by Dick Francis
He gave the letter on the desk barely a glance and he shook with his own rage as he forestalled accusation.
‘It’s not true,’ he declared intensely. ‘I never said that. What’s more, he sent a letter like that to my mother, and I’ve had her on the phone… she’s frantic. She borrowed that money. She borrowed fifty-seven thousand dollars… and however will she pay it back if Patrick Green keeps the money? She borrowed against her pension left by my dad. She borrowed from her neighbours and friends and on the security of her sister’s house… and I’ve yelled in Green’s face but all he does is give me a soppy grin, and says he’ll have me back in court if I make a fuss…’
‘Could he?’ Jules Harlow interrupted. ‘Could he have you back in court? And on what charge?’
‘Laundering drug money and selling drugs,’ Sandy Nutbridge said fiercely. ‘Which I didn’t do. But when he tells lies, people believe him.’
Patrick Green felt secure in embezzling fifty-seven thousand dollars from Mrs Nutbridge and ten thousand dollars from Jules Harlow because he believed both of them to be weak foreigners who wouldn’t do much beyond the first agitated squawking. He could make them believe that he wouldn’t be able to disprove further IRS allegations of money-laundering and drug-dealing against Sandy Nutbridge if his fees weren’t paid for the first case. The IRS had believed and acted on his allegations the first time and, because of its habitually suspicious outlook, he had faith it would do it again.
Patrick Green, well pleased with his clever scheme, used the Nutbridge bail money to pay off his own personally threatening debts. He had borrowed too much at exorbitant interest rates from dangerous people, and had come frighteningly close to their debt-collection methods, but no longer now need he fear being punched to pulp in a dark alley. Not a violent man himself, he shrank from even the thought of the crunch of fists. He felt very relieved indeed to have been able to steal the feeble old British people’s money to get himself out of the certainty of pain, and no flutter of remorse troubled his self-satisfaction.
Patrick Green had reckoned correctly that Sandy Nutbridge would month by month send to his mother instalments to pay off what she’d borrowed on his behalf. Green knew it would cost Sandy Nutbridge far more then he could afford to pay lawyers to try to recover his mother’s money through the courts. What Patrick Green had totally overlooked was the nature of the small quiet man whose ten thousand dollars he had pocketed with the help of his colleague Carl Corunna.
Carl Corunna, big and bearded, had reported Jules Harlow, after their meeting, to be an ineffectual mouse, ignorant and easily defeated. Carl Corunna had then insisted that he had earned half the embezzled ten thousand dollars for instructing Harlow to make the cashier’s cheque payable to Patrick Green himself, and not more safely directly to the US District Clerk. Patrick Green, bitterly arguing, finally offered one thousand: they settled on two.
Jules Reginald Harlow, though he might be unworldly in matters of bail bonds, still had an implacable belief that justice should be done. He set about finding himself an attorney of sufficient brain to out-think frauds, and via businessmen with inside understanding came finally to a meeting with a young good-looking electric coil of energy called David T. Vynn.
‘Mr Harlow,’ Vynn said, ‘even if you get your money back, which I have to tell you is doubtful, it will cost you maybe double in lawyers’ fees.’
‘Your fees, do you mean?’
‘Yes, my fees. My advice to you is to write off the loss and put it down to experience. It will cost you less in the end.’
Jules Harlow spent a long minute looking at the boyish outcome of his attorney search. He had expected David T. Vynn to be more substantial, both in body and years: someone more like big, bearded Carl Corunna, he realised. He also remembered, however, that physicists, mathematicians, poets, painters, composers and nearly all innovators (including himself) had been struck by divine revelation in their twenties. He had asked for the best: he must trust that in David T. Vynn he had got it.
David T. Vynn (29) spent the same minute remembering what he’d been told about Jules Harlow (51): that a chamois on a mountainside couldn’t leap as fast or as far as this grey man’s intellect. He had taken this – to him – minor case out of interest in the computer-genius mind.
‘Mr Vynn,’ the grey man said, ‘it isn’t a matter of money.’
