Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [92]
Jules Reginald Harlow met his attorney David T. Vynn for breakfast in a hotel. David T. Vynn preferred dining-rooms to offices, first because no ‘bugs’ could be listening and second because he was permanently hungry.
Over cereal, eggs Benedict and bacon on the side he described Patrick Green at his deposition as ingratiating, smooth-eyed and plausible, and over strawberries, waffles and maple syrup he outlined Green’s reply to Harlow’s charges, which was that Jules Harlow on the telephone had told him – Green – to apply the ten thousand dollars to his – Green’s – fees. He – Green – couldn’t understand why Harlow should want to go back on the deal.
‘Green was attended at his deposition by the attorney acting in his defence,’ David Vynn said. ‘He gave his name as Carl Corunna. Is he the person who told you to make your cashier’s cheque payable to Green? Is he the one who received the cheque and gave you a receipt for it, and couriered it round to the court?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘How is it good?’ Harlow asked.
‘Because I can get him disqualified as defendant’s counsel. Er…’ he explained, seeing Harlow’s mystification, ‘Carl Corunna is also a witness, right? If we go before a judge in his chambers – that’s just a room smaller than the whole court – I would hope to persuade him to make Green get himself a different attorney to defend him in court, and that will cost Mr Patrick Green a whole bucketful of his own cash, which I’m told he can’t afford, as he has already spent the thousands he stole.’
‘It seemed such a simple matter,’ Jules Harlow sighed, ‘to put up a bit of money towards a bail bond.’
‘Don’t despair.’
David Vynn ate warm English muffins spread with apple jelly and watched the slightly gloomy expression of his client change to radiant pleasure as they were joined by a vibrant woman who wore couture clothes as casually as overalls.
‘My wife,’ Harlow said, introducing her with pride. ‘She thinks I was crazy to listen to poor Mrs Nutbridge, and she’s fascinated by Patrick Green.’
‘It was for your wife,’ David Vynn asked, ‘that you bought the filly and met Sandy Nutbridge?’
Jules Harlow nodded. David Vynn looked from one to the other and thought Patrick Green hadn’t a hope of pinning drug-dealing sleaze onto people like this.
Even though the judge in chambers did agree with David Vynn that Patrick Green should engage a different counsel to defend him at trial, it was still Carl Corunna who acted for him when he demanded a deposition in his turn from Jules Reginald Harlow.
‘I’ll be sitting beside you,’ young David Vynn told his client, ‘but I’m not allowed to answer the questions. It will be you who does that. Remember that you’ll have sworn on oath to speak the truth. Think before you answer. They’ll be trying to trap you. Tricky questions. If they succeed in muddling you up, we’ll lose in court.’
So reassuring, Jules Harlow thought. He and David Vynn went to the office suite of Carl Corunna and in a boardroom there Jules Reginald Harlow came face to face with Patrick Green for the first time. He had expected perhaps to see deviousness, but Green’s success in the world was based on a plausibly persuasive exterior.
Green looked at Harlow as a fool throwing good money down the drain and didn’t in the least understand the mind of the man he was facing. In the context of the war-torn famine-racked world, Jules Harlow considered the disputed ownership of ten thousand dollars to be an irrelevance. Yet he still believed that justice mattered, whether on a huge or a tiny scale, and he would try to the end to prove it existed.
Apart from the four men sitting opposite each other in side-by-side pairs at one end of a long polished table – Corunna and Green opposite Harlow and Vynn – there was a woman court reporter who, on her swift typing machine, wrote down every word verbatim. There was also a video camera recording the proceedings, so that if necessary the spoken words could be synchronised with the video tape, to prove there