by Avery Duff
Robert knew what she meant. He’d seen his father gazing off across the farm. Lost in thought, and his father wasn’t considered old.
“He wasn’t gazing, though,” Gia said. “He was staring at his front door. At Jack, standing there with his daughter. A wolf inside the door.” She leaned closer to Robert. “He couldn’t take his eyes off them, didn’t even know I was there. That’s what Jack didn’t count on. Lionel was eighty-four then, eighty-nine now, and Jack gave him a reason to live. That’s why the old boy got well. Why he keeps hanging on—so he can grind poor Jack down.”
Grind Jack down? How?
He started a third recording file. “I’m curious,” he asked. “Did you and Jack discuss any current litigation he might be involved in?”
“Sure, litigation between you two. You’re asking a million eight for malpractice, and good luck with that. How long has he put you off so far?”
Not once so far, he thought, but he couldn’t answer her without discussing his case. Jack, on the other hand? He could talk to anyone. Shout it from the rooftops if he wanted. The lawsuit was his secret, and sharing it was up to him.
“What are you driving at?” he asked her instead.
“Well, unlike you, Jack direct-deposited his paycheck. So I know what he earns, and I’m saying he doesn’t have a million-eight cash. Not even close to that much.”
That brought him to his feet. “What?” he asked.
“He pays all his and Dorothy’s living expenses. He insisted on that when they got married, and he pulls down, what? Two million a year?”
Two million. That’s the number Robert used when he was deciding to sue him for the million eight. He figured Jack could handle that much without upending the matrimonial applecart.
“Half his salary goes to the tax man,” Gia said. “Thousand a night for this place. That’s a hundred grand a year at the rate he fucks around on Dorothy. Tailored clothes—what’s he call them? Bespoke? Travel with Dorothy, best restaurants, big man grabbing checks all over town, European sports cars, top cabin everywhere, year in, year out.”
“Loans. That’s what banks are for,” he said.
“Sure, if he asked Dorothy to cosign, and that I kinda doubt.”
He doubted it, too, and tried to stay calm as he went over what this might mean. Dorothy owned the house. That Cy Twombly in the lobby wasn’t Jack’s, either, was it? All he owned was his name on the frame. Even so, the idea he might be strapped never dawned on Robert, especially after Jack’s text to him confirming their million-eight settlement.
Listening to Gia, he started to worry.
She said, “Look, Mr. Worth, I know him better than you ever will. Better than Dorothy, too. So believe these two things: he burns what he earns, and he’d rather die than admit it to you.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “He hates you as much as you hate him.”
That’s a start, he decided.
“Besides,” she said, “I don’t see myself testifying against Jack under oath. Under penalty of perjury. You were in my shoes, would you?”
Before he could answer, she was out the patio door. He followed her outside, and as she eased herself into a steaming Jacuzzi, he set down his phone on the deck to pick up their voices.
“Why?” he asked. “Why even think about protecting a guy like that?”
“Thinking about what’s best for me. Either I’m willing to incriminate myself—under oath—or I’m not.”
“Wait a goddamn minute. Incriminate yourself? He’s the one who . . .” He stopped before committed a crime slipped out. He hadn’t given up yet on his current deal with Jack. “Tell me what you’re talking about.”
“I won’t incriminate myself. Once Jack finds out that I won’t, that’s gotta be bad for your team.”
Very bad. Forget actually going to court. It was the threat of litigation that carried weight for Robert. Without his threat of Gia testifying—the very heart of his claim—Alison would be facing her word against Jack’s—again. Yeah, very bad news for Alison—and for him.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“Risk Never Sleeps,” she told him. “That’s on Seymour Watkins’s business card.”
Seymour Watkins. He wondered where he’d heard that name.
Gia turned on the Jacuzzi jets, told him to quit recording her. Then she told him what really happened when she was fired from the firm.
Turned out, Seymour worked for the firm’s insurance broker, calling on the firm several times a year to make sure it was satisfied with its coverage. RISK NEVER SLEEPS, his card read, but Seymour, fifty-five, did, sometimes even dozing off in the firm lobby.
