Pro Bono

Chapter 15

15

P atrick Ollonsun held up his crystal whisky glass and looked at the patio light through the amber single-malt scotch. He loved the glow, the strong natural scent that seemed to strengthen in the still summer air as he swirled it around in the glass, the solid feel of the glass itself, the thick bottom adding weight in his hand. “Cheers.” He took a sip and savored the liquor flowing along the top of his tongue, just enough of it to warm it and then stream into his throat. He leaned back in his Adirondack chair and cradled the glass on the top of his slight middle-aged belly.

“Cheers,” Ronald Talbert said. He took a sip of his scotch, and then set the glass on the low circular table between them. He lifted his head and turned to look over his shoulder at the kitchen window. Francesca and Christina were doing something at the kitchen counter, their blond heads just visible through the window. They were having an animated conversation, talking and then turning toward each other and laughing.

“Don’t worry about them,” Ollonsun said. “If we don’t stop them, they’ll talk all night. Chris is always saying they don’t get together enough anymore. Time changes everything. When the kids were all little, it was easier to herd them around together.”

“Yeah,” Talbert said. “I keep thinking about how old my kids might be before I see them again if I go to prison. It keeps me awake at night.”

“A better use of your brain power would be to help figure out how to keep us out of prison. I’ve taken a few precautions already, but as this goes on, we might need to do more.”

“What do we have to do?”

“We’ve got to start with the assumption that no matter what, people are going to be taking a very close look at both of us. If you have anything at all in your past that won’t look good, you have to fix it.”

“I never did anything that was illegal until I met you,” Talbert said. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s the truth.”

“I don’t doubt it, Ron. I trust what you say. I just think that at this point the blaming stuff doesn’t help. We’ve got to pull together and defend ourselves and each other from this threat. I acknowledge that I was the one who got you involved in this. What I’m doing now is trying to help get you out of it.”

“At the time you told me you already had ways to make sure we wouldn’t get caught.”

“I remember. It was about a year or two after you married Francesca. You took me aside at a birthday party and said you were scared she was going to dump you because you weren’t making enough money. I said that marrying a Welbrower sister was a commitment to come up with what it costs to stay married to one. I told you all about how I stayed on the good side of Christina, helped you learn the tricks, how to step over the land mines.”

“That’s exactly what I was talking about,” Talbert said.

“That was how long ago? Let’s see. I think that was Zelda’s fourth? No, third birthday. Zelda is now seventeen. So the methods I taught you worked without a hitch for fourteen years. You’re still married to Fran—happily, right? People go out of their way to congratulate anybody who’s been married for twenty years like they ran a marathon on their elbows, and you’re only about four or five years from there. And this is the first time there was anything worth worrying about.”

“I appreciate that,” Talbert said. “And Fran hasn’t been the spoiled princess she was when I met her. She’s been a great partner.” He took a too-large gulp of his scotch, and it made the soothing liquid turn fiery. He winced as though he’d swallowed medicine.

Ollonsun took a sip of his scotch. “Every time before, if a client thought there was something wrong with his account, he would call me, I would promise to take a look, and I’d transfer funds to make it right that day. I said it was the damned new computer program that hadn’t been tested sufficiently, or a digit in the fifteen-digit account number had been misread by the electronic reader—whatever fit best. If, instead of contacting his account advisor—me—the client called customer service and a case number was assigned and it got shifted to the fraud pipeline, I would fix the discrepancy as though I’d already caught the mistake by myself. I taught you all of this, and I’m sure you did it.”

“Of course I did,” Talbert said. “A number of times.”

“And it worked, right? It’s like picking pockets. If the guy feels your hand or notices he doesn’t feel his wallet, you release it, back off, and pretend you bumped him by accident. But usually, he doesn’t notice. You get away with it. Most of the time, investing is money somebody puts away in a retirement or long-term account and looks at once a year. If the total is a little higher than last year, he doesn’t even read past the first pages, never looks at individual stocks and bonds. He puts it in a drawer and goes back to whatever he does for a living.”

“I know,” Talbert said.

“On the one occasion when I couldn’t smother the problem with bullshit and manipulation, I used my get out of jail free card.”

“What is it?”

“Years ago, when I hadn’t been in the business very long, I had a sort of combination mentor and role model. He was the one originally assigned to show me around, give me an orientation, get me used to the computer equipment on the big common floor. He was a couple years older than I was, maybe three. I not only learned from him, I admired him. He was obviously the most promising young guy in the company, the one the bosses expected to do great things over time. I studied him. I watched how he did everything and imitated him. After a while it went so far that I was almost spying on him. He didn’t seem to mind. Maybe there was some ego involved. It’s easier to be a savior if you have disciples.

“I learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that he was skimming money from clients—a lot of them. He was also selling company secrets to three other companies—things about our corporate clients that they could use to make trades. While he was showing me how to do things, he had demonstrated on his computer, and while I was looking over his shoulder, I memorized his passwords. I collected evidence of everything he did. One day I went into his little office and told him what I knew and gave him the evidence. I said I’d done it as a warning, a favor to him because he had been such a friend to me, and that I hadn’t kept any copies of it.”

