Gabriel Vandermere is a (magneticforce) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-09-25 09:31:00 |
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Entry tags: | magneto, nightcrawler |
Who: Connor and Gabriel
What: A little chat.
Where: LVPD
When: Backstory.
Warnings/Rating: Nope.
Being called into LVPD was nothing new for Gabriel. What was unusual was that it was the police that wanted to talk to him, instead of a client wanting him to come in to bail them out. It was a possibility that he had always prepared himself for. It's not like he didn't know who he was working for and what they did, even if he did his best to stay out of it now. Of course, staying out of it now meant that he was no longer running drugs or assisting in collections, but defending associates and consiglieres dumb enough to get themselves landed in jail.
As much as he would have liked to bitch about it sometimes, Gabriel knew who finished putting him through college and it wasn't the LVPD. It wasn't even his father, but that same damn family that he was called in to defend, even on the most petty of charges. But to be called in himself? He took his time to make sure he looked sharp, shirt tucked in, hair slicked back with a minimum of product, no lunch in his teeth. The days of dealing were behind him now. He was legitimate, he reminded himself before he stepped into the police building.
The very nice officer, Young, escorted him into a small room. A table, walls painted white, no mirror though. A personal chit chat Gabriel decided as he unbuttoned his jacket and sat down calmly in the chair, his long fingers laced together in his lap.
People had taken notice of the fact that Gabriel was continually brought on to defend members of a prominent crime family. Such things didn’t even escape the notice of the local media, so they certainly didn’t fly over the heads of the police. And when someone was brought in with mob ties, it was Connor’s job to feel them out.
Gabriel wasn’t being brought in to answer for the people he represented. Of course not - that would be a quick way to get him killed and lose any information he might give up. No, he was brought in for questioning about the mysterious way his tuition bills had been paid, large sums of money that it records said Gabriel hadn’t had until just before those bills came due. Gifts, or loans, from someone. His dogged defense of Family-affiliated clients made that look a bit suspicious. The charges were posed as a plain, vanilla tax fraud investigation, a search to see if he was hiding some larger sum of money in a tax shelter, though such a thing was unlikely. It was all the pretense they needed, however, to bring him in.
Connor had a decent rapport with the officers in LVPD, but he wasn’t close to a single one. He had never had a knack for getting close to people, and only rarely had even seen the need. It was difficult to relate to people, much of the time, and feigning things he didn’t feel grew tiring quickly. He did enough to stay friendly, and no more than that. When Young passed off the prisoner to him, it was with a smile and a short quip about this one being even worse scum than your average lawyer.
Connor entered the stark white room a few minutes after Young left it. He carried nothing in with him. His clothes were professional but comfortable lived in and worn at the edges, a clean jacket and dress shirt, black and white. He sat down across from Gabriel, and activated the recorder on the table. Then he settled into his chair and looked across the table at Gabriel. “Hello, Mr. Vandermere,” he said. “My name is Connor Baird, and I’m with the FBI. I promise not to keep you long. I just have a few questions to ask you. You can answer them, or not, as you see fit.” He took his time with each word, measuring his speech. His eyes were slightly lidded, hollowed, and it made him seem as if he wasn’t paying particularly close attention even to what he was saying. Such impressions were deceptive, of course. Behind his somewhat laconic expression, those eyes were intent, if cold. He never had been able to figure out the brightness other people seemed to carry in their looks. His eyes were flat and dark, and his stare seemed to pierce straight through the man across the table from him.
Being good at his job meant several things, the first of which was that a few innocent questions about his tax return had nothing to do with his tax return, especially when they could have been dealt with by paperwork. Secondly, the FBI didn't send people to clear up such things. And third, Gabriel was absolutely sure he was in the hot seat.
For years he'd ignored what had been going on between his parents, his mother's slow withdrawal, his father's dogged chase of her and anything else wearing a skirt and now, he made sure to be attentive. Sure there were the lazy hang of his eyelids, the dark slate of his eyes, but Gabriel knew men that would kill their own mothers without batting an eyelash. And, he was more afraid of them than the man across the table from him, even with the stare that could have killed had it been a physical spear.
Still, he knew his games. "Hello, Mr Baird. A pleasure to meet you," he said, easily, smiling through teeth that had been artfully re-whitened at the help of a dentist. Many things of his had been changed with the help of this or that doctor, but there was still evidence of hard years lived in the wrinkles of his eyes and the fact that even in Vegas heat, he still wore long sleeves to cover up the scars of old track marks.
His hands remained steady, even as he stood to offer the other man his hand to shake.It was a politician's move, to smile and shake the hand even in the face of adversity, but it also implied an equal footing. And either Gabriel was very smart, or (and not as likely) too stupid to realize why he'd been brought in. "I'd be happy to answer any questions you have so we can clear this matter up."
