Pro Bono

Chapter 16

16

A t seven thirty A.M. , Warren wrote a note:

“Dear Vesper, I’m going to the office to do a little work and get ready for my meeting. Please keep the door locked and the curtains closed for now. There’s food in the refrigerator and you can call me anytime.”

He set it on the kitchen counter beside the coffee.

He was out the door and headed downstairs for his rental car before it occurred to him that he should have reminded her that both of their phones could still be tapped, and she should use the burner, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t the sort of person who would forget that. He went to the edge of the garage opening to see whether the two surveillance cars had moved from Vesper’s block to his, but he didn’t see any parked cars with drivers in them this time, so he went to the rental car, drove out to the street, and then went around the block to be sure he hadn’t missed anything before he turned toward the office.

Warren couldn’t help thinking about Vesper Ellis as he drove.

He had felt he was being normal and professional to maintain his distance from her. He still had a clear picture in his mind of Vesper with the big bath towel wrapped around her when she’d peeked out of the bathroom door to talk to him, and then the feel of her hug two hours later. He’d felt that as a client she was trusting him to stifle any thoughts that led in that direction. Now he felt he’d offended her by stepping away. It had all been clumsy and bad. Reevaluating the mess also forced him to picture her again, to remember the sound of her voice, to feel the hug again. Pushing her out of his mind gave him a foretaste of the feeling of loss.

Approaching the office building helped sweep the topic away for the moment. He parked in one of the visitors’ spots on the floor below his reserved space, went upstairs, and opened the office. He went over the two lawsuits again, signed the final copies, and put them in Martha’s inbox. Then he went back to his own office and began to read through the backlog of paper and computer messages that had accumulated over the past two days.

He looked particularly for any communication from Founding Fathers Vested, the company that hadn’t yet responded to his complaint. He was curious about why they hadn’t responded quickly to head off the possible scandal. There was nothing yet.

He was expecting something from the office of Mr. Foshin, Great Oceana Monetary’s vice president for legal affairs, too, but what he was expecting was delay. So far there was nothing from Great Oceana, but the timing they would probably prefer was just before the one o’clock meeting, to inflict the most inconvenience on him.

He moved on through the routine business. It was interesting to see how steady the demand was for wills, divorces, contracts, minor lawsuits, and the like. He had already told Martha to warn these potential clients that he was fully committed at the moment, but that he had recommendations of several other excellent firms who specialized in those matters.

When Martha and her dog Alan arrived at the office, she said, “Good morning, Charlie. Need anything for your meeting today at Great Oceana?”

“Thanks, but I think I’ve got everything I can use. I’m expecting Mr. Foshin to either get sick or be running late so I’ll only have five minutes or so before he leaves to catch his plane. Every delay he can cause helps them.”

At twelve fifteen, Warren began to gather the papers he would take with him to the meeting. Then he remembered that his professional-looking briefcase had been stolen, so he took the backpack that he sometimes used as a carry-on for flights and began to pack it. He included two years of monthly reports from Great Oceana on Vesper Ellis’s account with plastic clips on the most damning pages, copies of the letters he had sent the Great Oceana Monetary offices so far, and a copy of the lawsuit he was ready to file. He didn’t plan to show all those papers to Mr. Foshin, but if he changed his mind, he’d have them.

The attorneys for a major company should be good enough to recognize when they had no defense and be inspired to start talking seriously about settling. He put on the lightweight sport coat he had selected. Martha nodded her approval. Then he picked up the MacBook Pro that had been left charging on a shelf and slid it into the big pocket at the back of the pack.

He put on the pack to test the weight, decided it was tolerable, and left the office. He rode the elevator down to the level where he had parked the rented Honda. He set the pack on the floor in front of the passenger seat, got in, and drove up to the exit from the garage. When he approached, he saw that the wooden barrier arm was down across the threshold. He craned his neck to see if an attendant was around to raise it, then got out of the car to see if he could do it himself, leaving the motor running and the driver’s door open.

