“It’s going to be okay,” I said. I had done some basic research before Megan came to my office, and I found that she had filed three restraining orders against Gerald. In these orders, she wrote that he had threatened her life, had attempted to strangle her, and had beat her so badly that she ended up in the hospital. I hated that he had gotten away with this. I imagined that the only reason why he wasn’t in prison for assault was because he was wealthy enough to buy his way out of his problems.
Maybe. But I had a feeling that his luck was about to run out. If he was behind murdering Judge Sanders, he was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Where he belonged.
“That’s easy for you to say. Gerald has had me followed more than once. I, uh, did some research on you before coming here. I found out that you’re on the case involving the Judge Sanders murder. How is that coming along?”
“It’s coming along fine. But that’s why I need to speak with you.”
She looked confused. “Okay. I guess I don’t really understand why you need to speak with me. I’ve been trying to figure out the connection, or, at least, how you’re connecting me to this murder. Or maybe you need to speak with me for some other reason?”
“No. I don’t think that you’re mixed up with Judge Sanders’ murder. Not at all. But I have to ask you some more questions about Gerald.”
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “What do you need to know?”
“Tell me about your relationship with him. I take it that he was already married to Kayla at the time that you and he met?”
“Yes.” She sighed. “I didn’t know that, of course.” She bit her lower lip. “I was working then. At a club. Bazookas. I was a dancer there.”
Bazookas was a strip club downtown that featured totally nude dancing. It was a juice bar, which meant that it didn’t serve alcohol – this was a requirement because of a local ordinance that stated that if girls were dancing nude, then the men cannot be drunk. It was a good ordinance, I thought, because it somewhat protected the girls from pushy men.
“You were a dancer. Did you meet Gerald at Bazookas?”
“I did. He was a regular there. He came in at least once a week. He paid for a lap dance from me, only from me, every time he came in. He told me that he wanted me to give him lap dances because he found me beautiful.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I believed him. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know he was rich. I only knew that, at least at first, he made me feel like I was the only woman in that club. He could be very charming.”
She started to cry, and I wordlessly gave her a box of Kleenex. She took one and dabbed her eyes and blew her nose.
I made notes as she spoke. I had a feeling that she was going to be one of my most important witnesses.
“So, yeah. I was a dancer and he was one of my most important clients. He always tipped extremely well. I mean, extremely well. He would tip me $1,000 for a lap dance, so I was excited when he would come in. All the other girls wanted him to choose them for a dance, too, but he was pretty well fixated with me.”
I nodded along and didn’t say anything. I was going to draw her out, so I wanted to say as little as possible.
“Well, sooner or later, he asked me what I was doing after work. At that time, I was working the 2-10 PM shift, three days a week. I would generally go to work and go home and watch television or something before coming back again the next day. In other words, I didn’t have much going on at that time, so I didn’t mind having him take me out. Again, though, I didn’t know who he was. If I did, I doubt that I would have gone out with him. Then again, if I never went out with him, I wouldn’t have Amelia, so, for that reason alone, I’m grateful to have met him. But that’s the only reason why I am glad that I met him, though.”
“Okay,” I said as I made notes. “So, you met him while you were working and the two of you went out.”
“Yes. But we only went out the one time.” She looked down at my desk. “He, uh. He did something. I still don’t know what. But he did something. Put something in my drink or something. All that I know is that I woke up on my couch, the morning after he and I went out, and I had no idea how I got there. But I could tell that he and I had sex. I could feel it - the tenderness that you get when you’ve had sex after not having had sex for a long time.”
I felt nervous when she spoke. It was safe to say that I was going to be very tender, probably be in pain, the next time I had sex. It had been 17 years. I was practically a virgin again.
I also felt an affinity for her. She was raped by Gerald. There was no other word for it. He no doubt put GHB, the “date rape” drug, into her drink and then had his way with her while she was unconscious.
“I thought nothing of it at first,” she continued. “I mean, I was angry, but I wasn’t all that sure that we did it. I wasn’t going to accuse him of something like that. I had no proof. So I just decided to move on. Kind of forget that I ever went out with him. I was relieved, too, when I realized that he wasn’t coming into the club anymore. I didn’t want to see him.” She visibly shuddered. “I moved on. I forgot all about him until about six weeks later when I started throwing up in the morning and I realized that I hadn’t gotten my period in awhile.”
I nodded along. “So, you realized that you were pregnant.”
“I guess so. I mean, I didn’t want to accept that I was pregnant. I tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. I’m a dancer, you know. I’m a dancer. I couldn’t be pregnant.” Then she laughed. “And I wasn’t still entirely sure that I had had sex, either. People think that we dancers are having sex all the time, but the reality is much different. At least, for me it was different. I didn’t date all that much. And Gerald was my first sexual experience in more than a year and I hadn’t had sex with anyone else after him. So I just thought that my system was haywire and I had the flu.”
She looked sad and she blew her nose again. Then she looked out the window. I just carefully watched her as she looked out the window and, from time to time, took sips of water.
