The Jezebel Remedy (35 page)

“No worries, Brett,” Lisa said. “She was very considerate and since you were with a client, I didn't want to interrupt you. I'm fine. She handled things as she should've.”

“Oh, okay. Excellent.” He turned to the older couple who'd been waiting along with Lisa. “How long you been here, Max?”

“Twenty minutes,” the man replied.

“Longer,” his wife added tartly.

“Here's the deal. Mrs. Stone is a rare bird and hotshot lawyer from Martinsville, and I very much need to speak with her, been trying to for weeks, so if you'll give me about ten minutes to take care of our particular business, your visit will be on the house, free as free can be. And, we'll pay for your parking.”

The man grunted, but he was, like most people, charmed by Brooks. “We both know there's no cost to park in your lot anyhow,” he said, suppressing a chuckle. “But we'll take the free meeting.”

“Ten minutes,” the lady declared. “After that, we start chargin' you. I'm keepin' track.” She tapped her wristwatch, her finger bony and misshapen, the knuckles gnarled.

Brooks's office was enormous and remarkably meticulous, the furnishings expensive and vaguely retro, especially the chairs, the feel that of a discreet, high-end 1960s private lounge where scads of arrangements were brokered off the record and powerful people twisted arms and gunned dry martinis. There was a signed Dalí print—probably fake, like most of them, Lisa guessed—an original Chagall, and behind Brooks's sleek desk a LeRoy Neiman painting of a boxing match, vivid men in colorful battle, nothing too precise in the details, but the scene somehow exact and true, convincing.

“I like your office,” she said. “I have a cheap reproduction of Blind Justice, a framed Monet poster and my diplomas on the wall. I didn't realize you're interested in art.”

“Oh, hell, I'm really not.” Brooks was sitting beside her in a chair, his legs crossed. He was wearing black cowboy boots with intricate tooling, the toes overlaid with silver. “I buy things when I'm in Vegas. Usually I'm about half in the bag when I visit the gallery, which is strategically located near the casino at Caesars. Melissa Robinson—a lawyer who
does
know her art—told me the Dalí's a counterfeit, that I overpaid by several thousand for the Chagall and the LeRoy Neiman is ‘frat boy rubbish.' But I like them, so I bought them, and hang them here so I can take a tax deduction.” He flashed a lopsided grin, pulled a cuff farther down the boot's shaft. “The Taubman hasn't been pounding on my door offering to take them off my hands, that's for sure.”

“Thanks for seeing me,” Lisa said.

“Happy to. Given the story in yesterday's
Lawyers Weekly
, I'm assuming I'm going to be disappointed as to the reason you're here. I'm guessing this is business, not Bahamian.”

The reference to their trip caused her to involuntarily sit stiffer, her back jammed tight against the chair's support. “Strictly business,” she answered immediately, stammering slightly. “Yeah,” she added pointlessly.

“Ah, well, you can't blame me for asking. But there's no need to make you uncomfortable by revisiting that weekend. As they say in junior high, I'm pleased we can still be friends.” Self-assured as he was, Brooks seemed slightly uneasy, clumsy, genuinely disheartened. He
awkwardly slapped the chair arms with both hands when he finished speaking, and it made her like him even more. “How can I help with your dreadful lawsuit? What do I need to say about Nassau?”

“My problem is discovery, Brett. It's amazing how Joe and I sat and debated this, and it seemed so distant. I just knew we'd have hearing after hearing, skirmishes and grinding miniwars, and this would take years to resolve, and now, damn, we've got about three days left to answer under oath tons of questions that put me in a major bind, and as we both understand, there aren't any effective do-overs with interrogatories. We're locked in once Joe submits his answers. There's that pesky perjury concern too.”

“I see your problem. Basic discovery and you're already in a straitjacket. I'm sure they asked you to list all witnesses and the names of all people with knowledge of events, the standard questions.”

“The routine interrogatories, but given our answer to their counterclaim they've also specifically asked us to list who was with me in the Bahamas. Just like that, the case went from zero to a hundred.”

