Personal injuries

JANUARY 1993
CHAPTER 5

THE Lesueur building, where Robbie and I both made our law offices, had been erected just before the economic collapse of the 1920s. It stands on a part of Center City called the Point, a jut of midwestern limestone that the river Kindle in its swift course somehow chose over the eons to avoid rather than wear through. The building commemorates the French missionary explorer, Pere Guy LaSueur, whose family name was perpetually misspelled by the unlettered settlers who followed him two centuries later to this part of the Middle West.

The LeSueur was built in the era of Deco. Waif-like naiads modestly shield their nakedness behind the leafy adornments embossed at the center of the elaborate brass grilles that decorate the elevators, the air vents, and much of the lobby. A cupola of stained glass, the design of Louis Tiffany himself, rises over the seven-story center atrium and lures frequent tour groups who often obstruct the tenants racing to work. For the most part it is law, not art, which preoccupies the denizens. More than half the space in the building has always been leased by attorneys, inasmuch as the LeSueur stands at a favored location, the center of a triangle formed by Federal Square at one point, the state criminal courts on the second, and on the third, the architectural recycling bin that is the Kindle County Superior Court Law and Equity Department.

Late in November, a lawyer named James McManis leased a vacant suite in the lower-rent region of the LeSueur's eighth floor. McManis, who appeared to be near fifty, was making a late start in private practice. For many years, he explained to various lawyers in the building to whom he eagerly introduced himself, he had been an associate general counsel for Moreland Insurance, situated in their South-Central Regional Office in Atlanta, in charge of personal injury claims. McManis told a complicated story about leaving Moreland so his wife could tend to her elderly mother in Greenwood County, and said his move had been supported by Moreland's General Counsel, who had agreed to jump-start McManis's practice by hiring him to conduct the defense of various personal injury claims brought in Kindle County against Moreland's insureds. Listening to McManis's tale, one could not avoid the impression that it had been sanitized a bit, and that McManis was actually one more middle-aged expendable cut adrift in another of the ruthless corporate downsizings familiar to recession America.

Jim McManis quickly assembled a staff. Every few days, there was a new employee-a secretary, an investigator, a receptionist, a law clerk, a paralegal-each of whom was offhandedly introduced to the adjoining tenants. All, of course, were FBI agents hailing from locales far from Kindle County. Given the fact that not long into January, The Law Offices of James McManis had four separate matters against Feaver amp; Dinnerstein, it was not unusual that Bobbie and his paralegal. Evon Miller, made occasional visits downstairs. So did I. My cover, employed with the greatest reluctance, was that I was the referring attorney on these cases, the lawyer who'd put the plaintiffs in touch with Feaver and who would be entitled to a piece of Robbie's fee in exchange for working with him on the lawsuits. McManis had also joined the Kindle County Bar Association's Task Force on Civility in the Courts, chaired by Stan Sennett. Thus Sennett, too, became a frequent visitor to McManis's.

Each of us came to Jim's office-referred to by the agents within as `the off-site'-at least once a week, far more often in the early days. We approached at prearranged intervals, always equipped with a briefcase or an envelope as a prop. Arriving in the reception area, richly paneled in red oak, I felt as if I were watching TV from inside the set. Everyone was playing a role, but until the steel-lined doors to the conference room were secured, all maintained a convincing atmosphere of earnest busyness, phones bleating, printers groaning, the various `employees' dashing back and forth. What each of them was actually up to was not shared with me, but in one of the early meetings a door was left ajar on a wall-length cabinet in the conference room, where I noticed a full bank of electrical equipment, stuff with blinking lights and digital readouts.

As for the so-called Evon Miller, she was the first to respond to an ad for a paralegal Feaver amp; Dinnerstein placed in The Lawyers Bulletin in early January. She was interviewed the next day by Mort, Robbie, and the office manager, Eileen Ruben. For the interview she wore a trim blue suit, a ruffled white blouse, and a doubled strand of costume pearls she'd probably worn four times since getting them for college graduation. Her glasses were gone now in favor of contacts, and to give her the jazzier look Sennett preferred, she'd also had a makeover at Elizabeth Arden on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, at Bureau expense. It included bleaching her hair bright blond and trimming it into a high-styled do buzzed down to fuzz on one side as it slid toward her ear.

