Due Diligence

by Michael A. Kahn

I glanced over at the clock on my desk. It was already ten after two. I had just twenty minutes to get downtown for Senator Armstrong’s press conference. “Jacki,” I said, standing up, “I have to run. We can check the trademark stuff when I get back.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis, now operated by the National Park Service, was a bustling site of justice, commerce, and drama years before Abraham Lincoln became president. Slaves were sold from the white step blocks of the east portico, while on the west side a struggling farmer named Ulysses S. Grant, on the verge of bankruptcy, freed his only slave. In fact, the Old Courthouse had a cameo role in the origins of the Civil War: it was the site where a black slave named Dred Scott filed a lawsuit seeking his freedom—a lawsuit that would eventually reach the Supreme Court.

  Built during the height of the Greek Revival era of architecture and topped with an Italian Renaissance cast-iron dome, it looks more like a state capitol than a courthouse. A broad stairway of granite leads up to the portico, which is supported by six massive Doric columns. The best view of it is facing east from the small park across Broadway. From there, the Old Courthouse is perfectly framed by the Gateway Arch, a gleaming steel parabola that rises in the background 630 feet above the levee of the Mississippi River. It’s the postcard view favored by the camera crews from the networks and CNN, all of whom were crowded in the park facing the Old Courthouse as I jogged toward them.

  Parked behind the camera crews and talking heads were the Minicam vans and equipment trucks and uplink satellite disks and miles and miles of wire. In front were the print reporters and photojournalists. All were jockeying for position in front of the makeshift podium erected near the top of the broad flight of stairs leading to the massive doors at the courthouse entrance. Senator Armstrong had not yet appeared.

  Near the podium were three youngish men in suits and loosened ties huddled in conversation with a harried-looking woman in a wrinkled gray dress. She was holding a clipboard and seemed to be in charge. I recognized her as Diane Raney, Armstrong’s press secretary.

  Other than Sherman Ross, who was nowhere in sight, Diane was probably the best person for me to approach for an audience with Armstrong, and this might not be a bad time to ask her. But as I pushed through the crowd of reporters, Diane turned from the three men, shouted something to another young aide standing off to the side, and then walked quickly up the stairs. A uniformed police officer pulled open one of the courthouse doors as she approached. Frustrated, I watched her disappear inside.

  As I turned to ask one of the reporters about Armstrong’s itinerary for the rest of the day, I was astonished to see who was standing right next to me scribbling notes in a steno pad.

  “Flo?” I said with delight.

  She looked up with a Hollywood double-take, her eyes widening as she broke into a big grin. “Rachel Gold!” she bellowed. “Goddam, how you doing, girl?”

  We gave each other a hug. I stepped back to admire my best friend from law school. Florence Shenker was as zaftig as ever—a big, robust woman with high cheekbones, full lips, and the beginnings of a double chin. She had thick curly black hair, fiery brown eyes, and a lusty, wonderful laugh.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her.

  “The usual: getting quotes from uptight suits, fighting with editors, and keeping a lookout for the last normal single man in America. What about you? What are you doing in St. Louis?”

  “I live here.”

  “I thought you were up in Chicago. What happened?”

  “My father died.”

  She winced. “I’m sorry, Rachel.”

  “Thanks. My mom was in bad shape emotionally, my best friend had just moved down to teach law at Wash U, and I guess I was kind of in the mood for a change.” I shrugged. “So, here I am.”

  “How’s Sarah doing?”

  “Better,” I said with a smile. “She’s off on a one-month cruise of the Far East with Aunt Recky. That’s her sister.”

  “Searching for knishes in Korea, eh?”

  I laughed. “If there are any over there, those two will find them. So what about you? I thought you were with a newspaper in Detroit.”

  “I moved to D.C. six months ago to take a job with the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune.”

  “What do you cover?”

  “Mostly old, ugly white guys in plaid suits or black robes.”

