by Avery Duff
It hurt his job search, too, that so much of his time had been spent on Brightwell business. Because of that, he didn’t bring his own clients along to a hiring firm. His ego finally allowed him to focus on reality. Without a stable of his own clients, no top firm would pay him what he was worth.
Almost daily, he ran into his beach buddies on Speedway, at coffee shops, on Venice Pier. People he knew, people he’d helped. Erik, Reyes, lots of others, all wondering what happened to the guy they believed would make it big. The guy who didn’t seem to be working anymore.
Then there was Alison. She called him once. He didn’t answer and deleted her voice mail. Somehow, she found out where he lived and left birds-of-paradise at his mailbox with a note:
Called the firm to thank you, they said you didn’t work there now. Sorry. I don’t know what else to say. Alison Maxwell.
Her flowers he tossed to a sun-blistered Canadian couple in splitting spandex: “Birds-of-paradise, guys, have a great day!”
Even though he avoided Santa Monica, it was bound to happen one day: seeing Jack and Chase on the boardwalk near the paddle-tennis courts. The pair grabbing a sausage sandwich at Jody Maroni’s and laughing at some inside-the-firm joke. Seeing them reminded him of Gia and that she hadn’t returned either of his calls, but he wasn’t surprised. What was it she’d said her last night in the firm’s parking lot? When a job’s done, it’s done.
It’s done. Guess so, he told himself.
Five weeks passed, and he realized he was out $20,000 and couldn’t account for it. Two long weekends in Vegas with the actress, picking up her shopping-spree tab. New interview suits, rent, gym, restaurants, tips, parking, fuck. Finally, he realized he could spend twice that much and it wouldn’t make a dent in his pain. In the anger boiling up in traffic, or with tourists walking on the bike path: It’s a bike path, douche bag! Or yesterday at 6:10 a.m., going off on that freestyle skateboarder two blocks over from his apartment. The one who made the mistake of cranking up “It Was a Good Day.”
He was drinking too much, scored hashish at a medical-marijuana store on Abbot Kinney, and smoked it to calm down. Chilling out on the beach, running the Santa Monica stairs, hitting Gold’s midmorning, working on his tan, hiking the Santa Monica Mountains, living the life, hanging out. Sure, great for a lot of people, but he wasn’t geared to hang out.
His business calls to firms he knew around town became cold calls to ones he didn’t. Résumés now went over the digital transom based on areas where he was willing to work, then later to locales within a ten-mile radius of Ozone. And ten miles from home meant he would consider working in downtown LA.
So what? He knew what he had to do. Get a job. Any job. So when that downtown firm reached out, one he never would have considered a month ago, he picked up on the first ring, knowing he shouldn’t have. And when they told him they wanted to talk, to discuss terms of employment, he let them know he felt confident he could work them into his schedule.
CHAPTER 10
All three lawyers who sat across from him in the conference room had dandruff flecking their suit shoulders. No, he corrected himself. The two male lawyers had dandruff-flecked suits. Not the woman. She wasn’t wearing a suit.
He first met them downtown on the forty-fifth floor of the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. The US Bank Tower, formerly Library Tower, was a terrorist magnet for that reason, he learned from a security guard, while cooling it for twenty minutes in the lobby for his elevator pass.
“Sorry about the mix-up,” one of these lawyers told him.
“No problem,” Robert said, mentally adding that twenty-minute lobby wait to the fifty minutes it took him to drive here, not counting the ten-minute walk from underground public parking at Pershing Square. Walking from there to the tower because this firm didn’t validate parking.
Strolling with the interviewers through their firm’s barren halls, he urged himself to stay positive. These guys are okay. They have families. They do a ton of banking transactions, and they’re building a mergers-and-acquisitions department.
Later, sitting in his interview, he was recounting to them how the Palmer closing blew up back at the firm and his solution, letting them know he was a problem solver when one of them raised a hand, midsentence.
“We have no doubt you are well qualified. No doubt at all.”
