office.
"Judge Loutrell, it's Samantha Kincaid from the District Attorney's
Office."
"Oh, sure, from the other day. Yes, well, would you mind calling
tomorrow morning? My secretary left for the day. I picked up because
I was expecting my wife."
"I'm sorry, sir, but I'm afraid it can't wait."
"Unless it's a real emergency, I'm afraid it's going to have to. I was
just about to head home for the evening. Promised to help at the house
with some things. You know."
Actually, I didn't, since I did just about everything myself. But
Loutrell didn't need to hear about my domestic issues.
"That's fine. I'll call tomorrow," I said. Too bad for him, he didn't
know I'd already checked with security. After five, all employees had
to exit through the Fourth Avenue doors. I planted myself on a bench
across the street in the park, hoping he meant it when he said he was
leaving soon.
As it turned out, he must have walked out right after we hung up. I
jaywalked across traffic to catch up with him at the corner, pulling
out a copy of Clarissa's memo from my briefcase while I walked. He
didn't hide his dismay when he saw me.
"I'm sorry, but I really do need to speak to you. I'll talk as you
walk to the car if I have to." I handed him the copy of the memo.
"Apparently Clarissa had a discussion with Dennis Coakley about an
appeal filed by Gunderson Development. She cared about it enough to
lock a copy of the file and this memo in a safe deposit box. I need to
know why she took such a special interest in the case, and I thought,
as chief administrative judge, you might have some idea."
I left out the fact that Nelly overheard him with Coakley arguing over
whether to tell me about it. Nelly said that Loutrell sounded like he
wanted to talk to me, so I hoped I could get what I needed without
diming Nelly up.
"I'm sorry, but if Clarissa had such a discussion with Dennis and I'm
neither confirming nor denying that she did the conversation would
clearly be privileged." He was walking so quickly I had to alter my
stride to a slow jog.
"And, I'm sorry, Judge Loutrell, but now Clarissa's dead."
"Attorney/client privilege survives the client's death." I got the
impression he was parroting back the words he'd heard from Coakley.
"It does, but unlike the City Attorney, you never represented Clarissa
Easterbrook. You're just her coworker. Even if her conversations with
Coakley were privileged, what you know is fair game if she came to you
about her concerns first."
He knew I was right about the law. On the other hand, he was still
thinking through what Coakley might say in response. One more push
would do it.
"If it makes a difference, I already know, but I need confirmation."
That one always worked on my junkie drug informants, and it was enough
at least to get him to stop walking. "Clarissa was biased on the
appeal. She ruled for Gunderson as a favor of some kind. That's why
she recused herself from a case filed by Grice Constuction. Grice was
complaining about unfairness in the urban rehabilitation project, and
Clarissa knew from personal experience that at least one company was
getting preferential treatment."
Still nothing. If the push didn't do it, maybe a shove would.
"I can have a grand jury subpoena at your house this evening, but I
really don't think that's going to be necessary."
I pictured him imagining the scene at home tonight if I followed
through on my threat and his wife were to learn that it was
preventable.
"All you need is confirmation?"
"Yep." I couldn't believe I was actually going to get it.
And, sure enough, I didn't. "Well, too bad," he said. "I can't
confirm something so completely ridiculous. She may have talked to
Coakley about the case, but you are entirely off base. My God, what
you're suggesting is offensive."
See how that works? In the course of denying the part of my theory
that surprised him, he had confirmed the rest of it.
"But she did talk to Coakley about the Gunderson case. Why?"
He looked at his watch, looked at me, then rolled his eyes. "Coakley
can be nuts about privilege for reasons I don't always understand. But
you're right. She came to me first. She said she had something she
needed to talk to me about. She'd ruled on a case a few months earlier
without realizing that the claimant had donated money to her husband's
hospital wing. If she'd known about the potential conflict at the time
the case was assigned to her, she should've recused herself. I told
her to talk to Coakley to see if he wanted to reopen the case. I won't
tell you that part of the conversation, since he thinks it's
privileged, but, let's just say that the Gunderson case wasn't
reopened, and Clarissa recused herself from the Grice matter because of
the potential appearance of a conflict."
"I get the impression that you don't share Coakley's concerns about
privilege."
