Dead Man's Rule Page 4

  “May I have ten minutes to discuss this with my client?”

  Judge Harris glanced at the clock on the wall. “You can have five.”

  The judge went into his chambers and Simeon, Zinoviev, and the two men from the back bench filed out into the hall.

  Ben guessed that Simeon would put Zinoviev on the stand rather than agree to a TRO. Otherwise, the judge might suspect that Zinoviev’s unvarnished testimony was bad for his case and needed to be polished before his deposition. Also, as a practical matter, it was easier to get a judge to continue a TRO that was already in place than to enter one ab initio.

  Ben spent his five minutes scribbling down notes for his cross-examination and asking Ivanovsky terse, whispered questions: “Who were those men in the back of the courtroom?” Ivanovsky didn’t know. “Did Zinoviev have any criminal convictions, whether for drug dealing or not?” Ivanovsky shrugged. “What price had the second buyer agreed to pay for the jewelry?” He didn’t know that either. “Who was that buyer?” No idea.

  “But you will win?” Ivanovsky asked anxiously.

  “I’m not sure,” replied Ben. “That’ll depend on what Zinoviev says on the witness stand.”

  “But you must win!”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  The judge reappeared just as Ivanovsky seemed about to say something else. A few seconds later Anthony Simeon and company reentered the courtroom and walked up to the podium. “Your Honor, we have decided to allow Mr. Zinoviev to testify, though we wish the record to reflect our continuing objection.”

  “So noted,” said the judge. He gestured to the witness box. “Mr. Zinoviev.”

  Simeon sat down at the defense-counsel table and watched with an air of faint disinterest as Ben approached the podium, his heart pounding. He had never done a cross-examination without days of preparation. He also had never done one without first taking the witness’s deposition. One of the time-honored maxims of cross-examination is “Never ask a question that you don’t know the answer to”—but Ben was about to ask lots of questions that he had no idea how the witness would answer. And he was going to do it on five minutes’ notice in front of an unforgiving judge and the toughest opponent he had ever faced.

  Ben said a quick prayer, took a deep breath, and smiled at the witness. “Good morning, Mr. Zinoviev. I’d like to ask you a few questions about safe-deposit box 4613 in the American Union Bank on LaSalle Street. Did you sell the contents of that box to Mikhail Ivanovsky?”

  “No.”

  “Did he give you $5,000 last Tuesday?”

  “He loaned it to me, yes. I tried to pay it back, but he wouldn’t take it. He insisted that I give him the box instead.”

  “Why did you ask Mr. Ivanovsky for a loan?”

  Simeon stood up. “Objection, relevance. This is getting pretty far afield, Your Honor. Mr. Zinoviev is here to answer questions about the jewelry in that box, not his personal finances.”

  The judge nodded. “Sustained. Mr. Corbin, at some point you’ll have to convince me that your client had a contract to buy that jewelry, but today your examination is limited to whether that jewelry is unique and irreplaceable.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Ben said as Simeon sat down. “Mr. Zinoviev, have you ever looked inside that box?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s in there?”

  He shrugged. “Some old pearl earrings, my brother’s passport, a few papers, a couple of watches. Nothing special or one-of-a-kind.”

  “What kind of watches?”

  The witness thought for a moment. “A Seiko, I think. A Rolex, too—or it says it’s a Rolex, anyway. Some of the gold is rubbing off, and I don’t think that happens with real Rolexes.” A chuckle ran through the courtroom. Zinoviev grinned and leaned back into the witness chair.

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Have you had the jewelry appraised?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any idea which piece is most valuable?”

  He shrugged again. “Probably the Seiko. It looks almost new. The earrings might be worth something, but the pearls are pretty small.”

  “You recently sold this jewelry, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “To whom?”

  “A trading company. I don’t remember the exact name.”

  “Are those gentlemen back there affiliated with this company?” Ben pointed to the two mystery men sitting in the back of the courtroom.

  Zinoviev sat forward in his chair and it creaked. “I think so.”

  “What are their names?”

  Zinoviev glanced at them nervously. “I think one of them is named Anton and the other is Josef. I don’t know their last names.”

  “Did you let them look in the box before selling the contents to them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you let Mr. Ivanovsky?”

  “I told you, I never agreed to sell the jewelry to him, so no.”

  I walked into that one, thought Ben, kicking himself. “How much did you sell the jewelry for?”

  “Objection.” Simeon stood again. “This is all outside the scope of this hearing.”

  “Overruled,” said the judge. He glanced at the clock. “But do try to wrap this up in the next few minutes.”

  “I will,” said Ben. He was running out of questions, in any event. “How much did you sell it for?” he repeated.

  “I don’t remember exactly.”

  “Do you remember generally?”

  “Not really.”

  “When did you agree to sell the jewelry?”

  Zinoviev hesitated. “Last Thursday.”

  “So you sold the jewelry last Thursday, but you have no idea how much you sold it for, right?”

  “Objection,” interjected Simeon. “He’s arguing with the witness.”

