Joel Goldman - Motion to Kill

“Kelly Holt says Sullivan was murdered. Someone tried to run me off the road on the way back from the lake. St. John is on us like white on rice. Pamela wants her million bucks. O’Malley is at the center of all of this. I’m not backing off.”

“You’re making a big mistake, Lou.”

He slammed the door on the way out just in case Mason missed his punctuation.

Scott’s reaction to Mason’s catastrophe checklist was near the top of the week’s bizarre turns. No questions or comments about the murder of his mentor or the attempt on Mason’s life, no concern for his own vulnerability, no solutions for the financial crisis they faced over Pamela’s demand for payment. Scott either didn’t care, which Mason didn’t want to believe, or trouble with O’Malley was the only thing that really frightened him.

The door was still vibrating when Harlan Christenson opened it, looking as if he’d just been sent to the principal’s office.

“St. John has upped the ante. I’m being audited.”

“Harlan, lawyers are audited all the time. I doubt if St. John has the clout to single you out. Just give the IRS agent your files and your accountant’s phone number and don’t worry about it.”

“It’s not that simple.”

Harlan picked up a pencil on Mason’s desk and rubbed it between his palms.

“How hard can it be? You give the IRS agent your tax returns and answer a few questions.”

“If all they wanted was my tax returns, there wouldn’t be an audit. I file my taxes on time every year. They’ve got the returns.”

Mason sat up straight, appreciating the seriousness of Harlan’s situation.

“Have they asked for any specific records?”

Harlan didn’t answer. He gripped the pencil with both hands, studying it as if the answer lay in the dull lead tip.

“They want records of my income outside the firm and my business expenses.”

“Is that a problem?”

Harlan snapped the pencil in half and dropped the pieces onto Mason’s desk. A thin trickle of blood dripped from the fat of his palm. He pulled a sliver of pencil from his skin and wiped his hand on his trouser.

“Lou, I can’t pass the audit. I’ve been underreporting income and overstating my expenses.”

Harlan shrugged his shoulders, stuck his hands in his pockets, and glued his eyes to the floor. He was a child hoping for his father’s promise that everything would be all right.

“Who else knows about your tax problems?”

“Scott. I tried talking to him but he just got angry and told me to get out. Said I should have known better.”

His eyes began to water.

“When’s your first meeting with the IRS agent?”

“Monday morning at ten.”

“Would you like me to go with you?”

Mason offered because he thought Harlan couldn’t bring himself to ask. Harlan wasn’t strong, but he was proud. It was a curiously sympathetic combination. Harlan was in trouble, which meant that Mason couldn’t keep his nose out of Harlan’s business.

Harlan straightened a bit and shook off the suggestion. “When the day comes that I can’t handle some snot-nosed IRS kid, I’d better hang it up.”

“That snot-nosed kid can send you away for a long time, Harlan. We’ve lost one senior partner this week. That’s my limit.”

“Don’t worry. The government will always make a deal for the right price,” he said before leaving.

Mason wondered what Harlan had to offer that would be good enough to wipe the slate clean on income tax evasion. He couldn’t decide whether the question or the answer bothered him more.

Sandra Connelly stopped by Mason’s office at three o’clock Friday afternoon. “Eight o’clock okay? Dress casual,” she said.

His blank look told her he’d forgotten about their dinner date. Recollection came an instant too late.

“You forgot, didn’t you?”

He didn’t expect the disappointment in her voice. Sandra wasn’t someone who let people know they’d hurt her feelings. She just found ways to remind them that paybacks are hell.

“Jesus, Sandra, I’m sorry. This has been a rotten week. I wouldn’t be good company anyway. Rain check till next weekend?”

“Sure, no problem. You don’t know what you’re missing, though.”

Her wolfish smile gave Mason a pretty good idea, but fooling around with a partner, even one as tempting as Sandra, was a low-percentage move. And he couldn’t understand her sudden interest, since he’d never shown up on her radar before.

The worst thing was that part of him didn’t object to the image of being taken advantage of by her. Which reminded him of the one and only piece of advice Aunt Claire ever gave him about sex: Think with the big head, not the little head.

Mason finished reviewing the O’Malley billing memos, checking them against the master index of matters Diane Farrell had generated. The firm had been billing O’Malley between a million and a million and a half dollars a year for four of the last five years. In the last twelve months, the billings had jumped to two million.

The only problem was that half a million had been charged to two matters that didn’t exist except in the billing memos. O’Malley had paid five hundred thousand dollars for work that had never been done. Nobody could have pulled that off without Angela knowing about it. Mason called her and told her to come to his office.

“The staff reads all these closed doors like smoke signals,” she said as she closed his. “They figure something big must be happening. It’s one of the best sources of office intelligence next to monitoring radio traffic and troop movements.”

“Yeah, I know. But this has been a closed-door kind of week. I’ve gone over these billing memos, Angela, and I-”

“-figured out that O’Malley was paying for work we didn’t do.”

“Do you always-”

“-interrupt and complete other people’s sentences? Sorry, it’s a bad habit. I knew you’d figure it out when you asked for the billing memos. No point in hiding it.”

“I appreciate your candor. Why didn’t you blow the whistle on Sullivan?”

“It’s none of my business what the firm charges its clients.”

Mason shook his head. “Angela, I’ve only been here a few months, but the one thing I know is that there’s nothing that goes on in this place that you don’t consider your business. Try me again.”

“You’re giving me too much credit. I’m a bean counter. That’s all. My job is to make sure clients pay their bills so we can pay ours and that there’s money left at the end of the year for my Christmas bonus.”

“So you knew that Sullivan was billing O’Malley half a million dollars for work we didn’t do and never once asked him why?”

“I didn’t say that. You did.”

Mason let out an exasperated sigh. “Okay, Angela. Let’s play cross-examination. Did you talk to Sullivan about the bills to O’Malley for work we didn’t do?”

She smiled at his frustration. “Isn’t it fun to use all that education, Lou? Sure, I talked to him. He was the boss.”

“And what did he tell you?”

“To keep my mouth shut …” She let her answer dangle, teasing him with the part left unspoken.

“Or else what?”

She eased back in her chair. “Or else he would have me arrested.” She said it with sudden resignation, her bravado exhausted. “Sullivan was blackmailing me. I had cash-flow problems last year and I took an interest-free loan from the firm without asking. He figured it out.”

“And if you told the partners about O’Malley, he’d-”

“-go to the police about my loan. I even slept with him, thinking that he might decide to forget about it.”