by Leigh James
“Walker, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and I felt my face turn absolutely, flaming scarlet. Does he think I’m PRETTY? My brain screamed at me, but I ignored it. “First of all, I’m your attorney. Enough said. Second of all, and no offense, but I already know that you have a thing for pretty women. It’s not like it’s a big secret.”
He looked at me again, half a smile on his face. “It’s not like I planned on being in those magazines,” he said. “Those last pictures, on the beach with Minky…those were embarrassing. She actually had them set up. She wanted them for publicity. But I didn’t find that out until afterwards.”
I shrugged at him. “I’m not judging you, Walker. You’re City Magazine’s most eligible bachelor, and a successful CEO. You can do whatever you like with Minky Lucca.” And her stupid yellow ruffled bikini, I thought. I sighed, willing myself to stop having this conversation with my client. But I had to get the words out so I could concentrate on my job. And not his gorgeous face and big shoulders.
“That’s not why I’m here — not for flirting, not for talking about personal stuff. Yes, you are easy to talk to. Yes, you are friendly and yes, I like you. No, I do not care if you think your lingerie model neighbor is hot,” I lied. “I’m here because you’re in trouble and David Proctor trusts me. I’m your attorney, and yes I’m young and I’m female, but because I am your lawyer, you cannot flirt with me, okay? Just pretend I have a dick instead. You know what I mean?” I asked, exhausted from trying to get all the words out of my mouth as fast as I could.
He sat and looked at the steering wheel for a beat, taking it in. Then he turned to look at me, a vaguely puzzled smile on his face. “You are weirder than I gave you credit for,” he said. “Pretend you have a dick?”
I sighed. This was harder than I thought. “I’m sorry. I just don’t want there to be any issues between us: there can’t be,” I said, and it was true. No one needed or wanted their job more than me. One hundred thousand in debt down, two hundred thousand to go, I reminded myself. “And I don’t want to hypothesize about whether you think I’m pretty or not,” I said, even though I desperately, pathetically, insanely wanted to know if he did in fact think I was pretty. “Let’s just get off this topic. And never go there again.”
“Because?” he asked me. He was looking at me with a sober expression on his face. Not humorous. Not distressed. Just level.
“Because I need to keep you out of jail.” And I won’t concentrate on my work if all I’m thinking about his your hot body. “And I need my job.”
“Well, those things are important to me, too. But I won’t pretend you have a dick,” he said. “You’re too pretty to have a dick.”
I felt myself beam at him, basking in his sneaky compliment, until I reminded myself I shouldn’t beam. I composed my face. “Fair enough,” I said. “Let’s go get started.”
“You’re the boss,” he smiled, and his smile had only the hint of an illicit gleam in it. But it was enough that I felt a small, illicit gleam in my heart, mirroring his, shine back towards him. Even though that shine could never burn.
CHAPTER 6
“Well, let’s get started,” Walker said. “It’s already late.” I looked at the clock: it was seven thirty.
“This is pretty early for me, actually,” I said, as we went into his house and I examined the gleaming grey-tiled floors in his immaculate mud room. He motioned for me to follow him; I did so nervously, my heels echoing on the tiled floor.
“I like that sound,” he said, nodding at my heels. I glared at him. “I’m just kidding. Sort of.”
We walked into his vast kitchen and my jaw dropped: it was amazing, just like out of a design magazine. I didn’t know how he’d modernized the old building, but the ceilings were soaring and all of the appliances were so new they looked like something out of the future. But the room was beautiful beyond that. The walls were painted a warm, inviting green color; there were colorful original paintings carefully positioned throughout the room, all softly, expertly lit. I’d never seen the type of stone that comprised his island and countertops, but it sparkled from within, like it was magic, like there was light shining out from inside. “This is incredible,” I said. I’d never been in a more beautiful room than this kitchen. “It’s like a kitchen for people who are too good to exist in the real world — it’s like a movie set.”
“I probably am too good for the real world,” he said, but when I glared at him again he laughed and I knew he was just teasing me. “I hired somebody to do it, of course. But all of those are my sister’s paintings — Adrian — she’s really talented.” He sounded proud.
I went over and looked at them. “Is this what she does for a living? I thought you said she was still in school.”
“She is — she’s getting her Masters at the MFA School. She wants to start a gallery. She’s been painting and dragging me to the Museum her whole life."
“These are wonderful,” I said, looking up close at one of her paintings. The paint seemed like it was done in layers, beautifully textured with bold colors. “So she lives in town?”
“She lives here,” he said. “But she’s not around that much — she has a lot of friends, and a boyfriend I don’t care for too much. He has about a thousand tattoos and says ‘whatever’ a lot more than I care to hear it. She’s twenty-four...just about your age.”
“I’m twenty-five,” I said, “ten years younger than you. But that’s a pretty big age difference, for a sibling.” I was thinking instead of the difference between me and Walker. I decided that it wasn't that big a difference for an attorney and her hot client that she could never sleep with.
“Adrian was unexpected,” Walker said, and smiled. “My parents always called her a force of nature. Nothing, no one could stop her. I still can’t get her to behave.” He laughed.
