by Dan Webb
“Well, Zeke, sorry I can’t help you there.” Alex found the passport, flipped open the cover and confirmed that the passport was good for another two years. “But my investigation has just about reached its end.”
“You found out who was behind the accident? Was it Frees after all?”
“Frees was definitely part of it. Luke Hubbard too, maybe.”
“Maybe? You’re ending your investigation with ‘maybe’?”
“I’m leaving,” Alex said. “With a friend. For a while, at least.”
“A friend,” Zeke said skeptically. “A new girlfriend? But where will you go? You have no money.”
“She does,” Alex said.
“Well, congratulations,” Zeke said. “If that’s what you want . . .”
“What does that mean?” Alex said roughly.
“What I mean is, you uncovered the corporate scandal of the year—of the decade—and you just drop it all once you find a sugar mama.”
“Don’t call her that,” Alex said. “You don’t know her.” Where does he get off? Alex thought.
“Ooh, didn’t mean to offend your tender sensibilities.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Fine, I did. And what about Roberta Cummings? Sure, Rampart reinstated her insurance, but she doesn’t make enough to pay her mortgage.”
For a guy who blindsided Alex with a newspaper story that cost him his job, and who helped Alex break into a locked office, Zeke sure had gotten scrupulous all of a sudden; and Alex didn’t like change—especially Zeke’s new self-righteousness. “It really sucks that Roberta Cummings is poor,” Alex snapped, “but it’s not my problem.”
“She’ll probably lose her house.”
“No one likes a self-righteous prick, Zeke. I never should have answered the phone.”
“Self-righteous? You know who told me she’d lose her house? You did, pal. Remember?”
Yes, Alex remembered. And he didn’t like being reminded about it. “You want to give her a house?” Alex yelled into the phone. “I’ve got four extra. I’ll send you the paperwork. You can sign my name on whatever you need to while I sit on a beach somewhere they don’t speak English.”
“This isn’t the Alex I know,” Zeke said softly.
Alex was still hot when he replied. “Yeah, well maybe you don’t know me that well.”
Alex hung up before Zeke could. Throwing my own words back at me like that, Alex thought. When did I ever ask for his opinion?
Alex looked down and saw the passport lying on top of his folded socks. He snatched it up and flung it against the wall like a Frisbee. Fucking Roberta Cummings.
46
“Do you remember me?” Jeff Smiley said.
“You’ve got the fedora again,” Brad said. “It really doesn’t suit you.”
They were sitting across from each other in Brad’s office. Neither man seemed eager to make eye contact.
“Do you remember the package I gave you?” Smiley asked.
“Of course,” Brad said. He thought back to his first date with Cindy, when the man who now sat across from him stepped out of the shadows and gave him the leads he used to ambush Luke in his deposition. This guy was like gum stuck to the bottom of Brad’s shoe. Brad really, really wanted to move on with his life.
“I see my little package has been very valuable to you,” Smiley said through pursed lips. “Now I’d like you to return the favor.”
Brad didn’t respond.
“I know you’ve settled the divorce, and for a lot of money,” Smiley said. “I’d love to see what Hubbard had to say in his deposition.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Brad said.
“Don’t make me spell it out.” Smiley looked around Brad’s office as if he worried someone might be listening.
“I’m not important enough for anyone to bug my office,” Brad said, annoyed at Smiley’s melodrama.
“What I mean is a quid pro quo,” Smiley said. “I gave you my transcript, now you give me your transcript.” When Brad didn’t respond right away, Smiley said, “I told you what I wanted when I gave you the grand jury transcript.”
“I never agreed to any deal.”
“But you used my transcript—no, don’t tell me you didn’t—and that’s agreement enough for me.”
“Really, I just can’t do it,” Brad said. “The divorce settlement includes a confidentiality clause.”
Smiley grimaced and pressed his hands down his thighs as if trying to iron his slacks with his palms. “Mr. Pitcher, the transcript I gave you was under court seal. It was bad for me to give it . . . and bad for you to receive it. But that’s just what you and I did.”
