$200 and a Cadillac

by Fingers Murphy

  “Three thousand a week.”

  “No offense, but they don’t pay you guys that because you’re worth it. I mean, you’re a smart guy, you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. The best and brightest or whatever they say. But you have no experience. I mean the firm tries to bill some of your time, but clients generally don’t want to pay for it. And in this economy, clients get what they want. So the firm just writes your time off as a recruiting expense.”

  The light changed and we crossed toward the building. I watched him walk. Reilly looked like a guy who had finally let himself go after years of resistance, as though he’d realized that the trim, frat-boy body he’d had all through college and law school was gone for good. He was still young, fit enough, but he was beginning to show the creeping weight gain at his middle that would someday transform him into a pudgy, forty year old attorney.

  “So they have this case. There’s a long shot that it might pay off. Who better to give it to than a summer associate, right? I mean, if you get lucky the firm gets all the glory, and if there’s nothing to it then the firm only loses your time, which it would have lost anyway.” Reilly looked at me and smiled as he went through the revolving door into the cavernous lobby of the K&C building. “Look man, this is a business. I mean you hope you can do some good along the way, but mostly it’s about money. Think of how big a payoff it would be to get this guy off. Why not take that gamble?”

  “But meanwhile,” I said, “this guy — who may have a good case, who knows? — is sitting in jail and his future is tied to a law student who doesn’t know anything. I mean, I don’t even know where to start.”

  When we stepped on the elevator, Reilly pushed our floors and leaned against the mirrored wall. “First of all, this guy doesn’t have a good case. He doesn’t have any case.” The elevator door opened at my floor and there was an awkward silence. I hesitated. Reilly filled it with, “Well, like Carver said, have a look through the file.”

  When I got back to my office there were eight cardboard boxes piled along the side of my desk with the word “Steele” written across the side. I had no idea the “file” would consist of so much paper. I spread the boxes out across the floor so I could see into each of them. Some were just loose piles of paper. Others contained smaller files inside the boxes. There was no organization to them. Nothing was marked “beginning” or “start here,” so I just started rifling through them.

  After a minute or two I came to a folder full of newspaper clippings and I sat at the desk and leafed through them. Steele had called 911 at 8:52 in the evening. The police arrived at 9:04. No signs of forced entry and the police dogs picked up no trails indicating any suspects had crossed the property. They arrested Steele at three that morning.

  When I was finished, I leaned back in my chair, remembering it clearly. Although I was only ten when it happened, it was such a major story that you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing some reference to it. The murder had been grisly and shocking. The senator swore that someone else had committed the crime but offered no proof at trial other than his own testimony. The jury convicted based on what they viewed as overwhelming evidence.

  Now it was my job to help get him out. But not because he was innocent, only because his high-priced lawyer didn’t do a good enough job. So much for good causes, I thought. I exhaled and turned to stare out the window, enjoying my sixty-eighth floor view of the white and green sprawl of Los Angeles. My first law job was to spring a convicted murderer on a technicality.

  Wonderful.

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  2

  Tom Reilly drove a black Porsche 911 convertible. He was twenty-nine years old and spent ninety thousand dollars on a car without worrying about hurting his retirement or breaking the bank. I sat beside him watching the scenery breeze by at a smooth and luxurious ninety miles per hour. It was nothing like my fifteen year old Ford Escort, and Reilly was nothing like me.

  I was in the middle of law school during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Unlike many of my classmates, who were the children of lawyers or doctors, my father was a mason — and I don’t mean the secret society. He specialized in tile work, but when times were bad he did anything. Brick patios, cinderblock walls, any work he could get his hands on. When times were worse, he did nothing at all. And times were the worst ever. No one was building anything. He said it was like someone just flipped a switch and turned the construction industry off.

  It might seem like being parked in school was a great place to be. Free to wait out the downturn without creating a massive gap on the resume. But the truth of the matter was that law firms hired almost two years in advance, so when the economy tanks, it’s the people in school who get screwed first and hardest. Most of us were racking up student loans at $40,000 per year — essentially mortgaging our futures — and there were almost no jobs. Even many of the best students couldn’t find anything. With the debt meter constantly running, many had little or no prospect of ever being able to repay what they owed. Most would be starting their careers in their mid-twenties from the bottom of a deep, deep hole.

  And it wasn’t like all would be fixed when the economy rebounded. Sure, law firms would start hiring again, but they would return to their old model, interviewing and hiring students almost two years before they graduated. Those classes that had missed that window would be lost forever. I was one of the lucky ones. Terrified of failure, I studied relentlessly. Jockeying with a few other students for the top position in our class.

  At the beginning of my second year of law school I got the nod. I had been summoned to the offices of K&C for a day of interviews with people who laughed and joked and didn’t seem the least bit interested in the law, or what I thought I might do with my career. The only thing they seemed to care about was whether they liked me. I was convinced I’d failed the test, that they could all tell I did not belong there. But almost by magic, a couple of partners took me out to dinner at the end of that long day and offered me a job. I was stunned. These people were considering letting me into their club. I was speechless, but managed to say yes before they could change their mind.

