by Dan Decker
How is a young woman partnered with these old geezers?
Max had been pushing sixty-five.
I leaned back in my chair, trying to put all the pieces together. When things were not how I expected, it always made me take a second look, both to examine my own biases as well as the situation to figure out what was going on.
As I read through her company bio, I learned that she had become a partner in the company ten years before.
“What would have made these guys willing to partner with one so young?” I wondered aloud. She did not list any degrees by her name. I couldn’t figure it out from the bio alone. “Perhaps she had technology skills that aren’t apparent, or she had a source of money they needed.”
I looked up from my phone and nearly ducked when I saw Vivian heading straight towards me.
I shook my head, resisting the urge to hide because I had done nothing wrong.
If Vivian had somehow spotted me and was coming out to talk with me, I would make a pleasant conversation with her before parting.
But she had no reason to know who I was, no reason to be suspicious of me parking in her parking lot, so I figured that it was a pure coincidence that she appeared to be heading straight towards me.
I continued to study the information on my phone while watching her in my peripheral vision.
When she got close to my car, I held my breath, but she passed without stopping.
Looks like I’m lucky today, I thought, looking at her in the rearview mirror.
She walked with a confident gait. I’d only caught a glimpse of her face because I had not wanted to stare, but the picture online had not lied. She was an attractive woman.
I had not been interested in titles initially when I looked at the leadership, but I saw now that she was a senior vice president. I didn’t know Mason’s previous title, so I couldn’t say if she had somehow supplanted him. I sat in the car for a few more minutes, researching Meridian Solutions until I had exhausted everything I could find online.
I was glad I had made the drive out to the actual office building because it had given me a sense of what the place was like. I looked around and identified the walkway where Mason must have gone for his walk by the river. I studied the river, thinking it would’ve calmed me down.
Unfortunately, it had had the opposite effect on Mason. I imagined him reentering the office and getting into a brawl with Max that had ultimately ended in Max’s death.
I was about to start my engine to leave when I noticed in my rearview mirror that Vivian was walking back towards the office and was going to pass right beside me.
I would wait until she had gone before starting the engine to avoid drawing her attention.
At some point, she would know who I was. I didn’t want her remembering that I had been here scoping out the office. It had not been my intention to spy on her, but she might remember me if I wasn’t careful.
I studied her through my rearview mirror. Was it just my imagination, or did she have a triumphant look on her face?
Was she feeling this because she had managed to remove two partners?
Something about her made my skin crawl.
I could not decide what it was.
Penny was right, I thought. Something was wrong with the situation. Perhaps it was just a set of fortuitous circumstances that led Vivian to an increasing amount of control within the partnership, or perhaps, she had manipulated her way up.
Whatever the truth, I would get to the bottom of it.
I waited until she had disappeared back inside the office building before I left.
11
Ellie greeted me with a smile when I arrived back at my office and handed me a couple of envelopes.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Aren’t you still supposed to be out sick?”
“I actually started feeling better this morning, and I knew it must’ve been driving you nuts to have a temp, so I thought I’d come in for the afternoon.”
“I was doing okay,” I protested, “things are working just fine.”
“Sure,” Ellie said with a knowing smile. “Mason Harwood called earlier. He wants you to call when you have a second.”
“Thanks for the message.” I started walking toward my office. I glanced back at Ellie. “It’s nice to have you back.”
“Good to be back.”
Once I was inside with the door shut behind me, I dialed Mason. He picked up on the first ring as if he had been waiting. The note Ellie left indicated that it had been over an hour since he called.
“Mitch,” Mason said. There was a long pause as if he was going to ask what had taken me so long to call him back, but he stopped. Perhaps he remembered that I wasn’t his employee and had other things I had to do.
It was not unusual for me to take an hour before returning a phone call. Sometimes, it might be a day or two before I got back to somebody. If it went longer than that, I always had Ellie call to explain my delayed response.
“Mason,” I said, forcing optimism into my voice, the sort of thing I always did when talking to a client whose life was on the line, “I’m glad you called. I have a small update for you on the case, but let’s first get into why you called me. How can I help?”
“I have had time to think about it and I want to fight this thing hard. I’m convinced that I was not in my right mind. I don’t know how, I can’t fully explain it, but I don’t want to go to jail for murder.”
I smiled, glad he had come around. I had been afraid he was going to tell me that he wanted to talk about a plea bargain. While I had an obligation to inform him about Cindy’s offer to start up a discussion, if he had been in the mood for a plea bargain, I might’ve waited a day or so to give him a chance to calm down, just to make sure it was something he wanted to do.
