34.

  Randall Manning stood in the office of his lawyer, Bruce McCabe. Being one of the name partners at Dembrow, Lane, and McCabe meant a corner office with enough room for a conference table as well, with impressive views to the west suburbs and south of the industrial flats.

  But the shades were drawn out of an abundance of caution, notwithstanding that they were thirty-two stories aboveground. Stanley Keane was smoothing out the map on the conference table. Bruce McCabe was waiting to present his information.

  Manning watched each of them. His eyes wandered to Bruce’s impressive walnut desk. Like Manning himself, Bruce McCabe lined his desk with photographs of his family, in particular his oldest son, James.

  Invariably, Manning’s attention turned to his only son, Quinn. Manning had always known that his son was smarter than he. He remembered the summers when Quinn would intern at the company that he was destined to take over one day, the fresh perspective he brought even as a high school kid, the insightful comments. It had been Quinn’s idea, not so long ago, to expand aggressively overseas. He’d done an entire workup without solicitation, projections and figures and strategies. “It says Global Harvest on the door, right, Dad?” he’d said. “And what does ‘International’ mean to you?”

  And Randall Manning had made the biggest mistake of his life. He’d agreed to let Quinn explore the opportunities.

  “Okay, here we go,” said Stanley Keane.

  Bruce McCabe had a yellow highlighter, which he poised over the map of the city’s commercial district and near-north side. He drew on the map as he spoke. “The procession starts at noon on South Walter Drive next to the Hartz Building,” he said. “It will move north up Walter and wind around with the river. It will cross the Lerner Street Bridge. And once over the river, it’s only three blocks to the federal building.”

  Manning nodded. That’s where the procession would end, at the north end of the federal building, known derisively as the “brown building” for its drab color and unexceptional architecture. It was home to the federal courts, the U. S. attorney’s office, and more than thirty agencies of the federal government. It was in the federal plaza that, immediately following the march, a brief outdoor commemoration would take place.

  “Last year,” said Stanley Keane, “it took thirty-eight minutes to reach the federal plaza for the commemoration.”

  “And the commemoration lasted how long?”

  “Thirty-six minutes.”

  “So one P.M. would be a safe target time.” Manning looked at Stanley.

  “Yes, sir. That’s the plan.”

  Manning nodded. “What about security?”

  “Security.” Stanley Keane groaned. “You know how it is these days, Randy. They keep that stuff pretty close to the vest. All we can say is what happened last year.”

  “Refresh me,” said Manning, though he didn’t require a refresher. He knew every aspect of the security from last year’s event. He just wanted to gauge Stanley Keane’s preparation.

  Stanley used a pencil and marked up the map. “It was primarily a perimeter formation,” he said. “City police on foot, about six for every city block, lining the curb on each side. Vehicle blocks on each end, but only sporadically blocking the cross streets. Mostly the east-west streets were simply barricaded with traffic horses. It’s kind of a scaled-down version of what they’d do in a full-blown parade. I mean, it’s the middle of winter and all. Most people don’t care all that much about Pearl Harbor Day.”

  They will now, thought Manning. He asked, “And what about the state police?”

  Stanley shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. I’d imagine they’d stay very close to the governor as he walks at the head of the pack. But I don’t know. The governor didn’t participate last year.”

  But he would this year. Governor Trotter, plus one of the state’s U. S. senators and the city’s mayor, would be walking in the front row of the procession. They would be joined by a former brigadier general who lived in the city and who served in World War II. He was, in fact, serving in Pearl Harbor on the day it was attacked.

  Manning looked out the window, through the drawn translucent shade, colored by the rays of the afternoon sun. He thought about what was going to happen nineteen days from now.

  What had President Roosevelt said about December 7, 1941? A date which will live in infamy.

  And what would be said about December 7 of this year? A different time, a different event, but no doubt similar proclamations, teeth-gnashing denunciations, self-righteous indignation.

  But one day, Manning was sure, history would thank him.

