Glass House (6 page)

The space they saw was too organized
.
Miners weren’t meticulous people in their living spaces. They
existed by themselves as near transients, wanting only a place to
sleep and eat and nothing more. An apartment that was this put
together was one that someone other than the miner laid a hand to,
which meant someone other than Anthony had been in this room
recently. Someone had cleaned it.

“Done,” one of them men said after a nod
from the other.

The lookout turned from the window.

“Nothing?” he asked.

“We’re too late.”

The men didn’t react beyond that. They
collected at the door, listened and then peered through a crack,
and slipped into the hallway and down the stairs.

_______________

Anthony coughed. He felt it buck in his
chest, like a knife had been stabbed there and was starting to come
up through his throat. But the feeling died as the cough
failed.

He did it again, struggling to clear his
lungs. Another convulsion. Still no breath. No air.

He was tied in the bolted-down chair. The
jerk of his body tightened the cords that bound his wrists, slicing
them farther into his skin. Blood dripped from the cuts, falling to
the ground and washing out in the flood of water on the floor.

The third cough brought it up. He shook, his
head snapping forward, his neck straining. The muscles and tendons
in it were taut. The arteries and veins stood out.

A shower of water sprayed from Anthony’s
mouth. It burst from him like a geyser, in an abrupt and ragged
rush.

He gasped behind it. His head fell to his
chest, his chin touching there before sliding to the side. A thin
string of spit, all bubbles and pink water, dangled from the corner
of his mouth. It stretched to his soaked pant leg, like a spider’s
web hanging between tree branches.

“Are you ready to tell me now, Anthony?”

That was Peter Rupert still. From somewhere
distant, like a voice shouted across a wide plain, Anthony could
hear an identification of the man ringing in his ears.

That is Rupert.

He fought to hang onto it. Knowing who was
in the room with him meant he was alive. Dikembé didn’t know much
at that point, but he knew he wanted to stay alive.

It was Rupert, and Rupert was the mine
supervisor for Laurentian. And the other man in the room, the other
voice he’d heard…?

Anthony couldn’t place that one. He had no
idea who the man with the hose was. On a different day, one that
seemed could only exist in another life, he very much would have
liked to know who that other man was, so he could track him down
and slowly cut him to pieces. But he didn’t know now, in this
life.

“Anthony?”

Rupert.

“Boss?” The spit hung from Anthony’s mouth a
moment, narrowed, broke.

“Are you ready to tell me?”

Anthony started to cry. He didn’t realize
that at all. He couldn’t feel the tears on his already wet face,
and he couldn’t hear the first hitches that started in his aching
chest before breaking out as sobs in the echoing room. He didn’t
taste the drainage from his nose, even as its saltiness came to his
lips and mouth.

He cried for a full minute before he managed
to control himself enough to speak.

“Got no….”

The words were weak, and he choked on them.
He coughed again. Another spray of fluid. “Got no … no diamonds,
boss,” he managed.

It wasn’t clear if he understood anything he
was saying at that point. He knew Rupert was there, all right. He
recognized the man’s voice. He knew who that was.

It was just everything else that was
lost.

Rupert waited another minute after the
answer. He paced around Anthony, walking a steady radius around the
chair in the center of the room.

The super finished the cigarette in his
hand, blowing the last of its smoke into the air and dropping the
butt of the Rothman to the floor. It hissed in the water and
died.

“Soak him out,” he said.

The other man moved to Anthony. He lifted
Dikembé’s head, pulling it by the hair, and he forced the hose he
held into the man’s mouth.

Dikembé didn’t respond. Didn’t jerk away
like he had at the start. Didn’t try to spit it out or bite
down.

The man with the hose twisted a valve at its
end, and the water came on. It drove Anthony back in the chair, the
power of it pushing the water until it jetted out from his mouth
and ran from his nose and leaked from his ears.

They were drowning him. In a chair that was
bolted into the middle of a barren room, in a desert corner of the
country that was ten miles from any body of water deep enough to
kill, the two men were drowning Anthony Dikembé.

