Laura Caldwell - Red Hot Lies

My nerves about my upcoming meeting with the FBI started to grow. And grow and grow.

Then I had an idea.

“I’m out,” I said to Q, leaving my office.

“Where to?”

“I have a meeting.”

I left the Baltimore & Brown offices and walked to LaSalle Street. Again, I felt the weight of someone’s eyes on me, but every time I spun around, no one seemed to be watching me.

I went north toward the Board of Trade until I came to an old high rise that housed a bevy of criminal-defense firms. The lobby inside used to be grand, but now the marble was yellowed and the lighting patchy. On the tenth floor, the firm of Martin Bristol & Associates wasn’t much better. God knew they made enough dough to have a sleek office overlooking the Chicago River, but like many criminal-defense firms they didn’t care about image. They only cared about the work and the clients. And, of course, the cash.

“Hey, Izzy,” the receptionist called when I walked in. I waved. She hit a buzzer under the desk that unlatched the door to the internal offices and went back to her phone call.

The hallway was lined with courtroom sketches, mostly of Martin Bristol, Maggie’s grandfather, prowling the courtrooms in his many cases. He’d been an assistant state’s attorney for years and had prosecuted the infamous serial killer Keith Lee Baker. It was a case that continued to define him, even now, and he’d told me he was just fine with that. Keith Lee Baker, he always said, had brought him a hell of a lot of business.

Maggie’s office had typical overworked lawyer written all over it. The windows that faced LaSalle Street were mostly blocked with stacks of redwell folders bearing the names of various cases. Her desk was littered with motions and complaints and witness statements.

Maggie was seated in the black leather chair she’d inherited from her grandfather’s old associate, who’d left years ago. The chair was faded and torn in spots, and I knew she’d been meaning to get a new one since she’d started practicing here after law school but, like many criminal lawyers, Maggie was superstitious. She’d somehow convinced herself that the chair was good luck, and now she couldn’t get rid of it.

“Mags,” I said.

She looked up, shocked. She always looked like that when someone came into her office, as if she didn’t know that other people, like clients and friends, might visit her. She was always completely consumed in what she was doing.

She blinked once, and I could see her brain clearing off a clean space. She batted away a lock of honey-colored hair that had fallen in her eye.

“Iz!” She jumped and picked her way over the piles of documents on her floor. “What’s up? Any news?”

“No.”

She shut her door while I excavated one of the chairs. “Did you come from work?” she asked.

“Yeah. It’s bleak. I can’t get anything done.”

“I can’t believe you’re still going to work.”

“What else am I going to do?”

She sank back into her chair and stared at me. “I don’t know.”

“Actually, I’ve got an idea.” I lifted my bag from the floor and took out my checkbook. I wrote a check to Martin Bristol & Associates for a thousand dollars. It was money we had earmarked for the honeymoon, but who knew whether I’d need it now.

I stood and put the check in front of her. “I’m hiring you on behalf of myself and Sam Hollings. This is a retainer.”

Here’s the thing about lawyers-everyone assumes that if you’ve graduated law school and passed the bar, you’re a mini-expert on every area of the law that exists. The truth is that while law school indoctrinates and introduces, it doesn’t truly educate. It can’t. The legal world is simply too vast. Real education happens on the job. And so, if we lawyers haven’t worked in criminal law (or patent law or real-estate law), we know as much about it as a CTA bus driver. I knew nothing about criminal law, and I’d realized that I’d better have someone on my side-on Sam’s side-who did.

Maggie looked at the check, then at me. “You’re my best friend. You and your fiancé get free legal advice. If you need it.”

“Nope. I don’t want you being half friend, half lawyer here. I want you, Maggie Bristol, tough-girl attorney, woman who pulls no punches. I want you to tell it to me straight. Just like Sam or I were any other client.”

“Why do you think Sam needs a lawyer? I mean, right now?”

“I got a call from the FBI. I’m going to see them at eleven-thirty.” I told her about my conversation with Andi Lippman. “Do you know her?” I asked Maggie.

“No. But I do know you’re not going to that meeting.”

I sighed. “Mags-”

She shook her head. “Never let yourself be questioned without a subpoena or an arrest.”

“I know, I know, but that’s the advice you give someone who has something to hide. Someone who might be arrested for something. That is not me.”

She shrugged. “You never know what kind of story these people can cook up. The feds are no better than the cops.”

“Right. Well…the cops seemed nice.”

Maggie’s eyebrows rose to the ceiling. “You didn’t.”

“They came to my office yesterday.”

She briefly dipped her face into her hands. “Have you learned nothing from me?”

“I needed to know what they knew. And that’s the same reason I’m going to see the FBI. This time I’m taking a lawyer.” I gave her a pointed look.

She nodded slowly, then her nodding picked up pace. “All right then.” She looked at her watch. “It’s time for a client-prep meeting.”

With the facts as we knew them, Maggie told me, Sam could be charged with embezzlement, which was essentially stealing property owned by someone else but which had been entrusted to his care.

“Like the Enron guys,” Maggie said. “They rightly possessed all that money due to their positions in the company, but when they started using it for their own personal benefit, then it became embezzlement.”

“Didn’t one of them get a twenty-four-year prison sentence?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, her voice getting a little louder, a little excited. “The judges smack those guys hard. I mean hard. There’s no mercy anymore for white-collar criminals.”

I flinched.

“What?” She raised her eyebrows. “I thought you wanted a tough-girl attorney? The woman who pulls no punches?”

“I do.”

“Okay, well, look, there are a lot of positives. I mean, number one, they haven’t found him.”

“Precisely how is the fact that Sam is missing a ‘positive’?”

“I’m just looking at it from the perspective of a defense attorney, okay? And the truth is, if I get a retainer and I work the case as hard as I can and then one of my clients disappears, I’m not too upset. I get paid, and I don’t have to deal with sentencing. Also, I get a soft spot for my clients, even if they sold thirty kilos of coke to an undercover cop. When they’re gone, I can imagine a better life for them.”

This always fascinated me about Maggie-she was part tough cookie, part legal scholar and part plain old softy. Scholar wasn’t even the right word, but there was no appropriate term for someone who simply loved the law like Maggie did. I was surprised to find out after graduation that most attorneys didn’t adore the law. Sadly, I didn’t adore the law.

“With Sam,” Maggie continued, “it’s possible the feds will lose interest if he stays gone. They’re human, too, and everyone wants to close cases.”

She caught my look. “Okay, obviously not finding Sam wouldn’t be the best result for you.”

“Moving on. Other positives?”

“Well, Forester may have given Sam the right to take those bearer shares. If he did, then it’s not embezzlement.”