by James Lepore
Everything looked and sounded the same.
On the keyboard of his computer was a large note from Cheryl: “Melissa Powers coming in at eleven.” Jay looked at his watch—it was ten thirty—and opened the mail folder.
Melissa arrived promptly and, after greeting Jay, settled—slowly crossing her long, tanned legs—into a chair facing his desk. She had on a short white skirt, gold leather sandals, and a light cotton pullover blouse. At twenty-two, her large hazel eyes deceivingly innocent, she did not need makeup and wore none, except for a hint of red lipstick.
“I’m sorry about Danny,” she said. “I tried calling.”
Jay nodded. He had not picked up the phone at home except for Cheryl. “Thanks,” he said.
Jay had gone to the Hyatt in Short Hills to meet Melissa and Marcy on the night of their parents’ deaths. They had a drink in the plush lounge on the twentieth floor, overlooking the lights dotting northern New Jersey’s rolling hills. He had not slept with Melissa that night, although she wanted to and he had been tempted. He did not blame her, knowing from experience how powerful an antidote sex was to grief, powerful but extremely temporary. He remembered seeing the Powers sisters’ thoughts in their eyes as they sipped their drinks. He knew what they wanted: their parents’ money, all of it, and as quickly as possible. He also knew the obstacles they faced.
“What’s up?” he said.
“They’ve put a freeze on all of my father’s assets.”
“Mesa Associates?” Jay said.
“Yes.”
Jay knew from the discovery in the now moot divorce case that Bryce Powers had been funding, out of his own pocket, a disastrous townhouse/golf course development in Arizona. Whatever could go wrong, had: the general contractor had filed for bankruptcy, the subcontractors had walked off the job, the bonding company was claiming fraud, the town fathers were upset; and somehow Bryce’s people had overestimated the market: sales were slow at first and recently nonexistent. Powers had kept it from failure, but still, at the time of his death, it was over six million dollars in the red. His investors, all general partners, could not be expected to be happy about being potentially liable for a debt in excess of ten times their initial investment. They would certainly try to do something about it, that is, shift the blame to Bryce, hence the jeopardy to the Powers assets.
“What kind of a freeze?” Jay asked.
Melissa had been holding some papers in her lap, which she handed to Jay. “We were served these this morning at the house.”
Jay glanced at the top document, an Order To Show Cause and Temporary Restraining Order, knowing that the fifty pages below it would be affidavits from irate partners.
“What about Plaza I and II?” he said.
“The partners are having a meeting next week. They’ve actually invited us.”
Jay knew that the partners in Plaza I and II were the same, for the most part, as those in Mesa Associates. Bryce had made many people wealthy over the years. No one challenged how he ran his business, not even those who knew about or guessed at his daughters’ illegal “maintenance” contracts. They all wanted to be invited back into the next deal. But Bryce was dead now and, given the amount of money involved, lawsuits against Melissa and Marcy and the Powers estate would be sure to follow.
“Don’t go,” Jay said.
“What will they do?”
“They’ll want you and Marcy to repay the money your father paid you every year.”
“All of it?”
“You didn’t do anything to earn it. It was a total scam.”
“Can you represent us?”
“Yes,” Jay answered. “I can, but it’ll be expensive.”
“How long will it take?”
“A year, more or less.”
Melissa remained serenely silent, occasionally stroking her long, honey-colored hair from her face, while Jay explained some of the issues he anticipated would come up in the case, and told her that she stood to lose a substantial portion of her share of the estate in settlements and attorney’s fees. He could see her calculating her net share as he spoke.
There had been no real romance in Jay’s affair with Melissa, no emotional connection to help him rationalize what he had done. Was this good or bad? He did not know. Certainly falling for Melissa Powers would be painful. But then again he only dimly remembered the joy and the pain of being in love. He was not surprised now to see Melissa’s flawless amorality serving her so well in the face of the horror of her parents’ death. She had her way of surviving.