‘Of pride?’ The question was nearly an insult, but the attorney wanted to know the strength and origin of his client’s motivation.
Jules Harlow smiled. ‘Perhaps of pride. But of principle, certainly.’ He paused, then said, ‘I don’t know my way around the corkscrews of the American law. I need a champion who does. I want Patrick Green to curse the day he thought of robbing me, and I won’t give up on you unless you yourself admit defeat.’
David T. Vynn thought drily, with inner delight, that Patrick Green had robbed the wrong man.
Client and attorney met again a week later.
David T. Vynn reported, ‘To prevent the movement of large amounts of drug money, there is a law in America that says banks and other financial institutions must inform the IRS, the tax people, whenever ten thousand dollars or more in cash is either deposited or withdrawn from a private account in any one day.’
‘Yes,’ Jules Harlow nodded, ‘I know.’
‘Sandy Nutbridge was arrested because nearly three years ago he had paid into his account three large sums of cash within two days. The payments aggregated twenty-two thousand dollars. The case against him was dismissed not because there was no evidence but because of affidavits from Ray Wichelsea and others that various legitimate commissions on horse sales had by coincidence been paid to him in cash in that time. He had declared the cash as income and paid tax on it. Case then dismissed.’
‘End of story.’
‘Not quite.’ David Vynn smiled thinly. ‘The IRS had had Sandy Nutbridge arrested in the first place because of information laid against him by a so-called friend in whom he had unwisely confided. A lawyer friend who saw all sorts of ways to profit.’
Jules Harlow said, ‘Dear God.’
‘Quite.’ His attorney nodded. ‘Patrick Green got Sandy Nutbridge first jailed and then bailed and is, I’m told, now stoking things up to have Nutbridge back behind bars on a charge of selling cocaine, that is if he doesn’t pay Green something near another thirty thousand dollars for a fee. I have to say that in Green’s leech-like machinations, your ten thousand is chicken feed.’
Jules Harlow said blankly, ‘What can we do?’
‘There are two roads to go.’ David T. Vynn was cheerful: he liked a good fight. ‘You can sue him for the money in court, and you can complain to the South Carolina Bar Association in an effort to get him disqualified from practising law.’
‘Which do you suggest?’
‘Both.’
Hearing nothing from Jules Reginald Harlow for quite some time, Patrick Green told himself complacently that he’d been absolutely right, the pathetic little guy from England had discovered it would cost him too much to kick up a storm and had caved in without making trouble.
Patrick Green, approaching forty, had for many years scavenged on the fringes of the law, never achieving the recognition he thought his due. He dreamed of brilliantly defending successfully in major murder trials but more typically lost misdemeanour cases in county courts. Most of his work, by this stage in his unsatisfactory career, consisted of carrying out dishonest tasks for other dishonest lawyers. ‘Gifts’ like Sandy Nutbridge came along rarely.
It was a nasty shock for him when he received notice that Jules Harlow was suing him for conversion, civil theft and breach of constructive trust in the matter of his ten thousand dollars. He didn’t like it that an attorney, David T. Vynn, was requesting a deposition. The grey little Englishman, Green frowned, should have learned his lesson and cut his losses. He, Green, would make sure that the little man not only lost his case, but would be much the poorer for having brought it.
Patrick Green didn’t much fear the deposition itself: he would swear on oath to tell the truth and then lie from start to finish. He had done it many times. People tended to believe what was said in a deposition (a sworn statement of fact) because lying under oath constituted perjury punishable by imprisonment.
Patrick Green, skilful at misrepresentation and evasion, told believable lies for nearly two hours at his deposition, with an appearance throughout of sincerity and conviction.
Jules Reginald Harlow met his attorney David T. Vynn for breakfast in a hotel. David T. Vynn preferred dining-rooms to offices, first because no ‘bugs’ could be listening and second because he was permanently hungry.
Over cereal, eggs Benedict and bacon on the side he described Patrick Green at his deposition as ingratiating, smooth-eyed and plausible, and over strawberries, waffles and maple syrup he outlined Green’s reply to Harlow’s charges, which was that Jules Harlow on the telephone had told him – Green – to apply the ten thousand dollars to his – Green’s – fees. He – Green – couldn’t understand why Harlow should want to go back on the deal.
