Joy Monrho.
Ike had not returned. I had a feeling he was not going to. I thought about my options. There really was just one more thing I needed to check. I went through the door to the foyer, closed it behind me, and looked around. No one was watching. With my back to the door I fished Joy Monrho’s plant badge out of my pocket and swept it past the activation pad. In response, the door latch snicked.
Bingo.
Quickly, I left. I did not sign out and I did not return my visitor tag. That’ll show them. Safe behind the wheel of my Mustang, I fished the business cards out of my pocket, flipped through them, and then dialed a number on my cell. Come on, answer, answer. “Hello?” came Ike Watt’s easygoing voice.
“What does EHS stand for?” I asked.
“Perkins?”
“Do you know?”
“Sure I know. Environmental-Health-Safety.”
I took a deep breath. “Question two. Where’s the plant saloon?”
“Beg pardon?”
“C’mon. There’s got to be one.”
“Uh... The Pour House. Dix Road, just this side of Schaefer.”
“Okay. No lawyers. Just you and me, two old shop-floor men. Half hour?”
“Sure.” He hesitated. “Don’t know how much I can help you.”
“Not to worry. I suspect it’s me that’ll be helping you.”
Micki called me back just as Ike pulled into the Pour House parking lot in his midnight blue Topkick. “Don’t postpone the deposition,” I told her.
“But it’s scheduled for Monday! How can we—”
“We’ll be ready. We’ll do good. Trust me,” I said, fingers crossed hard.
The Coyne Cose conference room — my second such in four days — occupied a corner of their suite on the twenty-ninth floor of the main Town Center skyscraper in Southfield. Micki Quick, in a Ferrari-red suit, met me by its open double doors, briefcase in one hand and bowling ball bag in the other. She took me aside. “Everything set?”
“Yeah, my guy’ll be here any minute.” At least I thought he would. Art had never let me down. “You got everything?”
She hefted the bowling ball bag. “I feel like an idiot!” she whispered fiercely.
“Well, what’re you gonna do,” I drawled. “What about the Melvindale crew?”
“They’ll be here in an hour.”
“You locked and loaded?”
For such a pretty woman, her smile was anything but. “This’ll be fun.”
“We’re ready,” came a female voice from just inside the double doors. Inside, at one end of the gleaming mahogany conference table, sat Joy Monrho, dark hair well coifed and squarish plain-Jane face placid of expression as always. She wore a sort of mud-colored cardigan over a black shirt. At the opposite end sat her opposite number, Faith Monrho, in whites and a hospital badge and heavy, dark-framed glasses. Her gaze was out the broad windows at the flat metro Detroit cityscape. Joy, on the other hand, was watching her successor, thinking only God knew what.
Arnie Bumpps, in full dark-suited Mafiosi mode, bustled in with his retinue, like a gander amid a flotilla of goslings, and seated himself protectively next to Joy. Halfway down the table, with her back to the windows, perched over a little steno machine on a tripod, sat a harried looking woman in a dark blue suit. “If we could begin,” she intoned. “We are now on the record.”
Micki and I sat at Faith’s end, flanking her. One of Arnie’s crew closed the double doors. The blue-suited woman said, “I am Maren Bickers, licensed court reporter and notary public for the county of Oakland, state of Michigan, under contract to Coyne Cose et al. Today’s proceeding is in re Monrho versus the Triangle Group LLP, d/b/a Stone Automotive. Case number DM-44510. We are here to take the testimony of one Joy B. Monrho, testifying for the defense. Which of you would be Joy B. Monrho?” Joy raised her left hand, no doubt deliberately, to show off her wedding rings. “Picture ID, please.” Obviously prepped, Joy slid over her driver’s license. After inspection, Bickers said, “Now raise your right hand, please.”
As Bickers administered the oath, a tapping came at the double doors. Bumpps’s doorkeeper, a whip-thin twenty-something with spiky black hair, leaned out, then turned and beckoned me. I slipped over there to see the squat, balding Art Drinkard hovering in the hallway. He handed me a big padded envelope, slightly damp from the sweat of his hand. “All set. Just hit ON,” he wheezed.
“Thanks, pal.” The conference room was silent as I went back to my seat. “Sorry, folks,” I said.
“For the record, I wish to object,” Arnie Bumpps blared, “to the presence of Ben Perkins at this proceeding.”
“Come on, Arnie... er... Ted,” Micki said, smiling. “He works for me. And look at him — he’s cleaned up pretty good.”
A titter sounded in the room. Bumpps’s scowl was fixed. “I respectfully ask the court to take official judicial notice that Perkins has, during the discovery process, acted in a fraudulent and deceptive manner toward my witness here.”
Woo, was I scared. “So noted,” Bickers intoned, fingers fluttering almost silently on the steno machine keys. “If that’s all, Mr. Bumpps, you may begin your direct.”
“He used to work for me, you know. I fired his sorry ass out of here years ago.”
Bickers’s fingers fluttered a bit more. Then she paused and gazed down at Bumpps. “Feel free to continue, counselor. Like you, I’m paid by the hour.”
Now here was a chick to like. I tried not to laugh. Micki beamed. Faith smiled briefly. Bumpps’s entourage stirred, and the spike-haired man by the door hissed, “Ted!” Arnie rose to his feet and blared, “May we begin.”
Joy Monrho’s direct examination went pretty much the way we expected. Arnie led her through her courtship with J. J., their wedding, their marriage. They reviewed the fights, the separations, the reunions. Joy owned up to three affairs, one just before their wedding and two after. She would not comment on J. J.’s fidelity record, insisting, with a quiet tear and trembling chin, that the memory of the deceased be untarnished. She was something, all right. Utterly credible. Yet she seemed a bit distanced, too, as if on a mild sedative.
The bulk of the time was spent on the five years between their divorce and his death. She recounted the informal if continuous extension of their relationship. And, under Bumpps’s labored questioning, she went into great detail about their together-time before and after his marriage to Faith. She showed the pictures I’d seen at her house, which were admitted as evidence. She described the phone calls, the e-mails, the weekday lunches. And she detailed the Thursday evening trysts, in terms that teetered on an R rating.
“It is your contention, then,” Bumpps said, addressing his witness but casting a glare down the table at us, “that J. J. Monrho, matrimonial technicalities notwithstanding, derived his physical and emotional comfort not from the plaintiff in this case, the putative wife, but in actuality of fact from you, Mrs. Monrho.”
“Objection,” Micki said quietly, speaking up for the first time. “Counsel is leading his own witness. And calling for a conclusion. Using run-on sentences. And whatever else.”