Westlund held up his hand. “I hear your words, but they are just excuses,” he said. “You have time for hospitals and doctors, but you do not have a couple of hours to spend with God even once a week.” He reached down and touched Micah gently on the head. “My heart breaks for this innocent child, but as I said, there is nothing I can do. You have chosen where to place your faith and now you must abide by that choice. I can only hope that God, in His infinite mercy and compassion, will forgive your transgressions, recognizing that you made them for all the right reasons and have been led astray by the false gods of medicine, and that God will help this innocent child.”
“What should we have done then?” David said, suddenly angry that this stranger had entered his house, touched his son with the promise of healing, and then decided he couldn’t help because their faith wasn’t strong enough.
Westlund ignored the anger. “Prayed,” he said. “Placed all of your faith in Almighty God, and prayed for the healing that can only come through the sacrifice of His son, Jesus Christ, who healed the sick and brought Lazarus back to life.”
“Please, please help us,” Nonie suddenly pleaded, grabbing the preacher’s hand.
Westlund withdrew his hand from her grip. “There’s nothing-” he said as he began to turn toward the door. Then he stopped and looked at David. “You’re struggling with finances, brother,” he said. “You say you’ve recently lost your job?”
It was true. “What about it?” David replied sullenly.
“There’s no shame in being hit hard by a capricious world,” Westlund said. He looked from the parents to their son and back to the parents. “Forgive me if I came off as criticizing you regarding your son. It’s hard to have faith when it appears that the world, and God, has turned against you.”
Westlund reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card. “Give my assistant, Brother Frank Bernsen, a call,” he said. “We are a small ministry, and not a wealthy one, but we do have an emergency fund to help good people such as yourselves.”
“We’ll be all right, but thank you,” David replied, somewhat sheepishly after his angry reaction.
Westlund nodded. “I understand. You’re a proud man and not one to take handouts. That’s why this would be a loan, not a gift, though in accordance with the Bible’s prohibition of usury, we can’t accept interest. Take only what you need, and pay it back.”
The preacher studied their faces and then smiled benevolently. “Look, we’ve just met, and in less than happy circumstances, so if it’s too soon to extend the hand of friendship in Jesus’ name, I understand. But do call if we can help.”
David accepted the business card and held out his hand, which Westlund shook. “Thanks again,” he said. “That is kind of you to offer and to have stopped by.”
“Would you say a prayer tonight for Micah?” Nonie asked.
Westlund turned to David’s wife and placed both of his hands on her shoulders. “I’ll do better than that,” he said. “I’ll get down on my knees with you right here and now. It is never too late to place your faith in God as the true healer.”
And so the Ellises found themselves kneeling next to their son’s bed as Westlund placed a hand on Micah’s head and gripped Nonie’s with his other. “O Lord, our God, we come before Thy face, bowing before Thy majesty in recognition of our unworthiness and giving thanks for all Thy good gifts, which Thou dost again and again give us for body and soul …”
“Nonie?” David called out again as he walked back to their son’s former bedroom and opened the door. The room was dark but he could make out the familiar silhouettes of teddy bears and toy airplanes. But his wife wasn’t in the bed. He wondered where she could be, if for no other reason than they needed to prepare themselves for the start of the trial.
The shock of Micah’s death had been compounded a few weeks later when police detectives arrived at the apartment, informing them that they’d been indicted on the charge of reckless manslaughter and were under arrest. At the time, he’d been outraged. Wasn’t it enough that his beloved son had died?
Westlund had, of course, been outspoken in their defense, and he’d soon been joined by an unlikely consortium of supporters, including Ivy academic lawyers who’d offered their services to fight what they said was an unconstitutional attack on their religious beliefs. Indeed, they’d received letters of support, even money, from people all over the country, ranging from anti-government types to religious zealots.
However, as time passed, David had started to wonder if the charge against him and his wife was perhaps legitimate. He’d never thought of himself as a bad father. He loved Micah with every ounce of his being. But the more he listened to Westlund and the others turn the case into a theoretical discussion, the more he began to question if he and Nonie were indeed guilty. But Nonie would hear none of it. She believed every word out of Westlund’s mouth and bitterly denounced the New York District Attorney’s Office as “a den of Satan worshippers.”
Already suspecting that she held him in part responsible for their son’s death due to his lack of faith, he’d never told her that he was the one who called 911 when Micah lay dying. He’d gone out for a walk and found himself in a grocery store, where he purchased one of those cheap prepaid cell phones and called. But it had been too late.
He left the room and made his way back down the hallway to the kitchen, where he noticed a pile of open mail on the table. Or rather he noticed a single envelope that was separate from the others. It was from an insurance company and addressed to David and Nonie Ellis. “Important document enclosed” was stamped on the outside.
David frowned. He didn’t remember doing any business with that particular insurance company. Probably an advertisement, he thought, but he still opened the envelope and pulled out the letter inside.
It was, after all, an important document. It explained that “pending the outcome of the legal actions” the Ellises were facing, the company was withholding the death benefits for Micah as a rider on a life insurance policy taken out in the name of his parents, David and Nonie Ellis, and assigned to the Reverend C. G. Westlund.
