Courting Trouble (28 page)

Anne leaned over the front seat. “I wonder how they’ll get him. I guess they’ll stake out the motel undercover, so he’s not warned when he comes back.”

“Right.” Judy accelerated. The car reached the tippy-top of the bridge, laying the entire city at their feet. The skyline shimmered, festive for the Fourth, with the spiky towers of Liberty Place outlined in red, white, and blue neon, and the tops of Mellon Center bathed in red lights. Stray fireworks launched from the Philly side of the waterfront, and one ersatz comet streaked into the twilight, trailing glitter.

Anne couldn’t stop worrying. “Tell me they’ll catch him, Judy.”

“They’ll catch him,” Judy answered. “He’s smart, but not that smart. They’ll get the Philly and Jersey cops, even the Feds all over it. They’ll face Bennie Rosato if they don’t.”

Anne felt reassured, almost. “But a zillion things can go wrong. I wish we could have stayed. I’d feel better. That closure thing.”

Judy caught her eye on the rearview, then switched to the outside lane as they raced toward the city. “When they catch him, it’ll be all over the news. Bennie said she’d call us on the cell as soon as they had him in custody.”

Mary turned around. “You will be free, Anne. Really free of him.”

“Wahoo!” Judy yelled, and Anne smiled.

“I guess you’re right. It’s just so hard to believe.” She breathed in the fresh air off the Delaware, but Judy was rooting around on the floor of the car while she drove, causing the Beetle to veer out of its lane at the edge of the bridge. Alarmed, Anne grabbed the hand-strap to keep from falling. “Judy, what are you doing?”

“Watch this, ladies!” Judy sang out. She stopped rooting around, stuck her hand out the window, and hung her red platform shoes out by their ankle straps. They twisted in the wind as the car hurtled toward the city. “I’ll be free, too!”

“Judy, don’t do it!” Anne shouted.

“Stop! No!” Mary yelled, but it was already too late.

“Good-bye, cruel shoes!” Judy yelled, and flung the platforms out the window and into the air. The shoes split apart like booster rockets and seemed to soar into the sky for a moment, then, realizing they were mere footwear, plummeted in a final arc over the side of the Ben Franklin Bridge and fell a few hundred feet into the Delaware River.

“You killed them!” Anne said, but Judy was laughing her ass off.

Mary peered out the back window. “You didn’t have to do that, Judy. They were perfectly good shoes.”

“They sucked!” Judy yelled. “My only regret is that I didn’t get to see them drown. Like Anne, I have no resolution, no closure.”

Anne found herself laughing, her spirits light. “Bet it sounded a lot like a car wash,” she said, and burst into car-wash noises. “
Ppppshhhhhh! Pssssshhhhh! Ssshhhhhhh!”
Judy joined her and in two minutes there was spit all over the VW dashboard.

Mary couldn’t help but smile. “I’ll never teach you guys anything,” she said, but she was drowned out by a spray of hot wax as they slid down the bridge and into the twinkling city of Philadelphia.

“Anne!” Gil exclaimed as he entered the conference room at Rosato & Associates. He looked Anne up and down, studying each star on her breasts, then his gaze lingered on her hot-pants and platforms. “Goddamn! You are so hot! And the shoes are totally—”

“Please,” Anne said, her face as red as her pants. They’d been so late to the meeting, she hadn’t had time to change. Mental note: Don’t dress like a whore to meet clients who cheat.

Gil couldn’t stop grinning as he eased into a chair opposite her. “I can’t get over it. Look at you, woman! You are so damn beautiful! You always were.”

“Right. Thanks.” She sat down in front of her legal pad to restore some sense of legitimacy, and noticed that Gil, in sports jacket and tie, was carrying a manila envelope. “You have the evidence of the affair? Great. Can I see it?”

“It’s in my pants.” He laughed, but Anne didn’t. Was he coming on? Why was he talking like this? He never had before. She didn’t like the way he was smiling at her and she could smell faintly that he’d been drinking.

“You come from a barbecue or something, Gil?”

“Or something. A party.” Gil seemed to forget about the envelope on the table between them, its shape reflected on the polished surface. “I have to tell you, it’s been really terrific working with you, Anne. You’ve been terrific.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re a great lawyer. You’re so—” he seemed to stall, waiting for the right word, “gutsy. Tough. Ballsy. For such a beautiful woman.” His eyes flashed. “And so very beautiful. I’ve always thought it, ever since law school.”

