Noble Chase: A Novel

by Michael Rudolph

  “Okay, Red Sky. This is the Tortola Radio Marine operator. Have a nice day and thank you for using Tortola Marine.”

  He put the microphone back on the radio and looked at his wife. “As soon as we’re ready, let’s raise the anchor.”

  “What do you think is the matter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you think? You must have some idea.” She was worried.

  “I have no idea what it’s all about,” Max kept answering her repeated speculations. “You heard the exact same words over the radio I did. When we get to a phone over on Tortola, we’ll know all the answers. Now, c’mon, let’s get moving.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll do last night’s dishes while you make the bed and shave.” She moved over to the galley as she talked.

  “Right. There’s a nice breeze out there today, so we’ll sail over to Road Town and tie up at one of the marinas over by Wickham’s Cay.”

  “Good idea,” she replied, turning on the faucet and causing the electric pump to groan into action.

  “Easy on the hot water. I need it more than those dishes.”

  “Don’t worry. There’s plenty.”

  Inside an hour, they were ready to go. Andi started up the diesel while Max winched up the anchor. It broke out of the sand and came up easily. In short order, they were motoring out of Savannah Bay. As Andi pointed Red Sky into the wind, Max raised the main and unfurled the genoa. When Andi turned off the engine, Max took over the steering, peering through his bifocal sunglasses while standing at the wheel. He took off his canvas tennis hat and tossed it smartly down through the hatch into the cabin below. Marylebone sniffed it briefly and then resumed his nap.

  Red Sky was on a port tack, being pushed along at 8 knots by the warm, silent wind. Her wake was unbroken as she sailed in a northeasterly direction along the Sir Francis Drake Channel toward Road Town.

  He enjoyed the wind blowing through his curly salt-and-pepper hair. His dark blue T-shirt covered the slight paunch that his appetite had created. His six-foot-two-inch frame had flourished as he discovered that even the most remote islands in the Caribbean sold junk food. “We might as well tack now,” he said to Andi. “It’ll save us time.”

  “Where’s Marylebone?” she asked, and in response the cat’s gray dust mop of a tail moved almost imperceptibly in the cabin below, just enough to indicate his presence. “I see him, he’s okay,” she said in answer to her own question, and then reached over to release the genoa sheet. “Go ahead and tack, Admiral. Me and the kitty are ready!”

  “Calling that fat cat a ‘kitty’ is perjurious.”

  “Sssh, he’s sensitive.”

  The sun beating down on the dock was high and hot. Max tried his cellphone first, but, as usual, there was no signal. Then he walked over to the freestanding telephone booth next to the marina office and stood by the phone, a life-size statue dripping perspiration, waiting for an operator to place his call to New York.

  When the call finally went through, the receptionist in the office didn’t recognize his voice, asked him twice to repeat his name, once to spell it, and then finally put him on hold while announcing the call. Just great, he thought. My office, my partner, my daughter, and after two years of absence, some new receptionist puts me through the third degree. Sic transit gloria. He finally heard the call being rung through into Beth’s office.

  It was Clifford, however, who picked up the phone and spoke first. “Hi, Maximilian. I’m in the office with Beth and we have you on the squawk box. How are you and Alexandra?”

  “She’s shopping for food and I’m baking my brains out in this marina. Otherwise, we’re both fine. Beth, how are you?”

  “I’m okay, Dad,” she said. “I have a long story to tell you, can you hear us?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s about that Paramount-Jasco case. Remember I told you I was going to have dinner with C. K. Leung?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “I had that dinner with him last night.”

  “Good,” he responded somewhat tersely, waiting for her to pass on to more relevant information.

  “The first thing he told me was how pleased he was with the Jasco verdict. He assured me that we’d continue to get his legal work no matter who the new president was.”

  “Did the Coast Guard find Len or Erica?”

  “Just the DNA identification from the blood on their clothing.”

