PMadriani 12.5 - The Second Man

by Steve Martini

  “We can assume Serna wasn’t into chocolates,” says Harry. “Watches? Rolexes?” He looks at Ives. “Banking!”

  The kid’s face flushes. He looks up at Harry.

  “Bingo. Well, we can’t put him on the stand,” says Harry. “They won’t need a lie detector to test his veracity. Just measure the movement of his Adam’s apple. I hope you don’t play poker, son. If you ever take it up, try to sit under the table.”

  “You can be sure they will want your passport until this is over,” I tell him. “As for bail, you have a job and contacts in the community. That’s a plus. Superior Court bail schedule says a hundred-thousand-dollar bond for a death case involving DUI. That means you or your parents have to put up ten percent, ten grand.”

  Ives shakes his head, looks down at the table. “I suspect my parents can raise it. But I’ll want to pay them back.”

  “Of course.”

  “And your fees,” he says.

  “Let’s not worry about that right now.” Harry gives me a dirty look.

  “What about the girl, the one you say you met who invited you to the party? What can you tell us about her?”

  “Not much,” he says. “Only met her the one time.”

  “How did you meet her?” says Harry.

  “Let me think. I guess it was about noon. I was out in the plaza in front of my office trying to figure where to go to grab a bite. This girl came up to me, real cute, you know, and she asked me for directions.”

  “To where?”

  “I don’t remember exactly.”

  “Go on,” I tell him.

  “It must have been somewhere close. I mean, she didn’t come out of a car at the curb or anything. Not that I saw anyway. So I assume she was on foot.”

  “Was she alone?” I ask.

  “As far as I could tell, she was.”

  “But you don’t know where she was going?” says Harry.

  Alex shakes his head.

  “And then what?” I ask.

  “We got to talking. She had a great smile. Said there was a party at some rich guy’s house that night. She said she was gonna be there. It might be fun. Said she was allowed to invite some friends. Would I like to go? What could I say? Beautiful girl. I had nothing going on that night. I said sure. She gave me the information . . .”

  “How?” I ask. “How did she give you the information?”

  “A note,” he says. “It had the address and a phone number. The address was the location of the party. She said the number was her cell phone in case I got lost. It wouldn’t have mattered. I went to call her when she didn’t show and my phone was dead.”

  That means we can’t subpoena the cell carrier to try and triangulate the location of the house where the party took place.

  “All I can remember is it was someplace up near Del Mar. Big house in a ritzy neighborhood. I remember it had a big pool, great big oval thing. I might recognize it if I saw it again. The problem is, you use this high-tech stuff, GPS, you tend to rely on it and you don’t remember anything because you don’t have to.”

  Alex is right. How many of us can remember telephone numbers for friends or family? We push a button and it replaces our brains.

  “I loaded the address into the GPS in the car and I didn’t pay any attention. I just followed the verbal directions. It took me right to the front door,” he says.

  And of course Alex’s car, which he borrowed from his parents’ company, was charred in the accident. Its GPS is toast. I make a note to check and see if we can access the information from its provider, OnStar or NavSat or one of the others.

  “Oh, there was one more thing,” says Alex. “She gave me a name. Some guy. She said that if anyone stopped me at the door, I was to tell them I was to be seated at this guy’s table.”

  “What was the name?” says Harry.

  Ives looks at us, first to Harry and then to me. Shakes his head. “I can’t remember,” he says. “Bender or Billings, something like that. I think it started with a B.”

  “This note, with the address on it. Did she write it down or did you?” I ask.

  He thought about it for a moment. “Come to think,” he says, “neither one of us did. She already had it written out. She just handed it to me.”

  “Didn’t you think that was a little strange?” says Harry. “A girl you just met handing out invitations to a party to strangers on the street?”

  “She looked like the kind of girl who would have rich friends,” says Ives. “When I got to the party, I realized I wasn’t exactly dressed for it,” he says.

