Free Dead Man by Joe Gores

Zimmer?”
    “I
told
you, the man’s a fucking law clerk. That’s why I chose him for this—he wouldn’t dare try a double cross.”
    “But he did,” said Dain. He stood abruptly, picked up his book, headed for the door. “I’ll be in touch.”
    It was the week before exams on Northwestern’s hundred and sixty green hardwood-dotted acres bordering Lake Michigan. Undergrads
     sprawled on the grass like terrorist victims. Dain, in his three-piece suit and power tie, wearing clear-glass horn-rims that
     made him look professorial, stopped a worried-looking coed for directions to the law school. She had a chocoholic complexion
     and a stack of books under her arm that listed her to port like a sailboat beating into the wind. When he spoke to her she
     dropped her books. He caught them before they hit the walk.
    “The law school?” he prompted gently.
    “Oh, ah, yeah.” She half turned, pointed beyond the U-shaped concrete admin building with its signature clock tower to another
     building half-hidden by the green leavesand startling white trunks of some birch trees. “The red brick? With the white window trim?”
    “Many thanks. Good luck with the exams.”
    An hour later, in the pleasantly secluded Shakespeare Gardens, he stopped beside a bench on which a sternly attractive brown-haired
     woman was correcting papers. She wore a tweed suit with a skirt short enough to show several inches of very shapely thigh.
     There was a great stack of law-books on the bench.
    “Dr. Berman?” She squinted up into the sun; Dain shifted so he blocked it from her eyes. “They said at the law review that
     you often came here in nice weather to correct papers.”
    She took off her glasses, said rudely, “I’m faculty advisor for the review. Who are you?”
    “James Zimmer,” said Dain as if the name were an answer.
    The irritation faded. Her eyes softened with memory. “Jimmy Zimmer! God, I haven’t thought of Jimmy for…” She caught herself,
     said sharply, “I asked who
you
were.”
    “Mr. Zimmer has applied to the United States Justice Department for a position as a federal prosecutor. In such cases there
     is a routine investi—”
    “Jimmy? A federal prosecutor?” She stopped just short of an unexpected giggle. “We were law students here together…” Sternness
     tightened her face. “I doubt if I can tell you anything that would be of interest to the Justice Department.”
    Dain put a shoe on the edge of the bench. “How about if Jimmy made the law review or not?”
    She looked startled, then burst out laughing. “You’re good at this, aren’t you?”
    “I hope so,” said Dain, and moved her books aside enough to sit down beside her on the bench.
    When he left a half hour later, he knew that on his own Jimmy Zimmer would have had neither the imagination, wit, nor courage
     to plan the bond theft from Teddy Maxton.
    * * *
    That evening at Zimmer’s apartment building he gleaned a second possibly useful fact from a snide overweight born-again in
     the laundry room. She described a woman Zimmer had been “shamelessly intimate with” for several weeks that past winter
    “Nights at his apartment?”
    Her eyes flashed. “Whole weekends. It ended around the middle of January.”
    “And after that?” Dain’s voice was insinuating.
    “He had a peroxide floozie up one time, a month ago, but I put a stop to that.” Her uncolored lips curved in righteous triumph.
     One plump cheek even dimpled. “I called the police and told them harlots were working out of his apartment.”
    Dain asked God to bless her, and left. Her description of the blonde was “cheap”; her description of the winter lover was
     that of Maxton’s executive secretary, Jeri Pearson.
    A cooling wind off Lake Michigan was puffing its way up the skyscraper canyons to swirl old newspapers against pedestrians’
     legs and tug at women’s dresses. If Marilyn Monroe had been out in it, her skirt would have been up around her ears and