by Ron Liebman
And then surrender bled into his eyes. His pickled brain shut down. You could actually see it happening.
He mumbled something about needing to go to the bathroom, managed to get himself up from the table, and staggered toward the back of the apartment.
We watched him go. The food on our plates now untouched, cold. Sean and me sitting there in the shadow of the old man.
Just like always.
But this was no longer my life. Just a bad night.
Thank the good Lord, I silently told myself (like my mother would have said). For me things were looking up. I had been placed in charge of an interesting new case. My first one. I was long gone from Hell’s Kitchen, making more money than I needed. And I had a new girlfriend. Not bad for a kid from this neighborhood.
So a few minutes later, there I was outside on Eighth Avenue, huddled back in my topcoat, frost on my breath, hailing an uptown cab to my Sixty-second Street apartment.
As the driver did the potholed New York version of the Indianapolis 500, I bounced around in the back watching the blocks fly by and thanking my lucky stars.
And then a few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, I was served with GRE’s motions to dismiss our asset-seizure case.
I began reading.
My first thought?
Give me a break.
11.
By 6:30 p.m. the office had cleared out.
Not another lawyer in sight. Like I said, it was Christmas Eve.
So it was just me and the nighttime all-Hispanic cleaning crew, some sporting white-fringed red Santa caps, others curiously wearing paper Burger King crowns.
They were in a seasonally jovial mood, wishing me a “Feliz Navidad” each time they passed my open door.
I was sitting there, glued to GRE’s pleading. It had been filed with the federal court literally minutes before its clerk’s office closed for the day. (Like I said earlier, that’s how the game was played.) Courtesy copies had also been messengered to Dunn & Sullivan by opposing counsel as required.
I had to leave. Should have by now. Diane had invited me for Christmas Eve dinner, and I was already late. She was staying in New York for Christmas. Because of me. (I’d told her about my Thanksgiving.)
GRE’s lawyers had leveled some really nasty charges. It looked to me like a smoke-screen defense. They weren’t trying to justify what they did in India. Like they say, the best defense is a good offense.
Or like that old lawyer’s adage:
If you’re weak on the law, pound the facts. If you’re weak on the facts, pound the law. And if you’re weak on both the facts and the law, pound the table.
Meaning go after the other side. Get personal. Nasty. Dirty.
And so what were these charges?
A supposed comprehensive scheme to (1) bribe the Indian judge with expensive gifts, (2) ghostwrite the “independent” expert-witness reports relied on by the judge, and (3) ghostwrite the judge’s opinion itself, allowing the judge to then pawn it off as his own handiwork.
But you know, the more I read, the more I thought about it, the more I began to think, could there be . . . ?
Whoa, I told myself. Get a grip. Slow down. You’re an advocate. You have a side to protect. You’re a litigation partner in a major American law firm. Not some wet-behind-the-ears kid lawyer whose knees buckle the minute the other side throws some punches your way. I was a made man. (Well, okay, maybe the Mafia metaphor was pushing it.)
I laid the pleading back on my desk, swiveled my chair to the window behind, and looked down at the Times Square night, dazzlingly lit, teeming with throngs of people and cars.
“Feliz Navidad, señor.”
Standing in my open doorway were two young women from the cleaning crew. Early twenties at the most. Both were short, a little stocky, with pretty, angelic faces. And wearing Burger King crowns.
I’m sure I had passed these two countless other evenings when they were heads-down in the hallway, going about their after-hours minimum-wage chores. Invisible. Tonight they were smiling, filled with Christmas spirit.
“Mismo a usted,” I said in my best high-school Spanish.
They giggled. Pleased, I guess, to get a response in their own language from an American abogado.
We waved at each other, and then they moved on, the second in line lugging an industrial-size vacuum cleaner half as big as she was.
I retook my seat and once again picked up the GRE pleading.
