Pleading guilty

V.

A. The Mind of the Machine Now and then everybody wants to be somebody else, Elaine. There are all these secret people rolling around inside – ma and pa, killers and cops and various prime-time heroes, and all of them at times reaching for the throttle. There's no way to stop it, and who's to say we should. What seemed sweeter yesterday than the thought of nabbing Bert and running with the money? It's just your brother, the old copper, explaining how it is that folks go wrong. Every guy I cracked said it: I didn't mean to, I didn't want to. As if it were somebody else who'd scored the smack or kicked the coins out of the vending machine. And it is in a way. That's what I'm saying.

I sat in my office this morning, venturing this two-bit commentary for the benefit of my dead sister, as I do a couple of times each day, and noodling over the statement that I'd pocketed from the Kam Roberts credit card. The thought of Bert being someone else impromptu still drilled me with that little secret jolt, but the particulars of his hidden life remained elusive. Besides the charges for air tickets and restaurants and motels in little Mid-Ten towns, there were items, five to fifteen dollars each, posted almost daily for some something called ‘Infomode', and there was also a series of cash advances totaling about three grand. Bert made more dough than me, maybe 275K, and I'd have figured he'd write a check to cash in Accounting if he needed folding money, rather than pay interest. Then we got really strange: a single credit item, over nine thousand bucks for something called Arch Enterprises. Maybe this was pal Archie, the wayward actuary, but what-for nine thousand dollars credit? I was writing comedy making up the explanations. E.g., Bert returned a big insurance policy? And then we had the small-time peculiar, two nights' charges last month at U Inn, a kind of run-down hotel/ motel right across from the university's main quadrangle, an odd spot for Bert to be checking in since his apartment was only a mile away.

I was pushing around these puzzle pieces when my phone rang. 'We have a serious problem.' It was Wash. 'We do?'

'Very serious.' He sounded undone, but Wash is not the fellow we turn to in crisis. There are people, like Martin, who talk about Wash as a legend, but I suspect he was one of those young men who was admired for his bright future and now is forgiven his lapses due to the supposed achievements of his past. Aged sixty-seven, Wash by my reckoning lost interest in the practice of law at least a decade ago. You could say the same of me, but I'm not an icon. This life can make you soft. There are always younger lawyers, agile-minded and bristling with ambition, to think for you, to write the opinion letters and draft the contracts. Wash has capitulated to that. He is, for the most part, a ceremonial lawyer, a soothing presence to old clients to whom he is connected by club affiliations and schooling.

‘I just spoke with Martin,' Wash said. 'He ran into Jake Eiger in the elevator.' 'So?' 'Jake was asking about Bert.' 'Uh-oh.' Ticklish inquiries from the client. I felt the usual moment of private gratitude that I wasn't in charge. 'We have to figure out what to tell Jake. Martin had to jump onto a conference call – we only spoke for a second. But he should be through soon. He suggested we all get together.' I told Wash I'd stand by.

In the interval I resumed my routine endeavor these days at G amp; G – trying to find something to do. When I came here eighteen years ago, it was with the promise that Jake Eiger would have lots of work for me, and for a number of years his word held true. I rewrote TN's Employees' Code of Conduct, I conducted a number of internal investigations – flight attendants selling drinks out of their own bottles, a hotel manager whose hiring standard for chambermaids was whether they swallowed after fellating him. Eventually that stuff tapered off, and in the last two years has stopped cold. I'm left doing odds and ends for Bert and Brushy and some of my other partners who remain on Jake's main menu, trying cases they are too busy for, doing firm committee work, still hoping, after eighteen years in private practice, that somehow, somewhere there's some million-dollar client who wants an ex-drunk former copper for its principal outside counsel. Between slouching work habits and a lack of clientele, my economic value to this enterprise is dwindling toward zero. True, I cash a hefty draw check every quarter, notwithstanding three straight years of reductions; and there are folks, like Martin, who seem inclined to support me as an act of enduring sentiment. But I have to worry about when someone like Pagnucci will call time's up – and then there's the matter of my pride, assuming I have any left.

Not happy thoughts as I looked over the Blue Sheet, our daily bulletin, and the remainder of the lost forest of memos and mail that are generated within G amp; G each day. I had some desultory work to do on 397, the air crash disaster that has provided nearly full-time employment for Bert and more than occasional toil for me in the last three years. There were letters to sign and a draft of payout documents which were due over with Peter Neucriss, the lead plaintiff's lawyer, an exacting prick who'd force me to rewrite them four times. Today's letters purported to be from TN, written on TN stationery – various proclamations regarding the settlement fund that we were supposed to safeguard and which TN controlled – and I applied my flawless imitation of Jake Eiger's signature, then went back to the Blue Sheet, shifting for interesting news. Only the usual. A corporate department luncheon to discuss interest rate swaps; time sheets due by 5:00 or we'd get fined; and, my favorite, mystery mail, a photocopy of a check payable to the firm for $275 with a note from Glyndora in Accounting asking if anybody knew who sent it and why. There was once a check for about 750 grand that ran for three days straight which I very nearly claimed. Carl and various subalterns had also sent four separate memos to the partners, hard copy and E-mail, telling us to giddy up and get our clients to pay their fees before the fiscal year ended next week on January 31.