  “What do you mean?” says Harry.

  “I mean, there were guys there wearing tuxes, women in expensive dresses and a lot of jewels. And they were all older. Gray hair everywhere I looked. I felt out of place, like maybe she should have warned me. I went looking for her. My first thought was maybe there was a younger crowd somewhere in the back. It was a big place, a lot of ground in the yard. Chinese lanterns lighting everything up. She was right about one thing. Whoever owned the place was part of the one percent,” he says. “A lot of money.

  “When I didn’t see her or anyone our age, I decided to leave. That’s when he came by.”

  “Who?” says Harry.

  “The waiter with a tray of drinks. They didn’t have any beer, but they had champagne. I took one glass, and that’s it. That’s all I can remember until I woke up in the hospital.”

  “Do you remember what he looked like, the waiter?”

  “Not a clue. Didn’t even look. It was crowded. There were people everywhere. I grabbed the glass and that was it.”

  “Do you remember what the girl looked like?” I ask him.

  “Yeah. You couldn’t forget her. Asian. Beautiful face. Great smile. Long straight black hair down to the middle of her back. Dark eyes. Bronze skin. About this tall.” Ives puts his hand flat on edge as if drawing a line across his upper body about nipple high.

  “What are you saying, about five five, five six?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I’d say that’s about right.”

  “Was she slender, heavy? How was she built?”

  “Yeah.” Ives gives me a kind of quick sheepish grin, the college jock. “I’d say she was pretty well built. You know what I mean?”

  “Tell us.” Commander Lust, Harry wants all the details.

  “Well, you know . . . showing some good cleavage. It was a nice sunny day. Summertime. A lot of the women, secretaries, come out of the buildings into the plaza showing a lotta thigh, short skirts. Hers was right up there. You couldn’t miss it,” he says. “As I remember, she was wearing a blue print dress of some kind, tight, a lot of curves, all in the right places, and . . . oh, yeah, she had a tattoo.”

  “Yes?” I look at him.

  “It looked like the tail of a dragon, blue and red; it was a colorful thing. It was on the inside of her left thigh. Fairly high up. By the way she was dressed I could only see the bottom part of it. But you could bet I wanted to see more.”

  “Looks to me like she was waiting for you,” says Harry. “Everything but a pole with a lure on it.”

  “With that kind of a lure, she didn’t need the pole,” I tell him.

  This thought is not lost on Ives. “I’ve wondered about that.”

  “Do you think you could have been drugged at the party?” I ask.

  “I’ve thought about that, too,” he says. “I guess I’m pretty stupid. But they didn’t rob me. They didn’t take any money, my watch, my phone, nothing.”

  “Any idea how you got way out to the accident site?” says Harry.

  “I’m not entirely certain where that was,” he says.

  “Try sixty miles out of town,” I say. “East, out in the desert.”

  He shakes his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. You think I could have driven all the way out there, gotten into an accident, totaled two cars, killed somebody, and not remember anything?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “The only connection fro
m what you’re telling us is your job, this story you were working on.”

  “She was part of it,” says Ives. He’s talking about Serna.

  I sit there looking at him, waiting for him to fill the nervous void. “Just give me some clue,” I tell him.

  “In general terms?” he says. “What it’s always about when it comes to politics and business. What do they say? Follow the money. What the Swiss bankers call Ben and Bin.”

  “What does that mean? Ben and Bin?” says Harry.

  “In international financial circles, Ben is a hundred-dollar bill. Bin is a five-hundred-euro note,” says Ives. “Follow the money. It’s always about the money.” Then he suddenly gives us a distant stare as if he’s looking right through the cement wall in the cubicle. “That’s it!”

  “What?” says Harry.

  “Her name. The girl. The one who invited me to the party. Now I remember. Her name was Ben.”