Connor reached out and took Gabriel’s hand without standing, a halfway meeting that sent a strong message. He would play along, but only so far. Handshakes, and their meaning to others as a sign of friendliness, had been one of the first things he’d ever learned how to fake. For whatever reason, even adults playfully shaking the hand of a child sought a certain kind of response, and without it, it planted the seed of assumption that something was wrong. Society wanted a strong handshake. It was a sign of good character, friendliness, openness, a willingness to engage. Connor had no desire to engage with the man sitting across from him, but following along, to a degree, tended to work better than being flatly confrontational. So he shook. Then he sat back down. “Thank you.”
There was a flat brown file sitting on the desk, and Connor flipped it open with the tips of his fingers. “I understand that there are some discrepancies with your tax return,” he said. His voice was quiet, measured, soft in tone with a bit of scratch. “You recently finished law school?”
Handshakes revealed much about the people involved. A strong handshake indicated strength, a limp hand weakness, but too strong and it was considered a sign of aggression. Likewise, not pumping it up and down for long enough indicated a desire not to be doing it, while pumping too long showed excitedness. Warmth was indicated when a second hand closed over the back of the other person's shaking hand. This was nothing more than perfunctory, all measured out in a careful dose of mediocrity, nothing given and nothing taken away. Shaking hands and smiling were the first two things he'd had to learn once he went into poli sci. He smiled now, just like he'd learned how to then, with the faintest edge of crinkling around his much brighter eyes, no longer lit by the wild cacophony of drugs as they might have been, several years ago. Now something different drove him.
"Yes, with a double major in political science," he said simply and without glancing down at the file that Agent Baird had flipped open on the table between them. "That's a matter of public record." Available also on the company website, under the profiles if the attorneys at law.
"Mm." Connor flipped over to another page. He'd read it, cover to cover, and he knew what was in it, but the more casual he seemed, the better. "The problem lies in your income." Connor looked up, those laconic, blank disks staring, staring across the table. "There isn't enough of it. You paid for school through gifts, instead." That was what the record said, at any rate - large, generous gifts from an unnamed benefactor, someone who certainly wasn't Gabriel's parents. "What is your relationship with your benefactor?"
It was almost like looking into one of those one way mirrors to look into Connor's eyes, whatever was behind them wasn't anything that Gabriel could see and that, more than anything, was the warning flag to tread carefully. This wasn't one of the officers that protected Vegas' streets, nor even the typical brassy, ballsy agent. Connor Baird was a creature cut from a different cloth. "A beneficial one," he shot back, smiled. "My father is a very wealthy man, with very wealthy friends." And enemies, but Gabriel hadn't been forced to go to them. "Some of them wanted to see me back on my feet again."
"That's kind," Connor said, softly, still looking at the file. It was so practiced, the tone so right, that the sarcasm wasn't actually perceptible. It was impossible to tell if he meant it honestly or not. He did make a very good facsimile of a real boy, after all. All the joints worked as they should, and the voice box in concert with them. "Have your father's friends ever contracted your legal services?" Connor asked, looking up to Gabriel again. Now his expression was flat, the question polite, but perhaps not as gentle.
Only the very worst of hitmen had such a flatness and Gabe did his best to avoid them. Such men were like rabid dogs. One wrong look, wrong move, a step out of place, and they were just as likely to attack him as they were to kill whoever had a price on their heads. The FBI must have been pulling at the bottom of the barrel for this one. "Many people contact me for my legal services. If I can help them, I do. If not, I refer them to one of my colleagues who can better assist them in whatever they might need." They were words, but not an answer, not a definitive one at least. And their delivery was just as seamlessly easy as Gabe's smile and the way he shook hands.
Hands that were currently clasped on the table top, not bracing, not tightly clenched, but fingers loosely woven together. The very ideal of ease from his fingertips to his shoulders and the relaxed splay of his long legs.
“Understandable,” Connor murmured, eyes flicking across that relaxed posture, apparently filing it away. Body language was always useful, always good to remember. “However, you have taken on more clients from one family in particular than nearly any other lawyer in the city.” And there was the heart of it, the thing that ought not be said, but was obvious to everyone. One of the things Connor hated most about the families was their ability to keep people quiet. Even men like this one, who were obviously mob lawyers, could never be accused of associating with criminals. Not until the criminals were put away, of course. Until then, everyone around them felt socially obligated to pretend they had never heard of the circles these affiliated bodies ran in. It wasn’t polite to imply a promising young lawyer at a good practice was on the take from the mob, after all, no matter how many murderers they helped off the hook and helped kill more. As far as he was concerned, the blood spattered wide, and even stained men like this one. “Has the family ever offered you any tokens of appreciation? Or are you repaying a debt to that friend of your father’s? Perhaps he knows them. Or is he a member of the family?” Connor pulled a pen from his pocket, clicking it into place. “I would love to get a name for him, as it happens.”
