by Adam Mitzner
“I appreciate that, Benjamin, I really do. As you know, I’ve devoted my professional life to this firm. My wife would have said that I devoted my entire life to this firm.”
He gave me a knowing smile, surely recognizing where this was heading. “Daniel, I know how hard you’ve worked, because it’s as hard as I’ve worked, and as hard as every single one of our partners has worked. And as many hours as we have all logged, it probably is roughly the same amount of time as put in by the world’s best surgeons, and pianists, and writers, and athletes. The others in our lives—spouses, children, friends—they all get a little less because of the commitment we have to make to practice law at our level. And you’ve just established yourself in that topmost echelon with the Macy verdict. Don’t throw all that away, Daniel. Instead, why don’t you take some time to think about how you want the rest of your career to look, and then call me when you’ve made a decision.”
“I appreciate the offer, Benjamin. I do, along with everything you’ve done for me over the years, but I’ve made up my mind. I’m done with this.” I could have left it there, but I wanted to make it crystal clear that this was final, and well considered. “And since you brought up the Macy case, you need to know . . . it’s not a reason for me to stay, it’s a reason for me to leave.”
I knew that he wouldn’t try to talk me out of it any further. “I see,” he said in a measured voice. “Best of luck to you,” and then he shook my hand.
And that was it. I hadn’t spoken to him or anyone else at Taylor Beckett since that day. Even though I’d known many of my coworkers for twenty years, I didn’t get a single telephone call or email. I was just as much to blame for the silence as my former colleagues, as I hadn’t reached out to them, either. The expression out of sight, out of mind doesn’t apply anywhere more than at a large law firm. It was all very Orwellian; I was wiped from the institution as completely as if I’d never worked there at all.
But now, this afternoon, and after all this time, I dialed Benjamin Ethan.
His assistant, a woman named Janeene, answered his phone. When I worked at Taylor Beckett, I spoke to Janeene so frequently that she joked about wishing her husband called her half as much as I did. But when I gave her my name and asked to speak to Ethan, she was all business, asking me to hold while she told “Mr. Ethan” that I was on the line.
“Daniel. Long time, no talk,” Ethan said when he finally picked up, after I’d been on hold for the better part of two minutes. “What has it been, two, three years?”
“Eighteen months, actually.”
“Time. Where does it go?”
I chuckled to myself. You’d think that a guy who billed $1,250 for every sixty minutes would have a better sense of time.
“How have you been?” I asked.
“You know, a slave to the billable hour. But I can’t complain. What can I do for you?”
“I’m ready to get back into practice.”
“I’m glad to hear it. But, well, you know the way this place runs. It’s not up to only me, and after so much time . . . I just don’t want you to get your hopes up, that’s all. I’ll certainly advocate for your return, but I don’t know how the other partners will feel about it.”
This was hardly a surprise. I’d long suspected that Ethan’s grandiose “you’re always welcome back here” when I’d left the firm was classic lawyer BS. The last thing that anyone at Taylor Beckett wanted now was for me to return. Nature might abhor a vacuum, but a big law firm devours it. My cases had been reassigned, and my clients were now firmly under another partner’s control. Even my office was occupied. My return would upset the natural order of things, and that is something a large law firm simply can’t abide.
“I’m afraid I wasn’t clear,” I said. “I don’t want to come back to the firm. I’ve got this one case, and I’m going to handle it with a friend. I’m calling to ask if I could use some of the firm’s resources—an office or two, maybe some light secretarial help.”
Even over the phone, I could tell that Ethan was letting out a sigh of relief.
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “Besides, it would be nice to see you around the office again. So what’s the case that’s so interesting it brought you back into the game?”
“It’s a big one, actually. The rapper named Legally Dead.”
“Really? A front-page murder case. Well, you’re not easing back into it, now, are you, Daniel?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Do you mind my asking how you came to represent him?”
“No, not at all. A friend’s sister, she’s an associate over at Martin Quinn. Or at least she was before we agreed to take on Legally Dead. Anyway, she knew the client from her time there and took an interest in the case. He’d heard about the Macy case, and I guess he figured since I got one celebrity acquitted for rape, why not another for murder, and so he asked her to make the introduction.”
I expected some pithy comeback, but Ethan didn’t say anything. When the silence became noticeable, I said, “Is something wrong, Benjamin?”
This time I actually heard him let out a deep sigh. “I’m afraid so,” he said in a somewhat pained-sounding voice. “I hate to say no to you, Daniel, especially because I just said yes, but unfortunately I have to rescind my offer of office resources.”
“Why’s that?”
Again there was a pregnant pause. Ethan had the kind of mind that was patient and deliberate. Whereas most of us fill our uncertainty with stammering and verbal tics, Ethan never did. If he didn’t know precisely what he wanted to say, he was silent.
“I’m afraid Taylor Beckett cannot be seen to be supportive of your client’s objectives. Please do not misunderstand me: I am not making a moral judgment, as much as relating a business reality. You know better than most that our clients are hardly saints-in-waiting. But your client, I am afraid, is someone we just cannot be associated with publicly.”