  “Got it.” He was anxious to have her get to the point. The other shoe, he thought, was waiting somewhere to be dropped.

  “So,” Beth went on, “all through dinner, C.K. is carrying on about how great a job I did.”

  “Sounds like the dinner was a testimonial.”

  “Right. And then during dessert, C.K. mentions to me that he and his brothers have decided to donate five percent of the Jasco recovery to set up a scholarship in Len’s memory. That’s when I realized we had a problem.”

  “How so?”

  “He also tells me that the five percent contribution equals 1.75 million dollars….”

  “Are they also going to contribute five percent of the punitives?”

  “That’s the problem!” she blurted out. “Until I told him about it at dinner, C.K. didn’t know that Paramount collected the extra seventy million. All he knew about was the thirty-five mil!”

  “Max, the bottom line isn’t very complicated,” Clifford interjected. “Leonard Sloane never told the Leungs about the punitive damages and never sent them the money. He used Erica to set up a secret account in Paramount’s name at Chase Bank and got the whole hundred and five million wired into that account. Then he wired thirty-five million to the Leungs in Taiwan, less our fees, naturally.”

  “And the other seventy million?” Max asked, already anticipating the answer.

  “Gone,” Clifford replied. “Erica handled the entire transaction from her office at Chase, and then erased any record of it from her computer.”

  “That was convenient.”

  “All Chase can figure out is that the seventy million was wired out the same day it hit the account, just before Labor Day, and that was six days before Sloane transferred the thirty-five million to Taiwan.”

  “Gave himself a real head start. Any chance C.K. knew about this?” Max asked.

  “I’m convinced he had no idea, Dad, and I was too shell-shocked to question him at dinner. I only wanted to finish the meal and get away from the table so that I could talk to you and Clifford about it.”

  “Well, you did the right thing. Where’s Leung now?” Max asked.

  “He’s flying back to Taiwan today,” Clifford answered.

  “What’s our malpractice exposure?”

  “I have a couple of the associates working on it,” Clifford said. “We haven’t called our insurance carrier yet.”

  “Good, we need some answers first.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Look, guys, maybe I’ll fly up to the city tonight so we can discuss it face-to-face tomorrow morning. I’ll call you back in a couple of hours.”

  “Okay, Max,” Clifford said. “Get back to us as soon as you can.”

  “Goodbye, Dad,” Beth whispered. “Sorry to lay this on you.”

  “Don’t sweat it, kid, and don’t waste your energy worrying. We’ll figure out something.” She was new to this kind of problem, and both the lawyer and the father in him tried to reassure her. “Goodbye, you two.”

  His mind was already racing through a hundred possible scenarios as he hung up the phone. As he walked back to the boat, the permutations increased. By the time he got back to Red Sky, his logic had narrowed them down again. Andi wasn’t back yet. He found some old Maalox tablets and chewed a couple. When his wife got back to their slip an hour later, he thought he had sorted the conversation out enough to discuss it with her.

  Andi saw his angry expression as she handed him the groceries and climbed on board. Unable to wait for her to even put the food away,
he started to pour out the whole telephone call. “I just cannot believe how badly Beth got suckered in by that bastard.” The more Max talked about it, the angrier he became. He stalked around the main cabin while Andi unpacked in the galley.

  “Will you stop rambling and tell me what it all means?” Andi felt her own upset growing in direct proportion to his. It was clear her daughter was in trouble.

  “She was too damn excited about winning the decision and too green to realize she was being scammed.”

  “What did she do wrong other than win a judgment for a hundred and five million?”

  “It’s real simple. The reason Sloane was able to get Jasco to wire the money into his phony Paramount bank account is because Beth never picked up on any of the warning signs.”

  “But she had no reason to see them. Sloane was able to set it up because the Leungs trusted him. They’re the ones who should have kept an eye on him. Beth was just the lawyer on the job.” She was a protective mother defending a child from attack.

