The photographs were back in the box and I was looking through one of the file folders when Detective Griffin snapped awake with a gasp. He blinked at me and grunted and turned back again to his paper.
“Hey,” he said after a few moments. “Can you believe this new stuff about Roseanne? Jesus. Listen to this.”
I listened. I figured I owed him that.
15
“MAYBE I’M NOT A LAWYER,” said Dr. Louis Saltz. “But it seems to me that until we find that crooked accountant, Stocker, we can’t really know the value of our case.” Saltz was a tall, gangly man with a long face and hairy arms who had a way of seeming to have figured out everything, which I guess is good in a doctor but which just then I was finding annoying.
“That’s true to a point,” I said. “Stocker collated the figures and made the projections that we claim were fraudulent. If we could put him on the stand and if he testified that the defendants told him to cook the books, we’d win for sure. We’d get punitive damages, too.”
“Exactly,” said Saltz, with a rich smile directed around the room. “We’d wipe the bastards out.”
We were in the conference room shared by all of Vimhoff’s tenants, the same ratty little place in which I had deposed Mrs. Osbourne and ruined Winston Osbourne’s life. In the room was a narrow formica table and walls of cheap particleboard bookshelves stocked with accounting journals and tax codes and sets of law books now out of date. Ellie used to spend hours each week updating our sets from West Publishing, from Collier, from BNA, replacing the pocket parts, slipping in the new pages, lining up the most recent volumes, making sure our Shepard’s Citations were absolutely current. But after Guthrie left and invoices went unpaid, one by one our contracts were cancelled and the updates stopped coming. A legal library falls out of date with a startling quickness. The fear of having our crucial arguments trumped by a recent case not in our now dated law books sent us scurrying to the Bar Association library, where for five dollars a day we could wander like ghosts around the association’s volumes with the rest of those second-rate lawyers too poor to own their own books. We could have sold what books we had for a small amount, but we kept them out of vanity – to the untrained eye these volumes gave the conference room a lawyerly sheen. Of course, when we met with other lawyers we always arranged to meet in their offices because to another lawyer, familiar with the volumes, our incomplete sets proclaimed with utter clarity our financial despair. But it wasn’t other lawyers I was meeting with that afternoon, it was Saltz and five of his fellow limited partners, there to discuss the settlement offer bestowed upon us by the good graces of William Prescott III.
“The problem, Lou,” I said, “is that we aren’t going to find Stocker before the trial. We’re not the only ones looking for him, there’s also the FBI and the IRS. The guy skipped town with other people’s money and his only goal in life now is not to be found.”
I looked at Saltz and then turned my gaze on the other men in the meeting. They were all white, middle-aged guys with so much money they couldn’t keep from throwing it away, which was exactly the state to which I aspired. Along with Saltz were another doctor, an owner of a plumbing supply company, a jewelry seller named Lefkowitz, and two partners in some sort of import/export thing that I never quite could figure out. There were two other plaintiffs who couldn’t make the meeting but had given their proxies to Saltz. I was trying to convince them all to accept Prescott’s settlement offer. Prescott had told me the check was already cut. If my plaintiffs said yes that afternoon, I could have the forty thou in our account by Tuesday.
“And even if we find Stocker,” I continued, hammering home my point, “we don’t know what he’ll say. He could bury us.”
“No way,” said Saltz. “The guy’s crooked as a corkscrew.”
“Can’t we just say how dishonest their accountant was?” asked Benny Lefkowitz, the jeweler. “Isn’t that enough to prove they lied on their projections?”
“What he did in other situations doesn’t prove he cooked the books here,” I said. “The judge will never let the jury hear it.”
“Let’s cut through the bullshit,” said Leon Costello, one of the import/export guys. He was a fat, well-dressed man with some sort of dragon ring on his left pinky. “What are you thinking here, Victor? I mean, with your percentage you got the most at stake, right? What do you say we do?”
“My gut says jump at it,” I said. “If we go to trial now, we’ll probably lose. When they were only offering five grand I was ready to roll the dice. But now they’ve put some real money on the table.”
“If their position is so strong, why offer anything?” asked Lefkowitz.
“It’s the way big firms work,” I said. “They bill the hell out of a case until it gets near to trial and then they settle. That way they suck out all the money they can without ever risking a loss.”
“I don’t think we can make this decision until we find Stocker,” said Saltz. “Or at least give it one more shot. What’s to lose? If we don’t find him by the trial we’ll just take the money.”
“If we don’t agree quickly, Lou,” I said, “they’re going to pull the offer.”
“What was that?” said the other doctor, a podiatrist.
“They are offering us this amount so they don’t have to spend the money to prepare for trial,” I explained. “If they have to spend that money, then they might decide to screw the offer and try the thing. And if they do, I believe they’re going to beat us.”
“That’s not fair,” said the podiatrist, a stricken look on his face. “They offer us a hundred and twenty thousand, that’s what we should get.”
“The only way to make sure we get it is to agree to the settlement now.”
“How much time do you think we have?” asked Lefkowitz.
“Not much, a few days, maybe a week. But they could pull the offer at any time.”
“All right,” said Costello. “I heard enough.”
“Maybe we should talk a bit privately, without you, Victor,” said Saltz. “Is that all right?”
“Sure,” I said, standing. “You’re the clients.”
I stood in the hallway outside the room and again mentally spent the settlement money. With the fifteen-thousand-dollar retainer for the Chester Concannon case we were almost current with our bills and had paid Ellie what we owed her. We had even gotten Vimhoff off our backs by paying rent. My share of the forty thousand would be enough to start getting my financial life in order, to almost bring me current on my student loans, to even start paying back my father. Down the line there would be more money from CUP for my defense of Concannon, not to mention the fees I would make on the Valley Hunt Estates deal with the Bishop brothers, from whom that very day I had accepted the outside counsel spot, with enough work promised to keep Derringer and Carl going for half a year. Oh man, yes, things were looking up.
I had played the meeting perfectly, I thought. Saltz was my biggest problem, seeking as he was the big hit, but I figured the others would each take the ten thousand and run. As soon as I told them of the offer, I knew it was as if the money was already in their pockets. Then, at the end of the meeting, I raised the possibility of the offer being withdrawn, as if a pickpocket were reaching into their wallets and pulling out ten one-thousand dollar bills. These guys didn’t build their fortunes by giving back ten grand here and there. At last I was starting to learn the secrets of the rich: whenever you have a chance for money grab it, quickly, clutch it to your chest as if it were life itself. That’s how the rich got rich and that’s how I would get rich too. Their signed releases were my first step. I had already instructed Ellie to prepare the documents so as to waste as little time as possible and they were now in the conference room, in a maroon folder, sitting in the middle of the table like a glorious centerpiece.