Follow the Money

by Fingers Murphy

  “So,” he began, “Senator James Steele, the case that won’t die.” He reclined and laced his fingers behind his head. “I’m not sure what I can tell you that isn’t in the file. After all, it’s been a long time.” He laughed a little and added, “Frankly, most lawyers don’t make it a practice of meeting with someone accusing them of ineffective assistance of counsel. But I was so damned surprised you called, I couldn’t resist seeing who you were.”

  “Well, thanks for agreeing to see me.” I wasn’t really sure what to say. He smiled at me and waited. I pulled a legal pad from my briefcase and flipped through it, searching for confidence more than a question.

  Finally, I said, “We’re trying to find out what was done to investigate Matt Bishop.”

  Andersen scowled, “Is that the boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not much, as I recall. There really wasn’t much to investigate.”

  “We can’t find any record of you ever talking to Matt.”

  “I probably didn’t.” He said it like he couldn’t imagine why anyone would talk to Matt.

  I was surprised by his answer. I had expected some kind of explanation, but he offered none. “Did you talk to Matt’s family?”

  “I don’t remember talking to them.”

  “But that was the senator’s alibi. You didn’t even talk to these people?”

  Andersen smiled and cocked his head sideways. “How old are you?”

  “Excuse me?” He repeated the question slowly, emphasizing each word.

  “Twenty-four.”

  He leaned forward on his desk, hunching his powerful shoulders toward me, looking me right in the eye. “I’ve been practicing law for more than thirty years, and I’m damned sure not going to sit here and defend myself or my actions from the accusations of someone like you. When you’ve actually done this a few years, you learn to spot bullshit from a mile away. I didn’t talk to these people because there was nothing to talk to them about. Have you read the police report?”

  I nodded.

  “Did you go out and talk to the Bishops?”

  I nodded again.

  “Did they say anything different from the police report?”

  I just sat there.

  “They didn’t, did they?” I didn’t respond. Andersen leaned back again, smiling, letting his words settle in the air. “Maybe after you’ve been in practice awhile, you’ll learn not to waste your time.”

  I stared past him, through the window, trying to gather my thoughts. He wasn’t impatient, he just sat there waiting. When I looked at him again, I asked, “But what if they’re lying?”

  He shrugged and shook his head. “So what if they are? How does that change things? I’ll let you in on a little secret, Mr. Olson.” He said my name like it was a joke. Then he pointed at me for emphasis. “People will look you right in the eye and lie to you.”

  Not much of a secret, I thought. It was the same thing Jendrek had said. “But what if you could prove they were lying.”

  Andersen almost laughed at the suggestion. “You’ll never prove they’re lying.”

  “Did you ever talk to Dan Kelly?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Dan Kelly is a friend of Matt Bishop’s. He was with Matt the night of the murder.” My voice was rising. I was arguing with him now and that wasn’t what I’d come to do, but I couldn’t help myself. “He says Matt wasn’t at home that night. But you wouldn’t know that, would you?”

  “No,” he said, “and I wouldn’t care to know it either because it doesn’t prove anything. But I’m not going to engage you in an argument about a case I washed my hands of a dozen years ago. You do what you need to do, Mr. Olson. You do whatever you think is right.”

  “You can count on that, Mr. Andersen.”

  “I don’t mean to get you all a twitter.” He laughed, “But you’re too involved, son. You’ve got a client who was found covered with blood in the house with his dead wife. That’s a hard one to get out of, no matter what kind of evidence you’ve got. Add to that the fact that Steele didn’t have any money of his own, and you might begin to understand why I wasn’t eager to hire a team of investigators to scour the countryside based on an alibi that no one in their right mind would believe. I suggest you take a few steps back and look at the forest, son, before one of these trees falls and crushes you.”

  There it was, I thought. He didn’t find Dan Kelly because he was trying to save money. “Don’t worry about me, Garrett, I’ll be just fine.”

  Our eyes met for an instant before the phone on his desk buzzed. “Mr. Rollins is here to see you,” his secretary said.

  Andersen pressed the button and stood. “Tell him I’ll be right out. I think Mr. Olson and I are finished.”

  I left Andersen in his office and found my way back to the lobby. There was a bald man with a moustache sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs, flipping through a magazine. As I passed him, our eyes met and an odd sense of recognition came over me. He seemed familiar, but again I couldn’t place him.

  I shook it off and made my way to the elevator and then my car. I was fuming. I wanted to rub Andersen’s face in his own mistakes. I was determined to show the arrogant son of a bitch he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.

  16

  The Shack is a seafood dive in Santa Monica that is actually a shack. It has long tables with bench seats, sawdust on the floor, and license plates nailed up on the walls from all fifty states. It also has two dollar fish tacos and draught beers, and was where I took Liz on our first date. We’d been back dozens of times.

  “You can always make time for people, Ollie,” she was saying. “I mean, why don’t you give up your apartment and move into the office?” She wasn’t being funny.

  I’d heard it before. Every few days when we talked on the phone, I would get the same grief. Two weeks of late nights with Tom Reilly, turning draft after draft of the brief, had put much-needed distance between me and Morgan and left tension between me and Liz.

