Attorney-Client Privilege (28 page)

T
he most important lesson that Special had learned from her buddy Eli was that a good investigator always started at the beginning, meticulously turning over every stone from the past to the present. No matter how insignificant a piece of evidence might seem, there was always the chance that it might lead to something that could break a case wide open.

With that approach in mind, Special had spent hours scouring the Internet, reading anything she could find about Girlie Cortez. But so far, nothing. Special refused to become discouraged. If she gave up this easily, she might as well forget about being a private investigator. Patience, Eli had said, was just as important as perseverance.

Her job in collections at Verizon gave Special the freedom to sneak in time on the Internet when she should have been working. She hit a few keys on her desktop computer and called up Girlie’s Facebook page. Everything there was related to her law practice. Girlie wasn’t stupid enough to put all her business on the web, so she didn’t find out anything helpful. She did learn that Girlie graduated from Cerritos High School.

She moved on to Girlie’s LinkedIn page.

“Interesting,” Special said out loud. All of the LinkedIn connections from Girlie’s high school, college and law school were men. Not a single female was listed. That was certainly weird. “She must’ve been a man stealer from birth.”

What Special needed was someone who was connected to Girlie’s past. Special wanted to know what she was like growing up. But she didn’t know anyone who’d gone to Cerritos High. She did have a few Filipino friends. Calling one of them up was a longshot, but you never knew.

She pulled out her Droid and started flipping through her phone book. When she came across Manny Manalo, one of her high school classmates, her spirits lifted. She immediately called him.

“Wazzup, homegirl?”

Unfortunately, for Manny, his Filipino parents forgot to tell him that he wasn’t black. “You don’t never call a brother.”

Special had to get past a few minutes of his flirting before bringing up the real purpose of her call.

“I need your help,” she finally said. “Do you happen to know anybody who graduated from Cerritos High School around the same time we graduated? Preferably a woman.”

A woman was more likely to have some dirt on Girlie and be willing to spill it.

“Manny know everybody,” he bragged. “And if I don’t know her, I can find somebody who does.”

He’d been referring to himself in the third person since tenth grade. It was part of the wise-guy demeanor he tried to portray. When you were five-foot-four, you had to sound large and in charge since you couldn’t look it.

“Well, can Manny hook me up?”

“Manny gotta know the real deal before Manny gets involved.”

Manny wasn’t stupid. That was why she liked him despite his self-absorbed persona. She had already come up with a cover story to tell him.

“Okay, I’ll tell you the truth. I’m trying my hand at being an investigator. A friend of mine thinks a woman who graduated from Cerritos High is screwing her husband. I want to find out if there’s anything interesting in her background I might be able to use.”

“Now that’s more like it. You gotta be up front with Manny.”

“So can Manny help me? Is there some Filipino nightspot in Cerritos you can take me to? We might get lucky and run into somebody who might know the woman from way back.”

“What’s her name? Maybe Manny knows her.”

Special couldn’t tell him too much because he had a mouth the size of a manhole cover. But it was possible that he might know Girlie.

“Her name is Girlie Cortez. She’s a lawyer.”

“Naw. Manny don’t know her. Manny don’t do lady lawyers. They talk back too much.”

Special laughed. “Can you take me to some Filipino joint in Cerritos? Maybe somebody there might know her or her family.”

“That’s going to be tough. You’re an outsider. Nobody’s gonna give you the four-one-one. But let me call some of my ladies. I’ll holla back at you.”

Manny called back two hours later and told Special to meet him at Joe’s for Happy Hour. As it turned out, he had two female friends who actually knew Girlie Cortez. He arranged for them to meet us for drinks. According to Manny, if they had any dirt on Girlie, by their second Mango Margarita, they’d tell it all.

Special ignored all the stares as she walked into the club. She was the only black person in the whole joint. She spotted Manny sitting on one side of a small booth, sandwiched between two petite, dark-eyed women with hair down to their butts. Manny was wearing a leather coat, dark shades and a baseball cap that read
The Man
.

Manny introduced Special to Suzie and Janie as his co-worker. She had asked him not to tell them the reason she wanted to talk to them. Special sat down across from the three of them.

Manny gave her a wink and a nod, which told Special he’d already gotten the women nice and loosened up.

“Manny told me you guys went to Cerritos High and that you know Girlie Cortez,” Special began, after ordering a Coke.

