“Your dad was out of town?”
“He went to New York to a private show,” Caitlin said. “Appraising art and antiques is one of the things he does. I thought he was coming back Sunday evening, but mom told the police that he’d called and said he’d be back tonight instead.”
“Flying or driving?”
“What? Oh, I’m sorry. Driving.”
“Did the police take anything else?”
“Three briefcases or attaché cases or something. They were all Dad’s. Plus all our old check registers and bank statements. And there were a couple of mobile phones that I didn’t know Dad used. They took those too.”
In framing my questions I focused on this numbing detail deliberately. A good deal of the work done by Justice For All was on court appointments to handle criminal appeals for indigent defendants like Tyrell Washington. I’d seen plenty of criminal cases during my judicial clerkship as well. Between the two, I’d picked up enough to know that having your home searched even by well-behaved cops isn’t like Law and Order S.V.U. It means drawers yanked out and turned upside down to dump their contents on the floor. It means guys wearing latex gloves throwing your bras and panties over their shoulders after they’ve pawed through them. It means couches pulled four feet away from walls and left sitting there in the middle of the room, with their cushions on the floor. It means books, CDs, and DVDs flung onto the carpet and ceiling panels in the basement pushed out of their frames. It had to be a searingly traumatic intrusion on Caitlin’s white-bread life. I wanted to get her into the routine of talking about this stuff as though it were the French Open before I reached the elephant-in-the-corner issue: Who else in the house, if anyone, was in cahoots with Dad on whatever had caused a magistrate somewhere to sign off on a search warrant?
“We’ve been calling them ‘police.’” I underlined the word in my notes. “Were they in uniform or civvies?”
“They were wearing suits. I thought they were FBI, but mom said they were some kind of state police.”
I scribbled methodically on my legal pad to buy myself some time so I could figure out how to ask Caitlin whether her father might now be in, say, Brazil instead of driving back to Pittsburgh. Before I could come up with anything she set off on a ramble, almost as if she were talking to herself.
“I didn’t know she smoked. I can’t believe that.”
“Excuse me?”
“I told you how Mom smoked a cigarette while she was telling me about how the police were going to come.” Caitlin spoke over a catch in her voice. “I didn’t have any idea she smoked. I remembered seeing her with a little extra weight a few months back and at first I thought maybe she’d started smoking to help her shed some pounds in a hurry, but that isn’t Mom. It can’t be a new thing. She must have hidden it all these years. So she wouldn’t set a bad example for me, I suppose. Looking back, it seems so…I don’t know, so sweet, somehow. So Mom.”
She started to cry. I fished out a handkerchief and gave it to her, then patted her hand to show a little sympathy while she wiped her tears. While all this was going on, though, I didn’t stop thinking—and what I thought was, I’m not buying it. The first thing my mom did after coming out of Mass every Sunday was light a cigarette, so I was going on intuition rather than firsthand experience; but I don’t think you can live in the same house as a smoker for seventeen years and not know she smokes. I’d figured out that Caitlin had had at least one cigarette that day during our brief handshake and walk to the library.
Why would a mature and intelligent adult resume a smoking habit that she’d presumably dropped something like eighteen years before? Maybe because she was stressed out by knowing about her husband’s illegal activities, whatever they were. If not that, what?
I put down my pen and took off my glasses. I leaned forward and put my hand close to Caitlin’s without touching it. I reminded myself that I was talking to someone in serious pain, and made my voice as soft and sympathetic as I could.
“Caitlin, do you have any reason to believe that your mom and dad have been having problems in their marriage?”
She couldn’t have looked any more wide-eyed if I’d asked whether she thought the pope might drop by for dinner.
