Face Value

by Lia Matera

  “Well …” He shifted his ample posterior in my just-upgraded chair. “You’ve taken on this criminal case.” His tone implied I’d jilted him for an unsuitable underling. “And as I said, with the in and outs of that …” He trailed off, as if there were no need to reprise his reasoning. As if he’d already explained.

  “You’ve heard that I back-burner civil cases, haven’t you? That I concentrate on my criminal clients and short-change my corporate.” I forced myself to swallow Steve’s name. “It’s not true.”

  Perry, and the multi-million dollar business he represented, stood up, preparing to leave. “It’s just, you know, Laura. With so much money at stake …” His jaw tightened visibly. “The shareholders pay me to be cautious. You’re a one-person firm. And you now have this big criminal case.”

  I looked up at his well-fed, petulant face. He had the spoiled-husband air of a wealthy man in his fifties. He appeared unused to contradiction.

  How many times had his corporation been sued, I wondered. Often enough for him to realize the judge in his months-away-from-trial suit would allow me court days off to defend another case.

  “Be honest,” I urged. “Steve Sayres came to you, didn’t he? He told you I’d ignore you because of this other case.”

  But even as I said it, I knew it hadn’t happened quite that way. Steve was a master of the small needle, a jab here and a jab there, until the inflammation set in.

  He’d have made a comment or two over drinks, another over lunch, a friendly hint, a sad shake of the head. Sayres was easy to see through, but most eyes stopped at the crinkly smile and gorgeous suit.

  My client—former client now, I could see—frowned slightly, pursing his lips in dismissive distaste. I sometimes think our strongest cultural bias is against accusers. No matter the accusation, we suspect it of tacky paranoia, silly conspiracy theory, strident bad-sportsmanship. Maybe we hate to have to deal with other people’s problems. It’s easier to think ill of the afflicted.

  I watched Perry and took stock. He would believe Sayres over me because Sayres had convinced him they were the same: good guys in business. He wouldn’t believe me because I fit a favorite stereotype: ballbreaker with a problem. I’d encountered this a thousand times in a thousand guises.

  One day, you accept the familiar injustice with your usual resignation. The next, you know you’ve had enough.

  2

  “I’ve had enough of Steve Sayres and his chickenshit innuendoes,” I concluded. “I want to sue him.”

  The lawyer sitting opposite me toyed with a black metal tape dispenser. She’d been doing that the whole time I talked to her. It was a measure of my general irritation that I said, “Do you need some tape?”

  She flushed, setting it back on her desktop. “I’m sorry—I have been listening.” She scooted the dispenser farther from her, across a litter of file folders and sheets of yellow legal pad turned upside down for privacy.

  Damn, she looked young. Young, indecisive and not quite completely with me. And yet I’d heard this was the most aggressive and cleverest labor law firm in town. I’d been told this firm played hardball. But you’d never guess it from the sweet Renaissance angels decorating the walls of Jocelyn Kinsley’s office, nor from the pink angora sweater beneath her beige linen jacket. She looked like a woman with a big extended family in the midwest and two cats at home. A woman who started her Christmas crafts in August. Not a labor lawyer. Not a player. Perhaps it was her law partner, Maryanne More, most people thought of when they mentioned More & Kinsley. But More, it seemed, specialized in high tech labor. And Kinsley, among other things, handled employment-related slander.

  As if startled by some inner prompt, she picked up a pencil, touching the tip to her yellow pad. “Steven Sayres,” she said, and wrote. “And who are some of the people you believe he talked to?”

  I defused a small volley of anger. Hadn’t she been listening? “It got back to me first from—”

  “What’s that?” She looked like a pretty rabbit, big-eyed and twitchy.

  “What?” I was only a few more irritations from walking out.

  She had the dispenser in her hand again, sitting straight, staring behind me at, I supposed, her closed door.

  “Do you want the names?” I tried to bring her back to business. I was aware of a slight commotion somewhere in the outer office. I could hear someone shouting, a few loud cracks, as of party poppers or champagne corks.