This was hardly a shock. In fact, I found it more surprising that Ethan initially agreed to my proposal without delving more into the nature of my representation. I assumed he figured it was some insider trading or accounting fraud case, and therefore there’d be little institutional resistance. A murder case, however, was a totally different thing at Taylor Beckett. That much I knew from the opposition from certain partners to the firm taking on Darrius Macy, and at least then, the firm was getting paid.
“I understand, Benjamin. I’ll just make other arrangements.”
“Daniel . . . would you mind if I asked you a personal question?”
“Of course not.”
“Why do you want to take on someone like him? Like this Legally Dead character? I would think you of all people . . .”
I laughed slightly into the phone, a defense mechanism to get him to stop from finishing the thought. “ ‘Someone like him,’ huh? This from a man who once said that the only mission of a law firm is to make money for its partners.”
“I never said that, Daniel.”
“Then it was something pretty close to it.”
“Well, is that the answer, then? Is it for the money?”
“No. It’s not the money.”
“Then my question still stands: Why, Daniel?”
“Isn’t the pursuit of justice a sufficient reason?”
Ethan chuckled. “I hope you know, Daniel, that I have always had a special fondness for you, which is the only reason I am intruding in this way. Given your experience with Darrius Macy, I would have thought—”
I tuned out what he said next, knowing full well what he thought about my experience with Darrius Macy. What he didn’t understand, however, was that far from viewing my representation of Legally Dead as a repeat of that experience, I saw it as my last chance to get out from under all that.
6
Before the accident, I’d wake up most mornings at six so that I could go for a run. On days when I was pressed for time, I’d do two loops of the reservoir in Central Park (3.2 miles), but my preferred
route was the inner loop of the park (5 miles), and if I was feeling particularly strong, I’d do the park’s outer loop (6.2 miles).
I’d be back home by seven, which was when my daughter would be sitting down to breakfast. The twenty minutes I’d spend with Alexa as she chomped on crustless toast smothered in strawberry jam was the only time I’d see her during the workweek, as I always came home well past her bedtime.
At 7:20 a.m., Sarah would take Alexa to school, which although less than ten blocks away, was nevertheless a half-hour walk for six-year-old legs. Then I’d shower, shave, and dress, and be out the door myself by eight.
Here’s what my morning routine was after they died:
I got up around nine, often after some type of bad dream had jolted me awake. It would take me a moment to get my bearings, and then my entire meaningless existence would flood back to me in an instant. My wife and daughter were still dead, and I had nowhere I needed to be. The end.
Filling the day, or even half the day, became a challenge. Sometimes I’d go to the movies or, less frequently, to a restaurant, just to get the hell out of the apartment. I’d read more than I ever had before, although found that I rarely finished a book, usually putting it down somewhere at the midpoint. I drank too much, even on the days I vowed to take it easy. And on the few occasions I put on my running shoes and headed to the park, I couldn’t go even half a mile. The moment I felt the slightest bit of struggle, I broke stride.
One of the cruelest ironies of my postwork life was that when I was gainfully employed, there never seemed to be enough hours in the day to get done what I wanted to get done, at the office or at home. But now the opposite was true. There was far too much time.
• • •
The day after our meeting with Legally Dead, Nina arrived at my apartment at ten a.m. with a large bag over her shoulder and a tray with two cups of coffee in her hands.
“Howdy, pardner,” she said, and gave me that smile.
I’d called Nina the previous evening and told her I was in. She said Legally Dead would be very pleased and she was looking forward to our working together. I said that I was, too, but she must have thought I didn’t mean it because she said, “Trust me, Dan, you won’t regret doing this.”
Stepping inside my apartment, Nina examined the space. “It’s beautiful, Dan. I never would have guessed you were so into modern furniture. It’s like Don Draper’s apartment from Mad Men.”
After the accident, I sold the apartment on Park Avenue I’d shared with Sarah and Alexa and our house in East Hampton. Rather than put down permanent roots, I rented a one-bedroom in Tribeca that purported to be a loft solely because it had high ceilings. It was less than half the size of the place on Park Avenue, but square footage was not something I cared about any longer. I took it because of the view, forty-two floors above the city, and the terrace off the bedroom. On more than one night during the summer, I’d fallen asleep out there, a bottle beside me.
One of the benefits of downsizing is that the furniture you’re left with is only the good stuff. Virtually everything else I owned went to storage, which included all of Sarah’s and Alexa’s possessions. It was somewhat selfish of me, in that I knew I’d never have any need for their clothing or Sarah’s jewelry or Alexa’s toys, but I just couldn’t imagine giving away anything that they’d ever touched.
“Sarah was the modernist, not me,” I said.
It was a quirk of my apartment’s design that it had both a dining room and a breakfast room. The dining room contained an oval Saarinen table, six plywood Eames chairs, and a midcentury credenza behind them, while the breakfast room opened from the kitchen’s other entrance and had a smaller Saarinen table, this one round, although still in white marble, and four acrylic Eros chairs in red.
