Firm Ambitions

by Michael A. Kahn

  “Oh, Eileen. What a nightmare.”

  She nodded as she lit another cigarette. Leaning back in her chair, she took a deep drag and exhaled through her nostrils. “That’s when I really freaked. I knew there would be police. He was dead. There was nothing more I could do. I knew I had to get out of there before the ambulance arrived. I grabbed the pictures, stuffed them into his Lands’ End attaché—”

  “What pictures?”

  She paused and looked me straight in the eyes. She took another drag on the cigarette. “Of us.”

  I nodded. “Go on.”

  “The pictures were on the nightstand. So was the camera. I stuffed them into his attaché. I grabbed my purse and grabbed his bag and got out of there as fast as I could.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  She gave me a look of disbelief. “Are you kidding? No one knows I was there.”

  “What about the hotel people?”

  “I always pay cash in advance. I never use my real name.”

  “Does Tommy know?”

  She laughed—a quick, manic bark. “Tommy? Are you crazy? That’s all I need.”

  “Eileen, according to the article the police are already suspicious about his death. They think he was poisoned. They’ll have autopsy results soon. If he didn’t die of natural causes—and that sure didn’t sound like a heart attack—there’s going to be a major homicide investigation. Count on it. He was practically a celebrity. That’ll put extra pressure on the police. It’s better if you come forward now.”

  “Jesus Christ, Rachel, I didn’t kill him,” she said with outrage.

  “That’s not my point, Eileen. Look, the autopsy is going to show that he had sex just before he died. You probably left something in the room—maybe your lipstick or mascara, certainly your fingerprints, probably strands of your hair. It’ll be a lot easier on you if you come forward now instead of letting them track you down on their own. I know how these things play out. I can arrange it for you with the police. You can tell them what you saw and—”

  “Forget it,” she interrupted impatiently. “I tell the police today and then read about myself in the newspaper tomorrow. No, thanks. I’m not about to become some scandal slut. And anyway, I didn’t leave my lipstick there. I didn’t leave anything there. And I’ve never been fingerprinted in my life.”

  “Eileen, you’re not thinking straight.”

  “I’m thinking very straight. I’ve been thinking very straight and very hard about this very subject and about nothing else since I got home last night. I know how these things work, Rachel. I know what kind of people are in the media. They’re vultures. No, vultures wait till you’re dead. They’re parasites. They feed on live flesh. I saw what they did to Tommy on his drug charges. Here’s a simple question: Can you guarantee that my name won’t appear in the newspaper if I come forward?”

  “Well, I can’t guarantee it.”

  “That’s the answer, then. I’m not going to have my children read about this. I’m not going to have them teased at school.” She paused to take another drag on her cigarette. “Do you know what the first Sunday of next month is?”

  “No,” I admitted, conceding defeat. You can give a client advice, but you can’t make them take it.

  “It’s CSL Night.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to put a little enthusiasm into my voice.

  CSL Night. Short for Cocktails over St. Louis Night. It’s an annual fund-raising event put on by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Mount Sinai Hospital of St. Louis. For $1,000, you can join the Jewish glitterati of St. Louis on a voyage to nowhere, i.e., a black-tie evening featuring cocktails and a motion-picture premiere aboard a specially chartered Lockheed L-1011 jet that departs St. Louis at 8:00 p.m., circles southern Illinois for four hours, and returns to St. Louis at midnight. For the Jewish country-club set of St. Louis, it is the social event of the season, which the Women’s Auxiliary thoughtfully times to coincide with the opening of the spring fashion season. I am told that when the hospital’s president announces during cocktails how they plan to spend the money raised on that year’s flight, the passengers—or at least some of the sober ones within earshot—feel a warm glow.

  “I’m chairman of CSL this year,” Eileen explained. “I’ve been planning for the event the whole year. We’re having John Goodman and John Landis for the premiere of their new movie. There are a lot of people counting on me, Rachel. Important people. Look, Andros is dead. There’s nothing I can do for him. This event is important to me. It’s where my life’s at these days. It’s where my future is. I’m not going to have some sleazy sex scandal ruin it for me.”

  Nothing I could say would change her mind. Maybe she’d get lucky. I doubted it. The Clayton police weren’t the Keystone Kops.

  “Okay,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s talk about what you should do if the police call.”

  I took her through the usual police techniques and the response she should make to each question they asked. “Understand?” I repeated.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “‘I want to talk to my lawyer before I answer that,’” she recited.

  “Good.”

  Eileen reached under her chair and handed me a canvas attaché. “Speaking of my lawyer, I want you to keep this for me.”

  “What is this?” I asked, although I had guessed the moment she pulled it out.

  “His briefcase. The one I took from the hotel room. I want you to keep it until the investigation is over.”

  I set the Lands’ End attaché on the edge of my desk, where it seemed to spontaneously generate a series of ethical issues worthy of a law school exam.

