Designer Crimes

by Lia Matera

  She nodded, not even looking at her computer date book. “Oh, yes. He was here when we heard about the shooting across the street. We sent someone down into the street because one of the other lawyers saw the commotion outside. We wanted to ask Mr. Sayres if we could look out his window, but Mr. Verhoeven was in with him.”

  I felt my fists clench. No sooner did Perry Verhoeven fire me than he came here to hire Sayres. And Sayres expected me to believe he hadn’t been turning my clients against me.

  Had he offered Perry bargain-basement rates? Just so he could crow that Perry had been dissatisfied with me?

  I scowled at the receptionist until she began to look alarmed.

  Sandy still hadn’t come out to join me, so I left the office. Outside, I stared across the street at Jocelyn Kinsley’s window, the third square on the left, tenth floor.

  I was damp with rage, a cold city wind billowing my sleeves. Shivering, I tried to lock Kinsley’s office in my memory: the angel paintings, the golden carpet, the oak-armed cloth chairs, the French Provincial desk. Maybe it would prove important. I didn’t want to forget the details, as I’d forgotten the decor of White, Sayres & Speck.

  I took refuge in memorization. I didn’t want my anger vibrating so intensely it paralyzed normal motion, necessary thought. Anger was my least favorite hell, more bitter for me than sadness, harder than embarrassment. I’d never figured out what to do with it. Anything constructive took too long, nothing in the moment seemed to help. And an out of control lawyer was no use to anyone. If couldn’t remain good at my work, what was the point? What else could I do? Who else was I?

  I walked on. Steve Sayres always brought out the worst in me. I needed to shut him up before he killed my practice and wasted more of my emotional energy.

  If there really was a Designer Crimes, I certainly understood its appeal.

  9

  Osmil Pelo practically capered toward me when I appeared at the door of Sandy’s office. His eyes were bright, his olive skin flushed, his curls finger-raked. He began singing the old Peter and Gordon hit, “Where Have You Been?” I must have looked surprised he knew the song.

  “I know everything, everything about fun,” he explained. “I listen to songs on record players at the library so I know about old fun, historic fun. I eat something small at every restaurant, something I can afford, everywhere, man, all the time.” Suddenly he wasn’t capering. He stood still, looking blessed, the picture of beatific cheer. “In Cuba, we have nothing, nothing to do, not even a small thing. No clubs, no stores, no restaurant—except for tourists. Even the tourist places, old person stuff. For the young there’s only sex, sex sex sex, that’s all to do.” He looked disgusted. And well he might, since his kind of sex was illegal in Cuba.

  Confused, I looked beyond him at Sandy, sitting splay-legged near the computer, frowning in concentration.

  “What’s up?” He’d made it sound like big news. He’d made me rush right over, despite my continuing fury at Sayres—and at him for dragging me there. “Sandy?” Now he was spacing off while his computer pet pranced boyishly around me. “You summoned, and I appeared. But I’m not in the best mood, okay?”

  “You’re not going to believe this.” He straightened in his chair. No remorse or mention of Sayres—it must be something big to push the episode out of his mind. “Come over here.”

  Osmil trotted beside me. What was making the kid so happy, so outside himself?

  Osmil said, “I don’t why I checked. I don’t know if I had a feeling or what. Man, I’m always lucky, but this is lucky.”

  I sat beside Sandy, in Osmil’s still-warm chair. “You’ve got my full attention.”

  “You don’t know anything about listening devices.” Sandy didn’t make it a question. “Basically, if size didn’t matter, you could use a walkie-talkie as a bug. Plunk one down where you want it and use its mate to listen. Smaller bugs operate on the same principle, but unless you’re talking real expensive, they transmit within a much smaller radius.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, one of the computers at More and Kinsley is set up to receive signals from a bug. That’s as near as we can figure it. Ozzy was looking for new data in their system, and he found something. There’s not much in the file. But he lassoed it.”

  Osmil smiled broadly. He looked like the classic Boy Posed With Big Fish.