“None,” said the woman, checking her file. “You had an excellent recommendation from a Philip Fanelli.”
“Great,” he said, but something was wrong. Had they picked up on his thinly masked desperation? Had he laid it on too thick about what a mack-daddy go-getter he was?
The woman said, “Having said that, we would consider starting you first of the month if we can come to terms.”
“Where there’s a will,” he said, smiling and wishing he hadn’t.
“But we don’t need a deal maker or a closer. We thought we were clear about that in the ad.”
“The ad?”
“In California Lawyer. The ad.”
“Right,” he said, clueless. “Of course.”
“So, even though we are aware of your qualifications, we see you more as a . . .”
The shorter of the two short men slid a black binder across the table. “We see you sinking your teeth into these new pension regulations. Our clients are overwhelmed right now with all the new rules coming out of Washington.”
Robert couldn’t bring himself to touch the book: Pension Protection Act of 1996. Best guess, it ran a thousand pages with page headings like Reg.1009.4 (g)(i)-(ix) et. seq.
“Pretty intricate material, we know, but we’re prepared to pay competitively.”
Robert decided to be polite, to see if he could get out of here with an offer. Maybe he could still beat traffic home on the I-10.
“I’m right here,” he said.
“Sixty,” the woman said.
“Sixty?” Robert thought about countering at one twenty.
“Only part-time,” she said then. “Sixty dollars an hour.”
“Sixty dollars,” he said. “An hour. Part-time.” He swallowed. “You’re hiring me as what?”
“As a junior associate. You’d be considered for partnership in, I’d say, roughly five years.”
“Provided you measure up,” someone added. “Who knows, before that, you could drop in on our M-and-A guys down on forty-three, see if you could lend a hand.”
Right then, Robert saw something he hadn’t noticed in any interview so far. They were getting off lowballing him because they were cheap like those plastic birds-of-paradise in the vase behind them. Cheap was in their smug DNA. Sure, they could send someone six blocks to the flower district, have fresh flowers wholesale for two hundred bucks a week, but why do that when you can jam that money into the unlined pockets of a three-for-one Men’s Wearhouse ensemble?
“Mr. Worth?” one of them said, not the woman this time.
He didn’t answer because something else was dawning on him. Something he missed because of his ring rust from smoking dope and drinking whiskey. He looked at the woman who told him about Philip Fanelli’s favorable recommendation. “Jack Pierce—did he also write me a recommendation?”
“We’re not at liberty to discuss that.”
She didn’t have much of a poker face. She already revealed what Philip Fanelli had to say about him. Now she wouldn’t tell him whether or not Pierce even wrote a recommendation. But Robert knew: Jack Pierce had definitely kicked in his two cents on the subject of him.
Their last insult brought Robert to his feet. At the window, he stared at the smog-choked city, where farther out his line of sight, syruping traffic oozed past a burning mattress on I-10.
“That view, the best money can buy,” someone chirped behind him.
Jack’s recommendation had torpedoed him. And not just here. All over town. It killed him anywhere he might’ve had a shot.
“But we need your answer, Mr. Worth, and please, we expect you to be precise.”
“Thirty-eight minutes,” he said.
“Excuse me?” the thin-lipped one in the middle asked.
“I see it like this. You three are the firm’s hiring committee, and that tells me, with you three, this fifty-person firm is putting its best foot forward.”
The crew nodded in appreciation.
“So I’m quite confident saying there’s gotta be forty-seven bigger losers backing you up, back in your Motel Six rabbit warren, and my first day sinking my teeth into those pension regs? I’d jump through that window—that one right there.” He pointed it out. “And I’d count my blessings on the way down because I’d never have to see your pale, sad faces again.”
They were all standing in varying states of outrage when he grabbed his briefcase.
“Oh,” he added, opening the door, “and I’d jump after working here precisely thirty-eight minutes. Head and Shoulders, fellas, have a good one.”
