Wearing the Spider (A Suspense Novel) (Legal Thriller) (Thriller)

by Schaab, Susan

  Paul Wayford opened the door to Conference Room A with a greeting. She entered and nodded to the eighteen partners seated around the table.

  “Evie recently completed negotiating an agreement for a sculptor that involved a moral rights issue few attorneys in this firm have encountered,” Paul addressed the room. “I’ve asked her to brief us on the law involved so that we’ll have a general awareness of the issue should it arise again.”

  Evie walked to the head of the conference table and deposited her folder on the lectern.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” she began with a smile and nodded to several of the faces, subtly avoiding Alan’s. “In the interest of full disclosure, the bulk of my experience with the Visual Artists Rights Act arises from the client matter I’ve just concluded, so my conclusions may be somewhat client-specific. Instead of spending time relaying the details of case precedent I discovered, I’ll just briefly mention one of the most well-known cases, as I describe the client’s situation. I’ll provide a copy of the full research file to anyone who requests it.”

  She walked out from behind the lectern. “As you all know, federal law protecting works of art was drafted with the intent to encourage artistic endeavors. In symmetry with that objective, VARA, an amendment to the federal copyright law, placed certain restrictions on the use of acquired visual art. An artist who offers a single copy or limited edition of a painting, drawing, print, photograph or sculpture can prevent any intentional distortion or mutilation of that work that would be prejudicial to his or her reputation.” Evie paused and her eyes traveled around the room.

  Hanover beamed at her as if she were his accomplished daughter. Alan coughed and seemed to be drawing pictures on the side of his paper coffee cup. Sam Lewis, one of the youngest partners, took notes on a yellow legal pad.

  “Unless negotiated terms dictate otherwise, such an artist can sue the collector for damages for simply tiring of the work and disassembling it, as long as the work is one of recognized stature.”

  She was relaxed now and she ignored the crunch of the paper cup being crushed in Alan’s hand. Hanover glared at the disruption and its source, but Alan’s gaze rested on Evie as she continued speaking.

  “In Carter v. Helmsley-Spear, Inc.,” she continued, “the Southern District of New York interpreted ‘recognized stature’ to mean that the work must be perceived as meritorious by art experts. This standard is still the precedent.”

  Evie smiled at the eyes attentively watching her as she retrieved a photo of a sculpture from a folder and displayed it, advancing the photo in a slow waist-high arc in front of her to allow viewing by each side of the room. “This is a work called Solitary Lady sculpted by our artist client. Because he has mastered his medium, according to certain respected members of the artistic community, and the Solitary Lady was arguably consistent with his signature style, we had a good argument that the Visual Artists Rights Act was applicable.”

  Alan was now staring with a mischievous grin and Evie was actively forcing herself to look beyond him. She fought off a sudden shiver with the realization that his expression seemed to be accusing her of posing nude as a model for the sculpture. As she was nearing the end of her commentary, Alan leaned back dramatically in his chair, distracting her. She took a breath and managed to regain her thoughts.

  “The final agreement included supplemental fees for the liberty to destroy, distort, mutilate or remove the work and the right to combine the sculpture with other artistic works,” she said. “It was truly a case of intangible rights dictating their monetary value.”

  Hanover’s secretary appeared in the doorway, but had to make her way around the back of the room to wrestle away Hanover’s attention. She whispered in his ear, and he rose to leave the room. As he stood, he gave a final nod to Evie and then disappeared through the door. Some part of Evie’s subconscious noted that he was walking slowly, but she kept her focus.

  After Hanover departed, Evie finished her chronicle of the negotiation and opened the floor for questions. As she answered inquiries, she noticed that Sam Lewis continued to take copious notes. Partners offered thanks or nodded and began to leave. She bent down to retrieve a pen that she’d dropped and sensed Sam walk out. Evie looked up, expecting to see an empty room, but met Alan’s stare. He was sitting quietly, frozen in place. She decided that this time she would just stay silent and leave. Her annoyance was palpable as she leaned over the front of the lectern to gather her materials.

  As she turned to leave, she saw that he had moved between her and the door. No one else was in sight. Evie sighed and psychologically braced herself. With Alan, anything could come out of his mouth. Especially now that there were fresh angry words between them.

  “That was very interesting,” he spoke in a low animated voice. “Although, you know, I had a bit of difficulty focusing on your words. All I could think about was what color underwear you’re wearing.”

  Evie rolled her eyes and shook her head in disgust, her resolve to stay silent abandoned. “Harassed anyone else lately, Alan?”

  “I know you. I know you very well.” Alan’s pursed lips curled confidently, and his eyes pulsed with arrogance.

  “And you’re willing to bet the other partners won’t be offended by your behavior?”

  “You’re too smart to start making allegations. You know how many natural barriers there are to female partnerships and your performance has been substandard.”

  The oblique reference to their earlier exchange was not lost on Evie. She moved to his right to try to slide past him, but he shifted in front of her.

  “Can I quote you on that?” she snapped. “The ‘natural barriers’ part?”

