Page 30 of Pro Bono

“You can call me back. I won’t be leaving the office for ten minutes or so.” He hung up. It wouldn’t be ten minutes. He estimated five. It was three. “Hello?” he said.

“Mr. Warren?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Foshin asked me to convey his sincere apologies for the inconvenience, and to ask you if you would please come to the Great Oceana Monetary Offices at one tomorrow. That would be a full hour before he has to leave.”

Warren was tempted to say he was too busy to do it, but he had made his point. There was no question that Foshin had either been listening to the call or a recording of it. He also had calculated that this was not the stage in the process when he should enrage the opposing attorney. “I can arrange to make it,” he said. “You can tell him I’ll see him at one.”

Things had gone as he had planned. A complaint sent in from a client about her account would usually be stuck in the office of her financial advisor, probably forever. A letter from her lawyer who made no secret that he was preparing a lawsuit had kicked the matter straight to Legal.

He used his desk computer to let Martha know that he had a one o’clock appointment at Great Oceana’s offices, saved the drafts of the two lawsuits, and put on his coat, then placed the burner phone he had programmed as Number 3 into his pocket, locked the office, and took the elevator down to the level where he had parked the rented black Honda. He began to anticipate the traps that could be laid for him—to make it appear that he was offering a chance for the company to buy his assurance that this case was not going to the police, or that his purpose was extortion. As he drove toward his condominium building, his phone rang.

“Hello?” He was wondering which it was: Detective McHargue, one of the two old convicts, or the lady from Great Oceana calling his cell phone just to let him notice that the giant conglomerate could get the number.

“Charlie, this is Vesper.” Somehow the level of familiarity seemed to have ticked up, he thought. She had the right. She’d spent hours lying forhim to the worst possible audience, police detectives. She said, “Where are you?”

“In the car, driving home.”

“Would you mind stopping at my house? I think I need to talk to you.”

She had remembered that his phone had been tapped, and so had hers, and neither had been told that the taps were gone yet.

“I’ll be right over.”

“Thanks.”

When he arrived in her neighborhood, Warren took a slight detour to circle two blocks away from the Ellis house. At each corner he stopped and looked up the street to see if there was anything odd going on. He hoped that Copes and Minkeagan had not broken their agreement to stay away from her.

He had thought they would be smart enough to keep their word, but hadn’t forgotten they were criminals. He had looked up their trial records in the Nevada criminal justice system. Minkeagan had been convicted of a string of armed robberies, which was bad, but Warren had noticed that the prosecutors had thrown in a lot of things that were incidental to those crimes—car thefts, firearm infractions, assaults, and so on. It had the look of a law enforcement system that was pretty sure the things he hadn’t been caught at were serious enough, so they’d wanted to keep him locked up forever. Copes had been the leader of a crew that had been captured in a warehouse he’d owned that was full of loot from hijackings and burglaries, including two in which a person had been killed. They hadn’t been able to prove he had been involved in any of the acts of violence, but he’d still gotten a long sentence.

He thought about Vesper. She was unusual, a person who’d had money disappear from her accounts at big financial institutions and gone to a lawyer about it instead of first wasting a year going throughthe Byzantine procedures for “disputed statements” while time ticked toward the statute of limitations deadline, when her rights would disappear. By now, not only the institutional hierarchies of two companies, but the people they paid to keep things like this from happening, knew she’d caught them.

He moved in a block closer and only made it to the first stop at Vesper Ellis’s street. There was a man sitting in a sedan on the opposite side of the street from her house, where he could face away from it and watch it in his rearview mirror. Near the other end of the block was another man in a car parked on the same side of the street as the Ellis house, also able to watch the house in his mirrors.

Were these cops doing surveillance on Vesper? Were they private detectives working for one of the financial companies he had threatened to sue in her name? He’d hired detectives for suits himself a few times.

To these thoughts were added the question of whether the phone call from the Vice President at Great Oceana had been a genuine attempt to head off trouble by a having a frank and open discussion with a possible plaintiff’s attorney right away. It might have been simply a ploy to be sure that they were tying up her attorney so they could get her to accept a low settlement.

He kept going around the block, parked, and then looked at his phone. The sun was nearly down. He had worked late, and he’d stayed even later for the idiotic phone call from Great Oceana. Driving into the Valley had taken time. The weather app said that sunset tonight was 8:14. It would be dark soon. He sent a text message to Vesper, “Slight delay. I’ll be at your back door in fifteen minutes.”

Warren waited until the sky was dark, and then walked around the corner to the side wall of her yard, where he could not be seen from the street in front of her house, walked across the back lawn to her door, andknocked. She opened the door immediately, he stepped in beside her, and she closed the door and slipped the dead bolt.

“Hi,” he said. “Have you noticed the two guys in cars at the ends of the block?”

“That was what I wanted to talk about, but I didn’t think it was smart to do it on our phones. Who do you think they are?”

“I guess the most likely theory is that they’re police officers. If they’re not, my next guess is that they’re private security people hired by Great Oceana Monetary Fund.”

“Why?”

“I got a call an hour ago from a woman arranging a meeting with me for her boss, the head of their legal division. It might mean they’re checking you out in preparation for a lawsuit, or leverage tactics.”

“What are those?”

“To make you an offer that just amounts to giving you back your own money immediately in return for signing a nondisclosure agreement, a promise never to sue them, and so on. But you have to sign right away or they’ll be forced to file countersuits and bad-mouth you to the credit bureaus, and on and on.”

“Would the company really do that?”

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