Big Law

by Ron Liebman

  Lawyer: How many times did you meet with Carl Smith about these book entries?

  CFO: I respectfully refuse to . . .

  And that’s how it went until the lawyer terminated the deposition.

  To be clear, by that point the guy’s nervous invocation of the Fifth wasn’t to protect Carl. It was to protect himself. Carl might have directed the guy’s actions, but they were his actions. When the CFO did what he did, he put himself on the hook. And Carl?

  Carl was careful. Left no paper trail. Did whatever he did under the cloak of relying on the law firm’s billing department and outside accountants for everything, professing that he really didn’t understand all that paper-shuffling bookkeeping anyway. If these people did anything they shouldn’t have? Well, that was on them.

  Certainly not on him.

  37.

  Big Law Eats Its Young.’”

  “What?”

  “That’ll be the next headline.”

  That was Jeremy Lichtman to me. He had come to my office, purportedly to see if I’d read the legal research memos he’d e-mailed earlier in the day. But what he really wanted was to schmooze about all the recent Big Law bad press.

  It was after 6:00 p.m., not even close to quitting time for many of those toiling up and down the cavernous halls on the various floors occupied by Dunn & Sullivan’s midtown offices. I had read his memos, but it took very little time (seconds) for the two of us to slide off subject. I had moved my wastepaper basket from under my desk to the far wall. Not too far, actually, given the size of my office.

  So Jeremy’s in a chair at the foot of my desk, and I’m seated behind my desk, each of us with a DUNN & SULLIVAN–embossed legal pad on our laps, pulling off sheets one by one, crumpling them and then seeing how many we each could toss in the basket. Me? All but one so far. Jeremy? None.

  “Eats its young?”

  “Yeah,” Jeremy said, tossing another crumpled ball wide of the basket.

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Well,” he said, “first the geniuses that run the big law firms start ‘downsizing.’ Cutting staff. Won’t work. Revenue is too far down, expenses too far up. Next come the partners.”

  I sank another crumpled Dunn & Sullivan sheet. Jeremy’s next shot bounced off the back wall and missed the basket by a good two feet. He shrugged and ripped off another page.

  When Jeremy came into my office, he left the door open. Richard Miller caught my eye as he stormed down the hall. He didn’t look my way, off to God-knew-what other skirmish. Jeremy didn’t notice him, intent as he was on trying to make the next shot. He didn’t.

  Jeremy was on top of the GRE case. He was my wingman. I knew I could rely on him. And that certainly proved right. Still, for all that, Jeremy never really had his head in the game.

  “Won’t happen,” I said. “Partners can’t be fired.”

  “Yeah, it’ll be a bitch.” (Another shot, another miss.) “Here are all these best of the best lawyers who pissed away any kind of normal life in exchange for eight years of associate drudgery down in that coal mine. Then the few who actually make it come out and see just a glimmer of daylight before they’re sent back down, though now with that unenforceable assurance of partnership tenure and just a slightly better life. And then,” Jeremy said as he snapped his fingers, “poof, handed their walking papers.” And then, mimicking management, “‘Look, sorry. But you’re a team player. Always have been, from the first day you set foot in here from Harvard or wherever, so you need to take one for the team. Good-bye and good luck.’”

  “Won’t happen.”

  “You think? All those set-for-lifers with their big incomes, big homes and cars, mortgaged no doubt to the hilt based on the assurance of all those anticipated years pulling down millions. The legal-fee faucet shrinks to a drip? They’ll be gone faster than you can . . . sink another basket.”

  And I did.

  “So why are you still here? You hate this life so much?”

  Jeremy shrugged. Took aim with his latest crumpled sheet, then lowered his hand. He looked at me with that mischievous smile I bet he gave that Seven Dwarfs (Sleepy? Dopey?) partner years earlier when slow-motioning his explanation. Jeremy’s outer shell displayed someone meek, spiritless. Nothing could be further from the mark. He chuckled.

