Designer Crimes

by Lia Matera

  “Stepping backwards or facing front?”

  “Backward.”

  “So he didn’t come far enough inside to turn around.” He looked fretfully back at me. “Too bad you didn’t see him.”

  “There were other witnesses in the building, Sandy. People who saw him charge out of this office, take the elevator. People who saw him hustle through the lobby. What could I add? A blurry idea of his shoe color?”

  “That’s right. If you don’t know what’s important, better know everything you can.”

  “If you don’t mind, I should get back to work.” More sounded too weary to work. But I could easily believe she needed to be alone.

  7

  Sandy stood on the sidewalk staring up at More & Kinsley’s tenth floor office. Occasionally, he loped to the lobby door and back. Then he turned toward the building across the street, a finer, newer, pricier palazzo.

  “Let’s go say hi to Sayres,” he suggested, as if it were just a thought.

  I was able to turn a snort into a merely noticeable exhalation. But he heard it.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  It didn’t take me but a second to believe him. He could be the most inconvenient person. He liked to charge in and barge around. Be a guy, be an ex-cop.

  “Talk to Sayres yourself! I’ll go—”

  “No.” He took my elbow. “Don’t go marching off. I want you to come with me.”

  “Oh right. I’m about to sue him, Sandy.” He knew that meant no contact, no way, except with a lawyer present.

  “We need to talk about that.” His hand slid up my arm, gripping for real. “You’re just going to mess yourself up. Yourself and me both. Steve’s my main client, he’s most of the money I’ve got in the bank.”

  I didn’t want to think about that. “He’s got enough money to pay me damages and still pay your retainer.”

  “But he won’t.” Sandy was right. Steve would enjoy playing guilt by association. It would give him a chance to be a spoiled, angry tyrant—his favorite and best role.

  I looked up at Sandy, torn between wanting to accommodate him—he’d done his share of that for me—and wanting Sayres to get what he deserved. All I could think to say was, “I can’t be guided by what Steve might do.”

  “Of course you can!” He squared off against me, face inches from mine as foot traffic flowed around us.

  “Sandy, he turned Doron against me, he got me fired, and now he’s crippled my—”

  “I know Steve’s a dickhead. I know he got you fired—”

  “I could put that behind me.” I backed up enough to gesture, chopping down from the elbow. “But he’s chasing away my clients. Perry Verhoeven dropped me like a hot rock because Steve told him I bungle civil cases so that I can put more time into criminal.”

  “I know that, too. But it’s no damn use suing him.” Sandy’s brows crimped. “You’re just thinking like a lawyer. You’re going to waste a lot of money and a lot of energy on something that’s going to come to no good anyway, just to some damn settlement where everybody’s ordered to shut up and that doesn’t put any money in your pocket when you back out costs—”

  “It’ll cost him money, too. And it’ll shut him up.”

  “No, it won’t. It’ll get all his friends—and he’s got a town full—talking bad about you.” He frowned so hard his head tilted forward. If that weren’t enough, he shook it. “And I’ll have to hustle up a bunch of new clients, which I’m too damn old to deal with.”

  “No, you’re not! You’re not too old. And you can’t ask me to forgo the only legal remedy to what I consider my biggest problem. Just because you and I are, are …” Friends didn’t cover it, not as far as I was concerned. “I won’t just roll over and take it from Sayres. Not for anything.”

  He backed up, to the irritation of people trying to walk around him. “That’s the least you should be willing to do for me. You know that, Laura? The absolute least.”

  This was the first time it had come out into the open. I’d left him for Hal, and yet he’d stuck by me, settling for friendship. Even when I rebounded into another affair, when we quarreled and grew distant, even then I’d been able to count on his professional help.

  I tried to shake my head.

  “You’re coming with me to see Sayres,” he insisted. “Not to prove your damn loyalty; that was out of line—I’m sorry. But because I can talk to him alone any time. And I can’t know what he’ll say with you there unless you’re there.” His eyes were narrow with anger, but his voice was calm.

