Pleading guilty

IX. TOUGH CUSTOMERS

A. Slave Queen of Accounting Like the engine room of an oceangoing vessel, where soot-spotted hands shovel coal into great fires, the firm's Accounting Department burns on below-decks. On 32, between an investment banking operation and a travel service, the location has a sub-basement feel, because it is cut off from the three other floors we occupy. Yet in many ways this is the heart of G amp; G: to Accounting our billable hours are reported on a daily basis; from Accounting our statements for services go out every month. Here the great profit-making motor of the law firm whines away at high r.p.m.'s.

One of the most peculiar things about going from BAD to G amp; G was getting used to a world where money -which as a cop and then a public lawyer I regarded as inherently evil – is, instead, the point of axis of an entire universe. Money's why the clients hire us – to help them make more or keep what they have. God knows, it's what we want from them. It is what we all have in common. At this point in the calendar, when our fiscal year concludes, the firm takes on the air of a campus before the Big Game. We have partnership meetings about collecting that can't be easily distinguished from pep rallies, where Martin, and especially Carl, make speeches designed to give us the stomach to demand our clients actually pay our bills. It was one of Carl's many clever innovations to move the close of our fiscal year back a month to January 31, in order to give clients the chance to book our fees in either calendar year. On February 2, Groundhog Day, after the receipts are totaled, the partnership meets in tuxedos, while the Committee announces each partner's 'points' – our percentile share of firm income.

Accounting is housed in a couple of rooms, garish with fluorescence, nine women in an environment of white Formica. Their figures are reported daily to the Committee and various CPAs. The staff supervisor, the resident person in charge, is Glyndora Gaines. When I came in she was on her feet, studying a clipping torn from the newspaper. The paper itself was spread on her desk, the only thing there besides a framed photo of her son. As soon as she saw me, she walked away.

I was in my overcoat, on my way out to see Peter Neucriss. I'd called Glyndora three or four times now without response, and I asked if she'd gotten my messages.

'Busy,' she said, the gal who'd just been reading the Tribune. I followed her around Accounting while she slammed through cabinets. 'This is important,' I added. I got a look that could have smelted lead.

'So's what I'm doing, man. We're 10 percent below budget and looking for ways to reallocate every expense we got. Don't you want to make money?’

Boy, this is a lady with an attitude – capital A – one of those powerhouse African-American women whose chief regret seems to be that she has but one life to fume over the indignities of the last few centuries. No one gets along with her. Not the attorneys, the paralegals, the staff. During her years as a secretary Glyndora worked with half the lawyers in the firm. She couldn't cut it with another woman and lasted only a week with Brushy. She'd been far too intimidating for Wash – and many others. In all the ensuing scrapes Glyndora's been protected by – guess who? – Martin Gold, patron saint of the local eccentrics. He seems to find her amusing and, as I knew well, is inclined to forgive every sin except sloth for the sake of ability. Able Glyndora is. That's the problem. She resents the way she's been enslaved by circumstance. She had a kid at fifteen, whom she raised on her own, with no chance after that really to make her way.

Recognizing that Glyndora could not resist the chance to prove how capable she is, Martin had ultimately teamed her with Bert, the lawyer for whom she'd worked longest. Glyndora filed his motions, kept his schedule, wrote the routine correspondence, filled in the blanks on the standard interrogatories, made excuses when he took a powder, even went to court for him in a couple of emergencies. (And had an income about 10 percent of his, if you'll excuse the son of a union man.) The only problem was that about a year ago they began to fight. Here I am not being euphemistic. I do not mean occasional cross looks or even one or two sharp words. I mean standing in the hallway bellowing. I mean papers flying, clients in the doorways of the conference rooms staring down the halls. I mean Scenes. Finally, someone who must have been in the army or on a police force got the right idea: promote her. Glyndora was less a tyrant as a boss than she had been as an employee and she clearly enjoyed having a universe of her own. Bert, naturally, carried on like a baby when they took her away. And Glyndora undoubtedly enjoyed that too.

'Glyndora, it's this Litiplex thing. The money.' That stopped her. We were in front of a row of bone-colored cabinets. Her face was narrowed by her customary suspicion. 'When you searched for the paperwork, I think you could have missed a memo. From Bert. Maybe attaching some kind of agreement with Peter Neucriss?'

