Corrupt practices, p.1
Corrupt Practices, page 1
Published 2013 by Seventh Street Books™, an imprint of Prometheus Books
Corrupt Practices. Copyright © 2013 by Robert Rotstein. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rotstein, Robert, 1951-
Corrupt practices : a Parker Stern novel / by Robert Rotstein
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61614-791-4 (pbk.) • ISBN 978-1-61614-792-1 (ebook)
1. Legal stories. I. Title.
PS3618.O8688C67 2013
813.’6—dc23
2013002602
Printed in the United States of America
To my family
He’d told his wife that he’d bought the Glock 22 for protection. Now, the barrel of the gun was lodged between his teeth. His heartbeat was normal, his breathing steady. His body wasn’t trembling. He’d conquered the legal profession—which to him meant that he’d conquered the world—by mastering the art of calm.
Even now he was thinking, not about his family, but about his law firm. The firm had always come before everything else. It bore his name and appealed to his paternal pride. It gratified his desires. Only during the last two weeks had he realized how poorly he’d served it.
One of his favorite aphorisms was “hubris kills more legal careers than greed and stupidity combined.” He’d drummed it into the young lawyers, but hadn’t heeded his own words. He’d infused the firm with a virus, believing that he could control its spread. His mistake was unforgivable.
When he heard the click, he tried not to gag on metal and fear. There was no longer any point in resisting. This morning’s news had reported that the Malibu surf would be particularly dangerous today, bringing powerful riptides that could sweep the strongest swimmer out to sea. The last sound ever to penetrate his consciousness was the crash of an all-consuming wave.
I haven’t set foot in a courtroom for eighteen months. I’ve altered my lifestyle, I tell everyone. I’ve decided to get out of the pressure cooker of trial work and start over before I turn forty. Only my two closest friends know the truth.
On this afternoon, as on most, I’m sitting alone at a back table at The Barrista Coffee House in West Hollywood sipping a macchiato and reading a book about the law. This one is a biography called Defender of the Damned, about famed LA trial lawyer Gladys Towles Root. Root represented mostly murderers and sexual predators because during the forties and fifties no one else would hire a woman. A flamboyant dresser, she was such a skilled advocate that the convicts composed a ditty about her: Root de toot. Root de toot. Here’s to Gladys Towles Root. Her dresses are purple, her hats are wide, she’ll get you one instead of five.
Lawyers truly can become legends.
Deanna Poulos comes out from the back and bops over to my table. She owns The Barrista, so named because she was a lawyer herself, one of my partners at Macklin & Cherry. Not so long ago, she wore pinstripe suits with pencil skirts to work. Now she dresses in black tee shirts and jeggings, and her left arm is half-covered with tattoos. When the firm fell apart, she quit the practice of law and opened her store on Melrose. Everyone told her she was making a huge mistake. But the shop has thrived despite the bleak economy and the cutthroat competition from the chains. I admire her bravery; I envy her freedom; I think she’s gone crazy.
“Waz up, Parker?” When she speaks, a silver tongue bar is visible. She touches my cheek, and then playfully pats me on the shoulder in a way that makes the gesture seem less intimate. She glances around as if she doesn’t want anyone to overhear, although there’s no one around. I think I know what’s coming—a story about an ex-colleague’s upcoming divorce or latest affair or professional misstep.
“Rich Baxter’s in jail,” she whispers.
Just because Deanna says it doesn’t make it so. This kind of slander flares up all the time, the spontaneous combustion of volatile nouns and verbs.
“Where did you hear this?”
“From him. He called me from the jail.”
I was going to take a sip of coffee, but my arm freezes in midair. I set the cup back down on the table so I don’t spill.
“The FBI arrested him five days ago,” she says. “They’re holding him for money laundering and fraud. The Church of the Sanctified Assembly has accused him of embezzlement.”
“Rich wouldn’t rip off a client, much less his own church. Hell, that guy wouldn’t overstay his welcome at a parking meter.”
She hesitates. “He actually called me because he wants to hire you as his lawyer. He didn’t think you’d take his call.”
“Is this your idea of a joke?”
She shakes her head.
“We haven’t spoken in years. Why would he possibly want me? ”
“Because you’re the best.”
“Once, maybe. Not anymore.”
“If you’d just . . . Wouldn’t you enjoy taking on the Assembly?”
“No one enjoys fighting the Assembly. They always make you pay for it.”
“It’s time for you to get back in the game. To show some guts.”
“It’s not about courage.”
“So you say.”
Her words sting. Before I can reply, she gets up and goes back into her office. With her short bottle-black hair, slender body, and swaggering gait, from the back she resembles a rebellious adolescent boy.
