Lawyer Trap

60





DAY TEN–SEPTEMBER 14

WEDNESDAY MORNING


All morning, Aspen expected someone to walk into her office and ask what she’d been doing in Derek Bennett’s office last night. When no one came, she started to feel better. That changed when Blake Gray called shortly after ten and asked if she was available for lunch today.

“Of course. What’s the occasion?”

“Nothing special. Why don’t you swing by my office at 11:30 and we’ll try to beat the crowd.”

As soon as she hung up, she ducked into Christina Tam’s office, closed the door, and told her.

“Somehow he knows,” she said. “I can feel it.”

Christina didn’t seem concerned.

“How could he?”

“They could have this place bugged a million different ways and we’d never know it.”

Christina rolled a pencil in her hand.

“Now you’re getting paranoid,” she said. “Just calm down, go to lunch, and see what he has to say. It’s probably nothing.”

She looked amused.

“What?” Aspen asked, curious.

“Here’s a list of things to not bring up,” she said. “Tops & Bottoms, Rebecca Yates, Robert Yates, flashlights, coat closets, and guns in drawers.”

“And Derek Bennett,” Aspen added.

“Right. And me too, for that matter.”

Aspen kept her nose to the grindstone all morning and then inconspicuously went to the billing room and pulled the time sheets for Jacqueline Moore and Derek Bennett, to see if either of them had been in New York on July 22nd when Robert Yates got murdered.

Both had been right here in Denver.

Billing clients like there was no tomorrow.

For the week before and the week after as well.

Just for grins, she checked on Blake Gray too.

Same thing.

In a corner booth at the Paramount Café, over the lunch special—salmon and salad—Blake Gray gave Aspen the inside track on how to survive life in a big law firm. Then he got to the point of the meeting.

She shouldn’t let her guard down.

He still firmly believed her life was in danger.

She should go to the firm’s D.C. office until everything blew over.

She listened carefully, thanked him overwhelmingly for his concern, and then politely rejected the offer. Then she changed the subject.

“Christina was telling me about this huge antitrust case that the firm won, over a hundred million,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what that must feel like.”

“Ask Derek Bennett,” Blake said. “He spearheaded the whole thing.”

She bit her lower lip, trying to not visibly react.

“Talk about your nasty kick-’em-in-the-balls fight, this was the granddaddy of them all. It was the legal equivalent of two packs of junkyard dogs ripping each other wide open. Lucky for us Derek Bennett was the biggest dog in the bunch.”

“Wow.”

“Bow wow. As usual, though,” Blake added, “the drama behind the scenes was a whole lot more interesting than the case itself.”

“How’s that?”

Blake finished chewing and then said, “The defendant, Tomorrow Inc., was owned and run by a guy named Robert Yates, an insanely rich guy, at least on paper. Have you ever heard of him?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t remember him being at my last party.”

“Mine either,” he said. “Anyway, he makes a slick move and persuades the trial judge to stay execution of the judgment without posting a supersedeas bond. So he’s temporarily off the hook. Then while the case is on appeal he starts to secretly buy the stock of our client, Omega, which is publicly traded. He’s doing it in small chunks, through a lot of dummy corporations, friends and brokers, to keep everything under the radar so the price doesn’t go up.”

“A takeover,” she said.

“Exactly,” he said. “A takeover, but not by the company itself, since it wasn’t Tomorrow buying the stock, but a takeover by a private party.”

“Why?”

“My theory is that he wanted to get control of Omega and then have it drop the case against Tomorrow, or at least settle it for some ridiculously small amount. It’s called, If you can’t beat your opponent, eat him.”

“But how could he have Omega drop the case? There are other shareholders besides him. Whoever’s on the board of Omega has a fiduciary duty to all the shareholders, to maximize the amount of the judgment.”

Blake laughed.

“That’s the difference between someone fresh out of law school like you and a crusty old guy like me,” he said. “You’re absolutely right, in theory. In reality, though, it would have worked very differently.” He nodded with respect. “You got to hand it to the guy, he was a genius. The interesting thing was, both companies would have come out stronger. But then, out of the blue, Yates gets robbed one day. It turns out he had about twenty dollars in his pocket. He decides to resist instead of handing it over and gets both himself and his daughter killed. Then, in an even stranger twist, his wife walks in front of a bus. That, by the way, just happened a day or two ago.”

She sighed.

“How tragic.”

He seemed to chew on the words.

Then looked at her.

“Yeah. It really was.”

Back at her office after lunch, she found a sealed envelope sitting on her chair where she’d be sure to find it. Inside she found a sheet of paper.

A little birdie told me you could use a friend, so here’s your shot of reality for the day. Don’t trust Christina Tam. She’s a spy. My advice is to get out of the firm while you still can. And whatever you do, don’t show this note to anyone. I’m the only one you have watching your back.





She read it six more times.

Then she swallowed hard and shredded it.

As soon as she did, she wished she hadn’t.