The Associate

by Rachel Sinclair

  Now, I was officially wealthy. That was the oddest thing in the world.

  Harper was going to be astounded when I told her. Or, maybe she wasn’t. After all, she probably read the paper as well. She had to have known this was coming.

  I just couldn’t get over how quickly it all went, however. As of this morning, I had no clue this was coming. Now, not even 12 hours later, I was a millionaire. It was as if I had won the lottery.

  I had a crisis of conscience, however, at the way that it all went down. Betsy had arranged for this to happen. She got Dr. Kim to do it for her. And yet, she was going to be even wealthier from this whole arrangement than I was. After I took my cut, her award was going to be over $10 million. And she was the one who made sure that it happened! She was Austin’s killer as much as Dr. Kim, yet she was going to profit over it. That didn’t seem right. If I had any ethics at all, I would have admitted the truth to April and be done with it.

  Yet, I knew that I couldn’t. Betsy had told me in confidence about what she had done. Attorney-client privilege dictated that I couldn’t say one word. What I could have done, however, if I had a decent bone in my body, would have been to withdraw from the case. Let Betsy find somebody else to settle for the blood money. That’s what this was. Blood money. It was tainted, so I couldn’t feel entirely good about it. I hated that, too. I hated that I had to always look at this money as tainted. I had to know that I got this money because a kid was dead. A kid who had a decent chance of living if only his mother hadn’t arranged for his death.

  Still, she was the one who had to live with what she had done. I was sure that she believed, at the time, that she was doing the right thing. She had seen her husband slowly pass away in agony from the same dread disease that Austin had. That had to weigh into her thinking. But still, she should have waited until she got the results from the genetic test before she did anything. She should have tried that one last thing – the gene therapy. Austin could have lived a long, happy and productive life. He could have contributed much to society and to the field of aerospace engineering. Betsy took that chance away from him. She had to live with that. Perhaps that was punishment enough.

  I arrived at Harper’s beautiful home that was in the heart of Brookside. I had secretly wanted to move to this neighborhood myself one day. I had a home in Leawood, that was also a desirable neighborhood, even though my home was tiny compared to Harper’s. Maybe that was what I would do with this windfall – I could buy a historic home in this district. I loved the way that these homes looked. The architecture of the 1920s, which was when these homes were built, fascinated me. Homes just seemed so much more solidly built in the 1920s, compared to more modern homes. My own home was mid-century, and it was typical for that era – it was built ranch-style and was rather small. Only 1500 square feet. But these Brookside homes were two and three story. Many were Tudor-style, others were Colonial and still others were Cape Cods. Many featured large porches and many were built in stone.

  Harper’s own house was a shirt-waist and was three stories with a large porch and sun room. I had my pie in my hand as I knocked on the door. A large, friendly Golden Retriever came bounding to the door when as I stood there, and Harper opened the door and greeted me with a smile. “Welcome,” she said. “Come on in. I’m so excited that you’re here to see my home and my family.”

  I walked in the door and immediately saw two identical girls. They both had black hair and green eyes, and they both looked to be around 13 years old. I also saw a tall man with salt and pepper hair and large muscles. I figured that was Axel and the two girls had to be Rina and Abby. Harper talked about them all the time.

  “I have a potato casserole in the oven,” she said. “And a baked chicken, plus salad. I hope all that is good for you.”

  “Sounds amazing,” I said. “Here’s my dessert. I picked it up from Dean and Deluca. I hope that it’s good.”

  Harper smiled. “Oh, you live close to Dean and Deluca? How lucky you are. I love that place. That place and the Whole Foods are probably my favorite places to shop, bar none.” She took the Tiramisu and put it on the island in her kitchen. “It looks amazing.”

  Dinner was excellent and her girls were hilarious. Rina talked a lot, and Abby sat quietly, not wanting to interject. She let her sister have the floor, and her sister took it with gusto. I heard everything about Rina’s life, including all the school gossip and all about the TV shows that she loved to watch.

  Abby, for her part, just quietly sat there, occasionally talking about some of the books she was reading. She also came alive when Harper told me that Abby was an excellent flute player and that she had just made first chair in the Middle School band. She did beam about that, and told me all about some of the pieces she was practicing for sectionals and how she had a solo.

  Harper seemed to have an amazing life, and I yearned for that myself. I envied the fact that both of her daughters were healthy, and that neither girl was facing an uncertain future. Maybe Amelia will come home and she’ll be just as vibrant and alive as these two girls. Maybe they can all be friends. I took a deep breath as I listened to the girls talk, thinking about Amelia and silently praying that I could have this kind of life one day.

  One thing was for sure. If God came down and told me that I could either have the $5.5 million that was coming to me from this medical malpractice award, or I could have Amelia healthy – I couldn’t have both – I wouldn’t hesitate. I would give up that money so fast…

  After dinner, the girls went up to do their homework, and Axel and I enjoyed some wine while Harper drank water. “So,” Harper said. “What did you think about Rina and Abby?”

  I nodded my head. “Amazing girls. You’re doing a great job with them.”