  “All right. Bruce, your turn,” said Manning. “Tell me about this visit you had this morning. Tell me about Jason Kolarich.”

  35.

  “The trial begins on December first,” I said to Joel Lightner. “That’s eleven days from now. Anyone mention that to you yet?”

  “Did anyone mention to you that the FBI has tried to come up with the identity of Gin Rummy for the last three years and drawn a blank?”

  We were walking down Gehringer Street. It was Saturday, early evening, and the Franzen Park neighborhood was alive. The taverns and restaurants we passed were full. The sidewalks were crowded with people. Everyone was having a good time. Everyone but me.

  To everyone else, Saturday meant the weekend, time with family, drinking and socializing and relaxing. To me, it meant people were harder to find, government offices and professional workplaces were closed. And after the weekend, it would be a short week for Thanksgiving. People would be halfway out the door by noon on Wednesday. And then forget it, there’s no chance of finding anybody until the following Monday.

  And the Monday after Thanksgiving was November 29—two days before we started selecting a jury.

  Joel Lightner had spent the last week trying to nail down the Gin Rummy question. He’d tapped all his connections at the local, state, and federal levels and come up empty.

  “Just the last three years?” Tori asked. Yes, I’d brought her along. She’d visited the other crime scene with us, why not this one, too? Besides, she’d shown a real interest in this case and her non-lawyer, lay perspective had proven helpful on more than one occasion thus far.

  Clearly, then, I had several reasons for bringing her along. It wasn’t like I was trying to impress her or win her over. Good. Glad that was settled.

  “The name Gin Rummy first came over a wiretap about four years ago,” said Joel. “Second-rate sources. Not Paulie Capparelli or anybody at the top. So the FBI, they jot the name down, but they don’t think much of it. Right? I mean, these guys, they all have about five nicknames, anyway.”

  “Okay,” said Tori, though she probably had no idea.

  “But then there’s a prison tap. Rico Capparelli, the top guy, who’s inside for life now, he mentions the name. So now the FBI is paying attention. As best they can tell, Gin Rummy has about ten hits to his name over the last couple of years. Remember Anthony Moretti?”

  I did, in passing, at least. The Moretti family, which had connections out east in New Jersey, was the principal rival of the Capparellis. About a year ago, Anthony Moretti, the capo, was shot in his bed. Two bodyguards in the apartment were found dead, too.

  “That was Gin Rummy?” I asked.

  “That’s what everyone thinks.”

  Tori looked at me. “So you’re messing with a pretty big guy.”

  “I like to keep things interesting. But I have to find this guy first.”

  We crossed Mulligan at the crosswalk and passed a shoe store that Talia used to love.

  “I love this store,” Tori said. It stood to reason, fashionista that she was. I can’t believe the word “fashionista” was even in my vocabulary. The boys back home would be ashamed. Maybe I was getting soft.

  We got halfway down the block on the west side of the street and stopped. Lightner fished out copies of the photographs from a manila envelope.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to a tree that had been planted in the middle of the sidewalk. I didn’t understand why the city bothered. Regardless, this time of year, the branches were naked, leaving it looking more like a gigantic, ugly weed.

  “The shell casing was found in the dirt at the base of the tree,” said Joel. He took a couple of steps to his left, which put him almost up against a tall privacy fence that served an apartment building. Behind that five-foot privacy fence was a condo building where a witness, Sheldon Pierson, was prepared to testify that he was outside, untangling Christmas decorations, during the interval of time in which the medical examiner estimated the murder occurred, but unfortunately he didn’t hear a thing or obviously see anything.

  On the opposite side of the street were walk-up three-flats and some single-families. Some were renovated in the last decade and some looked like they’d barely survived an aerial bombing. A neighborhood in progress, halted by the economic downturn.

  Joel extended his right arm and made a gun with his hand. “So he shot her from here. The casing probably landed straight in the dirt.”