Did he? This was another thing he didn’t know.
When Melissa left, he looked at his watch. Noon.
11.
5:00 PM, December 3, 2004, Newark
“Jay, John Parker, how are you?”
“Yes, John. I’m fine, thank you, and you?”
“Good, thanks. I’ll tell you why I called. We just had a call from an attorney in Houston. He says he represents the Santaria family. Apparently you sent a subpoena to a Herman Santaria. Is that right?”
Parker was a senior partner at McCrae & French. He was representing Chemical Bank, the executor of Bryce Powers’s estate, in the suits started by Plaza I and Plaza II and Mesa Associates. Jay had filed answering papers for Melissa and Marcy and, in October, over two months ago, using the lawsuit as a vehicle, had in fact sent a subpoena duces tecum, that is, for documents, to Herman Santaria, at the post office box in Houston given as his address in the Lantana Gardens partnership agreement.
“Yes, that’s right,” he replied.
“Well,” said Parker, “then I’m puzzled. I mean, I assume you know the subpoena is not valid, and that whether it is or it isn’t, we should have had notice.”
Parker had a junior partner and senior associate working with him in the cases. For him to make this call, his first personal communication ever with Jay, meant that the “Santaria family” had a lot of clout.
“Who’s the lawyer in Houston?” Jay asked.
“His name is Reid McKenzie, but you haven’t answered my question.”
“You didn’t ask a question.” Jay was playing for time. He could think of no plausible excuse for taking a step that was in blatant violation of the New Jersey Court Rules, that is, serving a subpoena beyond the state’s jurisdiction, by mail no less, and without notifying his adversaries.
“Look, Jay,” said Parker, whose reputation as a stuffy but brilliant lawyer, still in his prime in his mid-fifties, Jay knew well. “People tell me you know what you’re doing, so I don’t believe it was incompetence or stupidity that prompted you, but I’m here to tell you that if it happens again, you will wish it didn’t. They’re talking about suing you right now, and going after your license.”
“Nothing would come of that, John, you know that.”
“Probably not,” replied Parker, “but they sound like they would see it through, and in high style. You know the headache that would cause you.”
“I made a mistake,” said Jay.
“Yes,” said Parker, “you did. I assume you thought they’d simply respond, like some country bumpkins.”
Jay did not answer. He had not expected Herman Santaria to respond “like some country bumpkin” to his request for numerous documents, including all of the invoices and contracts relating to work done by H.S. Company for Lantana Gardens and the other three Texas properties owned and managed by Bryce Powers & Company. He thought it possible that Herman Santaria did not even exist.
“How did they get your name, John?” Jay asked.
“They called to retain me, actually, to quash the subpoena, if that became necessary. I know Reid McKenzie from American Bar Association business. I told him I represented Chemical Bank in the case, and so couldn’t handle a suit against you. I calmed him down, Jay. They need to know it won’t happen again, that’s all.”
“It won’t.”
A pause ensued. Jay, his reputation in mind, would like to have told Parker why he sent the subpoena out. Actually, he
hadn’t been exactly sure why he had done it. Until now.
“Who’s Herman Santaria?” Parker asked.
“He’s a managing partner,” Jay replied, “in one of Bryce Powers’s properties in Texas, Lantana Gardens.”
It was not hard for Jay to guess what Parker was thinking. Chemical Bank would be applying for a huge executor’s commission when the Powers estate was ultimately settled, and would receive trustees fees many years into the future. Only two partnerships of a total of forty-four were involved in the current lawsuit. If any of the others were unhappy, if they had claims that had merit to them against Bryce Powers, the corpus of the estate could be substantially reduced, and Parker’s client’s cash flow with it.
“I’m sure you had your reasons, Jay,” Parker said. “But I assume I am authorized to tell McKenzie that the subpoena was a mistake, and that it won’t happen again. Am I right?”
“Yes, of course,” Jay replied.
