“And that means Robbie is shit out of luck. It means his deal was a fraud to start, and every horrible thing I said would happen if he dealt us dirty is coming down. It means he’s going to the penitentiary as fast as I can get him there, wife or no wife, and that he’s going to be inside until the fucking hair on his empty head has all turned white.” Sennett closed his eyes and took a breath, perhaps reminding himself that I was his friend, or at least that I wasn’t my client. “That’s what it means.”
That’s what it meant. But that wasn’t why Stan was sitting in my den as the minute hand swung closer to midnight on the Herman Miller clock in the corner. I had an obvious assignment. My job was to figure out how to save them all.
“IN LAW SCHOOL, there are lots of required courses. You know that. Torts. Contracts. Criminal. Corporations. Yadda yadda yadda. I took all of that. And passed. Not by very much. I was jumping around like a grasshopper, clerking in a law firm, still reading for parts in commercials. But I got by. I’d always tell Morty, ‘You know what the guy who finishes last in the class gets? A diploma.’”
He peeked up to see if he could get a smile. I rotated one finger forward as a bare command to continue.
“So it gets to be my senior year, 1973, it’s Watergate, and all of a sudden, son of a bitch, we’ve got a new requirement. Now nobody can graduate without taking Legal Ethics. Like that would have stopped Nixon. Only I can’t take Legal Ethics. Cause it’s Tuesday and Thursday at four, and that’s when I’m working for Peter Neucriss. It was a bigger miracle than the loaves and fishes that he’d hired me in the first place. Blackstone Law School? Law Review from the U., you weren’t even worthy to run Peter’s Xerox machine. But I got to know him down on the Street of Dreams, he liked the girls I ran with, I guess, so he gave me my shot. This to me is bigger than Broadway. Cause if I really carry the load, then I can get a full-time job as an associate in the best P.I. shop in the universe, known and yet to be discovered. It’s all in lights: try cases, make money, be a star. So no way am I taking Legal Ethics on two of the four afternoons when I’m supposed to be at Neucriss’s office. And besides, the registrar’s office, they couldn’t hold a fire drill in a phone booth, they’ll never know the difference. Right?
“Wrong. The week of graduation, the dean whistles me in. ‘Robbie, Robbie, what the fuck are we going to do with you? You didn’t take Legal Ethics.’ If it was just me, he’d have flunked out my fanny faster than I could scratch it, but there’s about half a dozen other folks who’ve pulled the same stunt, including, bless his heart, a fella who’s number three in the class. So the deal is, we can go to graduation. And take Legal Ethics over the summer, which means write a paper while we’re studying for the bar exam. Pretty square deal. Frankly, I was so grateful I cried, because the idea of telling my mother she’s not going to this law school graduation, for which both her sisters are flying in from Cleveland, that’s inconceivable, that’s like the idea of antimatter.
“So that summer, I’m working for Neucriss, who still hasn’t firmly committed to a full-time job for me, and going to Legal Ethics and to a bar exam review course. I’m busier than a bunny in spring and then Peter got this case—it was a huge plaintiff’s class, one of the first toxic torts in the country, even before Love Canal. I’m working with Neucriss directly, at the right hand of God, no sleep, and of course, I blow off the final paper in Ethics. All I know is this is it, once in a lifetime, bottom of the heap to the top, and nobody’s taking it from me.
“So three weeks before the bar, it’s back to the dean’s office. ‘Jesus Christ, Robbie, we can’t certify you for the exam, you’ve got an incomplete in Legal Ethics.’ You know, I tried every angle. I’d donate organs and half my income for life if he’d just stamp the little blue sheet. No sale. ‘Finish the paper now, then you can take the bar in December with the group that flunks the first time.’
“And I don’t know, I thought I was going to do that. Of course, there’s no way in the world I’m telling Neucriss that I didn’t get my law degree. And, naturally, all of this works to my advantage. Peter thinks I’m a Trojan, cause the other two clerks, they’re wimping out to study as the bar comes up, and I’m like, I got it handled. I even came in the afternoon the first day the exam was given. Neucriss was really impressed!
