California Fire and Life (36 page)

“Not a goddamn dime.”

“Billy, why—”

“Because he did it and we know he did it.”

“You think you can persuade a jury of that?” Casey asks.

“Yes,” Jack says.

Walking right into it, because Casey answers, “You got yourself a deal. We’ll do a focus group tonight—rent-a-judge, jury, the whole nine yards. You testify, Jack, and I’ll cross-examine you.”

“When did you schedule this, Tom?” Billy asks.

“This morning,” Casey says. “The deal I made with Mahogany Row, trying to save your asses. It’s winner take all. You win, we don’t settle, you can investigate all the way up to the trial. You lose, we start settlement negotiations first thing in the morning. It’s the best deal I could get, guys.”

A terrific deal, Jack thinks.

Death.

Death by Focus Group.

“We’re dead.”

Translated from Russian, this is basically what Dani is telling Nicky.

They’re taking a walk out on the lawn of Mother’s house.

As far from the house as they can get, because the scene
in
the house is driving Nicky crazy.

It’s the kids, it’s the dog, it’s Mother. Actually it’s an unholy troika of the kids, the dog and Mother because the kids love the dog and Mother doesn’t. The kids want the dog in the house and Mother doesn’t, the dog wants to jump up on the couch and Mother has a stroke, the dog wants to sleep with the kids and the kids want to sleep with the dog but Mother wants the dog to sleep outside, which is the same as Mother saying she wants the dog dead—which she does. And last night Nicky experienced the sheer absurdity of making Leo sleep in a doghouse outside and then posting an armed guard by the doghouse so the kids would stop crying and so that little Michael wouldn’t, as threatened, sleep in the doghouse with his rubber knife to protect Leo from the coyotes.

Next, Nicky thinks, I’ll be stringing barbed wire around the living room sofa.

And Mother will not get off little Michael’s back. Natalie she ignores completely. Looks right through the girl as if she were a ghost, but Michael she suffocates with attention. Most of it negative. Poor little Michael cannot do anything right. All day it’s Michael, use the napkin not your sleeve, Michael, it’s time to do your scales, Michael, a little gentleman walks with his head
up
.

A broken record, Nicky thinks. An oldie but goodie, as the American DJs would say.

Driving the boy crazy.

Driving me crazy.

So it’s good to get away from that scene.

Take a walk on the lawn even if it is to hear that you are, more likely than not, dead.

“Tratchev is demanding a meeting,” Dani says. “For tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“They don’t want us to have time to get ready,” Dani says.

“But they’ll be ready.”

“Yes.”

“Tell him no.”

“Then we’re at war.”

“So we’re at war.”

Dani shakes his head. “Given our present strength compared to his, we can’t win the war.”

Nicky can hear the unspoken rebuke in Dani’s voice.

And it’s deserved.

In my obsession to be a California businessman, I let things deteriorate. To a point where now we are in mortal danger.

Very
uncool.

“So we meet,” Nicky says.

Dani shakes his head again.

“At this meeting,” he says, “they’ll kill you.”

Tratchev is selling it to the others and it’s an easy sale. Nicky Vale is taking my business—he’ll take yours next. Unless we stop him, and soon.

“Tratchev will accuse you of looting the
obochek
,” Dani says. “A serious violation of
Vorovskoy Zakon
. And this meeting won’t be like the last. They’ll be ready.”

Nicky takes a moment to inhale the scent of bougainvillea. The luminescent color of the fuchsia. The bright blue of the ocean and sky.

Beautiful.

“All I ever wanted was
this
,” he says.

“I know,” Dani says.

“I’ll go to the meeting,” Nicky says. “Alone.”

“You can’t.”

“Why should we all die?”

“Pakhan—”

Nicky puts up his hand. Enough.

I will do what has to be done.

I will deal with Tratchev and all the rest.

Dani says, “There’s something else.”

“Wonderful.”

“The sister.”

“What about her?” Nicky asks.

“She’s been asking about the two Vietnamese.”

“What?”
Nicky asks. “How do you know this?”

“She’s been making a noise in Little Saigon,” Dani says. “Putting real heat on.”

“How did she make that connection?”