  Unlike me, Tom Reilly was the quintessential Kohlberg and Crowley associate. Like most of K&C’s 900 lawyers in its fifteen offices around the world, Reilly graduated from an Ivy League college, where he excelled, and then went on to an Ivy League law school, where he was on law review and finished in the top ten percent of his class. Because of his wealthy family, he finished law school at twenty-five with no student loans or debt of any kind. The first job he ever had was making six figures at K&C.

  He exhibited the same casual behavior around wealth and power that I’d noticed in most of the other summer associates. It was a quality gained by attending private schools one’s entire life and growing up in the privileged neighborhoods of America where everyone’s father was a surgeon, lawyer, CEO, investment banker, or, in Los Angeles, a studio executive. Everyone Tom Reilly had ever been around was exactly like him. It was no wonder he felt comfortable at K&C. And merely because he was born five or six year before me, he had graduated from law school when the economy was great. For him, there was no economic downturn. He was completely unaffected by any of it. He was on an elevator headed nowhere but up, and at every floor along the way he would be handed more and more money. Seemingly endless money.

  Although I bore little resemblance to Tom, every elite law firm had a few people like me walking the halls. I was a candidate picked for my grit and life experience, picked precisely because I was not like the others. I was blue collar, working class, and had fought to get where I was. That made me hungry and they knew it. I resented Tom Reilly and his Porsche as much as I coveted it.

  After two hours of driving, we pulled off the freeway and followed the signs. A few minutes later we dropped over a rise and the prison loomed up out of the desert. It was a collection of gray concrete buildings surrounded by layer after layer of high chain link toppe
d with spiraling razor wire. Beyond the impenetrable rings of fence, there was nothing but wide open space — an expanse of hot desert and low brush — no place for an escapee to hide from searchlights, dogs, or bullets.

  I followed Reilly into a front office. We were led down a corridor to a waiting room where we sat for what seemed like an hour. We carried on the kind of stilted and disinterested conversation people engage in when they’re trying to kill time and nothing more. Those were probably the only kinds of conversations that took place inside prisons.

  Finally, a guard leaned in the door and said, “Steele’s comin’ out.” We looked up at him. “You guys here for Steele?”

  “Yeah.” We answered in unison, like goslings imprinting on the first authority figure we saw.

  “Well, he’s comin’ out.” We continued to stare. “You guys gonna come in, or what?” He looked at us like we were both idiots. We followed him through a door that locked behind us before the next door on the opposite wall opened. Then we went into the visiting room.

  That room was cold and everything in it was gray. The only natural light came from thin windows high up on the twelve foot walls. There were three rows of four metal tables that had been painted years before but now were just drab metal flecked with traces of worn white paint. I took several steps and felt the gloom sink into me. I could only imagine the dreariness that lay beyond the door on the furthest wall. Then there was the sound of a heavy lock turning, a metal echo filled the room, and the door swung back.

  A small man in plain blue coveralls entered the room. He was in his late fifties but looked older. He stood there, hesitant, his eyes darting around as if there were others present besides Reilly and me. He looked nothing like a man who once sat in the oval office and shook the president’s hand. But I didn’t know what a guy like that was supposed to look like anyway. All I knew was that Steele looked nothing like I thought he would — certainly nothing like I remembered. Finally, Reilly spoke.

  “Mr. Steele, I’m Tom Reilly.” He walked toward Steele with his hand out. They shook. “And this is Oliver Olson.” Steele smiled and his eyes lit up.

  “Mr. Reilly, Mr. Olson, it’s a pleasure to meet both of you. And please, call me Jim.” He shook my hand like a man who had once shaken hands for a living, and then he nodded his head at me. “I thank you for coming to see me. Please, let’s sit down.”

  He motioned toward one of the old tables with a slow, regal gesture, as if asking us to join him in the study for cognac. As I sat, I wondered how long it had been since Steele had a visitor. The cadence of his speech was refined, gentlemanly, and filled with education and experience that I imagined only alienated him from his surroundings.

  Reilly led the conversation. What would I have had to say? After a few more niceties, we started at the beginning.

  Steele took a deep breath and thought for a second, and then said, “It was a Saturday night. The re-election was heating up and Sharon and I were going to attend a fundraiser that night. Our daughter, Becky, had gone to a church event, so when we learned that the fundraiser had been canceled, we planned on a quiet evening at home. I put our son Shawn to bed at about eight, and Sharon decided to take a bath. You know, just relax.”

  “Why didn’t she take a bath in the master bedroom?” Reilly’s questions came out stiff. I wondered how many times he’d interviewed an actual client before.

  “The master bath just had this glass block shower, but no tub. She liked to use the bathroom down the hall with the Jacuzzi tub in it. But just before she got in the tub that damned Matt Bishop called. Sharon hated that kid. I could hear her yelling at him from across the house.”

  “Why didn’t she like Matt?”

  “Matt was a bad kid. He had no manners. He lived in another neighborhood, went to a different school, but all the kids knew each other. I think Sharon was more sensitive to it. You know, Becky went to private school and Sharon tried to keep her away from what she perceived to be bad influences, like Matt.”

