“You’re an immigration counselor?” she asked, surprised and impressed. When she’d handled Leo’s case two years ago, she’d believed he could have used such a counselor himself. Too many immigrants arrived in the country ill-equipped and alone, with no way to navigate the social services that would help them become productive citizens. That was why people like Leo wound up getting sucked into criminal activity. “Leo, that’s wonderful!”
“Not so wonderful,” he said sadly. “I no longer am working. They give me, what you call, the sickle.”
“The ax?” she suggested sympathetically.
“That it is. Ax, sickle—both sharp tools to cut with. I get this ax because of article in very bad, stupid newspaper.” With that, he reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out an envelope, which he handed to Gail.
Frowning, she lifted the flap and pulled out the front page of the Arlington Gazette, neatly clipped and folded. She smoothed it out and skimmed the headlines: an item about the President, a piece on landfill problems, a photograph of a tree that had crashed through the roof of a house, and there, below the fold, an article about criminal activity by recent arrivals to the city from Eastern Europe. She glanced up at the banner-head—the newspaper had a mid-March date—and then skimmed the article. It described a national crime ring based in New York City, with branches in mid-sized cities all around the country. This organized group specialized in stealing small appliances—calculators, electronic organizers, laptop computers—and shipping them to New York, where some Russian equivalent of a Capo forwarded them to St. Petersburg, from where they were distributed throughout former East-Bloc countries at premium prices.
Leo Kopoluski was identified as Arlington’s best-known Eastern-European small-appliances thief.
“Is not true,” he swore as she lifted her gaze to him. “I am counselor now, I do not do these bad things. But this terrible stupid newspaper says I do, and so I get the sickle. No job. Is called libel, Miss Gosbozha Saunders.”
Libel? For someone who had difficulty putting together a grammatically sound sentence in English, he certainly knew his legal terminology.
She read the article again, more closely this time. Leo was clearly named as someone well connected to the national gadget-theft ring. His previous conviction was noted as journalistic proof of his guilt.
“Is cost me my job. I am out of work seven weeks, Miss Gosbozha Saunders. I lose my flat. I stay at YMCA in narrow bed, is so tiny you can’t roll over in it. I have no money. I lose my good name. Is terrible thing, this libel.”
“Well, yes, it is a terrible thing,” Gail agreed, peering up at him. He looked earnest and woebegone, his dark eyes bulging slightly, as if under pressure from all the emotion crowding his brain. “Do you know anything about these robberies?” she asked, gesturing toward the newspaper clipping. “The police certainly seem to be implicating you. Have they charged you with anything?”
He appeared affronted. “Of course they do not charge me! Is not true, this story! You call my parole officer. Officer Jenrette. Good, good man. He tell you I am straight. I do not do this. I am of clean blotter. You call him, you see.”
“Well, even if the accusation isn’t true, I’m not sure what I can do for you.”
“You can sue Arlington Gazette. You can sue in my behalf for one million American dollars. Is cost of my good name which they have taken.”
Gail steeled herself against a reflexive laugh. “You want me to sue the Gazette for a million dollars?”
“Is only fair. I come here to America because this is very fair country. Is fair I should get my job back, and my flat, and my income. And my good name. Is worth one million American dollars.”
She didn’t bother to ask how he’d come up with that particular figure. “I can’t help you with this, Leo,” she said, shaking her head and folding the article along its creases. “I’m a defense attorney specializing in criminal law. I defend people who’ve been charged with crimes, the way you were two years ago. For something like this, you need to find a lawyer who specializes in civil litigation.” At his blank stare, she rephrased the thought. “You need a lawyer who knows how to sue a newspaper for libel.”
“You are best good lawyer I know,” he argued.
“But this isn’t my area of expertise—I mean, this isn’t the kind of law I do best-good.” She sighed and leaned back in her chair. The hinge creaked and a heavy lock of blond hair drooped over her forehead. She brushed it back and smiled regretfully. “I can’t help you with this.”