“Oh, no. Dad is a lot older than Mom. Sixty-three. I guess some people called her kind of a trophy wife for him when they got married. But she’s completely his. Absolutely devoted to him. I mean, he never threatens her or raises his voice, but he can get her to do anything he wants her to. Sometimes he’ll just say, ‘Ari, this is very important to me.’ Or he’ll act hurt and disappointed. And he gets what he wants. In the four or five years since I really started noticing it, he got her to stop seeing a friend that he didn’t like and to drop her involvement with Greenpeace, which he called ‘a bunch of eco-terrorists.’ And to quit a woman’s club he thought was ‘skewing old’ for her. Which is kind of funny, coming from him, but that’s what he said. He said, ‘Every time you walk in there you lower the average age by seven years.’ So, I mean, like, no. She admires him and she really loves him. I don’t think there’s any way she could imagine living without him.”
I didn’t induce this massive data dump because I’m a master interviewer. I think Caitlin had just been holding that stuff in for a long time and aching to get it off her chest. I saw a kind of gnawing worry in her eyes when she talked about Ariane, the kind of feeling you have when you love someone so deeply that her pain really is your pain, and her joy exhilarates you. I’d already pegged Caitlin as a pretty tough cookie for a rich brat, but I decided that she and her mom had something special going on in the bonding department. Whatever. At least I had enough to fill Mendoza in about what was going on.
I asked her if she wanted some more water, or maybe some coffee. She said no, so I told her to sit tight while I went to see if Mr. Mendoza was ready for her. I found him leaning against the door of his office, chatting with Pauline D. He was holding a piece of paper and looking jovially dyspeptic.
“What’s this I got here, Jake? We filing motions for the exercise now?”
“Hey, a win’s a win.”
“Sure, but how’s this a win? It’s just red tape for the clerks in Philly. Washington getting a shiv buried in him is tough luck for him, but it doesn’t wipe out the jury’s verdict.”
“Yes it does.”
“How you figure?”
“The presumption of innocence applies throughout the criminal process, including appeals. Thanks to us, Washington had a viable appeal pending. Because he’s dead, that appeal is moot. Because of the presumption of innocence, the court can’t just assume we would have lost. So the only thing the court can do is set the conviction aside and tell the lower court to throw out the indictment as moot. We win.”
“That’s one ugly win.”
“There is such a thing as winning ugly. There is no such thing as an ugly win.”
This was Mendoza’s kind of language. Behind his forehead a scoreboard flashed
Law Office of Luis Mendoza1
U.S. Attorney0
His face lit up in a radiant beam. His eyes widened in delight. He raised his arms in a caricature gesture, as if he were an Anglo thespian in a high school production of Man of La Mancha. He rattled out something in Spanish, which I didn’t understand a word of, except that I think chica magnifica showed up in it somewhere. Then he turned toward Pauline D, rolling her draft of my motion into a cylinder as if he were going to swat her with it.
“Get this puppy filed and served pronto.”
He turned back to me, smile still on high beam, and offered me his right palm for a congratulatory slap. Then he stepped into his office and summoned me to follow him.
“So what’s the deal with this chica Sam sent over here?”
I gave him a quick rundown, sticking to the essential facts. I knew he’d spot the issue without
my spelling it out for him. He sat in profile to me while I talked, leaning back in his chair and looking at the ceiling. He’s a quick study. He’s never going to handle a triple-inverse merger or remove a case from state court to federal court under the embedded jurisdiction doctrine, but in his chosen areas of practice he’s one helluva good lawyer. Even with the business casual dress code, he always wears suit and tie, including dress shirts with French cuffs. Sometimes the cufflinks have a scales-of-justice design embossed on them, and sometimes a skull-and-crossbones. Today was skull-and-crossbones.
“Okay.” He jumped to his feet a second or two after the last syllable was out of my mouth. “Let’s go.”
He turned on the professional charm as he walked into the library and shook Caitlin’s hand. No more macho swagger or sexist slang. He strolled in with a warm, reassuring smile and quietly confident body language that said, “No worries, I’ve been in tougher scrapes than this.”