“That doesn’t mean we should do it again.”
“Did you tell anyone about what I gave you?”
“No—of course not.”
“So . . . you’ve kept it confidential,” Smiley said. “Just like I’ll keep the deposition transcript confidential.”
“But you’ll use the information for . . . whatever it is you’re doing.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll cover my tracks,” Smiley said. “Otherwise we’re both in trouble.”
“I wish I could help you,” Brad said. “But the thing is, I’m already on thin ice with the state bar. They’ve started disciplinary proceedings on something else. It could mean losing my license.”
Brad searched his visitor’s face for some trace of sympathy. Instead he saw only contempt.
“I trusted you, Mr. Pitcher,” Smiley said. “I trusted you without knowing you—and now you won’t trust me.”
“I’m sorry, I . . .” Brad struggled with how to explain himself to this strange little man. Brad wasn’t sorry. Brad wanted to take the fedora and shove it down the man’s throat. “I’m just sorry.”
* * *
As Alex thought about his conversation with Zeke, Zeke’s criticism really got to Alex. Zeke was right—Alex was acting like a jerk, a selfish jerk. Alex had found an easy way out of his financial straits and was ready to take it, never mind helping Roberta Cummings and bringing a killer to justice—the causes that motivated Alex to risk so much in the first place. Alex figured that there was little he could do now to go back and fight for those causes.
Though as Alex thought about this, he did remember something Sheila had said at the celebration dinner with Brad the night before. She’d said something like Luke was paying to keep his deposition quiet. Why? And did the reason have something to do with why had Luke had gone from a scorched earth campaign against Sheila one day to unconditional surrender the next? Alex figured Brad must have uncovered something in the deposition, gotten Luke to admit something, that changed the whole case. Did that something relate to the car accident? Probably not. But there was only one way to find out. And it was worth a shot, given the way Alex had let Roberta Cummings down.
Alex drove to Sheila’s apartment.
Sheila wasn’t home, which was what Alex hoped for. Alex let himself in with a key she’d given him. “Another one for your collection,” she’d said.
Sheila had gotten copies of all the filings and transcripts from her divorce proceedings. If it were Alex, he would have been happy with just two pieces of paper—the final divorce decree and the settlement check. Maybe Sheila was just cautious, or maybe she was more sentimental than she seemed.
Alex felt bad about leafing through Sheila’s legal documents and reading the transcript of Luke’s deposition, but he did it anyway. If Sheila and Brad’s secret related to the accident, Alex had to know.
He skimmed most of the document until he got to the last few pages, which were gripping reading—Brad’s last series of questions to Luke was sharp and unrelenting, and Luke’s answers showed that Brad had trapped him. To Alex, after reading the transcript it seemed all but certain that Luke had orchestrated the accident in order to juice Liberty’s financial results and trigger a bonus payout. Alex couldn’t believe that Sheila had hidden this from him. The one thing Alex wanted was to find the
truth about the accident, and Sheila decided to trade this dynamite lead for her windfall payout.
Alex couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been. He should have known he couldn’t trust Sheila after she lied to him about knowing Beto in the first conversation they ever had. Now Sheila had lied to him a second time.
Right now Alex didn’t feel so bad about removing the transcript, and that’s what he did. After stopping to make a photocopy and buy a large envelope and a bouquet of flowers, he drove a few miles into a neighborhood of modest single family homes.
The little stucco Cummings house looked like he remembered it, except that occasional drizzles had brightened the unkempt lawn from a dead winter brown to a hopeful green. Roberta Cummings still hadn’t found anyone to help her look after the place. On the lawn near the sidewalk, the thick grass held up a discarded fast food cup on the tips of its blades. Didn’t any of her neighbors care?
Farther back on the lawn, Alex saw a real estate sign posted in the earth, with a placard on top that said “REO”—real estate owned, in realtor jargon; foreclosure, in plain English. Alex hoped it wasn’t too late for a different answer.
