Move to Strike

by Sydney Bauer

  But no matter, he comforted himself as he saw the pregnant and somewhat apprehensive-looking Sara Davis weaving her way in and out of the crowd towards his umbrella-shaded table, for this little fishing expedition should prove fruitful on more levels than one. And even if he did not achieve what he expected to today, there were already many other support strategies in place, the first of which would be a national TV extravaganza set to go to air in (he checked his Rolex), fifty-six hours, thirty-two minutes and forty-five . . . no, make that forty-four seconds from now.

  ‘Miss Davis,’ said Logan, rising from his chair. ‘Thanks so much for meeting me here. I know it is short notice, and I certainly didn’t want to cause any problems by asking for you personally but I . . . well . . .’

  Sara was immediately taken aback. Truth be told she had expected Logan to chastise her from the get-go for visiting Chelsea unannounced. David had urged her not to go solo, but she told him that Logan, who had called her direct line just as Barbara Wong-McGregor was packing up to leave, had requested a private conversation with her and her alone.

  ‘Not that it is any of my business, but I think she should go,’ Barbara had said after several minutes of heated discussion between David and Sara.

  ‘What?’ David had replied.

  ‘Logan sees Sara, a pregnant woman with two male bosses, as an inferior. He wants – he needs – to feel in control and if I were you, I would take advantage of his warped sense of ascendancy and send in Sara to see what she can find out.’

  ‘You want me to send my pregnant partner to meet a man who orchestrated the murder of his wife?’

  ‘No,’ said Barbara, who had rolled her eyes at the suggestion. ‘I want you to allow your fellow, experienced attorney to do her job – to help save your client by finding out as much as she can about his abuser.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that . . .’ David had begun.

  ‘Yes you did, and I understand why, so that’s okay,’ Barbara had said. ‘But the meeting is in a public place and there is no way the famous Doctor Logan is going to try anything untoward in such a busy, fan-filled location. Let me put it this way,’ she had continued, perhaps reading David’s expression and seeing he was still not convinced, ‘if he asked to see you or Arthur, would you hesitate?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Exactly,’ she had replied before she had grabbed her briefcase and headed towards the door. ‘So I suggest that you shove your chivalry where it belongs, David, and allow your co-counsel to do her job.’

  Sara could not help but smile. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she’d said.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ Nora had agreed with a nod.

  And so, short on time, they had discussed briefly what they hoped Sara might achieve, before she turned to leave.

  ‘Please don’t apologise,’ said a smiling Sara now, taking out her sunglasses to shade her pale blue eyes from the strong early afternoon sun.

  ‘It’s just that,’ Logan went on, ‘. . . Chelsea told me how you came to see her yesterday – and with her mother gone and me so busy, I, well . . . I wanted to say thank you, thank you so much for offering her a shoulder to cry on.’

  And Sara was gobsmacked – as Doctor Jeffrey Logan took her first false ‘assumption’ and batted it way out of the window.

  ‘I fear I have been somewhat short – with both you and David. I was frustrated you see, at not being able to see my son. I am going to see him this afternoon at last, so that has eased my concerns. But I know I have to come to terms with the reality that we are now at the mercy of the system and the delays are not your fault.’

  Sara paused, not sure where to begin. ‘Honestly, Doctor Logan, talking to Chelsea was my pleasure,’ she replied, composing herself. ‘Both David and I know how difficult this must be for you. And as for your omitting him from the lunch invitation, I can promise you he won’t be offended. He is currently tied up in a meeting with Barbara Wong-McGregor – discussing the validity of our plan to go with self-defence, so I decided not to interrupt him and come meet you here instead.’

  A tick in Logan’s eye suggested that her comment had surprised him. ‘You have decided to go with self-defence?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded.

  ‘It’s just that I thought the more obvious option was . . .’

  ‘Diminished responsibility?’ interrupted Sara. ‘No, Doctor, you have reared a very bright young man and if we even attempt to claim he has lost control of his faculties, the Commonwealth will shoot us down in flames.