Look. It was just a pleading. Just allegations. Proof of nothing. Not a word about what actually happened at the time of the plant explosion. Not one word trying to justify what GRE’s management did, or tried to do, to ensure the safety of its workers. Only these scurrilous charges about how the case had been tried.
I knew full well that lawyers are given certain leeway to write things in pleadings that may not—let us say—be truly factworthy. Not technically lies, but assertions following time-tested lawyer “wiggle words” like “on information and belief,” so-and-so did this or that.
Those wiggle words give lawyers a degree of immunity. Like an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing them to make claims that won’t necessarily hold up in court. And when that happens?
The lawyer tells the judge, “Look, that’s what the client told me happened. Remember, I didn’t say I knew, I said ‘on information and belief.’ It’s not on me. I promise I did what I could to verify. How was I supposed to know? I’m just the lawyer. My job is to advocate, and that’s what I tried my darnedest to do.”
Then the client loses his/her case. The lawyer pockets his/her fee. The client goes home empty-handed. The lawyer moves on to the next client.
And the words “on information and belief” were sprinkled over GRE’s allegations like cracked pepper over a dinner-size Caesar salad.
And no way would someone like Carl Smith allow a case into his law firm that was tainted in the way the pleadings said this one was.
No way.
That’s what I was thinking.
12.
Late again by the time I left our building.
I jogged down the entrance to the Forty-second Street subway station and impatiently waited on the platform for a train to Queens. The trains were on a holiday schedule, so I had a long wait. Finally the 7 train pulled up. I took it to Vernon-Jackson. Raced along the platform to the station exit, leaped the steps two at a time, and beelined it to Diane’s building at 4610 Center Boulevard, right behind that big outdoor “Pepsi” sign on the promenade that’s been there for I don’t know how long. By the time I arrived, I was bathed in sweat, wrapped as I was in suit, tie, and topcoat.
I raced through the lobby of her building, not giving the doorman behind the counter time to stop me and ask which resident I was visiting. There were no shouts from him as I turned the corner for the bank of elevators. Maybe he recognized me from earlier visits?
Willing the elevator to speed up, I got off at Diane’s floor, and then it hit me. I was supposed to bring wine. “Shit,” I murmured as I ferociously thrust my arm into the almost closed elevator doors.
Then it was down to the lobby and out the door so I could run back up to the 4700 block of Center Boulevard, where there was a wine shop.
Quick purchase, grabbing a white from the cooler and a red from the racks. Credit card. Sign. Thanks very much. Return smile of young male clerk, wearing hipster clothes, sort of like what backwater farmers wear but much skinnier and tighter. And with a decidedly non-farmer haircut, slick long hair on top with buzz-cut sides. Oh, and colorful, strategically placed tattoos on forearms and neck.
Back through the lobby. Elevator. Come on, come on.
And then at Diane’s. Hello kiss. Apology for lateness. Coat, suit jacket, and tie off. Open top collar button. Express delight over kitchen smells. Sit down to dinner, now on verge of being overcooked.
&n
bsp; And then.
“What’s wrong?”
We had been sitting across from each other at the small blond table pressed up against the oversize window looking out over the Manhattan skyline. The view was nothing short of spectacular. Manhattan’s landmark buildings (Empire State, Chrysler, and so on) were lit in blazing red and green.
Christmastime in New York.
Well, wrapped in my thoughts as I was, there could have been a massive, belching New Jersey refinery out there and I wouldn’t have noticed.
Diane had roasted a turkey. (For me, not her.) It was the missing twin of the one that Rosy had cremated. Miraculously not overcooked by my lateness. This one was succulent, tender, juicy, and accompanied by an array of sides all hand-selected by Diane from a nearby farmers’ market held each Saturday morning at an otherwise vacant lot over on Forty-eighth Avenue and Vernon Boulevard.
In other words, Diane had gone all out here, had spent considerable time and effort making this dinner for me. And she had chosen to miss her family’s Lake Charles Christmas.
