Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — Book 3
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Chagrin Crest was paying for the coffee.
Lorraine had that much worked out before the second pot came. The hotel had set the room for thirty and nine had come, so twenty-one chairs stood in ranks along both walls where nobody had troubled to send them back, and the company was being charged for every one of them. The urn. The cups with the hotel’s monogram on them. The little silver tongs standing up in the sugar. A block of that company was hers and had been since 1971, and this was the first afternoon in seven years she had spent thinking about what it bought.
She had come because Sterling said she should be present, and she was his client, and she was present. That Roy would be in the room was a fact about the room.
He was at the far side of it with his back half turned. He had put himself there at ten minutes to two and he had stayed. In nineteen years she had learned the whole vocabulary of the back of that head, and this one meant don’t.
“Mrs. Wendt.” Philip Doyle had a voice made for reading things aloud to committees, and he had been reading things aloud to this one since two o’clock. “I want to be sure you understand that nobody in this room believes you have acted in bad faith.”
“That’s generous,” Lorraine said.
“It’s accurate. Mistaken and dishonest are different animals. The order your counsel obtained on Monday is strangling a going concern. We’re offering you undertakings. Written, filed, enforceable. No transfer of any asset outside the ordinary course of business without ten days’ notice to your counsel.”
“And in exchange,” Sterling said, “the accounts come loose on Thursday and my client learns on the eleventh day where everything went. Mr. Doyle, I’ve read your undertakings twice. They’re beautifully drawn. They undertake nothing that has already happened.”
“Nothing has already happened.”
“Then an accounting costs you an afternoon and a clerk.”
That was the third time Sterling had asked for the accounting, and Lorraine, who had spent three hours learning that lawyers ask for the same thing until somebody’s face changes, watched Doyle’s face not change and Hollis Lattimer’s do it for him.
Lattimer sat at the head of a table he had not booked, in a room he was paying for, with his coat still on. He was seventy and built like something left over from a heavier trade, and he had the particular impatience of a man who has decided in advance that everyone present is slower than he is.
“You want my books,” he said.
“I want two schedules and a bank statement.”
“You want my books, and you’re going to get them, and you’re going to sit up all winter reading them and find nothing, and this woman is going to pay you by the hour to do it.” He said this woman to the table, not to her. “That’s the business, isn’t it. That’s the whole business.”
Sterling let it go by. Irene Miller, on Lorraine’s right, wrote something short and did not look up, and Lorraine had the passing thought that she would have liked to know what Miss Miller’s shorthand made of a sentence like that.
“Perhaps we could be reasonable,” Doyle said, “about what the order actually reaches.”
“It’s freezing the corporation,” Lattimer said.
“It reaches the corporate accounts at Cleveland Trust,” Sterling said. “Nothing else. It doesn’t touch a receivable, it excepts the payroll, and it doesn’t reach a foot of ground. If the corporation is being strangled by an order that narrow, I’d suggest the corporation has been living closer to the bank than its shareholders were told.”
“It’s the same thing in practice.”
“It isn’t.”
It came from the wall. Lorraine turned with the rest of them.
Audrey Orrick sat in one of the twenty-one, back against the paper, a black case open on her knees with a ledger in it and her coat folded over the arm. She had come in with her husband and she had not come to the table, and Lorraine, doing the arithmetic she always did, understood that no one had asked her to and that no one had thought about it.
“It’s the bank,” Audrey said. “Not the company. Everything already recorded stays recorded — an order doesn’t reach back and unwind a filed transfer, it only stops the next one. So what it actually stops is anything that needs cash out of Cleveland Trust to close.” She said it to the middle of the table, unhurried, the way a person reads off a figure she has already checked. “Which is a question about the calendar, really. It’s a question of what was going to close before Friday.”
The room took a second with that. “Thank you, Audrey,” Lattimer said. “Philip, tell him about Tulsa.”
And that was all. Doyle went on about Tulsa, and Audrey wrote a line in the ledger, and the moment closed over.
Lorraine looked at her a while longer. She had met Audrey Orrick perhaps six times, at the two company picnics and the funeral of somebody’s mother, and had formed the opinion that she was a quiet woman with a bad husband, which was an opinion Lorraine had formed about a number of people and had never once been asked to defend. Now she thought: those are the company’s books, and she has them on her knees in a hotel, and nobody in this room can tell me what she is paid for keeping them.
