by Ron Liebman
“Very good,” the waiter said, with the seriousness of an undertaker solacing the bereaved. Then, lifting his head my way, an unspoken, And you?
“The burger,” I said, then quickly added, “Medium,” before the waiter could ask what kind of coffin I would like that in.
“And to drink?” The waiter stood poised, note pad and pen at the ready.
To drink? My bladder was ballooning. One more sip of anything and Diet Coke–flavored ice water would start leaking from my ears and nose.
Pointing at my half-empty water glass. “I’m good with this.”
The waiter disappeared and in a flash returned with a frosted metal pitcher and refilled my glass. Just what I needed.
The fish tank’s circulating water kept gurgling.
With the waiter finally gone, Carl . . . well, waited.
(If I didn’t go soon . . .)
“Things didn’t go well in court . . .” I began.
Carl said nothing, listening to my tale of woe until I got to Moss.
“Peter Moss?” he asked. Carl had paid so little attention to the case that he didn’t even know who was on the other side.
“You know him?”
The strangest of smiles crossed Carl’s face. Really weird. Couldn’t read it. “Classmates at Harvard. He was an associate here.”
Meaning at Dunn & Sullivan. So Peter Moss had been an associate at our law firm? And then not? That probably meant let go, I was thinking. Passed over for partnership. But I remember also thinking that there seemed more to it, given the look on Smith’s face. Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now.
So I went on.
When I got to the part about the judge ordering full discovery, he again stopped me.
“How long?” he asked.
“How long what?”
By this time I was really having trouble concentrating. The fish tank’s gurgling in my ears seemed so much louder now.
“You all right?”
“What?”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine.” (Never better, though I’m about to piss my pants.) I shifted in my seat.
Act natural. Look normal, I told myself.
Like Carl. Who looked just fine. Like always.
I noticed his tan. Must have been away someplace warm, I remember thinking. He was in one of his tailored-to-perfection suits. This one so deep blue it was almost purple, his shirt and tie in perfectly matching lighter shades of complementing hues. An ensemble. Even Carl’s hair was fluffed just right. Did he have a stylist come to his apartment each morning with a hairbrush?
What was he asking?
“The discovery?” Carl prodded.
The discovery. The discovery what? Oh. How long?
“A year,” I told him.
That seemed to please him. (He wanted the delay of anything happening in the case until after the IPO, of course.)
A different server approached with Carl’s lobster salad and another with his iced tea. The restaurant had a system, I guessed, for how to get orders to diners. Then our waiter was back.
He ran his eyes over the table.
“Everything okay, Mr. Smith?” he said.
A nod was all he got from Carl. Then the waiter told me there was a slight backup in the kitchen and that my burger would be out any minute now.
Carl began eating. He seemed in a hurry. Months later, when Carl’s electronic calendar was put into evidence, it showed that he had a 2:15 p.m. meeting that day with the investment bankers. The schedule bore the notation “finishing touches.”
“Blake,” Carl said between mouthfuls. (What happened to “Carney”?) “Do not send me any more e-mails or any memos. Is that clear?”
I nodded.
“You want me? You pick up the phone and call me.”
He waited for my acknowledgment.
“Understood.”
“Nothing in writing,” he admonished, pointing his fork at me like he was about to stab me with it.
Okay, okay, I got it but wondered all the same what was the big deal here? Not yet realizing that Carl wanted deniability should anything go wrong in the case. There was to be no record of our communications.
Carl went back to gobbling his lunch. I had the feeling that he was now done with me. I was peripheral. He had said what he needed to say.
It’s now or never, my bladder signaled.
“Be right back,” I said as I got up from the table. Carl didn’t look up from his plate as I race-walked to the men’s room.
When I got there, I tried the door handle. Locked.
I waited as long as I could, then I jiggled the handle.
“Out in a minute,” the guy inside said.
After another full minute, another jiggle.
“Hold your horses,” the guy inside said, with clear and understandable annoyance.
But I needed to go. Standing here so close and yet so far made matters even worse. I tried the ladies’. The door opened. Unoccupied. I went in. Raised the toilet seat, unzipped, and waited. I was so backed up that nothing wanted to come out. I felt the pressure, but nothing.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, probably too loud, but hey, I was alone in there and I was bursting.
And then it came. A small stream, a bigger stream, and there it was. Relief.
“Ahhhhhhh,” I moaned out loud. “Ahhhhhh.”
When I finished, I quickly washed my hands and opened the door. The woman who had been standing there waiting to use the ladies’ gave me such a look. I heard you in there, it said. You pervert. Masturbating, middle of the day. And in the ladies’.
I tried a sheepish smile. She glared at me and shook her head. You are filth.
And what do I do? Flustered, I quickly shut the door. Then, after a beat, I opened it again. Like where was I going to go? When I opened it, she was gone. Once back at our table, I saw her seated at hers, whispering to the three other women lunching with her. Two of them were giving me the evil eye.
When I made it back to our table, no Carl Smith. His lobster salad had been cleared away. Ditto his iced tea. He could have gone to the men’s room and found it unoccupied while I was moaning and groaning in the ladies’. Somehow I didn’t think so. On the table was the folder for the check. When I sat down, I opened it. Smith had paid the bill. I saw our waiter approach with my burger.
