CASHED OUT
By
Michael H. Rubin
Dedication
To Ayan, whose love, creativity, and support make this book (and everything else) possible.
Acknowledgement
Professor Michael Adams read early versions of the manuscript, and his comments and encouragement were invaluable. Attorney Phelan “Chuck” Hurewitz and agent Linda Langton have shepherded this project along. But above all else, I cannot acknowledge enough the contributions of my wife, Ayan. We developed and refined the many characters and plot lines together, and she revised and edited each draft of the manuscript. This book is as much the result of her efforts as my own.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
About the Author
Chapter 1
Failed lawyer? Damn right I’m a failed lawyer. Got a failed marriage, three maxed-out credit cards, and a broken-down office with a mortgage that’s underwater.
Until three weeks ago, I had no clients and no money.
Well, no clients except for G.G. Guidry, and he’s just been murdered.
And no money, except for the $4,452,737 in cash that G.G. had left with me for safekeeping.
G.G. Guidry hired me on a Sunday morning. Less than a hundred hours later he was dead. His body was found on the industrial plant site of toxic waste processor Camellia Industries, floating in one of the “holding ponds” in a scummy mixture of petroleum waste, drilling fluid, arsenic, lead, barium, chromium, manganese, mercury, and who knows what-all.
The police initially thought that G.G. had been overcome by fumes and had fallen in. But when they pulled his body out, the cause of death was clear. G.G. had been shot three times. Once in the stomach. Once in the chest. And once in the forehead.
He was dead before someone dumped him in all that muck.
Chapter 2
THE FIRST SUNDAY IN JUNE
The knock on my office door startled me. I hadn’t had a client – or a visitor – in weeks. And no one ever came by on a Sunday.
There he was, looking just like he appeared on all the TV newscasts. Big cigar. Florid face. Mound of swept-back gray hair. Houndstooth sports coat stretched over a patterned black-and-white silk shirt. The utter confidence of a huckster stuffed in a rotund casing.
“Lawyer Schexnaydre, glad to meet you. G.G. Guidry. Son, this is your lucky day. You’re just the man I want to hire, and when you hear what I want, you’re gonna thank me.”
He pumped my hand and barged right in.
I was more than a little embarrassed that the notoriously successful G.G. Guidry saw how I operated. My office is in my house. An old, run-down house. My conference room used to be a living room. Several windowpanes are cracked. The fireplace hasn’t functioned in years. The wallpaper is peeling away at the corners. My conference table is actually two old cypress doors, scratched and faded, set on saw horses and surrounded by six mismatched chairs with torn seats.
Guidry took it all in with a withering glance.
I pulled out my battered faux-leather folio containing an iPad and Bluetooth keyboard and said, in my best professional voice, “So?”
Yeah, that was a little abrupt, I know. I should have engaged in all the perfunctory pleasantries that normally begin a business meeting, but I had dispensed with all that long ago.
Catch Adkinson, my former boss at the biggest law firm in town, had noted as much in my final annual review: “Still has the intellectual ability, but now seems to be lacking the requisite ‘people skills.’” Damn right, after what had happened to me there.
“Hell,” said G.G. Guidry. “I’ve got a shit-load of a real estate deal and a bunch of corporate work, and I need you to paper it up.”
“Real estate and corporate. Got it,” I said, trying not to salivate.
The news had been full of stories about the temporary restraining order that had shut down Camellia Industries. G.G. had been making vast profits there, what with Camellia’s “reprocessing” of anything and everything, from asbestos-tainted materials to petrochemical plant waste, oil-sheened swamp sludge still being scraped up years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, used drilling mud from oil wells, and spent fracking fluids. G.G. had been a constant presence in the press, excoriating his opponents and promising to get the plant back up, running, and even expanded.
How G.G. had gotten to me, I didn’t know and didn’t care. I’d show all the other attorneys in town that I was still a lawyer to be reckoned with, not the failure they thought I had become.
“What you’ve got to understand is this: I own some property out on Bayou Grosse Noir, and I need to assemble some tracts next to it. It’s a full quarter section of land, and it’s in five parcels, each owned by a different group. One is held by old man Chevallier and the second by the Caitelleau family. You know them?”
“No.” He hadn’t come to me because of my connections. I’d never been part of the country-club-golf-and-tennis-playing-socially-connected-society-set. My ex-wife wife had – a former cheerleader who turned heads whenever she sashayed by – but I’d been too busy building my law practice, going out of town for weeks at a time to argue cases for Catch Adkinson. And when I finally had time, after I was fired by Catch’s law firm, no one wanted me around.
