The Associate Read online

  “Yeah, that wasn’t true.” He shrugged. “How was I to know? The girl was good. Spectacularly good. She had some major skills. I took her at her word that she had done this professionally for years. I really should have figured that a girl like her wasn’t somebody who was going to be courting trouble. I should have figured out that she was trying to infiltrate us. Man, all I had to do was look at her Facebook Page and I would have seen what she really was – a rich sorority girl who graduated from the best journalism school in the nation and was working for The Star. It was all on her Facebook page for the world to see. Somehow, I didn’t even think to look at it, and neither did anybody else in my clan. That was our mistake, and it’s a mistake that I’ll never make again.”

  I wrote that down and circled it. Not looking at her Facebook page seemed like a rookie mistake, to say the very least. I immediately put a question mark by that and wrote down the words is he already lying? “So,” I said. “You’re trying to tell me that your organization doesn’t do even a cursory background check on your new hires? It would seem that you didn’t do your due diligence, to say the very least.”

  I noticed that Erik’s left cheek started to tic slightly when I called him out. “No, that’s not right. We always do a thorough background check on anybody who comes to work for us, but this one was different. She came so highly recommended that I figured that she was clean.”

  “Highly recommended? What kind of recommendation would be so trusted that you wouldn’t bother to do even the slightest amount of due diligence on Shelly?”

  “My father sent her to us.” He crossed his arms in front of him. “Is that a high enough recommendation for you?”

  Chapter 4

  I cocked my head, wondering exactly what kind of game was being run here. Sargis Gregorian, the man that I had never met, but Harper assured me was intimidatingly intelligent, apparently set his own son up. Unless one would believe that Sargis also didn’t do his due diligence with this girl, but that beggared belief. From what Harper told me, the man was meticulous.

  “Your father sent her to you,” I said, hoping that my voice didn’t belie my disbelief. “Now, are you telling me that your father didn’t know what Shelly was either? That your father didn’t do his due diligence on her? Is that what you want me to believe?” I shook my head and glared at him. Either this rat wasn’t being truthful or Sargis Gregorian was up to no good. That pissed me off when I thought about it. Here Sargis was, apparently setting his own son up for a murder, and then pressing Harper into getting him out of it. For free. What kind of a man would do that?

  A gangster. A thug. A man who had no morals, no scruples and no sense of family pride. That surprised me in a way. I had done my share of research on criminal families. I had known quite a few guys who were a part of these families. I met them in my prison stint. What I got from them was that there was quite a bit of familial loyalty that was the glue that held everything together. They spoke of their fathers, sisters and brothers fondly. They usually got letters from their family and visits from their parents and siblings. From my talks with some of these guys, I understood that loyalty was the only way that their organizations could function. That the family members who weren’t loyal were usually the first ones on the chopping block, and they didn’t always go down pretty.

  Yet here was a father who apparently was setting his own son up. Why would he do something like that? I looked over at Harper, who was quietly sitting next to me, absorbing everything this kid had to say and writing down notes. She shook her head and looked perplexed, and I knew that she and I were going to have to have some talks about all of this later.

  “Yes, my father sent her to me.” Then he shook his head. “No, that’s not exactly how it all went down. Actually, she came to us and asked for a job and I did my background check and ran it through my father. He called back to tell me that she was perfectly clean and that we should hire her. So, I didn’t pursue her background any further. That was my mistake, I’ll admit. I should have kept on doing my background check, but if my father tells me that she’s clean, then she’s clean.”

  I stood up. “Get your story straight,” I said. “Now, did your father send her to you or didn’t he? And if he didn’t, then how did she come to know about your organization in the first place? Did you ever ask her that?”

  He put his hands out in front of him. “Easy, easy.” He swiveled in his chair some more and ran his hands through his short hair. “I told you, she came to us, I called my father, and he told me she was clean. I can’t be any clearer than that.”

  “Then how did she come to your organization? To your clan? She didn’t just waltz in off the street, did she? You didn’t do a job posting on Zip Recruiter, did you?” I had to smile at that one. I imagined what kind of job posting Erik would post on that website – “computer hacker needed. Must be able to illegally tap into worldwide bank networks. Relevant experience would include hacking into governmental databases, planting malicious code on user networks throughout the globe, and stealing. Must be ethically blind and not mind having to serve 10 years to life if caught. Apply within.”

  He nodded his head. “Vardan Dorian, one of my closest friends in our clan, referred her to us. He told me that she was a friend of a friend, and that she was interested in working with us. That was another reason why I didn’t do my due diligence on her background. Vardan is like a brother to me. Needless to say, when I found out what she was and who she was really working for, I cut Vardan completely out.” He shook his head. “I had to take care of him. I didn’t want to do it. That was the last thing that I wanted to do. I might as well have killed my own brother, but it had to be done. I figured that Vardan was a complete rat.”

  I looked over at Harper, who was chewing on her pen and making notes. “So, let me get this straight. A close friend of yours brought Shelly into the organization and your own father vouched for her. That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Well, it looks like you trusted the word of not one rat, but two. One of the rats being your own father. What do you have to say about that?”

