I have a life, at least.
“So what’s with all the cloak-and-dagger stuff?” Rudy asked as he strolled up to the park bench. “It’s like thirty-five degrees out here. Couldn’t we meet in a warmer venue like . . . uh, I don’t know. Maybe that big fancy office of yours?” He snickered and blew a quick puff of warm air into his hands before he rubbed them together like a praying mantis.
I reached into my bag and pulled out the manila envelope. “There’s something really weird going on up on Twenty. Michael’s wife, Anna, found this in a safe-deposit box he secretly kept. Houghton is supposed to do a joint venture with a Mexican company called Libertad. Here, take a look.” I handed Rudy the envelope. “The day of Michael’s memorial service, someone broke into his house. They ransacked his study. I assume whoever killed Michael was looking for these documents.” I sat quietly, allowing Rudy time to read through the papers.
“Michael was going to resign?!”
“Looks like it. I think he found out Houghton is laundering dirty money for that Libertad company. Hardy looked into it and found a list of Houghton’s bank accounts. Houghton has a quarter billion dollars in a small bank in the middle of nowhere.”
“What the hell?”
“Yeah. And there’s no record or paper trail for this deal.” I recounted my phone conversation with Richie Melcher, the outside attorney. “Michael should have been talking to Richie about a deal like this. Instead, he was consulting a white-collar defense firm.”
“Oh shit.”
“But that’s not even the best part. Nate has Alzheimer’s and my esteemed colleagues on the Executive Committee are covering for him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Willow plays nursemaid and attends all his meetings with him, and Jonathan and Max are acting as de facto CEO. And just to round things out, Max made a veiled threat. It’s like a corporate freak show up on Twenty.”
“What the hell? You have to go to the police. Show them this stuff. Tell them what Max said.”
“No. I can’t disclose the email thread or the bank information because they’re privileged and confidential company records. Although, if the police are smart, they’ll figure out a way to get their hands on them soon enough.”
“But there’s criminal activity involved . . . somebody murdered Michael. All bets off. That’s a clear exception to the privilege rule,” Rudy said. “Besides, if Anna has already seen these documents, the privilege is broken anyway, right? You can take the documents to the police.”
Lawyers inside corporations are bound by the same ethical canons as lawyers in law firms. If a lawyer discovered illegal activity going on inside the company, ethical rules required the lawyer to report it up the chain of command, to the CEO and/or the board of directors. It was essentially “see something, say something” for lawyers, with a few exceptions. If you have an iota of a moral compass, a lot of practicing law is a matter of doing what’s right, making commonsense choices. Admittedly, since I discovered my own brother was mixed up in this mess, I hadn’t tried very hard to justify taking the documents up the chain of command or to the police. Doing what’s right in this case meant protecting my brother. I think the only reason I was telling Rudy about all this was to vent and have someone tell me I wasn’t crazy. Deep down, I knew I needed to give this information to the authorities. But doing so would be like handing Sam over to the police too.
I sighed. “I haven’t brushed up on the ethics rules lately, but I think there has to be some threat of imminent harm or danger before I can go to the police without breaching my ethical duty. And as for Anna seeing them, the privilege might stand if it was Michael’s intent to keep them under lock and key away from her. Anyway, I don’t have any proof that these documents got him killed. A resignation letter and an email thread to schedule a phone call isn’t much motivation for a murder. And Anna made me promise that I’d find out what’s behind all this, just in case Michael was tangled up in some sort of trouble.”
“That’s not your job, Ell. Who are you? Nancy Drew?! This isn’t just Houghton’s confidential information. It’s possibly evidence in a murder investigation. Maybe somebody killed him because he threatened to blow the cover on Nate’s dementia.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But Willow said the cover-up was Michael’s idea.”
“What the hell? The guy was having an affair with some woman. Now he’s involved in a fraud and cover-up. He sure fooled me.”