  “What do you even need to ask him? What’s Steve got to do with anything?”

  Sandy almost got his arm dislocated waving it in front of a rushing teenager. “Ouch. Because that’s Steve’s damn office two windows over from your old one.”

  “So?”

  “So he could have seen you go into Kinsley’s office two days ago.”

  “With what, Sandy? A telescope he keeps trained on More and Kinsley in case—just on the off chance—I walk in there to sue him? And you are not too old to get new clients.”

  “I am going to calm completely down now, Laura, because I have got to do a better job”—his jaw was too tight, he had to stop and work it a second—“of explaining this to you. Steve Sayres can see into Jocelyn Kinsley’s office, where you were sitting when you got shot at.”

  “Talking in a Mr. Rogers voice doesn’t make you sound rational, Sandy. This is the heart of the most lawyer-intensive neighborhood in the most lawyer-intensive city in the world, probably. A whole cliff of windows looks into Kinsley’s office. And only if you’re lying on Kinsley’s carpet do you see Steve Sayre’s window. Probably if you crawled around her office, or walked through in on stilts, you would see the offices of many other people we know because so goddam many lawyers have offices right here.”

  I thought I was speaking with professorial calm. But the people walking by jostled one another to keep from coming too close.

  “I don’t care if you can see a holy vision of Elvis from Kinsley’s window,” was Sandy’s response. “All I care about is that the one person you’d probably call your biggest enemy on the planet can see into the office where you got shot at. I’m not going to assume that’s a coincidence because I never got anywhere by assuming anything.”

  We stood there, a stationery monument to stubbornness in a flowing river of suits and briefcases.

  “Laura, look. So what, so you have to see Steve Sayres for five minutes. It won’t hurt you—you’re a big girl. It won’t even keep you from suing him. At the worst, you’ll get a lawyer who says, Why’d you go and do that? And you’ll explain—”

  “That I wanted to be obedient?”

  It was his turn to snort. “You’ll explain that a private detective you trust to do his job with something approaching thoroughness and logic told you it was the only damn way he could get the reading he needed on Steve Sayres. Okay? Because it won’t cost you diddly, and it buys me information.”

  And because he was absolutely right. In matters of loyalty, I owed him. This was the least I could do.

  “I would never, because of this,” his tone contained a promise, “think or tell anyone that you were obedient.”

  “I doubt anyone would believe you anyway.”

  His smile made me want to turn back that clock a few years.

  8

  It was as bad an idea as I’d feared. Riding up in the elevator, I realized it wasn’t just Steve Sayres I’d be seeing again. There were other attorneys at White, Sayres & Speck, not to mention paralegals and clerical help. I’d worked with them for six and a half years. My old secretary, Rose, might still be prone to sobbing sentimentality. I felt unprepared, antisocial, underdressed. Worst of all, I felt obedient.

  When we entered the outer office, I was struck not by how familiar it looked, but by the gaps in my recollectio
n. My memories didn’t include a carpet this shade, yet this one didn’t look new. Nor could I have described the walls, the furniture, the smells with anything approaching detail. My memories, I realized, focused on me, on my clients, my case files, my clothes, my movements, my conversations. I’d inhabited the office without truly noticing it. Because it had remained the same, day in and day out, I hadn’t bothered tattooing it to my consciousness. Today, the small touches—the white and cream striped wallpaper, the gunmetal frames around minor Hockneys, the cast glass tables—were familiar only because I was seeing them again.

  The receptionist watched me look around. She tilted her head, working her jaw as if biting the inside of her cheek. “May I help you?” Her tone seemed to apologize for not being able to place me. She’d been new when I was fired. When Sandy walked in behind me, she broke into an easy smile.

  Sandy said, “Steve in?”

  She hit a button on a sleek machine, speaking toward it. “Mr. Sayres? Mr. Arkelett to see you.”

  “Arkelett?” the machine crackled back. “Well, okay. Send him in.”

