“Some information on an insurance policy.”
“There was insurance?” Harry’s eyebrows go up a notch.
“We don’t know.”
“Maybe you don’t,” says Harry. “But I have a feeling the erstwhile Mrs. Rush does, though it begs another question.”
“What’s that?”
“Why you? You do about as many insurance cases as Nick did corporate formations.”
“She thought she could trust me.”
“Can she?” Harry wants to know if I’m interested in more than just the legal issues involved.
“She also wanted to know what Nick and I talked about that morning, over coffee.”
“Ah. Did you tell her?”
“What I could remember. Not all of it.”
“And in between remembrances, this insurance thing came up?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of policy is it?”
“Like I said. We don’t know if there was a policy.”
“She doesn’t have a copy?” says Harry.
I shake my head.
“Don’t tell me,” he says. “They had a key-man policy out on him at the firm?” Harry is a quick study.
“If it’s in play.”
He starts to laugh, the kind of laugh he reserves for foolish acts by foolish people. “You told her you’d go over there and ask them about it?”
“Somebody has to. He left her high and dry. Besides, I have other reasons for doing it,” I tell him.
“I hope they involve a fee?”
“They might not.”
Harry looks at me. “You didn’t tell her you’d do it for free?”
“I didn’t tell her anything about fees. The problem is, Nick told me some things that I can’t discuss. They involve other people. Innocent people who could be drawn into this in ways that would be ugly.” The thought of Laura and her mother with reporters camped outside their door is not an image I wish to be responsible for. It is the reason I didn’t tell the cops, that and the fact that Nick had trusted me with his secret.
“You’ll have to trust me. There is a reason. It’s a good reason.” I look a Harry. He glances back at me, then nods.
“Nick made some bad investments,” I tell him.
“Yeah. In former wives.”
“He also made some other mistakes.”
Harry looks at me sensing this is the item I can’t talk about.
“You feel strongly about this?”
“I do.”
“All right. Fine. What do you need from me?”
“Thanks.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rocker, Dusha and DeWine is one of the old-line firms in town. No one can remember when Jeremiah Rocker died, and James Dusha’s picture in the outer lobby depicts a proper gent in waistcoat and staid collar, squinting at the camera lens through a pince-nez.
While the firm name may be old, there is nothing sedentary about their business plan. In the last few years, they have gobbled up two other sizable law firms and established other offices in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C. They have moved to the power and money centers, and word is that they are on the prowl for more, always with an eye for people having contacts to corporate clients.
The firm looms large on the political scene. A few years ago RDD led the charge in Congress lobbying for a bill later known as the Corporate Lawsuit Reform Act. It carried all the right buzz words, everything people hate in the form of “corporations” and “lawsuits” and love by way of “reform.” This particular piece of mischief fed a steep recession, though you wouldn’t know it from the profits scooped in by RDD.
The legislation contained what is known as a “safe harbors” clause for accountants and lawyers, so they could shade their eyes from otherwise obvious fraud committed by their business clients, while taking hefty fees in the process. In this way, the lawyers and accountants could avoid both civil and criminal liability while their corporate clients stole billions from unwary investors. Within four years, mega corporations around the country began folding up like card tables, filing bankruptcy, throwing tens of thousands out of work and transforming retirement plans into piles of worthless paper. Of course RDD couldn’t be touched on any of this. They had legal immunity from Congress.
RDD has become a master player in this game. They have been known to lobby for legislation creating the crime and then to represent the injured in a class action lawsuit afterward. That the victims got three cents on the dollar, and that this was taken to pay gargantuan attorneys’ fees, does not even faze them.
The firm has more than three hundred lawyers and an untold number of legal assistants, secretaries, and drones, strapped to the oars and toiling to keep this great ship of commerce pointed in the right direction: always toward the bottom line. Few in the bar and certainly no one at RDD ever blanches at the notion that justice, if it exists at all, is a mere by-product of making money.
All of this shows up in the firm’s address and the tasteful appointments of its public spaces. RDD occupies the upper five floors of a highrise on the waterfront, overlooking the bay. It is well known that they own the rest of the building beneath them, renting it out until they can raid enough of the competition to fill steerage and bilge.
The executive suite is up on eleven. A Persian carpet long enough to cover the runway at LAX paves the way to the reception, enough knotted wool to have gnarled the fingers and blinded a generation of kids toiling in some dim Middle Eastern sweatshop.
A large bronze sculpture of whales, mother and calf, rests on a pedestal in the center of the room, a metallic statement of the firm’s sensitivity toward motherhood and the environment.
So as to cover all their bases and not offend commercial interests, oil paintings of ships, some of them under sail, dot the walls illuminated by halogen-spot museum lighting. None of this mars the uninhibited vista to the west, across the bay, an unparalleled view of the north end of Coronado Island and its sprawling naval base.
I approach the counter and drop a business card on it. “Paul Madriani to see Mr. Tolt.”
The receptionist, a slender redhead in a business suit and telephone headset, sports fingernails an inch long as she picks up my card and eyes it. I tell her I have an appointment.
“Just a moment.” She punches a button and calls to the back, mentions my name and the appointment, listens, smiles, then pushes the disconnect key. “Mr. Tolt’s assistant will be out in a moment. Please take a seat.”
I try the cushy couch under the massive oil painting of a square-rigged ship in storm-tossed seas and hope that I won’t get wet. The outer office is a busy place. There is the constant bleep of telephones, three receptionists pushing buttons repeating the mantra “Rocker, Dusha,” “Rocker, Dusha”-De Wine, it seems, has somehow gotten lost in the commercial flurry, every billable second being precious. Long-nailed fingers flail the buttons on phones with the speed of flamenco artists, connecting calls to the back offices and downstairs, feeding the money machine. Computerized billing devices attached to the phones will be clicking every six minutes, charging for each tenth of an hour. Slot machines in most casinos don’t provide the house with this steady a take.
In less than a minute, a well-dressed woman in a dark blue business suit appears from around the corner of the reception counter. She is smiling under blond shoulder-length hair. She stops for an instant to gather my card at the counter and then, still reading it, moves toward me.
“Mr. Madriani.”