Once Robert exited the tower, he walked straight down West Fifth toward Café Pinot, never noticing the ’06 lift-back Celica parked up the hill. Or the lean, fit man inside watching him. A one-year, glow-in-the-dark Narcotics Anonymous bracelet dangled from Stanley Tifton’s mirror. Jack’s occasional go-to guy, Stanley cracked open a fresh pack of Larks, caught their familiar aroma, and made a call on one of three burner phones in his console.
When Jack Pierce answered without a word, Stanley brought him up to speed.
“He looks pissed off, that’s for sure. Had to drive all the way downtown for the interview, and it didn’t go well. As we speak, he’s walking into a bar, middle of the day. I give him six months before I run into him at a meeting.”
“What about the other?” Jack asked.
“Grunion still aren’t running,” Stanley said, coding his words. “Between following your farm boy around and trying to pin down my guy—he’s got some kinda bronchitis, fuck if I know—but anyhow, my guy says grunion ought to be running wild by next week. Give me a call when you . . .”
He stopped talking. Jack had switched off midsentence. That wasn’t unusual. Stanley remembered the grunion running at Cabrillo Beach, way back when. A group of Venice High students watched hundreds and hundreds of those small fish beaching themselves, mating under the fading moon. Everyone else in their group was yelling about the grunion running and jumping around like madmen, but Jack never said a word.
Same thing, even today. Long as Stanley had known him, he never knew what Jack would do next or what he was really thinking.
It was cool and quiet inside Pinot: concrete and glass with polished aggregate floors. Back at the bar, Robert ordered a glass of red wine—whatever was open—and tried coming to grips with how his life was shaping up. Or down. He knew the stunt he’d pulled inside that firm had been ill advised. Okay, stupid, but he’d reached the point where he didn’t care. Not quite fuck it, but fuck its angry next-door neighbor.
And there they were on the bar: birds-of-paradise. Real ones in a clear glass vase, grounded in round, gray rocks, and soaking up vivid, filtered water.
He was thinking about Alison Maxwell as he stepped through the bank of rear glass doors.
Outside on a dining terrace, skyscrapers towered around him, but it was somehow intimate. And Alison stayed on his mind. So did the birds-of-paradise she left at his mailbox, the ones he tossed to spandexed strangers. Sure, maybe she paid five bucks for them to an illegal vendor on a traffic median, but she didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Jack dropped her brother’s case, no friends in LA, no family anywhere. She still called him, bought flowers, wrote him a note. Even so, he never called back.
As opposed to Jack Pierce. Relentless and cruel, Philip said of him. No doubt about that as he paraphrased to himself Jack’s likely Robert Worth recommendation: “In spite of my repeated efforts to work with him, Mr. Worth showed poor judgment, had questionable legal skills, and vandalized his office upon his abrupt departure.”
So he swallowed some wine and reviewed his dwindling options: returning to the Bay Area for some kind of government work, starting his own practice in LA from scratch, without funds. Or . . . his mind began slowly turning toward a third option. An option still inchoate.
“Have you decided what you want?”
This came from a waitress standing beside him. He didn’t answer because that third option was still taking shape.
“Sir?” she said.
An option that quickened his pulse in a good way.
“Would you like to be seated?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” he said, handing her his empty glass. “But I think I know what I want . . .”
Free weights lay on Robert’s apartment floor underneath his TRX workout straps on the bedroom doorjamb. Family pictures sat on his coffee table, a couple more on the mantel over the bootlegged fireplace. Robert sat at his desk typing into his laptop, squeezing the life out of a gel ball, and feeling better than he had since the day Jack fired him.
With his new business cards ordered and on the way, he opened a software application: Plaintiffs and Defendants, Los Angeles County. Once he entered Alison Maxwell, the app began to search the county court’s database for other cases involving her.
That photo of Rosalind and him in the garlic shed rested on his kitchen windowsill. No need to actually look at it before asking: “Talk to me, Rosalind, what do you think? Think I should burn his ass? Show Bel-Air Boy who he’s dealing with?”
