Pleading guilty

III. MY LAWYER

It was about seven-thirty when I got back to the office, and Brushy, as usual, was still there. Near as I can tell, none of my partners believes that money is the most important thing in the world – they just work as if they did. They are decent folks, my partners, men and women of refined instinct, other-thinking, many of them lively company and committed to a lot of do-good stuff, but we are joined together, like the nucleus of an atom, by the dark magnetic forces of nature – a shared weakness for our own worst desires. Get ahead. Make money. Wield power. It all takes time. In this life you're often so hard-pressed that scratching your head sometimes seems to absorb an instant you're sure will be precious later in the day.

Brush, like many others, felt best here, burning like some torch in the dark hours. No phone, no opposing counsel or associates, no fucking management meetings. Her fierce intelligence could be concentrated on the tasks at hand, writing letters, reviewing memos, seven little things in sixty minutes, each one billable as a quarter of an hour. My own time in the office was a chain of aimless spells. I stuck my head in, feeling the need for someone sensible. 'Got a minute?'

Brushy has the corner office, the glamour spot. I'm ten years older, with smaller digs next door. She was at her desk, a plane of glass engulfed at either end by green standing plants whose fronds languished on her papers.

'Business?' she asked. 'Who's the client?' She had reached for her time sheet already.

'Old one,' I said. 'Me.' Brushy was my attorney in my wars with Nora. An absolutely ruthless trial lawyer, Emilia Bruccia is one of G amp; G's great stars. On deposition, I've seen her reform the recollections of witnesses more dramatically than if they had ingested psychoactive drugs, and she's also gifted with that wonderful, devious, clever cast of mind by which she can always explain away the opposition's most damaging documents as something not worth using to wrap fish. She's become a mainstay of our relationship with TN, while developing a dozen great clients of her own, including a big insurance company in California.

Not only does she bill a million bucks a year, but this is a terrific person. I mean it. I would no sooner try to get a jump on Brushy than I would a hungry panther. But she is not dim to feelings. She has plenty of her own, which she exhausts in work and sexual plunder, having a terminal case of hot pants that makes her personal life, behind her back, the object of local sport. She is loyal; she is smart; she has a long memory for kindnesses done. And she is a great partner. If I had to find someone on an hour's notice to go take a dep for me a hundred miles from Tulsa in the middle of the night, I'd call Brushy first. It was her dependability, in fact, which inspired my visit. When I told her I needed a favor, she didn't even flinch.

'I'd love it if you could grab the wheel on Toots's disciplinary hearing at BAD,' I said. 'I'll be there for the first session on Wednesday, but after that I may be on the loose.' BAD – the Bar Admissions and Disciplinary Commission – is a sagging bureaucracy ministering over entrances, exits, and timeouts from the practice of law. I spent my first four years as a lawyer there, struggling to remain afloat in the tidal crest of complaints regarding lawyerly feasance, mis, mal, and non. Brushy objected that she'd never handled a hearing at BAD and it took a second to persuade her she was up to it. Like many great successes, Brushy has her moments of doubt. She flashes the world a winning smile, then wrings her hands when she is alone, not sure she sees what everybody else does. I promised to have Lucinda, the secretary whose services we shared, copy the file, to let Brushy look it over. 'Where will you be?' she asked. 'Looking for Bert.' 'Yeah, where in the world is he?' 'That's what the Committee wants to know.' 'The Committee?'

Brushy warmed to my account. The Big Three tend to be tight-vested and most of my partners relish any chance to peek behind the curtains. Brushy savored each detail until she suddenly grasped the problem.

'Just like that? Five million, six?' Her small mouth hanging open, Brushy looked dimly toward the future -the lawsuits, the recriminations. Her investment in the law firm was in jeopardy. 'How could he do that to us?'

'There are no victims,' I told her. She didn't get it. 'Cop talk,' I said, 'it's a thing we'd say. Guy walks down a dark street alone in the wrong neighborhood and gets mugged. Some shmo cries a river cause he lost a hundred-thousand bucks hoping some con artist could make a car run on potato chips. People get what they're asking for. There are no victims.'

She looked at me with concern. Brushy sat here tonight in a trim suit and a blouse with a big orange bow. Her short hair was cut close, a little butch, and showed off two or three prominent acne scars that pitted her left cheek, like the dimples of the moon. Her teenaged years had to have been tough. 'It's a saying,' I said. 'Meaning what? Here?'

Shrugging, I went to the pencil drawer in the gunmetal credenza behind her to find a cigarette. We both sneak butts. Gage amp; Griswell is now a smoke-free environment, but we sit in Brushy's office or mine with the door closed. From the drawer I also removed a little makeup mirror, which I asked to borrow. Brushy couldn't have cared less. She was chewing on her thumb, still wrought up with the prospect of disaster.

'Should you be telling me this?' Brushy asked. She always had a better sense than me for the value of a confidence.

