“Anyway … there’s a chance here to make a killing,” said Jack Silver. “I’ve put friends into it. But there’s a limit. If the word gets around that—”
“You’re into it too heavy—” said Dave.
“I’m in deep shit.”
“But I, being a broker, can—”
“You got it. We have a week.”
“Okay.”
They sat at the dining table in the Sheas’ modest apartment. They’d eaten pork chops with mashed potatoes and broccoli. Jack Silver had come directly from his office and wore a dark brown suit. Dave had been at home awhile before Jack arrived and wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt. Amy, too, wore blue jeans with the white open blouse where her baby nursed.
“It’s simple enough,” Jack said. “On Tuesday, AGD Corporation will announce FDA approval of something it calls Bioxin. Clinical tests have demonstrated that the little pill, taken daily, sharply reduces the risk of heart attack. Now … the market is going to be skeptical. But when the FDA confirms its action—Do I have to tell you?”
“It’s selling at … ?”
“Forty-three and three-quarters. In two weeks … who knows?”
“My role is?”
“To put it out to people who couldn’t possibly know anything about AGD and Bioxin. So the SEC can’t possibly trace it back to me.”
“Insider information,” said Amy.
“It’s called that,” Jack agreed.
“I buy some for myself,” said Dave.
“Sure. Hell, I’ll lend you enough to buy a thousand shares.”
“Where do you come out?”
“Two or three fake investors, trading under assumed names,” said Jack. “I’m one of them, but I’ve got other guys. I’ll pick up my profit, don’t worry.”
Dave looked at Amy. She was quietly nursing her baby, showing no concern. “It’s how money is made, hon,” he said to her.
“I never figured it any other way,” she replied with a shrug.
Jack picked up his glass and sipped wine. “I’m glad we all understand each other.” He grinned. “You’ve got great tits, Amy,” he said.
She nodded. “I know. Why do you think this guy married me.”
VI
JUNE, 1981
Cole graduated second in his class. In February he had been initiated into the Order of the Coif, an honor for law students. He interviewed with Hale & Dorr in Boston and with Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York but in the end decided not to affiliate with these prestigious firms but with a smaller firm named Harris & Pickens, which had offices in the Empire State Building.
He and Emily rented a tiny apartment in Midtown; and although H&P paid him forty-one thousand dollars a year as a starting salary, she continued modeling at the Art Students League.
Until she became pregnant.
“You can do it until—”
“Until it shows,” she said. “Actually, after that. There’s one hell of a fine sculptor who asks for pregnant models. He does beautiful bronzes of girls with big bellies and sells them for premium prices.”
“C’mon, Emily!”
“All right. As soon as I begins to show, I’ll quit.”
Cole embraced her. “You can’t imagine how much I love you.”
“I love you, too, Cole.”
A joke in the big New York firms was that a new young lawyer spent his first year finding out where the men’s rooms in the courthouses were, then a year carrying briefcases for senior lawyers. That was why Cole had joined Harris & Pickens: because he would have real responsibilities much earlier.
“Mr. Jennings, review this file. Then come and tell me what you think we should do about it.”
The file represented a lawsuit filed by a multitude of plaintiffs in a class-action case. They contended that ARZO Corporation manufactured unsafe toys: plastic items that children could swallow.
“Is our client liable for the fact that kids stick things in their mouths?” he said to his senior partner a few days later. “Hell, can’t you manufacture golf balls, tees, Ping-Pong balls … ? I’d tell them to go to the devil. Besides, that firm does this all the time. It’s a thing with them. In my judgment, it’s high time they got their ass beat.”
H&P eventually sent him to try the case. A more senior lawyer was with him in the courtroom, but Cole argued the case to the jury—
“What are we to say? That you can’t manufacture nails, screws, or bolts because they are so small that some child somewhere might choose to put one in his mouth and swallow it? Paper clips, ladies and gentlemen? Thumb tacks? Is there a limit? Marbles. Kids love to play with marbles. But some child puts one in his mouth and swallows it. Are we going to eliminate the game of marbles? Jacks? What else?”
The jury found for the defendant.
FOUR
I
1982
Dave could not play music, not on any instrument. He never even cared much about music until he decided he was in love with a young woman who was an accomplished pianist.
Her name was Greta Sorensen, she was nineteen years old, and she was a gorgeous beauty with shoulder-length blond hair. Though she was a talented pianist, recognized as the winner of important competitions, people who knew her well described her as predatory. Her talent and her career meant everything to her, and she had no scruples about using people who could help her attain her ends.
Dave and Amy had been given tickets to Greta’s concert by one of Dave’s clients. After the concert, Dave excused himself as he and Amy waited for the crowd to leave. Dave went backstage and introduced himself to Greta. He gave her his card and asked her to dinner the next evening.
Amy was pregnant again. She had begun a slow process of losing her youth and her figure. She was loyal to Dave. She knew he was involved in illegal trading, but he knew he could be confident that she would never reveal anything.
