“Hmmm, that’s interesting. It doesn’t sound like anything. But the thing you’ve got to remember, you can’t tell them anything that isn’t true. They always seem to find out in the end. Now, tell me, do you know of any other reason, any reason at all, why they would be questioning you about this other than what you’ve told me?”
“No, of course not.”
Ben sighed. “Okay, then. Look, you’ve got to remember, if we find out that Greenfield didn’t just drop dead at his desk, if you really and truly believe they think you’re involved somehow, you shouldn’t talk to them again without an attorney present. If you want, call me, and I’ll be there when they talk to you. But remember, you don’t want to say anything, even inadvertently, that may unduly cast suspicion on you, okay? I’m not trying to upset you. I just want you to know how these things work.” There was a long pause. “Meg? Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure it will turn out to be nothing.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Again, I don’t think it means anything, but still, be careful. These guys build cases through people saying the wrong things at the wrong time.”
They talked for a few more minutes. Ben could sense that she was calming down a little bit and really needed to get this out of her system more than anything else. Nevertheless, he couldn’t believe that she could really be a suspect in a murder, assuming it was a murder. It just didn’t make any sense.
“Ben,” she finally said, “if it came to that and I needed a lawyer to represent me in this, would you help me? Would you represent me if I needed help?”
Ben flushed. “Of course I would,” he said, “but I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think you’re going to need anyone’s help. I think you just misunderstood what they were trying to find out. I’m sure it’s going to be nothing.”
A moment later they hung up and Ben sat in his office for a minute staring silently at the phone. Scott Nelson. That had to mean something. His secretary, Nancy Schulte, poked her head in the door. She must have heard him hang up the phone. “So, what was that all about?” she asked. Nancy had been with the firm for more than twenty years, and had more or less been Ben’s secretary since he arrived several years before. Something of a refugee from the Sixties, who only became a legal secretary when she didn’t know what else to do, Nancy was fast, efficient and almost never made mistakes. Ben considered her the best legal secretary he’d ever known and he liked working with her.
She also served as the unofficial gatekeeper for the firm. She often had the task of breaking in the new people to ascertain whether or not they were truly competent to practice law with the firm. Once they had passed this threshold and thereby earned her respect, a woman who at first glance appeared very difficult, suddenly became very easy to work with. Ben crossed over that bridge fairly early in their relationship so that any hazing period he had experienced with her was relatively short.
The only problem with Nancy from Ben’s perspective was that Nancy also worked for Phil Luckenbill, the firm’s managing partner. That occasionally put her in an awkward position and necessarily tended to divide her loyalties. Ben appreciated this fact and found a way to work around it without ever forgetting it. She sat down opposite Ben on the bench that served as the guest chairs in Ben’s office. “So, tell me, what happened?”
Ben sat back in the chair and took a deep breath. “Well, it appears that our Megan is being questioned regarding the death of one of our former law professors.”
“You mean that guy in the paper?”
“That’s the one.”
“What did she say?”
“Well, not too much. I really don’t think it’s anything. They just wanted to get some facts. We don’t even know how he died. They found her name on something in his office. Probably nothing.”
“So that’s what you told her?”
“Yeah. I told her I didn’t think it was going to amount to anything.”
She noted that he wasn’t making eye contact, unusual for him. “But you don’t really believe that, do you?” she said suspiciously. He didn’t answer. Scott Nelson. Homicide detective. He merely looked at her, a gaze which spoke volumes. “Holy shit,” Nancy said. “Does she want to hire you?”
Ben nodded. “If she needs to, I suppose.”
“And you think she’s going to need to, don’t you?”
Ben paused. “Is Phil going to come in today?” he asked avoiding the question.
“I doubt it,” she answered. “He’s got redistricting meetings all day downtown. You can probably catch him on the cell phone if you want to badly enough though.”
Ben nodded getting to his feet. “I’ll go over to the other side to talk to Casey. I’ll be back.”