And I was behaving like some petulant child, sulking because some other kid on the playground had called me and my friends a bunch of names.
I must not have heard Diane the first time.
“I said what’s wrong?”
“Huh?”
I was miles away.
“All good,” I then managed, with a politician’s sincerity. Adding in the same unhelpful voice, “Great dinner.”
Then I beamed back up to my starship.
And that’s pretty much how our dinner went. There was some perfunctory conversation. Must have been, since we sat across from each other and ate.
I drank too much wine. So much for the child of alcoholics’ booze awareness.
When we finished dinner, we both started cleaning up. We were at the sink in Diane’s kitchen area. She was rinsing, and I was stacking the dishwasher, still light-years away. Diane saw that.
She shut off the water and turned to me. We stood facing each other. Close. Diane took my hand and then led me to the bedroom. I looked back at the sink and counter, still piled with dishes, glasses, and whatnot. Diane shook her head, silently telling me, Leave it.
The only light in her bedroom came from what crept in through the open doorway. But it was enough. Again we stood facing each other. Diane started kissing me, unbuttoning my shirt. Then she took my face in both her hands, moved me eye to eye with her.
“Baby,” she whispered. “It’s a job. That’s all. Not life or death.”
And then Diane pressed her lips to mine. Those succulent lips. We kissed long and hard. Whatever perfume she had on was working. That and the potent aroma of her warm presence so close to me. When we finally separated, we undressed and got into bed.
• • •
After we finished, I fell dead asleep. I awoke hours later, slipped out of bed, and returned to the kitchen. When I flipped on the lights, I saw that Diane had already been out here and cleaned up.
I returned to the bedroom. Back in bed, I spooned into Diane. She slid in closer.
Now awake. Thinking. To find a woman like this? That’s a Christmas gift.
All true.
Still. Those pleadings.
It was a job. But not just a job. I was a lawyer. I had a sworn duty to my clients. I’m not going to get all operatic about it. But it wasn’t just a job.
Not life or death, she had said.
Well . . .
13.
I could see him, but I couldn’t hear him.
A guy playing a saxophone on the sidewalk forty-five floors below, directly across the street from our offices.
It was 10:00 a.m. on Monday. He had to be freezing his ass off in this blistery mid-January weather. There was an open instrument case at his feet, probably with a smattering of dollars and coins he’d put in himself to encourage passersby to toss in some of their own loose change.
The best I could tell from up here, the saxophonist looked to be in his late fifties, though he might have been older. He was wearing a long, worn-looking coat and had on one of those oversize green-and-yellow-striped Rasta knit caps. The kind for shoving your dreadlocks under. While he played, he would raise his sax and tilt his head back. As I said, I was too many floors up to hear, but it looked like he was really into it.
So Christmas was Christmas. Diane and I went with Rosy to midnight Mass. But not in the old neighborhood. I hadn’t been to that church in ages. We went to St. Joseph’s in the Village. Dad and Sean didn’t go.
I hadn’t set eyes on my father since Thanksgiving. And that was more than okay with me.
New Year’s Eve we caught a movie—Diane and me, that is. After Mass, Rosy took off and more or less disappeared. I hadn’t seen Sean either.
He and I did a few cell-to-cells. But it was just “brotherspeak.” You know? Hey, what’s up, how’s it going? . . . Good, you? . . . Yeah, all good. Sean was keeping his distance from me. His crystal-meth habit was pulling him down. He didn’t want me to see him like that.
I had been chained to my desk writing the plaintiffs’ opposition brief to GRE’s motion to throw out the case. I did it myself. Without help.
Big Law says that was wrong.
Why?
Leveraging. Or more accurately, the absence of leveraging.
Lawyer hourly rates at Dunn & Sullivan were steep. I won’t tell you what the firm charged for my services. It’s embarrassing. (Six hundred or maybe even seven hundred dollars an hour, you’re thinking? Think higher.) Anyway, that’s not where the real money was. For that you needed to populate cases with a full bevy of young associates and paralegals. The point was to have multiple meters running, all at the same time, as many as the case would take.
