“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?” I smile. “When you went all light-headed on us and almost flattened my ficus bush behind the chair there.”
She smiles at the little joke I’ve made. “I don’t know. I just suddenly felt faint.”
“You seemed to be feeling just fine a few minutes ago, ready to do battle with the insurance company. Until I told you that wasn’t why I called you in here. That it was something else, something more serious. What did you think it was?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.” She looks at the wall in one direction, then the other. Her eyes everywhere but on me.
“But you know why I called you here now, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure.” She offers up a mystified expression, but she’s sweating, the first time I have ever seen Dana perspire. She has the glass to her forehead again, hoping to cover it with condensation, while she licks the gloss off her lips.
“Think about it,” I tell her. “Or maybe we should call Nathan back in?”
“No,” she says.
“I thought so. He doesn’t know about the trust account checks, does he?”
She brings the glass from her forehead to her lap, so that she has something to focus on down low, away from my searching stare. She shakes her head quickly as if this might make the admission less painful.
“Tell me, did you do the checks before or after you started holding hands with Nathan?”
She shakes her head, shrugs a shoulder. She doesn’t want to say.
“You thought I was going to tell you that the police wanted to talk to you about Nick’s death, wasn’t that it? I suppose that would tend to move all the blood into someone’s feet. I mean if the news seemed to be coming at you all of a sudden like that, and if you’d been thinking about the possibility for a while.”
She looks up. “Why would they want to talk to me? They already talked to me, right after it happened. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. You thought they might be looking at you. Thinking about the youthful widow, married to a man who was married to his job, a lawyer who, according to you, even with the work ethic of a Puritan, wasn’t doing all that well financially. You could see how the cops might be thinking about all that insurance money and how two million dollars might go a long way to soothe the loss of a loved one.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” I tell her. “The police and their narrow little minds, always filled with distrust. But I’m afraid that’s a genetic deficiency we will both have to deal with. It’s one of the conditions of employment in the police force. And a real pain in the ass if you’re in my line of work.”
She looks up at me and smiles, the first note that I might be on her side after all.
“Still, anybody with a reasonable mind might wonder about all the ways a young woman such as yourself might find to spend that kind of money. That was it, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure,” she says. “But you’re right about the police. They’re very suspicious about everything. Who knows what goes on in their heads?”
“But, why would they be thinking all those thoughts?”
“I don’t know that they are,” she says. “You’re the one who brought it up.”
“Guess I did, didn’t I? Fine. Let’s talk about something else.”
A look of relief in her eyes, a different direction.
“Let’s talk about what Nathan didn’t want you to tell me.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was standing outside the door with the glass of water?”
This is not the direction she hoped for. “Paul, listen.” Her soothing tone turns to honey, sweet and running fast, like something off a hot stove. “I’m really not up to this right now. I’m not exactly feeling well.”
“Feeling faint again, are we?”
“Well. Just a little,” she says.
“Want to try another subject?” I ask.
She nods.
“Let’s talk about the law firm, Rocker, Dusha. They have a difficult decision to make now. What to do with all those client trust account checks that somebody else wrote, drawing down Nick’s fees? Unearned fees,” I tell her. “I mean, they may have to service some clients and not get paid, since somebody else already took the money.”
“What else can they do?” she says.
“Well, let’s see.” I rub my chin as if this takes some thinking, which it doesn’t. “I suppose they’d have a handwriting expert examine the signatures on those checks. From what I’m told, it looks like the same signature on all of them. So that won’t be hard. Then they’d go hunting for suspects, get exemplars, signatures from those suspects. Well, you can see where this leads?”
“How would they find suspects?” she says.
“Well, they have the accounts where the checks were deposited. The bank tellers are likely to remember a face, even if somebody else’s social security number was used.”
She just swallows this, making me suspect that perhaps she used disguises.
“But, I don’t think finding the person who did it would be a problem for them. In fact, I think they already know who it is.”
“How?”
“The person wasn’t that careful taking the checks out of Nick’s drawer,” I tell her.
Her eyes get big. This shuts her up.
“Then comes the hard part. They have to make a decision.”
She’s waiting, anxiously.
“One, they could take the money out of whatever source of funds this person might have. Say for example, some lucrative insurance settlement. You know, try to sweep the whole thing under the carpet. Avoid the embarrassment to the firm. That is, if they can move fast enough to keep the State Bar from turning it into an open investigation.”
I can almost see her eyes do a little nod on this one, the corners of her mouth turning up just a little in approval.
“Or, number two, they could turn the checks over to the district attorney’s office, file charges for forgery and theft, and leave it in the D.A.’s hands. Now that, that last one is the cleaner course of action. It’s the one any good lawyer would probably recommend. That’s the one that doesn’t get them in any trouble with the bar. They just lose a little public face, some P.R.”
Corners of her mouth down again.
“Of course, with all those suspicious little minds and nothing else to do down at the police department, it wouldn’t surprise me to see an epidemic of paranoia sweep through the place if the D.A. were to get his hands on those checks, depending, that is, on who signed them.
“In which case, I suppose we might have to show a little understanding for those with wayward minds who might be misled into thinking that you had a reason for wanting Nick to die a sudden death.
“I mean, what with all those checks bearing Nick’s name in somebody else’s signature, the full-court press on the insurance company for a couple of million, and you riding around town next to Dudley out there, the two of you with the top down sitting on jaguar pelts. I mean you have to admit, it does beat grieving.”
“You make it sound so…” she searches for the word.
“Tawdry?” I say.
“Selfish,” she says.
“That’s a good word. I mean not good, but, well, I think you understand what I mean. So. Now.” I lift the other cheek onto my desk so that I’m sitting completely on it, my feet dangling a few inches above the floor directly in front of her. “Before I have to call Adam Tolt back and talk to him about which direction the firm might want to go, why don’t you tell me what it was that Nathan didn’t want you to mention when I was standing outside the door?”
She sits there wide-eyed, considering her options: door number one, carpet sweeping; door number two, some serious felonies for forgery and theft with some probable time, and some good points toward motivation on a