“A murder case,” she said to herself as Ben walked by.
As he reached the door, he turned, “Nance?” She turned to face him. Ben simply put his forefinger across his lips in the universal symbol for silence. She nodded.
Ben was the last one left in the building that night. He looked at his watch and yawned. It had been a long day and he was tired. He got up and walked downstairs and grabbed a beer out of the fridge in the kitchen. It had been one of those days where he had been busy from the time he got into the office, yet what he had accomplished didn’t seem to amount to much. Some days it seemed as though he could work for twelve hours straight and only bill for six. Other days, far less frequent, he could work for six hours and bill for twelve. Ben liked those days better.
He had Court in the morning in Wheaton and needed to get his stuff together before he could go on home. As he took a long swallow of his beer, he couldn’t get Megan Rand out of his mind. He couldn’t possibly fathom what evidence the police could have that caused them to link Megan Rand with the death of Daniel Greenfield, however that may have occurred.
He thought back to the day he first met Meg and Fran. It was late August of 1989 when the Class of 1992 at the Chicago College of Law began law school. Their first class was Property with Professor Gordon Hyatt. Their second class was Criminal Law with Daniel Greenfield. When Ben got to the classroom on the 4th floor of the old building on Wacker Drive, many of the seats were already taken. Greenfield hadn’t arrived yet and the students were milling about and engaging in quiet conversation. Ben saw a seat on the aisle at the end of the second row and sat down. A few minutes later, Megan Rand and Fran Fischer came in together. Ben did not know either of them. Meg took the lone empty seat next to Ben, while Fran took a seat in front of them in the first row. It was apparent that the two women knew each other. After a moment of small talk, Fran introduced herself. “Hi. I’m Fran Fischer. This is my friend, Megan Rand. We went to undergrad together.”
“Nice to meet you,” Ben said quietly with a nod.
A few minutes later, Professor Greenfield arrived and they began their study of criminal law. It didn’t take long before they realized that all of the rumors were true - the more prurient and sensational the subject matter of a criminal case, the more likely that Professor Greenfield was to be interested in it and discuss it in class. Thus, his class focused on assaults, rapes and murders, the more brutal and graphic, the better. They also noticed Professor Greenfield’s habit of beginning his lectures by starting with a student seated at the end of a row and working down that row, class after class, before moving on to another row. Although Greenfield was fairly Socratic in nature, he wasn’t particularly difficult to students, unlike some of the other professors in the law school. He usually allowed students to embarrass themselves before moving on to the next person. He apparently didn’t feel the need to pile on.
Many of the women in Greenfield’s class were embarrassed both by the subject matter and his need to hear them recite the specific facts of the crimes described in that day’s cases. It was about three weeks into the semester and Ben and Meg’s row had yet to be called on in class. They had been talking about it for days and knew that it was coming sooner or later. One
bright Wednesday morning, their time came. They were talking about one particular case before class, and Meg was hoping that this would not be the day. It was a case before the United States Supreme Court, a Justice Brennan opinion involving sexual assault. Professor Greenfield introduced the case and turned to face them. “Mr. Lohmeier,” he said, “can you give us the facts of this case, please?”
Megan groaned as Ben began describing the facts in some detail and squirmed uncomfortably to his right while he continued. After a few moments of this, Greenfield turned to Meg and asked a follow-up question.
Without hesitating and before she could speak, Ben cut in and began to answer. Greenfield stopped him. “I’m sorry Mr. Lohmeier, I meant that question for Ms. Rand, but since you’ve already started, why don’t you go ahead and finish.” Megan sighed in relief. Ben finished his answer and continued to answer all of the questions Greenfield posed until they were done with the case. Greenfield did not turn his attention back to Meg until the next case, one largely devoid of lurid details.