Both women simultaneously turned up their pert little noses. One of them looked as if she wanted to spit in Special’s drink.

“Yeah, I know her,” Suzie said. “I went to elementary, middle school and high school with that slut. She’s got issues.”

Great.
So Girlie
had
been a bitch from the cradle.

“Sounds like you hated going to school with her as much as I hated working with her.”

“You got that right,” Janie chimed in. “I’ll never forgive her for what she did to me in the tenth grade. I made the mistake of telling her I liked a guy. The next day, guess who was all over him? I thought we were friends.”

“Wow. Sounds like she was a hot mess,” Special said laughing.

“A hot, slutty mess,” Suzie clarified. “We’d been best friends since fourth grade. A week after I broke up with my boyfriend, she invited him to the junior prom. Don’t ever bring your man around her. You’ll leave to go to the ladies’ room and she’ll be under the table giving him a blow job.”

This was juicy gossip, but Special already knew from firsthand experience that Girlie was a man-stealing ’ho. She needed something she could actually use.

“To act that way, I suspect she must’ve had a rough family life,” Special said.

Janie shrugged. “Kinda.” She reached into her purse, pulled out her phone and started texting.

Special was dying to snatch the phone from the girl’s hands so she could have her full attention. “Tell me more.”

“She’s half-white, you know,” Suzie said. “She thought she was better than everybody because of that.”

Special feigned surprise. “I didn’t know that. Was her mother or her father white?”

“Her father. I know the whole story about him,” Suzie continued. “Like I said, we were pretty close before she stole my boyfriend.”

“Do tell.” Special leaned in over the table.

Just then, the MC called Suzie’s name and she sloshed her way to the stage. Special endured the most painful version of Beyoncé’s
Single Ladies
that she’d ever heard. She had no idea how these people could sit there and listen to such bad singing.

When Suzie returned to the table, she was ready to move on to another topic, but Special was dying to know Girlie’s
whole story
.

Suzie downed the remainder of her drink and got up to go to the ladies’ room. Special waited a couple of minutes, then followed.

She stood in the mirror, pretending to be freshening up her lipstick when Suzie came out of the bathroom stall.

“You know,” Special said, “I really feel sorry for Girlie. She didn’t have any female friends at work and from everything you told me, she didn’t have any at school either.”

“That’s because she’s a conniving bitch,” Suzie huffed.

“You said she had a rough childhood. What exactly happened?”

Suzie opened her purse, pulled out a lipstick and took her time painting her thin lips with a grape-colored lipstick that gave her a hideous Goth look.

She turned to face Special. “Girlie’s mother went after nothing but married men. She even tried to hit on my father.”

“Really?” Special opened her purse and hit the
record
button on her Droid.

Suzie matted her lips with a tissue. “You think Girlie’s a slut? She ain’t got nothing on her mother.”

“I
know you don’t take walk-ins,” the receptionist said when I picked up the phone. “But there’s a woman out here who says she needs to speak to you right away. She’s pretty upset.”

I glanced up at the clock. It was a quarter to five and I was bushed. A new client, especially one in distress, could mean a couple more hours in the office.

“Tell her I’m sorry, but she’ll have to make an appointment.”

I hung up and started straightening up my desk. A minute later, the receptionist called back.

“The woman asked me to tell you that she works for Big Buy. Says she’s the executive assistant to the CEO of the company.”

That tidbit of information changed everything.

I walked down to the reception area to find a woman who looked thin and matronly. She was totally gray, with deep age lines in her face. Her eyes were sad and vacant.

The woman struggled to get to her feet when I approached. “Thank you for seeing me,” she said in a shaky voice. “I really need your help.” She wiped at the corner of one eye with a handkerchief.

I needed to get her out of the lobby. I led her to my office and closed the door.

“I think she’s going to fire me,” the woman blurted out before I could even ask her name. “She’s going to try to send me to jail!”

“Who?”

“The CEO of Big Buy, Rita Richards-Kimble. She’s my boss.”

“I need you to slow down,” I said, ushering her to a seat, then returning to the chair behind my desk. “First tell me your name. Then I want to know why you think you’re going to be fired and why you think you’re going to jail.”

The woman, who identified herself as Jane Campbell, recounted an incident with her boss earlier that day. Rita Richards-Kimble had accused her of looking at confidential records on her desk and threatened to fire her if she did it again. She’d come to me because she knew about the sex discrimination case I had filed against Big Buy.