  “Running to my partners with a sob story could be a fatal obstacle.” He put his arms up on each side of the opening so she couldn’t leave. “You can’t deny a poor overworked colleague a bit of levity, now can you?” He grinned. “What color underwear are you wearing? Mine are black silk.”

  “I’m not wearing any,” she half whispered in a flash of anger as she pushed by him and headed back to her office. Not that you’ll ever know.

  Damn it. I can’t believe I let him get to me like that. How could I have said something so stupid? She rubbed her forehead and grimaced to herself. Somewhere in her office was a mini digital recorder she’d used for client meetings. She took a look around, but it was not in any logical place. If only I had recorded that initial set of instructions about Sangerson.

  Sitting down at her desk, the pile of work there discouraged her from spending any more time searching for the recorder. She responded to an email from one of Hanover’s clients, Meter Beverage Company, about a trademark-protection policy. Despite growing vexation, she dutifully opened the VelloPro file and took out the draft memorandum that had been the subject of the conference call earlier. She brought up the file on the computer, rearranged the order of the paragraphs to create a flow that she thought Frank would find more logical, re-read the document once more and emailed it to Alan. He can’t say I didn’t follow through. I’m done. He can take it from there.

  She purged some unnecessary emails, opened the electronic Sangerson file on the system, found her notes and began a rewrite of the document, drafting in a form consistent with the contracts she usually produced. At 8:15 p.m., she closed the document, copied it from the firm’s electronic library to her laptop’s hard-drive and loaded her notes into her briefcase to continue work at home.

  Oh … that expense report. Evie took out the report and its attachments and began to review the typed text Helen had inserted. A Post-it note stuck on the first page indicated that Helen had made calls to the hotels, but no one had offered an explanation as to how the paperwork mix-up could have occurred. Evie’s hotel stay at the Euphorion had extended from a Monday night through a Thursday afternoon. Evie flipped through the receipts attached and came to the computer printout with the logo of a hotel at the top. Just as Helen had said, it was not the logo of the Euphorion Hotel or the Windh
am, it was the letterhead of the Hotel Colonial Court. That IS really strange. I didn’t stay at the Colonial Court. She looked back at the first paragraph of the printout. It did contain Evie’s name and the firm’s address, so it was not someone else’s bill. The date of arrival in Dallas was correct.

  She read down through the paragraphs grouped by date. The days were correct, Monday through Thursday. There were meals listed, but she honestly couldn’t remember how many times she had ordered room service or eaten at the hotel breakfast buffet. There were other charges, telephone calls. Oddly, the outgoing calls were almost exclusively to a series of related numbers with an international dialing sequence. There was a separate listing of telephone numbers from which calls had been received for the stated room number. She didn’t recognize the country code that preceded each of the international numbers. Some of the incoming calls matched those outgoing numbers, but there were still more incoming calls from local exchanges.

  How could this have happened? She tried to remember that particular check-out experience. No clear recollection of reviewing the bill before leaving the Euphorion Hotel on that Thursday materialized in her mind, but she had to have at least glanced at it. That was her normal practice.

  Evie thought about that trip to Dallas. She had been representing Green Tree, a client from Philadelphia that had enlisted her services to negotiate a license grant for a squirrel cartoon character to a Texas children’s clothing manufacturer. It had been a lengthy but fairly smooth negotiation that had culminated in a celebratory cocktail party on Thursday before Evie left to catch a flight back to New York. She tried to remember the series of meetings that had taken place over the several days, but it was all a blur. So many other clients’ needs had received her attention since her return.

  As was typical of any associate of the firm, she had taken the work of other clients with her on the trip and had spent some downtime in her hotel room on those matters, but she couldn’t recall making or receiving any international calls. She wrote a note to Helen, “Please call one or two of these telephone numbers and say that you are cleaning up some administrative paperwork. Try to identify sources without alerting them that we don’t know who they are. I guess it’s possible that these calls could be calls to another room charged to me by mistake. Also, look up my billing records for those dates and make a list of client matters I billed time to. See what you can find out. Thanks!”

  Evie left the note and the expense report on Helen’s desk and checked the clock. Before she left the office, she would have to wait for a telephone call. One of her more disorganized clients on the west coast was scheduled to call any minute for a consult that she knew they considered urgent. And the time difference meant that they expected her to be available for the remainder of the California business day.

  The office was unusually quiet. She needed coffee. Evie rose from her desk and walked out into the hallway to refill her coffee cup. As she walked past Jenna’s office she noticed that it was dark. She glanced back toward her own office to confirm that she’d left the door open to enable her to hear the telephone. Evie walked into the kitchen, slid her coffee mug in place, pressed the “with milk” button and stood watching for the liquid to flow into her cup.

  Evie thought about her earlier exchange with Alan and wondered whether she should have held her tongue. I’ve never spoken to a partner that way … even if he or she deserved it. Nothing seemed to be happening with the coffee machine, so she fumbled with its buttons, but it refused to cooperate. The lower drawer revealed raw sugar packets and Evie added milk manually from the refrigerator. She could hear the sound of a muffled voice in the small conference room adjacent to the kitchen. It would never have entered Evie’s mind to eavesdrop, except for the fact that she heard her name mentioned.

