by Arlene James
Someone was explaining the niceties of address to him, “girlie” being an unacceptable substitute for “Ms. Bellamy,” a grown woman and first-rate attorney whether or not Pratt was sagacious enough to realize it before now. Shaking her head, Charly turned the corner and bumped into Darren. His arms closed about her before she could even register what had happened. A familiar electricity shot through her, but she didn’t have to be struck by lightning twice to protect herself when storm clouds hovered overhead. Shrugging free of him, she quickly stepped back.
“What are you doing here?”
“I, um, have that list of names.”
Charly blanched. It was a list of women with whom he’d been involved during the past year, the year, supposedly when he’d been keeping Tawny Beekman in an extravagant love nest, depriving her of her normal means of support as a matter of male pride. Charly walked around him, saying, “Just give it to my assistant.”
“I wanted to see you.”
Her feet stopped of their own foolish accord, but she managed to keep firm command of her tongue. “I don’t want to see you.”
Ignoring that, he said softly, “You look great, but I prefer the real you.”
She folded her arms and made a decided effort to rebuff the pronounced flare of delight his words evoked. “The plain me, you mean.”
“No. The real you could never be plain. Your beauty shines from the inside out.”
She fended off a spurt of pleasure with sarcasm. “I suppose I should say thank you for that. But I won’t. Now if you’ll excuse me…”
“How is Ponce?”
She rocked back on her heels. “You have some nerve asking that.”
“I miss him. I hope he’s not confused by all this.”
“He knows nothing of all this.”
He sighed with obvious relief. “That’s good. But he must be wondering where I’ve gone. He’s too smart not to. If you’d ever like me to speak to him about it, I’d be glad to.”
“No! No, I would not like you to speak to him about it.”
Darren lifted a hand to his forehead. “Maybe we should just settle,” he muttered, “get this whole mess out of the way so we can—”
“Settle?” she echoed, derailing that thought before he could complete it. “Then you’re admitting that you used Tawny Beekman?”
He shook his head listlessly. “No. I tried to help Tawny, nothing more. I didn’t lead her on. I didn’t make promises. I didn’t sleep with her, not after she moved into the building and not even for a while before. But what difference does it make?” He lifted a perfectly agonized gaze to hers. “What difference does it make now?”
She knew very well what he was asking for, and some part of her wanted to give him a reason to keep fighting, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. After all, he was very likely guilty of everything Tawny Beekman accused him of, not that she truly considered the Beekman woman a victim, not anymore. Nevertheless, he would be wiser to settle, especially considering what the firm was charging him for their services. It was not, however, her problem, and she would not allow herself to become personally involved. So she kept her personal opinions to herself and merely walked away, the lawyer in her retorting evenly, “That’s up to you. I expect to get paid, either way.”
Employing a greater force of will than should have been necessary, she managed not to look back.
He simply could not believe how much it hurt. Watching Charly walk away knowing that she detested him was like receiving a death sentence. His life as he had come to envision it was over, and somehow he couldn’t seem to even imagine another.
He couldn’t reach her, couldn’t make her understand that she and Ponce were everything to him now. For the first time in his life he didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to stop the pain. Oh, he had money all right, but without Charly and Ponce what did it matter? What had it ever mattered?
Oh, God, what a fool he had been. Was. Always would be now.
Chapter Ten
Looking again at the subpoena delivered to their office the day before, the very day after they’d agreed to a prearbitration meeting, Charly muttered, “Why would they want a video surveillance tape?”
Helen shook her head. “Beats me. One thing’s for sure, though, that woman’s got more tricks than a traveling magic show.” Helen parked herself on the corner of Charly’s desk and told her what their investigator had found out. “Our guy nosed around the joint where Beekman dances—and I use the term very loosely. The story is that she performed there without pay because Rudell got a charge out of it.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Charly said, unable to reconcile that thought with the Darren she knew, or had thought she knew.
“So does our investigator,” Helen said. “He couldn’t find any actual evidence that Rudell was ever at that club. Tawny herself admits that they met at a party. He says that he realized what she did for a living at about the same time she was booted out by her roommate, and that he finds it distasteful. She says he was turned on by it, but nobody could give our guy any specific dates when Rudell supposedly attended performances. They couldn’t offer receipts, names of anyone who came in with him, nothing. And Rudell’s limo driver didn’t even know where the place was.”
Charly laid aside the paper she’d been studying and rose to her feet. “Okay, we won’t worry about her contention that he deprived her of her livelihood. This video thing worries me, though. I can’t believe Da—Mr. Rudell doesn’t know what’s going on there.”
Helen didn’t have to point out that if Charly had questioned her client about this herself, she might not have these doubts “All he could think of,” Helen told her, “is a brief argument they had in the elevator bay.”
“There must be more to it,” Charly said. “Let’s take a look.”