  Kinsley straightened, rolling back slightly in her high-back chair. She didn’t look at me, didn’t seem to hear me.

  With a fuck-this shake of the head, I started out of my chair. I’d find an adult lawyer with a normal attention span.

  Because it happened so quickly, I didn’t get a chance to analyze her shocked cry or the fact that she suddenly hurled the tape dispenser at me.

  The metal object caught me in the forehead. The impact, perhaps coupled with the surprise, collapsed me sideways. I tried to use the chair for support, felt it slide backwards, legs raking the gold carpet. I landed on my shoulder and face, in a hot shock of outrage.

  I wanted to excoriate Jocelyn Kinsley for her stupid behavior, to turn a firehose of rage on her, in fact—rage toward Steve Sayres and all the unfair obstacles and petty bullshit threatening to sink my law practice. I was too angry to feel pain, but quite ready to use the unfelt pain as an excuse to detonate.

  I should have known something was terribly wrong. Kinsley had hurled a tape dispenser at me. That was beyond unexpected, beyond bizarre.

  I heard explosions again, this time too loud to be distant corks. I could feel a cool shift of air: the office door was open. The explosions were almost deafening.

  From somewhere behind me, somewhere out in the hall, came a staccato of screams and panicked voices. I inhaled a sharp stink like spent firecrackers. I looked up. The ceiling lights wavered like daylight through water.

  I felt motion on the floor. On the other side of her curve-legged, antique desk, Jocelyn Kinsley lay crumpled on the carpet. Her face was turned toward me, pink foam gargling from her lips.

  I screamed. I knew why I was on the floor—but why was she? Reality had done a sudden somersault.

  Her eyes were half-closed, her face was a sweating alabaster white with foam angling from her delicately-painted mouth. I became aware of commotion around me, someone holding down my shoulders when I tried to sit, a voice screaming, “He shot them!”

  I tried to bat the person’s hands away. I wanted to get up, get oriented, understand what had happened, make everything normal and within my control again. But pinned by worried hands, I was forced to stay put, staring through the arch of Kinsley’s desk to her rasping, pale face.

  There were people around her, too, but to me they were just sleeves and torsos, hastily ripping off jackets to cover her, talking about pressure points and keeping her warm.

  Her eyes were half open, she seemed to stare at me across the meter of carpeted floor. Her lips moved, stopped. Her tongue came out to push bloody sputum away.

  Her eyes opened wider, holding my gaze. For the first time, I noticed they were yellow-brown, similar in shade to her curls.

  To me, directly and distinctly, she rasped, “Designer crimes.”

  Someone hovering over her, a woman in white silk, her jacket partly covering Kinsley, said, “What? What? Jocelyn?”

  Above her, someone else replied, “A sign of the times. She said, a sign of the times.”

  “Oh, Joss, no,” said the white shirt woman. “No, it’s not. It’s not.” As if Kinsley would be all right if the shooting weren’t a sign of the times.

  “Not what she said,” I told the person hovering over me. But she was busy looking over the desk top, trying to learn from her coworkers’ faces whether Jocelyn Kinsley would be all right.

  My disorientation was fading. I struggled to a sitting position, un
ceremoniously pushing the woman away.

  I could feel a crawling tickle on my forehead and reached up a frightened hand. It was blood. I stared at it on my fingertips for a cold-clutch second before I realized the tape dispenser had hit my forehead and broken the skin.

  I hadn’t been shot. The second I realized it, I knew Jocelyn Kinsley had.

  And I knew the explosive sounds for what they had been. I recognized the firecracker smell in the air.

  Someone had burst into this office carrying a gun. Kinsley, already startled by the sound of gunfire in the outer office—had she known it was gunfire?—had been watching the office door. When the person entered, she’d hurled the object in her hand, the tape dispenser. But I’d risen impatiently at that moment, catching it on the forehead.

  The gun shots that hit Jocelyn Kinsley might have hit me if I’d remained seated. But I was already on the floor when they blasted past, catching her once in the shoulder and once in the chest.