I had been assigned two juniors for this case. We younger partners couldn’t simply go out into the halls and select our own helpers. We needed to requisition them like jeeps from the army motor pool. I had called the firm’s staff member in charge of divvying out the juniors.
Me: I need a fourth-year associate and a paralegal for the GRE case.
Her: Just two people?
Me: Yes.
Her: That’s a big case. You need more help than that.
Me: Two should do it.
Her: You need to think about that.
(Some silence on my end.)
Her (again): So . . . how many?
Me: Two. (But I was feeling uneasy. Thinking, first, maybe I should get some more, even if I didn’t really need them. Then. But just to placate her? No way.)
Her: Okay. (But it was one of those “okay”s with an edge to it.)
Then I asked for the two I wanted by name. It turned out they were available. In fact, I was expecting them any minute.
So I was reading my draft pleading for the umpteenth time, still making small changes and adjustments, when I heard the knock on my door.
“Come on in,” I said as I blocked and stacked the loose pages so I could have them copied and given to the two juniors I figured were out there about to come in here.
But it wasn’t them.
Richard Miller (“Mad Dog”) stuck his large head into my office. Other than at a distance, I hadn’t seen him since he almost knocked me down when he stormed out of Carl Smith’s office. There was no shortage of office scuttlebutt about him.
The younger lawyers universally considered him an equal-opportunity abuser. His rantings and ravings, and other assorted over-the-top antics, made him the butt of some razor-edged lampooning. Not that the guy didn’t deserve it. Two years ago, at a private Halloween party attended by Dunn & Sullivan associates, one attendee came dressed as Mad Dog, with inflated chest and special growling Mad Dog mask he had commissioned from a Broadway costume shop. Don’t know if Miller ever found out about that. The young lawyer left the firm soon thereafter, but for what
reason or under what circumstances, I never found out.
Miller made a quick visual sweep of my office and saw there was only me. Then he came in and shut the door.
Just then there was a second knock. Ignoring me, he opened my door. My two juniors were standing there, here to see me as expected.
“Not now,” Miller told them, and shut the door in their faces.
He came over to my desk like he owned the place. Dropped his big frame into one of my two opposite-facing chairs.
“How you doin’?” he grunted. Mad Dog was always angry at something or somebody. His right leg was motoring a mile a minute.
“Good,” I said.
But I was thinking maybe I should get up and try and catch the two juniors who no doubt were walking down the hall from my office wondering what that was all about. I didn’t.
As I said, Mad Dog was a senior-level partner. He had what was called a book of business, a large assortment of active legal matters that were making a meaningful presence in the firm’s bottom line. A book of business brought stature. But Miller was a cheat. He padded his time and the time of those who worked for him. His expense-reimbursement requests were similarly doctored.
He had been caught on more than one occasion charging a client for personal items like tailor-made shirts, gifts for his kids, even his dry cleaning, all falsely described as client-related expenses (“supplies” or “meals” or “support assistance”). He always had an explanation: My secretary fucked up. I grabbed the wrong goddamn form. And so on. The time I saw him escaping from Carl Smith’s office clutching that piece of paper was after another such discovery.
Carl Smith wanted Miller gone from the firm. But quietly. So he had put the word out—the way only Smith could, with no fingerprints traced back to him. Dunn & Sullivan’s other lawyers should stay away from him. There was to be no working on his cases. Carl was slowly cutting off Mad Dog’s oxygen supply. It would be only a matter of time, and Miller would seek employment elsewhere, his work no longer getting done.
Carl needed to avoid any scandals. Not then, on the cusp, as he was, of convincing Wall Street’s bankers to take Dunn & Sullivan public. That’s right. Public. What Wall Street calls an IPO—initial public offering.