On his way home from Pinot, he’d detoured to Bel-Air and found the Brightwell estate, top of Stone Canyon Road. The home where he attended all those firm parties, years gone by. Standing at the mansion’s tall iron gates, his hands grasped two cold bars. Their strength reminded him of the power Jack must feel living like this. People who lived up here had made it. All they had to do now was hang on to what they had.
Now on his computer screen, the county-court results showed up: Alison Maxwell/No Case(s) Found. The same result had been served up by his earlier Alison Maxwell searches of Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties. Alison was clean. So he started typing again.
“Let’s do it, Rosalind,” he whispered. “Let’s burn Jack Pierce’s little house down.”
He opened one of his desktop folders. Its title: Worth Work Product. Twenty Word files appeared inside it. From among them, he selected a document called MCP-PNA, July 12, 2012.
Once he clicked on that document, he wondered: Alison Maxwell was clean. Jack Cross Pierce, how clean are you, bro?
CHAPTER 11
A logjam of local business cards and flyers with tear-off phone numbers littered a bookstore bulletin board: Rentals Needed! Lesbian Roommate Wanted! Yoga With Sonya! My Cat: Murdered! Lost Dog: Answers to Trey or Tree!
Standing beside the bulletin board, Robert slid off his shades and spotted Alison kneeling on the floor back in the mystery section. She was sorting and stacking incoming novels, and as he headed her way, she looked up and saw him. She looked down again.
“Hey, Alison,” he said.
“Hi,” she said.
“Your flowers, your note. My apologies, I never got around to thanking you.”
Still looking away, she said, “I called the firm to thank you. For calling the ambulance, riding to the hospital, and all they said was, you were no longer with the firm.”
“Right. I was fired.”
“No.” Looking at him now. “Oh, no, did I have anything . . . was it my fault?”
“No,” he said. “It was mine.”
She didn’t know what to say. Neither did he. A few awkward moments passed as she shelved a few more books.
“Looks like you’re doing better,” he said.
“Much better, thanks to you.”
“Scary thing to see up close,” he said.
“Was it, really?”
“Yes. Really.”
“I never passed out like that before,” she said.
“First time,” he nodded. “What do you remember about it?”
“Not a lot. I was looking at you, and then it was . . . kinda . . . lights out.”
“I mean, before that.”
“Before that? My luck. Everything!”
She tried to find a smile, couldn’t quite catch one. “I’ll never forget what you did.”
“Neither will I,” he said, and he meant it.
She went to her thermos, sitting on a bookshelf, and refilled her cup with green tea. “Want some? Package said it will help me live a carefree life.”
“What’s it called? Fluffy Bunny?”
“Opium, I think,” she said.
He caught a first flicker of her postlawsuit personality.
“I’m sure you landed somewhere great,” she said. “Where are you now?”
“Actually, that’s why I’m here. If you don’t mind my asking, whatever happened to your brother’s case?”
She shrugged. “I tried some other lawyers, but they all turned me down after they heard he withdrew. I wouldn’t be surprised if they talked to him, too.”
“Count on it,” he said.
She moved to another shelf. “This new mystery by Michael—”
“No, thanks, not today. But look,” he said, “I was always curious. That night. The night Jack Pierce assaulted you. Did you tell the ER doctor what he did?”
He could see her anger simmering. “I thought about it, then I wondered, why would I want to do that? So I could talk to all his buddies at the police station about it? So I could hear that arrogant prick call me a liar again and run down my brother? I’m done with it, with him, done with all of it. He humiliated me enough already.”
“Me, too.”
“You?”
“Last time I ever talked to him, he mentioned he was working late with Chase Fitzpatrick that night.”
“Him? All he ever did was get coffee and kiss butt.”
“Face it, he has a gift. A few weeks ago, he became a partner at the firm. Funny, huh?”
“Him?”