“Great.” Anne let him babble while she reached for the envelope and slid it toward her. She didn’t have time to waste, and she felt antsy and nervous. They still hadn’t heard from the detectives about Kevin’s arrest. Bennie and the others were sitting by the phone. She held up the envelope. “May I open it?”

“Sure!” He waved it off. “You know, me and the guys, you remember the guys, from the poker group in the dorm?”

“Sure. Played poker.” Anne had no idea what he was rambling about. She unfastened the little brass brad and reached inside the envelope.

“We all were so hot for you. I had this picture of you, the one from the pig book. I always thought you were the most stunning woman I ever saw in my life.”

Anne fished around in the envelope but there was no paper inside, only something thin and sharp.

“I knew you didn’t go for my type. Computer geek. B.A. in engineering. I was smart, but you were way out of my league. Well, you’re not anymore. I’m fairly successful, no?” Gil waved a raised fist. “Geeks rule!”

But Anne was only half listening, because there was nothing in the envelope except a CD. She pulled it out and held it up. Its silvery surface caught the overhead light in wiggly rainbow stripes. She flipped it over, looking for a label. Was it music, or some type of stored data?

“I’d really like it if you’d come work for me, Anne. I’m offering you a big job, a big, big job as general counsel at Chipster. Pay is three hundred grand to start, plus stock options. When we go IPO, you’ll be worth millions.”

Anne held up the CD. “What is this?”

Gil grinned crookedly. “You answer me first. When do you want to start? Me and you can take Chipster onward and upward!”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Guilty as charged!” Gil held up a hand. “So you wanna be my GC? ’cause I wanna be your boyfriend.”

Anne’s stomach turned over. “Gil, focus a minute.” She sent the CD spinning across the table like a flying saucer. “I’m trying to win a case for you, despite your best efforts to screw it up. First, you lie to me about your affair with Beth Dietz, then you bring me a CD when I ask you for evidence. What gives?”

“You don’t need to win the case for me, Anne. I already won it for myself. The CD
is
the evidence, my love.”

Anne ignored the “my love” part. Gil was only embarrassing himself, and it was the Glenlivet talking. “How is a CD evidence of an affair?”

“It’s not, but it’s evidence, all right. It’s proof.”

“Of what?”

“Of wrongdoing. Of theft. Of corporate espionage.” Gil picked up the CD with difficulty and looked through the hole in the center, peeking out with one blue-green eye. “Boo!”

“Gil, what are you doing?”

“You underestimated me, Anne.” He set the CD down, suddenly serious. “You thought that I had screwed up—as you say, interesting choice of words—but I never really do that. I cover my tracks. Plan all my moves. You have to, to be successful in e-business, you know. The competition is killer. On the bleeding edge, you can’t be the one who bleeds.”

“So what’s on the CD?”

“Okay, well. Let me take you back a minute, to our corporate annals. I started Chipster with a few good men—sorry, good-lookin’—and one of them was Bill Dietz.”

Anne remembered, from rereading the dep the other day.

“Dietz came a little later, from another web company called Environstar. Dietz was smart and he worked hard, put in the hours, and he had good ideas, for an asshole. Above all, he wrote good code.”

“Okay.”

“Chipster took off, and we developed our product, our web application, partly on the code he wrote. But a year down the line, Dietz told me he’d stolen the base code from Environstar.” Gil held up the CD. “This is the code he stole.”

“Did Environstar prosecute?”

“No, they had stolen code to start their own company. Everybody steals in software, mainly because it’s never finished, it just goes through about three hundred versions, from 1.0 to 37.9, and people change jobs, over time. But that’s not the point. This is about me, not Dietz. Be a smart girl and tell me what I did next.”

Anne thought a minute. Last week she would have had a different answer, but she was looking at Gil with new eyes. And learning to plan—in advance. “You did nothing. You used the base code, developed it, and made a fortune. You shut up about its origin and you grew your company.”

“Yes! God, and so smart, too! A whip!” Gil hunched over the desk. “I like women with brains. I’m not like the others.”

No, you’re worse.
“Why didn’t you give Dietz any stock options?”

“Because he came later, and he wasn’t a founder, technically. And I didn’t have to keep him.”

Anne was catching on. “No, because you’d found out about the stolen code. So you had something on him. If he left you, you’d expose him.”

