The First Law (18 page)

“This isn’t for a client.” He realized he had taken her hand when she’d come up to him and hadn’t released it. “Come look at something.”

She stopped in the doorway to the kitchen and turned to him. “Who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend?” Then, more seriously, “This is beautiful, David. Is it an occasion? Don’t tell me we started seeing each other a year ago today and I didn’t remember.”

“It might be an occasion someday,” he said, “in the future.” He drew in a deep breath and came out with it. “I wanted to know if you’d be interested in marrying someone like me.”

She looked quickly down to the ground, then back up, staring at him with a startled intensity. “Somebody like you? Do you mean hypothetically?”

“No. I said that wrong. I meant me. Will you marry me?”

For an eternal two seconds—they were still holding hands—she did not move, looking him full in the face. She brought her other hand up and held it over her mouth, obviously stunned. “Oh, David . . .” Her eyes filled. “I never thought . . .” She looked at him, hopelessly vulnerable, terrified. A tear spilled out onto her cheek.

But still the word didn’t come. “I love you,” he said. “Please say yes.”

“Oh God, yes. Of course yes.” Her arms were around his neck and she was crying openly now, kissing his face, eyes, lips again and again. “Yes yes yes yes yes.”

“This Saturday?”

It was midafternoon and they were taking a break in the deposition of their old friend Aretha LaBonte while she used the ladies’ room.

Panos’s lawyer Dick Kroll was waiting, taking notes back in the conference room, a large sunlit enclosure resembling a greenhouse that they called the Solarium. Freeman and Hardy were ostensibly filling their coffee cups in the old man’s office.

Freeman nodded. “If you’re free.”

“I’ll get free. It’s not that. I’m flattered that you’d ask me. I’m just a little surprised. No, I’m flabbergasted. I didn’t know you were even thinking of it.”

“Well, there you go. You don’t see everything.”

“And isn’t Saturday a little soon if you just got engaged today?”

“Why would we want to wait once we decided?”

“I don’t know. Most people do, that’s all. Send out invitations, plan the party.”

Freeman was shaking his head. “None of that, Diz. We don’t want a party. Just a best man—that’s you—and a maid of honor and a judge. Oh, and Gina’s mother.”

“It’s nice you remembered her. Can Frannie come?”

“And Frannie, naturally. Goes without saying.”

Hardy drank some coffee. “You know, I’ve been a best man twice now in two years. I stood up for Glitsky.”

“Good for you.” Freeman’s enthusiasm was restrained. “You’ll be in practice.”

“I didn’t need it. It was pretty easy. Like Aretha here.”

Again, Freeman shook his head. “Don’t get complacent. Kroll’s good, even if he’s got no principles. In fact, it might be why he’s good.”

“I don’t know,” Hardy said. “I’m not seeing much yet.”

Freeman opened the door out to the lobby. Aretha was back at her place in the Solarium, and smiling, Freeman waved at Kroll, who was staring angrily in their direction. He pointed at his watch in an impatient gesture. Freeman waved again, turned back to Hardy. “He’ll come up with something.”

“I’m just saying we’ve got him on the ropes. I don’t see him coming up with a
legal
something.”

“You wait,” Freeman said, “you’ll see.” Then, an afterthought, “What do you mean, legal something? What else is there?”

The law offices of Richard C. Kroll were located in one of the recently built and controversial loft spaces south of Market Street at Third and Folsom. For the past twenty minutes, Kroll had been turned around in his swivel chair, looking out of his second story, floor-to-ceiling window, for the familiar sight of Wade Panos to appear on the street below. It was the day after his latest deposition with Aretha LaBonte at David Freeman’s office.

And now here Wade was, half a block down, on foot and in uniform as always, stopping to look into the shops as he passed them, even occasionally raising a hand to acquaintances on the street. An extraordinarily successful man in his element, Panos bestrode the pavement like a parade marshal, confident and unassailable.

Kroll’s stomach rumbled, and he clutched at it. Taking a few antacids from a roll in his desk drawer, he stood up. In the mirror over the bar area, he got his face composed so that it wouldn’t immediately telegraph the bad news he was about to deliver. By the time his secretary buzzed him with the word that Wade had arrived, he was back at his desk, apparently lost in other work. When Panos opened the door to the office, he looked up and motioned to the wing chair in front of his desk. He’d be done in just a moment.

