Screenscam

by Michael Bowen

  “Please forgive that little intrusion,” he roared. “Would you gents like a caucus?”

  One of the partners on the other side nodded, and Finneman shooed everyone on Tavistock’s side of the table out into the hallway.

  “I’m really sorry about that, Steve,” Rep murmured after they were outside.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Finneman said. “I think a little break might do us all good. I suspect they’ll be a bit more reasonable when we go back in.”

  “While we’re waiting,” Arundel muttered, “we might take a few minutes to wander down to my office. There’s something I think you might want to look at before we decide who walks back into the conference room after their caucus.”

  Well now, that was subtle, Rep thought, as his gut rose to his throat for the eighth or ninth time since he’d awakened that morning. If having a grand jury subpoena served in front of his senior partner and a major client hadn’t sunk him, the trinkets Arundel had in his office surely would. It served him right. You swim with the sharks, you risk being lunch.

  “You know what, Chip?” Finneman said. “I don’t think this caucus is going to go much more than three minutes.”

  He was right. Buchanan and a couple of others barely had time to make it back from the men’s room before the conference room door opened and the Tavistock delegation was summoned back in. The lead lawyer for Tempus-Caveator looked tough, and confident, and determined—just the way the thug in biker shorts had looked, now that Rep thought about it, the moment before Rep had put his head in the guy’s solar plexus.

  “That little performance was entirely unnecessary and I might even say bush league,” he said. “We know whom we’re dealing with. We never said we wanted any trouble. That’s why we’re here. Understand, though, we won’t be bullied. If we’re going to get something done, let’s get it done. We’re prepared to cut our premium to one percent—but we have to get the deal done tonight.”

  “Let me assure you that we view that as a responsible and constructive step in these negotiations,” Finneman said complacently. “But I think this talk of premiums is not helpful or, I might say, not relevant any longer. Here’s what I think we can do. We’ll drop our lawsuit and along with it our request that the court authorize immediate depositions. You’ll give Tavistock a five-year option at the lower of today’s price or future market price on all the Tavistock securities you hold today.”

  “But we could get creamed if the price of the stock goes down in the future,” one of the partner-lawyers protested.

  “That would be a good reason for you to help the price of the stock stay up. You will also agree to sell all of your Tavistock holdings that we don’t buy on the market, over five years, with no more than five thousand shares sold on any one day. And you’ll pay the bill Tavistock’s going to get from us. Tell you what, though. If we get the papers signed before dark, we’ll cap the fees at six hundred twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  The lawyer across the table from Finneman looked a little green around the gills.

  “We’re going to have to discuss those terms very thoroughly,” he said, in what even Rep could recognize as a stall.

  “No you’re not,” Finneman said. “Nothing to discuss. Last, best, and final offer. Take it or leave it.”

  The excitement that Rep felt during the eight seconds of silence that passed then was downright sexual. There was no other word for it. This M and A stuff might be fun after all.

  “All right,” the partner-lawyer across from Finneman said. “Let’s write it up. We have a plane to catch.”

  The write-up took almost two hours. Then the lawyers and the corporate predators from New York went away. Buchanan extracted promises from everyone still present, secretaries included, to meet in a private room at the Commerce Club at 8:00 P.M. for a celebratory dinner that he was now heading off to arrange personally.

  “Gosh,” Rep said to Finneman at that point. “How did that happen?”

  “Oh, I’m just guessing,” Finneman said. “But the way I see it, a company like Tempus-Caveator may think it’s tough as nails and may play fast and loose with the campaign finance laws, and may even be able to line up a couple of stunt men with big muscles and long records to help a schmoo like Mixler with some rough stuff. But it doesn’t have anyone on staff who can go around giving people the wherewithal to blow up helicopters and arrange oxygen tank switches. They’d have to go to, oh, an outside consultant for that. And that consultant, and its family, might be very upset if they thought someone associated with Tempus-Caveator had gotten it crosswise of the kind of people who get hauled in front of federal grand juries, because those people tend to be associates.”

  “You mean they thought I was, what, Sonny Corleone’s wimpy younger brother or something and they were about to get in the middle of a family feud?”

  “Or something, I’d say. I mean, look at you. And look at the way those U.S. marshals dealt with you. It’s not the kind of treatment you’d expect for an upstanding taxpayer and model citizen, is it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Speaking of which,” Arundel said with a sigh suggestive of vast patience nearly exhausted, “and before this celebratory dinner, I really do have to insist that we check out something in my office. This is serious. There’s a lot at stake here.”

  “Well, Chip,” Finneman said, “if it’s that important to you, by all means let’s go see what’s on your mind.”

  Rep figured that anything he said could only make things worse, so he followed along in silence. They trooped up stairs, down halls, and around corners through the now largely empty law firm to Arundel’s corner office, where this insanity had all begun. Arundel walked in first, left the lights off, and snapped on the VCR/television still sitting on the metal cart in front of his desk. Rep hung back to close the door. Very firmly. The oddly cheerful music that Rep recognized from The Discipline Effectiveness Program came on.