  “I know. I’m sorry. Things have just been crazy getting ready for the hearing.” Which was true. With Danny Kelly’s affidavit and Garret Andersen’s attitude, we were all feeling good. Andersen should have found Kelly. But after our meeting, I knew why he didn’t. It was a terrible case and his client was out of money. He simply stopped working on it, shot from the hip in court, and chalked the resulting loss up to the law of averages. It was a carefree approach that worked well, unless you were the guy who went to prison.

  “But we’re pretty much done now,” I went on. “Things will be back to normal again.”

  Liz ate through half her taco without saying anything. I’d been repeating the same excuses since the tryst with Morgan, and even I was getting tired of hearing them. I knew she understood the demands of the job, but that didn’t mean she liked or accepted them.

  After a minute, she said, “You sure seem to like it there.” I heard a ring of disappointment in her voice.

  I knew the only way she could really understand was if I told her about the case. Up until then, she only knew it involved Garrett Andersen. I’d been careful about confidentiality. But with the brief about to get filed, the whole thing would soon be a matter of public record. I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to tell her about it.

  We went through it, detail by detail. She caught everything, asked all the right questions, grasped every nuance, and reminded me why I fell in love with her in the first place. I might have had better grades, but there was no question that Liz was smarter than I was. But more than that, she had no need to prove it to the world. She might have had some insecurity about her youth and being taken seriously as a woman lawyer, but she never doubted her own ability the way I doubted mine.

  “You see,” she shook her head, “that’s why lawyers have such a bad reputation. How do you just walk away from a client because he runs out of money to pay for an investigator? It’s not like Andersen couldn’t have gotten off his ass and done it himself just like
you did.”

  “I know.” I was feeling good.

  “And why didn’t this Dan Kelly come forward way back when? He just stood by and let Steele go to jail? What kind of society do we live in?”

  “I’m not sure Kelly really understands the magnitude of what he knows. I mean, it’s not like he actually saw Matt kill her.”

  “True.” She said, and ordered us another round. “Still though, the evidence is pretty strong against Steele. There’s always a risk that this Kelly guy just isn’t remembering things right. And just because Matt Bishop turned out to be a criminal as an adult, doesn’t mean he killed Steele’s wife.”

  “Sure, but those are issues for a jury to sort through. It’s not like we’re saying anything one way or the other. All this is about is making sure the system works the way it’s supposed to. Garrett Andersen didn’t do his job and Steele’s entitled to a fair shake with all the evidence presented.”

  After an hour, she’d forgotten she was angry with me and I’d forgotten I’d cheated on her. We sat in The Shack as if nothing were wrong and as though our prior actions held no consequences at all. It was almost as if, by sheer will, we could set the truth aside and reinvent our lives the way we wanted them to be.

  After dinner, we drove down to the beach. On the way, I shifted the focus away from me and asked, “So have you guys bankrupted those credit companies yet?”

  “Those people,” she started saying and then cut herself off. “I can’t even talk about it without getting mad. It’s an industry that makes its living defaming people. You can’t imagine the shit that these companies put on people’s credit reports even after they’ve been told it’s not accurate.”

  “Like what?”

  “Bankruptcies, late payments, non-payments, you name it. We help people challenge their reports. But it’s tough to get anything fixed.”

  I thought about it and laughed. “I wonder what Steele’s report looks like. Imagine it. A U.S. senator, with a big house in Hancock Park and fancy cars just stops paying all of his bills one day. That’s got to be an ugly report.”

  “Sure,” she said, “but in his case it’s deserved. He actually did stop paying.”

  “Right, but only because he was falsely imprisoned. It’s not because he was trying to get away with anything.”

  “Well, if you get him out, maybe he can become a client of ours.” She found the idea of the former senator being a client of Legal Aid pretty funny.

  “Why wait?” I said. “Why not challenge it now?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure. If nothing else, it would be interesting to see what the report looks like. How is it done?”

  “We just write a letter demanding substantiation of the accounts and debts on the report. It’s pretty simple, really. It’s getting it fixed that’s the hard part.”

  I pulled into the Will Rogers State Beach and parked facing the ocean. With the windows down and the light wind blowing in off the water, it was a perfect late summer evening. We watched people walking on the sand and riding bikes along the strand of pavement that ran along the beach.

  “So what do you need to do it?” I asked.

  “You’re really serious?”

  “You bet. Why not?”

  “Social Security number, last address, date of birth. That would do it.”

  I dug though the file in my briefcase and wrote everything down on a sheet of yellow legal paper. “There you go. We can read it with a bottle of wine and have some laughs.”

  17

  The brief made it to the United States District Court for the Central District of California at three-thirty in the afternoon. The next day at ten in the morning, my phone rang.

  “Mr. Olson, this is Ed Snyder of the Los Angeles Times. Do you have a minute?”

  A reporter? I had no idea what to say. Was I even supposed to talk to reporters? I assumed not. “Yeah, this is Oliver Olson.”

