"Really?"
"Something he got from his shrink I heard." Weiss smirked. "Did he give you that cockamamie spiel about rowboats and the Ivy League? The chutzpah of that asshole."
"Yeah, he did," Micah said, grinning. "How'd you know?"
"Those white shoe characters at Horvath are inbred poodles. Nepotism and snobs. You don't want that. You want us. We're a meritocracy. Sullivan & Adler was formed years ago because those firms wouldn't hire Irishmen and Jews."
Micah nodded, then said almost to himself, "Meritocracy." He glanced down at the salary sheet again, at that dollar sign and six numbers. "I do have a lot of respect for Sullivan & Adler. But Chatham has the highest job satisfaction grades for associates-"
"They pay half what we do. You'll have more satisfaction when you get your paycheck here. Think about it, Micah." Weiss stood, rounded his desk. "Just don't make the wrong decision, all right? You can only go down from here."
"That's it?" Micah slowly rose from his chair with a suspicious smile. "No trick questions or quizzes? You don't want to know what kind of tree I would be?"
Weiss laughed. "We don't do that schtick here. If we like someone, we invite them in." He shook Micah's hand, firmly patted his back. "Unfortunately, I have to jump on a conference call. If you have any questions at all, Micah, call my direct line, all right? My secretary will give you the info. Have a safe flight back."
"Thank you very much. I appreciate it." Micah exited the office, nearly bumping into a rotund partner with a bright red face.
"Hey, you must be Micah Grayson, right? Max Goldberg." He extended his chunky hand. "I'm a litigation partner here. How ya doin'? Just had your interview with the old dragon, huh?"
"Dragon? Oh, you mean Mr. Weiss? He was very nice."
"Glad it went well. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to interview you, Micah."
Weiss stuck his head out of his office. "Max, come on. We're gonna be late for this call."
"Speak of the devil," Goldberg said. "I was just saying hello to young Mister Grayson here. What do you think? Reminds me a little of Bianco, right?"
Micah felt uncomfortable as they examined him, nodded their chins.
"Yeah, maybe when Bianco first started," Weiss said and turned to Micah. "Raphael Bianco's one of our best senior associates. Now, we've gotta take this call. Sorry to rush."
"I have to run, too." Micah pretended to check his watch. "Nice meeting you."
Micah started down the hall, peeking at the sheet of paper in his hand. And the six figures that stood out like lottery numbers.
3 (18 months ago)
* * *
Raphael Bianco was working at his faux-wood desk, awake for thirty-six hours straight, rubbing the stubble on his chin, thinking about his chances at the Firm. He asked himself, How much more shit do I have to eat before I make partner? Delusional and tired, he fixated on his glowing computer monitor, as if it were some kind of crystal ball.
The brief on screen just stared back at him, and it said, You suck.
"No, you suck."
He couldn't turn this draft in to anyone, forget about giving it to Lord Darth. "He'd give me the friggin' Vader choke." He sighed, squinted at the clock in the corner of the bright high-definition panel.
11:07 P.M. Three hours after the Knicks game had started. Two hours after he'd have talked up Spike from the Firm's front-row seats. A half hour after Carmelo had hit the game-winning jumper.
"Forget about it," Raphael muttered. He thought about the treatment he should have gotten, no, what he deserved after nearly seven years and twenty thousand billable hours. He grabbed the telephone receiver and punched in Elliott Needleman's extension.
"This is Elliott."
"Dude, I'm never gonna make it, no way. You know what? I'll tell him I need a few more days. I am not killing myself for this case."
"Is this your motion for summary judgment in the Southern District?"
"Yeah, it's killing me. He always does this to me. He should be beating up a junior associate, not me. I'm just going to tell him I need another couple days."
"It's a little late for that, Raph. Why don't you just take a break? Clear your head."
"Yeah, fuck this. I need a break. Wanna go?"
"I can't. I'm going back to the printer's."
"All right. Later." Raphael hung up the phone.
