Deadly Audit

By David M Selcer

Winston Barquist III, a former big time corporate attorney who narrowly escaped disbarment, is now a 300 pound, moped-riding lawyer, turning his life around with a new girlfriend and a re-invented career as a sole practitioner in a flea-bag office above a Dairy Mart. Mostly, his cases consist of defending small-time hoods and negotiating simple divorces, but his life takes an abrupt new direction when a svelte society matron parks her Mercedes at his front door and hires him to investigate a large fund in which she and her business-mogul husband are both trustees. Doesn’t sound too dangerous––that is, until bullets start flying and our intrepid hero finds himself in the middle of one DEADLY AUDIT.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cozy Cat Press
• Release date: Apr 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301982479

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DEADLY AUDIT

(A Buckeye Barrister Mystery)

David M. Selcer

Published by Cozy Cat Press at Smashwords

Copyright © 2013 David M. Selcer

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and events are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Some of the locations described in the book actually exist, but are described from the characters’ points of view and do not necessarily represent the traditional perspective of such locales.

Dedicated to my wife, Susan, who never stopped encouraging me to write

CHAPTER ONE

The only time I can get away unnoticed is four o’clock this afternoon. Can I come to your office then? The velvet voice at the other end of the line made it impossible to say anything but yes, even though I had planned a nap for myself after the game.

My name is Winston Barchrist, III, and I came to Columbus, Ohio, after my disbarment proceedings ended in Illinois. I was never actually disbarred, but what they did do, ruined my law career big time. I call it The Great Catastrophe.

Ten years ago, just out of Ohio State Law School, I landed myself a job at Chicago’s largest law firm where I was a lowly, but eager, associate trying to specialize in securities law. Part of the art of securities law is to disclose information about a stock before it’s sold, and whether the information be good or bad news, to make it sound like the stock was sent down from heaven for the ravenous pack of speculators waiting out there to buy it.

What happened, you ask? Well, in short, I missed something. I thought a ten million dollar charge against a multi-billion dollar corporation’s earnings for a recently discovered fraud in the sale of insurance policies was immaterial because the amount was mere pocket change to a company that size. So I failed to disclose it.

In a class action law suit filed by the stockholders, captioned SEC v. Winston Barchrist III, et al., the Supreme Court thought otherwise. The et al. included my law firm, the accounting firm, the underwriters, and the actual perpetrator of the fraud, Mr. I. M. Canard. I was included on principle because the SEC’s disclosure rules apply to everyone, even the lowliest associate of a law firm, to quote the Court’s opinion. Why my name had to be first, I’ll never know, but it changed my life.

After the Court held my law firm liable for more than their malpractice insurance covered, the firm sought my disbarment. I lost my job, which made me very depressed––so depressed that when the Illinois Bar Association finally cleared me of all personal and professional wrong-doing, I hardly noticed. It had something to do with there being no precedent that a mistake like mine was illegal before I made it, even though the Court said the securities law clearly required the disclosure I had missed.

By that time, my wife, Angela, had already left me, taking our 15 month- old-daughter with her. Nobody in Chicago would hire me, even though I’d been cleared. I lost everything, and just too emphasize that losers can get depressed, I managed to put on close to 100 pounds, taking me north of the 320 pound category. I couldn’t stop eating. Everything was fair game if it was in front of me. Selling tacos on the street? I’ll take eight; thanks. Oh, free ice cream at a street fair? Give me a banana split please. Mmm. Offering a Sunday buffet? Let’s see; I’ll try the roast beef, the fried chicken, the ham, the fish, and the ravioli if it has meat, and give me the noodles and sour cream with my baked potatoes, some fried cauliflower, and as many types of salads as you can get on my salad plate. If it was in front of me, I ate it. My waist expanded to 54 inches and my chest developed huge flaccid breasts. My arms waived with flab and my legs, which had once been beautiful––lean and strong––were now the legs of the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

I returned, like a disabled blimp limping back to its original hangar, to Columbus, Ohio, only to find that no law firm would hire me here either. So, I hung out my own shingle and started doing DUIs, divorces, small bankruptcies and mal-practice cases against other lawyers—anything I could get my hands on. Of course, the latter didn’t endear me to the local bar association. Today, I lead the life of a very parsimonious sole practitioner.