'Probably not,' I admitted. 'Call it attorney-client.' Privileged, I meant. Forever secret. Another of those witless jokes lawyers make about the law. Brushy wasn't really my lawyer here; I wasn't really her client. 'Besides, I need to ask you something about Bert.'

She was still pondering the situation. She said again she couldn't believe it.

'It's a nice idea, n 'est-ce pas! Fill your pocket with some new IDs and several million dollars and jet off to be someone else for the rest of your life.' I made a sound. 'It gives me the shivers just to think of it.' 'What kind of new IDs?' she asked.

'Oh, he seems to be using some screwy alias. You ever hear him call himself Kam Roberts for any reason – even just kidding around?'

Never. I told her a little about my visit to the Russian Bath, watching these guys built like refrigerators flail each other with oak branches and soap. 'Weird,' she said.

'That's how it struck me. Here's the thing, Brush. These birds around there seem to think Bert has gone off with some man. He ever mention anyone named Archie?'

'Nope.' She eyed me through the smoke. She already knew I was up to something.

'It made me think, you know. It's been years since I saw Bert with a woman.' When Bert got here more than a decade ago, he was still squiring Doreen, his high-school honey, to firm functions. He'd made vague promises to marry this woman, a sweet schoolteacher, and in the years she waited she turned into a kind of sports-bar bimbo, with a drinking problem like mine and skirts the size of handkerchiefs and blonde hair so ravaged by chemicals that it stuck out from her head like raffia. One day at lunch Bert announced she was marrying her principal. No further comment. Ever. And no replacement.

Always live to nuance, Brushy had perked up. 'Are you asking what I think?'

'You mean something dirty and indiscreet? Right. I'm not asking you to speculate. I just thought you might be able to contribute pertinent information.' I sort of scratched my ear lamely but it wasn't fooling her a bit. Pugnacious, you would call her look. She's not big – short, broad, and but for tireless health-club hours tending to the stout – but her jaw was set meanly. 'Who are you now? The Public Health Service?' 'Spare me the details. Yes or no will do to start.' 'No.'

I wasn't sure she was answering. Brushy is touchy about personal lives, since hers is always the subject of sniggering. Every office deserves a Brushy, a stalwartly single, sexually predatory female. She subscribes to a feminism of her own vision, which seems to be inspired by piracy on the high seas, regarding it as an achievement to board every passing male ship. She does not recognize any common boundary: marital status, age, social class. When she decides on a man, either for the position he occupies, the promise he radiates, or the good looks that stimulate other females to mere fancy, she is unambiguous in making her desires known. Over the years she has been seen in the company of judges and politicians, journalists, opponents, guys from the file room, a couple of former jurors – and many of her partners, including, should you be wondering, for one fitful afternoon, me. Big and good-looking, Bert had undoubtedly fallen within the circled sights of Brushy's up-periscope.

'It's not prurient interest, Brush. It's professional. Just give me a wink. I need your opinion: Is it he's or she's when Bert dances the hokey-pokey?'

'I don't believe you,' she said and looked off with a sour scowl. In her pursuits, Brushy, in her own way, is discreet. She generally wouldn't talk under torture, and her advances, while relentless, always recognize the proprieties of the workplace. But for her sexual follies, Brushy still pays a heavy price. Her commitment to appetites that most of us are busy trying to suppress leads folks to regard her as odd, even dangerous; other females are often downright hostile. And among her peers, the younger partners, the men and women who started together as associates and survived those years together – the giddy all-nighters in the library, the one thousand carry-in meals – Brushy is on the outs anyway. They envy her advancement in the firm, and when they gather privately for gossip, it's often about her.

She is, in her own way, alone here, a fact which I suppose has drawn us together. Our one misfiring encounter is never a topic. After Nora, my volcano seems more or less extinct, and we both know that afternoon belongs to my wackiest period – right after my sister, Elaine, had died and I had stopped drinking, just when the recognition that my wife was busy with other sexual pursuits was beginning to assume the form of what we might call an idea, sort of the way all that swirling gas and dust in the remote regions of the cosmos starts to zero in on being a planet. For Brush and me our interlude served its purpose, nonetheless. In the aftermath, we became good pals, schmoozing, smoking, and playing racquetball once a week. On court, she is as vicious as a mink.

'How's the Loathsome Child?' Brushy asked. She eyed me in strict warning. We both knew she'd changed the subject.

'Living up to his name,' I assured her. Lyle was Nora's and my only kid, and his insular ways as a little boy had led me to refer to him with what I thought was tenderness as the Lonesome Child. When adolescence set in, however, the consonants migrated. 'What's the latest?'

'Oh, please. Let me count the ways. I find muddy footprints on the sofa. Dried soda pop on the kitchen floor. He comes home at 4:00 a.m. and rings the doorbell because he forgot the keys. The PDR doesn't list half the drugs he takes. Nineteen years old. And he doesn't flush the toilet.'

At that last item, Brushy made a face. 'Isn't it time for him to grow up? Doesn't that happen with children?'

'Not so as you'd notice with Lyle. I'll tell you, whatever you saved me on alimony, Brushy, she got even with that shrink. All that crap about how an adolescent male was too vulnerable to be without his father in these circumstances.'

