Authors: Gini Hartzmark
I stepped up and gave him a quick hug. “Don’t worry,” I said, suddenly feeling more like a friend than a lawyer. “This is all going to turn out all right in the end.”
The look he shot me over his shoulder on his way out the door said, I sure as hell hope you’re right.
As soon as the door banged behind him, I went upstairs in search of Chrissy. I found her, as Jeff had indicated, in her bathroom putting on her makeup. The room was roughly the same size as my office, only prettier, with hand-painted porcelain sinks and flattering rose-tinted tile. The vanity was littered with dozens of jars, tubes, compacts, and brushes, including several implements that I had never seen before. I pulled out one of the two pouf stools tucked beneath the counter and took a seat.
“Trouble at the office?” she asked, carefully patting moisturizer around her eyes with her ring finger in the way she’d tried to teach me when we were both in high school—before she gave up trying to make me over.
“Oh, nothing that couldn’t be solved with a .45 and a shovel.”
“That bad?”
“That bad.”
“As bad as what’s happening to us?”
I shook my head. “In this case the clients are bad people and they’re used to trouble. No matter what happens they’ll just disappear under a rock for a while and then ooze back out again after it all sorts itself out.”
“Whereas Jeff and I are about to be crushed into the ground and may never recover,” observed Chrissy, setting down her brush and turning to look at me.
“I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that you aren’t looking a pile of trouble in the face,” I said. “But as big as it is, it’s nothing that can’t be handled. And I promise, I’ll be right there next to you every step of the way.”
“It’s all so surreal,” complained Chrissy. “I hold the baby, I look at the house-—everything seems exactly the same as it did on Monday morning before any of this happened, only now it seems like it’s so fragile that it’s made of smoke. One big gust and it will all blow away....”
“The baby isn’t going to blow away. Jeff isn’t going to blow away—”
“No. They’re just going to come and take him away in handcuffs,” observed Chrissy bitterly. “And all because they think that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on the glorious Milwaukee Monarchs. And you know what the hysterical part of all of this is? While the cops are busy thinking that Jeff killed his father in order to get rich, we don’t even have the money to pay for his funeral. That’s why Jeff left early. He wanted to be there to talk to Mr. Massy in case our check has already bounced.”
“It won’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had Cheryl make arrangements with your bank. Whatever checks you write will be automatically covered.”
“We can’t take your money, Kate,” protested Chrissy.
“You and I have known each other much too long to even be having this conversation,” I pointed out brusquely. “So just forget about it. We’ll settle up once we’ve got this whole thing straightened out.”
“You mean once we’ve moved the team to L.A.”
“Is that what you and Jeff have decided you want to do?”
“We haven’t decided anything. With everything else that’s going on we haven’t even had a chance to talk about it. On the one hand I know that Jeff doesn’t want to be remembered as the guy who took the Monarchs away from Milwaukee.”
“And on the other hand?”
“On the other hand I think he’d rather die than see Gus Wallenberg sitting in the owner’s box.”
By the time that Chrissy and I arrived at the funeral home, the line of mourners was so long that it wrapped all the way around the block. They were friends and acquaintances, funeral buffs and politicians, but mostly they were fans—regular folk who’d come to stand in the cold to wait their turn to pay their last respects and sign the visitors’ book as a token of their appreciation of the man who’d brought them thirty years of Monarchs football. Even the Monarchs’ court was there, the dozen or so fans who dressed up for every game. They stood near the head of the line, somber in their medieval garb. Beau, ever the showman, would have loved it.
Mr. Massy met us at the door and took Chrissy by the hand, drawing her into the building. He murmured a mixture of condolences and instructions as he led her to her place beside Jeff at the foot of the coffin. Beau, the man who could not have afforded a pauper’s pine box, lay in a handsome bronze coffin lined with satin. Dressed in the fine blue suit that Chrissy had selected from his closet, he looked very much as he had in life—cantankerous, demanding, and formidable.
