There Are No Innocents

Chapter 2

Our dead lawyer was a corporate schmooze whose firm had maybe two hundred clients in the local Fortune 500 companies in this state. He was the senior partner and co-founder in a law firm consisting of five partners and a stable of conscripts. All expensive and all extremely intelligent coming from the best law schools in the country.

The firm of Stewart, Pierce, Hoskins, Alberts & Benedict occupied the entire fifth floor of the office building the garage was attached to. Spacious to the point of opulence. So new the paint smelled fresh, and the carpet was still springy to step on. Daniel Stewart’s office was the biggest office on the floor. Windows, the entire north wall, had a magnificent view of the immediate farm fields surrounding the building and the distant skyline of the city’s downtown just a few miles away. On the light-oak paneled walls, real wood and not the normal four by eight sheets of paneling one buys at the local lumber yard, were seven or eight original oil paintings. Each painting had an individual spotlight to accentuate the canvas. Each was by someone whose name I recognized.

Stewart, Pierce, Hoskins, Alberts & Benedict Impressive.

A quick glance of the dead man’s office told me several things about our victim. The man’s desk was spotless. A big desk set close to the windows, with a black onyx top, and not a paper or folder seemed out of place. Pencils were aligned in perfect formation on the left-hand side of the desk’s center. Black and red ink pens on the right. Three thick folders were stacked one atop the other on the left inner corner. On the right inner corner was the phone/intercom.

The furniture in the office was black leather. Expensive black leather.

Our victim liked his life to be lived in an orderly, planned, and concise fashion. And he liked to flash his money around.

“The boy was a stickler for precision,” Frank grunted, unimpressed, as we eyed the place.

“You know what I say about an organized mind.”

“Yeah,” Frank nodded, grinning. "An organized mind is the sign of a sick puppy. If that’s the case, then the chump outside must have been a rat"s ass away from wearing a straitjacket.”

An organized mind is the sign of a sick puppy“We need to find one of the partners and take him out to the garage to identify the body. Anyone here yet?”

“One. A Franklin L. Pierce. Apparently, he and our victim started the firm ten years ago. Stewart came out of law school and created this from scratch. Apparently, he offered Pierce a full partnership right off the bat.”

Funny thing about high-priced corporate lawyers. They know their way around a lawsuit and the courtroom. They can smooth talk their way through the front doors of a convent if they had to. But they are not used to seeing a dead body. Especially a messy one. Franklin Pierce became physically sick when we asked him to identify the body. We had to shuffle him over to one side and allow him to hurl up his Starbucks and rolls over the hand railing two or three times before he caught his breath. Eventually, standing up straight, wiping his lips with a silk handkerchief, and as pale as fresh alabaster, he nodded and turned to face us.

“My god! Poor Dan. Who could do something so horrible as this?”

“Apparently someone who had a major disagreement with him,” Frank answered, his big frame dwarfing the small frame of the lawyer in front of us. “Got any ideas who that might be?”

“We had our share of those who disliked our successes, Detective. But in the business world you can’t become as successful as rapidly as we did without stepping on someone’s toes. Our reputation as a firm is our intense aggressiveness in defending our clients. But we do no criminal litigation. We don’t represent organized crime. Or, at least, not to our knowledge. Admittedly, a number of firms would like to see terrible things happen to us. I can’t deny that. But not this. Not murder. This is unbelievable. Insane.”

I saw it. And glancing at Frank I knew he saw it as well. The way Pierce used his hands as he spoke. The dark gray silk suit. The dark gray button-down shirt and the black silk tie. The once perfectly folded white silk handkerchief placed just so in the suit’s breast pocket. And finally, Franklin L. Pierce himself.

The lawyer was a small man. Smaller than even a normal-sized woman. Dark curly blond hair, thinning up front, with dark brown eyes made the small man visually impressive. In an effeminate sort of way. Glancing at my troglodyte friend and partner, I read his unreadable face and said nothing.

“So, you think none of your associates or competitors are capable of murder.”

A brief hesitation, a narrowing of the eyelids and a shift in his stance told me there was something. But Pierce shook his head and shrugged elegantly.

“For the life of me I can’t think of a soul, Detective. I’m at a loss for words.”

Yeah. Sure.

No matter. Eventually we were going to get back to that little part he forgot to mention. All in due time. I nodded and half turned to look at the office.

“When did you see your partner last?” Frank asked, picking up something off the dead man’s precision-lined desk and in the process forging a look of disapproval from the man standing beside me.

“Last night. Here, in the office, around seven or eight. At the end of the day, the partners usually get together for a twenty- or thirty-minute confab to touch base with everyone. We’ve decided to do away with formal staff meetings during the day. Too stressful. In this work there is more than enough stress to work through. So, we’ve become more casual in our approach.”