“I have a meeting scheduled with my investigator for this afternoon, he will get going on it right away. He mentioned to me that he just finished up with a big case for another attorney, so he’s wide open. He should dig into this quickly; hopefully, with another week or two, we’ll have something more for us to talk about.” I paused to let all that sink in before going on. “I should tell you, though, that I have already had a preliminary meeting with the prosecution.”
“Already?” Mason chuckled. “Man, you do work fast, don’t you!”
“Perhaps I need to temper your expectations that we’re going to resolve this quickly. You should be in this for the long haul, the long fight. However, the prosecutor is an old friend of mine from back in the day and she wanted to chat about the case.”
“How do you know her?” Mason asked.
I hesitated but decided just to go ahead and tell him the full truth, rather than risk him learning of it some other way and accusing me of hiding something. “We used to date. This was a long time ago, back in undergrad, back before either one of us went to law school.”
Mason was silent for so long I started to wonder if the call had become disconnected.
“Are you talking about just a date or two, or was she a former girlfriend?
“Yes, to the latter. We had a brief relationship during college. It didn’t last long, she wasn’t my type, and I ended it after that.”
“So the prosecution is being represented by a woman you dumped?”
I chuckled. “I guess you could put it like that if you want, but I should be clear that she and I have a very good relationship at present.” I hesitated, thinking about the last time she and I faced had off in court. It did appear that whatever had been egging her on that day was not going to be an issue now.
If I felt like it was going to be problematic for this case, I would let my client know and would probably even waive a portion of my fee so he could find another attorney.
But I wasn’t going to walk away from this case just because Cindy Seakowics was the prosecutor. No, I had too many questions I wanted to answer. I wasn’t convinced another attorney would do as good of a job representing Mason as me.
In my professional judgment, I was still the best choice as his attorney.
I could almost hear the gears turning in his head. “Do you think I should get a different lawyer?”
“I don’t think you need to,” I said without hesitation, “but I will certainly keep you abreast of any developments if I feel it would be beneficial for you to be represented by somebody else. As I said, we have an excellent working relationship. She called me up and wanted to meet for lunch if that gives you any indication of how things are between us.”
There was silence on the other end, far longer than I was anticipating.
“Okay,” Mason said slowly, “I’ll still proceed with you for now, but no hard feelings if I need to go somebody else.”
“I would understand if you did. I believe there’s something to your concerns that you were not in your right mind that day, and I intend to get to the bottom of it. Winston is one of the best investigators I’ve ever worked with. We work well together and we’ve cracked a lot of cases.”
“So what did she say?” Mason asked as if he had not been listening to a word I said.
He would have to make up his own mind.
I just hoped that I would still have this case at the end of the week. I was looking forward to figuring this puzzle out.
“She wanted to talk about an offer,” I said slowly, wondering how he was going to take the news.
“I suppose that’s understandable, considering the circumstances, isn’t it?”
“It is. I told her that I would pass her suggestion on to you, but that we’re still in the preliminary part of this case, and we weren’t anticipating discussing numbers at this point.”
“The option is still on the table?”
“It is for now,” I took a deep breath before going on and chose each word with care, “if that’s an avenue you want to go down, we would need to start the discussion sooner than later—”
“Do you think I would get a better deal now if I went to discuss an offer early on before they are entrenched in the case?”
“That’s difficult to say.” I thought he wanted to fight this thing all the way? “It doesn’t hurt your case to talk about a plea bargain, at least in the eyes of the court. Having said that, I would, however, recommend we wait until we have a preliminary report from my investigator.”
“Let me think this over.”
“Sure. Take all the time you need. Do you still want me to have my investigator start on the case? It is going to cost a fair amount of money, but I would recommend you have as much information as possible before making any decisions. Think of it as an investment into feeling good about your choice regardless of which decision you make.”
“Okay, let’s go ahead.”
“I’ll keep you up to speed.”
Once I was off the phone with Mason, I turned my attention to another case. My telephone appointment with Winston was not until 3:30 PM, so I still had plenty of time to get something else done.
It wasn’t until almost 4:00 PM before I got a phone call from Winston.
I hesitated, thinking of mentioning to him that he was late, but deciding to let it slide. He was good enough that I wasn’t going to call him to the carpet for a little tardiness, particularly when it was a rare occurence.
“Thanks for calling,” I said to Winston as I opened up the notes I had written on my computer about the case.
“Is this the case I read about in the newspaper?” Winston asked. “Didn’t your client get caught red-handed, literally?”
“He did, but that doesn’t mean he’s guilty. I’m not convinced that there wasn’t some sort of manipulation going on.”
“What gives you that idea?”
“I’m going to hold that back from you for now,” I said, a smile forming on my face. Winston knew how I liked to operate, but regardless, he always tried to get as much information as he could, hoping I was gonna slip up and give him key information at the beginning. I liked to see what he could find coming from an unbiased perspective.
