Arnie kept a great set of burglar's tools in the Firenze plumbing van. He was a wizard locksmith, and I figured he'd have us into Bearden's apartment easily, once I talked him into it.
You read a lot of crap in detective stories about guys just walking into people's offices, rifling through desks, breaking into people's houses like it's normal business. It's not. I had to fight off an unwanted case of the 'noids: the cops catch me, my P.I. license goes south, I spend six months in county sleeping with one eye open, trying to discourage the drooling proctologists from getting familiar with the Fagen posterior. As an ex-cop I wouldn't be a candidate for Inmate of the Year.
My hands were shaking, my insides churning as Henry hid himself in the bushes in front of Bearden's place to stand lookout.
It was an Edwardian-style house with large round windows. According to the mailbox, Bearden's apartment occupied the entire ground floor, with someone named Lipschultz living upstairs.
I deactivated the alarm system in seven minutes flat, then coerced Arnie into taking a look at the back door. We heard no evidence of a dog inside, or any other form of life. I finally convinced Arnie to try his ring of keys on the dead bolt. Thirty keys and we had the mate, but the door lock was old and worn; it took Arnie five minutes to pick.
The apartment was large, filled with old, overstuffed furniture; neat and boring. I made my way to the front and tapped on the picture window to let Henry know we were in. We found Bearden's office and took a look around, careful to return everything we touched to its original place and position. Burglarizing a neatness freak requires a lot of extra work.
I took Bearden's high school yearbook down from a shelf and handed it to Arnie. One thing that struck me was the year he'd graduated: I knew Bearden was fresh out of USC, as Zane had told me, but the yearbook indicated that he was at least thirty-two years old. That meant there was an eight-year gap between his graduating from UC Davis and his entering law school.
There was a box of personal papers with a small lock. Arnie opened it in seconds. Inside was a passport stamped with over two dozen trips to Europe during the eight-year period between college and law school, each one with a stop in Zurich, Switzerland. As in bank account.
A look through his income tax statements revealed he'd worked for two major investment banks, the same firms that contributed heavily to Helen Smidge's campaign coffers and that had lobbied heavily for and financed the building of the Farragut skyscrapers in the Market Street corridor. Firms with millions to lose if everyone had listened to Alan DiMarco or a loose cannon like Flynn Pooley.
There was a record of Bearden's frequent-flyer miles on several airlines, dating back years, all of the payment columns on his personal records marked "cash." From Europe, he rarely returned straight home: he flew to the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, a few times even to Panama. Places with bank secrecy rules rivaling Switzerland's.
The slush fund. Bribes and payoffs, smuggled place to place, in cash or cashier's check. No wire transfers, no records to trace. With all the business that Farragut did with the investment bankers, it's probable they put Bearden on their payroll at Farragut or Smidge's request, especially since he wasn't an investment banker himself. His degree from UC Davis was in anthropology.
We'd been on the premises almost an hour. We were both sweating, nervous. I was about ready to call it quits.
"Look at this," Arnie said. "And this."
In the yearbook was the inscription To my best friend, the coolest guy in 8th period study hall (Ha! Ha.') signed Adam Smidgelewski. I knew that Adam was the nephew of Helen Smidgelewski.
A scrapbook photo showed Bruce Bearden, circa ten years old, on a Police Athletic League baseball team coached by Officer Warren Dillon and backed by Smidgelewski Printing, owned by Supervisor Smidge's father and uncle.
Bearden had been a friend of Helen Smidge's family since childhood. He'd known DiMarco's killer, Warren Dillon, as long as he'd known Smidge. Smidge and Dillon, I already knew, were lifelong friends. They'd groomed Bearden since he was a kid, almost the way that Smidge had found and groomed Warren Dillon to be her reactionary mouthpiece.
Arnie nervously checked his watch. "We gotta book it Frank." We put everything back, double-checked that it was just the way we found it.
On a last-minute impulse, I decided to check the trash cans. I found a note at the bottom of the one in the bathroom that read 10 g, meet J.N. Harris Street 9:00, reason w/ M.B. first.
Take ten thousand and meet John Naftulin somewhere on Harris street at 9:00, try to reason with Lynne McBain first. And then what?
Where would he get ten grand on Friday night? I began crawling around on the floor, patting the carpet, much to Arnie's consternation. I noticed one of the drawer sections of Bearden's desk was a rollout. I rolled it out, felt a round, hollow spot under the carpet, peeled it back to reveal a floor safe imbedded in cement.
Arnie got a stethoscope and went to work on the safe. I wiped sweat from both our brows as he twirled the tumblers and listened intently.
The phone ran on the desk by our heads, almost giving us both a heart attack. I turned the volume up on the answering machine.
"Bruce? This is Sean Kaplan over at Bajilla. Listen, we found a pair of glasses on the bar, thought they might be yours. Let's see, it's one forty-three, if you're headed home you should be there in about five minutes. You can call if you like, we'll be here."
It was Sean warning me. He knew what I was up to, he'd heard me on his office phone telling Henry and Arnie where to meet me.
We had to give up on opening the safe, but we'd found plenty. I turned the volume on the answering machine back down and we tidied up in about ninety seconds.
Before we left, I took a plastic sandwich bag out of the kitchen drawer and dropped into it the note Bearden had written about taking ten grand and meeting "J.N." on Harris Street at nine.
I passed Bearden on my Norton on upper Market Street. With the visor on my helmet down, he never even noticed me.