Corrupt Practices (29 page)

I tell them what I learned from Markowitz.

“Have you told the authorities?” Manny asks.

“I’m going to call Neil Latham Monday.” It’s not true. I have to get to Grace before the authorities do or I’ll never get to talk to her.

Manny takes a long drink of coffee and makes a face.

“Something wrong, dude?” Deanna says.

“Yeah. It’s decaf. I can’t stand decaf.”

“Then why are you drinking it?”

“My doctor. Blood pressure’s up.” He frowns and narrows his eyes. “Faculty members giving me stress by flouting school regulations.”

I laugh it off, but he seems to have some kind of psychic radar that’s alerted him to what’s happening between Lovely and me. “I need to find Grace,” I say. “And I need to do it before the trial starts.”

“You’ll never find her,” Deanna says. “She’s got seventeen million dollars stashed in an offshore account. She’s probably in Brazil or Costa Rica or wherever.”

“I can’t believe that she’d do something like that,” I say.

“Come on, Parker,” Deanna says. “I’m sure it’s occurred to you that she turned on Rich and took the money herself. She’s much smarter than he ever was, not to mention that she was far ahead of anyone technologically, so all she had to do was work her magic and make an electronic bank transfer into a shell account that she created for herself. Poor Rich wouldn’t have had a clue. When the Assembly got wise to the scheme, she skipped out and let him take the blame. Something like that could have driven him to suicide once he figured it out, which he had plenty of time to do in that cell. He always had a thing for Grace, you know. What I’m saying doesn’t fit your theory that the Assembly murdered him, but it makes a lot more sense.”

I look at Manny.

“I hate to say it, but she’s right,” he says.

“I don’t see it that way,” I say. “There’s the pathology report showing that Rich had a fractured hyoid. Grace certainly didn’t sneak into the detention center and kill him. And whatever she is, she’s not someone who could arrange a contract hit.”

“Weirder things have happened,” Deanna says.

“Not Grace. When I talked to Rich at the jail, he didn’t say a word about her. If he thought she had anything to do with taking that money, he would have said so. He was protecting her. He might have been trusting, but he wasn’t that naïve.”

“Yes he was,” Deanna says. “And seventeen million dollars will make your pet Labrador drop a dime on you and hop a jet to Brazil.”

“My gut says otherwise,” I say. “So stop the negativity and help me find her. She’s now become my most important trial witness.”

Deanna shrugs. “I’ll ask around.”

Manny points to the picture of Grace. “May I get a copy of this? If Grace really is on the run as you say, maybe some of my pro bono contacts can find some leads. It’s remote, but . . .”

“Definitely a long shot,” I say. “But I like it.”

“I’ve also gotten to know one of her old law school professors at Penn,” he says. “You should hear how highly she talks about Grace after all these years. A once-in-a-generation legal mind, she calls her. Sometimes Grace communicates with her. I’ll e-mail and see if she’s heard from her recently.”

“Did you ask whether Grace was embellishing her law school grades?” Deanna asks.

Manny shakes his head sadly. “She truly did have the highest GPA ever up until that time.”

“So one of those crazy stories was actually true,” Deanna says. “Remember the time she told us how she flew off to Paris with Kevin Costner after meeting him at a party in Laurel Canyon?”

“The worst was telling people that she’d been kidnapped by pygmies in the Amazon rainforest,” I say.

Manny piles on. “Worse than shooting heroin with Kurt Cobain?” We laugh at this oft-repeated gossip, the bracing cruelty of it drawing us together.

“The liar’s curse.” Deanna says. “She was such a bullshitter that she didn’t get credit for a lot of what she did accomplish.”

“Except for being the most creative lawyer any of us ever met,” I say.

Deanna and Manny nod in agreement. We reminisce about how Grace’s inspired work on a supreme court case resulted in victory even after every wonk had called our firm’s position hopeless, and how she taught stubborn Andrew Macklin, a good negotiator but a horrible writer, to construct cogent sentences after thirty-plus years of writing gibberish.