  “Huh?”

  “The courts and the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

  I paused. “Is Douglas Armstrong on that committee?”

  “No. We drew straws for the likely presidential candidates. I have Armstrong and Dole.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “So he’s really going to announce today?”

  “Naw,” she said with a weary roll of her eyes. “I couldn’t get Diane Raney to confirm one way or the other yesterday. She probably didn’t know herself. The one calling the shots these days is Sherman Ross, the little putz.”

  “So if he isn’t announcing today, what’s he going to do?”

  She chuckled and shook her head in grudging admiration. “The son of a bitch doesn’t shy from controversy. He’s unveiling a public school bill that has something in it to piss off everyone. It would simultaneously eliminate the use of busing to desegregate schools and require all public schools within each metropolitan area to be funded equally from a combined city-suburb tax fund.”

  “Which means?”

  “That the inner city schools would be funded at precisely the same level as the schools in the wealthiest suburban community—same teacher salaries, same programs, same extracurricular activities.”

  I nodded. “I like it.”

  “Sure,” Flo said sardonically, “but he’ll never get it off the ground. Rush Limbaugh is already putting on the warpaint.”

  “Armstrong’s no pushover,” I said.

  “No question about that. Ted Koppel has him booked tonight on Nightline to talk about it, and I’m sure Armstrong will be impressive. But on this one I’m afraid he’s tilting at windmills.”

  “So how long are you in St. Louis?”

  “I’ll cover this speech, stay overnight, maybe do a piece on the southern Illinois court system for the Sunday paper and head back tomorrow night.”

  “Are you free for dinner?” I asked.

  “You bet I am. What’s it been for us? Six years?”

  “At least.” I touched her hand. “Flo, it’s so great to see you.”

  She threw an arm around my shoulder. “Same here.”

  One of the huge courthouse doors swung open and Diane Raney walked quickly across the staging area toward the place where two of the three youngish men in suits and loosened ties were still huddled in conversation.

  I turned to Flo. “I came here to talk to Armstrong.” I pointed to Raney. “Is she the best person to see about that?”

  Flo looked at me with surprise. “What do you have to talk to him about?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you over dinner tonight.”

  Flo looked back toward Raney and the two men. “Forget Raney. See the guy with the brown hair talking to her? That’s Mitch Kinsock. He handles Armstrong’s schedule. Talk to him.”

  Just as I started to push through the crowd of reporters, the courthouse doors swung open and Senator Douglas Armstrong emerged, along with the mayor of St. Louis, the mayor of East St. Louis, and the commissioner of suburban St. Louis County. Armstrong towered over the three local officials. The 35mm cameras all around me were whirring and clicking as Armstrong strode toward the podium. He paused and surveyed the crowd without a smile.

  The man definitely has charisma, I said to myself as I stared up at his ruggedly handsome face. It was thrilling to see him up close and in person. I felt a little like one of the schoolgirls at a Beatles concert.

  “Let’
s get to the point,” he started briskly. “The system has failed twice. It failed a black man named Dred Scott, who came to this very courthouse seeking equality nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. That time the court said no. One hundred years later, a little black girl from Topeka, Kansas, came to another courthouse, the big one in Washington, D.C. She came seeking equality in education. That time the court said yes.” He paused. “But it didn’t matter. The system failed again. We’re no closer to equality in education today than we were back then. I know it. You know it. So let’s be honest with one another. It’s time for a change…”

  ***

  We touched our glasses of Singha beer.

  “To friendship,” I said.

  “And to normal men who don’t live at home with Mom,” Flo said with a wink. “May they seek us in droves.”

  “Hear, hear,” I said with a laugh as we clinked our glasses again.

  Flo and I were having dinner together at the Thai Cafe on Delmar. Benny was supposed to join us, but hadn’t yet arrived. I was glad he was running late, since it gave us a chance to catch up on each other’s lives.