  “And what did he get? Am I allowed to know?” I’d lied about my full attention. I was hungry, still cranky, worried about money.

  “Listen.” Sandy hit a button on his keyboard.

  The computer made a loud noise, scaring me. More sounds followed. In a few seconds, speech.

  “God damn!” I responded.

  The computer was playing my voice. I was saying, with a bit of buzz and crackle, “You have quite an art collection.”

  To which Maryanne More’s voice, sharp and tinny in the computer speakers, replied, “I’ve been a collector for a long time. I hoped at one time to become an artist …”

  “God damn!” I repeated. “That’s our conversation in More’s office.” I talked over More telling us she’d gone to the Sorbonne. “Her office has a bug in it?”

  “Yup.” Sandy tapped a button, turning the sound down but letting the conversation wind on. More was describing her classmates: “They were dipping their brushes into some internal well I couldn’t find.”

  “Our whole conversation was bugged, Sandy?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he nodded. “Kinsley’s office, too.” He tapped another button. On-screen graphics resembled the control panel of a VCR or a tape deck. The cursor lit a small panel with a forward arrow. However this data was stored, one could pretend to play it as if it were a video or cassette tape.

  When Sandy hit the play icon again, his cowboy alto could be heard: “Okay, take a chair. I’ll be Kinsley. Walk me through it every second.”

  “It wouldn’t be the police, would it?” I asked him. “Bugging the murder scene?”

  “No way. For starters, their listening devices are Jurassic. They’d have to be right in the building with a receiver. But what I’ve been trying to tell you: the receiver is inside one of More and Kinsley’s computers—it’s gotta be. If a computer there weren’t storing this, we wouldn’t have access.”

  “How about the FBI, maybe an unrelated investigation? Maybe they bugged the office, and they’re eavesdropping through More’s computer.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Osmil still jittering with excitement.

  Sandy clicked off the sound as More said of Kinsley’s tape dispenser, “They took it away.”

  “Not the Fibbie,” Sandy replied. “The funny thing is, anybody sophisticated, anybody in the spying biz, would have put a scrambler on this. It would record as gibberish that had to be unscrambled to be understood. No, if I had to put money on who did it, I’d say either Kinsley was bugging More or More was bugging Kinsley.”

  “First the hidden file, now this.” I let it sink in. “They’ve got to be doing something illegal over there.”

  “Designer crimes …” Sandy rubbed the spot between his eyes. “Let’s assume Kinsley was conspiring with clients against their employers—that’s the obvious way to interpret her memo. Say she decided to listen in to More’s consultations, see if they were kosher. Why bug her own office? More wouldn’t be using Kinsley’s office to talk to clients.”

  “Kinsley might have been trying to protect herself, prove More didn’t let her in on it.” Office bugging didn’t match my recollection of Kinsley, sweet in angora and linen. But that didn’t make my impression right.

  “Or it could be More was listening in on Kinsley, seeing if any of her clients needed customized revenge.”

  “If More installed the bug, wouldn’t she have taken it out by now? Why leave all those incriminating electrons lying around?”

  “Probably doesn’t think anyone knows abou
t it. Whoever’s doing it must keep on top of it,” he mused. “Play the stuff back ASAP and erase it. We didn’t find anything besides this afternoon’s conversations.”

  “They know how to erase over there,” Osmil put in. “Damn fine erasers.”

  “Or,” Sandy continued, “it could be More put the bugs in today, just for our visit. Although”—a shake of the head—“I can’t think why.”

  “Hester,” I said. “The executive secretary or whatever More called her. It might have been her. She has a computer out in the reception area.”

  Sandy nodded. “I’ll have to find out what she’s about—strange lady.” He flipped through a small notebook on the table. “Hester Donne, BA from Berkeley, former union organizer, one year of law school at Malhousie, paralegal courses at Golden Gate. Been with More since the office opened.”

  “Have you checked her bank accounts?”