  He shrugged. “What am I supposed to say about that? I trusted them and they both screwed me over. Vardan I took care of. My father, of course, I haven’t done anything about. Listen, I have this job just because my father put me in this position. That’s the only reason why. Now, I don’t know why my own father was so careless as to vouch for Shelly. I try not to think about that particular angle.”

  “It’s my job to think about that angle,” I said. “To think about who might have set you up and why. Now, I’m not going to ask you if you actually killed Shelly or if you were behind it. I don’t want to know the answer to that question. If I know the answer to that question, and you tell me that you did it, then that limits my trial strategy. Basically, it means that you cannot testify on your own behalf. So, please don’t tell me if you killed her or not. I have to look at your circle and figure out if I can pin the murder on anybody else. That’s my job. Now, your job is to tell me the absolute truth. The absolute truth up to the point where you tell me that you killed her, because, I reiterate, I don’t want to know that.”

  Erik sat back in his chair and stared at me. He had a bit of an eerie look about him. His eyes were light, a pale color that I rarely saw on anybody. The sun was shining through the window, so his eyes were illuminated by the rays that were dancing on his face. The way that he was carefully studying me unnerved me. It unnerved me in a way that hardened criminals that I knew inside didn’t. With those criminals, with most of them anyhow, what you saw was what you got. There were the guys with the personality disorders who had delusions of grandeur. They would say things like “I was a bassist with Nirvana in the early days,” or “I’m the love child of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe” – which usually was impossible, because this would come out of the mouth of a guy who wasn’t 30 years old, and Marilyn has been dead since 1962. I usually
was friends with them, just because they were so entertaining. Then there were many, many guys who literally thought that they were Jesus. I took them all with a grain of salt. There were the guys who were violent and delusional – I tried to steer clear of them. If they were in the throes of their violent delusions, they could cut you down because they thought that you stole a cheese sandwich from them. Then there were the garden-variety thugs. Those were the guys that I bonded with, because they were usually the ones who had messed-up family lives like mine.

  But Erik, the way that he was looking at me, struck me as a totally different kind of criminal. He struck me as a psychopath. I had known my share of those guys as well, and they were the scariest criminals of them all. The psychopath had no conscience, no remorse, and no true feelings. At his core is nothing but blackness. They were always the ones that I knew that I had to give a wide berth to, and not get sucked in, because it was actually easy to get sucked in by them. That was what made them so scary – they had a casual kind of charm that made you think that they were good dudes. They knew how to play a good dude quite well. But, underneath it all, underneath their casual glibness, their obvious intelligence and their charm, lay a monster. A monster who would get you into his good graces, and, before you knew it, you were caught up in his web. He would be the one who would not only kill a man in prison just because he looked at him wrong, but would then turn around and convincingly blame it on somebody else.

  I straightened my shoulders, trying to get back on track, but the way that Erik was studying me still rankled. “Who do you want me to give you?” Erik finally asked. “Who do you want to focus on for this murder? I know that you have to come up with some kind of plausible alternative, and I can give you some names. Mainly they’re people that I want out of the way, and this would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone, as they say.”

  This was always where my own conscience got to me. I always wanted to give my clients the best representation, but I always had a difficult time trying to throw somebody under the bus if they had nothing to do with the murder. When I had an alternative suspect in mind, I tried to make sure that it was a plausible alternative. That he or she could very well have done it. I didn’t like it when my clients offered somebody else up on a silver platter because, more often than not, that person offered up was somebody who my client didn’t like. Maybe it was a guy who slept with my client’s wife, or perhaps a guy who stole money from my client. I didn’t feel comfortable pointing a finger at just anybody, let alone somebody who my client indicated was somebody who was his enemy.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t want you giving me names unless they’re names of people who might have actually had a hand in this. If you know somebody like that, then, by all means, give me that name. I’ll check it out. But don’t name names just to name them. That’s another one of my rules.”

  Erik shook his head. “You have an awful lot of rules. Listen, I know your job, and you have only one job. You work for me, and your only job is to make sure that I walk these charges down. So, if I tell you that I have the name of somebody that I want you to use for this case, then you use it.”

  I stood up. I was going to have to take control of this interview and make sure that this Erik kid knew who was the running the show. Yes, he was technically my boss. That was always the case. But he wasn’t going to dictate trial strategy to me. I was going to make damn sure about that. “Now, you listen to me. I’m the one who is trying this case, which means that I’m the one who is going to dictate strategy. I’m the expert here. If I tell you that we’re going to go a certain way, then that’s the way that we’re going to go. And I’m telling you that I don’t want you to throw out random names to me. If you give me a name, you better be goddamned sure that that person might be good for this crime. You got that?”

  Erik’s face was expressionless as I yelled at him, which unnerved me all the more. “You’re the boss,” he said. “You do your investigation and you try to figure it out. I got nothing for you.”

