Big Law

by Ron Liebman

  The minute William was in Polly’s apartment, he changed his tune. He shoved her out of the narrow entrance area and kept shoving her until she fell back onto the sofa in her small living room. And there he stood before her, doing his best to bulge his considerable pecs and biceps as menacingly as possible. He was only marginally convincing at this, attired as he was in a lemon yellow polo shirt with spotless matching sneakers, too-tight jeans, and salon-frosted hair.

  Let’s stop a minute.

  You know, when I later heard about all this, I thought no way. Carl Smith hatching a plan like this? This befuddled comedy of errors? That wasn’t the Carl Smith I knew. But know what?

  Even the smartest and most capable among us loses track of reality when he or she is deep in the throes of marital discord. Ask any divorce lawyer. They will all confirm it. You simply wouldn’t believe the behavior of even the most accomplished and brainiest of people when it comes to heaping scorn on a despised spouse. When matrimony turns into acrimony, these people will exhibit all the cool and deliberate thinking of a vindictive twelve-year-old with enraged hormones.

  Our Carl was no exception.

  So back to William doing his best to tower over Polly.

  Now, even though this was late morning, Polly was drunk. She had begun imbibing earlier and earlier each day. In fact, any earlier and Polly would need to be pouring scotch over her morning cornflakes.

  Carl had done his damnedest to prepare William for this confrontation. He had made the poor guy repeatedly rehearse his lines until Carl was satisfied he could pull it off.

  William was to warn Polly that if she didn’t get rid of her divorce lawyer this instant and allow Carl to provide for her in the manner that Carl thought best . . . well, not only would she get absolutely nothing from him—Nada. Rien. Nichts.—she would also be facing some very grave personal danger. It would strike her when she least expected it. And it was not going to be pretty. So Polly had better do as she was told. Or else.

  And what was our Polly’s three-sheets-to-the-wind response? It was the question that threw William off his script.

  “So how was it?” she’d asked him.

  “What?” he had said.

  “How was sex with my husband? Good? Better than good? Less than good? It’s a pretty straightforward question.”

  This was not how this was supposed to go.

  Perhaps we should cut William some slack here. He was, as we’ve seen, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. So what does he do? Or say?

  Well, nothing, mostly. Lost for words as he was, he tried out a series of facial expressions on Polly. Squinty-eyed mean. Glaring. Silently snarling. All met by Polly’s mirthfully patting the empty space beside her.

  “Come sit by me,” she told him.

  And so he did.

  Polly was having trouble focusing. She had dropped a couple of high-strength Xanaxes just before William’s appearance, just in case she would need to summon the courage to remain cool and calm. And there was no way in heaven or hell that Carl in his prep sessions with William—let alone this splendidly attired young man, seated so close to Polly that their thighs were pressed together—could have known that she was at that very moment internally screening a sex fantasy. Running through Polly’s alcoholic brain was an HD video of the three of them in bed together, going at it, skin on skin, bodies on bodies, in some hot preorgasmic interlude.

  Polly moved her face within inches of William’s. She studied his eyes, his mouth. Got even closer.

  “Sweetie, I’m seeing you and me and Carl, the three of us naked in bed. Are his lips as soft as mine?” she asked poor William, not giving him the time to respond before pressing her mouth to his and forcing her tongue down his throat.

  Polly’s eyes were slammed shut as she kept kissing William, pushing her body even closer, ensuring that her surgically enhanced breasts made a hard landing onto his bulging chest.

  William, on the other hand, sat ramrod straight, his eyes large open saucers staring with understandable panic as Polly kept tonguing and embracing. His arms were lifted in what could have been seen as an impending embrace of his own to this cloyingly perfumed and boozy older woman. In reality they were simply raised in total dismay as Polly’s hand slowly slid down to his crotch.

  Tight jeans or no tight jeans, once Polly’s hand had made contact, she had no trouble detecting that William’s penis was as soft as a three-day-old peeled banana. She gave it a little squeeze. Then something snapped in her, and that gentle caress turned into a crunching, viselike grip.

  “Ow! What are you doing? Stop that!”

  William tried his best to disengage, but Polly’s hold on his flaccid pecker only tightened. Xanax or no Xanax, Polly came to her senses and was enraged. The booze cursing through her veins provided all the necessary fuel she needed.

  “You think you can come here, to my place? And scare me? You can tell that son of a bitch husband of mine he can’t scare me.”

  “Ow! Let go of me. Please!”

  Polly gave William one more seismic penis crunch and then released her hand. But before William could move away, she slapped him hard across his face. Polly was enflamed, any theoretical rationality by then much too far gone for retrieval.

  She sprang to her feet, and now it was she who was towering over William. Pointing an accusing finger at him.

  “You pathetic pansy. Waltzing in here thinking you can scare me.”

  “You hurt me,” William whimpered, still in the throes of severe penis pain. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Really!” Polly screamed back at him. “I hurt your poor little flaccid dick? Well, I’ll tell you what—you can inform Carl that if he sends you back here again, I’ll cut off your teensy winky and FedEx it to him. You both disgust me.”

  Still rubbing his crotch, William stayed where he was. That is, until Polly leaned over and spit right in his face. That did it.

