Beach Lawyer (Beach Lawyer Series)

by Avery Duff

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Avery Duff

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503943926

  ISBN-10: 1503943925

  Cover design by Faceout Studio

  This novel is dedicated to each of my parents, Frank and Betty Duff.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  He knew he didn’t look like the typical person who wound up in this small room using the pay phone. But right now what he looked like didn’t matter. Given the handcuffs locked onto his wrists, he was just another criminal inside, making a call and hoping for a way out.

  “Bring my laptop when you come,” he said into the scuffed plastic receiver. “They took my phone, that flash drive. I know it looks bad, but—no—I didn’t do anything . . .”

  The dark room grew even darker. He stopped talking, turned, and looked through the small Plexiglas window with SUK MY DIK etched into it. A uniformed cop blocked the light, peering in at him.

  Turning away, he spoke lower into the phone this time. “I think it’ll work out. Those faxes . . . oh . . . I already said that? Okay, thanks, no, really, thanks, I mean it. You’re the only person I trust to do this.”

  He hung up and pushed open the phone-room door. As the uniform took his arm and led him down a long hall, he limped, favoring his right leg, which pained him whenever he put weight on it.

  The uniform asked him, probing, “Guy like you, how’d you wind up in here?”

  Knowing better than to answer, he kept quiet as the steel door from booking slammed shut behind them, and they headed along the twin bank of cells. Not many other occupants back here. Couple prisoners draped across their bunks, drunks judging by the odor of ammonia and booze reaching out to him. Still, his cell was clean. Ten by twelve, toilet in the corner, a steel bunk bed bolted into the wall.

  Once uncuffed, he stepped in alone, took a seat, and told the cop, “You guys gotta talk to Venice. Seriously, they’ll back me up. Where’s Officer Sedgwick?”

  “Told you, I don’t know any Sedgwick, and nobody’s doing nothing till morning anyhow. Doctor said you weren’t dizzy or vomiting from that lick on your head, but he’ll drop by to check on you in a couple hours, so . . .” He shrugged. “You’re good to go.”

  Good to go? He was pretty sure his jailer got off on making that crack. Once the cop locked him in and left, the prisoner eased himself off the bunk, knelt down, and looked under the bed. The floor was dusty and he gently swept his hand across it, smoothing out the surface.

  With his index finger, he wrote: L@L@918-------L@L@.

  Trying to make sense of it, he said, “La, la, nine, one, eight, blank, blank, blank, la, la.”

  For several minutes he tried filling in those blanks on the floor and inside his head. Finally he gave up, made it to his feet, and hobbled around his cell. Six foot one, 190, athletic with dark brown hair close-cropped, he looked like a thoroughbred or like he came from people who owned them. More than that, he wasn’t a person who liked his forward momentum blocked. Then again, what he looked like and what he liked didn’t matter. He wasn’t going anywhere except over to his cell door.

  Looking back down the empty hall, he wondered when things started coming unraveled. Was it that broken glass in the picture frame, or was it the phone call at his apartment? What if he’d never answered—would he be behind bars now? Then again, maybe it all started way before either of those things, back when he was growing up on the family farm.

  That puzzle was too much to solve right now, so he laid his face against the cold, painted steel and knew one thing for sure: he wouldn’t be locked up on suspicion of murder if it hadn’t been for one person.

  He thought about the day all this began. Nothing out of the ordinary, was it? Up before dawn, rolling down the Venice boardwalk on his ten-speed beach cruiser toward the outdoor handball courts. Three concrete walls, a partial ceiling, and no back wall, just two players who would soon square off in the predawn hours.

  Moist air misted his face. Nobody else roamed around the beach quite yet. That day had all the earmarks of a good one, and an hour later he was on the courts, crushing that Latino, the one with all the attitude whose name escaped him. Working the guy, about to finish him off.

  He could envision his serve: a spinning blue handball compressing against the concrete front wall, and until the ball caromed away, its true direction was a mystery to his opponent. And Robert Logan Worth, attorney-at-law, age thirty-one and change, pictured that day and slowly closed his eyes . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  Venice, California, Ten Weeks Earlier

  A bulked-up Latino in a white ribbed tank top lunged late for Robert’s serve as the ball flew past him into Robert’s waiting hand.

  “Match point coming up,” Robert said, stepping back to the service line.

  The Latino didn’t say anything. He was too pissed off.

  “Hey, ese,” Robert said, “you see Jacobson’s cruiser? Said he had something to ask you?”

  “Something about this?” The Latino grabbed his package. “Serve, cabrón.”

  Robert bounced the ball a couple more times. “Sayin’ a guy looked like you was runnin’ from a meter maid.”

  “Oh, yeah, I did her. She’s wantin’ more’s what it was. Vámonos pendejo.”

  “What I heard was, you got off so quick, cops’re hunting El Rápido.”

