No Accident (13 page)

Alex had trouble getting as excited about Steele’s latest case
—it sounded like a case of ordinary greed. Alex’s own case was much more interesting—Alex’s theory, at least, included greed
and
murder. In fact . . .

Alex picked up the telephone and looked up a number. The man who answered said, “Department of Justice, United States Attorney’s Office.”

“Hello,” Alex said. “I’d like to speak with Grant Steele.”

The air outside was in the high fifties, but Petra P’s skirt stopped six inches above her knees. She inched one leg out the door of her small, well-kept house, and cautiously looked about.

Then she opened the door and with a catwalk sway stepped down the walk, her high-heeled shoes marking a confident beat. When she reached the morning paper, she folded smoothly at the waist to retrieve it.

The photographers were waiting, the same two as yesterday. They emerged from behind a car, tossed down their cigarettes and raised their cameras. Petra feigned surprise and turned away.

“Petra, baby, what does the ‘P’ stand for?” one of them said.

“The P stands on principle,” she said in Russian-accented English. She tilted her head in a pose and smiled, displaying two rows of small, straight teeth. Her straight black hair flipped under her chin with the motion of her head, and her cobalt eyes flashed in the morning sun.

The cameras clicked like insects in heat.

A familiar rattle joined the cacophony, and within seconds Petra was showered from all angles with water from the lawn sprinklers. She screamed and reflexively put her hands to her hair. She twisted from side to side looking for safe passage back to the door, but in vain. Water spilled in streams from her dark, flattened tresses.

A young boy of four or five dashed out of the house. He jumped over the sprinklers and waved his arms with delight as the spray soaked his clothes.

“Dmitri! Nyet!” Petra said. She chased the child, who gleefully led her in a wide loop through the grass before disappearing back inside.

The cameras kept clicking.

*
* *

Inside, Luke Hubbard crouched on a linoleum floor and shut the door to the bathroom to block out the noise of Petra yelling at Dmitri and Dmitri yelling at God knows what.

“How much do you want?” he said. Even though alone, he cupped his hand over his mouth as he spoke into the phone.

“Half a mil,” said the voice on the other end, a man’s voice, not particularly deep. Luke heard muffled but fervent words in the background. “No, one million,” the voice said clearly.

Luke had no idea who he was talking to. Whoever had put together the amateurish blackmail letter had been sophisticated enough not to leave fingerprints on it.

“That’s a lot of money,” Luke said.

“Not for you, it’s not. We seen you in the paper. You’re rich.”

Luke shrugged, though no one was there to see him do so. “It’s not like I have that kind of cash in my wallet. I’ll have to sell assets, move things around. It’ll raise questions.”

There was another muffled off-line colloquy.

“Just tell them you wanted to buy that pretty girlfriend of yours a new necklace,” the voice said finally.

“It’s especially a lot of money when I don’t even know what it is you’re offering.” Luke spoke cryptically on purpose. If reporters could hide behind cars and bushes, there was no reason they couldn’t pretend to be blackmailers and bluff him into revealing details of his personal life.

“Look, Mr. CEO, you bring the money, you see the proof. That’s the deal. You don’t like it, there’s plenty of newspapers that’ll be interested in what I got.”

Luke looked up at a bird preening itself outside the bathroom window. Somewhere in the house, little Dmitri had started to cry.

“Hey, you still there?”

“I’m here,” Luke said.

“One million. Today.”

“Not possible. A hundred grand is all I can get today.”

Luke waited for a reply. His blackmailers seemed to do everything by committee. It was as bad as trying to get a decision out of his board of directors. Finally the answer came back in the affirmative.

“Fine,” the voice said. “We’ll call again with the location. Come alone. You bring the cops, we go to the press.”

“Don’t worry,” Luke said. “There won’t be any cops.”

Luke hung up the phone and left the bathroom. Petra’s little house was quieter now, and when he entered the living room, he saw why. Crash had arrived to drive Luke to work, and now he was roughhousing with Dmitri, wrestling with him and tossing him in the air. Dmitri was giggling a little, but no longer screaming. Petra stood in front of the two of them, wearing a towel around her wet hair and a bathrobe that revealed as much of her thighs as her skirt had.

