The Deposit Slip (29 page)

“What just happened?” Erin asked. They were standing in a back hallway of the courthouse, away from observation. Jessie was barely suppressing a grin.

“Judge Lindquist just pocket-vetoed the motion,” Jared answered, entirely exhausted and elated at once.

“What do you mean?”

“It means,” Jessie said, picking up the point, “that the judge didn’t deny the motion—he just told Stanford he wasn’t going to rule in the next three weeks.”

“Which means?”

“It means we’ve got to prepare for trial,” Jared answered, and Erin threw her arms around his neck.

Jared caught up with Stanford just as he was following Whittier out the front door of the courthouse.

“Marcus.”

The Paisley attorney turned. He looked dazed, but the stare hardened as his eyes recognized Jared.

Jared held out two subpoenas. After a moment’s pause, Marcus grabbed them from his hand.

Jared didn’t allow himself the pleasure of the grin he felt, but simply turned and walked away. There was a lot of this case still to fight. Jared headed back into the courthouse to gather his briefcase and papers for the drive home.

Marcus stood on the top step of the courthouse, reading the subpoenas in disbelief. He felt Whittier at his elbow. “What is it, Marcus?”

How had they found out?

“Marcus?”

He handed one of the subpoenas to Whittier; he folded the other and slid it into his pocket.

“It’s a subpoena,” he said. “Let’s talk about it later.”

The junior partner nodded, clearly afraid to ask any more questions after the summary judgment motion. He wandered away, leaving Marcus standing alone in front of the courthouse doors.

T
he clock on the mantel was wrong. Marcus couldn’t place it at first. It was . . . too loud. He stared at the clock face passively, listening to the crack of the second hand, unable to master his thoughts.

The universe had tipped up and spilled its contents into the ether today, and now nothing was in its right place anymore. A man could walk through a room he’d spent his life traversing, and he’d hit every piece of furniture—every lamp and table. He’d fall like a drunken fool on a split in the carpet that shouldn’t be there—because everything had changed.

At this instant, the deposit slip case should be a file his secretary was walking to Paisley’s storage vault. Marcus should be hearing his partners’ congratulations in the hall—or sitting at his desk throwing pads of unnecessary case notes and pleading pages into the trash. Perhaps signing the final check for Mick Elgart and phoning the good news to Sidney Grant. Planning the flight to Baltimore for an unscheduled visit with the children he hadn’t seen in months, and launching his campaign to convince his wife to return.

Neaton had no evidence and this judge—hoary Judge Thomas Lindquist—
always required evidence
. The clerk, Rachel Langer, who was their secret weapon, was used against them; the witness, Cory Spangler, that his high-paid help assured him would not testify, blew into the courtroom on the wings of a two-page statement; and even Mick Elgart was revealed in open court.

Yet he
still
should have won that motion. But he didn’t. The universe upended today.

He’d nearly crashed on the drive away from the hearing. Unable to stomach returning to Paisley, he’d set off to his cabin and, distracted, slid across the median on a curve, narrowly missing a truck. The act barely registered with him.

His cell phone on the end table buzzed. He picked it up absently, saw that it was Sidney Grant, and pushed the button to answer.

“Marcus. I heard the result. I sent Charley from the bank to watch the hearing.”

The calm in Sidney Grant’s voice was more jarring than the shout Marcus had expected.

“Marcus, are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“You’ve let this go,” the banker went on in the unnaturally soft voice. “You said you had it under control, and you’ve let it go. You told me that the Spangler girl was taken care of and she wasn’t.”

Marcus didn’t respond, because he couldn’t. Didn’t Sidney see that
everything
had changed? Look out your window, Sidney, at the cantilevered horizon.

“We cannot try this case. Marcus, something more serious needs to be done about the Spangler girl.”

So that was it. The banker was in his persuasive mode and he thought that calm would be more effective than anger. Especially to convince Marcus to do to Cory Spangler what the banker assumed Marcus had already done to Paul Larson.

He closed his eyes and took a breath to clear his lungs, trying to focus.

“It’s too late, Sidney,” Marcus answered at last, and felt surprise at the ordered rationality of the words. “Spangler gave Neaton a statement that the judge relied on to deny our motion. If something happened to her now, I think he’d let the statement into evidence at trial. And they also know about Rachel Langer and Mick.”

When would that shoe drop? he wondered. When would Neaton let the court know the full truth about them? At trial?

The banker’s breaths huffed across the phone line. “You’re not trying hard enough, Marcus.”

The strain of focusing was proving too much. “Sidney, I’ve got to think this through. I’ll call in the morning.”

“All right, Marcus.” The banker sounded strained but still controlled. “But no later than the morning.” The line clicked dead.

He set the phone on the couch. It was growing cold in the room, he thought without caring.

What a coward. Thinking Marcus would do his dirty work for him. Would
kill
a witness for him.

Besides, Spangler’s testimony was no longer the greatest concern in the case. He looked at the subpoena lying on the table—one of the two Neaton had handed him on the courthouse steps this morning. That wan, self-righteous twit who didn’t even have the decency to gloat.

