“They’re calling it quits already, huh?”
Sanders turned and saw Alan, one of the investigators, coming up from the parking lot. Alan had glanced over at the lawyers and quickly appraised the situation.
“I think so,” Sanders said.
Alan squinted at the lawyers. “They should. Johnson has a problem. And a lot of people in the company know about it. Especially her assistant.”
Sanders said, “You talked to her last night?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Herb found the cleaning woman and got her taped. And I had a late night with Betsy Ross. She’s a lonely lady, here in a new town. She drinks too much, and I taped it all.”
“Did she know that?”
“She doesn’t have to,” Alan said. “It’s still admissible.” He watched the lawyers for a moment. “Blackburn must be shitting staples about now.”
Louise Fernandez was stalking across the courtyard, grim-faced, hunched over. “Goddamn it,” she said, as she came up.
“What happened?” Sanders said.
Fernandez shook her head. “They won’t make a deal.”
“They won’t make a deal?”
“That’s right. They just deny every point. Her assistant bought wine? That was for Sanders. Her assistant bought condoms? That was for the assistant. The assistant says she bought them for Johnson? The assistant is an unreliable drunk. The cleaning lady’s report? She couldn’t know what she heard, she had the radio on. And always the constant refrain, `You know, Louise, this won’t stand up in court.’ And Bulletproof Betty is on the phone, running the whole thing. Telling everybody what to do.” Fernandez swore. “I have to tell you. This is the kind of shit male executives pull. They look you right in the eye and say, `It never happened. It just isn’t there. You have no case.’ It burns my ass. Damn it!”
“Better get some lunch, Louise,” Alan said. To Sanders he said, “She sometimes forgets to eat.”
“Yeah, fine. Sure. Eat.” They started toward the parking lot. She was walking fast, shaking her head. “I can’t understand how they can take this position,” she said. “Because I know-I could see it in judge Murphy’s eyes that she didn’t think there’d be an afternoon session at all. Judge Murphy heard the evidence and concluded it’s all over. So did 1. But it’s not over. Blackburn and Heller aren’t moving one inch. They’re not going to settle. They’re basically inviting us to sue.”
“So we’ll sue,” Sanders said, shrugging.
“Not if we’re smart,” Fernandez said. “Not now. This is exactly what I was afraid would happen. They got a lot of free discovery, and we got nothing. We’re back to square one. And they have the next three years to work on that assistant, and that cleaning lady, and anything else we come up with. And let me tell you: in three years we won’t even be able to find that assistant.”
“But we have her on tape . . .”
“She still has to appear in court. And believe me, she never will. Look, DigiCom has huge exposure. If we show that DigiCom didn’t respond in a timely and adequate fashion to what they knew about Johnson, they could be liable for extremely large damages. There was a case on point last month in California: nineteen point four million dollars, found for the plaintiff. With exposure like that, take my word for it: the assistant will be unavailable. She’ll be on vacation in Costa Rica for the rest of her life.”
“So what do we do?” Sanders said.
“For better or worse, we’re committed now. We’ve taken this line and we have to continue it. Somehow, we have to force them to come to terms,” she said. “But we’re going to need something else to do that. You got anything else?”
Sanders shook his head. “No, nothing.”
“Hell,” Fernandez said. “What’s going on? I thought DigiCom was worried about this allegation becoming public before they finished the acquisition. I thought they had a publicity problem.”
Sanders nodded. “I thought they did, too.”
“Then there’s something we don’t understand. Because Heller and Blackburn both act like they couldn’t care less what we do. Now why is that?”
A heavyset man with a mustache walked past them, carrying a sheaf of papers. He looked like a cop.
“Who’s he?” Fernandez said.
“Never seen him before.”
“They were calling on the phone for somebody. Trying to locate somebody. That’s why I ask.”
Sanders shrugged. “What do we do now?”
“We eat,” Alan said.
“Right. Let’s go eat,” Fernandez said, “and forget it for a while.”
In the same moment, a thought popped into his mind: Forget that phone. It seemed to come from nowhere, like a command:
Forget that phone.
Walking beside him, Fernandez sighed. “We still have things we can develop. It’s not over yet. You’ve still got things, right, Alan?”
“Absolutely,” Alan said. “We’ve hardly begun. We haven’t gotten to Johnson’s husband yet, or to her previous employer. There’s lots of stones left to turn over and see what crawls out.”
Forget that phone.
“I better check in with my office,” Sanders said, and took out his cellular phone to dial Cindy.
A light rain began to fall. They came to the cars in the parking lot. Fernandez said, “Who’s going to drive?”
“I will,” Alan said.
They went to his car, a plain Ford sedan. Alan unlocked the doors, and Fernandez started to get in. “And I thought that at lunch today we would be going to have a party,” she said.
Going to a party . . .
