Follow the Money

21


I awoke at ten in the morning and I knew it the second I opened my eyes: There was something in the bank records. I was out of bed and out to the couch in one swift movement. I flipped through the copied checks. It seemed to leap out at me. On the fifth page was a dishonored check to a lawyer in Palm Springs written by Sharon Steele three days before the murder. A check for five thousand dollars made out to The Law Offices of Marcus Murdock, Esquire with a memo line reading simply “retainer.”

I leaned forward and set the paper and my elbows on the coffee table. Why would Sharon Steele visit a lawyer in Palm Springs three days before she was killed? What’s more, why would she visit a lawyer for the very first time, which, I assumed, would have been the case if she wrote him a check for a retainer. Maybe it was nothing. Rich people had a lot of reasons to consult a lot of lawyers and did so all the time. But why in Palm Springs? No one had ever mentioned Palm Springs: not Steele, not Becky, none of the police reports, none of the people who testified. There was no connection. I scratched my head and thought back over the case. I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe it was nothing. But maybe it wasn’t. I took the page with the check on it and set it off to the side.

Energized, I flipped through the rest of the pages carefully. There were letters written from creditors about failure to pay on this or that account. There were past due bills from the power company, the phone company, the gas company, both Steele’s and his wife’s cell phones. A finance company had repossessed Steele’s Mercedes and his wife’s BMW, but still wanted to get paid for the missed payments. I went back through the credit card statements again. There seemed to be nothing else, nothing interesting. I turned my attention back to the check, staring at the name of the lawyer. Then I had an idea.

I flipped through the three telephone bills I had: the home phone, Steele’s cell, and Sharon’s cell. I scanned the long distance portions of each, looking for calls to Palm Springs in the days before the murder. I focused on the home phone and Sharon’s cell. The bill for the home phone was huge. There were calls all over the country and many international calls. I noted numerous calls to Alaska a week before the murder. I also noted several calls back east early in the morning following the murder. I assumed that was Becky contacting relatives. But there was nothing to Palm Springs.

Then, on Sharon’s cell phone bill, I found what I was looking for. Four days before the murder, there were two calls to the same number in Palm Springs. There was another call to the same number the day before the murder. I looked at the check made out to Marcus Murdock and headed for my computer. The Martindale-Hubbell website took about thirty seconds to locate a listing for Murdock. He practiced on his own and listed himself as an expert in family law. That was code for divorce lawyer.

When I called, I got an answering machine. I left a message telling Murdock who I was, what I wanted, and left him my home and cell numbers. Then I sat on the couch and wondered what I would ask him if he ever called back. Furthermore, as Sharon Steele’s attorney, I wondered if Murdock would tell me anything. The likelihood of there being anything to tell was probably slim.

I laid back on the couch, dreading the pile of books on the coffee table. I needed to study. Classes were barely two days away. My real life seemed so uninteresting after the events of the summer that I couldn’t stand the thought of hanging around campus and cramming for exams. There was no way I could focus.

What did Sharon Steele call Murdock about in the days before she was killed? My thoughts drifted back to the cell phone bill. I imagined it sitting in a file in a dusty warehouse for a dozen years. It probably should have been shredded long ago, but corporate laziness had saved it. It was simply too much work to go through all the old files to get rid of them, so they continued to pile up in warehouses all over the country. Box after box of rotting documents memorializing trivial interactions. I wondered what else was out there. I stared at the arrangement of the papers on the coffee table and kept wondering.

And then an obvious thought came to me. If Sharon used her cell phone to make calls she wanted to keep secret, perhaps Steele did too. I picked up Steele’s old bills and flipped right to the page.

There they were, preserved on a single thin sheet of paper. Two parallel rows of text, each identical except for their four-minute separation in time. On the night of the murder, at 8:49 P.M., Steele placed a call on his cell phone. The call lasted two minutes. Then, at 8:53, there was another call to the same number. That call lasted nine minutes.

