Pro Bono

Chapter 4 July 2024

4

JULY 2024

T he client arrived in the reception area of the Charles Warren & Associates law office carrying a two-handled basket-woven bag full of dark blue file folders. She looked down at the woman behind the reception desk and saw that the name plate on the surface said Martha Wilkes. Martha Wilkes’s hair was buzz-cut around the sides, a bit longer at the top, and she wore a dark blue sport coat with a brooch that looked a bit like a flower with a yellow gemstone in the center. She scanned the appointment calendar in front of her and said, “Mrs. Ellis?”

“Yes.”

“Please take a seat.” The way to the chairs was blocked by a large black Labrador retriever lying on his side on the carpet. Martha saw the problem and said, “Alan, please. Over here.”

The dog got up, walked to the other side of the desk, and lay down again. The woman at the reception desk said, “I just have to be sure we’ve got all your contact information and so on.” She typed the name on her computer, scrolled down the screen, and said, “It’s all here.” She dialed a single number on her desk phone, and said, “Mrs. Ellis is here,” then stood and said, “Come with me.” They started toward the door across the room.

The door swung open and Charles Warren came out. He smiled and said, “Hello, I’m Charlie Warren.”

She set down the bag of files and held out her right hand. “I’m Vesper Ellis.”

He shook her hand, picked up her bag, and said, “Come on in.” When she entered, he closed his office door, walked across the room to where his desk was, and gestured at the pair of armchairs facing him while he got over his surprise. Her name had made him imagine someone older and not so eye-catching. She had long hair with a slight wave, and she wore a blue dress that showed a hint of a slim but shapely figure. Her face was strikingly beautiful. He was determined not to let himself be distracted by her appearance or even let her suspect that he had noticed. A woman like her would probably be sick of the male gaze.

She sat.

Warren looked at the empty chair beside her and said, “Will anybody else be joining us?”

“No,” she said. “My husband died about three years ago, so it’s just me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said. “I’m not happy about it, but it’s been a while.”

He set the bag of files on the empty chair beside her and went to sit behind his desk. “What brings you here today?”

“Tiffany Greene recommended you. You probably remember her as Tiffany Shaw.”

“Both. I represented her in the divorce, and our office also handled the name restoration, so I know. Nice person.” They both waited for a couple seconds, and then he said, “I can’t say anything more about a former client than that.”

“Oh,” she said. “I was waiting for more. I should have realized there would be rules. Tiffany said you’re a CPA besides being a lawyer?”

“Yes. Is that the kind of legal issue you have?”

“It might be. I’ve noticed that some investment accounts have been getting smaller when I think they should have been growing.”

“What sorts of investments are we talking about—businesses, property?”

“Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and the money-market funds from dividends. The only real estate I have at the moment is my house. My husband George handled our investments. We met when we were both twenty-four. He was ambitious and hardworking. He’d sold cars for a while, and then real estate, then managed a small shipping company. He always saved, and he invested. He already owned the condominium where he lived and some empty land in Santa Barbara County that he rented out to a farmer who was growing garbanzo beans and things on it. I was working as the IT department for a medical clinic, and we put away most of my salary too.”

“What happened after your husband died?” Charlie said. “Did you keep up the investments?”

“Yes. I had the payroll system programmed so that kept happening automatically. By then my little company did IT for five medical partnerships. George’s salary had been most of our income, but I didn’t need much to live on, and we had life insurance, so I left the investments alone.”

“When did you notice something odd was going on?”

“Not until just about three days ago. After he died, all I tried to do was just keep his system from falling apart. He always stuck with paper copies of monthly reports. He put them in folders and stored the folders in file drawers in order. I kept doing it. At tax time the companies sent 1099 forms, and I gave them to the tax accountant with everything else, signed the 1040 and 540 forms, wrote checks, put them in the mail, and forgot about the long-term investments except to stick the reports in the file drawers once a month. I sold my business about a year and a half after George died. I still didn’t bother to pay attention to those accounts because the sale produced enough so I didn’t have to for a while longer.”

“What changed?”

“Nothing, really. My birthday was coming up, and one day I just happened to get curious about how much money had accumulated, so I took a look.”

“And what was the matter?”

“The numbers seemed smaller than I had expected, so I began to read the actual reports. I saw some withdrawals.” She lifted the big bag of financial papers and set it on Charlie’s desk. “I’d like you to take a look.”

“You hadn’t made them?”

“No. So I called and asked who had requested them. They said George did. As I told you, I lost George three years ago.”

