The Death of Distant Stars, A Legal Thriller

by Deborah Hawkins

  He was silent in the face of her fury, as if observing and calculating the depths of her emotion. Finally he observed, “You didn’t grow up here.”

  “No, Tom did. He wanted to come home after law school. I’m from Atlanta.”

  Hugh nodded. “You’ve got a little bit of an accent left. I think mine’s all gone. My Boston Catholic father was unmerciful in schooling it out of us. I grew up two hours north of you in Chattanooga. Are Tom’s parents alive? Did he have brothers and sisters? Did you and Tom have any children?”

  “We didn’t have any children.” But not for lack of trying, she thought bitterly. “He was an only child, and his parents passed a few years before he died. I’m glad they weren’t here to see Tom die.”

  “How do you know Rick Peyton?” Hugh asked.

  “Through Paul Curtis.”

  A flicker of recognition danced through the otherwise inscrutable eyes behind the small, thick lens. “I know Paul. Fine attorney. Yet to beat me, though. Like everyone else.” He grinned.

  “Do you always win?”

  “No, and you don’t always lose.”

  “But most of the time.”

  “And most of the time our firm gets a favorable result for our clients. No one can outspend us, and no one can out litigate us. And we are careful about the cases we take. Obviously thorough screening increases our chances of winning. What did Paul say about me?”

  Most successful trial attorneys had huge egos, but Hugh Mahoney’s was the biggest she had encountered, and he wanted it stroked. “I’m going to give you an honest answer.”

  “Those are the only kind I like.”

  “Paul said, ‘You won’t like Hugh Mahoney. He’s the nastiest, meanest plaintiff’s attorney on earth. But if he takes your case, he’ll fight for Tom and for you like a rabid pitbull.’”

  The minute the words were out of her mouth, she regretted being that frank. But Hugh threw back his head and laughed until his whole body shook. Finally he looked at her again. “I’m delighted by that description. And do you dislike me?”

  Kathryn thought of the ostentatious champagne party probably still going strong in the conference room. Above all, she thought of Hugh’s wedding-ringed hand draped over the blonde as Mark Kelly had introduced her.

  Hugh spoke before she could. “Never mind. I see the answer on your face. You’ll be happy to know you’re in the majority. When I tried cases, I lost a few because jurors don’t like me. I think I’m just a teddy-bear of a guy, but jurors find me abrasive. I take depositions and plan case strategy, but I put the appealing guys like Mark Kelly out front in the courtroom to wow the jurors. Juries really like your friend Paul, too. He wins when he isn’t up against me and my partners.”

  Although he was being affable about her opinion, she knew she’d blown it. She felt as if a job interview was over, and she was about to be shown the door.

  And she was exactly right. Hugh unfolded his six imposing feet from his leather chair and stood up, extending his hand across his desk. She rose, too, and returned the handshake automatically.

  “Thanks for coming by. I’ll give your case some thought. I need to talk to Rick some more about Myrabin. It’s not a drug that’s on my current hit list. But maybe it should be. As I said, we do a lot of research before we agree to take on a case. I forgot to ask when your husband died. Is there a statute of limitations problem?”

  “Possibly. He died on June 18, 2012. Dr. Myers told me about Myrabin in mid-July, so I have to file by July 15 of this year.”

  Hugh nodded. “There are a lot of good plaintiff’s attorneys in Southern California. I’ve worked with most of them. Best of luck to you, Mrs. Andrews.”

  She felt like an intruder being escorted off the premises as he walked her back to the lobby, shook hands once more, and pressed the down call button to summon the elevator. He turned back to the party as she entered the lift; and, just as she’d guessed, the festivities had ramped up into an even higher gear. The sound of champagne corks had been replaced with the intoxicating smell of filet mignon, making her empty stomach rumble. She knew that if Hugh had planned to take her on as a client, he would have invited her back to the party to chat and get to know her. Being shunted into the elevator depressed her. Although everything about Hugh and his grandiose firm turned her stomach, her lawyer’s instincts said that he was the one who could make Wycliffe swing slowly in the wind. Well, she’d call Paul later tonight and tell him she was back to square one on finding an attorney to tell Tom’s agonizing story. She saw Mark Kelly come forward to welcome Hugh back to the festivities with a glass of something that looked like scotch. As the elevator doors began to slide together, she saw Mark cast a curious eye in her direction while Hugh shook his head “no.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Friday, January 31, 2014, Coronado Island, San Diego, California

  At midnight, Hugh Mahoney stood in his bedroom, sipping scotch and staring out at the night-dark Pacific. He had bought the oceanfront Crown Manor more than ten years ago in the fire sale that had been Larry Lawrence’s estate. Lawrence, a Chicago real estate developer with a taste for pretty women and a warmer climate, had bought the Manor, just down the street from his other Coronado investment, the Hotel Del, so he could keep his eyes on his prize. But his third wife, who managed the hotel, loathed the Manor; so it stood empty until said third marriage went belly up because he was having an affair with his soon-to-be-fourth wife. He was forced to renovate the Manor for his new bride because his Rancho Sante Fe mansion had become the property of Wife Number Three.

  Hugh had pulled down the brick wall that Larry had built around the sprawling house to ensure the privacy of visiting presidents. Like Larry, Hugh had vast sums to contribute to presidential campaign war chests; but unlike Larry, Hugh rarely entertained the victors themselves. No, Hugh would much rather take depositions where he could watch corporate executives squirm, hour after hour, under the onslaught of his surgically precise questions, designed to reveal where the bastards had hidden their shareholders’ money. Then he preferred to come home to his scotch and this breath-taking view of the infinite Pacific. Hugh Sean Mahoney was no longer the boy who had grown up poor and land-locked in Tennessee. He was an attorney as powerful as the vast black ocean stretching into the dark night. He was the majority owner of an eight-hundred-attorney firm with offices in San Diego, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, D.C., and London. And in the past six months, his attorneys had won verdicts in excess of three hundred million dollars in securities and pharmaceutical class actions. Mark’s verdict today had been the cherry on top. Hugh smiled as he sipped his scotch. Under his leadership, Goldstein, Miller, Mahoney & Fitzgerald had become unbeatable. He had only to pick his next target, and it would fall at his feet.

  But Wycliffe Pharmaceutical was not going to be his next target. Although very little penetrated the armor of his invincibility these days, meeting Kathryn Andrews had unsettled him unlike any meeting he had ever experienced. But his unease didn’t come from her beauty, although Hugh was a connoisseur of beautiful women; and Kathryn’s shoulder-length, honey-blonde hair and almond-shaped, hazel-green eyes and perfect oval face ranked her at the top of the beautiful scale. He was equally intrigued by the way she carried her lean, lithe five-eight frame. Her grace and poise said she must have been a dancer at some point in her life. She was the only woman he had ever met who could look elegant in a cheap gray suit.

  No, Hugh was uneasy because meeting Kathryn Andrews had brought him face-to-face with an uncomfortable truth: becoming the most powerful lawyer of his generation had stripped his heart of the ability to feel anything. He could remember the days at Vanderbilt when his relationship with Elizabeth “Buffy” Chapin, a banking heiress from Atlanta, had been brand new and when he had still believed himself to be the luckiest man in the world because she was in love with him. And he could remember their wedding day and the days his children, Elise and Erin, had been born. He could remember how full o
f love he’d been on those days as he’d vowed to be the best husband and father on earth. But his desire to hunt Big Corporate Game and to bring home million-dollar verdicts had defeated all of those vows. Little by little, the words “I love you” became empty, their meaning wiped out by his insatiable lust for power and money.

  He had spent his marriage on the road, deposing witnesses. When he had been at home, he hadn’t slept with his wife often because he had been up at all hours planning trial strategy. Without complaint, Buffy had raised Elise and Erin alone and filled the rest of her days with volunteer work for charity in return for the privilege of spending as much of Hugh’s money and her own as she pleased. Her mother had lived that life, and Buffy had felt entitled to the same. Now asleep down the hall in her own room, she never raised an objection to Hugh’s absences, or to his many affairs, including the current one with second-year associate, Logan Avery. After so many years, Buffy was as devoid of feeling as he was.

  Elise, who was now twenty-nine, had always been closer to her mother. Even if Buffy was comfortable with their arrangement, Hugh knew Elise judged him for being unfaithful. On the other hand, Erin, who was twenty-seven, idolized him even if he had missed most of her birthdays and her high school graduation because he had been nailing major corporations to the wall ostensibly on behalf of their shareholders, large and small, although in truth his purpose had been to fill his firm’s coffers even higher with the spoils of attorneys’ fees from class-action victories.

  He watched the vast Pacific, reduced to nothing but curling shadows at low tide, lap the wide ribbon of gray sand at land’s end and willed himself not to let meeting Kathryn disturb his comfortable, numb peace. Sometimes people come into your life who remind you of what you have lost, or have never had, or have never been. He sipped his scotch and smelled the soft briny air drifting through the open windows and remembered how her fierce anger over her husband’s unjust death had made him realize that his own heart was nothing more than a dark, empty hole. His empty heart twisted as he remembered the way her hazel eyes had flashed fire as she’d vented her rage at Wycliffe Pharmaceutical. Her husband had been more than lucky to have been loved like that. He wished someone could yet love him that much. But that was impossible. Women like Kathryn Andrews had much more depth than the wet-behind-the-ears associates like Logan, who were Hugh’s willing prey.

  Hugh didn’t respect the women who gave in to his advances. Their real aphrodisiac was money. He had grown up lanky, plain, and spectacled, driving a Dodge clunker of a car. It was not until his bank account swelled, and he owned a Porsche and a Mercedes that women like Logan flocked to him in droves. It was an important lesson: a man with a paunch, coke-bottle glasses, and a wedding ring could have all the sex he wanted if he had the bucks. Women with perfect bodies and vacant hearts didn’t take to “poor.” And Hugh knew way too much about “poor.”

  Although it was midnight, his phone began to ring. He looked to make sure it wasn’t Logan. She’d been upset because he hadn’t wanted to continue the victory party in a suite at the Westgate. Thankfully, she’d taken “no” for an answer. It was his older brother Patrick calling from San Francisco.

  “You’re up late, little brother.” Hugh could still hear the faint purr of southern vowels in Patrick’s speech. He smiled at being called “little brother” by his sixty-four-year-old sibling.

  “As are you. Up late worrying about some slimy plaintiff’s attorney alleging you all have infringed their software patent?”

  “There probably aren’t going to be any software patents after the Supreme Court hears Alice v. CLS Bank at the end of March.” Patrick was the general counsel of Fisher Technology Group, the multimillion dollar software-development child of twenty-nine-year-old, San Fran boy-wonder, Marty Fisher.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “No reason you should. It doesn’t involve a drug that has killed people or manipulating corporate assets to screw the shareholders. I keep Marty and the accountants on the straight and narrow. Believe me, little brother, they know you are out there lurking.”

  Hugh smiled. He loved to hear that Corporate America was terrified of him. “So why the call? Are you going to be in town?” He hoped so. Patrick was the one person with whom he could be his genuine self.

  “No, unfortunately. I’m heading over to London with Marty in the morning for a week-long summit with ten or twelve international software development firms. I just called to congratulate you on the Besser case. Stunning victory.”

  “Thanks. We had a big party at the firm tonight. Wish you’d been there.”

  “I’ll take a rain check until the next time Marty sends me south. I actually thought you’d be holed up at the hotel with that ‘friend’ of yours.”

  “You don’t have to beat around the bush. You know the arrangement Buffy and I have.”

  “Yeah, sorry. I just feel awkward about it. All that Catholic upbringing and Saturday afternoon confessions are still hiding inside me somewhere. Doesn’t it ever feel odd to be sleeping with someone your daughter’s age?”

  Patrick’s words stopped Hugh in his tracks. He thought for a moment. “No and yes.”

  “How no and yes?”

  “No, because I don’t think about the age gap when I’m with someone I’m attracted to. It’s there, but I don’t think about it. Yes, because when it’s over and I try to give them something to make up for ending it, I thank God Elise and Erin would never sleep with an old guy like me who ought to know better.”

  “That’s honest, at least.”

  “It is. But I have to confess I met a woman today, late thirties, early forties, taffy-blonde, with melting hazel eyes, who makes all the rest pale in comparison.”

  “I believe you,” Patrick said. “Your voice changes when you talk about her. Who is she?”

  “A Harvard graduate working at the public defenders’ office, of all unlikely places. She and her late husband wanted to ‘make a difference’ by being PD’s.”

  “And are they ‘making any difference’?” His soft sarcastic vowels said it all.

  “Of course not. She’s thoroughly disillusioned with that notion.”

  “What about the husband? Does he still see himself as the Ivy League Knight in Shining Armor?”

  “He’s dead. Died in June 2012. She came to see me about a wrongful death suit against the drug company that she believes killed him. Wycliffe Pharmaceutical.”

  “That should be right down your alley. Wycliffe is one of the biggest. They are even a client of ours. We make an inventory tracking product for them.”

  “Know anything else about them?”

  “Not a lot. I’ve met some of their execs. Typical MBA suits. The R & D Ph.D.’s are all in the trenches, developing drugs. Wycliffe is tough to sue because their litigation war chest is bottomless.”

  “Hmm. You’re right. Sounds like my kind of lawsuit.”

  “If you pick them off, it will be your biggest coup yet.”

  “I’m not going after them.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’m not going to take this one. Rick’s mixed up in it. He’s the one who sent her to me.”

  “Oh, and you’re still backing off of those arrangements with him? But you want to take her case?”

  Hugh stared out at the neutral ocean and asked himself what he wanted: to feel something other than blood lust for taking down Corporate America. He wanted to feel the kind of passion for someone that Kathryn Andrews had felt for her husband. He wanted a relationship about real love, and not about the size of his bank account and the cars he drove. And then he came to his senses and silently laughed at his middle-aged self with the gray hair and the noticeable paunch and the coke-bottle glasses. How ridiculous could he be?

  “No, I don’t want it,” he lied. “It’s just that she reminded me of how much Dad cared about Mom. I always thought they were lucky to fall in love with another Catholic. You didn’t marry outside the church back then.”

 
; “Yeah,” Patrick agreed. “And there was no birth control. Mom lost three babies between you and me.”

  “She never told me that.”

  “No reason to. But I was nine when you were born. I was old enough to be shocked when they came home with you. I didn’t think you’d live either.”

  “Not only did I live, but now I tower over your puny six feet.”

  “True. Remember those soggy fish sticks we had to eat every Friday?”

  “All the charm and taste of shredded paper.” Hugh’s voice changed to the angry, bitter tone he used when he talked about William Mahoney’s death. “What I remember best is the day Dad lost the dealership.”

  “You were only ten.”

  “Yeah, but it’s as clear as if it happened yesterday.”

  “I was away at college.”

  “At least you had a scholarship and got to stay. It was losing the dealership that killed him.” Hugh’s bitter tone was back. “Ford screwed him royally on his contract.”

  “So you grew up to build a mega law firm based upon pure hatred for Big Business. And that’s the reason you’re going to take Kathryn Andrews’ case. But be careful, little brother, your eye for women is going to be your downfall one of these days.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Friday, February 7, 2014, Hugh Mahoney’s Office, Emerald Shapery Center, San Diego

  “You have to take Kathryn Andrews’ case,” Rick Peyton said as soon as he sat down in one of the chairs in front of Hugh’s massive desk. The wan winter sunlight cast long shadows over its polished red mahogany surface.

  “No, I don’t have to,” Hugh said. “Would you like some coffee?” The door swung open at that moment, and his secretary appeared with a silver carafe and two sturdy black mugs.

  “It’s going to be an important case,” Rick insisted. “There’s been talk in the medical community about Myrabin ever since it was approved.”