  ‘The law very rarely operates in absolutes, Doctor. True, your son killed his mother, but our strategy is to encourage a jury to look beyond the obvious and remember that there are degrees of innocence and guilt. In J.T.’s case we must convince the twelve that your son was the lesser of two evils. We must make them see that when he killed his mother, he did so to save himself.’

  For once the ‘King of Talk’ was speechless.

  ‘Did I ever tell you why he was born in New Zealand?’ he asked after some time, after the waiter had taken their order for salads and coffees and brought long, cold glasses of iced water that came with an array of colourful straws.

  ‘No,’ said Sara, feeling a little more confident now that she sensed she was holding her own with the clever psychologist. ‘No, I don’t think you did.’

  ‘Stephanie was at a corporate development conference. She refused to come home for the birth. She even had him induced a day early – on the Tuesday, so she could give a major talk on corporate finance at the end of the week.’

  ‘I thought she stopped working for Cunningham, Eather and Groves after Chelsea was born.’

  ‘She did, but her old bosses asked her to be a guest speaker at this conference and of course – Stephanie being Stephanie – she could not resist.

  ‘So you see, Sara,’ he said, his hand reaching across the table but stopping mere fractions of an inch from her own. ‘She was the one responsible for ensuring J.T. was born a full twenty-four hours before he was meant to come into this world – the same twenty-four hours that allowed the ADA to charge him as an adult. So in actual fact, Stephanie started screwing J.T. from the womb – and continued to do so until . . .’

  Logan stopped, before tapping his hand briefly on top of Sara’s, and retrieving it again to pull his sunglasses from his crisp blue shirt pocket. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I seem to be doing a whole lot of crying of late.’

  Sara had to stop herself from retching.

  Moments later, after their lunch arrived, Sara decided to approach some of the issues she had really come here to discuss. She was hoping that she might be able to draw Logan into acknowledging his call to Tony Bishop, and ideally get a sense of what they might have discussed. She wanted to feel him out regarding Tony’s suggestion that the doctor was about to release information on his wife’s abusive nature to the press, and approach the issue of Tony’s confusing ‘tip-off’ to David – his allusion to the fact that Amanda Carmichael was working on something else, something important that might affect the outcome of the case.

  ‘Our next priority, Doctor,’ she began.

  ‘Please, Sara,’ said Logan. ‘You know you can call me Jeffrey.’

  ‘Jeffrey,’ Sarah said and smiled. ‘Our next priority is sitting down to devise a strategy on how we are going to work with the media.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Logan. ‘And, forgive me for sounding a little pompous here, Sara, but working as I have in the industry for so long, I would hope you and David would take my counsel on how we might proceed.’

  ‘Do you have any specific ideas?’

  ‘Not really. With everything else going on I haven’t had a chance to think on it. But I will.’ He smiled. ‘If you like.’

  And Sara, who was ready for an out-and-out argument about releasing the controversial tape, found herself caught short and thus, stuck for words herself.

  ‘Of course I can understand David’s hesitations,’ said Logan. ‘About releasing the tape, I mean.’
/>
  Sara knew he could read the surprise on her face.

  ‘But I can assure you, that despite David’s past friendship with my wife, I know that he is on board one hundred and ten per cent.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sara, now seeing an opportunity to gain back some control. ‘It is true Stephanie was part of his social group in college – in fact, I believe your wife once dated his good friend Tony Bishop.’

  Logan stopped short, his fork mere inches from his mouth. ‘Yes, I knew that,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you did,’ she said. ‘In fact Tony works for Williams, Coolidge and Harrison – the same firm that represents yours and your wife’s legal and financial interests.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Logan replied, putting down his knife and fork as if finally realising her intent. ‘You want to know why I called Bishop.’

  But Sara was too surprised by his frankness to reply.

  ‘His firm is sorting out the issues surrounding Stephanie’s will. I just wanted to see where my children stood – or more to the point where my son stood, given the recent turn of events.’

