Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631) (13 page)

“I wanted to come here today because…” She stopped and shook her head. “Just because…” Her voice trailed off.

“That's understandable,” I said.

“But also to give you something,” she added. She reached into her purse and pulled out a piece of paper. “You asked me the other day if I knew who Mr. Kurobashi might be going to see on a ferry. I couldn't think of anybody then, but this morning I was going through last week's messages, the carbon copies, and I came across this.”

Big Al was still working on his sandwich, so she handed the paper to me. The blue ink had copied badly, so it was difficult to read. The telephone number itself was almost totally illegible.

“Clay?” I asked. “I can't make out the last name.”

“Woodruff. He called last Friday. I was so upset at hearing his voice that I almost didn't give Mr. Kurobashi the message.”

“Who's Clay Woodruff?”

“I
thought
he was Mr. Kurobashi's friend,” Mrs. Oliver said disdainfully.

“Was?” I asked. “What happened?”

“I met Clay when we all worked at RFLink. He was young then, but he was already director of marketing. He and Mr. Kurobashi became very close. They both loved computers, used them at home and in the office the way other people use
pencils. That was years ago, you see, long before everybody had one.”

I nodded, not wanting to interrupt her, but trying to urge her to go on.

“Anyway, when Mr. Kurobashi came up with that new product design, it was really innovative, really exciting. The two of them went to see Blakeslee and offered it to him. It could easily have doubled the sales of RFLink, but Blakeslee turned it down. Clay said that was crazy and that if Blakeslee was that stupid, he was quitting, so Blakeslee fired him on the spot. He fired Mr. Kurobashi as well. I quit right after that.”

“It sounds like Blakeslee was a turkey and the other two stuck together like glue.”

Mrs. Oliver nodded. “That's how it seemed at the time. Right away, Mr. Kurobashi began putting together money to start MicroBridge. Blakeslee had made him sign a noncompetition agreement, but since he had been fired, Mr. Kurobashi figured it wasn't enforceable. Blakeslee's lawyer must not have thought so either, because nothing ever came of it, but after MicroBridge came online, Blakeslee sued for patent infringement.”

“And won,” I said.

“He shouldn't have,” Mrs. Oliver said bitterly. “And he wouldn't have, either, if Clay had done his part.”

“Which was?” I prodded.

“Show up to testify. He dropped off the face of the earth for a while after he left RFLink. He's a
composer, and he told Mr. Kurobashi at the time that he was sick of the business world and that he was going to concentrate on his music. When the patent infringement thing came up, Mr. Kurobashi didn't worry about it very much, because he was sure Clay would testify. Except he didn't.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. Before the trial, Mr. Davenport tracked him down. He had to hire a private detective to do it. That's very expensive, you know. But when it came time for the trial. Clay couldn't be found. Mr. Davenport said that Blakeslee must have bought him off. That was why I was surprised when he called on Friday, acting all friendly like, as though nothing had ever happened. Such nerve!”

“So you gave Mr. Kurobashi the message. Did he return the call?”

“I don't know. I didn't pry into Mr. Kurobashi's affairs, but he may have.”

“Where does Clay Woodruff live?”

“At the time of the trial, I remember Mr. Davenport saying Clay was living in a hotel over on the peninsula somewhere.”

“Which peninsula, Kitsap? Olympic?”

“Over there somewhere,” she said. “Across the water.”

“Can you get us a better copy of this phone number?”

“I wrote it down on the back,” she said.

I turned over the paper and looked at the number. The last four digits began with a nine. “This is probably a pay phone.”

Mrs. Oliver shrugged. “That's the only number he gave me.”

Big Al had long since finished with his sandwich and had been listening quietly from the sidelines. “How did Mr. Kurobashi feel when this Woodruff character didn't come testify? Was he angry?”

“Not angry. Hurt. To be treated like that by a friend when he had counted on him so heavily. I mean, he had borrowed money everywhere, even mortgaged his house.”

“And Woodruff let him down.”

She nodded. “And that's what makes me think Mr. Kurobashi must have talked to him.”

“Why?”

“Because the last thing he said to me as I was leaving on Friday was that he just didn't know who he could trust anymore.”

Abruptly, Mrs. Oliver stood up to leave. “I'd better be going now. I don't like to be gone more than an hour. People still expect someone to answer the phone, you know.”

“Could I ask you one more question, Mrs. Oliver?” Al Lindstrom asked.