Charlie eyed the bag. “I’ll see what I can find out, and then I’ll call you.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “I guess that’s all we can do until you’ve taken a look.” She stood, so he did too. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you. I gave my numbers, email address, and so on to your assistant.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I promise I won’t take long. I’ll start looking right after my last appointment today.”

“Good. Then I’ll talk to you soon.”

He walked her to the door.

When he’d closed it, he turned to his assistant, Martha Wilkes. “When have we got the next person coming?”

“You’re free for an hour and a half.”

“Thanks,” Warren said. “I’ll be in there. I want to take a quick look at the stuff she brought.”

“I hope you’re not putting her ahead of your other clients just because she’s the best looking,” Martha said.

“By that logic I should be looking at her, and not a bunch of papers.”

“You’re such a good lawyer, Charlie.” Martha went back to the reception desk, and Charlie went into his office.

He picked out the six most recent folders and opened the one from the first of this month, examined each of the reports, then set that folder aside and went on to the one for the previous month, and then made some notes on the legal pad at the corner of the big desk. He had already detected two irregularities.

He looked at the top of each report. All the accounts were in the names George W. and Vesper R. Ellis. She had apparently not notified the financial corporations when George died. There was no blame to attach to Vesper Ellis. Once George had died, she was the only living signatory on any of these accounts. Removing the name of her deceased husband would hardly have seemed urgent to her, and making the changes to all the accounts, deeds, credit cards, insurance policies, ownership papers, car registrations, and things after a death was a lot of work. For Vesper Ellis these stagnant accounts must have been easy to let slip. She had still been working and running a business, and that meant spending her days off doing laundry, grocery shopping, and other chores. By the time she’d sold her business she’d probably forgotten about removing his name. She’d mentioned she had an accountant do her taxes, but for at least the year of George’s death he’d had income to be taxed, and maybe the accountant hadn’t been told about the death, or he’d had an assistant do the forms who knew nothing about her.

As he noted discrepancies and irregularities, he was also writing down the questions he would need to ask Vesper Ellis about various specific entries, and also about the general picture he was getting. He kept getting the feeling that he was looking at his mother’s papers seventeen years ago. Vesper Ellis was a lot like his mother. His mother had been married to Matt Warren, the kind of man who had done his best to make sure she was safe and secure, and after he was gone, she had still relied on the provisions he’d made for her. What he couldn’t do was make sure that after he was dead, she would only run into people who could be trusted.

Charlie fought the feeling of dread that was coming on about the Ellis accounts, and kept his mind on the work. More questions. Had she notified the IRS that George was dead, or had her accountant just kept filing joint returns after the first one? How about the Social Security Administration and the Franchise Tax Board?

It occurred to him that maybe maintaining the joint investment accounts was part of a swindle too. Vesper could very well have notified somebody who had decided to keep the dead husband listed as co-owner, and had been using his signature power. Vesper had not withdrawn or transferred money, but she’d neglected to look for other activity. In at least some corporations, it might be possible to have any notices sent to “George” at another address from Vesper’s.

Warren made notes of all these thoughts and the questions they raised. He brought the big bag closer and looked down into the folders to see if he could spot any notes attached to the reports or paper clips on the folders. People often kept slips of paper that included or alluded to valuable evidence without realizing that was what it was.

Warren went back to looking at the monthly reports, and reminded himself to use his notepad whenever he saw a surprising number so he could check it later. Often the surest sign that something was wrong was when the numbers were too good. Another was when investment results were summarized as upward curves or increasing percentages. Many people hated numbers. They preferred summaries, and predators loved summaries.

He wasn’t sure of the exact moment when he had begun to think of these minutiae as evidence, but it had been early on. He straightened the pile of file folders he’d looked at, massaged his desktop computer to life, and looked up Vesper Ellis’s telephone numbers. He jotted them on his yellow legal pad, picked up his office phone, and dialed. The phone rang ten times and then offered to let him leave a message after the tone. He said, “Mrs. Ellis, this is Charles Warren. I’d like to talk with you as soon as possible.” He recited the office number, which he knew she had already, and then added his cell phone. He dialed her cell phone, which also went to voice mail, and left the same message.

He went on studying the monthly reports for Vesper Ellis’s accounts. The number of puzzling entries grew, and his list of questions grew too. He had to interrupt his work to meet with the attorney of a building contractor he had sued on behalf of a client whose house had been partially demolished and never remodeled. The contractor’s attorney, after issuing threats that Charlie received impassively, finally settled for full costs plus damages to save the contractor’s license. When he had walked the attorney out the door, he asked Martha, “Has Vesper Ellis called?”