I loved Angela a lot, and losing her and the baby has permanently scarred me. I still often think of her––with her streaming blond hair––at night when I can’t fall asleep. I don’t know if I’ll ever find a replacement for her, or if I want to. She’s an open wound. And I’ll probably never see my daughter again. I don’t even know where they are.

Anyway, that’s enough of my resume. On this particular football Saturday, since it was a certainty by the fourth quarter that the Buckeyes would lose, I didn’t mind prying myself off the couch in my Bexley duplex living room to go to the office. I inserted the earpiece of my Walkman into my oversized biker’s helmet and headed downtown on my yellow Vespa. Actually, it’s a 2000 Vespa ET2 moped (2-stroke). The five mile ride from my ramshackle double on South Drexel is an easy trip by motor scooter, except in the winter. Then, I use the ancient Kawasaki in my garage, because slush often fills the streets and it’s was just too cold and dangerous to muddle along all that way on a slow moped, especially with a man of my heft trying to balance it while keeping his brief case and brown sandwich bag in the basket.

I also kept a 1985 blue Honda Civic at the ready in the garage behind my place, for days when I had to trek around town interviewing witnesses or filing papers. But it cost too much to drive and park, and it was pretty hard to pry myself into it even with the customized tracks under the driver’s seat which allowed the front seat to move all the way back against the back seat in order to make enough room for my gigantic legs. In truth, with me in it, the car was little more than a hopped-up Hoveround Power Chair with metal sides.

Admittedly, after The Great Catastrophe, financial circumstances controlled my practice habits. I had a very low overhead. The competition for divorces, simple bankruptcies and the collections I now did was very steep. There were 5000 attorneys in Columbus, which is a bigger city than most people think. According to Wikipedia, there are 18 cities and towns named Columbus in the United States, but everyone who’s ever been here knows Columbus, Ohio, is the Columbus. We’re the ones with a statue of Christopher and a replica of the Santa Maria floating in the Scioto River to prove it.

As I scootered along East Main Street, past its decaying buildings and low class bars, toward Third Avenue, I listened to the fourth quarter of the Ohio State game through my helmet earpiece. It was an Autumn Saturday. Iowa had just scored another touchdown, moving the Hawkeyes into the lead in what was becoming an all too familiar scenario at Buckeye Stadium. Buckeye defensive running-back, Ivan Stevens, had just missed another tackle, and as in other games in this particular year where the opposing team had a passing offense, Ohio State’s defense was crumbling in the second half.

I stopped at Wass’s to have a beer at the end of the game before meeting the velvet voice at my office. Wass’s was between the first Zettler’s Hardware Store in town and Dick’s Fish Market, which had been declared a landmark at the turn of the 21st Century. Wass let me park my Vespa inside his establishment by the door because the neighborhood was a little rough and there were a lot of collectors around who liked to pick up stuff they could pawn across town.

Dick Wasserberg had been cooking lunches and selling beer for forty years near the same corner in the southeast downtown community. His place still had the original mahogany bar in it from 1920 when his father cooked brats and sold beer there. Behind the bar, intricately scrolled mahogany shelves framed a huge oval mirror, and there were beer logos, neon signs and advertisements from Columbus breweries that had gone out of business long ago.

He called the bar Dick’s Den now, appropriating the name of a famous campus bar on North High Street he thought was going out of business, only to find that a year later the owners had opened under the same name in another location. Of course there was a lawsuit and I was representing him.

The only other customer in the place when I arrived, was Trudy Fischel, a computer geek from New York with an investigator’s license whom I sometimes employed if I could afford her. Trudy was in her mid- forties, but she still had long bleached blond hair and nice legs, and she wore tight fitting tops that rode up in the back revealing her tramp stamp. In another world, she might have been taken as some kind of east coast activist who had graduated from Sara Lawrence or maybe Vassar, 25 years ago. In the darkness of Wass’s bar, she could even look inviting.

Well, if it isn’t Mr. Barchrist, lurking outside his cave on a Saturday afternoon! She coughed, her hand under her chin, palm up, with a cigarette between her fingers, ashing all over the bar. Wass permitted smoking when things were slow, even though it was against the law, but most of the time Trudy had to smoke outside. You’d be talking to her and suddenly when you were in the middle of a sentence she’d just say ‘excuse me,’ and go outside for a smoke, picking up the conversation when she returned as if nothing had happened.