Loutrell shrugged. "Dennis is Dennis. He sees potential city
liability around every corner, but he's well-intentioned. I actually
considered calling you last week about this. The media were
insinuating that something was going on between Clarissa and T. J.
Caffrey which I know nothing about, by the way and for some reason the
conversation with Clarissa stuck in my mind."
"I'm missing the connection," I said.
He shook his head quickly as if to shake the suggestion away. "Not a
connection, really. It was just that Clarissa seemed so serious about
the matter when she raised it with us, particularly when she was
talking about how important the hospital wing was to her husband. She
seemed unreasonably upset by the situation, considering how innocuous
it was. I think my imagination got the best of me, and I started
wondering if maybe the entire situation had something to do with the
state of her marriage. By the time Coakley spelled out his bogus
privilege concerns, it just didn't seem like anything worth bothering
you about."
People don't realize that a criminal case is rarely built on a single
piece of evidence, relying instead on tens and hundreds of clues in
context, each by itself insignificant. Too many helpful witnesses show
up late in the game, because they didn't want to bother the police with
insignificant information. In the meantime, the wackos flood the phone
lines with visions and premonitions.
Clarissa may not have given Coakley and Loutrell a full blown
admission, but at least I was on the right track.
From City Hall, I made a stealth pop into my office to grab copies of
the Gunderson case file, the information Jessica Walters had copied for
me detailing Max Grice's complaints, and the financial records for the
hospital wing. Within thirty minutes, I had gathered everything I
needed for my research and was nestled back in my home office and ready
to start filling in the missing pieces.
Based on Jessica's notes about Max Grice, he wasn't a
happy camper. At
the heart of his discontent was a woman named Jane Wessler, city
licensing official for the Office of Landmarks Preservation at City
Hall. Three years ago, as a nod to preservationists, the office had
designated an area surrounding the train station an historic district,
seeking to protect the small neighborhood from the
warehouse-to-luxury-loft conversions that marked the nearby and rapidly
expanding Pearl District. As a result of the designation, the Railroad
District, located at the eastern edge of trendy northwest Portland,
still remains an enclave for starving artists, aging hippies, and other
eccentrics who are happier in the neighborhood's traditionally
industrial atmosphere than with high-end yuppified retail, restaurant,
and residential development.
One year after the designation, however, the preservation office
created a licensing provision that permitted developers to obtain
special-use licenses for approved "urban renewal" projects that were
consistent with the architectural history of the Railroad District. For
the first sixteen months of that program,
Jane Wessler was in charge of deciding which projects qualified as
special uses. Grice's three proposals, in her view, did not.
Grice, however, was persistent. After seeing several similar projects
in the neighborhood approved, Grice filed a request under the Oregon
Public Information Act for the names of all companies who applied for
special-use licenses and for Wessler s determination on each
application. Using the data, Grice had tried to make the case to
Jessica Walters that Wessler was on the take. I looked at the list he
had compiled. Maybe there was a trend; a few companies were three for
three while Grice had no luck at all. But I could see why Jessica had
decided there was nothing criminal; with so few examples, it was
impossible to tell if it was just coincidence.
According to Jessica's notes, Grice had resubmitted his applications
after Wessler left for a yearlong maternity leave, but the city had
refused to reconsider the original decisions. That must have been the
appeal from which Clarissa had recused herself.
I took another look at Grice's list. No mention of Gunderson.
Next, I turned to Clarissa's copy of Gunderson's case file. I'd read
through it when Slip had first shown it to me in his office, but I
wanted to see how it fit together with Grice's complaint. Gunderson's
Railroad District project had also been rejected by the city, but by a
different licensing official, a month after Wessler went on leave.
Unlike Grice, however, Gunderson had appealed, and Clarissa had
reversed the decision.
Then I spread out the pages of financial information Slip's
investigator had printed from Clarissa's password-protected disc. The
text at the top of each page identified the spreadsheet as the budget
for the Lucy Hilton Pediatric Center. Lots of money coming in, but no
substantial expenditures yet. That made sense, given that the center
was still in the planning process. From what I knew, the project had
been dropped at one point because of the bad economy, but Townsend had
resurrected it as his baby.
Whatever he was doing, it seemed to be working. There were pages of
entries for donations, large and small, from individuals, corporations,
and the major local foundations. But no money from Larry Gunderson or
Gunderson Development.
