by Ron Liebman
So, all in all, William played and Carl worked.
Carl was tracking the investment bank’s due diligence on the IPO. He was pleased with their progress. And he was proud of himself for having so effectively beefed up Dunn & Sullivan’s balance sheet with the five or six plaintiffs’ contingent-fee cases he’d brought in, each with the mostly illusory promise of off-the-chart legal fees.
It was a clever plan, bringing these cases of questionable value into Dunn & Sullivan. There was some chance of success for them, though at best they were long shots. They looked good on paper—if you didn’t look too closely—with their expectation of big-money settlements or jury awards. And they brought immediate cash into the law firm with their hedge-fund litigation-finance loans. But the odds were stacked against them. They were probable losers.
Carl didn’t care. These plaintiffs’ cases added (deceptive) value to the law firm. That was good for the IPO. The higher the firm’s value, the higher its stock value at the time of the initial offering to the investing public. And by that time Carl planned to be long gone with a treasure trove of stock in his name, all of it sold on the open market at the highest IPO price. By the time things at Dunn & Sullivan turned south—if they ever did—Carl Smith would be history.
Peter Moss was unaware of the upcoming IPO. (At least then he was.) So Carl Smith didn’t know the GRE case was a trap (monkey or booby, take your pick), and Peter Moss didn’t know of the pending public offering. Whichever happened first would surely affect the other.
Tomorrow, after returning to New York, Carl had some “domestic” business to attend to. He needed to deal with Polly. She was getting in his way. He had moved her out of the apartment, cut off her use of all but one credit card, barred her from the Naples home and the Aspen condo. Carl didn’t for a moment think he was being totally heartless. For Christ’s sake, he thought, hadn’t he actually had her moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a still-somewhat-fashionable Upper East Side co-op?
He told her she didn’t need a lawyer. Said it wasn’t necessary. And what does she do? Goes and hires one of New York’s most visible and vicious divorce attorneys. A guy the tabloids loved to cover, with his roster of athletes, hip-hop artists, and other newsworthy clients.
Her lawyer had called. Demanded a meeting. And he got one. At Dunn & Sullivan right before Christmas. This brainy and resourceful attorney who had the audacity to march into Carl’s law firm holding Polly by the arm like she was some kind of frail and damaged little bird.
Carl took the meeting in one of the rooms in the firm’s conference center, an entire floor devoted to gatherings with outside parties. The last thing he needed was his wife and her divorce lawyer walking down the hall to his corner office a few floors above.
Polly was drunk. He saw it immediately, even before he pointed her and her lawyer to seats across from him at the highly polished rectangular table. He had told the staff not to bring in coffee and other beverages, as was the norm for meetings held at the conference center. There would be no legal pads stacked on the table, no assortment of pens bearing the firm’s name. Nothing. Just Carl.
Polly’s lawyer was Iván Escobar, known as “Iván the Impaler” for his cutthroat tactics, his take-no-prisoners behavior. (How we lawyers love to come up with colorful or malicious monikers.)
Iván was slick and smooth, artful and nimble. There was never a shine off his shaved head, the rumor being that he retained his own private makeup artist, especially for his cameo appearances on CNN when he was called upon to opine on the latest celebrity marriage on the rocks. He was highly tailored, though not in the Carl Smith mode. No understated, elegant Brioni suits for Iván. He went to tightly fitted and boldly chalked pin-striped suits adorned with shiny silk pocket hankies, ultra-high-collared monogrammed French-cuffed shirts, and thickly knotted Countess Mara neckties. To top off the look, he wore his trademark black-rimmed, perfectly round eyeglasses.
Iván stayed in shape, so while on the short side he still made an imposing appearance. Here was a lawyer who would cut his opponent’s heart out and eat it in front of him.
Incensed as Carl was over Polly’s selection of counsel, he knew that Iván Escobar was not one to trifle with. All the same, he was Carl Smith, no match for some sleazeball divorce lawyer, no matter how famous and sharp he might be.