What brings you to this part of our fair cow town on a Saturday, Sir Winston? she wheezed.

I’m meeting a client, and it’s no longer a cow town, in case you haven’t noticed, I said defensively.

Here?

No, at my office. She could only meet on Saturday.

She?

Privileged information, Trudes . . . sorry, I replied.

It’s OK. You know I can find out if I want to anyways. Just start a file for her on your computer. I dare you. I’ll be into it in a New York minute.

Trudy was the best computer hacker in Columbus. The story on her was she’d come to town after getting away with the robbery of a bank money machine outlet in New York. No one could ever prove it, of course, and she did have her investigator’s license, which made this tale seem highly improbable. But I believed it. Personally, I suspected she’d grown up here on the eastside, changed her name and moved to New York, where she’d done the dastardly deed, and that she then came back to live in the Clintonville area where she could easily lose herself in one of the non-descript 1950’s red-brick two-story apartment buildings with old-fashioned casement windows that dotted the city. She lived under the radar, but she seemed to live well, judging by the car she drove and the hundreds of pairs of shoes she seemed to have, many with staccato heels.

Trudy, I parried, aren’t you supposed to be doing that outside?

What?

Smoking.

Well, aren’t you supposed to have your scooter tied up to a parking meter now that the City Council has passed that stupid law giving bikers the same rights as drivers on city streets? she shot back.

The game was blaring on the TV in the background. Iowa had just intercepted a pass by Ohio State. There was a penalty on the play, but it looked like the penalty was against OSU.

No fighting kids, Wass announced, coming over from behind the bar and shooting a mug of St. Pauli Girl my way. There’s already enough trouble over at the stadium. We don’t need any arguing in here.

You see, in the fall, Columbus, Ohio, is the Ohio State Buckeyes, and nothing else. People wear buckeye necklaces handed down from their grandmothers, and no other colors are appropriate for clothing on football Saturdays except scarlet and gray. People can’t think about anything but OSU football. Buckeye fans care a lot about winning. They’re unaware that outside the Big Ten Conference, some people don’t even know what buckeyes are. Someone from the west coast once asked me if buckeyes were protruding eyes like buck-teeth. Actually, they’re the inedible nut-like seeds of the horse chestnut tree.

Wass was wearing his grey football shirt with a scarlet O in the center, nestled among three buckeye leaves and the famous nuts in their two shades of brown. His registered trademark shirt cost twice as much as the simple silk-screened knock-offs abounding around town that didn’t have the buckeyes below the O. But to Wass, who was almost 65, it was worth it. To him, buying Buckeye paraphernalia was like investing in the future. Some day all these things would be worth a lot of money.

Just think of the Big Ten’s growth potential, he’d say. Whoever would have ever guessed the league would actually have twelve teams in it someday, as it does now? Not only did he love his shirt, but it kept the locals happily drinking at his bar.

Wass was also very community-minded. Look at this, he uttered with a tinge of disgust in his voice, unfurling Saturday’s Columbus Dispatch in front of us. We’re getting that casino, and they want to put it in the Nationwide District. That’ll ruin that part of downtown if they do . . . idiots!

I don’t think Wass had any idea why this might be ruinous. He was just grousing to fit in with what seemed to be the prevailing view that if we had to have a casino in the first place, don’t put it in that part of town, because it will attract a sleazy element. All the rich new downtown condo owners, who lived on the outskirts of the Nationwide District, were against the idea. They recognized the new gambling establishment would increase tax revenues and jobs, but why not put it out somewhere in the west side Hilltop Area, which was lower middle class, where the sleazy element would fit in better?

Suddenly, the door opened behind us, allowing in a blinding flash of sunlight. Jerry Shapiro, Columbus’ only Jewish cop entered. Off duty now, he had illegally parked his cruiser outside Wass’s front door, as he always did when he hit the bar for a beer after his shift. Wass hated it. He felt it kept customers away. He also didn’t like it that Jerry wore his gun in the bar.

Hey, Barchrist, said the policeman. Why would a Mercedes SLS be parked in front of your office? I passed it coming over from the auto pound. You win a big case or something? No other reason I can think of for a sweet vehicle like that to be in front of your office in a part of town like that.