  Using one of the evidence photos as a guide, I walked over to the curb and found the spot where Kathy Rubinkowski had fallen dead. There was a diagonal crack in the curb that I could use as a reference point from the photographs. Plus I pretty much knew it, anyway, as this wasn’t my first trip to the crime scene. It’s absolutely vital that you visit the crime scene. It’s almost as important that you visit it a second time, and a third. You have to see things up close. You have to play out the scene. Otherwise, you could miss something that could make or break the case.

  “Last time I walked it, it was ten feet,” I said, measuring the distance from Joel Lightner to me.

  “That’s highly accurate shooting,” Joel said, not for the first time.

  “He shot her right between the eyes?” Tori asked. “So she was looking right at him?”

  I looked at Tori. “What’s your point?”

  She was her typically put-together self in the long white coat with black knee-high boots. “If someone pointed a gun at me, I’d run. Or duck.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Joel. “But in fact, humans center their eyes on danger. There are studies on this. People want to predict the danger, so they focus on whatever is the source of danger. If Kathy saw the gun, odds are that she’d fix her eyes directly on it, and she’d turn so she was seeing it head-on.”

  Tori listened, then shook her head. “I’d duck. I wouldn’t stare at the gun.”

  “That would be your secondary response,” said Joel. “Your initial response would be to focus on the weapon. Remember, this probably happened in the space of a second or two. Maybe given more time, maybe the outcome would have been different.”

  “This is all very fascinating, folks,” I said. “When this over, let’s write an article together. But for now, how about we figure out how to acquit our client of murder?”

  Peter Gennaro Ramini watched Jason Kolarich and the others as they reenacted the shooting of Kathy Rubinkowski. He’d had little trouble following them, using the cover of the festive crowd on a Saturday night. He didn’t need to get too close at this point. He knew what they were doing. So he stood at the intersection of Gehringer and Mulligan, half a city block away, leaning against the door of a bank, his hands stuffed in his pockets as always—his signature, at this point.

  Kolarich and company seemed to have the details of the shooting basically right, the distance and the angle, the position of the victim’s body. The latter detail would have been easy to gather from the photographs. The accuracy of their distance measurement surprised him initially. Once you got past a space of four feet or so, it was difficult to pin down the distance of a gunshot with any particularity.

  But then he remembered the spent shell casing. That must have been how they measured it. There had been no need to be concerned about the shell casing, from his perspective, because it didn’t matter if the casing traced back to the murder weapon; the murder weapon was going to be found, anyway. Besides, if the shell casing wasn’t left behind, it would look like a professional job. It wouldn’t look like an amateur robbery-turned-homicide, which is how he’d wanted it to appear.

  But the flip side of that was now obvious to him: It gave a distance. And that distance was meaningful, a pretty long distance for a Glock to be fired with such precision. It gave Kolarich an argument he wouldn’t otherwise have—that the shooting was carried out by someone of superior skill. A pro. A hired gun.

  He watched them until he knew all he needed to know. And then he went home.

  Tomorrow, there would be a conversation.

  36.

  The black town car picked up Peter Ramini at precisely nine in the morning, as Ramini exited the drugstore. He got into the backseat and quickly returned his hands to his coat pockets.

  Next to him, Donnie ate a bagel lathered with blueberry cream cheese, more than a little of which found resting places on his chin or his ever-expanding stomach. The guy was like a beached whale. But he was the only person Paulie Capparelli trusted, the only person in the world who could lean down and whisper into Paulie’s ear and receive advice back the same way.

  “Whaddaya got, Pete?” Donnie grunted.

  “I got a problem, that’s what I got.”

  “Tell Donnie. Donnie will make it all better.”

  Ramini glanced over. Sometimes Donnie forgot that he was the courier, not the decision maker.

  “You remember this thing back in January, almost a year ago, with that lady at the law firm.”

  Donnie grunted again. That meant yes. “Polish name.”

  “Rubinkowski, right.”

  “A beautiful piece of work, my friend. They pinched some other guy, and the fucknut actually confessed to it.” Donnie had a good chuckle with that. “He says he was insane, right?”