  “I’m in it for the training. And the inflated salary. I mean, where else can a young lawyer earn these kinds of bucks? Six figures right out of law school? I’m paying off all my student loans while learning more than I would anywhere else.” Then sheepishly adding, “And trying my best to convince Gloria Delarosa to fall in love with me.” A shrug. “Anyway, even if they don’t trouble themselves to fire me this round, I’ll be gone in a year or two. Maybe when the GRE case finally ends.”

  “If it finally ends.”

  “It will, Carney. All trains pull back into the station.”

  “Not the ones that go off the rails.”

  Another Jeremy shrug.

  “O ye of little faith,” he said. “You’re underestimating yourself. And me. We are gonna whoop their asses.”

  “You think so?”

  Jeremy took another shot at the basket. Swish. He turned to me and smiled. A good omen. “See?” he said.

  I took a shot.

  And missed.

  38.

  Hand me my clothes, boy.”

  My father had dropped the hospital gown he’d been wearing to the tile floor of the curtained examining cubical. I can’t remember ever before seeing my old man naked. His belly was extended, his legs varicose-veined, his skin blotchy. I noticed the tremor in his hands, the deep sag of his genitals. Of course, he saw how I was looking at him. Once my eyes traveled back up to his face, I saw his glare. I don’t know how else to put this. There was a mix of embarrassment and real hatred in his eyes.

  He and I were in the emergency room at Mount Sinai West Hospital on Tenth Avenue. He had called me from the apartment around midnight and told me to come over and take him there.

  “Mount Sinai West Hospital?” I said, still half asleep. “What’s the matter? Where’s Sean?”

  “Get up here.”

  “Okay, but where’s Sean?”

  My father didn’t answer. He hung up. I threw on some clothes and caught a cab to Hell’s Kitchen.

  I hadn’t seen or spoken to my brother since the day of Rosy’s funeral. Partly because I was wrapped up with work. But truthfully? I just didn’t want to deal with his drinking and drugging.

  As for my old man, he had ignored enough symptoms (blood in his urine, pissing his pants, back and abdominal pain) to cause the need for this hospital run, and after a three-hour-long battery of tests, the attending doc privately gave me what turned out to be a correct diagnosis.

  “We need some more tests but I’m pretty sure your father has bladder cancer,” the doc said as we stood out in the hall.

  A gurney flew by accompanied by a shouting medical team trying to triage some bloodied teenager who was writhing and lurching in pain, his torso ripped apart from what looked like some sort of gun blast. The doc didn’t seem to notice. For him this was far from an isolated occurrence.

  “How bad? If you’re right?”

  “Best guess? It’s most likely what we call superficial bladder cancer. Only the bladder lining will be affected, not the bladder’s muscle walls. It’s treatable. It won’t kill him, but I know what will.”

  “Meaning?”

  This doctor must have been about Jeremy’s age, but even in the white lab coat and stethoscope snake-wrapped around his neck and the black-rimmed geek eyeglasses, he looked like someone playing the doctor in a high-school production of Our Town.

  “Meaning your father has a fairly advanced case of cirrhosis of the liver. He doesn’t stop drinking? That’s what will kill him.”

  And that was when I walke
d back into the cubicle and saw my old man drop his gown to the floor.

  I reached over to the small side table and took hold of his street clothes. “Want some help?” I asked.

  He waved me away with a dismissive sweep of his hand. I tossed his clothes to the gurney next to where he was standing and watched my dad struggle as he twice almost keeled over from trying to guide his feet into his undershorts and slacks. Each time I started near him, he snapped at me to leave him “the fook” alone.

  In the cab on the short ride back to the apartment, I asked him if he’d understood what the doctor had said to him after he was dressed.

  “What does he know?” my father said, once again waving it all dismissively away. “He’s just some snot-nosed kid. A doctor? Ach, my aching arse.”

  “It’s simple, Dad,” I said when he’d finished. “You keep drinking, you die.”

