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of those people yet didn’t have money. Lack of taste, maybe, but they all have bucks. It’s a precondition. Otherwise they don’t get into the fraternity. You don’t get on the A-list for the auctions and fund-raisers. Get your face on the social sheet in the Trib and the Times.”
    “Is that how you did it?”
    “I did it through my wife. She has class and taste,” he says.
    “And your checkbook.”
    “That too.” He drinks some coffee, and I have to divert my eyes. “What else are you gonna do for fun when you get old and flatulent?”
    “I’ve never viewed art auctions as that much fun,” I tell him.
    “I wasn’t talking about art.” He’s talking about Dana. “Come on. Why not? You can hold Metz’s hand and I’ll do the trial. We’ll lift him by the heels and shake him, see what’s in his pockets.”
    “You might not be prepared for what falls out,” I tell him.
    “That bad?” he says.
    Nick and I haven’t talked since our conversation four days ago. I played telephone tag with him for a week before I finally caught him in his office, and then he didn’t want todiscuss the details over the phone. It’s the nature of Nick’s practice. You can never be sure whether your phone is tapped.
    “You want my honest opinion?”
    He nods.
    “All of the pieces are in place, including the transfer of large sums of cash and the laundry fee.” He listens as I fill him in.
    “If your man’s to be believed, he took two hundred thousand dollars while he parked two million of his partner’s money in an account in Belize.”
    None of this unnerves him. “Go on.”
    “He calls his part a consulting fee, but it never shows up on his company’s books.”
    “So we have an accounting error,” says Nick.
    “He tells me the money was actually intended as security on heavy equipment he was supposed to ship south to do a job. Except that none of the equipment was ever moved. According to Metz, the deal never got off the ground. He took one trip down to Mexico that lasted maybe a week, and for this he charged a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fee.”
    “Maybe his time is valuable,” he says.
    “And maybe his two Mexican partners wanted to cleanse some revenue from illicit activities?”
    Nick clears his throat. “Doesn’t mean he knew about it.”
    “On top of all of this, unless I misjudge the man, I think you’re going to find currency violations and probably tax evasion.”
    Nick lifts one eyebrow, rubs his chin, and looks at me with the kind of expression I might expect from an appraiser who’s being told the diamond ring he just told me to buy is melting ice.
    “If you check, I think you’re going to find that he used friends and neighbors to move his fee back into this country in order to do the limbo under the currency limits. And if he did that, I suspect he may have gone just one baby step further in forgetting to report any of it on his tax return.”
    “You didn’t ask him?”
    “I thought I’d leave that one to you.”
    Nick nods, his knowing and understanding nod. This is practiced, refined from years of listening to sordid deeds, so that by now nothing particularly arouses or discourages him.
    “What did he say about the account in Belize? Why did he set it up?”
    “I didn’t ask that either. I wouldn’t want to cut into your options for maneuver.”
    He laughs, tips his cup to me.
    I have often suspected that Nick is not above performing surgery on the facts in a case once the curtain is pulled and he and his client are safely behind it. It is the reason I have refrained from getting into these details with Metz, so that I don’t end up as Nick’s scrubbing nurse.
    “Did you ask him why he kept the money? The two hundred K?” Nick is hoping beyond hope.
    “Unfortunately I did, and his answer was not encouraging, or believable.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Consulting fees.”
    “That sounds fair to me,” he says.
    “Especially if you can get your hands on it for legal