She shook her head immediately, a copse of long hair, dulled by straighteners. I nodded firmly in response.

'Hey, man.' She swept her hand wide. 'I got 80,000 files here and I had my nose in each one. You think you can do a better job, Mack, help yourself. We lock up at five.'

The phone rang then and she picked it up, long sinister sculpted nails painted bright red. Glyndora is past forty and showing little wear. This is one good-looking woman and she knows it – built like the brick shithouse you've always heard about, five foot ten in her stocking feet and female every inch of it, a phenomenal set of headlights, a big black fanny, and a proud imperial face, with a majestic look and an aquiline schnozzola that reports on Semitic adventures in West Africa centuries ago. Like every fine-looking human I have ever met, she can be charming when there's something she wants, and with me, in certain moods, she's even something of a tease, picking up, I guess, on a certain susceptibility. I've lived most of my life with women like this, who were suffering from the peculiarly female frustration of feeling there had never been any way out to start – and besides, a body can't ignore how she looks. I've heard men speak of Glyndora with admiration for years – but only from a distance. As Al Lagodis, an old pal from the Force, told me one day when he came by for lunch, you'd need a dick like a crowbar.

She had no use for me now. 'I told you, Mack,' she said when she was done on the phone, 'I don't have time for this.'

'I'll see you at five. You can show me what you went through.' She laughed. Glyndora and non-essential overtime were mutually exclusive. 'When?' I asked. She picked up her purse, dropping something into it, 118 and gave me a little tight smile that said, Go jump. She was on her way down the hall, where I couldn't follow. I said her name to no avail. She left me by her desk. The newspaper from which she'd ripped that item was still open. It looked like it had been an article, an eighth of a page. A little portion of the headline remained. WES, maybe part of a ‘I. West? I looked up. Sharon, one of Glyndora's underlings, was watching me, a little brown woman in a pink outfit that was half a size too tight. Twenty feet away, she eyed me from her desk with suspicion – worker against boss, woman versus man, all of the workplace's silent little competitions. Whatever I was looking for, she figured, I shouldn't know.

I tried a silly smile and stepped away from the forbidden zone of what was Glyndora's. 'Tell her to call me,' I said. Sharon just looked. We both knew I had no chance.

B. Prince of Darkness TransNational Air Flight 397 went down in a horrible fireball at the Kindle County Municipal Airfield in July 1985. A TV crew was coincidentally at the airport to cover the arrival of the Peking Circus at a nearby gate and so the footage played again and again across the country, you've probably seen it, 397 bouncing on its front wheel and taking air again, looking a bit like a kiddie's book where the hippopotamuses dance ballet, all quite slo-mo and graceful until the thing canted forward, hit square on its nose, and fire ignited, flashing through the cockpit first and then rolling back through the plane, lighting the windows as it went, until the engines and underbelly blew off in a memorable eruption of orange and yellow flame. No survivors – 247 fried.

At this point, the plaintiffs' lawyers took the field, the guys and gals who prate to juries about the misery of the widows and orphans and then take a full third of what is forked over in sympathy. As someone who works the other side of the street, I'll spare the high and mighty – let me just note that Peter Neucriss, Barracuda-in-Chief of the local plaintiffs' bar, had filed three lawsuits in behalf of the families of crash victims not only before the remains were buried but in one instance before, quite literally, they had cooled. Within six months, there were more than 137 cases on file, including four class actions in which some enterprising lawyer claimed to represent everyone. All of these cases were consolidated before Judge Ethan Bromwich of the Kindle County Superior Court, a former law professor at Easton whose brilliance is exceeded only by his regard for his own abilities. And in every single suit, TransNational Air, our client, was the lead defendant.

Being the airline in an air crash case is sort of like driving a bumper car at the carnival. There are more drivers than you can count; no one knows or cares about rules of the road; everyone's headed in his or her own direction; and every single one of them seems to get his jollies out of ramming you in the behind. It's not just that there are 247 individual victims, each one with relatives and lawyers looking for money to assuage their misery, but you also have ten or twelve co-defendants, ruthlessly pissed off to be involved. Everybody gets sued, not just the airline and the pilot's estate, but any poor son of a bitch who left so much as a fingerprint on the plane: the folks who made the body, the engine manufacturers, the flight controllers, even the company that distilled the gas – anybody with deep pockets who might conceivably be blamed or forced by the prospect of a decade of expensive litigation to throw a few million bucks in the pot. And every one of those folks has a stop-loss insurer who steps to the plate looking for a way to deny coverage to the company that pays their premiums, or, if that won't work, to blame somebody else and get them to pay. There are weathervanes that do not point in as many directions. We blame the people in the flight tower; they in turn say the ailerons weren't working; the manufacturer speaks of pilot error. The plaintiffs all stand on the side and gloat.