  For me, the voice was a hit of ammonia, a sharp, shocking slap to my attention.

  I didn’t bother rubbernecking as we walked down the hall. The decor here, however elegant, however expensive, said nothing about the office itself. That was determined by the people in it. Maybe that’s why the physical details never fixed themselves in my memory. Now, as then, they faded behind my dislike for Steve Sayres.

  We walked past the office that had once been Sayres’s, past the office that had once been mine. I was relieved and disappointed that the doors were closed. At the end of the hall was the corner office that had once belonged to Doron White, the founding partner who’d been my mentor and protector until Sayres turned him against me.

  Sandy tapped at the door. Without waiting, he pushed it open for me to precede him.

  Sayres was fussing with sheets of yellow legal paper, rustling them as if looking for something. He grumbled a greeting without looking up.

  The office, I saw, had been redone. Doron had decorated it with older man conventionality, browns and tans and greens, dark woods and leathers. Steve, ever chi-chi, had replaced the wall-to-wall carpet with oak parquet and a huge Kilim carpet. The desks and tables were antique Persian inlay. The chairs were carved wood thrones. Welcome to the seraglio.

  Sandy stood to one side, making sure he wasn’t between me and Sayres. He was slightly slumped, head forward, intent on studying Steve’s face when he looked up and saw me on the other side of the sultan’s desk.

  We must have raised a flag in Steve’s peripheral vision. His head jerked suddenly up, his brows lowered, his lips in a petulant twist.

  The sight of me did not sweeten his mood. He flushed, nostrils flaring. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, as if were some offensive package. He glared at Sandy, “What are you doing?”

  “You heard about the shooting across the street?” Sandy’s voice was calm.

  “Of course I heard about it.” He shook his head impatiently. “What’s this about? What do you want?” This last was directed at me.

  “You can see Kinsley’s office from your window, Steve,” Sandy continued. “I’m wondering if you saw or heard anything.”

  From across one of the busiest streets in the city? Steve looked justly derisive. “I didn’t know I could see the window from here. Not that it makes a difference. I’ve got plenty to do without staring at other people’s offices.” He scooted his chair back from the desk, glowering at me. “I heard you were almost shot. What? Did you think I had a long-range rifle in here?” His upturned lip told me he appreciated his own wit. “I heard, of course, that you were fine.” As if he’d have sent armloads of flowers otherwise.

  “I went there to see Jocelyn Kinsley about suing you, Steve.” Might as well give Sandy his money’s worth. “For commercial and personal slander.”

  The initial flush of rage he’d managed to master regained ascendancy. He stood, face aflame beneath silvered brown hair. “On what grounds?”

  “You’ve been telling my clients and potential clients that I—” I stopped. “Never mind. You’ll be contacted by my lawyer.” Why commit to a generalized version of the facts when I could hit him with particulars later?

  “Warning your clients? No.” His eyelids drooped, making him look as cold and mean as a snake. “But when I’m asked to evaluate the work you did for this firm, I must in good conscience refer inquiry to Second Continental. And to some of the other clients who became of little concern to you during the Crosetti debacle.”

  Fury froze me. I loathed him beyond sensation or movement. “My cousin was missing from his hospital bed and my friend Dan Crosetti had just died in front of me. Do you tell them that? Do you tell them about the millions of dollars in legal fees you’d never have collected without me? About the cases your unimaginative, sloppy arguments would have lost if I hadn’t stepped in? Do you tell them about the time Graystone Federal—”

  “And you accuse me of slander?” he sneered. “You’ve got a nerve to come in here, to my own office, and say these things to me. And then turn around and tell me I’m slandering you because I refer people to your former clients.”

  Smart son-of-a-bitch. Getting other people—coached to his point of view—to do his slandering for him.

  “That’s a white-wash, Steve. You don’t refer people to the clients I won five-year cases for. You refer them to a handful of clients that got your side of the story when things went wrong.” I’d lost one pinch-hit motion, and a few continuances cost other clients a few bucks. That was as bad a job as I’d ever done. Steve was a worse lawyer than that at the best of times. “And that’s only part of it. You’ve done and said more than you let on.”