“Well, don’t matter.” Guidry took the cigar out of his mouth and rolled it between his fingers, looking with obvious disgust at the dusty window blinds in this room and the adjacent kitchen’s dirty linoleum floor. “Just do me up the corporate documents. That’s the first step.”
I didn’t care how he felt about my h
ouse. I don’t like it all that much myself. I had pretty much ceased caring about almost everything, other than trying to figure out a way to stay one step ahead of a bankruptcy filing.
I was already making a mental checklist of items to cover and fees to charge, so I asked, “Do you have purchase agreements on any of these?”
“Hell no, son.” Guidry yanked the cigar out of his mouth and leaned forward across the table, its edge making an indentation in his gut. “If I had purchase agreements, would I need corporate work done?” He pointed his cigar at me like a dagger. “You’re gonna form me five corporations. You’re gonna be the agent for all of them. I got a good right-of-way man who’s out there right now arranging to buy up those tracts.”
“Five corporations,” I said, confirming the scope of the project. “But,” I added, “if the owners are all going to sell, do you really need five?” My questioning whether he needed fewer corporations than he had asked for was my way of trying to look like I wasn’t as desperate as I really was.
“Goddammit, son. Here I am bringing you the best work that you’ve probably had in a long while, and you’re trying to tell me my business? Look, they sure as hell ain’t gonna sell these properties to me. So, let them sell to entities they think are gonna stop me. You see, son, you’re gonna form me corporations that are, let’s say, environmental sounding. Understand? Got to have the right label if you’re going to have a marketable product.”
“No problem,” I said. “These will be subsidiaries of Camellia Industries, right?”
“Hell no! Where the fuck did you get that stupid idea?”
Now I was completely puzzled. If he wasn’t here about Camellia Industries, why was he here at all? And, come to think about it, if it had been about Camellia Industries, why would he have come to me?
No time to ponder that right now. I really needed the money, whatever the job was. “I just thought,” I said, trying to sound disinterested, “with the news about Camellia Industries, this was somehow related.”
“I ain’t hiring you to speculate! This has got nothing to do with Camellia! Nothing! The damn temporary restraining order that those shitty little environmental bastards got ain’t gonna amount to a gnat’s ass. At the hearing next week, it’ll be taken care of. I got the State on my side, after all.”
Guidry took a couple more puffs on his cigar. “Just don’t you worry none about Camellia Industries. This don’t involve that company. At least, as far as you’re concerned. Look, there’ll be just one shareholder of each corporation . . . you just gonna sit there listening? Write it down, dammit! I got a lot of ground to cover.”
Impatient with the speed of my note-taking, he looked at his watch. “Fuck, I don’t have time to mess with this shit.”
He got out of his chair and started pacing the room. “You’re the lawyer. Do cookie-cutter documents. Don’t need to be fancy. Give the corporations any environmental-sounding names you want. Just make sure my name won’t appear on any public document. I’ll be here at eleven tomorrow morning. Have everything done up by then.”
A one-day turnaround. That could be accomplished, but there would need to be a retainer up front. No way I was going to work on a job this size on spec, not even for headline-grabbing Guidry. “Of course,” I told him, “there will be filing fees, plus a tax number for each entity, and then there’s . . . .”
Guidry cut me off. “Just do the paperwork right, that’s all I’m asking.” He reached in his pants’ pocket, pulled out a roll of bills in a gold money clip, and unfurled three thousand dollars, in hundred dollar bills, placing them on the cypress table. “I know what the going rate is. I know what the big firms in town charge. I told you, you’re gonna thank me.”
I had thought that money clips and corporate clients paying in cash were relics of the past.
“That’s your retainer. Take your initial expenses out of it. I’ll treat you right. I’ll pay you a grand for each corporation, a grand for each purchase agreement, and four grand for each closing, including reviewing each title abstract. If things go right, you’ll have thirty thousand bucks of my money in your pocket before month’s end. Understand?”
Guidry was going to be a great client. My career was turning a corner. Opportunities that had been closed to me for years were going to open up. “The corporate papers will definitely be ready by tomorrow. How soon do you want me to head out to start looking at the title papers in the courthouse?”
“What in the hell makes you think I would want you to do any such fucking thing? If you go into that courthouse in St. Bonaventure Parish to search the titles . . . a tall, lanky city boy down there, who no one knows, trying to pull all them conveyance or mortgage books to figure out who owns what parcels of what dimensions? All you’re gonna do is give those ladies in the clerk’s office enough to talk about for a week. No, Spider will handle that shit down in St. Bonaventure. All you have to do is review what he brings you.”
Someone named Spider?