Rupert pulled the good and solid pink from
his pocket again. He rolled it in his palm, alternating his glances
between the rough but beautiful stone and the man who was dying in
front of him.

Blood began to drain from Anthony’s mouth.
It wasn’t like what seeped from the gashes that the cords had cut
into his wrists. It wasn’t like the spider-web spit, with its hint
of cotton candy pink color.

It was somewhere in between, a red tint that
had been deep but now was washed pale by the water.

Rupert was thinking of that color as he eyed
the pink. He lifted it toward the room’s weak light and felt his
heart pick up a bit.

Even here,
he thought.
That color
is fantastic even here
. He knew it would be ear-marked for some
particularly valuable, and lucky, customer.

Rupert returned the pink to his pocket. He
passed the man with the hose, and he passed the man who was dying
in the chair. He didn’t look back.

Two
Sides

The file in the matter of
Landry v.
Waldoch & DMW Holdings
arrived two days after Megan Davis’s
meeting with Jeremy Waldoch. Megan was just starting to worry about
what she’d gotten herself into when the messenger wheeled it
in.

Then she started worrying about what she’d
gotten herself into anyway.

She’d reserved a conference room. It was a
small one, and the file filled it.

Four binders of pleadings were on the table
in the center, all of them fat, their sides bulging. Three more
equal-sized binders of correspondence were beside those, and twelve
boxes of discovery were set against the wall, nine of them labeled
“Documents.” “Research” was scrawled on a tenth box in the heavy
black lines of permanent marker.

Megan opened the first of the document
boxes. The pages were stacked, stapled, and rubber-banded. The
documents were a fresh copy that was so neatly put together it
couldn’t have been looked at. It probably was prepared by Waldoch’s
previous counsel, solely to provide to Megan. They’d have kept
their own set, for no other reason than making sure they could
prove all the work they’d done if need be.

She read the production number that was
stamped on the first page of the set of documents on top, then
emptied the box and found the number for the last page of the set
at the bottom. The box included pages 6023 through 8514. Each of
the others would contain about the same amount, roughly 2500
sheets. For nine boxes, that was almost 23,000 pages of material,
most of it likely from DMW and Jeremy Waldoch.

Another box contained transcripts of
depositions, the formal reporting of witness testimony taken during
a civil action’s discovery process. Megan counted five depositions
in all, with four of those for people she didn’t yet know by name.
She pulled the fifth, the deposition of Plaintiff Kathleen Landry,
and settled herself in a chair at the table.

Megan looked through the first few pages,
then turned more hurriedly through the rest. The deposition had
gone most of a day, and the transcript was long, but it seemed
straightforward enough.

Allegations and facts in sexual harassment
cases can be startling and distinct, but they follow a general
pattern. They’re typically either inappropriate touches or
offensive comments or propositions of various kinds, or they’re
sexual relationships that went south and pissed any number of
people off in the process – whoever was involved, co-workers,
spouses, you name it.

This one didn’t seem much different.

Skimming over the questions and answers and
jumping back and forth through the transcript, Megan saw that
Landry’s allegations had a degree of specificity to them that
carried some seeming heft – places she’d supposedly been with
Waldoch, things he’d purportedly said – but they were only one
side of a story, and nothing too remarkable or unusual showed in
them.

On a quick read, she counted two times when
Kathleen Landry said she’d traveled with Waldoch on trips that
included sex. Landry had produced the airfare and hotel receipts to
pin down the dates, and Megan flipped to the exhibits to see them.
Landry’s name was the only one on the reservation forms, and she’d
signed the credit card invoices herself. Waldoch’s name and
signature didn’t show up. Megan made a mental note of that.

There were at least three occasions when the
plaintiff said she’d had sex with Waldoch in the office. Landry
identified the dates only by a guessed-at week, claiming they were
after hours, twice in his office and once in a company vice
president’s.

