Before You Know Kindness
Page 35
But she knew that he had been. Recently, in fact. Seven or eight weeks ago.
Now he was a shabbily dressed, sloppily bearded, debilitated wretch in a safety-pinned cardigan. This was her director of communications? This guy was supposed to sit in one of those boxy armchairs opposite Katie Couric and Jane Pauley?
He picked up a sealed cardboard carton about half the size of a shoe box with a long serial number stenciled in black ink across the side. "What's this?" he asked her.
"I believe that's your headset. For your telephone. So you don't need to hold the receiver in your hand."
"Oh, goodie. I can be just like a telemarketer."
"Hands-free communication."
He put the box back down on his desk and gently rapped the lid with his knuckles. "Well. Thank you for this, too."
"You're welcome. We want to do everything we can to make your return to work as seamless as possible. We want--"
"Everything's fine," he said to her, his voice as calm and sonorous as an incoming tide. He touched her elbow when he cut her off and she was able to suppress the need to flinch. Barely. "I know what you want, and I thank you for . . . for everything. Okay?"
She glanced down at the spot where his fingers were separated from the flesh on her arm by a wisp of linen fabric. She nodded. She wished she enjoyed the touch of humans half as much as she did the warm fur of her dogs or the scratchy tongues of her cats.
JOHN THOUGHT the offices of Tuttle, DiSpiro, and Maroney, P.C., looked surprisingly unchanged from the period in his life when he'd toiled here. The only visible difference was the removal of Howard Mansfield's name from the signage and letterhead since the older lawyer had become a justice on the Vermont Supreme Court. The offices sat in a renovated brick building on the Burlington waterfront that had once been an icehouse. When Burlington began to gentrify the area, the icehouse was one of the first structures to be transformed into office space. Howard Mansfield and Chris Tuttle were among the business visionaries who understood that its views of the lake and the mountains were sufficiently panoramic to justify moving an upscale law firm to what was then a still up-and-coming neighborhood.
As John strolled down the corridor, his feet positively sinking into the plush cobalt carpet, he realized just how squalid was the workplace four blocks to the east that housed the Chittenden County Public Defenders' Office. The threadbare carpet there was no thicker than cardboard, the walls--an ivory so coated with fingerprints and grime that it now resembled the color of a T-shirt left too long on a subway grate--were peeling, and most of his lawyers' offices were about the size of this firm's coat closet in the waiting room. The difference in the two waiting rooms, in fact, said it all: The one here had a pair of leather couches so soft he could have slept on them, a postcard view of the mountains in New York, and tables with the latest issues of Forbes, Fortune, and that morning's Wall Street Journal. There was coffee or ice water or tea if you simply raised your gaze at the receptionist, a polite young woman who could have passed for a Neiman Marcus model. The waiting room back in his world of PDs was a cramped cubicle with two badly cushioned wooden chairs and a box of half-broken toys for the children of the drunk drivers and mentally ill street people and insolvent check bouncers who hoped that, somehow, he and his associates could finagle for them yet one more chance.
Though John didn't believe he had made a mistake leaving this splendor for the public defenders' office, he couldn't help but wish he could find within the organization's state-funded budget the money to repaint the walls and perhaps buy a decent couch for the waiting room. It wasn't simply that he believed his lawyers deserved freshly painted walls: Those forlorn denizens who depended upon the PDs deserved them, too. After all, was it too much to expect that your lawyers' offices would be clean?
Chris Tuttle rose from behind a desk the size of a small putting green as soon as he saw John in the doorway of his office and came around it to greet him. Tuttle was a few years older than Mansfield--John guessed he was in his midfifties now--but his hair was a shade of black darker than creosote, and his eyes were a vivid chestnut brown. His face was deeply wrinkled, however, and John suspected that Tuttle was dying his hair.
Unlike some of the other senior lawyers in the firm, Tuttle didn't keep a conference table of his own in his office, and so when they sat back down Tuttle was on one side of the massive desk and John was on the other. He was reminded of those images of estranged couples in their baronial dining rooms in movies from the 1930s and 1940s, the length of table between them a signal for the viewer that this marriage had absolutely no hope of being saved. He and Tuttle had already spoken twice on the phone about his deposition, and John had told him all that he could about the rifle--including his fear that when the New Hampshire State Police had returned the gun to him in August the casing had somehow been lost.
"So, how are the girls? Sara and young Willow?" Tuttle asked.
He answered briefly that the girls were as fine as could be expected, given the reality that his family was dealing with a waking nightmare of guilt and self-recrimination. John knew that Tuttle didn't actually want the details of their personal lives right now; nor did he himself have any great desire to volunteer the information while on this other lawyer's billable clock.