Closing the folder, he finally found the nerve to look at his client. Wade, for his part, sat back comfortably, an ankle resting on a knee, his eyes half closed. He was always a patient man, and the small wait until his lawyer gave him his attention didn’t seem to rankle in the least. Still, when Kroll closed the folder, he came out of his trance, suddenly all business. “So how bad is it?” he asked.

Kroll tried to smile. “How do you know it’s bad?”

“You want to see me in person, Dick, it’s bad. It’s one reason I like you. Other guys, they get bad news, they give it to you over the phone, or leave a message. You? You got the balls to be here and try to break the fall. I appreciate that. So how bad is it?”

Kroll templed his hands on his desk. “Pretty bad.”

Panos nodded. “Tell me.”

“We got denied on the summary judgment.”

“Which means what?”

“It means the judge decided that this thing’s going forward.”

Panos showed little reaction. If anything, he settled back a little more into his chair. “Okay,” he said, “you said from the beginning that filing the thing was a slim chance. So it didn’t work. No real surprise, right?”

“But there is a surprise.”

Panos cocked his head, an inquisitive dog. “I’m listening.”

Kroll noticed that his knuckles had gone white and he willed himself to loosen his grip. “You remember we decided that since you personally were not alleged to have harmed any of the plaintiffs, that you shouldn’t be personally named as one of the defendants?”

“Right. It’s just WGP and some of the assistants—” Noticing Kroll’s look, he stopped midsentence. “What?”

“That’s what Freeman and Hardy decided to hit. They were shooting to pierce the corporate veil, and it looks like they did it.”

Still well back in his seat, still in a relaxed posture, Panos frowned. “You lost me, Dick. What’s that mean?”

“It means. . . .” Kroll stopped, shook his head, reached for another folder, and opened it. “I’ll read the relevant part to you. How’s that? ‘Plaintiffs have introduced enough evidence to show that there exists a triable issue of fact as to whether WGP Enterprises Incorporated, a California corporation, and Wade Panos, an individual, are in fact alter egos of one another.” ’ He dared a glance up at Panos. “They’re saying that the corporation is a sham and that therefore you should be personally bound in. Apparently the judge bought it.”

“Dick, I’ve been incorporated for thirty years, and my dad before that.”

“I know, I know.” Kroll sighed. “But apparently they argued that the corporation is undercapitalized, among some other technical points. Also, since you’re the only shareholder and you control the company’s day-to-day workings on your own, they said the corporation is being maintained not as a legitimate entity but as an artificial dodge to avoid personal liability.”

“Artificial my ass. I donate to all these charities through the corporation. I pay my guys and my bills with corporate checks. The corporation’s as real as a heart attack, Dick.”

“I agree with you, Wade, and certainly that’s what I’d argue in front of a jury, and I might even prevail. But the judge ruled that it would have to be decided by a jury, so that’s what we’re dealing with.”

“And if we lose, then what?”

“Then you’re exposed. Personally.”

Panos seemed to go into another kind of trance.

“It gets worse, I’m afraid,” Kroll said. “It also means you’ll be deposed before the jury gets to hear anything. You and me go up to Freeman’s office, there’s a court reporter taking everything down, and you’re under oath.”

Panos opened his eyes again, but didn’t respond. Folding his hands in his lap, he took a breath.

The lawyer continued. “It also means that Freeman and Hardy get to ask you where you get your money, all of it. And how you get it.”

This brought a small rise. “So then you object, right?”

Kroll nodded. “Yes I do. Except in a depo the objection is noted for the record, but you’ve got to answer the question anyway. And later the judge rules whether the answer is admissible.”

“Later?”

“Way later.”

Panos’s chest rose and fell, long and slow.

“The point is,” Kroll continued, “once they’ve got you in a depo, they can ask anything. That’s how they finally got Clinton, you know. Not because of anything he did with Paula Jones, but because he said under oath that he hadn’t had sex with anybody else. Then when Monica came along . . .”

Panos held up a hand. “Spare me the history lesson, Dick. What’s this mean to me in the here and now?”