She put that beside a fact of her own. Roy had put stock in her name in 1971 and had never once, in seven years, asked her to sign anything about it.
Tulsa took twenty minutes. There was a letter of intent from people in Tulsa, and there was a price, and the price was not said aloud in front of her. She noticed that. What was said aloud, twice, by Lattimer and not by his counsel, was the thirty-first.
“They will not wait past the thirty-first for me to get my own house in order,” he said. “You understand me. That is a Tuesday. Not the fifteenth of November, not when it suits a judge — the thirty-first, and after that they buy in Michigan and I have spent two years for nothing.”
“Hollis,” Doyle said.
“He can have it. Let him have it. He should know what he’s costing.” Lattimer put a finger on the table. “You’ve got until Friday morning to be reasonable, counselor, and after Friday morning I stop being.”
Doyle asked for five minutes. Nobody took five minutes; the room simply stopped and turned into a room where nine people stood around holding cups, and Lorraine stood at the window with hers and looked down at the Square in the rain, where the buses came around the monument in a slow chain, and thought about the word reasonable, which she had heard four times that afternoon and had not once heard applied to anybody but herself.
It was during the five minutes that Doyle discovered the verification.
He had an affidavit for Friday, three paragraphs of it, and it wanted Lattimer’s oath, and Doyle’s own notary was up on Euclid with her coat on by now. He said so in the mild voice of a man deciding not to be annoyed in public.
“Norman keeps a seal,” Lattimer said.
Norman Orrick had said nine words since two o’clock, all of them agreement. He was a well-dressed man of fifty with a good watch, and he stood up out of his chair as though the chair had let go of him.
“In the car,” he said.
“Then it’s not doing anybody any good in the car.”
So Norman went down for it. The elevator took him and eventually gave him back, seven or eight minutes later, with rain across the shoulders of a coat he had not stopped to button, and he set the seal and the little register book on the corner of the table and put his own employer on oath standing up, in a hotel meeting room, while the man swore to the truth of three paragraphs without reading either of the last two.
Doyle watched the whole operation with an expression Lorraine could not read and did not try to.
“You’re an officer of the corporation, Mr. Orrick.”
“Vice president,” Norman said.
“Yes.” Doyle looked at the seal, and then took the affidavit back. “It’s a verification. Nobody will look at it twice.”
Norman snapped the seal back into its case and put it in his pocket, and nobody thanked him, and he sat down.
The five minutes ended and the meeting died the way Lorraine had understood it would die about an hour before anybody else appeared to. Doyle would not give an accounting. Sterling would not give up the accounts without one. Lattimer said something about Friday and buttoned the coat he had never taken off.
Through all of it Yvonne Beck sat at the foot of the table and did not speak.
She had come alone. Lorraine had noted that at two o’clock — alone, without a lawyer, without so much as a legal pad — and had watched her sit three hours through the disposition of a company in which she did not own one share. Doyle had introduced her at the beginning as holding the mineral leases out on the Solon acreage. Hers, in her own name, nobody else’s name anywhere on them. He had moved straight along to the next thing and nobody had come back to it all afternoon. She was the youngest person in the room by seven years, and she had taken off her gloves at two o’clock and had not touched them since.
She asked one question, at the end, while people were standing.
“Mr. Sterling. Does the order reach an instrument that hasn’t been executed yet?”
Sterling turned around and gave her the same courtesy he had been giving Doyle all afternoon, which Lorraine thought was a waste of it.
“The order runs against the corporation and its officers, Miss Beck. It enjoins dealings in the frozen accounts. It doesn’t enjoin the world, and it doesn’t reach into the future to forbid a document nobody has drawn yet.” He put on his hat. “If you’re asking me whether it stops a man signing his name, no. It stops him paying for the stamp.”
“Thank you,” Beck said, and picked up her gloves, and that was the whole of her afternoon.
Lattimer caught Lorraine at the door.
He did it without hurrying and without raising his voice, and he stood a little too near, and she understood that he had been waiting three hours to be near enough.
“Do you know what your husband did in 1971, Mrs. Wendt?”
“I know what he did.”
“He saved a few hundred dollars a year in tax.” Lattimer’s eyes went over her face. “That’s all that was. The state had just got itself an income tax that autumn and Roy is a great believer in the rates. If they’d been kinder he’d have bought you a hat, and neither of us would be standing here.”
“Mr. Lattimer.” Sterling had come up on her left without appearing to move.