Because the insurance company never moved off its quote, anyway, it fell to Gia as office manager to entertain him on the firm’s nickel. They’d always end up at Chez Jay’s. Peanut shells on the floor, Sinatra and Tony Bennett on the box, right down Ocean Avenue from Santa Monica Pier.
There Seymour would sit, slouched across from Gia in a dim booth, plowing into a rib eye, positive that this drunken year he would finally bed Gia Marquez.
“Face looked like it might explode any minute,” she told him. “Finally, it did. Well, not his face. His heart.”
Insurance, he kept thinking. What had the ex-office manager done with the firm’s insurance to incriminate herself?
Quite a bit, he learned. Gia knew, same as Robert, that the firm had never been sued for malpractice. Still, it was paying well over $100,000 a year for malpractice coverage. “Insurance it never used,” was how she put it to him. So one day, she walked the firm’s quarterly malpractice insurance premium check down to Jack’s office, along with a batch of other checks. As managing partner now, Jack signed it. After that, she walked the signed check—for $25,000 and change—downstairs to Leslie’s desk.
Gia had scribbled her signature on the back of it. Then Leslie, a bank officer, made the deposit into her good friend’s personal account.
Before she went that far, Gia called Seymour and broke the bad news: the firm went another way on their malpractice insurance, but they’d still use Seymour for everything else.
“No hard feelings,” she told him. “Drop by whenever you’re in town.”
After that, she altered the firm’s certificate of insurance that proved it was currently covered. A simple one-page printed form. All she did was change the dates of coverage on the old one, typing x’s in boxes for Limits of Liability, Type of Coverage, and Deductible.
“Stupid easy for something so important,” she told him, and when she circulated the one-pager to the partners, nobody said a word.
Gia wouldn’t have risked it when Philip ran the show, but with Jack in charge, office procedure had gone a little slack. Gia made the firm deposits and picked up its bank statement, which included the firm’s actual check with her forged endorsement on back.
Year one, she sweated out the firm audit, but they signed off on the books and took their big fee like good boys. After that, she got used to living with the risk, slipped Leslie five grand each quarter, cashed premium checks, and lived large. That is, until Seymour’s heart exploded chuffing a Pall Mall straight outside Hustler Casino in Gardena.
Seymour’s replacement, she told him, was an actual professional who did what any pro would do. Call on the managing partner of the firm: Jack Cross Pierce. Ask Jack what he could do to recommission the firm’s malpractice coverage.
Hearing that, Jack knew Gia was the only person with access to pull it off, so he laid hands on the firm’s bank statements, almost a formality, and nailed it down quick. All Gia had needed was an insider at the bank, and that meant her friend downstairs: Leslie DeRider.
“He fired me the night you heard him screaming,” she told Robert beside the Jacuzzi. “But Lionel doesn’t know a thing about this. Not one word. And he never can know. But come rain or come shine, there he sits, Lionel Brightwell, still hanging on to life. Delaying the day Dorothy inherits the whole shooting match,
and grinding poor . . . well, you know, right?”
Yeah, he knew. Sitting on a chaise, his face buried in his hands: grinding poor Jack down. She turned off the jets, floated in the water. It was quiet and still in the canyon, but there was plenty of noise inside his head. He tried coming to grips with things he knew for sure, making educated guesses about others.
First of all, he believed her story. Jack must have met her here and filled her in on Alison’s lawsuit. No other way she could know about it. And Robert already knew the firm paid about $100,000 a year for insurance it never filed a claim on. Gia liked to gamble. She must have liked her odds cashing those checks.
And admitting multiple felonies to him? That made her whole story even more credible. Until now, she had protected Jack, lied to Robert after Santa Anita about why Jack had fired her. But now? Access to her loyalty was up for grabs.
She stood up, slid from the water, and sat beside him, her body wet and hot, radiating onto his.
“The cash he paid you?” he asked. “That was to keep you quiet, right? Keep you in line?”
