Page 37 of Pro Bono

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 reflectionin 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 brokenglass 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 thesame 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?”

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