“I don’t think I can make it before six, Luke.”

“I got plenty to keep me busy here, Warshawski. I’ll be waiting for you.”

When he’d hung up I looked at my watch again. It was close to three now—I guess Loring had to prove he could keep me waiting, since I had made him come south. Corporate egos are a much more disagreeable feature of my job than the occasional thug.

I called a friend of mine who was a senior counsel for the Department of Labor, and was lucky enough to find him in his office.

“Jonathan: V. I. Warshawski.”

It had been some months since we’d last spoken. We had to go through the ritual of discussing baseball—Jonathan, who’d grown up in Kansas City, had a regrettable affection for the Royals—before I could ask what I needed to know. I sketched it as a hypothetical scenario: a company wants to convert a union’s pension fund to an annuity and pocket the cash. They get the duly elected officers of the collective bargaining unit to sign on to the plan.

“Now, suppose the officers sign on without putting it to a vote of the rank and file. Would the courts see that as legal?”

Jonathan thought a bit. “Tough one, Vic. There’ve been some related cases under ERISA, and I think they hinge on how the local conducts its business. If the officers make other financial decisions for the local without a vote, I think they’d probably find that it was legal.”

ERISA was a twelve-year-old law supposedly designed to protect pension and other retirement programs. It had already generated more volumes of federal case law than the Talmud.

“What if the officers received, well, substantial cash for signing onto the plan?”

“A bribe, in fact? I don’t know. If there was evidence of intent to defraud the union … but if it was just to convert a pension to an annuity, it’s possible ERISA would find it unethical but not illegal. Is it important enough that I should check up on it?”

“It’s pretty important, yes.”

He promised to look into it by Friday. When we’d hung up I wondered what position Dick was really in. He must have looked into the legal angle before getting Eddie Mohr to sign over the pension fund. Surely he hadn’t been so blinded by greed that he’d exposed himself to a federal prison sentence.