Project Moses - A Mystery Thriller (Enzo Lee Mystery-Thriller Series) (6 page)

“This could all fizzle into a big zero by tonight,” protested Lee. “What am I supposed to do? See if Santos will turn up the heat on the petri dishes so the crud cooks faster? Jesus.”

“I just want you to think like a goddamn reporter,” said Pilmann. “Be aggressive. And you, of all people, shouldn’t bore the hell out of our readers.”

Lee turned around to leave, resigned to the fact that he would have to cover Santos’ press conference. He hoped that would get him off the hook once and for all.

“What about the profiles?” asked Pilmann, stopping Lee in his tracks and sending a chill up his spine.

“What?” said Lee, turning back. “What profiles?”

“Look, Enzo. These are your stories now. You break ‘em, you take ‘em. The judge and the prosecutor.” Pilmann spoke slowly, but Lee could see the pressure building for an explosion if he wasn’t careful.

“You haven’t covered much hard news here,” Pilmann continued. “Maybe you didn’t realize that we usually write profiles about people like this, glorified obituaries, really. They weren’t exactly nobodies, you know.”

“Shit,” said Lee. “Okay. When are these gems due?”

“You got two days, Enzo. Make ‘em count.”

When Lee got back to his desk, he saw that one of the copy clerks had dropped a letter on his desk from the late mail run. He opened the plain envelope. The 12 pages inside contained nicely formatted paragraphs on the left side with columns of dollar amounts on the right. Lee saw the pages were a monthly bill from a local law firm to some company with an address in Palo Alto.

The law firm was Sutro, Foerster and Bridges, one of San Francisco’s megafirms. The client was a company called Futura Products, Inc. Lee had never heard of the company. He scanned the pages quickly. The bill was for the month that had just ended and totaled $47,750. It listed meetings, telephone calls, legal research, memo drafting and the like. The itemized listings mentioned directors’ meetings, securities regulations and other corporate-related topics.

No letter accompanied the document. He looked at the envelope. There was no return address, just a San Jose postmark. The bill meant nothing to Lee. He shoved it into his bottom drawer, meaning to examine it more closely when he had the time, and promptly forgot about it.

Chapter 7

THE EIGHT-STORY Whalers Hotel on the outskirts of Casa Grande rose out of the endless rolling Sonora Desert unexpectedly, like someone decided it would be a funny idea to plunk down a deluxe hotel in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The hotel towered over the countryside and dwarfed any other structures from Phoenix to the north to Tucson to the south, both an hour’s drive away. The most noticeable feature of the hotel was a huge black baseball cap bearing the orange “SF” insignia of the San Francisco Whalers.

In the early spring, the hotel filled with players working off the winter’s rust while the desert floor began its slow bake. By April, the ball players moved on to cooler climes and the empty, out-of-place monument to baseball stood empty while the Arizona sun went from hot, to hotter to flat-out sizzling.

The past year had been the exception.

The young athletes had left, taking with them their aloha shirts and baseball gloves. Then came the newcomers who were not quite as young as the ballplayers. They carried Toshiba laptops rather than Louisville Sluggers. Computer paper filled their wastebaskets, not beer cans and bandages.

After breakfast in the hotel restaurant, these older, pudgier, less playful hotel guests, climbed into their rentals, three or four to a car, and headed east down one of the straight country roads that carve the desert into square mile chunks of real estate.

The hotel clerks, the waitresses, the bellboys, the maids and the manager didn’t care where they went or what they did. They were just happy for the continued employment. If their guests claimed to be working on a farm, that was all right. It made a certain amount of sense. Casa Grande is in the heart of the Arizona cotton growing region. No one cared that the men came back without dirt on their shoes, sunburned necks or salt stains on their golf shirts that come from working, even a short time, under the relentless sun.

Had anyone followed the Chryslers, the Buicks and the Fords heading toward the east, they would have seen them pull onto the asphalt apron, all in a row, next to a large hangar at an abandoned airport 40 minutes away from the Whalers Hotel.

