Bearing Witness (8 page)

“You should leave here now,” Jonathan told them in a firm voice.

“Hey,” the shorter guy snarled as he jammed his middle finger in the air. “Fuck you, kike.” His head was bobbing defiantly, his middle finger still up. “And fuck your Jew bitch, too.”

Jonathan stared at him. “Turn around,” he finally said in a totally calm voice, “and walk away and no one gets hurt.”

“Wrong, dickhead,” the big guy said, his face suddenly contorting in rage as he started forward. “You get hurt.”

Jonathan burst into action. He punched the big guy in the gut just as the guy was raising the dowel. He hit him again, even harder this time, squarely in the solar plexus. The first blow staggered him, the second one toppled him. As he keeled over, wheezing in pain, Jonathan ripped the dowel from his hand and spun toward the smaller guy, who'd hesitated a moment too long before attacking. Jonathan whipped the dowel against the guy's throat. He lurched backward with an awful gargling noise, both hands grabbing for his neck. Jonathan moved in fast and whacked him again, splintering the dowel against the side of his face. The guy collapsed, curling into a ball as he covered his head with his hands. There was a set of brass knuckles on his right hand. Jonathan stood over him, the shattered dowel raised high, waiting. The guy was moaning, blood streaming from his mouth and nose. He wasn't going anywhere. Neither was his comrade, who was on his back near me, gasping for air, his eyes squeezed shut, his hands pressed against his ribs. The front of his jeans was soaked. The odor of warm urine was unmistakable in the chilly air.

Stunned, I looked at Jonathan, who was standing over the smaller guy with the shattered dowel held high. Jonathan was panting, his breath vaporing in the cold, as he looked from one assailant to the other. With his yarmulke still in place and his close-trimmed dark beard, he looked every inch the Maccabee warrior. He lowered the dowel and seemed to contemplate it a moment before tossing it aside.

He turned toward me and our eyes met.

“Wow,” I said.

“Are you okay, Rachel?”

I nodded. “Sure.”

He frowned as he reached into his coat pocket. I watched him remove his cellular phone and punch in a number.

“Third-rate goons,” he mumbled, shaking his head as he waited for the call to go through. “Hi, this is Jonathan Wolf. You have a dozen officers stationed at Reavis Banquet Hall. Lieutenant Bradley is in charge of them. He knows who I am. Tell him I'm two blocks north on Carter Avenue. Have him send over a squad car with two officers.”

***

This was definitely not shaping up to be a typical lazy Sunday. Having started our day with a Nazi diatribe and a one-round boxing match with two thugs, we were now seated in the reception area of the Sangamon County Jail in downtown Springfield waiting to interview the two skinheads arrested for Gloria Muller's murder.

“Boy,” I said to Jonathan, trying to force a smile, “you sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

“Hey,” he said with a wink, “don't forget lunch.”

“My apologies,” I said, my spirits picking up a bit. “That was excellent.”

Road trips require a little extra planning if you're an Orthodox Jew. Jonathan was as likely to find a kosher meal at a food-and-gas exit along I-55 as he was to find the artist formerly known as Prince—theoretically possible, but the odds were steep. So Jonathan came prepared, having swung by the Tel Aviv Deli on his way to pick me up that morning. He deserved an A+ in deli shopping. During the drive to Springfield we had a feast of corn beef on rye with spicy mustard, potato knishes, tangy coleslaw, kosher dills, plenty of Dr. Brown's to wash it all down, and a slice of luscious apple strudel for dessert.

The food and the drive had helped put some distance between me and the morning's events, but the memories had been catching up during our wait in the prison lobby. Bishop Robb's words had been so hateful and depressing, made even more chilling by his smooth, syrupy delivery—as if we were listening to the headwaiter of Armageddon. I'd felt blue on our way to the car afterward, and then those two thugs attacked. That scene ended so quickly I found myself watching in a daze as the police hauled them away in handcuffs.

Jonathan didn't think Robb was behind the attack. First, he explained, Robb was too smart to order his people to beat up a prosecutor, especially with all those cops nearby. Second, the attackers were amateurs. Although they'd looked plenty menacing to me—so much so that Jonathan's response had seemed right out of an action-hero flick—he shrugged it off, explaining that they were a pair of stumblebums.