  “So how did he know your daughter?”

  “I’m not really sure. But all the kids just seemed to know each other. They met different places. Anyway, he used to come around and he terrorized Shawn.”

  “What do you mean terrorized?”

  “Well, that was the word Sharon used. She said he used to growl, make monster noises, and chase Shawn around. I never saw it, I wasn’t around much.” Steele looked at me, like he was apologizing for being a bad father or something. “He was a nasty kid. Sharon used to yell at him to leave Becky alone and to quit coming around.”

  “But he kept coming over?”

  “Yeah, he called three times that day, so, you can imagine. She was pretty mad.” Steele raised his eyebrows and grinned a little, “Sharon could really get hot about things like that.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Shawn was already in bed, so it was after eight. It was probably about eight-fifteen, eight-twenty.” Steele stopped and exhaled. He looked up at the small windows with an expression of grief and despondence. He breathed deeply, and shook his head slightly. “Y’know how many times I’ve thought about it? She went down the hall and I went downstairs to watch TV. The next time I saw her …” He stopped again.

  Reilly looked over at me and I could tell right away he had no more experience with this kind of thing than I did. We waited while Steele kept himself from losing his composure. I thought I heard water dripping somewhere in the room. Steele exhaled again — long and slow, like he’d been punctured with a needle and his past was flowing out, propelled by the pressure of his own remorse.

  Finally, Reilly asked, “When did she go take a bath?”

  “Right after Matt called. Probably around eight-thirty.”

  “What were you doing while she took a bath?”

  “I just went down to the family room to watch television and shoot some pool. I flipped on an old Hitchcock movie. Well, I don’t know if it was Hitchcock, but something like that. And I made myself a drink, and I racked the pools balls.”

  I watched Steele’s movements as he spoke. Though he was a small man, he had a large personality. I could see the politician in him. He used wide gestures and his torso moved back and forth as he talked.

  “And then what?”

  “I heard a noise.”

  “A noise like what?”

  “Well that’s just it, it’s like … you know how you can be sitting at home and you think you hear something? You know how you perk up and listen for it again because you’re not sure if you really heard anything at all? Y’know what I mean?”

  We both said we did.

  “Well, it was like that. I thought I heard a scream, or a woman hollering or something, but first, it was real faint and second, it’s not something you expect to hear so you discount it. Plus, the TV was on and it was some kind of thriller that might have a scream in it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing. I mean, I didn’t hear it again. I stopped listening and went back to playing pool.”

  “How much time went by?”

  “It’s really tough to say. It could have been as long as a minute, but it was probably less. I thought I heard something, I paused for a few seconds and didn’t hear anything else, and then I went back to what I was doing. And then I heard a scream.” Steele stopped again, just as he had before. His face was somber and his hands fell down to his side.

  Reilly waited a second before speaking. “So the second time you knew you heard a real scream.”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t loud, but it had a quality to it. I knew it wasn’t the TV. It was real. I just froze for a second. I was terrified because I knew right then what I heard before was real too and that something was going on in the house. Then I just bolted, ran right out of there.”

  Reilly prodded, “And then what happened?”

  “I ran up the stairs and down the hall and as I came around the bathroom doorway somebody else was coming out. I mean he was running out and I grabbed
hold of him, it was just a reaction. I mean we literally ran into each other. Then he pushed me back and swiped at me. I didn’t see the knife or anything. He just made a slashing motion and pushed me away. There wasn’t anything I could do. I’m a small guy.” Steele patted the chest of his coveralls, as if to confirm the obvious. “I must have hit my head because I was stunned for a second. By the time I shook it off, the guy was gone.”

  “So you were knocked out?”

  “No, no, I mean it was only, I don’t know, five seconds or something. But this guy was sprinting, I mean he was out of there, like he knew exactly where he was going.”

  “Which direction did he go?”

  “I honestly don’t know. The stairs were just a little way down the hall. Once he got downstairs there were four or five different ways out of the house. Which way he went is anyone’s guess.”

  “So you didn’t chase him?”

  “No, I got up and ran into the bathroom. There was blood everywhere.” Steele’s speech halted abruptly, and then began again, slow, as if wallowing in a heavy, viscous pool of memory. “Ah, goddamn, I mean it was a mess. My feet slipped on blood as I ran in. I could see Sharon in the tub. She was moving, trying to keep herself afloat in the water.” He stopped. My eyes glanced down at Steele’s arms and hands as they unconsciously mimicked his dying wife’s slow and feeble treading motions. Then he wiped the corners of his eyes and looked up at the high windows again. The bleak light coming through gave no hint of the gorgeous day outside.

  “I could hear her choking on the water. I cradled her head and tried to talk to her, but she couldn’t answer me. Then there was a noise behind me. I let go of her and jumped up. It was Shawn asking what was going on. I yelled at him to get out of there but he just started crying. I ran over and shut the door, then I realized that Sharon was back in the water again. I ran back and pulled her up so she could breathe and then I unstopped the drain so the water could run out. I had no idea how bad she was hurt, I mean there was blood everywhere … ”