Shapiro was a really nosey cop, and with the exception of me, most people didn’t like him. He was always alienating somebody in some way. He was so unpopular that the only extra off-duty work he got was directing traffic in the parking lots of the synagogues and the Jewish Center for event parking. But he was dependable. If you needed him, he was always right there. And, I’d needed him more than once, because, unlike the law offices in the nicely tuck-pointed, quaint little historic buildings dotting German Village, my office was located over a Dairy Mart, across the street from Planks on the corner of Whittier and South High, at the very edge of the Village, with its back door facing Columbus’s south side. The south side was one of the rougher areas in town. It was okay during the day, because Plank’s Bar was always overrun with softball players from Berliner Park after the ninth inning. But at night, it was a different story. I’d had break-ins, sometimes while I was still there working, and Shapiro always showed up fast when they occurred.

But a Mercedes SLS meant my new client was already at my office. The velvet voice was early. Wolfing down the remainder of my beer, I excused myself and grabbed and wheeled my Vespa out the door.

Hey, where you going so fast? Shapiro asked

He’s got a new client, Trudy answered, a ‘she.’

CHAPTER TWO

I putted over to the office as fast as I could, circled the block to scope out the Mercedes, and then approached my building from the back, so the new client wouldn’t see me dismounting my motor scooter. In my business, perception is fact, and the wealthier your lawyer looks, the smarter he supposedly is. Nobody chooses an advocate who can only afford a Vespa as his main mode of transportation. I locked my scooter to the fire escape, as, presumably the lady with the velvet voice was still sitting in her car, apparently not wanting to be early. My building was a two story structure, built like a Red Roof Inn Motel, now doubling as a mini-convenience mall, with access to my office from an outside covered balcony hallway that ran the length of the building. The entrance stairs up to my office were also outside, but covered, at the east end of the building’s balcony. The façade of the office entrance itself was designed with a nod to the 19th and early 20th century milieu, which pervaded German Village, even though I wasn’t really in the Village area. As clients completed the flight of stairs to my second story establishment, they found themselves facing an oak-framed door with a floor-to-ceiling fogged glass window displaying the words, Winston Barchrist III—Attorney at Law. Over the door was a glass transom, which was the only type of period decorating I could afford to have installed.

I puffed as I rushed up a concealed fire escape and in through the back door, leaving it open to air out the musty smell. I also flipped on the fan in the room where I kept my files and my rented Xerox machine. The wooden boards on the steps to the balcony at my front door began to creak louder and louder. I unlocked the door, just as I heard my new client reach the top landing. I barely had time to slip into the tweed jacket and rep tie I kept in the back room for the few occasions when a client actually visited me at work. I used the jacket, with its patches at the elbow, to give me the look of a roly-poly academic, especially when worn with the khakis I had on. In actuality, it was a huge expanse of wool that had picked up every odor I’d ever passed, and now gave off a smell that could curl paint. The running shoes and white sweat socks I was wearing didn’t help the effect much.

Mr. Barchrist? A sweet voice purred, as the woman entered my tiny waiting room. There was a counter there, behind which Marinda sat for the three weekdays a week she worked for me, and there were two relatively old, black leather chairs, framed in upholstery tacks, together with a lumpy green couch. It all barred the door to my stark little inner sanctum.

I looked up to see what can only be described as a Swedish princess, blond and in her late thirties, about five seven, demure in every respect, with diamonds sprinkled on her ears and fingers. She was wearing white Jeans fitted to her legs, and high heels on bare feet. As her top, she wore an O shirt like Wass’s, but her torso looked a thousand times better in it than his did. Around her neck was an obligatory strand of buckeyes commemorating game day. For a moment, Angela flashed into my mind, probably because of the texture of the woman’s hair.

I’m Karen Sverenson.

Yes, I said, I’ve been expecting you. Your emails . . . I’ve read all your emails.

Then you know why I’m here.

No, not really, I replied. It seems you want a divorce, but why would you come to me if that’s what you want? There are far bigger divorce lawyers in town, and I can see that you deserve one of them.

Karen Landrake Sverenson was an atypical divorce seeker, not because she was from Upper Arlington––by far the city’s wealthiest suburb––but because she was married to a very prominent man, the biggest developer in Columbus––Leo Sverenson. He’d built the Sverenson Office Building and Hotel complex downtown, multiple shopping centers, the most well known of which was the Town Center, that abutted his