“You just told me you worked for the company for close to thirty years,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like you did anything wrong. She’s not going to fire you.”

“She knows I know,” Jane whimpered.

“You know what?”

“Everything she’s been doing.”

“And what has she been doing?”

Jane opened her small purse and unfolded a piece of paper. “Take a look at this.”

I reached across my desk and took the paper she held out to me. There was no heading on the page, but the document appeared to be some type of financial statement. There were several columns of numbers on the right, and several categories on the left.

“What is this?”

“Information from our last earnings statement. I had to copy and paste it from another document.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We get an earnings report from each of our divisions and the information is used to compile our quarterly earnings statements. The information you have is what the divisions reported last quarter. Those numbers don’t match the numbers in the final report prepared for the board of directors. Those earnings are significantly lower than what was reported to the board.”

My heart began to patter with excitement. “Sounds like you’re telling me the CEO of Big Buy might be cooking the books.”

“That’s precisely what I’m saying.”

“I’ll need more evidence than this,” I said, looking down at the paper again.

“And I have it. Lots of it. She started doing this about two years ago. I’ve been keeping a copy of the original documents for about a year.”

“I want to see them,” I said. “In the meantime, you’ll need to go back to work and act as if everything is fine, but continue to keep your eyes open.”

“I don’t know how long I can continue to put up with Rita. She’s always been a spiteful person, but lately she’s been absolutely vicious. She’s determined to make sure that—”

She paused. “Is everything I tell you confidential?”

“If you’re here for the purpose of retaining me as an attorney, then yes, our communications are confidential.”

“The CEO is obsessed about making sure the Welson deal goes through because she’s going to make millions.”

“What’s the Welson deal?”

She told me about the pending sale of Big Buy, which would net the CEO $125 million.

Then it hit me. This could be the reason Judi was murdered. Maybe those missing documents had a connection to the fraudulent earnings reports and the CEO’s attempt to push through the sale of the company at a price much higher than it was really worth.

“How’d you find out about Judi Irving’s lawsuit?”

“Everybody knows about it. I was in Rita’s office when the company was served with the complaint. She had quite a temper tantrum. Rita’s even asked me if I knew anything about a rumor that Judi Irving had confidential company records.”

Jane averted her eyes in a way that signaled that she wasn’t telling me everything.

“Do you?” I asked.

Still not making eye contact with me, Jane slowly nodded, then broke into a full-fledged wail. “That’s why I think they’re going to put me in jail!” she sobbed.

“What are you talking about?”

“I need to be completely truthful with you,” Jane cried. “I did do something that I know could get me fired.”

I stared across my desk, unconsciously holding my breath. “I’m listening.”

“I was the one who mailed those Big Buy documents to Judi.”

My mouth sprang open. “You?”

“Rita is an evil, hateful woman,” Jane said, her emotions having grown from anxious to angry. “When I heard those women were suing the company for sex discrimination, I wanted to help them. I figured that if they had information that the CEO was engaging in fraud, it would help them with their lawsuit.”

My mind was racing too fast to take this all in.

“The documents you mailed Judi,” I said, “what were they?”

“I sent her copies of the company’s true earnings reports. If you compared them to the fake reports actually submitted by the company, you would see that they don’t match.”

I was too dumbfounded to form another question.

“She thinks I’m stupid,” Jane said angrily. “She gave me documents to shred, figuring I wouldn’t look at them. But I did. And when I figured out what she was doing, I started taking the documents home instead of shredding them.”

“Do you have a copy of the documents you gave to Judi?”

She nodded.

I sat there, lost in my own thoughts, trying to put this all together.

“That’s not everything I have to tell you.” Jane’s eyes started to water again. “It’s my fault that Judi’s dead.”

“What? Why would you say that?”

She cupped her forehead. “Judi was murdered because of those documents I sent her.”

I could tell she was about to rev up for another good cry. I got up from my desk, sat down next to her and gave her a hug. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do,” she shrieked.

It took several minutes for Jane to regain her composure.

“I’ve been listening in on Rita’s calls,” she admitted, her voice hoarse from crying. “Rita was determined to make sure Judi Irving’s case didn’t jeopardize the Welson deal. When I told you that woman is evil, I meant it.”

Her moist eyes met mine head-on.

“I think Rita hired somebody to kill Judi Irving because of those documents I sent her.”