Greta lived in a tiny, inexpensive apartment in Ridgefield, where she had a Steinway piano worth as much as the building. Dave loved sexy lingerie and kept her well supplied with it. When she sat and played the piano for him, she would be dressed in black bra, black panties, a black garter belt, and black stockings. The truth was, after a while he was easily bored with her music, but he enjoyed seeing her erotically dressed and seated at the piano.
“You know it can’t come to pass, Greta,” he said to her one evening when she had played for him and was still sitting on the piano stool. “I’m married, and my wife is pregnant with my second child.”
“I know,” she said. “I knew from the day I met you that we had no future together. We’ve only got now! I never asked for anything more.”
“And the first chance you get, you’ll—”
“Sure. You figured any other way?”
Dave grinned. “Jesus!”
“Jesus has got nothing to do with it, love. You have the biggest cock I ever saw, and you know how to use it. And …” she said playfully, “I can always use a couple bucks.”
II
“Damnit, Dave, it’s undercapitalized.” said Cole.
“I know that. You know that. But the fuckin’ world doesn’t know it. And by the time the world finds out, B&G may have made ten fuckin’ million.”
“Or may have lost ten fuckin’ million—in which case we’d be in deep shirt.”
“Look over there,” said Dave. He pointed to the towers of Manhattan. “That’s where I’m going. That’s where it is, man. Not here in New Jersey. I’m gonna have an office in one of those buildings. And you don’t get there, or anywhere, if you’re afraid to take chances.”
“Yeah? Well, I’ll tell you what you do, Dave. You drive up to Danbury, Connecticut, and take a look at the federal slammer. That’s where your office may be. Plenty of guys have ‘offices’ up there—with locked doors.”
“Somebody figured them out. You have to be smarter. You have to cover your ass.”
“How you expect to cover? You’re gonna sell shares in B&G; and hell, man, B&G doesn’t have enou
gh capital to go into the business it has in mind.”
“It will when the shares are sold,” said Dave.
“And what if you can’t sell enough shares? The people who do buy are going to be left out on the limb.”
“I’ll cover them.”
“With what?”
“There’ll be something. There’ll always be something. I’ll give them another opportunity.”
“Dave … what you’re gonna do is lie. And that’s what gets you an office in Danbury.”
“I’ll make you a little bet,” said Dave. “I’ll never see the inside of Danbury or any other slammer. I’ll bet you a hundred thousand dollars that ten years from now I won’t have been prosecuted, won’t have risked the slammer, and will have a bank account of … well—say, ten million.”
“Sucker bet. If you’re inside Danbury, you won’t be able to pay a nickel.”
Dave grinned. “You’re too damned smart, my friend. So, are you in or out?”
“In. Because you’re too damned smart.”
III
Tony DeFelice sat with Cole and Emily, and with his wife Margot, over a Chinese dinner in a restaurant on Lexington Avenue. Tony and Cole had remained friends. Cole had been best man at Tony’s wedding to Margot Donofrio. Tony had won gold at the Olympics and had won some significant bouts as a welterweight boxer but in the end had wound up with nothing to show for it but a misshapen nose. And a gold medallion displayed prominently in his house. He had gone into the DeFelice family business, which now operated forty packer trucks in Bergen County. In the six years since the death of Jim Amos, Tony had become a prosperous young businessman. He was taking night classes in business administration at Ramapo College and was valued by his family as the son who might turn their business into a business empire. The gold medal he won opened plenty doors.
The DeFelice family remained not “connected,” only their relatives were. The Donofrios—Margot’s family—definitely were, though the relationship was vague. It was convenient. But no more. The Donofrios handled labor relations for the DeFelices, as a family accommodation. They did not claim or take a percentage, though the DeFelices were careful not to let their assistance go unrewarded.
“I don’t know how to look at it,” Tony said to Cole. “That guy has got his nerve, doesn’t he?”
“He’s a hustler, Tony. He always was.”
“Right. You took the fall for what he did to Amos.”
“Amos had it coming,” said Cole. “Anyway … it would probably have ruined Dave’s life. It didn’t ruin mine.”
“Jim Amos was on his way to destruction,” said Margot grimly.
She was a beautiful young woman, in a distinctively Italian way. Her dark eyes were deep and wise. Her black hair hung smoothly beneath her ears. She was fleshy. Her breasts were huge, affording her a deep, shadowy décolletage. They were on show tonight, swelling above a modest neckline on her black dress.
When Margot said Amos had been on his way to destruction, the statement could have had a gruesome connotation—or might have been only a casual comment.
“What’s Dave want now?” Emily asked.
Emily had emerged comfortably from pregnancy and the birth of the daughter they named Emily. She was again slender and graceful, wearing an emerald-green dress with a miniskirt.
“Dave’s selling a stock he says is going to make a killing,” Tony explained. “It’s called B&G, and he says it’s going to make big money for its initial investors.”
“I wouldn’t believe that son of a bitch if he told me the sun will come up tomorrow morning,” said Emily.
“Well … I’m looking for advice,” said Tony.
“Tony …” said Cole quietly. “I wouldn’t invest with Dave. Anyway, I wouldn’t put in any money I couldn’t afford to lose.”
“He’s damned persuasive,” said Tony. “Maybe a few thousand …”
IV
As Cole had hoped would be the case, his affiliation with Harris & Pickens involved him in a variety of matters. He was not compelled to become a specialist.
