Page 52 of Pro Bono

She checked her watch. “You’re early. It looks as though we have some time to kill before the meeting. Come on, we can wait in comfort upstairs.” She pressed the elevator button and then hurried in and pressed the sixth-floor button. When the elevator opened again Warren saw that the floor had wide hallways lined with individual offices. She took him to a small conference room. She said, “Would you like coffee, tea, sparkling water, a soft drink?”

“Do you have just regular bottled water?”

“Sure,” she said, and left him alone in the room. He sat down. It seemed to take a very long time for her to return. He wondered if she had gotten a call or been derailed by someone she’d met in the hall. Finally, he got up and went to the door, opened it, and spotted her about a hundred feet away heading in his direction with a water bottle.

He held the door open and accepted the bottle. “Thank you.” He glanced at his watch. “Six minutes to four. Is the meeting on this floor, or should we get going?”

“It’s a bit farther. Come with me,” she said, and walked along the hall, turned a corner and then another.

He was impatient. He liked to be in a meeting room before the planned time. It gave him a chance to collect his thoughts and size up theother people as they entered the room. This Ms. Pollock had a relaxed manner that was becoming irksome.

She reached a door and swung it open. He could see the usual giant conference table, the large windows. This row overlooked the southern part of the city and ended in a blue stripe of ocean. He was relieved. She said, “Sit where you’re comfortable. The rest of the group should be nearly ready to head over here.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “It’s four o’clock now.”

She looked at him, apparently puzzled. “Yes.”

“Your Mr. Morham scheduled this for four o’clock.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr. Morham is a senior vice president. He’s used to having other people scheduling meetings for him. He probably forgot that there are a lot of people who have to gather for this one, including someone who flew in this morning from the home office in New York. You could say that setting your meeting for fourP.M.today was aspirational. At the moment you’re set for four thirty.”

“The only one they didn’t tell was me?”

His phone rang and he reached for it. Constance Pollock said, “I wouldn’t tie up your phone line if I were you.”

“Why not?” He looked at the screen of his phone. It was Martha.

“If there’s a change and they’re ready early, they’ll try to text you.”

“Hello,” he said into his phone. “What’s up?”

Martha said, “I just got a call from Founding Fathers. They say you missed your meeting time, and they’re getting ready to call it off.”

“Call them back, tell them I’m in their building, and find out where the meeting is. I’ll hold.”

He kept his eyes on Constance Pollock while he waited. She was on her way out of the room.

He got up and kept his phone to his ear as he snatched up his file envelope and followed her out.

Martha said, “Room 901. It’s a conference room.”

“Thanks.” He put his phone away.

He saw Constance Pollock disappear into one of the elevators and when he arrived he saw she had pressed the down buttons on all of them. He went into the stairwell and ran up the steps to the seventh, then the eighth, to the ninth, flung open the door and trotted only eight steps before he was at the door marked 901. He tried to open it, but it was locked. He knocked on the door firmly, waited, and then pounded on it.

The door opened and a man about thirty was standing there. “Mr. Warren?” the man said. He fiddled with the doorknob. “Sorry. This seems to have gotten locked.”

“Right,” Warren said. “Apparently there was a mix-up. Ms. Pollock was under the impression that this meeting was at four thirty.” Constance Pollock was sitting near the far end of the table, and she pantomimed her surprise at what he was saying.

“We were about to give up on you,” said the man at the center of the table. Warren recognized him as Morham from the information Martha had sent him. Warren realized Morham was almost certain to have realized that Constance Pollock had been trying to sabotage this meeting. He decided to say nothing further about her.

Warren’s eyes left Constance Pollock. “Well, we seem to be here now.”

Morham said, “Please have a seat.”

“Thank you.” He sat.

When Morham went through the polite ritual of introducing each of the sixteen people who were seated around the long table, he skipped Constance Pollock. Then he said to Warren, “I’m sure you must have guessed the reason I asked you to come. The director of our frauddivision, Ms. Susquino, was struck by your response to her letter, and took a second look at your client’s accounts. She decided to make the effort to investigate your assertions about them. She had our IT people look into when the computer files had been opened or closed, and what operations had occurred. It turns out that you were right. There was evidence that someone had made some changes to old information contained in Mrs. Ellis’s file and tried to erase the times and dates of those changes. In addition, the files for the two cash accounts for investment were dated years ago, but were actually quite new.”

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