"So, the folks in New Hampshire tell me they're still looking for your missing casing," Tuttle said to him. "But I really have no more confidence than you that it will turn up. They don't think there was a casing in the chamber when it was checked into the firearms locker."
"Oh, that's bullshit, of course there was. They just lost it is all."
"I'm just telling you what they're telling me. You still have the box the cartridge came in?"
"Yes, absolutely. Why?"
"A gun guy thought it might be worth seeing if other rounds from the box jam in the chamber. Maybe it wasn't just that one."
"Interesting."
"A longshot. Obviously you loaded and unloaded the rifle a couple of times last November, and no other cartridges got stuck. Still, it's something to consider when we get a chance to look at the gun. So, bring me that box of ammunition, okay? Now, let's talk about the deposition," Tuttle continued. On the lake outside the window John could see a ferry leaving the dock at the boathouse and starting its way west toward New York.
"Yes, let's."
"Obviously there is no justification for your . . ." Tuttle paused, searching for the right word. John considered assisting him with stupidity, irresponsibility, or carelessness, but he restrained himself. "Improvidence," Tuttle said finally. "There is no rational reason for what you did."
"Thank you."
"So what I've told Paige I want us to focus on, first of all, is the mystery of the round in the chamber. How it simply wouldn't pop out when you cycled the weapon, and then--and this will be very important--how you struggled and struggled to extract it."
"I didn't struggle. I didn't want to shoot my hand off with a ramrod or risk blowing my head off by firing it. I didn't know what would happen if I fired it, and I envisioned the damn thing exploding against my cheek."
"I understand--and we'll need to make that point. But you did try to pop out the cartridge; you did try to remove it. Multiple times. Correct?"
"Correct."
"And it just wouldn't come out."
"Yes."
"Good. It must be clear that you did what you could. Second, it must also be clear that events then conspired to prevent you from dealing with it further, i.e., bringing it to a gunsmith. All that busyness you told me about at work, the birth of young Patrick. I want the numbers, please, of exactly how many cases your office handled over the last twelve months, and the number for the previous year, too. You were down, what, two lawyers this year?"
"One. But we were also down an investigator."
"Fine. I also want to know how many cases you managed personally, in addition to all your responsibilities running the public defenders' office."
"I can get you that."
"You mean the garden Spencer had us plant?"
"Yup. That one. You must have helped him weed it or something."
"I spent all of Memorial Day Weekend over there putting the damn thing into the ground."
"Excellent. That's three days right there you were helping him when you could have been taking the gun to a gunsmith. That is, after all, half the problem here. You never brought the gun to a professional."
"The other half, I presume, is leaving a live round in there in the first place?"
"Okay, the problem should be divided into thirds, not halves. Forgive me. You left a live round in the chamber. You failed to bring the weapon to a gunsmith. And then you left the rifle where a child could get it."
"It was only where a child could get it because I was actually going to see a gunsmith roughly thirty-six hours after Spencer was shot. That was the whole reason the rifle was in the trunk of my car."
"You sound angry. You needn't be. It goes without saying that you shouldn't be angry at your deposition."
He heard a small laugh escape his lips, unexpected and trilling. I'm not angry, he wanted to say. I'm depressed. His depression might have made him sound cranky, but one was only a visible manifestation of the other. Some mornings it took every bit of will he could muster to simply climb out from under the sheets on his and Sara's bed, to emerge from the warm cocoon he had created with a little cotton and a nighttime's worth of body heat. He might not have made it out of bed today--the depression this morning was almost a quilt, shielding him from all the nastiness the world had to offer with the cozy affection of a down comforter--if he hadn't heard Willow calming Patrick in the kitchen (so distant, so very distant) while Sara was trying to get one child ready for school and the other for the Mother's Love Nurture World. He had to help. He had to. If he didn't, he understood, he would have ratcheted up the self-loathing yet one more notch, and that might have sent him so deep into his nest of percale and gloom that he would never have emerged.
"I won't be angry," he said to reassure Tuttle, and he tried to sit up a little higher in his chair. He realized he'd been slouching, just the way his own clients did when they were meeting with him.
He hadn't really thought about it until just that moment, but he guessed they were depressed, too.
PAIGE LEANED FORWARD in the ergonomic stool with a back that purported to be a chair. She used to have a chair that was a deep burgundy leather. Once she was the youngest lawyer in the firm who got to sit on the slick, supple skin of a dead animal. It was a big chair with plush cushions and wheels--an unmistakable sign of achievement and success. Then she started working with FERAL and she understood that the chair had to go. Now an associate who would soon be a partner (but wasn't yet) had it, a woman from Harvard who spent lots of time suing automobile manufacturers over headrests, fuel tanks, and air bags. Nothing she did ever wound up in trial, and she made the firm mountains of money. She was likable. She was pretty. She was a rising star. Paige knew she would have detested her if she herself weren't already a partner.
