“I’m going to bed,” Moira told Wyatt, sloughing her shoes as she climbed the stairs to their bedroom. “I’m beat.”
“I’m still too wound up to sleep,” he said. He kissed her good night.
“Maybe I’ll still be up when you’re ready,” she said invitingly.
Wyatt went out the back door, skirted the swimming pool, the water dark, still, rippling with light coming from the rising moon and the lamps that were on inside the house, and let himself into the small pool house on the far side of the pool.
His trombone, a Bach tenor, stood on its stand in the corner. Apart from the main stuff—family, work, friends—running and music were the two constants in Wyatt’s life. Music was great therapy—it made all the bullshit and pettiness of the day melt away into the ozone.
He usually worked on classic trombone pieces, Arthur Pryor solos, and Marine Corps virtuoso stuff, but when he got tired from what he was practicing, or stuck, he’d improvise jazz riffs, closing his eyes and playing à la J. J. Johnson, Jimmy Knepper, Bill Watrous.
Jazz was his passion. He had every album J.J. had ever cut; de rigueur for a trombonist—plus all of Miles, Coltrane, Monk, just about everyone, starting with Bird—thousands of old LPs and CDs. Whenever he was in New York on business he would hit all the big-name jazz clubs—the Blue Note, Village Vanguard—wherever there was someone good.
Wyatt’s secret fantasy, nurtured from Jack Kerouac books and forbidden trips to local clubs when he was still in high school (underage and using a friend’s stolen draft card to get in), was to live in some funky apartment in the Village and play jazz trombone professionally. It was an indulgent pipe dream. He knew that the life of a jazz musician was impossible—no money, scant recognition in relationship to your worth as an artist. And he was white—how many whites made it in jazz?
He picked up his horn and started blowing, warming up for a minute with long tones. For the past few weeks he had been working on a difficult eight-bar section, a series of 64th-note triplets that were all written above high D. The piece was by Pryor—“Blue Bells of Scotland,” one of the trombone master’s most famous numbers. It would take Wyatt about eight months to work through the intricate work, note by single note sometimes, from start to finish, until he reached the point where he would be comfortable enough with his technique and understanding to play it all the way through, nonstop.
Tonight he wasn’t playing for enjoyment, as he usually did. Tonight he was playing because he had hit a wall, and losing himself in music was the best way he knew to stop agonizing over it. Compounding his free-form anxiety was the incident next door and then, worse than that actual incident, how his closest friends had reacted to it. The latent racism and bunker mentality, the hostility and fear, had been chilling. Jesus Christ, he thought, is everybody in this country armed except me?
He knew he’d been burning out for a long time, but he had been unable—unwilling was more to the truth of it—to admit it to himself. He was fighting the feeling like a warrior, but it was a fight he knew he wasn’t winning.
He closed the cover on the Pryor piece. Then he played the opening notes of “On Green Dolphin Street,” glissed down from B flat to sixth-position F, secured the slide lock, and set the trombone on its stand. He fastidiously wiped a finger smudge from the bell with a chamois and turned off the light over the stand.
THE PARAMEDICS AND THE cops arrived at the scene of the botched crime at the same time. A crowd had gathered, forming a loose circle around Marvin, who was lying half in the street and half on the sidewalk. He was obviously no threat to anyone, so there wasn’t any tension. It felt like a block party—a couple of the male onlookers were drinking beer out of cans, while mingled sounds of radios, televisions, and ghetto blasters came from nearby open apartment windows and passing cars.
The store owner hovered in the entrance of his shop, his face a stone.
After giving Marvin a cursory check to make sure he wasn’t in immediate danger of dying, the paramedics loaded him into their wagon and took him, sirens wailing, to Memorial Hospital, the city’s main public facility, a couple miles away. One of the responding officers rode in the ambulance with him, while the other stayed behind to take the store owner’s statement.