‘Green was attended at his deposition by the attorney acting in his defence,’ David Vynn said. ‘He gave his name as Carl Corunna. Is he the person who told you to make your cashier’s cheque payable to Green? Is he the one who received the cheque and gave you a receipt for it, and couriered it round to the court?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘How is it good?’ Harlow asked.
‘Because I can get him disqualified as defendant’s counsel. Er…’ he explained, seeing Harlow’s mystification, ‘Carl Corunna is also a witness, right? If we go before a judge in his chambers – that’s just a room smaller than the whole court – I would hope to persuade him to make Green get himself a different attorney to defend him in court, and that will cost Mr Patrick Green a whole bucketful of his own cash, which I’m told he can’t afford, as he has already spent the thousands he stole.’
‘It seemed such a simple matter,’ Jules Harlow sighed, ‘to put up a bit of money towards a bail bond.’
‘Don’t despair.’
David Vynn ate warm English muffins spread with apple jelly and watched the slightly gloomy expression of his client change to radiant pleasure as they were joined by a vibrant woman who wore couture clothes as casually as overalls.
‘My wife,’ Harlow said, introducing her with pride. ‘She thinks I was crazy to listen to poor Mrs Nutbridge, and she’s fascinated by Patrick Green.’
‘It was for your wife,’ David Vynn asked, ‘that you bought the filly and met Sandy Nutbridge?’
Jules Harlow nodded. David Vynn looked from one to the other and thought Patrick Green hadn’t a hope of pinning drug-dealing sleaze onto people like this.
Even though the judge in chambers did agree with David Vynn that Patrick Green should engage a different counsel to defend him at trial, it was still Carl Corunna who acted for him when he demanded a deposition in his turn from Jules Reginald Harlow.
‘I’ll be sitting beside you,’ young David Vynn told his client, ‘but I’m not allowed to answer the questions. It will be you who does that. Remember that you’ll have sworn on oath to speak the truth. Think before you answer. They’ll be trying to trap you. Tricky questions. If they succeed in muddling you up, we’ll lose in court.’
So reassuring, Jules Harlow thought. He and David Vynn went to the office suite of Carl Corunna and in a boardroom there Jules Reginald Harlow came face to face with Patrick Green for the first time. He had expected perhaps to see deviousness, but Green’s success in the world was based on a plausibly persuasive exterior.
Green looked at Harlow as a fool throwing good money down the drain and didn’t in the least understand the mind of the man he was facing. In the context of the war-torn famine-racked world, Jules Harlow considered the disputed ownership of ten thousand dollars to be an irrelevance. Yet he still believed that justice mattered, whether on a huge or a tiny scale, and he would try to the end to prove it existed.
Apart from the four men sitting opposite each other in side-by-side pairs at one end of a long polished table – Corunna and Green opposite Harlow and Vynn – there was a woman court reporter who, on her swift typing machine, wrote down every word verbatim. There was also a video camera recording the proceedings, so that if necessary the spoken words could be synchronised with the video tape, to prove there had been no illegal editing.
Jules Harlow swore on oath to tell the truth, and did so. Carl Corunna tried to get him to admit he had agreed that, when the District Clerk returned the bail money, Green should keep it as part of his fee.
‘Absolutely not,’ Jules Harlow said.
‘You made the cashier’s cheque out personally to Mr Green, did you not?’
‘Yes, you told me to.’
‘Did you stipulate on the cheque that it was to be used for any particular purpose?’
‘You yourself knew that its purpose was to complete the bail bond so that Sandy Nutbridge could be freed to enjoy his family’s visit.’
‘Answer the question,’ Corunna instructed. ‘Did you stipulate on the cheque for what purpose it was to be used?’
‘Well… no.’
‘Did you stipulate on the cheque that you expected it to be returned to you?’
