The King of Torts (25 page)

Clay opened a beer himself, then began with Tarvan and ended with Dyloft. Jarrett had heard rumors of his son’s success, but he never read newspapers and tried his best to ignore any news from home. Another beer as he tried to digest the idea of having five thousand clients at once.

The $100 million closed his eyes, turned him pale, or least a slightly lighter shade of bronze, and it creased his leathery forehead with a wave of thick wrinkles. He shook his head, drank some beer, then began laughing.

Clay pressed on, determined to finish before they landed.

“What are you doing with the money?” Jarrett asked, still in shock.

“Spending it like crazy.”

Outside the Nassau airport they found a cab, a 1974 yellow Cadillac with a driver smoking pot. He got them safely to the Sunset Hotel and Casino on Paradise Island, facing Nassau Harbor.

Jarrett headed for the blackjack tables with the five thousand in cash his son had given him. Clay headed for the pool and the tanning cream. He wanted sun and bikinis.

__________

THE BOAT was a sixty-three-foot catamaran made by a builder of fine sailboats in Fort Lauderdale. The captain/salesman was a cranky old Brit named Maltbee whose sidekick was a scrawny Bahamian deckhand. Maltbee snarled and fussed until they were out of Nassau Harbor and into the bay. They were headed for the southern edge of channel, for a half day in the brilliant sun and calm water, a lengthy test drive of a boat that Jarrett said could make some real money.

When the engine was turned off and the sails went up, Clay went down to examine the cabin. Supposedly it could sleep eight, plus a crew of two. Tight quarters, but then everything was junior-sized. The shower was too small to turn around in. The master suite would fit in his smallest closet. Life on a sailboat.

According to Jarrett, it was impossible to make money catching fish. Business was sporadic. A charter every day was required to turn a profit, but then the work was too hard for that. Deckhands were impossible to keep. Tips were never enough. Most clients were tolerable but there were plenty of bad ones to sour the job. He’d been a charter captain for five years and it was taking its toll.

The real money was in private sailboat charters for small groups of wealthy people who wanted to work,
not be pampered. Semiserious sailors. Take a great boat—your own boat, preferably one without liens on it—and sail around the Caribbean for a month at a time. Jarrett had a friend from Freeport who’d been running two such boats for years and was making serious money. The clients mapped their course, chose their times and routes, selected their menus and booze, and off they went with a captain and a first mate for a month. “Ten thousand bucks a week,” Jarrett said. “Plus you’re sailing, enjoying the wind and the sun and the sea, going nowhere. Unlike fishing, where you gotta catch a big marlin or everybody’s mad.”

When Clay emerged from the cabin Jarrett was at the helm, looking very much at ease, as if he’d been racing fine yachts for years. Clay moved along the deck and stretched out in the sun.

They found some wind and began slicing through the smooth water, to the east along the bay, with Nassau fading in the distance. Clay had stripped down to his shorts and was covered in cream; he was about to doze when Maltbee crept up beside him.

“Your father tells me you’re the one with the money.” Maltbee’s eyes were hidden behind thick sunshades.

“I guess he’s right,” Clay said.

“She’s a four-million-dollar boat, practically new, one of our best. Built for one of those dot-commers who lost his money faster than he made it. A sorry lot of them, if you ask me. Anyway, we’re stuck with it. Market’s slow. We’ll move it for three million, and at that you should be charged with thievery. If you incorporate
the boat under Bahamian law as a charter company, there are all sorts of tax tricks. I can’t explain them, but we have a lawyer in Nassau who does the paperwork. If you can catch him sober.”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Then why are you sober?”

Ha, ha, ha; they both managed an awkward laugh.

“What about depreciation?” Clay asked.

“Heavy, quite heavy, but again, that’s for you lawyers. I’m just a salesman. I think your old man likes it though. Boats like these are quite the rage from here to Bermuda to South America. It’ll make money.”

So says the salesman, and a bad one at that. If Clay bought a boat for his father, his sole dream was that it would break even and not become a black hole. Maltbee disappeared as quickly as he had materialized.

Three days later, Clay signed a contract to pay $2.9 million for the boat. The lawyer, who was in fact not completely sober during either of the two meetings Clay had with him, chartered the Bahamian company in Jarrett’s name only. The boat was a gift from son to father, an asset to be hidden away in the islands, much like Jarrett himself.

