A Conflict of Interest Page 17

  “No! It’s pink.”

  “Pink?” I say, continuing to play my part. “You’re having your fingernails painted pink? What color were they before?”

  Charlotte tilts her head slightly, as if she’s considering this question. “I don’t know. What color was it?” she asks her mother.

  “It was a different shade of pink,” Elizabeth says, and then Charlotte repeats it for me, in case I didn’t get it the first time.

  I put down my briefcase, hang up my coat, and make my way over to the couch to inspect Elizabeth’s handiwork. “It’s absolutely beautiful, Charlotte. I really love the color you picked.” I lean over to place a kiss on the top of my daughter’s head, and then do the same to Elizabeth’s.

  “I thought you’d be at the office much later tonight,” Elizabeth says. It is about as sad a commentary on my life as I can imagine, but Elizabeth is more surprised when I come home before midnight than when I’m out past that time. She smiles at me and says, “I’m glad you’re home.”

  “I’m sorry about going into the office. I was a little freaked out by the judge refusing us a reasonable extension. But everything seems under control, so I figured I should make sure all was good at home.”

  “I’m not sure your priorities are properly sequenced,” Elizabeth says, “but all’s well here.”

  I immediately become defensive. “I had to go in, Elizabeth.”

  “I’m not criticizing,” Elizabeth says softly, highlighting that my tone was uncalled for. “I’m just stating a fact. I realize that you have this trial, and that it’s important. But after this one there’ll be another one. And another after that. Et cetera and so on. Remember when you joined the firm you had to establish yourself, and then you were up for partner, and then as a junior partner people were looking to see whether you’d ultimately take a leadership role in the firm, and now you’ve got this trial.”

  “Elizabeth—my mother just died, can’t you cut me a little slack?”

  “No, Alex, that’s precisely why I shouldn’t. Your mother’s death should be a wake-up call for you, and not another excuse to bury yourself in work. Life is just too short.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Do I have to spell it out for you? You know what I’m saying.”

  “I really don’t, Elizabeth,” I say, although the better answer is that I hope I don’t.

  “The short version, Alex, is that this”—and she waves around the room—“is your life. Me, Charlotte. And it’s right now. Not someday or later. But now. Is this really the way you want it to be? Because it’s getting damn near the point where that decision is going to be irrevocably made.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No,” she says with a sigh, as if I’ve missed the point entirely. “It’s my greatest fear is what it is.”

  30

  The red light on my phone is blinking when I arrive at the office. I assume it’s Abby, and eagerly punch in my password, but when I access my messages, it’s a much different voice that I hear.

  “This is Assistant United States Attorney Christopher Pavin calling about the United States v. Michael Ohlig matter,” his message begins, as if we’ve never met. “Mr. Miller, it is extremely important that you call me back as soon as possible. Thank you.”

  When I call Pavin back, I get his voicemail. “This is private attorney Alexander Miller of the law firm Cromwell Altman Rosenthal and White. I received a voicemail message from Assistant United States Attorney Christopher Pavin to call him on a matter of extreme importance. By this phone message, I hereby return his phone call. The time of this call is nine-thirty five in the A.M. The date is Friday, the fifth of December.”

  Pavin calls me back less than five minutes later. “I liked your message,” he says. “You’re a funny guy.”

  “You’re the one who can’t just say, ‘Alex, it’s Chris, call me.’” I respond, trying my best to act unconcerned that the prosecutor has left a dire message on the eve of the trial.

  “Alex, it’s Chris,” he deadpans back. “Before getting to the reason for my call, I wanted to express my sincere condolences about your mother.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that you didn’t take a hard line with Judge Sullivan on the extension. Not that it mattered very much.”

  “She wants this trial to go. That’s for sure.”

  Our small talk complete, I wait for the purpose of the call. He’s at least experienced enough not to make me wait very long.

  “I’ve got something important to talk to you about.”

  “Okay. Shoot,” I say, still trying to convey there is absolutely nothing he could say that would shake my belief in Ohlig’s total innocence.

  “We had considerable internal discussion on this issue and we ultimately concluded we needed to focus you on something, in case you didn’t realize its importance.”

  “That’s very kind of you.” Although Pavin’s preface is condescending, I know better than to turn down free discovery.

  “You need to listen to tape number 17 very carefully,” he says gravely. “I think it would be inappropriate for me to say more at this point, but if you have questions after you’ve listened to it, feel free to call me.”

  “Well, you certainly have piqued my interest, Assistant United States Attorney Christopher Pavin. I’ll take a listen and get back to you. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  He says nothing for a moment, then, “I’ve never encountered this type of situation before and, truth be told, no one else in my office has either. We really didn’t know what to do, so we decided to err on the side of caution.” If this were not tantalizing enough, Pavin adds, “Just so I’m clear, when I say you need to listen to it, I mean you, Alex. Don’t have Abby Sloane or anyone else do it. You have to be the one.”

  “Okay,” I say, still trying to sound lighthearted, but now very much more concerned.