‘No,’ Harlow said. ‘And why,’ he added bitterly, ‘why didn’t you as a lawyer advise me to make out the cheque directly to the District Clerk? Ray Wichelsea did that, and had his money returned without trouble. You yourself told me to have the cheque made out to Patrick Green personally. If you knew that what I was doing on your instruction was inadvisable, why did you so instruct me?’
Carl Corunna refused to answer. It was he, he said, who was asking the questions.
The session lasted forty-five minutes.
‘They won’t want to use that deposition in court,’ David T. Vynn said with satisfaction afterwards. ‘You sounded much too genuine.’
‘I spoke the truth.’
‘It’s not always the truth that’s believed.’
The wheels of the justice system revolved with the speed of tortoises. It was well over two years from the day that Jules Harlow had bought the filly that he received a phone call from David T. Vynn saying that the grievance committee of the South Carolina Bar was ready to hear his plea for probable cause.
‘My what?’ Jules Harlow asked blankly. His mind at the time resonated with visions of storing personality and memory on microchips that could be implanted to restore order in confused brains. His loving wife, happy with her horses, held his elbow on kerbsides so that he wouldn’t absent-mindedly step off in front of buses.
David Vynn said, ‘Three weeks next Tuesday, in the evening, eight o’clock, in the hotel where we meet for breakfast.’
‘I thought we were going to court.’
‘No, no,’ his attorney told him patiently. ‘If you remember, I told you at the beginning there were two ways to go. One is to file suit and make the depositions and wind the way slowly into court, and the other is to file a grievance with the South Carolina Bar Association. That grievance – your grievance against Patrick Green – has now reached the top of the pile.’
‘Double helix,’ Jules Harlow murmured.
‘What? Yes, I suppose so. You will turn up for the Bar hearing, won’t you?’
Sandy Nutbridge, during the same two years, had been in and out of jail. Patrick Green, his one-time friend, had again invented information against him and delivered him to arrest with an approximation of a Judas kiss, but this time Sandy, with his family safe in England, had made no attempt to raise bail money, choosing instead to wait resignedly behind bars for the date of his trial.
He chose also to be defended not by Green but by an attorney appointed pro bono by the court, and although he lost his case and was found guilty of minor money irregularities through horse sales, the worse charge of selling cocaine didn’t stick. He was sentenced only to time served, which mea
nt he was freed immediately. Ray Wichelsea gladly put sales his way as before – but paid him commission with regular cheques, not cash.
As Sandy Nutbridge, on behalf of his mother, had also made a complaint to the South Carolina Bar along the same lines as David T. Vynn, the committee had decided to hear both complaints together. Mrs Nutbridge, as sturdily determined in her way as Jules Harlow in his, emptied the last few pounds from her piggy bank back home and on coupons for free-flier miles from her local supermarket, made her way again across the Atlantic.
She met Jules Harlow for the first time in the waiting-room of the extensive business suite in the hotel chosen by the South Carolina Bar Association for their enquiry. No one formally introduced them, but tentatively they approached each other until Jules Harlow (as ever in a grey suit) said to the grey-haired grandmother in her best print wool dress, ‘Are you… er…?’ and she replied self-consciously ‘Mr Harlow, is it?’
Without heat, they exchanged sorrows. Sandy Nutbridge was faithfully sending small amounts to help repay her borrowings, though to do it he had had to abandon his expensive lakeside home. She thought Patrick Green an unspeakable villain. Jules Reginald Harlow looked back to the day when he’d succumbed to her sobs and supposed he would do it again if he had to.
Jules Harlow’s vivacious wife, who said she wouldn’t have missed the Bar Association gathering for all the thoroughbreds in Kentucky, immediately offered sympathy and lighthearted jokes to Mrs Nutbridge, the two women surprising and dissipating the general run of long faces. Mrs Nutbridge visibly strengthened from jitters to determination. Jules Harlow’s wife said, ‘Attagirl!’
Jules Harlow gradually understood that the grievance committee was already in session in the large boardroom across the suite’s lobby and, when David T. Vynn arrived, he confirmed it. The fourteen lawyers at present forming the grievance committee had been listening to Patrick Green’s lies and twisted version of things for almost an hour.