Carl stared at Escobar. Waiting. Purposefully injecting tension into the room.
“Carl . . .” Polly started to say before Escobar placed his hand over hers.
He had told his client that he would be the lone spokesman. That Polly needed to keep silent. Not a word. I’ll handle it, he had said repeatedly. And here she goes—two seconds in front of her husband and she’s breaking down.
Carl Smith watched this. Saw the pleading look in Polly’s eyes. Noticed Iván’s hand over his wife’s. It was pale and hairless, with glossy manicured fingernails. And diamond-pinkie-ringed, of course.
When Escobar finally removed his hand, he reached down into the thin calfskin briefcase he had placed at his feet and removed a neatly folded single sheet of paper. He slid it toward Carl.
“This,” he told Carl, “is a list of demands you will need to meet if you want to avoid an ugly and very public divorce proceeding.”
Iván stayed eye to eye with Carl. Piece of cake.
Carl slid the paper the rest of the way, picked it up but didn’t bother opening it. Instead, still locked in eye contact with Escobar, he tore it in two. Then slid the pieces back toward the divorce lawyer.
“Your services for my wife are no longer needed. You are discharged,” he told Escobar. “Send me your bill for time spent. Put your thumb on the scale a little if you want. But send it. You will be promptly paid. Good-bye.”
Iván smiled. Silently nodding his head. That’s the way you want to play it? Fine with me.
Carl caught that. Momentarily jolted but quickly recovering, he broke eye contact and turned his attention instead to poor Polly.
“Dear,” he said, “I’ll take care of you, but not this way.” Nodding in Escobar’s direction. “Not with someone like him.”
Another smile from Escobar. Another nod. He turned to his client.
“I think we’re done here,” he told her, rising. Then, to Carl, “Think it over. With me there are no second chances.”
And then he escorted Polly from the room. He opened the door for her, and just as he guided her out, he turned once more toward Carl, still seated.
That look? If Carl didn’t know better, he would have thought Iván’s parting look was one of pity.
Iván quietly shut the door behind him.
Carl remained in his seat a beat or two longer than he normally might have.
• • •
The tropical sun was getting intense, rising directly above the palm trees at the edges of Carl’s property. He checked his watch. Time to go in. He slid off his lounge and walked over to where William was seated on his bench doing dumbbell biceps curls.
He watched as William did another rep of ten, bulking his arm muscles even further. He liked seeing those protruding veins. Then William dropped the weights. He smiled up at Carl, gently put his hands on Carl’s swim trunks, and slowly lowered them. Carl’s erection popped into his face.
“Oh, my,” William said.
Neither Carl nor William saw or heard anything, consumed in passion as they were. But they couldn’t have anyway. It was too far off.
The private investigator hired by Iván Escobar was getting all this through the long telephoto lens as he rapidly clicked off one shot after another. The chartered boat was far enough offshore that its presence was unlikely to make itself known to Carl or William. It was just another boat out there in the ocean.
When the PI was satisfied that he had more than enough, he uploaded the digital photos to his laptop and e-mailed them to Escobar.
Within seconds
Iván’s laptop pinged with the new e-mail. He opened the attachment. Looked at the pictures. Sat back in his desk chair.
And smiled.
16.
There were three of us.
The two juniors I had been assigned and me. We had passed through security at the federal courthouse on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan and were standing in an upper-floor hallway waiting for the bailiff to unlock the doors to the courtroom.
This was to be our first appearance before the judge assigned to the GRE matter. It was just a status conference set by the court for scheduling, I had thought, nothing more. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was Peter Moss who had requested the conference. I think he should have given me the professional courtesy of letting me know in advance that was what he wanted. But he didn’t. I was about to learn why.