  The Fast One. The Latino opened his mouth to top the insult, and that�
�s when Robert ripped his next serve down the line. Even so, the Latino got to it and underhanded a high, rising arc, forcing Robert out the back of the open court. He got to it on the run and managed a looping return toward the front wall. In play but weak, and he jammed back inside the court.

  An easy shot for the other man, who let Robert’s return bounce once, then bam! The Latino smacked it as Robert ran past. No way Robert was going to get to it in time. The ball hit low and died. Fifty-fifty it touched the wall first, not the ground, but it was still so dark, neither player could tell.

  “Perfecto,” the Latino said anyway. “Coulda saved you all that runnin’ around, abogado.”

  Arms raised, giving himself the point, he was posturing for the other three cholos in the concrete bleachers behind them. By their ink, it looked like they were Venice 13.

  Reserving comment, Robert went to the front wall, knelt, and looked at the blown-in beach sand on the pavement. The initial sand mark was a good inch away from the front wall. Clearly, the shot was short and hit the ground first.

  “Short. My point. My game. My match,” he said, standing.

  “Fuck you say?”

  He closed on Robert, fronting him. But Robert wasn’t someone who made a habit of backing down, and right now he wasn’t even thinking about it.

  “Yeah, fuck I say.”

  Now those bleacher cholos finished a shared Colt 45 quart. The one leaning back watching the beef was Raymundo Reyes, who went by Reyes. The others looked to him for a reaction, but he wasn’t giving them anything.

  Back on the court, the beaten Latino got in Robert’s face, took it up a notch. “What? Out? All on your say-so?”

  “Hey, look at the mark, you don’t believe me.”

  He gave Robert a chest bump. Robert bumped him back harder, bracing for a fight, and said, “The mark, cabrón. Look at it. It was short, not even close.”

  “Bullshit, ese! Fuck, man, tell you what, I let you take it over.”

  “Not happenin’, bro, gotta go.”

  Now Reyes came down from the bleachers and approached the players.

  “You believe the shit you hearin’, Reyes?” the Latino player said.

  “Stay out of it, Reyes,” Robert told him.

  “Was my point. I beat this güero any day, any time.”

  “Between us,” Robert said to Reyes, and he meant it.

  Reyes said, “I hear you, Roberto, but hey.” Now he spoke to the other Latino. “Mi abogado says ball is out, so it’s way the fuck out. Feel me, homey?”

  The guy got the picture fast and moved to the bleachers as Robert and Reyes headed for the bike rack. On the way, Robert checked his cell phone: 5:47 a.m. Saw a few incoming e-mails and sent back a couple of quick replies.

  Reyes said, “Thanks for writing HSN, hermano. Mi esposa don’t know how she find a stolen credit card up in my crib.”

  “Yeah, man, a real Home Shopping Network mystery.”

  Reyes pulled out a roll of cash. “How much I owe you, lawyer man?”

  Robert unlocked his bike and hopped on. “Keep it, but don’t say I worked for free. You’ll kill my rep on the boardwalk.”

  “Boardwalk, shit. You destined for the big time, hermano.” They bumped fists, then Robert rolled over to the Latino player, extended his fist, and said, “You’ll take me next time, for real.”

  The guy bumped back and said, “Sí, next time, güero.”

  As Robert pedaled away, digging hard toward home, Reyes called out, “You gonna be big time, Roberto. ¡Seguro!”

  “Big time,” he said to himself, rolling up the mist-slicked bike path, past the dead-quiet, still-shuttered rows of knockoff-everything stalls, food nooks, and cannabis vendors.

  To the west, the Pacific was still fogged in, but he could feel vibrations from waves crashing on the breakwater’s granite mass. Eternal forces at work, the world’s unknowable pulse beating faintly beneath his rolling wheels.

  He checked several old voice mails as he cruised toward home. Several female voices: “Hey, Robert, it’s me, I—” Delete. “Robert, right? Don’t know if you remember me. I’m an actress, and we spoke at—” Delete. “You still live down at the beach? I was thinking about coming down this weekend, hanging out—” Delete.

  Then his workday calendar showed up. It was jammed.

  Pocketing his phone, he picked up his pace, dodging a drunken man pushing a boosted grocery cart. Alongside the bike path, scattered forms lay on the ground. Junkies in boxes and the walking-around crazed tucked in among young seekers, cozy in North Face bags and Schopenhauer T-shirts, a comet tail of humanity strewn along the manicured grass-scape.

  Robert swerved off the bike path, crossed over the boardwalk, and pedaled a half block inland onto Speedway. Several miles long, Speedway paralleled the ocean, running north from Marina Del Rey through Venice and ending one block inside Santa Monica at Rose.

  Corner of Speedway and Club, a coffee shop opened its doors, and a cop car was pulling up. Its driver chirped Robert, who waved to the cop behind the wheel. Officer Erik Jacobson, a deceptively intelligent Swede. Given his blond hair and body mass, Latinos liked calling him El Oso Polar, the Polar Bear. Erik hated it, ignored it, or liked it. With him, it was hard to tell.