I cast my eyes around the room and eventually found what I was looking for—the two police detectives who’d come to the house to question Jeff, loitering near the service door, conferring quietly. Suddenly the whole thing seemed ridiculous and far-fetched and I was tempted to just walk up and tell them so.
Coach Bennato appeared from nowhere and took up his place beside me, both of us watching the pair of detectives from the distance.
“I see that the police are here,” he announced conspiratorially and without preamble. “They were out at practice this morning.”
“Really, what were they doing?”
“Asking questions.Snooping around.”
“Who did they talk to?”
“Me, the security guard who found Beau, a lot of the front office people. I also heard they went down and talked to Jack McWhorter and some of the concession people to see if they saw anything.”
“I’m sure it’s all just routine,” I replied.
“When my father-in-law dropped dead of a heart attack at the barber shop last year, the cops didn’t come around asking questions.”
“He didn’t own a football team,” I pointed out.
“That’s true. He also really died of a heart attack.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come on. You don’t think that the cops would waste the whole morning trying to pin down Jeff’s movements if all they were worried about is what time Beau died of a heart attack, do you?”
“I’m sure they asked other people where they were, too,” I said, not feeling happy at all about the direction this conversation was headed.
“Of course, they did,” he answered. “But you can be sure they didn’t get anything out of me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, suddenly finding myself looking at the face that had been caricatured on a thousand sports pages: the eyebrows knitted to- gether into a single line, the jutting chin, the flinty eyes narrowed to a slit, giving nothing away.
“I don’t know what you think has been going on with this team, but if you think that Beau was the only person who had something to hide, you’re sorely mistaken.”
The Pfister Hotel is a Milwaukee landmark, a lovingly restored shrine to the Victorian era that sits in the shadow of Monarchs Stadium. I pulled up to the curb, ignored the look of barely concealed disdain the doorman gave my Volvo, and consulted the slip of paper on which I’d written the room number I’d scribbled off my voice mail.
It was the break between afternoon and evening visitation, and I’d left Chrissy and Jeff in the hands of some friends who’d swooped them up and offered to feed them dinner. Lack of courtesy being the partner’s prerogative, I didn’t bother to call up from the lobby, but instead just made my way to the gilded elevator, took it to the fourth floor, and knocked on the door. I knew that Sherman Whitehead would not be taking a shower or a quick nap or indulging in the illicit pleasures of pay-per-view. What I expected was to find him pacing the floor with a copy of the EEOC complaint in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. That’s why I was so surprised to see Stuart Eisenstadt open the door.
“Hello, Kate,” he said. “Come on in.”
“Where’s Sherman?” I asked, crossing the threshold into the living room of a large suite furnished in hotel Chippendale. The client might be hurting for cash, but that didn’t mean that Stuart was cutting comers.
“I thought I’d bring the complaint up myself. That way you and I could just hash things out ourselves.”
“Where’s the complaint?” I asked, taking off my coat, eager to get this over with and get back to the funeral home.
“Over there on the table.”
I sat down and made myself comfortable. Then I read everything through twice, determined to not let Stuart’s presence make me feel under the gun.
“So what do you think?” he asked when I finally looked up. “Is that a baseless suit or what?”
“There are a lot of similarities to the Hooters suit,” I pointed out. “Some of the language is nearly identical.” Hooters was a privately owned chain of restaurants whose main draw was amply endowed waitresses in skimpy outfits. Got up in short shorts and tight-fitting tops, the female food servers earned all of $2.13 an hour plus tips dispensing food, drinks, and jiggle at over two hundred restaurants around the country. The company had recently settled a class action suit that had been brought against them by seven Chicago men who’d claimed sexual discrimination when the chain had refused to hire them as waiters.
“I thought that thing was settled,” protested Eisenstadt, for whom the facts had never been much of a strong suit.
“Yes. For almost $4 million, which was peanuts compared to what the government tried to get them for, which as I recall was damages plus setting up a $22 million fund to assist ‘dissuaded’ male job applicants. In the end I’m sure the suit cost the company something like $6 million. Besides, you’re forgetting, Tit-Elations isn’t as classy as Hooters. At Hooters the waitresses not only wear clothes, but they actually serve food.”