A sob escaped David’s mouth as he crumpled the letter in his hand and stormed out of the apartment.
9
Bruce Knight sat in his one-man law office staring at the telephone, willing it to ring. The silence remained unbroken except for the creaking and knocking of the ancient radiator that had kicked on as evening fell on the city. Thank God it’s March, he thought. At least the heating bill will be going down.
There weren’t any sounds from the minuscule reception area outside of his office, either, not even a secretary typing at a keyboard or talking to friends about her boring job. He’d had to let his assistant go a month before due to the reason behind the silence-a dearth of paying clients. A young woman with short black hair, tattoos, and a nose ring, she still came in on Fridays to help him out with filing, declining his efforts to pay her, even with post-dated checks.
“You’re a good man, Bruce Knight,” she’d said the previous week when she left. “One of these days, you’ll be back on your feet and can make it all up to me.”
It’s only Monday afternoon; things will pick up, he told himself for the hundredth time that month as he glanced over at the stack of envelopes perched precariously on the edge of his desk. Most of them remained unopened; he knew what they would be-demands for payments from collection agencies, threatening notes from his landlord regarding missing rent checks, utility bills several months in arrears. He just didn’t need the aggravation, and it wasn’t like he could do anything about it. So they sat unread and unanswered.
Knight combed his fingers through his prematurely thinning hair and thought ruefully back to the days when he’d been a young Turk fresh out of law school and already climbing his way up the ladder of one of New York’s best boutique law firms. As with his current practice, he’d specialized in criminal law and fit right in with the firm’s take-no-prisoners reputati
on. But unlike his current practice, his clients then had been wealthy men and women, mostly accused of white-collar crimes or those crimes of passion the rich sometimes indulged in-sexually assaulting domestic servants, or shooting one’s spouse and his mistress as they romped about on the Mulberry silk sheets.
By New York standards, the firm had been small, only seventy-five attorneys as opposed to a Wall Street-Madison Avenue white-shoe firm-which would have hundreds, along with satellite locations in Chicago, Los Angeles, London, and Paris-but charged gold-shoe prices. They often took clients referred by the white-shoe firms that either weren’t as capable at fighting it out in the trenches with the New York District Attorney’s Office or didn’t want to scuff the polish on those shoes by getting involved in ugly cases.
With the aid of his clients’ deep pockets for hiring “expert witnesses” who would say anything for a price, Knight’s success rate had outshone that of even some of the firm’s more experienced attorneys, earning him the notice of the partners. The more acquittals he won, or cases he got dropped, or cases he pled down to a slap on the wrist, the more important cases he was assigned to and the higher his salary and bonuses climbed. With the sort of praise he was earning in firm meetings, he even dreamed of becoming the youngest partner in the firm’s ninety-year history.
Unfortunately, he did not handle success well. He discovered a penchant for beautiful women, expensive cars, and forty-year-old Glenfiddich single-malt Scotch whiskey, which at $2,500 a bottle was one of the world’s best and priciest. But even a great single-malt sometimes needed, at least in his mind, a snort or two (or three) of cocaine to balance the high.
He didn’t worry about where all that might be leading; he was young and had the world by the balls. However, those late nights, beautiful women, drugs, and Scotch started taking a toll. He found that it was getting increasingly tough to get up in the morning and into work without a couple more lines of coke to go with a pot of coffee. Before long, he was sneaking snorts at his desk and even in the men’s stalls of courthouse restrooms during breaks.
When he was almost caught snorting a line off his office desk by one of the partners, he started to worry a little. But he reasoned that he was under a lot of stress and needed cocaine to handle it for the time being; he’d tone it all down after he made partner. At least that’s what he told himself on mornings when no amount of eyedrops got the red out and blood appeared on the tissue when he blew his nose.
The pressure to perform just kept getting more intense, which meant more cocaine and more booze. Then he started making mistakes: arriving late for court and angering the judges; forgetting to file paperwork on time; rushing in late to meetings-once missing a meeting entirely as he slept one of his binges off. He called in and said he had the flu, but it had not saved him from being told to report to the office of one of the senior partners when he arrived at work late, the next morning.
“What’s going on with you?” the partner, a middle-aged Harvard grad with movie-star looks, asked bluntly after Knight sat down in the chair in front of the man’s massive desk.
“What do you mean?” he replied, feeling a wave of nausea rise in his throat that was partly from fear and partly from the excesses of the previous night.
“I think you know what I mean,” the partner said sternly. “Bruce, when you started here, we all were impressed with your work as an attorney and with you as a person. You had a great chance of making partner at an early age-”
Knight did not like how the man was speaking in the past tense about his dream. Had a great chance.
“-but the quality of your work has fallen off considerably,” the partner continued, “and to be honest, your reliability is in question, too. We take this very seriously; this firm has a ninety-year reputation for excellence. We are nothing without our clients, and if we fail them, they’ll go elsewhere.”
The partner leaned across the desk and locked eyes with Knight. “Do you have a drinking problem? Because if you do, we’ll get you help.”
