Sasha McCandless 03 - Irretrievably Broken (11 page)

“You never thought about it,” Sasha repeated.

She arched a brow and looked at Larry, who shrugged, like he’d heard it all and didn’t consider this to be outside the realm of possibility.

Greg went on, haltingly, “I mean, I guess, if I had thought about it, I might have wondered if she was having me followed, maybe?”

“Was she?” Sasha asked.

“She said no. I thought we were on pretty solid ground, until she found out about the gambling. We did a bike trip through the French countryside last spring. We were getting along fine—no, better than fine. So, I don’t think she had any reason to be suspicious.”  He spread his hands wide and said, “But, I don’t know.”

Naya shook her head but said nothing.

“It’s true. We had been in love once, you know,” Greg insisted. “And, it’s not like we’d ever had a big falling out. It’s just that life, work—her work—got in the way, buried us. But, in the Loire Valley we spent our days riding through rolling hills dotted with heather and sunflowers turning their faces to the sun and our nights drinking wine under the stars in the courtyards of ancient chateaus. There was nothing in the way. Just us. It gave us a chance to uncover what had been there all along. I don’t care if you believe me or not, things were the best they’d been in years,” Greg finished, choking back tears and staring down at the table.

“Let’s get back to that morning in June,” Larry suggested in a neutral voice.

Larry had asked Sasha if he could sit in on the meeting to get a sense of Greg’s personality and demeanor, but he planned to play a behind-the-scenes role. Sasha couldn’t wait to hear what Larry thought of their client: Greg had been agitated and short-tempered ever since he’d arrived ten minutes late for their nine o’clock meeting. But, now he’d finally shown a flash of humanity.

“Okay,” Greg said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “Fine.”

“Try to remember why you chose that particular day to go to the casino.”

Greg rolled his eyes to make sure they understood how put upon he felt and repeated, “Fine.”

He fell silent for a moment, searching his memory—or at least pretending to do so. Then, he said, “My comp was about to expire.”

“Your comp?”

He sighed. “Yes. Around Memorial Day, I guess it was, I got an introductory certificate in the mail, inviting me to try out the table games at The Rivers. There was a coupon I could exchange for fifty dollars in chips, but it expired at the end of June.”

“Hold on,” Naya interrupted. “Aren’t you a recovering gambling addict?”

Anger flashed across Greg’s face. “No. Look, I got in a jam with some guys on sport betting ages ago. Before Ellen and I were even married. It was stupid, and they were ... unsavory people. Ellen helped me out. My going to Gamblers Anonymous was
her
requirement. I wasn’t then—and I’m not now—
addicted
to gambling.”

Naya opened her mouth to respond, but Sasha beat her to it.

“Nonetheless, you had given up gambling completely, correct?”

Greg answered right away. “Yeah. I hadn’t set foot in a casino or placed a bet of any kind in fourteen years. Until that day. And, you know, to be clear, I wasn’t gambling. I was playing poker. It’s a game of
skill
.”

From the way he said it, at once defensive and aggressive, Sasha knew he’d tried that argument on Ellen. She imagined Ellen hadn’t found it any more persuasive than she did.

“Let’s leave that aside for the moment. Do you believe the marketing department of a casino randomly sent a certificate for chips to someone who could be considered a recovering gambler? They’re pretty heavily regulated; I don’t think they can just send out that sort of thing unsolicited.”

Greg reddened. “The brochure had a cover letter that claimed it was sent in response to my inquiry, but I swear, I didn’t sign up for anything. Besides, I was in France most of May, biking seventy-five miles a day. How could I have?  I figured it was a mistake, but, it was fifty dollars. I didn’t see the harm. I’d cash it in, play a little bit of poker, and then head to work.”

Sasha could see in both Larry’s and Naya’s eyes that they thought the same thing she did: Greg Lang was, quite possibly, the perfect patsy.

The phone rang; its electronic beep cut off Greg’s efforts at self-justification.

Naya stepped over to Sasha’s desk and picked it up.

“The Law Offices of Sasha McCandless.”

