Corrupt Practices (5 page)

“I hired a private investigator to look into Harmon’s . . . what happened to Harmon. He says it was murder. So the insurance company has to pay, right?”

She keeps focusing on the insurance issue and not on the fact that if Harmon really was murdered, his killer is still at large. It doesn’t matter. She’s sucked me in.

“Can I see the report?”

She hurries into another room and returns in all of ten seconds. She prepared for this. She hands me a sheaf of paper about two inches thick.

“I can’t read all of this right now.”

“You don’t have to. There’s a, what do you call it? Executive summary. It tells you all you need to know.”

When I see that the author is a man named Ray Guglielmi,
that’s
all I need to know. Guglielmi is a notorious conspiracy theorist who thrives on tabloid publicity and manufactured controversies. He once had his own reality TV show. Six months ago, he was convicted of illegally wiretapping his own clients, sentenced to prison, and stripped of his private investigator’s license.

“Layla, Guglielmi is a fraud. Publicity hungry. He’s in prison. He has no credibility at all.” I try to give the report back to her, but she jerks her hand away as if I’ve tried to prod her with a branding iron.

“That’s what Andrew and the other lawyers said. I don’t believe any of them. I thought maybe you’d be more open-minded.” “Andrew” is Andrew Macklin, the other named partner in our old firm.

“Andrew read this report?”

“He was the executor of Harmon’s estate, so he helped me with probate after Harmon died. I asked him to read it.”

“If he told you there’s no case, then there’s no case.”

“Please just keep an open mind and read the summary. Please.”

I take a deep breath, flip to the executive summary, and start reading. Layla keeps her eyes fixed on me the whole time. The report lists the reasons Guglielmi believes that Harmon was murdered: there was no suicide note; one of Harmon’s credit cards was missing and never recovered; a week before his death, Harmon told Layla that he feared for his life and that he’d bought a gun to protect himself; apart from the single bullet to Harmon’s head, the gun was fully loaded, more consistent with protection than suicide; although the medical examiner’s report claimed that Harmon was barricaded in his room at the beach house the night he died, there was no evidence of that; Harmon had prescriptions for a number of powerful antidepressants and pain killers, easily potent enough to kill him in a much less violent manner than a gunshot; the shell casing from the gun was found to the right of his body, even though the gun itself was found on his left; there were two sets of latent fingerprints on the gun, neither of them legible, leading to the conclusion that someone wiped the gun clean; Harmon’s eyeglasses had been found thirteen feet from his body behind a planter, too far to have been propelled by the force of the gunshot; the gunpowder residue on Harmon’s hands could have been caused by a postmortem placement of the gun in his hand and the firing of a second bullet; Harmon’s calendar was full for the next four months and included extensive travel plans, behavior inconsistent with suicidal thoughts.

Guglielmi raises some interesting question if his facts are accurate—and that remains a big
if
. Had Rich not told me he believed that Harmon was murdered, I would dismiss the report out of hand. But Rich added something vitally important—a motive. Still, I’m not about to take on a hopeless contingency case against an insurance company with an unlimited legal budget. And I’m not about to get entangled with Layla. I set the report down on the coffee table. “Sorry, but I agree with the others. There’s no civil case. Have you talked to the cops about reopening the criminal investigation?”

“Many times, and they won’t. They think I’m just a distraught widow. But I know in my heart that someone took my husband’s life.” She laughs bitterly. “Ironic, isn’t it? None of you who worked at the law firm will help me. Harmon always said the firm was a family.”

The firm
was
a family. She just wasn’t part of it.

“I should be going,” I say.

She grabs my wrist. Her eyes wobble nystagmically. “Are you seeing anyone? Because you and I should go out sometime. Maybe have coffee at Deanna Poulos’s place? You have my number, right? Of course you do, or you wouldn’t be here.” Desperate people emit a peculiar kind of energy, animating and crude. She glows with it.

“I’m flattered, Layla. But I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

“Oh, wow. OK.” She primps her hair to show she doesn’t care. “Thanks for at least listening. No one listens to me anymore.”

She once occupied a lofty station in life, but now she’s a commoner. I know the feeling.

An hour later, I’m sitting in the Century City office of Andrew Macklin, the other titular head of our law firm. In his late sixties, Macklin is short, round, and bald, with a grizzled beard. People at the law firm used to call him “Papa Smurf” behind his back.

He was Harmon’s equal in name only. Harmon brought in all the clients and wielded all the power. The clients that Macklin brought in were unsavory—a meat packing plant in trouble with the FDA, a small union pension fund with ties to local mobsters, a sleazy Russian entrepreneur. But Harmon had a soft spot for Macklin. They’d left a large downtown law firm together and started Macklin & Cherry in the late eighties. So Harmon protected him, even though a lot of the younger partners resented Macklin for not carrying his weight.

“What can I do for you?” he says in a gruff voice that has never lost its Chicago twang. “Like I told you over the phone, I don’t have much time.” I’m sure it’s posturing—I suspect he has nothing to do.

I tell him about Rich’s arrest and my meeting with Layla and their belief that Harmon was murdered.

