I reached for the phone to call Liz, unsure of what I would say, but it rang before I picked it up. It was Jendrek.
“Hey, hey, Mr. Bigtime, how’s it going?”
“Uh, just cleaning my office up a little.”
“You got some time to get together? We need to figure out what we’re going to do for this class. I’ve got some ideas, but I’ll need you to do some things before the first class. Can we get together before Monday?”
“Sure, how ‘bout this afternoon?”
That was all I needed. It was perfect. It would forestall the inevitable and uncomfortable confrontation until the following week at the very least. I had a class to T.A. I had work to do. There was always work to do. It was a refrain that would govern my life at K&C. Personal problems that could not be solved simply by throwing money at them could be avoided by late nights, by business trips, by devotion and commitment to clients.
I shut off my office light, swung by my secretary’s desk, picked up my thick stack of mail, and left the building just after noon. I drove my new BMW down the ten freeway with the top down and the late August heat blowing over me. I got off on Robertson and drove north into Beverly Hills. With the money I would make working part-time, I had thought about moving to a nicer place, something in the hipster area between Santa Monica and Sunset and east of La Cienega in the small triangle of West Hollywood that sat just off the Sunset Strip. For a couple grand a month I could get a place with city views within walking distance of the trendy clubs and bars and restaurants. I imagined the late nights full of food and drinks and live music. I imagined returning to my swanky pad at three A.M. with a crowd of people where I would entertain them on my balcony with the city lights and the latest cocktail they’d all heard about. It was all within reach. It was all accessible. It was mine. I had worked for it, and I would take it.
I went up Olympic and approached the Century City Mall from the south. I would meet Jendrek for drinks at the same place as before, but first I would kill some time and treat myself to something. I wandered around the open air shops until I found it. I knew what I’d come for, another distraction, another accoutrement of my new life.
I’d seen the jewelry store with the fancy watches before. I spent a half hour picking it out.
“Among connoisseurs, the Omega is one of the most prized makes,” the thin, balding man with the affected English accent went on. He peered at it over the top of his glasses as though he’d never seen it before, as though he did not dust it and polish it everyday.
I held it. It was solid, heavy, ornamental, yet practical. It was the kind of thing only truly successful people could afford to own. It was a watch that communicated to the world not only the time, but the fact that I, Oliver Olson, had made it, had arrived, had succeeded in life where others had failed.
“If you ask me,” he began, as if I weren’t really asking, “I think jumping into a Rolex is a sign that the buyer really doesn’t understand fine watches at all. The Rolex is all flash, it’s style over substance.” He laughed heartily, “I suppose that makes it perfect for this town. But really, the Omega is understated. It makes a scene without making a scene. If you know what I mean.”
I didn’t, but his delivery was good and it was undeniably a fantastic watch — all silver, even the face. It gleamed in the special light of the jewelry store. I had read that the most important thing a young professional man could spend money on was a fine watch. Most people can’t tell the difference between a five hundred dollar suit and a two thousand dollar suit, but a fine watch is immediately recognizable. I figured it would be a good thing to have, and now that I was staring at a counter full of them, I knew the article had been right.
Four thousand dollars later, I walked out of the shop with the new Swiss chronometer strapped to my wrist. I tossed my old watch in a trash can and walked along, checking the time much more often than before.
Jendrek whistled long and slow when I took the stool beside him. “Nice watch. You look like a plaintiff’s lawyer with that thing on.”
I just grinned, feeling slightly embarrassed, but figuring I’d have to get used to people noticing it — and wasn’t that why I’d bought it in the first place? “Ah, well, I figured it was the kind of thing that will last forever.”
“It’s probably worth more than you and me put together.” Jendrek was halfway through a beer already. “So I saw your guys all mixed up in that Steele case. Pretty interesting stuff.” He gave me a knowing look and winked. “Don’t suppose that had anything to do with what we talked about last time?”
I could feel my cheeks flush. I was proud of my work and excited about being involved in something everyone was talking about. I also figured it was acceptable now to talk about the case. And I wanted to, badly, and Jendrek could see it. I went through every detail, embellishing my own role in the strategy decisions, and then finished with my acceptance of the job offer.
“Ha, ha! That explains the watch.” Jendrek ordered another round and went on. “Well, that’s great. You’ll do great there. They need some people like you around there. A blue collar type to stir it up a bit.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. They’re actually a good group of people.”
Jendrek gave me the look of someone who knew a lot more than the guy he was talking to and knew when to keep it to himself. “So, I hear he’s going to run again. He’s already out making speeches.”
“That’s what they say. But who knows.” I could hear the tone of my own voice lowering, trying to sound world-weary, salty, like a guy in the know. “They’re also saying Carver might get a judicial nomination out of it. You know, if Steele gets reelected.” I winked as I said it, unaware of my own obnoxiousness. By the time I was two beers into the next day’s hangover I’d stopped paying attention to myself.
“Well, with connections like that, you might do alright for yourself in the bigtime.”
