The Judgment by William J. Coughlin Page B

setting him up to take the fall for the missing funds. That was his justification for his sudden fit of righteousness.
    I put it to Conroy directly. “Was there anything to that?” I asked. “Did he have reason to think you’d tag him with the blame?”
    “Look,” said Conroy, “the safe was in my office. Only he and I had the combination. There was over a million in it, give or take. The money went missing all at once. Maybe the Mouse saw it was gone before I did, and if he did, he’d think I took it. And if he thought that, then who else was there for me to blame but him? Since we were at least theoretically the only two who had the combination.”
    This was confusing. It was a little like one of those puzzles, or whatever they were, that consist of boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes. “Now, wait a minute,” I said. “In spite of all this, you don’t think the Mouse took the money? I remember you said that earlier. It bothered me then.”
    “No, I don’t think he took the money.”
    “Why not?”
    “We’ve been together too long. You get to know somebody. Frankly, I’m disappointed that he felt he had to cover his ass and didn’t come to me to talk about it.”
    “So what do you think is the answer? If he didn’t take the money, and if you didn’t take it, who did?”
    “Somebody else must have had the combination to the safe, somebody we don’t know about.” As he said that, I looked at him, studied him. For the first time since we’d started talking, I had the feeling that he wasn’t telling me the truth, or the whole truth. I knew he was reading me, too. He was perceptive. But Conroy added nothing, said nothing more.
    Finally, I said, “What about those account books that the Mouse kept, the ones in code?”
    “What about them?”
    “Where are they? I understand that if he’s fingering you, the Mouse isn’t going to say, ‘Oh, by the way, I was book-keeping the entire operation.’ He’s going to say what he did at the preliminary hearing. That you were entirely in charge of disbursements, that he was only your gofer.”
    “So?”
    “The books exist, don’t they?”
    “What’re you saying?”
    “That he might have destroyed them, or …”
    “Or what?”
    “Or passed them on to interested parties.”
    Conroy was getting elusive. Obviously, at this point, I felt that I wasn’t getting everything from him he had to give. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he should be holding out when it was in his interest to tell me what he knew, or suspected.
    Rather than lecture him, I decided to take a new tack. “All right,” I said, “let’s talk about one of those interested parties.”
    And then I told Conroy about my troubling lunch with Jack Rivers. I omitted Rivers’s name, just called him “a prominent Detroit attorney.” But the rest I summarizedjust about as it had happened, the bait and then the threat.
    Conroy listened, expressionless, until the very end. Then he gave me another one of those smiles that seemed more like a sneer. “You should have taken the two hundred thou,” he said.
    “You think so? Well, maybe I should have. But that session at the Rattlesnake Club told me a couple of things. Number one, it told me why you’d come all the way out to Pickeral Point to hire me as your lawyer. There are bigger lawyers with better records in Detroit. So why me? Because I’m so far out of the loop that I wouldn’t know you’re too hot to handle. Nobody in town would take you on. Am I right?”
    I waited for a response, returning the stare from those laser-beam eyes of his.
    At last he shrugged and said, “Something like that.”
    “Okay,” I said. “Another thing I found out at the Rattlesnake Club—and this really surprised me—it was that you might, just might, be telling the truth, at least about being framed for the theft of the W-91 Fund.”
    That smile again. “Well, it’s nice to know my own lawyer might possibly believe