Pleading Guilty kc-3

by Scott Turow

  'The corporate guys are getting hit,' said Henry. 'The eighties are over.' He was a bankruptcy lawyer himself, on boom times. Madge, a deal person, didn't really agree, and we debated a little among ourselves, as if it made any difference.

  The Committee members were over at Club Belvedere today, in one of the elegant conference rooms, licking their pencils and passing out points. Groundhog Day was Thursday. My partners reacted with the same anxieties all the good boys in grade school exhibited on Marking Day, when the nuns sent us home so they could fill in our report cards. I never worried. I knew what was coming — A's and boxes of corrective checkmarks in the sections reserved for deportment.

  But I was not as sure where I was headed this year at the firm. I thought my deal with the Committee when I agreed to go looking for Bert was no more pay cuts, but nobody'd actually said that. My four partners on Recruiting were up-and-comers and it was clear that Pagnucci had given each one the treatment — some soothing, some encouragement. They were all going to make more money next year. As for me, I could tell from the sidelong glances that each of them sensed, supposedly privately, that my share was going to be reduced again. It was never ax murder. Just a 5 percent cut every year. Still, I walked back to the building after lunch alone and brooding.

  All right, I admit it — these decreases each year hurt my feelings. Money's the big scorecard in this kind of life; there's no winning percentage, no runs batted in. It's always struck me as meaningful how we refer to the percentage of firm income we each are awarded as 'points.' Your partners tell you each year what they think you are worth.

  By now I can live without everything the marginal dollar buys, except self-esteem.

  I sat in my office. The cold winter sun could be seen through the screen of clouds; its light played on the river, tossing Christmas spangles across the greenish reflections of the big buildings on the banks. I tried to set aside my feelings of deprivation to think about Bert, but I got nowhere with that. How much? I kept thinking. How much were they taking away this year? What an effing load of nerve. I'm running from coppers and they're cutting my pay. I kept this up until I was seething. I was in one of my states, angry and mean, Bess Malloy's boy reeling from what he was missing. I drifted upstairs, not really telling myself where I was going, then looked both ways down the book-lined hall and slipped into Martin's office, figuring he'd have retained a draft of the proposed point scheme somewhere in his drawer where I'd peeked at it three years before. I wasn't worried at that moment about being caught. Let somebody catch me. Fucking let them. I had a few things to say. Eighteen years, for Chrissake. And they're paying Pagnucci on my back.

  The most important papers in Martin's office were locked in his credenza behind the thousand-year oak. I'd seen him open the drawer a hundred times before, lifting the rubber belly on his hula dancer clock to reveal the battery and the little gold key. I had the usual drilling sense of isolation when I was alone in the firm and screwing around. The big corner office with its reliquary of goofball objects — the paintings, the sculptures, the weird furniture — was dim and I hesitated to turn on the light. What the hell would I accomplish? I wondered. Would I shit in the drawer, like some badass burglar expressing himself? Could I complain? I might. There were a lot of people around here who lay on the floor and moaned as GH Day approached, or went office to office sniping. It didn't matter, though, really. I was being bad. I felt just like a kid, but I'd felt like that before and there was some peculiar purification in acting on impulse.

  Martin's private drawer is a mess. I was shocked to discover that the last time I did this. I would have expected exacting order. Martin is one of those persons, so large and voluble, so much a presence, that it is always disquieting to realize how much of his soul he conceals. I suppose Martin did the filing himself, given the utter sensitivity of the documents, and chaos reigned without a secretary's assistance. There were hanging folders in the drawer but many of the papers had been slopped un-stacked on the unfinished slats of the bottom. A lot of the most intimate secrets of the firm were in here. Letters from a shrink saying that one of our first-years would slit his throat if we fired him. (We hadn't.) Financial projections for the end of the year, which looked pretty bad. There was also a file with written evaluations of the performance of each partner. I was tempted to read through the disdainful comments about me, but decided to pass on the chance for more self-laceration. Finally I found a folder marked 'Points.'

