by Ron Liebman
Was I kidding myself? I saw the looks of some people passing us on the street. No doubt far fewer than years ago. And not necessarily looks of disdain. Just noting the difference. Yeah, well, so what? Still, race was one of those “you can run, but you can’t hide” kind of things.
It was on my mind that night. Was that why I couldn’t sleep? Or was it the case? Whatever it was, it was now 3:00 a.m., and I was staring out the window.
So was Carl Smith.
In fact, in some screwy way we were staring at each other.
Really?
Well, not exactly, but get this.
8.
Carl Smith had sold his luxury prewar Upper East Side apartment for a fortune and then had put another small fortune into a newly opened steel-and-glass needle of an apartment building at 432 Park Avenue, a structure so high (eighty-five floors) that it looked down on the blocks-away Empire State Building.
Carl’s new Manhattan apartment was on the thirty-first floor, level with Diane’s in Long Island City. Even Carl couldn’t afford to live on one of the above-the-clouds floors of his new building. Apartments up there went from $85 to $100 million. Who owned those? Russian oligarchs, Arab sheikhs, Chinese billionaires, with probably the occasional thirty-something American hedge-funder thrown in for good measure. City records showed that Carl paid $17.5 million for his place.
So it’s 3:00 a.m. Carl’s awake, like me. Staring out the window across the East River, right in my direction. His wife’s asleep. More accurately, out cold.
Tonight, like most nights, Polly Smith had drunk herself into a stupor. How do I know this?
Their divorce-case record. And I can come pretty close to pinpointing the particular night in question. Polly remembered that night. Carl gave her reason to. Here’s what she said in her deposition:
She awoke, alone in the bed. Her illuminated night-table alarm telling her it was 3:00 a.m. She turned on the light and pulled back the covers. She had wet her side of the bed. Again. She slid her way to the floor and walked out of the bedroom. She saw a thin sliver of light coming from under the door to the second bedroom. The one Carl had outfitted as his study. (There had been only one child to this frazzled marriage, and she had been estranged for years.)
Carl slept in pajamas, custom-made by Brioni, like his suits (the divorce case again). Polly squeezed the door open, and there stood Carl in his silks, deep in thought, looking out the window across the East River. She took a barefooted step or two into the room.
Polly, this doyenne of New York society, in her urine-soaked nightgown. Groggy. Still half drunk.
“Carl?”
He kept his back to her.
“Go back to bed.”
She took a few steps closer to her husband.
“Carl?”
This was an important night. Carl had come to a final decision. His exit strategy from Dunn & Sullivan was about to be put into play. He had been standing there thinking this through very carefully.
“Carl?”
“I said go back to bed.”
Carl heard the rush of something falling, more like slipping away. Something fragile, light. He turned.
She had let her nightgown slip off her. She stood there buck naked, facing him.
Now, Polly was no spring chicken, but she’d had a fair amount of work done to her. Her breasts were small, though no longer saggy. Her hips were thin, and her recently waxed legs belonged to a younger woman. She did her best to look directly at Carl. That wasn’t easy given the residue of booze coursing through her veins.
The expression on Carl’s face crushed her. At her deposition she had described her husband’s reaction as pure revulsion.
Carl left the room and went to their bedroom. After a while Polly picked up her nightgown and followed.
Carl had locked the bedroom door.
I remember that night at Diane’s, looking across the East River at that one building that stuck out, dwarfing the rest of the Manhattan skyline, wondering, Who lives there?
Carl made some important decisions that night. Those that dealt with Dunn & Sullivan would affect a lot of people. Me very much among them.
His other decision was to move out of his apartment the next day. He started living with someone he’d been seeing on and off for some time. A fitness instructor, quite attractive, with a near-perfect body, though not too bright.
His name was William Cunningham.
And he, too, was about to play a role in all this.
9.
I filed the asset-seizure case on Wednesday close of business, the day before Thanksgiving.
I wanted to catch GRE’s lawyers off guard. Make responding more burdensome, since now they would need to prepare their opposition papers during Thanksgiving and the run-up to Christmas, typically a downtime for litigation.
That was the way the game was played. Big Law took advantage of any opportunity to inflict pain on the other side. That’s how I was trained. That’s what you did.
You know, lawyering isn’t nurtured by genius. No, the mother’s milk of lawyering is preparation.
You worked thousands of hours, reading, rereading, researching, and drafting memos and position papers and legal pleadings, over and over and over. Logging billable hour upon billable hour upon billable hour. You sat at your desk, at your computer. Writing. Reading. Thinking. Day and night.
You took advantage of any opportunity to blindside your adversary, just as your adversary sought to do with you. So long as what you did was professionally ethical and not in violation of the prescribed rules of the road that lawyers were required to follow . . . well, you did what you needed to do.
My focus back then was on that road. On being a team player.
I should have looked in the rearview mirror once in a while.
I did learn that the Indian lawyer who’d brought the case to Dunn & Sullivan was named Dipak Singh. We didn’t meet until later—more about that soon—but did speak briefly by phone. He was polite, lightly accented. And uninformative.