He high-stepped it out of the Sullivan & Adler office tower and onto Broadway. Neon lights and theater billboards glowed over his balding scalp and lit up the wrinkles in his unshaven face and disheveled suit. He looked at himself in a darkened store window and thought Shar-Peis had fewer creases. He wiped snowflakes from what was left of his shrinking hairline and walked one block east, toward an adult peepshow, where he stopped and looked around anxiously. No one he knew in sight. He reached inside his shirt collar, felt the small "evil eye" charm and crucifix on his gold necklace. He probably only made it to mass once a year, midnight on Christmas Eve with his mom and grandma in Westchester. But when he did things that made him feel guilty, he liked to apologize first. If he were sober and remembered.
A quick preemptive Catholic confession, then a quicker, "Fuck it." He grinned and slipped into the peepshow.
Inside the surprisingly clean adult store, a slattern leaned behind the counter and stared at Raphael, who avoided eye contact. He wondered why the old lady, instead of the little Philippino guy, always had to be working when he went there. He sighed, weighed his options. He was embarrassed, but the delirium of sleep deprivation and his mutant libido nudged him to the counter. Shoved him really.
"No place to be shy," the craggy clerk said. "The show is through that door. Twenty bucks whether you get off er not."
Raphael nodded, walked through the door into the blackness of a tiny theater with foul smells and phony moaning and girlish squealing. This wasn't what he wanted though. He needed the Happy Meal version, and he was only stalling. He sidled out of the mini-theater, coming right back to the clerk.
"Listen," he said, his speech drunk with fatigue, "could you . . . I mean, do you know where I . . ."
"What do you want?" The woman held her fist out, made a sharp jerk-off motion. "Tissue paper? You look like the neat type."
"Listen, I don't wanna watch that movie. My grandmother's younger than the chicks in that John Holmes peeper. A friend of mine was here one time, and I thought, he thought. . . is there a 'massage service' here or something?"
"This ain't no whorehouse, slick. Giuliani gave 'em all an enema years ago. Try the internet. There's a million of 'em on there." Her lips moved slower, as if she were talking to a retarded kid. "They're called 'escorts' I hear."
"Yeah, no shit. Thanks."
Raphael cursed himself for being too exhausted to think and Guiliani and Bloomberg and every other tight-ass politico for cracking down on vice. He walked back out onto the crowded sidewalks. When he first started working at the firm as a paralegal, Times Square was crawling with hookers. Not anymore.
Now, tourists were flocking around Times Square, taking pictures and heading out of stale Broadway shows and chain restaurants that made them feel like they weren't dangerously far from Hometown, Suburbia. The crowds and the tourist traps made Raphael sick. He just wanted to get laid, and these people and their rotten kids were knocking him over to see the fucking Lion King.
Raphael hesitated and glanced up at the ink black shadow of the Sullivan & Adler office tower, spiking up into winter clouds and white ghosts of snow.
"There she is, a fully operational Death Star."
He sighed, shuffled down the block toward The Death Star, mumbling "blow me" to tourists and street peddlers and caricature artists along the way.
When he reached the revolving door to the Firm's lobby, another associate was leaving the office. The associate hailed a taxi at the curb, saluted good-bye to Raphael.
"Hey!" Raphael shouted at the associate. "Half day?"
"Christ, Bianco, it's almost midnight." The associate pause
d, halfway inside the rear of a yellow cab. "What are you doing going back to the office?"
Raphael shrugged his shoulders, flashed a counterfeit smile. "Because I'm an asshole, that's why!"
He spun through the revolving door and slipped into the marble lobby. His Bruno Maglis clapped across the floor to the security gate where he swiped his ID card then stepped onto an empty elevator. He punched the button for the forty-second floor and then the other eight buttons for the Sullivan & Adler floors above his. Just for fun. Maybe a partner would get screwed, he hoped.
"Pretty soon," he said, staring at all the glowing buttons, "we'll have every friggin' floor in the building."
On the forty-second floor, he stumbled out of the elevator, used his ID again to unlock the floor door. "This place is the Fort Knox of legal documents, or is it Fort Dix? Fort Dicks, yeah." He laughed at his own joke and realized what he was going to do now. He didn't have to go out for his Happy Meal. He'd order in. On top of that, he'd bill it to the client.
"That's what they get for making me suck it here."
Raphael waltzed down the hall where half the office doors were open with lawyers hunched over their desks. He gave his opinion of each one he passed.