This is how it started: I was down at the old Van Nuys courthouse on a simple discovery dispute over a confidential e-mail. Moments before the judge was to take the bench, my cell phone buzzed. I still don’t know why I answered the call. It was my partner, Manny Mason. He sucked in air, almost a gasp. “Harmon Cherry’s dead. There’s an emergency partnership meeting at five thirty. Parker, Harmon shot himself.” He started sobbing.
I tried to speak—to ask how it happened, to swear at him, to call him a liar, anything—but I couldn’t find words. Then the door leading from the judge’s chambers swung open, and the judge walked into the courtroom. I hung up on Manny without saying goodbye.
When the clerk called my case, I stood up, determined to muddle through the hearing despite the odd detachment I was feeling. Harmon used to preach that sometimes the ability to muddle through is a lawyer’s greatest asset.
The opposing counsel entered her appearance. When I tried to enter mine—all I had to say was “Parker Stern for the defendant”—my voice caught and my vocal cords felt raw and swollen. The courtroom walls elongated, and the judge’s bench became a shimmering mirage. Then my cheeks flushed hot and my stomach leapt up and pressed against my throat. I croaked, “Sorry, Judge” and sprinted out of the courtroom and down the hall to the men’s room, where I found an empty stall and vomited. When I finished, I went to the sink and rinsed my mouth out with cold water. Thank God the episode was over. Embarrassing, but the embarrassment would go away as soon as I won my motion. “Victory is the strongest palliative,” Harmon would say.
When I returned to the courtroom, the judge was waiting for me. She told me to proceed with my argument, but when I tried to speak, the nausea returned. And then I heard a high-pitched whirr, like a child’s humming top. My knees buckled. I groped at the lectern for support, but my flailing arm pulled it down with me, and I tumbled to the floor.
The shrinks call it situational glossophobia, a fancy name for stage fright. I’ve tried everything—psychotherapy, yoga, meditation, biofeedback, Valium, Xanax. Nothing works. Deanna wouldn’t think of telling someone with a bum knee to suck it up and start running, or of admonishing an addict to show some willpower, but now she’s called me a coward.
One of the baristas brings me a fresh macchiato, even though I didn’t order one. I really am a fixture in this place.
A little while later, Deanna comes back to my table. “Listen to me, Parker. Rich needs a lawyer. If nothing else, you should do it out of loyalty.”
“Loyalty? Where’s his loyalty? He bailed on his partners only weeks after Harmon died, took the firm’s biggest client with him, and stood by while rest of us split apart. Meanwhile, he’s made millions off the Assembly. As much as I hate that damn cult, the legal fees could have kept the firm afloat. Not to mention that if he did commit this crime, he betrayed his family and client and church.”
“All the more reason why you should help him. Remember what Harmon used to tell us? Loyalty is most meaningful when its object has betrayed you.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Maybe so. But it’s what Harmon believed.”
“You’re not playing fair.”
She turns and glances at me over her shoulder, her smile knowing and flirtatious, her dark brown eyes dancing like they always do when she knows she’s won an argument. “When you see Rich, tell him I said to keep fighting.”
I park at the lot on the corner of Temp
I pass through the rigorous security check and take a chair on my side of the Plexiglas barrier, waiting for the guard to bring Rich Baxter into the attorney meeting room. In here, the government respects the attorney-client privilege, meaning the marshals can only watch, not listen—or so say the regulations.
We were part of Macklin & Cherry’s vaunted class of 1999—Harmon’s Army. Deanna Poulos and I were The Gunslingers, litigators anxious to take depositions and get into a courtroom ASAP. Manny Mason was The Intellectual, the thoughtful lawyer who loved the law’s logic. Rich Baxter was The Dealmaker, intent on negotiating eight-figure financial arrangements for powerful individuals and huge companies. And there was mercurial Grace Trimble, The Genius—the brightest of us all, but also the most fragile.
My friendship with Rich ended five years ago. He oversaw the Church of the Sanctified Assembly’s day-to-day representation. I thought it was just business until he announced one day that he’d become an Assembly member. I tried to talk him out of it, insisting that the group was a dangerous cult that only wanted his money. Things degenerated from there. He accused me of blasphemy and said I didn’t believe in anything except winning cases and making money and getting laid by a different woman every week. I shot back that he’d joined the Assembly because it was the only way he could finally get some pussy—I was talking about Monica, who would later become his wife. After that, he would have nothing to do with me. When Harmon died, Rich left the law firm and took the Assembly’s legal work with him, a move that not only made him wealthy, but also led to the firm’s collapse. I haven’t seen him since.
Last night, I pulled the indictment off PACER, the federal court website. The charges are more serious than I imagined. The government claims that a confidential source notified the Internal Revenue Service about unusual banking transactions involving the Church of the Sanctified Assembly. Rich allegedly controlled the Assembly’s bank accounts. The IRS monitors identified a series of large withdrawals, followed by deposits into shell accounts in European and offshore banks. What knocks me off-balance is the amount they say he stole—the indictment details numerous transactions between May 2010 and May 2011 that total approximately seventeen million dollars. The last alleged illegal transaction alone is for six million dollars, supposedly a transfer of laundered Assembly money into a British West Indies shell company called The Emery Group, which Rich set up and controlled.
