Shelby Baskin was next. Bruce actually recognized her name—they were at Harvard Law School at the same time. He made a note to check his yearbook later. He reviewed the pleadings—some were signed by both her and Jeffries, while others, such as the ones relating to the confidentiality issues, were signed by Jeffries alone. Bruce pulled out the ones signed by her; he knew these were the ones she had drafted. He re-read them. The early pleadings, such as the original complaint, were well-written and compelling, though not particularly passionate. As the case progressed, however, Shelby’s writing became more forceful, more urgent. The last filing, only weeks before Charese’s death, was almost desperate in its tone:
“It is imperative that this Court put an immediate and final end to the Defendant’s delay tactics in this case. The Defendant has on three different occasions in this action requested extensions to discovery deadlines; on one occasion, the stated ground for this extension was to allow Defendant and his wife to travel to the Cayman Islands for a two week vacation. But while Defendant is sipping pina coladas on the beach and working on his tan, Plaintiff is scrounging for food and wrapping herself in blankets to keep warm because she cannot afford her heating bills. Counsel for Plaintiff has personally witnessed a marked and frightening deterioration in Plaintiff’s health during the pendency of this action, and said Counsel hereby implores this Court to heed the maxim that ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’ and to take immediate steps to prevent further delays in this case....”
Bruce re-read the section, again comparing it to Shelby’s earlier writing style. No doubt about it: Shelby had personalized this case; her client had become more to her than just a client. And now her client was dead. Did she believe Pierre was the killer? If not, Bruce was sure Shelby would jump at the opportunity to help find Charese’s real killer. Hopefully she had stayed in the Boston area after graduation.
Bruce returned the pleadings to the clerk. It had been a successful few hours—the players in this case all seemed to have complex agendas and motivations that transcended the facts and the issues of the legal action itself. There were plenty of buttons to push. Hopefully one of them would set off a bomb in the face of his enemy.
* * *
Bruce returned to his office and pulled out his Harvard Law School yearbook. Shelby Baskin was in the class behind Bruce, so she would not be pictured individually. But she would likely be pictured in some group picture of a club or organization. He thumbed through the pages, quickly skimming the names beneath the photos. There. He found her name, beneath a picture of the Harvard Law Journal staff. He lifted his eyes to the picture, counted four faces in from the left in the front row. He felt his skin tingle, his body reacting even before his brain figured things out. So you’re Shelby Baskin. He closed his eyes and remembered:
It was near the end of his second year in law school, sometime late in the spring of 1988. The winter had been a harsh one, but it had turned suddenly, and a warm spring rain was falling. It was late at night—maybe one in the morning—when he finally left the library. He began to jog slowly toward his apartment, at first indifferent to the puddles, then playfully splashing his way through them.
In the faint light of the city, he saw that the Cambridge Common had become a giant mud puddle. After days in the library, the mud called to him. He stopped to take off his jacket, draped it and his book bag over a branch. He sprinted toward the mud, his feet somehow firm beneath him, then launched himself into a headfirst slide. The water was warm, and the mud soft. Bruce slid forty, maybe fifty, feet, before he came to a stop. Then he stood up and did it again. And a third time. He had now traveled to the far side of the clearing and was about to turn around and body surf his way back to his belongings when he heard a young woman’s voice. She was just ahead of him, running toward a swing set. “Come on, just one swing,” she to some unseen companion. Her voice floated to him in the nighttime air.
“Not me. I’m not putting this umbrella down—what if I catch a cold right before finals?” A man’s voice.
“Okay, have it your way. But I feel like swinging in the rain. Get it? Swinging in the rain?” The woman skipped over to a swing, launched herself skyward. She sang: “What a glorious feeling, I’m happy again, I’m laughing again....”
Her face was visible as she swung in and out of the shadows cast by a nearby streetlight—a beautiful, confident, joyous face. Eyes glistening through the raindrops. Loose hair rising and falling as she fell and rose. Droplets of water running down her cheeks, joining her mouth in delighted song. A vision from a song Grandpa used to sing about enchanting mermaids.
Sensing his darkened, muddy presence, she turned her face toward him. Their eyes met, and she smiled through her song to him, urging him to continue his frolic, to share with her in the pure joy of living. He returned her smile, held her eyes for one, two, three swings, then broke away and ran. He dove, landed and slid, then twisted himself onto his back and slid even further, laughter and muddy water in his wake. He strained, unsuccessfully, to see her through the spray, but the night air transmitted her own sweet laugh across the watery clearing to him.
He stood up to slide his way back to her, then heard a distant voice. The male voice. “Come on, please, I’m getting soaked. Let’s go home. We still might be able to catch the end of Letterman.”
In the distance he saw a figure, holding an umbrella, moving toward the swing set. She hesitated, then hopped off the swing and skipped toward her companion. They began walking away, his arm around her waist and his umbrella over her head.