The officer in the ambulance Mirandized Marvin, who was lying on his stomach, one hand cuffed to the gurney. There were about two dozen pellets in his ass and the backs of his upper legs. Number-four bird shot, pheasant load, a little smaller than a BB. His pants were shredded and he was bleeding good; there had been a trail of blood on the sidewalk, from where he’d been hit to where he had landed. He had regained consciousness before the police had arrived.
Marvin moaned loudly. He knew he sounded weak, but he couldn’t help it. “This is killing me! Give me something for it, it hurts like hell!”
The paramedic felt his pulse and checked the flow of the IV he had inserted into his arm to keep him from dehydrating and going into shock. “Can’t help you there,” he told Marvin. “You’ll have to wait for the doctor to examine you first.”
“It’s killing me,” he moaned again.
“Hey, shut the fuck up,” the cop ordered him. A veteran, a black man like Marvin, his face pocked with craters from years of shaving with a can of Magic and a butter knife. “Be a man—if you know how.”
“It hurts.” Softly, a wounded dog’s whimper.
It took the ER intern over an hour to pick the individual pellets out of Marvin’s ass and legs. He had to probe with tweezers, and every time he pushed against one of the open sores Marvin screamed. They didn’t give him any painkillers—he was going directly to jail from here and he couldn’t be admitted with drugs in his system.
WYATT AND MOIRA SAT in the kitchen. Wyatt, bare chested, had on a pair of boxer shorts. Moira wore her old thin cotton nightgown that she’d bought years ago in Paris, on their second honeymoon. He poured himself a glass of white wine out of the refrigerator left over from the night before’s dinner.
“So …?” she prompted him.
“I can’t keep doing this anymore. I mean … I don’t want to.” He stared at her.
She held his look firmly, without judgment, but said nothing. For one thing, she didn’t know what he was referring to. “I thought you were upset about what happened tonight.”
“I was, but it’s deeper than that, Moira. It’s about me. This isn’t why I became a lawyer.” His arm waved a vague all-encompassing motion.
Moira pulled her legs up onto her chair and wrapped her arms around her knees to anchor herself. “What isn’t?” she asked.
“What I’m doing.”
She got up and poured herself a glass of orange juice, sat down again.
“This is not original, what I’m talking about. Everybody in the world seems to go through it. Everybody that can afford the luxury of thinking about it.”
“Everyone goes through periods of self-doubt, Wyatt,” she said, trying to soothe him.
“I don’t have any self-doubt,” he corrected her. “Not personally. It’s the work.”
“With you they’re the same thing.”
He shook his head. “That’s not true anymore. It used to be that way, I used to think that was true, but it isn’t. My work, the firm, it’s part of me but it isn’t me, like playing trombone is part of me, and running is part of me. And being your husband, and Michaela’s father. They’re all part of me, but they aren’t who I am.”
“I know,” she said, “but still …”
“Still … what still?”
“If somebody asks you who you are you don’t say I’m a trombone player or a runner. Or a husband or a father, for that matter. You say you’re a lawyer. That’s what it says in Who’s Who, in the American Bar Directory, in your college newsletters. You’re a famous attorney who wins important cases all over the world.”
“And makes a lot of money,” he added pointedly.
“That, too,” she agreed.
“So what does that mean?”
/>
“It means you’re successful.”
“So?”
She got up and stood in front of him, taking his head in her hands. “Something’s troubling you besides whatever this is,” she said. “So tell me whatever that is so we can go to bed.”
He looked up at her. “I’m burned out, babe.”
“You’re tired. You’ve been through a grueling case. You always feel down after a big long case; it’s inevitable. And what happened tonight didn’t help. We should go somewhere for a couple of weeks,” she declared. “We’re overdue for some time off.”
“You’re right, we should.” He paused. “But that’s still not what I’m talking about.”
“Okay,” she said. She massaged his temples. “But let’s put some distance in this. For perspective.”
He shook his head doggedly. “I don’t need perspective to see what’s wrong with this picture.” He took hold of her hands and stood up. “There’s a basic phoniness to all this and I can’t not look at it any longer.”
“Phoniness where? With me, Michaela? I don’t think so, Wyatt. I know that isn’t so.”