“Certainly.” She sat back down and waited attentively.

“Why didn't you want us to meet you at your office?”

“I suppose I'm just being silly, but several times during the last few weeks, Mr. Kurobashi said he felt like someone was spying on him. Maybe he was just being paranoid, but with everything that's happened, I'm not so sure.”

“But you still can't tell us what exactly he was working on?”

“No. I know he thought it was important, but he kept all his notes about it locked up in his own computer and written in Japanese. He said he didn't want someone wandering into his office and reading things over his shoulder.”

“Not even you?”

“Not even me,” she replied.

I tried to tell if there was any resentment in her voice when she said it, but I couldn't. If Mrs. Bernice Oliver was angry with Tadeo Kurobashi for keeping secrets from her, it certainly wasn't showing.

She stood up again. Pausing long enough to wipe a few remaining bread crumbs and sesame seeds from her lap, she stepped over the rail at the end of the picnic table bench and walked back to her car, hurrying to answer the last few phone calls in her dead boss's dead business.

Big Al shook his head as he watched her walk away. “I still haven't figured out what makes that old dame tick, have you? Do you think he was banging her?”

“Who, Kurobashi?” It was almost impossible to think of the angular Mrs. Oliver in a sexual con
text, but luckily for the human race, we don't all have exactly the same tastes.

“Maybe,” I said, “but then again, maybe not. And I sure as hell don't have balls enough to ask her.”

“Me either,” Big Al admitted ruefully, “so I guess we'll never know.”

B
IG
A
L AND
I
SAT IN THE WARM AUTUMN
sun at the rough picnic table at the Pecos Pit Barbecue for the next forty-five minutes, while outdoor diners milled around us. We chewed on leftover hunks of ice in Styrofoam cups and brought each other up to date on what had been happening at opposite ends of the state.

“Did you ever talk to the people from the shredder company?” I asked.

“Not yet. They were out of town yesterday when I stopped by on my way home. I thought I'd try to see them today.”

“And what about Davenport?”

“I had an appointment for yesterday, but he stood me up. His secretary rescheduled me for later on this afternoon.”

“I'll go along, if you don't mind. He may be able to shed some light on this Woodruff thing. If nothing else, he might know where to look for him. Mrs. Oliver's saying he lives in a hotel on one of the peninsulas isn't a whole hell of a lot of help.”

“We can always get the location of the pay phone from the phone company,” Big Al said.

“I know, but if we can get it from Davenport it'll save time.”

When we finally left the Pecos Pit, it was to drive to 1201 Third Avenue, Chris Davenport's shiny new building. According to the rave review of one prominent architectural critic, the building is “a perfect rendition of art deco style.” I'd call it more an architectural rendering of tutti-frutti, with its towering confection of green mirrored glass and matte-finished pink granite. The multi-humped roof line looks like it came straight from the set of the 1930s
King Kong
, but of course that movie was made in black and white.

Once inside, we found that the old-fashioned marbled lobby looked like a time traveler from that same era. We fumbled around for several minutes before we were able to locate the bank of elevators.

Chris Davenport's office on the forty-fifth floor was suitably high in the building, definitely not low-rent squalor. When the elevator door opened, we found ourselves in a spacious and highly modern reception area done in the current fashion of dusty rose and subtle grays, rich-looking but soothingly quiet.

“Bankruptcy must pay pretty good wages these days,” Big Al said under his breath.

“For attorneys,” I returned.

As far as female help is concerned, law firms al
ways seem to recruit the pick of the crop. A young receptionist with big boobs, a tightly belted knit dress, and a tiny waist announced our arrival over an intercom. Behind the receptionist's desk, mounted on the cloth-covered wall, was a large brass plaque listing the names of the partners, thirty-four by actual count. Davenport's name, in position nineteen, showed that despite his youthful looks, he had been around for some time.

Another nubile young secretary appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to lead us to Davenport's office. She directed us through a door around the corner from the reception counter. The door opened on a private stairway leading down to the next floor. That's when we discovered that the firm—Rice, Baxter, and Wheeler—leased two entire floors.

Davenport may not have been high enough in the pecking order to rate an upstairs office, but his did have a western exposure window with a magnificent view of the shipping traffic on Elliott Bay.

As we were shown inside, we found Davenport seated at his huge polished desk intently studying the inside of his mouth with a small, hand-held mirror. Like a kid caught doing something he shouldn't, he quickly stowed the mirror in a desk drawer and stood up, rubbing the outside of his cheek, offering his other hand in greeting.