“You’re being paid by the hour, counselor, and she hasn’t got the hours.” Lattimer said it comfortably. “I’ve buried better men than you in fees. I will spend two dollars to keep you from earning one, and I have got a great deal more than two.”
“Then we are agreed on the figures,” Sterling said, “which is more than this room managed in three hours. Nine o’clock Friday, Mr. Doyle. Bring the schedules and we can all be home by ten.”
Out in the corridor the carpet ran a long way toward the elevators, and Roy was standing at the far end of it, by the fire stair, saying something to Yvonne Beck with his hat in his hand.
Lorraine went and pushed the button and waited. It took a while. She did not look down the corridor again. There was nothing down there worth looking at.
The doors opened. Audrey Orrick put a hand against one of them and held it.
“Mrs. Wendt — they gave you the wrong schedule.” She had the ledger case under her arm and two stapled sheets held out. “That’s the July one, they photocopied the whole file for the hotel. This is the September. The July hasn’t got the Solon parcels on it and you’ll want the Solon parcels.”
Lorraine took them. “Thank you.”
“It’s no trouble. Somebody has to keep track of the paper.” Audrey stepped back and let the door go. “Good luck Friday.”
The doors closed on her standing in the corridor with her coat and her husband’s over her arm, waiting for her father.
Miller left at the end of the day with instructions about the coffee in the machine — it was from two o’clock and Lorraine should not drink it — and Lorraine thanked her and drank it.
She had the September schedule and the July one side by side and a borrowed pencil. It was the third night this week. Sterling had said, mildly, that a client did not have to do this, and she had said that she owned it, which had ended the conversation in a way she was still turning over, because she had not meant it to sound like that and it had, and he had let it go.
The parcels ran down the left-hand column in a surveyor’s shorthand she was learning: township, range, lot, acres. She was looking for the ones that appeared on the September sheet and not the July, and there were four of them, and three were in Solon.
The telephone rang at half past eight, and she answered it because it was ringing and there was nobody else.
“Mrs. Wendt.”
A woman. Low, and not close to the mouthpiece — there was cloth over it, or a hand, and behind the voice a room with dishes in it.
“Yes.”
“Your husband is out at the Solon well tonight with Hollis Lattimer and they’re burning the books. Forty-three out past Solon, then the gravel on your left after the second bridge.” A pause, no longer than a breath. “And he isn’t out there alone — I don’t mean Lattimer.”
“Who is this?”
The line went dead.
Lorraine stood with the receiver against her ear until the dial tone started, and then she put it down, and then she picked it up again and dialed the number Sterling had written on the back of a card in September, which rang four times and produced a woman at an answering service who was pleasant and wanted a name.
“No,” Lorraine said. “It’s not — no. Thank you.”
She put on her coat.
She was at the elevators before she understood that she had not turned off the lamp, and she went back and turned it off, and while she was in the room she gathered up the July and September schedules and put them in her bag, because if they were burning the ledgers out there then somebody ought to have the paper that said what the ledgers were supposed to say, and that was the reason, and it was a good one, and by the time the elevator came she had it arranged in her head in that order.
The night man had the register on the desk under the lamp with a chained pen beside it. She signed L. Wendt, 8:34 in the OUT column, in the column with the times in it, because the sign on the desk said to and she was a woman who did what signs said, and he said good night to her without looking up from the radio.
Broadway took her out of the city, and the fog took her at Tinker’s Creek and did not give her back.
It was the kind that lies in the valley and lets you have twenty feet of the world at a time, and she drove the twenty feet the way everybody drove them that night, at thirty and then at twenty, hunting the white line at the shoulder with the wipers going against nothing. Solon came and went in twenty-foot pieces. Past the town the road narrowed and went dark in earnest and the woods came down to the ditch on both sides.
Two bridges. She counted them out loud. She would not have admitted that to anybody. At the second one she slowed to fifteen and found the gravel on the left where the voice had said it would be.
He isn’t out there alone.
She had a whole speech by then. It had assembled itself somewhere around Solon and it was about the ledgers and about what a man does not do to his wife’s property in the dark, and it was a good speech, and it was going to be delivered to Roy in front of Hollis Lattimer, which was the part of it she was looking forward to. She held on to that. It was a better thing to be doing at nine o’clock at night than the other thing, and she had decided, somewhere back on 43, that it was what she was doing.
The access road went two hundred yards through the trees and came out on a graded pad with two buildings on it and a light on a pole.