He placed it before me.
“I brought this out when you were in the bathroom. Mr. Smith told me to hold it until you got back.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking around the restaurant. No sign of Smith.
Reading my mind. “Mr. Smith is no longer with us.” (This guy was taking the undertaker role too seriously.)
“Gone?” I said.
Gone, he confirmed with a funereal nod of his head.
19.
She was Jeremy Lichtman’s idea.
I suppose I could have called Carl Smith and asked him for the rabbi I never had the chance to bring up over lunch. But Smith had made himself pretty clear: Leave me out of it. He never said it that way, but a rocket-science degree wasn’t necessary to read him. And, yes, I thought back on that many times.
I met with Jeremy and Gloria in my office the day after the lunch. I told them what had happened. (Without the ladies’-room part.)
They seemed to take what I said at face value. Looking back on it, should they—or should I, for that matter—have been suspicious about Carl’s luncheon behavior? Yeah, sure, with hindsight I can say that. But we weren’t. Okay, maybe shame on us. But the truth of the matter is, we weren’t.
“So,” Jeremy said. “Do what you need to do.”
“Meaning?”
“Get your own rabbi.”
He was right. I looked at Gloria. She conveyed nothing. This was above her pay grade. Fair e
nough.
Okay, let’s see, I was thinking, who in the litigation department could I go to? What experienced partner would give up otherwise billable hours to confer off the record with me? Meaning said litigation partner would receive zero compensation from said law firm for helping me. The chances of that happening at Dunn & Sullivan? Slim to none, I decided.
“I’ve got just the person,” Jeremy said.
• • •
Not two hours later, there I was in her office.
Anka Stankowski was known in the firm’s hallways as “Jabba the Hutt.” She weighed in somewhere seriously north of two-fifty. As, by the way, did her husband, a partner in another big law firm in the city. They were his-and-her sumo wrestlers in lawyer’s clothing. I remembered seeing them dancing together at last year’s Christmas gala. They were surprisingly light on their toes, even though they looked like a couple of hippos in an animated Disney film.
Anka was powering down. She was less than a year away from the firm’s mandatory retirement age (sixty-eight). She was as smart and experienced a litigator as the firm had to offer. Jeremy’s thinking was that Anka could well afford to help me. She had made a pile of money at the firm. As had her husband at his. She was on her way out. She really had nothing to lose and might be willing to meet with me from time to time.
“Come on in,” Anka said as I stood in her open doorway. “Have a seat.”
Anka was behind her desk, looking like a container ship docked at its berth, but friendly, smiling at me, motioning me to a chair. Her belly protruded, her head was covered with a thick carpet of white hair. She had coal-gray eyes and ham-hock arms. When I got myself seated and was closer, I noticed the peach fuzz covering her cheeks and a simple gold wedding ring embedded in her sausage finger.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.
“What’s up?”
“Well, I need some help,” I said, and then launched into the summary of where we were in the case and what I wanted from her. I was midway through my story when I heard a hard thump on the frame of Anka’s open door. I instinctively turned. There stood Richard Miller, glaring. He had tracked me down.
I’d done nothing on his cases. Absolutely nothing.
Pointing his finger at me like an executioner pointing to the one next in line for the gallows.
“You,” he said, reversing his hand and beckoning me with his index finger.
I turned and looked at Anka.
As I said earlier, word was out on Miller.
“Not now,” she dismissively told Miller.
“Yes now.”
“Richard, get the fuck out of here. He’s meeting with me. He’ll see you later.”
“Not good enough,” Richard said.
I was ping-ponging between them. While looking at Miller, I heard this stage sigh from Anka.
“Richard,” Anka said with bored annoyance, leaning forward in her chair, laying those enormous arms on her desk. “How fucking hard is this for you to understand? He’s meeting with me. Go away.”
Like I said, Anka was a heavyweight at Dunn & Sullivan. (Figuratively speaking at the moment.) So was Miller, but he could not best her if it came to it. He knew that.
And sure enough he stormed off. All well and good, but guess who was going to pay the price for this mini–Mexican standoff?
“You’re working for him?” Anka said, like, Didn’t you get the memo?
I told her what had happened when Miller barged into my office.
“Okay,” Anka said. “Leave it with me.”
I looked at her, pantomiming, Leave it with me what?
“Just leave it with me.”
And so I went back to the GRE story.
I must say that Anka listened intently, even to the point of making periodic notes on the legal pad in front of her.
“Interesting,” she said when I finally finished. “I didn’t know we were now taking plaintiffs’ class-action cases. We’ve always been on the defense side.”
And she made a note of that.
I guess we do now, I shrugged.
“Interesting,” she repeated. “And Carl was the case initiator?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who’s paying our fee?”
That was above my pay grade, so it got a dunno shrug.
Another note on Anka’s legal pad.
“What’s this Indian lawyer like?” she asked.
As I started explaining that I’d talked to the guy on the phone but hadn’t met him, Anka was shaking her head no, no, no.
