Corrupt Practices (9 page)

“You haven’t been meeting with this Tyler person, have you? That would be dangerous.”

“It’s not dangerous.” She thinks for a moment, and then picks up Rich’s autopsy report. “Look. You wanted my help with this Baxter thing, right? In return, I’m just asking that you talk to her before you make a decision.”

“Talk to who?”

“What do you mean, who? Tyler, of course. If you’d—”

“You said
her
. Who’s
her
?”

“
Her
. The client.” She sits back in her chair. “Tyler Daniels is a woman, Professor. I thought you knew.”

I flip through the indictment again. There’s no reference to the defendant’s gender. That Tyler is a woman shouldn’t lessen my disgust and trepidation over this case one jot. But it does. “OK, Ms. Diamond. I’ll meet with her.” My voice is disembodied, as if I’m listening to someone else talk on a cheap speakerphone.

“I’ll set up a phone call.”

“No. It has to be in person. That’s something I should’ve told the class. Always meet with your client in person before you get in too deep, especially in a dicey case like this. You can’t get to know a person over the phone, much less e-mail.”

“But I don’t know if she’ll meet in person. She’s—”

“It’s not open to debate.” I check my calendar. Other than teaching once a week, I have nothing to do. So I try to accommodate her job and school schedule by picking a weekend. “How about Saturday, November nineteenth?”

“I can’t do a Saturday. I observe Shabbat.”

“You’re—?”

“Yeah, I’m Jewish. And don’t say I don’t look it.”

“People don’t really say that nowadays.”

“Oh, they absolutely do. I’ll see if Tyler can meet with us on Sunday the twentieth, if that’s OK with you.”

“The twentieth will be fine.”

At a little before six o’clock, my cell phone rings.

“Is this Parker Stern?”

“Yeah, this is Parker.”

“Mr. Stern, you don’t know me. My name’s Raymond Baxter. Richard Baxter’s father. I know you were Richie’s attorney before he died. I was wondering if you and I could meet.” His voice squeaks in that way of decrepit old men. His speech is labored, a half-breath behind.

After so many weeks, I didn’t expect to hear from anyone in Rich’s family. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“Kind of you to say, sir.” A forced, perfunctory reply—nothing he wants to linger on.

“Can you tell me what you’d like to meet about?”

“I’d rather we do it in person.”

“Of course. I’m free every day except Thursday afternoons, when I teach.”

He wheezes a couple of times. “Actually, how about tonight? The Lansing Bar and Grill on Third Street? Eight o’clock?”

“I’ll be there.”

I spend the next couple of hours trying to frame a gentle way of describing Rich Baxter’s last days to his father, to spin a story that will give a grieving parent comfort. I attack it from all angles, but can’t come up with anything to blunt the horror surrounding Rich’s death. We attorneys so often forget that there really aren’t two sides to every story, that some things just can’t be lawyered away.

When I walk out of the administration building, it’s pouring. This is the first rain we’ve had in eight months, and it’s already early November. Even in a drought year, it’s late for the season’s first storm. The air smells like fresh-cut grass and pine resin and wet asphalt. The temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees, into the low-fifties. I don’t have a jacket. I linger under an awning for a moment, steel my courage, cover my head with the book I’ve been reading, and sprint across the plaza to the parking lot. By the time I reach cover, I’m drenched and shivering. I get into my Lexus—a status symbol from a different time of my life—start the engine, and turn up the heat. I can’t get warm.

I drive out of the parking lot and merge into the inevitable traffic jam. I make a right onto Wilshire Boulevard. Traffic is snarled from downtown to the ocean, the procession of cars like twin serpents of red and white light trying to slither in opposite directions but going nowhere. Honking, oil slicks, potholes, street-floods, signal-outages, gridlock, profanity, road-rage.

When I still practiced law—when I considered myself an important man—traffic jams like this would unravel my nerves and make me pound the steering wheel with the heel of my hand. After all, I had places to go and deadlines to meet. But now I have precisely the opposite reaction. Now, there’s something enchanting about the ebbs and flows and fits and starts of the cars and buses. It’s as if we’re all doing a kind of impromptu dance that has its own peculiar rhythm. Spontaneous environmental art; automotive choreography, with the dilapidated storefronts and harried pedestrians as our audience. Some of us master the steps and some of us falter, but we’re all in it together. I don’t bother turning on the radio. The city generates its own music, enthralling even on this most dissonant of nights.

After fifty minutes in traffic, I arrive at the Lansing Bar and Grill on Third and La Brea. The place is half-empty. The patrons who have shown up are mostly older men dressed in synthetic suits—veteran insurance executives or stockbrokers with too much time to kill. At thirty-seven, I feel like a kid in this room. I sit in a corner near the window. When the waitress comes, I order a Bass Ale. Though smoking in bars and restaurants has been illegal for years, I could swear I smell stale cigarette smoke emanating from the upholstery. I nurse my beer and look out the window. The headlights from the cars driving down La Brea refract through the raindrops.

In my peripheral vision, I see an older man walking toward me with deliberate steps. He’s dressed casually in a khaki windbreaker and brown slacks. Even stooped with age, he’s tall, much taller than Rich. The overall impression is gray—gray hair, gray skin, gray stare, gray demeanor. For a fleeting moment, I wonder if Rich was adopted.

“Parker?”

I stand and extend my hand.

