Guilt By Degrees

46

But Audrey Wagner, the paralegal in charge of human resources, hadn’t known about Lilah’s marriage to Zack either.

“Don’t the lawyers usually keep you up to speed with their personal information?” I asked.

“Usually,” she said, peering at me through hip-looking black-framed glasses.

She pushed a stray hair back into the bun twisted at the nape of her neck with brisk efficiency. That hair had some nerve.

“Did she have health coverage through the firm?” I asked.

Audrey scrolled through the file on her computer. “Yes, the standard employee deal. Individual, no spouse, no children.”

“Did she leave you any contact information after she got fired?” I asked. “Any place to forward her mail?”

“I never heard a word from her after she got arrested. So, long story short, no.” Audrey thought for a second. “Matter of fact, I don’t even know that I ever had any kind of backup or emergency contact information for her.” Audrey scrolled further, then tapped a few keys. “Well, she did provide her parents’ address.” She frowned at the screen, then looked up at us. “I’m not sure I’m allowed…”

“It’s okay,” Bailey said. “We’ve already got it.”

“Good. Anything else I can help you with?” she asked.

Audrey really seemed to mean it. I appreciated that.

“Can you tell me if anyone else got hired around the same time as Lilah?” I asked.

Audrey peered at the monitor and jotted something down on her notepad, then punched some keys.

“Phyliss Blankmeyer and Joel Carstone,” she read from her screen. “You can find them one floor down.” She gave a wry smile. “Where we keep the ‘help.’ I can give you their numbers,” she offered.

“That’d be great,” Bailey said.

Audrey wrote the information on her notepad, tore off the page, and handed it to Bailey.

“Audrey,” I said, “you’re a breath of fresh air. Thank you.”

“Actually,” she said, shooting a careful look over my shoulder at the hallway, “I’d much rather work with criminal lawyers. So much more interesting. You’re in the DA’s office, aren’t you?”

“I am,” I replied. “And you’re right, we are more interesting.”

Why be modest?

“Do you mind telling me what they pay senior paralegals?” she asked.

I told her.

“Oh,” she said, her eyes widening for a moment. She adjusted her glasses. “Well, good luck. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Once again, the promise of meager financial reward had choked the life out of a budding career in criminal law.

Bailey and I made our way downstairs. Exercising our superior investigatory skills, we quickly succeeded in locating our targets. The nameplates on their office doors did help.

“I haven’t known anyone named Phyliss in a long time,” I remarked.

Bailey nodded. “It fell off the ‘cool baby name’ list a while ago.”

We found uncoolly named Phyliss just as she was pushing away from her desk. No doubt getting ready for the only physical exercise she and all the other young associates would get that day-a trip to the cafeteria for a fast lunch.

“Knock, knock,” Bailey said from the threshold as she held out her ID.

Phyliss, a short-haired, no-nonsense, athletic-looking type, involuntarily stepped back a few feet when she saw Bailey’s badge.

“Whoa,” Phyliss said, holding up her hands. “I know I was a little late with my parking tickets, but isn’t this kind of extreme?”

“Parking is no laughing matter, Ms. Blankmeyer,” I said sternly.

“And you are?” she asked me, looking alarmed.

I pulled out my badge. “Rachel Knight, DA’s office.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, looking from me to Bailey.

“Yeah, I am,” I said with a little chuckle. “Just a little law-enforcement humor. Crushing crime one lame joke at a time.”

Bailey shot me a look. “We’d like to talk to you about Lilah Bayer.”

Phyliss sighed and shook her head. “Okay. But I can’t tell you any more than I told the first guy-”

“Rick Meyer?” I asked.

Phyliss squinted. “I think so…yeah. I haven’t seen Lilah since she got arrested. Man, that was gnarly.”

“You have any idea where she might be now, or how to reach her?” I asked without much hope.

Phyliss shrugged. “Once she got arrested, she was untouchable. All of a sudden, everyone had amnesia. ‘Lilah who?’ I’ve got to admit, I felt a little sorry for her. I mean, we all know it’s bull, but still, whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”

“Was there any talk of rehiring her after she got acquitted?” I asked.

“They might’ve talked about it-if she’d ever asked to come back,” Phyliss said.

But she hadn’t even tried. It was somewhat surprising, and it was significant. Her old law firm was the most likely place to forgive her past-and, granted, those odds were long. But any new place where she hadn’t already proven her merit wouldn’t want to take a chance on someone who’d been on trial for first-degree murder. She had to be doing something-and whatever it was had to be way off the radar, because we couldn’t find any trace of it.

“You ever hang out with her when she was an associate?” I asked.

“Yes and no,” she said. “Lilah’d go out with us after work every once in a while.” Phyliss stopped so abruptly, I got mental whiplash.

“But?” Bailey prompted.

Phyliss stared past us, her gaze unfocused. “I never really felt like she was there to hang. It was like she just wanted the latest dope on office politics. Lilah was superambitious.” She quickly added, “Not that we all weren’t, but…”

Phyliss again paused suddenly. It was a dramatically effective gambit that both she and some rather famous actors overused. But it could be handy in a closing argument.

This time, I did the prompting. “She was more so?” I asked. “How?”

“No wasted motion,” Phyliss said. “She was totally focused on the bottom line one hundred percent of the time. Lilah did the work, no question about it. And she was good. But she worked the personal angle just as hard-”

“You mean schmoozing with the partners?” Bailey asked.