  In the moment it took me to look around the room and understand what had happened, Jocelyn Kinsley died. The woman crouching over her began to tremble fiercely and to sob. And more than once, waiting for the paramedics to arrive, I heard the phrase, “a sign of the times.”

  But those had not been Kinsley’s last words.

  Designer crimes. I could close my eyes and hear Kinsley. It seemed to me she’d offered the words like a journal or a diary, expecting me to understand her by them.

  Merely because I had been in her range of focus? Or because I had been the only relative stranger in the room?

  I backed into a corner and hugged myself, watching the grieving women. Within seconds, the police burst in, guns drawn to make sure the scene was secure. They were followed by frantic paramedics, pulling open Kinsley’s shirt and muttering about “tubing” her.

  I must have spoken to the police, assuring them I’d stand by for their questions. I must have told the paramedics I’d suffered nothing worse than a nick in the forehead. But all I actually remember was huddling alone, watching and thinking.

  Designer crimes, her dying words. They had to mean something. You wouldn’t utter nonsense before you died. You’d want to say as much as you could about whatever was topmost in your mind.

  Designer crimes. The phrase would become my mantra.

  3

  What might have once seemed a normal reaction on Sandy Arkelett’s part, I now freighted with connotations, some positive, mostly negative. We were growing close again. It dogged our interactions.

  He turned away, running his hand over thinning, sand-colored hair. From the back, he might have been Gary Cooper, tall and lanky in an almost baggy suit.

  He paced the length of his office, then turned.

  “I don’t care.” His tone said otherwise. “I don’t care what you say about it, what you put on it, where you think it comes from.”

  “A good man takes care of his own.”

  “Pretty much.” His long legs brought him swiftly back to hover over me. Behind him, streaked windows framed gray buildings. The city looked grimy. It had been too long since the last rain. “Why not, Laura? Who’s going to do it any better?”

  “That attitude usually means a lot of posturing and bluster. A lot of noise and not much else.” If I could keep honest, I stood a chance. If I had to tiptoe around his ego, all I had was a replay of my last relationship.

  “Well, that might usually be true,” he conceded. “But what’s it got to do with you and me?”

  I looked up at him. Before I could stop it, my feeling for him caught me in a pouncing ambush. Lately, I always seemed to be clawing it off my throat.

  “Seriously,” he continued. “What does any of this have to do with you getting shot at?”

  “I don’t know that I was shot at.”

  He knelt, grabbing the arms of his office rocker, stopping my comforting movement. “We’ve been over this. If you hadn’t stood up and gotten knocked down—for which I bless Kinsley no end—those bullets would have ripped through your back somewhere right about here.” He touched my collar bone and my chest. “You’d have a hole in your heart, most likely.”

  “Maybe if I’d still been sitting, he wouldn’t have fired from that spot. If he was after Kinsley—”

  “We’re talking about a couple of seconds. Question if he could register you falling out of the way that quick.”

  “But he didn’t fire until I fell.”

  “Don’t be fooled. The sound takes a while. Shots happen sooner than your ears hear them.” As if in agreement, horns popped on the street below.

  I’d spent hours with the police. I’d been taken to the hospital for a check-up I didn’t need at the insistence of some insurance company and of the district attorney. I’d been reliving the incident since it happened. I was sick of it.

  Sandy repeated, “I’m going to find out who did it, Laura. Guaranteed. I don’t care if you think that’s macho bullshit. You tell me it had nothing to do with you. But you don’t have that on anybody’s authority. We need to know for sure.” He watched me assessingly. I suppose he knew I’d overdose on my emotions soon. “Tell me again. Designer crimes—you’re sure she said that?”

  “Yes. The police have three other witnesses swearing she said, ‘a sign of the times.’ But I was looking right at her, eye level. I know what I heard.”

  He nodded. “Who suggested ‘a sign of the times?’“

  “Her law partner, I think. Maryanne More.” I too had wondered, “You think she purposely misled them?”