“Sorry I’m late. The traffic in the rain is terrible.”

He orders a Chivas 18, but has to settle for a Dewar’s. We make small talk about the traffic and the weather until the waitress brings him the scotch. He looks like the type of man to toast you automatically, but he doesn’t toast me. His hand is shaking. He takes a long drink of the booze and sets his glass down on the table. “You know, when the law firm was still around, Rich would say that you were the best young trial lawyer in the city.”

“Rich liked to exaggerate his friends’ abilities.”

He raises his hand and waves it in a way that makes me embarrassed about my false modesty.

“Richie was great with people, but he struggled with the cerebral part of life. He did well enough in school, but he got by on hard work more than anything. He knew it. He would say that other people at the firm were smart or articulate or crafty, but that you were the only one who had all those skills. That’s why he hired you when he got involved in this last scrape with that so-called church of his. He admired you.”

No matter how much Rich admired me, I hardly acquitted myself well as his lawyer.

“I never understood why Harmon Cherry took that evil cult on as a client,” Baxter says. “A horrible thing for him to do.”

“The Assembly deserved representation just like any other client,” I say, unable to suppress my compulsion to defend Harmon’s memory no matter what the truth. “Besides, Harmon could control them.”

“That’s bullshit. No one can control them.” He takes a quick breath. “I thought Richie was really going to make it until that woman got him involved in that Sanctified Assembly crap.” Without warning, he leans in toward me, so close that I can smell the booze on his breath. That, and the sour odor of human decay. “They murdered my son.”

I don’t know yet where this man is coming from, so I don’t reveal my own suspicions. I knit my brow almost imperceptibly and pretend to be perplexed. I’m a still a good actor. “What makes you think that Rich was murdered? I’ve seen the pathology report, and the medical examiner concluded otherwise.” I can’t bring myself to use the word
suicide
. Not to his father.

“Because Richie was starting to awaken from the nightmare that is the Sanctified Assembly. He called me from the jail just two days before he died. The first time in years. Did he tell you that?”

“He didn’t.”

“It was an act of bravery on his part, and God knows Richie wasn’t always brave. You know about the Assembly’s policy of disengagement? Sounds like they plagiarized it from the Cold War. They ordered him to disengage with us because we were vocal nonbelievers. Said we were toxic, that we would threaten the health of him and his family. And they meant physical health. According to their Fount or whatever, it’s other people’s attitudes that cause disease, not germs. His mother and I were bacteria to him. That kind of thinking literally killed my wife. He didn’t even come to her funeral. She never got to see her grandson.” The dim bar lamps shimmer in the glaze that coats his eyes. “But then Richie called me. He told me he was in jail, that he was being framed by someone, that he had some information about doings at the Assembly that made him rethink everything. He just wanted to get back to his little boy. I never heard him so driven. Suicide? Impossible.”

“Did he name names? Give you any evidence?”

He shakes his head. “I asked him. But there is one person I know about. Richie worked with a man named Christopher McCarthy. He’s the Assembly’s top PR man.”

Christopher McCarthy is more than a PR man. He runs the Assembly’s Technology Communications Organization—TCO for short—and serves as the Assembly’s public face. He’s a member of its hierarchy. He was also the main client contact back at the law firm. He’d walk in unannounced looking for Rich or Manny or some other lawyer he knew and demand that they drop whatever they were doing and meet with him. Only Deanna had the guts to blow him off if she was busy on another matter.

“I don’t mean to be insensitive,” I say. “But Rich was found with a false passport in his possession. That’s a crime, and evidence of guilt. The FBI also found a large amount of cash and drugs in his apartment, which, by the way, he rented under an assumed name.”

“Richie was frightened of the Assembly, and he had reason to be, as it turned out. Who wouldn’t have a contingency plan? I think he was going to go to the authorities, but just in case . . .” His voice trails off. He doesn’t mention the drugs. The identity theft and the drugs are the two pieces of evidence that I find impossible to explain away. “What do you think happened to Richie?” he says.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You know they killed him. You have no use for them. Of all the people at the firm, you refused to work for them. Poulos did, and Mason and that Trimble woman. But not you. The firm’s biggest client and its rising star, and never the twain met. You don’t like them.”

“How can I help you, Mr. Baxter?”

“I need a lawyer and I want you. I think the Assembly is going to sue me.”

“For what?”

He clenches and opens his fists several times. “I don’t know. But I’m the executor of Richie’s estate and his sole beneficiary. I expect them to come after me for the money.”

“I’m sure his wife Monica is the—”

“Harmon Cherry required all lawyers at the firm to have a will, right?”

I nod. I was the only one who didn’t follow Harmon’s instructions. I had no one to bequeath my estate to.

“Well, Rich had the will drawn up because of that rule. It was before he joined the Assembly, before he was married. And I know he didn’t change it since then.”

“How can you be so sure? He got married and had a kid and—”

“You should know why he didn’t change it.”

It takes me a moment. “OK. I get it. The Assembly doesn’t believe in bequeathed wealth. They believe it’s a transgression to die with resources. Possessions are supposed to be gifted to the church while the person’s alive. So they don’t allow wills.”

“A scam by those phony bastards to increase their coffers by getting people to give up their money sooner. But I’m sure Richie had money left when he died, and they’re going to want it. I’m going to fight them for it.”

“What about Monica and the child? Ordinarily—”