“You can’t trust anything that either of them tells you,” he says. “Layla is a delusional narcissist and always has been. As for Richard Baxter, he worked for me on some Assembly transactions. I had to bail him out of malpractice over and over. He couldn’t draft his way out of a paper bag. He’s a salesman, not a lawyer. His assessment of a situation is worthless.” He’s not quite telling the truth—
he
worked for
Rich
on Assembly matters, not the other way around. Harmon insisted on it because Macklin didn’t have anything else to do. It must have been the low point of his career.

“What about this resurrected idea that Harmon was murdered?” I ask. “Layla has a private investigator’s report showing that—”

“That Guglielmi report? Pure fiction. When Layla first sent it to me, I showed it to an ex-detective friend of mine from the Ventura PD. He laughed out loud when he saw who wrote it and laughed even louder when he got down reading it. The thing is full of holes.” He rattles off the flaws in the Guglielmi report as if he just spoke with his detective friend an hour ago: Not all suicides leave a note. One of Harmon’s daughters likely used his credit card, probably with her father’s permission—he was always buying them things if they promised not to tell their mother. Harmon might have told Layla that his life was in danger, but that’s not inconsistent with suicide. He probably shot himself because he believed it a more manly way to die. He had gun residue on his hands. There was only one shell casing found at the scene, so there couldn’t have been two shots as Guglielmi suggests.

Then he says something that shocks me. “Harmon Cherry was a selfish son of a bitch. And a traitor. He abandoned his wife and children by committing the most horrendous act you can imagine. He didn’t even have the decency to secure their future. In the end, he thought the firm belonged to him alone, the rest of us be damned. It didn’t belong just to him. I started the place with him, nurtured it, but he forgot that. As we grew, the other partners, guys like you, helped build it, and he forgot that, too. The only thing that Harmon did alone was destroy the place and damage his family beyond repair.” He stares at me, his eyes glistening, his lips curled in a half snarl.

I look back at him, speechless. Andrew Macklin was bitter about a lot of things, but never about Harmon Cherry.

“Do yourself a favor,” he says. “Avoid Layla Cherry and Richard Baxter like the Ebola virus. Let them hire other attorneys to handle their problems, attorneys who aren’t tainted by Harmon’s insanity. Harmon is dead. The law firm is dead. Put it all behind you.”

I spend the rest of the day on the balcony of my condo studying the criminal charges against Rich. I read through documents and conduct computer searches until the sun goes down and the ocean wind picks up and forces me inside. Just after nine o’clock, my security bell rings. It’s Deanna. As soon as I open the door she rushes in and wraps her arms around me.

“I need you tonight, Parker,” she whispers.

Since our early days at the law firm, we’ve had sporadic trysts like this, except when one of us was seriously involved with someone else. We’ve mutually agreed that these sessions aren’t romantic, but rather expressions of friendship, acts of generosity. All my other relationships with women have been brief, born out of lust and interred by boredom. Intimacy means revealing my past, which I want to bury forever. As for Deanna, she claims to have three kinds of lovers—feral men with big cocks who fuck her hard, pixyish women with soft lips and a tender touch, and me.

“You’re the only man I’ve been with who eats pussy as well as a woman,” is how she describes my presence in the mix.

When we began dating during our first year at the firm, I thought that I could fall in love with this strong, ambitious, irreverent woman with eyes so dark they could spin your insides around. But then I found out that she was also sleeping with the woman who worked at the lobby gift shop. When I ended our relationship, Deanna was truly baffled.

“I didn’t think women counted,” she said in all seriousness, and despite myself I burst out laughing.

Improbably, we remained friends. I could manage it only because Deanna seemed to be completely without malice. And then, six months after our breakup, we were working late and ended up going home together. The same thing happened several months later, and the pattern has continued to this day.

She remains an unsolvable puzzle. Her devout Greek Orthodox parents disowned her when she came out, yet she travels to Greece every other year and meets up with them on neutral territory, hallowed ground. She’s a militant supporter of gay rights, yet had no qualms about representing the openly homophobic Sanctified Assembly (“That’s what lawyers do in an adversary system, Parker!”) She got more pleasure out of back-alley discovery fights than any attorney I’ve ever met, yet gave up the profession to open a coffee shop. She spent her legal career representing the powerful, yet decried injustice against the weak. She shows equal disdain for laws criminalizing recreational drugs and laws funding welfare for the employable and able-bodied. I once saw her drop ecstasy at an all-night rave party and then show up in court the next morning clear-headed and articulate.

We undress and lie on the couch. I inhale her familiar scent of verbena and coriander, now leavened with the aroma of roasted coffee. I trace little circles on her ribcage and breasts and thighs with my fingertips. When I’ve gone down on her long enough to bring her to the edge, she pulls my head away with both hands and makes sure to kiss me deeply, and then I slide into her. Afterwards, we lie in silence, arms and legs entwined, bodies pressed together spoon-like. I find myself measuring her evolution from lithe young woman of twenty-five; to restless thirty-year-old who’d just gotten her first tattoo, a scarlet hummingbird on her lower back where she could hide it under her business suits; to neo-punk entrepreneur whose body is pigmented with colorful swirls, whose thighs and ass are dimpling. I wonder if she, too, feels the leaden solitude that I’ve lately begun to feel after these encounters.

She rouses herself and sits up. “I didn’t ask about your meeting with Rich.”

I go over the charges against him and tell her about the drugs and the cash.

“Rich doesn’t do drugs.”

“He sure looks like he does.”

We’re quiet for a while.