She nodded. “Until you showed up with all your talk about suing for malpractice.” A bell chimed inside, and she excused herself to check on it.
Alone now. The more Robert thought about her story, the more sense it made. All of it had the ring of truth. After Jack fired Gia, he must’ve cooled off and made nice in spite of what she’d done. He needed her to stay quiet about his mistakes conducting firm business. In the Brightwell study, Jack must have flipped out when he heard about Gia’s hush money. No doubt, Jack believed Gia had broken her word and already revealed the truth to Robert.
Grinding poor Jack down, he thought.
Now, he recalled his last night in the firm lobby. There was Dorothy, telling her husband that Lionel’s physical’s results came back. That Lionel was in excellent health. And there was Jack reacting: “So glad to hear it, Lionel,” he’d said. “That’s great news for everybody.”
Overreacting, Robert thought. Great news for everybody except you, Jack.
It was no secret at the firm that Lionel would hold his financial reins till the very last minute of life, longer if he could. That was when Dorothy would slip out of the top one percent and into the upper echelons of the very wealthy. Less than a billion after estate taxes, but not much less. No doubt, Jack had already imagined ways to lay his hands on as much of it as he could. If that meant only 10 percent of the fortune, a hundred million was a payday Jack could surely live with. Forget the prenup. If Jack wanted, he could stay married and live even larger than ever.
Gia came outside, sat beside him in a thick hotel robe over . . . he wasn’t sure over what.
She said, “In my defense, I lie a lot. But it’s usually to myself.”
“Gia,” he said.
“You know where all this is headed?”
Catching up, he saw what was already clear to her. He had stepped into a situation bigger than anything he could have scripted. Bigger and better for his client.
If Gia was right about Jack’s finances, suing him personally wasn’t going to cut it. He sells a few cars quick, picks up a half million, and maybe he bullshits a bank on a signature loan for another quarter million.
But a million eight, cash on hand? If Gia was right, no way he had it. That meant Alison’s case was now aimed at a new target.
The firm.
Basic partnership law stated—and he paraphrased it to himself: If one partner fucks up, they all fuck up.
To him, that meant this: Jack Pierce allowed the firm to go uninsured at the time he assaulted Alison Maxwell; had an affair with the office manager, the same woman who lapsed the firm’s malpractice insurance; and he paid hush money to keep his partners from finding out about it.
Under partnership law, each of the partners were responsible for his behavior. Like Jack, the firm would never want an internal situation like this one going public. Rumors alone would kill them. He thought about how the exaggerated gossip might unfold among Westside legal wags: What? They let their malpractice insurance lapse? The managing partner raped a client while he was tripping out on PCP? Screwing the office manager? Raped her, too? So, Brightwell’s business is up for grabs, right?
And on and on. Some two-bit firm could survive it. Not Fanelli & Pierce. Same difference as O.J. Simpson murdering his wife versus O.J. Smith doing the same thing. This firm could not withstand an assault on its own business judgment—what it was often paid fees to possess—and stay on its feet. Once public, this news was a fierce liver shot to the firm’s body. The firm would pay up, possibly faster than Jack paid, because each partner had so much to lose.
The firm. All the partners and each of them. The deeper pocket. If Jack wasn’t flush, that’s where the money was.
As Alison’s lawyer, he had an obligation to go against the firm if need be. To sue them all and make them all pay. Fair’s fair. They let Jack Pierce get out of hand, gave him the firm’s reins. Not him. They let Jack bully a firm client, assault her, and withdraw from her case. Not him. And Philip and the others let him get fired without lifting a finger.
“The firm,” he told Gia.
“What I thought, too,” she replied. “I told Leslie to wait over at the pool. Be nice, and maybe she won’t ask for too big a slice of our pie.”
“What are you talking about, our pie?”
“Hey, I’m out five hundred cash money on the room, and if I sleep over, I’ll want snacks,” she said, kidding around with him. “Did you think ahead, Boy Scout? Bring a swimsuit?”
