THE CLEANER
Chapter Two: Privileged Information
He arrived at the precinct at ten o'clock exactly, which Ava noted the way she noted everything that might turn out to matter later: punctuality as a choice, not a default setting. She had spent the previous evening telling herself not to be curious about which one it would turn out to be, and had failed at that project almost immediately.
The overcoat was folded over one arm now instead of worn, the suit beneath it a dark grey cut close enough to suggest it had been made for him rather than merely bought. She took him to an interview room rather than Interrogation; he was technically a witness, and treating him like a suspect before she had evidence would only give him a reason to stop talking.
"Coffee?" she asked, once he'd sat.
"Thank you."
She brought two cups, set a recorder on the table between them, and watched his face for the flinch most lawyers produced at the sight of it.
"You don't mind," she said.
"No," he said. "I prefer it. I'm not being interviewed as a suspect. The record protects me as much as it protects you."
"Experienced."
"Yes."
"Tell me about Marcus Ellery."
He looked at his coffee rather than at her, which she filed away as its own small answer. "I represented him for seven years. Personal matters. Estate planning, a handful of contracts, a civil suit four years ago that was resolved."
"What civil suit?"
"Resolved means sealed."
"By whom?"
"The parties. It isn't relevant to your investigation."
"I'll decide what's relevant."
"And I'll decide what's privileged," he said, not unkindly. "We'll manage that together."
We, she thought, and let it pass without comment. "The private client meetings. His PA told me about them. Unrecorded, once or twice a month."
He was quiet long enough that the quiet became its own information.
"You know about them," she said.
"I know about some."
"Were they legal?"
"The ones I know about were legal."
"And the ones you don't?"
"I don't know about them."
"Mr. Rourke."
"James," he said.
"James. A man is dead. His private meetings never made it to a calendar. You arrived at the scene at seven in the morning, before I'd even made a call. What do you know that I don't?"
He looked at her directly then, the full weight of his attention landing on her for the first time, and she understood in that instant exactly why juries were supposed to be warned about defence lawyers who looked like this.
"Ellery was cautious about certain clients," he said. "Not because what they did was illegal. Because discretion protected them."
"Protected them from what?"
"Complicated financial arrangements. The kind that benefit from staying off a calendar."
"Harland and Cross," she said. "Private equity. The Kowlowski case, two years back, the firm sat adjacent to it."
Something flickered across his face, gone before it finished arriving. "You know about Kowlowski."
"I was in Financial Crimes before Homicide. It crossed my desk."
"The firm was cleared."
"Adjacent," she said. "I know the difference."
"Yes," he said. "There is one."
"The clients Ellery met privately. Same territory as Kowlowski?"
"Adjacent."
"You're telling me something without telling me."
"Yes," he said. "That's deliberate."
"Why?"
"Because names are privileged. The shape of the situation isn't."
"Give me the shape."
He was quiet for a long moment, long enough that she could hear the hum of the building's ventilation and, faintly, Martinez laughing at something two rooms away.
"Ellery managed money for people who couldn't afford to have the management visible," he said finally. "Not always because the money itself was illegal. Because visibility created problems. Regulatory scrutiny. Personal exposure. The sort of problems that high-net-worth people with complicated tax situations go to considerable lengths to avoid."
"Structuring."
"Not necessarily. Discretion. There's a difference, and I know they can look identical from where you're sitting."
"Which is why he used a lawyer."
"For the arrangements that needed legal structure. Yes."
"And the ones that didn't?"
"I didn't manage those."
"But you knew about them."
"Generally."
"Enough to know who might have wanted him dead?"
"If I knew that," he said, "I would have said so at the scene."
"Even privileged?"
"Privilege doesn't cover knowledge of a murder. You know that."
"I do. I wanted to hear you say it."
He almost smiled, the ghost of something that didn't quite arrive. "You're testing me."
"I test everyone. It's the job."
"How am I doing?"
"Carefully honest," she said. "Which isn't the same as fully honest."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
"How do I get to fully honest?"
He looked at the table for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped into something quieter and more deliberate. "There's a file. Ellery kept one, somewhere outside the office and outside the Seaport apartment. A second location. Find it, and you'll have the client list."
"Why tell me this?"
"Because the file isn't privileged. It's his records, not mine."
"And if the file connects to Kowlowski territory?"
"Then you'll have what you need."
"Where would he keep it?"
He looked past her, toward the window and the parking structure beyond it, as though the answer required him to see something that wasn't in the room.
"A property in Cambridge. Not in the estate filing. In someone else's name, a shell, but a clean one. I helped him set it up."
"You're handing me the address of a shell property you built."
"I'm handing you information relevant to a murder investigation. The shell itself is legal. Information about its existence isn't privileged."
"Is it in his name?"
"A trust name. I can give you that much. The rest requires a court order."
"I'll have one by end of day."