“So I got the job. Now what do I do? The bar results come back. Everybody’s crowing. And you know, the third of November the three new associates—Robbie from Blackstone and two hotshots from Easton and Harvard—get the afternoon off to be sworn in. The ceremony’s just a cattle call over in the Supreme Court, eight hundred kids all standing on the front steps. So I raised my hand with everybody else. The only difference was that the rest eventually got mailed a certificate to practice law and I didn’t. That’s how it happened.”
He sat in the leather club chair in front of my desk with an unfaltering, fawnlike expression, utterly compelled by his rationale for ridiculous behavior. He took no responsibility for the thousands of hours of work to which he’d laid waste—by Stan, by the agents, by Evon, by me—or the peril and pain to which he’d exposed himself and Lorraine. The Robbie I’d come to know and like was elsewhere, like a spirit released from a body and hovering in a corner of the room. Observing my reactions, he made a face and looked out the window.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You do stuff as a kid and then you’re stuck with it. I was a kid.”
He was a grownup, I pointed out, when he didn’t tell me.
He brought a hand to his temple protectively. It was no later than 8 a.m. and he appeared to be watching the light crawl, like a gentle hand, down the sides of the big buildings along the river—anything rather than face me.
I asked if Lorraine knew.
“Nobody knows. No one.”
I could take the usual consolation: my bills were paid. And I’d realized all along there were reasons we were each sitting where we were, on either side of the desk. Nor could I pretend that similar things, perhaps not on this scale, but not entirely unlike it, hadn’t happened before: clients who lost their deals because they tried to hide money they were required to forfeit; an executive who’d recently gotten probation to testify against the grubby smack-dealer he’d scored from, and then blew his first monthly urine drop and spent a year in the pokey. There was no end to the way clients could disappoint you. But I’d seldom been as thoroughly taken in.
Feaver finally seemed to be absorbing the weight of it. He was slumped with both feet in his close-soled loafers flat on the floor. Eventually, he went to the door.
“Are you my lawyer?” he asked from there. It was the right question, not so much for focusing both of us on the pragmatic issues, but because the fragile look that accompanied it redeemed him somewhat. Robbie was an eternal beacon of need, like those dead stars which, even imploded, continue emitting a radio signal through space. But his bad-dog truckling made it seem that he actually cared about what I would answer, and not simply because it would represent a monumental inconvenience to him if I withdrew. I realized what had been implicit from the start: he had come to me not out of regard for my courtroom oratory or my connections but out of personal respect. I seldom thought of myself as an example, or of the valor of what I tried to do every day. I whisked him out the door with a backward wave and no answer, but I’d already settled the matter with myself. I was his lawyer. In the better sense of the word.
NEAR 2 A. M. the lobby buzzer had roused her, a honking duck in her dreams.
“This is your Uncle Peter,” rasped a voice distorted by the intercom. ‘Uncle Peter’ was the Project code word, a fail-safe i.d. for times of trouble. It was McManis who showed up at Evon’s door. He was too proper to step any farther into the apartment. He just leaned back against the steel jamb.
“It’s about Robbie,” Jim told her. Her first thought was that he was dead. And he was, as far as she was concerned, once she heard the story.
“I was wrong,” McManis said before he left. He was wearing a light suit
spotted with rain. “I always said that Mort was the most dangerous person to the Project. Which was foolish. We knew where the risk was from the start and we forgot. Heck, that’s why you’re here. We knew he was a con. And he conned us anyway.”
“Played us,” said Evon. It was more impulse than humor, but Jim responded with his mild smile.
“There’s never a bottom with these people. It’s like facing mirrors. You just go down and down.” McManis instructed her to skip the morning pickup, just go to the office, so she’d be at hand when they started to sort things out.
Around 9 a.m., Robbie appeared at the opening to her cubicle. His tie knot was already wrung down six inches below his open collar. He wanted to talk.