In mid-stride she suddenly stopped, stepped out from underneath his shelter and turned. She searched for Bruce’s darkened figure. Her eyes flashed as they settled on him, and Bruce squinted—it was as if her eyes had captured all the world’s light and somehow reflected it back directly into his darkness. He held her gaze for a few seconds, then her companion turned to retrieve her once again and guide her home, and she was gone.
He had looked for her around campus and in Harvard Square for the next few weeks, but he never saw her again. Until the picture in the yearbook in front of him….
He sat for a moment and reflected on his discovery. How much of life was fated, and how much just coincidence? With a flick of his neck, he shook the question away—he had work to do; answers to philosophical questions would have to wait for a more leisurely time in his life. But, he had to admit, the yearbook discovery put a smile on his face for the first time in a month.
He picked up his phone and called the Harvard alumni office. They had hounded him for money since graduation—he had no doubt they did the same to every alumnus, and would know exactly where Shelby Baskin was living and working now that she had graduated.
He was right, and the news was good: Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office. This was a huge bonus—not only was she still in Boston, but she was working in the very office that was in charge of the murder investigation.
Maybe he could do more than just deny his enemy his profit. Maybe he could, subtly, point the DA’s office to the real killer. A lucky break. It was about time.
* * *
Bruce left the office at 4:30 and jogged home. He threw on a pair of blue jeans, a T-shirt and an old leather jacket, and continued jogging toward the LAP offices.
He arrived at 4:50, just as the receptionist was gathering her things to leave for the day. He eyed her quickly—she wore plain clothes, making no attempt to distract from an equally plain face. He mustered his best smile. “Oh, I’m sorry, are you closing up? I heard there was a tenant rally coming up, and I wanted to get some information.”
She looked him up and down, smiled back. “Yeah, here’s a flyer. Thursday night at City Hall. The City Council is considering rolling back rent control, so we need a big turnout.”
“Great stuff. I’ll be there. Anything I can bring?”
“Friends, as many as you can.”
“Actually, a buddy of mine is the one who told me about it. He’s friends with a lawyer
named Reese, I think—does that sound right?”
“Yeah, Reese Jeffries, he’s one of our senior attorneys. He’ll be there Thursday, running the show.”
Bruce smiled. “I thought the President of the City Council ran the show.”
The receptionist shook her head and smiled back. “Not in Reese’s mind.”
CHAPTER 56
[November 8, 1990]
Three times over the past two days Bruce had been tempted to dial the District Attorney’s office and ask for Shelby Baskin, only to talk himself out of it. She—or more accurately, the enchanted she of Bruce’s memory—was becoming a bit of a distraction to him, and he wanted to make contact with her as soon as possible so that he could replace the almost surreal quality of their first encounter with something a bit more mundane. But, for tactical reasons, he should first wait until after his encounter with Reese Jeffries. With Shelby’s help, there was a slight chance he would be able to put his enemy in jail. But with Jeffries’ assistance, he could almost surely deny his enemy his profit, and maybe recapture it himself. So first things first.
The tenant rally that night was being held outside City Hall at five o’clock. Jeffries wasn’t stupid—the City Council didn’t meet until 7:30, but a five o’clock rally would be sure to provide lively footage for the six o’clock news.
Bruce again left work early, went home to change out of his lawyer uniform, then walked to the open brick plaza area outside of City Hall. He was forty-five minutes early, but he wanted the chance to observe Jeffries during the set-up period of the rally. It was then, absent the scrutiny of the press and hidden from sight from his unwashed followers, that Jeffries would be at his least staged. At some point during the evening Bruce planned to make contact with him, and he hoped to gain some insights into the man before that encounter.
What Bruce knew about him so far came from what he had gleaned from the pleadings in Charese’s lawsuit, and from deductions made based on Jeffries’ academic and professional background published in a directory of Massachusetts lawyers. From the pleadings Bruce concluded that Jeffries’ primary objective was to champion the cause of tenants’ rights. This conclusion was consistent with Jeffries’ academic and professional history—Middlebury College in the late 1960’s, with a major in sociology; two years off, probably to travel the country by van and protest the war; law degree from NYU; and a series of professional affiliations with non-profit organizations focusing on the liberal cause du jour: first human rights, then nuclear disarmament, then homelessness. Poster boy for the left. Trusted Lapdog of the liberals.
Now that Bruce watched him in person, he was surprised to see a man who looked like he was organizing a political convention rather than an outdoor rally. Law students ran to fetch him coffee, assistants dabbed the sweat away from his face, activists dutifully assumed the positions he assigned to them and held their signs aloft. Bruce assumed Jeffries would be just an older version of a Sixties flower child—sort of like Jerry Garcia in a blue suit. But Jeffries seemed too comfortable to be a true radical. It was as if he was not so much interested in provoking changes in society, but rather in ensuring that his would be the loudest voice in the fight for change. He would never admit to no longer being a radical, yet he appeared perfectly comfortable in his role as emperor of the opposition to the establishment. The issues were not important; what was important was that Reese Jeffries was the top dog in fighting on the anti-establishment side of them. Then he went home to his house in the suburbs.