“Let’s not start splitting hairs-—”
“If Avco’s looking at a potential $6 million settlement, then you and I both know there’s no question that this suit will have a material adverse impact on the company’s financial performance. That, I remind you, is the issue at hand. Not whether tank tops and pasties are similar articles of clothing.”
“And I’m telling you that this kind of frivolous suit is already covered by the routine-litigation-incidental-to-the-conduct-of-business clause in the registration document.”
“It’s really a question of where you draw the line between what is material and what is incidental. That’s a lot of what-ifs. I just wonder whether in your zeal to deliver what you’ve promised to the client, you’re losing sight of your responsibilities in this.”
“Our responsibility at this point is to get this deal closed,” snapped Stuart.
“By making sure that the letter of the law is satisfied,” I shot back. “That’s what I have to sign my name to, and I’m telling you right now that I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to risk exposing this firm to shareholder lawsuits down the road based on our failure to make necessary disclosure. Frankly, I don’t care enough about whether the world has more topless bars to take the risk.”
“I knew it,” seethed Eisenstadt. “This has nothing to do with the law. This is about the fact that you’re so uptight about a little skin that you can’t see straight. If this were some other kind of company, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation!”
“If this was a different kind of company, I wouldn’t be worried about how Tillman will look on
Hard Copy,”
I pointed out. “You’re the one who took us into the gutter in the first place. Don’t insult my intelligence by trying to convince me that we’re on some mountaintop.”
“I always knew you were a prude,” said Eisenstadt. “Right or wrong, that still doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to call the client right now and tell them that we need to call the SEC and edit the language in the legal proceedings section before I’ll sign off on it.”
“I’m going to bring this up with Tillman and the management committee,” huffed Eisenstadt.
“Be my guest,” I said. “But if you think that I’m a prude, wait until you talk to them.”
CHAPTER 13
I’m usually not one of those lawyers who let their clients’ problems keep them up at night—those are the guys who make their psychiatrists rich instead of making partner— but that night in Chrissy’s guest room I could not sleep. While there is something about a late-night conference call with your client that turns into a screaming match that hardly seems designed to facilitate slumber, it wasn’t Avco that was keeping me awake. It was Beau Rendell’s murder.
As I tossed and turned in Chrissy’s guest room I struggled to put what had happened into some kind of focus, but any sort of rational perspective stubbornly eluded me. I felt as though no matter how hard I tried, I was always either too close to things or too far away to see them clearly. The problem was that when it came to Chrissy and Jeff, I was completely incapable of being objective.
It wasn’t just that I had a hard time believing that my friends were involved in anything as sordid as murder, but that I felt torn between the two roles that I was being called upon to play. I had the nagging sensation of always being forced to operate outside of my element—standing with Chrissy at the funeral home when I should have been at my desk figuring out a way to keep the team solvent and rushing off to meetings when I should have been at her side.
I must have finally dozed off because when I woke up, Chrissy was sitting beside me on the bed, shaking me and calling my name. I struggled to sit up, feeling disoriented and surprised to find that it was still dark.
“What is it?” I mumbled, rapidly clawing my way from sleep to panic. “What’s happened? Is it the police? Have they come for Jeff?”
“No,” whispered Chrissy, her voice sounding shocked and thin, “but you have to see today’s paper.”
I sat up and scrabbled clumsily at the nightstand, fumbling until I was finally able to switch on the light. Chrissy was dressed in a heavy flannel bathrobe. She smelled of winter and outdoors, and the newspaper that she handed me was still stiff and cold from lying out on the driveway. I was expecting to see a picture of the Reverend Marpleson beside an article accusing Avco of participating in the white slave trade. Instead I was assaulted by a two-inch headline, the size usually reserved for mass murderers and declarations of war:
MONARCHS MOVE IN WORKS,
it screamed.