“I don’t think so, Robbie.”
“Look, I’m sorry. I want to say that.” He was too weakened to raise his hands; he simply opened his palms at his side. “It was the past to me. A mistake in the past.”
She propelled her chair to the credenza behind her and, waiting for him to leave, hovered over a phone-book-sized printout of hospital charges she’d been abstracting. But what was the reason for that? she thought suddenly. A case she didn’t care about, clients who weren’t really hers. The months, the time, the work, the hope for something of value—the staggering size of what had probably been destroyed, of what was being wrenched away from her, brought a whirling moment of desperation and, as ever, shame. He took a step closer.
“Don’t be a jerk,” she told him.
“A bigger jerk, you mean.”
“You couldn’t be a bigger jerk, Robbie. You’re maxed. You busted the meter.”
The cover occurred to her remotely, whatever it was worth new. They were out in the open here. Yet it fit. Lovers’ tiff. If she wanted, she could throw something at him. Instead, when he tried to speak to her again, she stuck a finger in each ear.
In time, she felt his shadow move off her. She sat still, contending with her rage. Once lit, it could incinerate everything else, including normally reliable means of restraint. She tried to sit in this chair, be in this place, step aside, but it was useless. In a minute, she was tearing down the corridor.
“What matters to you?”
He looked up abjectly from his chrome-armed desk chair.
“Did you hear what I asked?”
“Yeah, I heard.” He motioned to close the door. She slammed it.
“Then what’s the answer?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. What counts. With you? I can’t figure it out. I really can’t.”
“Shit, what counts with you? Getting merit badges from the Bureau? You think your bullshit’s better than my bullshit?”
“No way, bub. I want an answer. What matters to you? Can you even tell me? Or is it just whatever play you can work. That’s it, isn’t it? So you can look down on us poor morons when we buy it?”
“Is that what you think?”
“Yes, Robbie. Yes, that’s what I think.”
“Well then, that’s what you think.”
“Don’t you blow me off. Don’t you dare. Tell me what matters to you, goddamn it!”
In his face, she could actually detect a fluttering aspect of fear. He had no idea how far down she’d drive him. Nor, in truth, did she.
“Can you tell me?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Then I want to hear it.”
His jaw rotated.
“It’s love. Okay? It’s the people I love. That’s what counts. My friends. My family. A lot of my clients. That’s all. Everybody else? They can take a leap. Everything else? It’s just that crap floating in the sea. Flotsam and jetsam. The rest of life is just people doing things to other people for their own good. Except for love.”
She closed her eyes, so angry she felt as if she might fly apart.
“Is that why you did this? For love? Is that why you walked through that door every day, where it says ‘Attorney-at-Law’ right under your name, and didn’t just fall down from shame?”
“I don’t know. I guess that was part of it. There were people I didn’t want to disappoint. Christ, what are we talking about? Not writing a twenty-page paper? It’s not homicide. I didn’t try to hurt anybody. Just the opposite. For twenty years, I’ve been doing my job, caring about people and winning their cases.”
“That’s a play, Robbie. You wanted it for yourself. You wanted the job, the status, the money. But you hadn’t earned any of it, and you took it anyway. Just like a thief. And because of that you’ve screwed over anybody who didn’t have the good sense to wonder if you were lying when you said ‘a,’ ‘and,’ ‘the.’ How do you keep yourself from seeing that? Look what you’ve done to Mort. Or to those clients you say you love. My God, think about the poor Rickmaiers—that little girl you cried about when she lost her mom? What’ll you say to her, Robbie, if somebody sues her to get back that great big settlement check you handed that family last week? How’d you just forget about stuff like that? For twenty years?”