On the first day after 'Evon Miller' was hired, Robbie strutted her around the harshly lit corridors of the firm. He explained the layout, introduced other employees with maladroit quips, and unapologetically boasted about the lavish decorations. Gaudy contemporary pieces-resin figures, neon sculptures, huge clocks-were clustered on the silky peach-colored paper covering the walls. The conference room was dominated by the longest table she had ever seen outside a museum, an oval of pinkish granite surrounded by Italian-designed armchairs, its polished surface glazed with the oblique light from the large windows on the LeSueur's thirty-fifth floor. Feaver referred to the room as `the Palace.'

"See, we lay it on thick for the play," he said. "Know what I mean?"

She didn't.

"My first legal job, I worked for Peter Neucriss. You've heard of Peter, right? Everybody's heard of Peter-the Master of Disaster, that's what the papers call him. Peter can be understated. We're Feaver and Dinnerstein. Who are they? The arrogant docs who come here for their depos, our clients, who are mostly little people from the apartments and bungalows, they all want to know one thing: Are these guys successful? Do they win? So it's gotta show. You drive a Mercedes, you wear Zegna, and your office looks like Robin Leach should be coming through the door any second. I told Mort, when we started-think Beverly Hills."

Beverly Hills, Evon thought. Feaver brought to mind the brassy city types she began encountering in town as a child when two ski resorts cropped up like pimples on the clear face of adjacent mountains. Dark, gabby men, stuck on themselves, operators like Feaver, with his guy's-guy air and a style that made you wonder if, like a slug, he would leave a grease track behind. But she'd been an agent for ten years now and had dealt with her share of bottom feeders and flippers. As an FOA in Boston-a first-office agent, a rookie-she'd worked with dopers, and everybody knew those people were the worst. Her job here, she told herself, was to keep an eye out, to make sure this boy did his stuff, stayed straight as six o'clock, and didn't get bushwhacked in the process. Beyond that, she figured, it did not really matter if the bugger had ringworm or an attitude. Roger, wilco, over and out.

They were in Feaver's office now. His secretary, Bonita, a pretty, smooth-skinned Latina with torrents of cosmetics ravaged hair and eye shadow applied like finger paint, had come in to greet her. Feaver continued in the role of new employer, detailing a paralegal's duties. She'd schedule deps, issue subpoenas and interrogatories, handle court filings, even meet with clients to gather info and hold hands.

"And here's another thing," Feaver was saying, "you and Bonnie work this out, but I don't read the mail. For fifteen years, I got holes in my stomach from the mail, then I turned forty and said life's too short. Because one thing is surer than gravity: there is only bad news in the mail. No lie.

"First, there're always motions. Bane of my existence. On the other side of every case we have, there's a defense firm getting paid by the hour. So it's money in their pocket to file every brain-damaged, not-a-chance-in-hell motion they can think of. Motion to dismiss. Motion for summary judgment. Motion to reconsider prior motion. Motion to declare Puerto Rico a state. You can't believe this. And we're on a contingency. Nobody pays me to answer this dreck. And if I win ten motions, but lose the eleventh, the whole case still craters." Feaver went on describing the disasters he could encounter in his in box every morning. There were letters from clients who'd been romanced by other attorneys and were discharging them, often after years of work; urgent alerts from trial lawyers' organizations about antiplaintiff legislation which the insurance lobby had inspired. And, of course, never the checks that defense lawyers owed on resolved cases.

"Only bad news," he concluded. Bonita stood near Feaver's glass-topped desk, chuckling indulgently, then departed, closing the door at her boss's request. The whirring sounds of the office, the phones and the machines and the urgent voices, were closed off now and Evon felt a sudden quickening. She had not been alone with him before. He chucked his chin toward her in a familiar way.

"So what's your real name?" he asked quietly.

She stood a second without moving. ` Evon."

"Oh, come on. I feel like we're at a costume party. You know my name."

"My name is Evon Miller, Mr. Feaver."

He asked where she was really from, whether she was married. She gave him back her myth, without expression.

"Christ," he said.

Feaver's office was large, with a leather sofa and a desk and tables in contemporary stylings of glass and wood. The floor was covered by an immense Oriental rug, a wine-red Bokhara at the center of which she was standing. She tightened her jaw and spoke to him in a low hardened voice. They were not playing charades, she said. She repeated what had been drilled into her: Never give it up. Never. Not for one second. That way you don't worry about being overheard or caught out.