  “Of course, of course. Len counted on Leung’s absentee ownership to make the damn thing fly, but if Beth had been more careful, it could have been prevented, or at least it wouldn’t have been so easy for him to pull off.”

  “Well, what could she have done? Nobody even knew Leung existed until after Len and Erica drowned. And where was Clifford during all of this?” Andi, never a pushover in any argument, was actively engaged in Beth’s defense.

  “I know, I know.”

  “So I’ll ask you again: What should she have done? Leung didn’t even know who his attorneys were until he saw the paid bill from Clifford.”

  “Sloane was no dummy. Look, the point is Beth should have checked out his authority before letting Jasco wire the funds into Chase. She didn’t get one lousy little piece of verification from anyone else at Paramount to establish Sloane’s authority to do anything, let alone open up an account at Chase. She took his word for everything. When he told her he didn’t know where their corporate minute books were kept, that was the end of the due diligence as far as she was concerned.”

  “She trusted her client.”

  “She actually had a copy of their old banking resolution from Fidelity National Bank in the file. It required two signatures for all transactions. That alone should have warned her to be extra careful. She even let Sloane con her into notarizing the signature of some nonexistent officer at Paramount who supposedly countersigned the Chase banking resolution.”

  “Come on, Max. Even I can see that’s just a lot of administrative nonsense. Len couldn’t have pulled it off if Clifford had reviewed the paperwork.”

  “Maybe so, but he did pull it off.”

  “Does all that add up to malpractice?”

  “That’s what Clifford is having researched now. You might as well also know that Beth signed an opinion letter to Jasco’s attorneys assuring them that the wire into Chase was completely authorized.” He saw Andi’s expression crumple at this, but he was still too angry to feel very supportive.

  “If it’s malpractice, won’t your insurance cover the loss?”

  “After we eat the hundred-thousand deductible, and then only if the malpractice wasn’t intentional. You can be sure Leung will stick in a claim that it was, and that’s not covered.”

  “But it was an accident. Beth didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “It doesn’t matter. There’s no payoff for mistakes, accidental or intentional. And, by the way,” he added ironically, “how do you think it’s going to look to a jury when it comes out that Sloane personally paid Beth a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus?”

  “Clifford told her to keep it!” she fought back in defense of her daughter. “Satisfied clients are allowed to give presents to their lawyers.”

  “Sure. Flowers, a case of wine, maybe even a watch, but Sloane’s personal check should have been deposited in the firm account, not in Beth’s. I can just see Leung’s attorney arguing that it proves Beth was in on the entire scam.”

  “That’s pure hindsight.”

  “Trials are all about hindsight.”

  “Then don’t expect Beth to be omniscient.”

  “The thing that’s got me so absolutely furious is that I got taken the same damn way when I first started practicing law thirty-five years ago, only that time the client actually filed a written complaint with the bar association.”

  “I didn’t know. You never said anything to me about that.”

  “Yes, and before the bar association held a hearing and found me innocent, I had been fired from my job and my father nearly died from a heart attack. It took cardiologists three weeks to save his life.” Max heaved with emotion at the memories.

  “Oh, Max, I’m so sorry. That must have been terrible.” She was distraught by their confrontation. His last disclosure brought her to tears.

  “And that’s why this is killing me, that Sloane should pull this off and then die, leaving Beth holding the bag.” He shook his head sadly. “Her only sin is inexperience or overzealousness.” He spoke regretfully now, blaming himself for her failure.

  “So what now? Do you think we should go up to New York?”

  “I told them I’d call back. I think maybe we should.”

  “You know what, better that Beth never had that damn dinner with Leung. He’d have never found out otherwise.”

  “Beth was right to be straight with him. We could never take a chance that Leung might find out himself one day.”

  “But then you could simply deny knowing anything about it. Paramount won a hundred and five million and Paramount collected a hundred and five million. What happened to the money afterwards wasn’t Beth’s problem.”

