Legal Tender

10

The press mobbed the sidewalk in a dense pack, overrunning the curb and spilling onto the Roundhouse’s parking lot. Grady and I pressed forward as they scurried around us on all sides. I’d run this gauntlet with clients a zillion times, there was nothing to do but bear down and go forward. Cameras with rubber filters popped into my face, video cameras whirred beside me in stereo, and TV news-people pressed microphone bubbles at my lips. Each reporter shouted his own version of my name. “Bernadette, look this way!” they called. “Belladonna, just one picture! Benefaci, over here!”

I stared straight ahead, my mind clicking away with the cameras. I knew how this would play out. I’d be the lead story on the local noon news, CNN, and Court-TV. The cops would leak the details about me and Mark, including the will, and by nightfall, I’d be labeled a murderer. My media clients would drop me quick as you can say “film at eleven.” My police abuse clients would find a lawyer who wasn’t under investigation. My career was crashing and burning around me. And Mark’s killer was free.

Suddenly I recognized a couple at the curb on the other side of the crowd. The woman had her arm in a sling and the man was a strawberry blond. It was Bill Kleeb and Eileen Jennings, together. They stood with a heavyset man with slicked-back hair and a shiny Haliburton briefcase, hailing a cab.

“Miss Rosato, did you do it? Miss Rosato, just one question! Please! Over here!”

How had Eileen gotten out? What was she doing with Bill? Then I remembered the death threat to the CEO. “Bill!” I shouted over the sea of cameras, since I had the height advantage. “Bill Kleeb! Over here!”

Bill turned vaguely in my direction just as a Yellow cab pulled up behind him. The man with the Haliburton ushered Eileen into the cab and climbed into the darkness beside her.

“Bill!” I hollered, trying vainly to be heard over the reporters. I could see him scanning the crowd, but he didn’t see me. I waved wildly while the cameras whirred, even though I knew it would end up as teaser footage. “Bill!”

“Are you nuts?” Grady asked, wild-eyed. “What are you doing?”

I was trying to save a life.“BILL!” I screamed, but Bill got into the cab, closed the door, and took off.

Outside my closed office door, uniformed police and crime technicians inspected, measured, and photographed every inch of R amp; B, trying to gather evidence against me. You would think I could have barred the front door, but they’d had another search warrant and presented it to me and Grady in front of the few associates still left. Wingate had looked down, shamefaced, and Renee Butler had run out the front door, disappearing into the crowd of reporters I couldn’t seem to shake, like a low-grade infection.

“This is Bennie Rosato and I just spoke with him. Can you put me through?” I was standing, phone to my ear, in the middle of the disaster area that used to be my office. The cops had searched and confiscated most of my client files, and the few they left were dumped on the floor. The mess I could clean up, but there was nothing I could do about the breach of client confidentiality.

“You have to hold while I find him,” said a rasp I recognized as Meehan’s. I replaced a casebook that had been torn from the shelves. Papers were scattered over the floor and tables. A jade plant had been knocked over and its dirt spilled out. Fingerprint dust covered everything. What did they expect to find? My prints and Mark’s? What would that prove?

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Grady said, from the wing chair in front of my desk. “We agreed I was running this case.”

“You are. I told you, this is on another matter.”

“A criminal matter?”

“Sort of.” I righted the jade plant, cupped the loose soil in my hand, and dumped it back in the pot.

“You can’t tell me more than that?”

“No.” Before I made this call, I’d checked the ethical rules for lawyers, which is not an oxymoron. I could tell the cops what I knew, but I couldn’t tell an associate, friend, or the intended victim. I didn’t see what good it would do to tell Grady anyway. He’d just try and stop me. “Give me five minutes, okay?”

“You telling me I have to leave?”

“Sorry,” I said, covering the receiver. “I have to make this call.”

“To Azzic? Have you lost your mind?”

“Just trust me, okay? And go, please. I’ll let you win the next power struggle, I promise.” Grady frowned and left the room just as Azzic picked up. First things first. “Detective, this is Bennie Rosato. You boys did a nice job on my office. Why’d you take my client files?”

“They were covered in the first warrant.”

“‘All client files from 1980 to present’? It was overbroad. If you’d tried to serve it on me, I wouldn’t have honored it.”

“Oh really.”

“My clients have nothing to do with this, and it’s their confidential information you took. If I hear that they got a visit or a call from you or your men-”

“I don’t have time for this, Rosato. I gotta go.”

“Wait, I need to talk to you, it’s important.”

“Now you wanna talk? Twenty minutes ago you told me to fuck myself.”

“It’s not about me.” I shoved my law dictionary into place with a smooththunk. “One of my clients, Bill Kleeb, was arrested yesterday for protesting animal rights at Furstmann Dunn. I have reason to believe his accomplice, Eileen Jennings, who was also arrested with him-”

“I don’t know anything about it, Rosato. I do homicide, not animals. You want to talk to the animals, they’re in the cells.” He laughed, then exhaled audibly. I gathered he was smoking, and it had brought his warm good humor to the fore.

“This is about a homicide, Detective.”

“Something you know about, Rosato?”

“The CEO of Furstmann Dunn may be in danger. Eileen Jennings threatened him yesterday with a taser.”

He laughed. “That’s rich. He might like it, who knows, them guys.”

“I’m not kidding around. I wouldn’t call unless I thought there was something to this, I’m breaching my client’s confidence here. Get Jennings in for questioning and put somebody on the CEO, or at least alert him.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. I’m sick of you dictating to this department, Rosato. You think you know what we do, but you don’t. You wanna tell us procedure, you don’t know procedure. You think you can jerk us on a string, but this time you’re jerkin’ the wrong guy.”

Another Great and Powerful. They abounded, and I handled them wrong every time. “You have a choice, Detective. Pick her up or explain later why you didn’t, even after you were warned.”

“Warned? She didn’t do anything about this threat, did she?”

“She told her boyfriend she was going to kill the man, and the boyfriend thinks she’ll do it. They got a new lawyer. I think he put up bail.” I was talking about the man with the Haliburton.

Azzic was silent a minute, exhaling. “Rosato, what’s your angle here? You trying to distract me? Jerk me around? What?”

“Christ, I’m talking about a murder! Why don’t you try protecting and serving, for just one single minute? I won’t tell the other boys, I swear.”

“Don’t tell me I don’t do my job. I’m talkin’ about a murder, too! I’m talkin’ about a lady who would kill her boyfriend for twenty mil. That’s what I’m talking about, so excuse me if I don’t have time to take your crap.”

“It’s not crap. She could be a killer!” I shouted, but Azzic had already hung up.