  “It’s worth considering.” He sat back on his haunches. “Could be Kinsley found out something about More, and More put a contract out on her. It’s got all the hallmarks of a contract hit: No one else was shot, and the guy was at close enough quarters. He could have taken out the receptionist easy. Maybe the shots in the outer office were camouflage. But he shot Kinsley dead, Kinsley only. Then he dropped the gun like a pro. And he was wearing gloves and a ski mask. Not like some lover snapped and went gunning for his girl at work. Not some one-oh-one California thing.”

  101 California. The address had become associated with a crazy client bursting in and shooting eight people in the law office he felt had done him wrong.

  “I’m just saying, if Maryanne More—or somebody—hired this guy, maybe Kinsley was trying to tell you why.”

  “‘Designer crimes.’ It sounds like a service for bored yuppies. ‘Tired of moonlight kayaking? How about a fun little felony tailored to your individual needs and skills? Come to the Designer Crimes boutique.” I had to smile. “It’s actually not a bad idea. We could do something like that. With your knowledge of surveillance and lock-picking and electronic—”

  “That’s where we’re going to start.”

  “Where?”

  “Put the new kid to work.”

  The new kid in Sandy’s private investigation agency was a computer specialist—at least, that’s what his freshly-printed business cards said. He was really a hacker with an insatiable thirst for raw, unprocessed information.

  Sandy rose, striding to the telephone. “We’re going to sneak a peak at More and Kinsley’s e-mail, do the grand tour of their files. If we can get in.”

  By “getting in,” he meant crawling through some electronic mousehole connecting their office computers to a network service. If they had old-fashioned unmodemed computers, that would be impossible. But most firms subscribed to online case law libraries, at the very least. Many could access public records, news stories, and a rich menu of other services as well. Lexus-Nexus, ATT’s Easy-Link, and the Internet were cyberspace low roads for a new generation of information bandits.

  I still wore the cement shoes of an older technology—telephone calls, paper files, handwritten notes on yellow pads. But working for Perry Verhoeven had forced me to learn the basics of electronic communication.

 
I watched Sandy make the call, admiring his undertailored length. He looked terrific, maybe looked better dressed than not. Being too slender worked for him in a suit.

  He muttered into the mouthpiece. “You heard me, Ozzy. However you need to.”

  Sandy usually reigned his newest employee in, reminding him they could get their information by legal means, if they were patient enough. Certainly their lawyer clients preferred admissible evidence to the ill-gotten lowdown. “Especially look for anything around the phrase ‘designer crimes.’ Doesn’t have to be those words, but anything that could fit under that umbrella.”

  When he hung up, I commented, “You’re picking a hell of a time to break into their computer system. You leave a trace and the police will nail you to the wall.”

  He turned back to face me. “Could be someone’s after you.” As if that justified any risk.

  “No.” I resumed rocking. “I’d have some clue or worry. There’d be some area of my life it could come out of. I’d know what it was about, even if I didn’t know who.”

  I reviewed the months since my return to San Francisco. I’d angered a few people, certainly—I was a lawyer, it went with the territory. But I could think of nothing likely to generate an attempt on my life. Not down here, anyway.

  “I’ve got the Rommel thing up in Hillsdale.” I’d returned to my hometown to help my Uncle Henry with the sad business of probating my father’s will. I’d ended up agreeing to defend my high school friend Brad Rommel against a murder charge. “But there’s nothing in that case to send someone gunning for me.”

  “Connie Gold.” Sandy offered the name jokingly.

  Hillsdale’s DA had written a teleplay based on her prosecution of the county’s only serial rapist. She’d spent months winning the victims’ trust and eliciting confidences no one else could have. Then she’d put them on the witness stand, dragging out humiliating details arguably irrelevant to the case but necessary for a teleplay. There were ethical rules prohibiting defense lawyers from doing that. But prosecutors could cash in on the public’s hatred of criminals even if it meant revictimizing the victims.