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She looked beyond him down the hall.
“You’re early,” she said, checking the time on her watch. “I wasn’t expecting you for another hour or so. Usually, I have the office to myself all day.”
“You mean you come here every Sunday? Were you working yesterday too?”
Squinting, she pulled off the large glasses he noticed she used only with the computer.
“Maybe. Why are you early?”
“I had a thought about something and wanted to look up a case file,” he said, holding back a laugh. She was flustered. He held up a bag of sushi. “And I brought us a snack.”
“Look who else was working on our case,” she quipped.
“Ha, I could have been working on our case all weekend and likely wouldn’t be able to keep up with you.”
He retreated back down the hall to his office and sat his things down. Each junior lawyer was afforded a small room with no windows, and just enough room for a desk, a chair, and narrow bookcase. The doors were all fogged glass, giving them no ability to see each other or a partner approaching. He waited eager to see if she would follow him and admit he was excited when she joined him in his space.
“Which case file?”
“That’s the problem. I can’t remember the names of the case, but it was a big story around here when I was in high school. Did you eat yet?”
“Because?” She drew out the S, in a singsong tone, as if she had to coax him into sharing more details.
He logged into his computer and pulled up the database with all the precedence files in Alexandria, state court. He typed a few key words into the search bar, hit enter, and let the system do its work. Headlines scattered on his screen.
“You can stand on this side if you want to see what I’m looking up.”
She moved next to his desk where she could see his screen but was still over an arm’s length away from him. It seemed like progress, considering she was ready to beat him up with a paperweight a few minutes ago.
“Love triangle, scandal in the suburbs?” She read the headlines with her glasses back in place.
“There was this couple. They owned all the dry cleaners in my neighborhood, but the husband’s girlfriend tried to off the wife, assuming he would get to keep all the cleaners. It turned out the wife had been the business-savvy one, and everything was in her name. The wife survived, and her lawyer proved in court that none of the husband’s money had been used in the startup of the businesses. He got nothing in the divorce.”
“Very tawdry; I can see why that would get stuck in your brain.”
He looked at her with mock disdain. “The thing is, the husband’s family was filthy rich so the assumption was he’d used his money to start the businesses but for tax purposes put everything in the wife’s name. But the wife proved how she started the businesses and grew her own fortune.”
“So if we can figure out how they delineated between funds for the family and funds to start their business, we can use it as precedence,” she said, filling in the blanks.
“And likely find dozens more like it.”
She grunted, but her lips quirked in a faint smile. Before he could dwell on it, her stomach growled.
“Sounds like you forgot to eat, which seems unlike you.”
Backing away, she looked at the simple digital watch on her delicate wrist, and from his angle, he noticed a jagged scar for the first time. She was wearing loose fitted black slacks and a white button-down collared blouse. Professional, but the most casual he’d seen her dress at the office in the almost two years he’d been there.
“I’ve been digging into the financials. The business didn’t start with a loan or a large sum of money transferred from any of their joint accounts. It’s like she walked into a bank with a pile of cash and used it to create new accounts from thin air. Fifty thousand dollars.”
He nodded, looking at the blank white wall to his right. “Mrs. Tovar said she used an inheritance to start the business. Money from a dead aunt’s estate that she technically didn’t have to share with her spouse, per state law.”
“Right, but it was fifty thousand in cash deposited with no trail. The lawyer that handled the estate is no longer practicing, and she can’t find the one letter she received, notifying her of an inheritance. If there aren’t any receipts, how do we prove that Mr. Tovar is lying? He claims she used his money, or he knows she can’t prove where she got the money from,” she said. “We just have to keep digging, and I think you’re going to have to grill our client again about all the facts of this case.”
“Damn, that woman is making it really difficult to defend her. It’s just like they said in law school,” he said.
“What?”
“Everyone is lying,” he said, meeting her eyes and holding their stare longer than necessary. But he didn’t know what she might be lying about.