In our papers filed with the New York federal court, we asked that GRE’s response time be shortened, claiming urgency, a need to seize assets before the company could sell or otherwise dispose of them.
I didn’t know then which law firm represented GRE. I hadn’t met Peter Moss. Knew nothing about him.
But I would.
10.
Thanksgiving was at the Hell’s Kitchen apartment. It was something.
Even though it was a holiday, I went to the office on Thursday and stayed too long.
I got to the apartment just as my dad, Rosy, and Sean were sitting down to dinner. It was traditional turkey and trimmings. Rosy was a terrible cook, but she did manage to make what looked like the meal you’d expect to see on Thanksgiving.
Just as I reached the landing at the top of the third flight, Rosy opened the door. I got the big hug. The double cheek kiss.
“You’re here,” Rosy said, holding on to me tight.
“Hey, sweetie,” I said. Rosy smelled like whiskey.
Once she let go and I got a better look I could see there was more than booze going on. (Or should I say going in?) While I didn’t know it at the time, she and Sean were already signed on to a serious crystal-meth habit.
Sean and my dad had just seated themselves at the dining table. I hung my coat in the entranceway closet and joined them. Sean got up. My father didn’t.
I hugged Sean.
“Bro,” he said, slapping my back. “Glad you could make it.”
I gave him my What can you do? look. Then I went over to my dad.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, bending to hug him. He just sat there.
“You’re late, boy,” he said. To Dad I am—and have always been—“boy.”
I let it go and took my seat.
Sean started to carve the turkey.
He was standing at the table in one of his marine semper fi T-shirts (these old New York apartments are always overheated). My brother’s tattooed muscles were bulging, but his hands were shaking.
“Want me to do the honors?” I asked, thinking Sean was about to carve himself rather than that undernourished bird lying on the chipped serving plate.
“Got it, bro,” Sean said. “No worries.”
And then he sliced into his thumb.
“Shit! Goddamn it!” he said, dropping the carving knife on the table and grabbing his hand.
Rosy got some super-strength Band-Aids from the bathroom cabinet and wrapped them tightly around Sean’s thumb. Back in his chair now, he held his bandaged hand up like a sixth-grader asking his teacher if he could go use the bathroom.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Fucking A-OK,” Sean said, his eyes crinkly, grinning.
Sean of course was also drunk. Or stoned. Or both.
“You need to be more careful, lad,” my father told Sean.
Sean was always “lad” to my “boy.”
My dad then rose from his seat. He reached over for the carving knife. I watched as he fumbled across the table. Almost too sloshed to stand. With my dad that was hardly a shocker, since he was shitfaced most of the time. For a minute it looked like he was about to tumble right onto the turkey.
I half stood to get the carving knife ahead of him.
“Here, let me do it,” I told my father.
That caused my father to reach farther and harder. He stumbled and almost upended the table, but he did manage to grab the knife.
“You’ll do no such thing,” my dad said. “I will carve.”
And somehow he did.
I can remember my father as a younger man. My memories begin with him coming though the door after work, tall and thin, once in a while still in his doorman’s uniform. He looked weirdly like some army big shot with the visored cap and the epaulets on his greatcoat.
My mother was always there to greet him. She’d help him off with his coat and hang it in the entranceway closet. And while she was doing this, she would take soundings.
What sort of mood was my old man in? Or, to put it more succinctly, how bad a mood was he in?
Dad would ignore his boys and go directly to the fridge for a beer. The whiskey from the cabinet in the living room would follow in short order.
Mom would always feed Sean and me before my dad got home. For years I thought that was just the way it was in families. I didn’t understand until later that our mom was protecting us from him. Sometimes Dad would drink himself unconscious at the table. He’d slump over, and our mother would then get him up and guide him into their bedroom.
And then there were the other nights.
The old man would look at his sons. Watching. Like a house cat with a cornered mouse. And we’d wait, frozen, knowing that something was coming. Just what? And how bad this time?
Well, there was no predicting. Like I said, Mom ran as much interference as she could. I also didn’t understand until much later that my dad was afraid of Sean. Sean would take my dad’s abuse. But only up to a point. When he’d had enough, he’d let Dad know. Not with words. Just a look telling the old man, Enough. And drunk as he was, Dad would back off.
Then, the next morning at work, there would be our dad, at his station in the Park Avenue co-op’s lobby, smiling and gently joking with the residents. Tousling the hair of the little tykes being led out to a waiting car by their mothers or nannies. Gentle Irish Seamus Blake in his general’s uniform and his lovely, lilting, Gaelic way of speaking.
Like a lot of people who have had alcoholic parents and siblings, I drink, too, but watchfully. People like us have seen what booze can do to a person.
Rosy had placed a bottle of red wine on the table. That was meant for me. This was emphatically not a wine-drinking family. Sean was chugalugging Pabst from the can. Dad and Rosy were deep into the Jameson’s, the two-thirds-gone Irish whiskey standing sentry next to the untouched red. Rosy must have gotten some assistance from the liquor store, because that wine was an “in the know” Napa cabernet (like she’d seen me order at Keens) that must have put her back fifty or sixty bucks. Maybe even more. How could you not love Rosy and her big heart?