“But you must help me!” For a moment she feared he was going to hurl himself across her desk and drop to his knees before her in beseechment—or else perhaps shake her by the shoulders until she agreed to represent him. He restrained himself, only gripping the edge of her desk and leaning across it, knocking a few files askew. “You are best good lawyer in Arlington. You are only lawyer I know. You save my life when I first come here, Miss Gosbozha Saunders. You make me see error of my ways and change myself around. I do good now. I abide law. I counsel my countrymen so they never need lawyer. I keep them to not make my mistake. Now they have no counselor, they make my mistake and you get too much criminals to save lives. You save my life, you don’t have to save others. I save them.”
Sorting through his mangled sentences, she discovered a thread of logic: if she helped him to regain his job, he could resume his work helping other immigrants, and his help would prevent them from getting caught up in crime rings like the one described in the Gazette. Since Leo had been through the system and knew the consequences of breaking the law, it made sense to have him offering guidance to other newcomers.
She wasn’t a specialist in libel, but she was probably a better lawyer than most of the attorneys he might find through a random search. But she was on the public payroll, employed by the taxpayers to represent indigent clients charged with crimes. How could she justify taking a case like this? How could she get approval from her boss?
“You save my life,” Leo repeated, as if he sensed she was almost persuaded and needed just a nudge. “Now to see this life you saved and it goes down pipe, is terrible waste.”
“Goes down the pipe?”
“Like flushing toilet.”
“Down the drain,” she translated.
“Da. I go down the drain, round and round in swirling motion with toilet paper if you do not help me. They say that when you save a life you take—” he struggled to come up with a word “—onus for that life.”
“Responsibility?” she guessed.
“Yes. You save me once, you have to save me twice.”
Gail ruminated. She really did want to help Leo. After seven years of working in the Public Defender’s Office, she was willing to admit that not all of her clients were innocents led astray. But Leo was. He’d gotten into a fix once, and with her help he’d gotten out of that fix and cleaned up his act. She couldn’t abandon him now.
“I tell you what,” she offered, gazing at the folded newspaper clipping on her desk. “Let me telephone the newspaper and see what I can do. But as far as a million dollars, don’t hold your breath.”
Leo’s face blossomed into a smile. “You make call. I don’t hold breath. I keep breathing and you get me million American dollars. You are great lady, Miss Gosbozha Saunders! Great, great lady!” He lunged forward and snatched her hand, then hauled it to his lips and treated it to a loud, juicy kiss. “You are great, good lady. You make newspaper pay me for my name!”
Gail waited until he’d departed from her office before she let out a groan. She had no time to take on the Gazette for him, and her office had no money to pay her for such a quixotic pursuit. If she accepted Leo’s case on a contingency basis, he’d see even less of any money she might win for him.
Then again, any money would be better than what he had now. And how could she not help him, when he was so deserving? The newspaper shouldn’t have dragged his name through the mud. They’d probably included him in the article be
cause of his previous brush with the law. The police had probably supplied the newspaper with his name. They loved cultivating reporters and making themselves look important in the process.
Gail needed to do some checking of the facts. She would have to call the police and find out why they’d leaked Leo’s name to the media, and she’d have to call whatever church had hired Leo—probably the Eastern Orthodox Church on Center Street—and speak to whoever had fired him. But if she didn’t like the answers they gave her, she would have to take on his cause. She’d been battling the police for seven years; why not battle the Arlington Gazette?
Especially if, in taking them on, she would be saving Leo Kopoluski’s life, again.
***
“LOOK, LET ME put it to you straight,” Dennis enunciated in the general direction of the speaker phone on his desk. “My life is a wreck right now. Do you really think I want to leave my footprints on the backs of your legal department while I handle some crackpot Russian and his loony-tunes law suit?”
