[Boston Law 01.0] Unlawful Deeds

by David S. Brody

  He was fairly confident that the other bids would be far less than his, and he had considered bidding less, but eventually rejected the idea. This was the score he had been waiting for—a seven-figure profit, a completely hidden interest, an untraceable path back to him. Not to mention the fact that, once he paid off Howie, the rental income would pay him another $100,000-plus per year. No wonder losing the property had upset Pierre so much. So why risk it all by trying to save a piddling $50,000 or so on the bid price? He would take his best shot, and happily subsist on stale bread in a cold apartment for a few months if his bid was successful.

  “Yes, thank you. You have received my letter?” Bruce had actually driven to New York state to mail the letter because he didn’t want the Springfield attorney to see a Boston postmark. With the letter, of course, he had enclosed a generous retainer check.

  “Yes, and I have reviewed the files at the RTC offices for your bid, as you requested.”

  “Good. And do you decide the asset is acceptable?” Bruce didn’t give a damn what the lawyer thought, but it concerned him that the RTC might be suspicious if his trust purchased the asset without anyone even first reviewing the files. So he sent the lawyer up to Lowell, and now had to listen to him babble about what he found. Bruce asked a couple of obligatory questions, listened to the answers, checked his watch to make sure they didn’t go over the twenty-minute time limit, then moved to conclude the conversation.

  “Well, I think I am quite satisfied, and I thank you very much for your work. Would you please to prepare the bid and send it to RTC?”

  “Yes. I will use the same trust we’ve been using. And you still want to bid the amount you put in your letter—$182,230?”

  “Yes, that is the number I wish.” Bruce thanked him and ended the call.

  CHAPTER 52

  [October 24, 1990]

  Bids were due by 5:00, and Andrea told Bruce that she would be sticking around for at least another hour after that to field calls from curious bidders.

  It was now fifteen minutes after five, and Bruce, in the last hour, had visited the men’s room three times, gone for a walk around the block, and besieged his office wastebasket with an aerial assault of crumpled-up paper basketballs.

  Finally he could wait no longer. He phoned Andrea. She picked up on the fifth ring, just as Bruce had begun to wish her dead for lying to him about staying until six. “RTC, Andrea Cameron speaking.”

  Bruce quickly regained his composure. “Oh, yes, Ms. Cameron. This is Bruce Arrujo. I’m the attorney for Howie Plansky, and I met you yesterday at your office.”

  “Yes Mr. Arrujo, what can I do for you?”

  “My client is curious to learn who his new partner is going to be. Understandably so. Can you tell me the results of the Fenway Place auction?”

  “Of course. There were actually two bids within a thousand dollars of each other, and then everyone else was way behind.”

  Bruce shifted in his chair. He could feel a bead of sweat drip from his underarm and run down the side of his body. He began to speak, then remembered he had to first unclench his teeth. He coughed to cover up the grunt and tried again. “Really? Can you tell me who the high bidder was?”

  “Yes. It was an offshore company, from the Netherlands Antilles, I believe. Collateral Acquisition Corporation. High bid of $183,000, even. Beat the second-highest bid by less than eight hundred bucks.”

  Andrea waited for a response. There was none.

  “Mr. Arrujo? Are you there? Mr. Arrujo? Mr. Arrujo?”

  BATTLE WITH A PIRATE

  CHAPTER 53

  [October 30, 1990]

  Since his bombshell of a conversation with Andrea Cameron of the RTC, Bruce had spent six days walking the rocky coastline of the North Shore. When walking didn’t calm him, he ran on the deserted beaches until he collapsed from fatigue. He lived in his car, although he hadn’t driven it since he arrived in Marblehead. On warmer nights, he slept on the beach—or, more accurately, napped between periods of staring at the stars—and awakened himself with a swim in the frigid waters. He didn’t shave, and hadn’t bothered to wash the salt off his skin.