“I saw Grace a few years ago in court,” Manny says. “I told you about it, right?”

Deanna and I look each other and shake our heads.

“I was down on one of my pro bono cases, representing some Lazers accused of unlawfully assembling out in Pacoima. I was standing in the courtroom before the calendar call, and Grace came from out of nowhere and gave me this big, inappropriate hug. All the lawyers in court saw it. I knew right away she was manic. She asked about my case, and when I told her about it, she began shouting at me, saying that my clients were no better than terrorists and that the First Amendment should be repealed.”

“She had to be messing with you,” I say.

“She was serious. When she got up to argue her case, it turned out she was representing this guy suing Best Buy because a big screen TV allegedly fell off a shelf and crushed his foot. Can you imagine? Grace Trimble working a sleazy personal injury case? She could barely get an articulate sentence out. The judge slammed her. It was pathetic. It actually made me want to cry.”

“I don’t get it to this day,” I say. “Editor of the Penn Law Review and clerk for a supreme court justice, and she wanted to be a music lawyer?”

“She was a shy girl overwhelmed by LA, but enraptured by it, too,” Deanna says. “She wanted in.”

We’re silent for a moment, as if honoring the memory of an icon who died an early death.

“She should have been a law professor or a judge,” Manny says. “She couldn’t deal with anyone, much less difficult entertainment clients.”

“Grace is like a feral cat,” I say. “She wants you to get close, but if you try, she’ll fight or flee. She couldn’t even get along with the people who tried to be her friends.”

“She and I got along fine,” Manny says. “You and Deanna were the popular kids at the firm. Grace was intimidated by that.”

“That’s bullshit,” I say. “Harmon treated us equally.”

“Hardly. Grace and Rich and I were one rung down. I don’t know, maybe it’s because the two of you were litigators.” He rests his elbows on the table and leans his long torso forward. “And then Rich lucked into heading up the Assembly’s legal work, and he was a cool kid, too.”

“Rich was never cool,” I say.

Deanna is mindlessly drumming her fingers on the sides of her coffee cup. The muscles in her neck visibly tense. “I’ve never told you guys this, but I was responsible for getting Grace into all that crap.”

“Oh come on,” I say. “Grace was—”

“Grace was a fragile girl with no experience. She told me she’d never had a boyfriend. I took her to some rock concerts in Hollywood, introduced her to a bunch of predatory men. Out of pity or friendship or whatever. I was twenty-five years old with a law degree, and yet . . . Manny’s right, hanging around nerdy Grace Trimble made me feel special, superior. The second time we went out, we got to go backstage and hang out with the band. I got her high on weed and ecstasy. She’d never even smoked before. She refused at first, but I was this brilliant advocate who could convince anyone of anything, so . . . Next thing you know, she’s ingesting any drug handed to her and fucking every guy who claimed he could strum a power chord. I should’ve known from the start that she couldn’t handle it.”

“Grace was a grownup,” I say.

She blinks her eyes. “It’s been eating at me for years. I’ve always been able to tiptoe to the edge of a cliff and keep my balance. Grace couldn’t. She tumbled right over. I had no right to lead her there.”

“She was ill,” Manny said. “You couldn’t have known.”

“Couldn’t I? With all the lying and the hyperactivity and the absences from work, shouldn’t we all have known?”

“It was Harmon who should’ve done something,” Manny says, an edge of resentment in his voice.

“He did,” I say. “After she self-destructed, he—”

“The key word is
after
,” he says. “Harmon had to know about Grace’s problems. He knew everything that went on at the firm. Everything. He . . . never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“I want to hear it,” I say.

“Grace was too valuable a commodity for Harmon to lose to therapy or a leave of absence. Once he made her give up the music lawyer fantasy and work on matters for the Sanctified Assembly, she was indispensible.”

I lean back in my chair. “Harmon wasn’t like that.”

“The sicker Grace got, the more work he piled on her,” Manny says. “And when she embarrassed the firm with that Knolls debacle, he got rid of her.”

