Copp On Fire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp, Private Eye Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

also had a clincher. Supposedly he had an anonymous tip that I had been paid fifty thousand dollars in cash by Bernard Wiseman to help him fake his own death.
    The motive: a scandal brewing at United Talents and Wiseman's fear of a coming indictment on criminal charges. No substantiation but it made a good enough story to string me out and give County a focus of public interest in the case.
    It mattered not a damn that the officers dispatched to arrest me had found me unconscious and bleeding on my office floor. Edgar did not even wish to discuss it, except for a wise comment about thieves falling out. He was trying to provoke me into attacking him, and maybe I would have if I'd been myself. I was just too sick to rise to his bait. I think I had a mild concussion, the man at the trauma center apparently didn't bother to check it out. He put a butterfly on my lacerated scalp and sent me, he thought, off to jail.
    Well, I really wasn't willing to go to jail, nor sick
    enough to let Edgar have his way with me. And I did have some resources. I have never liked to think of friends in just those terms, but sometimes you're reminded. Mark Shapiro is a friend. He is also one of the best criminal lawyers in the area and he isn't in it for the money. Mark is about forty years old, a displaced New Yorker who came West for his bar exams after flunking twice back East. He says that the New York bar was rigged against him and that he would never have been admitted to it. I don't know why. I do know that "passing the bar"—any bar—is not necessarily a matter of simply passing the tests. Mark says it's no more than a method for controlling the numbers in the club. That may be true in some areas. Anyone who can survive the rigors of a decent law school shouldn't have that much trouble passing the bar, with appropriate cramming.
    Whatever, Mark Shapiro is one smart fellow. He is also a friend and sometime employer. He has hired me to help him on several criminal cases. Law and hockey were his only passions that I'd ever discovered. You might think that the fellow is something of a nerd, unless you'd seen him in a courtroom or at a hockey game. He has a warrior's heart in both arenas, and I'd quickly learned to respect him in any arena.
    He was waiting for me downtown. Nobody said so but I suspected that Forta had tipped him. I do know that I was glad to see him there when they brought me in. He hand-held me through all the ignominious formalities, and we walked out the door at nine o'clock on the dot. I was free on my own "recognizance pending an arraignment not yet scheduled." Better yet, my license was intact "pending further developments." All of which was a tribute to Shapiro's aggressive skills and warrior heart. Even though the whole case against me, to that point, was purely circumstantial, without a good, combative lawyer at my side, Edgar would have locked me up and hidden the keys at least until an arraignment hearing.
    When I was released, we went outside and stood on the steps to talk for a moment. "I can't believe those guys, trying to pull that kind of crap on you, Joe. Who the hell do they think we are?"
    I caught that "we" and appreciated it.
    "I mean, with your exemplary police record, to come up with cockamamie charges like those."
    "Save it for the judge, pal, we'll probably need it. Speaking of which—you must know that for all practical purposes you're defending an indigent. You'll probably have to take it out in trade, so you'd better do it quick while I still have a license."
    "They'll play hell getting your license, Joe."
    A man's friends are his greatest treasures, especially for a man like me. I told him that and it embarrassed him. He covered it by telling me, "Be very careful, Joe. This matter is drawing a lot of press. A lot of press automatically translates to heavy politics, and that translates to pressure on everyone to look their best. That includes you, my friend, so be forewarned. I know you like to cut