A thick manila envelope sat on my desk. It had come from FitzGibbon. I knew what was in it. Old files. Trust deeds. Wills. Correspondence. Maybe a legal opinion or two. I was supposed to forward it to Kennedy. Normally, I’d call in Judy, tell her to seal it, send it to John. Hand delivery. Private. Confidential. To be opened only by addressee.
That was the right thing to do.
But, I said to myself, pulling the envelope toward me. Wait a minute. Jules is my client. Not his father. Daddy’s just paying the bills. I don’t have any fiduciary duty to him.
Actually, I didn’t know for sure if that was true. But I wasn’t about to look it up. And I wasn’t about to call up Tightass Bob Shumaker, the firm’s resident Ethics Guru, and ask him. Bob’s answer was always the same: if it feels right, it must be wrong.
A peek. A quick look. Who would that hurt? Jules, it might help. Jules was my client. I owed it to him to take a look. It wasn’t just curiosity, prurience. There might, there just might, be something in there that would help Jules. Information: it’s the stuff of litigation. Jesus, it’s the stuff of life itself. Without information, where would we be? Even the sloth, the slug, the amoeba, they operate on information. At a minimum, where the food is. Why was I any different?
The beauty of poker, I mused, the envelope heavy on my desk, is that it’s a game of incomplete information. Like quantum physics. No matter how powerful our computers, our detection methods get, the best we will ever do is predict the probability that a given electron is in any given place at any given time. And poker’s exactly like that. He who divines most consistently the missing pieces of knowledge – the other players’ cards – is the master of the game. The old lady next to you in Vegas. The old lady who lifts her cards to her face each time, like she’s seen in the cowboy movies, giving you a millisecond peek at her hand. Ignore the input? Be a good boy, turn your head away? Lean over to her, whisper a word of warning? ‘Ma’am, please keep your cards on the table. Watch how the others do it… you’re giving your cards away’?
No, you wouldn’t, would you? I didn’t think so. You might stop short of taking her money, if you wanted to be a stickler about it. But you’d keep looking at her cards. For the edge it gave you on the others.
I opened the envelope.
Just a quick peek.
Trust deeds. At least a dozen. Most were old enough to have been typed. High-class bond paper. Ancient paper clips. I paged through them. The usual mumbo jumbo. Whereas. Heretofore. Thus is it said. And the Lord God made it so.
I flipped through the documents. Ah, there it was. The grandpa trust. To Eamon FitzGibbon. Daddy hadn’t entirely disappeared, had he. Twenty million. Jesus. Daddy had been rich as Croesus too. And never shared a dime with his family before his death? It seemed inconceivable. And to any grandchildren, a cool twenty million too. Vesting at the age of twenty-five. Until then, a modest allowance. Enough for the loft. Not much more. To be administered by Jones amp; Pogue, Attorneys at Law. Never heard of them.
I put the papers back into the envelope. What had I learned? I asked myself. Nothing I hadn’t already known, really. The amounts involved. A little shocking. But nothing that was going to help Jules stay out of jail.
Shit. Maybe it had been just prurience. Had I risked violating a sacred trust for nothing?
This wouldn’t do.
I opened the envelope again.
Maybe I’d missed something.
Page upon page of ancient legal cant about dead people. Long-gone enough to be meaningless, most of it. And then, near the end, I saw what I had overlooked the first time.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
Somebody had a motive.