Our pie. As they headed over to the pool, he tried sounding indignant about Gia wanting a cut. According to her own version of things, she’d committed bank fraud, for Christ’s sake. Even so, he’d already figured she would want compensation for filling him in, tilting his way against Jack. And why not? Why not go ahead and make her a consultant for his side, long as he could keep a lid on what it cost his client?
It turned out, Gia wanted enough to pay off her mortgage and back taxes, even gave him an accurate number on her loan balance. Once he backed her down to a $500,000 consultant’s fee, the heated pool opened up in front of them, its sky-tinted water turquoise and pink in the darkening canyon.
The only swimmer was Leslie, her banker suit folded on a deck chair. One lap, crawl, the next, underwater. Strong swimmer, an OC girl doing her thing.
Far end of the pool, a waiter set up guacamole, chips, and beer. Leslie worked a sidestroke now and talked to Robert and Gia. “Hey guys, s’up?”
“Not much,” Robert said.
“You sure? This place is kind of romantic.”
Gia took his arm. “Easy, Les, he’s got a lot on his mind.”
“Just sayin’,” Leslie said. “You two look baller together.”
Gia walked him down to the far end, signed the drinks ticket, and the waiter took off. Leslie swam over to them. In one motion, she swept out of the water, straight to her feet like a competitive swimmer.
“Hola, Roberto,” she said. She sat beside Gia, slid Gia’s robe off her shoulder, and kissed her bare skin.
Friendly neighborhood banker, he couldn’t help thinking. Jesus, these two.
“So,” he said. “Hi, Leslie.”
“Is this place cool or what?” Leslie asked. “How’d you find it, G?”
“It’s been around for a while,” Gia said.
“No, I mean, it’s so hard to find. My GPS is fried. I drove around forever. Finally, a Bel-Air cop showed me the way.”
Lights flashing, he’d bet.
Gia stood, dropped the robe. “You two talk. She’s diabetic, Mr. Worth,” she said before knifing in the water.
Diabetic? He wondered what that had to do with anything.
“You’re from the artichoke capital?” Leslie asked him.
“No, that’s Castroville. I’m from the garlic capital, Gilroy.”
“Oh, right, right, but both of them are close to the bay.”
“Monterey Bay is over the h
ill, not too far as the crow flies.”
“Did you ever surf Four Mile?”
“Never had time to surf growing up,” he said. “Farm boy, I had lots of chores.”
But he had surfed Four Mile when he was younger. Before he got serious his tenth-grade year. Four miles from Mission Street in downtown Santa Cruz, a secluded beach, cliffs on the point, walk-in access only, an epic break when it was going off.
“Yeah,” she said. “I heard it was undeveloped all around there. I want to try it out but no time these days, not since becoming a grown-up. As you already know”—she pointed to her chest, nipples straining the sheer material—“I heart banking.”
He recalled her T-shirt from Santa Anita. “That’s the word on the street,” he said.
“What about Mavericks?” she asked.
Another surf spot up north of Santa Cruz, real monsters up there. “Why don’t we get back to banking, Leslie?”
He could tell she didn’t want go there. She stood up, that one-piece clinging to her. No need to worry about hidden recording devices. Through the gap in her thighs, he saw Gia swim up behind her, lay her arms on the coping, and wink at him.
He told Leslie, “Gia said we should talk about something.”
Leslie touched her toes, came back up. “Well, yeah. So.” Another breath. “I was wondering, if you had a bunch of client money, what would you do with it?”
“I don’t know. Why?” he asked, letting her do the talking.
“Well, like, if you had a client, say, and if you both put your money with me? A lot of money? I’d keep my job, keep it for sure. That way, I don’t lose my benefits, my medical and, you know, like that.”
Her medical. He peered around Leslie’s body at Gia.
“Diabetic,” Gia said again.
“I could never promise you that, Leslie,” he said.
Leslie wasn’t much of a listener. “After that, I would make sure I earned your business. Seriously, Robert.”
“I can’t do it,” he said. “Sorry.”