Now he was giving her money. He and
his clients had to trust her to keep it quiet—although they
had gone over that part very carefully. Everything about the drop
was covered by the attorney client privilege and it was inviolate.
Even a judge could not order disclosure of the facts concerning
the handoff. He had worked that out carefully and they had reduced
it all to writing. Technically at the moment of the drop she and
her clients were clients of his and the opposite was true. Accordingly,
for this very limited purpose on this one occasion the courier
and the donor were clients of hers even though Maria personally
had no notion of either the courier’s or the donor’s
identity.
Since Maria didn’t know Dan
well and he was without his mustache, he wondered if in the dark
corner of a tavern he could, for a few minutes, disguise his identity.
Even if only for a short while, he wanted to talk to Maria Fischer
without her hating him. And it was the sort of humor he couldn’t
quite resist.
* *
*
Muldoon’s Pub stood five blocks
from the downtown university campus, such as it was. As Dan had
expected, there was only a light Saturday morning crowd, most
of it near the TV at the end opposite the fireplace. He found
a booth far from the other patrons, in a dark and quiet corner
of the room.
Dan Young was a member of an old-school
law firm that worked for private industry, mostly a group of lumber
companies owned by one Jeb Otran. Unlike the other attorneys in
his firm, Dan was anything but traditional. He had distinguished
himself early on, not only because he was daring and shrewd, but
because under the country-boy exterior was a man who prepared
like a bean counter and spoke with the eloquence of a prophet.
He wore cowboy boots, usually without the barnyard mud.
Dan had grown up on a ranch in Eastern
Oregon near the Deschutes River, outside of