From that date on, the friendship between Benjamin Lohmeier and Megan Rand was set in stone. Ben’s performance that day not only got Megan off the hook, but also had the unforeseen benefit of inoculating them somewhat from these kinds of cases. Because he realized that Ben could handle a case like this without any difficulty and throw whatever he dished out right back at him, Professor Greenfield tended to shy away from them in situations like this. Instead, he preferred to give them cases with more difficult legal issues, not more prurient fact patterns. And Megan Rand couldn’t have been more grateful.
7
When Ben dragged himself out of bed on Wednesday morning, he peered through the blinds of his bedroom and saw a smattering of snow flurries falling harmlessly from the sky. By the time he left his house and headed for Court, more than two inches of fresh snow covered the driveway. It was twenty-five minutes past eight and he had to be in Wheaton by nine. “God damn it,” he said to himself as he pulled out of the driveway. He knew there was no way he would make it on time.
Ben arrived at the Courthouse twenty minutes late, but managed to take care of his two status calls without serious difficulty. His route back to the office took him down Bloomingdale Road, past the former house of Senior Partner Jim Schulte. He checked his speed as he headed down the hill toward Schulte’s house because he knew that the Ithaca police often hid on the side streets off Bloomingdale Road in order to catch unsuspecting drivers who had not slowed sufficiently as they cruised toward downtown. As he passed Schulte’s old house, once known as the Pig Farm, he saw a handful of Schulte’s old plastic pigs dotted throughout the front yard, partially obscured by the falling snow. He eased his way into downtown, circled around Usher Park and turned left at the Tree Top Pizza Inn and coasted back toward the office.
Irving Park Road is a highly trafficked thoroughfare bisecting downtown Ithaca. The office was set back off the road west of and slightly behind the pizza place and its adjoining tavern. Further up Irving Park Road to the west stood the Ithaca Train Station, where commuters would take the forty minute trip to downtown Chicago. The train tracks angled behind the office and its parking lot and were so close that they could make telephone conversations difficult when the numerous commuter and freight trains rumbled by. The office also sat smack dab in the landing pattern for O’Hare Airport to the east and jumbo jets flew deafeningly low over the building all day long.
The original part of the office was a white frame Victorian house built in the 1890’s. To this structure, some twenty or so years before, Jim Schulte had attached a storefront grocery store originally found around the corner in downtown Ithaca. The grocery store served as the main entrance to the building. On the other side of the grocery store, Schulte built a two-story addition, which housed additional offices for both the firm and for a handful of renters, primarily other lawyers. Facing the railroad tracks, Schulte built a structure that appeared to be a modest-sized garage, complete with an old gas pump on the east side and what appeared to be the entrance to a barbershop on the west. The garage served as the building’s library and conference room.
Clients coming to the office for the first time would turn off of Irving Park Road onto First Street and drive back behind the tavern, where they would encounter the new addition on the east side of the building flanked by a row of parking spaces. Continuing back, they would come to the garage and the gas pump jutting out from the main entrance of the building at a right angle toward the railroad tracks. If there were no parking spaces on the east side of the building, clients would circle around the garage, where they would find a back entrance to the building and four more parking spaces. Proceeding around the corner of the white frame house, six or eight more parking spaces ended at a sidewalk that paralleled Irving Park Road. A short walk down this sidewalk across Walnut Avenue brought the commuters to the Ithaca train station.
Finding no parking spaces near the main entrance, Ben pulled around the garage and found an open space next to the back entrance at the corner of the house. Ben grabbed his briefcase and shuffled through the snow, past a telephone box and a small stone fountain, and up the six wooden steps to the back entrance of the building located in a small porch. He kicked the snow off his shoes as he entered a small hallway, which housed the restrooms. At its end, a doorway led down a couple of steps into a hallway and out to the garage. To his right, the bookkeeper’s office sat opposite the copy room.
