‘Janet!’ I called out into the office hallway, whipping off my glasses and rubbing the bridge of my nose. ‘Janet, where the hell are the Peterson memos?’
‘Peterson?’ Janet asked with a frown, stepping into my office with her trust clipboard.
‘Yes, yes, Peterson,’ I repeated, annoyed. ‘We need them for the deposition on Thursday and they aren’t in my packet.’
‘I’ll check with Reggie again, but I don’t remember seeing any Peterson memos,’ she said.’
‘Damn,’ I muttered under my breath, swivelling around in my chair. If Janet didn’t remember them, that meant we didn’t have them. She may have been annoying and shrill, but she had a mind like a steel trap.
‘What are the memos?’ she asked, suddenly standing next to me.
‘Our client swears that he wasn’t camped up in the office suspended ceiling while the plaintiff was discussing sensitive legal matters with their in-house counsel. The Peterson memos are his alibi.’
‘Was he in the ceiling?’
‘Does it matter?’ I asked, frowning at her. ‘He’s paying us an extraordinary amount of money to argue that he wasn’t.’
‘Which probably means he was, then,’ she said. I let a small smile slip onto my face.
I should keep more of an eye on her.
‘Will that be all then, sir?’ she asked me, scratching another note onto the clipboard.
‘Yes, yes,’ I sighed, waving for her to leave. ‘Wait, one more thing.’
If she rolled her eyes, I didn’t see it.
‘Sir?’
‘Find me a commercial plastering expert near Melbourne, someone trustworthy. Reliable. Nice face, all that, you know what we look for.’
‘As an expert witness?’
‘No, I want to have a dividing wall put up,’ I said sarcastically.
‘I see,’ Janet nodded, writing that down. ‘Where were you thinking for the wall?’
‘Yes, he’s an expert witness!’ I yelled at her. She nodded and wrote that down too.
‘Anything else?’ she asked, with remarkable poise, even as I could see her knuckles tightening around the back of the clipboard.
‘That will be all,’ I said, curtly.