“Morning, Crash,” Luke said.

Crash put Dmitri down and turned toward his boss, studiously ignoring Petra’s damp skin inches in front of him. “Sir?”

Luke looked over at Petra. “What do you think, P? We should ask Crash to moonlight as a ‘manny.’ Save a little money on daycare.”

Petra pulled her bathrobe more tightly around her body and smirked at Crash. “The sensitive men are so sexy,” she said. “Maybe Crash could find a girlfriend and not be so lonely.”

Luke gave Crash a playful wink. “Let’s go, Crash. We’ve got business to discuss.”

Outside, the photographers were gone. Luke leaned in toward Crash and spoke in a voice just above a whisper.

“I just spoke with the blackmailers. They want money today. I’d like you to take it to them.”

* * *

In a conference room at the offices of Boswell & Baker, the two spouses and their lawyers started gathering at eight in the morning in business attire and varying states of wakefulness. They began early on the basis of the amicably agreed fiction that they would finish earlier that way.

Brad Pitcher chatted with Alan Matthews, his nemesis in these negotiations, about baseball and other banalities. Even Sheila was in a good mood this morning. Brad felt better than he expected to, given a nervous fit of vomiting around midnight. It had been a week since the disastrous discovery hearing and Brad’s even more disastrous improvised press conference on the courthouse steps. The stakes for this meeting couldn’t be higher for his client—and for him. But after plotting out the possible course of negotiations in a lengthy outline, after weeks of commutes spent visualizing his arguments and responses, this morning he felt the same calm confidence that he felt arguing before judges in the criminal courts. This was his house today, Matthews just didn’t know it yet.

The bonhomie ended at twenty past the hour when Luke Hubbard arrived. He glided in, his head down as he tapped out an email on his smartphone. With a word to no one, he took a center seat on one side of an oblong conference table made of dark wood. After finishing his email, he looked up at Matthews impatiently.

Matthews gestured toward the table and smiled at the others. “Shall we?”

Luke’s side of the table was more crowded than Sheila’s. On Sheila’s side, it was just her and Brad. They knew it would be that way
—Brad didn’t have a staff to help him like Alan Matthews did. On Luke’s side, Luke and his lawyers took every spot. Arrayed beside Matthews were four more suit-clad lawyers, who appeared to be spaced by intervals of about five years of age: a junior partner, a senior associate, a mid-level associate and a junior associate—the last one a sleepy-looking young woman who tensely held a pen over a yellow note pad.

Something clicked in Brad’s brain and he finally recognized the lawyer sitting to his far right. He was in Brad’s class at Harvard Law. He had been an arrogant prick back then, a skinny little mole who talked to the professors as if his seat on the Law Review made him a peer of theirs. Brad recalled the disdainful way this classmate rejected Brad’s offer to form a study group for their torts class. The haughty, cock-eyed expression on his face now was the same as back then, but Brad was sure that it was the names Boswell & Baker on his business card, rather than the Law Review, that now fueled his hauteur. It would always be something.

The mole looked back at Brad, unmoving and unsmiling. Clearly, the mole didn’t recognize Brad. Brad noticed with satisfaction that the years had brought the mole’s hairline and waistline into convergence with Brad’s. Brad gave him a wide, thin-lipped smile and held it until he looked away.

A paralegal, an ungainly kid who looked fresh out of college, bustled in with a box full of files. He froze at the foot of the table with an expression of perplexed concern and stared hard at the empty chairs on Sheila and Brad’s side as if trying levitate a chair over to Luke’s side of the table by telekinesis.

“Looks like we have a few extra on that side, Robert,” Matthews said. He shot Brad a malign grin.

Brad stood and pulled a chair out for the paralegal, which caused a renewed look of confusion on the boy’s face. “I use what your firm would call ‘thin staffing,’ Alan,” Brad said. “Your client will appreciate the difference when he pays Mrs. Hubbard’s legal expenses.”

All day, Matthews was the only lawyer from Luke’s side who spoke, and Brad never figured out what the other lawyers were doing there.