“I love it when you talk dirty. Do you talk dirty, Anne? I have often wondered about that, late at night.” Gil leaned even farther over the table, but she stood up and walked around the back of her chair, really sorry that she was half-naked.

“Gil, what does the CD have to do with the Chipster case?”

“It will make it go away. I didn’t have it before, but I finally paid off the right programmer. Now I have the proof I need. Bye-bye Beth, hello IPO.” Gil licked his lips. “I called Dietz directly after we spoke today. I told him to tell his wife to call off the dogs or I’ll go public—with the CD.” He laughed, but Anne was struggling to get up to speed and avoid attempted rape.

“If you expose him, you’re liable too, maybe even criminally.”

“He won’t call my bluff, he’s too scared. I can afford the hottest lawyer in town. He can’t afford dick.”

Anne ignored it. “But how does that get rid of the lawsuit?”

“Beth doesn’t know he stole the code. They met after he came to Chipster.”

“How do you know she doesn’t know? Maybe he told her.”

“No, she never would have sued me if she’d known, it was too risky. And she would have mentioned it during our little affair, but she didn’t. Now he’ll tell her the whole truth and nothing but, and she’ll understand that suing me for revenge was not a good idea.”

Anne blinked. “Gil, you won’t win now. She’ll just drop the suit. Withdraw it.”

“No, no, no.” Gil wagged his finger, rising from his seat. “Not what I want. Not what I asked my old friend Dietz for. I want the suit to go forward and the plaintiff to have a sudden memory loss. Trial amnesia, when she takes the stand. Then I want you to kick her lousy ass, get me my jury verdict, and restore my good name, so I look good to my Board. Not just settle.
Win
.”

“You mean she’ll deep-six her own lawsuit? Like a fighter, who throws a fight?”

“Exactly. Well put. God, I’m so glad you’re not dead. Be my GC and wear that tiny little top. Also the shoes. The shoes are—”

“I won’t do it!”

“Okay, you win. No tiny top. Ha!”

“Stop, it, Gil. You’re not funny.” Anne shook her head. “No, I won’t try a sham case. I won’t play a role, or pretend. I won’t do it.”

“You have to. You can’t withdraw from the case this late.” Gil walked to one chair, then the next, closer to Anne. “We’re both riding this rocket, and it’s going up, up, up, baby.”

“How do you know Beth will do it?” Anne asked, suppressing a tingle of fear as Gil moved closer, around the table.

“I don’t for sure, but she will. The smart money’s on Bill. He’s the brains of that operation. She’s just the pussy.” Suddenly Gil lunged across the chairs, his hands reaching awkwardly for Anne’s stars.

“That’s it, get out!” she shouted, ducking away from his grasp, around the table and toward the door. “Get out!”

But Gil seemed not to have heard her. “And boy, did Dietz have some choice words to say about you! He said, ‘I’m thrilled that little whore is dead!’”

“I don’t want to hear it!” she shouted, but her thoughts were racing. It must have been what Dietz and Matt had fought about. Why Matt had gotten slugged.
Her
. Anne flung open the door to the conference room. “Get out now!”

Gil tripped on a chair leg and caught the back of the chair, trying to right himself. “Dietz told his lawyer. They even got into a fight over it. Dietz said he would have shot you himself, for what you were doing to wifey. This is the man whose side you’re taking against me.”

“Get out! All I have to do is yell, and my friends will come running.”

“Don’t shoot!” Gil threw up his hands, and just then the conference doors flew open. Standing in the door was a furious Bennie, and Anne was hoping she was furious at Gil, not her.

“Get out of my law firm, Mr. Martin,” she ordered, her mouth tight.

After the women got Gil into the elevator, down the alley, and outside into a cab, they recovered in the reception area while Anne told them the whole story of the CD and what Gil had done. They listened, draped over the soft navy chairs and loveseat. Judy had changed into her denim overalls and Mary was still in her hooker outfit, but barefoot. Her platform shoes formed a vaguely pornographic mound on the Oriental rug.

“This is an interesting situation, very interesting,” Bennie said, when the account was finished. She crossed one muscular leg over the other, in her shorts. “By the way, you’re fired.”

Anne hoped she was kidding again. “Have we heard anything about Kevin? Have they arrested him yet?”

“Rafferty said they’re still staked out at the Daytimer. There’s nothing to do but wait. They’ll pick him up as soon as he gets back. Rafferty will call right away.”