  He got to his feet.

  “How dare you!” he yelled at her as he wiped her spit off his face with the back of his hand and then grabbed her hard by the neck.

  “Go ahead, try it,” Polly said to him, glaring, her eyes on fire. “You don’t have the balls.”

  So William accepted Polly’s brash invitation and started squeezing. Harder and harder. In no time at all, Polly’s panicked eyes started bulging, she began gurgling, and then her face and lips started turning blue. Another few seconds and Polly would be a goner. But in the nick of time, he let go.

  Polly fell to her knees choking, her own hands now reflexively at her neck. William watched for a while as she gasped for air. Then he grabbed her by an arm and flung her back onto the sofa, where she sat gasping and coughing.

  William stormed from the apartment, making it out to the street by the same back-way path through which he had entered Polly’s building. (And once again tripping the fifth-floor security camera.) Out on the sidewalk, he made that call to Carl.

  When the police eventually found Polly a few days later, lying faceup on her bed, stone-cold dead, they figured her a suicide.

  After William’s hasty exit, Polly must have spent some time on the sofa trying to compose herself. As best the cops could figure, at some point she probably got up and went to her bathroom, where she removed the Xanax vial from her medicine cabinet and took a few more pills. That extra dosage, combined with the lethal amount of scotch she’d earlier ingested, had put her out like the proverbial light. The prescription bottle was found on her night table, where she had placed it before lying down, faceup, on the bed.

  Unfortunately for Polly she was too deeply asleep when, sometime in the middle of the night, the cops concluded, she began vomiting and swallowing so much of what she was chucking up that she choked to death on her own puke.

  At least that was the medical examiner’s initial finding. There were traces of vomit around her mouth,
and her lungs weighed in heavier than normal, given the upchuck she’d swallowed.

  Ah, but.

  Both the police and the coroner had detected bruising around Polly’s neck. Evidence, needless to say, of foul play. What’s more, they were miraculously able to lift some partial fingerprints belonging to our young gym rat off Polly’s cold neck flesh (medical science does advance), as well as finding enough of William’s DNA in the living room of her apartment to clone him several times over. And then there were the freeze frames from the fifth-floor security camera showing William going up the back stairwell, then soon thereafter hurriedly leaving the same way.

  An investigation was begun, though, for the time being, death by suicide remained the (provisional) finding.

  Was Carl worried?

  Probably.

  He carefully studied the autopsy report. So if it came to it, he had a backup plan. This one also involved William.

  Though not in a way William was going to like.

  41.

  Polly Smith’s obituary made the New York Times.

  She was featured just below the obit of a twenty-something rock-star drummer who had piloted his private plane (and its three female passengers) into the side of a mountain. His autopsy revealed enough dope in his veins to fuel at least ten rows of fans that had attended the stadium concert the evening before his fatal flight.

  Like the rocker’s, Polly’s obit featured an accompanying photo. It clearly looked to be from times past, with a delighted Polly in sundress with her hand securing a floppy hat as she leaned against a stiff breeze at the rail of someone’s yacht. The Times did not provide a cause of death. Carl got next-of-kin billing, noting that he was “chairman of one of America’s most prominent law firms.” Their decade-long-AWOL daughter (who neither showed up for the funeral nor sent a card, electronic or paper) was also named.

  As next of kin, Carl was required under New York law to identify Polly’s body at the medical examiner’s office. He did, telling the ME that his poor, lamentable wife had been severely depressed ever since their estrangement. Shaking his head with the utter sadness of it all, he also made sure to mention Polly’s out-of-control drinking. (Nothing was said to him at the time about the marks found on her neck. As I said, he would later catch that in the autopsy report.)

  “So very tragic,” Carl just about whispered, shaking his head in post-connubial grief, while managing to squeeze out a tear or two.

  A terse e-mail about Polly’s untimely death was circulated throughout Dunn & Sullivan. It was left at that. Coffee break’s over, back to work. Carl stayed away from his office for only a day or two. Once back, he acknowledged hallway expressions of sympathy wordlessly, with a slightly altered version of the Carl Smith head nod. There was, however, one task Carl saw to during his “mourning” period.

  He paid a visit to the law offices of Iván the Impaler.

  Polly’s divorce case had died with her. So the prospect of a continuing handsome legal fee for lawyer Escobar was no longer to be. But there was still the matter of those pesky photos and the accompanying video. A loose end that needed tidying up, so to speak.

  Iván was later questioned under oath about his meeting with Carl.

  Lawyer: How long after Polly Smith’s death did her husband pay his visit to you?

  Iván: The day after.

  Lawyer: What did he want?

  Iván: Why don’t you ask him?

  Lawyer: I’m asking you.

  On the deposition video, you can see Iván smirk. He fingers his perfectly situated necktie. He’s letting the questioner—a junior lawyer with a timid voice—know: Don’t even think about fucking with me. He’s also testing this kid, seeing how easily he can be pushed.

  Iván: I’m not sure what he wanted. All I can tell you is what he said.

