Past Due - Past Due Part 19
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Past Due Part 19

He held out his hand. "Patrons ain't allowed in the back."

"We're not patrons," said R.T., taking a paper out of the file, handing it to the greeter. "Step aside, pilgrim, we got a right to be here. We're looking for a 2002 Cadillac Eldorado."

The man laughed. "An Eldorado, huh? Well, if you want, you can look under them tables, behind the bar, wherever, but I don't see no Eldorado. Who did you say you was again?"

"I'm a lawyer," I said, pulling a card out of my pocket.

Without so much as a glance, he dropped it to the floor, ground it with his shoe.

"Nice manners," I said. "In Japan they'd behead you for that. Just be advised I represent Jacopo Financing, which is owed a hundred thousand dollars by Derek Manley."

"A hundred thousand dollars? That's a lot of money. And you think it's here? Hey, Wanda," he called out to the girl on the stage.

She was bending over now, bending away from us, her legs straight, hands on her ankles, jiggling. With her head upside down between her knees she screeched, "What do you want?"

"This guy's looking for some money. You got a hundred thousand dollars maybe stuffed in your top?"

Wanda straightened up, turned toward us, pulled her straps forward so she could look down. "I don't think so," she said, and then she lowered the straps so that her breasts tumbled out like two soft, red-eyed bunnies. "But my boyfriend says these are worth a million."

"Can we seize those, R.T.?" I said.

"Sorry, Victor," said R.T., shaking his head. "Appealing as it sounds, I don't reckon we can."

"That's a shame," I said. "According to Mr. Manley, he owns a third of this club."

"I ain't no corporate lawyer," said the greeter, "so I can't tell you who owns what. But there's no car and the club's worth squat. You ain't going to find a dime. Sorry, gentlemen, but it looks like you wasted your time."

Just then a dark-haired woman in a sheer robe and high heels stepped through the beaded curtain and came up to the greeter. With her hand on her hip and a strong accent she said, "We out of ice in back, Ike. Chou mind? And get the air conditioner fixed, why don't chou?" The woman looked at us, gave us a smile as quick as a wink, spun around and walked back through the beads.

The greeter raised his eyebrows at us. "Bunch of spoiled brats, all of them."

"Ike," I said. "She called you Ike."

"No she didn't," said the man.

"You're Ike Rothstein."

"No I'm not. I told you, I just work here."

"You know what the penalty is for lying to a public official?" said R.T.

"Is that what you are?" said Rothstein. "A public official? I thought you was one of the Village People. Why don't you both just park your asses here while I call my lawyer."

He turned and disappeared through the curtain.

R.T., standing beside me, looked around the empty, dreary club. "You sure the car's here?"

"My man says it's here, so it's here. Somewhere. Let's go in the back."

We headed toward the doorway where Rothstein had disappeared and pushed through the beaded curtain, walking smack into the woman with the sheer robe.

"What chou want?" she said.

"We're looking for a car."

"Not back here chou not. This is private. Does Ike know chou back here?"

"He told us to follow him."

"Cherk."

"Who, me?"

"Ike. He knows he's not supposed to send no one back here. There's rules. And what about the damn air conditioner. It's been broke for two week. You can't dance when it's hot like this. Everything, it rides up."

"Tell me about it. And the chafing."

"Chou got that right."

"Does a guy named Derek Manley, who owns part of the club, come here much?"

"Asshole."

"Who, me?"

"Him. Manley. Every time he walk by he think he entitled to squeeze."

"I guess he's a hands-on owner. I'm looking for his car."

"What are you, repo?"

"Of a sort."

"Well, if it's that asshole's car chou looking for, there's a bunch of locked up sheds in the back."

"Keys?"

"Hanging in the office."

"And the back door."

"Through the office."

"Thanks. You don't happen to be Esmerelda, do you?"

"That's me."

"The Brazilian Firecracker."

"Chou know my work?"

"Absolutely. By the way, nice shoes."

"Really?"

It didn't take long to find the office, a cheesy little place with thin wood paneling and a cat calendar. What kind of strip joint owner has a cat calendar hanging on his wall? Made me wonder what was hanging at the SPCA. Rothstein was on the phone and he stood up and waved his arms like a traffic cop when we entered, but we ignored him. I walked past Rothstein to the back door, popped a jumble of keys off a hook, tossed them once in my hand, and headed outside.

There was an alleyway behind the club with a bunch of sagging garage sheds on either side. Beth and the tow truck were there, waiting.

Rothstein followed us out. "I'm getting my lawyer on the phone," he said. "He's in a meeting right now."

"You owe him money, right?" I said.

"How'd you know?"

"And you got tax problems?"

"Well, yeah."

"Then take my word, it's going to be a long meeting."

I stepped to the shed closest to the club, fiddled with the keys, found one finally that fit, turned the lock. I reached down and pulled up the door: a bunch of old tables, a couple of sagging, stained couches, dented metal beer kegs, a pile of trashed speakers, mops. I didn't even want to imagine what the mops had mopped. I pulled the door closed.

I strode over to the shed next to the first and fiddled again with the keys. I reached down, pulled open the door: a busted-up motorcycle, cardboard boxes with water damage, four decrepit mattresses leaning one against the next. It was amazing how much junk people saved for that one time when they might just have four moldy guests who needed four moldy mattresses.