He didn’t let the lowered barrier unnerve him, but he didn’t want some malfunction like this to make him late. He stepped forward to examine the place where the arm connected to the machine. Some of them he’d seen were bolted, and others had some simple mechanism to disconnect. He reached the arm and looked down at it, when he heard a voice behind him say, “Hold on, Mr. Warren.” He felt relieved—help had come—but the relief lasted only a second before a strong hand grabbed his arm and jerked him backward.

Warren shrugged his right shoulder to free his arm and pivoted to the left to face the man. He pushed the driver’s door into him, knocking him backward, then charged into him and pushed him down onto his back, pivoted into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and accelerated through the opening, snapping the wooden arm and sending it spinning into the street.

Warren glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a plain white van slide forward along the curb behind him and across the lot exit. Warren turned to the right and accelerated into traffic, and by the time he could look in his mirrors again he was too late to see where the van had gone.

He drove along Wilshire to La Cienega, turned south, and kept checking the mirrors for the white van. It was only a few blocks to West Olympic, but the way contained a continuous row of restaurants and stores, and pedestrians walking to and from them, and there were traffic lights and congested stretches. He made it to Olympic, and he knew the Great Oceana office building was only a few blocks from that corner. He had just had at least two men try to keep him from leaving his office for the meeting by stopping his car. They were sure to be looking for it now.

When he passed a public parking lot, he pulled the black Honda in, selected a parking space next to a tall SUV, where it would be hard to spot from the busy Boulevard, took off his sport coat, folded it into his backpack, got out, and put the backpack on. He took a ticket from the attendant, and began to walk along Olympic at a brisk pace. He tried to make himself part of the steady stream of people on the sidewalk, and not stand out. He had changed his appearance a bit by taking off the sport coat.

He didn’t look back up the street over his shoulder, which could get him noticed. He looked at the street ahead to watch for the van to pass him, and he kept wondering who those men could be. When men had been watching the Ellis house, he hadn’t seen a van, and he had been too far away to get a look at their faces, but he suspected that these two were connected with that group.

As he walked, he heard, faintly at first, a single set of footsteps coming up the sidewalk, shoes hitting the pavement some distance behind him. He thought it might be time to look back, but at first decided to resist the impulse. If the van was about to pass by along Olympic, then both men would see his face. And even if they were far behind, nothing helped a pursuer spot a person better than having him look to see if he was being chased. But then the footsteps grew louder, and soon he heard a man’s panting breaths. He began to turn. As he did, a hand grasped the strap of his backpack and jerked him back.

Warren spun and freed an arm from his pack, and when the arm came around, he hooked it into the man’s jaw. This was the same man who had grabbed him at his office building. The blow rocked the man sideways and made him raise his hands to his face. Warren ran at him, pushing the backpack against his chest. The man retreated backward, but after three steps his feet weren’t moving fast enough, and he fell over backward onto the sidewalk. Warren saw the man start to get up, and realized his right hand was reaching into his jacket.

Warren turned and began to run. After three steps he had his arms through the straps of the backpack again, shrugged it up onto his back, and ran harder. He accomplished only about fifteen more steps before he felt an impact pound his back and hammer him ahead a step.

It was only then that he realized he had heard a shot. He needed to run a few quicker steps to recover his balance and avoid falling forward, and as he did, he understood what had just happened, and his alarm goaded him to a sprint. The man had freed his pistol from his coat and shot Warren in the back. As Warren ran, he wondered if he was one of those shooting victims who was dying but didn’t know it at first because he was in shock.

It didn’t matter what was enabling Warren to run. He was glad he could do it. He heard two more shots, but he didn’t feel anything. He reached the next corner on a green light and dashed across the street, and as he did, he saw the WALK sign begin to flash. He glanced behind him, and he could see the man with the gun was up and running after him, but now he was almost a whole block behind. Warren judged that the light would turn red before the shooter reached the corner, but he could also see that his decision to look back seemed to have made the man speed up.

