Pleading Guilty (7 page)

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 Criswell, 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 revie
w a
t 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 he 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
Info mode
!

-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 "Mailbox." 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--

Kam's Special 1.12--U. five, five Cleveland. 1.3--Seton five, three Franklin.

Lena grabbed a yellow pad out of another carrel and wrote it down.

"Does this mean anything to you?" she asked.

Not a thing. Baseball scores in January? Map readings? The combination for a safe? We both stared desolately at the screen. I heard my name from the P
. A. S
in the ceiling: "Mr. Malloy
,
please go to Mr. Thale's office." The announcement was repeated twice, somehow more ominous with each rendition. I felt trouble darken my heart. What were we going to tell Jake? I rose, thanking Lena. She clicked off the machine so that Bert's message, whatever it was, vanished in a little star of light that lingered on the dull screen.

B. Washing

Relieved to have found me, Wash welcomed me to his office with a warmth you'd expect if you were entering his home. George Washington Thale III has the sort of charm meant to reflect breeding, a steady geniality he radiates even with the secretaries. When he turns all his attention and smooth manners on you, you feel like you've met somebody out of Fitzgerald, scion of an old rich world to which all Americans once aspired. Still, I never can forget the term "stuffed shirt." He has this big bag belly that seems to push up to his chest when he is seated. With his bow ties and his horn-rimmed glasses, his liver-spotted face and his pipe, he is a type, one of those used-up_ emblems of prosperity whose very sight makes you think that somewhere there's a kid waiting for his inheritance.

Wash asked after my well-being, but he was still fretting about Jake, and he promptly dialed Martin's extension on his speakerphone. In Wash's grand corner office, decorated in dark woods, with colonial objects brightened by dabs of gold or red, the practice of law generally has an easy, elegant air, a world where men of importance make decisions and minions at a distance carry them out. He has filled this space with memorabilia of George Washington--portraiture and busts, little mementos, things that G. W. was alleged to have touched. Wash is some ninth- or twelfth-hand relation, and his hapless attachment to this stuff always seems secretly pitiful to me, as if his own life will never measure up.

"I'm with Mack," Wash said when Martin came on. "Good," he replied. "Just the men I'm looking for." I could tell from Martin's tone, a quart over on oil, that he too was in the company of someone else. "Mack, I just bumped into Jake and we began to talk about the progress on some of the 397 cases Bert's been handling. I invited him to stop in. I thought we all might want to talk about this together."

"Jake's with you?" Wash asked. He only now grasped what Martin had meant when he said we all should get together. "Right here," Martin answered. Upbeat. Strong tone. Martin is like Brushy--like Pagnucci--like Leotis Griswell in his day, like many others who do it well, a lawyer every waking hour. He manages the firm; he plans the renewal of the river and the buildings on the shore. He counsels clients and gets fourteen younger attorneys in a room and plays war games on all his big-time cases. He flies here and there and engages in endless conference calls with parties strung out across most of the world's time zones, during which he listens, opines, edits briefs, and reads his mail. Something in the law is always at hand and on his mind. And he adores it--he is like a gourmet gorging down an endless meal, eating every goody on his plate. With Jake there, with crisis looming, he sounded chipper and self-confident, raring to go. But when Wash looked back, his aging, pale face was stricken and he looked more scared than Inc.

C. Introducing the Victim of the Crime

If you've ever seen The Birth of Venus with the goddess on the half-shell and all the seraphim bent back with the vapors because she is so great, then you've seen big-firm lawyers when the General Counsel of their major client arrives.
During our first few minutes with Jake Eiger in Martin's vast corner office, getting coffee and waiting as Martin quelled the usual urgent calls, about half a dozen partners stuck their heads in to tell Jake how fit he looked, or that his latest letter on the Such and such matter reflected the same pith and sensibility as the Gettysburg Address; they threw out offhand invitations to dinner, theater, and basketball games.
Jake, as ever, accepted this attention with grace. His father was a politician and he knows the way, waving, laughing, parrying with various skillful jests.