Ollonsun smiled. “We never mentioned it again. As I expected, he was promoted out of our section soon afterward. Over the years he was promoted regularly. He moved upward in the building, floor to floor, like a fire. And on each promotion he got, I would smile and think about how much more valuable the evidence I had kept had become. He’s a brilliant man, too smart to think for a second that I hadn’t kept copies of everything. When I finally got in trouble a few years ago I never even called him. He immediately and quietly got me out of it, and never spoke to me about it. He’s been promoted twice more since then. He’s a member of the board of directors of Great Oceana now, part of his regular job as president of the European Division.”

Talbert said, “That’s fine for you. It does nothing at all for me. He doesn’t have any influence at Founding Fathers.”

“It depends how I use him. If we can’t come up with enough money to cover the fake trades we invented in Vesper Ellis’s accounts, I can mention the problem to him, and I know the money will come. If things came to the very worst, and you and I were about to be indicted on federal securities charges, we could go to the prosecutors together and say we want to cooperate. We can make a deal to give them my mentor. That’s the way they do federal prosecutions. The first one to walk in their door gets to testify as a friendly witness, maybe does ninety days, and then goes home. I’d hate to sacrifice him, but if we need to, I will. And there are also a few other things I’ve got in the works, so don’t start getting panicky.”

This time when Talbert took a sip of his scotch, his hand was steady. “What sorts of other things?”

“I’m keeping track of developments. I hired some guys to start paying attention to Vesper Ellis, and to report to me regularly.”

“For what?”

“I want to know everything I can about her, her lawyer, and anybody else she drags into this, where they’re going, who they see, and so on.”

“What if they see these guys? Won’t that just make them scared and turn this into a police thing?”

“Trust me. It will be nuanced, based on what Vesper Ellis and Charles Warren do. If they realize that attention is being turned away from us and onto them, they may be intimidated and back off. If they overreact and turn hostile, we might be able to make her seem hysterical and him opportunistic and unethical. I hired reliable, serious men. They can judge the exact level of force that’s necessary. Best of all, they’re capable of operating at any level that’s called for.”

“Wait. ‘Force that’s necessary’? Are we talking about violence?”

“Not necessarily. It depends on them, Ron. If somebody is bent on destroying our family, what are we supposed to do?” He pointed at the lighted windows in the kitchen. “We’re talking about people making us lose those two women in there, seizing our money so our four kids won’t ever go to good colleges, and getting us locked in prisons until we’re old or dead. Maybe even charging our wives with crimes too. Wouldn’t you be willing to do what’s necessary to prevent that?”

“I’m mainly concerned about ‘what’s necessary.’ What does that mean?”

“For the moment, very little. You can help me come up with the money to pay the men I hired. Beyond that, make sure your record is clean.”

“It’s clean.”

“There’s no time when you had a fight in a bar? There’s no woman who could pop out of the past to say you had sex with her at some business conference when you and Fran weren’t getting along? Nothing?”

“No.”

“Okay. Then relax and let the pros do their jobs.”

Zelda opened the back door and walked down to the table where the two men sat drinking and talking. She said, “Uncle Ron? Aunt Fran asked me to let you know your kids are getting sleepy.”

Talbert stood, his eyes still on Ollonsun. “Thanks, Zelda. I guess we’d better get them home. Thanks for the great barbecue and everything, Pat.” He began to follow the girl up the slight incline toward the back steps.

Ollonsun snatched up the bottle and recorked it, then swallowed the last bit of scotch in his glass. “Our pleasure,” he said, and made his way up after them and went inside. He looked down on the backyard of his little estate and wondered what his new employees were doing right then at Vesper Ellis’s house.

In the darkened guest bedroom of Charlie Warren’s condominium, Vesper Ellis looked at the glowing screen of her phone, struggling with the fine print of the California Bar Association’s Rules of Professional Conduct. She was glad she had chosen the larger screen model. She turned her phone horizontal so she could make the print bigger, and read one paragraph at a time. Rule 1.8.10 (a):

“A lawyer shall not engage in sexual relations with a current client who is not the lawyer’s spouse or registered domestic partner, unless a consensual sexual relationship existed between them when the lawyer-client relationship commenced.”

That seemed only too clear, but also lent itself to easy lying. Paragraph (b) was a definition of “sexual relations,” which, not surprisingly, was pretty much the definition she had always assumed the world agreed on.

She moved quickly to paragraph (c):

“If a person other than the client alleges a violation of the rule, no Notice of Disciplinary Charges may be filed by the State Bar against a lawyer under this rule until the State Bar has attempted to obtain the client’s statement regarding, and has considered, whether the client would be unduly burdened by further investigation or a charge.”

Vesper turned her phone vertical again, scrolled down her emails, saw nothing she wanted to answer right now, turned off the phone, lay back, and closed her eyes.