  5

  Evie Sullivan … I told you … won’t be a problem … ”The door between the kitchen and the small adjoining conference room was ajar. She moved slightly closer to the door and strained to hear more, but the voice was purposefully muffled. There was only the one voice, though. A man’s voice. Whoever it was must be speaking to someone on the conference room telephone.

  “… sufficient … schedule … show the deal take shape …”

  “… paper trail … … … acted alone …”

  Nothing else was intelligible except that some words sounded like Spanish or some Latin-sounding language. Evie stood silent and did not breathe. The cup holding her coffee became very heavy and started to slide from her weakening grip. She focused on the voice coming from the next room, speaking at a low pitch and with an artificial cadence. It sounded familiar. Who was that? The voice came from Conference Room C, often used by Steve Buniker because his office was just next door. But the voice was not Steve’s baritone.

  It sounded like Alan, but she couldn’t be certain. Why would someone choose to place a call from a conference room telephone extension instead of from the privacy of his office? She knew that the firm tracked calls made from each attorney’s office extension for client billing purposes. Was this person making a call that he did not wish to be attributed to him? She took a breath and recognized a familiar odor wafting through the tiny opening, a cigar smell. Alan.

  Evie moved in a trancelike state toward the hallway door, coffee in hand. She walked the length of the hallway in the direction opposite Conference Room C, turned the corner, and took the long way around toward her office. She put the cup of coffee on the corner of her desk, grabbed her briefcase, stuffed in her BlackBerry without thinking and switched off her desk lamp.

  When Alan had mentioned her name, the words he had spoken told a chilling story. And who would he be speaking to in Spanish? She felt a sense of dread … her defensive instincts had awakened. There was a sudden realization that she was being isolated, targeted. What could he have been referring to? “Paper trail …” Was he saying that I acted alone? And what sort of action was he talking about? What did he mean by ‘problem’ and what was sufficient about a schedule? What deal taking shape?

  As she turned to leave, she heard two male voices, the volume and clarity increasing as they approached. She froze, but could not make out the words. The steps quickened and she suddenly realized that they were headed right toward her door. As quietly as she could, she vaulted back to her desk, flipped on the desk lamp, flung herself into the desk chair and assumed a natural slump over the desk with her acute attention devoted to a series of pages in the center of her desk. She was staring solidly down toward the second page of a confidentiality agreement when the two men passed in view of her open door.

  They were still talking, but she could hear that the conversation had turned to an armed robbery that had occurred on the adjacent street the week before. One of the men was indeed Alan and the other was a younger partner, Lance Warren, who had not been at the partner meeting earlier in the day. Two feet beyond her door they stopped and abruptly ended their conversation.

  Evie concentrated on relaxing her facial muscles as she felt Alan enter the room and approach her desk.

  “You’re here awfully late,” he said flatly.

  She looked up. “Don’t you remember that you asked me to finish work on Sangerson by the end of the week?”

  “Are you always here this late?”

  “Depends.” No more details. And no more reactions.

  Alan walked slowly around Evie’s office, straightening a crooked picture, studying each book title as he made his way around to where she was sitting. He turned his eyes toward the page beneath her hand, his eyes traveling along the desk to the cup of coffee still perched on the corner of her desk. “May I get you a fresh cup of coffee?” he asked, as he suppressed a yawn. “That must be cold by now.”

  “No thanks,” she said calmly. “I’m on my way out in a few minutes.” Evie suddenly, horribly, realized that the coffee cup was full and had been standing awkwardly on the edge of her desk untouched while she and Alan were avoiding each other’s gaze.

  She nonchala
ntly picked up the full cup. She wanted to go back to the kitchen and pour it out, but she didn’t want to leave Alan in her office unsupervised. Her every instinct screamed out not to trust him. She placed the cup on the other side of the desk and sat down again in her desk chair. She pretended to organize some papers and then looked up at Alan. “Is there something you wanted to talk about?” she asked.

  In his full regalia of artificial charm, Alan sat down in the chair across from her and began recounting anecdotes about his years at the firm as if reminiscing with a long-lost friend. He propped his feet where the coffee cup had been on the edge of her desk. He seemed unaffected by Evie’s expressionless gaze and preceded as if they were two jovial colleagues sharing a beer. After a few moments he finished with a “Well, see you tomorrow.”

  She watched him leave, feeling sick to her stomach. What the hell was he up to? With a shiver she tried to imagine the portion of Alan’s conversation in Conference Room C that she had not been able to hear. There might possibly be plausible and benign explanations, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that he was arranging something manipulative. She suddenly felt certain that he was capable of more than abuse and sexual misconduct. She wondered how ruthless he could really be.

  She looked at the clock and realized that the gallery from the west coast had not called so she checked voice mail once more and then looked over at the computer screen for any new email. She noticed one electronic message that read:

  Go ahead with the deal we discussed in Dallas.

  Adinaldo, Gerais Chevas

  What? She had no idea who Adinaldo was and she had never heard of Gerais Chevas. She drafted a reply.