It was mid-February, and winter had been in a rage the whole week. Sleet, snow, near-constant damp and freezing weather was propelled by wind gusts forcing all this at us from both rivers (East and Hudson). Wind ricocheted off buildings throughout the city, boomeranging icy bursts up and down its skyscraper-infested streets. We three were still in our coats, warming up in this underheated hallway.
I had finally caught up with my two juniors after Richard Miller’s assault on my office. They got themselves up to speed quickly. By the time we walked into the courthouse, they knew as much about the case as I did.
“Here they come,” Jeremy Lichtman said.
Two guys in suits and topcoats had just stepped out of the elevator bank at the far end of the hall and were coming our way. The middle-aged guy had to be Peter Moss, the younger one his junior.
Jeremy Lichtman was my fourth-year associate. I had worked with him on another case, but before I became a partner. I’d been the senior associate, and Jeremy had been one of a group of first- and second-years stuck with the vast bulk of the grunt work.
He was in some ways a strange guy, though average-looking, with horn-rimmed glasses and frizzy side-parted hair with an early bald spot. He was another Yalie, but you wouldn’t know it from him. He didn’t wear it pinned to his chest like some did. And there was a definite abrasive side to him, but he also could be wickedly funny in a Woody Allen sort of way. Plus, as I was soon to appreciate, he had a heart of gold.
The earlier case we had worked on was a suit between a CEO and his former New York Stock Exchange–listed company. The CEO had been lured away by a competitor and had left with his head (and laptop) filled with protected trade secrets. We represented the CEO’s former company.
I don’t know where the Dunn & Sullivan partner in charge had his head, but it certainly wasn’t in the case. On the day before an important court hearing, he finally woke from his Rip van Winkle nap and realized that he needed to know the details of the lawsuit. Really know it, since in twenty-four hours he would be at counsel’s table in court explaining to the judge why the defendant CEO shouldn’t receive summary judgment against our client company.
Jeremy had been assigned the job of briefing the partner on all the legal issues he needed to master. The entire trial team was huddled around a table in one of the conference center’s rooms. (Not that it matters, but it was the same room that Carl Smith later used for his meeting with Polly and Iván the Impaler.) Jeremy was brilliant, his mind an interstellar rocket. The problem was that the now-terrified partner’s mind traveled at go-cart speed.
No one in that room will forget that meeting. It wasn’t the only thing that sealed Jeremy’s fate, so far as an eventual Dunn & Sullivan partnership was concerned, but it was right up there in a series of episodes that would torpedo his chances. Jeremy didn’t care, as I later learned. He really didn’t give a shit. He’d stay at the firm as long as they let him, and then he’d move on to something else.
So that meeting . . .
Like I said, Jeremy was briefing the partner, rattling off at breakneck speed the litany of legal issues the guy needed to know, explaining the pros, the cons, the relevant case law, and so on. The partner was panicking, trying to take notes, but Jeremy was going too fast for him. Keep in mind the guy hadn’t done any of his homework.
“. . . and so . . .” Jeremy was saying, head-down in his own notes. “There are three cases you need to ace on this point alone, because the judge will ask . . .”
The partner was drowning in information, and instead of throwing him a life preserver, Jeremy was dumping buckets of water over his head.
“Hold it, hold it, hold it,” the partner said in near hysteria. “What are you saying? Is that the whatchacallit doctrine or the . . . the . . . ?”
(The whatchacallit doctrine? This guy was charging over a thousand dollars an hour for his time. Unbe-fucking-lievable.)
Here Jeremy, I think probably for the third time, rattled off the name of the legal doctrine, yet again explained its meaning. Why it mattered. Why there was a competing doctrine, its name, and why it mattered.
“Hold it. Hold it.”
The partner again. He dropped his pen and raised his hands high over his head in the same gesture of surrender that the Germans did when captured at war’s end.
Jeremy stopped. He waited, said nothing. Though his look across the table at the partner was unmistakable. What a fucking dummy, it said.
