Chapter 1107: Kim Wexler
June 1997
"Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man's sake…"
The woman who handled bail read from Luke for a while, then set the book down and looked at him.
It was a motion to vary bail conditions, the most boring half-hour you could spend in an American courthouse. Alex was out on bond in the Barn case, and he wanted six days in Tokyo: officially to see a rehabilitation specialist, and while he was there to call on a business partner. The business partner was Sega. In federal court "the government" meant the U.S. Attorney's office for the Northern District of Illinois, and a defendant out on bond who wanted to leave the country had to come and ask a judge in person. The government objected because it had to. The defense leaned on the word humanitarian until it squeaked. The judge had a stack of these before lunch, so he didn't bother watching the lawyers. He watched the defendant. The lawyers' parts had all been written the night before.
Alex, in the wheelchair, dipped his head. He opened his mouth and what came out was a faint ho… ho…, his face went slack, his head tipped over, and Sloane leaned over and wiped the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief.
The judge sighed. He looked at the papers, then at the assistant U.S. attorney, who had nothing, then at the ceiling.
Then he gave them six days, on condition the passport came back to the clerk the morning after he landed and a bail supervisor flew with him at his own expense.
Gavel.
Out in the corridor, the retired deputy marshal from Pretrial Services' approved list, who'd drawn the assignment, was already on a payphone to his wife, explaining that he was going to Japan on Wednesday at a private citizen's expense and would be back on Monday, and no, he couldn't bring anything back, because the whole point of him was that he didn't touch anything.
"Heh," Alex said, once the door had shut behind them.
"Wipe that smile off, somebody might see," Sloane said. "The supervisor's name is Mullen. Twenty years in the marshals' service, retired, on the court's approved list, and we pay his day rate. He wants the room numbers tonight."
"Fine. Give them to him."
Old Mike had the car radio on low and turned it off before they were out of the court garage. "That's the third time this hour," he said. "Those three brothers. The mmm-bop one. I can't even hear on the right side and it's still too much."
Nobody argued. Hanson's "MMMBop" had been number one since the end of May, and every station in Chicago played it twice an hour.
In the car Sloane kicked her shoes off, put her feet up on the jump seat and leaned against his shoulder.
"You drooled on my handkerchief in there. Real drool. I'm billing you for it. One: McGill and Hamlin can't produce Jimmy, so they've sent a former employee to open negotiations. Kim Wexler. McGill's girl from your A+CN table. She's been in the lobby since nine. Old Mike had her searched at the gatehouse, gave her a coffee and her briefcase back, and nobody's said a word to her since. She hasn't sat down, and she hasn't asked to use a telephone."
"Good. Let her wait."
McGill's people had nothing to bargain with and they knew it. Keeping their own messenger standing in somebody's lobby for three hours wasn't going to change that, but it was all they had.
Old Mike had noticed she didn't take the chair, and he'd liked her for it. "Stubborn," he'd told Sloane on the car phone. "I like stubborn."
"Two," Sloane went on. "Halle Berry called. Amy Adams called. A lot of people came to the hospital and you saw none of them. And now you won't even take their calls? That's a little cruel."
"So call them back."
Sloane blinked. She'd expected an argument and had three sentences ready for it.
"Four times. Ms. Berry has called four times since Tuesday, two of them to my own line, because she figured out the switchboard wouldn't put her through. Ms. Adams has called the Peninsula concierge every morning at eight to ask whether a car's been sent. She's decided she's not going to call you herself."
"And I'm not saying it because I'm jealous," Sloane added. "I'm saying it because Halle keeps calling my line and I have work to do."
"You're a little jealous."
"I'm a lot busy." She pinched the back of his hand.
"Why are you starting to sound like my ex-wife?"
"Hh! Because somebody has to!"
At eight that morning, two thousand miles away, the concierge at the Peninsula in Beverly Hills took the call standing up. He'd taken it every morning for more than a week, and he'd started to feel he ought to stand for it.
"Good morning. Um — has a car been sent?" Amy asked.
"No car this morning, Miss Adams. I'm sorry."
"Right. Okay. Thank you. It's fine, it's totally fine."
"Would you like me to order one for you?"
"No," Amy said. "It has to be his. Hmph."
The concierge put the phone down. "Same girl," he told the bellman. "If that man doesn't send a car soon, I'm going to drive her myself."