"Jackass. Shrew. Ginger. Geek. Malignant dwarf." He glanced at the locked door of someone who had already gone home. "Lucky fuck."
He unlocked the door to his office, threw his jacket on a pile of freshly-laundered suits in plastic bags on the floor. He plunked down and started scanning escort sites on line. An orange and black Princeton pennant and a Fordham Law diploma hung on the wall behind him. He leaned back in his plastic Office Depot chair, thumbed the mouse with the vigor of a spoiled kid tearing open a birthday present.
"Tokyo, Ebony, Impulsive. That's what I'm talking about." He grinned. "Why be alone when you can be impulsive? Absolute discretion assured, all major credit cards.' Oh yeah, frequent flyer miles, baby."
He hesitated, mulling over whether they would check his search engine history, whether this could hurt his chances at partner. "I'll say it's my sister visiting. It'll have to be a white chick then, no one'll think twice." He reached for the phone but noticed the last thing he wanted to see. The red flashing light.
"Suck balls! I was only gone five minutes!" He punched his access code on speakerphone, hung his head, praying that it wasn't Lord Vader.
The computerized voice said, "You have . . . two new messages and . . . fifty-eight saved messages."
"Yeah, yeah." He pressed "1" and crossed his fingers as the first new message played.
"Hello? Raphael, are you there? Pick up. Sweetheart, it's your mom. I tried to call you at home, but there was no answer. You better not be at work. I'm going to call your partners if they don't let you go home. Hello? Are you there?"
Raphael made a mental note to call his mother in the morning and skipped her message.
The second new message began, "Raphael, it's Gabe Weiss. . ."
"Aw fuck. This blows!"
". . . so now the client's going out of town and he wants the brief tomorrow morning instead of the afternoon. I'm driving in early tomorrow so just email me a draft at home before 2:30 A.M. Email if you have questions, but don't call. I don't want to wake my wife up."
"Yes, Lord Vader," Raphael mumbled, deleted the message.
He tossed the phone book onto the pile of suits, said a tearful good-bye to the website for Impulsive Escorts. He turned to his computer, pulling up the summary judgment brief he had been drafting for thirty-six hours straight. The brief that didn't have to be filed and served for another eight days. Gabe Weiss's brief.
"Client service," Raphael mimicked Gabe's scratchy Brooklyn voice as he typed and strained to keep his eyes from gluing shut. "It doesn't matter when the filing date is, Bianco. If the client wants it tomorrow, they get it tomorrow. It's the Sullivan & Adler way, capisce?"
"Oh yeah, is that the way it is?" He pointed at the lifeless telephone, the bitterness swelling into a tantrum. "Well, fuck you, Gabe. And you know what? Fuck your wife, too." Raphael snorted. "Everyone else has."
4 Wednesday
* * *
Strangely, it made Gabe feel younger. He glimpsed himself in the mirror, wistfully thinking he looked more virile with blood on his face. When she was younger, Gabe's wife would become aroused by his angry red face. He washed his hands and thought about his wife when she was a Binghamton student with long hair he could curl up with and fall asleep in. The blood-soaked fingernails gave him trouble, but he scrubbed every dried droplet, rubbing his hands together and thinking of his wife's loose braided hair.
A scarlet ring stained the edge of the porcelain sink as he soaped his leathery cheeks. The mixture of blood and water actually made his complexion look ruddy and youthful. He stared at his cheeks and his filmy blue eyes, mystified by his new sense of vanity. The sucking sound of liquid draining in the bathtub brought him back to reality.
In the cold white tub, the warm body purged itself of the last remaining drops of life. The skin wasn't just pale now, it was a sweaty green shade of dead. The body was lying back, awkwardly draped beneath the spout, head tilted sideways, eyes frozen in permanent terror, a hand resting comically on a pink bottle of Mr. Bubble as strings of red swirled down the drain.
Gabe finished washing his hands and stripped down to his starched crisp undershirt and boxer shorts. He turned to the green body and racked his brain for an answer. He was on the verge of tears, but composed himself. He started giggling, muffling the sound with his hand. He genuflected next to the body and patted the chalky face, which flopped to one shoulder. He shook it by the clammy gray shoulders.
"Coveting my wife," Gabe whispered.