We'd arrived at the prison right on time. That was thirty-five minutes ago. Jonathan walked over to the clerk's window to try to speed things up. The delay wouldn't have surprised me if I was alone. I'd had prison officials keep me waiting for more than an hour, and those were times when I was there to see a client. But today I was with Jonathan. These prison officials knew him. He'd been here several times during his years as an assistant U.S. attorney, and he was here today in his official capacity as a special assistant attorney general on an investigation that had the official cooperation of several Illinois law enforcement agencies.

He came back over, shaking his head.

“What?” I asked.

He frowned. “Something's not right.”

Ten minutes later, the inner door opened and a woman in her sixties stepped into the reception area. She smiled when she spotted Jonathan.

“Hello, Wolf Man,” she said as she came over. She was a vibrant woman with sparkling blue eyes and salt-and-pepper hair cut short.

They shook hands and Jonathan turned to introduce us. “Rachel, this is Ila Frisbie. Ila's with the State's Attorney's office in Springfield, and she one tough prosecutor.”

Ila laughed and told me she was a pussycat compared to Jonathan. Pussycat or not, she was obviously a character. She was wearing a white knit T-shirt, a long pleated blue skirt, white socks, and brown leather Birkenstocks. She had dangly earrings and a clunky necklace that she must have found at an arts-and-crafts festival. I liked her immediately.

“So what's going on?” Jonathan asked.

Ila's smiled disappeared. “Well,” she said, hesitating and glancing at me.

“Rachel's okay,” Jonathan said. “She witnessed the murder.”

Ila nodded, all business now. “Let's go inside.”

We followed her through a security door and down a narrow hallway to a small conference room. She ushered us in and closed the door.

“We don't know how it happened,” she said, shaking her head.

“Both?” Jonathan asked quietly.

“Yep.”

“No one else?”

“Just those two.”

“Knives?”

She nodded. “All the inmates are on lockdown now.”

“Where are the bodies?”

She gestured toward the hall. “The infirmary. The medical examiner's already looked at them. They're moving them to the hospital tonight for the autopsies.”

“I'd like to see them,” Jonathan said quietly.

Ila raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “Sure.” She glanced over at me. “What about you, Rachel?”

I looked at Jonathan and then back at Ila. I hadn't seen either suspect since the arrests. If one of them was the killer, I might recognize him. “Well, okay,” I said.

Jonathan looked at me with concern. “Are you sure, Rachel? You can wait right here. I just want to see whether they were killed execution-style. It won't take long.”

“I'm sure,” I said unsurely.

We followed Ila down the hall, around the corner, past two security checkpoints, and into the jail infirmary. She led us to a closed door near the back.

“In here,” she said, opening the door.

I paused in the hall, staring at the floor as I psyched myself up. They didn't teach Dead Bodies 101 at Harvard.
Come on
, I told myself,
you're a big girl
. I took a deep breath and stepped into the room.

The bodies were on steel gurneys. Mercifully, a white sheet covered each man from head to ankle, exposing only the feet. The big toe on the left foot of each corpse had been tagged. From the size of the feet and the outlines of the bodies beneath the sheets, these were large men.

Jonathan was standing between the gurneys up by the head area. I was down by the feet. He leaned over the body on the left and pulled the sheet back, exposing the head, neck, and chest. I had feared that there'd be blood and dreadful wounds, but instead the body looked almost peacefully intact. Except for blue and purple tattoos on the chest and arms, the skin was as pale as wax, as if they'd just pulled him out of a meat locker. I moved slowly around the far side of the body to get a look at the face. The eyes were open, gazing at the ceiling. I peered closer. The face wasn't familiar.

Jonathan was bending over the corpse, studying the neck area. I shifted my focus to where he was looking, and reared back, almost gagging. The neck had been sliced from ear to ear. The flesh along the knife slash had puffed and curved outward, making the wound resemble a pair of slobby lips pressed into an enormous smile. I stepped back, a little woozy, and tried to focus on the wall clock on the far side.

“Where did it happen?” Jonathan asked Ila in a clinical tone.

“In the showers.”

Jonathan turned from the corpse to Ila. “Both at the same time?”

She nodded. “According to the guards, they went down together after breakfast around ten. The showers were on the whole time. The place was all steamed up when the guards went in to fetch them a few minutes before eleven. They found them on the tiles, their throats slashed.”