“Sorry,” he said, with an apologetic, metallic grin. “My orthodontist tightened the bands this morning. It hurts like hell.”

“Aren't you a little old for braces?” Lindstrom asked. I detected a trace of Norwegian humor behind the question. If Davenport caught it, he ignored it completely, and he didn't appear to be offended by the question. By then he was probably used to it.

“In our family, the girls were the ones who got braces,” he explained. “They all had to be pretty enough to land husbands. That's why I'm having my teeth fixed now.”

My own private opinion was that it would take a whole lot more than straightened teeth to turn Chris Davenport into Prince Charming, but I remained silent. Somebody on the team had to play it straight.

Davenport motioned to the window. “Great view, isn't it?”

It was the same view of Elliott Bay that I see every day from my windows in Belltown Terrace, but, remembering the manners my mother had drummed into me, I went over to the window, looked out, and politely agreed that it was indeed a magnificent view. As I turned back to the room, I noticed the wall behind the visitors' chairs had two framed diplomas on it as well as a series of wife-and-kiddie-type photos.

I stepped close enough to the wall to read the text on the two diplomas. One was a Bachelor of Arts from Loyola and the other was a Juris Doctor from Northwestern. Neither was
Summa Cum Laude
or
Magna Cum Laude
, which didn't sur
prise me when I remembered Mrs. Oliver's derisive assessment that bankruptcy was all Davenport was good for.

The lawyer noticed my interest in his sheepskin display. “Good Catholic family,” he said. “We boys all went through the Jesuit mill.”

“Law school instead of braces?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yup. That's how it works.”

Davenport seated himself behind his desk and began doing a series of annoying finger aerobics that revealed, despite his otherwise open and relaxed air, that Christopher Davenport wasn't nearly as happy to be spending time with us as his outward show of geniality implied.

Big Al had lowered himself into a complicated low-slung chair where he shifted uncomfortably, like a rhino stuck in the mud. “We don't want to take too much of your time, Mr. Davenport, but we do need to ask you a few questions.”

“Fire away,” he said.

Since Big Al had set up the appointment, I was content to take a backseat and let him run the railroad.

“We're still trying to piece together Mr. Kurobashi's activities and whereabouts on the day he died,” Big Al said.

Davenport nodded. “That makes sense. It's hard for me to believe he's dead. And the news reports of what happened to his wife and daughter—” He broke off, shaking his head. “It's shocking. Appalling.”

“I couldn't agree with you more,” Big Al said. “When was the last time you saw him?”

The attorney opened his top desk drawer and pulled out a leather-bound appointment book. He paged back through several days, then stopped and ran his finger down the page.

“Here it is. Friday, one-thirty. He came by and we went over what all he needed to bring to the hearing on Monday.”

“The bankruptcy hearing?”

“Yes. I told him everything we'd need in court on Monday.”

“And he agreed to bring whatever was needed, financial records, and all that?”

“Of course.”

“So you're saying that you as his attorney were not in possession of those records?”

“That's right. We always reviewed them in Tadeo's office. He insisted that we do it that way.”

“Do you know anything about an arrangement to have the company records moved or destroyed?”

Davenport let out a disgusted sigh. “As far as I know, they're still there. Somebody called me with a wild rumor that Tadeo had sent everything to the shredder.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Who what?”

“Who called you with that rumor?”

Davenport looked at me for a long moment before he answered. “Mr. Blakeslee was the one who
called. As head of the creditor's committee, he was all in a lather over it.”

“And where did Blakeslee get his information?” Big Al interjected.

“From that slimy Rennermann character, the Industry Square property manager. He claimed to have gotten the scoop from one of the cops on the case. I told him I was sure it wasn't true, but I haven't been able to go by and check for myself. Mrs. Oliver told me that you cops aren't allowing anyone inside.”

Big Al and I exchanged glances. We had caught Mrs. Oliver in a little white lie. “In other words, you can't go inside because of the investigation?”

“That's what she said. I told Blakeslee not to worry, that I'd have things straightened out as soon as possible, with the new owner.”

“Who is?”

“Machiko Kurobashi. In name only, of course. Until the bankruptcy proceedings are completed.”

I was stunned. “Machiko? Are you sure? What could she do with it?”