  Chapter 3

  CLETUS PROFFIT, THE managing partner of the Mandella law firm, looks a lot like one of the characters from an old Hitchcock movie. It was the cadaverous assassin in a tux, brandishing a pistol at the Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much. The title, if you put it in the present tense, would have made a fitting moniker for Proffit’s business card. Though at the moment he was more worried about what he didn’t know.

  “Clete,” as his associates call him, was an up-from-the-bootstraps lawyer, a graduate of Harvard Law, originally out of the Midwest, a man who kept climbing his entire life and never looked back. His father had been a store clerk in a small town in Iowa, a fact that Proffit spent most of his life trying to forget. You could mark the significant waypoints in his career by the scandals he had sidestepped and the bodies he had climbed over along the way.

  He had spent a few years in government, but never as a civil servant. Clete always believed in starting near the top; undersecretary of defense in the waning days of one administration and special assistant to the president in another. He was rumored to be on a short list for a Cabinet spot, perhaps attorney general, as soon as his party was back in power. Poster boy for the revolving door but always, in the end, back to the firm. It was the chair that was always there whenever the music stopped.

  Quiet, in the same way a leopard is before he jumps you, Proffit was always the last to speak on any controversy at a meeting. Not because he was shy but because he was searching for qualities of leadership in others. Leading from behind was the best way to identify competitors so you could sink your canines into the back of their neck while they were still moving forward.

  The firm’s headquarters were located in Los Angeles, though Proffit spent much of his time skipping like a stone off the stratosphere between there and Washington, D.C. He had spent too much of his life getting his hand on the spigot of power to let go now. Increasingly, that elixir and the people who were under its delirious effects resided in Washington, as did the mounting threat to Proffit’s future and his continued leadership of the firm: Olinda Serna.

  “She’s gone now. You can relax,” said Fischer.

  “There’s everything to worry about.” Proffit froze Fischer with an icy glance. “You don’t kill a vampire in a car crash. That requires a silver bullet or a wooden stake. Take your pick. And even then you can’t be sure she hasn’t left toxic entrails behind.” He was curious as to details of how she died. According to the sparse reports, the accident happened on a deserted road some miles from San Diego. What was she doing there? He had already told his secretary back in L.A. to get a copy of the accident report as soon as it was prepared.

  Proffit hated Serna in a way that left its mark on the core of his very being. They both prayed at the altar of progressive politics, and in a public fashion that no one could miss. Proffit did his time on the board of the ACLU and took his share of high-profile pro bono cases for the poor, minorities, the oppressed, and every other needy group.

  Serna wrapped herself in the body armor of women’s rights as protection against the male lawyers who dominated the firm. She served on the board of directors of several women’s organizations and carried the banner of liberation like a cattle prod. She poked Proffit in the ass with it enough times to remind him that electricity could hurt. The last thing you ever wanted was an injured woman coming out of the woodwork screaming sexual harassment when your name was on the short list for power player of the week in a rising administration. To those in the glass bowl of power it was all a matter of perspective. If your heart was in the right place and your behind was on the correct side of the political divide, such claims would wither in a desert of disregard. But woe unto those in the wrong party, or worse, who had made enemies in the activist camp. For them the ninth circle of hell would provide a refreshing interlude from the pounding they would take before Senate committees in confirmation hearings. Tales of pubic hairs on cans of cola were mild compared to the nuclear crap that would rain down on you from the cloud and the Internet, which had a habit of breeding other victims and cloning new complaints. All of this could be yours if you fell into the cross hairs of the wrong activist group, something that Olinda Serna could guarantee if you got on her wrong side.

  “You worry too much,” said Fischer.

  “Is that right? Tell me,” said Proffit, “how much do we really know about what she was involved in, here at the firm, I mean? Do you know?”

  Fischer stood there, his lower jaw beginning to quiver with disclaimers. “I just meant . . .”

  “I know what you meant. She was running her own secret empire within the firm. You know it and I know it. What we don’t know are the details of what she was into.”