Sanders looked at Fernandez sitting in the front seat, behind the rain spattered windshield. He held the phone up to his ear and waited while the call went through to Cindy. He was relieved that his phone was working correctly. Ever since Monday night when it went dead, he hadn’t trusted it completely. But it seemed to be fine. Nothing wrong with it at all.
The couple was going to a party and .she made a call on a cellular phone. From the car . . .
Forget that phone.
Cindy said, “Mr. Sanders’s office.”
And when she called, she got an answering machine. She left a message on the answering machine. And then .she hung up.
“Hello? Mr. Sanders’s office. Hello?”
“Cindy, it’s me.”
“Oh, hi, Tom.” Still reserved.
“Any messages?” he said.
“Uh, yes, let me look at the book. You had a call from Arthur in KL, he wanted to know if the drives arrived. I checked with Don Cherry’s team; they got them. They’re working on them now. And you had a call from Eddie in Austin; he sounded worried. And you had another call from John Levin. He called you yesterday, too. And he said it was important.”
Levin was the executive with a hard drive supplier. Whatever was on his mind, it could wait.
“Okay. Thanks, Cindy.”
“Are you going to be back in the office today? A lot of people are asking.”
“I don’t know.”
`John Conley from Conley-White called. He wanted to meet with you at four.”
“I don’t know. I’ll see. I’ll call you later.”
“Okay.” She hung up.
He heard a dial tone.
And then she had hung up.
The story tugged at the back of his mind. The two people in the car. Going to the party. Who had told him that story? How did it go?
On her way to the party, Adele had made a call from the car and then .she had hung up.
Sanders snapped his fingers. Of course! Adele! The couple in the car had been Mark and Adele Lewyn. And they had had an embarrassing incident. It was starting to come back to him now.
Adele had called somebody and gotten the answering machine. She left a message, and hung up the phone. Then .she and Mark talked in the car about the person Adele had just called. They made jokes and unflattering comments for about fifteen minutes. And later they were very embarrassed . . .
Fernandez said, “Are you just going to stand there in the rain?”
Sanders didn’t answer. He took the cellular phone down from his ear. The keypad and screen glowed bright green. Plenty of power. He looked at the phone and waited. After five seconds, it clicked itself off; the screen went blank. That was because the new generation of phones had an autoshutdown feature to conserve battery power. If you didn’t use the phone or press the keypad for fifteen seconds, the phone shut itself off. So it wouldn’t go dead.
But his phone had gone dead in Meredith’s office.
Why?
Forget that phone.
Why had his cellular phone failed to shut itself off? What possible explanation could there be? Mechanical problems: one of the keys stuck, keeping the phone on. It had been damaged when he dropped it, when Meredith first kissed him. The battery was low because he forgot to charge it the night before.
No, he thought. The phone was reliable. There was no mechanical fault. And it was fully charged.
No.
The phone had worked correctly.
They made jokes and unflattering comments for about fifteen minutes.
His mind began to race, with scattered fragments of conversation coming back to him.
“Listen, why didn’t you call me last night?”
“I did, Mark.”
Sanders was certain that he had called Mark Lewyn from Meredith’s office. Standing in the parking lot in the rain, he again pressed L-E-W on his keypad. The phone turned itself back on, the little screen flashing LEWYN and Mark’s home number.
“There wasn’t any message when I got home.”
`I talked to your answering machine, about six-fifteen.”
`I never got a message. ”
Sanders was sure that he had called Lewyn and had talked to his answering machine. He remembered a man’s voice saying the standard message, “Leave a message when you hear the tone.”
Standing there with the phone in his hand, staring at Lewyn’s phone number, he pressed the SEND button. A moment later, the answering machine picked up. A woman’s voice said, “Hi, you’ve reached Mark and Adele at home. We’re not able to come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, we’ll call you back.” Beep.
That was a different message.
He hadn’t called Mark Lewyn that night.
Which could only mean he hadn’t pressed L-E-W that night. Nervous in Meredith’s office, he must have pressed something else. He had gotten somebody else’s answering machine.
And his phone had gone dead.
Because . . .
Forget that phone.
`Jesus Christ,” he said. He suddenly put it together. He knew exactly what had happened. And it meant that there was the chance that
“Tom, are you all right?” Fernandez said.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just give me a minute. I think I’ve got something important.”
He hadn’t pressed L-E-W.
He had pressed something else. Something very close, probably one letter off: With fumbling fingers, Sanders pushed L-E-L. The screen stayed blank: he had no number stored for that combination. L-E-M. No number stored. L-E-S. No number stored. L-E-V.
Bingo.
Printed across the little screen was:
LEVIN
And a phone number for John Levin.
Sanders had called John Levin’s answering machine that night.
John Levin called. He said it was important.
I’ll bet he did, Sanders thought.
He remembered now, with sudden clarity, the exact sequence of events in Meredith’s office. He had been talking on the phone and she said, “Forget that phone,” and pushed his hand down as she started kissing him. He had dropped the phone on the windowsill as they kissed, and left it there.