About a year after 397 went down, Martin Gold began an effort that seemed to me as romantic and ill-considered as the Crusades: settling 397. Martin has a mind like a cloud chamber, that device where nuclear physicists trace the course of complex atomic reactions; he is probably the only lawyer I know who could even have embarked, let alone succeeded, on a negotiating process which, at one point, had him taking calls from 163 different attorneys.

Under what Martin is always careful to refer to, even sometimes in the office, as 'The Bromwich Plan' the defendants, meaning for the most part their insurance companies, put together a fund of $288.3 million. In return the plaintiffs, led by Neucriss, agreed that the damages in all the cases together could not exceed that sum. Over the last five years, every individual case has been either tried before a Special Master, or more often settled, with Captain Bert heading the TN litigation team and supervising administration of the settlement fund which G amp; G has held in an interest-bearing escrow.

Recently, as the last of the damage trials have been resolved, we've had an unforeseen development: there's going to be millions left over which, accordingly, will remain the property of little ol’ TransNational Air. Indeed, the only problem for TN has been keeping this news to ourselves, since it would be a public-relations nightmare to explain how, when everything is added and subtracted legal fees, interest, the surplus, and TN's initial contribution to the fund – the company netted close to $20 million by killing 247 people. More pertinently, the plaintiffs' lawyers, who have never seen a dollar they didn't think was rightfully theirs, would use that vulnerability to weasel themselves a bigger share, and the co-defendants of course would wail piteously. We have been on a self-conscious campaign to make sure that every plaintiff has been paid out and signed a release before we submit our final accounting on the settlement fund to Judge Bromwich. Nonetheless, if you put liquor into Tad Krzysinski, TN's CEO, in an intimate setting, you can get him to laugh pretty hard at the inevitable jokes about crashing more planes.

When I was finally allowed to see Neucriss about 4:30, he had a tuna steak on a plate before him. Just out of court, he was enjoying a light supper, preparing for an evening's toil. He had a full kitchen and a chef in the office. The immediate air was savored with ginger, but there was still the frantic feel of trial. Peter's $100 foulard was dragged down; the sleeves were rolled on his white-on-white silk shirt; he stood as he ate, rumbling out every free-associated thought as a command. Four or five associates came charging in and out with questions about exhibits that they would need tomorrow. It was a bad-baby case, worth in Peter's hands at least $10 million. The mother was going on in the morning.

Meanwhile, I sat there in the mendicant pose in which Peter prefers to see everyone around him. I was hoping to get a quick answer and go. I had brought over drafts of the payout documents on 397, and had casually mentioned Litiplex, using the routine Wash said had been employed with others – correspondence we couldn't place, maybe Peter had an idea? 'Litiplex.' Peter touched his forehead. He stared, unsee- ing, toward the middle distance. 'I did talk to somebody about that.' 'You did? Was it Bert?' 'Bert? 'He's been out of town, I haven't been able to ask him.'

'Right. Visiting his family on Mars.' Neucriss rolled his eyes. 'No. Who?' He drummed his fingers, he yelled for one of the secretaries, then stopped her with an explosive clap of his hands. 'I know who asked me about Litiplex. Jesus Christ, what a squirrelly bunch you are. Don't you guys even talk to each other? Gold. Gold brought it up. Is he out of town too, or just out to lunch?'

My heart went flat, I wasn't even sure why, except I knew something was wrong. There were plaintiffs' guys Martin could talk to with confidence, whereas even hello on the street with Peter required full body armor for Martin and an Alka-Seltzer afterwards. 'Martin?' I asked.

'No, good as. Yeah, Gold called three or four weeks ago. Doing the same soft-shoe as you, talking to me about something else, then trying to slide this Litiplex name in so I wouldn't notice. What the hell are you guys up to now?'