It might cost more to operate this way, but I found that an unbiased perspective was more than worth the cost we paid. I couldn’t count the number of times Winston had looked at something different than me because he was unbiased by what we thought we knew. If I had told him my view of the situation, it might have colored how he saw it, and we might never have stumbled upon some of the evidence that had been critical to successful resolutions for my clients.
“Fair enough, I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.”
“I believe that one of the partners—not going to tell you who because I want you to look at each one of them as if they are the potential suspect—was trying to manipulate Mason into killing Max.” I hesitated. “Or vice versa. I don’t think they were particular about who needed to die. They were just trying to stoke the fire until one of them went too far and started a physical altercation.”
“Two birds, one stone?”
“Precisely.”
Winston thought about it for a long moment. “So you do have inside information on this case already, I take it; otherwise, you wouldn’t be pointing me in this direction.”
“I have a hunch and a guess. I’m hoping you can find something real.”
“I’ll see what I can turn up.”
“Perfect.”
12
It had been two days and I had not yet heard anything back from Winston, which was hardly a surprise. He sometimes took weeks to get back to me with preliminary information. Winston liked to come to his own conclusions and then waited for several days before giving me anything he had found. He felt that it was valuable for him to let his ideas sit to see if he made any subconscious connections that weren’t immediately obvious.
I was in a lull in between some of my other cases, so I had a few extra hours to strategize and think about Mason’s case. Just so that I had a change of scenery, I went to a local coffee shop I liked to frequent for the pastries. I sat in a booth with my back to the wall, connecting my computer up to the Wi-Fi.
Before I started my research, I pulled out a notepad in front of me and started thinking high-level about the case.
The biggest obstacle I had to get over was, of course, Mason getting caught red-handed. I wrote that down on the notepad.
I wrote down the name Vivian with a big question mark by her name, and then underneath that, I wrote Penny with a big question mark by her name as well.
I leaned back in my chair, rubbed my temples, and review that conversation I had with Penny the day when she wanted to hire me as a third-party attorney after her husband had been killed.
There was something about that that was just still so off. I didn’t know what I was going to do about it, or even if there was anything I could do, but the whole thing just seemed so strange that I had to believe there was more to it than just her dislike of Vivian.
I had not asked Mason if he had a prior relationship with Penny, mainly because I had been in his home. I wanted to make sure circumstances were right before I brought something like that up. If I did broach the topic, I preferred to have evidence in hand.
I stared at my page of notes for a couple of moments before I brought up an internet browser on my computer and started to do basic research on all the parties in the case. As Vivian was the one I was focused on, I decided to do her last because I figured she would be the most interesting.
I started with the victim.
Max, tell me your secrets, I thought as I went to the Meridian Solutions website again, just to remind myself about his background, and saw that there was now a prominent memorial for him on the front page.
I studied his picture, imagining in my mind how he and Mason had fought one another in Max’s office.
Everything I had read about Max so far seemed to say he was energetic.
There was a link under his name. I clicked on it and was taken to statements from all of the remaining partners of the firm, everybody except Mason.
Vivian’s wo
rds were at the top. After I read what she said, and those from the others, a thought came to my mind.
“She doth protest too much,” I said out loud before I looked around and remembered that I was not in my office. It did not appear that anybody had heard me, but even if they had, it was not like I’d said anything confidential.
I started running internet searches on Max. I quickly learned that he was almost a decade older than Mason. It was not too long before I was looking at a press release from twelve years back. After Mason’s original partners had left, Max had been the next partner. There were laudatory statements from both Max and Mason as they talked about the other in glowing terms.
Little did they know that things would be quite different at the end. Broken relationships were, unfortunately, an all too common occurrence in many businesses.
I made a note to ask Mason for some history about how he had picked up these other four partners along the way and what had happened to his two original partners before I continued to research Max.
The man was smart. He had a Ph.D. in history from Stanford, as well as a Masters in accounting.
It was an unusual combination, but judging by the fact that he had been the CEO of Meridian Solutions prior to his death, it was easy for me to see how he might have seen both of those things as critical toolsets for his career.
I looked for social network profiles on Max and didn’t find anything other than an incendiary Twitter account. This wasn’t necessarily a surprise because he was old enough that he might not have cared to ever create any of the usual social networking accounts.
As I reviewed his Twitter profile, I started to assume that Meridian Solutions had become his life’s focus. Other research shows that Max had divorced twice before marrying Penny. As far as I could tell, he had no children.
Perhaps this was why he had been so intent on trying to make Meridian Solutions as big as he possibly could, so he could feel like he had left behind a legacy when he died.