The last of those was a particular focus. Of
all the assertions, it was the most salacious, with Landry
testifying that Waldoch had especially liked having sex on the desk
of a colleague he hated. She reported the conversations she’d had
with him that day at length, the events leading up to their
undressing in the other man’s office after everyone else was gone,
and the sex, oral and otherwise, they’d had on the desk.

Besides those things, Megan caught
references to a number of more minor points. Some pats and touches,
pinches and kisses. A few hallway comments. Some dinners at
expensive restaurants, once in town and a number of times in Kansas
City. A vaguely described tryst in a car on the way to the airport.
A lot of it was specific, and little of it was documented.

Again, it was nothing too extraordinary in
cases like this.

She didn’t see anything about notes or
flowers. There was no testimony about candy or cards. No e-mails
professing anything resembling either love or lust. Nothing, in
short, in writing.

By the look of it, Natalie Quinlan,
Waldoch’s original attorney, had done fine. Megan hadn’t
scrutinized the questions and testimony, but Quinlan’s examination
hit most of the bases, and Kathleen Landry’s recitation of the
facts didn’t appear to include any real bombshells.

Megan closed the transcript and slid it to
the side. She pulled the phone over and read Quinlan’s phone number
from the transcript’s cover sheet. She dialed and waited.

In her career, Megan had taken over only one
case that was previously handled by another attorney. The transfer
didn’t go well. The prior counsel balked at sending the file to
her, and Megan went to court to get an order compelling it. In the
end, the matter was resolved without much more, but it left a bad
taste.

Megan had met Natalie before, though. She
didn’t expect anything like that here.

Quinlan answered on the third ring. “World
record time,” she said when Megan identified herself. “You couldn’t
have had the file for more than an hour.”

“Thanks for sending it.”

“I wish I could’ve gotten it to you sooner,
given the time crunch, but I wanted Jeremy’s approvals and written
instructions in place. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

“Not a problem,” Megan said.

“You know, I didn’t know you were back at
work.”

“A couple months.”

“So I suppose I shouldn’t have been
surprised when Waldoch asked for the file transfer. I knew he was
happy with your work before. He certainly mentioned it enough. And
with you being back….”

Quinlan was terse and to the point. She
didn’t sound angry, and she didn’t sound thrilled. Her tone was
unemotional and calm, as though she had expected the transfer after
all and didn’t really mind that it happened.

“I wanted to talk with you about –”
Megan began. Quinlan cut her off.

“He’s an ass, Megan,” she said. “You know
that. Right?”

“I’ve dealt with Jeremy before.”

“Which means you understand. It doesn’t have
anything to do with what’s being said in this case, but he’s an
ass. Top to bottom. Side to side.”

“That’s not a crime, and it’s not grounds
for a multimillion dollar claim or verdict.”

“It doesn’t help, either.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Megan agreed. “Do you
think he did what Landry says?”

“Truth?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve no idea.”

“The settlement demand suggests at least
someone thinks he did, and that someone is Paul McCallum,” Megan
said. McCallum was Landry’s counsel. “You and I both know Paul.
We’ve seen him inflate cases before, but we also both know he
doesn’t play too loose. He knows good cases when he sees them, and
a three million dollar demand makes me guess Paul thinks he’s got a
good one here.”

“It’s high,” Quinlan said in response. “Too
high certainly, but I agree with the point – he obviously
believes there’s something there.”

“So what’s that something?”

“I wish I knew. I wanted Jeremy to settle
this, and I wish I could tell you exactly what it was that made me
push him to do it. But I can’t. I can’t say it any better than
telling you that the case just felt slippery, like I was building a
house on sand.”

Megan didn’t know the case well enough yet,
but she did know Waldoch and the difficulty of dealing with him.
Natalie may have been right, there might be something there, and
the case might be slippery like she said. Or it could also be that
dealing with Jeremy Waldoch always meant you were paddling a little
more than usual, so you constantly felt you were waiting for
trouble even when it didn’t exist.