  Abby’s in the war room, surrounded by three-inch black binders. We, or rather she (and I’m sure an army of others—temps, paralegals, secretaries, mailroom guys) have prepared about thirty of these witness binders. Each has the witness’s name written on the spine in large letters and inside is an outline of the points to be covered in the examination, followed by the exhibits we’ll need to introduce into evidence through the witness, each designated with a numbered side tab.

  “Well, good morning to you,” Abby says, her face lighting up.

  “You too,” I say. “I just had the strangest call with Pavin,” I say, a bit abruptly, I realize, because Abby’s smile recedes.

  “Isn’t every call with him the strangest call?” she says, morphing into work mode.

  “This one was in a special category. He said we need to focus on tape 17. What’s on that one?”

  “Alex, I’m listening to the tapes, not memorizing them.” She says this with a nervous laugh suggesting she’s worried she missed something important. “Anyway, since when is Pavin doing us favors?”

  “That’s one of the things that made the call so strange. And get this, he made a point to emphasize I had to be the one who listens—not you.”

  “Well, that does wonders for my ego,” Abby laughs again, as she starts clicking through the electronic files on her laptop.

  “Pavin must be worried Ohlig will have an appellate claim for ineffective assistance of counsel if we—I should say I—am not aware of what’s on tape 17.”

  “I don’t have tape 17 on the system,” she says, now looking even more concerned. “I didn’t upload every tape, just the ones I thought had relevant information. I have an index of what’s on all of them, though.” She pulls out a yellow legal pad from a stack that is sitting beside her and begins furiously flipping the pages.

  “Finally,” she says in an exasperated voice. “Tape 15, 16, okay, 17.” She stares at her paper, reading her notes silently before she’s going to say anything. “That one is just Ohlig talking to his wife.” She looks up at me. “According to my notes at least, there’s nothing a
bout Salminol on that tape.”

  “I thought that Ohlig’s phone wasn’t taped.”

  “It wasn’t, but occasionally he took a call on a broker’s phone, and that was taped.”

  “Do you have the tape here?” I ask.

  “Somewhere,” she says, already walking over to the boxes on the far wall, which are stacked up behind me. I help her lift the ones on top until she begins to rummage through the contents of a box marked July. After some digging, she pulls out a disk. “Here it is. It’s dated July 10.” She pauses, staring at the disk. “I’m almost sure there wasn’t any business talk on it. I’m sorry if I missed something, but I really don’t know what Pavin is talking about.”

  “Let’s find out,” I say, probably sounding impatient, because I am.

  She walks back over to her seat at the table and places the disk in her laptop. “Do you want the headphones?” she asks.

  I shake my head no, and then explain we should hear the tape together, which elicits a smile that thanks me for not having lost confidence in her. Then she presses the play button.

  The tape begins with Agent McNiven sounding like Joe Friday on his most serious day. “This is Special Agent Gregory McNiven of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The date is 10 July. The conversations on this tape will be from the phone number, 561 area code, 555-7592. This tape recording is pursuant to warrant.” From there the tape trails off into the familiar static, until Ohlig’s voice is heard.

  “Hello.”

  A woman’s voice is next. “Hi there,” she says.

  “See,” Abby says, “it’s a personal call between Michael and his wife.”

  I’m not listening to Abby. Instead, all of my senses are directed to the laptop emitting these sounds.

  Ohlig speaks next. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No,” the woman says. “I know you’re busy, but I just wanted to thank you again for last night.” A slight pause. “For both times.”

  Ohlig chuckles. “Glad to be of service.”

  “Can you service me again tonight?” she asks in a husky voice, like she’s channeling Mae West.

  “It will be my pleasure to be of assistance,” Ohlig says, apparently not so busy at work that he can’t take some time out to talk about his sexual prowess.

  “That’s all I wanted to hear. Go back to work. I won’t bother you again until tonight, but then I’m going to bother you a lot.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” Ohlig says.

  “Michael,” a slight pause, “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” he says and hangs up. There’s static for about ten seconds, and then McNiven’s voice saying that this is the end of the recording and that it took fifty-seven seconds.

  “Do you think that Pavin mixed up the number?” Abby asks. “Maybe he was thinking about another tape.”

  “No,” I say. “This is the right tape.”

  “Then I don’t get it. Why does Pavin think this is so important?”

  “Because,” I say with a sigh, “the woman on the tape isn’t Michael’s wife. She’s my mother.”

  My mother was in love with Michael Ohlig, that much seems clear. It isn’t hard to go from there to the idea that he promised to leave his wife for her, and my mother got caught in the oldest lie there is. By Thanksgiving she must have realized that, one way or another, either because Ohlig was going to stay with Pamela or maybe because he might go to prison, she was going to end up being alone, and she decided that just wasn’t the way she wanted to live.

  Anger consumes me, rushing in a thousand directions. How could she be so selfish? Or so stupid? How could I have not noticed that she was suicidal? Why didn’t I go to Florida for Thanksgiving?

  But there is a special place of rage where it is most warranted. Michael Ohlig is responsible for my mother’s death.

  31

  I tell Abby I need some time to process and go back to my office. Once there, I shut the door and dial Ohlig’s number. In as matter-of-fact a voice as I can muster, I tell him to come to New York on the next flight. I explain that there’s something on one of the tapes that we need to discuss in person.