“No. I’ll let you know as soon as she does.” At five, she came into his office and said, “I’m going to take Alan home unless you need me.”

Warren said, “No, thanks. I’ll be staying a little while, so please lock the door on the way out. I think Mrs. Ellis’s problems are at least as serious as she thinks they are, so if she returns my call tomorrow, I’ll need to know it right away.”

“Sure thing,” Martha said. “Good night, Charlie.”

“Night, Martha.”

Warren devoted two more hours to the Ellis matter and then realized he had begun to think of it as a “case.” He supposed that had occurred when his own notes had grown copious enough to deserve their own file folder. He called Mrs. Ellis’s cell number again. This time he added, “Please return my call as promptly as possible, I’m leaving the office now, but you can still reach me on my cell phone at—” and he recited the number again and the number of his house phone and hung up. He was now too tired and hungry to trust himself not to miss any entries he needed to notice. He locked the Ellis monthly report folders in the office safe, looked up the phone number of Bernardine, one of his favorite restaurants, and ordered a dinner to take out, and walked to the elevators with only his notes on the legal pad in his briefcase.

He drove to Bernardine, gave his car to the parking attendant, went inside, and waited at the bar for the waiter to finish packing his food.

Charlie was a steady customer, familiar to the bartender and the waitresses. He usually came with a date, was respectful to everyone, and tipped well, so Bernardine and a few other good restaurants always took special care of him. He had ordered a dinner of salmon, spinach, and a baked potato, and when it arrived, he took it, left a large tip to preserve his welcome for his next visit, and went outside to reclaim his car.

In his mind he was still compiling his notes and questions about Vesper Ellis’s investments. He had not planned to keep at it late, but when he’d started this afternoon, he’d seen things that made him think that the bad behavior was still happening. The thought had made him feel some of the panicky urgency he’d felt in high school when he’d seen what was happening to his mother.

Con men and women were sociopaths, every one of them like Mack Stone. They had no sense that the people they were robbing were anything but prey. Other people had no rights, their feelings and thoughts and hurts weren’t worth noticing unless emotions made them more vulnerable. In his legal career he had never seen even one of them who stopped stealing from a victim voluntarily before their victim was left with nothing. There was no such thing as a con man who decided to leave his victim enough to survive. They stopped when there was no more that they could take.

He was determined to work quickly to save what Vesper Ellis still had. The thought made him take his phone out of his pocket and look for a missed call, but there hadn’t been one. He probably had found enough irregularities in the files to establish a reason to freeze the assets, but he wouldn’t do that yet without her knowledge and consent. His power of attorney was hours old, and hadn’t been established with any financial corporation, so there would be delays and maybe even inquiries to the culprits from their superiors that would tip them off.

While Warren was waiting for the attendant to bring the car to the curb, he noticed a Range Rover idling in the right lane. It seemed to be waiting its turn to pull ahead and have an attendant come and park it. The odd thing was that there wasn’t a car in front of it. There wasn’t a rule that a car had to pull forward as far as it could, but it was the normal thing to do. Warren stepped back two steps so he could see past the headlights, and saw there were two men in the front seats of the Range Rover.

A moment later the attendant drove Warren’s car to the curb and stood holding the driver’s door open, so Warren walked up, handed him the money, got in, and as he fastened his seat belt, looked in his rearview mirrors, trying to be certain the other car wasn’t about to move forward just as he pulled out. The Range Rover was immobile, and it was blocking other cars from coming along in the right lane, so Warren took the opportunity and pulled out and away from Bernardine.

The Range Rover pulled forward, but the driver didn’t swing close to the curb and turn it over to the parking attendant. Instead, the car sped up and followed Warren’s. It looked as though the two men had been waiting for him. Were they cops? For half his life he had been having that thought, but there was no rationality to it anymore. If anything was going to happen, it would have been seventeen years ago. That was over. If the police had wanted to talk to him about a client, he wasn’t hard to find. He spent most of his days in an office with his name on the door. If they had suspected him of something and wanted to do surveillance on him in a plain car, then presumably they would have stayed back and preserved the distance between them.

He thought about driving back to his office to pick up a few of the reports Mrs. Ellis had brought in. He turned to the right and drove a block, then realized it had been an unrealistic idea. He had his legal pad in his briefcase in the trunk with several pages of dates and amounts of transactions, names of people responsible for accounts, and related questions and thoughts. He still hadn’t had dinner, and he had enough information on his computer to keep him busy all night. At the office tomorrow he could get help with some of the time-consuming tracing. He pulled into a driveway, backed out, and saw that the Range Rover from Bernardine was a block away, coming toward him.

