I found myself tiptoeing into Dick’s office, as if my steps on his Kerman could raise his hackles out in Oak Brook. The room didn’t run to filing cabinets. He had several shelves of the legal casebooks he felt he needed every day, a slab of burled blond wood that apparently was a desk, and an elaborate sideboard housing German ceramics and a wet bar. Teri and their three blond offspring beamed at me from the burled slab.
A door on one side led to a private bath. A second door opened on a shallow closet. A few clean shirts hung there. I couldn’t resist looking through them; at the back hung the one I’d flung coffee on. He’d forgotten to take it home for Teri to look after. Or maybe he couldn’t bring himself to explain to her how it got that way. I grinned in rather childish triumph.
I tiptoed back across the Kerman to his secretary’s office. Harriet Regner had hitched her star to Dick’s when he was starting out and had to share a secretary with five other men. She’d been his executive secretary now for ten years and managed a small staff of clerks and paralegals for him. If Dick was involved in something truly illegal, would he trust it to Harriet? I thought of Ollie North and Fawn Hall. Men like Dick always seem to find women so enthusiastic in their devotion that they consider their bosses more important than the law. Harriet would take care of anything questionable herself. The clerical grunts she supervised would handle her routine filing elsewhere.
On that fine logic I approached her filing cabinets. Their blond burl matched Dick’s desk, although I suspected in here it was just veneer. Without my picklocks it took a certain amount of force to unlock the cabinets: I had to get
Mr. Contreras to come in and blast them with his power driver. I didn’t really care, though, if Dick knew I’d been here—I hadn’t even bothered to wear gloves. It was one thing to find out what he was up to, and quite another to figure out how to confront him with it. If he thought I’d been burglarizing him it might force his hand.
Once I had the cabinets open, Diamond Head leaped out to greet me. Their affairs occupied an entire cabinet and spilled over into the top drawer of a second. I’d thought I was going to be home free when I found the files. I’d forgotten the amount of paper a law office generated; it was the only way to show they were really working. When Mr. Contreras heard me cursing, he came in to see what was wrong. He clucked sympathetically, but didn’t feel able to help. Anyway, he had to man the lookout post.
I skimmed through the material in the first drawer. It dealt with the conditions surrounding Paragon’s sale of Diamond Head. Paragon had bought a helicopter manufacturer, Central States Aviation, Inc.; the Justice Department had ruled that they needed to divest themselves of Diamond Head as a condition of the acquisition. That explained why they got rid of the little engine company, something that had been troubling me.
An enormous stack of documents detailed a consent decree between Paragon and Diamond Head. I hovered over them, tempted to read them closely, but I needed to get to material that might explain terms of a settlement between Diamond Head and Eddie Mohr. Carefully keeping everything in its original order, I put that stack on the floor next to me and turned to the next drawer.
Here I found the documents dealing with the bond issue enabling Jason Felitti to buy the engine maker. Skeletons from the Felitti family popped out at me in the form of letters from Peter Felitti to Dick. Jason had sold most of his shares in Amalgamated Portage years ago, apparently to finance his political ambitions in Du Page County. He’d used the remainder to acquire a stake in U.S. Metropolitan Bank and Trust.
When he wanted to sell that stake to help finance his acquisition of Diamond Head, Peter put his foot down. Let Jason use debt financing, he wrote to Dick. This was in 1988; Drexel was still riding high. It was relatively easy to find an investment banker willing to issue the debt that would enable Jason to make the purchase.
That same memo explained why Jason wanted Diamond Head to begin with, or at least gave Peter’s version of the case. Jason played golf with one of Paragon’s outside directors, a political crony who also sat on U.S. Met’s board. The crony knew Jason wanted to establish himself as a financial success separate from his brother—why not buy Diamond Head? Since Paragon had to unload it in sixty days, they would take any offer they could get.
All this was fascinating, but not illegal. Not even immoral. It was the next drawer that suddenly revealed what I was looking for.