Nothing, I said. Lying to Peter is not even a venial sin: speaking to a Frenchman in French. Wash had said Martin phoned a couple of plaintiffs' lawyers with discreet inquiries about Litiplex, but it had never crossed my mind they might include Neucriss. In the meantime, I tried to smooth over the concerns all this Q and A about Litiplex seemed to have raised. Just getting ready for distribution, trying to cover all details, who more likely to know all than Peter?

With Neucriss, flattery is always the best way. Perhaps because it is the social world's realm of ultimate restraint, the law seems to attract more of these types, the utterly self-impressed who regard the bar as the pathway to a frontier where will and ego can go virtually unbounded. The sole partner in a seventeen lawyer firm, Neucriss is the only lawyer I know who earns more every year than a good left-handed pitcher makes in the National League. Between $4 and $6 million are the printed estimates, and this year, with some $30 million worth of settlements in the 397 litigation about to pay out, his income will, as he puts it in his own unctuous way, 'reach the eight figures'.

This success has not been achieved by adherence to scruple. Peter's political contributions are vast – he hits every limit and gives in the name of his sixteen associates, his wife, and his children. Even so, he leaves nothing to chance. His witnesses are skillfully tutored; documents disappear; and in the bad old days, perhaps not entirely gone, when cash on the barrelhead bought judicial favor, Neucriss was figured to do this as well. Worst of all, his very prominence is a sort of revolting advertisement of the fallibility of the jury system. Ten minutes with this guy and you know the story: ego run wild, some form of character disorder. But somehow, from juries, Peter's schmaltzy performance, his self-congratulatory baritone and silvery mane, have drawn nothing but rave reviews for forty years. He goes on, with all of us knowing that no matter what his triumphs, his wealth, the national accolades, all the purchased adoration, the only motive force in nature surer than gravity is Peter's desire for more.

He continued talking about Martin, always a raw nerve with him.

'Oh yeah. What was Gold's line? Something like yours. A letter to be forwarded. I asked him, "What game is this? Post Office? I thought that was adolescent foreplay."' Neucriss roared at himself, his mouth still full. Being profane, he kept Martin on edge. 'But what about it, Peter? Litiplex? What is it?'

'Listen to this. How the hell do I know? For crying out loud. Call information. Ask them about Litiplex. Jesus Christ,' he went on, 'how do you stand stuff like this, Malloy? One hundred forty lawyers running around bumping into each other. Two senior partners sorting the mail. And now you'll bill Jake Eiger five hundred bucks for looking at an envelope and tell him it's the plaintiffs' lawyers who make legal expenses so high.'

Jake and Neucriss were sort of on speaking terms, since Jake's dad was one of those pols to whom Neucriss had barnacled himself decades ago. Peter, in the meantime, was off and running, going on about big law firms, the Gog and Magog of his universe. In his own oleaginous way, he was even attempting to appeal for my support. He knew where I stood at G amp; G – the entire legal world, local and national, was mapped in his head. Hanging on there by my fingernails, I might be brought to side with him against my partners. Instead, I fended him off lamely with wit.

'If I didn't know better, Peter, I'd think you were offering me a job.' As soon as I said it, I heard that the tone was all wrong. Neucriss's quick eyes registered something, the possibility of corruption, which around here is always in the air, like carbon dioxide. He held on just a second before rejecting that thought.

'Not you, Malloy. You're an old plowhorse.' That's all he said. Dead or dying went unspecified, but either way, my bones in his view would soon be tromped upon, ground down by some other dray treading my row. He went back to work and I went on my way, fighting him off, trying not to be diminished by his estimate, but of course feeling absolutely flattened. I wasn't even worth buying off.

I was on the street, my overcoat open for the short walk to the Needle, buffeted by the thick pedestrian traffic on all sides, workers departing in the sullen dwindling light of winter. Overhead, the sky was dimming to the color of a burnt pot. The morning snow was now nothing but a dampness on the walks, freezing over amid the little hummocks of salt that rimed the concrete and would stain my shoes.