“Yes, I'm sure. In the corporate minutes she's listed as both a major stockholder as well as an officer. But she's certainly not qualified to run it, and Tadeo didn't expect her to. He thought that with his wife holding the company, his daughter would finally come on board and take control. Now, though, with the bankruptcy proceedings, it's just a formality. At least this way I'll have someone qualified to sign off on things. Thank God, she's all right.”

“Did Kurobashi have any enemies as far as you know?” Big Al asked.

“Other than Mr. Blakeslee? No, not that I know of.”

“What about Clay Woodruff?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“Would he qualify as an enemy?”

“I don't know how to answer that.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were friends once, had worked together at RFLink. Tadeo claimed that Woodruff had been present when he offered to sell his new product design to Blakeslee, that Woodruff knew Tadeo had done all the design work on his own computer at home during off hours. And that testimony would have been invaluable, but Woodruff didn't testify. Without him, Tadeo's version of the meeting was totally inadmissible.”

“Why didn't Woodruff testify?”

“I couldn't find him. I sent process servers out after him, but by the time they located him, it was too late. The case had already been decided.”

“And Tadeo lost his patent infringement case.”

“You bet we lost. The whole case hinged on him.”

“And it put Tadeo out of business.”

“That's right. Tadeo felt that Woodruff had let him down, and of course he had. I think someone paid Woodruff to drop out of sight at the critical time.”

“Who?” I asked.

Davenport shrugged.

“Would Blakeslee have done it?”

“He wouldn't be above it,” Chris Davenport replied.

It was conjecture on the attorney's part, but it was worth following up on nonetheless. I nodded in approval as Big Al made a note of it.

“Who was the judge?” I asked.

“Kelley,” Davenport answered. “Judge Chip Kelley. He's good. Tough but good.”

“I know Judge Kelley,” I said. “Tell us what you know about Bernice Oliver.”

Davenport shook his head. “A kook, if you ask me. When I found her there working, I tried to tell her to go home, that the company's broke and nobody's going to pay her, but she was adamant, said no matter what, she'd stay and keep on working until they disconnect the phones at the end of the month.”

“Why would she do that?” I asked.

Davenport shook his head. “I don't have any idea.”

“Was there any hanky-panky going on between her and Tadeo?”

Chris Davenport grinned as though he found the very idea quite amusing. “Bernice Oliver? She doesn't seem like the type. Besides, Tadeo never struck me as being that desperate, if you know what I mean.”

“When you talked to Mr. Kurobashi on Friday did he mention being in touch with Woodruff?”

This time Davenport frowned before he an
swered. “No. Why should he be in touch with Woodruff? I'd be surprised to hear there was any further contact between those two. Tadeo was a stubborn man, gentlemen, and once someone crossed him…”

“Like his daughter?”

“So you know about that? Yes, exactly. Once he wrote someone off, that was it.”

As long as I was sending up a series of trial balloons, I figured I could just as well let go of all of them. “What about connections to organized crime?”

Davenport looked incredulous. “Tadeo and organized crime? Totally preposterous! You can't be serious.”

“Do you have any idea what Mr. Kurobashi was working on just prior to his death?”

“No, not really. He was a secretive man. Smalltime entrepreneurs often are. They invent something or discover something and then want to keep it all to themselves. They'd rather go out of business than have to give up control to an investor.”

“Were there investors willing to step in and save MicroBridge?”

Abruptly, Davenport stood up, took an open briefcase from the credenza behind him, and began placing a series of file folders into it.

Questioning witnesses is very much like panning for gold. You have to sort through a lot of water and sand before you see the glimmer of a trace of
gold in the muck at the bottom of the pan, and this was nothing more than a glimmer, but a sudden need for physical action is often indicative that the questioning is coming too close to real nuggets of truth. If that was the case here, Christopher Davenport didn't want us any closer.

“There could have been,” he said eventually, as he snapped the briefcase shut and spun the numbers on the combination lock. “But Tadeo wouldn't let me try to find any. Instead, he borrowed money on his own home to keep the company afloat. He kept it going far longer than anyone expected, but in the end it was like holding his finger in a dike. I tried to get him to see how unwise that was, to cut his losses. As I told you, Tadeo was a very stubborn man.”

“Is it possible that Mr. Kurobashi might have stumbled onto some important discovery or process that he thought would turn things around?”

“It's possible. He hinted around about that some, but that's all. That's the other thing you have to understand about entrepreneurs. They're always incurable optimists who think the next thing down the pike is going to save their ass.”