  We had met our first day of law school, a pair of Jewish girls with little in common but our religion. Flo was the brassy Brooklynite who arrived at Harvard ready to coldcock the first professor who tried to pull a Socratic number on her. I was the polite one from St. Louis who arrived at Harvard wondering how in the world a product of a midwest public school system would survive at the alma mater of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter.

  Flo was in my section first year, and she quickly organized an all-woman study group that met once a week at her apartment in Somerville. The five of us gathered every Wednesday night over pizza and wine in her cluttered living room. We’d spend the first hour or so trying to make sense out of that week’s caseload in Torts, Contract, and Civil Procedure. Once that was out of the way, the wine having taken effect, we would spend the rest of the evening laughing and commiserating over life as a female 1L at manful and manly Harvard.

  After her second year, Flo landed a coveted summer clerkship at Silverstein & Candicci, the hottest law firm in L.A. and one of the premier merger and acquisition firms in the country. The firm, headquartered in Westwood with a branch office in Newport Beach, had a prominent role in virtually every significant corporate takeover battle during the 1980s. Nevertheless, at the end of the summer Flo shocked them (and us) when she rejected their offer of permanent employment (starting salary: $76,000 plus bonus) for a job with the staid downtown L.A. firm of Fowler & Graves—a 174-lawyer firm that (by choice) represented no client in the entertainment business and, to this day, still does not have enough Jewish lawyers for a minyan.

  “Why?” I had asked in astonishment back then when I learned of her decision.

  “I spent a whole summer with berserk Jews and Italians,” she had explained, referring to the lawyers of Silverstein & Candicci. “They may be brilliant and they may be out there on the cutting edge of the law, but three months of listening to those testosterone-crazed geeks screaming and cursing and pounding on tables and savaging each other was too much. I felt like I was back in Brooklyn. Forget it. I want a firm filled with nothing but uptight, repressed, anal retentive WASPs—the kind of lawyers who would rather die than have a confrontation. You know why? ’Cause when I go to the office I want some goddam peace and quiet.”

  The theory was better than the reality. Flo lasted three years in the medical malpractice defense group at Fowler & Graves. Bored out of her mind, she returned to her first love: journalism. She landed a job on the business page of the Dallas Morning News. From there she went to the Washington office of the National Law Journal, but had a falling out with the bureau chief after just a year. She quit that post and took a job as the national legal correspondent for the Detroit Free Press, which is when I lost track of her. And now she was back in D.C., covering the legal beat for the Trib and, judging by the stories she had told me that afternoon, loving it.

  “I think it’s great that you’re on your own,” she said to me. “How’d you ever get the courage to leave Abbott and Windsor?”

  “It wasn’t that hard.” I shook my head at the memories. “After a few years, I was really starting to get fed up with big firm hierarchies. I realized that even if I hung around long enough to become a partner there, I’d still be taking orders from jerks on cases that I couldn’t care less about. I mean, how excited can you get representing some huge defense contractor in a highly technical dispute with a subcontractor over a payout under a government contract?” I sighed. “So I left.”

  “Sounds like my final days at Fowler and Graves. I woke up one morning, looked at myself in the mirror, and said, ’Florence, honey, life is too short to spend it taking shit from these assholes.’ So I put on a pair of jeans, a Grateful Dead T-Shirt, and sandals, drove down to the office, and resigned.”

  “Regrets?” I asked.

  “Hell, no. How ’bout you?”

  “Not yet.” I smiled. “I’m having fun.”

  Flo leaned back. “You look great, Rachel.”

  “You, too.”

  “No, I mean great great. You were practically the homecoming queen of Harvard Law School, and now you look even better. You must have to fight them off.”

  I laughed uncomfortably, not sure what to say.

  “I’m amazed you’re not married,” she said.

  “Bad timing,” I said with a shrug. “It’s either been the wrong guy at the right time or the right guy at the wrong time.”