It’s hard to see how the accusations could get worse, but they do. A couple of weeks ago, there was a flurry of activity in the bank accounts. Believing that Rich was about to flee the country, the FBI arrested him at an apartment in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles. In the course of the search, the agents found a false passport bearing the name and social security number of one Alan Thomas Markowitz alongside Rich’s picture. The real Alan Markowitz is a used car dealer in the valley who has no apparent relationship with The Church of the Sanctified Assembly. The agents also discovered a large quantity of methamphetamine, along with $428,000 in cash, hidden in the casing of a Gateway desktop computer. Rich faces up to twenty years in prison for each count of mail fraud, up to ten years in prison for each count of money laundering, and more time added on for the drug and passport charges.
The Rich I knew wasn’t capable of any of this. His idea of bending the rules was leaving work early to catch a Dodgers game or hitting the bar across the street after work for a good scotch.
The door on the other side of the barrier opens. He’s been jailed for less than a week, so despite his bleak situation, I still expect to find the person whom I worked with, the pudgy, avuncular man with the rosy complexion and blond hair styled so perfectly that we’d tease him about using a can of hair spray daily. When he walks in, I recoil. He’s sickly thin with gaunt cheeks, as though he’s suffering from a serious illness. His hair is tangled, more gray than blond. His once-bright eyes are deep-set and dull. Jail alone couldn’t have done this to him. On the face of it, he’s lived conservatively. The Assembly’s promotional materials emphasize family values, stable marriages, physical fitness, and disdain for Western medicine. Christian fundamentalism meets New Age doctrine; the Pentecostals meet Scientology. As far as I know, he’s adhered to the tenets of his faith. And yet, something insidious has eaten away at him. Maybe he has been using hardcore drugs.
He takes a seat at the counter, picks up the handset, and forces a smile. “Long time, Parker.”
“Tell me what happened, Rich.”
“What happened is they locked me up without bail for no reason. Josh is turning two in a couple of weeks. I have to get out of here so I can be at his birthday party. You’ll make that happen, right?”
He hasn’t changed—he always believes everything will turn out fine. His unchecked optimism is one of the reasons his clients like him so much.
“Why are you in here?” I ask.
He reveals his teeth, although I wouldn’t call the way he’s parted his lips a smile. “Attorney-client privilege?”
“It’s too soon for us to—”
“If you’re not going to agree to represent me up front, then you might as well leave. I’m only going to talk to my attorney.”
“I . . . Sure, Rich. I’m your lawyer.” My words send a current of exhilaration through me. It’s the first time that I’ve felt like an attorney since Harmon died. At the same time, I feel as if I’ve jumped into battle wounded and unarmed.
“I’m innocent. I’ve always been loyal to the Assembly, both as an adherent and as an attorney. The charges are bogus. I’ve been set up.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why would anyone do something like that?”
“Because I learned something.” He takes the handset away from his ear, and for a moment I think he’s going to hang up. He slowly raises the handset again and covers the mouthpiece with his free hand. “Someone inside’s been stealing from the Assembly. I’m getting the blame, but it’s someone on the inside. And . . . and I also think they murdered Harmon.”
“Harmon fell into a depression and killed himself.”
“Whoever killed him made it look like suicide. Harmon had information.”
“Which was?”
“I don’t know. I was looking for a workout agreement I drafted a few years ago and stumbled on these notes that Harmon wrote. They were on a DVD of scanned documents that the firm sent over when I left.”
“What did they say?”
“It was hard to understand. You know how Harmon wrote in riddles. But they talked about how someone was diverting funds from the Assembly. There were some initials, but no detail. It was like a code or something. I couldn’t . . .”
“Where’s the DVD now? Did the cops—?”
“That’s the thing, I . . . someone stole it from me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you remember anything else in the notes?”
“It’s all so fuzzy, I . . .” He shrugs his shoulders in defeat.
“Focus, Rich.”
He pushes the heels of his hands hard against his temples, as if by compressing his brain he could squeeze the lost information to the surface. “Something about a financial crime. There was all this code that I couldn’t understand, and all these numbers, bank accounts, initials. I’m sorry, it’s all so foggy. I just can’t . . .”
“Any chance the original document is still in storage?”
“No. I took all the original Assembly files with me when I left the firm. The client directed me not to leave anything behind. Not even copies.” He mumbles something, an incomprehensible hum, and then perks up. “Talk to Layla Cherry. Maybe she still has some of Harmon’s old documents. You remember how Harmon was a packrat. When I left the firm, we found some Assembly documents at his house. Talk to Layla.”