Lattimer’s car stood nose-in at the larger building, and nothing else stood anywhere on that pad. She looked twice, across ninety feet of lit gravel, for a car that was not there. Then she got out.
There was a noise.
It came from behind the smaller building, a hard flat sound like a kettle with the lid off, except that it did not stop, did not rise or fall, did not do anything a sound is supposed to do. It filled the whole clearing. She stood beside her own car door with her hand still on it and understood that she was going to have to shout.
“Roy!”
Nothing. The noise went on being the noise.
She went toward the larger building, the one with the window lit, and she was still shouting when she got to the door.
Hollis Lattimer was behind the desk in his overcoat.
He had a green metal wastebasket beside him with paper burned down to a gray collar in the bottom of it and more paper stacked on the desk waiting, and his head was back against the chair, and his mouth was open, and there was a hole in the front of his coat with very little around it. The room was cold. Her breath went out in front of her and so did nothing else in that room.
She said his name once. It came out ordinary and conversational, as though she had come in with a message.
The pistol was on the desk corner, on top of the paper stack, square to the edge the way a thing is when somebody has put it down and not dropped it.
She knew it before she got near it. She had bought it in the summer of ’seventy-six from a shop out past Bedford after the Kowalczyks two doors down came home to a broken kitchen window, and she had fired it four times at a range and hated it, and it had lived in a shoebox on the closet shelf under the winter hats for two years, and in the first week of October the box had been light when she moved it, and she had put it back and said nothing to anybody, including herself.
She picked it up.
She could not give a reason. She did not look for one. It was hers, and it was there, and Roy had taken it out of her house, and she had gone three weeks without asking him about it, and now it was lying on a stack of paper in Solon with a dead man behind it.
Then she was outside and running, and the noise was still going.
She got the car turned. She did it in one motion on a gravel road twelve feet wide, in fog, in the dark, and it was the single competent thing she did all night, and if she had simply driven it after that she would have been on the highway in ninety seconds.
Instead she looked in the mirror.
There was nothing in the mirror. There was fog and the pole light going away, and no headlights, and no one behind her at all, and she looked at it for the length of time it takes to be sure, and while she was looking the near-side wheels went off the shoulder into the ditch and the car came down hard and stopped with its nose in the weeds and its far wheels off the ground.
She got the door open uphill and climbed out into the mud, and the pistol went out of her hand somewhere in the middle of that, and she did not go back for it.
Afterward she stood on the road. The engine had stalled. The noise came down through the trees from two hundred yards away, patient and enormous and completely indifferent, and she thought that it would go on making that sound whether or not anybody ever came, and she put her hands over her ears and it made no difference at all.
Headlights came up out of the fog behind her about ten minutes later.
It was a tractor unit running without a trailer, and it came slow, and it stopped twenty feet short of her with the engine going and the marker lights strung out along the top of the cab like a small town seen at a distance. A man got down. He was in a plaid coat and he had a flashlight and he looked at her, and then past her at the car, and then at her again, and he did not ask her if she was all right, which she was grateful for, because she would have said yes.
“You’re in it,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Anybody with you?”
“No.”
He went and looked at the ditch, and came back, and said that he had chain and that it would come out but that it would come out slow, and did she have the sense to steer it when it moved. She said she did.
He took the chain off the frame behind the cab and got down in the ditch with it in his good coat, and hooked it, and got back up, and came alongside her window before he went.
“Second time down 43 tonight,” he said. “Fog both ways, and worse coming back.” He rapped the door frame with two knuckles, and she took that for a man deciding whether she could steer. “Wheel straight. Don’t help me.”
He put it in low and took the slack up so gently she did not feel it start, and the car came up out of the weeds at a walking pace with the mud letting go of it in long sucks, and it was on the road and level and he was unhooking the chain before she had finished deciding to be grateful.
He was coiling it when she said, “There’s a man dead back there.”
The chain kept going around his arm, one turn, two.
“Back down that road?”
“In the office. Mr. Lattimer. He’s —” She discovered she had no next word and used the one she had. “He’s dead.”
He looked down the gravel, where the noise was, and she watched him decide something in about two seconds flat.
“Get in the truck,” he said. “Leave yours. Your car’s not going anywhere and neither’s he.”
She rode into Solon in a cab that smelled of diesel and cigarettes and somebody’s dog, up on a seat too high for her, holding her bag on her knees with both hands. He did not talk to her and he did not turn the radio on, and once, on the highway, he said, “There’s a blanket behind you,” and she said thank you and did not take it.