  “It’s more pragmatism than anything else. Suppose there was a criminal conspiracy indictment because we failed to disclose.”

  “Why don’t you call the Beef Island airport while I pack and see what’s flying over to San Juan this afternoon? It’ll be easy for us to catch a flight there for New York.”

  “Good idea.” He was much subdued and exhausted by his rage. So was Andi.

  Beth could feel the adrenaline flowing and had to remind herself this was not an adversarial proceeding. “Stay cool!” she muttered one last time as she entered Clifford’s office. She quickly scanned the expressions. Her stepfather on the couch. Clifford at his desk. Frank Epstein, over by the window, the buffer, sticking to the middle of the road like he always did.

  New clients entering Clifford’s office for the first time were confronted by him behind the desk, ringed by a couch and three overstuffed red leather chairs, surrounded by dark walnut paneling, and basking in smiles from framed photographs of him shaking hands with four Republican presidents. They knew immediately that they were in a secure place, being guided by competent and conservative counsel.

  Beth bent down, kissed Max on his tanned cheek, and sat on the chair that he and Frank had left between them. The three men in Clifford’s office each gave Beth a supportive look as they shifted into business gear. Thank God, she thought. Compared with last night’s confrontation with Max, today would be easy. The pent-up frustration Max had accumulated during the flight up north had been vented on her with a fury she hadn’t anticipated.

  “Beth, I asked Frank to join us,” Clifford opened the meeting. “His boys have been researching our little malpractice question.” The mere use of the word malpractice was enough to make her skin crawl. “Why don’t you bring us up-to-date on what we know as of this morning?”

  “I spoke to Chase Bank again a few minutes ago.”

  “What did they have to say?”

  “It’s clear that Erica used her computer at Chase to set up a worldwide string of Paramount bank accounts controlled by Sloane. Chase has located three of them so far, but the money was long gone from each, in and out in hours. They’re still working on it.”

  “Well, if we have to…,” Clifford said. “One of the best bank investigators in the business is a good friend of mine.”

&n
bsp; “You mean that Israeli guy Rheinhartz?” Max asked.

  “Except he lives in Zurich now.”

  “Maybe you should give him a call.”

  Clifford nodded and then continued, “What did your research turn up, Frank? Do we have a malpractice problem?”

  “It’s pretty much a question of fact…,” he began.

  “Like we tell our clients, huh?” Max commented dryly.

  “Exactly. Beth had the right to rely on Sloane’s authority unless she knew or should have known about some restriction. Like a lot of things, it all boils down to her due diligence and whether she was careful enough.”

  “That bonus check she deposited into her personal account won’t help on that issue,” Clifford said.

  “I deposited that check on your specific instructions!” Beth charged in.

  “I’m not saying you did it on your own,” Clifford replied.

  “The bastard was setting me up!”

  “Clifford, you and Frank both knew that Beth was in over her head when she handled the closing documentation. She asked both of you for help.”

  “Oh, come on, Max,” Clifford said. “Beth got caught on something that any novice should have avoided.”

  “Listen, she tried, but you were all too busy to provide oversight. That fee may have dulled Beth’s caution, but it should have piqued yours.” Max spoke calmly, but his voice was uncompromising. There was no question of his priorities.

  “Yes, but she’s the one that got nailed and it places us all on the spot. There’s no need to personalize it.”

  “Then let’s cut out this ‘we’ and ‘she’ crap. This is our joint problem.” Max was an old hand at arguing with Clifford, no quarter given or asked. To hear them go at it, one would never suspect these were two lifelong friends. Beth had never heard it before. She was hard-pressed to sit there and listen to it, glued to her chair by the force of their vehemence.

  “Come on, relax, you two.” Frank was an imperturbable veteran of these encounters. “And I didn’t mean to imply any fault either, Max. No one’s pointing the finger at Beth.”

  “Frank, are the individual partners personally liable even though we’re organized as an LLC?” Max asked.