  Inside was a photocopy of an early draft, handwritten by Carl Pagnucci, of this year's point distribution plan. I didn't look at it closely, because in the same file I found a memo. It had been folded in four, but the handwritten initialing at the top could not be mistaken. J.A.K.E. John Andrew Kenneth Eiger. Jake loved his initials. They were on everything, his shirt cuff, his beer mugs, his golf bag. Like anything else in his hand, I could imitate the initials so well that I didn't even need a subscript to show I was signing with his authority, but nobody else around here was quite as skillful. I had no doubt this was authentic.

  pleading guilty

  privileged and confidential

  18 November

  TO: Robert Kamin, Gage amp; Griswell FROM: John A. K. Eiger, General Counsel,

  TransNational Air

  RE: First Wave 397 Settlements

  I wanted to advise you of a flap concerning the 397 settlement payments which arose while you were trying the Grainger claim. As usual, the plaintiffs' lawyers are fighting with each other about litigation expenses. It seems that Peter Neucriss engaged a firm in Cambridge, Mass., called Litiplex for litigation support — apparently they provided crash reconstruction, computer modeling, consulting engineers, expert testimony, analysis of the NTSB proceedings, and records management. Litiplex has a series of invoices outstanding totaling about $5.6 million. Neucriss says he hired them with the consent of all lead counsel for the class and says I agreed at the time of the settlement that Litiplex would be paid from the 397 fund. The class lawyers say there was no such agreement — not too surprising, since paying Litiplex off the top, as Neucriss is demanding, will reduce the class lawyers' fee by about half a million dollars. Both sides are threatening to take up the issue with Judge Bromwich. I am very much afraid that Bromwich will ask for an accounting, which will lead to discovery of the fund surplus. Rather than take that risk, and accepting that I may have made a commitment to Neucriss, I'll authorize payment of Litiplex's invoices as a below-the-line charge against the surplus. Please deliver the following checks to me.

  Attached was a listing of Litiplex invoice numbers and the amounts supposedly due.

  I no longer had to look for what Bert had transmitted to Glyndora. 'Per the attached, re agreement with Peter Neucriss …' This, clearly, was it. But I read the memo three or four more times as I sat there in Martin's empty office, feeling as if somebody had put a cold hand on my heart. I kept asking myself the same thing, the voice within speaking in the forlorn tones of a child. What was I going to do now?

  XX

  MEMBERS OE THE CLUB

  The Club Belvedere is Kindle County's oldest social club, erected in the Gilded Age. Here the true elite of the county, men of commerce and standing, have dined and played squash with each other for more than a century. Not your usual grubby politicians whose power is transient and, worse yet, borrowed, but people with fortunes, the owners of banks and industrial concerns, families whose names you see on old buildings, who will still be prominent here in three generations and whose children are apt to marry one another. These are folks who, generally speaking, like the world as it is, and virtually every achievement in social progress which I can recall has involved a celebrated fracas among the club membership, some of whom have inalterably opposed the admission of first Catholics, then Jews, blacks, women, and even a single Armenian. You would think that a sensible human would find this atmosphere repulsive, but the cachet the Belvedere confers seems to overwhelm almost every scruple, and Martin Gold, for instance, in relaxed conversatio
n spoke of nothing but 'the club' for a solid month — how good the food was, how handsome the locker rooms — when he was elected to membership over a decade ago.

  The club is an eight-story structure in Revival style that occupies half a block in Center City, not far from the Needle. I dashed over there, Jake's memo in my pocket, and swept in past the doorman. The facility is splendid. The entire first floor is paneled in American walnut, handsomely burnished to a deep tone which seems to embed the glow of low lights and reminds me inevitably of the brownskinned men who chopped these trees, and their descendants in livery who've kept the wood polished to a sheen like somebody's shoes. An imposing dual staircase of white marble rises at the far end of the lobby, adorned with the club crest and winged cherubs, emblems of the period when Americans felt their surviving republic was destined again to achieve the greatness of Greece.

