Gordon Pruitt arrived at his deposition with two lawyers, a tan like a golf membership, and a warm, heavy, room-closing handshake. He called Claire "young lady" once. She smiled the smile that had ended several careers of my acquaintance and said, "Counsel will address me as Ms. Hensley," and after that he called her nothing at all.
For the first hour he was magnificent. Pruitt Holdings was a steward. A rescuer of distressed family businesses. He had admired Eli Calloway and had stepped in, reluctantly, at the court's own direction, to keep the shop's doors open. Every answer arrived padded and upholstered. Brandt, seated at the far end as Pruitt's counsel, wore the small, still smile of a man watching a performance he had directed.
Then Claire began the walk. She is patient, and she had laid the path months in advance, document by document, in the order a man would have to deny them.
The original share certificates first — my father's eighty percent, never endorsed, never surrendered. Did Mr. Pruitt recognize them? He did not recall. The duplicate ledgers next, with Ruth Ann's columns of "management fees" flowing out of the shop into accounts Pruitt Holdings controlled — fees for management the shop never received, under a contract no one had signed. Had he authorized those transfers? He would have to review. The fees had a smell, and it got stronger every time he declined to recognize his company's paperwork.
And then the forged order. Claire set it before him: the wrong case number, the traced signature of a retired judge, the filing stamp at 9:47 p.m. She asked where Pruitt Holdings had obtained it. She asked who had verified it before his company took another man's business under its authority. She asked whether a steward and rescuer ordinarily accepted the crown jewels of an acquisition on the strength of a document filed in the dark by a clerk he could not name.
Pruitt's counsel objected. Pruitt conferred. Pruitt's tan seemed to retreat somewhere. "My understanding," he said, "was that documentation was reviewed and found regular. The legal sufficiency of the instruments was a matter for the firm's counsel." A beat. "Brandt handled the paperwork."
There it was. Not an admission — a direction. He pointed, the way men of his size always finally point: down and sideways, at the help.
Brandt's smile did not move. I watched it not move, which is a different thing entirely; it was furniture by then, and something behind his eyes had started doing arithmetic.
Brandt was deposed separately, in the same room, and the temperature of him had changed. He arrived with counsel of his own — a gray, expensive man — and for the first time since I had met him, Brandt looked like a client. Claire walked him the same path: the packet, the template petitions, the identical hardship paragraphs in estates that had never met. Delores Fenn. Harlan Oakes. Eli Calloway. She asked who had drafted the template. She asked what instructions he had given the clerk's office about filing times. She asked about envelopes.
"On the advice of my counsel," Brandt said, "I decline to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me." He said it to the hardship paragraph, to the filing times, to nearly everything, in a voice half its former size, and the smile was gone by the third invocation and did not come back. A man invoking his own protection against his own paper trail is a man reading his future in a transcript.
We rode the elevator down in silence, Claire carrying the transcript binder like a hymnal. "Pruitt pointed at Brandt," she said. "Brandt hid behind the Fifth. Men like that are a load-bearing wall for each other, Nora. The wall just cracked on the record."
Judge Ellison's order came within the fortnight. Not a ruling — she was saving that — but a directive: the parties would attend a settlement conference, in her chambers, on a date she set, with principals present. Both men would attend. Settlement conferences are where judges tell parties what is about to happen to them if they insist on finding out formally.
Mercer telephoned that evening, and I heard Claire laugh — an actual laugh — through her office door. Then she came out and looked at the bankers boxes, still sitting in the corner.
"Settlement," she said, "is where they offer you most of what they took and ask you to call it peace." She looked at me. "So before we walk in there, Nora Calloway, I need to hear it from you. What is it you actually want?"
I thought about my father's traced name, and Delores's cedar chest, and a clerk learning to read again. "All of it," I said. "In daylight. With their names said out loud."
Claire nodded slowly. "Then we'd better practice your poker face," she said. "You're going to need it across that table."
Chapter 21: The Charges