Bruce watched him closely, watched his eyes. They usually gave a man away, especially a man who didn’t know he was being watched. There it was. He glanced down the shirt of one of the young female lawyers, licked his lips, leered. And there. A step closer—a step too close—to the woman applying powder to his face. So maybe that was the key. Maybe here was a weakness Bruce could use to his advantage.
Bruce turned toward the young lawyer who had been the lucky recipient of the Jeffries leer. She seemed lukewarm to the flirtation. Maybe she had no desire to see the emperor in no clothes. Or maybe she had seen it already, and had been unimpressed.
“Hi, my name’s Bruce. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Actually, yes. I need somebody to read this to me.” She spoke quickly, impatiently. She stuffed a three-page document in Bruce’s hand. “It’s the latest draft of the proposed ordinance filed by the landlord assholes. I need to see what they’ve changed from the previous draft. Read it out loud while I compare it to the older version.”
“I think I can handle that.”
“Good boy. Now read.” She looked up and flashed a quick smile. “My name’s Laura, by the way.”
As Bruce read, she lit a cigarette, her eyes never leaving the page. Occasionally she reached down and swigged from a bottle of Diet Coke, but mostly she just puffed and read. Her teeth had yellowed a bit from the cigarettes, but otherwise she was fairly attractive—long curly hair, green eyes, full breasts climbing out from beneath a v-neck sweater.
She cut him off. “Stop. Read that again.” As he did, she made notes on her text. “Go on.”
They continued in this manner for ten minutes, until he had completed the text. “And they lived happily ever after.”
She gave him a sardonic smile. “Thanks, asshole.”
“Any time. Any changes?”
“A couple. Nothing major. Who are you, anyway? I’ve never seen you before.”
“Bruce Arrujo. I’m actually a lawyer at Stoak, Puck & Beal.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You mean ‘Choke, Suck and Steal’? That explains your fluency with words like ‘heretofore.’”
“That’s us. I work on the Steal side of the firm. Sometimes the Choke side.”
“Oh.” She looked him up and down, arched an eyebrow. “That’s too bad. Well, what are you doing here?”
“I left the office early, jumped into a phone booth to change, and here I am. Ready to help make the world safe for tenants again. Just don’t tell any of the partners at my firm that I’m here. They probably think this is some kind of Communist insurrection or something.”
“Don’t worry. You’re secret’s safe with me, comrade.”
“How about you?”
“I’m on staff at LAP. Known to you big-firm types as a Lapdog. I usually do consumer protection stuff, but we’re all helping out on this rent control fight.”
He had sparked her interest a bit; it was time now to leave. He would come back to her later. “Well, let me know if there’s anything else I can do. Nice meeting you.” He shook her hand firmly, like he would a man’s, smiled, then turned and waded back into the crowd of gathering rally participants.
The rally began a few minutes later, with Reese orchestrating the event for the television cameras. He was damn good. The crowd responded well to him, and he spoke in short, juicy sentences—perfect for sound bites on the nighttime newscasts. The performance made Bruce think of Ronald Reagan—not the brightest leader, but ideal for the television age.
Bruce did his best to cheer and jeer, as directed, along with the other activists, trying to put out of his mind that these were the same people who had heckled Grandpa to his grave. Another minute or two and Bruce was sure he was going to pummel a fellow demonstrator who had eaten too much garlic for lunch and kept breathing on him, but then the cameras stopped, which also signaled the end of the demonstrating, and everyone watched quietly as the television news reporters interviewed Reese.
“Let me be clear about this. If rent control is terminated in Boston, thousands of tenants—including the elderly and the handicapped—will be forced to live on the streets of this city. And for what? I’ll tell you for what—so that millionaire landlords living on estates in Dover can afford to re-stock their wine cellars and trout ponds. Since when do we in this country rob from the poor to give to the rich?” One of the LAP staff members cued the crowd, and it again cheered zestfully.
Bruce smiled. The Dover millionaire was a reference to Wesley
Krygier—he was glad that Jeffries still had Krygier in his cross hairs. It would make his job a bit easier.
After the last of the interviews was complete, Reese moved away from the reporters and re-joined the other LAP staff. Bruce caught Laura’s eye, smiled, walked to her. Reese was nearby, close enough to hear. “I know you think I’m a capitalist pig, but would you allow me to buy you a drink anyway? You know, use the product of some poor laborer’s sweat to indulge my idle follies.”
She looked up at him, a bit surprised. She recovered quickly. “Sure. I’ll be with you in five, although I’m not sure I like you referring to me as a folly.”
“Great.” Bruce then quickly turned and introduced himself to Reese, who had overheard his invitation to Laura and was eyeing him jealously. “Hi, I’m Bruce Arrujo.” He reached out and shook Reese’s hand, using two of his own. He made sure to speak loudly enough so that the other staff members could hear. “I thought that last interview was fabulous, Mr. Jeffries. I have a lot of respect for what you do.”
[Boston Law 01.0] Unlawful Deeds Page 34