Finally, she spoke again. “I saw the doctor and found out that I was pregnant. I knew who the father was, of course. And I knew for sure that I had been raped. I wasn’t sure before that Gerald and I had sex, but when I found out I was pregnant, I knew for sure that he had sex with me while I was unconscious. So I was furious. And the first thing that I wanted to do was take care of it. Go to Planned Parenthood and take care of it. I couldn’t have a baby. I was a dancer, making really good money, but I would have to quit, so there wasn’t going to be the money for a kid.”
She sighed and, for a long time, she didn’t say anything else. I saw the look on her face and I knew that telling this story was difficult for her, to say the very least.
She flattened out her mouth, as if she was trying to hold back tears again. “No money for a kid,” she said softly. “I didn’t even know how to get in touch with him. I never got his phone number. I didn’t know where he lived. It was a disaster. I was pregnant by a man who raped me while I was unconscious, and I had no clue on how to find him again.”
“How did you find him?”
“Well, it was the weirdest thing. His company, Stone Enterprises, was in the newspaper. It lost a lot of money that year, yet Gerald was still pocketing millions of dollars a year as its CEO and founder. People were outraged, so the company was in the newspaper and they showed a picture of Gerald there. I read the newspaper, saw the picture, and I was stunned. Absolutely stunned. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”
I made notes furiously while she spoke. “So, you found out who he was. How did you get in touch with him?”
“It wasn’t easy. I knew who he was, finally, but that did me little good. I mean, I couldn’t just call Stone Enterprises and ask to speak with the CEO. That wasn’t going to work. I went to the headquarters and asked to see him, and they laughed at me. They said that there wasn’t any way that I could get a meeting with him. So, I was frustrated.”
; “How were you able to finally speak with him?”
“I had to have him served at his office. With a paternity petition.” She shook her head. “To say that he wasn’t happy would be an understatement. He called me the night that he was served and he cussed me up and down. He told me that there was no way that he was the father of my baby, and that I was a stripper, so I probably had sex with a hundred men since him, so how did I know that he was the father? He was a completely different man than the man that I had gotten to know at the club. But I was firm. I told him that he was the only man that I had slept with in over a year, so I was positive that he was the one who had gotten me pregnant.”
I had to smile. I imagined the look on his face when he received that petition and just the thought of that made me want to giggle just a little. Men like Gerald needed to be brought down to size, and I imagined that her petition did just that – brought him down to size.
“And then what happened?”
“He fought me the whole way. He had some powerful lawyer file a bunch of motions, and I didn’t have a lawyer at all. I was doing it all myself. The lawyer tried to stop me from getting a DNA test, but the judge ordered it anyway, and, of course, the results came back that he was the father. He was the only one that was possible, so I wasn’t surprised. He was, though, and furious. He was married, which made things more complicated.”
To say the least.
“Did he lose his temper?”
“Oh, yeah. He did. He came over to my house three separate times. He strangled me one of those times. He had me down on the floor and he had his hands around my neck and I thought I was going to die. The second time he came over, he kicked me in the stomach. I knew that he was trying to get me to lose the baby, and that scared me. The third time, he beat me up so bad that I was put into the hospital. After each time he came over, I filed a restraining order against him. He obviously didn’t care, because he kept on coming over.”
“The bastard,” I muttered, and Megan laughed softly.
“To say the least,” she said. “You can call him a sociopath. That would be the better term for him. I was very angry, because I kept going to court because he kept violating the restraining order, and the judge would let him go every time. The cops also refused to arrest him after he beat me up that one time. The cops refused to arrest him every time he came over. I felt pretty helpless. I had restraining orders against him and he was beating on me and strangling me and I couldn’t get law enforcement to protect me. I thought he was going to kill me next.”
She put her fingers on my desk and drummed them while she looked out the window again for several minutes.
“Would you like another water?” I asked her.
“No,” she said with a shake of her head. “I just want to get through this.” She paused again. “I thought he was going to kill me. But I got the upper hand on him. I got the upper hand, and I was able to make him do what I wanted him to do.”
My ears perked up when she said this. I was genuinely curious on how she managed to get the upper hand on him. “What happened? What did you do to get the upper hand?”
“I got smart. I hired a private investigator to find out any information on him that I could use. I needed to fight fire with fire. And that PI came through. He came through like a house on fire.”
“In what way?”
“My PI, Manuel, found out that Gerald was stealing from the company. He had a forensic accountant go through the company’s books, I guess he also had somebody hack the company’s financial records, and they found out that Gerald had been stealing millions from his own company. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I read in the paper that he was being paid $30 million per year and that his stock options brought him millions more, sometimes over a hundred million dollars a year, and that wasn’t enough. That wasn’t enough. He had to also steal millions more. I mean, how much does one person need? Truly. I guess, for some people, they can never have enough money. It’s some kind of psychological disorder.”
I believed it. I believed that people who were that obsessed with acquiring millions upon millions, by any means possible, were suffering from a psychological disorder of some sort. That made sense to me. At any rate, Gerald sounded like a real piece of work.