Brushy said what she always said: the first custody fight she'd seen where the dispute was over who had to take the child. 'Well, she got even,' I repeated. 'What did she have to get even for?' 'Jesus Christ,' I said, 'you really haven't been married, have you? The world went to hell and I went with it. I don't know.' 'You stopped drinking.'

I shrugged. I am seldom as impressed by this feat as other people, who like to think it shows I have something, some element which if not unique is still special to the human condition. Courage. I don't know. But I was aware of the secret and it never left me. I'm still hooked. Now I depend on the pain of not drinking, on the craving, on the denial. Especially the denial. I get up in the morning and it strikes me that I'm not going to drink and I actually wonder why I have to do this to myself, same as I used to think waking from a bender. And inside there's the same little harpy telling me that I deserve it.

I had taken another cigarette and wandered to the big windows. The trail of headlamps and brake lights stippled the strip of highway, and an occasional building window was lit up by the isolated sparks of somebody else's life being squandered in evening toil. Stepping back, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection decaled over the night: the weary warrior, hair gone gray and so much ruddy flesh beneath my chin that I can never button my collar.

'You know,' I said, 'you get divorced, it's like being hit by a truck. You walk around in a fucking fog. You're not even sure you're alive. Maybe the last year, I've realized when I stopped drinking was probably what pushed her out the door.'

Brushy had removed her pumps and crossed her feet on the desktop. With my remark she stopped wiggling her short toes against the orange mesh of her pantyhose and asked what I was talking about.

'Nora liked me better when I drank. She didn't like me much, but she liked me better. I left her alone. She could conduct her international experiment in living. The last thing she wanted was my attention. They have a word for this now. What is it?' '"Co-dependent".'

'There you go.' I smiled, but we were both rendered silent. It hadn't taken Brushy many guesses. As usual, the mess in my life was its own dead end.

I sat down on her sofa, black leather trimmed with metal rails. It was twenty-first-century decorating in here, 'high-tech', so that the place had the warmth of a hospital operating room. Every partner furnishes as he or she likes, inasmuch as our offices are otherwise the same, three walls of union Sheetrock and a glamour view, all plate glass framed by piers of stressed concrete. We have been here in the TN Needle, a forty-four-story stiletto looming prominently against Center City and the prairie landscape, since it opened six years ago, keeping cozy with our biggest client. Our phones and electronic mail intersect with TN's; half our lawyers have stationery of the General Counsel, Jake Eiger, so they can dash off letters in his name. Visitors to the building often say they cannot tell where TN ends and Gage amp; Griswell starts, which is just how we like it. 'So you're really going to do this, look for Bert?'

'The Big Three didn't think I had a choice. We all know my story. I'm too old to learn to do something else, too greedy to give up the money I make, and too burnt out to deserve it. So I take on Mission Impossible and buy myself a job.'

'That sounds like the kind of deal somebody could forget about. Have you thought of that?'

I had, but it was humiliating as hell to think it was so obvious. I just shrugged. 'Besides,' I said, 'the cops'll probably find Bert before me.'

She became rigid at the mention of the police. I took some time to tell her the rest of the story, about Jorge, the lightweight, and his three mean friends.

'Are you telling me the cops know about this? The money?' 'No chance. It's gone out of our escrow account and we haven't heard word one from them. It's not that.' 'Then what?' I shook my head sadly. I didn't have a clue. 'Actually,' I said, 'from the drift I got, I think they've been asking about Kam Roberts.' 'I'm lost,' she said. 'Me too.'

'Well, I don't understand why you're willing to do this,' Brushy told me. 'Didn't you say he'd shoot you?'

'I was negotiating. I'll fend him off. I'll tell him I didn't believe it, I took it on to defend his honor.' 'Do you believe it?'

I raised my hands: who knows? Who ever knows? I spent a moment with the wonder of it all. What is it really, this life? You're shoulder to shoulder with a guy eight hours a day, try cases with him, go to lunch, sit in the back row and make wisecracks at partners' meetings, stand beside him in the men's room and watch him shake his thing, and what the hell do you know? Zippity-do. You haven't got a clue about the inner regions. You don't know what he regards as dirty thoughts or the place he dreams of as a haven. You don't know if he constantly feels close to the Great Spirit or if anxiety is always nibbling inside him like some famished rat. Really – what is this? You never know with people, I thought, another phrase I picked up on the street and have been repeating to myself for twenty years. I repeated it to Brushy now.

'I can't accept it,' she said. 'This is so calculating. And Bert's impulsive. If you told me he'd signed up to be an astronaut last week and was already halfway to the moon, that would sound more like him.'

'We'll see. I figure if I actually track him down, I'll always have a great alternative to turning him in or bringing him back.' She stared, green eyes hopped up with all her wily curiosity. 'And what alternative is that?'

'Bert and I can split the money right down the middle.' I put out the cigarette and winked. I said to her again, 'Attorney-client.'