  Lawyer: (The young lawyer ignores Iván’s baited-hook comment and doesn’t then ask, “So what did he say?” That would have given Iván room to assert some open-ended, self-serving bullshit about his claim of what Carl had said. Instead, to pin Carl down, the lawyer asks . . .) Carl Smith wanted something from you, didn’t he?

  Iván: Did he?

  Lawyer: Yes, in fact he did. He wanted the return of certain . . . let’s call them troublesome photos and an accompanying video. You remember that, don’t you?

  Iván: Yes.

  Lawyer: Smith bought them from you, didn’t he?

  Iván: No.

  Lawyer: Well, let’s talk about that.

  Iván: That’s not a question. You need to ask me a question.

  Lawyer: Smith told you he was there to see you as next of kin and as executor of his deceased wife’s estate. And not as the counterparty to the terminated divorce proceeding. You remember that, don’t you?

  Iván: (Nods his head yes.)

  Lawyer: You will need to answer verbally, Mr. Escobar. You’re a lawyer. You know that. (This young lawyer clearly doesn’t like this overdressed, smug divorce lawyer. Good for him.)

  Iván: Yes.

  Lawyer: And Smith asked you, as executor, to hand over his deceased wife’s entire file, all papers and all exhibits. You remember that, too, don’t you?

  Iván: Yes.

  Lawyer: And you complied with Smith’s request, didn’t you?

  Iván: Yes.

  Lawyer: And he paid you for that effort, didn’t he?

  Iván: I think he did.

  Lawyer: What was your hourly rate at the time?

  Iván: Eight hundred dollars an hour.

  Lawyer: And it took you . . . what? Ten minutes to comply with Smith’s request? Go to your file cabinet. Pull out the file—all the papers and exhibits, including the photos and the video. Then pass it across your desk to Carl Smith?

  Iván: About that.

  Lawyer: And can you recall how much you charged him for this ten-minute effort?

  Iván: No, I can’t.

  The lawyer pulls a document from a file lying on the table beside him. He asks the stenographer to mark the document as Exhibit One. After the stenographer does that . . .

  Lawyer: (sliding the document across the table to Iván) Mr. Escobar. Please take a look at what has been marked as deposition Exhibit One and tell me if you can identify that document.

  Iván: It appears to be a photocopy of a canceled check.

  Lawyer: Appears to be?

  Iván: It is.

  Lawyer: And to whom is the check made out?

  Iván: To me.

  Lawyer: And who signed it?

  Iván: Carl Smith.

  Lawyer: And how much is it made out for?

  Iván: A hundred thousand dollars.

  Lawyer: And so Carl Smith paid you one hundred thousand dollars for your ten minutes of work, consisting of your turning over to him a file, a batch of photos, and an accompanying video. Right?

  Iván: I think I would like to consult with counsel before I answer that question.

  Thereupon the deposition was suspended for the day.

  • • •

  I had seen the firmwide e-mail about Polly’s death, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time. My mind was elsewhere.

  Peter Moss had sent me a notice scheduling my deposition. That notice was like a loaded gun to my head.

  You see, unlike the main case where I was acting as a lawyer and so essentially exempt from interrogation, in the stand-alone case Moss had brought, I was a party defendant and not counsel of record. So I could be compelled to sit for a deposition like any other witness. Put under oath and questioned. And since both cases dealt with the same general set of facts, by interrogating me in case number two Moss would make me a witness against myself in case number one.

  He was playing chess with me. Scheduling my deposition in the second case was his latest move.

  Moss was not about to restrict his que
stioning. He’d grill me about everything, whether it was legally privileged or not. Was there any way I could stop him?

  Not likely. Of course, I could have taken the Fifth and refused to answer questions on self-incrimination grounds. But no fucking way was I about to do that. For two reasons: One, I hadn’t done anything wrong. Two, I took the Fifth? How was I going to explain that to the bar?

  I had been placed in check. Was it checkmate?

  No.

  The deposition never went forward.

  Why?

  It starts with Jeremy Lichtman.

  42.

  Jeremy walked into my office.

  Just as he shut the door, I once again caught sight of Richard Miller racing down the hallway.

  “We need to talk,” Jeremy said as he took the chair facing me.

  I was still consumed with my deposition dilemma and was about to ask him what he thought I should do, but the look on Jeremy’s usually tranquil face stopped me. He was clearly agitated.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “This,” he said as he pulled out his smartphone and pushed SEND. I heard the whoosh of his message and the almost immediate ping on my laptop screen.

  “Take a look.”

  Jeremy had sent me an attachment that contained an Excel spreadsheet, something he’d apparently created. I opened it, lowered my eyes, and started reading.

  “How’d you get this information?” I asked midway through the document.

  “The first part I just ran a search of our law firm’s client files.” Anticipating my next question—why he’d gotten the information—he quickly added, “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Call it instinct, whatever. I don’t know, something just told me that this GRE case was weird enough I should take a look around. See what else the firm recently brought in.”

  What Jeremy had found and then indexed was a listing of five new class-action plaintiffs’ cases, including our GRE case. All were on contingent fees. All had been assigned to relatively new Dunn & Sullivan litigation partners. All had been financed by hedge funds. And all were listed as under the supervision of Carl Smith.