  Rep studied the carpet while Finneman gazed with apparently unruffled dispassion at the screen. After about five minutes, highlighted by a hairbrush vigorously smacking a well-filled pair of jockey shorts, Finneman turned toward Arundel.

  “Does it pretty much go on like this?” he asked.

  “It gets worse, if you can believe it.”

  “Well, Chip, this is a side of you I frankly wouldn’t have suspected.”

  “It’s not my tape,” Arundel bleated. “It belongs to Pennyworth.”

  “Then why is it in your office?”

  “Because someone had to investigate this!” Arundel insisted, whipping out the list of web sites and tendering them to Finneman. “There’s also these. This is not some trivial thing we can just sweep under the rug. Using firm resources to access pornography creates enormous potential liability for the firm.”

  “Well, I’m a little older than you are and I don’t know about calling it pornography,” Finneman said placidly as he scanned the list. “Seems to me it’s a little like smoking. It might not be fashionable and you don’t hear people bragging about it—but I don’t see how it can be pornography if you could do it on network television in the nineteen fifties.”

  Finneman turned off the television. Rep and Arundel looked for a moment at each other, equally astonished at the old man’s reaction. Then Arundel pivoted abruptly and stalked toward the door. Rep had just managed to set himself in motion when Arundel opened the door. He was, accordingly, quite surprised by the next words he heard:

  “On your knees!”

  Rep recognized Mary Jane Masterson’s unmistakable contralto. Rep moved toward the door in hopes of finding out why she would be directing this unusual command at Arundel.

  Masterson stood six feet from the door. She sported thigh-high, black leather, stiletto-heeled boots. She was wearing a black leather teddy. She was holding a leather-handled scourge with six long, black, leather tails.

  “On your knees!” she repeated. “Now! Drop
your trousers and present your worthless bottom for the lash!”

  She started to say something else, but she stopped abruptly when she saw Rep and Finneman peering around Arundel’s shoulders.

  “You sure that tape was Rep’s?” Finneman asked jovially.

  “I-I-I-I-I-” Arundel said.

  “Golly,” Rep said.

  “Am I fired?” Masterson said.

  “If it were just this,” Finneman said, “you most certainly would be fired. We can’t have associates flogging partners, at least without management committee approval. But if you’re through playing with that whip for the moment, there’s something far more serious I’ve been meaning to discuss with you: theft of food from the employee lounges.”

  “How did you know about that?” Masterson squealed, snapping the whip ferociously in frustration against the carpet.

  “After Rep told me about his little adventures,” Finneman said, “I figured out everything except what had happened to the delicatessen death-threat that Mixler had sent to him, hoping he’d figure it came from our client. Then I remembered some complaints the secretaries had mentioned about food disappearing, often when you’d just been in the lounge, and I put two and two together. It’s still four, even in the digital age.”

  “You mean that awful thing was a death threat?” she demanded. “It tasted terrible, even after I microwaved it.”

  “We are a profession that depends on honor,” Finneman said, “so theft is beyond the pale. It calls for a sanction far more draconian than dismissal. You’re being transferred to the firm’s labor department. You’ll be defending employment discrimination claims.”

  “You mean I’m not fired?” Masterson asked in astonishment.

  “I can almost hear you now in your first negotiation,” Finneman said, looking dreamily at the ceiling. “‘How do I know your client’s claim is a fraud? Because every employment discrimination claim is a fraud.’”

  “I-I-I-I-I-I-” Arundel said.

  “Don’t thank me,” Rep said. “The expression on your face is enough.”

  Chapter 19

  Before sitting down on the quaint metal chair, Rep took an elegant little foam pillow from his flight bag and positioned it carefully on the seat. Melissa, who had already started sipping from the mocha latte he had fetched for her, lowered the cup and examined him with a mixture of sympathy and anxiety.

  “Did I, er, do it all right, honey?” she whispered. “I mean, after Jennifer showed me how and everything?”

  “You did it perfectly,” Rep said. “After all, the proof is in the pudding, and I certainly didn’t hear any complaints after the, ah, private time we had together.”

  “No, the private time was quite wonderful,” Melissa said with dreamy contentment. “I won’t pretend to understand it, but I guess that’s like not understanding why one joke is funny and another one isn’t.”

  “Right,” Rep said.

  “I mean, you don’t really have to understand to laugh. In fact, it’s generally better if you don’t understand.”

  “I don’t think even Professor Krieg would disagree with that.”

  “Don’t disparage Louise, however slyly,” Melissa said, wagging her finger. “She has officially accepted The Irreducible Heterosexuality of Lord Peter Wimsey: An Objectivist Challenge to Sexual Orientation as an Inevitably Arbitrary Construct as my dissertation topic.”

  “Isn’t that terribly subversive?”

  “Terribly.”

  “I mean, won’t they march you out into the courtyard at the next PMLA convention so that Stanley Fish can rip off your epaulets and cut the buttons from your tunic and break your sword in two?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Melissa said. “That’s what appeals to Louise about it. It’s so reactionary that it’s the ultimate rebellion. Advising me on that dissertation will keep her on the cutting edge.”