"Halle. The Friday after Tokyo. The premiere, then dinner, at the house."
"She's shooting in Toronto until that Thursday, so that's a night flight, and she'd land at six in the morning."
"Then that Friday works. Amy — the twenty-second of August. And tell her it's a date, not a brush-off."
"That's ten weeks away. And she's been staying at the Peninsula on her own money since the day you woke up."
"The twenty-second." He looked out at Chicago going by: the river, a scaffold, two men arguing over a parking space with the whole avenue honking behind them. "Everybody else, take a message."
"So you are seeing people. Two girls, and not one of your senior managers." Sloane sat up off his shoulder. "Hayden's going to love that. Two actresses get dinner and your agent gets 'after Tokyo.'"
"Hayden doesn't look as good in a dress."
"Neither do I, apparently. I've been sitting next to you for five months and I don't get a Friday dinner."
"You get every dinner, Sloane. You eat off my plate."
"That's true." She lay back against his shoulder, mollified. "After Tokyo, then."
At Highland Park, Muffler was waiting at the door. Alex reached out and the two men held each other's forearms. "Hey, man."
"You look like hell, boss."
"You look like a man who hasn't slept since January."
Muffler didn't answer that. He'd been off with Tony the day it happened, and everybody in the house knew it. "Quiet night," he said. "Bought the boat. Tony hates it."
"Good. And anything that looks like nothing, a car that turns around, a meter reader who isn't ours, you come and tell me. Me, not just Mike."
"You got it, boss. Mike's gonna sulk."
"Mike sulks anyway."
Since the week they got back from New Jersey, Old Mike and Muffler had been walking the fence line twice a night and chasing every strange car off the neighbor's road themselves. If the same car kept coming back, Old Mike wanted its driver's name before breakfast.
Kim Wexler was in the lobby. Standing, next to a coffee cup she hadn't touched. Dark suit, blonde hair pulled back hard, briefcase held in both hands in front of her.
She'd been an associate at McGill & Hamlin until the payroll stopped, and she was Jimmy McGill's girlfriend. McGill and Hamlin couldn't show their faces in Illinois, so they'd sent her to hear what APLUS wanted for the money.
She'd driven out at half past seven with the offer in her head and not on paper, because nobody had been willing to put it on paper.
A polite South African had searched her, taken away her nail file and handed her own briefcase back unopened. That told her a good deal about the house.
Then she'd stood in a marble lobby for three hours with a cooling coffee and hadn't sat down. Nobody had authorized her to take a position on anything, and that included a chair.
"Ms. Wexler," Alex said.
"Mr. APLUS. Thank you for seeing me. I'm here on behalf of—"
"I know who you're here for. Sit down, please. You've been standing for three hours."
She sat on the edge of the sofa with the briefcase on her knees.
"You used to sit at the end of my A+CN table and count Gordon's paperclips," Alex said.
"Until the governor's wife had me walked out of the building." Her face didn't move. "I was told not to take it personally."
"Did you?"
"Very."
"I fly to Tokyo tonight, so let's make this quick," Alex said. "Fifty-nine million, taken over five months, run through Icahn's funds."
"I'm not in a position to confirm a figure, or an amount, or a route, and I was told before I left to say exactly that and nothing else—"
"You don't have to confirm anything. Some of it's been spent, and Icahn kept his commission. The rest is sitting in accounts you've got the numbers for."
Kim gave him a pleasant, empty face. It was a very good one. She'd built it over eighteen months in a mailroom and four years of night classes, and she could hold it through almost anything.
"So here's my offer," Alex said. "Everything recoverable comes back to me. All of it, by the end of the month. Whatever Icahn's fund charged on the way through, that's McGill's loss, not mine. If Icahn took two percent, McGill makes it up out of his own pocket."
"He'll say he doesn't have it."
"He's got a house in Winnetka and a boat in Door County. He has it. And every piece of paper that firm ever held for me comes back intact. Nobody new gets to read any of it."
"He'll want a release."
"He gets a mutual one. Privilege stands both ways. Nobody talks to a prosecutor, nobody talks to a reporter."
A mutual release meant both sides agreed in writing never to drag the other one into a courtroom again. Nobody admitted anything and nobody got cleared of anything. The whole business just got shut up in a drawer.
