The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  There are some phone messages in my slot on the reception desk, so I grab them.

  On the screen, one of the network news anchors is being interviewed, a sagging form sitting there in his suspenders sans suit coat trying to look like a regular guy in his starched $3,000 shirt.

  “I think he threw his back out giving the news a twist,” says Harry.

  My partner has no use for what passes as journalism these days, particularly on the tube. According to Harry, they spend too much time in deep admiration for politicians who show particular skill in lying, so much so that they have now institutionalized the destruction of public ethics by elevating deceit to a statecraft called “spin.” It is no longer the lie that matters but the qualitative fashion in which it is told.

  We now have a receptionist and file clerk rolled into one, though she is not in yet this morning. Marta comes in six hours a day around her school schedule to screen messages from our phone mail, knock correspondence into final form, and organize files so that we don’t drown in an avalanche of loose paper.

  “So how did it go, the meeting with the widow?” Harry was in my office when I placed the phone call to Dana.

  “Fine.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Some advice.” I thumb through my messages. There is one from Nathan Fittipaldi. Perhaps he’s checking up for Dana.

  “No shoulder to cry on?” says Harry.

  “That too.” I quickly change the subject to what little information I gleaned from Nick’s PDA.

  “Let’s talk in the office.” Harry punches the power button on the TV’s remote, the screen goes dark, and we head into my office and close the door.

  I fill him in on the information I got from Nick’s PDA.

  “I did what you asked,” he says. “You know you can get most of that stuff online.” Harry is talking about corporate filings with the Secretary of State’s office up in the capital.

  “Fortunately, Effie was here late last night so she was able to go online.” Harry still won’t use a computer, not even for word processing. In Harry’s arcane world, keyboards are for secretaries and typesetters. No self-respecting lawyer would touch one. I tell him he’s a dinosaur.

  “Her name is Marta, not Effie,” I tell him.

  “I like to think of her as Effie.” Harry has been on a kick lately, fiction noir, reaching back in time, the old mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, relishing a time when everything was black and white. He has taken to naming our secretary after Sam Spade’s girl Friday from The Maltese Falcon. One of these days I’m afraid I will come into the office to find the names of “Spade and Archer” in black letters across our front window.

  “It’s fine with me as long as she doesn’t mind,” I tell him. “The laws of harassment being what they are.”

  “She thinks it’s cute,” he tells me.

  Marta is Latina, about five-foot-two, with a good sense of humor, an affable nature, and a work ethic that keeps her nose to the grindstone sixteen hours a day between school, work, and two kids. She is eager to learn and has taken charge of the office, even finding some available space for filing cabinets in one of the vacant cabanas two doors down from our office.

  “She went online,” says Harry. “She’s getting good.”

  “Maybe she could teach you,” I tell him.

  Harry gives me a look as if to say “in your dreams.” “We managed to run down the corporate records for Jamaile Enterprises. Like the cops said, it’s a limited partnership. The stuff was filed a little over a year ago. Shows your Mr. Metz as the general partner. Nick shows up as one of the officers. It looks like Metz had control of the day-to-day operations of the business and that maybe Nick was an investor. It’s not really clear.”

  I am wondering if maybe this was the investment that went sour, the one that Dana told me about. The reason she was broke.

  “Any other names on the filings?”

  “One. A Grace Gimble,” says Harry. He looks at the notebook in his hand and shrugs his shoulders like this doesn’t ring any bells. “She shows up on the statement of officers as the secretary.”

  “Where was the business located?”

  “It shows a P.O. box as the address of record.” He gives me this on a piece of paper.

  “You can be sure the cops have already been there with a search warrant,” I say.

  He nods. “Maybe one of the partners knows about it?”

  I continue to finger absently through my phone messages. “Anything else?”

  “Just the usual. Articles of incorporation containing a statement of purpose for the business.”

  I look up at Harry.

  “Like the cop said, import-export. That and any other lawful business they wanted to conduct. A lot of boilerplate from the form books,” says Harry.

  “That’s it?”

  “I went to the law library and had them run a Lexis-Nexis on Grace Gimble.” This is not something we have bought into on the office computer yet. “We found a couple of G. Gimbles, no Grace, and without more information we couldn’t tell if it was the right person.”

  “What are you thinking?” I ask.

  “About the woman?”

  I nod.

  “It could be a secretary, somebody with the firm. A signature of convenience they used for formation when they put the thing together.”

  “That was my thought.”

  “You want me to check it out? Call the firm?”

  “No. Let’s hold off. It wouldn’t do to be asking the same questions the cops are.”

  Harry considers this. “Why wouldn’t Nick have told you about this? Good friend that he was.” Harry looks at me, that cynical twinkle in his eye. “I mean if he was in business with Metz, what’s to hide? Unless they were importing contraband,” he says.

  “Don’t even go there,” I tell him. “A lawyer like Nick sees a lot of people in a year. It could be he talked with Metz over the phone and signed the formation documents through the mail.”

  “Right,” says Harry. “Nick did so much corporate work he just couldn’t remember.”

  He has a point.