“Who knows.” I shrugged. “I like it so far, it’s a great way to get some experience and pay off my student loans. Besides, getting to work on cases like Steele’s ain’t bad either.”
“Course,” Jendrek continued. “With friends like that it’s easy to make powerful enemies too.” He smiled and took a swig. “A guy’s got to play his cards pretty well.”
Just like the time before, all the times before, we never got around to planning the class or even mentioning it. Jendrek was a cool hand and knew how to get the job done. The fact of the matter was, he liked me and felt responsible for making sure I didn’t drift too far out into the abyss. After some minor jabs at big firm life and the damage it can do to a young lawyer both personally and professionally, I could tell Jendrek realized he had a lot more work to do. When we got up to leave, I snatched the check and paid it. “Big spender,” Jendrek laughed on the way out.
When I got home I found a large envelope on my doorstep. I recognized Liz’s handwriting on the outside and I tossed it on the coffee table. As usual, my apartment was three degrees shy of hell on a balmy day and I fired up the air conditioner immediately. I was feeling drunk and drowsy in the heat and I removed all of my clothing except the watch. I decided to enjoy my new toy a little longer. For all I knew, I might never take it off. It was waterproof up to one hundred meters, after all.
I sank into my battered couch and stared at the silver watch face. At that very moment, it was far and away the most valuable thing in my apartment. But I kept glancing at the envelope, wondering if she’d dropped off a pile of personal things I’d had at her apartment. Finally, I tore it open. It was Steele’s credit report and the supporting documentation that went with it. I’d completely forgotten I’d asked her to get it.
The first things in the pile were past due credit card statements for accounts held by both Steele and his wife. There were several pages comprising the charges from the month prior to the murder. I scanned through them, grinning at my voyeuristic glimpse into the lifestyle of the politically powerful and wealthy. Meals out at restaurants near
ly everyday, in locations all over the country. A five hundred dollar purchase at Neiman Marcus in San Francisco two weeks before the murder. There were plane tickets to Dallas on the first line of the statement. There were bills for haircuts, dog grooming, car washes, dry cleaning. The final entries on the bill were for restaurants and hotels in Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska. I rolled my head back on my neck and thought of Ed Snyder’s comments about the Alaskan Wilderness Preserve and the article I’d read in the LA Times.
The next set of papers were bank statements. The joint account had $132,268 in it the day of the murder. Two days later the account was closed. I wondered why that would have been. Then I remembered Becky Steele’s comment about her mother’s family having all of the money. I also remembered that the grandparents, and presumably the holders of the purse-strings, had come to town to retrieve the grandchildren. I flipped through the bank papers carefully and found what I was looking for. The grandfather had also been a signatory on the account and had closed it after the son-in-law was arrested and the evidence appeared to point to him. I almost laughed at the outlandish cruelty of it. Steele sure must have felt good, left for dead and penniless in a state penitentiary only days after his arrest. But surely he must have had some other account of his own, how else could he have afforded Garrett Andersen?
Behind the bank statements were sheets of paper with photocopied checks that had been dishonored on the account after it was closed. There were three checks to a page and six pages in all. Many of them appeared to have been written by an accountant with signature authority to cover routine household expenses such as water, power, maid, gardener, landscaper, pool guy, and a bunch of other stuff. I shook my head and marveled at the idea of having other people to do everything for you, even pay your bills. And then I thought that my own life might soon be like that, and then the idea didn’t seem so strange.
21
I awoke at ten in the morning and I knew it the second I opened my eyes: There was something in the bank records. I was out of bed and out to the couch in one swift movement. I flipped through the copied checks. It seemed to leap out at me. On the fifth page was a dishonored check to a lawyer in Palm Springs written by Sharon Steele three days before the murder. A check for five thousand dollars made out to The Law Offices of Marcus Murdock, Esquire with a memo line reading simply “retainer.”
I leaned forward and set the paper and my elbows on the coffee table. Why would Sharon Steele visit a lawyer in Palm Springs three days before she was killed? What’s more, why would she visit a lawyer for the very first time, which, I assumed, would have been the case if she wrote him a check for a retainer. Maybe it was nothing. Rich people had a lot of reasons to consult a lot of lawyers and did so all the time. But why in Palm Springs? No one had ever mentioned Palm Springs: not Steele, not Becky, none of the police reports, none of the people who testified. There was no connection. I scratched my head and thought back over the case. I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe it was nothing. But maybe it wasn’t. I took the page with the check on it and set it off to the side.
Energized, I flipped through the rest of the pages carefully. There were letters written from creditors about failure to pay on this or that account. There were past due bills from the power company, the phone company, the gas company, both Steele’s and his wife’s cell phones. A finance company had repossessed Steele’s Mercedes and his wife’s BMW, but still wanted to get paid for the missed payments. I went back through the credit card statements again. There seemed to be nothing else, nothing interesting. I turned my attention back to the check, staring at the name of the lawyer. Then I had an idea.