  “Yup, just did. She’s about as broke as she should be. But it’s not hard to hide money. It could also have been a client—someone with physical access to the computers. Maybe an industrial spy looking to eavesdrop on other clients. Or someone trying to set More up—gathering proof of illegal activity. Maybe a client’s employer. Top of the agenda, we need more information about the cases in Kinsley’s memo. You want to help?”

  “Who do I have to visit this time? My Aunt Diana?” My least favorite person on the planet, as Sandy well knew. “Charles Manson?”

  He grinned. “I thought that went okay, at Sayres’ office.”

  I could feel my jaw drop. “Went okay? As in, what? I didn’t kill him? He didn’t actually pull out his dick to show me how big it is?”

  I heard Osmil snicker.

  “As in, he told us your Mr. Perry Verhoeven is a turncoat, at least. Maybe even a spy from day one.” A wry grin. “Maybe even a co-conspirator in a botched attempt to murder you.”

  “I asked the receptionist about Perry.” Gloom sapped my excitement over Osmil’s discovery.

  Sandy nodded. “I guessed you would. That’s why I kept Sayres in there, wouldn’t let him chase out after you shouting schoolyard insults.” His tone told me he didn’t think Sayres was the only one.

  “You thought of Perry, too?”

  “Of course. How else would it get back to Sayres you were accusing him of slandering you to clients? Number one, you haven’t hardly got any clients.”

  “So glad you reminded me. I assume Perry went there Monday to hire him in my place.”

  “He was there on Monday?” Sandy sat up. “I figured he’d been there sometime, but damn! Monday. That’s no coincidence.”

  “No. Obviously, he went straight to Steve’s office after firing me.” Just as I’d gone straight to Kinsley’s.

  “Right across the street from where you almost got—”

  “Right across the street from thousands of other lawyers. We’ve been through this. You’re talking about the heart of the financial district. Not that I wouldn’t love to implicate Sayres in a felony.”

  Sandy laughed. “What do I get if I put him in jail for you? Would you marry me?”

  I froze, catching my breath. I didn’t dare glance at him. Was he joking?

  The tension was immediately unbearable. To break it, I blurted out, “I should plant some evidence. Scare the pompous bastard.”

  When I looked at Sandy, he was typing computer commands, the ghost of a smile still on his face.

  10

  Sandy had learned, by setting freelance investigators to the task, more details of the incidents listed in Kinsley’s memo. He’d also found out when Super Prime was performing the “spraying” Kinsley worried would be sabotaged. And he’d become convinced, after a mere day of research, that another of More’s clients qualified for the designer-crimes list.

  He offered to tell all on the drive down to Santa Cruz—including the reason for the trip. An hour and a half of winding cliff road seemed a long drive at the end of the day. But he swore we’d be on our way home by midnight.

  “And you can sleep in tomorrow,” he coaxed. “No reason you have to be in your office before noon.”

  So I relaxed into the velour of his passenger seat, trying to ignore the dry-clean smell of new car.

  Basically, he told me, Kinsley had been right: In every instance she’d listed, a client had approached Maryanne More with a hard-luck tale the law could only ignore.

  “I didn’t know this till one of the researchers told me, but I guess it’s pretty hard for an employee to get a grievance fixed.” Sandy rounded a cliff curve so fast I clutched the door handle. “The law’s on the employer’s side. For one thing, employees can’t strike without getting replaced, not anywhere anymore, not really. Did you know that?”

  A no-strike clause had been “implied” by the Supreme Court for the duration of every employment contract. Workers could be permanently replaced if they tried to strike or picket, removing the only real leverage they had. “I’m afraid that’s old news, Sandy.”

  “And the government body that’s supposed to hear employee grievances,” Sandy continued, “got packed with pro-employer lawyers during Reagan and Bush.”

  “I know.” Even the skeleton of old labor laws, picked clean by the “right-to-work” forces of the eighties, were rarely enforced by the National Labor Relations Board. Maybe the Democrats would change that. But so far their “pro-business” agenda had been merely pro-management.

