,” Kimberly said, turning to me with an glare. “Ask now or forever hold your peace.”

I kept my eyes focused on the judge. “There's no need for Your Honor to resolve that issue before it's ripe.”

Judge Wagner looked up from her papers and fixed me with a chilly stare. After a moment, she asked, “And after Mr. Beckman?”

“I'll be reading the deposition of Otto Koll.”

“Alone?”

“I'll have an assistant in the witness box to read the part of Mr. Koll.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Professor Goldberg, Your Honor.”

“Oh, come on,” Kimberly scoffed.

Judge Wagner gave me a severe look. “I assume you will impress upon
Professor
Goldberg the fact that he will be appearing today in a United States District Court and not the Comedy Club.”

“He understands that, Your Honor.”

“And after the Koll deposition?”

I went through the rest of my plans for the day: testimony from a Beckman Engineering employee in the government contracts division, presentation of a series of summary exhibits prepared from Beckman Engineering's bid documents, and—if time permitted—the beginning of the testimony from one of my expert witnesses.

“There's one last item,” I said. I handed a copy of the habeas application to Kimberly and the original to the judge. “Plaintiff has learned of an important witness. As you see from the application, he's an inmate at Potosi.”

I waited until the judge finished reading the four-page application and my attached affidavit. When she looked up from the documents, I continued, “He has direct personal knowledge of the conspiracy, Your Honor. I'd like to put him on tomorrow morning. He is, however, quite ill. If he's too sick to be transported to St. Louis, I ask for leave to do a videotape deposition one night this week.”

Judge Wagner looked over at Kimberly. “Counsel?”

I could tell from Kimberly's expression that she hadn't the foggiest idea who Herman Warnholtz was. It confirmed my hunch. I'd been purposefully vague in my habeas application and in what I said to Judge Wagner about the witness. That's because I assumed that there was only one person connected with Beckman Engineering who would have any idea of the significance of Herman Warnholtz's testimony, and that person was not in Judge Wagner's chambers. I almost felt sorry for Kimberly.

“Defendant objects,” she said, regaining her mettle. “This is trial by ambush. Miss Gold doesn't have this man on her witness list. We have no idea who he is.”

“Your Honor,” I said, “up until two nights ago I had no idea who this man was, either. Mr. Beckman, however, most assuredly knows exactly who he is. I drove down to Potosi after court yesterday to interview the witness and learned that he has direct personal knowledge of critical facts going to the heart of this case.” I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I believe that Mr. Warnholtz's testimony will destroy the defendant.”

“Please, Counsel,” Judge Wagner said, “save the hyperbole for the jury.” She turned to Kimberly. “I'm inclined to grant this application in part.” She looked at me. “Given that Mr. Warnholtz is quite ill, I'm reluctant to order him brought to St. Louis. I'll have my clerk check with the prison officials this morning to get a clearer sense of his medical condition. If he's strong enough for a videotaped deposition, I'll order one to take place in Potosi on Saturday. If the witness has any admissible testimony, we'll play the videotape to the jury next week.”

When we returned to the courtroom, I kept an eye on Kimberly. She gathered her troops into the corner to explain the Herman Warnholtz development. The huddle broke with one of the younger associates dashing out of the courtroom door, no doubt to return to Roth & Bowles to launch a frenzied search for information about Warnholtz.

Kimberly signaled for Conrad Beckman, who had been sitting in the front row of the gallery with two of his assistants going over certain business matters. Beckman joined her in the corner. I watched them closely. He listened to her carefully, rubbing his chin as she talked, his face set in a contemplative expression. When she had finished, she nodded toward me. His eyes followed her gesture. Beckman and I stared at one another. I expected some reaction, perhaps a flicker of anxiety or a flash of anger, but his eyes were dead, his face a blank. I turned away, troubled.

***

Conrad Beckman settled into the witness chair, a placid expression on his face.

“You understand that you are still under oath?” I reminded him—and the jury.

He nodded. “I do.”

“Do you know a man named Herman Warnholtz?”

Another nod, completely unruffled. “It's been many years. We grew up in the same neighborhood.”

“When was the last time you saw Mr. Warnholtz?”

He seemed to think it over. “A long time ago,” he said, shaking his head. “Probably not since before World War II.”

“Mr. Beckman, were you and Mr. Warnholtz ever anything more than childhood pals?”

He gazed at me, his expression almost serene. “Not that I recall, Miss Gold.”

“When you were both adults, Mr. Beckman, were you and Mr. Warnholtz ever members of any organizations together?”

“Not that I recall, Miss Gold.”

I walked over to the chart showing the other five companies and their founders. “When you were both adults, Mr. Beckman, were you and Mr. Warnholtz ever present at any meetings also attended by any of these men?”

“Not that I recall, Miss Gold.”

His composure was impressive, and unsettling. He knew what was coming, possibly as soon as tomorrow, more likely by videotape early next week. Could his strategy be to simply tough it out, to deny Warnholtz's allegations, to characterize them as the ramblings of a bitter, dying killer? Or was he simply conceding what he knew he had to concede—that he grew up in the same neighborhood with Warnholtz—while refusing to budge on any important issue?

No matter. I'd established all I needed to establish through Beckman. The rest would come from Warnholtz's mouth.

“Mr. Beckman, is there anything else of significance that you recall about your relationship with Herman Warnholtz?”

Beckman leaned back in the witness chair and frowned in thought, or at least pretended to. After a long pause, he shook his head. “I don't think so.”

“Is there anything that you and Mr. Warnholtz did together that you feel like sharing with this jury?”

“I don't think so.”

I paused. “Are you sure?”

He observed me coolly. “Nothing comes to mind, Miss Gold.”

I turned toward the judge. “No further questions.”

***

Benny and I finished reading the deposition of Otto Koll to the jury shortly after noon. Judge Wagner announced that court would be in recess until two o'clock. After the jury filed out of the courtroom, I started gathering my papers.

“Counsel,” Judge Wagner said, “please approach.”

Kimberly and I stepped toward the podium. Judge Wagner was holding my writ application in her hand.

“My clerk spoke with the warden down at Potosi.” She looked toward me with an expression that bordered on sympathy.

I caught my breath. Something was very wrong.

“There has been a change of circumstances down there,” she continued. “I'm afraid your application has been rendered moot, Ms. Gold.”

I gripped the podium for balance. “Moot?”

“The inmate passed away during the night.”

“He's dead?” I was numb. “How?”

Judge Wagner shrugged. “Apparently in his sleep. His cancer was terminal.” She took out her pen and scrawled
Denied, Moot
across the first page of my writ application. She looked up and nodded firmly. “Ladies, I'll see you back here at two.”