  “You have two kids, right?” Harper asked. “You should bring them next time. They’re a lot younger than my girls, of course, but I still would love to meet them.”

  I took a deep breath. I still had a hard time talking about Amelia. I never liked to tell people how sick she was. I sometimes felt that if I didn’t talk about Amelia’s illness out loud that it somehow didn’t exist. That was silly, of course. It did exist. She was sick. She was possibly going to die. I had to face that fact. Still, I wasn’t ready for the questions. “I’ll bring them next time,” I said. “But I would love to have you over for dinner, too. I don’t cook a whole lot, but I do make a mean pot roast.”

  As Harper cleared the dishes, Axel and I bantered. I liked him. He was a man’s man. Plus, he really seemed to love Harper. He looked at her the way I used to look at Sarah. That seemed like so long ago. Sitting there at that table, seeing Axel get up and help Harper in the kitchen and watching them tease each other, I somehow had problems picturing my doing the same with Sarah. It was as if I had never loved her. I intellectually knew that I did, at one time, but I just couldn’t conjure up the emotions I felt when Sarah and I were in love. Those emotions seemed foreign to me.

  After Harper cleared the table, she came back in about ten minutes and I knew that it was the right time to tell her the news. “I settled Betsy Ward’s case today,” I said. “You probably read in the paper about what happened.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was going to ask you about that. I would imagine that they’re willing to settle.”

  “They actually did settle. Today. I think that when the news broke, they knew that they were going to have to settle everyone’s cases as rapidly as possible. The quicker the victims get confidential settlements the quicker this story is going to die. That’s PR 101, really.”

  “Right.” Harper nodded her head. “Still, wow. They already got you in to settle the case. How much?”

  “$18 million,” I said, and Harper gasped.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I wish I would have gotten on this case with you sooner. Congratulations.” She raised her glass and I clinked my glass with hers. Axel did the same.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve already decided to give you 10%. That means t
hat your firm will soon be $1.8 million richer.”

  Harper rapidly shook her head. “No. That’s not right. I didn’t do anything on this case. Thank you, that’s very generous of you, but I can’t accept that.”

  “Of course you can. Listen, you gave me a chance. You hired me and you gave me a chance. And I figured that my cut will be $5.5 million, even assuming that I give you 10%. Trust me, that’s more money than I ever thought that I would see at one time. It’s more than enough for me. I’m a simple guy with simple tastes. I’ll have both of my kids colleges completely funded, and I’ll be able to get a new car and a new roof and maybe a house around here. If I can do all of that, I’m good. I want you to have 10%. This was a windfall that I never expected, considering the circumstances, and I want to share it.”

  Harper continued to shake her head, but Axel put his hand on her forearm. “Mate,” he said. “Your new associate wants to do something nice for you. Accept his generosity with a smile.”

  Her face flushed red. “I didn’t do a damn thing. You did all of it. You did the discovery, you hired the actuary, you did all the research. You went to the settlement conference. You met with the client. You did it all. I didn’t do a thing. I can’t-“

  I cleared my throat. “You’re not going to have a choice. I’m just going to make a direct deposit into your bank. I’m going to do that whether you like it or not, so please accept that.”

  She finally nodded. “Thank you,” she said in a small voice. “I think that’s the nicest thing that anyone’s ever done for me. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”

  I smiled. “You’ve already repaid me by taking me into your firm. Now, there’s one major case off my plate, and now we have to focus on Erik Gregorian’s case. I’m glad that I can really focus on that one, because it’s going to be a doozy.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is. Going to be a doozy. But I think that we can win it. I think that we have enough other suspects that might have done it. We can just throw spaghetti against the wall and hope that something sticks.”

  The three of us talked long into the night. By the time I finally stumbled home at midnight, I was exhausted and happy. I was a wealthy man and Harper and I had a solid game plan for Erik’s case.

  It had been a good day.

  It would have been an even better day if I didn’t know that Betsy Ward made the choice to have her son deliberately killed. She had blood on her hands, and she had tainted everything about this settlement.

  But I was just going to have to try to forget about that.

  Chapter 20

  Six Weeks Later - December 11

  “Okay,” Harper said. “Trial is next week. It’s time for us to really prepare for it.”

  We were in the conference room, with everything that we had prepared for trial spread out in front of us. We had the strategy that we were going to go for, and we were fairly confident that our strategy was sound. Still, one never could tell exactly what was going to happen. Juries were fickle, to say the very least.

  “I’ll be taking the lead on this one,” I said. “And you’ll be second chair. I know how much Erik turns your stomach. I can feel the contempt that you have for him. I don’t want the jury to also feel that contempt, so it’s probably best that I go ahead and try the case.”

  “Go for it,” Harper said. “You’re right. Erik is scum, and I think that he’s a sociopath. It makes me want to vomit to know that, if we get an acquittal, we’re going to be letting that vile snake back on the streets. But it is what it is.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s very true. It is what it is. It’s what we do, of course. Erik won’t be the first violent sociopath that we let loose on the streets, and he certainly won’t be the last. We just have to let that go and forge ahead with the best plan that we can come up with for his acquittal.”