“No, not that. It’s about why I’m a lawyer. Why I wanted to practice law in the first place.”
He’d been all fired up as a young man. Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. He was going to be Ramsey Clark, William Kunstler. Instead, he had become one of the most important and sought-after corporate lawyers in the country. It was tremendous power and awesome money, but it wasn’t the stuff of his dreams. “I haven’t defended an actual human being in ten years—only corporations. And I’m almost never actually in the courtroom.”
“I thought that was good. You’ve always said you don’t ever want to go to trial with your clients.”
“Because juries hate clients like mine. Nobody feels very sympathetic toward multibillion-dollar corporations.”
“I’m calling the travel agency tomorrow.”
“I could retire tomorrow. We could afford it.”
“Not the way we live now.”
“We don’t have to live the way we live now,” he said. “We could live fine with much less money.”
She turned to him. “You’re too young to retire, you’re decades away from even thinking about it, it’s not an option. Now enough for tonight. I really am tired—come on to bed.”
“You’re right,” he admitted. “Quitting isn’t what I want.”
She leaned against his body in relief.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS one?” the duty officer inquired. He glanced over his shoulder at the clock on the wall: 3:25, dead of night. A few stragglers were sitting on the benches waiting to be booked, but the main surge of arrests had abated.
“Got shot in the ass.” The arresting officer chortled.
A couple of jail deputies, watching the arrival of the prisoner who was being transported from the local ER, laughed along with the cop. Marvin, still in a hospital gown, his exposed ass wrapped in bandages, grimaced, trying to become invisible.
That’s who he was now—a joke. A chump who ran away from a simple holdup.
The pain was pulsing through his body. “I’m gonna throw up,” he cried out.
“Not on my floor!” the duty officer shouted. “Get him in there,” he bellowed, pointed to a bathroom across the dirty linoleum-covered floor.
Marvin had to get down on his knees and hang his head over the edge of the bowl. The toilet was old and super-funky—the overwhelming smell of human waste invaded his nostrils and made him throw up more, dry heaves.
He was taken through the booking procedures, his personal effects inventoried. Besides the gun, which had been confiscated and would be used as evidence (the fact that it was a stolen, unregistered weapon would be an additional factor against him), there were a few dollars in bills and change, a pack of cigarettes, a driver’s license, and a Swiss Army knife.
When that was done he was examined by a doctor, who checked and rebandaged his wounds and then finally, mercifully, gave him a fifteen milligram shot of morphine.
His entire body relaxed almost instantaneously. This shit was good. His last thought, as they were taking him to the infirmary, where he would stay for a few days until his condition stabilized, was that when he got out of here and started out dealing, he’d have to get ahold of some of this stuff.
THE TANK-SIZED DISPOSAL VEHICLE rumbled slowly down the alley behind the dance bar where Violet and her friends had been partying the night before. The driver set the brake and jumped down from his cab, joining his partner, who was rolling a large orange cart on wheels down the asphalt. The two men (Portuguese, the Portuguese had the monopoly on the city’s waste-disposal contracts) worked opposite sides of the alley, grabbing the garbage cans that were lined up against the building walls, lifting and dumping them into the large orange one, which they wheeled to the back of the truck, where they heaved the entire contents—garbage, trash, whatever—into the open jaws that shut down and crunched everything it was fed into shreds.
The two men covered the block quickly and methodically, twenty 25-gallon garbage cans emptied into the bowels of their truck in less than two minutes.
“Give me a hand over here,” the partner called, wrestling with the last can in the row. “This one’s heavy as a bitch.”
The driver crossed the alley. Each man grabbed a handle and lifted.
“Jesus, somebody must’ve dumped a load of bricks in this one,” the driver groused. “Wait a second, save your back. I’ll pull the truck down so we can dump it right in.”
He drove down the alley a hundred feet and parked right next to the can that was particularly heavy. He climbed down; each man grabbed a handle.