  “So here you have these folks, some of them with outrageous grievances—one guy’s supervisor outright stole his idea and fired him so he wouldn’t try to take credit. The Dataphile guy got blamed for something that was corporate policy. It messed up his work record so bad he couldn’t even get a volunteer job in the field. Big-deal stuff, but none of them had a leg to stand on. No place to complain, and no chance of winning even if they did. That’s what Maryanne More told them, and my researchers say she was right.”

  “But somehow, after these people saw More, things worked out so they got what they wanted?”

  “Not if they wanted their jobs back.” Sandy slowed behind a timid out-of-state driver crawling the cliffs of Devil’s Slide. He blinked his lights: speed up. “But if they were looking to make the jerk who screwed them over look bad, then bingo. For instance, the case where the supervisor ripped off the new process, it suddenly went berserk and cost the company almost half a million in missed shipments and lost contracts—which got the supervisor fired.”

  “Serves him right.” The encounter with Steve Sayres was fresh in my mind.

  “That seems to be the whole idea. The theft cases were maybe the slickest. An art gallery—terrible employment record—got a chance to get a truly impressive show in, really hit the big leagues. And what happened? A couple of pieces got stolen. They were returned later, but by then it was pretty clear they didn’t have the best security. Nobody was going to put any Matisses in there.”

  “And you think Maryanne More said to these clients, the law can’t help you but I can.” She looked so orthodox, hardly a Scarlet Pimpernel.

  “Yup.” Sandy passed on the first straight stretch of road, enjoying his powerful engine. I wondered if the trip down to Santa Cruz wasn’t an excuse to put his RX-7 on the road. “That’s definitely what I think. All but one of the clients had money. Their careers were maybe important to them, but they had some cash laid by, too—family money, a court settlement on a personal injury claims, in one case, the guy had a golden parachute.”

  “Do you have any idea what More charges—assuming you’re right?”

  “No. Are you comparison shopping?” The dashboard light seemed to lengthen his dimples. “Remember the last bit of Kinsley’s memo? A company that primes mechanical equipment so it won’t corrode or flake paint? It went and fired almost everyone in its quality-control department. They brought in a new supervisor who hassled them over every damn thing—fired people
for taking an extra five at lunch, for a little cussing, for wearing dangly earrings, you name it. These were people who’d been there five, ten years. Within two weeks, the new super was the only one left on quality control.”

  “Presumably so the company can cut corners? The machine parts they prime will start rusting—”

  “Right after the warranty date, most likely.”

  I expected him to say more. Kinsley had anticipated sabotage there.

  Instead he changed the subject. “The other thing my researchers found, the cherry on the cake: the most recent case More turned down for ‘failure of remedy’? It fits the profile. The client’s got bucks—”

  “How do you know that? Did she put it in the file?”

  “Nope. But he paid for the consultation with a check—that number’s in the file. So I called his bank. And I followed up a bit. He’s got a good bit tucked away.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “He invents arcade and funhouse software. The company he works for put together a new pavilion at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk—independently run by them, not the corporation in charge of the rest of the place. A lot of virtual reality and interactive games, some fancy puppets, too, to hear Ozzy tell. I guess it’s nerd Mecca, in addition to catering to the backwards-baseball-cap crowd. Laura?”

  “I’m listening.” I’d been staring out the passenger window at pounding waves, their white ridges dazzled by a three-quarter moon hanging low and huge. “I was just thinking the ocean’s beautiful here, too.”

  “Too?”

  “I’ve been missing the way-north coast.”

  “Oh.” He was quiet. He’d thought I was crazy to walk away from city life last year, to bury myself in a tiny berg like Hillsdale. But he’d grown up in Louisiana; the craggy, rain-whipped majesty of the Pacific Northwest didn’t speak to him. He liked wetlands and bayou, honky-tonks and heat. “I was saying. I think we figured out why Lovitz—More’s client—went to see her. Turns out everything that went into assembling the pavilion—every last chip, every scrap of plastic, every bit of cloth—comes from some country that’s using forced labor, or close to it.”