  “That’s right, Don. But listen. So we just had this other thing—the one with Zo.”

  Donnie grew quiet with the change in topic. Of course he recalled that. Lorenzo Fowler, at one time, had been one of those guys who could whisper in the capo’s ear, only then the capo was Rico Capparelli, not Paulie. Still, even with the transition, Zo had been considered a trusted member of the inner cabinet—trusted, that is, until the problem with the strip club owner. Nobody had told Zo to take a baseball bat to the guy, and then, of all things, he fucking died from the injuries.

  Lorenzo had been feeling the hot breath of law enforcement on his neck, and it wasn’t hard to see the nerves getting to him. Enough so that Paulie ordered a close watch over Lorenzo.

  So when Lorenzo made a phone call to set up a meeting with Jason Kolarich—not one of their Mob lawyers but a total outsider—Paulie knew about it within ten minutes. And he didn’t like it.

  “You remember how Zo called that attorney,” said Ramini.

  “Yeah. Right. We figured he was gonna cut and run. Use an outside lawyer so we wouldn’t know.”

  “Right. So remember this lawyer’s named Jason Kolarich.”

  “Right.” Donnie took a mountainous bite of his bagel. “Kolarich. What is that, Russian? Bulgarian?”

  Ramini breathed in, breathed out.

  “Romanian? No, Hungar—”

  “Don, how the fuck should I know? He’s from… Paraguay, okay? He’s from fucking Antarctica. I fucking care.”

  “Petey—”

  “I’m trying to make a serious point here. I got a problem here, all right?”

  “Okay, Petey.” Donnie patted Ramini’s knee. “Listen, I know this already. Lorenzo goes to see the lawyer. We’re afraid he mighta told him things. Lots of things. But then you took care of Lorenzo. So that erases the lawyer from the equation. He’s got nobody to worry about after Lorenzo was in the ground. Problem solved, right?”

  “Wrong. Because this guy Kolarich, he’s not some random lawyer. We figured Lorenzo picked just anybody. Like outta the phone book or whatnot.”

  “Right.”

  “Right, but it turns out Kolarich isn’t just some random guy. Kolarich is the lawyer who is defending the guy they pinched on the Rubinkowski thing.”

  Donnie stopped in mid-bite. His head slowly turned to Ramini, cream-cheese chin and all. “The guy who says he’s crazy?”

  “Right. Tom Stoller is his name. But whatever. Point being, Zo wasn’t just talking to some stiff. He was talking to the guy trying to figure out who killed Kathy Rubinkowski.”

  Donnie wasn’t sure what to say, which has hardly surprising. When Donnie fell out of the tree, he hit a few stupid branches on the way to the ground. Undying loyalty was in his job description. Smarts, not so much.

  “So taking care of Zo doesn’t automatically take the lawyer outta the equation,” Ramini said. “If Zo told this lawyer how the Rubinkowski thing really went down—”

  “Did he?”

  “I don’t know, Don. But here’s the thing. Sounds like this lawyer isn’t so much going with this insanity thing anymore.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because remember the guy who hired us on Rubinkowski?”

  Donnie thought for a moment. This could take a while. “The industrial guy. Moneybags from bumblefuck.”

  “Manning. Randall Manning,” said Ramini. “Manning pays me a visit the other day. He says this lawyer Kolarich is sniffing around him. Asking questions that don’t sound so much like he’s pleading insanity anymore. More like he’s trying to solve a puzzle. And sounds like he’s getting pretty fucking warm. Warm like a fucking blowtorch.”

  Donnie moaned.

  “I just watched this lawyer Kolarich,” Ramini went on. “I just watched him last night, looking over the scene, trying to figure the thing out. The whole time, I’m thinking, he’s looking at this like it’s a pro job.”

  “Oh, motherfuck,” Donnie moaned.

  “I know all about this Kolarich. I did good intel back when Zo paid him a visit. He used to be a prosecutor, and now he thinks he’s a cowboy. You remember this thing our last governor had with the feds?”

 

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