  I’d seen it in Perry’s embarrassment, day before yesterday. I could see it in the frigid cordiality of bank lawyers I met in the street. I couldn’t prove it yet. But I was willing to go down in flames trying.

  “Is this your idea of a joke, Arkelett?” Sayres demanded.

  “This is my idea of asking you if you saw anything from your window that day, Steve. Or if anyone else in the office did.” Sandy dropped calmly into a carved minithrone.

  “No, I did not.” He turned back to me. “And you can do as you choose. But just remember that truth is a defense to slander. And it will be my pleasure to put a few facts into the public record that maybe not everybody knows.”

  “Ditto.” If he wanted to put my track record on trial, then I’d be happy to take out tongs and hold his up to view. His lack of imagination had amounted to recurring sabotage. Every time I’d second-chaired him, I’d struggled to keep him out of court during crucial motions. When I couldn’t, we lost. “You’ve never thought of an argument in your life that the opposition wasn’t expecting and couldn’t demolish. You’ve got no creativity and no guts.”

  Still Sandy made no move to rise. He seemed to content to let us squabble. And yet, he must have known Steve would retaliate, would withhold business from him.

  Maybe I’d convinced Sandy I meant to sue. Maybe he was growing used to the idea of canvassing for new business. Or maybe he was learning something from this—though what, I couldn’t imagine.

  “Well,” Steve wore his pomposity comfortably, “you do what you think best, Laura. It’s no secret you have a vendetta against this firm.”

  I was stupefied; felt my jaw drop. “I—I—have a vendetta?”

  He brushed imaginary lint from a perfectly pressed blue suit. “Do you suppose your rantings don’t get back to us?”

  I could smell him now, his sporty post-workout cologne, the stiff starch of his shirt, the faint cedar of expensive closet. I took a backward step, repulsed by the stink of rich city lawyer.

  “We hear about it,” he continued snidely, “when you interrogate people, insisting we’ve said negative things about you.”
He’d interpreted my withdrawal as his victory, not my disgust made manifest. “Our clients are loyal to us, you know. They have reason to be.”

  At that moment, surrounded by his pasha fittings, tall and comfortable in his one-upmanship, he looked like some spoiled European Count, like old money that couldn’t spare a raise for the servants.

  My god, I was lucky not to work for him anymore. Lucky and blessed to work for myself. Better the leanest year on my own than one moment of submission to this imperious, untalented little man.

  “Your clients’ loyalty,” I said with careful anger, “is bought and paid for. You wine and dine bank VPs, racquet-ball them, take them on jaunts. And they don’t care that you overcharge their corporations because the money comes out of shareholders’ pockets, not theirs. They don’t mind spending other people’s money for services you can’t even perform well. But Steve, there’s not a business in this town that wouldn’t be stupid to hire you if they could get me. And I’ll make sure that comes out in court if I have to discover every file in your office.”

  As I turned to leave, he said, with theatrical weariness, “Can’t you grow up, Laura? How often do we have to play this little ego game of yours?”

  I had thought my earlier resolve strong. But now I took the modern equivalent of a blood oath. I would get Steven Sayres. I would mop his reputation through the gutter of his own stupidity and moral slop.

  I slammed the door behind me, leaving Sandy inside. Let him make nice to his boss. Let him ask whatever else he wanted to ask, guy to guy, sport to sport, serf to master.

  Halfway down the hall, it occurred to me to wonder who had told Steve—if he was telling the truth—that I’d accused him of maligning me.

  At the front desk, I stopped. I looked down at the receptionist. She was as painted and prettily-coifed as a Christmas doll. “They want to know”—I jerked my head back toward Steve’s office—“if Perry Verhoeven has been here this week.”

  Perry was the only client to whom I’d vented. The only one to whom I’d actually voiced my accusation.