A real piece of work.
She looked out the window again. “I told him, after I found this information out, that I had the goods on him, and that I was going to the authorities to have him arrested.”
“How did he react to that?”
“He blustered. He told me that he had no clue what I was talking about. But he suddenly started to play ball. We went to court, and I got child support from him, but I wanted to really make him pay. So I continued to hold that information above his head. Also, I knew that he wanted to literally kill me. He was desperate for me to keep my mouth shut, and I knew that he was the kind of guy who wouldn’t have a problem with killing somebody to protect himself, so I let him know that the information I had about him stealing was in a secure location and that my mother knew where it was and so did one other person. I didn’t tell him who the other person was.”
She was a smart cookie. If Gerald thought that he could just kill her to shut her up, she let him know that that plan wouldn’t work. She also told him that two different people had that information, without telling him who the second person was, therefore he wouldn’t know who to kill in order to keep everything quiet. Very smart.
“So, then what happened?”
“I got what I wanted from him. He bought me that house in Hallbrook and he agreed to pay me $100,000 a year, in addition to the child support that he was giving me, which was figured out to be $5,000 a month.” She smiled. “And he hasn’t harassed me since. In fact, I haven’t seen him since. Thank god.”
I leaned back in my chair as I regarded her. She was smart and tough. She also had the goods on Gerald. One thing was for sure – after speaking with her, I had no doubt, zero doubt, that Gerald was capable of ordering Judge Sanders murdered.
“Let me ask you this. The reason why I wanted to speak with you is that I’m hot on the trail of finding out who killed Judge Sanders. I’m thinking that Gerald Stone is looking pretty good to me right now.”
She furrowed her brow. “Gerald is? Why do you think that he did it?”
“His company has a case that’s pending. A class action. It involves Dowling Chemicals, which is a subsidiary of Stone Enterprises.”
She nodded her head. “Yes. That chemical. Toluene or something like that.”
“Toluene. Yes. That’s exactly it.”
“Those poor people. I mean, I know that community. It’s pretty similar to the neighborhood where I grew up. Those people have very little to begin with. They certainly don’t need some negligent company poisoning them. All those babies born with brain damage – it’s heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking.”
I nodded my head. “It is. It breaks my heart, too. And you’re right – those people have enough to worry about without having to worry about getting sick because some idiotic company doesn’t make sure that they’re disposing of chemicals correctly.”
“Amen. So, that case is pending. Why do you think that Gerald wanted to get rid of Judge Sanders?”
I raised my eyebrows. “If you knew about Judge Sanders, you would know why. He was a plaintiffs’ attorney. By that, I mean that he consistently ruled on behalf of the plaintiffs against the big corporations. He had no qualms slapping companies with large punitive damages when they were guilty of criminal wrong-doing. In this case, there was the possibility of being assessed millions of dollars in punitive damages. Maybe even as much as a billion in punitive damages. At any rate, the punitives would have probably been in the hundreds of millions if Judge Sanders was trying this case. I read through his opinions, and he hated corporations who are criminally negligent. He despised them. He slapped them down hard. And the way that Dowling got rid of those chemicals – that was criminally negligent. I mean, the employees were just
pouring that stuff on the ground. They didn’t even bother putting all the chemicals in barrels. And the barrels that they did use were not rated for those kinds of chemicals.”
“Really? I didn’t pay that much attention to that case. I mean, I saw that it was Dowling Chemicals, but I didn’t really associate it with Gerald.” She smiled. “If I did associate it with Gerald, I probably would have thought the same thing that you’re thinking – that Gerald was behind Judge Sanders’ murder. Because you’re right – Gerald would have a judge killed. He would do that without even thinking. The man’s a sociopath. A straight-up sociopath.”
I drummed my pen on the desk. “He is. I mean, he sounds like it.” I bit my lower lip. I was fairly certain that Gerald’s fingerprints were all over this murder. Just all over it. But was Michael’s fingerprints on it as well?
That was going to be the trick. I was going to somehow, someway, connect Michael to this whole murder. I didn’t know how I was going to do that, however. Gerald Stone had motive to kill the judge. Gerald Stone had the right mentality to do it. Michael, however, didn’t quite have the same motive.
It might have just been a huge coincidence that Michael was involved with Kayla Stone, and that Gerald Stone most likely ordered that Judge Sanders be killed. Yet, there wasn’t any doubt that Michael had the best access to the judge. Somebody poisoned him, too, before he was killed, and Christina Sanders told me that Michael had the best access to poison the judge.
Michael told me, however, that Christina was setting him up.
I was confused. After speaking with Megan, I thought that I knew who did it – it was Gerald. But I couldn’t deny that Christina Sanders, and, for that matter, Ava Sanders, also had reason to do it. Michael was having an affair with Kayla Stone, and Kayla Stone’s prenuptial agreement was changed the day after the judge was murdered. That would indicate to me that Kayla Stone did something for Gerald in exchange for getting the terms that she wanted on that agreement.
Justice Denied - A Harper Ross Legal Thriller Page 21