“Well, technically, your husband's answering the discovery, and he's telling the truth as he perceives it, so he's covered.”

“Yeah, but he's claiming I was with M. J. Gold. You don't have to be Learned Hand to see where that leaves us—they'll depose M.J. and me, and we'll have to lie. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. M.J. will claim she was with me and enjoy every minute of it—she's cold-blooded under pressure and doesn't have a very high regard for the legal system. But I figure there's at least a decent chance they'll learn you were there, so they'll get M.J. and me swearing on the record and then drop proof of you and me in Nassau, and suddenly we're in a world of hurt. I'm not only a liar but a cheater as well, and Joe gets hammered twice, legally and maritally. The final piece of my unfortunate puzzle is that while M.J. kept a fairly low profile the weekend we were gone, she used her credit card, and her other phones will show they were active in Raleigh, not the Caribbean. Our cover wasn't intended to…to fool anyone but Joe.”

“Once they start digging, it won't be difficult to establish that we were together. Passports, immigration, TSA and airport security tapes aren't our friends. The seat belt fuzz and mini-pretzel constables might even recall us; it hasn't been that long.”

Lisa cocked her head, puzzled.

“The flight attendants. They're so tiresome and redundant about the seat belts, as if they're going to do any good when you plummet from thirty thousand feet and bust the ground and the plane fireballs. It's a personal issue with me. Once, I dared unbuckle before the
ding
at the gate and almost was barred from my connecting flight.”

“Oh,” she said, barely listening to Brooks's practiced rant. “But right, they might remember us. I think strategically we have to proceed under the assumption they have the truth on you and me and can prove it.”

“What can I do to help?” Brooks asked. “I'm happy to lie so long as I'm not under oath and don't jeopardize my license. I'm just not positive exactly what lie helps and what lie hurts.”

“Well, basically, I'd appreciate it if you could stall and delay for as long as possible, should you become involved. We didn't expect to have to show our hand this quickly.”

“Joe's clean, right? Hell, he's the most ethical lawyer there is.”

“Absolutely,” Lisa answered emphatically. “We have a few tricks of our own. Well, we have one trick. Maybe. If we can locate her in the damn top hat. Mostly, though, we need time to regroup and figure things out.”

“I can definitely buy time if I'm subpoenaed or they attempt to depose me.” He nodded decisively. “I know better than most not to believe the case that's tried in the press, but it sounds like they've got a couple big guns. If the will Joe gave the clerk is a forgery and benefits him, that's brutal, Lisa. I don't envy your choices when it comes to how to handle this.”

“I hope I don't have to choose,” she said. “More important, I needed to make sure, well, where you figured in all this.”

Brooks recoiled. He scowled. “Meaning?”

“I had to make certain you weren't a part of some kind of plot. Sorry. The stress can make you crazy. You start hallucinating. You question everything.”

“No need to worry about me,” Brooks promised her. “I can't believe you'd even consider the possibility. I'd sure hope you could look back and tell my…friendship was completely genuine. Hard to fake head-over-heels. I'll do all I can for you.”

Two days later he phoned Lisa on her cell. She was in her car, driving to see a disabled client about drafting a power of attorney, still making the occasional house call. “The damn process hound just arrived with a dep notice for me in your case,” he said. “It's conceivable they sent it simply because my office prepared the renouncement, but I wouldn't count on it being so insignificant. I'd say that's a message from Benecorp, wouldn't you? And I'd also say you were tailed to my office. Sorry, Lisa.” Brooks sounded concerned. “I threw the damn notice in the trash with him standing there, but we both understand I've now been served and the clock's ticking.”

The morning following Brooks's call, the Stones met Phil Anderson and Robert Williams at Williams's conference room. Anderson had brought along a computer wizard named Derek Hansen so he could explain his opinions about the bogus VanSandt will in the clerk's office. When Lisa and Joe entered the room, he was busy with an iPad, and he looked up and acknowledged them only after several taps and slides on the tablet's screen. He initially focused on Lisa, stuck to the gaze longer than was mannerly and rotated his head several degrees clockwise, delicioused, not bothering to conceal his admiration. “Good morning,” he said. He stood and stretched across a mahogany table to shake hands with her and Joe. He was wearing a seersucker jacket, khaki pants, a red tie and brown tasseled loafers. Lisa guessed he couldn't be more than twenty years old.