This thought of bills coming due reminded me of the Kam Roberts credit card. I told Lucinda where I'd be when Wash called and rambled through the halls to the law library, a floor above on 38. Three associates, all in their initial year of practice, were yakking around a table. At the rare sight of a partner in these surroundings, they embarked on a silent, quailed departure from each other's company to resume making profit of their time.

'Not so fast,' I said. I had recruited each of them. A large law firm is basically organized on the same principles as a Ponzi scheme. The only sure ingredients of growth are new clients, bigger bills, and – especially – more people at the bottom, each a little profit center, toiling into the wee hours and earning more for the partnership than they take home. Thus we have a lecher's interest in new talent and are always wooing. In the summers we give fifteen law students a tryout on terms that make overnight camp look like hard labor. Twelve hundred a week to go to baseball games and concerts and fancy lunches, an experience that is a better introduction to life as royalty than the practice of law. And who's in charge of sucking up to these children this way? Yours truly.

When I was assigned to the recruiting subcommittee, Martin tried to explain it as a tribute to my raffish charm. Young people would relate to my offhand ways, he suggested, my casual eccentricities. I knew that with his native bureaucratic dexterity he'd struck on some last-hope way to demonstrate my usefulness to our partners. The fact is I do not particularly care for younger people. Ask my son. I resent their youth – their opportunities, the zillion ways they are inherently better off than I am. Nor, frankly, are they particularly taken with me. But nineteen times each fall I sit in some desolate hotel room near a premier law school and watch them, in their lawyer costumes, strut their stuff, twenty-five-year-olds, a few so self-impressed you want to stick a pin in and watch them blow around the room. Jesus.

'I got this guy's bank card statement in discovery,' I said, 'and I'm trying to figure what he was spending money on. What's Infomode?' Amid the library's lavish surroundings, the three listened to me with the studied solemnity reserved to the young and ambitious. This was a comfortable, old-fashioned place with club chairs and oak bookcases and tables, and a second-floor balcony rimmed with gold-trimmed volumes that ran the circumference of the room. Leotis Griswell, the firm's late founder, had spent generously here, sort of on the same theory by which Catholics like to glorify their churches. It was Lena Holtz who knew about Infomode.

'It's a modem information service. You know. You dial up and can go shopping or get stock-market quotes, the wire services. Anything.' 'You dial up what?'

'Here.' She walked me over to a laptop computer in one of the carrels. Lena was my touchdown for the year, law review at the U, from a rich family out in the West Bank suburbs. She'd had some rough times prior to law school and they left her with an appealing determination to use herself well. Five feet tall, with those teensy thin limbs so there always seems to be extra room in her clothes, she's not much to look at, not when you looked closely, but the pieces fit well. Hair, cosmetics, clothes – Lena has what is generally called style.

I had given her Kam Roberts's bill and she was already punching at the computer. A phone was ringing inside.

'See?' she said as the screen brightened with color proclaiming INFOMODE! 'And what kind of information can you get?' I asked.

'You name it – flight schedules, the prices of antiques, weather reports. They have two thousand different libraries.' 'So how do I figure out what he was doing?' 'You could look at his billing information. It would come right up on the screen.' 'Great!' 'But you'd need his password,' she told me. Naturally I was blank.

'See, this isn't free,' she said. 'They charge your credit card every time you enter a library. Like now, I logged on into his account.' 'How?' 'The account number's right here on the bank card statement. But to make sure that I'm really authorized to use it, we need his password.' 'What's the password? "Rosebud"?' 'A kid's name. Birthday. Anniversary.'

'Great,' I said again. I sat hunched, watching little iridescent squiggles radiate on the screen, as if the letters were burning, fascinated as ever by the thought of fire. This might be why Bert had the card, so he could rack up Infomode charges in another name. I grabbed her arm. 'Try Kam Roberts.' I spelled it. The screen lit up again: WELCOME TO INFOMODE!

'Whoa,' I said. Once an art student, always an art student. How I love color.

'Do Billing,' she typed. The listing that scrolled up looked like the bank card statement, a log of charges incurred every day or two, which included the length of use and the cost. It was just what you'd expect of Bert. It was all for something called 'Sportsline,' or for another service they referred to as 'Mail-box.' I figured Sportsline reported the scores of games. I asked about Mailbox.

'It's what it sounds like. Get messages from people who are on-line. Like electronic mail.'

Or, it turned out, you could leave messages behind, little memos to yourself or to someone who logged into your account with your permission. That was what Bert had done. The note we found was dated three weeks ago and seemed to make no sense. It read: Hey Arch- SPRINGFIELD Kam's Special 1.12-U. five, five Cleveland.