Follow the Money

16


The Shack is a seafood dive in Santa Monica that is actually a shack. It has long tables with bench seats, sawdust on the floor, and license plates nailed up on the walls from all fifty states. It also has two dollar fish tacos and draught beers, and was where I took Liz on our first date. We’d been back dozens of times.

“You can always make time for people, Ollie,” she was saying. “I mean, why don’t you give up your apartment and move into the office?” She wasn’t being funny.

I’d heard it before. Every few days when we talked on the phone, I would get the same grief. Two weeks of late nights with Tom Reilly, turning draft after draft of the brief, had put much-needed distance between me and Morgan and left tension between me and Liz.

“I know. I’m sorry. Things have just been crazy getting ready for the hearing.” Which was true. With Danny Kelly’s affidavit and Garret Andersen’s attitude, we were all feeling good. Andersen should have found Kelly. But after our meeting, I knew why he didn’t. It was a terrible case and his client was out of money. He simply stopped working on it, shot from the hip in court, and chalked the resulting loss up to the law of averages. It was a carefree approach that worked well, unless you were the guy who went to prison.

“But we’re pretty much done now,” I went on. “Things will be back to normal again.”

Liz ate through half her taco without saying anything. I’d been repeating the same excuses since the tryst with Morgan, and even I was getting tired of hearing them. I knew she understood the demands of the job, but that didn’t mean she liked or accepted them.

After a minute, she said, “You sure seem to like it there.” I heard a ring of disappointment in her voice.

I knew the only way she could really understand was if I told her about the case. Up until then, she only knew it involved Garrett Andersen. I’d been careful about confidentiality. But with the brief about to get filed, the whole thing would soon be a matter of public record. I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to tell her about it.

We went through it, detail by detail. She caught everything, asked all the right questions, grasped every nuance, and reminded me why I fell in love with her in the first place. I might have had better grades, but there was no question that Liz was smarter than I was. But more than that, she had no need to prove it to the world. She might have had some insecurity about her youth and being taken seriously as a woman lawyer, but she never doubted her own ability the way I doubted mine.

“You see,” she shook her head, “that’s why lawyers have such a bad reputation. How do you just walk away from a client because he runs out of money to pay for an investigator? It’s not like Andersen couldn’t have gotten off his ass and done it himself just like you did.”

“I know.” I was feeling good.

“And why didn’t this Dan Kelly come forward way back when? He just stood by and let Steele go to jail? What kind of society do we live in?”

“I’m not sure Kelly really understands the magnitude of what he knows. I mean, it’s not like he actually saw Matt kill her.”

“True.” She said, and ordered us another round. “Still though, the evidence is pretty strong against Steele. There’s always a risk that this Kelly guy just isn’t remembering things right. And just because Matt Bishop turned out to be a criminal as an adult, doesn’t mean he killed Steele’s wife.”

“Sure, but those are issues for a jury to sort through. It’s not like we’re saying anything one way or the other. All this is about is making sure the system works the way it’s supposed to. Garrett Andersen didn’t do his job and Steele’s entitled to a fair shake with all the evidence presented.”

After an hour, she’d forgotten she was angry with me and I’d forgotten I’d cheated on her. We sat in The Shack as if nothing were wrong and as though our prior actions held no consequences at all. It was almost as if, by sheer will, we could set the truth aside and reinvent our lives the way we wanted them to be.

After dinner, we drove down to the beach. On the way, I shifted the focus away from me and asked, “So have you guys bankrupted those credit companies yet?”

“Those people,” she started saying and then cut herself off. “I can’t even talk about it without getting mad. It’s an industry that makes its living defaming people. You can’t imagine the shit that these companies put on people’s credit reports even after they’ve been told it’s not accurate.”

“Like what?”

“Bankruptcies, late payments, non-payments, you name it. We help people challenge their reports. But it’s tough to get anything fixed.”

I thought about it and laughed. “I wonder what Steele’s report looks like. Imagine it. A U.S. senator, with a big house in Hancock Park and fancy cars just stops paying all of his bills one day. That’s got to be an ugly report.”

“Sure,” she said, “but in his case it’s deserved. He actually did stop paying.”

“Right, but only because he was falsely imprisoned. It’s not because he was trying to get away with anything.”

“Well, if you get him out, maybe he can become a client of ours.” She found the idea of the former senator being a client of Legal Aid pretty funny.

“Why wait?” I said. “Why not challenge it now?”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure. If nothing else, it would be interesting to see what the report looks like. How is it done?”

“We just write a letter demanding substantiation of the accounts and debts on the report. It’s pretty simple, really. It’s getting it fixed that’s the hard part.”

I pulled into the Will Rogers State Beach and parked facing the ocean. With the windows down and the light wind blowing in off the water, it was a perfect late summer evening. We watched people walking on the sand and riding bikes along the strand of pavement that ran along the beach.

“So what do you need to do it?” I asked.

“You’re really serious?”

“You bet. Why not?”

“Social Security number, last address, date of birth. That would do it.”

I dug though the file in my briefcase and wrote everything down on a sheet of yellow legal paper. “There you go. We can read it with a bottle of wine and have some laughs.”