He was beginning to think more clearly now. He was sure that what must have happened was that the man’s first shot had hit his backpack, and the assortment of stuff in it had diminished the bullet’s energy enough so it hadn’t reached his back. It would have pierced the backpack’s fabric, then hit the laptop, and if it had gone all the way through the metal case, the screen, the circuitry, the keyboard, and the other metal side, it would have needed to pierce at least two reams of paper to get to his folded sport coat and then the inner side of the pack.

As he reached Tillis Avenue, which seemed to be the final cross-street before the Great Oceana office on Olympic, time sped up. The white van arrived at the same intersection, Olympic and Tillis, less than a second later. Warren’s momentum had already carried him out into the street, and he saw the driver spot him and glance ahead up Olympic to see if he had time to make the left turn to hit Warren as he tried to run across the open pavement. The driver decided to chance it, and swung to the left toward Warren. There was the loud blare of a car horn and the squeal of brakes as the driver of a car coming toward the van on Olympic tried to stop to avoid hitting it.

The front of the white van appeared to expand as it roared onto Tillis Street toward him. He took two steps and dove, landed on a dusty patch of weeds and grass, and struggled to his feet as the white van streaked past behind him. He saw the shooter was in the passenger seat, and guessed the van’s driver would try to stop and let the shooter out.

He ran hard for the length of the block toward the Great Oceana building until his hand grasped the door handle on the right side of the double glass doors and tugged the left door open. As soon as he was inside, he felt the relief of the air conditioning. He kept going deeper into the lobby toward the row of elevators. While he waited for the elevator, he slapped his sleeves and pant legs to get rid of the dust from his dive.

Warren was breathing hard and sweating. He realized that the next thing to do was to call the police. He glanced at his watch. Parking his rental car had cost him time, and it hadn’t protected him. His meeting was in eight minutes. If he called the police, those eight minutes, and maybe eighty more, would be spent explaining hundreds of details that would only waste time. The elevator door opened and he stepped inside, then pressed the button for the seventh floor, the highest number on the panel. He was alone in the elevator, so he used the gauzy reflection in the stainless steel doors to see while he brushed off the rest of the dust, pulled his coat out of the pack, gave it a shake, slipped it on, and straightened his collar.

When the elevator opened on the seventh floor and he stepped out he saw a circular console with three men in dark suits looking at computer screens. The one nearest to him said, “Yes, sir. How can we help you?”

“I’m Charles Warren and I have a one o’clock meeting with Mr. Foshin at Great Oceana Monetary.”

The man studied his computer screen. “Yes, sir.”

He pushed forward a clipboard with a form clipped to it and a pen. “Please print your name here, sign beside it, and over here put Mr. Foshin’s name.” Warren followed the instructions and slid the board back to the man.

“Take this elevator to the twentieth floor.” The man pointed, and Warren stepped into it and let it take him up. He could feel the speed of it tugging his innards downward, but appreciated being spared stopping repeatedly to let people on and off. He barely had time to check his watch, which said 12:58.

He stepped off the elevator and found a woman in a dark blue suit standing with her hands folded in front of her. “Mr. Warren?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m Hannah Soames, one of the deputy vice presidents for legal affairs. I’m afraid Mr. Foshin has been delayed. He asked me to let you know, and see if you would mind meeting with him another time—as a professional courtesy.”

Warren said, “Oh, gee. I’m sorry. My coming over here to talk with him today before filing the lawsuit and holding the press conference was all the professional courtesy my schedule allows. So that’s that, I guess.” He reached into the backpack and felt his way around pieces of broken glass or plastic and a jagged curved shape like a splash pushed up from the side of the murdered laptop. He felt the sheaf of paper of the right thickness and tugged it out. He glanced at it and could see the bullet had penetrated the back of it, but she couldn’t. He held it out to her and said, “Here’s the lawsuit. So I guess I may see you in court.”