  “Eileen, this is—”

  “Look, Rachel, if someone really killed him, they certainly didn’t use anything in that bag. Believe me, nothing in that bag could hurt him. But the two pictures in there could ruin me. I admit I was stupid. All I wanted were the damn pictures, but I panicked and took the whole goddamn bag. Now I’m stuck. I can’t exactly sneak it back into the room, right?”

  I stared at the attaché. It sat there like fresh roadkill. This truly had become the divorce case from hell. “I have a safe in here,” I finally said.

  “God bless you, Rachel. You have no idea…”

  I held up my hand to stop her. “I’ll keep it there for now. No promises about the future.”

  “I understand.” She reached across the desk and grabbed my hand with both of hers. “Thanks.”

  ***

  A fierce spring thunderstorm was raging outside my office window. Cars were creeping down the street, their windshield wipers flailing at sheets of water. The rain came in waves, thundering across the roofs, clattering along the streets. Raindrops bounced off the asphalt like shotgun pellets. The office lights flickered. I glanced at the bulky safe in the corner.

  Eileen had left almost immediately after I locked the attaché in the safe. An hour later, alone in my office, still feeling used, I had looked dully up as my secretary poked her head in to say good night. The sky was already dark by then, and the wind was blowing. The first crash of thunder sounded five minutes later, followed by the rain.

  I stared at the safe.

  Although she said nothing in that attaché killed him, I told myself, how can you be sure of that unless you look?

  But, I interrupted, it’s really none of your business what’s in that attaché.

  Are you crazy? I answered. How about when the police get involved? What if there’s evidence of a crime in there?

  Eventually, I won the argument. Closing the blinds, I opened the safe. Placing the attaché on my desk, I unzipped it and removed the contents, one by one, writing them down as I did:

  1. one yellow legal pad (blank);

  2. three blue felt-tip pens (medium point—0.5 mm);

  3. three microcassette audiotapes (Leuwenhaupt Model 5400)
, each with a title written on the stick-on label:

  • “Dance Routine”;

  • “Low-Impact Workout”;

  • “High-Impact Routine w/Jazz Steps”;

  4. one calculator (Texas Instruments 2000G);

  5. a handwritten outline of an article on breathing exercises that Andros was apparently planning to write for an aerobics magazine called Fitness 2000;

  6. a Polaroid Impulse camera;

  7. a vibrator (battery-operated);

  8. a French tickler (I think); and

  9. the two photographs that had caused me to inherit the bag.

  I studied the photographs. Eileen was the star of both. In one, she was alone, “posed” on her back on the bed, her legs wide apart, her right hand pressing the tip of the vibrator into her vagina. In the other, she was licking an erect penis (presumably attachéd to Andros). The second picture was off-center and slanted, as if Andros had taken it by holding the camera out to the side and snapping the shot. Both pictures were in focus, and Eileen was clearly identifiable in each one.

  I could understand why Eileen hadn’t wanted the police to have those pictures. But I couldn’t understand why she had wanted Andros to have them in the first place. He seemed precisely the type who would collect pictures of his conquests the way others might collect hunting trophies. And like most mementos, his pictures looked like they existed to be displayed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Andros’s trophy case included explicit shots from other affairs.

  For Eileen’s sake, I hoped the two shots she had taken from the hotel room were the only such pictures he had ever taken of her. I wasn’t optimistic.

  Chapter Five

  By 12:25 a.m. I knew it was going to be a rotten day.

  Twelve twenty-five, I said to myself as I turned in bed and stared at the alarm clock. That’s not so bad. If I fall asleep in five minutes, I’ll still get six hours of sleep,

  The next time I checked, it was ten minutes after one.

  No problem, I assured myself. I can still get more than five hours of sleep.

  I tried breathing slowly. I tried breathing deeply. I tried breathing through my nose. I tried breathing through my mouth. At 2:45 a.m. I turned the alarm clock toward the wall and told myself that all I really needed was three and a half good hours of sleep. I revised the estimate to three hours at 3:10. The next thing I knew the alarm was ringing and it was 6:30.

  The same thing happens to me every night before a trial or an appellate argument. I get in bed after telling myself how important it is to get a good night’s sleep—which for me is the best way to ensure that I won’t get a good night’s sleep.

  But this time my insomnia was due to more than nerves. I had a loser. A fascinating loser, but a loser nevertheless. My client was an elderly man who had lost his life savings in an investment partnership that owned, according to the prospectus, a huge quantity of frozen semen collected from several prized Brangus bulls, including 200,000 “straws” of semen (surely the least appetizing unit of measurement ever coined) from a blue-ribbon stud named Lucille’s Grand Slam. But when the bottom fell out of the show cattle market and the bank foreclosed on its collateral, it discovered a distressing lack of congruence between the descriptions of the collateral contained in the security agreements and the actual collateral contained in the storage freezers. Even in a depressed market, a bucket of Grand Slam’s liqueur de vivre had real value. Two hundred thousand “straws” of frozen milk, however, did not.