I couldn’t take my eyes from the two brief lines of information. Steele had called someone at 8:49. He hung up at 8:51, dialed 911 at 8:52, and then, during one of the gaps in the 911 call, dialed his cell phone again at 8:53 and called the same person he’d just spoken to.

Could it be right? Steele told a story of panic, of confusion and uncertainty, of racing around the house, of handling the body, of going out on the lawn and looking up and down the street for the ambulance. That was the explanation for the gaps in the 911 call. But what he had not mentioned, what he had never mentioned, was that he had also called someone else. In the heat of the moment, in the midst of his panic, he had thought to call someone and speak to them. In fact, he had kept them on the phone almost the entire duration of the 911 call and hung up just before the first policeman, Detective Wilson, arrived — probably at about the time he heard the sirens.

I held the phone in my hand. I doubted the number would be good anyway, but still I hesitated to dial. Should I tell someone about this? Would anyone listen if I did? And what was I doing? Steele was my client. We’d won his case. Why keep asking questions? I started dialing the number and stopped, hesitating at the last digit, then hung up. There could be lots of people Steele might call in the midst of panic, I thought. There could be plenty of reasons. He needed help. He was terrified. The police weren’t coming fast enough. I sat on the couch with the phone in my hand, a thousand reasonable possibilities running through my head. And all of them felt empty. All of them felt wrong. The same obvious question remained. Why keep it a secret? If it corroborated his story about the intruder, why would Steele hide it? If there was a “witness” of sorts out there who could tell the same story Steele was telling the police, why the silence?

I took a deep breath, stopped thinking altogether, and dialed again. I told myself the number wouldn’t be any good, and then I heard it ring. I immediately wondered if the number had been given to someone new and tried to imagine who might answer at noon on a late-summer Saturday. It rang again.

I imagined that somewhere within a few miles of my tiny apartment someone was walking to a phone. Someone who believed that the calls they’d received from a panicked Senator Steele on the night his wife was murdered were a dozen years in the past and long since lost into the bottomless abyss of history.

It rang once more and was answered.

“Hello?”

I froze. Adrenaline and fear raced through me. There was a tingling in my neck and I held my breath. I could not speak. I did not want to speak.

“Hello? Who is this?” Garrett Andersen’s voice was unmistakable. “Who’s there? I can hear you. Who the hell is this? How did you get this number?” He was getting upset, the pitch of his deep voice rising in anger. “Look, whoever the hell this is. This is a private, unlisted number, and whoever you are you’d better not call here again and you damned well better not share this number with any telemarketers.” Andersen hung up.

There was a flush of heat all around and within me. My face, my hands, everything was buzzing with hot confusion. What had just happened? I went to set the phone down and was still reeling, trying to figure out what was going on when the phone rang in my hand. I stared down at it, unsure what it was for a second, and then answered.

Garrett Andersen’s deep voice came through clear, calm, and controlled. “Mr. Olson, you ought not call people from your home phone. The caller ID makes you too easy to find.”

I wasn’t sure what to do or say.

“You don’t need to talk,” he said. “You’ve done plenty already. But let me tell you, you’ve just stepped in shit, son, and you’d better be careful not to track it all around. Got me?”

“Excuse me?” I’d gone completely numb.

“Kid, you’re way out of your league.”

Andersen hung up. I sat with the phone to my ear, dumbfounded. I thought about the lawyer in Palm Springs, thought about the calls to Andersen on the night of the murder, and immediately got up, stuffed all of the documents into my briefcase and left the apartment.

I drove through my fog of fear and disbelief down Pico Boulevard to the beach in Santa Monica. I parked the car and headed south, strolling toward Venice on the paved sidewalk of the strand like I was just another guy out to kill a sunny Saturday afternoon.

The late-summer crowds were still thick. Couples on roller blades whizzed around me as I waded through the crazies and burnouts who perpetually linger, hawking tarot readings, hemp bags, and homemade incense to the tourists. But I hardly saw them.

I stopped in at the Bayside, a small bar that fronted the strand and had tables in the back with no view that the tourists never sat at. I ordered a beer and racked my brain. What did I know? And more important: what didn’t I know?