You think you’re safe. You think you’ve used all your skill and cunning to steer through the rapids and the shoals and then this cunt of a sister …

“We’ll do what we have to do,” Nicky says.

“She’s a cop.”

“I know that.”

“An honest cop.”

“I know that, too.”

“It’s too much for a coincidence,” Dani says. “Two sisters—”

“Goddamn it, will you do as I say?!”

I know it’s a risk. It’s
all
a risk. But I didn’t kill my beautiful Pamela and make my children motherless just to lose everything anyway.

We will do what we have to do—however regrettable—and we will do it soon. And the day after tomorrow we will have our share of $50 million, more than enough to start again.

From ashes come new shoots of grass.

Life from death.

The ritual sacrifice of Jack Wade starts with peanut M&M’s.

Jack stands in the “observation room” behind the one-way mirror, gobbling peanut M&M’s and watching the “jury” file in. Jack’s been in a couple of dozen focus group facilities and it seems like whatever else they have or don’t have, they always have bowls of peanut M&M’s.

For nervous chomping.

They always serve dinner, too, except Jack’s too edgy to enjoy the lasagna bubbling in the heater trays. The meals at these things are usually pretty good, but tonight it’s
really
good—in addition to the lasagna there’s roast basil chicken, fettuccine Alfredo, a Caesar salad and profiteroles for dessert. Also, real plates, real silverware and linen napkins.

The quality of the meal is a good news/bad news joke.

The good news is that it’s a high-quality meal, the bad news is that the reason it’s a high-quality meal is because the muckety-mucks from Mahogany Row are there.

Casey ordered the menu.

Casey knows that the mucks tend to take their meals very seriously, so it’s prudent to at least feed them well. Especially when the bill’s going to be $50 million.

Not counting the tip.

Jack watches them eat.

Half of freaking Mahogany Row bellied up to the trough. Twelve years with the company, and Jack’s never seen these guys in the flesh before, just on a few motivational closed-circuit TV presentations. The boys can eat.

So there they are, VP Claims, VP Legal and VP Public Relations. Goddamn Billy runs it down for him.

“Phil Herlihy, VP Claims,” Billy says, pointing to a sixtyish guy with a shock of white hair and a paunch. “Came out of Agency, of course. Doesn’t know a claim from a blow job. He’s an administrator.”

Billy gestures at a tall, thin guy in his fifties. “Dane Reinhardt, VP Legal. Couldn’t
buy
a verdict in a goddamn courtroom, so now he’s telling
us
what to do.

“Jerry Bourne, VP Public Relations,” Billy says, pointing to a short fortyish guy with curly red hair and a red nose. “Basically in charge of arranging hookers for the visiting firemen and hiding the bills in his expenses. He’s a fucking idiot, but at least he knows it. So’s Reinhardt, except he doesn’t know it. All he knows is it’s a lot safer to settle claims than to take one to trial and lose. Last thing that no-balls so-called lawyer wants to see is another courtroom. Herlihy’s the one to watch out for. He swings the big stick in the president’s office.”

Herlihy looks over at them.

“Billy,” he says, “aren’t you going to eat?”

“I’m watching my figure.”

Herlihy looks at Jack.

“Are you this Jack Wade I’ve heard so much about today?”

“Guilty.”

Herlihy says, “You Claims cowboys from So-Cal …”

Like he’s so disgusted he can’t even finish.

Jack figures it doesn’t require a real answer so all he says is, “Yippi-yi-yo-ky-ay” and walks away, which doesn’t score him a lot of points with Phil Herlihy, VP Claims, from the start of this thing.

The observation room itself is shaped like a slice of a lecture hall. A bunch of desks bolted onto the floor slanted down toward the observation window. The dining table is off to the left on the five feet of flat floor by the window and the door. On top of the room, a videographer is getting his camera ready to record the whole mess for the boys at corporate who couldn’t make the live show. At the bottom, a table runs the width of the window. Seated at the table are two jury consultants with laptop computers and stacks of questionnaires.

What the two jury consultants also have is a monitor that’s hooked up to each of twelve ProCon machines on the desk of each “juror.”