  “Last time I saw you, you were living with that studly Northwestern professor. What was his name?”

  I looked down. “Paul Mason,” I said softly. “We broke up.”

  “Oy, that sounds bad.”

  I nodded, still remembering the pain of discovering how he had betrayed me. It unfolded like a scene out of a soap opera. I had come home early one afternoon, stopping on the way to pick up a loaf of crusty French bread, a large wedge of cheddar cheese, and a bottle of chilled white wine. It was going to be a romantic surprise. We would build a fire and start with a picnic on the rug in front of the fireplace. Instead, I found him up in the bedroom with one of his students. I later learned that Paul had escorted a procession of coeds up to the bedroom during his Tuesday and Thursday afternoon “office hours.”

  “Fucking intellectuals,” Flo said with disgust. “The professors I’ve dated have been among the nastiest, most self-centered men I’ve ever met. Second only to surgeons. You know what I want?”

  “What?”

  “A blue-collar worker. A guy who punches a time clock and makes an honest living with his hands. I’m beginning to think that my Mr. Right is a big strong steelworker.”

  I laughed. “My secretary is a big strong former steelworker.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Problem is, he’s in the process of becoming Miss Right.”

  Flo rolled her eyes heavenward. “Terrific. See what I mean? Find a good one, and next thing you know he wants to put on lipstick and cut off his johnson.”

  “All rise.”

  I turned toward the unmistakable sound of Benny’s voice just as he arrived at our booth, out of breath. “What a fucked-up day,” he said, panting. “Jesus, I feel like I ran a hundred feet. My heart is beating like a rabbit’s.”

  “Benny,” I said, gesturing toward Flo, “you finally get to meet my best friend from law school.”

  Flo stood up and put out her hand. “Glad to meet you, Benny.”

  As Benny reached for her hand I waited for the usual snappy rim shot. Instead, I heard a subdued, almost klutzy, “Me, too.”

  I looked up in surprise at the two of them standing there. Benny seemed transported, and Flo was actually blushing. It lasted only a moment, and then they both took their seats, just a little awkwardly. Benny sat on my side of the booth, facing
Flo.

  “The beer’s good,” she said, sounding more girlish than I had ever heard her sound in my life.

  “Great,” Benny answered, just a tad too cheerfully.

  It was almost a scene out of Ozzie and Harriet (Episode 42: “Ricky Falls In Love”), except that Benny was wearing a Beavis & Butt-head T-shirt under his sports jacket.

  Another round of Singha beers helped break the spell, and before long the three of us were laughing and talking.

  “So,” Benny asked, “did the great and mighty Armstrong announce his candidacy today?”

  “No,” I answered. “Flo said that Sherman Ross decided it’s better to hold off for another few weeks.”

  “Once he announces,” Flo explained, “he goes under a media microscope. Every thing he says or does will get scrutinized. This way he can pick his moments in the spotlight and then scurry offstage for a while.”

  Benny turned to me. “You have any luck with him?”

  “Maybe tonight,” I said. “Flo told me to ask Mitch Kinsock after the speech. He’s one of his aides. At first Kinsock was kind of rude.” I paused to wink at Flo. “But when I explained that I needed to speak with his boss about a possible link between his former company and at least one and possibly three recent homicides, Mitch suddenly became Mr. Congeniality. I have a private appointment with the senator at eight o’clock tonight down at Channel Two.”

  “Why there?” Benny asked.

  “He’s doing a Nightline with Ted Koppel. I guess they’re going to film him from there.” I checked my watch. “So let’s order.” I looked over at Benny, trying to mask my smile. “Flo is staying down at the Marriott. If I’m running late, do you think you could possibly give her a ride down there?”

  “No problem,” he said with genuine conviction.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mitch Kinsock was waiting in the lobby of Channel Two. He ushered me back to an empty office. “The senator will be down in a few minutes, Rachel. Would you care for coffee or a soft drink?”

  “I’m fine.”