After a pause, Naya continued, “I’m sorry, Ms. McCandless is in a client meeting. May I take a message?”

Naya started to scribble a note on the pad beside the phone, then she stopped.

“Please hold, and I’ll see if she can be interrupted,” she said, pressing the hold button.

Sasha gave her a quizzical look. She couldn’t stop and take a call in the middle of this.

Naya held out the receiver toward Sasha and said, “It’s the crime beat reporter for the
Post-Gazette
. He got your name from Greg’s former counsel. He wants to know if you have any comment.”

“On what?” Sasha asked.

“On the fact that Clarissa Costopolous was found dead in her car in the P & T garage this morning,” Naya said, her face unreadable.

Sasha blinked and processed the news. Then she said, “Okay, have him hold.” She felt light-headed.

Sasha and Larry huddled together to craft a sound bite for the reporter. After she’d provided the quote and gotten the reporter’s contact information, Sasha turned to Greg, who had been silent since Naya had broken the news of Clarissa’s murder.

“So, I guess this is helpful news for our defense,” she said, ignoring the self-loathing that came with those words.

Greg, his head down, mumbled something at the table.

“I’m sorry,” Sasha said, “I didn’t catch that.”

He raised his head and repeated, “I said, I have to go.”

“Why?”

He cleared his throat and hesitated, then said, “Because Nick Costopolous is asleep in my guest room. I need to break the news to him that his wife is dead.”

Sasha didn’t want to—knew she shouldn’t—but heard herself ask, “Why is Nick at your house?”

Greg looked her straight in the eye and said, “Last night, Clarissa had divorce papers served on him while he was at his club. He tried to call her but she didn’t answer her phone. When he left the club to go home, his key didn’t fit in the lock. Apparently, that sneaky little bitch had gotten the locks changed.”

“So, how’d he end up at your house?” Naya asked.

“We’re friends. I mean, the girls were friends, so we sort of just ended up pals. Me, Nick, Tanner Landry.”

“Nick called you?”

Greg nodded. “Right. He was crying and slurring. He’d been drinking. I told him to call a cab and come over. He didn’t. That big idiot drove his truck, but he came over and passed out on my couch. Around two a.m., I woke him up and set him up in the guest room. When I left this morning, I could hear him snoring in there. Anyway, I have to go. He’s going to lose it when he hears about this.”

Greg pushed back his chair and stood with his feet planted hip-distance apart, as if he expected someone to try to stop him. No one did.

“Call Naya to reschedule, though, Greg. We need to get a cohesive story in place,” Sasha said as he started for the door. She added, “And please give Mr. Costopolous my condolences.”

He nodded and walked out.

As soon as the door banged shut behind him, Sasha turned to Larry and Naya.

“Clarissa’s death could give credence to Prescott & Talbott’s idiotic theory that someone is killing female partners to make the firm look bad. But, if Greg and Nick are buddies, that also could lend itself to a theory that they had some kind of pact or something to kill their wives. Especially since Nick was just served with divorce papers, too,” Sasha said, working through this new development, trying to decide if it was a net positive or negative for her case.

Naya jabbed a finger in Sasha’s direction. “What makes you so sure they
didn’t
have a pact?”

CHAPTER 21

Caroline scraped her teeth across her bottom lip even though she knew she was leaving tooth marks in her lipstick. She was trying to decide how to get Mr. Prescott to stop poking around in the filing cabinets and tell her what he needed. She realized many of the attorneys whispered about her boss’s personal quirks and lack of legal acumen, but she had always enjoyed working for him. He was a boss who understood his place.

Unlike so many of the younger attorneys, he didn’t insist on doing his own word processing, entering his own time entries into the electronic system, or drafting his correspondence on his own. No, he dictated all of his documents—mainly, she thought to show off the fact that
his
assistant knew shorthand.

Equally important, he didn’t burden her with endless personal errands. She selected his wife’s birthday, Christmas, and anniversary gifts and had the jeweler wrap them. That was the extent of it.