Over dinner their last night in Nassau, in the back of a seedy saloon packed with drug dealers and tax cheaters and alimony dodgers, virtually all of them American, Clay cracked crab legs and finally asked a question he’d been considering for weeks now. “Any chance you could ever return to the States?”

“For what?”

“To practice law. To be my partner. To litigate and kick ass again.”

The question made Jarrett smile. The thought of father and son working together. The very idea that Clay wanted him to return; back to an office, back to something respectable. The boy lived under a dark cloud that the old man had left behind. However, given the boy’s recent success the cloud was certainly shrinking.

“I doubt it, Clay. I surrendered my license and promised to stay away.”

“Would you want to come back?”

“Maybe to clear my name, but never to practice law again. There’s too much baggage, too many old enemies still lurking around. I’m fifty-five years old, and that’s a bit late to start over.”

“Where will you be in ten years?”

“I don’t think like that. I don’t believe in calendars and schedules and lists of things to do. Setting goals is such a stupid American habit. Not for me. I try to get through today, maybe give a thought or two to tomorrow, and that’s it. Plotting the future is damned ridiculous.”

“Sorry I asked.”

“Live for the moment, Clay. Tomorrow will take care of itself. You’ve got your hands full right now, seems to me.”

“The money should keep me occupied.”

“Don’t blow it, son. I know that looks impossible, but you’ll be surprised. New friends are about to pop up all over the place. Women will drop from the sky.”

“When?”

“Just wait. I read a book once—
Fool’s Gold
, or something like that. One story after another about great fortunes that had been lost by the idiots who had them. Fascinating reading. Get a copy.”

“I think I’ll pass.”

Jarrett threw a shrimp in his mouth and changed the subject, “Are you going to help your mother?”

“Probably not. She doesn’t need help. Her husband is wealthy, remember?”

“When have you talked to her?”

“It’s been eleven years, Dad. Why do you care?”

“Just curious. It’s odd. You marry a woman, live with her for twenty-five years, and you sometimes wonder what she’s doing.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“Rebecca?”

“Next.”

“Let’s go hit the crap tables. I’m up four thousand bucks.”

__________

WHEN MR. Ted Worley of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, received a thick envelope from the Law Offices of J. Clay Carter II, he immediately opened it. He’d seen various news reports about the Dyloft settlement. He’d watched the Dyloft Web site religiously, waiting for some sign that it was time to collect his money from Ackerman Labs.

The letter began, “Dear Mr. Worley: Congratulations. Your class-action claim against Ackerman Labs
has been settled in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. As a Group One Plaintiff, your portion of the settlement is $62,000. Pursuant to the Contract for Legal Services entered into by you and this law firm, a 28 percent contingency for attorneys’ fees is now applicable. In addition, a deduction of $1,400 for litigation expenses has been approved by the court. Your net settlement is $43,240. Please sign the enclosed agreement and acknowledgment forms and return them immediately in the enclosed envelope. Sincerely, Oscar Mulrooney, Attorney-at-Law.”

“A different lawyer every damned time,” Mr. Worley said as he kept flipping pages. There was a copy of the court order approving the settlement, and a notice to all class-action plaintiffs, and some other papers that he suddenly had no desire to read.

$43,240! That was the grand sum he would receive from a sleazy pharmaceutical giant that deliberately put into the marketplace a drug that caused four tumors to grow in his bladder? $43,240 for months of fear and stress and uncertainty about living or dying? $43,240 for the ordeal of a microscopic knife and scope in a tube slid up his penis and into his bladder where the four growths were removed one by one and retrieved back through his penis? $43,240 for three days of lumps and blood passed through his urine?

He flinched at the memory.

He called six times and left six hot messages and waited six hours until Mr. Mulrooney called him back. “Who the hell are you?” Mr. Worley began pleasantly.

Oscar Mulrooney, in the past ten days, had become
an expert at handling such calls. He explained that he was the attorney in charge of Mr. Worley’s case.

“This settlement is a joke!” Mr. Worley said. “Forty-three thousand dollars is criminal.”

“Your settlement is sixty-two thousand, Mr. Worley,” Oscar said.