"You get used to breaking cover," she said, "and you'll mess up sure as sunrise when the pressure's on."

"Oh. don't you worry about me handling a role," he told her. "I'm a pro." He pointed to the credenza behind him where a picture of his wife sat. The photo showed Lorraine as she'd been before disease had plundered her. Within the broad silver frame, Rainey, as she was sometimes called, remained an extraordinary raven-haired beauty, with eyes almost the color of an amethyst and a lengthy pointed jaw, an irregular element that somehow elevated her looks from the merely cute or pleasant. But it was a photograph beside it he had meant to point out, a glossy close-up of him, in greasepaint and a pirate's costume, apparently engaged in song. `Bar Show, 1990' was engraved on a phony gold plaque below it. "Look, we're gonna spend a lot of time together," he said. "I'm just trying to find out a little about you. The way I figure," he said, "they couldn't just uproot you, if you didn't want to go. So you don't have kids. Right?"

She was never adept with people and somehow he had seen that; he knew she'd have no smooth way to stop him.

"No," he said. "No kids. And I figure you're single, too. Single person would be the first one they'd ask. They wouldn't expect somebody married to spend the next year away from home. Divorcee or never took the plunge? That's where I'm stuck."

"That's enough," she said.

"Relax," he answered. He was having a good time, leaning back in the chrome-armed leather reclining chair behind his desk. "I already know about the Olympics."

That finally ignited her, finding that even now, undercover, that single damnable detail was being paraded miles before her like a banner on a standard. Just that fast, she was leaning over his desk, ignoring a furtive quiver of his eyes which she immediately suspected was a brief effort to look down her blouse.

"Listen, mister, the 302s-the reports I read?-they said that some of these guys have got real mean friends. Isn't that what you told us? So you better act like your life is at stake, bud, because as far as I can tell, it is."

He shrunk his lips and turned a cheek, his beard so dense that, even clean-shaven, it seemed to turn his skin blue. The man was furry as a bear. A few renegade chest hairs peeked over his collar.

"What about a wire?" he asked. "George says you may be wired."

I had told him, actually, that the government was unlikely to do that. On hours of tape, there were bound to be a hundred idle remarks that could prove embarrassing to both Robbie and Evon on cross-examination. And there were complicated issues of attorney-client privilege with an open mike in a law office. Yet there was always the chance, in the brittle bureaucracy of D.C. where the practical often mattered little compared to camouflaging behinds, that UCORC might have insisted on taping in order to have unchallenged proof that they had kept Feaver in line.

"Are you going to answer me?" Feaver asked, as she turned for the door.

"No."

"Which means you're wired," Feaver said.

"If I were you, brother, I'd assume I was." I'd told him as much, since Evon was obliged to report any act of dishonesty that might bear on Robbie's future credibility as a government witness.

"I knew you were wired." He was so pleased with himself he actually clapped.

"Look, darn it, I'm not wired. Now stick with the cover and button it up."

"And what would you tell me, if you were wired?" She'd had it. Coming around the desk, she grabbed him for a second by the shoulder.

"Listen," she said, "ordinarily I'd say, you want to kill yourself, go ahead. But the sharp edge of the sword here is that if your life's on the line, so is mine. Now either you shape up, or I'll call this whole thing off and you can go sit in the can where you belong."

Feaver took his time. He deliberated on the hand with its bright nails which she'd removed by now, then turned his long face up to her.

"Hey"-he gave her a lopsided grin, aimed at appearing good-natured-"we're just fuckin with each other."

He had that half-right.

"We're gonna catch plenty of bad guys," he called as she retreated.

She wheeled and pointed: "I thought we already caught one." I CALL HER EVON, because that's what she called herself She once told me that as a teenager she'd undergone a period of religious passion, in which her complete devotion to God seemed to remove her from normal life, as if she'd acquired the power to levitate or leave her body behind. And now she felt something akin, a limitless stake in being Evon Miller. She'd burned the details into herself. Thirty-four. Mormon family. Born in Boise. Three years of college at Boise State. Married to her high school sweetheart, Dave Aard, a flight mechanic for United with whom she'd moved to Denver. Divorced since 1988. She'd collected a hundred particles of an imagined past with which to spice offhand conversations. When she talked to herself, she called herself Evon. She ate the food Evon Miller liked, she window-shopped in the stores favored by Evon, whose tastes for shorter skirts, brighter colors, bigger earrings were, blessedly, just a little more daring than hers. And at night, she was certain, she dreamed Evon Miller's dreams.