  If he was a liar, he was very good at it, thought Sara, his eyes hidden safely behind his dark Armani glasses.

  ‘I understand,’ she said, before taking another risk and adding, ‘Did you know that Tony was currently dating the ADA?’

  ‘What? Amanda Carmichael?’ responded Logan, and Sara sensed she might have finally told Logan something he did not know.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sara.

  ‘Wow,’ said Logan, his frown now melting into a rather supercilious grin. ‘Do you lawyers always date in-house?’ he asked, now shoving a large piece of tomato into his mouth. ‘I mean Stephanie, Tony, Carmichael – you and David? What’s that old adage about not shitting where you sleep? Rather junior high of you all, isn’t it? And it most certainly limits the intellectual gene pool from which you draw . . . Oh, I am so sorry,’ he said then, as if realising what he had just said. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ He gestured at Sara’s middle.

  But Sara knew exactly what Logan had meant, and also guessed he was well aware of the ‘seriousness’ of Tony and Amanda Carmichael’s relationship – maybe even counted on it.

  ‘You know, I must tell you something funny,’ he said, his knife now making little circles in the air as if in introduction to the titbit he was about to share. ‘When I first set eyes on Amanda Carmichael, I thought she was you.’

  ‘Ah . . . excuse me?’ said Sara. ‘I mean, the ADA and I, we are . . . well, let’s say we look nothing alike.’

  ‘Not true, my dear, for you are both incredibly beautiful women, but that is not where this little story is going. You see, Stephanie and I attended the St Valentine’s Day Law Society ball last winter, the same dinner where David caught up with my wife.

  ‘Anyway, I found myself at this table of legal heavies and the discussion got around to David and his growing reputation as one of the best litigators in the city – and to you as his professional and personal partner. So I said something like, “Oh yes, they did a tremendous job at the Matheson trial last year”, and asked Gareth Coolidge to point David out. Which he did, of course – at a moment when David and Amanda Carmichael were in the middle of what appeared to be a very private conversation.’

  He dug into his salad again.

  ‘They were standing very close, you see,’ he resumed in between swallows. ‘Close enough for me to assume that this was the Sara Davis that everyone was raving about – the tall, willowy blonde, in the form-fitting sheath now stretching up to whisper something into your fine-looking lover’s ear.

  ‘But then, if I recall, they were joined by another attorney. And perhaps, doing what I do, I read too much into David’s reaction to the disruption. I felt he was a little annoyed by the interruption, you see, that he was already leaning in to her to respond.

  ‘Of course, in hindsight, they were probably just discussing some extremely delicate legal matter,’ he suggested. ‘In fact, that is most definitely what it must have been, given the colour in your loyal partner’s cheeks.’

  Sara sat frozen in her seat, her entire body numb with shock.

  ‘Anyway,’ Logan went on, finally taking off his glasses. ‘It’s funny how these things happen isn’t it – the reckless assumptions that we make? Because then I met you and understood of course that David was lucky enough to share his life with this glowing, full-bodied woman beside him. And the fact that you had planned this child together, well, there is a sign of commitment if ever there was one.’

  But this baby had not been planned, and Sara guessed that Logan knew it.

  ‘Did I tell you that I met Stephanie at a hotel bar following a work conference? She was so smart and sexy and strong. It’s true what they say about those professional dos, Sara – they are the backdrop for many a dangerous dalliance; they throw sexually charged, like-minded people together under the guise of professionalism and the cocktail can be impossible to resist.’

  But then Logan was interrupted by a tour group of middle-aged women from Kansas City who approached him, and fawned over him, and sympathised with him, and said they were behind him ‘one thousand per cent’. He smiled and posed for photos, before long triggering a similar reaction from scores of other fans who seemed to flock towards him like moths drawn to the brightness of his now irresistible flame.