Through the sleek plastic box came the voice of Robert Hammond, the executive editor of the Arlington Gazette and a frequent squash partner of Dennis’s at the health club, which he hadn’t been to since the kids had moved in with him three weeks ago, and which he couldn’t imagine ever having the time to visit again until they left for college. He loved them, he really did—but from the moment they’d made themselves at home in his apartment, Life As He Knew It had undergone a serious metamorphosis.
Squash? Squash was what Sean did to his dinner rolls. It was what Erin did to her Beanie Babies. It was what both of them had done to their father just that morning, when they’d arisen a half hour early, invaded his bedroom, and vaulted onto his slumberous body. His brain had scarcely struggled to semi-consciousness when he’d discovered himself squashed beneath one hundred pounds of squirming twins.
Fortunately, he was able to escape to his downtown office on a regular basis. From the moment he dropped Sean and Erin off at their school until he cruised into his co-op’s underground garage sometime between five-thirty and six each evening, they were the responsibility of the school and then their nanny, Betty Grover. During those hours each day, he was assured that no one was going to be spilling anything on his tie or head-butting him in the stomach or belching or whining loudly enough to damage his ear drums. He got to live like a genuine adult, ensconced in his oversized corner office, discussing legal strategies with his partners and clients, using the law as a fencing weapon and slicing his opponents to ribbons with the finesse of D’Artagnon and the ruthlessness of the Terminator.
Given the size of his practice and the affluence of his clients, he wasn’t looking to drum up business. But Bob Hammond was a friend, and apparently his newspaper needed help. “My legal department,” he explained, “is on a maternity leave.”
“The whole department?” Dennis settled back in his leather chair and propped his feet up on his desk. It was mahogany and it was massive—and it was impeccable, thanks to Velda, his anal-retentive secretary, who never left a scrap of paper lingering more than a few minutes. “Who’s the father? The City Desk?”
Bob didn’t laugh. “I’ve got three lawyers in my legal department, okay? One of them is sixty-seven and he wants to fork over a six-figure settlement to this Kopoluski nut because that would require no effort on his part, and he and effort aren’t well acquainted. Lawyer Number Two is my wife’s idiot cousin, who ranked one-hundred-thirty-two in his law school class, which had exactly one hundred thirty-three graduates. He’s so stupid, he can’t even get being the worst right. The third lawyer is my whiz-kid, Beverly—who, unfortunately, gave birth to an eight-pound girl last Thursday and isn’t going to be back for six months.”
“You’ve got a problem,” Dennis remarked, eyeing his elevated feet and realizing, with a start, that his socks didn’t match. Ever since the kids had moved in with him, strange things like that kept happening.
“So some lady calls the newspaper and starts yammering about how she’s an attorney for this Kopoluski clown who claims he was slandered on the front page of our March sixteenth edition. We mentioned his name in connection with a Russian crime circle which happens to have a branch in town. The guy’s got a criminal record, but his lawyer says he isn’t really a criminal, just a poor young lad who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time and paid his debt to society two years ago. And because of our article, she says, he’s lost his job and he wants restitution. The reporter stands by his story. He says if we print a retraction he’ll quit. This is a reporter I don’t want to lose—to say nothing of the legal principles at stake. But without a retraction and a financial settlement, this lady says her man is going to make our lives miserable.”
“Extortion,” Dennis concluded. “The guy and his lawyer are just trying to get some money. She’s probably working on contingency. She’ll get one-third of whatever she can bleed out of you. Have they mentioned any numbers?”
“The number she mentioned was one million bucks, can you believe it? I offered ten thousand to get him off our back. This lady—the lawyer—says not a chance. She wants serious compensation for her client’s suffering—her words. If we don’t start negotiating in good faith—also her words—she says she’ll see us in court.”
“You don’t need me to handle this,” Dennis insisted, shifting his feet into the light to ascertain that, yes, indeed, one of his socks was gray and the other was navy blue.
“I do need you, Dennis. The woman is obviously a hard-ass. I need someone who can shut her down. If anyone can do that, it’s you.”