  “Did you talk to her about it?” Harry is talking about Dana.

  I shake my head.

  “Why not?”

  “The subject didn’t come up.”

  He laughs. “What, she was too busy loosening the knot on your tie, toying with your belt?”

  I look at him.

  “I know, don’t tell me. I have no respect for those in mourning.”

  I leave it as a statement of fact.

  “What did she want?”

  “Some information on an insurance policy.”

  “There was insurance?” Harry’s eyebrows go up a notch.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Maybe you don’t,” says Harry. “But I have a feeling the erstwhile Mrs. Rush does, though it begs another question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why you? You do about as many insurance cases as Nick did corporate formations.”

  “She thought she could trust me.”

  “Can she?” Harry wants to know if I’m interested in more than just the legal issues involved.

  “She also wanted to know what Nick and I talked about that morning, over coffee.”

  “Ah. Did you tell her?”

  “What I could remember. Not all of it.”

  “And in between remembrances, this insurance thing came up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of policy is it?”

  “Like I said. We don’t know if there was a policy.”

  “She doesn’t have a copy?” says Harry.

  I shake my head.

  “Don’t tell me,” he says. “They had a key-man policy out on him at the firm?” Harry is a quick study.

  “If it’s in play.”

  He starts to laugh, the kind of laugh he reserves for foolish acts by foolish people. “You told her you’d go over there and ask the
m about it?”

  “Somebody has to. He left her high and dry. Besides, I have other reasons for doing it,” I tell him.

  “I hope they involve a fee?”

  “They might not.”

  Harry looks at me. “You didn’t tell her you’d do it for free?”

  “I didn’t tell her anything about fees. The problem is, Nick told me some things that I can’t discuss. They involve other people. Innocent people who could be drawn into this in ways that would be ugly.” The thought of Laura and her mother with reporters camped outside their door is not an image I wish to be responsible for. It is the reason I didn’t tell the cops, that and the fact that Nick had trusted me with his secret.

  “You’ll have to trust me. There is a reason. It’s a good reason.” I look a Harry. He glances back at me, then nods.

  “Nick made some bad investments,” I tell him.

  “Yeah. In former wives.”

  “He also made some other mistakes.”

  Harry looks at me sensing this is the item I can’t talk about.

  “You feel strongly about this?”

  “I do.”

  “All right. Fine. What do you need from me?”

  “Thanks.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rocker, Dusha and DeWine is one of the old-line firms in town. No one can remember when Jeremiah Rocker died, and James Dusha’s picture in the outer lobby depicts a proper gent in waistcoat and staid collar, squinting at the camera lens through a pince-nez.

  While the firm name may be old, there is nothing sedentary about their business plan. In the last few years, they have gobbled up two other sizable law firms and established other offices in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C. They have moved to the power and money centers, and word is that they are on the prowl for more, always with an eye for people having contacts to corporate clients.

  The firm looms large on the political scene. A few years ago RDD led the charge in Congress lobbying for a bill later known as the Corporate Lawsuit Reform Act. It carried all the right buzz words, everything people hate in the form of “corporations” and “lawsuits” and love by way of “reform.” This particular piece of mischief fed a steep recession, though you wouldn’t know it from the profits scooped in by RDD.

  The legislation contained what is known as a “safe harbors” clause for accountants and lawyers, so they could shade their eyes from otherwise obvious fraud committed by their business clients, while taking hefty fees in the process. In this way, the lawyers and accountants could avoid both civil and criminal liability while their corporate clients stole billions from unwary investors. Within four years, mega corporations around the country began folding up like card tables, filing bankruptcy, throwing tens of thousands out of work and transforming retirement plans into piles of worthless paper. Of course RDD couldn’t be touched on any of this. They had legal immunity from Congress.

  RDD has become a master player in this game. They have been known to lobby for legislation creating the crime and then to represent the injured in a class action lawsuit afterward. That the victims got three cents on the dollar, and that this was taken to pay gargantuan attorneys’ fees, does not even faze them.

  The firm has more than three hundred lawyers and an untold number of legal assistants, secretaries, and drones, strapped to the oars and toiling to keep this great ship of commerce pointed in the right direction: always toward the bottom line. Few in the bar and certainly no one at RDD ever blanches at the notion that justice, if it exists at all, is a mere by-product of making money.

  All of this shows up in the firm’s address and the tasteful appointments of its public spaces. RDD occupies the upper five floors of a highrise on the waterfront, overlooking the bay. It is well known that they own the rest of the building beneath them, renting it out until they can raid enough of the competition to fill steerage and bilge.

  The executive suite is up on eleven. A Persian carpet long enough to cover the runway at LAX paves the way to the reception, enough knotted wool to have gnarled the fingers and blinded a generation of kids toiling in some dim Middle Eastern sweatshop.

  A large bronze sculpture of whales, mother and calf, rests on a pedestal in the center of the room, a metallic statement of the firm’s sensitivity toward motherhood and the environment.