  Harper shook her head. “I know. So, let’s see. I got the witness list from the prosecutor’s office, so let’s go over it. It looks like they’ll be calling their automotive expert first to the stand. He’s going to testify about the brake lines being cut. There’s not really a whole lot that we can do to counter his testimony. I say that we don’t even try.”

  I nodded my head. “Do we have the report back from your expert – the one that you hired to find out if there was some other defect that we didn’t know about? The person who might be able to testify about why Shelly was going at such a high rate of speed when she died?”

  “Yeah.” Harper nodded her head. “He did a thorough examination of the car, and he found nothing wrong with it. Aside from the tampered brakes, that is. So, it’s still a mystery on why she would have been driving so fast. I hate mysteries like that, but there’s nothing that we can do about it.”

  “Nothing, indeed. So, their expert’s name is Josh Day. We don’t have an expert to counter it. I say that we let his testimony stand. Our expert, Nick Savolo, agreed that the brakes were tampered with, so there’s nothing that we can really do with this witness. Do you agree?”

  “Of course,” Harper said. “So, we won’t cross examine their automotive witness. In fact, I think that we should go ahead and stipulate to the fact that the brakes were tampered with.” If we stipulated to the brakes being tampered with, that would mean that there wouldn’t be any need to put the expert on the stand.

  I shook my head. “They will still have to put the witness on the stand. The jury needs to hear that evidence.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me see who else they plan to call for their case in chief.” I looked through the witness list. “It looks like the next witness is going to be the Officer O’Reilly, the officer who was at the scene of the crime. Is there any reason to cross-examine him?”

  “Nah, let’s skip it. That officer isn’t going to prove anything but the fact that Shelly was dead,” Harper said. “Who’s next on the list?”

  “Hannah Bailey. She’s one of the witnesses who will testify about Shelly’s erratic driving. In fact, she’s the only witness that they have lined up.”

  Harper looked down at her pad of paper that she was writing on and seemed to contemplate what she might want to do with Hannah as a witness. “So, it has been established that Shelly was driving at a high rate of speed when she crossed the median.” Harper shook her head. “Again, this witness does nothing for us. Or nothing really against us, either. I say we skip her as well. Let’s save our firepower for somebody who matters.”

  “Somebody like Ara Babyan maybe?” I was looking down at the witness list and saw that the second-in-command in the Gregorian clan was scheduled to testify. “I wonder what his testimony is going to be?”

  “I guess we’ll find out. At any rate, he’ll be fairly easy to cross-examine, really. Whatever it is that he’s going to say about what Erik might have told him, we can counter. You can ask questions about his position in the clan, what he does for them and then you can move on to making him look like a climber who wants Erik out of the way so that he can take Erik’s job.” Harper nodded her head. “Nail him on the things that his clan does. Ask him about the white slavery, the drug dealing, the prostitution rings and the identity theft. Everything that the clan does, ask him about it. You have to soil him up completely so that the jury will think that they can’t believe a word that is coming out of his mouth.”

  “Of course,” I said, “However, there’s a risk to that strategy. Namely, we’ll be demonstrating to the jury everything that Erik does as well. If we don’t put Erik on the stand, then the jury might not know the kinds of activities that he’s involved in. But the jury will come to the conclusion that anything and everything that Ara is involved in, Erik was just as involved in the same activities.”

  “Listen,” Harper said. “The jury is going to come to the conclusion that our client isn’t a choir boy. They know that he’s in the Armenian mafia, so they can just imagine all the criminal and nefarious acts that he commits. Personally, I think that we should go ahead and pu
t Erik on the stand. He hasn’t ever told us that he killed Shelly, so it wouldn’t be suborning perjury to put him up there. I think that we should go ahead and get him in here and prepare him for his testimony. At this point, it really couldn’t hurt, and it might actually help.”

  Of course, it always helped to put the client on the stand. For one, if the client didn’t take the stand, the jury would inevitably think that there was a reason for it. No matter how many times you instruct the jury that they are not to take into account the fact that the client doesn’t testify, and no matter how many ways you tell the jury that it is your client’s right not to testify, the jury would still hold the lack of testimony against him. That was one thing that I knew in my bones.

  Still, putting Erik up on the stand to be cross-examined about all that he did for the Armenian mob was a risky, risky strategy. It could very well blow up in our face. The prosecutor was, no doubt, going to make Erik look like an Armenian Tony Soprano. That couldn’t be a good thing, to say the very least.

  But perhaps Harper was right. Perhaps the jury was already going to have it in their heads the fact that Erik was a very bad guy. Maybe his testimony wasn’t going to be a net negative and it might even be a net positive. It was difficult to tell.

  “Okay, so I come at Ara with both barrels about his criminal activities.” I nodded my head. “The next witness on the list was one of Shelly’s best friends. Her name is Charlize Allen. She was a sorority sister down at MU and she was also somebody who Shelly hung out with here in Kansas City as well.”

  “And her testimony will be…”