Page 8 of Pro Bono

“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 robbingwere 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 wouldever 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 rapidsuccession. 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.

---