While I had the file open, I read through all my entries. One thing I hadn’t followed up on was Zamir’s rage at the law firm that had taken over defending her lover’s murderer. Zamir had tried to attack the Devlin attorneys in court, but Elisa Palurdo said the firm had taken out an order of protection against her. She’d been picketing the firm, which shouldn’t be illegal, unless she was threatening to harm them.
I burrowed into Cook County legal records until I found the order, which was dated about six months after Arthur Morton had taken his life. It barred Lydia Zamir from being within fifty feet of any of Devlin & Wickham’s partners. It also barred her from calling or approaching a woman named Jane Cardozo.
Cardozo was listed in the administrative tab of Devlin’s website; she wasn’t a lawyer but headed their transcription department. All the lawyers in the firm’s far-flung empire dictated their thoughts and briefs to a twenty-four-hour central hub in Chicago, where people with nimble fingers and acute hearing turned them into documents. Like all the big firms, Devlin had clients from around the world; they boasted that they could take dictation in fifteen languages, including Arabic, Mandarin, and Thai.
I could understand why Lydia might have gone after the Devlin lawyers, but not what she might have against the transcription team. Maybe in her fragmented state she held the person who produced the briefs as culpable as the partners.
The bigger question was who got the firm interested in Arthur Morton’s fate and who paid the fees. Even if they were acting pro bono, what that meant is that Morton wouldn’t be charged for his lawyers’ time. However, he’d still have to pay the other expenses—travel, photocopying, taking depositions, the fees charged by expert witnesses, and all the other add-ons. In a big case those add-ons can run to the high six figures. If he’d also been responsible for the lawyers’ fees, those probably hit the million mark by the end of the first day in court.
Arthur Morton had been the semiemployed son of a bankrupt farmer. Who in his orbit had that kind of cash?
I went back to the trial record to see what witnesses had been called to speak for Morton. His pastor, his high school football coach, two of his buddies who’d joined the marines out of high school. All four men said essentially the same thing: Morton had been an ordinary boy until his father’s suicide. He’d become morose, withdrawn, barely managed to graduate from high school. His buddies tried to talk him into joining the marines with them, but he didn’t want to leave his mother on her own, or at least he’d been coached into saying as much at the trial—his lawyers trying to make him look like a loving son, not a maniacal murderer.
As the newspaper had reported, Morton’s counsel took the position that Morton had come under the influence of extremist websites and that he wasn’t responsible for his actions. The trial report listed the websites. Some came from the survivalist movement, but others promoted maximum lethal force against all nonwhite, non-Christian people. Morton had also bookmarked an Aryan matchmaker’s site: keep the race pure by marrying women with guaranteed northern European pedigrees.
The home page for TakeBackOurLand.com showed a trio with caricatured Semitic features, wearing yarmulkes and grinning wolfishly as they stood in front of a grain silo, each with a foot on top of a blond woman in a torn and bloody dress. A giant shell casing, engraved with not on our watch, hymie, was heading for their evil faces. The inside pages had tips on how to protect yourself from the Jews, Mexicans, and Muslims who wanted to take over America’s farms.
Farms in western Kansas used to belong to Americans. No longer. They’ve been taken over by the globalist agricultural companies who are sucking the lifeblood out of Americans. We all know where our wheat and soybeans are going, but you have to bore deep into the manure to find out what’s happening to the profits.
“Farms in western Kansas” was such a specific reference. Why not Nebraska or Iowa? Maybe it was one of those sites that knows where you live when you log on and tailors the message to the address. But in that case, they should have given me a message about Illinois farms.
I entered the URLs into my Zamir case file, but the content was so foul that I couldn’t bring myself to read any more deeply. Instead I treated myself to an actual sit-down meal at a café up the street. I was a civilized person who knew how to use a knife and fork. I didn’t live in a world of hatred.
My own lawyer, Freeman Carter, phoned as I was walking back to my office. He’d asked an intellectual property lawyer to look at the contract Global’s Spinning Earth division had offered me.
“He says it’s not out of line with contracts for reality TV shows. It gives Global ownership of everything you uncover while you are under contract to them. They want to include six investigations, starting with Lydia Zamir, and then five that you will mutually agree on. If you’re thinking about signing, we’ll rework the contract.”
I assured him I wasn’t thinking about signing. “I just wanted to make sure they weren’t preemptively staking out a legal claim to my work.”
“It’s a very strange offer, Warshawski,” Freeman said dryly. “I’ll give—what’s his name? Bolton—a call. It won’t hurt for Spinning Earth to know you have serious counsel watching your back.”
When he hung up, I called Murray, to tell him I was definitely not signing with Global.
“Not a surprise, Warshawski, just a disappointment. We could make beautiful music together.”
“Nothing to stop us without deeding our souls to Global,” I said.
“So you will work with me on Zamir?”
“There’s nothing to work on, except the ongoing tragedy of gun violence survivors, and Elisa Palurdo has that ground well covered.”
“Tell me the truth, Warshawski. Do you know where Lydia Zamir is?” he persisted.
“I have absolutely no idea. Do you?”
“I’ve been trying to find the guy Coop,” he said. “I’m betting he’s the key.”
“Any luck?”
“Shaking the cop tree at the Second,” he said.
The patrol officers, especially the men, were the kind of source Murray knew how to work. If someone in the district knew Coop’s full name and where he lived, Murray would get it out of them.
“When I get it, how about a trade—an interview with Palurdo for Coop’s name and address?” Murray said, or wheedled.
“Why do you and Bolton keep thinking I own access to people? I can’t get you to Palurdo. Or Lydia. And I will try to keep you from Bernie Fouchard.”
Murray cut the connection.
25
Legal Standing
I unlocked the door to my office in a sober mood. If Global wanted to keep track of what I uncovered, they must have some vested interest in Palurdo’s shooter, or Lydia, or Hector Palurdo himself.
I tried to see if any of Global’s senior staff were related to Arthur Morton. The closest connector I found was a Global board member who also served on the board of Sea-2-Sea, the big agricultural firm. However, he lived in Los Angeles. It was hard to believe he paid attention to the woes of small farmers like the Morton family. Still, just to be prudent, I added his name to the Zamir case file.