“Good,” said Parker. “We’ve got enough on our hands, don’t you think?”
“I do,” said Jay.
Jay put the phone gently down onto its cradle, and slowly looked around his office. The legal files that needed attention in September were still lined up next to Kay Del Colliano’s plant. Others were piled on each of the client chairs facing his desk, and more on a table under the window to his left. In front of him on his desk was the memo pad that Cheryl used to record his telephone messages, opened to the Thursday before. For a moment he could not remember the current day of the week, and then realized it was Friday. The top message on the pad was from an assistant county prosecutor asking him to call her back to discuss the possibility of a deal in a drug case he was handling. Cheryl had written “# 2” under it in parentheses. The next message was from a law clerk at the federal court in Newark telling him that the adjournment he had requested in a product liability case had been granted. Under this Cheryl had written “Notify client, expert, etc.?”
Earlier in the day, Danny’s mother had called to tell Jay that the police were allowing access to Dan’s office and apartment, and to ask him to go through both, and to do whatever had to be done to wind up Dan’s affairs. Jay had quickly agreed. It would give him something to do. Looking at the barely touched law artifacts lying around his office, the irony of this thought had not escaped him, but subtleties, like irony, had not been very important to Jay in the last two months. His work ethic had turned out to be a fraud, betraying him when he needed it most. Although, thinking about the strangely menacing quality of the call from John Parker, the dormant lawyer in him stirred. Herman Santaria had something to hide, and had the juice, or thought he did, to keep it hidden.
Before leaving the office, Jay went online and Googled Reid McKenzie, who, he quickly found, was a name partner in Smith, Dillon & McKenzie, a Houston firm of some 430 attorneys, with offices in Dallas, Austin, and Mexico City.
12.
6:30 PM, August 25, 1991, Mexico City
Herman would have preferred to break Isabel gently into her new life. After all, she would be in it a long time. But Rafael, when he saw her in Herman’s apartment the day she arrived from the convent, still wearing her school uniform—a pleated navy blue skirt, a white blouse, white socks, and penny loafers—was of a different mind. And why defy Rafael—a rising and brilliantly corrupt star in the PRI, the all-powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party—who would shepherd Herman’s brother, Lazaro, an idealistic young lawyer, to the top or very near the top of the government? So near that Herman and Lazaro and their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren would never have to worry about money and all that it could buy.
Herman was also concerned for the girl, not that she would lose her innocence to a jaded, fifty-year-old politician, but because she was such an exotic flower, and might wilt and never recover from the shock of being fucked for the first time by Rafael, a pig who found his only sexual pleasure in brutal “love” with young girls, especially virgins when he could find them. They were partners, were they not, in the matter of Isabel, as they were in many other matters, and had they not spent good money in cultivating her from a seedling? But this argument, discreetly made, fell on ears made deaf by the drumbeat of lust.
Herman did defy his partner on one minor point. On the evening of her first “date” with Rafael, he tried to prepare Isabel for what lay ahead. He did this to give her some means of softening the blow she was about to receive. She was an incredible beauty, a treasure, but would be of no use to them if she broke down mentally and retreated into a more or less permanent state of semishock as he had seen some girls do in the same situation.
Rafael wanted to actually rape his virgins, and did not want them spoken to beforehand. Some, taken from the streets or from the dirt of the countryside, had felt some of the world’s harshness and were able to recover, but others, from orphanages or bought from good peasant families, were mortally wounded in their spirit, and had to be disposed of. Herman did not want to lose Isabel to that fate, and so he sat her down in the living room of his spacious apartment overlooking Alameda Central—Mexico City’s answer to Central Park—about an hour before his bodyguard, Stefan, was scheduled to take her to meet Rafael, and her destiny.
“Do you know what sex is, Isabel?”
“Yes.”
“And love?”
“Yes.”
“They are not the same, do you know that?”