Though it was late and she’d only managed a quick dinner with Ponce, who was at home in the company of his great-grandmother, she really had no choice but to study the tape immediately. A meeting had been arranged for the next morning by Beekman’s side in an obvious attempt to force a settlement. Both sides were supposed to lay their cards on the table, a minitrial, so to speak, each side hoping to prove to the other that they couldn’t win in court. Charly had gone along with the stratagem, intending to blow Beekman out of the water early. Then Beekman’s attorney had dropped a bomb at the last possible moment by requesting a copy of a certain surveillance tape from Darren’s apartment building. Charly couldn’t allow that bomb to detonate.
Helen got up and withdrew two tapes from the bag she’d placed on a chair in front of Charly’s desk. One of them was obviously a videotape. The other was significantly smaller. “Rudell said something about the audio being separate,” Helen told her offhandedly, “so I figured I might as well get that one, too, just in case.”
Charly nodded as she picked up the videotape and headed toward the screening room. The audio accompaniment remained, for the time being, on the desk blotter, a testament to Helen’s laudable attention to detail. It was only later, after viewing the video, that either of them even remembered it.
At first, Charly couldn’t believe what she saw on the videotape. Then she feared that Darren Rudell had duped her far more seriously than she’d understood. It was sheer desperation that prompted Helen to retrieve the audio recording from Charly’s desk and insist they listen to it. Sick at heart, Charly agreed. Afterward, she knew exactly what to do.
Charly shrugged at the partners and said for the third time in as many minutes, “But we don’t need them.”
Dennis Cartere was the only who hadn’t argued that the two women standing apart at the opposite end of the long room ought to stay and give their statements. He seemed no more able to keep his gaze off the shapely, high-heeled, long-haired duo than the others, however. Darren, on the other hand, stood alone with his friend and personal lawyer, Walt Anselm, gazing out the window.
Charly knew that after what she’d seen and heard the night before, she pr
obably should have called all four of the partners at home, but the lateness of the hour and the work to be done had decided her against it. The clock on her bedside table had read eight minutes after four o’clock in the morning when she’d finally kicked off her shoes. With less than three hours’ sleep she’d barely managed to shower, dress and get to the meeting on time, at a large conference room in her own firm’s building. Beekman’s side appeared to be running a bit later, however.
“It’s absurd to think we don’t need their testimony,” Pratt said. As he spoke, he smiled and nodded at a very tall, leggy brunette with a wealth of curly hair.
Charly refrained, barely, from rolling her eyes. “I’m telling you that I have all the ammunition we need to put Ms. Tawny Beekman out of the extortion business.”
The female in question entered the room just then with her attorney, a fortyish, well-tailored gentleman. A stenographer and two strange men followed. One of whom wore an expensive Italian suit, slicked-back hair and a cocky grin, while the other, obviously the older of the two, sported a poorly fitting jacket in a loud plaid and a look of distinct unease.
“Load your guns, Counselor,” Dennis Cartere murmured to Charly. “The battle officially begins.”
“And in case your shot’s not as powerful as you think,” Pratt said, “we’ll send in the infantry first.”
Charly brought her hands to her hips in pure disgust. Begrudgingly, she led the way to the long, narrow conference table positioned in the center of the room. After greeting Ms. Beekman’s attorney, Johnson Ward, and then Ms. Beekman herself, Charly had Helen send in their own stenographer, who would be making their own record of the proceedings. When everyone had been introduced, Charly sent the witnesses out of the room and got down to business.
“This meeting has been called in a good-faith effort to put this suit to rest,” she said. “While witnesses are not being sworn, they will be expected to sign as statements transcripts of their testimony here. We will use an informal debate platform. In all fairness, however, I think I should tell plaintiff and her attorney now that we possess clear and irrefutable evidence of her intention to extort money from our client.”
“Fat chance,” Tawny Beekman snorted. She threw a venomous glare at Darren and added, “In fact, if he doesn’t want to be charged with assault, he’d better settle quick.”
“Assault!” Darren yelped, as Beekman’s attorney quieted her with a hand on her wrist. Walt Anselm leaned over and whispered in Darren’s ear. Nodding, Darren subsided, but the glance he shot at Charly stated emphatically what she already knew.
“Perhaps I should warn you,” Beekman’s attorney said to Charly, “that we believe we have irrefutable proof of your client’s abuse of Ms. Beekman. At any rate, we intend to make our case.”
Charly sighed. “If you insist on playing out this farce, so be it. How do you want to proceed?”
“We’ll hear first from Mr. Londel,” Ward said.
Londel, the owner of a so-called gentleman’s club, was called in and proceeded to lie like a rug on the hearth. According to him, he hadn’t paid Tawny to dance in a year, ever since she “moved in with Rudell.” He continued to schedule her appearances, he said, because she wanted to please her boyfriend, namely Darren, who apparently got a major charge out of her dancing.
The other defense witness was far more nervous than Londel but did, nevertheless, disgorge the lie expected of him. According to him, Tawny danced because Darren wanted her to, and Darren had bragged about her doing it for free because he took pride in being able to support “his woman.”
“I never said any such thing!” Darren vowed. “I’ve never even seen this man before in my life.”