“How did he act last night? Was he tense? Was he relaxed? Did anything strike you as being different?” I chipped in, turning to look at the little man again.

“Tired. I would say he was very tired. The last couple of months he has been working on a rather large piece of litigation involving patent rights. A smaller company is suing one of our clients over who owns the patent. Such cases involve lots of detail work and reams of reading pertinent decisions. They are time-consuming and can sap the strength from you.”

“What about his home life?” Frank grunted, putting an expensive pen down on the desk not exactly like he found it. Causing the look of irritation on Franklin Pierce’s face to increase in severity. “Was our victim married?”

“Oh, indeed. Old college sweetheart. Became engaged when Dan was in his last year at law school. Married the day after he graduated. A beauty. Or so they tell me.”

I tried not to smile.

The last statement sounded like something pushing awfully hard toward jealousy. Was Franklin Pierce jealous of our victim’s wife? Could that mean more than a business relationship between Pierce and the deceased? Jealousy was one of the oldest reasons to murder someone. Especially someone who had been as good-looking as our dead man out in the parking garage. I glanced at Frank and saw him nod slightly. We agreed. It was a string in the investigation we would have to follow up on.

“What’s the wife’s name?” Frank grunted, folding his arms across the massive span of his chest, and frowning as he looked down on Pierce.

Frank, when frowning, and as big as he is, could make a canonized saint fidget nervously with his prayer beads. It wasn’t that Frank was just taller than Pierce. It was like looking at Mt. Everest hovering over an anthill. It was about mass. Density. Strength. Oblique intimidation.

Intimidation.

A gravely misunderstood tool, intimidation. When used in the hands of a craftsman it can open up entirely new lines of investigation. It can reveal clues which otherwise would have remained hidden.

“Jocelyn Stewart.”

Frank looked at the lawyer and grunted. Grunted in a tone that made me turn and glance at Pierce and then at Frank.

“Jocelyn Stewart. The one who owns the cosmetics empire?”

“That Jocelyn Stewart,” the lawyer agreed, a thin smirk peeling back his lips as he nodded.

“Who’s Jocelyn Stewart?” I asked.

“She owns Frederic’s of Georgia. One of the largest cosmetics firms in the country. Old money. Really old money if you know what I mean.” Frank answered, glancing at me, and not looking happy.

Sighing, I looked at the lawyer. I knew what Frank was hinting at. Money. Old money.

Meaning lawyers. A ton of them. And power. Layers of political power magnified by the color of green. How Frank and I stumbled like a couple of blind men into these cases was a mystery to me. It had to be Karma. Both of us must have really pissed people off in our previous lives. And for that, we were being grievously punished in this one.

“We’ll need to ask some questions to everyone in the office. Does the deceased have a personal secretary?”

“Certainly. Two, actually. Vivian Spears is Dan’s personal assistant. If you’re interested in Dan’s itinerary, she would be the one to talk to. Deborah Charles is Dan’s records assistant. She keeps track on all of Dan’s legal briefs, documents. Things like that.”

We nodded and said we needed to talk to them.

Two hours later we had nothing. Nothing suspicious. Nothing to point to a possible motive for murder. Nothing for a suspect.

Nothing.

And as usual, when we had nothing, something always came along to break up the monotony.

Riding the elevator down from the law offices, Frank’s cell phone began singing “Take this Job and Shove It.” A country/western tune I really disliked in general and certainly despised as a ring tone. But it was his phone. Not mine. Sighing, but keeping my mouth closed, I eyed the big grunt beside me and waited until he scanned the phone’s screen before clearing the screen and dropping it in his sport coat.

“That was Yankovich. Apparently, we’re getting a new case handed to us. A new old case, to be precise.”

“Huh?”

“Just wait. You’ll see what I mean. We’re gonna meet Yank at the morgue in a half hour.”

Dimitri Yankovich was our shift commander at South Side. Generally Frank and I pulled the four to midnight shift in the detective division at South Side. Yank was the lieutenant in charge of the eight detectives assigned to this shift. He was also second in command of the precinct–which basically meant he kept an eye on everyone–uniformed officers and detectives–who worked with us on that shift. Frank and I and one other set of detectives worked the homicide desks. A third team worked Narcotics while the fourth team of detectives worked Robbery/Larceny cases.

Yes. Business was that good down on our side of town.

Walking out of the office building and into the sunlit walkway which would take us over to the adjacent parking building I slipped a pair of aviator’s sunglasses on and glanced at my watch. It was almost nine in the morning. We had been on duty for almost thirteen hours. Tired, brother, wasn’t even close to describing how we felt. If I didn’t get a hot shower soon and about nine hours in the sack, I knew I was going to do something stupid. Really stupid.