She held her hand up in a panicky gesture as though the packet of paper was a snake. “Wait. Please.” She produced a cell phone from a pocket he hadn’t noticed, and backed away about twelve feet, pressed a spot on the screen, and began talking quietly. A moment later she was back. “He’s going to wrap up now and join us in the conference room.” She began to walk, and Warren assumed he was supposed to follow. He had detected nothing that indicated she knew he had been attacked. She had been deceptive, but it was the level of deception that many people in business visited daily, lying to help her boss evade him, not enabling his murder.

She opened the door of a big glass-enclosed conference room dominated by a table that he estimated to be eight feet wide and over thirty long, with a dozen chairs on each side. At the far end was a television screen that filled the whole wall. As he entered, he watched himself and Hannah Soames on it. He assumed that their entrance was being recorded, and that someone was simultaneously watching the feed. The outer wall was a row of large windows that overlooked the Hollywood Hills.

She took a few steps along the waist-high cabinets below the glass inner wall. “Can I offer you something to drink?”

“If you have water I’d love it,” he said. She opened one of the cabinet doors and he saw that it was a refrigerator. She brought out two plastic bottles of water and a couple paper cups from a cupboard, set one on the table at a chair three down from the head, and then the other at the same level directly across from it. He sat down at his bottle, opened it, and took a drink. She sat down and opened hers, but it looked as though she was only imitating him. She didn’t drink it.

They sat there in silence, waiting. He looked at her as long as it seemed a sane person would, then checked his image in the television screen, ran his hand through his hair, and rearranged his shirt so the row of buttons ran straight from his Adam’s apple to his belt buckle. After his long run in the afternoon sun the heavily air-conditioned room felt very pleasant.

He lifted his backpack from the floor to the seat beside him, took out a pile of papers, and organized them. He used the opportunity to open his pack wide enough to verify that the thin laptop had a fatal through-and-through wound. He was tempted to take the pack to the wastebasket by the cabinet and dump the remains into it, but he resisted. He had been in a few trials in which experts had removed hard drives, reinstalled them in the same model computer, and read them.

“There you are!” a man’s voice said. A man who had to be Donald Foshin appeared in the doorway. He was thin, about fifty-five or sixty with an expensive haircut that made the most of his thinning hair. He wore a dark blue suit, possibly the whitest shirt Warren had seen in years, and a good gray tie that was exactly the current fashion. He stepped up to Warren and shook his hand. “Mr. Warren, I apologize for rushing like this. Please, sit back down,” and he sat down himself in the chair at the head of the table. The door opened again and three, no, five, no, seven men and women in serious business suits streamed in and seated themselves around the table.

Warren inhaled to begin, but Foshin said, “We’ve been troubled by the material you sent us about Mrs. Ellis’s account with us. Of course we’re going to do our best to repay her losses.”

“Yes, Mr. Foshin, but—”

“And yes, we are aware that we should come to an agreement about damages in addition to undoing the harm.”

Warren said, “Then we agree in principle about the main points. I appreciate your—”

Foshin looked at his watch and then instantly back into Warren’s eyes. “Yes. I’m sure you do. I regret that there’s more to this. Great Oceana was founded on the fortune of the Pacific trader McGuane Parmonikoff in 1872, and has grown to a size and complexity that he could never have imagined, in spite of his travels.”

Warren sensed a trainload of pretense and intimidation was just chugging into the station.

“Size is great,” Foshin said, “but in a situation like this, being bigger means that for a thief, there are many more victims to rob, and many more transactions to provide cover.” He sighed. “Polter?”

“Yes, sir.” This was a man about forty. He opened a file folder on the table in front of him and passed a stack of papers from it around the table. When it got to Warren, he took one, set it in front of him, and passed the stack to the place beside him, which was unoccupied.

Polter began to read it aloud. “This is a supplement dated October twelfth to the current Summary Prospectus, Statutory Prospectus, and Statement of Additional Information for all Great Oceana Monetary account holders, Investment Services clients, Mutual Funds, Retirement Funds, their employees, heirs and beneficiaries, creditors and other interested parties. Please read and retain it for future reference.