Harmon fired Grace after his client Lake Knolls had complained that she was stalking him, crashing campaign fundraisers and loitering outside his Nichols Canyon mansion at all hours of the night. One night, Knolls’s security guard found her trying to scale a wall at the side of the house. When the police arrived and arrested her for trespassing, they found a gun in her car. Grace claimed she carried it for protection. Harmon managed to pull some strings and get the gun charges thrown out because Grace had a permit. He also convinced Knolls not to press charges in exchange for promising that Grace would get help.

“What other choice did he have but to fire her?” I say.

He purses his lips and gazes downward. “If that neighbor hadn’t found her, she would’ve done just what Harmon and Rich . . .” Two weeks after Grace lost her job, she went into her garage, sealed all the doors and windows with duct tape, got behind the wheel of her car, and started the engine.

“Harmon and Rich were murdered,” I say.

“Forgive me, my friend,” Manny says. “But you’ve always had blinders on when it comes to Harmon. To this day, you can’t accept the fact that he committed suicide. I’ll be forever grateful to him for hiring me and teaching me how to be a good lawyer. But he was a flawed human being like the rest of us. He put his law firm above the people in it, above his own family even.”

“How long have you felt this way, Manny?” I ask.

“Since the firm fell apart and I got some perspective on what the place was about. Since Grace went crazy. Since Deanna left the practice. Since you fell to pieces. Since Rich died. All byproducts of the Macklin & Cherry culture.”

“You’re wrong about him,” I say. I look to Deanna for support, but she averts her eyes. “Deanna . . .”

“I got out of the legal profession for a reason, Parker.”

“But Harmon got the firm to pay her psychiatrist bills. And the firm sued Grace’s insurance company pro bono for refusing to cover her.”

“To assuage his guilt,” Deanna says.

“It wasn’t that way,” I say. “It wasn’t that way at all.”

Monica Baxter arrives at The Barrista two hours later. When I tell her that Grace Trimble is the person she calls the Outsider, she says something that I can’t hear over the clatter of dishes and crescendo of the patrons’ voices.

“Say again?”

She leans in close, her teeth clenched. “I said,
not that whore
.”

“I don’t understand. Rich and Grace were friends, but—”

“You think they were just friends? They were engaged to be married once. In a sanctioned ceremony.”

“A sanctioned . . . ?”

“You are a sightless man. Trimble was an Assembly convert. She brought Rich into the fold.”

“But didn’t you—?”

“You thought that
I
lured him in with my feminine wiles. He told me. No, Trimble joined the flock and he followed her.”

I feel the blood pulsing in my cheeks. I stare down into my coffee cup. “I didn’t know she was an Assembly member.”

“If anyone could drive my poor husband to suicide, it was that Trimble woman. She lived to drag him down. And she’d like nothing better than to get back at the Assembly.” She grabs her handbag and gets up to leave. “I have to tell Christopher McCarthy about this.”

“Monica, wait.” I reach out and grab her wrist.

She jerks her arm away in disgust. “Don’t you dare put your hands on me again. Ever.”

“OK. I’m sorry. But please listen. Before you tell anyone about Grace, give me a chance to find out what really happened. Rich was murdered. There’s the botched autopsy report. There are other irregularities in the financials that prove that something else was going on. And now that I know that Grace was involved, I can get to her. She knows something. So give me some more time. Please.”

She hesitates, and sits back down. “Trimble stole the money. And had Rich killed. I want you to prove that.”

“I know . . . well, I knew Grace. She didn’t care about money. She was desperately looking to connect with people, but she couldn’t because of her illness. And you’re right, she had feelings for Rich. That’s why I don’t believe that she’d hurt him.”

“She’s not ill. She’s weak and selfish, desirous of empty self-gratification. And she certainly would hurt him. Revenge for his leaving her.”

“I truly think that Grace was helping him sort out the facts,” I repeat with as much conviction as I can muster. “The only way I can figure this whole thing out is to find her. If you tell the Assembly about Grace, that’ll never happen, because if they’re responsible—”