Some verbal wrangling followed, with Tawny and Darren calling each other liars. Charly was oddly pleased to see Darren in fighting form. In this, at least, he had not lied to her. Might he have been telling the truth about other things, as well? Pratt called their first witness to the table, a perfectly stunning model with long, straight, pale-blond hair and ice-blue eyes. Every guy in the room practically drooled. Except Darren, Charly noted with some satisfaction. Even Anselm, his attorney, couldn’t seem to help smiling warmly at the woman, whose unlikely name was Morgana Hunter.
Ms. Hunter calmly and coolly testified that she had very publicly dated Mr. Rudell for several weeks earlier that year and that when they’d bumped into Ms. Beekman one evening Ms. Beekman herself had stated that she and Mr. Rudell were “neighbors and friends.” Tawny denied it, of course, and claimed that the dating was all for show, that she allowed it because Darren convinced her that his reputation as a playboy was important for his business as it kept his name in the papers. Darren just rolled his eyes, and the next witness was called.
Rita Carpenter, an actress prominent on the local theater scene, testified in much the same manner as Morgana Hunter, except she stated bluntly that she once considered moving into Darren’s plush apartment building only to be told in no uncertain terms by him that it would be the end of their “friendship.” It was apparent, she said, that Darren tried to protect himself by refusing to carry on a personal relationship with anyone who got too close.
“We all knew that Darren wasn’t ready for personal commitment,” she said, “and that when he was, he wouldn’t fool around about it.”
Darren turned his head just then and looked at Charly. Was it possible that he hadn’t merely set out to seduce her? Could it have been more than that all along? He hadn’t, after all, warned her that it could be nothing more than fun and games between them as he had these other women. He had, in fact, said that he loved her and wanted to marry her, although his timing in that could have been better. What was he thinking, feeling now? She had rejected him, been colder to him than anyone else in her memory. What if he was sincere? Charly couldn’t help wondering if she was as stupid in her own way as Tawny Beekman was in hers.
She put away her personal concerns, however, the instant the plaintiff’s attorney produced the video. Tawny no doubt believed that the tape was the clincher, that Darren would surely agree to settle once the thing was shown. Charly, however, knew that it would be Tawny’s downfall. She said nothing as the tape was played, showing Beekman coming on to Darren in the elevator nook, the heated exchange that followed and Tawny following Darren as he walked away, out of sight of the camera. Johnson fast forwarded the tape through what he called “several moments of dead time.” Then Tawny staggered back into view on the screen, her hair mussed, bodice torn and throat bruised, and Johnson Ward paused the tape there for dramatic effect.
“I think that speaks for itself,” Ward announced smugly.
Looking directly at Charly, Darren exclaimed, “That isn’t what it seems. I didn’t do that to her!”
“The camera doesn’t lie!” Tawny refuted.
“But it doesn’t always tell the whole story, either,” Charly stated calmly. With that, she placed the audio tape on the table. Helen immediately got up and began passing out copies of the statement signed by Darren’s head of security at the apartment building.
“The security agent who made this recording,” Charly stated, “told his superior that he did so because Mr. Rudell had seemed upset when Ms. Beekman came on the scene. He was concerned, he says, for Mr. Rudell’s well-being because of the suspicion that Mr. Rudell’s private elevator had been intentionally sabotaged.”
Tawny laughed nervously at that and proclaimed loudly that no matter what was wrong with the elevator, the video proved Darren had assaulted her when she’d begged him not to throw her out in the street. Charly just smiled and moved to the video player with a tape of her own, one with the video and audio integrated. She’d spent hours putting it together the evening before, and while the quality was not as good as she’d have liked, it was good enough.
“Let’s try this again,” she said, pushing the play button. This time the chain of events started earlier.
The video showed Darren trying the elevator, then calling security. The
audio, though not perfectly synchronized, was clearly audible, as was every word spoken that morning by Darren and Tawny. Even the sound of Tawny slapping Darren came through with unmistakable clarity, as did her blatant threats. By the time the screen showed Tawny stumbling around the corner of the elevator bay, disheveled and now clearly feigning that she’d been assaulted, everyone in the room knew that Darren was innocent of Tawny’s charges. Tawny, however, couldn’t seem to believe that her cause was lost.
“This is rigged up!” Tawny exclaimed desperately, while her lawyer sat with his head in his hands. “The words don’t even match the movements of our mouths!”
“You have the security guard’s statement,” Charly said calmly. “We’ll call him to testify personally in court, of course, and the two tapes will be synchronized perfectly by a professional.” Charly looked directly at Tawny and went on. “We don’t know yet how you sabotaged the elevator, but I’ve no doubt we can figure it out. You staged this whole scene, knowing it would be recorded by the camera. You didn’t count on the audio recording, however, or the competence of Mr. Rudell’s security staff.”
“I didn’t know anything about this,” Johnson Ward interjected heatedly. “I knew the case was probably unwinnable in court, and so I applied myself to getting a settlement, but I did not know it was a setup.”
Charly nodded. “I assume you’ll be withdrawing your suit.”
“Yes.”
“No!” Tawny objected.
The lawyer addressed his client sternly. “Don’t you get it? You’ll be lucky if you aren’t charged with attempted fraud and, I suspect, harassment. At the very least, you can expect Mr. Rudell to sue you for reimbursement of the money he’s spent defending himself.”