  “Mr. Olson, thanks for talking to me,” the voice said, despite the fact that I hadn’t done any talking yet. “The receptionist said you were working on the Steele case.”

  “Uh, yeah, that’s right.” The brief had barely been on file for twelve hours, and most of those were in the middle of the night.

  “Well, I’m doing a story on the Steele case and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.” His voice sounded young and hungry.

  “Well,” I laughed, trying to act like a veteran at this sort of thing. “That depends on the questions.” Did people really ever answer with “no comment”?

  “Certainly. I’ve read the brief. It’s quite a story. Do you guys really believe you’ll get Steele released?”

  It seemed like a silly question. Like I was going to say no. “Well, we think Mr. Steele did not receive a fair trial. Given the testimony of Dan Kelly, it’s fair to say that a jury would likely have reached a different conclusion had they been presented with the evidence that Mr. Kelly has to offer.” I told myself to shut up, to just stop speaking, but the words flowed out.

  “I see.” Ed paused on the other end of the line. I could hear him taking notes. Shit, I thought. I was going to be quoted in the newspaper and there was no way that could be good. If anyone was to be quoted, it was undoubtedly supposed to be Carver.

  “So,” Ed went on, “how does Mr. Steele feel about all of this finally coming out?”

  “Well, as you might imagine, he’s looking forward to getting a chance to tell his side of the story. He’s looking forward to getting the truth out there.”

  “If he does get out, does he plan to seek office again?”

  “You know, we’re just taking things one step at a time. I certainly haven’t talked to Steele one way or the other about that. I simply have nothing to say on that topic.” I had to find a way to end it. Could I just hang up?

  “I was just wondering whether you know if his politics have changed during his incarceration. I would assume they have on certain issues like prison reform, but I was wondering about his more traditional issues. For example, has he expressed any opinion one way or the other on drilling in the Alaskan Wilderness Preserve?”

  The question seemed bizarre. Steele was in prison for murdering his wife, the last thing on the guy’s mind was an issue as obscure as that. “Uh, no.” I chuckled, “I haven’t heard him talk about anything like that.”

  “Well, I was just wondering. I mean, rumor was that he was getting ready to push for a bill that would open up those sections of Alaska for drilling. It was the last piece of legislation he was working on before his arrest. I was just wondering if that was an issue he still felt strongly about.”

  “I have no idea. I think he has a lot of other things on his mind at the moment.”

  “Well, never hurts to ask.” Ed paused and then he spoke again in a less formal and more earnest tone. “Uh look, I’m trying to put together a series of stories about Steele and his appeal. If you can think of anything, anything at all of interest, give me a call. I won’t quote you or anything. I’ll only refer to unnamed sources, you know, background. We younger guys gotta stick together you know.”

  “Uh, sure.” I was suspicious, but interested. It was always good to make friends in the news business. I took down Ed’s number and hung up.

  Drilling in the Alaskan Wilderness Preserve was a position that seemed at odds with Steele’s pro-environment stance, and I couldn’t see what relevance his position on an issue like that could possibly have to his habeas petition.

  I went back through the file and leafed through the newspaper articles. There was only a single reference in one story written three days after the murder. It recounted simply that two days before the murder, Steele returned from a trip to Alaska where he had discussed the issue of tapping Alaska’s oil reserves with the state’s governor. That was it.

  I placed the articles back in the folder and pulled the old day planner out. The meetings from that last week corresponded with the newspaper. There was a dinner at the governor�
�s mansion, lunch with an oil industry group, the meeting at the Fairbanks Hotel with Gary R., and the flight home two days before the murder. I was finished flipping through it when Jim Carver poked his head around the door.

  “Hey there, got a minute?” he said as he strolled on in. It was the first time Carver had come to my office. He took a seat and laced his fingers behind his head. “So, how’re things going?”

  I told him everything was fine. That the summer had been great. I sounded like a goofy kid. Gee Mr. Carver, this summer’s sure been swell!

  “Well, that’s good to hear,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that I think you really did an excellent job on the Steele matter.” Then he lowered his arms and leaned forward. “I’m going on vacation starting next week and I’ll be out for several weeks. My wife and I are spending the next couple of weeks in the south of France. Steele’s oral argument will be right when I get back and I want to be sure you’re still around to help with whatever needs to be done to get ready for that.”

  Carver paused and smiled, watching my confused look. “I know these kinds of decisions aren’t supposed to be officially made for a few more weeks, but I wanted to make sure I could come down myself. So, on behalf of myself and the firm, I’d like to offer you a permanent position with Kolberg & Crowley.” Carver stood up and reached his hand across the desk, as if welcoming me to an exclusive club.

  I almost burst out laughing. I didn’t know how to react. I had been so immersed in the case I had almost forgotten I was applying for a job. A numbness overcame me and I stood and shook Carver’s hand.

  “That’s great. That’s wonderful news. Thank you.” I could hear my own voice gushing, the words flowing out naturally and without reflection. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Great, great.” Carver put his hands on his hips, peering down over the top of his glasses. “So, can I tell the committee that you’re joining us, or do you want to take a little time with the decision?”