Jonathan moved to the other body after covering the first one. As he pulled back the sheet, I forced my eyes to focus only on the face. The skin was chalk white, the mouth sagging open. I stared at the broad forehead and the big chin as I tried to remember back to the night in the Applebee's parking lot. I nodded. It was the face of the shooter.

***

But you don't agree?” I asked.

We were on the drive back to St. Louis.

Jonathan scratched his beard pensively. “I'll concede that there's logic to their assumption. Skinheads hate blacks, blacks hate skinheads. Two skinheads get killed, round up the leaders of the black prison gangs.”

“But?”

“If they'd been arrested for murdering someone black, then maybe. But this?” He glanced at me “Where's the motive?”

“They're still skinheads.”

He shook his head. “Not enough. Blacks and skinheads co-exist in prison. They have elaborate social codes, and the gangs have enforcers to keep their members in line.”

“Even the skinheads?” I asked.

“Oh, definitely. There's a loose affiliation of skinhead prison gangs around the country known as the Aryan Brotherhood. In fact, prison outreach has become an important part of the neo-Nazi movement.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take Spider, for example. It has outreach programs in several states. They correspond with gang members, send them a prison-oriented newsletter called
The White Path
, and make prison visits.” Jonathan paused: “So the mere fact that these two guys were skinheads doesn't mean that a black man killed them.”

“Then who?”

He looked over at me and shook his head. “Unfortunately, it's not that hard to get yourself killed in prison.”

Chapter Seven

Benny leaned back in his chair with a satisfied smile and patted his belly with contentment. “Sarah,” he said to my mother, “you deserve a special place of honor in my Hall of Fame.”

My mother was beaming.

He turned to me. “Am I right?”

“It
was
delicious, Mom,” I told her, “but as your attorney I have to advise you to be careful about allowing your name in the Benny Goldberg Hall of Fame.”

“Now, Rachel,” Benny said, placing his hand over his heart and feigning offense.

I winked at him. “Let's just say you have some peculiar items in there.”

“Such as what?” my mother asked.

I shook my head. “Such as you don't want to know, Mom.”

Benny uttered a long, lugubrious sigh. “Oh, to be forced to endure such calumny.”

I had to smile. It felt wonderful to smile. To smile and to eat my mother's wonderful cooking. A dinner in the warm cocoon of my mother's house was just the antidote for this miserable Sunday.

Ruth Alpert came out from the kitchen carrying a fresh pot of coffee. The doorbell rang as she started pouring refills.

“I'll get it,” I said, checking my watch as I stood up. “It's probably Jonathan.”

It was. He looked handsome in his navy pullover sweater, red turtleneck, and tan wide-wale corduroys.

“Hi,” I said, giving him a quick kiss on the lips. He had that clean, musky scent that I loved. “Mmmm, you smell good enough to eat.”

He chuckled. “You look lovely, Rachel.”

“Well, thanks.” I did a playful curtsy. I was wearing a black cotton turtleneck, a denim mini-skirt, black tights, thick white socks, and black Doc Martens. It was one of my favorite cold-weather ensembles: fun and comfortable. “Did the girls have fun?”

“They loved it.”

My mother had invited Jonathan and his daughters to come for the dinner, but he was already planning to take them to a Sunday father-daughter dinner event at the JCCA. Nevertheless, he told my mother he'd drop by after he put the girls to bed. He was curious to hear the results of the Internet search.

My mother called from the dining room, “Is that Jonathan?”

“Hello, Sarah,” he said as we rounded the corner. All eyes were on the two of us.

“You know Benny,” I said to Jonathan.

“Sure. How are you, Benny?”

“Hangin in there, Wolf Man.”

“This is Ruth Alpert,” I said. “Ruth, this is Jonathan Wolf.”

“Hello, Ruth,” he said, warmly shaking her hand.

“It's a pleasure,” she answered, captivated. “I've heard so many splendid things about you from Rachel and her mother.”

“And these are my heroes,” I said, turning toward the five law students, who were all seated along the far side of the dining-room table. “This is Hanna, Zack, Josh, Kayla, and this is Jake. Guys, this is Jonathan Wolf.”