They had followed him from the restaurant, and gone around the block when he had. They were up to something. Robbery? He drove toward them as though he had no memory of seeing them earlier. He knew he had to decide quickly. He could try to lose them, or at least get so far ahead that he had time to use his remote control to open the iron bars that blocked his building’s underground garage, get inside, close the barrier, and then disappear into the elevator or up the stairs. His dilemma was that they had made a mistake, and he couldn’t be sure they would ever make another. He decided he had to use this chance to get behind their car and take a picture of its license plate.

If they had been waiting to pull a follow-home robbery on somebody just because they had enough money to pick up dinner at Bernardine, they had not been very clever about it. Their tactics seemed more like an attempt to intimidate him than to surprise him. He was in the profession of fighting clients’ battles, and he was good at it, so there had to be a growing number of former opponents who hated him for old cases he’d won. If any of them had reached the point of hiring people to do something about it, this might be his only chance to find out who they were before they did it.

He turned right again, drove at high speed for two blocks, and pulled over at the curb near the corner, where he could see the cars going by on Wilshire Boulevard toward his condominium building, turned off his lights, but left his engine running. If they were trying to come after him, they would have realized by now that he had eluded them. They would have no logical choice but to double back onto the Boulevard and try to catch up with him before he reached home.

Warren watched and waited for the black Range Rover to go past. Black was a common car color in Los Angeles. The Range Rover had tinted side windows, and a lot of cars had those too. Every time a black car sped across his field of vision from right to left, he jumped a little, ready to go after it, but it was always the wrong black car. Minutes went by, but he still didn’t see the Range Rover. He became more and more primed. He told himself that each second when he didn’t see it brought the time closer when he would see it. His eyes were focused on the cars speeding past, almost afraid to blink for fear of missing it. He took out his phone and pressed the camera symbol so it would be ready. And then he realized that too much time had passed.

He put his phone into his coat pocket and reached for the headlight switch. His hand didn’t reach it, because in that moment, a metal implement swung against the passenger side window and smashed the glass. Warren’s head spun toward the noise and he saw the white hand, the black sleeve, the tire iron, and fragments of glass spraying onto the empty seat and his lap. The man’s other hand reached in through the jagged gap, feeling for the door handle.

Warren stomped on the gas pedal and his car shot forward. The man with his arm in the door didn’t get his arm out of the broken window in time, and was jerked forward with the car. Warren hit the brake again after ten feet and the man was hurled forward against the door frame and then slid out. Warren pulled forward and stopped again, his eyes on his rearview mirror. In the red glow of his own brake lights, he saw the man curled up on the pavement near the curb clutching his arm, and beyond him about a hundred feet was the Range Rover. He couldn’t see the second man.

Warren hesitated. He couldn’t make himself forget that using a car as a weapon for self-defense was legal, but using it once the threat was over was not. He pulled farther ahead, made a right turn onto the Boulevard, and accelerated. It occurred to him that he was still in the same situation. This was his chance to take a picture of the car’s license plate.

Right now, both men were out of their vehicle, and one of them was hurt, so it would take thirty seconds or so for them to get back into their seats and drive off. He made a quick right turn and drove hard. He took his phone out of his coat pocket and engaged its camera again, made the second right turn, and raced toward the third. When he got to the corner he slowed, made the final turn, steadied the phone on the top of the steering wheel, and accelerated again, taking pictures in rapid succession. He moved the phone to his left hand while he switched on the high-beam headlights and kept taking pictures.

The second man was helping his injured companion into the passenger seat when the bright light caught them. The man let go of his friend and reached into his coat. His hand came back out with something black in it.

Warren hit the brakes, dropped his phone, spun the steering wheel, and shifted into reverse. The car swung around, he shifted to drive, and headed away, accelerating as much he could, and ducking low to present a smaller target. He heard a “pop-pop-pop” behind him. He turned right at the first cross street, turned again toward his condominium, and sped away. He drove aggressively, moving in and out past the slower cars, stretching the yellow lights to gain the extra block without stopping. He had needed to drop his phone to evade the two men, and now he knew he shouldn’t pull over and stop to find it on the floor, so he made his bet on getting to the garage fast.

The injured man said to his companion, “Let’s get the hell out of here now. This was a bad idea.”

“It was your idea,” the driver said. He put the car in gear and pulled out onto the street to the right, away from where Warren was going.