  Naturally, I was not even in the lobby long enough to check my topcoat when here, goddamn it, was Wash. He was carrying, of all things, a golf club, a wood, gripping it like a dead goose by the neck, right below its lustrous persimmon head. I could not imagine what he was doing. It was in the twenties outside and the ground was frozen hard. He was equally surprised to see me, and met my appearance with a member's vaguely scornful air for a known outsider. He was wearing a smashing houndstooth sport jacket, checks of black and autumnal gold, and gleaming tasseled loafers. Squashed down below the neck of his open button-down shirt so that it was partly concealed, as if even Wash recognized that this was a ludicrous affectation, an ascot peeked out, spotted with itsy-bitsy paisleys. I had no idea what I was going to say when he greeted me, but I was saved by instinct.

  'Meeting over?' I asked. Wash is far too cowardly to want to discuss with me the Committee's decisions about points, especially mine. That job fell every year to Martin, who, after the formalities of Groundhog Day, would honor me by a visit to my office and clap me on the back, creating the impression that he, at least, maintained firm opinions about my value. Instead, Wash's face weakened at once into a sappy ingratiating expression. Up close you can see a certain studied nature to Wash's amiable mannerisms. Pressed, he has no instincts of his own. He is a collection of everybody else's gestures, the ones he sees as appealing, winning, sure not to offend.

  'Not quite,' he answered. 'Martin and Carl needed a break for the phone. We'll resume at four. Thought I'd take the opportunity to clear my head.' Wash hefted the golf club; only the fear that I might actually detain him kept me from saying that I was glad to finally know what it was for. Wash, meanwhile, escaped gladly from my company and headed for the gilded doors of the elevators.

  I did not leave the lobby. With my topcoat checked, I took a straight-backed chair in a small paneled alcove near the cloakroom and the telephones. I still didn't know what I was doing here. I had rushed over to confront Martin, but now I was moving as if my weight had tripled, and thinking at the same pace. What would that exercise accomplish? Plan, I told myself, think. Beneath my hand, my knee, to my considerable surprise, had started to tremble.

  A few years ago Martin's pal Buck Buchan, who was running First Kindle, got in Dutch in the S amp; L crunch and Buck made a few calls so that Martin was hired as special counsel to the board. Buck and Martin go back to a time when the mind of man runneth not to the contrary, Korea and the U when they were both trying to get in the girdles of the same sorority girls. There's a picture someplace of both of them in white socks and bow ties. I was with Martin the morning he had to go tell Buck they were taking his job. It was the end of the line for Buck, the conclusion of an upper-class life of achievement, a daily existence of hopping along the highwire, with the eyes of the world upon him and his body full of the erotic pleasure of power. The tent was coming down for Buck; he would have to tend his wounded soul in the festering dark of scandal and shame. Buck had dropped the ball and Martin was going to tell him, eye to eye, man to man, and remind Buck of what he undoubtedly always knew, that for all the hours he and Martin had spent together matching lively minds and senses of destiny, no one could expect Martin Gold to take a dive, to abandon the noble traditions of his professional life. Martin went off to this meeting with a graven face, shadowed and grieved. Everybody here admired his grit — and so did the board at First Kindle, which has hired Martin since then with increasing frequency. But how good are all those principles when you and your law firm come out on the short end of the stick? The answer — the memo Martin had stashed — was folded in my shirt pocket.

  I should have known better of course than to go after Wash. He's a weak person, never any help at all in a crisis. But when push came to shove, I wasn't ready to take on Martin — I lived with my father until I was twenty-seven and never once told him that I knew he was a thief. Nor did I want to confront Pagnucci's icy calculations. That would require more forethought and surer resolve. Instead, I went to an attendant, the kind of good-looking retainer you expect in this sort of place, a guy in a navy blazer and white gloves, retired military probably, and asked if he had any idea where Mr Thale could have gone with a golf club.