Later on, when he left Meredith’s office, buttoning his shirt, he had picked up the cellular phone from the sill, but by then it was dead. Which could only mean that it had remained constantly on for almost an hour. It had remained on during the entire incident with Meredith.
In the car, when Adele finished the call, .she hung the phone back in the cradle, She didn’t press the END button, so the phone line stayed open, and their entire conversation was recorded on the persona answering machine. Fifteen minutes of jokes and personal commentary, all recorded on his answering machine.
And Sanders’s phone had been dead because the line stayed open. The whole conversation had been recorded.
Standing in the parking lot, he quickly dialed John Levin’s number. Fernandez got out of the car and came over to him. “What’s going on?” Fernandez said. “Are we going to lunch, or what?”
`Just a minute.”
The call went through. A click of the pickup, then a man’s voice: `John Levin.”
`John, it’s Tom Sanders.”
“Well, hey there, Tom boy!” Levin burst out laughing. “My man! Are you having a red-hot sex life these days, or what? I tell you, Tom, my ears were burning.”
Sanders said, “Was it recorded?”
`Jesus Christ, Tom, you better believe it. I came in Tuesday morning to check my messages, and I tell you, it went on for half an hour, I mean-”
“John-”
“Whoever said married life was dull-”
“John. Listen. Did you keep it?”
There was a pause. Levin stopped laughing. “Tom, what do you think I am, a pervert? Of course I kept it. I played it for the whole office. They loved it!”
“John. Seriously.”
Levin sighed. “Yeah. I kept it. It sounded like you might be having a little trouble, and . . . I don’t know. Anyway, I kept it.”
“Good. Where is it?”
“Right here on my desk,” Levin said.
“John, I want that tape. Now listen to me: this is what I want you to do.
Driving in the car, Fernandez said, “I’m waiting.”
Sanders said, “There’s a tape of the whole meeting with Meredith. It was all recorded.”
“How?” “It was an accident. I was talking to an answering machine,” he said, “and when Meredith started kissing me, I put the phone down but didn’t end the call. So the phone stayed connected to the answering machine. And everything we said went right onto the answering machine.”
“Hot damn,” Alan said, slapping the steering wheel as he drove.
“This is an audio tape?” Fernandez said.
“Yes.” “Good quality?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see. John’s bringing it to lunch.”
Fernandez rubbed her hands together. “I feel better already.” “Yes?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because if it’s any good at all, we can really draw blood.”
John Levin, florid and jovial, pushed away his plate and drained the last of his beer. “Now that’s what I call a meal. Excellent halibut.” Levin weighed nearly three hundred pounds, and his belly pressed up against the edge of the table.
They were sitting in a booth in the back room of McCormick and Schmick’s on First Avenue. The restaurant was noisy, filled with the lunchtime business crowd. Fernandez pressed the headphones to her ears as she listened to the tape on a Walkman. She had been listening intently for more than half an hour, making notes on a yellow legal pad, her food still uneaten. Finally she got up. “I have to make a call.”
Levin glanced at Fernandez’s plate. “Uh . . . do you want that?”
Fernandez shook her head, and walked away.
Levin grinned. “Waste not, want not,” he said, and pulled the plate in front of him. He began to eat. “So Tom, are you in shit or what?”
“Deep shit,” Sanders said. He stirred a cappuccino. He hadn’t been able to eat lunch. He watched Levin wolf down great bites of mashed potatoes.
“I figured that,” Levin said. “Jack Kerry over at Aldus called me this morning and said you were suing the company because you refused to jump some woman.
“Kerry is an asshole.”
“The worst,” Levin nodded. “The absolute worst. But what can you do? After Connie Walsh’s column this morning, everybody’s been trying to figure out who Mr. Piggy is.” Levin took another huge bite of food. “But how’d she get the story in the first place? I mean, she’s the one who broke it.”
Sanders said, “Maybe you told her, John.”
“Are you kidding?” Levin said.
“You had the tape.”
Levin frowned. “You keep this up, Tom, you’re going to piss me off” He shook his head. “No, you ask me, it was a woman who told her.”
“What woman knew? Only Meredith, and she wouldn’t tell.”
“I’ll bet you anything it’ll turn out to be a woman,” Levin said. “If you ever find out-which I doubt.” He chewed thoughtfully. “Swordfish is a little rubbery. I think we should tell the waiter.” He looked around the room. “Uh, Tom.”
“Yes?”
“There’s a guy standing over there, hopping from one foot to the other. I think maybe you know him.”
Sanders looked over his shoulder. Bob Garvin was standing by the bar, looking at him expectantly. Phil Blackburn stood a few paces behind.
“Excuse me,” Sanders said, and he got up from the table.
Garvin shook hands with Sanders. “Tom. Good to see you. How are you holding up with all this?”
“I’m okay,” Sanders said.