I made a mental list that contained almost nothing. Steele had not disclosed that he had called Andersen at the same time he was calling 911. In fact, Steele had lied, saying that he had never met Andersen before he hired him. Not only did he know him, he knew him well enough to have his number handy and to think to call him immediately. And Anderson had also denied knowing Steele before he was hired to defend him. What had they talked about for nine minutes?

Furthermore, Sharon Steele had seen a lawyer in Palm Springs only three days before she was killed and had last spoken to the lawyer only the day before. Then she was murdered. I sat there gulping a beer and trying to connect the two. Surely there could have been marital problems. There had been marital problems in the past, but no one had indicated that they’d begun again. Steele could surely have lied about it, but Becky told the same story. Any motive Becky had to lie was less likely if she believed Steele was the killer.

Finally, there was Andersen’s reaction. He’d been angry and outright threatening. I finished my beer and ordered another. Goddamned caller I.D., I thought. How could I be so stupid? I was clearly not cut out to be an investigator. The bartender brought the beer and I was taking a drink when my cell phone rang. I jumped at the sound and nearly spilled the beer.

“Um, hello.” I was beginning to dread phones.

“Hello. I’m trying to reach Mr. Olson.” A cheerful voice said.

“This is him.”

“Hi, this is Mark Murdock, I’m returning your call from earlier today. I left a message on your machine at home, but I’m glad I caught you right away.”

“Oh, hey, Mark, thanks for calling me back. I take it you understood my message?” I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what I’d say to this guy. I’d half assumed he wouldn’t return my call.

“Well, yes and no. This is a bit tough as you might imagine. Even though Mrs. Steele’s dead and all, there are still privilege issues, you understand. So, I’m not sure what I can do to help you out.”

I leaned back in the chair and looked around to ensure no one was paying attention to me. “Well, look,” I began. “I trust you’ve seen the news lately? The news about Steele?”

“Sure. It’s been interesting.”

I listened to his voice. Murdock seemed too cheerful, a bit too eager to sound like he didn’t have much to say. He was a twenty-five year lawyer with too much experience under his belt to sound so helpful and unsuspecting. I decided I had to come right out with it and see what he would say.

I said, “Well, look Mr. Murdock, I haven’t shared what I’m about to tell you with anyone. But I’ve come into some information that shows that Ms. Steele hired you only a few days before she was killed and that she spoke with you the day before she was killed. Now, it seems awfully strange that she was consulting a lawyer whose name has never come up once in the twelve-year history of the case only a few days before her death.” I stopped myself. I was afraid to finish my thought. Murdock said nothing.

“Frankly,” I continued, “I’m not sure Steele didn’t kill his wife.” There was silence on the other end, but I could hear him breathing. I went on. “I think you know something, something important.”

“Uh,” Murdock’s voice had changed, the pitch was lower, the tone more careful. “This is — I gotta tell you, I haven’t even thought about this case since it all happened. Well, until recently that is. Look, I don’t know a whole lot. She came to see me, but things were just barely getting started when this all happened. So I never actually did any work for her.”

“Well, what did she come to see you about?”

Murdock cleared his throat. “Look, Mr. Olson, I never wanted to be involved in any of this. I just took the stuff I had, the stuff she sent me, it was less than a box of stuff, and put it in storage. I washed my hands of this thing a long time ago.” He sounded like a man groping for sand to stick his head into.

“Look,” I lowered my voice, speaking just above a whisper. “No one wants to get involved here, but the fact of the matter is we’re all involved whether we like it or not.” I could feel my heart racing, skipping beats. “I understand your hesitancy to stick your nose into things and I’ll do whatever I can to keep your name out of it.”

There was silence again. I could hear Murdock rummaging through some papers. “Okay, look. I’m a little nervous talking about this over the phone. I think we should meet. Can you come by my office tomorrow, around noon? I’ll dig the box I’ve got out of storage and tell you what I can tell you. But remember, there are privilege issues here. I’ve got ethical obligations.”

I said, “I understand. We all do.”