  “As I recall, you didn’t want to know,” said Fischer.

  “That was when she was alive,” said Proffit.

  Cyril Fischer was Proffit’s number two, managing-partner-in-waiting at the firm, and a man who Proffit knew would never get there. He lacked the instincts for survival as well as the searing coals in the belly that fired ambition. This was the reason Proffit kept him around. He was useful as a pair of eyes and ears, but he was no threat. Fischer ran the Washington office, at least on paper.

  “If she had people on the cuff in Congress that she was paying off, you’re damn right I didn’t want to know. If you mean poisoned e-mails from Olinda to keep me in the loop, you’re correct. I had no desire to be on that mailing list.”

  It was the kind of stuff a wily lawyer and pillar of the community like Proffit generally didn’t want to know about. He had imagination enough to fill in the blanks. And if Serna got in trouble, Proffit would protect himself like a mobster with at least three or four layers of subordinates to insulate him from accountability. But now that Serna was dead he had no choice. If there were damaging documents lurking in her files, he had to protect the firm, and by extension, himself. They would have to find some lawyerly way to inoculate themselves and disinfect the office.

  Serna was the firm’s “juice lady,” specializing in political law and lobbying—“mother’s milk,” political money, action committees, and donor lists—the dark side of democracy. She had no personal life, no family, and seemingly no existence outside of the steaming swamp that was Washington and in which she seemed to thrive. For some time now, from what Proffit could see, her ambition had gotten the better of her. She had turned her job into a launching pad in an increasingly obvious campaign to unseat him at the head of the table within the firm.

  “I’ve got two trusted associates and three secretaries auditing her files and checking her e-mails as we speak,” said Fischer. “If there’s anything there, I’m sure we’ve got it contained.”

  This is what Proffit expected. They were looking in all the wrong places. “What I’m worried about you won’t find in her files.” Proffit knew that anything in her office files, short of hostage notes or blackmail letters, the firm could probably throw a blanket over under attorney-client privilege or lawyer work product and probably make it stick. “That’s not the problem.”

>   “What then?” said Fischer.

  “Sit down for a minute and let me think.”

  Fischer wandered toward one of the client chairs across from Proffit’s enormous mahogany desk, slumped into the deep cushions, and stared at his boss across the shimmering plate-glass surface.

  What troubled Proffit was that Serna was a loner. If she had shot a dozen people in a shopping mall they would have said she fit the profile. Usually in a hurry, irritable, always on her own mission, a cipher you couldn’t read if they gave you the code. She was dedicated to her work in the way a zealot is to his ideology. She had her fingers in almost everything the firm handled if it had to do with the gods of politics. She blanketed Congress, the regulatory agencies, and the White House and did it all by herself. At times Proffit was left to wonder if she had cloned herself. If she had posted a sixty-hour day on her billings no one who knew her would have accused her of padding the bill. Her work ethic wasn’t the problem. The fact that she had an ambition to match it was.

  More to the point, Serna had her own power base outside the firm, mostly friends on Capitol Hill and in the bowels of the administration. She was a registered lobbyist, one of only three in the firm. She either directly or indirectly ladled campaign money on members of the House and Senate from well-heeled clients, many of them large well-organized trade associations and corporate business groups. It wasn’t her money, but as far as the recipients were concerned, it didn’t matter. She was on the giving end. Otherwise, it would have been an easy task for Proffit and his supporters in the firm to outflank her, undercut her, and send her packing. The problem was, if they did that, they couldn’t be sure of the political or economic fallout.

  If deals were made on critical legislation with Serna in the middle and her friends in Congress on the doing end, high-paying clients of the firm might feel more comfortable with her than with Mandella. Especially if they started receiving phone calls or e-mails from Serna’s friends in the Capitol. She had come from congressional staff when they hired her, consultant to the Senate Banking Committee. She had a lot of friends there. It was a delicate problem, not one that was easily or quickly dealt with.