It was an old gray building with a corrugated roof and a heavy metal door in front painted black. New vents were spaced every 30 feet around the building, each carrying the hum of a powerful air conditioner. Inside was a science laboratory that would have been the envy of the nation’s most prestigious universities…had they only known that it existed.

•   •   •

THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S Office was located two blocks away from City Hall in an aging granite office building filled with narrow corridors, worn linoleum and doors with frosted glass. It reminded Lee of the grade schools he had attended as a boy - constructed after the war with hardly a dollar devoted to renovation since then.

Barry McDonell, the Assistant District Attorney for felony prosecutions, was in his mid-40s. He was a small, wiry guy with sandy hair cut short, a whippet of a prosecutor.

Lee entered his office wearing his chinos, docksiders and a blue nylon parka over a striped dress shirt. He sat on a blue and purple couch with chrome legs and arms, a 70s throwback. Flanked by a big, dusty rubber plant on his right, McDonell spelled his name for Lee and then leaned back behind his heavy mahogany desk and waxed eloquently about Adams, his climb within the office toward bigger, more difficult prosecutions, and his prosecution style - quietly understated but hiding an incisive mind that could slice apart a weak argument.

McDonnell described Adams’ intense disappointment during the rare times that he lost a case. He always felt it was a personal failure. He would dwell on it, almost to the point of depression and analyze and re-analyze every step to determine where he had gone wrong. He was a perfectionist. It made him a good prosecutor and Adams would be missed by the office.

“A couple of hours before he died, Orson stopped by to talk about a hung jury,” said McDonnell. “He was berating himself for not eliminating the juror who hung the case. She just couldn’t bring herself to convict. She developed some attachment to the defendant, Orson said.”

“What was the case?”

“Uhh. Let’s see.” McDonnell put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling while he thought. “Was it Washington? It was something like that. Or, maybe Warrington. I think that’s it. Warrington. Just a burglary case in Municipal Court. It was a bullshit case that should have been bargained down, but the guy’s attorney thought he could get him off. Orson was great about taking it.

“See. That’s the kind of guy he was.” McDonnell continued and pointed his finger at Lee for emphasis. “It should have gone to someone more junior, but everyone else was up to here.” McDonnell held his hand at the level of his forehead.

“Did he have any other cases coming up?” Lee felt foolish as soon as he had asked the question.

“Are you kidding? He was responsible for 70 or 80 cases. He probably had trial dates penciled in for the next three months.”

“Any really big cases? You know, important cases?”

“I guess they’re all important to the defendants,” said McDonnell. “Let’s see. He had a good drug case. A few rapes and armed robberies. I don’t think he had any capital cases. Orson wasn’t to that stage yet, taking the cases where the prestige of the office is on the line. He was a couple of years away but he was getting there.”

“Any threats?” As soon as he asked the question, Lee wished he hadn’t. Stick to the profile, he told himself. Limit your losses.

“Hey,” said McDonnell. “I thought you were working on a profile.”

“I am. I’m just curious. And, as long as I’m here…”

“If there had been any threats, I wouldn’t tell you while the investigation is ongoing. But Orson hadn’t mentioned anything. Sure, defendants screamed at him on occasion. But that comes with the territory. Some people take going to jail too personally.”

Lee closed his notebook, thanked McDonnell and headed out the door. In the corridor, a final question occurred to him. McDonnell watched his back through the door while the reporter teetered in indecision. Finally, Lee turned back to face the prosecutor.

“Who was the judge in the Warrington case?” Lee asked. “Was it Miriam Gilbert?”

“Yep. I think it was. Pretty strange, her dying in her chambers like that, huh?”

•   •   •

WHEN HE AWAKENED an hour after dawn the next morning, Lee’s head was feeling the effects of too much single-malt scotch and beer consumed at the Bull’s Eye, a neighborhood watering hole where he had gone to practice his dart throwing, flirt with a barmaid named Donna and wash away the increasingly bitter taste that his confrontations with Pilmann were leaving.

He pulled on sweats and tennis shoes and walked down to the corner where he dropped two quarters into the newspaper box and pulled out a copy of the Chronicle. As he climbed the stairs to his flat, he read a front page Chronicle’s story that was almost the same as what he had written after Santos’ press conference.