  He directed me to the second sub-basement, a cavernous service area that had probably doubled as a fieldhouse decades ago, before a sturdy running track had been put down under a dome on the roof. Now a flooring of green plastic turf had been laid over the concrete and a line of folks stood whacking golf balls. Many of these people were in sweats. Down this low, it was chilly, maybe 65 degrees. The green rug of the tee area extended twenty feet or so to a curtain of netting that was suspended from the ceiling and draped in layers like a veil. Beyond was a region of complete blackness, darker than doom. Somewhere out there must have been some kind of wiring, because mounted from the concrete abutments, directly over each golfer, was what looked like a green electric scoreboard. I watched as the guy nearest me hit and then studied the screen overhead, where a progression of white dots appeared, meant, I eventually realized, to show the predicted flight of the ball. After the last dot lit up, a digital readout popped up, announcing the supposed distance of the shot.

  I finally spotted Wash down the line, flailing away. He had a bucket of balls and had laid his fine jacket out neatly behind it. He swung awkwardly. He'd probably been playing his whole life, without ever quite getting the game.

  Seeing me approach, Wash's look hardened. I knew at once he thought I'd come to beseech him about my points and he was already drawing himself up to a high-minded stance in which he could remind me, with his usual perfect cordiality with underlings, that I was way out of line. Instead, to disarm him, I took the memo from my pocket and watched him unfold it. He read it standing on the driving mat. His eyes had a sort of hyperthyroid extension from his face anyway and they were quick, with little throbbing veins jumping about. The air around us raced with the steady rhythmic click of balls struck and rising. When Wash finished, he looked utterly uncomprehending.

  'It's Jake,' I said.

  He recoiled somewhat. He checked over his shoulder on the other golfers, then pushed me back toward the steel door I'd come through to enter this area, where the light trailed off and the full subterranean dark began to reach toward you, along with the spooky underground sounds of the building.

  'You're making assumptions,' Wash said. 'Tell me where this came from.'

  I told him. I didn't know how to explain and I didn't. But even Wash recognized that my bona fides were a side issue. It was obvious from the results that I had good reason to search.

  'The memo's a phony, Wash. There's no Litiplex, remember? There are no records at TN. Jake faked this. Maybe Bert's in on it too. There are a million questions. But it's Jake for sure.'

  Wash scowled again and took a gander over his shoulder. His look was reproving, but he was too well brought up to tell me to keep my voice down.

  ‘I say again you're making assumptions.'

  'Like hell. You explain this.'

  The whole notion of a challenge clearly vexed him. I was putting him on the spot. Then I saw Wash's pale, soft fa
ce become firm as he fixed on an idea.

  'Perhaps it's Neucriss,' said Wash. 'Some game of his. Maybe he made all this up.' Peter, God knows, was capable of anything. But I had realized still sitting in Martin's office why he had contacted Peter. Martin had the memo. He wanted to know what was going on. He wanted to know if the document was real or a fraud, if Neucriss, by some improbable circumstance, could explain. But it wasn't Neucriss jacking us around. It was Jake.

  'Sure,' I said to Wash, 'sure. So we get Jake in Martin's office and tell him there's no Litiplex, and does Jake say, "Oh my God, Neucriss told me there was"? Hell no. He acts like this whole thing's a shock to him. "How dare Bert," he says. "And by the way, if you don't find him, let's never hear about this again." This only adds one way. Jake wrote this frigging memo to Bert. Bert gave him the money. And Jake's got it now. He's covering himself, Wash. And Martin's helping him.'

  'Don't be absurd,' he said immediately. He was reacting to the idea of Martin as corrupt. His mouth worked around, as if he could actually absorb the bad taste.

  'Absurd? You think about this, Wash. Who was it who said he'd called the bank down in Pico? Who told you that the General Manager, whatever his name is, Smoky, that he indicated between the lines it was Bert's account? Who'd you hear that b.s. from?'

  Wash is a good deal shorter than me, and my height seemed at the moment, as it is now and then, an odd advantage, as if I was out of reach of refutation.

  'Think about Martin's performance the other day,' I said, 'dragging Jake in and spilling the beans after you and Carl had decided otherwise. What did you make of that?'

  'I was put out,' Wash said. ‘I told Martin so afterwards. But that's hardly the sign of some dark conspiracy, that he felt he had to speak up.'