From the awed expressions of Josh and Kayla, it was clear that they recognized the name. Both were interested in criminal law. To be interested in criminal law in St. Louis and to meet Jonathan Wolf was the equivalent of being interested in baseball in St. Louis and meeting Ozzie Smith. And like Ozzie Smith, Jonathan's reputation reached beyond the city. He'd made two appearances on Ted Koppel's
Nightline
during the second O.J. Simpson trial. More recently, his defense of Oklahoma lieutenant governor Billy Rimmel in the Indian casino vote fraud prosecution had generated coverage in newspapers around the country.

After politely declining a slice of cherry pie and accepting a cup of coffee, he turned to the students. “Rachel told me you were able to match the bids to the contract award announcements.”

They nodded.

“Let's hear what you found,” I said.

Josh stood up. “I'll get the charts.” He came back from the living room with a sheaf of documents. “We made several copies,” he said as he passed them out.

The chart was nineteen pages long, and each page contained summary information on eight or nine contract awards. I paged slowly through the document, studying the entries. By the time I reached page five, the pattern had emerged. Page five was typical:

I skimmed the remaining pages to confirm it. The pattern held. The entire universe of winners of the one hundred fortyeight bids over the last ten years was limited to six companies, including Beckman Engineering. I recognized two other names: Muller was presumably Muller Construction of Springfield, Illinois, and Koll had to be Koll Ltd. of Chicago. Owned by Otto Koll, as I recalled from Gloria Muller's comments. Her words still echoed in my memory:
Oh, yes
, she had said with a chuckle,
Otto was one of them
. I flipped back through several pages of the chart. Koll's name appeared at least once on every page.
Oh, yes, Gloria
, I thought,
Otto definitely was one of them
.

I leafed slowly through the document. Each of the six companies had won roughly the same number of contracts over the ten-year period. Most striking, though, were the winning bids: all were crowded up near the high end of the estimated cost range. No matter how wide the spread between the lower and upper end of the government's estimated cost range—$10 to $14 million, say, or $5 to $10 million—the winning bid was always within a few hundred thousand dollars of the high end.

I could feel my optimism grow as I skimmed down each new page. When I finished, I looked around the table. My five volunteers were beaming at me. Benny was studying his copy and nodding his head thoughtfully. My mother and Ruth were sharing one set and staring at it with equally mystified expressions.

I looked over at Jonathan. He'd put the chart down and was sipping his coffee. He winked and said, “You're in business.”

“What do you mean?” Ruth asked.

I turned toward her. “These charts back up the rumors you heard. Now we need to get out and dig for the evidence.”

“But where?” she asked.

“Right here,” I said, pointing at the nineteen-page list of winning bids. “These other five companies.” I turned to the students with a sheepish look. “One more favor, guys? Does anyone have time to run these companies through the computer? We need to find who owns them, who runs them, that sort of thing.”

“Sure,” Kayla said. “I used to do that all the time at Price Waterhouse. It won't take me long. I have two free hours tomorrow morning.” She turned to Benny. “I could drop off the results at your office before noon, Professor.”

It still cracked me up to hear them call him Professor.

“That'd be super,” I told Kayla.

I did a quick mental review of my schedule for tomorrow: a discovery motion in the city circuit court in the morning, a meeting at a client's office at two in the afternoon, my self-defense class after that, and then dinner at my sister's house. I glanced over at Benny. “You eating lunch tomorrow, Professor?”

“Am I eating lunch tomorrow?” He held his palms up, as if I'd just posed the most moronic question of the year. “Does the wild pope shit in the woods?”

“I'm buying,” I told him.

“And I'm eating.”

***

Nu?”
Benny said, chewing on his sandwich as he studied one of the printouts that Kayla and Jake had dropped off at his office that morning.

We were having a light lunch at Stacks cafe in The Library Ltd. bookstore. Or rather, I was having a light lunch—a bowl of mushroom barley soup, a banana muffin, and a cup of coffee. Benny was devouring what charitably could be called a heavy lunch, and more accurately a pair of heavy lunches.

He stuffed the rest of his second sandwich in his mouth, swallowed it nearly whole, and gestured toward the printouts that were spread between us on the table as he reached for his bottle of Pete's Wicked Ale. “What's your reaction?”

“Surprise,” I said, pausing to take a sip of coffee, “and hope.”