She ripped the top sheet off her legal pad and then tossed the pad over to me. “Got a pen?”
I grabbed a ballpoint from the inside pocket of my suit jacket.
I then got Anka’s tutorial. A lot of what she said I think I could have eventually pulled together on my own. Not all, but a lot. Except I hadn’t, and it was helpful to hear from her the list of things I needed to do to protect the case.
Among what she told me:
Get Dipak Singh’s ass to New York PDQ and keep him here until he has been thoroughly (And I mean thoroughly, Anka said, and I duly noted) debriefed.
Don’t wait for Peter Moss and his discovery demands. Figure out what you’d be asking for if you were Moss and collect and analyze that shit (“shit” was Anka’s word) now.
You need to find any holes in your case before the other side does.
If you find any holes in your case, start plugging them now.
Use Jeremy Lichtman’s outsize brain as much as possible. (Anka seemed well aware of Jeremy’s peculiarities but clearly felt they were trumped by his abilities.)
There were about twenty or twenty-five other line items she had me write down, but you get the picture. When she finished, she sat back in her chair. There went that belly, floating up like an emerging landmass at low tide.
“Door’s open anytime,” she told me.
Walking back to my office, I felt better. I had my sideline coach.
And I thought back on that many times, too.
20.
Was Dipak Singh ignoring me?
I had placed three calls to him in India over the last several days. I left clear, detailed recorded messages. I never heard back. That didn’t necessarily mean he was avoiding me. Maybe it was the time zone (though I called during his business hours). Or he could have been in court. Could have been away. Could have been anything. I should have e-mailed him. So I was in my office doing just that when my cell rang.
I looked at the screen. Was that Dipak finally calling me back? Nope, the call was from the Hell’s Kitchen landline. That meant my old man. Sean and Rosy had cells. My father didn’t. Who was he going to call? Except me, apparently. I tapped on the screen’s green ACCEPT circle.
“Hi,” I said, my gaze on the laptop screen as I proofed my e-mail before sending. There was silence on the other end of the line. “Dad?”
“Get over here.”
“What?”
“I said get over here, boy.”
I could hear something in his voice. Fear? No way, I thought. Not from the mighty Seamus Blake.
“Dad, I’m at the office.”
“You. Here. Now.”
And then he hung up. I speed-dialed my brother. Got voice mail. Next Rosy. Voice mail for her. Then I called the apartment landline. It just rang until I got voice mail there, too. One of those computer-generated messages, the mechanical male voice choppily telling me, “You. Have. Dialed. 212 . . .”
All right, something was up. I needed to go and see what the hell it was. I hit SEND on the Dipak e-mail, then grabbed my suit jacket and overcoat off the hook behind my door.
I cabbed it up to the apartment. Didn’t take long. I have a key to the street-level door, so I let myself in and climbed the stairs. The apartment door was ajar, the living room empty.
“Dad?”
“In here,” my father called from Rosy and Sean’s bedroom.
I took off my topcoat and tossed it to the sofa. The bedroom door was open. Rosy was seated on the edge of the bed, eyes fluttering, shoulders slumped, head drooping. She had on jeans but no top, just a threadbare bra. My father stood facing her, stone-still, helpless.
“Your brother’s on a rampage,” he told me. “He’s gone off for the fella that done this.”
“Done what?”
“He took his .45.”
I had to drag it out of him question by question as his head began swiveling between me and poor, strung-out Rosy. His face had drained of all color. Rosy’s eyes kept fluttering, her head dipping.
What I pulled from him was that last week Rosy had indeed overdosed. On heroin. Sean and he had rushed her to Mount Sinai West on Tenth Avenue. Even though Sean was deep into crystal meth, he had been infuriated with Rosy. Once home, in a teary shouting match with my brother, Rosy had promised to stay clear of her new dealer and no more smack.
When earlier that morning Sean had found Rosy seated on the toilet, semidressed like now, nodding off, a crumpled strip of aluminum foil, glassine bag, syringe, and Bic lighter on the sink ledge beside her, he lost it. After grabbing his .45 from his sock drawer, he stormed out of the apartment. He knew the dealer. Rosy had told him who the guy was last week in the emergency ward. Sean had gone and confronted the guy. Told him if he sold anything ever again to Rosy, Sean would come back and shoot him dead on the spot.
I knelt in front of Rosy, put my hands on her thighs, and gently squeezed. She opened her eyes, saw me.
“Hey, Carney,” she said with that angelic Rosy smile. Then nodded off.
“Rosy,” I said, squeezing her thighs again. “Where’s Sean?”
Another smile. Another drop-off.
It took a little while, but I managed to get a name and address for her new dealer.
You know, I didn’t see Rosy much. And never before like this. Sweet Rosy, so important to my brother. This kind and tender soul. Over the last few weeks, she had from time to time called me, always late at night. Slurring her words, telling me how happy she was that I, too, now had a girlfriend. Telling me, “Be nice to her, Carn, okay, baby?” And I’d say, “You bet, Rosy.” “Love you, Carn,” she’d always say as she clicked off. Love you, too, Rosy, I would think as I lowered my phone.