"I know," he said, and something in the way he said it made her suspect he'd already anticipated the exact hour.
He gave her the trust name. She wrote it down without looking up.
"James."
"Yes."
"Ellery trusted you. Enough to let you build a shell for him. Enough to tell you about clients nobody else knew existed."
"Yes."
"And now he's dead, and you're sitting across from a detective handing over the one piece of information that might expose everyone he was protecting."
"Yes."
"Why?"
He met her eyes without hesitation. "Because he's dead, and whoever did it should be found. Even if the investigation exposes former clients."
"You liked him."
"He was a difficult man to like," he said. "Precise. Not warm. He didn't particularly care what anyone thought of him."
"Sounds familiar."
Something shifted in his expression, the calibrated thing loosening by a fraction of a degree. "He was a good client. Seven years. Consistent. He said what he meant, which in my line of work is rarer than you'd think."
"And he deserved better than this."
"Whatever choices he made," James said. "Yes."
"You're going to be part of this investigation. You understand that."
"I understand that."
"And if it leads where I think it might, that's Federal."
"I know."
"You're not worried?"
He considered the question with more weight than it seemed to require. "I'm a lawyer. I'm always worried. I just don't perform it."
"I'm terrified," she said, testing the shape of the sentence in her own mouth.
He looked at her for a long moment. "No. You're not."
"No," she admitted. "I'm not."
"Neither am I."
"You just said you're always worried."
"There's a difference between worry and fear. Worry is what happens when you can see a problem clearly. Fear is what happens when you can't."
"And you can see this one clearly."
"Clearly enough."
"Good," she said. "Then help me see it too."
"Tell me about the property," she said. "Cambridge. Why there, and not somewhere closer to his office."
"Distance was the point. He wanted a location he could reach without being seen leaving from somewhere that mattered." James turned his cup a quarter turn on the table, an absent, precise gesture, the kind of thing a man did when his hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching for anything else. "He asked me to find somewhere boring. His word. Boring enough that no one would ever think to look twice at it."
"Did you choose it, or did he?"
"I found three options. He chose the one with the worst light, which I took to mean he intended to spend as little time there as possible when he wasn't using it for its purpose."
"And its purpose was the file."
"Its purpose was privacy," he said. "The file was simply what he kept there once the privacy existed."
"You set up the structure and never asked what he planned to put inside it."
"I asked once," he said. "He told me it was none of my business, in the specific tone he used when he meant it kindly. I didn't ask again."
"That's an unusual kind of trust to extend a lawyer."
"It's the only kind of trust worth extending one," James said. "The kind that doesn't require supervision."
She studied him for a moment, turning that sentence over the way she turned over everything people said in this room, looking for the seam where performance met sincerity.
"You trusted him the same way," she said. "Didn't you. You never asked, because asking would have meant admitting you suspected something worth asking about."
He didn't answer immediately, and the silence told her she'd landed closer to something true than either of them had planned on that morning.
"Yes," he said finally. "Something like that."
By the time he left an hour later, she had a trust name, three flagged clients she didn't yet have names for, and a request she hadn't planned on making until it was already out of her mouth.
"When this is over," she said, at the door. "I'm going to want to talk to you again. Not in a room like this one."
He looked at her for a long moment, the recorder already off, the overcoat already back over his shoulders. "About the case?"
"About the case," she said. "And other things."
"Detective Calloway."
"Ava."
"Ava," he repeated, as though testing the weight of it. "Yes."
"That's all," she said.
"That's a significant amount," he said, and walked out before she could decide whether to agree with him.
She signed out of the interview room log, rinsed both coffee cups at the small sink down the hall out of a tidiness that had nothing to do with procedure, and found that she was, against her better judgement, already looking forward to the next conversation they'd have, whatever shape it took.
Martinez was waiting at his desk with the elevator footage pulled up, grainy and badly angled, a figure caught mid-stride forty-three minutes before Ellery died.
"Professional," Ava said, studying the build, the deliberate posture, the way the figure seemed to already know exactly where the camera's blind spot was. "Or coached."
"Not Rourke," Martinez said. "Wrong build. Too narrow through the shoulders."
"No," she agreed, "it's not him." And found, not for the first time that day, that the observation left her oddly, inconveniently relieved.
"Court order," she said instead, closing the thought down before it could finish forming. "Trust name, Cambridge property. I want it today."
"On it," Martinez said.
She went back to her desk and sat with the trust name until the letters stopped looking like a lead and started looking, faintly, like the first few words of a much longer sentence. She told herself that was an investigative instinct and nothing more, and almost believed it.
Both, she thought, remembering his answer from the lobby the day before. He's probably going to turn out to be both things at once. The careful man and the man who handed me the one piece of paper that could burn his own career down. It was an uncomfortable thought to sit with, mostly because she suspected she was going to enjoy finding out which part of him was true more than the job strictly required.