He picked a chair that let him sit facing Caitlin, about four non-threatening feet from her with a corner of the table in between them. I took one at the far end of his side of the table, where I’d be unobtrusively in the background.
“I’ve worked with Sam Schwartzchild on a lot of cases over the years.” Mendoza carefully modulated his voice. “He is a very good lawyer. Did he tell you why he thought you should see me?”
“Not really. He just said there was a possible conflict of interest and he thought it would be better if I had my own lawyer.”
Mendoza’s grave nod acknowledged the Solomonic wisdom of Schwartzchild’s view.
“Did the state troopers—that’s what they were, by the way—ask you about your conversation with your mom on Saturday?”
“No. It’s funny, Mr. Schwartzchild asked me that same question right before the conflict of interest thing came up.”
I’ll just bet he did, I thought. I kept my head down so that I could concentrate on my penmanship.
“Well,” Mendoza said, “the first issue I would like to discuss with you is whether you have any legal obligation to report that conversation to the police.”
“What? Why would I do that? Why is it their business?”
Ask her! I telepathically willed Mendoza. “Have you actually talked to your father since that conversation?” Ask her that!
“Good questions,” Mendoza said calmly, meaning Caitlin’s audible ones rather than my mental one. “It would only be a concern for law enforcement if your father were in some danger. I take it you don’t have any reason to think he is. Am I right?”
Caitlin’s eyes went back and forth rapidly, as if she’d suddenly lost her bearings in the woods and was looking for a landmark. After a second or two, she seemed to recover. When she spoke her voice sounded confused but not panicky.
“No. No reason at all. I mean, I’m like, I don’t even know why you’d ask that. I guess you have to, but I just don’t see…. I mean, Dad is a curator and an art dealer. He spends volunteer time working as a docent. Why would anyone want to hurt him?”
“Very good point.” Mendoza gave Caitlin a confident, affirming nod. “I’m not here to speculate about half-baked ideas some cop might have—or not. My job is to give you legal advice, and I’m going to give you some.”
“What is it?” Caitlin seemed genuinely curious.
“You don’t have any legal obligation at this time to go to the police and tell them about that talk you and your mom had. If the police ask you about that talk, you don’t have to answer their questions. You can just say, ‘That’s private and I don’t want to talk about it.’ In fact, you can just say, ‘Talk to my lawyer.’ That’s even better. You understand what I’m saying?”
“You mean I’m lawyered up, like the bad guys on TV.”
“You’re lawyered up like a smart girl in the real world. I’m not telling you not to talk to them. That’s up to you. I’m just saying you don’t have to if you don’t want to. Right?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Okay. Now, Caitlin, do you have any questions for me?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Mendoza stood up and took out three of his cards. Before handing them to her, he leaned over to put one of them on the table while he wrote an additional number on it.
“Caitlin, I want you to call me if any questions come up or if anything happens that you’re concerned about. Call me anytime of the day or night. That number I wrote on the top card is my mobile phone, and I have that with me all the time. You can give the other cards to cops if they drop by to pass the time of day. Jake, you give her a card too, just in case.”
Caitlin suddenly seemed to glow as I handed over one of my cards—and why shouldn’t she? She’d just been treated like the most important client Mendoza had. I’d seen him do the same trick with restaurant owners and rock-hard hookers. It worked with them, too.
“I mean it, Caitlin. If anything comes up, give me a call. Ms. Jakubek here will show you out and get your parking ticket stamped.”
He smiled. She beamed. They shook hands. Mendoza exited, basking in the glow of her esteem.
I showed her back to the reception area, and saw to it that the receptionist put a shiny yellow sticker on her parking stub. Then I walked her to the elevator.
“So if I, like, can’t reach Mr. Mendoza, then I could call you?”
I felt the tiniest little surge of professional satisfaction. I wasn’t exactly basking in the glow of her esteem, but apparently I’d made an impression.
“Sure.”