Now her eyes moved back and forth between the papers on her desk that had been faxed to her moments before and the telephone. She had known essentially what the fax was going to say for fifteen minutes before it arrived because the engineer at the ballistics lab in Maryland had called her and left a message on her voice mail. Then he'd followed up with this fax. The results? They could find nothing wrong with the extractor on the Adirondack rifle she had sent them. Not a thing. And they'd put the weapon through batteries of tests, using different brands of ammunition and test-firing the gun multiple times. Always, however, they had been able to extract both live rounds and spent casings from the chamber with ease. Never once did any round stick.
She'd called Spencer at FERAL a few minutes ago, but he was already in a meeting. She considered telling Keenan the news, but that wasn't quite fair. Spencer was her client. Not FERAL. Spencer should get the results first.
She guessed she should not have been surprised by the findings, given how little faith she had in John Seton. Fortunately, this disappointment did not derail the lawsuit. In some ways it actually meant the stakes were even higher, because now it wasn't simply one defective rifle, it was the whole Adirondack thirty-ought-six she was taking on: the model. They were going to sue a brand because there was a fundamental defect with the gun: A round remained in the chamber when a person emptied the magazine, and that--they would argue--was inherently dangerous. The company was putting an irresponsibly lethal weapon into the stream of commerce.
Well, it's a gun, that little voice of reason kept muttering inside her head. Of course it's lethal. Hello? She thought of the Shakespeare quote one of the malpractice attorneys in the firm had engraved in bronze on a plaque on his wall:
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
Still, this was the information she needed to finalize her theory of liability and compose the complaint. Now, at least, she knew precisely what they were going to argue.
THAT AFTERNOON, Keenan pulled back the bolt on the rifle an intern in Paige's firm had purchased the day before at a sporting goods store on Long Island. It was the exact same model John Seton owned. Keenan was familiarizing himself with the weapon in his office while Paige watched, and a surprisingly articulate mountain man from some small, smoggy city in northern Pennsylvania patiently explained to them why the chamber and the magazine on a bolt action rifle could not be unloaded simultaneously. Dan Grampbell must have been six and a half feet tall, and Keenan would have been shocked if he tipped the scale at an ounce below three hundred pounds. His eyes were green, his mouth--what Keenan could see of it behind the massive beaver beard that swallowed up cheek and neck--was pink, and his hair, all of it, was the sort of orangish red he'd once seen on poppies at the botanical gardens. He was wearing an ill-fitting blue blazer over a worn flannel shirt.
Yet Grampbell also had a degree in criminal science from Penn State, and he spoke with the soft voice of a poet. Moreover, Dan Grampbell knew about guns. He knew a lot about guns. That was why he was here and why he was being paid an hourly rate commensurate with that received by the associates in Paige's own firm.
"It's a two-step process for a reason," Grampbell was saying quietly. "If Adirondack chooses to settle, it will be because in their opinion settling is less expensive than the cost of a trial or enduring the negative publicity that would surround the case."
"Let me try unloading it for myself one more time," Keenan said. He was afraid that his clumsiness with the weapon in front of Paige was unmanly, and he was surprised at himself for giving a damn.
"Fine. It's now fully loaded," Grampbell observed. "There is a full magazine and a round in the chamber."
Paige was grinning mischievously, and she looked to him a bit like a schoolgirl. Twice when he'd been trying to load the weapon he'd fumbled the dummy ammunition, one of the cartridges dinging off the dark oak of his precious mission desk.
"You're on safety. Correct?" Grampbell asked.
He looked to make sure. "Yes."
"Now, pull back the bolt--that's right--and, voila. The round will pop--"
Sure enough, it popped right into his nose, ejecting like a pilot from a doomed fighter jet. He yelped, and Paige's pixielike chuckles were turned into a single burst of full-throated laughter. He wasn't smiling, however, and so she put a cap on her mirth and extended her hands to him, open-armed, as if to say, What did you expect? Really, now, what did you expect?
"The bullet certainly popped," he murmured to Grampbell. He hoped he sounded liked a good sport.
"Next, you are going to push the magazine release by the trigger guard."
He pressed the small knob and instantly four cartridges cascaded onto the floor, a pair rolling under the chair in which Paige was sitting, two
others disappearing near the credenza. He'd forgotten to place his cupped hand beneath the magazine to catch them, even though Grampbell had warned him earlier that he should.
"You've now cleared the magazine. See?"
"I see."
"A good thing to do at this point might be to close the magazine door."