"And what does he get for all that, besides a release?"
"He gets me doing nothing. No suit, no bar complaint, no phone call to the U.S. Attorney."
He spread his hands. "The offer's good until I land at Narita. And nobody negotiates it but you."
Narita, Tokyo's airport, was thirteen hours from O'Hare. That gave McGill thirteen hours to answer.
She turned a page back and read something on it again. "That's a lot less than you could get. On those facts a Chicago jury gives you the money, treble damages under the state statute, and both their licenses, and it'd take you maybe eighteen months."
"Sure. And in eighteen months I'm still paying lawyers and he's probably in Costa Rica."
Treble damages meant whatever the jury found had been taken got multiplied by three, which some statutes allowed when the taking was deliberate. Fifty-nine million became a hundred and seventy-seven on paper, and whether you could ever collect it was another question.
"May I ask why, then?"
"Because it's fast. And I want my paper back more than I want the money."
Kim thought about it. "He'll take it," she said. "But he'll try to hold back some of the accounts, the small ones, and argue they were fee income and never yours. I'd advise you to insist on—"
"Oh? You're advising me now?"
She stopped. Color came up in her face. "I'm— sorry. Force of habit."
"Don't be sorry. Finally somebody from that firm says something useful. Keep going."
She looked at him carefully. Then she opened the briefcase, took out a single sheet with account numbers typed down it and put it on the coffee table between them.
"Those are the ones he'll try to hold back. The top ones are in Delaware, about four million between them. The bottom ones are in the Caymans, and that's closer to six. He thinks I don't know about the Caymans."
Alex looked at the sheet, then at her.
Somewhere above them a floorboard creaked, twice, and somebody swore at a chair leg. Kim's eyes came off the sheet for about a quarter of a second and went back to it.
"Ms. Wexler. When you walk out of here today, are you going back to that firm?"
"There is no firm. There's an empty floor on the thirty-second, a lease with nine years left on it, four filing cabinets standing open, and two named partners nobody in this state can get hold of." Her voice didn't change at all. "The associates found out on Monday from a temp. I was the last person on the payroll, and the payroll stopped on Friday."
"So that's a no."
"It's a no, and my rent's due on the first, and I'd appreciate it if that didn't end up in anybody's file." She looked at the window instead of at him. She hadn't meant to say the part about the rent.
"Jimmy's upstairs, by the way," Alex said.
She went completely still.
"He's asleep. He showed up with my lawyer on Saturday with a toothbrush in a paper bag. He works for me now."
"Doing what? He can't file a motion without calling me first."
"We'll figure that out. He's loyal, which is more than I can say for his brother." He nodded at the sheet. "When my paper's back and the releases are signed, ask Jimmy for Alicia Florrick's number. She's at Lockhart Gardner. She's taking over one small piece of my business, and she needs good people. People who hand me four million dollars in Cayman accounts on a coffee table."
Kim looked at the sheet on the table. Then at the man in the wheelchair, in a cardigan, with a blanket on his knees and a hand that hadn't moved since she sat down. Then at the house: the marble, the men standing in the corners, the old bodyguard in the doorway pretending not to listen.
"Why would you do that for me?"
"Because Jimmy likes you, and I like Jimmy. And because McGill would be pissed off if he knew you gave me that sheet, and I'd enjoy that. Call the number or don't. Up to you."
"I didn't give you anything, Mr. APLUS. It's a piece of paper somebody left on your table." She said it very precisely, and she looked a little pleased with herself.
She closed the briefcase. "I'll have a response for you tomorrow. Chicago time, before you land, and in writing if he'll put his name on anything. If he won't, I'll tell your Mr. Song exactly what he said to me, and you can take my word for it or not."
"Mr. Song lands in Chicago on the nineteenth, he'll be glad of the homework. Tell McGill the clock's running."
She stood. At the door she stopped and turned around. "Jimmy talks about you, you know."
"Ha. Jimmy talks, period," he said, and rolled the chair toward the elevator.
She walked out past the South African, got into a nine-year-old Suzuki with a cracked wing mirror, and sat in it in the drive with both hands on the wheel for a good while before she started the engine.
Old Mike watched her from the window. "Didn't touch the coffee. I made that coffee myself, kid. Three hours and she didn't touch it." He sounded personally hurt. "Smart girl. What's she doing with Jimmy?"