I have known Jake Eiger most of my life. We went to high school together at Loyola, Jake two years ahead. You and I, Elaine, we were the kind of Catholics who grew up thinking we were a minority group, the mackerel snappers who ate fish on Friday and wore ash on our foreheads and made way for the ladies in black sheets; we knew we were regarded by Protestants as a clandestine organization with foreign loyalties, like the Freemasons or the KGB. Jack Kennedy of course was our hero, and in his aftermath America for Catholics, I think, truly was different. But you are ever the child, and I'll never really be sure there is a place at the table for me.

But Jake was a Catholic boy, German-Irish, who thought he'd joined the white man's country club. I envied him that and many other things, that his father was rich and that Jake was easy with people. Very good-looking, a movie-star type, he has smooth coppery blond hair that never leaves its place and is only now, with Jake a year or two past fifty, beginning to show less of the radiance that always made you think he was under a spotlight. He has prepossessing eyes--the kind of abundant lashes that you seldom see on a man and which gave Jake, since an otherwise unimpressive childhood, the misleading look of a worldly adult depth. There were always lots of girls after him, and I suspected him of treating them cruelly, wooing them in his soft way and rebuffing them once he'd gotten between their legs.

Still, when I was on my fourteenth version of who I would be, having decided against Vincent Van Gogh, Jack Kerouac, and Dick Tracy, and figured I'd give my dad's idea, law school, a try, Jake, of all people, became a kind of ideal. Our paths had split after high school but my role as Nora's intended brough
t u
s back in contact at little family dos, and Jake took it on himself to give me pointers and advice about law school and practice. Then when I got started at BAD he called upon me for a rather auspicious favor which he felt obliged to repay years later by bringing me here.

A rational person would be grateful to Jake Eiger for that. I made $228,168 last year, and that was after they cut my points for the third time in a row. Without Jake, I'd probably be in some interior office space with cheap paneling, practicing on my own, scrambling around to the police courts and otherwise looking hungrily at the silent telephone. But Jake flies and I float. He's still soaring for the stars and on his way has cut me loose to go to cinders as I plummet back through the atmosphere. A lesser type might be bitter, because without me Jake Eiger would be a handsome middle-aged guy looking for ways to explain why he gave up the practice of law many years ago. "Wash, Mack--" Martin had clapped down the phone, dispensing with the last interruption, and his secretary had finally closed the door. "About Brother Kamin.."

"Ah yes." I smiled brightly and waited to watch Martin dance this tightrope.

"Jake's aware, of course, that Bert is on another of Isis self-declared sabbaticals."

"Right." Smiles. Wash laughed out loud. Martin's such a card. "And I thought, frankly, that it would make more sense just to share with Jake everything that we've been concerned about. Everything. I don't want any misunderstandings down the line." Martin went on in a mood of impressive gravity. The room was quiet as he spoke, windowed on three sides, full of abstract paintings and the kind of kooky
objects
d'art that Martin adores --funny clocks, a side table whose glass top overlay an entire city carved of exotic woods, a shaman's crook that makes the sound of a waterfall when you turn it upside down. Rather than the standard photo of the family, a small soft-sculpture that rendered Martin and his wife and three kids in the mode of

Cabbage Patch Kids was perched on his credenza. Martin was behind the desk toward which all the room's furnishings subtly angle, a broad barely finished burl from the trunk of some thousand-year-old oak.

I saw where Martin was going long before Wash, who was in one of the Barcelona chairs that form a proscenium about Martin's desk. When Wash finally realized that Martin was detailing our suspicions about Bert, he made a vague move to object. But Wash clearly had no time to think it through and instead contained himself.

Martin removed his credenza key--he had it hidden in the rubber belly of a clock set in a hula dancer--and displayed the folder of documents I'd seen yesterday. He explained to Jake that we had found no paper trail authorizing these checks. As Jake began to sense that something had gone wrong, he started to fidget. But Martin, the man of principles and solid commitments, showed no wavering. It couldn't have been easy for him. G &G has been life to Martin since his days at Leotis Griswell's right hand, and he adores the hurly-burly, the business of bringing everyone together. That's his faith, that the team is greater than the sum of the parts. He's my Chinaman here, the man I admire, and he was being admirable now. Only yesterday the Committee had made its decision to wait before the client was informed. Yet Martin was manifesting his allegiance to something more significant than law firm Hoyle: Values. Duty. The lawyer's code. The client, unexpectedly, had asked a question which clearly invited the truth and Martin would not be party to withholding it.