Steve Martini - The Arraignment

Rocker, Dusha’s offices in San Francisco are located at One Market Plaza overlooking the Bay Bridge and the waterfront. The location is pricey, but within grasping distance of the city’s financial district. Here the firm occupies two floors on the upper levels, squeezed in between another law firm downstairs and a securities trading company above.

It is almost five o’clock, closing time as I step off the elevator onto carpeted floor and approach the reception counter.

A young Asian woman with a telephone headset is seated at one of the stations behind the counter. Two other women are gathering their things getting ready to leave for the evening.

The woman smiles. “Can I help you?”

I give her my card. “I’m here to see Jeffery Dolson.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. I just flew into town this afternoon and took a chance that he might be in.”

“Just a moment.”

Dolson heads up the firm’s M amp;A division. Mergers and acquisitions is the place where lawyers capitalize on the laws businesses buy from Congress, the ones designed to ensure that wealth remains concentrated in as few hands as possible, usually by wiping out small investors. Talk to lawyers working in this field and they will tell you that corporate management getting rich when their companies go broke is just part of the normal business cycle. For people who believe the world is changing too fast, they should take comfort in the fact that a lot of money in America is still made the old-fashioned way, by stealing it.

The receptionist is talking through the transparent tube on her headset to somebody in the back or upstairs.

“I don’t know. Just a minute. I’ll ask him.” She looks at me. “Can I ask you what it regards?”

“I had lunch with Adam Tolt in San Diego this afternoon, and I wanted to stop in and see Mr. Dolson.” All of this is true, none of it responsive to her question. Just the same, Tolt’s name does its magic. As the woman turns her back to me, she cups a hand over the end of the little tube, but I can hear her mumble into the mouthpiece. “Apparently, he’s been referred by Mr. Tolt.”

Open sesame. Three minutes later, I’m being ushered up the elevator by a secretary with my business card in one hand and a key to let us off the elevator on the executive level in the other. I follow her through the labyrinth of partitions to the far side of the building where the hallway is wide and the rosewood paneling is real. She knocks on the door at the end of the hall, the one with Dolson’s name engraved in plastic on the wall next to it.

“Yes. Come in.”

The door is opened, and I can see a large corner office with windows on two walls. One of these looks out at the cabled spans of the Bay Bridge. Through the other, I can see the single spire of the Ferry Building.

The man behind the desk is young. I would guess mid-thirties. He is straightening his tie, and from the look of his desk, with some papers sticking out of the partially closed top drawer, I suspect he has been cleaning up for my arrival. What the dropping of an important name can do to create a little anxiety.

Dolson shimmies around the partially open drawer that he has now given up on, and makes his way to my side of the desk. We shake hands as he looks at my card. “I understand you just flew into town?”

“Yes. A flight from San Diego. I had lunch with Adam Tolt today, and your name came up a couple of times. I thought that as long as I was coming north on other business it might be a good idea if we met.”

“My name?” he says. “How is he? Mr. Tolt, I mean. I see him about once every six months or so. When some of the division heads get together to compare notes.”

“He’s fine. Doing great,” I tell him.

“So did Adam, Mr. Tolt, send you to see me?”

“No. Actually your name came up in another context. I understand that you knew Nick Rush?”

His pupils float away from my face over to the wall of windows behind me and back again, as if they crossed the bridge and returned, all within less than a second.

“Nick Rush?” he says.

“Yes. Nick was a friend,” I say. “And your name came up.”

“Really?” This is an octave higher than his last statement. I can tell he’d like to ask in what context Nick might have mentioned his name, but he doesn’t.

“It’s terrible what happened to him,” he says.

“I understand that Nick came up here to your office, to meet with you about a week or so before he was killed?”

Like he’s been hit by a train. “Ugh? What?”

“I understood the two of you had a meeting here in your office?”

His lips are moving, sort of quivering, but nothing is coming out. “Oh. Oh that,” he says. “Guess with everything going on I forgot about it.”

How do you forget your last meeting with a man who is murdered nine days later?

“Then the police haven’t talked to you?”

“Why would they want to talk to me?”

“They usually talk to anyone who had contact with one of the victims shortly before a murder.”

“I couldn’t tell them anything. How did Nick tell you… I mean why did Nick talk to you about our meeting?”

“Nick and I didn’t have a lot of secrets.”

“Oh. I see.” Right now his eyes look as if they could swallow the couch I’m sitting on. His complexion has gone pale. “Tell me,” he says. “How exactly do you know Adam Tolt?” Dolson is trying to put all the pieces together.

I open my briefcase and pull out the firm’s newsletter. Hot off the presses in San Diego, it hasn’t made its way to the colonies yet. I hand it to him, pointing to the story under the fold with my name in the headline.

“I did the settlement on the insurance for Nick’s wife.”

He compares the name on my business card with the headline. Then reads the article as if he is sucking the print off the page with his eyes. When he’s finished, he looks at me. “Good result,” he says.

This is the lawyer’s equivalent of a high five after moon walking in the end zone.

“I understand Nick had a couple of meetings with you up here?”

I can tell by the look that he isn’t sure whether I know, and if so how much. He’s trying to regroup but has the look of a man struggling to fight off panic.

“It was social,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“My meeting. My meetings here with Nick. They were social.” He says it with all the certitude of a guess on a multiple choice quiz.

I don’t say anything. I look at him. What to do with a witness who’s nervous. Let him talk.

“He just sorta dropped by from time to time. We talked. That’s all,” he says.

“So Nick came all the way up from San Diego just to socialize with you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But he came up specifically to meet with you?”

“Oh no. I don’t think so.”

“That’s what his calendar says.”

He looks at me. It’s the kind of expression you might expect from someone who is swallowing his tongue. “His calendar?”

“Yeah.” I don’t tell him it was on a handheld and that I probably have the only copy.

“Nick put my name on his calendar?”

“That’s what I said.”

“You’ve seen this?”

“Uh-huh.”

“This is his office calendar?”

“One of them.”

“Then I suppose the San Diego office has seen it?”

“I’d have thought you might be more interested in whether the police have seen it?”

“Oh. Well sure. That’s why you thought they might want to talk to me?”

“Sure. Why? Is there some other reason?”

“I told you. I don’t know anything. Have they seen the calendar? The police, I mean?”

“Actually, I’m not sure.”