Isabel did not answer. She was wearing blue jeans—her first pair—with white sandals, a shimmering silk blouse, a new bra, and tiny new panties, all purchased for her by Uncle Herman on a shopping trip he had taken her on earlier in the day. American jazz was coming softly from the apartment’s hidden speakers. But the music was not soothing or distracting, and the new clothes were beginning to be not so exciting. Uncle Herman had insisted on watching her change into them.
“You are a very beautiful and desirable young woman, do you know that?”
“I am happy to be here.”
“You will be meeting Senor de Leon tonight. Stefan will take you.”
In the three days that Isabel had been living with Uncle Herman, there had been no mention of her working as a servant, or training as a nanny, as Sister Josefina had told her would be the case. There had been television and good food and an occasional exchange with Stefan—a dark and muscular giant—and then today’s shopping, exhilarating until she was made to disrobe while Uncle Herman sat on her bed and watched, turning her this way and that with his hand from time to time.
“Rafael will have sex with you,” Uncle Herman said. “It will hurt, and you will bleed, but it will not kill you. It happens to all young girls, it is how they become women.”
Isabel knew that she had not sinned, had done nothing to earn the strange nauseating mix of fear and remorse churning in her stomach—nothing to offend God. And yet she must have offended Him, must have sinned, must be a truly bad person in the sight of all the saints and martyrs, and the Blessed Virgin, to whom she had promised her purity on many occasions. Otherwise how could she feel so evil, with such sickness in her heart? How could she be chosen to do a thing like lay in love with someone like Senor de Leon, who was old and smelled of cigars and whose thin lips seemed always to be wet with saliva?
“But you have already seen me,” she said, raising her beautiful eyes to meet Herman’s, hoping to find in them a reprieve from the vast emptiness that had so suddenly replaced all of her childish dreams and longings and complaints. “I would rather marry you.”
“You will not marry Senor de Leon, Isabel.”
“I know. I meant . . .” She could not find the words for what she meant, embarrassed, and shocked, that she had mentioned marriage.
“After tonight you will have sex with Rafael a few more times, and then no more. Soon, but not too soon, you will have sex with other men, at my command, and only at my command. You will live here for a while, but eventually you will have your own place. You will have beautiful clothes and money, all that y
ou may need. You will work for me, and I will pay you and protect you. As long as you do as I say, you will come to no harm, you will have a good life, far better than most orphan children ever dream of. But if you defy me, or try to run away, I will find you and you will be hurt. Your face will be cut and your body. You will be killed.”
Isabel took advantage of the one defense available only to children and the simpleminded: she put aside her pain, locked it away, and released the key into the cosmos. Herman—he was no longer Uncle Herman—had done her a favor, and on some unconscious level of her being, she knew that he had. He had allowed her to anesthetize herself against the deep wound that Rafael was about to inflict. Afterward, when the anesthesia wore off, she would find a way to deal with her new life. She would survive. She did not know—what child does?—that someday someone would pluck her cast-off key from the seemingly haphazard currents of the universe, insert it into her heart, and unlock her many secrets, down to the last one.
“Do you understand?” asked Herman. He had been intensely searching her face, thinking perhaps that she would cry, but she had already retreated into herself. She saw that he was pleased, and it occurred to her that there was safety in such retreat, survival.
“Yes.”
“One last thing.”
“Yes.”
“Rafael will expect you to be surprised, unprepared. He does not know that I have spoken to you as I have. You must act accordingly.”
Isabel stared into Herman’s face and nodded, and by that nod, she made her alliance with evil, but what else could she do? Had not Herman betrayed Rafael in this small respect in order to help her? And would not this knowledge be an advantage to her someday, when she began to fill the place where her soul—now lost forever—used to be?
There was a knock, and the door that led to the kitchen and back rooms of the apartment swung open and Stefan entered the room. Dressed in the simple black suit, white shirt, and thin black tie of a livery driver, stalwart, of few words, Stefan gazed at his watch and said, “It is six thirty, senor, senorita.”