Alex put on dark sunglasses and a baseball cap. Weeks had passed since Roberta Cummings slapped Alex in the face and broke down at Rampart’s offices, but Alex still wanted to minimize the risk that she would recognize him. He knocked on the door and held the bouquet of flowers in front of him and smiled so that she would open the door for a stranger. She did, and she smiled when she looked at the flowers.
“Who are these from?” she said. She looked in vain for a card attached to the bouquet.
“From a friend—an anonymous friend,” Alex said, keeping his head down so she wouldn’t recognize him.
She squinted and studied Alex’s face, as if searching her memory for when she had seen him before. “Who are you?”
“Someone who wants you to get what you’re entitled to,” he said. He handed her the envelope. “Take this to a lawyer, and do it today—you need to sue Luke Hubbard to save your house.”
She was too confused to reply, and Alex didn’t wait for her to. He left her standing in the doorway and hurried away.
“Take that, confidentiality agreement,” Alex said to himself as he drove away. Sheila and Brad wouldn’t show Luke for the murderer he was, but Alex was sure plenty of clever and greedy L.A. lawyers would be eager to help Roberta Cummings do so.
Once on the road, Alex called Sheila. He got her voicemail, which made him even angrier. He didn’t want to leave her a message; he wanted to bellow curses in her pretty face and make her cry. He hung up the phone and did the next best thing, a break-up by text message: “TAKE YOUR $ TO SWITZERLAND W/O ME. GOODBYE LIAR.”
47
Three days later: It was morning, and Luke had just finished giving a presentation on the energy industry to a conference of analysts and investors. He stepped down from the stage and took questions from a polite huddle of friendly audience members. The little crowd was laughing softly at a joke Luke made when a man bouncing on the balls of his feet at the periphery of the group called out, “Are you Luke Hubbard?”
“Was it the banner above the stage that gave it away?” Luke said.
The crowd gamely laughed again, and the man tossed a thick, stapled sheaf of papers like a grenade over the heads of the other people. The papers landed at Luke’s feet. “I’ll bet he’s got a mean forehand,” Luke said to an assistant standing next to him.
“You’ve been served,” the man said loudly. Luke’s audience turned its attention to the man, but he quickly walked away.
Luke picked up the papers and scanned the first page. He and Liberty were being sued again. Luke had never heard of Roberta Cummings. He handed the papers to his assistant and said, “Call Alan Matthews now.” Then he looked up and smiled at the people still waiting to speak to him. “Who was that masked man?”
* * *
It was after lunch, and Sheila was monopolizing the time of a hopeful young jewelry salesgirl whose annual salary, even with commissions, wouldn’t cover any of the pieces Sheila was considering. In the girl’s favor, she was thin and pretty, but so was Sheila.
Sheila was taking her time. She could afford anything in this store now, but wanted to choose the right piece to mark the occasion—the successful closing of one chapter of her life and the auspicious start of a new one. She wanted something to dazzle, something that both men and women would notice.
Finally, from among the array of costly necklaces, she chose a platinum strand studded with diamonds. Laid over her collarbone, it looked like a thread of spider’s silk lined with dewdrops.
Sheila handed the sales clerk her debit card and, as she waited, she twisted her torso by millimeters to watch the diamonds sparkle in the mirror.
Finally, the clerk returned wearing a sheepish expression. “For some reason it’s not taking the card,” she said, and she presented the offending slip of plastic to Sheila.
“That’s impossible,” Sheila said. “I know for a fact that the funds are there.”
“I’m sure they are, ma’am,” the clerk said. “It’s probably just a glitch on our side. Would you like to call the bank? Or maybe try another card?”
The settlement money wired by Luke was there, Sheila knew. The funds had cleared yesterday and should have still been there. Something must have gone wrong. Sheila felt her guts knot up. She forced a smile and removed the necklace. “Hold this, please,” she told the sales clerk. Then she picked up her purse and walked quickly from the store.