  On the second day, a Thursday, he had walked to a convenience store to buy a toothbrush, some food and a bar of soap. He also called his secretary—he told her he was in a Vermont hospital with a severe viral infection, and asked her to inform the firm’s managing partner that he would be out of work for another few days. Otherwise, he had no contact with another human being.

  Mostly he watched the sailboats.

  Not once did he see a boat capsize. Not once did he see a boat run aground. Not once did he see a crew member fall overboard. Not once did he see even the most inexperienced captain, in the most unseaworthy boat, lose the battle to sail another day.

  So how could he have so misjudged the winds and the currents and the tides and, yes, most of all, his own sailing abilities? How could his plan—so carefully and methodically crafted, so thoroughly and painstakingly detailed—so suddenly fail in such a titanic fashion?

  He ran through the Fenway Place auction again in his mind. It just didn’t make sense—there was no way that anyone else would value Pierre’s interest so highly. In a booming market, there was always too much money chasing too few deals, and people would take silly risks and overpay for the privilege of having sugar plums dance in their dreams. But money was tight now, especially for real estate people—most investors were just struggling to pay the mortgage. Anyone who did have a wad of cash had his choice of prime properties at huge discounts. So why buy a minority interest in a leveraged property with mediocre cash flow and oil contamination liability?

  Why?

  Adrift and alone, the question was the hunk of driftwood Bruce clung to, the one thing preventing Bruce from descending rock-like to the ocean depths. The answer wouldn’t right his ship, but every ounce of his intellect demanded an explanation. It was traumatic enough to find himself shipwrecked, but it was paralyzing to not know what had caused the calamity. Whether swamped and splintered by a savage storm, or battered and broken by boulders lurking beneath blue-black waters, or made motionless by a morose and moody Mariah, the culprit was always visible, always apparent. Not this time. Bruce had been beaten up and busted open, yet he didn’t know by what or by whom….

  He listened to the sea crash ashore and watched the winds scatter the sand—somewhere in that sea and that sand he had scattered Grandpa’s ashes. He closed his eyes and the ashes spoke to him, as Grandpa had while he lay dying in his hospital bed with Bruce by his side.

  Don’t let the ocean control you the way it did me, Brucie. The smart thing would have been just to pay the fine and get on with my life. I’ve been acting out of anger and pride, but instead of admitting it to myself, I tried to justify my actions with some fancy words like ‘justice’ and ‘principals’—like that somehow makes my behavior rational. Don’t lie to yourself, my boy: anger is anger, pride is pride, passion is passion. They’re part of you, and they can give you strength, but they’re not rational, and they don’t make you any smarter. They’re part of your ocean side—make sure you understand that, and make sure they stay off the land.

  Bruce reflected. Make sure they stay off the land. Maybe that was his problem. Had some of his emotions—his anger, his pride, his bitter disappointment—oozed across the divider in his brain and short-circuited his intellect?

  He jogged toward the foaming surf. He covered the distance quickly, his long strides propelling him faster and faster as the sand hardened and his traction increased. He launched himself headfirst into a crashing wave, knifed through the wall of water with two strong stokes, and stood.

  He raised his chin to keep his mouth above the water line, relishing the familiar power and passion of the sea, and braced himself for the next tidal assault. It hit hard, lifting him up, hurling him shoreward. He re-gained his feet and dug his toes into the sand, bracing for the next breaker, his nipples tingling and hardening as a cool breeze stroked
them. He closed his eyes and concentrated, imagining his feet as pylons buried deep into the earth, through sand and muck and clay and rock. The Atlantic crashed into him again, lifting his heels, fighting to rip his curled toes off the ocean floor, finally abandoning the effort in a momentary truce. Bruce dropped back on his heels, gulped air, and readied himself for the next caressing attack.

  He stood firm that way for another twenty waves, each wave crashing into him with powerful, intoxicating fury, each salvo unable to move him. He remembered Grandpa’s words: The sea should empower you, not overpower you.

  Legs quivering, he staggered out of the ocean and dropped to the sand.