The ProCon machines are simple little devices that measure how the juror is “feeling”—generally pro or vaguely con—at any given
moment. It’s basically a joystick attached to a base and the juror is supposed to keep his or her hand on it at all times. The juror’s feeling con about something, he pushes the joystick down. A little con, a little down. A lot con, a lot down. Same with the pro feelings. A little pro, the juror pulls a little back on the joystick, a lot pro, she can whip that puppy all the way back.

It’s basically a high-tech version of the old Roman thumbs-up/thumbs-down gladiator deal.

What it does is it allows you to instantly measure the jury’s ongoing “instinctive” reaction on a scale from Negative 10 to Neutral to Positive 10 to any witness, question or answer. They’re carefully instructed that they don’t need a reason for their reaction—they should just react. If they’re feeling “bad” they should push the stick down. If they’re feeling happy, they should push it up.

Jack knows this is only for the gut reaction, that they’ll get the rational response from the questionnaires and the actual decision from a “verdict,” but he also knows that the the jury will rationalize its gut reaction onto the questionnaire and then onto the verdict.

Doesn’t matter what a lawyer or a judge says; any jury will decide a case on its gut reaction.

So the ProCon machine is an important little fucker in this proceeding.

Everyone in the observation room is going to have their eyes on the ProCon monitor.

Not inside the actual “courtroom.”

Inside the actual focus group room, on the other side of the window, the “jurors” are seated in a mock jury box, with individual little tables for their ProCon joysticks. There’s a witness stand, tables for the plaintiff and defense, and a judge’s bench, where the “rent-a-judge” for the focus group will sit.

The two jury consultants—a yuppie guy and a yuppie gal—and the moderator—a slightly older male yuppie—are all from TSI, Trial Science Inc., and this is what they do for a living. They’re all a little frantic at the moment because this is a rush job. They’ve spent the afternoon assembling a demographically correct focus group that would be an accurate sampling of a potential Orange County jury. Age, gender, race, education, profession have gone into the mix, plus they had to figure in the attorney’s preference.

“How do you want this one to come out?” the older yuppie had asked Casey.

Because the attorney is the one they have to keep happy, so they need to know if the attorney wants a real focus group or a dog-and-pony. A lot of times, the attorney is trying to use the focus group to persuade a client to settle or to go to trial, and because the TSI people already know the demographics that tend to be pro-defense or pro-plaintiff, they can slant their recruiting the lawyer’s way.

They can also slant the questionnaires and the live discussion, and while they can’t guarantee an outcome, they can take a lawyer a long way down his or her chosen path.

Hence the question, “How do you want this one to come out?”

“Accurately,” Casey answered.

One, because he’s not about to set up a Potemkin village for old friends like Billy Hayes and Jack Wade, and two, he already knows how this one’s going to come out anyway.

He’s going to kick their ass.

Which is what Jack thinks, too, when he sees the rent-a-judge walk in and take the bench. Dude is wearing black robes, just like this is the real thing.

Dude also looks very familiar.

“We’re dead,” Jack mutters to Goddamn Billy.

Because the rent-a-judge is none other than retired Justice Dennis Mallon.

From the Atlas Warehouse trial.

Mallon bangs on a gavel, which gets the expected chuckle from the group, and he asks them to finish filling out their “pre-stimulus questionnaires,” and then he tells them that they’re going to hear about a lawsuit involving a fire.

“You’ll hear a brief statement from the plaintiff, then one from the defense. Then you’ll be asked to fill out a questionnaire based on what you’ve heard. Then you’re going to hear testimony from a witness for the defense, who will be examined and then cross-examined. After which you’ll fill out, yes, another questionnaire, and then you’ll discuss the case just as you would if you were on a real jury. Then I’ll ask you to render a verdict for the defense or for the plaintiff, and if for the plaintiff, how
much you would award. I encourage you to take notes; just please be aware that your notes will be collected at the end of the evening.

“During all of this, please manipulate your little ProCon joysticks so the people in the observation room know how you’re feeling.”

Which gets another appreciative chuckle from the jury.

“Can you believe,” Jack whispers to Goddamn Billy, “that with all the law, all the science, everything we do on a file, that a multimillion-dollar decision is going to be made by twelve people who show up for fifty bucks each and all the cookies they can eat?”