Ben walked through the copy room and stuck his head into a small, oddly-shaped office where he had spent the first couple of years of his time with the firm and Dan Conlon now called home. The office had a large window which looked across the open yard to the pizza place and tavern beyond. Conlon was on the phone and Ben gave him a quick nod before heading left toward the lobby and dropping his briefcase and coat on a long, wooden church pew against the wall on the right. The main entrance to the building under the Matt’s Grocery sign stood opposite the church pew. There was no identification for the law firm or any of its tenants anywhere.
The lobby also contained a large wooden reception desk, fax machine, and two rocking chairs flanking a small table. One corner opposite the door held a large wooden credenza complete with book shelves, while the other contained an open icebox dating from the 1940’s with artificial food inside adding to the rustic country feel of the room. A rustic chandelier hung from a white, ornate trey ceiling made of faux plaster. Beyond the lobby and a stairway filled with political posters and photographs, a perpendicular hallway formed the new part of the building, a two-story structure with a row of offices on each floor.
Behind the church pew and opposite the main entry was the kitchen. A modest room with a wooden table, sink, microwave and refrigerator to go with a small amount of counter space and a few cabinets, the kitchen was largely a tribute to Jim Schulte’s late father, an assistant fire chief in a small town in Wisconsin. The walls were ordained with framed newspaper clippings, photographs celebrating his career and even his fire axe and helmet. A sense of casualness permeated the atmosphere of the office, where lawyers seldom wore suits unless a Court appearance or formal meeting required it.
James Schulte came to Ithaca in the 1970’s when most lawyers still practiced in downtown Chicago and DuPage County was wide open and there for the taking. He and a handful of others established a foothold in DuPage County, where they could bridge the gap between the silk stocking practices of downtown Chicago and the more rural collar counties. His firm broke apart in the early 1990’s, with several of his more senior people leaving to set up their own firm in Ithaca and taking some of Schulte’s business with them, without much of a protest. Phillip Luckenbill, then an associate only four or five years out of law school, decided to stay and was named a partner in the new firm, Schulte & Luckenbill.
Thereafter, Schulte became even less interested in practicing law, ceding much of the management duties of the firm to Luckenbill, and spending increasing amounts of time at a rustic home he was buil
ding on a large piece of property outside of Hayward in northern Wisconsin. By mid-1997, he more or less quit the practice of law, giving away all his suits save for one and even renting out his own personal office in the building. Within two years, the Pig Farm on Bloomingdale Road was also on the market and he was spending essentially all of his time in Hayward. He would come back occasionally to handle the odd matter or two, but for the most part, Jim Schulte’s large ego and unusual presence were largely confined to the north woods, where, among other things, he raised buffalo.
Law firms, particularly small and mid-sized ones, are often oddly managed enterprises, for some of the best lawyers are also the worst businessmen. It is not uncommon for small and mid-sized law firms to operate both fiscally and otherwise as little more than the alter egos of their founders. This typically results in a chaotic and often despotic management structure. Within the confines of Schulte & Luckenbill, Ben defined the management structure with something he liked to call the Pie Chart of Power.
The Pie Chart was really very simple. It was a traditional pie chart, where the size of an individual’s slice of the pie corresponded with his or her degree of power within the hierarchy of the firm. The size of the pieces of pie might vary from time to time and according to the particular issue involved, but generally speaking, Phil Luckenbill possessed approximately sixty percent of the pie, while Jim Schulte’s share had dwindled to twenty percent.
The remaining twenty percent was divvied up in what at first glance would be unusual proportions. Nancy Schulte, the secretary to both Phil Luckenbill and Benjamin Lohmeier, held about seven percent of the pie, reflecting her longtime status as the firm’s gatekeeper and a major power behind the scenes. Newly-minted Senior Associate Casey Gardner also held seven percent. Dianne Reynolds, Jim Schulte’s secretary and the firm’s office manager, had seen her share shrink to three percent with her boss’s semi-retirement. The remaining support staff members combined for approximately two percent. That left a meager one percent share of the pie for all the remaining attorneys in the firm combined.
Final Exam: A Legal Thriller Page 4