“Where are your parents?” I asked.
“They’re dead,” he said. “What about you?”
“My mom’s dead. Died five years ago of cancer. My dad lives in Somerville with my two younger brothers.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. We looked at each other stupidly. I grabbed my laptop and held it up. “You ready?”
“But you don’t live with them?” he asked, ignoring my laptop and my question. I shook my head, no. “You live alone?”
“Yes,” I said. I blushed again underneath his scrutiny. My boyfriend is trying to move in but I won’t let him, I thought. I kept it to myself. The last thing I wanted to talk to Walker about was Mike the Spike and his fancy beers.
“I’m glad Adrian’s here. I’d get lonely. Do you get lonely?”
“No.” It was true. I was rarely home, and I think if I broke up with Mike and stopped having to pick his boxers and wet towels up off of my bathroom floor, I would be thrilled. Not lonely.
I couldn’t picture Walker being lonely; he was too good-looking to have problems like that. I looked at him expectantly, trying to reign him in. “Our prep work — yes,” Walker said, finally. “Let’s go into the living room. And for the love of god, let’s please have a drink. This is going to be boring.” He grabbed a bottle of wine from a wine cooler next to the dishwasher, and I briefly wondered what it would be like to have a fully-stocked white wine cooler. And a live-in manservant that looked just like Broden Walker. Fabulous, I thought. It would be freakin’ fabulous.
He grabbed glasses, an opener, and then led me through French doors to his living room. Dark, almost black, hardwood floors and a luxurious, thick white throw rug contrasted with the enormous leather couch. The room would have been stark if not for the artwork on the walls, which were of brightly-colored flowers...and the...enormous pink poodle Pillow Pet that sat slumped on the couch.
I went over and sat next to it. “Yours, I assume?”
“Ha-ha,” he said, opening the wine expertly and pouring two glasses. “My sister’s in her twenties, she’s an avowed Feminist, she has five tattoos and her nose is pierce
d, and yet, she keeps that thing around. It’s a fucking Pillow Pet. It’s embarrassing.”
“I think it’s sweet,” I said, thinking about the fact that I still kept my jewelry in a music box that had a spinning ballerina in it. My mother had given it to me when I was nine. “Sometimes it’s nice to have something to hold onto.”
Walker put a very healthy glass of wine in front of me. “I can’t drink more than I already have, remember?” I said. “I’m on the clock.”
“Trust me, I’ve had plenty of drinks with David Proctor — we had some earlier today — and they’re all on the clock. Fucker bills me for everything.” He took his tie off, unbuttoned his shirt further and put his feet up on the coffee table. He motioned to the wine. “I’ll just leave it there until you get so bored you feel compelled.”
I doubted I would find staring at him for any length of time anything but fascinating. Boring was not on the agenda.
“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “Boring is what I do. That’s why we get paid so much — we have a knack for being able to review documents and listen to backstories that put lesser professionals to sleep.” He laughed and I smiled at him, but I was being serious. “I’m going to take all of this information, sift through it, articulate a compelling narrative, and then I’m going to find a way to get you off. And that will be anything but boring.”
“Well, it might surprise you, but I get tired of hearing myself talk, so I’m gonna go ahead and drink,” he said.
I snorted at him. “I kind of don’t believe you, but drink away,” I said, and turned on my laptop. “Now, tell me about how you started Blue Securities in 1999.”
“In 1999, I was twenty, and I didn’t know shit, like most twenty-somethings,” he said and smiled at me. I gave him the requisite glare, which he ignored. He stretched his arms over his head and I could see his large biceps pressing against his shirt. It made me feel squishy inside. Therefore I turned on my laptop and started taking notes so I wouldn’t stare at him with my mouth hanging open.
“I was in the Marines. We were in Serbia for several months, on the ground. It was during the Kosovo war. You were probably too little to remember that,” he said.
“I remember Slobodan Milosevic,” I said. “I remember being afraid of him, watching him on the news. And I remember that there was some sort of war going on. Something horrible.”
“So you were a smart girl even then. Yes, it was brutal. He was rounding up ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. I was part of a crew that was trying to take out the front line of his forces. They were his version of Special Ops. And we couldn’t get a handle on these guys. We never knew from where they were going to strike — they were slippery, and they were always ahead of us.
“In any event — this is the long version, sorry — I’ve always been a tech guy. I used to invent things in my parents’ basement when I was growing up. I had a couple of things catch on fire...but both my parents worked and I managed to clean things up pretty well. They never knew. So when I wasn’t in school, I was building electronic things in my basement. I was a teenaged mad scientist. And then I’d try and sell my inventions to my friends.”
“Did they buy them?” I asked. I could picture him as a hot Marine in Serbia, but I couldn’t picture him as some dorky kid inventing things in his basement.
“The ones I swore could blow things up sold quite well,” he said. “But my results weren’t very reliable back then.”