“Effective immediately, Patrick Ollonsun no longer serves as a Financial Advisor, spokesperson, or officer of the Corporation or any of its divisions, subsidiaries, or partnerships in the United States or abroad.

“All references to Mr. Ollonsun in the Summary Prospectus, Statutory Prospectus, and Statement of Additional Information are hereby removed.”

Warren said, “October twelfth?”

“Yes,” said Polter. “The current Prospectus was printed and delivered to the Postal Service three days ago so it arrives everywhere at the end of the third quarter on or around August first. If we get this one out anywhere near October 12, it will be an achievement. It will also nearly double the Prospectus section’s expenditure for that month. Our printings are in the millions of copies, with proportional mailing costs.”

Warren looked at Mr. Foshin. “And what does it accomplish?”

Foshin’s hand rose from the table in a gesture that meant, “If you’ll look, you’ll see it,” but there was nothing there. “It will let the clients, prospective clients, and any businesses know that he’s not authorized to act on Great Oceana’s behalf. It prevents any future Vesper Ellises.”

Warren said, “It does nothing for the only Vesper Ellis who exists at present—the widow who has trusted Great Oceana for about ten years and has been robbed.”

“Okay,” Mr. Foshin said. “I understand you have a client and you have a duty to advocate for her and protect her interests. Everybody in this room has read the evidence you’ve provided, and our problem isn’t that we disagree with you. We also know that besides being a lawyer you’re a licensed CPA. But Great Oceana has hundreds of CPAs and many more lawyers than Warren & Associates, and we’ve already gone much farther and deeper on this than you have. Not only has Mr. Ollonsun been doing this for longer than the statute of limitations runs, but he has been doing it to people besides Mrs. Ellis. We don’t know exactly how long, and we’re not sure how many just yet. As of noon today, the number was twelve. They’re working backward in time, and that means retrieving information from the company’s archives in New York, London, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, some of it pertaining to clients who are deceased. It’s a much worse problem than you know, and may be even worse than we know so far.” He looked at his watch again.

“What is it you’re asking for?” Warren said.

“Time,” Foshin said.

“What for?”

“It takes time to collect the rest of the evidence, complete the full investigation of each account he might have been tapping, brief the police and the relevant federal agencies. We know he’s guilty, but we also know he managed to do this without getting stopped by our system of audits, spot-checks, and safeguards. Is anyone else in the company doing this too? The truth is, we don’t know. The day we drop the net on Mr. Ollonsun, of course he’ll know he’s caught. But so will anyone else who’s doing it, or helped him do it or hide it. We can’t take the chance of leaving some within our organization.”

“Publicity.”

“That too. There will be terrible press. The FBI will come for him. The SEC, the FTC, and the US Attorney will come for us. What weren’t we doing to prevent it, what do we need to do now, who should have been doing what, how much will our fine be. I’ve been proud to work for this company for twenty-eight years. Now I have to fear that the rest of my time here will be spent defending it in court and trying to negotiate its penalties.”

Warren said, “I’m sorry for your part of it.”

“Does that mean that we can count on you to keep this out of the legal system and the public eye until we have time to prepare and get the answers we need? As officers of the court, you and I have a responsibility to act for the public good. I take that to heart, and I think you do too.”

“I do. But as you pointed out, my main—as well as immediate—responsibility is to Vesper Ellis. And as you also pointed out, Great Oceana is an enormous corporation. You can pay what you’re going to owe Mrs. Ellis today and have a signed settlement in hand within an hour. If you prefer to handle it online, we could probably do it faster than that.”

“What do you see as an appropriate figure?”

Warren removed a couple inches of paper off the stack in front of him, retrieved the copy of his lawsuit, and set it in front of Foshin. He said, “Full repayment plus ten million dollars. The argument for it is in the lawsuit.”

“Ten is far too steep. We could agree to full repayment plus one. That would still pay you adequately without penalizing Mrs. Ellis for being robbed. You’ll take a full third, right?”