In the interval, I tried to figure what was doing. I wouldn't say I believed Peter. It was safer to bet on the Easter Bunny. But I couldn't figure why he had anything to hide. I was feeling surly, in a formerly familiar cop-mood in which everyone was a suspect. Bert. Maybe Glyndora. Even, possibly, God's emissary on earth, Martin Gold. The vague unpredictability of Martin's behavior bothered me especially: the way he'd been with Jake; the fact that Martin had called Neucriss, which he ordinarily did only when somebody was paying premium rates. I stopped on a corner where a little boy in a hooded sweatshirt was hawking papers, while a sudden wind snapped my muffler in my face. Here I stood in the city where I've lived my entire misbegotten life, the canyons I've been prowling for decades, feeling depressed and undermined, full of the convincing if momentary illusion that I didn't know where in the hell I was.

C. Somebody Else's Girl For unexplained reasons, I always found it a shock seeing Brushy's pale meaty thighs in her athletic shorts. Her adolescent acne still flared on the parts of her body that were ordinarily concealed, high up on her arms and in the V-neck of her tennis shirt, but I found her appealingly girlish. She did not spend much time letting me look her over, though, and began to bat the ball around the racquet-ball court. We went through more or less the same routine each week. I moved well left and right, and had superior reach and better strokes. Brushy swung with an awkward roundhouse, elbow locked, but she scrambled all over the white-walled court like a squirrel and got to every shot; she'd run me over rather than call hinders. Each week we'd play the first two games even. I careered around, yelling oaths and curse words whenever I mishit the ball. Then Brushy, who had not hit drop shots out of deference to my knee, would dink one ball after another, until I was limping and so short of breath I could faint.

We were at the usual fateful pass between the second and third game in the little low corridor outside the court, toweling off. She wanted to know what had come of my visits with Glyndora and Neucriss.

'Zero,' I said. 'Nobody knows nothin. Maybe you were right. Bert was just trying to phony up something to cover his tracks.' She started asking me questions and I told her a little about Archie and his betting scheme, and my misadventures yesterday, in which, in my version, I had stood up heroically to my old nemesis from the Force.

Brushy took in as much as I said and with her usual cool deliberation got fast to the bottom line. 'So whose credit card is it,' she asked, 'Bert's or Kam's?' I had no idea. 'Where'd you find this card anyway?' she asked.

I was still keeping that part to myself. I didn't want anybody to put me near Bert's refrigerator. I invoked the magic words 'Attorney-Client' and pushed Brushy back onto the court, where she shortly whipped my butt once more, 21-7, dropping shots to the corners and banging the ball off the ceiling like a storm of large blue hail.

'Would it kill you if I won just once?' I complained as we were leaving.

'I know you, Mack. You have a weak character. You'd want to win every week.'

I denied it, but she didn't believe me. She was heading off to the ladies' locker room, and I asked about dinner, which we did now and then when we were both in the office late. 'I can't. Maybe later this week.' 'Who's the lucky fella?'

Brushy frowned. 'Tad, if you must. I'm meeting him for a drink.' Brushy's occasional rendezvous for lunch or cocktails or dinner with Krzysinski had been going on for some time, and nobody at G amp; G knew what to make of them. Tad had been on the job at TN no more than a month when he was personally named in a securities fraud case which Brushy had handled and won, filing a successful motion to dismiss. Purportedly, Krzysinski was just staying in touch, but everybody at the firm alternately suspected or hoped that he was getting the usual from Brushy, since any direct line to the top was valued, given the precariousness of our relationship with TN. The part that didn't fit was that Krzysinski had the rep of a serious family man, nine kids, and had been known to fly back from Fiji so he could be around for family Mass late afternoon on Saturday. On the other hand, as my mother would say, the devil finds a way into the safest home.

I greeted Brushy's news with a lascivious wag of my brow.

'Ooo la la,' I said. Between us, Brushy generally took this kind of joshing pretty well, but today she called the foul.

'I resent that,' she answered, and her eyes heated up. Brushy wanted to be thought of as a counselor to titans, a hotshot who'd be a logical drinking partner for a Fortune 500 King. Instead, here was her ace partner and pal assuming that she'd have one hand on her martini and the other on Tad's privates. I stood there in the hallway, a foot taller, sweating, and felt myself vulnerable for the lack of any smart remark.

'You happen to be wrong,' she went on, 'and you're getting to be worse than anybody else. Why do you suddenly think my sex life is your business?' 'Because I don't have one of my own?' She remained in a huff.