The subpoena Marcus handed on to Whittier demanded that a bank employee appear the first day of trial with some floppy disks containing information about closed accounts. That was trouble enough, but easy to fix. Disks got erased every day.

The second subpoena—the one he’d withheld from Whittier—was another matter. How had they found out? It demanded the appearance of Paisley’s chief bookkeeper at trial—with copies of all Paisley trust account checks cashed in the past four years in excess of ten million dollars.

No one could see this subpoena. At Paisley. At the bank. Even if he could quash it before trial, someone would begin to ask questions. Someone at Paisley would remember the pro bono case. A partner. A staffer.

Through the window, a formation of geese winged across the cold blue sky, so high they could have been jets. Marcus felt disembodied, as though he were up there with them, looking down at the tiny figure of a man gazing upward through the glass.

In a universe that had lost its way, limits Marcus thought inviolate could no longer be respected. Unique solutions had to be considered, new paths forged. Things once unthinkable could no longer be so.

He struggled with the notion for a moment. This was a chasm that, once crossed, offered no return bridge. Could he really do this?

He’d never kill for Grant. For himself? But no, that wasn’t what this was about. This was for his children and the wife who needed him.

After all, he hadn’t brought matters to this impasse, had he? The farmer was the one who’d kept the check in the first place. If Larson hadn’t taken it to Grant, and Grant hadn’t called him, then Marcus would not be standing on the ragged edge of this precipice. And if Neaton had just let the case go—
for two more days—
this would all be unnecessary. He wouldn’t be facing these risks to his career, family—freedom.

He felt a calm as the resolve settled in. His mind cleared.

All right then. This would be done. And if he was going to proceed, it would, of course, have to be against the right target. Cory Spangler was irrelevant now. The Estate and the case only died with Paul Larson’s sole living relative, Erin.

And maybe their lawyer too.

The investigator’s voice over the phone was shaky. “I think that’s a really bad idea, Marcus.”

It was evening now. Marcus hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights, hadn’t even moved from the couch. It had taken several hours to reach Mick. Just when Marcus thought the investigator might be avoiding his calls, he had telephoned.

“I need this.”

A sigh filled the phone. “Marcus, I told you it wasn’t a good idea to get mixed up with this guy to begin with. But you went ahead and hired him for that Athens work. Fine. Now you want me to get you personal information on the guy? If it gets back to him that I’m even
looking
for that kind of stuff . . . Marcus, this is a really bad idea.”

“Mick, your name came up today in court.”

The silence was long. “How.”

“Neaton knows who you are. That you work for me. In this case.”

He let the quiet sink in.

“You’re a part of this, Mick. You made the trips to our man in Washington. You followed Neaton and Goering. You arranged for Langer to work in their offices. You set me up with your New York contact for Athens.”

“Don’t do this, Marcus.”

“I just need enough information to get a feel for the man. And I need his new number. The old one doesn’t work.”

Mick’s voice hardened when he responded. “I don’t like this. But I’ll see what I can find out.”

The drive to the Larson farm was unhurried, soft and easy—like a journey on a cloud. Jared looked out the window, and he couldn’t keep the smile from his face.

Mrs. Huddleston at his side chatted with his father in the back seat, but Jared scarcely listened. He couldn’t. Nothing mundane could hold his attention at the moment.

They’d won the unwinnable motion. They were going to trial.

Cory Spangler’s statement had put it over. The statement he couldn’t use. Until Mrs. Huddleston suggested a way to reduce the risk to Cory by keeping the statement from Stanford until the hearing.

The risk was reduced, but not eliminated. They still needed Cory’s permission. That was the hardest step for Jared, because it meant admitting to Cory the knowledge he’d withheld from her in Athens.

He had planned to email Cory to explain it all—including the risk of proceeding—and ask her permission to use the statement. The librarian suggested it was better if she did it. It was much fairer to the young woman if Mrs. Huddleston posed the request rather than Jared.

They’d gotten Cory’s agreement by email the following day.

They drove up the driveway to the Larson farmhouse half an hour later and unloaded the groceries from the trunk to the kitchen. There, Jared took a seat at the kitchen table. Sam and Jessie were soon at the sink washing vegetables, while Erin and Mrs. Huddleston prepared the handmade tortillas. By silent consensus, Jared was allowed to watch. Pressed elbow to elbow in the small farmhouse kitchen, Jared thought the group looked like a friendly scrum.

It was warm and relaxed, and Jared intended to enjoy it. He would not focus on the fact that they still lacked the evidence to convince a jury of key elements of their case, that the judge could still change his mind and dismiss the case after hearing the limits to the estate’s evidence at trial, or that jury trials were never won on bluffs.

Because they were going to trial. They had bought another three weeks. And more importantly, they now had the subpoena power to force the bank to bring
more
evidence to trial.

It was enough for tonight. He knew that they stood in the eye of the storm. They had passed safely through one side of the tempest and were heading straight toward the other in just twenty-one days. But for tonight, Jared would look up at the clear skies overhead and pretend the hurricane had passed.