“I’m suffering for it now,” the injured man said. “I felt like his car was going to tear my arm off. But I was stupid. I knew who the guy was, and I should have remembered that was still going to be who he is, instead of thinking he was going to be somebody different. We weren’t going to scare him. All we did was piss him off. Unless you hit him and he’s bleeding out right now.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s not hit. We blew our chance to take him by surprise on the first try, but nothing else has changed, and nothing else gives him an edge.”

When Warren reached his building, he pressed the remote control to raise the steel bars of the garage gate, pulled in, and watched the gate close. He found his phone on the car floor, got out and called 911, and told the operator what had happened. He paced as he described to her precisely how he had injured one of the men, gave her an accurate description of the black Range Rover, and read out the license number from one of the photographs that was brightly lit by his high-beam headlights. As he was talking, his eyes strayed to the back of his car and he noticed three bullet holes punched into his trunk, so he mentioned that too.

She said that a police car was on the way to the side street where the encounter had turned violent, and told him to hold on. After about two minutes she gave him the unsurprising news that the Range Rover wasn’t there anymore, but added that another police unit was on the way to his building and would be there shortly.

Warren was waiting when the police car arrived at his building. As soon as he saw the black-and-white pull up and stop, he pressed the remote control to open the garage and walked out to meet the two officers who got out to speak to him.

“Mr. Warren?”

“Yes,” said Warren.

“Are you injured?”

“No.”

“Good. Is your car in there?”

“It’s that one right there.”

They followed him to it, looked at the broken window and the bullet holes, and one of them took out a flashlight and leaned to look into the car while the other looked at the photographs Warren had taken. He carried Warren’s phone to the patrol car, spoke on the car radio for a couple exchanges, read the license number into the microphone, and then came back. He handed Warren’s phone back to him and said, “I sent the pictures to the station.”

The other cop, who had been examining Warren’s car said, “Do you mind if we take a look in your trunk?”

“Not at all.” He pressed his key fob and popped it open. As the two officers used their flashlights to search for spent bullets or fragments or holes in the front walls of the trunk, Warren noticed something.

“My briefcase is gone.”

“It was in the trunk?”

“Yes. I stopped at Bernardine on the way home from work. I left the car with the parking attendant, picked up a take-out dinner. I don’t know who took the briefcase.”

One cop added a note to his notebook and asked, “Was there anything valuable in it?’

“Not monetarily valuable, but important. I had a legal pad in there with a few hours of notes I had been making about a client’s financial records in a case.”

“So you lost your work, and the value of your briefcase?”

“Yes, but that’s not as important as the information in the notes. Somebody now has quite a bit of confidential information about the client’s investments, savings, retirement accounts, and so on. If they know what they stole and how it can be used, it could be a serious loss.”

“Can you define ‘serious loss’ for me?”

“Sophisticated criminals could probably steal a lot of my client’s money.”

“Do you think the guys who shot at you knew you had the notes?”

Warren said, “I don’t know. The briefcase had to have been taken while the car was parked and I was waiting for my order to be put together. If they took it, I have no idea whether they opened it, or looked at the notes, or understood them. If the briefcase was what they were after, and they already had it, why follow me at all, let alone chase me all over the place?”

“So, no.” the cop said.

“It seemed as though what they wanted was to do me some kind of harm. Since I’d never seen them before, they must have been hired to do it. One of them smashed this window with a tire iron to get to me, and the other one shot at me when I was driving away.”

The cop was writing furiously to preserve all he could of this. During this pause, the older cop came back. “They identified the Range Rover. It’s been reported stolen from an owner in Pasadena. He’s an anesthesiologist, no record, and he’s seventy-two years old.”

“I guess going for the pictures was a waste of effort,” Warren said.

“We’ll probably find the car abandoned in a day or two. If we don’t, it will mean it got to a chop shop, here or in Mexico. A detective will be in touch with you tomorrow. Sorry about the damage to your car, too. Don’t get it repaired until the detective gets a look.”

The next morning Warren woke feeling irritated and uneasy. He had no idea why the two men had followed him and tried to do him harm. He kept thinking about his practice and each of his recent cases, searching for a reason why someone would be willing to commit a string of felonies to get back at him. Most of the clients and opponents in his cases were civil litigants, none of them criminal cases. This brought him back to the one current case that might be an exception—Vesper Ellis. The thought added to his irritation. By now, Vesper Ellis should have listened to at least one of the recordings her lawyer had left on her phones asking her to return his call as soon as possible. Why had she not done it?