  “And he’s winning,” said the judge, who was now watching with interest. “Overruled. This is well within the bounds of permissible cross-examination.”

  Asking questions about the men on the back bench seemed to make Zinoviev uncomfortable, so Ben decided to do it again. He pointed at them. “Do you think Anton or Josef might have any idea how much they paid you?”

  Ben could see tiny drops of sweat glistening between the strands of Zinoviev’s sparse black hair. “I didn’t say I had no idea how much they paid, I just said I couldn’t remember the figure.”

  “So what do you remember?”

  “I think it was somewhere around $100,000.” He was flustered and didn’t realize his mistake until the words were already out of his mouth.

  Gotcha! “You earlier testified that the Seiko watch was the most valuable of the four items in that box. Would it be fair to say that it accounted for forty percent of the purchase price?”

  Zinoviev now sat on the edge of his seat, shoulders slightly hunched as if he were expecting someone to hit him. “I don’t know.”

  “Thirty percent?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But certainly more than twenty-five percent, right?”

  Zinoviev sat in miserable silence for several seconds. “I guess so.”

  “No further questions.” Ben returned to his seat, walking on air.

  Simeon stood up, but the judge held up his hand. “May I ask a few clarifying questions, Your Honor?” Simeon asked.

  “Not unless you can clarify how a Seiko watch can be worth more than $25,000 and not be unique,” the judge replied. He didn’t wait for Simeon to respond. “I’ve heard enough to convince me that whatever is in that box is pretty unusual and should stay there until we can have a full preliminary injunction trial, at which point you can ask as many questions as you want. Now, I’ve got another trial starting in here in half an hour, and I needed to meet with the two sides ten minutes
ago to rule on some motions in limine. I want you gentlemen to go into the cloakroom back there and work out a discovery-and-trial schedule. Then go to my chambers, and my clerk will give you the next available trial date.”

  The two lawyers caucused with their clients in preparation for meeting in the little room that opened off the entrance to the courtroom. As soon as they were alone, Ivanovsky grabbed Ben’s hand in both of his and shook it vigorously. “You were magnificent!” he said, his voice quavering with emotion. “I thought for sure we were going to lose, especially after I made the judge mad at you for talking. But then you put Zinoviev up there and showed the judge he was lying and he gave us this TRO! Thank you so very much!”

  Ben smiled and gently retrieved his hand. “You’re very welcome. This is a significant win for us, but it’s just the first round. Remember what I said about litigating with our hair on fire? That’s what happens now. Do you have any appointments during the next month that you can’t cancel?”

  Ivanovsky shook his head.

  “Good. Wait out here and I’ll go see if Simeon is ready.”

  Ben found the distinguished defense attorney waiting for him in the cloakroom. It might at one time have been used to store coats, but now it served as an informal conference room for attorneys appearing before Judge Harris. It held a well-used round table and five unmatched chairs, the best of which was now occupied by Anthony Simeon. Ben sat down facing him, and they quickly agreed to extend the TRO from ten days to thirty to give them both time to prepare their cases. They then hammered out a schedule of deadlines for the coming month. As they sat waiting for the clerk to finish in the courtroom, Simeon turned to Ben and said, “By the way, congratulations. That was a nice piece of cross out there.”

  “Thanks, Tony,” said Ben, who was still a little giddy from his victory. “It’s always nice to get a win, particularly when the competition is so good.”

  Simeon’s smile was both affable and hard edged. “Savor the moment.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  SECRET POLICE

  Twenty-two phone messages and forty-three e-mails awaited Ben when he finally reached his office at two forty-five the next afternoon. He had spent most of the morning at Circuit Dynamics, preparing their tax returns for review by John Weaver and his minions. Then he’d spent forty-five minutes taking a slow and construction-intensive drive downtown. After that, he’d wasted two hours cooling his heels with roughly a hundred other lawyers at the “cattle call,” where a single judge went through several dozen cases and checked on the status of each one while everyone else waited. Ben had once calculated that the collective billing rate for all the lawyers kept loitering by the cattle call was about $20,000 per hour.

  One of the waiting phone messages, from a college friend of Noelle’s, piqued Ben’s curiosity. A friendly woman’s voice with a slight but noticeable Russian accent said, “Hi, Ben, it’s Elena Kamenev. Congratulations on your TRO win yesterday. Please give me a call when you get a chance. And say hi to Noelle from me. Thanks!”

  Elena Kamenev was a tall, athletic woman who would have been a serious contender for the Russian women’s biathlon team in the Lillehammer Winter Olympics, but she’d injured her knee in a fall. Her athletic career over, Elena had decided to settle in the United States and become an American citizen. She had subsequently joined the FBI, which always had openings for native Russian speakers who could shoot. She now lived in Chicago and occasionally had lunch with the Corbins or met them at alumni functions. But Ben hadn’t seen her for over a year, and he didn’t think Noelle had either.

  He played the message twice, then sat back in his chair and stared absently out the window at the empty offices in the building across the street. How did Elena know about the hearing yesterday? Why would she call him and not Noelle? He buzzed Noelle to get her thoughts, but she wasn’t in. He wondered if there was any reason to wait to call Elena back, decided there wasn’t, and picked up the phone.