Here was why he had been called in, why a simple matter of paperwork led to this room, with this man, who said more about his activities to the family than he had in the entire conversation before it was brought up. A passion then. Gabriel did nothing but smile at the man across from him. "The IRS considers gifts to pay for tuition to be non taxable as long as they are claimed. Other gifts require the donor to pay taxes if it fits within certain criteria. There was quite a bit of paperwork involved." Tax law was not his area of expertise, but he did know the particular details of this one.
"As I said on my schedule A, the donations were received from Shelby Shelton, Marcus Wright, and Giovanni Ritoli." A wealthy socialite out of Dallas with a coke habit, some low level thug who had more muscles than brains and could be easily used, and a mobster that had died earlier that year. "My father's name is Dominic Vandermere. You can find him on the Senate floor," he said blandly. "You would have to ask them if they know this family you're referring to, but you might have trouble with Giovanni. He passed away earlier this year."
Convenient, Connor thought, but the revelation that one of the gift-givers was dead did little to ruffle his expression. “That is true,” Connor said. “The problem, actually, is the strangeness of your donors. We can track one to a wealthy family and a number of minor narcotics violations, but neither of the other two have, or had, such connections. Yet the gifts are substantial, enough to draw surprise. Incredulity, even.” He met Gabriel’s eternal smile with a calm stare, and a faint quirk to the edge of his lips. “Two of the men have connections with a major crime organization. Were you aware of this?”
The calm stare was unnerving, less because it was a stare and more because of the blankness behind it. Not even that passionate outburst earlier had changed the flatness of Connor's gaze. An odd one to be sure and one to be wary of. "I am not under legal obligation to ask about such matters. How they choose to earn and spend their money is of little concern to me. Though isn't one usually paying the mob instead of taking money from them?" People that took money from men like that usually ended up in a shallow grave in the desert. Or, in Gabriel's case, owing some extensive favors. Not that he was going to admit to that.
“I guess you’ve never met a loan shark,” Connor said. His mouth split disconcertingly into a brief, fleeting grin, and then it was gone again. “You regularly defend members of the family on a variety of charges in the court room. But you don’t know anything about what they do.” All his sentences were short, clipped, to the point. His sarcasm was expressed neatly by the contrast between those two ideas, without inflection ever entering into it. He spoke as if he was simply stating facts.
"No, never," Gabriel replied, inflection as sharp as Connor's wasn't. He could hear the sarcasm but ignored it, the way it fit into that bland tone, like it had been desaturated of everything. "Despite what you and Las Vegas' finest may believe, it's not illegal to defend them in the courtroom. It's part of their Miranda rights, that they may have legal representation to argue their case, if they can afford to do so. I'm sure you know the rest of it. They must like my rates. " And the smile was back, a little sharper around the edges than before. "Now, are we done with this little fishing expedition or would you like to try casting another line?"
Connor leaned back in his chair, then stood. “Of course. We’ve been done for a few minutes now.” He had the information he wanted. He wanted an impression of the other man, wanted to hear his lies from his own face. Knowing that, and now that he had him on the record lying about it, he could go about the business of proving his wrongdoing - by whatever means necessary.
Connor moved toward the door and opened it, holding it wide for Gabriel, waiting patiently for him to stand to go. “By the way, I heard a rumor that you have an interest in entering politics. Is that true?”
That, he hadn't quite been expecting, but Gabriel would know it for the next time. There was no doubt in his mind that this wouldn't be the last time he saw Connor Baird, no matter how much he didn't want to. "You know what they say about rumors," Gabriel replied as he stood, one hand smoothing down the lines of his suit jacket.
"In this case, that one is true," he said, smile firmly in place as he stepped past Connor, careful not to touch the other man in the least. "The next time you see me, I may be a city councilman already."
Connor stepped through the door and shut it behind him. “Huh,” he said, elegantly, and gestured to the officer to the right of the door, who stepped in to guide Gabriel out. “I guess I know who to bring my civic problems to.” Connor smiled again. It was a smaller smile this time, measured, easy. “Have a good afternoon, Mr. Vandermere.”
"Of course," Gabriel offered mildly, the politician firmly in place. "I'd be very interested in hearing whatever ideas you have on ways to make our city even better." Normally such a statement would have been accompanied by a clap to the arm, perhaps even another handshake, but he had no desire to get that close to Connor again. It was enough that he was going to have to wash his hands as soon as possible. "And you as well." Without offering much more in terms of a farewell, he walked down the hallway, his gait easy and long, shoulders relaxed until he got to the front desk and asked for the restrooms. Unlike most, he didn't race for his car to call his contacts and let them know a fed was sniffing down his neck, that's how far too many of them ended up back here with a pair of fancy new bracelets. He'd wait and call tonight, but first he wanted to clean his hands.