“One, two, three.” They lifted the heavy metal can to the lip of the opening, tilted up the bottom, and emptied the contents into the belly of the disposal truck. The driver returned to the cab and started the mechanism that mashed and chewed and crunched everything into a tight, compact mass.
The jaws started closing. The last load of garbage began rolling down the slope of the truck inside, turning and folding on itself.
“Hey! Stop the motor!” The second man sprinted to the door of the cab. “Stop it. There’s something in there! Open it back up.”
The driver hit the grinding gears. The back door reopened, the jaws lifted. The driver got out of the cab again and joined his partner at the back of their truck.
They looked inside. All they could see was one foot and ankle. The rest of the body was buried under a load of trash.
“Oh, Jesus!”
They reached in and brushed the trash to the sides, clearing off enough so the body could be seen. A woman. Black. She was wearing a dress, but most of it had been ripped away, exposing her. She was a big woman, and when she was alive she had been attractive.
THE SIXTEEN SENIOR PARTNERS who made up the firm’s executive committee sat around a large oval table in their conference, room. Twelve were men, four women. Two were African Americans, one was Latino, the rest white. A quarter were Jewish. An unremarkable assortment demographically, but all very powerful, capable, important lawyers.
It was the beginning of the workday. Coffee and pastries were available at a side buffet.
There were 168 lawyers in Wyatt’s firm: Waskie, Turner, Liebman, Schultz, Carter, & Matthews. These sixteen owned the firm. One was a former secretary of commerce. Two others had been deputy attorneys general.
Wyatt was the youngest partner and newest who had his name on the door. He got the distinction four years ago, when as lead attorney overseeing hundreds of other lawyers he had won the first billion-dollar case in the firm’s history.
Over the past five years Wyatt had become the most important lawyer in the firm. He had brought in more money than any other partner. He was the lead attorney in all of the huge antitrust cases the firm handled, where the profits or damages could run into hundreds of millions of dollars, and the fees into tens of millions. If for any
reason he were to leave, their revenues could drop as much as twenty-five percent, which would be catastrophic. That knowledge gave him extraordinary power; he was extremely cautious about how he used it.
Ben Turner, at eighty-one the only founding partner still active, sat at the head of the table. He ran these meetings and he was brisk about it. Information was exchanged, cases were discussed—the progress of ongoing work, and the decisions about what new cases should be accepted. Generally, if a partner had something he or she wanted to take on it was a done deal, unless there was a conflict with an existing case or client; most of their work came from clients who had long-standing, ongoing arrangements with the firm.
“Let’s get on with it, ladies and gentlemen,” Turner said. “We haven’t all gotten together in one room since Mr. Matthews and his crack team won the Larchmont case, which is going to help make this the most profitable year this firm has ever had, not to mention the future work it will bring. Congratulations, big boy,” he said, turning to Wyatt, who was seated a few chairs down the table.
Sitting next to Wyatt, Darryl Davis, the firm’s top criminal-defense litigator, offered his huge palm. Wyatt high-fived him. Wyatt had brought Darryl into the upper echelons of the firm, the first African American to achieve that status. Darryl, four years younger than Wyatt, was terrific in the courtroom, spellbinding in front of a jury. Other members of the firm would come and observe during his summations. Despite Darryl’s individual brilliance, however, criminal defense was the smallest division at Waskie, Turner. Darryl was the only prominent attorney in it.
Turner called the meeting to order and in less than half an hour he’d covered all the bases. “Any new business before we go back to work?”
“I do,” Darryl spoke up. “I talked to Lucien Walcott at the Public Defender’s office last week about our ongoing pro bono commitment. We’ve had two probationary people, Morris Estead and Lucille Walton, doing this for the past twelve months. They’ve finished their apprenticeship with him and will be coming in as associate members of the firm, so we’re going to have to assign two new people to that program. I’ve been interviewing applicants but so far I’ve only come up with one. She had a full scholarship to Michigan Law, clerked for Justice Stevens a couple terms back. I’d like to start her next month. She’ll be working out of the PD’s office and the firm will be picking up her salary, our normal SOP.”
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