Six weeks ago, the ASAC, the Assistant Special Agentin-Charge of the Des Moines Division, Hack Bielinger, had called her into his office. It was not really an office but a cubicle with a door. In his stubby hands he'd held a Teletype, on pulpy yellow paper. Bielinger was like a lot of the Bureau supervisors she'd had, hard to like, a guy who had moved up because he really wasn't cut out for the street and who still tended to resent the agents he oversaw who were good on the pavement. He was a small, fussy man-people always speculated that he'd fudged the height requirement -a born-again who didn't get what was wrong with bringing up Jesus at lunch.

"Got something interesting for you," he said.

Reading the Teletype, she felt as if somebody had hitched a generator to her heart. The message was from the DD, the office of the FBI's Deputy Director. PLEASE ADVISE RE WILLINGNESS REFERENCED SA TO ACCEPT ASSIGNMENT IN ORIGINATING UCO. K CTY DIV. TERM INDETERMINATE, EST. 6 MOS – 2 YRS. DEEP COVER.

Bielinger wasn't smiling. In fact, he was tense. The DD wanted this, so he had to deliver. That was Bielinger. He said he'd had a call a week ago, kind of unofficial. He'd told them she'd be good.

"They need somebody who's trained as a paralegal." Bielinger shrugged. Why was a mystery to him. But it meant he must have asked, Why her? What's so special about her? The men in the Bureau always had the same reactions: chicks these days get first lick on every lollipop.

The agent who was going to run the op had flown out to meet her. He said to call him Jim, no last name, everything on this deal was strictly need-to-know. But she liked him. Smart. Sober. Quiet. Somewhere on the sunny side of fifty. He was good-looking, despite some chunkiness as he steamed into his middle years, with big glasses and a full head of graying hair that dropped in a boyish sweep over his forehead. He didn't say where he was from, but she figured D.C. He had an HQ finish, and knew all the right names. From the breadth at his shoulders, the way he filled up his shirts, she could see he'd been a jock at some point in his life. She took that as a bond. He had that contained aura of well-being, an aspect of sporting success she'd observed in so many others, especially men, but which somehow had never settled in her.

"It's hard," he said about what he was proposing. "I was under almost a year once." He described the case. He had worked on Wall Street. He was supposed to be a bad guy who ran the back office operations at a big brokerage house, a quiet, sullen suit who manipulated the box count and fenced stolen securities. It was a big sting. They rolled up three LCN-La Cosa Nostra-capos. One more nail in the Gambinos' coffin. "I'm proud of what we did. And on Friday night other agents will always treat you like a hero, especially if you're paying for the beer." A droll grin lit up and passed, a momentary indulgence subject to quick discipline. "But it was hard. And lonely. And dangerous, People's lives depend on whether you get made, and so you're paranoid every minute, every hour. It wears." He repeated that. It wears.

She tried to take that in respectfully, but she told him what she knew she was going to before they started: she was ready. He wanted to know why.

"Forty-four caliber adrenal glands?" she answered. He'd probably already read that in her personnel jacket: first hand raised to help out on a bust, weekends, evenings, even with the local cops; still addicted to the instant of unthinking reaction she first experienced on the playing field.

"Must be something besides that," the man whom she now knew as McManis had said. "You're gonna be putting yourself through a lot." They were in a drab little conference room in the Des Moines Division, his quiet way somehow a contrast to the phones and commotion just beyond. His eyes, pale gray, didn't leave her. In the Bureau, they were always trying to get inside your head. When she'd taken the qualifying test after college, there was a psychological portion and one question still reared up at her at times out of the murky turbulence of nightmares. `If your mother and father were both drowning, which one would you save?' Someday, she'd have to find out the right answer.

She shrugged off his scrutiny now. It was tough to name any grand motive. She wanted it. Who knew why? But his response had rung something inside her.

"My bet,' he said. "is you'll find out."