The purpose of the paralegal became clear early on. He pulled files out of the box and replaced them, sorted papers and flipped through them in what seemed like a purposeless, repetitive chore. But every time Brad spoke, the paper flipping got much louder. Brad was sure that Matthews had instructed the paralegal to do that. Brad couldn’t help admiring his opponent’s diabolical attention to detail.

As the hours passed, the color of the sky outside the conference room windows deepened into the saturated blue of midday and then gradually faded again, until at last hints of brown and yellow near the horizon announced the start of the sun’s slow retreat to the sea. Inside, time stood still, despite a messy accumulation of discarded scratch paper and empty coffee cups that made a misleading picture of progress.

With no children to divvy up, Sheila and Luke’s disputes only related to how to split their property. The fact that the pot held more than enough for each of them only made the process more difficult. Which was the better asset, the Malibu house valued at ten million dollars or the one in Aspen worth nine million? How would they split the tax benefit from their charitable contributions? Should Sheila take her alimony over time or take a discounted sum up front?

That last question was the one that Brad had been trying to get the other side to focus on, but they stubbornly denied that Sheila would even get alimony.

“Your client has a degree and high-level executive experience. She could easily support herself
—in fact, she could walk in as head of H.R. pretty much anywhere,” Matthews said.

Brad’s hands, resting on the table top, twitched in frustration. “Alan, you give new meaning to the word ‘chutzpah.’ The only reason Mrs. Hubbard doesn’t have a job now is because your client fired her. He needs to correct his wrong.”

Sheila huffed and then said under her breath, “Like I’d crawl back and work for him now.” Brad laid a steady hand on her arm without breaking his stare at Matthews.

“Is she actively looking for a new job?” Alan said. He wore the same wry smile that he had when telling stories that morning before the meeting.

Brad and Sheila didn’t have to answer because Luke looked up from his email to interject with a tardy response to an earlier part of the conversation.

“Wasn’t me,” he said. “Canning Sheila was approved by the board.”

“Oh, and I’m sure the idea just came to them out of the blue,” Sheila said. The two spouses shared a long, venomous look at each other. Brad smiled sympathetically at Sheila and then turned to Matthews.

“As good a time as any, I suppose
—getting late,” Brad said. Then he produced a folded sheaf of papers from inside his suit jacket and dropped them onto the table in front of Luke. “Mr. Hubbard, you’re being served on behalf of Liberty Industries in a claim of sexual harassment and wrongful termination. Alan, I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise.” Matthews took the complaint off the table and looked through it.

Brad had been waiting for just the right time to play this card. Boswell & Baker was a corporate law firm
—Liberty’s law firm—and Liberty and Luke had conflicting interests regarding Sheila’s termination. Brad was curious to see whether he could put some daylight between Matthews’ two favorite clients—Liberty and Luke. If so, that would make it awkward for Boswell & Baker to keep representing both of them. Would Luke become more eager for a quick settlement? Would Alan?

“You’ll understand if we don’t take your client’s word on the reasons for Mrs. Hubbard’s dismissal,” Brad said to Matthews. Then he added, as if an afterthought, “I mean, your client in the divorc
e case . . . not your client in the wrongful termination case, which is, of course, the company.”

Matthews frowned. Brad knew he understood.

“That’s why we’ll be deposing all the members of Liberty’s board of directors,” Brad said. “As the group with ultimate legal responsibility for running the company, we need to know whether Mrs. Hubbard was fired in retaliation for reporting to Mr. Hubbard various . . . irregularities in the expense reimbursements by some of Mr. Hubbard’s chief lieutenants. Anyway, I assume Mr. Hubbard
told
the board about those irregularities . . .”

Luke looked at Brad, then at Matthews. “Alan, we talked about this,” Luke said. Matthews interrupted him simply by lifting his hand off the table. Matthews’ wry smile was gone now.

Brad calmly rose, biting his tongue to suppress a grin. He brought Sheila up with him. He smiled condescendingly at Matthews. “Clearly, Mr. Hubbard has a lot of fight in him, so I doubt we’ll be getting our quick settlement—in either the divorce case or the termination case. I’ll call one of your associates to set up the depositions of your board members.”