I flipped through the three telephone bills I had: the home phone, Steele’s cell, and Sharon’s cell. I scanned the long distance portions of each, looking for calls to Palm Springs in the days before the murder. I focused on the home phone and Sharon’s cell. The bill for the home phone was huge. There were calls all over the country and many international calls. I noted numerous calls to Alaska a week before the murder. I also noted several calls back east early in the morning following the murder. I assumed that was Becky contacting relatives. But there was nothing to Palm Springs.
Then, on Sharon’s cell phone bill, I found what I was looking for. Four days before the murder, there were two calls to the same number in Palm Springs. There was another call to the same number the day before the murder. I looked at the check made out to Marcus Murdock and headed for my computer. The Martindale-Hubbell website took about thirty seconds to locate a listing for Murdock. He practiced on his own and listed himself as an expert in family law. That was code for divorce lawyer.
When I called, I got an answering machine. I left a message telling Murdock who I was, what I wanted, and left him my home and cell numbers. Then I sat on the couch and wondered what I would ask him if he ever called back. Furthermore, as Sharon Steele’s attorney, I wondered if Murdock would tell me anything. The likelihood of there being anything to tell was probably slim.
I laid back on the couch, dreading the pile of books on the coffee table. I needed to study. Classes were barely two days away. My real life seemed so uninteresting after the events of the summer that I couldn’t stand the thought of hanging around campus and cramming for exams. There was no way I could focus.
What did Sharon Steele call Murdock about in the days before she was killed? My thoughts drifted back to the cell phone bill. I imagined it sitting in a file in a dusty warehouse for a dozen years. It probably should have been shredded long ago, but corporate laziness had saved it. It was simply too much work to go through all the old files to get rid of them, so they continued to pile up in warehouses all over the country. Box after box of rotting documents memorializing trivial interactions. I wondered what else was out there. I stared at the arrangement of the papers on the coffee table and kept wondering.
And then an obvious thought came to me. If Sharon used her cell phone to make calls she wanted to keep secret, perhaps Steele did too. I picked up Steele’s old bills and flipped right to the page.
There they were, preserved on a single thin sheet of paper. Two parallel rows of text, each identical except for their four-minute separation in time. On the night of the murder, at 8:49 P.M., Steele placed a call on his cell phone. The call lasted two minutes. Then, at 8:53, there was another call to the same number. That call lasted nine minutes.
I couldn’t take my eyes from the two brief lines of information. Steele had called someone at 8:49. He hung up at 8:51, dialed 911 at 8:52, and then, during one of the gaps in the 911 call, dialed his cell phone again at 8:53 and called the same person he’d just spoken to.
Could it be right? Steele told a story of panic, of confusion and uncertainty, of racing around the house, of handling the body, of going out on the lawn and looking up and down the street for the ambulance. That was the explanation for the gaps in the 911 call. But what he had not mentioned, what he had never mentioned, was that he had also called someone else. In the heat of the moment, in the midst of his panic, he had thought to call someone and speak to them. In fact, he had kept them on the phone almost the entire duration of the 911 call and hung up just before the first policeman, Detective Wilson, arrived — probably at about the time he heard the sirens.
I held the phone in my hand. I doubted the number would be good anyway, but still I hesitated to dial. Should I tell someone about this? Would anyone listen if I did? And what was I doing? Steele was my client. We’d won his case. Why keep asking questions? I started dialing the number and stopped, hesitating at the last digit, then hung up. There could be lots of people Steele might call in the midst of panic, I thought. There could be plenty of reasons. He needed help. He was terrified. The police weren’t coming fast enough. I sat on the couch with the phone in my hand, a thousand reasonable possibilities running through my head. And all of them felt empty. All of them felt wrong. The same obvious question remained. Why keep it a secret? If it corroborated his story about the intruder, why would Steele hide
it? If there was a “witness” of sorts out there who could tell the same story Steele was telling the police, why the silence?
I took a deep breath, stopped thinking altogether, and dialed again. I told myself the number wouldn’t be any good, and then I heard it ring. I immediately wondered if the number had been given to someone new and tried to imagine who might answer at noon on a late-summer Saturday. It rang again.
I imagined that somewhere within a few miles of my tiny apartment someone was walking to a phone. Someone who believed that the calls they’d received from a panicked Senator Steele on the night his wife was murdered were a dozen years in the past and long since lost into the bottomless abyss of history.
It rang once more and was answered.
“Hello?”
I froze. Adrenaline and fear raced through me. There was a tingling in my neck and I held my breath. I could not speak. I did not want to speak.
“Hello? Who is this?” Garrett Andersen’s voice was unmistakable. “Who’s there? I can hear you. Who the hell is this? How did you get this number?” He was getting upset, the pitch of his deep voice rising in anger. “Look, whoever the hell this is. This is a private, unlisted number, and whoever you are you’d better not call here again and you damned well better not share this number with any telemarketers.” Andersen hung up.
There was a flush of heat all around and within me. My face, my hands, everything was buzzing with hot confusion. What had just happened? I went to set the phone down and was still reeling, trying to figure out what was going on when the phone rang in my hand. I stared down at it, unsure what it was for a second, and then answered.
Follow the Money Page 15