“I’m getting forty-three, son.”

“No, you’re getting sixty-two. You agreed to give one-third to your attorney, without whom you would be getting nothing. It’s been reduced to twenty-eight percent by the settlement. Most lawyers charge forty-five or fifty percent.”

“Well, aren’t I a lucky bastard. I’m not accepting it.”

To which Oscar offered a brief and well-rehearsed narrative about how Ackerman Labs could only pay so much without going bankrupt, an event that would leave Mr. Worley with even less, if anything at all.

“That’s nice,” Mr. Worley said. “But I’m not accepting the settlement.”

“You have no choice.”

“The hell I don’t.”

“Look at the Contract for Legal Services, Mr. Worley. It’s page eleven in the packet you have there. Paragraph eight is called the Preauthorization. Read the language, sir, and you’ll see that you authorized this firm to settle for anything above fifty thousand dollars.”

“I remember that, but it was described to me as a starting point. I was expecting much more.”

“Your settlement has already been approved by the court, sir. That’s the way class actions work. If you don’t
sign the acceptance form, then your portion will stay in the pot and eventually go to someone else.”

“You’re a bunch of crooks, you know that? I don’t know who’s worse—the company that made the drug or my own lawyers who’re screwing me out of a fair settlement.”

“Sorry you feel that way.”

“You’re not sorry about a damned thing. Paper says you’re getting a hundred million bucks. Thieves!”

Mr. Worley slammed the phone down and flung the papers across his kitchen.

   CHAPTER 24   

The December cover of
Capitol Magazine
featured Clay Carter, looking tanned and quite handsome in an Armani suit, perched on the corner of his desk in his finely appointed office. It was a frantic last-minute substitution for a story titled “Christmas on the Potomac,” the usual holiday edition in which a rich old Senator and his newest trophy wife opened their private new Washington mansion for all to see. The couple, and their decorations and cats and favorite recipes, got bumped to the inside because D.C. was first and always a city about money and power. How often would the magazine have the chance at the unbelievable story of a broke young lawyer who got so rich so fast?

There was Clay on his patio with a dog, one he’d borrowed from Rodney, and Clay posing next to the jury box in an empty courtroom as if he’d been extracting huge verdicts from the bad guys, and, of course,
Clay washing his new Porsche. He confided that his passion was sailing, and there was a new boat docked down in the Bahamas. No significant romance at the moment, and the story immediately labeled him as one of the most eligible bachelors in town.

Near the back were the pictures of brides, followed by the announcements of upcoming weddings. Every debutante and private school girl and country club socialite in metropolitan D.C. dreamed of the moment when she would arrive in the pages of
Capitol Magazine
. The larger the photo, the more important the family. Ambitious mothers were known to take a ruler and measure the dimensions of their daughters’ pictures and those of their rivals, then either gloat or hold secret grudges for years.

There was Rebecca Van Horn, resplendent on a wicker bench in a garden somewhere, a lovely photo ruined by the face of her groom and future mate, the Honorable Jason Shubert Myers IV, cuddling next to her and obviously enjoying the camera. Weddings are for brides, not grooms. Why did they insist on getting their faces in the announcements too?

Bennett and Barbara had pulled the right strings; Rebecca’s announcement was the second largest of a dozen or so. Six pages over, Clay saw a full-page ad for BVH Group. The bribe.

Clay reveled in the misery the magazine was causing at that very moment around the Van Horn home. Rebecca’s wedding, the big social bash that Bennett and Barbara could throw money at and impress the world, was being upstaged by their old nemesis. How many
times would their daughter get her wedding announcement in
Capitol Magazine
? How hard had they worked to make sure she was prominently displayed? And all of it now ruined by Clay’s thunder.

And his upstaging was not over.

__________

JONAH HAD already announced that retirement was a real possibility. He’d spent ten days on Antigua with not one girl but two, and when he returned to D.C., in an early December snowstorm, he confided in Clay that he was mentally and psychologically unfit to practice law any longer. He’d had all he could take. His legal career was over. He was looking at sailboats himself. He’d found a girl who loved to sail and, because she was on the downside of a bad marriage, she too needed some serious time at sea. Jonah was from Annapolis and, unlike Clay, had sailed his entire life.