“So you were a teenaged-mad-scientist entrepreneur,” I said. I couldn’t picture it. I knew he was brilliant, because of the company he’d managed to build. But he was so gorgeous, and so playful, that I couldn’t imagine him like that, trying to cook up inventions alone every day after school.
“Absolutely. I had some friends, but I spent a lot of time alone. I liked to invent things and use my imagination. I also liked to read spy novels. So I was always trying to invent Bond-like gadgets, cool things that a spy could use, weapons, stuff like that.”
He did not strike me as a man who had been unpopular or alone for a day in his life. I couldn’t reconcile a young Walker, cackling over his latest invention, with the gorgeous six-foot-two babe sitting across from me. “That sounds…nerdy.”
“I’m guessing you would know all about that,” he said, and although I frowned at him, I let it slide. Because in fact, I did know all about that.
“Anyway. I had that sort of technical background — or at least a technical curiosity — before I joined the military. I didn’t go to college — I never went to college,” he said and laughed. “The military was a much more practical education. I got to see a lot of the world, and I got to keep inventing things. Which brings us back to 1999. I’d been working for a long time to create all sorts of tracking devices. Once I started in the military, I wanted to make one that you could insert into a computer. So that you could track the physical computer itself, but also be able to review documents, communications, etc. from the hard drive. It was basically a two-fer. A GPS and spyware wrapped into one small microchip package. That was the Holy Grail I’d been trying to create. And that year in Serbia, I finally made a prototype that worked.”
“And you still sell that, today,” I said. I’d done my reading on what Blue Securities actually made.
“Correct. Blue Securities was borne out of that one invention. Even though I created it during my service, and it was for military use, I made it on my own time. It was outside of my obligation to the Marines. So it was proprietary, and the government agreed then to buy it from me. We tested it over there, in Kosovo, and it really worked. When we got off of assignment, I had it patented, and I sold the exclusive use of the device to the United States government. And then I started manufacturing it. It’s one of the technologies that I sold to a third party. I think it’s one of the reasons I’m here now, giving you this statement.” He sat up abruptly and drank some wine. His face looked troubled, but I left it alone.
“What happened next was that the original contract with the government was doubled. Then tripled. Then I increased output by two-hundred percent. I used a good portion of the money I made to invest in research and development, and I hired the best people I could find. They loved the work — it was exciting, cutting edge stuff, meant to help our country. My scientists produced a number of profitable inventions. We now hold over 5,000 patents.”
I let out a whistle. “That’s incredible,” I said.
“Yes. It is.” He rubbed his face and drank some more.
“So you've been in business for fifteen years? How many contracts do you currently have with the government?”
“Ninety-eight percent of all of our contracts are with the United States government. We have over 20,000 contracts of various sizes, in various stages. They range in value from thousands to millions of dollars. Two percent of our clientele, the newest two percent, are foreign governments and privately held corporate entities.”
“And do you sell any of the same technology from your U.S. contracts to foreign governments?” I asked.
“Yes, we do. And we sell them to corporations, too. But only the nonproprietary technology. There are some of our contracts that have locked-down non-compete clauses. Those are our classified products. And we don’t sell those to anyone but the American government.”
He drained his glass and looked at his watch. “Nicole,” he said, and he put his face in his hands. “I can’t do this anymore tonight. I was with David Proctor all day, yesterday and today. You are much nicer than him, but I was indicted this morning. The one good thing that happened today was the fact that we got burritos. Otherwise, it’s been shit. And talking about my company, that I’ve built from the ground up, that I’m about to lose, is making me sick.”
“It’s okay,” I said, “I totally understand. I’m going to call a cab now.”
“You don’t have to rush out of here,” Walker said, giving me a long look and having another sip of wine. My insides squeezed themselves fiercely. “Stay and keep me company.”
“I’m not worried about it,” he said, and relaxed back in his chair. “It’s probably the one thing I’m not worried about right now.”
“Glad to be of service,” I said. He looked like he really wanted to say something else right then, but he didn’t. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning, then,” he said. “Text me your address.”
“I need to run an errand first thing in the morning,” I said, knowing that I needed a new suit before the arraignment. “So I’ll text you while I’m out. Is ten-thirty okay?” I asked. He nodded. “What’s your number?”
Five awkward minutes later, I was sitting in the back of the cab, staring at his phone number in my contacts. My fingers lingered over his number and I smiled to myself. Then I fanned myself the whole way home. In spite of my better judgment.
* * *
ONCE I GOT BACK to my apartment, I ripped off my suit and my bra, threw on my sweats, poured myself a very large glass of wine and silently thanked God that Mike wasn’t here. Not necessarily in that order.
Then I sat down and took out my notebook. I could not let my hormones get in the way of providing my client the best possible defense money could buy. I wanted to show him, David Proctor, and all the other senior partners that that’s exactly what I was— the best. This was my chance, and I was going to show all of them. Walker included.
I was a list-maker by nature; I loved crossing things off. It helped me to calm down, to make order out of chaos. So I thought about what Walker had told me tonight, and I mentally filed it all away. But what I was going to need more than anything was a charge by charge rebuttal. So I listed the charges against him:
