“That was a righteous thing you did on the Washington case. His family won’t understand the legal mumbo jumbo. Hell, I barely understand it. But it’ll mean something to them that he won’t have that conviction over his head when he goes to meet Jesus.”
“Thanks.”
“Why do you suppose he got killed?”
“I don’t know. He was a thug. Thugs die young.”
He closed his eyes and savored the rich, pungent smoke he was producing. His next question came from around the cigar.
“You see anything odd about a hard-core gangbanger like him getting sent to that Club Fed at Lewisburg instead of some more muscular pile of rocks?”
“Sounds like the government was negotiating an exchange of information for a recommendation to reduce his sentence. Risky business.”
“Fatal in his case—if you’re right.”
I wondered where he was going with this. Wherever it was, he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get there. The smoke was getting a little thick by now in the semienclosed space, but I didn’t mind. I’d actually gotten rather fond of cigar smoke. When I was a junior at Duquesne, the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper would host “cigar tastings” in his office every Friday. Undergraduate feminist paranoia being what it is, I suspected this was a ploy to have unofficial, male-dominated staff meetings. I showed him. I practiced until I could puff on a cigar without choking and attended three “tastings.” No one discussed much of anything except NCAA basketball. I didn’t acquire a taste for cigars, but I got to like the aroma. You never can tell when an eccentric taste like that might come in handy—and here I was.
“The thing is this,” Mendoza said then. “Caitlin asked if anything had happened to dad. Before answering, ‘Not yet,’ mom looked at her watch.”
So what?
“Point is,” he continued, as if he were reading my mind, “why would she look at her watch on Saturday afternoon if she was planning to waste hubby Monday evening?”
“You’re saying mom’s statement to Caitlin doesn’t imply that dad was still in danger by the time Caitlin spoke to us.”
“Bingo.”
“So by this afternoon, ‘not yet’ might be evidence that mom had already killed dad, but not that she was still planning to.”
“And I don’t think it was either one.” He sounded pretty sure. “Personally, I think mom was expecting dad to get arrested and grilled by the constabulary. That’s what hadn’t happened to him ‘yet.’ Meaning he might be in danger from whoever was in cahoots with him about whatever the cops were looking into, because that would leave him in your basic Tyrell Washington situation. But that doesn’t put mom’s finger on the trigger for an upcoming murder.”
“If you’re right, then by this afternoon Caitlin had no legal duty to go to the cops. She might help to solve a crime by ratting out mom, but she could no longer prevent one.”
“And even more important, we have no duty to go to the cops. Everything Caitlin said to us is covered by the attorney–client privilege. The imminent-crime exception doesn’t apply.”
“Which means you made the right call,” I conceded.
“I get one right every once in awhile.”
I turned it over in my mind while he contentedly sucked smoke into his lungs. Mendoza wasn’t one of those puff-but-don’t-inhale guys. He smoked like he meant it. After a minute or so he held the cigar up contemplatively and looked at the haze accumulating just above us.
“You sure this isn’t bothering you?”
I wiggled the first two fingers of my right hand at him. With a surprised and intrigued smile, he handed the cigar to me. I took a respectable puff—a little awkward, but not bad—and contributed a decent stream of smoke to the ambient fog. The cigar left some interesting tastes rolling around my tongue: coffee, with a hint of…what? Chocolate? It was actually milder than I remembered cigarettes being, from my distant experience with them.
“I can handle it.” I gave him back the cigar.
“You’re something, you are.” He shook his head. “You ever wonder why Fletcher and Peck partners with me on cases?”
The question blindsided me. Fletcher & Peck sent Mendoza something like a thousand hours of billable work every year. You can buy a lot of Cohiba panatelas with that kind of change. It did seem a little surprising, now that he mentioned it, and yet the truth was I hadn’t wondered about it. I had unconsciously adopted a Wall Street associate’s view of clients: you don’t have to worry about where they come from; they’re just there.
“I never really gave it any thought.”
“Well, there’s two reasons. The first is MBE. Not MBA, MBE. Minority-owned Business Enterprise.”
“Such as the Law Office of Luis Mendoza.”
He nodded. “Fletcher & Peck’s clients are mostly Fortune 500 companies. The directors of these companies are enlightened, right-thinking people who believe in social justice. The boards tell their general counsels to send x-percent of their outside legal work to MBEs. If Fletcher & Peck partners with us on a case—say, has us research a couple of issues, add our name to the pleadings, show up in court for a hearing or two—the general counsel gets to count that case in his statistics. Or hers.”
“An affirmative action scam.”
“It’s not a scam, Jake, it’s a hustle. A scam means you’re fooling someone. The directors know exactly what’s going on. Their PR departments report these statistics in self-congratulatory press releases. Minority interest groups all over the country pat the directors on their mostly Anglo heads and tell them how enlightened and right-thinking they are, and then don’t make too much noise about how there aren’t all that many black and brown and yellow faces among the directors themselves.”
“Thanks. I feel a lot better.”
“You should be taking notes, Jake. See, it’s really not just MBE, it’s WMBE. Women and Minority-Owned Business Enterprise. Women cut themselves in on this action a while ago. That’s the way the game is played, Jake. Once you get to Wall Street you can afford to sit on your principles, polishing your halo. The rest of us have to dive in and try to get our share, any legal way we can.”
I thought about asking for another puff on his cigar, just for the hell of it. I decided not to.
“So why is Fletcher & Peck partnering with you on the Bradshaw thing? There sure isn’t any Fortune Five-hundred company involved here.”
“That brings us to the second reason. They’ve worked with us enough to notice that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ve become a known quantity. So now and then they actually refer cases to us just because we’re good lawyers.”
“Okay.”
“Smart young lady like you, of course, by now you’ve noticed that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to keep on being a known quantity for Fletcher & Peck.”
“I’m not sure I would have put it that way.”
“Which is true. I deeply value the good opinion of Sam Schwartzchild and his partners. But I still draw a line.”
“And you draw it short of giving bad advice to clients.”
“I said you were smart, didn’t I?”
Chapter Four
The Monday New York Times crossword puzzle is waayyy too easy. I finished it about ten minutes into the thirty-five minute bus ride back to Dad’s house that evening, which left me with nothing to do but think. There was no point in thinking about Caitlin Bradshaw’s situation, because Mendoza was right: until the cops called, there was nothing to think about. I spent a couple of minutes thinking about whether I’d remembered to take the ground chuck out of the freezer and put it in the refrigerator before I left that morning. I had. My memory coughed up a distinct image of shrink-wrapped red meat slipping onto the top shelf of the refrigerator, next to the Promise margarine. I wouldn’t have to squeeze in a trip to Sully’s Groce
ry tonight.
I didn’t have to look around the bus to know that I was the youngest person on it by close to twenty years. Pittsburgh is in Allegheny County, which has the second-oldest population in the United States—right after Miami–Dade, in Golden Girls country. Some of these people were poor, but most of them weren’t. They were riding the bus from okay jobs downtown to decent houses in not-bad neighborhoods. They’d have meat loaf or macaroni and cheese or baked chicken for dinner, and then they’d spend the night watching the same TV programs the rest of America would. They’d make love with their spouses, or hit them, or ignore them, or remember what they were like before they died or walked out. Some of them would get drunk and some of them would read the Bible and some of them would fall asleep with Jay Leno flickering on their television screens.
Despising these people is one sin I’ll never have to confess. I admire them. They pay America’s taxes and raise America’s children and fight America’s wars. If they don’t get up at six in the morning to catch the 7:20 bus downtown, America stops happening.
But is it also a sin to pity them? To shudder at lives that are all yesterdays and no tomorrows? To sit there with Kelly Clarkson throbbing in my iPod’s earbuds, dreaming about how fast I could get out of their world?
I honestly don’t know where this morbid introspection comes from. Class consciousness? Puh-leese. The only thing Karl Marx was worse at than economics is sociology. Everyone on that bus would have run for the same exit I did if they could have. Maybe it’s some genetic-memory, Slavic guilt thing: I don’t deserve this. I’m supposed to be hoeing a wheat field in Silesia or somewhere, waiting to get raped by Prussians or Austrians or some other species of uniformed Germans.
I got off the bus at 82nd and hiked two blocks uphill to Dad’s three-bedroom brick-and-frame house on Hickory. I’m not kidding about the uphill part. You wanna know how hilly Pittsburgh is? The front half of the house is two stories and the back half is three stories—and that’s not particularly unusual. Nothing from Calder & Bull in the mail and the rest was none of my business. Tool catalogues and bills, mostly. Nothing from either of my brothers, Sergeant Mike in Afghanistan or Father Ken in Erie. Dumped my briefcase on the kitchen table, moved the ground chuck from the fridge to the counter, and poured myself a goblet of Chablis to keep me company while I hiked upstairs to change into sweats and Nikes.
It was Monday, so dad wouldn’t be home for over an hour—sometime between 7:30 and 8:00. I could have squeezed in a run, but I’d run twice over the weekend and I didn’t feel like running in the dark so when I got back downstairs I found NPR on the radio. I put a skillet on one of the back burners on the stove-top, cut a two-tablespoon tranche off the end of a wrapped stick of margarine, and dropped that in the middle of the skillet so that it would slowly melt. Let’s see, what else would I have to get ready? Quarter-cup of Worcestershire sauce, bottle of ketchup, bottle of barbecue sauce, small onion, slice of Kraft American cheese. With that stuff lined up on the counter I was set for Dad.
I dug out a mini-Wok that was my contribution to the cooking gear in the house and whipped up a little stir-fry for myself: most of the small onion, shallots, beans, carrots, garlic, sea salt, and some real butter. When I got that done I carried my plate into the dining room and put it down beside my laptop. By sitting on the interior side of the dining room table I could keep my eye on the driveway through the dining room window. While I nibbled veggies and sipped wine I booted up and checked Above the Law. Nothing about Calder & Bull. Good.
With my plate in the sink and a quarter of a glass of Chablis left I turned to my own blog, Streetdreamer. I didn’t see any comments that merited a response, so I jumped right in:
I took a puff on a cigar this evening—my first taste of tobacco in about six years. The good news is that it wasn’t the highlight of my day. The bad news is that I can’t write about what was. The worst news is that even if I could, I’m not sure anyone would be interested in reading it—including me. Oh well. One day closer to the Street.
I might have written more, but I heard the first four bars of “Hungry Heart” playing, which meant my mobile phone was ringing. Even better, Paul’s number was showing on the screen.
Gut fluttering, I launched my musings into cyberspace and opened the phone. “Hey, lover, what’s up?”
“Eight hundred words, dudette. Net.”
“That’s great, stud. So you’re up to what, now—twelve thousand?”
“Almost thirteen.”
I mentally ran through my nightly math exercise while Paul exchanged some billing and cooing with me. A respectable post-modern novel would have to run forty thousand words anyway, probably more like fifty thousand. So with eight hundred net today, Paul was averaging a little over five hundred net per day, which meant he was not quite two months away from having a first draft. I knew this was silly, that I couldn’t compute fiction-writing productivity as if Paul were producing widgets, even if one of his characters is actually named Widget. But my bachelor’s degree is in math; I had to find some way to deploy it in support of my lover’s passion.
I can’t tell you very well what Paul’s novel is about, to the extent a postmodern novel is “about” anything. It’s not about a subatomic particle. Start with that. The protagonist is a man who is like a subatomic particle in that you can’t simultaneously know his location and his velocity. If he’s driving on Frontier Street in downtown San Diego and you notice 38 on his speedometer, that means he might suddenly be on Eighth Avenue in New York. So he has to do things in motion of indeterminate speed, which works for sex but complicates going to the bathroom. Not to mention there’s no telling where he might wake up on any given morning. Also, there’s some really deep banter about confusing John Barth with Karl Barth and time (the concept) with Time (the magazine).
“So.” Paul spoke in a mellow, serene voice that meant he was happy with what he’d written. “What was the highlight of your day?”
“What, you’ve been scoping out my blog while we’re about three fingers short of phone sex?”
“Have to. Can’t get too much CJ.”
“That’s sweet. Anyway, when I did the blog I was thinking about a client interview I conducted this afternoon. On further review, though, the real highlight was probably apologizing to someone.”
“Not your boss, I hope.”
“No, a secretary.” I told him about Pauline D.
He whistled when I finished.
“You know what you are? You’re the sixth proof, that’s what you are.”
“‘Sixth proof of what?’”
“Wasn’t it Augustine who had five proofs for the existence of God? Or was that Anselm?”
“Aquinas.”
“Aquinas, right. I knew it was an A guy. Anyway, he had five proofs for the existence of God. You’re the sixth. You couldn’t possibly have happened by accident. Four more proofs and I’ll start doubting my atheism. Maybe just three.”
While I was feeling pretty good about that Paul ran in a light-hearted way through the joys of writing for four hours in his brother’s basement after working the breakfast and lunch shifts at Mickey D’s. I made sympathetic noises. He segued neatly into the perennial topic of us going up to New York together to check out housing possibilities.
“Not this week.” I shook my head even though he couldn’t see me. “I can’t bail on Dad over Thanksgiving.”
“He could come along. Thanksgiving weekend is perfect. You can have your turkey, then pop up to Newark on Friday. We’ll find a couple of cheap hotel rooms there and take the train to Grand Central.”
“Okay, Paul, let’s play this out. I’m in my cheap hotel room at, say, seven fifteen Sunday morning. Let’s say you’re there too. You’re fast asleep after a hard Saturday of checking out real estate. Suddenly, there’s pounding on the door. Dad’s voice: ‘Cindy! Cindy! Wake up! We’
re gonna be late for Mass!’”
He started laughing, a little more than my crack called for. I figured I deserved the credit for that. Then I saw the headlights on an eighteen-foot step-van swing into the driveway. It would have been hard to miss them. They could’ve been used to spot enemy aircraft.
“Gotta go, tiger. My landlord just rolled in and he’ll be hungry.”
We exchanged phone kisses and hung up. By the time Dad—Vince Jakubek to you—walked through the back door, I had the butter sizzling in the skillet and ground chuck in a mixing bowl with chopped onion bits fluttering into it like pungent dandruff. He was wearing a baseball cap and a sateen baseball-style warm-up jacket, both electric blue and dominated by Pro Tools, in slanted script with speed lines behind it, as if the letters were racing. He was carrying his own computer in a leather bag and had a thick, grease-stained three-ring binder under his left arm.
I hustled over to give him a hug.
“What, you’ve taken up cigars now?” He’d caught a whiff of my breath.
“Oops, busted.”
“No kidding, Buttercup, that is seriously addictive stuff. I oughta know. You’d better watch it.”
I then missed an excellent opportunity to keep my mouth shut. “Am I just grounded, or are you going to turn me over your knee?”
Dad was supposed to chuckle at that, but instead he bridled. I’d forgotten how close we were to December 3rd. It would take some scrambling to save the moment. Fortunately, as soon as he opened his mouth I knew by heart what was coming next.
“I never hit you once the whole time you were growing up, Cynthia Jakubek—”
“Except that one time when I was eleven—”
“—except that one time when you were eleven—”
“—and I had that one coming.”
“—and you had that one coming.”
“You’re the best, Vince.” I hugged his neck and gave his cheek a quick peck.
But Remember Their Names Page 3