I took a break and grabbed a Diet Coke from the kitchen. This time
Vinnie followed me upstairs, sprawling himself beneath the desk near my
feet. When I stopped scratching him behind his ears and returned to my
documents, he looked up at me and snorted. It was as close as he could
come to saying, "Snoozapalooza."
"Tell me about it, little man," I said, rubbing my eyes with the palms
of my hands. For some reason, Clarissa had kept a copy of the
Gunderson file, Townsend's financial records, and the videotape of her
and Caffrey together under lock and key. If there was a connection,
where was it?
I studied the list of the hospital donors again and finally saw it: a
name. The MTK Group had made a donation of $100,000 to Townsend's pet
cause. I reopened Jessica's file on Grice. There, on Grice's list of
companies affected by the decisions of Jane Wessler, was the MTK Group:
three renewal projects in the Railroad District, and every one of them
approved. So what the hell was the MTK Group?
I called the corporate filing division of the Secretary of State's
office, hoping to get the company's basic registration information, but
their business hours were long over. Then I called information, but
there were no listings under MTK. I even tried an Internet search.
Bupkes.
I cross-referenced Grice's list of development companies with
Townsend's list of donors but didn't find any additional overlap.
More than ever, I missed the resources of the U.S. Attorney's
Office. What I needed was access to LEXIS/NEXIS. From what I could
remember, NEXIS's public records database included corporate filing
information from all fifty states. Unfortunately, Duncan never saw fit
to include the service in the office's budget. If we needed legal
research, we did it the old-fashioned way.
Out of desperation, I pulled up the LEXIS/NEXIS Web site on my computer
and tried my old federal password. Part of me was relieved when it
didn't work. Getting busted by the feds wouldn't exactly help my
current professional standing.
Then I remembered that the computer research sites all give free
passwords to law students and judicial clerks. It's the legal
profession's equivalent to a dealer handing out drugs on the
playground. Once the kids are hooked on an easy fix, they'll pay
anything for more.
I found Nelly Giacoma's home number where I'd jotted it in the file.
"Nelly, hi, it's Samantha Kincaid from the District Attorney's
Office."
"Oh, hey there. Congratulations on your PC determination. I heard
about it on the news."
"Thanks. It was pretty much what we expected, though."
"Right," she said. "So did you ever figure out what the key was that I
gave you?"
"We did, actually, and that's sort of why I'm calling. Clarissa had
some documents in a safe deposit box. I'm trying to make sense of
them, but I need to do some NEXIS research."
"Urn, sure, I don't see why not. I'm not doing anything tonight
anyway."
What a trooper. "No," I said, laughing. "I don't expect you to do it
for me. I just need to get onto the system. Believe it or not, you
lose all that fancy stuff if you join a prosecutor's office."
"You're kidding. How do you get anything done?"
"I usually manage, but I need to look at some public records that are
hard to get after business hours. Do you think it would be OK if I
used your password?"
She didn't need to think about it long. "What the hell? It's not like
it costs the city anything, and I hardly use it anyway."
I jotted down the s
eries of letters and numbers she gave me, thanking
her profusely before I hung up.
First, I perused the Public Records library. This was perfect. I had
access not only to the corporate registry information of all fifty
states but to records of all civil court judgments and property liens
filed.
I looked up the information that MTK had filed with the Oregon
Secretary of State. According to the filings, the president of the
corporation was Carl Matthews. The name didn't ring a bell. I
searched next for Gunderson Development. Larry Gunderson was listed as
both the president and secretary of the corporation, which usually
signaled a one-man operation. The Gunderson listing also included an
entry for a former corporate name of Gunderson Construction, Inc." as
well as for Gunderson Construction's bankruptcy dissolution years
earlier.
I switched to the database of recorded judgments. That's when my
search got more interesting. Typing in gunderson development had
yielded nothing, but my search for the former gunderson construction
turned up twenty-seven civil judgments, each one representing a
judgment against the company. No wonder the guy had filed for
bankruptcy. On the fourteenth hit I had a connection, a judgment of
$126,000 against Gunderson Construction in favor of the MTK Group.
So ten years ago, Gunderson and MTK had enough business together that
it led to a judgment against Gunderson. Now they were both doing
business in the Railroad District. MTK had obtained Railroad District
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