  So as to cover all their bases and not offend commercial interests, oil paintings of ships, some of them under sail, dot the walls illuminated by halogen-spot museum lighting. None of this mars the uninhibited vista to the west, across the bay, an unparalleled view of the north end of Coronado Island and its sprawling naval base.

  I approach the counter and drop a business card on it. “Paul Madriani to see Mr. Tolt.”

  The receptionist, a slender redhead in a business suit and telephone headset, sports fingernails an inch long as she picks up my card and eyes it. I tell her I have an appointment.

  “Just a moment.” She punches a button and calls to the back, mentions my name and the appointment, listens, smiles, then pushes the disconnect key. “Mr. Tolt’s assistant will be out in a moment. Please take a seat.”

  I try the cushy couch under the massive oil painting of a square-rigged ship in storm-tossed seas and hope that I won’t get wet. The outer office is a busy place. There is the constant bleep of telephones, three receptionists pushing buttons repeating the mantra “Rocker, Dusha,” “Rocker, Dusha”—De Wine, it seems, has somehow gotten lost in the commercial flurry, every billable second being precious. Long-nailed fingers flail the buttons on phones with the speed of flamenco artists, connecting calls to the back offices and downstairs, feeding the money machine. Computerized billing devices attached to the phones will be clicking every six minutes, charging for each tenth of an hour. Slot machines in most casinos don’t provide the house with this steady a take.

  In less than a minute, a well-dressed woman in a dark blue business suit appears from around the corner of the reception counter. She is smiling under blond shoulder-length hair. She stops for an instant to gather my card at the counter and then, still reading it, moves toward me.

  “Mr. Madriani.”

  I push myself up from the couch.

  “Glenda Rawlings, Mr. Tolt’s administrative assistant. If you will come this way.”

  I follow her past reception and down the corridor. There is only one large double door at the end of the hall. On the dark mahogany in gold letters is the name “Adam Tolt.” She knocks.

  “Come in.” The voice is muted behind the solid wood.

  She opens the door and leads the way. I have never met Tolt before. He appears as a gray eminence behind a massive dark desk twenty feet away. God would have such surroundings if he had more money. There are Greek vases lining a continuous shelf on three of the four walls, the other being glass. These are obvious relics of great value in earthen hues. On the wall behind Tolt’s desk is a Matisse, not a copy, an original, in shocking colors, vibrant blues and greens.

  The surface of Tolt’s desk reveals swirls of inset bird’s-eye inlaid in a delicate border around an exotic dark polished slab that spent an eon surviving on the floor in some primeval tropical forest. It is swept clear of everything except an ornate silver pen set, a telephone with a zillion buttons, and a large leather blotter. On the blotter is a sheaf of papers to which the man is giving his undivided attention. He doesn’t look up as I enter.

  “Glenda, I’m going to need the file on the Masery case. Tell Halston I want to see him before I leave. And call Schafer and tell him I want a briefing on the Electric Stylus matter when I get back on Friday.”

  With the point of his fountain pen, he scratches a diagonal line across the page he is reading.

  “This memo to Wentworth needs some work.” He flips it at her so it sails and she has to catch it in the air a foot off the surface of his desk.

  “I don’t know who did the figures,” he says, “but they don’t add up.” By now he is already looking at the next piece of paper in the stack.
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  “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it right away.”

  He scratches the scrawl of his signature, the point of his pen like a needle over the linen letterhead, lifts the page and repeats the process. He does this four more times in quick succession, his name represented by what looks like two letters, an A with a T through it, followed by an inky squiggle. He affixes this to the paper with the staid majesty of one using sealing wax and the royal signet ring to endorse an imperial commission.

  Tolt is a fixture not only in the politics of this state, but on the national scene. As a young man he is reputed to have led a trade delegation to the Orient where, within a year, rumors of bribes to foreign officials began to surface, rumors that blossomed into scandal, and led to the collapse of a government over the purchase of defense equipment. The fact that one of Tolt’s clients was the supplier of this equipment did not seem to tarnish the man. That he could do this, his name never being mentioned in the press or any of the inquiries that followed, coined for him the title, in darker corners and behind his back, the “Stealth Fixer.”

  Tolt’s political tracks have the same illusive qualities as a shadow. Shine light on them and they disappear. There are those who suspect that his fingerprints would not even adhere to the smooth leather surface of his own briefcase. Currently he sits on more than a dozen corporate boards, as well as the national committee of one of the two great political parties. Given the moral compass of the country over the past quarter century, one day we will no doubt find him on the Supreme Court or in a presidential cabinet.

  He doesn’t look up at me until he is twisting the cap back on his pen.

  “And Glenda, hold my calls, and call the airport and make sure the Gulfstream is fueled and ready. I don’t want to wait for the crew again.”

  “Yes, sir. Your car is downstairs. The driver’s waiting.”

  “Thank you, Glenda.”

  She hustles out, the picture of efficiency, and closes the door behind her.

  Tolt picks up my business card, which she has placed on the blotter near his right hand, and examines it. He wears glasses under a creased forehead. His face is well tanned, and he seems fit for a man I would guess is in his early sixties. “Mr. Mad-re-ani?”