MYSTERY DISEASE REMAINS UNSOLVED
By Lawrence W. Frankman

The strange disease that took the life of Municipal Court Judge Miriam Gilbert earlier this week remained a mystery yesterday but health officials said they believe the disease poses no immediate health threat.

San Francisco Chief Coroner Michael Santos said laboratory tests failed to identify the foreign substance, virus or bacteria that resulted in Gilbert’s death. Researchers also found no evidence that whatever caused the judge’s death is infectious.

In addition, local hospitals reported no other deaths or illnesses similar to Gilbert’s, another indication that whatever caused the judge’s death does not presently pose a health threat.

Santos said medical researchers locally and at other research centers throughout the nation continued to attempt to isolate the cause of Gilbert’s death and to discover how she contracted her fatal illness…

•   •   •

THE TWO LAWYERS in Courtroom Three were arguing about the portly gentleman in the witness box with a toolbox sitting on his lap. The dapper attorney with black blown-dried hair and a gray double-breasted suit complained that the witness was not qualified to testify as an expert witness on home construction techniques. Lee settled in the back pew. Ah, the courts, he thought with an inner smile. Where all the details of people’s lives – from the mundane to the sordid – get spilled out on the table for public inspection.

Still fighting a hangover, Lee had purposely arrived just before noon. He had once written a story about a judge who guarded his private time so zealously that he made a sequestered jury wait overnight before delivering its verdict so he could keep a date with his mistress at a delicatessen: (
“It was a pastrami on rye, hold the justice, please…”
)

Lee knew the stomachs of most judges were well trained by the custom of the lunch recess so that only the most urgent business kept court running into the lunch hour. He could tell that the end of Mr. Double Breasted’s argument would soon be cut short in favor of a meatball sandwich.

“Thank you Mister Sawyer,” growled Judge William Canady, a veteran of the bench who looked particularly bored at the moment. “Recess until two o’clock.” Canady tapped the gavel quickly to cut off any protest and headed for the door so fast that no one had an opportunity to stand.

While the attorneys gathered their papers, Lee walked quickly through the gate separating the spectators’ section from the business end of the courtroom. He strode up to the young woman who sat at the enclosed desk below and in front of the judge’s seat.

“Melissa Jensen?” he said.

“Yes.” She had a round face and long blond hair parted down the middle that was held in the back by a mother-of-pearl clasp. Her glasses were old-fashioned horn rims that might have been throw-back fashionable on someone else. She wore a pale yellow blouse with frills in front and at the end of the sleeves, and a plain blue skirt loose enough to accommodate her rather generous hips and thighs.

“I’m Enzo Lee of the News. I want to talk to you about Judge Gilbert.”

The expression on Melissa Jensen’s face changed from quizzical to pained. She swallowed and looked down at the papers in front of her.

“God,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m so tired of talking about it. I just want to forget about it. It was too horrible.”

Lee explained that he wanted to tell readers what Judge Gilbert was really like. He had heard so many wonderful stories about her. Then he assured Melissa Jensen that he understood how difficult and horrible the entire episode had been. He could scarcely imagine the horror himself.

Mostly, what Lee did as he was trying to talk Melissa Jensen into an interview about her deceased former boss was stick to her like glue while she finished gathering her papers and when she stood up and walked past the bailiff into the private corridor behind the courtroom used exclusively by the judges and their staffs. The bailiff raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. Lee guessed that law clerks are a couple of notches above bailiffs in the courthouse hierarchy.

He had learned through a couple of telephone calls that Melissa Jensen had recently graduated from Golden Gate Law School. He also knew that she had arranged to keep working as a clerk to Judge Canady whose original clerk had contracted hepatitis and was out indefinitely. It was only when Lee saw the nameplate outside the office that she turned into that he realized that Melissa Jensen was still working out of Judge Gilbert’s chambers.

Melissa was describing Judge Gilbert’s dedication and amazing work habits, how she labored well into the night, long after Melissa had left for the day. Lee was asking questions and taking notes for the profile almost by rote.