  I wondered if I overplayed my hand. I looked over at Harper to see if she disapproved of the way I was treating Erik, but it didn’t seem that she did. I couldn’t necessarily discern if she approved, either. Her face was that of a poker player.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “I think that I have the information that I need. I have an investigator who will be turning over every stone, and I hope to have some kind of firm grip on the direction that we need to go for this trial. Assuming that there is a trial.” I looked over at Harper. “Ms. Ross, do you have any questions for Erik?”

  Erik cocked his head and looked at Harper. “Yeah. You’ve been sitting there, as mute as a mime. My father said that you’re going to be my attorney, yet you haven’t said word one. What do you have to contribute?”

  Harper bit her lower lip and I wondered what was on her mind. “Mr. Gregorian,” she said. “I have complete confidence in my associate, Mr. Harrington. He’s very highly skilled and experienced. He’s thoughtful and sure of himself. I’ll defer all strategic decisions to him.”

  Erik didn’t seem very happy with that announcement. “You mean he’s going to be my lawyer here, not you. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  I looked at Harper, wondering if that was what she was thinking. If so, she and I were going to have words, because I did not think that I was going to be first-chairing this thing. I didn’t anticipate that, and I didn’t want that. I had my own cases to work up and the understanding that Harper and I had was that I was going to assist her in her cases. Conduct interviews, lay the groundwork, brainstorm with her, help her out in a pinch. I didn’t imagine that she would just dump a case on me, especially without warning.

  She sighed and put her hands to her temples. “No, Erik, Mr. Gregorian, that’s not what I’m saying. I’ll be trying your case. What I’m trying to tell you is that Mr. Harrington and I are on the same page as far as trial strategy goes. I agree with him 100% - we aren’t going to finger just anybody for this crime. We have to find somebody who might really have done it. Otherwise, we just go into the trial and try for reasonable doubt and let the jury come to their own conclusions. In other words, we don’t necessarily have to show the jury proof that somebody else might have done it. We just have to put doubt in their minds that you did it.”

  “But it helps a helluva lot if you can show that somebody else did it, and name that person. I know that.”

  “That’s true,” Harper said. “The jury does abhor a vacuum. It’s always helpful to actually present an alternative suspect to the jury, but that’s not always easy to do. That said, we will do a thorough investigation on this case and, hopefully, we’ll be able to pinpoint somebody else for this crime. But we won’t throw just anybody under the bus. I hope that we have made that point perfectly clear.”

  Erik glared at both of us, but finally shrugged his shoulders and stood up. “Well, okay,” he said. “You guys do your investigation and come with a plausible alternative theory. But I hope that you know that I’m going to be somebody who isn’t exactly going to be like a fly on the wall and just try to study everything and not put my two cents into the discussion. I’m going to give you my opinion on every move you make, so you have to keep me informed every step of the way.”

  “We will,” Harper said. “We promise.”

  He grimaced. His face told me that he didn’t really trust either one of us. I trusted both of us, especially Harper. She had a lot on the line on this trial.

  “And one other thing,” Erik said, pointing right at me. “You said something earlier about the possibility that there won’t be a trial. I can tell you that there will be a trial. Unless those prosecutors choose to drop all charges against me, there is going to be a trial. Because I won’t spend a single day in prison for this. That means that any and all plea deals are going to be null and void. I won’t take one of them. I hope that I make myself perfectly clear about that point.”

  It was my turn to bite my lower l
ip. I knew what he was saying. It didn’t mean that I had to agree with it. He was the boss, though. If he didn’t want to take any plea agreements, then we couldn’t force him. “Crystal clear,” I said, looking at Harper. She nodded in agreement.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “This is where I leave you. You get that investigator on the case. Hopefully he can figure out who did it and what happened.”

  At that, he left.

  Chapter 5

  Harper and I continued to sit in the conference room. She had her notebook out, but she was doodling in it, not writing out a word. “Harper,” I said to her. “What’s going on?”

  She tried to plaster on a smile, but I saw right through that. I had seen that look before, on Sarah’s face, 1000 times. Tight lips, stone face, eyes that didn’t light up. Her smile was fake, as fake as Sarah’s breasts. “I don’t want this case,” she said. “I don’t want it, and I resent having it. I’ve never been forced to represent somebody before. Except for when I was a baby lawyer with the Public Defender’s Office.”

  I somehow didn’t know that she, too, came from the Public Defender’s Office. She obviously was there long before I got my attorney to defend me after the Innocence Project attorney, Chuck Riegel, got me a new trial and Colleen took my case. I did wonder if she knew Colleen and I asked her.

  “Colleen Sutton, of course, of course,” she said. “She was one of my closest friends at the PD’s Office.” She looked out the window. “I remember going out with her and some of the others on New Year’s Eve one year. It turned out that many of us were not only single, but also dateless for the evening, so we went out as a group that night. I think that Colleen and I ended up dancing on the tables. That was obviously during my drinking days.”

  “During your drinking days. Meaning?”