“Yeah,” Phyliss replied. “She had the looks, and she used them. Bent the men around her little finger like they were pipe cleaners.”

I detected more than a tinge of jealousy in Phyliss’s voice. I couldn’t say I blamed her.

“She ever have an affair with any of the partners?” I asked, thinking that our buddy Lyle Monahan, the senior partner, was a likely conquest. “Or a client?”

“Clients, I wouldn’t know about,” Phyliss said. “We didn’t work the same cases. Partners…not that I ever heard. And I would have, because that kind of news travels fast around here.” She paused, then added, “I really don’t think Lilah did have anything happening on the side. She was smart enough to know better than to play favorites. Lilah never let anyone in too close. Not us, not the partners-nobody.”

“Did you know she was married?” I asked.

“None of us did. And that was a shocker. Believe me, Lilah being married to a cop was not something any of us would’ve guessed.”

This appeared to be a popular sentiment. Since we seemed to have come full circle, I asked Phyliss if she had any other observations or information to add. She didn’t.

“We need to talk to Joel,” I said. “Do you know where his office is?”

“Two doors down,” Phyliss replied. “Though he probably left for lunch by now. Come on, I’m on my way out. I’ll show you.”

We followed Phyliss down the hall. Before we got to Joel’s office, a young male voice called out to us.

“Can I help you with something?”

The voice belonged to a male secretary in a shirt and tie who was eating an obnoxiously healthy-looking sandwich of sprouts and avocado at his desk in one of the partitioned cubicles. The nameplate next to his computer said he was Teddy Janeway.

“Joel Carstone?” I asked.

“May I ask what this concerns?” Teddy inquired, his tone polite but firm.

Why oh why couldn’t I get a secretary like this instead of Melia? Then I remembered Audrey’s reaction when I told her the salary range at the DA’s office.

Bailey identified us, then explained, “We want to talk to him about Lilah Bayer.”

“Really?” Teddy remarked, looking at us with interest. “Let me see if I can find him.”

He picked up his phone and punched in numbers.

Phyliss gave us a mock salute. “Since my duty seems to be done here, and I’ve got about seven minutes left for lunch-”

“No worries, Phyliss,” I said. “You’ve been great. Thank you.”

“Not a problem,” she said.

She moved in long, fast strides toward the elevators, and Bailey and I went over to Teddy Janeway’s desk. He hung up, shaking his head. “Joel’s not answering for some reason.”

“Do you know how long he’ll be gone?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes, tops. None of these juniors get a real lunch.”

So the cliché about slave labor in the big law firms was true. On the other hand, I had little cause for celebration. My hours were no better and my pay was a heck of a lot worse. I pushed away this irksome train of thought and considered what to do next.

I didn’t want to wait. Based on what we’d seen so far, it seemed unlikely that Joel would give us anything new. Plus, I hated waiting-for anything.

“Did you happen to know Lilah?” Bailey asked Teddy.

“As Lilah Rossmoyne,” he replied. “And if you’re wondering whether Joel knew her well, the answer is no. He was just a junior associate, so he didn’t have any clout. And he’s not the political type, so he didn’t have any juicy information either. Therefore, Lilah had no use for him whatsoever.” Teddy’s tone implied he had uniquely confidential information.

“How well did you know her?” I asked, intrigued.

“We didn’t hang,” Teddy replied. “But I keep my eyes open, so I notice things. And from what I saw, Lilah really didn’t have any friends.”

I nodded. “Which is why no one knew about her marriage to Zack.”

“Exactly,” Teddy replied, then looked around the near-empty office. He wiped his mouth neatly, dropped the napkin into the wastebasket, and stood up. He leaned toward us and spoke in a low voice. “But when the case first broke, I saw a picture of her husband on the news.”

Teddy again scanned the room quickly before continuing in a voice barely above a whisper.

“I recognized him,” he said. “You can ask anyone around here. I’m one of those people who never forget a face, even one I’ve only seen for a few seconds.”

Pattern recognition. Some have it, some don’t.

Teddy had stopped to let a beat of silence build the suspense. Seriously, what was it with the people in this law firm and their addiction to the “pause for dramatic effect”? If I’d worked here, I’d have smacked someone by the end of the first week.

“And?” I prompted.

“It was just a few months before the murder,” Teddy said. “He was here-”

“Here?” I asked. “In the office?”

Teddy shook his head. “No, he was sitting in a car, parked out in front of the building. But in a regular car and civilian clothes.”

“What made you notice him?” I asked.

People sitting in parked cars couldn’t be that unusual around here. The area was filled with twenty-story office buildings.

“The fact that I saw him out there on at least three different days,” Teddy said. “And the way he just sat there, watching the front entrance, not doing anything. Something about the way he looked just…bothered me.”

It bothered me too.

“Why didn’t you tell the police about this?” I asked.

“I did,” Teddy said, his tone peevish. “And I can’t remember which cop I told, so don’t ask me for a name,” he said, anticipating my next question. “I just remember that when I told him, the cop looked at me like, ‘Uh-huh, sure,’” Teddy mimicked and then sniffed. “He didn’t believe me-thought I was one of those fools who’ll say anything to get his name in the news.”

Bailey and I exchanged a look.

“We believe you, Teddy,” I said.