“Derek's the best in the business,” Anderson stated after they were through with introductions and were all seated around the table, files and papers in front of everyone except Hansen.

“You're not what I expected,” Joe noted, directing the comment to Hansen.

“My age?” Hansen asked, his tone neutral.

“No, actually, I'm pleased our expert is young—it's definitely a young man's game. Truth be told, I expected a skateboard and a backpack, maybe a piercing and sullen bad posture.”

“That is the stereotype, isn't it?” Hansen replied. “But I'm not about that. Being a slacker's stupid, and it's even dumber to think your talents
somehow justify antisocial behavior and hobo hygiene. You can be brilliant and bathe, can't you?” He was intense, spoke forcefully. “It's my own little crusade.”

“How old are you?” Lisa asked.

“I'm twenty-two. But I've already graduated from Virginia Tech.” He paused for effect. “The doctoral program at Tech. Strictly speaking, I'm
Doctor
Hansen. I brought a CV with me if you'd care to have a copy. How old are you, Mrs. Stone?”

“I was born in 1966.”

“I wasn't asking as rhetorical payback. You're rockin' hot for your age.” He turned toward Joe. “No offense meant, sir,” he said, almost in a monotone. “It's a compliment, not a gambit. I have a steady girlfriend.”

Joe smiled, amused. “None taken. After two decades, I'm accustomed to it. Plus, I agree with you.”

“So tell us about the will,” Williams said. “I'm anxious to hear how a fake could be substituted into the system.”

“Sure. You hardly need me—this is a rung above
Computers for Dummies
. Here's the deal. The VanSandt document appears as a binary image on the terminal in the clerk's office. The software package is basic—Adobe PDF, probably the same program all of you run on your laptops. The very efficient Mrs. Helms has an RMS server there in her office. So does every other clerk's office in the state. Her whole package is provided by Richmond and, like I just mentioned, the components are uniform throughout Virginia perhaps with a few exceptions that don't concern us.”

“Okay,” Joe said. “I'm assuming, then, that you'd need to access her server, where, for lack of a better term, everything's stored.”

“Correct,” Hansen said.

Williams was sitting with his arms folded. “How do you do that? Gain access?”

“I can tell you how I did it,” Hansen replied. “To obtain control, you simply need full administrative privileges. You need to be able to log on as a user who can access the entire system.”

“Makes sense,” Joe agreed.

“I obtained a roster from the Supreme Court's main website, sort of an organizational chart, then manually—yep, manually, ladies
and gentlemen, that's how easy it was—entered a few shots at a password—”

“Wait,” Lisa interrupted. “How'd you get into the system in the first place?”

“I used a rogue wireless access point to breach Mrs. Helms's system from her office, but if you have the password, you can use any terminal or computer in the network.” Hansen waved his hand dismissively. “Seriously, Mrs. Stone, most ninth graders with an iPad understand the theory. This isn't complicated. I assumed the ‘executive secretary' to the Supreme Court would be loaded for bear, so I did about ten variations of his name and birth date—which I found elsewhere online—and presto, I'm in the system. Pitiful security. Completely lame. If I don't luck into the combination manually, no problem—I've created my own program called Prospector that will automatically attempt thousands of variations of a name and numbers. Here, I didn't even need it.”

“So,” Williams said, “in effect you track down the people at the top of an organization via public information, then guess at their passwords to gain access? Or use your program to run different possibilities?”

“Precisely,” Hansen said. “The whole security effort is such a sieve—I could've also manipulated the system to send a password to my e-mail. Really a beast there, guys: Everybody's e-address is their first initial and last name at Virginia Supreme Court. Clever and complex. It'd take years to crack that masterpiece.”

Anderson smiled. “In a sense, there's not much out there to steal or access, Derek. Courts are all about transparency, and there's a great deal of redundancy in the system. It's like tapping into a phone book or a road map.”