The Associate (32 page)

Daniel hoped that he would get the job with Amanda’s firm, but he had no regrets about turning down J. B. Reed. Amanda Jaffe had let him see firsthand that there was another, better, way to use his law degree. Still, Daniel had not walked away from his meeting with J. B. Reed and Isaac Geller empty-handed. Alice Cummings would not have to worry about Patrick’s medical expenses anymore. Daniel had sold Isaac Geller on the public relations benefits that Geller Pharmaceuticals would reap by agreeing to help Alice’s son. Daniel didn’t want any credit for the good deed. Knowing that Patrick would have a chance at a normal life was payment enough.

Daniel rolled onto his side and noticed that Kate was not in bed. In the past few days he had learned that she was an early riser. Daniel smiled at the thought of her.

Amanda’s house stood on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, which was calm today. Last night, Kate and Daniel had sipped hot buttered rum and let the heat from the bedroom fireplace warm them while they watched a brutal storm assault the beach. This morning, the sand was littered with driftwood.

Daniel washed up and found Kate on the phone in the kitchen. She smiled when he walked in. He poured a glass of orange juice and sat down at the kitchen table while Kate finished her call.

“That was Billie,” she said as soon as she hung up. “She found out some more information about Gilchrist. Her name was originally Melissa Haynes. Her father was a colonel in the army. He was away a lot and she grew up wild. Billie says she had a string of juvenile arrests, some involving violence, but her father used his influence to get her out of most of her scrapes.

“When she turned eighteen Melissa left home and moved to California. She married an actor wannabe, but the marriage lasted less than a year. She went to secretarial school, then learned how to be a court reporter. Gene Arnold met her during a deposition in L.A.”

“Is Billie certain that Renee was Flynn’s partner?”

“She’ll probably never be able to prove it, but everything makes sense if Renee was the mole at Reed, Briggs. She was in a perfect position to slip the Kaidanov letter into the discovery and send Amanda the videotape. If Kaidanov called Briggs at his office to arrange the meeting at the cottage, Renee would have answered the phone and could have eavesdropped on their conversation. But there’s something else that convinces me that Renee is guilty.

“We were never able to figure out why Arthur Briggs wanted April Fairweather to meet him at the cottage on the night he was killed.”

“Right. It made no sense, since her case and the Insufort case were totally unrelated.”

“I’m certain that Briggs never wanted Fairweather at the cottage. Renee was in the waiting area when Fairweather saw you blow up at Briggs. I bet she heard Briggs leave the message on your answering machine asking you to meet him at the cottage. I think Renee told Fairweather to go to the cottage so she would see you leaving after Briggs was murdered. With you as the main suspect, no one would look at anyone else. But better still, Renee knew that your lawyer would use the videotape to thoroughly discredit Fairweather when she was under oath, assuring another hefty attorney fee for Flynn that she would share.”

“Renee probably made the anonymous call that tipped off Zeke Forbus about my call to her.”

“That’s my guess. But I don’t think we’ll ever know for certain.”

Daniel stood up and took Kate in his arms. “I don’t want to talk about the case anymore. We’re out here to forget about it.”

“If you don’t want to talk about the case, what do you want to do?” Kate asked mischievously.

“I’d like to kiss you, but I’m afraid you’ll use your self-defense moves on me.”

“I might if there was a bed nearby.”

“I guess ugly women need judo to get a handsome guy like me in the sack.”

The next thing Daniel knew, Kate was behind him and had him in a hammerlock. The idea of resisting never entered his mind.

On August 21, 2001, my eighth novel,
The Associate
, will be published. One of the questions that I am most frequently asked on my book tours is, “Where did the idea for your book come from?” The idea for The Associate came from three unrelated events. In 1997, I was asked to be part of a month-long promotion of thrillers in the Netherlands. As part of this promotion, I was required to write a novella that would be published only in Holland. The story I wrote was based on the disappearance of a court reporter in Oregon in the late 1970s in a murder case that I was handling. I liked the novella and I toyed with the idea of expanding it into a full-length novel, but I was always sidetracked by the other books on which I was working. Some time after I wrote the novella, my wife, Doreen, and I were in an art gallery in New York looking at a photo exhibition. Doreen got the idea for a story in which a person viewing a photo exhibition sees something in one of the photographs that is truly shocking. (I am being vague on purpose here because I don’t want to spoil one of the surprises in
The Associate
).

I was a criminal defense lawyer for twenty-five years. One of the cases I argued in the Oregon Supreme Court challenged the use of hair identification evidence to connect a defendant to a crime scene. (This was before DNA tests.) When I undertook the appeal, I assumed that there must be a lot of scientific validity to conclusions you could draw from hair found at a murder scene because the FBI and other police agencies testified about their ability to connect hair to a specific individual.

After researching the topic, I got interested in the idea of “junk science”; that interest was heightened by a widely publicized product liability lawsuit in which claims were made that leaks from silicon breast implants were causing serious illnesses in women. When the manufacturers agreed to a billion dollar class action settlement I assumed that there must be validity to the plaintiff’s claims. Then I began reading about the results of scientific studies—which uniformly showed that there was no connection between the leakage from the breast implants and the specific types of injuries the women were claiming. I was shocked that a major corporation like Dow Corning would settle cases for huge sums of money when there was no factual basis for the claims.

This got me thinking about how science could be misused in a major product liability case. And at some point these three separate ideas came together to form one complete novel. It is not unusual for my mind to work this way. I will frequently get an idea for a book that I’m unable to develop into a complete novel—at least not right away. Later I’ll get another idea for another book that I’m similarly unable to develop into a complete novel. At some point it will dawn on me that I might find a way to put the two ideas together to make a good book.

The Associate
starts with an Arizona lawyer being shocked by something he sees in a photograph in a Greenwich Village art gallery. The bulk of the book centers on Daniel Ames, a young associate in a huge law firm who is part of a team defending a pharmaceutical company against charges that it is manufacturing a pregnancy drug that causes birth defects. Daniel uncovers information about the validity of the lawsuit that makes him the target of a killer. The back story that eventually leads to the discovery of the identity of the person behind this conspiracy is in large part the novella I wrote for my Dutch audience.

– Phillip Margolin
July 2001

PHILLIP MARGOLIN’s compelling insider’s view of criminal behavior comes from his unique background as a longtime criminal defense attorney. Each of his seven novels has been a
New York Times
bestseller. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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