* * *
It was late afternoon on what had been a quiet day, and Cindy was in Brad’s office. His office was much cleaner now that the divorce case had settled.
Cindy was pressing him about why the settlement was so hush-hush. Brad explained that confidentiality clauses, applying to both parties, were common in high-profile divorces, and went on and on about other examples he had seen.
“I know what you’re doing,” she said with a smirk.
Brad smiled back at her. “Just complying with my confidentiality obligations.”
“Sheila already said at that awful dinner how much money she got.”
“I’m not going to confirm or deny that,” Brad said with a grin.
“Brad, you’ve gotta give me something. How did you win in the end? At least tell me that.”
Brad thought for a moment, then said, “Well, there were some details—tactical things about how I wound up the case—it’s sort of inside baseball, though, you’d probably be bored.”
“Spill it,” she said.
“Well, I guess we have . . .” Brad’s hands shuttled back and forth over his desktop as if the gesture would generate the words. “There’s . . . implied confidentiality between us.”
“Does that mean you’re asking me to marry you?” Cindy said wryly.
Brad blushed for just a moment, then proceeded to recount, with strenuously understated pride, how he had baited Luke in his deposition to admit a motive to kill his employees, get the insurance money and earn a large bonus. At the end of the tale, he looked at her with a restrained smile, but Cindy wore a look of disgust.
“So . . . do you think Luke Hubbard actually killed those poor people?”
“Sure. I mean, probably.”
“If you really think that, then why don’t you turn him into the police?” Cindy said.
“Well, my job is to advance my client’s interest, and—oh, who knows anyway? I mean, no one really knows if Luke did it or not—and no one will know, because the police didn’t really investigate, and the evidence is stale, and . . . all the rest.”
Cindy’s expression hadn’t changed.
“And anyway,” Brad said, “I’m bound by the confidentiality clause.”
Cindy looked at Brad with eyes as dark as ink. “Some confidentiality clause—you just told me, didn’t you?”
Brad laughed nervously. “You ask questions like a lawyer.”
“I wish you wouldn’t
answer them like a lawyer.”
Brad was stuttering a lame response when the door to the office burst open. A scruffy bike messenger leaned in just far enough to snap a manila envelope like a Frisbee toward Brad’s head. He dodged the missile and avoided a bruise to his neck. The intruder disappeared before Brad had a chance to protest. After he had gone, a woman they had hired part-time to do administrative work rushed to the doorway.
“I tried to stop him, Mr. Pitcher, but he just ran right in,” she said.
“It’s all right, Estelle,” Brad said, waving her away.
“What is it?” Cindy said.
Brad smiled at her as he opened the package beneath his desk with shaking hands. Inside was a single page, a heavy watermarked sheet of paper with the Boswell & Baker letterhead. Brad quickly scanned the letter, and when his eyes reached the bottom, his face went white.
“But I didn’t give anyone anything . . . they can’t do this,” Brad said.
“Can’t do what?” Cindy said.
Brad looked up from the letter with wide, frightened eyes. “Hubbard says we breached the confidentiality clause. He says we gave information from Luke’s deposition to the widow of the guy who drove the sports car in that accident.”
Cindy smiled at Brad as if she understood, then said, “What does that mean?”
“It means Luke’s cancelling the settlement. He says he won’t pay a dime.”
48
The day was almost over. It was the third day that Alex had ignored Sheila’s voicemails and text messages, and he would be happy to do so forever. It was cruel, but he enjoyed listening to the pain in her voice. Alex had called Del, now that he was out of the hospital, to offer him a place to stay if he still needed one, but Del hadn’t responded. Whatever.
Armed with his new knowledge from the deposition transcript, Alex had restarted in earnest his hunt for Crash and his mission to ingratiate himself to Luke. Alex now knew Luke’s reason for killing the employees in the van, and he wouldn’t rest until he found evidence that proved Luke’s guilt.