Page 9 of Pro Bono

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, searchingfor 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?

5

Warren called his insurance agent, who gave him the number to call to have a rental car delivered to his building so he could get to work. At the moment Warren & Associates consisted of Charlie, Martha Wilkes, and Martha’s dog, Alan. Occasionally Martha would recruit her wife Sonya, who had worked as a paralegal, to help out on demanding cases.

Warren & Associates took on a variety of clients and cases. Warren did a large business in divorces, child custody, and estate planning, which tended to bring him the sort of clients who could and would pay his fees. A few times a year he had sued insurance companies when their treatment of their clients or others was particularly outrageous or defended clients from meritless and predatory lawsuits from business rivals. He shied away from criminal defense, only agreeing to step in for a current client on a temporary basis—getting the defendant bail, and sometimes attending their indictments while referring them to the best specialists.

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