She examined my card closely with a puzzled expression on her face. Then she looked back up at me with her charmingly ingenuous, tempered-but-not-hard-seventeen-year-old eyes.
“So, you’re, like, you’re a lawyer, too?”
Chapter Three
OHHH-kay, I told myself as I trekked back from the elevator bank. Six months from now, while you’re researching some tangled sale-and-purchase issue under section 16(b) of the Securities Act of 1933 and planning a trip to the bank to visit your money, you’ll think back on that little incident—and you will laugh your ass off.
It was pushing five o’clock by now, with Thanksgiving weekend on the horizon. Overtime? I don’t think so. I headed back to my cubicle to log off for the day. On the way I stopped at Pauline D’s desk to make sure she was preparing an intake and engagement letter for Caitlin Bradshaw. It was eight-to-one that Mendoza had gotten her on it while I was taking Caitlin to the elevator. One thing I’d learned in his shop, though, is that when it comes to legal paperwork it’s better to check twice than blow it once.
Ms. Denckla frostily confirmed that she was indeed already handling the intake while she continued rattling her keyboard at ninety words a minute. Instead of stalking off, I took a deep breath. My next words stuck in my throat for a couple of seconds, but I managed to get them out.
“I’d like to apologize for the way I handled our discussion earlier. I shouldn’t have been flippant with you.”
If I’d gotten a picture of her face as she turned it toward me, I could have sold it to Webster’s to put next to “flabbergasted.” Her expression combined astonishment and suspicion, as if something as shocking as an apology from a lawyer had to mask a hidden agenda that would come back to bite her ample fanny if she didn’t keep her guard up. For a long, long moment she was literally speechless. Then she recovered enough to respond.
“No apology is necessary. Mr. Mendoza agreed with you.”
“He agreed with me about filing the motion, but that’s no excuse for my copping an attitude with you. You were just doing your job. Anyway, I’m sorry.”
Her face softened into a smile—somewhat confused, but still a smile.
“That’s okay, Ms. Jakubek. Really. Please don’t think anything more about it.”
I trundled back to my cubicle, blitzed through
the dozen emails that had accumulated since I’d left, and shut the machine down. I was just about to pull my coat on when Mendoza popped out of his office.
“Hey, Jake, you got a coupla minutes before you leave?”
“Sure.”
I followed him into his office, but he only paused there long enough to take a long, thin cigar from a humidor on his desk. Then he led me out onto a balcony barely big enough to accommodate the two faux Adirondack chairs on it. He sank into one, and I took that as an invitation to perch on the other. The balcony is glassed in on its three exposed sides and has a jury-rigged space heater whose cord snakes back into Mendoza’s office. The glass takes care of the wind, and the space heater takes care of the cold. In late November, unless you’re a wimp from the sunbelt, it’s actually fairly comfortable. This little arrangement is Mendoza’s answer to the Clean Indoor Air Act adopted by some busybodies in Harrisburg a few years ago.
“This going to bother you?” He held up the cigar.
“Nope.” He had the cigar in his mouth before I had that syllable completely out of mine, and he didn’t waste any time lighting up.
“You think I made the wrong call on Caitlin, don’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Because when Caitlin asked mom whether anything had happened to dad, mom said ‘not yet.’”
“Pretty much. If a client tells you he robbed a bank yesterday, that’s privileged. If he tells you he’s going to rob one tomorrow, that’s an imminent crime. It not only isn’t privileged, you’re supposed to drop a dime on him.”
He nodded in a way that implied understanding rather than agreement. He held the cigar in his mouth at a ninety-degree angle to his face as he lolled against the chair back. He was somewhere in his forties. I’m not sure exactly where. He wore his gray-streaked dark hair a little long, spilling over his shirt collar and curling up naturally at the ends. His bristly moustache was a distinguished charcoal gray and silver. He had a way of looking freshly groomed even at the end of the afternoon, as if a barber had finished with him less than two hours before.
But Remember Their Names Page 2