"The club rents these out," said Rothstein. "We only use the first one you opened. There's nothing in the rest but crap. It's a nation of crap. You're welcome to it, but it ain't what the paper says you can take and it ain't worth a hundred thousand dollars, no way no how. All together it ain't worth six bucks."

I turned another lock, reached down, pulled up another door: mannequins, naked mannequins piled high in the middle of the space, arms and legs in a strange geometric confusion like a plastic orgy without genitalia. And on the side, neatly stacked, dozens of boxes with advertising printed on their sides. I looked closer. VCRs. Camcorders. DVD players. Stereos. Computer monitors. Not so kosher, whatever it was, but not a clue who they belonged to and not a car. I yanked the door down. It slid closed with a roar.

I took two steps toward the next shed and stopped. Something Earl Dante had said sparked in my memory. Manley sent his trucks all over the northeast, said Dante, delivering to department stores. Department stores. And what do they have in department stores but mannequins and DVD players. It wouldn't be out of character for Derek to boost what he could from the shipments. I turned back and lifted that door once again.

There it was. Right there. What I hadn't noticed before. Behind the wild pile of plastic limbs was a black covering. The mannequins weren't just lying all over one another, they were lying atop something covered by the black tarp. I stepped forward, reached through legs and arms, past dazed faces and pointed toes, and grabbed hold of a piece of the thick black cloth. I yanked it aside.

A headlight.

"You'll hear about this," Rothstein said.

"I suppose I will."

"Derek won't be happy."

"I suppose he won't." I thumbed at the boxes. "Are these yours?"

Rothstein looked at the stacked boxes and his eyes blinked a bit as he did the calculation of how connected he wanted to be to a load of stolen electronics. "Never saw them before in my life," he said finally.

"Then we'll take them too, is that all right, R.T.?"

"It's your seizure," said R.T.

"Derek won't be happy," said Rothstein.

"I suppose not," I said. "The name's Victor Carl. Carl with a C. Derek will know how to get hold of me."

Chapter.

24.

WHERE SIT THE honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court?

Any place they want to.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a lovely chamber in the statehouse in Harrisburg, with fine leather chairs and murals on the walls and a great stained-glass dome, but who the hell wants to sit in Harrisburg? So there is a courtroom in Philadelphia and a courtroom in Pittsburgh and satellite chambers in each of those cities, and the honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court can pretty much work anyplace they choose. Which is why Justice Jackson Straczynski spent most of his time in his hometown of Philadelphia.

It's not a bad life, the State Supreme Court life, the pay is high, the perks many, and the justices get to wear those boss robes. A lot of lawyers have their eyes on that particular prize and there is only one small requirement for getting your very own seat: enough votes. Aye, there's the rub. It takes not merit to rise to Pennsylvania's highest court, just politics.

What do you get when you mix justice and politics?

The Marx Brothers starring in Duck Soup.

I don't mean to paint the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as a bunch of vaudeville clowns honking horns and making wisecracks to Margaret Dumont, but then I don't have to, they do a good enough job themselves. And I'm even not talking here of their legal decisions, which are generally considered boneheaded at best and venal at worst. The court is infamous for charges of ethical violations, countercharges of case fixing, vulgar insults hurled from justice to justice in the public press. One guy got impeached for sending his employees out to buy Valium and jockstraps. I'm not making this up. He used the subterfuge so his enemies wouldn't suspect he was crazy. They suspected him anyway when he wore the jockstrap on his head. No, the honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have not covered themselves with glory. All except for Justice Jackson Straczynski.

Justice Straczynski was the most respected jurist to ever sit on that court, a brilliant legal scholar who used economic theory to slice through the Gordian knots of the most difficult legal problems. His great legal treatise, The Economic Laws of Constitutional Interpretation, once a fixture only on the bookshelves of the most conservative law student and right wing legal activist, had become, with the rightward tilt of the U.S. Supreme Court, a staple desktop reference for every constitutional scholar in the country.

After a stint making policy at the Department of Justice for Ronald Reagan, and a period teaching law at the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater, Straczynski was tapped by the Republican Party to run for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He wasn't much of a campaigner, his speaking style was likened to that of an aardvark on Quaaludes, but it just so happened that during the campaign he published a much-publicized article interpreting the Second Amendment to protect the unequivocal right to buy and bear anything with a trigger. Two things are wildly popular in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, guns and funnel cakes, both are tasty, both are deadly, but if the state's denizens had to pick one, well, you can't kill an eight-point buck with a funnel cake, now can you? Straczynski won his election in a walk and now he sat on the state's highest court, writing uncompromising decisions of uncompromised brilliance and waiting for that call from Washington. The pundits all said it was coming.

"So we agree, right, Kimberly," I said, as we sat side by side on the beige couch in the justice's wood-lined waiting room, "I'll do all the questioning, you'll just sit quiet and watch the show."

"Whatever."

Kimberly glanced at the stern-eyed secretary with the high gray hair manning the desk in the middle of the room. "But remember," Kimberly said in a hushed voice, "Mr. D definitely wants his name kept out of this."

"Mr. D?"

"Sure. He was very clear about it."

"Okay."

She sat for a moment, something obviously bothering her. "What if a question sort of pops out of my mouth on its own?"

"Gosh, I hope it doesn't. He might not want to tell us his favorite boy band."

"Excuse me?"