Nina put the coffee on the table in the breakfast room and settled into one of the Eros chairs. “They remind me of that ride in Coney Island called the Whip,” she said. “You know the one? It was this red thing with a high back, and you’d sit in it and then it would spin.”
“These swivel,” I said with a smile, and then gave her chair a twist.
She pulled one of the coffee cups out of the tray and passed it to me.
“I prepared my coffee at Starbucks, but I didn’t know how you take yours,” she said, “so I left it black.”
I would have added milk, but if I had any in my refrigerator, it would have been well past its expiration date, so I made do without. “How do you take yours?” I asked as I sipped.
“Milk and Sweet’N Low.”
“Okay, then. Now that the most important matter has been settled, I guess the next thing on the agenda is to figure out where we’re going to work. I called Taylor Beckett but, unfortunately, there’s no room at the inn.”
“I don’t mind working out of here,” Nina said. “One of us can work at this table, and the other one on the dining room table. I’ve got my laptop, and that’s all I need. Besides, it’s not like we have a client who’s going to be visiting the office.”
“That sounds like a plan. So, I guess, the first thing we should do is prepare a notice of appearance. We should hold off on filing it with the court until right before we have to appear in person next week. No need to start the media feeding frenzy if we don’t have to. A few days of work under the radar will be nice.”
“How bad will it be?” she asked.
“If the Macy case is any guide, reporters won’t be going through our garbage or investigating whether you smoked pot in junior high school, but we’ll probably have a paparazzo or two in front of the building from time to time, mainly on days we’re due in court. The truth is, they get better pictures in front of the courthouse, so that’s where they usually stake out. We’ll also get a lot of requests for interviews. On the Macy case, any time any idiot had something to say about Darrius, they’d call me looking for comment.”
She looked a bit concerned. “You okay with that?” I asked.
“Yup. I didn’t even smoke pot in junior high school,” she said with a sudden change of expression.
“Okay, because you looked a little worried for a second.”
She laughed. “Oh no, I was thinking about something else.”
“Care to share?”
“When I draft the notice of appearance, I’ll need to identify our little law firm’s name, and I was wondering whether it should be Sorensen and Harrington or Harrington and Sorensen.”
I laughed with her. “I take it, then, that you’ve rejected out of hand the Law Offices of Daniel L. Sorensen or Daniel L. Sorensen and Associates?”
She looked crestfallen, apparently taking my effort at humor seriously. “I’m joking, Nina. Whatever name you want.”
“Okay, because I was joking a little bit, too. I realize I’m being a bit presumptuous to assume that you’re going to put my name next to yours, given that the client wanted you and I really have very little clue what I’m doing unless all of a sudden the DA’s office dumps a bazillion emails on us.”
“No, we’re partners, Nina. I’ll likely do the lion’s share of the stand-up trial work because I’m more experienced, but you’ll see how quickly you’ll pick things up, and I’m going to rely on you almost exclusively for the legal arguments. Besides, our client may have asked for me, but he loves you.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “I’m going to go with Sorensen and Harrington,” she said, “in deference to your age and experience.”
“That’s very generous of you.”
“I try.”
While Nina worked on the notice of appearance in the breakfast room, I took my coffee out to the dining room and put a call in to Marcus Jackson. Protocol was that prior counsel should hear he’s being replaced, rather than get an email notification from the court system.
The woman who answered the phone at Jackson’s eponymous law firm told me that Jackson would not be able to return my call for a few days, as he was engaged in “several serious matters” that required his immediate atte
ntion.
“Does he have voice mail?” I asked.
“I’m it.”
“Okay, my name is Dan Sorensen. Please explain to Mr. Jackson that I’m sorry to leave this in a message, but if he’s really not going to be able to return my call for several . . . days, I guess I have no choice. I’ve met with Legally Dead—Nelson Patterson—and he wants to substitute us in for Mr. Jackson.”
I’m not sure what type of reaction I expected, but the loss of the firm’s marquee client should have engendered some comment. All I got, however, was a very bored-sounding, “What is your number and could you spell your name, please.”
Next I called Matt Brooks’s office at Capital Punishment Records. It was a rerun of my call with Jackson’s office. Brooks’s assistant told me that Brooks was out of town but would get back to me shortly. Like with Jackson, I wasn’t going to hold my breath.
“Well, I’m done for the day,” I said when I came back into the breakfast room less than five minutes later. “I left messages for Jackson and Brooks. Want to bet which one calls back first? Or if either one ever bothers calling back?”
“So what do we do now?” Nina asked.
I paused for a moment, making a mental checklist of the things we’d need to represent Legally Dead. “Well . . . since we’re flying under the radar for now, I don’t want to call the prosecutor just yet. But we could start to think about lining up an expert. We’ll need a forensic guy.”
“The only MEs I know are on television,” Nina said with a smile.
“I have a list somewhere of the guys we used at Taylor Beckett. Since you’re a little more up to speed about our client and his music, why don’t we divide things up like this—you call the potential MEs and line up some interviews, and I’ll do some work on Google and find out what I can about Legally Dead?”