  “Well, aren’t I the lucky one?” he said, purposefully turning his face from me and toward his window. It was still dark out, dawn at least a good hour away. “To be blessed with this posh, educated lad who’s not only a highbrow lawyer but also miraculously schooled in the fine art of healing.”

  Fuck it, I told myself as my father continued staring out his window. Let it go. Take him home. Then go home.

  I dropped him off. Walked him up to the apartment. But I didn’t go home. Once back on the street, I pulled out my cell and called my brother.

  Three rings in, he answered.

  “Hey, Carney,” he said. I could hear the sleep in his voice. “What’s up, bro?”

  39.

  I watched my brother pour three full packets of sugar into his coffee.

  He was seated across from me in a booth at a diner on Eleventh Avenue, not far from the Hell’s Kitchen apartment. To give Sean credit, it didn’t take him long to show up after my call. He looked like shit, though not much different really from how he’d looked ever since Iraq, just thinner and paler. He needed a shave, and his hair was longer and shaggier than last time, but not any kind of fashion statement.

  “That’s a lot of sugar, Sean.”

  And that’s when he let me know that he’d gotten himself hooked on heroin, despite what had happened to Rosy.

  It was still early morning, and the diner was pretty full with those making a pit stop for a hurried breakfast before embedding themselves in their offices or delivery trucks or whatever. Glass, china, and utensils were quietly clattering. There was a buzz in the place, but a fairly subdued one given the hour and the collective need for coffee. The morning was warm, and Sean was in T-shirt, jeans, and unlaced high-top sneakers. I made a grab across the table and examined my brother’s arms, looking for track marks among the tattoos.

  “No telltale lines, bro,” he said. “I shoot up between my toes. Old trick.”

  Why would Sean just come out and tell me of his new addiction? That was Sean. My brother. Really as simple as that.

  The waitress came by to take our order. Scrambled eggs and a toasted bagel for me. Sean smiled at the waitress, who seemed interested in him despite his road-weary look.

  “Just coffee,” he told her.

  “Nothin’ to eat?” she asked, concerned. (How women have always wanted to mother him.)

  Sean pointed to his coffee mug.

  “Just coffee, babe,” he said with that Sean smile.

  Things I didn’t say to my brother once the waitress was out of earshot: How could you do this? Think about Rosy and what happened to her. You’re slowly killing yourself.

  I mean, why? Sean didn’t need to hear that. Like, what, it hadn’t occurred to him? What was the point? I loved my brother, as he knew, without limit. Sure, I was scared shitless that something catastrophic was about to body-slam him. But a lecture would have been downright worthless.

  Instead I filled him in on our old man. He listened, sipping at his coffee, smiling thanks to the waitress who kept topping him up. When I was done, he told me he didn’t give a “rat’s ass” what happened to our father.

  Flashing me that Sean smile.

  “The great Seamus Blake bites the dust,” he said, adding, “Who the fuck cares?”

  “And how are you getting by?”

  A shrug. A sip of coffee. “Dunno. Working odd jobs. Some petty crime. You know.”

  “You’re not living in the apartment?

  Another Who knows, who cares? shrug from Sean. “Tell you the truth, Carney, I’m not ‘living’”—here my brother held up air quotes—“anywhere.”

  • • •

  While Sean and I were in that booth at the diner, Peter Moss had just entered the three-car garage of his Chevy Chase, Maryland, home. He got in behind the wheel of his Porsche 911 Turbo and fired up the engine. He then pressed the visor button to raise his garage door and carefully pulled out to make his way over to Western Avenue and then Rock Creek Park for the trip downtown to his office.

  It had been six weeks since Josh’s accident. Peter had chartered an air ambulance to bring the boy back to D.C. for inpatient rehab at a facility near their home. And as predicted, it was slow going, the ultimate outcome still uncertain.

  When Peter left the house that morning, his wife was still in bed, where she would likely remain for the better part of the day. Dinner with her at home the night before had been the latest in an increasing number of tense encounters. At her end of the table, she would alternate between monastic silence and mournful laments over her fate, by which she meant their fate.