  He again turned his eyes toward the Atlantic, toward the sailboats skimming across the surface, sea spray splashing from beneath their bows. A particular boat caught his eye: Three young women skillfully sailing a mid-size boat had drawn the attention of a group of young men racing through the harbor in a cigarette-style speedboat. Bruce watched as a couple of the guys raised beer bottles toward the women in salutation; the women ignored the gesture and angled away from the pursuing motor boat. The speed boaters responded with a roar of engines and three bare asses. The women continued to ignore them, angling further away, but the speedboat easily flanked them and raced up alongside. Bruce could hear their shouts over the motor boat’s engine: “Show your tits. Show your tits.”

  Suddenly one of the men reached out, grabbed the railing of the sailboat, and pulled the two boats even closer together. He then flung himself over the railing and tumbled onto the sailboat. Two of his friends quickly joined him. The three of them drunkenly staggered to their feet, and the remaining motorboys tossed them a few beers and raced off. The pirates had boarded.

  Bruce turned away. The women, if they wanted, could probably just throw the guys overboard—the guys were drunk and not very big. More likely the women would just sail into the marina and call the harbormaster. Still, the pirates had ruined their sail.

  Pirates had always been the scourge of the high seas. Ships could be durably built, mutinous crewmen disciplined, coastlines charted and mapped, sails trimmed in times of bad weather. But a pirate attack was unpredictable and usually lethal. No amount of planning or seamanship could prevent it, and few crews had the skill—or courage—to fight off the attackers. Sometimes the pirates attacked at night, slipping aboard under the cloak of darkness, their quarry oblivious to the danger that lay just beyond their own gunwale. Only after their ship was aflame, their on-duty crew mates dead, their treasures pillaged, did the sleeping crewmen become belatedly aware of the peril to themselves and their vessel.

  Bruce stood up and began slowly jogging along the shoreline. Pirate attacks. Sudden, unseen, unpredictable. A human variable capable of sabotaging even the most well planned and skillfully executed sailing voyage.

  Bruce contemplated the unimaginable. Had he been stalked, raided and plundered by a predator even more skilled than he? Had the winning bid come not from some random real estate investor but from a cunning, calculating adversary?

  Had he himself been the pigeon? Had he been so intent on the stalking that he had been blind to his own vulnerability?

  Bruce increased his pace, his muscular legs now pounding the wet sand with rhythmic regularity. He stopped briefly, vomited, snorted the vomit residue out his nostrils, then continued running. He forced himself to continue the analysis, to imagine himself as the unwitting foil.

  He thought back over the past few months, trying to analyze the series of events. He was almost sure Pierre didn’t commit the murder—he knew Pierre had only been kidding when he asked Bruce about the penalties for murder. So the fact that the killer’s car matched Pierre’s had been an incredibly lucky coincidence. As had the fact that Pierre happened to be at Fenway Park the night of the murder—Pierre’s activities fit perfectly into a time-line supporting the theory that he was the murderer. Bruce couldn’t have scripted the events better if he himself had been trying to frame Pierre….

  Trying to frame Pierre. What if the car match and Fenway Park were not merely coincidences? What if someone had learned what kind of car Pierre drove, rented an identical one, then stalked and killed Charese? And had done so at a time when he or she knew Pierre would be downtown and alone? Bruce cursed himself. How could he have accepted these coincidences as nothing more than lucky breaks? He had failed to examine them critically, failed until this moment to recognize how incredibly fortuitous the timing and circumstances of Charese’s murder had been.

  So who could have framed Pierre? Who else might have benefited from Charese’s death?

  Bruce stopped abruptly, and waded into the ocean again. He dove into a crashing wave, came out the other side, and began swimming parallel to the shoreline. He swam with his eyes closed, stroke after stroke, his internal compass guiding him. He tried to relax and clear his head—he sensed an understanding taking shape deep within his consciousness. He knew it was an understanding borne of instinct and intuition rather than of logic and analysis, and he knew it needed time to form itself, unimpeded by thought or reasoning. Stroke after stroke, he fought to resist the temptation to think, fought to keep his brain from interfering with the work of his gut. When the urge to think became too great, he held his breath underwater until his brain became totally consumed by his body’s demand for oxygen.