  They were having this conversation a little over three weeks after the climactic confrontation between Tavistock and Tempus-Caveator. Rep’s bandages were gone. He and Melissa were sitting—gingerly, in his case—at one of the abundant Starbucks dotting Orange County International—the L.A.-area airport with a larger than life-sized statue of John Wayne outside. They had just spent the weekend at Jennifer Payne’s semi-annual Ensure Domestic Tranquility Conference, which billed itself as featuring Hands-On Marital Counseling and Spousal Attitude Adjustment. In less than an hour, if all went well—and for the last three weeks all had been going rather well—they’d be in the air, on their way home.

  Their banter having run its course, Rep stared contemplatively into his own coffee cup. Then he looked back up at Melissa and gazed steadily at eyes he never tired of seeing.

  “I had the strangest feeling about something back there at the, ah, at the conference,” he said in a quiet voice. “And now that I’ve thought about it, I’m absolutely sure it was right. That was mom, wasn’t it? Jennifer Payne is my mother.”

  “I’m certain of it,” Melissa said. “I actually mistook her for you for an instant when I just got a glimpse of her face the first time I saw her. And it explains why she went to such incredible trouble to help you, once you’d revealed your name on the net, and why she was such a guardian angel for me at the scene party.”

  “She didn’t say anything or give any sign,” Rep said.

  “No. She’ll never be able to admit it openly, even to you. Even in private. She’ll keep quiet to protect you as much as herself. But I think one of the reasons you’re so sure is that she wanted you to be sure.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “And because she’s a star in the scene, we have a perfect excuse to come out here regularly if we want to.”

  “That’s true,” Rep said.

  Melissa then giggled mischievously as she reached with flirtatious coyness into her purse and extracted a brown envelope.

  “I brought a souvenir for you,” she said.

  She slipped the envelope across the table to him. Finishing his coffee in a gulp, he set the cup out of the way and chanced a sly look at the envelope’s contents. It was a computer-printed brochure. Its title read:

  Jennifer Payne Attitude Adjustment Center

  Top 10 Chat Rooms

  Top 100 Special Interest Web Sites

  “This is extremely thoughtful,” Rep said. “And ‘souvenir’ is exactly the right term for it. Thank you.”

  “What do you mean?” Melissa asked. “I actually thought of it as one of those useful, practical gifts.”

  “Coals to Newcastle,” Rep said, shaking his head. “I have the most confident conviction that from now on I’m not going to require any stimulus except from the mischievous minx across the table from me.”

  “What a sweet thing to say,” Melissa said. “I’ll bet Harriet Vane never heard anything that romantic from Lord Peter.”

  “I think you can count on it,” Rep said. “By the way, I have something for you.”

  He drew a small, gift-wrapped package from his inside coat pocket and handed it to her. The wrapping had been done a bit clumsily, according to a form-follows-function approach, the way a man would do it by himself. She opened it eagerly, fumbling with the ribbon a bit in her hurry.

  “Oh, darling,” she said when she had the box open. “A roach clip! How thoughtful. You shouldn’t have.”

  “Well, I just wanted to let you know that, you know, I trust you to know what’s right for you, and—you know.”

  “Yes,” Melissa said, “I do know. I do truly appreciate this. And it will be kind of a souvenir too.”

  “Not practical and useful?” Rep asked, unable to conceal the relief in his voice.

  “Well,” Melissa said, “it’s a bit hard to explain. When Louise and I had our little chat about how her theory that Lord Peter was gay was full of it, there was a lot of free associating going on in my head. One of the topics that sort of popped up was kids, which we’re going to have someday. And that go
t me to thinking about what I’d do to someone who sold marijuana to our oldest when he or she got to be, say, thirteen. While I was sitting there in the hospital looking at you, banged up the way you were because you drew a line and wouldn’t cross it, I realized what the answer was.”

  “Dare I ask?” Rep demanded.

  “Only if you want to hear that I’d cut his testicles off,” Melissa said, putting her own cup aside and briskly standing up.

  Rep stood up, stuffed the pillow carefully back in his flight bag, and fell into step beside Melissa.

  “Who would have thought?” he asked. “Life is endlessly surprising.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Melissa said. “Who would have thought an old dinosaur like Steve Finneman would have such a liberal attitude toward alternative sexual practices?”

  “Well, actually,” Rep said, “what he has is a very traditional attitude toward money.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Charlotte Buchanan’s father had told him that he wanted me to become the billing partner for Tavistock. That meant he had to work things out so that, whatever I did short of outright felony, I’d stay with the firm.”

  “What a nice surprise,” Melissa said with the mildly polite interest of someone for whom money had become a secondary concern.

  “This really is a charmingly ironic situation all around when you think about it, isn’t it?” he commented.

  “Truly,” Melissa agreed. “There’s nothing left to do, really, except stop to buy me a candy bar.”

  “Ah,” Rep said, “the proverbial munchies. Fair enough. What would you like?”

  “Well, naturally,” Melissa said, “an Oh Henry.”

  More from this Author

  For other books, upcoming author events, or more information please go to:

  www.poisonedpenpress.com/michael-bowen

  Contact Us

  To receive a free catalog of Poisoned Pen Press titles, please contact us in one of the following ways: