by Gorman, Ed
TIME WILL TELL
By Twist Phelan
Lauren Winslow swept into my office a half hour after my secretary left, twenty minutes before Security came on duty downstairs. As slim as a fading hope, she wore a long sapphire sheath that was sexy but modest at the same time. She hung her wet umbrella on the coat tree next to the door and collapsed into her favorite chair, the one closest to my desk.
I turned over the spreadsheet I’d been reviewing and put on a welcoming smile. “You’re looking lovely this evening, Madame Prosecutor. What’s the occasion?”
“Annual judges’ dinner at the Downtown Club. If I’d known the weather was going to be this bad, I would have rented a tux.” She brushed off the raindrops that spangled her hem, revealing a pair of satin slingbacks with vicious heels. “They’re roasting Galletti, so I have to be there. Would you please just kill me now?”
Laura going to an event for Glamour Boy Galletti? “An evening of lawyers in white ties telling white lies — you’ll be in your element, Counselor.”
She chuckled; a low sound of genuine mirth. She had deep-set brown eyes, wavy chestnut hair, and a dusting of freckles so fine I often wondered if I’d imagined them. “I think you’d hold your own, Tommy.”
Lauren headed up the Complex Crimes Unit for the regional office of the Department of Justice. A dozen attorneys under Galletti were on a crusade against “sophisticated” criminals — corporate fraudsters, identity thieves, computer hackers, pay-for-play politicos, big-time polluters. “We’re not interested in ordinary crooks,” Lauren had told me when we first met. “We go after the smart people who’ve gone bad, the ones who screw over widows and orphans.”
I held up an almost-empty tumbler of whiskey. “Care to get a head start on the festivities?”
She declined, as she always did during her impromptu visits. Instead, she stood up and walked to the window, all fine-boned elegance and height. What began as an afternoon shower had turned into leaden rain. It was an ugly day, exactly as forecast.
I wondered why Lauren was here. Usually she dropped by to regale me with some courtroom triumph — the defeat of a defendant’s motion to suppress evidence, a unanimous Guilty verdict, a plea that sent somebody away for twenty-five years. Her stories hinted at rules she had to bend, witnesses she had to bully into fatal admissions.
Tonight, though, she was different. There was something about her I hadn’t seen before; she was wired, so electric she nearly set the air vibrating. I swallowed a mouthful of scotch, felt the warmth spread through my belly, and waited.
“Have I ever told you what brought me to Seattle?” she asked, gazing out at the city. Her skin was pale against the darkness on the other side of the glass.
“No.” Although Lauren was familiar with my background, she had always been closed-mouthed about hers. I took another sip of my drink. In less than a week, I’d be downing mojitos instead of single malt.
She turned, and her dress pulled tight against her thigh. I glimpsed the outline of lace through the thin fabric and sucked in my breath. Lauren was the only woman I knew who wore a garter belt. Her legs were great, and outside the courtroom she preferred short skirts to pants. During our first meeting she had leaned across a table to hand a document to Nick, exposing a thin strip of smooth flesh at the top of her stocking. Nearly a minute had passed before I’d been able to focus on her questions again.
“It was four years ago,” she said, turning away from the window to reclaim her chair. I could smell her perfume. She always wore the same scent — subtle but crisp, not too flowery. I imagined her touching the glass stopper to the hollow of her neck, dabbing it between her breasts ...
I felt the heft of my new watch as I lifted the whiskey bottle from the desk drawer and replenished my tumbler. Audemars Piguet — the only brand Arnold Schwarzenegger wore. With its gold face and thirty-two diamonds rimming the bezel, the thing weighed almost a pound. The black rubber wristband made it popular among the yachties in Boca.
Lauren noticed my new hardware. “Check out the bling. I could hire another paralegal for what that cost.”
More like two, I didn’t say. Eighty thousand dollars, no discount for cash.
“What happened to the Rolex?” she asked. “Or was that a Patek Philippe in your briefcase?”
I put the bottle back into the drawer, next to the mini digital recorder. I touched the square red button and left the drawer open. “I still can’t believe you snooped.”
“Your driver shouldn’t have left the backseat door open. And briefcases come with locks for a reason.”
I was tempted to ask what part of no unreasonable searches and seizures she didn’t understand. “Next you’ll be telling me, if I carry cash, I deserve to have my pocket picked. You’re lucky I didn’t think you were a carjacker.”
Lauren looked at me through her eyelashes. “What if you had, Tommy? Would you have shot me?”
“Jesus, how can you — ”
“I never figured you for one of those big-watch guys,” she interrupted. “Bonus from a grateful client?”
“If you’re gonna keep asking questions, Madame Prosecutor, I want my lawyer.” I said it automatically. Not a big-watch guy. I turned my wrist so the diamonds wouldn’t show so much.
Lauren made a face. “Very funny, Tommy.”
As hilarious as the Fourth Amendment, Lauren. Bad guys aren’t the only ones who think the end justifies the means. I pulled at my drink. Galletti knows it, too.
Outside, headlights were yellow smears in the downpour and a foghorn mooed. I knew I shouldn’t spill the beans, but I couldn’t resist.
“As a matter of fact, the watch is a going-away present to myself. Good-bye, perpetual rain; hello, eternal sunshine.”
Lauren tilted her head. “You’re moving? Where?”
I picked up the Prada sunglasses from my desk — another recent purchase — and put them on.
“Next week I’ll be sitting on the private beach of one of the ritziest golf communities in Florida.” Harbour View or Vista or something like that. Harbour with a u of course, and a gated entrance even more pretentious than the name.
Gated, alarmed, rent-a-copped. Drop-ins at the office were one thing, but I’ve never been keen on clients — or anyone else — showing up at my house. “And I won’t be back,” I added in my best Ahnuld imitation.
A small crease appeared between Lauren’s brows. A big reaction, if you knew her. I took off the glasses, prepared to launch into my sun, beach, and golf riff. None of these things actually mattered to me, but the explanation had satisfied everyone else.
Few people ever surprised me like Lauren.
“So you’re walking away before things are finished,” she said.
“What do you mean? The practice is all wrapped up. Not that there was much to do. After what happened to Nick, things went into the crapper pretty fast.”
When my partner got shot in our parking garage, the local news feasted on it for a week. There was a lot of speculation — fueled by an anonymous source — that it was a mob hit. That was enough to scare off old clients and keep away new ones. I regarded Lauren. And with my other reason to stay in Seattle leaving too.
“I’m not talking about your accounting firm,” she said.
I looked at my watch, no longer giving a damn what she thought of it. “Aren’t you supposed to be at Galletti’s roast?”
Lauren tossed back her prodigal curls. Usually she wore her hair in a ponytail. I decided I preferred it loose around her face.
“I want to arrive late.” Her tone turned coy. “Besides, don’t you want to hear why I came to Seattle?”
It was impossible to stay annoyed with her. Besides; this could be our last evening together before I left. “Go ahead.”
“Ever play Monopoly when you were a kid?”
You could get whiplash trying to follow her train of thought. “Sure.”
“Did you know it’s the only game where going to jail is an accepted risk?”
/>
I put on an Uncle Sam scowl and pointed at her. “Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”
Her eyes sparkled. “I used to really rub it in when my brother pulled that card. Sometimes I made him so mad, he’d kick me out of the game.”
You’re still pissing off the other players, Lauren. “All I cared about was collecting rent,” I said.
“Spoken like a true accountant. So, Tommy, did Monopoly make us what we are today?”
I wasn’t exactly sure what she was getting at, so I sipped my whiskey and stayed quiet. The rain increased its patter on the windows. It sounded impatient, like a dealer’s fingers drumming on the felt.
Lauren broke the silence. “Private placement offerings put together by Merrill Bache — coal-mining deals. That’s what brought me here.”
She was talking about PPOs. If the investment banks won’t touch you, they’re a way to raise capital without jumping through too many government hoops. Lawyers and accountants vet you and your numbers, then brokers sell the deal to “accredited” investors, rich people who’ve been around the financial block a few times.
I always thought private placements were small-time. Give me a REIT any day. You pool investor funds to buy commercial rental properties or mortgages — that’s serious money.
“I don’t remember hearing anything about coal.”
Since meeting Lauren, I’d made a point of keeping up with local financial and legal news. The deals must have gone down before I moved to Seattle.
“It was a pretty standard fraud. The geology was faked — there wasn’t any coal. The investors got stuck with worthless holes in the ground.”
I shrugged. “So a few of the privileged class spent the summer at their lawyer’s offices instead of the beach.”
“Not so privileged,” Lauren said, her voice like ice. “The brokers sold units to anyone who walked in the door, even if they weren’t accredited. Retirement savings, college finds, cushions against medical emergencies — they took in millions, tens of millions.”
Although we’d never talked about it, I sensed that Lauren took investors’ losses personally. I wondered if there was a private history.
“The money was gone, of course.” I tried to sound sympathetic.
“I followed the funds through three banks before the trail went cold. As usual, nothing was left stateside. Rich crooks don’t need walking-around money.”
“Promoter disappear too?”
“As soon as the deal went south, he followed it.”
I swirled the scotch in my glass. “So you were left with the professionals. I assume you picked the obvious target.”
She nodded. “The brokers who peddled the deal. You know how I hate white-collar types who think the rules don’t apply to them. When these guys tried to play games during discovery, it really ticked me off. I wasn’t going to settle for a fine after that. I wanted them in prison.”
“Any defense?”
“The usual.” Her voice became singsong. “Each investor received documents describing the risks, the brokers had no way to know the attorneys hadn’t done the due diligence or that the accountants had inflated the numbers, it wasn’t their fault unqualified investors bought into the deal, blah blah blah blah.”
“Did the jury buy any of it?”
“Not after it took the head broker a full five minutes to locate where the lawyers had buried the risk disclosures in the offering memorandum. The printing was so small, he couldn’t read it without borrowing the judge’s glasses. Meanwhile, the projected returns were smack dab in the middle of the first page, in typeface as big as the top line on an eye chart.”
“I take it you won.”
“Don’t I always?”
That had been true for as long as I’d known her. Lauren was a real buccaneer. She tried cases other prosecutors would have passed on, and she was willing to do whatever it took to win, even if it meant sailing to the edge of legal boundaries, or beyond. I get the message, Lauren.
I took a long pull from my tumbler. “A criminal conviction makes a civil suit practically a slam-dunk. I bet some class-action attorney had a complaint on file the same day your jury came back.” I could feel my neck getting red.
She plucked at a thread on her sleeve and looked bored. “Probably.”
“What did the investors finally end up with? Ninety, ninety-five cents on the dollar?” I heard the edge in my voice, so I gulped some of my drink. I had to choke back a cough as the whiskey scorched my throat.
Lauren hitched up her dress so she could cross her legs. “A little more than a hundred, actually. The jury was generous with punitive damages.
I forced myself to look away from her slender ankles. “I bet you went after the attorneys and accountants, too.” I set the tumbler down hard on my desk. Amber liquid sloshed over my hand.
“The law allows — ”
“To hell with the law! The investors got back more than they put up. And they’re no less greedy than the professionals you’re so hot to put in prison. Most people wouldn’t go near these deals if they didn’t think they’d get a big tax write-off, plus beat the market. Why not be reasonable? Dial it back after things are more or less even again, go after real bad guys.”
“I do! Lawyers and accountants are supposed to be the watchdogs who make sure offerings are legit. And the ones in these deals did more than look the other way. The promoter was smart, but not that smart. He couldn’t have put the fraud together without professional help.”
I made a calming motion with my hands. I was determined not to argue with her. Besides, it was an old debate. “Okay, okay, these lawyers and these accountants were dirtbags. You have my blessing to prosecute them.”
She grimaced. “Easier said than done. I barely had enough evidence for a search warrant. By the time it was executed, they had shredded all the documents. I needed the promoter’s testimony that the attorneys and accountants were in on the scam from the get-go.”
I rubbed a thumb against the rubberized band of my watch. “Those guys can be hard to find once they’re in the wind.”
“The coal mines were in Kentucky, so I started there. I went to the town, talked to the guy’s landlord, the people who leased him office equipment, even the waitresses at his favorite diner. Wasn’t hard — I was raised in a place like that. Turns out the guy’s Norwegian, grew up working on a family fishing boat. He emigrated to the States about ten years ago with plans to make it big.”
“Let’s hear it for the American dream!” I took a mouthful of scotch and let it sizzle on my tongue. I was feeling good again. “He must have played Monopoly when he was a kid.”
Lauren glared at me. “I expected him to go back to Europe. But Immigration didn’t have a record of him leaving.”
“How about Canada?”
“They said he wasn’t there either. So that left Seattle.”
“Seattle? What made you think — ”
“When we went through his office in Kentucky, we found a bunch of blank Seattle postcards and some country-western CDs in the back of a desk drawer. Apparently he missed them when he cleaned out the place.”
“You thought he came here because of some postcards?”
“Don’t give me a hard time, Tommy. It was all I had to go on. The databases — ”
“I was wondering when you’d get to those.” I heard that edge in my voice again. “Do you feds even bother with warrants anymore? Or do you just whisper the word ‘terrorist’ and wait for the sysop to hand over the master password?”
Lauren’s expression told me she wasn’t in the mood for my privacy-rights rant. “Oh, we got the password all right, but the databases were a bust. There was nothing in the computers — no driver’s license, no address, no credit cards.”
I was impressed by Lauren’s quarry. Despite disposable cell phones, false identities for sale on the Internet, and banks that were more interested in fees than references, it was harder than ever to live off the grid. “So what di
d you do?”
She flashed that luminous smile. “Drove around in the rain, hyped on caffeine. I went to bars, hotels, used-car lots — anywhere he might have gone or done business. Nada. It was as though he’d never been here.”
Despite myself I was getting interested. “Why not give up?”
“I almost did. I was running out of places to look. But I knew — I just knew — he was here. The local Norwegian community, the climate, the fishing, the postcards — ” she ticked each one off on a finger, “ — made Seattle the most logical place for him to go to ground.” She shook her head. “Thank goodness for clams.”
“What do clams have to do with this?”
“I was eating lunch at this tiny joint downtown — ”
“The one next to the bridge? You ever have the chowder?”
“Every Tuesday. White, with extra crackers.” She ducked behind a grin. “And an Elysian Fields Pale Ale, no glass.”
A noontime beer should be the least of your worries, Lauren. For half a second, I wondered if she would go to lunch with me. Maybe if I called it a bon voyage thing ...
“Anyway, I was eating on the patio when the ferry came in from Bainbridge Island. That’s when it hit me.”
“A boat,” I said.
“A boat,” she repeated, clearly relishing the memory. “And I had five days to find it before I had to start working another case.”
“The State of Washington must have a hundred thousand registered vessels. How did you think you were going to come up with the right one in time?”
“Make that three hundred thousand, plus transients.” Lauren flicked invisible lint from her dress. “Still, it was no problem.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. How did you find the needle in a third of a million boats?”
“Did you know the DMV is in charge of maritime registrations? It handles them just like cars. I sat in a back office and scrolled through the listings for vessels over thirty feet — the DMV guy said that would be the minimum size for someone to live on. I found it the second day.” Her tone was only slightly smug.