  His prior efforts to console her had been paper thin. Even he could hear the lip service he was paying as he repeatedly told her that things would work out somehow. Patricia would then berate him.

  “Work out somehow? How the hell would you know? You’re hardly ever here. And when you are here, your head is somewhere else. Are you listening to me?”

  Peter couldn’t stand it. He was a prisoner, doing family time.

  So he shut her out, like last night: Peter seated at his end of the table, retreating into the iPhone stationed at his elbow, working his way through the most recent batch of e-mails, as Patricia pushed her food around her plate, all the while throwing eye daggers at him.

  “Put that away.”

  “Okay.”

  But he didn’t.

  “Put it away, goddamn it.”

  He continued reading and sending.

  Peter didn’t hear Patricia’s chair lurch back as she rose and went to his side of the dining-room table. Didn’t see her swooping hand until it was too late, as she grabbed the phone and then with all her might flung it against the wall.

  Peter maneuvered his Porsche through the park, slowing and speeding with the rush-hour flow.

  Could he be a better husband? Spend more time with her? Try his best to repair her broken heart?

  Could he? Or would he?

  He wouldn’t. It just wasn’t in him.

  Peter’s salve for life’s disappointments wasn’t family. No point in wishing otherwise. When home, he was nothing special, only another nobody standing in a long line going nowhere. Of course he fretted over Josh’s unfortunate fate. Just as much as she did, he told himself. But what was he supposed to do? Wallow in it? Like her?

  No point in overanalyzing this, he told himself. It was what it was. Work made him feel alive. Made him somebody. So be it. And that’s why as Peter Moss drove downtown, he switched mental gears to GRE and Carl Smith. And as he did, he could feel tension evaporate like steam off a boiling pot.

  Taking the P Street exit out of the park, he decided that now was the time to fire up the rest of his plan. Meanwhile the object of Peter Moss’s destructive desire was busy dealing with his own “family issues.”

  Carl Smith kept a close watch on the screen of his cell phone. It was at his elbow on his desk, much as Peter Moss’s cell had been at his the night before. When it finally came to life and bl
eeped, Carl literally flinched. That was how intensely he’d been waiting all afternoon.

  His ear to the phone, he said nothing, just listened. He could hear William’s sobs.

  “That bitch hurt me,” he told Carl.

  40.

  What?”

  William Cunningham was in Polly Smith’s Upper East Side one-bedroom.

  As Carl had instructed, he’d called Polly the day before. She knew who he was; she’d seen (courtesy of Iván) the video and the stills of William seated poolside with his hands gripping Carl’s buttocks for dear life, trying his best to keep his mouth wrapped around Carl’s you-know-what, as our law firm’s chairman jerkily ejaculated all over the place.

  William told Polly that Carl had dumped him. No human being should be treated the way he was by that dreadful man, he’d said. And that got him to thinking. Polly no doubt had suffered a similar fate at Carl’s hands. And so he was prepared to do whatever was needed to help Polly get her well-deserved pound of flesh from that terrible man. He was prepared to tell her things about Carl that were so explosive that this thoroughly contemptible person would buckle at his knees and give in to each and every one of her demands.

  It was all bullshit, of course, but Carl figured it would do the trick. And it did.

  “Can I come over and see you?” William had asked her on the call.

  “By all means,” Polly had said.

  And so the next day, by prearrangement, William had entered Polly’s building through the back entrance, having been given the security code by Polly, who had waited out in the hall on her floor to let William in from the fire stairs. William did his best to avoid any security cameras. And he had. Well, mostly he had. He missed the one over the fifth-floor stairway entrance.

  All this secrecy was necessary, William had said, because what he was going to tell her was so wild, so ugly, that he needed to be sure there would be no tracing it back to him. No one must know, he’d told Polly, at least for now. Especially not your divorce lawyer. That was okay by her, and so they made it a date.