“Five million. We’d be giving you over a month and a half to clean house and prepare your case.”

Foshin was leafing through the lawsuit, which he appeared to be scanning. “Three.”

“Done.”

Foshin held up the lawsuit and pointed at the hole. “What’s this? It looks like a bullet hole.”

“It does,” said Warren.

Another man in a dark suit opened the door halfway and sidestepped inside, but made no attempt to move farther into the room or sit down. He simply stood waiting.

Foshin looked at him and said, “Hello, Phil.” He said to the room, “We’ve got to leave for the airport now, I’m afraid.” He stood. “Mr. Warren, will payment within seventy-two hours be acceptable to you?”

“Yes.”

“Ms. Soames, will you please conclude our business with Mr. Warren?”

“Yes. Have a safe trip, Mr. Foshin.”

Foshin shook Warren’s hand. “You’ve done a fine job for your client, Mr. Warren. I’m sure we’ll be in touch over the next year or so while this plays out.”

“Yes,” said Warren. “Thank you.”

Phil the driver opened the door for Foshin and then moved ahead of him, probably to press the elevator buttons and open more doors.

Ms. Soames said to Warren, “I assume you’ll have no objection to the nondisclosure clause in our standard liability settlement agreement?”

“I’m sorry. She can’t agree to hush up felonies. At the moment I don’t intend to go to the police before you’ve collected your evidence, and I don’t have anything negative to say about your company or its management, but if she’s interviewed by the authorities, she has an obligation to tell the truth.”

“I understand,” Ms. Soames said. “Anything else?”

“I assume this television system doesn’t just function as a giant mirror,” he said. “You should have an accurate record of what we agreed to.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “We can have the agreement in your office by close of business today, and the settlement sent after it within seventy-two hours.”

“Excellent,” he said. “I’ll call a ride service.”

She looked at him. “You didn’t drive?”

“No,” he said. “Thank you all.” He stood and walked out. At the seventh floor checkpoint he signed out, got into the elevator to the lobby, called for a Lyft ride, and then waited. In four minutes, the car was pulling up in front of the building, so he got into the back seat of the car quickly as possible. As the car pulled out, he searched for the white van. It was gone, probably because the two men had assumed he would have called the police immediately. The ride to the parking lot to pick up his rental car was calm, almost pleasant. It occurred to him that it had been a beautiful afternoon. This was the first time he’d thought of it that way.

A half hour later he walked from the lot under his building to his condominium and unlocked the door. He turned the knob, but it wouldn’t move. He was relieved, but only tentatively, because it was still possible that the two men who had been trying to kill him this afternoon could have gotten Vesper to open the door and then barged in past her and locked the deadbolt. He knocked. He heard her voice answer.

“Who is it?”

“Charles Warren.” He heard her footsteps coming toward the door.

“Say something more. I want to hear your voice.”

“I had my meeting, and decided to take the rest of the day off, so here I am.”

She fiddled with the locks and he heard the clicks, and then the door opened. She only stepped back one step, so he had to slip in before she set the locks again. “How was it?”

“There were high points and low points.”

“Highest point first.”

“Great Oceana agreed to pay you back and give you an additional three million dollars for damages within seventy-two hours.”

“Thank you, Charlie.” She threw her arms around him and hugged him, but he stiffened and groaned in pain. She said, “I read the bar association rules. I won’t bring charges, and you don’t have to hug me back, so what’s the moaning for?”

“That was the low point. I got shot in the back.”

“You mean betrayed?”

“No, shot. Two guys in a white van were trying to keep me from getting to the meeting. One of them took a shot at me, but all the stuff in my backpack seems to have stopped the bullet.”

“Let me look at your back.” She pulled the shirt up and looked. “Oh, my God, Charlie. You have a huge bruise.”

“It felt like I probably would. I should thank my laptop, which gave its life to save mine. This also taught me something.”

“What?”

“Somebody at Great Oceana must have told them I was coming.”