'Maybe you should work on that,' she told me, and marched off down the narrow white hall that led to the locker rooms. The door was too heavy to slam but she gave it a try.

It was rare, but there were instants like this when between Brushy and me there was the throb of something, maybe lost opportunity. Especially in her early days, Brushy let a guy know she was available not long after you said how do you do, and for ten years or so we'd had this running thing about the great fun I was missing. I smiled but kept my distance. Not, by the way, that I was a man of perfect virtue. But it was bad enough being known around the office as a lush, and something about Brushy seemed to make her a daunting proposition, maybe just the well-worn story of a college student who worked in the mail-room and let it be known after one magic summer night that Brushy had so inspired him that they'd had, count them, nine separate encounters between 7:30 p.m. and the following dawn, an achievement that led the young man to be known thereafter solely as Nueve and cast such a pall over every man in the place that there was a palpable atmosphere of celebration the day the kid finally left to go back to school.

Anyway, during that period when my life seemed to be demonstrating some law of thermodynamics or entropy, all to the effect that if things could fuck up they would, with my sister dying and Nora wandering and Lyle in his teenaged funk and me sworn off the bottle, I finally spent an afternoon with her at the Dulcimer House, a class place around the corner. Sex with Brushy was, well, brief. I did not completely fail, but various thoughts of home and spouse, a staid life, and even social disease had suddenly crowded within me, leaving me weak as water and quick as mercury.

'So what?' Brushy had said, and I welcomed her kindness. For Brushy it was all conquest anyway. No doubt she felt better finding that she hadn't missed much.

As for me, I probably expected it. The only good sex I've had was when I was drunk, which must tell you something about me, I wish I knew what. Still, something was easier when I could blame each mishap on the bottle. I was so gassed, et cetera – that's why I spent two sawbucks on the hooker who sucked me off in the back of that taxi; that's why I plugged that girl, even after she puked. A lot of guys lose the capacity that far along, but now and then after half a bottle of Seagram's 7, I lit up like a firecracker.

Without it, there is not a lot left to be said. Every now and then some fancy still strikes me, the oddest things -some gal in a cosmetics ad or some ordinary-looking female whose skirt hikes up in a provocative way as she is crossing the street – and I find myself engaged in Man's Oldest Amusement. I know this is revolting to imagine, a grown man, a big one, with a hand on his own throttle, but we're not really talking about much. Afterwards I am full of Catholic shame, but also curiosity. What's wrong with me? I wonder. Am I just half-dead in that region, or is it that no woman can be as good as what I dream up myself? And what is it I dream? you ask. People. Couples, frankly. I admit it, I like to look. X-rated movies, but in my own theater. The man is never me. So that's what I was thinking as I came out of the locker room into the reception area of Dr Goodbody's Health Club. There were a couple of chairs with a little table between them where most of the papers for the week were piled up, as well as the usual health and fitness magazines, and feeling somewhat morose anyway, I plopped myself down there, having half a mind to look for something in the newspaper, although at the moment I could not quite recollect what. The sports page was full of hype about the Super Bowl on Sunday and the high point of local interest, Friday night's Hands game with UW-Milwaukee. The season records of the Hands and the Meisters were in a box on the inside pages, and I noted, in passing, that Bert or Kam, whoever, had won the $5,000 wager he'd called Kam's Special on Infomode, the U over Cleveland State. I diddled around with that thought. The card statement had a $9,000 credit for December. He'd been winning, Kam or Bert, which meant nobody had a reason to steal to pay Archie.

I remembered then, suddenly, why I'd wanted to see the paper – to check what Glyndora'd torn out. I went through the day's Tribune twice with no luck, and was ready to quit when I found it at last in the late edition, an item from the City section: WEST BANK EXEC MISSING. The wife of prominent insurance industry executive Vernon 'Archie' Koechell confirmed that her husband had not appeared at home or work for the last two weeks. Koechell's disappearance had been reported to the Kindle Unified Police, who were investigating a possible connection to an undisclosed financial crime. On the jump page, there was a picture of Archie, a noble-looking business type with a round mug and a widow's peak. The photo was old, twenty years, but I recognized him, no doubt of that. We'd met face to face, so to speak, and I'd be a long time anyway forgetting the man I'd seen in Bert's refrigerator.