  Finally, exhausted, he dragged himself ashore. He knew that his intuition had unveiled the painful truth, and was waiting to share the information with his brain. Slowly, Bruce allowed his brain to lift the shrouds, to peek in, to see the face of his enemy.

  He blinked the face away, then nodded in understanding. It was time for revenge.

  CHAPTER 54

  [October 31, 1990]

  Halloween. Bruce had been out of the office for almost a week. But it was time to return to the land of the living. It was time to put on his lawyer costume again.

  He greeted his co-workers cheerfully, patiently answered their questions about his sickness. “Yeah, it was some rare virus. And of course I’m stuck in some country hospital up in Vermont. But they took good care of me. Matter of fact, I feel like a new person.” They shook his hand, patted him on the back. Nobody bothered to ask why he was in Vermont on a Wednesday night. By nine-thirty in the morning, it was as if he had never left.

  He closed the door to his office. His enemy had beaten him, beaten him out of a couple of million dollars. But he had survived. And his enemy had lost a crucial tactical advantage—Bruce had figured out the identity of his adversary.

  But he was realistic. He was fighting a defensive battle now. Success would be defined as denying his enemy the fruits of its victory. Anything more would be an added bonus.

  He ignored his stack of phone messages and mail—he would deal with those later. He picked up the phone and called Andrea Cameron at the RTC.

  “Hi, Andrea, this is Bruce Arrujo. Could you tell me if the successful bidder has closed yet on the Fenway Place sale?”

  “As a matter of fact, they’re closing tomorrow.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Good question. Some offshore corporation.”

  “Do you know who’s representing them?”

  “Actually, I don’t. The whole thing’s sort of weird. It’s like they want to remain completely anonymous—the only person I ever talk to is the property manager they’ve hired to run the project. I’ve never even gotten a call from their lawyer.”

  “Could you give me the property manager’s name? My client, Howard Plansky, just wants to touch base and see what’s going on.”

  “Of course.” Andrea gave Bruce the name of one of the large residential property management firms in the city. Bruce thanked her and hung up.

  It was almost ten o’clock now. Bruce called Howie at home, knowing it was not yet seven in California, yet Howie answered on the first ring. “Hi, Howie, this is Bruce Arrujo. Sorry to call so early.”

  “Jesus Christ, Bruce, where have you been? I’ve been calling you
for a week; you’re secretary told me you were in the hospital up in Vermont or something.”

  “Well, I’m back at my desk now.”

  “What’s going on with Fenway Place? I talked to that RTC woman, and she said they were closing this week.”

  “Have you heard from anybody?”

  “Yeah, some property management company called me, looking for the vacancy decontrol certificates. I guess we have the only copies. Beacon Management was their name. Ever heard of them?

  “Sure. It’s one of the biggest in the city. High fees, but they’re honest and competent, from what I hear. So I don’t think you have to worry about them ripping you off. Did you send them the certificates?” Please say no.

  “No, I wanted to check with you first. Do you think I should? You know, without them, the whole property’s not worth snot. It’d still be under rent control.”

  Under Boston law, it was up to the property owner to prove a property was exempt from rent control—and the proof had to be ironclad. “Well, I think you just answered your own question. Don’t forget, you still have a huge stake in this project, so you don’t want it to go back into rent control. Besides, you’re going to have to live with these guys as your partner, so it might be a good peace offering if you sent the certificates over.”

  “That was my feeling, but I wanted to talk to you first. I think Pierre left them in the safe deposit box. Carla has the key.”

  “You know what? I was going to call her anyway. Why don’t I just arrange to have them sent over to Beacon Management?”

  “Sounds good.”