“Slower, slower,” the partner pleaded, now pushing his open palms at Jeremy like he was carefully guiding the driver of a ten-wheeler trying to back his jumbo rig up to the warehouse loading dock.
Jeremy waited a good long minute. And then, dropping his voice several octaves, like a slow-motion recording, he said:
“Youuuu . . . represeeent . . . theeee . . . plainnnntiff. . . . Arrre . . . youuuu . . . withhh . . . meee . . . soooo . . . farrrr?”
Most of us around the table were busy biting our inner checks hard enough to stifle giggling. It was a bad career move to laugh at a partner. Especially one in the state this one was in.
Anyway, back to the courthouse hallway.
The approaching lawyer who was no doubt Peter Moss had pegged us for the opposition and so was heading our way, his junior in tow. He was smiling. The junior not so much.
“You take the older one,” Jeremy said under his breath, “I’ll take Tonto.” Then adding, “Or we can let Gloria put them both down.”
Gloria was Gloria Delarosa, our third team member, who was shaking her head at Jeremy. They had also worked together before and had become friends. Gloria was a paralegal. It was her second career. After the marines.
Gloria had been one of the few (experimental) women marines who’d seen actual combat. In both Iraq and Afghanistan. (My brother knew of her.) She had been awarded a Purple Heart, though I never did learn under what circumstances or how badly she’d been hit.
After mustering out of the Corps, she earned her paralegal certificate from Bronx Community College. Gloria was from a large Hispanic family, originally from Puerto Rico, I think, that had settled years ago in the upper reaches of eastern Manhattan, above Ninety-sixth Street, still known as Spanish Harlem.
Her dream was to become a lawyer. So far she had been rejected from every law school she’d applied to.
I don’t know how to describe Gloria without saying she was virile—not masculine, really, but decidedly not feminine. She was stocky, wore her bleached hair female cut but military short. She had beautiful dark chocolate eyes, wore zero makeup, sported Angelina Jolie lips and a killer smile. Butch? That doesn’t quite do it. I knew nothing about her private life. Even out of uniform, Gloria was still a marine. You could just see it.
“You must be Carney Blake.”
I took Peter Moss’s offered hand.
“Peter,” Peter Moss said, meaning, We’ll be on first names here. I must say I was somewhat surprised by this guy’s warm and friendly behavior. This was a big case. We were adversaries. This was New York.
Introductions were made, handshak
es all around. Peter’s associate was a tall Asian guy named Harold Kim. He never said a word or cracked a smile.
“Bitter out there,” Moss said, rubbing his hands together. Both he and Harold had also kept on their topcoats.
“Yeah,” I said, not sure where this was going.
“Courtroom still locked?” Again with that beaming smile.
“Yeah. Bailiff should be around soon.”
Looking at his watch. “He’d better.”
More smiles.
“Uh-huh,” was all I said.
“You been before this judge?” Moss asked.
“No. You?”
“A couple times. Smart. But a real stickler. Know what I mean?”
Just then the bailiff unlocked the courtroom doors from the inside. He ignored us standing out there in the hallway.
I didn’t get a chance to answer Moss (now Peter to me, I guess).
He motioned for us to go in ahead of them, and we did, Moss still brandishing that gracious smile. I remember thinking that he must be one of those consummate professionals, the kind who never takes a client’s position personally, always keeps his head above the fray.
Guess what?
17.
Mr. Moss?”
Peter Moss stood facing the judge. Like I said earlier, he was a tall guy, about as tall as me, but he was thinner, more athletically built. He brushed away some loose strands of hair from his high forehead.
“You asked for this meeting,” the judge continued.
“Yes, Your Honor, I did,” Moss said.
I was sitting across the aisle at our table, Jeremy beside me and Gloria out in the gallery. (She was the only one out there.) I got an elbow nudge from Jeremy. When I looked at him, he mouthed, What the fuck?
Then, still on his feet, Moss turned and looked at me. No, that’s not what happened. Still on his feet, Moss turned and glared at me.