The Arraignment

CHAPTER SEVEN

The next morning as I come through the office door, Harry is picking through pink phone message slips with an eye on one of the morning talk shows bleeping from the television set in the lobby. His briefcase is on the floor next to his feet, his coat still on, so I assume he has just arrived or is heading out again.

There are some phone messages in my slot on the reception desk, so I grab them.

On the screen, one of the network news anchors is being interviewed, a sagging form sitting there in his suspenders sans suit coat trying to look like a regular guy in his starched $3,000 shirt.

“I think he threw his back out giving the news a twist,” says Harry.

My partner has no use for what passes as journalism these days, particularly on the tube. According to Harry, they spend too much time in deep admiration for politicians who show particular skill in lying, so much so that they have now institutionalized the destruction of public ethics by elevating deceit to a statecraft called “spin.” It is no longer the lie that matters but the qualitative fashion in which it is told.

We now have a receptionist and file clerk rolled into one, though she is not in yet this morning. Marta comes in six hours a day around her school schedule to screen messages from our phone mail, knock correspondence into final form, and organize files so that we don’t drown in an avalanche of loose paper.

“So how did it go, the meeting with the widow?” Harry was in my office when I placed the phone call to Dana.

“Fine.”

“What did she want?”

“Some advice.” I thumb through my messages. There is one from Nathan Fittipaldi. Perhaps he’s checking up for Dana.

“No shoulder to cry on?” says Harry.

“That too.” I quickly change the subject to what little information I gleaned from Nick’s PDA.

“Let’s talk in the office.” Harry punches the power button on the TV’s remote, the screen goes dark, and we head into my office and close the door.

I fill him in on the information I got from Nick’s PDA.

“I did what you asked,” he says. “You know you can get most of that stuff online.” Harry is talking about corporate filings with the Secretary of State’s office up in the capital.

“Fortunately, Effie was here late last night so she was able to go online.” Harry still won’t use a computer, not even for word processing. In Harry’s arcane world, keyboards are for secretaries and typesetters. No self-respecting lawyer would touch one. I tell him he’s a dinosaur.

“Her name is Marta, not Effie,” I tell him.

“I like to think of her as Effie.” Harry has been on a kick lately, fiction noir, reaching back in time, the old mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, relishing a time when everything was black and white. He has taken to naming our secretary after Sam Spade’s girl Friday from The Maltese Falcon. One of these days I’m afraid I will come into the office to find the names of “Spade and Archer” in black letters across our front window.

“It’s fine with me as long as she doesn’t mind,” I tell him. “The laws of harassment being what they are.”

“She thinks it’s cute,” he tells me.

Marta is Latina, about five-foot-two, with a good sense of humor, an affable nature, and a work ethic that keeps her nose to the grindstone sixteen hours a day between school, work, and two kids. She is eager to learn and has taken charge of the office, even finding some available space for filing cabinets in one of the vacant cabanas two doors down from our office.

“She went online,” says Harry. “She’s getting good.”

“Maybe she could teach you,” I tell him.

Harry gives me a look as if to say “in your dreams.” “We managed to run down the corporate records for Jamaile Enterprises. Like the cops said, it’s a limited partnership. The stuff was filed a little over a year ago. Shows your Mr. Metz as the general partner. Nick shows up as one of the officers. It looks like Metz had control of the day-to-day operations of the business and that maybe Nick was an investor. It’s not really clear.”

I am wondering if maybe this was the investment that went sour, the one that Dana told me about. The reason she was broke.

“Any other names on the filings?”

“One. A Grace Gimble,” says Harry. He looks at the notebook in his hand and shrugs his shoulders like this doesn’t ring any bells. “She shows up on the statement of officers as the secretary.”

“Where was the business located?”

“It shows a P.O. box as the address of record.” He gives me this on a piece of paper.

“You can be sure the cops have already been there with a search warrant,” I say.

He nods. “Maybe one of the partners knows about it?”

I continue to finger absently through my phone messages. “Anything else?”

“Just the usual. Articles of incorporation containing a statement of purpose for the business.”

I look up at Harry.

“Like the cop said, import-export. That and any other lawful business they wanted to conduct. A lot of boilerplate from the form books,” says Harry.

“That’s it?”

“I went to the law library and had them run a Lexis-Nexis on Grace Gimble.” This is not something we have bought into on the office computer yet. “We found a couple of G. Gimbles, no Grace, and without more information we couldn’t tell if it was the right person.”

“What are you thinking?” I ask.

“About the woman?”

I nod.

“It could be a secretary, somebody with the firm. A signature of convenience they used for formation when they put the thing together.”

“That was my thought.”

“You want me to check it out? Call the firm?”

“No. Let’s hold off. It wouldn’t do to be asking the same questions the cops are.”

Harry considers this. “Why wouldn’t Nick have told you about this? Good friend that he was.” Harry looks at me, that cynical twinkle in his eye. “I mean if he was in business with Metz, what’s to hide? Unless they were importing contraband,” he says.

“Don’t even go there,” I tell him. “A lawyer like Nick sees a lot of people in a year. It could be he talked with Metz over the phone and signed the formation documents through the mail.”

“Right,” says Harry. “Nick did so much corporate work he just couldn’t remember.”

He has a point.

“Did you talk to her about it?” Harry is talking about Dana.

I shake my head.

“Why not?”

“The subject didn’t come up.”

He laughs. “What, she was too busy loosening the knot on your tie, toying with your belt?”

I look at him.

“I know, don’t tell me. I have no respect for those in mourning.”

I leave it as a statement of fact.

“What did she want?”

“Some information on an insurance policy.”

“There was insurance?” Harry’s eyebrows go up a notch.

“We don’t know.”

“Maybe you don’t,” says Harry. “But I have a feeling the erstwhile Mrs. Rush does, though it begs another question.”

“What’s that?”

“Why you? You do about as many insurance cases as Nick did corporate formations.”

“She thought she could trust me.”

“Can she?” Harry wants to know if I’m interested in more than just the legal issues involved.

“She also wanted to know what Nick and I talked about that morning, over coffee.”

“Ah. Did you tell her?”

“What I could remember. Not all of it.”

“And in between remembrances, this insurance thing came up?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of policy is it?”

“Like I said. We don’t know if there was a policy.”

“She doesn’t have a copy?” says Harry.

I shake my head.

“Don’t tell me,” he says. “They had a key-man policy out on him at the firm?” Harry is a quick study.

“If it’s in play.”

He starts to laugh, the kind of laugh he reserves for foolish acts by foolish people. “You told her you’d go over there and ask them about it?”

“Somebody has to. He left her high and dry. Besides, I have other reasons for doing it,” I tell him.

“I hope they involve a fee?”

“They might not.”

Harry looks at me. “You didn’t tell her you’d do it for free?”

“I didn’t tell her anything about fees. The problem is, Nick told me some things that I can’t discuss. They involve other people. Innocent people who could be drawn into this in ways that would be ugly.” The thought of Laura and her mother with reporters camped outside their door is not an image I wish to be responsible for. It is the reason I didn’t tell the cops, that and the fact that Nick had trusted me with his secret.

“You’ll have to trust me. There is a reason. It’s a good reason.” I look a Harry. He glances back at me, then nods.

“Nick made some bad investments,” I tell him.

“Yeah. In former wives.”

“He also made some other mistakes.”

Harry looks at me sensing this is the item I can’t talk about.

“You feel strongly about this?”

“I do.”

“All right. Fine. What do you need from me?”

“Thanks.”