Knight shook his head. “No … some social drinking after work, but nothing outrageous,” he said, having never wanted a drink more in his life than at that moment.
“What about drugs?”
“Drugs?”
“Yes, illicit drugs … speed, pot, coke, heroin. Are you doing drugs?”
Again Knight denied the accusation. “No … not since a little experimentation in college,” he replied, hoping that the man didn’t notice the sweat he could feel popping out on his forehead.
The partner remained quiet for a moment and then nodded. “Okay, I hope not. But whatever it is that has been affecting you and your work, it needs to stop now. I’m letting you know that you are officially on probation. We’ll be watching to see how you respond to this little chat.”
Knight left the office and almost collapsed in the hallway with fear. He vowed to quit the boozing. And no more coke. And he meant it. He wasn’t a bad guy; he called his parents back home in Columbus, Ohio, every week, gave to charities and even the occasional bum on the street. He’d just been enjoying life a little too much, and he could adjust … tone it down.
When he got back to his office that day, he reached into his desk drawer and withdrew the small bindle of coke. He got up and went to the bathroom, intending to flush the drug down the toilet. But as he stood there looking at the snowy white powder, he decided that it would be a waste of money. He’d have one last blowout that weekend and be done with it. To celebrate his upcoming sobriety, he dipped a fingernail in the powder, brought it to his nose, and sniffed.
The only problem was that once it was gone that weekend, he wanted more. At first he resisted the drug’s call. He even started working out at the firm’s gym, ate healthy, and went to bed early-without the beautiful women. But then there was that night he went out with an old law school buddy and twin brunettes, each wearing the same low-cut dress. “His” twin kept telling him how turned on she got after snorting cocaine and, well … the rest was history.
Knight tried to hide that “toning it down” wasn’t working by spending a lot of time at the courthouse and the firm’s law library. But he was sinking and he knew it. He considered going to the partners and accepting their offer of “help” with his addictions, but he also knew that would be the kiss of death for his dream of becoming a partner. They might pat him on the back and pay for rehab, even keep him on as one of the firm’s low-level attorneys, but they would never trust an addict-even a recovering addict-with important cases or the firm’s reputation again. So he just tried his best to hide his problem, knowing that sooner or later it would have to end.
It came sooner. After one particularly wild night, he slept through his alarm clock on the morning of an important pretrial hearing. There wasn’t time to shower or shave, and he put on the first suit he found lying on the floor, albeit a Brooks Brothers. He arrived in the courtroom ten minutes late to find an irate judge and a panicked, angry client.
It was then that it struck him that his lifestyle wasn’t just affecting him; it was playing Russian roulette with the lives of his clients. He’d sworn an oath to zealously protect the rights and freedom of the people who trusted him, and he was failing miserably.
There was still enough left of the boy from the Midwest who’d been raised to believe in old-fashioned values like honesty, integrity, and earning his paycheck. He got through the hearing, but when he returned to the office, he walked into the senior partner’s office and resigned.
After that there was only one thing left to do; he spent what little savings he had on a hedonistic cocaine-fueled monthlong binge that he half hoped would kill him. It didn’t. Then when the expensive cars and furniture were sold and the money was gone, he was evicted from his apartment and found himself living on the streets. He was too ashamed to go home to his parents or beg friends-most of whom no longer wanted to know him anyway-for a place to stay or a hand back up out of the gutter.
Instead, he learned where the homele
ss shelters were located, and when they were full, the heating grates and nooks and crannies of buildings where he could shiver the night away. He did odd jobs when he could, raided Dumpsters for food and things to sell or trade, and sold his blood. He couldn’t afford cocaine or Glenfiddich anymore, but by panhandling he could usually afford a bottle of the cheapest whiskey or rotgut wine and tried to drink himself to death.
A year later, he looked fifty-five, not thirty-five; his nose was perpetually red and his blue eyes had the haze of the perpetually drunk. He’d sunk about as low as he could get one night four years earlier when he climbed down from a subway platform, planning to end it all. …
Knight’s recollection of the dismal past was broken by the sound of someone entering the reception area. He jumped up from his desk to see who it was, worried that it might be a bill collector. Since he couldn’t risk losing a client, he opened the door of his office and stopped. His jaw dropped; he could not quite believe what he was seeing.
Standing in the doorway to the hall was the partner from his former firm. The look on the man’s face was one of scorn, but he brightened when he saw Knight. “Good afternoon, Bruce,” he said pleasantly.
“Uh, h-hello,” Knight stammered, and then just stood, mouth agape, wondering if he was dreaming.
The man tilted his head to the side and smiled. He pointed to the office behind his former employee. “Mind if we sit down and have a little talk? I may have some work for you … and if you don’t mind my saying so, it looks like you could use it.”
Knight finally shut his mouth and nodded. He couldn’t believe it. Work? From his old firm? “By all means,” he said, stepping aside to indicate that the man should enter. “I apologize, my receptionist needed to leave work early today so I am manning the fort by myself.”
“Of course, I understand,” the man replied as they entered the office.
“Would you care for a cup of coffee?” Knight asked, wondering if he had any coffee to make.
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