I took some of the red, poured it into the juice glass that Rosy had set out. (Wine goblets in this family?) Then we all started eating, each of us forking or spooning from the serving plates in the middle of the table. (And Rosy’s cooking was truly awful.)
“So,” my dad said after a while.
I didn’t look up from my plate. Didn’t have to. I knew the drill. As they say: been there, done that.
“So,” he repeated, waiting for his dutiful son to face him.
Then I did.
A pause, Dad eyeing me, and then, “How’s life among the swells?”
“Fine.”
As self-conscious as it was, I went back head-down to my greasy turkey, bracing myself for the oncoming barrage. (How is it we become involuntary children around our parents?)
“Haven’t forgotten where you came from, have ya, boy?”
Big brother to the rescue.
“How could anyone ever forget that?” Sean told our dad, grandly motioning around the room. “Lap o’ luxury we came from? Huh, Dad?”
My father ignored Sean. He was coming after me.
He reached for and grabbed the red wine bottle and ostentatiously studied the label. He stuck out his jaw, nodded his head. Signaling, I guess, something like, Fancy wine for my fancy son. We all watched as he replaced the bottle back to where it had been.
“So tell us all what life is like these days among your betters.”
My betters?
He was getting to me. Every word or phrase loaded with the history of being his son, of enduring years of this. I was eight-year-old Carney Blake again. How could I still fall for this shit?
Sean and I exchanged glances. Drunk or stoned as he was, he was signaling me: Cool down, bro. The guy’s an asshole. You know that.
“It’s fine.”
I was mumbling, angry with myself for slipping so quickly back into childhood, yet unable not to.
That brought a smirk from my father. He was just getting started.
“And you’re now a partner in that fancy law company you work for?”
Only a nod this time.
Then my dad’s nodding, too, jaw stuck out. Just like he’d done with the wine bottle.
“And tell me, boy, are these grandees you’re workin’ for inviting you to their homes now? Introducin’ you to their daughters?”
“Carney’s got a nice girlfriend.”
This time it was Rosy to the rescue.
“Do tell,” my dad said to Rosy. And then to me.
“So who is this lucky lass?”
Rosy again.
“She’s a lawyer, just like Carney.”
“A lawyer? Well, then.”
Dad nodding, feigning admiration. His eyes narrowing, all the while preparing his next barb. The drunk son of a bitch.
When not in his presence, I could calmly tell you that what my father was doing was projecting onto me his own sense of inadequacy, his own deep frustrations at how his miserable, mediocre life turned out. But in his presence? It was like a knife between the ribs.
“And you’ve met her, then?” Dad said to Rosy. Turning on her. About to stick that knife in her.
And that, my brother was not about to allow.
“Yeah, Dad,” Sean interjected. “We both have. The girl’s a beaut. Black Irish, Dad. I mean really black Irish.”
With that came the Sean Blake grin, his mirthful-eyed instant-messaging system. My father could see something was up. Wasn’t as it should be. Something he wasn’t going to be at all happy with.
Then he go
t it. “Tell me, boy,” aimed directly at me.
“Tell you what?”
“You aren’t, are you?”
“Aren’t what, Dad?”
“A Negress?”
“A what?”
“There’ll be no black bitches in my house. At my table.”
His house? His table? I pay the rent on this shitty little apartment. That’s it. I was done. I pulled the paper napkin off my lap, about to get to my feet and get the hell out of there.
Before I had the chance, my father stuck his fork in a big chunk of turkey thigh from the serving dish and dropped it onto my plate.
“This’ll be the only dark meat that’s ever gonna be at my table. Ya got that, boy?”
I was stunned. Didn’t utter a word.
“Go on, boy,” he said. “Eat up.”
While this was going on, Sean had risen from the table and disappeared. I hardly noticed at the time. And then, just as my father was taunting me with his “dark meat” insult, Sean returned.
He had gone to the bedroom that he and Rosy slept in, the room that I had shared with him when we were kids. He calmly walked up to the table. In his hand was his .45-caliber semiautomatic. Fully loaded.
Sean stood there facing my seated father. He lifted the pistol, then racked a shell into the chamber. Sean placed the gun on the table to the right of his plate and sat down.
“Now, Dad,” he said. “That’ll be enough. You’re gonna need to behave. Or at least shut the fuck up if you can’t say something nice. You can do that, can’t you, Dad?”
Nothing from our father. He was stunned like the rest of us.
Sean then slammed his fist on the table hard enough to rattle the dishes.
“Gonna need a response here, Dad.”
I saw my father’s eyes darken, saw something primeval, murderous. He was raging inside. Drunk. Angry. And now humiliated.
Rosy’s eyes were darting back and forth, first to Sean, then my dad, then me, then back to Sean. My father clenched his fists. Started to rise.
No one said a word.