Kroll picked his words carefully. “It means they’re going to be able to look at any bank account you have anywhere. It could be—I’m not saying it
will
be, but knowing Freeman I’d say it’s likely—that it’s going to be open season on your books, and not just your corporate books. They want your net worth.”

“Why? What’s the big deal with my net worth?”

“That’s largely what they base punitive damages on, Wade. The idea is that punitives are supposed to punish, to hurt. The more you’re worth, the more they ask, the more—”

Panos raised his head, stopping Kroll. His face betrayed no deep concern. In fact, it had a controlled calm that, given the circumstances, Kroll found to be a little scary. A small laugh came from deep in Panos’s throat. “You remember when this started? You called it a—what was it?—a nuisance lawsuit?”

“I remember.”

Again, the frightening smile. “I’d say these two sons of bitches have taken it a little further than that, wouldn’t you?” He came forward in the chair. “Okay, you’re my lawyer, what’s your advice now?”

Kroll appeared to be thinking, although he’d known all along that it would come to this. “We might want to offer to settle now.”

Panos lived with that notion for a beat. Then, “How much?”

“A few million, at least. Say three, four.”

Panos shook his head, uttered an obscenity. “You think they’ll take it?”

Kroll shrugged. “I don’t think I would, especially after this ruling, but it can’t hurt to ask. There’s no other option really.”

Panos grunted. “There’s always another option,” he said. He cast his eyes about the room, then settled them on his lawyer. “But you go ahead. Make the offer.”

9

D
an Cuneo lived in Alameda, across the Bay from San Francisco. He had a dentist appointment at eleven o’clock on Monday morning. Though it killed him to miss a day when they might be able to close in on a murder suspect, he also had a strong aversion to spending the day drooling with a numb lip next to his partner.

He’d read many, many magazine articles and listened to hundreds of hours of psychobabble nonsense about burnout, and the consensus was that if you wanted to avoid it, you had to keep some perspective on real life. Don’t be a cop all the time. If you’ve got an appointment with a doctor, keep it. If you’re really sick, stay home. The job isn’t everything. So he had finally talked himself into believing that he wasn’t abandoning the Silverman case by taking one day off.

He had accrued eleven extra sick days from the past couple of years—times when the exigencies of the job had won out when he’d been sick. But today he had the damned appointment and as a conscious exercise he had decided, albeit before Silverman had been shot, that no matter what came up—and there would always be
something
that came up—he was going to keep the appointment. Mental health.

To quell the voice of his conscience before it could change his mind, he called his partner on Saturday morning and gave him the news that he was calling in sick Monday. Russell, who lived in Sunnyvale, forty-five miles south of San Francisco, took this as an opportunity to make plans to go fishing on the Bay. He had three unused sick days in his bank, and like every other city employee he knew except Cuneo, he believed that it was bad luck to let too many of them pile up. So on Monday he went fishing.

This morning, Tuesday, after three days out of the office, both inspectors had enormous amounts of busywork waiting for them when they checked in at a little after 7:45—a couple of dozen phone calls for each to return, transcripts of the tapes of witness interviews to proofread for accuracy—and they stayed at their desks for three and a half hours before breaking for lunch, which took up most of an hour at the McDonald’s next to the Hall.

At one, they had to be out at the Academy for a mandatory, previously scheduled four-hour sensitivity training class. Every cop in San Francisco made fun of these attempts to create social workers out of law enforcers. But if you didn’t go, your pay got docked.

Today’s topic had been transgender issues, timely and relevant because the city had recently decided to extend the insurance of city workers to cover sex-change operations. This change in policy also brought to light some sensitivity shortcomings among city service personnel. Especially the police, who needed guidelines on how to refer to those of questionable gender during the arrest and booking process. The critical element was the person’s self-definition—if someone defined herself as a transsexual, officers should refer to her as a female; if she possessed a penis, however, she should be booked as a male.

But even with all the education, the concepts remained mostly elusive to some people. Drumming “Wipeout” on the steering wheel as he drove back downtown after the class, dusk descending, Cuneo turned to his partner. “So if I don’t want ’em to cut off my dick, I can’t be a girl.”