The noise was still going when they left. She heard it over the engine, all the way out the access road, and then she did not.
At the police station in Solon a sergeant took the address twice and made three telephone calls, and after the second one two more cars went out, and after the third one a man in a raincoat drove out from Cleveland and was there by half past eleven and was polite to her, and at some point in the night the whole thing left Solon and went downtown, and she went downtown with it.
They gave her coffee in a heavy white cup stained brown to the glaze. She held it for an hour without drinking it, which she noticed, and thought that Miller had told her not to drink the coffee, and nearly laughed, and did not.
Somebody found a form, and somebody else found the detective, and at some point the form went into a typewriter and he typed the time at the head of it. She read it upside down. 2:10 A.M.
He was heavy and tired and had a cold, and he typed with four fingers, and he read each line back to her as he finished it in a flat voice with no opinion in it, and he was not unkind at any point.
“Start with why you drove out there.”
“A woman telephoned the office.”
“You know her?”
“No.”
“What’d she say?”
Lorraine looked at the cup.
“She said Roy and Mr. Lattimer were out at the Solon place burning the ledgers.”
The typewriter went. He asked her what time that was, and she said half past eight, and he asked what she did then, and she said she signed out of the building at 8:34 and drove out, and he typed that, and after that it went easily for a long while — the fog, the two bridges, the gravel, the noise behind the building, the light in the window, the desk, the wastebasket, the pistol she recognized, the picking it up, which she made herself say, and the mirror, and the ditch, and the mud, and the truck.
He read the whole thing back at ten to three.
It was two and a half pages and it was accurate, every line of it. He read it in a flat voice that gave nothing in it any more weight than anything else — the fog, the hissing behind the smaller building, the mud on her shoes, the pistol she had recognized and picked up — and hearing her own sentence about the ledgers come back at her in a stranger’s mouth was worse than saying it had been.
“Anything else you want to add, Mrs. Wendt?”
“No,” she said.
He turned the form around and gave her his pen.
Philip Doyle came down the fourth-floor corridor carrying nothing at all, and Sterling had revised the morning before the man had covered half the distance.
A lawyer coming to a contested return hearing carries a file. He carries it whether or not he needs it, because it is the visible part of being ready, and Doyle had spent Wednesday afternoon being visibly ready about a great many things. So either the hearing was off, or the hearing had stopped mattering, and in Sterling’s experience of the practice of law those were rarely the same event.
“Mr. Sterling.” Doyle stopped a courteous distance off. “Hollis Lattimer was shot to death last night at the Solon well.”
Sterling put his hand on the back of the bench beside him and did not sit.
“When.”
“Somewhere before ten. I’ve had two telephone calls and I don’t have the second one straight yet.” Doyle’s voice was the same voice he had used to read the undertakings aloud, and Sterling saw what that cost him, and thought better of the man for it. “I’ll ask for a continuance. Nobody’s going to argue about the corporate accounts of a company whose president is in the county morgue, and I’d as soon not be the man who tries.”
“You’ll have no argument from me.”
“I know.” Doyle looked down the corridor at the courtroom doors, and then said the next part looking straight at him instead. “Vance. I’m told your client was out there.”
Miller had the docket sheet, a legal pad, and a pocketful of dimes, and she went at the pay telephones by the elevators the way other people go at a buffet.
It took her forty minutes to establish what the county was willing to say out loud on a Friday morning: that a Cleveland homicide crew had taken the matter over from Solon before midnight, that a woman had been interviewed at the Bureau until three in the morning and released, that the woman’s automobile was still in the ditch on the access road because the county had not finished with it, and that nobody at any level would discuss a weapon.
“Released,” Sterling said.
“Released. She’s at her sister’s in Maple Heights and she called the office at eight and Ruth had her hold and then lost her.” Miller closed the pad. “Released at three in the morning is not a decision. It’s a delay. They let her go because they hadn’t got the thing that finishes it yet, and they will have it by lunch, because it’s daylight now and they couldn’t see the ground last night.”
“Get her downtown. Not to the office — put her in a room somewhere on Prospect with a sandwich in front of her and tell her not to talk to anyone.”
“And if the thing arrives while she’s on the way?”
“Then she surrenders like a citizen and not like a rabbit,” Sterling said. “But I’d rather it arrived while she was in front of me.”