  “Hi, Elena. It’s Ben Corbin returning your call. What’s up?”

  “Hi, Ben. Thanks for getting back to me. How do you like having your own firm?”

  “It can be a headache, but it can also be lots of fun. There’s nothing quite like seeing your name on the door when you walk in each morning.”

  “And how are things going in court? I understand you won a TRO hearing yesterday. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. It’s always nice to win. By the way, how did you know about that? The FBI isn’t investigating me, is it?”

  She laughed. “No, no, of course not. We’re just keeping an eye on a client of yours.”

  That couldn’t be good news. “Who?”

  “Mikhail Ivanovsky. He is a person of interest to us.”

  “Really?” Ben was genuinely surprised. “What’s so interesting about him? Or can’t you tell me that?”

  “I can’t tell you. Sorry.”

  “Can you tell me why you’re investigating him?”

  “We’re not really investigating him,” she explained. “We do routine monitoring of anyone in the US with certain types of backgrounds. We noticed that he had filed a lawsuit and I saw that you were representing him, so I thought I’d give you a call.”

  “Okay,” said Ben, thinking quickly. “So what can I do for you? I assume you’ve seen the complaint and the TRO filings.”

  “I read them this morning. We’re not looking for anything in particular. We’d just appreciate it if you kept us in the loop about developments in the case.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “As I mentioned, your client is a person of interest to us, and Nikolai Zinoviev has a pretty long rap sheet. Any connection between the two of them is something we want to keep tabs on.”

  “I see,” said Ben, jotting down a note to track down Zinoviev’s criminal records. “So do you think there might be more to this case than a box full of jewelry?”

  “Do you?”

  Ben thought for a moment. Zinoviev was lying, of course, but what was he lying about? Just the type of jewelry in the box? Maybe . . . but maybe not. “It wouldn’t shock me.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  A box full of drug money, or maybe evidence of a crime, Ben surmised. Either of those would explain the men in the back of the courtroom. He had to be careful what he said, though. Elena was a friend, but she was also FBI. And it suddenly occurred to Ben that he wasn’t entirely sure his client was clean in all this. “It could be lots of things,” he said carefully. “What do you guys think?”

  “Nothing really,” Elena replied casually. “Like I said, this is just routine monitoring, not an active investigation. I’d appreciate it if you’d send me copies of court papers, let me know about upcoming dates, and that sort of thing. It’s nothing I couldn’t get from the public record, but it would make my life easier if I didn’t have to go dig through the court file every week to find out what’s going on. We’ll reimburse you for copying and postage costs.”

  Sounds harmless, Ben thought. “I’ll need my client’s permission, of course, but I don’t see why he’d have a problem with what you’re asking.”

  “Actually . . . he hasn’t been that cooperative in the past. He can be a little . . .” She paused, searching for the right word. “Cranky. But if you have to ask, you have to ask.”

  “I have to ask. I’m sorry, but my first duty is always to my client. So, how are things at the Bureau?” They chatted for several more minutes, sharing news about mutual friends and catching up on developments in each other’s lives.

  After they hung up, Ben immediately dialed Ivanovsky’s number. He knew he probably should have collected his thoughts a little more before calling, but there were some questions he wanted answered now.

  “Ivanovsky,” said a familiar man’s voice.

  “Hi, it’s Ben Corbin. I just got a call from the FBI, and there are a few things I’d like
to talk to you about.”

  Ivanovsky paused for a heartbeat before responding. “What did they want?”

  “They asked if we would keep them informed of developments in the case—”

  “No.”

  “—and give them copies of any court filings.”

  “No.”

  That sent up a big red flag. Through hard experience, Ben had learned that people who wanted to keep information from the FBI generally had reasons for doing so. “Why not?”

  “They are secret police. I never cooperate with secret police. You cannot trust them.”

  “The agent who called is an old friend of mine,” protested Ben. “I’ve known her for years.”

  “No,” repeated Ivanovsky firmly. “Maybe she is a nice person, but she is secret police. My lawyer must not be informing to secret police.”

  “We wouldn’t be ‘informing,’” Ben replied. “She’s not asking for anything she couldn’t get by walking over to the Daley Center and looking in the court file.”

  “Let her look in the court file. You must not help her.”

  Ben took a deep breath. “Mr. Ivanovsky, what is in that safe-deposit box?”

  He paused before answering. “Jewelries. I told you this already.”

  “Anything else?”

  He hesitated again. “I do not know. You heard Nicki say in court there is an old passport.”

  “Why would those men in the back of the courtroom pay $100,000 for some jewelry and an old passport?”

  “I do not know.”

  “That’s an awful lot to pay for some jewelry, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe it is. It depends on the jewelries.”

  “Is it possible that there’s something else in there that would be worth $100,000?”

  “Maybe,” admitted Ivanovsky. “I told you I have never seen inside the box.”

  “What might that something be?”