In autumn of 1982 he was handed a file that was all but unique.
Sara Belle Lucas was a worker in a Bronx bakery. She was a woman of thirty-three, a little heavier than was stylish, and had coarse features.
Her duty at the bakery was to pour ingredients into a large mixer, where they became dough. One day in the spring she leaned over the mixer to clear flour off the sides of the tub, and the blades caught her blouse and drew her, screaming in terror, into the machine. By the time coworkers could shut down the mixer, Sara Belle had lost her left breast.
Workers’ compensation and the bakery’s insurance company paid her medical expenses. But they emphatically refused to pay her a pension, arguing that the want of a breast did not affect her employability. A woman with one breast could work as she had worked before, mixing dough—or, for that matter, selling threads and buttons, or whatever.
She sat down across Cole’s desk.
“They won’t acknowledge what I lost,” she wept. “I mean … in the first place, what guy wants to marry a girl with one tit?”
“Unfortunately,” he told her, “Workers’ compensation has to do only with the ability to make a living. Disfiguration doesn’t come into it. If you were an actress and suffered irreparable scars—”
“So they’ve said. But let me tell you something. Look at me. I’m no goddamned ravin’ beauty, but I made half my income by dancing naked in cheap clubs.”
“Then—?”
“Oh, no. That’s not a legitimate way of making a living. Income I lose by not being able to do that anymore doesn’t count.”
She opened her blouse and showed him her ugly scar.
Cole argued her case in court, before the jury.
“I repectfully cite to the Court the Ohio case of Grumble v. Workmen’s Compensation Commission. In that case, a striptease dancer stumbled over the footlight fixtures in a barely lighted theater and fell into the orchestra pit, breaking her leg. The Commission refused her compensation, saying that strip dancing was not legitimate employment. The Supreme Court of Ohio overruled unanimously, noting that what she was doing was not illegal, only that it did not meet approval with a large segment of society.”
The judges frowned hard at Cole Jennings, but they did not interrupt his argument.
“Suppose my client were a blackjack dealer in a casino,” he went on. “And suppose somehow, in the course of her employment, she injured her hand and could no longer deal blackjack. The legislature could have enacted a law saying that only certain specified occupations came under the benefits of the Workers’ Compensation Law. Or it could have enacted a law excluding some occupations—in which case we might have before us a constitutional argument. But it didn’t.
“As a result of an industrial accident, my client was deprived of her ability to earn a significant part of her income from a not-unlawful activity.”
The court ruled in favor of Sara Belle Lucas and ordered she be paid annual benefits.
It was not the first or last time when a client asked to supplement payment of her fees and offered an alternative—
“I can’t pay you much, Mr. Jennings,” she said. “You know I gotta support other people. But what I ain’t able to pay … I’ll be glad to … to pay off in blow jobs, I mean … you know … it might take a long while at, say, twenty dollars apiece. I got a friend who is paying her lawyer that way. He gives her sometimes to other guys. Uh … clients. Guys he wants to make happy. Anyway—”
“No, Sara,” Cole said gently. “It’s okay. Don’t think about it. Don’t worry about it. I’m not going to—It might be great. But you don’t need to do that.”
“Is she the only client who ever offered you sex?”
“Specifically. It’s been hinted. You remember the Miss Houdini case?”
“She was the hooker who figured out how to slip out of handcuffs,” said Emily.
“Well … she was so young, so pretty, so
upset to be arrested. She’d cry, and she’d convince the cops they had her cuffed too tight and it hurt. They’d loosen them and leave her alone in the car or in a van while they went off to chase down another girl, and she’d slip out of the cuffs and scram. She got away with it four times. I couldn’t do anything for her. She’s doing six months. She suggested if I could get her out she’d make me glad I did.”
“You’re seeing a cross section of mankind, aren’t you?”
“Better than seeing a cross section of some little area of tax or securities law.”
“We’re going to have another baby, Cole.”
Cole was surprised. “But, I thought, you didn’t … Honey, that’s wonderful.”
“Let’s hope it’s a boy this time,” she said, and smiled.
“Let’s just hope it’s healthy and everything’s okay.”
V
Greta sat beside Dave on her couch, facing a TV tray and a large pizza, with cans of beer. She wore black patent-leather shoes, sheer black stockings supported by a black garter belt—and nothing besides.
“You know I’m playing in that concert at SUNY Purchase,” she said.
“I do know. That’s real progress for your career.”
“Well … I need a dress.”
“Which will cost—?”
“I might be able to get something decent for, say, three hundred.”
“Jesus, Greta!”
“You want me to look right.”
“Yeah, but … three hundred dollars!”
She shrugged. Shrugging bare-breasted made her boobs bounce provocatively—which she well knew. “I thought I was seeing a guy who is making ten fuckin’ fortunes. Three hundred lousy bucks?”
“You got it, hon. You got it. Of course. But I don’t have the ten fuckin’ fortunes yet. I took a real hit on that B&G deal.”
She shrugged again. “You still want me to shave my pussy?” she asked.
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