Chapter 3
MONDAY
I had the documents ready and was sitting on my porch, guzzling my third beer of the morning, when a maroon Mercedes pulled up into my driveway promptly at eleven. Guidry dashed out of his car in a hurry, cigar clenched in his teeth.
A wasp-waisted blonde with big tits and loud red lipstick emerged slowly from the passenger side. She adjusted what little fabric there was in her short skirt. She was decades younger than Guidry.
I held the front door of my house open for them.
Guidry barreled on through, trailing smoke and the blonde. He stalked directly to the conference room. “OK, son, let’s not take all day with this.”
I brought the files in from my office. “I assume you’ll be President of each entity, and this lady will hold the combination office of Secretary-Treasurer?”
“Son, did a leech crawl up your nose and suck out your brains? I told you I don’t want my name on anything that has to be recorded. You ought to know that officers got to file those damn annual reports with the Secretary of State. That’s why Millie Sue is here. She’s gonna be the President, and you’ll hold the other offices and do as I say.”
Millie Sue was busy examining her nails with their Corvette-red finish. Completing that important task, she turned to look vacantly out the window, chewing on a strand of her blonde hair.
“Let’s get on with it.” Guidry brusquely snapped his fingers at her. “Millie Sue!”
Millie Sue turned and smiled at Guidry. “Yes, honey?”
“Now you just do as this lawyer says,” Guidry said, rubbing his hand affectionately on Millie Sue’s bare thigh, just below the hem of her tiny skirt.
What they wanted to do was fine with me as long as I was getting paid. I concentrated on completing the stack of papers. “I’ll need,” I said to Millie Sue, “your full name.”
“Mildred Susanna – that’s without an H but with two Ns – Aix. That’s A-I-X.”
As I pointed out where she had to put her signature on the first set of documents, Guidry’s hand was creeping up her skirt.
“G.G.,” she giggled, squirming in her seat. “Honey, I can’t sign if you keep doing that!”
She playfully pushed him away and wrote slowly, in childlike script, with curlicues circling the capital letters. When she finally came to the last blank of the last document, she excitedly put down the pen, looking around for Guidry. “This is great,
G.G., honey. I’m President of five companies! President!”
He was already halfway to the front door. “Let’s go, Millie Sue.”
Guidry ushered her out. As I followed them onto the porch, Guidry said to me, “Spider will be here tomorrow with the property stuff. Get the rest of the paperwork with the property descriptions done pronto. I’ll call you when I’m ready to pick up everything.”
****
I was awakened at two in the morning by banging on my front door. Dressed only in a pair of boxers, I peered through the peephole to see Guidry in a tuxedo, tie as
kew, pounding away with his fist. I turned the lock. He dragged something in, slamming the door behind him.
With some effort, he slung a mammoth leather suitcase, secured with a thick yellow mesh strap, onto my conference table. “You’re my lawyer, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“And what I tell you, as a client, you can’t tell anyone. Right?”
“Right.”
“This,” Guidry said, stroking the leather suitcase, “is confidential. It’s mine. It’s my corporation’s, and it’s mine.”
“Corporation? Which one of the five I formed for you?”
“This has nothing to do with those, you idiot. I’m talking about Camellia Industries.”
Guidry wasn’t making any sense. I had asked him about Camellia Industries when he first came to see me, and he had insisted that nothing I was doing in any way related to
Camellia. “Camellia Industries? But I thought . . . .”
“Hell, I’m not paying you to think. I’m paying you to do exactly what I fucking tell you to do.” He pointed to the suitcase. “Now look, this here is mine and my corporation’s. It’s confidential. Highly confidential. I want you to keep it here.”
“In this house?”
“Of course in this house. If I wanted to put it somewhere else, it would be there by now. I am a client giving something to my attorney. And you’re going to keep this something in your office and give it back to me when I call for it.”
Why was Guidry here at this ungodly hour? Why was he asking me to stash a suitcase for him?
Guidry saw my look of puzzlement. His hand clenched into a fist, hitting the suitcase with a solid thump. “You live, breathe, work, and fart in this shitty little building. Just hold onto this until I tell you otherwise. Don’t even fucking leave this house until I call you and give you instructions. Until then, keep this goddamned thing safe. Understand?”
I reluctantly agreed.
And that was the last time I saw him alive.
Chapter 4
Once I heard Guidry’s car take off, my dilemma began. Where was I going to find a safe place to keep this thing? No South Louisiana home has a basement. The water table is too high. And, if you’re rich enough to have a swimming pool, you don’t dare leave it empty for more than a few days, because it would pop out of the ground. My house is a one-level raised cottage on three-foot-high brick pillars, the underside open and exposed, so there was no place beneath the floor where something could be hidden.