  And in that moment Sara knew exactly what Logan had been trying to tell her. And his eyes . . . his deep brown eyes, flicked towards her with such penetration, such power, that she could swear he was reading her mind. He smiled, and despite herself, Sara felt the contents of her stomach rise swiftly in her throat. She grabbed her bag and ran from the table, determined to find the closest restroom before she vomited in full view of Doctor Jeff and his ever-multiplying following of starry-eyed, faithful devotees.

  36

  Tony Bishop was sitting two feet away from Amanda Carmichael in the meeting area of his expansive harbour-view office. She was reading, her white-blonde hair tied back in a low bun, her glasses on the end of her long narrow nose, her concentration intense. Tony, Amanda and Harry Harrison had spent the better part of the past hour listening to Stephanie Tyler’s controversial phone message – the voice mail being short but to the point. Stephanie had directed Harrison to remove her husband from her will completely, leaving her two children as the sole beneficiaries. She requested that in the event of her death all of her assets and monies, including her stake in the family’s Rockwell Wineries fortune which had an estimated worth of $200 million, be held in a trust and managed by her attorneys until the children reached the age of twenty-one. After which they could invest it as they pleased.

  Then they had been joined by another visitor, a man named Shane O’Rourke from a company known as APS Insurance. Tony disliked the man from the get-go, his entire demeanour screaming smarmy insurance salesman – striped suit, garish tie and slick brown hair framing a too-tanned face.

  The room was unsettlingly quiet as Amanda sat on one of two burgundy silk upholstered chairs, reading a print-out of an email sent almost two weeks ago. It was accompanied by a copy of another email of confirmation from the receiver of original said email – two pieces of correspondence that would set the whole Logan situation on fire and, as Tony knew, cause a national media frenzy in the process.

  From: Stephanie Tyler Logan (Loganhome@webmail.com)

  To: Shane O’Rourke (orourkes@APSinsurance.com)

  Sent: Fri 4 May 9.56am

  CC:

  Subject: Life insurance adjustments

  Dear Mr O’Rourke

  Thank you for sending me the recent brochure on your various levels of life insurance cover. The information was incredibly helpful and has assisted me in deciding how best to adjust my current cover to meet my family’s on-going needs.

  I have read the information in detail and have thus decided to make the following changes to my existing policy effective immediately. From what your documentation advises, there
is no waiting period for any increases nor any of the ‘riders’ I have chosen below and as such would appreciate it if these changes could be made as per the date at the top of this email. The changes are as follows:

  1.

  I would like to increase my existing policy from a basic (lump sum) benefit of $5 million to $20 million.

  2.

  I would like to add the life income option whereby my beneficiary(s) received monthly payments equivalent to my salary (including that pertaining to both my work as an attorney and as a member of the Rockwell Wineries Board of Directors) for a period of my calculated working life (up until I reach 65 years of age).

  3.

  I would like to add the ‘supplementary rider’ noted as ADB or ‘Accidental Death Benefits’ to the value of an additional $2 million.

  4.

  I would like to reaffirm my beneficiary as being my husband, Doctor Jeffrey Logan and the contingent beneficiaries (in the event of my husband’s death) being my two children, Chelsea Marie Logan and Jeffrey Tyler Logan.

  I have, as of this morning, electronically transferred a sum of $10,799.50 to my policy account as a first payment to what will be the adjusted policy effective today. This sum should cover me for the next six months after which additional premiums can be direct debited from my account as was done previously.

  Thank you so much for your assistance in this matter. I would appreciate it if a return email to the above email address could confirm your receipt of this request and activation of its recommendations.

  Yours sincerely,

  Stephanie Tyler.

  The return email read:

  From: Shane O’Rourke (orourkes@APSinsurance.com)

  To: Stephanie Tyler Logan (Loganhome@webmail.com)

  Sent: Mon, 7 May 10.47am

  CC:

  Subject: Re: Life insurance adjustments

  Dear Ms Tyler,

  Thank you for your recent email regarding the requested adjustments to your APS Life Insurance Policy.