  “Bear claws on me!” Robert shouted out.

  Another cruiser chirp as Robert sped past more blocked-off, car-free walk streets feeding east-west into Speedway. Past a girl in four-inch spikes and a sequined mini—wait, was that a man?—walk-of-shaming down Wavecrest Avenue. Then past Park Avenue and Paloma till he hit Ozone, leaned hard, and cut right. He rolled up this walk street’s rise till he reached a classic gray-frame bungalow with white trim.

  He opened the gate, checked his mail, and walked his bike down the bungalow’s side walkway to a three-car garage in back. Over it rested a framed addition, bootlegged by an owner in the seventies, when nobody cared what happened down here. Back when this part of the beach was trouble town.

  Shouldering his bike, he walked up the weathered wooden stairs to his door. Grabbed his key from his pocket. Unlocking one dead bolt, then another one, he finally keyed the door handle. As he swung open his door, he checked his iPhone again: 6:05 a.m.

  In the distance, someone was cranking up Ice Cube’s LA rap anthem “It Was a Good Day.” Like most people, Robert heard those lyrics and had to smile before he hurried inside.

  And so far, Cube had it right. It was a good day.

  CHAPTER 2

  Inside an elegant sixth-floor foyer, an elevator light blinked green. Its polished doors glided open with a subdued chime reflecting the portal of a law firm. Robert stepped out with his laptop case in hand. Wearing a sports coat and tie now, he followed an oriental runner toward two mahogany doors laden with heavy hardware, keyed the firm’s lock, and opened the door.

  First, though, a ritual. He looked at a bank of names in brushed stainless steel on the wall. The top row: FANELLI & PIERCE, PC, ATTORNEYS AT LAW. Below this were the names PHILIP FANELLI and JACK PIERCE, followed underneath by five other partners’ names. Most important to Robert was a thin, horizontal bar: the dividing line between partners and associates. Right below the bar, topping all other associates’ names: ROBERT L. WORTH.

  He stared at all twenty-two names. Then at his own. Same as he did most every morning when he was first to arrive at the firm. Ritual completed, he stepped through the door into the reception area where four Eames chairs faced one another on either side of the receptionist’s desk. On each side wall hung a single painting. Both of them looked old and expensive. The one to his left belonged to Philip Fanelli. It was an elegant California landscape from the thirties: an arid windswept coastline, two cypress trees clinging to a cliff. On his right was an energetic canvas splashed with bright colors and hewn by scribbled lines. On the frame’s base: Artist Cy Twombly: From the Collection of Jack and Dorothy Pierce.

  He hardly noticed the artwork anymore but stopped here to feel the stillness and hear the faint hum of dormant of
fice machines. As he headed past the receptionist’s desk, he allowed himself a smile because he liked being first.

  Once he made the hallway, the litigators’ offices were to the right. So he took a left, heading into the corporate end of the firm where lawyers like Robert plied their profession. Past a handful of empty offices, he stepped into a no-frills kitchen, not so tricked out that a client would remember he’s the one paying for it. After opening a bag of Peet’s coffee, he got his first pot of the day going and kept moving.

  Near the hallway’s end, he opened the door to his office and went inside. Through his four narrow windows lay eight-inch slices of the building next door. If he angled sideways far enough, he caught a glimpse of the ocean and the Santa Monica Pier, but from any angle, it was not a partner’s view.

  He set down his laptop on an orderly desk dominated by a large computer screen. Behind the desk, document stacks sat on a long credenza. Post-its reminded him in red Sharpie about a closing this afternoon.

  After switching on his laptop and office computer, he entered his password and logged in to the firm’s workflow system. As his phone, computer, and laptop began to sync, he grabbed a John Deere coffee cup and walked out.

  An array of family photographs rested on his credenza beside the documents. Two of them stood out. The first was taken at a racetrack: a good-looking couple, early forties. His parents. Son, Robert, about twelve, wore a coat and tie like his dad. Everybody was posing, focused on a horse, its head wedged between father and son. In the second photograph: the front of a rustic, columned two-story home. Robert stood on the front porch in a tuxedo, his hair slicked back. The girl beside him wore a prom formal. Both of them were about fifteen years old and smiling those smiles most kids have on prom night.

  A minute later, he returned with his coffee cup filled, noticed a swarm of incoming e-mails. All of them concerned one client: Brightwell Industries.

  Once he saw what had happened to his morning, he grabbed a seat.

  All right, dude, let’s kill it, he was thinking.

  First, he downloaded a deal-related, redlined Sale and Purchase of Assets Agreement attached to the earliest e-mail. Brightwell was buying Palmer, Inc. back in Tennessee, and Tennessee law governed, so Brightwell, on Robert’s recommendation, associated with Nashville counsel to take the lead drafting this agreement. The next hour or so he spent absorbing and editing that firm’s twenty-one-page document. His changes were fairly minor until he reached Section 29: Representations and Warranties. That stopped him.