The most surprising find of the day was contained on several pages of new materials gleaned from the
Commerce Business Daily
data bank. Last night at my mother's house, Jake had shown us another chart he'd put together: a random review of construction contracts in an unrelated field, which demonstrated that winning bids in an untainted market tended to be evenly distributed throughout the government's estimated cost range. This morning, acting on a hunch, Jake had sampled contract awards from earlier decades in the same field of water-control projects at issue in our lawsuit. I had alleged a ten-year bid-rigging conspiracy in the Midwest. Jake was curious to see how that market functioned before then. It was another way to test my antitrust hypothesis.

The
Commerce Business Daily
data bank went back to 1956, so he picked four years at random—1957, 1964, 1975, and 1982. The results were completely unexpected. Regardless of the year, the winning bidder was always one of the alleged co-conspirators in our case: Beckman, Beek, Eagle, Eicken, Muller, or Koll. Moreover, the winning bid was always at the high end of the estimated cost range. The implication was plain.

“I thought ten years was pushing it,” I said, shaking my head in wonder, “but this is incredible. A forty-year conspiracy?”

Bid-rigging schemes tend to be unruly and inherently unstable beasts that rarely survive their first year. The greed that brings the confederates together is the same force that drives them apart. But here, according to the data, we had a conspiracy that had thrived not merely for years but for decades. It was, quite simply, extraordinary. Moreover, it raised a fascinating question. What was it about these companies that had enabled them to maintain that level of group discipline over so many years?

“Where's that summary page on the six companies?” I asked Benny.

He shuffled through the papers and found it. As Kayla promised, she'd spent the morning searching through various business and commercial data banks for information on the six companies. She'd taken the hodgepodge of information and summarized the basic facts on the one-page chart that Benny and I were studying.

Several points stood out. All six companies were based in the Midwest in a relatively small geographic area: one in eastern Missouri (Beckman Engineering); two in Indiana (Beek Contracting Co. in Gary, and Eicken Industrial in Indianapolis); two in Illinois (Koll Ltd. in Chicago, and Muller Construction in Springfield); and one in western Tennessee (Eagle Engineering in Memphis). All were middle-aged companies, that is, somewhere between forty-five and sixty-five years old—the oldest formed in 1934, the youngest in 1953. Although three of the original founders were still nominally at the helm of their companies, only one—Conrad Beckman—was still in charge. The day-to-day management of the other five had passed to the next generation. Beckman Engineering appeared to be the largest of the six, at least in terms of revenues, but all were significant commercial operations.

“What are you thinking?” Benny asked.

I took a sip of tea as I stared at the one-page summary. “I'm thinking Eagle.”

“Huh?”

“These guys.” I pointed at the summary information on Eagle Engineering in Memphis. “They're my best bet.”

“Why?”

“Look what happened to them in 1994.”

Benny leaned forward and studied the entry. “New owners,” he said, a little tentatively. “You're thinking maybe they'll be easier to deal with than the old-boy network.”

“Benny,” I said impatiently, “they're not simply new owners. Look how they did it.”

Benny squinted at the entry. “Ah,” he said, leaning back with a smile. “An asset-purchase deal.”

I nodded. “Exactly.”

There are several ways for one corporation to acquire another. It can merge with it, purchase all of its stock, or buy all of its assets (but not the stock). The latter transaction is known as an asset-purchase deal, and one of its most attractive features is that the purchaser buys the assets, but
not
the liabilities, of the seller. A simple example of such a deal is buying a used car: the buyer acquires the asset (the car itself) but not any of the seller's liabilities for, say, a prior speeding ticket or an overdue insurance bill.

If our bid-rigging allegations were correct, Beckman Engineering and its co-conspirators had a staggering joint liability under the Federal False Claims Act. That meant that each of the other companies had good reason to fear my lawsuit, and thus good reason to vigorously resist my efforts to obtain any information from them.

Except for Eagle Engineering.

The new owners of Eagle Engineering had no liability for the prior owner's misconduct. That meant that the new owners had little to fear from my lawsuit, and thus little to fear from a subpoena for all relevant documents generated during the period
before
they purchased the assets of Eagle Engineering.

“Oh, woman,” Benny said, giving me the thumbs-up. “You're a goddamn genius.”