  My client had come to me with a judgment for $380,000 against the general partner of the partnership. Unfortunately, the general partner had a negative net worth. I struggled with the appellate brief for weeks, trying to find a way to break into the corporate fortress and get at the folks with the money. I even went to the extreme of citing a line of California decisions. Benny Goldberg warned, “Hey, trying to get a Missouri court to buy a California precedent is like trying to get June Cleaver to buy a set of gold nipple rings.” By the time oral argument ended that morning, it seemed obvious that the three appellate judges weren’t in a buying mood either.

  As I trudged out of the courtroom and down the hall, I heard someone call, “Miss Gold!” I turned. It was one of the assistant court clerks. “Your secretary called, Miss Gold. She needs to talk to you right away.”

  I returned the call from a pay phone down the hall. “What’s up?”

  “You need to get right over to the Clayton police headquarters. Mrs. Landau called from there an hour ago.”

  “Eileen? She called from the police station?”

  “She left the number.”

  “Damn. Is this about Andros?”

  “I think so. The police asked her to come down for questioning.”

  “Call her back. Tell her I’ll be there as soon as I can. Tell her not to talk to anyone until I get there.”

  ***

  The first person I saw at the police station was L. Debevoise Fletcher.

  “Well, well, well,” he said with a big, hearty smile. “The lovely Rachel Gold.” He held out a huge paw. “Delightful to see you, dear.”

  We shook hands. His face became solemn and he covered my hand with his other one. “I am terribly sorry about your father, Rachel.” There wasn’t a trace of sympathy in his slate-gray eyes.

  “Thank you, Deb,” I said.

  Deb Fletcher was, as usual, outfitted for the part he had so adeptly played throughout most of his legal career: the role of “show” partner. He definitely looked the part: tall, tanned, thinning brown hair tinged with gray, a London-tailored suit. His teeth were capped, his voice was deep and booming, his hands were huge, and his brain was small. Like most litigation show partners, Deb Fletcher kept a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. The glasses were pure stage prop, as I personally witnessed several times during my days at Abbott & Windsor in Chicago. When a judge asked him a tough question during oral argument, he would remove the glasses from his pocket and pensively chew on one of the ends, thereby creating the impression that he was actually familiar enough with the facts and the law not only to understand the question but to formulate an intelligent response thereto.

  In fact, Fletcher was rarely well prepared on any of his cases. He brought to the practice of law a lethal combination of mental sloth and sixty-watt intellect. Nevertheless, he had parlayed stellar family connections, a patina of charm, and a sixth sense for even the subtlest of shifts within the Abbott & Windsor hierarchy into a lucrative career in the law. And given that 95 percent of all significant commercial lawsuits settle before trial, the huge gaps in Fletcher’s mental armor could be concealed behind a phalanx of brilliant young attorneys whose job it was to get him ready for show time.

  To put it mildly, Deb Fletcher and I did not get along. On my first day as a lawyer, fresh out of law school, I had received my first assignment from L. Debevoise Fletcher. One day later, when I returned to his corner office to ask a question about the assignment, Fletcher gave me my first partner’s-arm-around-the-waist. Two weeks later, as we were walking down the hallway in the federal courts building, Fletcher gave me my first and my last partner’s-pat-on-the-tush. It took a moment to overcome the shock and react to what he had just done.

  “Mr. Fletcher—”

  “Please, Rachel,” he had interrupted, “call me Deb.” And then he placed his hand on my shoulder to give me a friendly squeeze.

  I had shrugged out from under his hand and turned to face him. “Don’t do that, sir.” My voice quavered from a combination of fury and fear. After all, I was a first-year associate and he was not only a corner-office partner but a member of the firm’s executive committee. “If you ever touch me again,” I warned, “I’ll take you to court and make you sorry you did, so help me God.”

  The only thing worse than our three-block walk back to the office from the courthouse was the
elevator ride up to the Abbott & Windsor offices. For all fifty-one floors it was just the two of us in that little room. The ride seemed as long as an Apollo moon shot. Although we never worked together during the rest of my years at Abbott & Windsor, Deb Fletcher always took the time to write down a few corrosive observations about me for the annual associate reviews each spring. The partner who conducted my review told me each year, “With one notable exception, Miss Gold, you seem to have many admirers and supporters among the partners.”

  And now, standing in the lobby of the police station, I looked up at the notable exception and asked, “What are you doing here, Deb?”

  “The police wanted to talk to young Thomas. I stayed here with him while his father arranged for appropriate criminal counsel. As you may recall, criminal law is not my area of expertise.”

  I resisted the temptation. Instead, I asked, “Tommy’s a suspect?”

  “I don’t believe he is anymore. However, I fear that the same can’t be said for Eileen Landau.”

  “Where is she?”

  He chuckled in a patronizing way. “I believe she is with her attorney.”

  “I’m her attorney.”

  “And I’m sure you’ll do a fine job for her in the dissolution proceeding. However,” he said with a condescending smile, “as we both know, criminal law is hardly your metier.” He mispronounced it ME-dee-er. “When Thomas no longer needed the services of a criminal defense specialist, his father arranged for the retainer to be applied to Mrs. Landau’s representation.”