  I can hardly imagine anyone else who would not be beside himself upon hearing, a week before trial, there was a problem with the case and he had to meet with his lawyer immediately. Ohlig’s only response is to tell me he’ll take an early flight out tomorrow morning and, barring traffic, he’ll be at my office by one. He doesn’t even ask me what the problem is, but at this point it would have been more surprising if he had expressed some concern.

  I head back down to the war room, finding Abby once again amidst the binders.

  “What did he say?” she asks, a smile revealing that she’s proud of how well she knows me.

  I could play dumb, but there’s no point. “We didn’t really talk. I told him I needed him to come up to discuss a recent development, and it has to be in person. You know him, he acts like it’s nothing, as if I’m calling to set up a golf game or something.”

  “You want me in the meeting?”

  “You know I do, but I think I should do it alone.”

  “Okay,” she says, sounding a little disappointed.

  “Where are OPM’s phone records?”

  “Maybe I can help. What are you looking for?”

  “I’ll tell you when I find it.” A response designed to convey that I’d like some privacy.

  “They’re boxed over there,” she says with a sigh, pointing to the far wall, adjacent to the wall where the box containing tape 17 was located. There are about twenty-four boxes lining the wall, six rows, each four boxes high. “Fortunately for you, we’ve put them in chronological order. What time period are you looking for?”

  “What’s the most recent we’ve got?”

  “Through the indictment are in the boxes on the end. On top, I think.”

  “And after that?”

  “We don’t have any. Through the indictment is all that’s been produced.”

  “And what if I wanted to see who Michael called more recently?”

  “Like during our prep right before Thanksgiving, for example?” Abby clearly knows exactly what I’m thinking.

  “Yes, like then.”

  “Can I make a suggestion?”

  “Please.”

  “Don’t go through his records. Check your mother’s. Her cell phone will have a call log, both incoming and outgoing. See if she was the one who called Michael.”

  “Her cell phone is down in Florida,” I say. “I could probably get someone to FedEx to me, but I really don’t want to wait.”

  “You’re the executor of her estate, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I bet you can get the phone records from the phone company.”

  At last, a reason to smile. “That’s why you earn the big bucks. Thanks.”

  Sure enough, getting my mother’s phone records is only slightly more difficult than accessing my own. She used the same carrier for both her cell and her land line, so I have to call only one phone company. I explained that my mother had recently died and I wanted to pay off her bills in full; however, before I made the payment, I needed to verify the charges. The customer service rep, a woman with an Indian accent, was more than happy to oblige me. She told me that if I emailed her the documentation indicating my appointment as the executor of my mother’s estate, she’d email me back the phone records.

  Less than an hour later, I’m in my office with the door closed reviewing the last phone calls my mother ever made.

  I look at her land line bill first. It isn’t itemized and contains only the overall service charges and an indication that she made forty-two local calls. That makes sense. On the rare occasion that my mother called me or anyone else out-of-state, she’d use her cell to avoid long-distance charges.

  The cell phone records have what I’m looking for. November 23 at 4:52 P.M.: a three-minute and twenty-seven-second call to Ohlig’s cell phone. The timing matches up with the call i
n our conference room because I remember that I was thinking at the time that Ohlig would have trouble getting a cab at five. The three-minute duration also seems to be about right.

  She called Ohlig again at 5:35, no doubt to confirm he was actually coming to see her as he had promised. At 6:19, there began a string of one-minute calls, every fifteen minutes or so, which I assume were her compulsive efforts to reach him before the plane took off, but he must have already turned off his phone. She finally made contact at 9:07, a two-minute call.

  I don’t know why it simply hadn’t occurred to me before that moment to check my mother’s voicemail messages. Getting her password won’t be quite as easy as obtaining the phone records, but it’s not impossible either. Before contacting the phone company again, I decide to try a more low-tech solution. I dial my mother’s cell phone number. I hear my mother tell callers to slowly leave a name and number at the beep so she can return the call as soon as she’s able. Hearing her voice, a wave of sadness crashes over me.

  I press the pound key, getting the prompt to put in her password, and then repeat. Sure enough, my mother never programmed a password. The default still worked.

  She had only one unheard message. It was from me, a call I had forgotten I made. Thanksgiving day, at 11:49 A.M., according to the computer voice. “Mom, it’s me. Just calling to wish you a happy Thanksgiving. I’m sorry about how things turned out this year. Next year Elizabeth, Charlotte, and I will definitely come down. Call me.”

  My mother never heard that message, and so it makes little sense I’m as upset as I am, but I wish I had said I loved her. When was the last time I said it to her?

  She also had one saved message. My mother always claimed we were the same and, at least in this regard, we are. It’s from Ohlig and more than two months old. I can only assume she saved it for the same reason that I save Abby’s messages—to be able to hear it over and over again.

  “I love you,” he says. “Last night was wonderful. A dream I wished I’d never wake up from. I can’t wait until we’re together again, and not just for a few hours, or even a night, but forever and always.”