“You know what it’s going to cost you to drag me into this?”
“It’ll cost less than I’ll lose if I let my legal department minus Beverly handle this. Do me a favor, Dennis. It’s a no-brainer for you. One afternoon. Sit down with the lady and teach her the facts of life.”
“If that’s what you want me to do, I’m not sure I want to do it sitting,” Dennis joked. He swung his legs down and plucked a pen from the brass stand above his leather blotter. “What’s the attorney’s name?”
“Gail Saunders.”
“Never heard of her.”
“You’ve heard of her now,” Bob said. “She sounds like a gorgon. The kind who sharpens her tongue on a barber’s strop every morning.”
“My kind of lady,” Dennis muttered, jotting down her name and then the phone number Bob provided. “You want me to get you out of this mess sweet and simple?”
“Yeah. And as cheap as possible—only don’t forget the principles at stake.”
“In other words, you want a miracle. Well, miracles just happen to be what I do best,” Dennis boasted. He bade his friend good-bye, hung up, and stared at the name he’d scribbled on his note pad. Gail Saunders. A sharp-tongued gorgon trying to take on the Arlington Gazette. Rash enough to turn down a ten-thousand-dollar offer. She must think she was some kind of hot stuff.
Dennis would have a lot of fun setting her straight.
***
AS SOON AS GAIL parked her car in the basement garage below the downtown building, she knew why Dennis Murphy had asked to meet with her at his office instead of at the Arlington Gazette. Schenk, Murphy, Lopes and Associates was located in the high-rent district. Murphy was obviously hoping to intimidate her.
Fat chance. Gail Saunders had been intimidated once in her life, and it was an experience she had vowed never to repeat. And anyway, his elite business address notwithstanding, the Gazette’s hired gun didn’t have much. If the newspaper believed it had a case, it wouldn’t have farmed out the legal chore of defending itself to an outsider.
Gail was ready for this fight—ready to win. She’d done her research, squeezing it into spare minutes here and there. She’d interviewed the Social Services director at St. Peter’s, who had conceded that Leo Kopoluski had done a good job counseling immigrants. He’d related well to the recent arrivals, not just from East Bloc nations but also from Latin America. He’d located places for people to
live, worked with landlords, finagled jobs for his clients flipping hamburgers or making beds at motels—anything to get them started on a new life in a new land. But, the social worker explained, there was no way they could keep a man like Leo on the payroll, not with his name linked to criminal activity. They were a church and they simply couldn’t have a crime kingpin working for them. When Gail had insisted the charge was false, the social worker had lamented that too many people had seen Leo’s name in the newspaper. He’d lost his effectiveness.
After getting nowhere with the church, Gail had swallowed her pride and invited her sister and brother-in-law to dinner. She and John Russo were never going to be the best of friends; he was a cop, and Gail didn’t like cops. But after devouring her roast beef and a thick slab of pecan pie, he’d promised to run a computer check on her client and see what the police had on him. What they had, he’d reported back several days later, was the testimony of three thieves currently in FBI custody in New York City, all of them swearing that they had done business with Leo Kopoluski.
Three criminals under arrest, scared shitless that they were going to get deported. They gave real credible testimony, for sure.
She locked her car and stalked across the garage to the elevator. Her footsteps echoed against the flat concrete walls, and after tallying twenty-four luxury cars in her row of parking spaces, she stopped counting. Stepping into the elevator, she punched the button for the third floor and tried to guess whether Murphy’s car was one of the Mercedes, or one of the Jaguars, or maybe that silver Porsche with the phallic spoiler.
The elevator doors slid open, delivering her into a lobby facing the exquisitely understated offices of Schenk, Murphy. Well-behaved potted plants flanked the glass doors. The carpet reeked of class. The receptionist at the sleek semi-circular desk appeared to have just stepped out of the pages of Elle. No, Seventeen. She appeared awfully young.
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