He stared at the body, mesmerized. The white half-moon eyes stared back at him, almost glowing, but the partially open eyelids didn't bother Gabe so much. Neither did the bright puddle in the porcelain tomb, the blood draining into the pipes, to join the sewer water and rats. But the strange pursing of the body's lips, a smile or maybe a sneer, unnerved him.
Gabe tried to shove the mouth closed and twist the smile off the face, but it wouldn't move. The body just smirked at him. It was either rigor mortis or the shape of the mouth or . . . paranoia. That was it, paranoia. He didn't have time to be mired in the quicksand of panic.
He took a handful of cotton balls from the medicine cabinet and stuffed them in the runny hole in the chest. He laid bath sheets on the floor and pulled the body from the tub, wrapping it in the towels. He quietly searched under the sink for cleansers and sponges. His hands quickly, almost maniacally, scoured the tub. The scrubbing went back and forth, over and over until his fingers turned numb and his back tingled like needles deep in his spine.
"Rachel would die if she saw this mess," Gabe whispered at the body's toes protruding from the fluffy bath towels. "You son of a bitch."
Gabe's brain spun as he cleaned the locked bathroom. Everything was driven by rage. It enveloped him. It had him on the end of a collar like some mindless animal. But it wasn't the anger he'd felt almost every day in his towering office. It wasn't like arguing paper battles over money. It wasn't even like berating a young fuck-up associate or delivering a choreographed tirade to his secretary of seventeen years. Even Cherise saw right through that routine. No, that was all bitter pretense.
There was nothing superficial about the anger he felt now. This was real rage that had been festering inside him, and, oddly enough, it finally made him feel warm, almost like when he'd tried scotch for the first time. It was as close to feeling good as Gabe could remember. But, like the scotch, the feeling vanished as swiftly as it came, and he didn't know how to deal with the consequences. All he knew was that he had to work feverishly to clean up.
He unlocked the bathroom door, dragged the body into the storage closet next to the kitchen, and locked the closet. It was getting late, and he hadn't seen Sarah. He thought she was sleeping over at a friend's house, but he never knew where she really was or what she was doing. She'd
just turned twenty-one, and she sometimes came home in the middle of the night, wobbling and giggling after a night of fun with her girlfriends. So now Gabe worried that she may barge in at any moment, tipsy and curious, looking for something to snack on in the kitchen. Or what if she were home for once? Paranoia gnawed at him, making him wonder if his daughter were upstairs in her room.
Gabe mulled over the thought. For the last twenty years, Rachel wouldn't even engage in a fight with Gabe until Sarah was in her room, door closed, and sound asleep in bed. The idea that Rachel would do something like this, and in front of Sarah, was unfathomable. Still, he had to check the bedrooms, at least to make sure that no one heard what he had just done.
In his underwear, Gabe inched upstairs and through the darkness of the second floor hallway, his feet sliding across a lush carpet. A ceramic night light of a hula girl lit the molding on the floor. His wife had bought it on the last trip they'd taken, three years ago in Maui. At the end of the hall, past the two guest rooms and farthest from the master bedroom, was Sarah's room. Gabe reached for the brass crescent of the handle, slowly cracked open the door. He peeked his head into the room, his eyes adjusting to the complete blackness inside. After a long moment, his eyes began to make out the Impressionist prints on the walls, the tennis trophies on the shelves, and the laptop near the window sill. The glint of moonlight helped him see the huge canopy bed in the corner, but the curtains were only half open.
Was Sarah asleep? Was she waking up now, staring at him in his bloody undershirt? Was she listening to what her mother had done? Or what he had done? Gabe's heart thumped as he approached the bed, wondering what he would say if she were there. He hadn't tucked her in bed, kissed her forehead, nothing like that since she was twelve. He reached out for the lace of the curtain and looked. The bed was made, sheets untouched.
He wondered about Rachel. He knew she was in the house, because he could smell the perfume she wore for special occasions. She had bought it at a boutique called "I Hate Perfume" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that made organic scents and this one was called The Beach. She said it reminded her of their trips to Hawaii, the sunburns, the smell of cocoa butter, the ocean. He wanted to smell Rachel now, to look at her and see how his wife acted after having another man inside her.
PLUMMET: A Novel Page 3