“I don’t know. I did it. I knew it, but I didn’t think about it. I kind of forgave myself, or put it away, I don’t know. I don’t know how I lived with it. I lie, okay? I lie all the time. You think I really kissed Shaheen Conroe? I never got closer to her than clomping around in the chorus. That car I drive you around in? It’s an S500, thirty grand less than the S6. I owned it a week when I saw Neucriss breezing down Marshall Avenue in the 600. Suddenly I felt like such a river-bottom turd that I went back and paid some stock boy five hundred bucks to replace the plate on the trunk lid and the steering wheel so it looks just like a 600. But it’s not.”
The car! She actually groaned.
“I’m a weak, fucked-up person. What can I say? I never told you I made sense to myself.” He had another quotation from theater life handy for trouble: “‘Ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do.’”
Even in anger, she had to give him that much. For months she’d had an intuition, a vision almost, of a steaming jungle, full of hairybarked trees and thick vines, teeming wildlife in all forms, and rank greenish waters that bubbled with stinking hot gases venting from inside the earth. That was the great primal wilderness that lay at the center of Robert Simon Feaver.
Sitting in his tall leather chair, backed by the dramatic shapes of the city, he continued to seek mercy from her assault.
“Did I ever tell you when I knew I was in love with Rainey?” he asked.
She looked at him coldly, unwilling to be entertained, but it did not deter him.
“Funny story, actually. Very funny story.” He chortled once to prove that was true. “I was taking her to a hockey game. And she got hung up. I can’t remember why. She was late and she was, you know, upset. These were great seats. Third row. Right behind the glass. She was like falling all over herself. And I said one of those things I say. ‘I heard they’re starting late tonight. No, no, really. The Red Wings’ plane was late.’ I can’t imagine what I was gonna say when she saw they were in the middle of the second period. But I said it. ‘No. No, really. They’re late.’ And like I could see this smile, half a smile, and this thing behind her eyes. She got it. That I wanted it to be true. I mean, she got me, really. Not it. But just that I believed it myself. Right then. And it was okay with her. That’s when I was in love.”
“Fuck you,” she answered. “That’s the whole problem. You think the world owes you that. You want everybody to give you a big goddamned hug, when you oughta be feeling terrible guilt, Robbie, or at least a little regret. And I don’t understand how you let yourself off so easy. How do you do that? Every blasted day? How do you not level, even with yourself? How do you look people in the eye, knowing they think you’re something you’re not? How do you get out of bed every morning to do that? I don’t understand.”
“You don’t?” His look remained bleak; he was not being underhanded or snide. He was startled only by the lapse of some fellowship he thought they shared. But when she took his meaning, the
ignition of anger nearly lifted her off the floor. She eyed the scalloped silver letter opener on his desk, which she used to open the mail every morning, with half a mind to cut his treacherous tongue from his throat.
Instead, she flew from the office. She did not say a word to him for the rest of the day, or the day after. She spent as much time as she could around McManis’s, but Amari, with little to do, got on her nerves referring to Robbie as often as he could as ‘the pussbag.’
As the week wore on, with the status of the Project still in doubt while they hashed things over in D.C., her anger somehow subsided to gloom. It was like being trapped in a pastepot. She couldn’t get out, and seemed to exhaust herself with the inevitable effort. Although it was supposed to be for her own safety, she’d come to hate being under constant surveillance. She felt exposed and somehow less secure. On Thursday, the super, buffing the brass mailboxes, reported that a man had been asking about her and a number of the other tenants on the third floor. In alarm, she’d beeped Amari, but Joe’s guy had been watching and ran the plate. A local—a Kindle County cop, on the dick squad, presumably working a lead. The pointlessness of her fear seemed only too typical of where things were. It was all screwed up, everything. Her. And Feaver. Everything. She walked on the streets and felt solemnly unmoved by the tulips with their bright faces popping up in the spring air.
29
MY PLAN TO SAVE PETROS—AND ROBBIE—REQUIRED him to withdraw at once from practice. He would never again see clients, go to court, or sign documents. There was no other alternative. Even if we could somehow wangle Robbie’s law degree, BAD, Bar Admissions and Discipline, would never license someone whom they’d inevitably discover had been illegally masquerading as a lawyer for the last twenty years.