Some of the other senior partners were, in her view, far out of bounds in the requests they made of their secretaries. Marco DeAngeles, for instance, not only had his secretary fire his children’s nanny, but required her to interview and select the replacement. And Lettie Conrad had recently told her that Kevin Marcus asked her to log into his personal bank account and take care of paying his mortgage and utility bills each month.

By comparison, Mr. Prescott was an excellent boss. Usually.

But, she had to put a stop to this business of him rifling through the floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets across from her desk. He’d been there ever since he’d returned from the grim scene in the parking garage.

Whatever he was looking for, it was clear he wasn’t going to find it. First, of course, because she did all the filing. And, second, because he had insisted she not label the drawers, explaining that labels detract from the minimalist aesthetic he strove to achieve in his surroundings. So, he was doing nothing more than opening and closing unlabeled drawers at random.

When he had first hurried into the office after seeing Clarissa’s body, she’d asked if she could help him find something. He’d said that the documents he was looking for were “sensitive” and he would handle it personally.

That had stung. Caroline prided herself on her discretion. As the personal assistant to the chair of the firm, she’d seen more sensitive documents than most of Prescott & Talbott’s attorneys combined.

She knew who earned how much, which partner had amassed—and submitted for reimbursement—an enormous hotel bill watching pornographic movies, and which staff members were on performance improvement plans. And she had never breathed so much as a word of it.

In fact, her refusal to gossip had left her a social pariah. Once the other secretaries had realized she intended to maintain Mr. Prescott’s confidences, the lunch invitations and suggestions that she join a group of girls for happy hour had evaporated.

Not that she’d minded. Caroline took her position seriously and had always believed that Mr. Prescott valued her loyalty. Yet, here he was, rooting around in her filing cabinets for some documents that were too “sensitive” for her eyes.

She told herself to give him some leeway; after all, the poor man had lost two attorneys in the space of a week. Two murders. Two creepy hand-delivered envelopes. Caroline shuddered.

He pulled open another drawer, flicked through the folders, and slammed it shut in apparent frustration.

 She saved and closed the memo she’d been typing and walked around to join him in front of the cabinet.

“Mr. Prescott,” she said in an even tone to his back, “if you would just tell me, in general terms, what you are looking for, I could at least direct you to the correct set of drawers.”

He straightened and stood still for a minute, trying to decide, then turned to her and said, “Okay. That would be a help. Where are the personnel files from 1996 through 2001?”

Caroline arched a brow despite herself. Here he was digging around in the locked confidential files in search of personnel records that had been archived off-site years ago. The man had no earthly idea how she ran his office.

“I’ll have to order those files up from off-site storage,” she told him with a gentle smile. “Are you interested in all of the files or just those of certain employees?”

She watched as he calculated the mess and clutter all those boxes would create. A prudent lawyer would have said to order up all the files, but she was not surprised when his love for order won out, and he said, “Let’s begin with all associate attorneys who joined the firm in 1996 and 1997. Tell the vendor to expedite the order, please.”

“Very good.”  She graced him with another smile.

He dropped the keys to the filing cabinet into her open palm and retreated to his inner office, back where he belonged.

CHAPTER 22

Larry had left to meet Bertie and some friends for a late lunch and their standing canasta game. Naya was on her way to The Rivers with Greg’s pictures to see if she could convince the security staff to locate tapes that showed either the photographer or the subject. The casino had discouraged Naya from coming when she’d set up the appointment, but she’d persisted. Without a subpoena and depending, as it did, on Naya’s charm and the goodwill of strangers, they both knew the trip was a long shot. But it was something tangible they could do to move forward.

Sasha sat behind her desk and worked her way through the piles of documents that seemed to multiply overnight. Every morning, she sorted and purged the mound of papers on her desk; she scanned those she wanted to keep, as part of her Sisyphean effort to run a paperless office, and tossed the hard copies along with the pure junk. Despite her paperless goal, each morning, the document mountain seemed, if anything, taller.

She was feeding correspondence into the scanner function of the printer/copier/scanner beside her desk, when she heard footsteps in the hall. She swiveled her chair around to face the door, half-expecting to see Connelly’s face in the doorway.