Pleading Guilty

by Scott Turow

  'I guess, Brush, I thought I'd missed my chance. I figured we'd just sort of finished that.'

  ‘I guess I figured we'd just sort of started.' Her little eyes were luminous and very much alive, full of the quest. Like a great institution, say a university or the President of the United States, Brushy was seldom formally rejected. According to the know-alls with whom I served on recruiting, nosy fishwives who somehow always heard this stuff,

  Brushy over the years had mastered a perfect line: ‘I’m wondering if I should let you make love to me.' The nonplussed or the sincerely uninterested could back off, with little harm to either party. I was touched that she'd actually gamble, but I was confused in the presence of real emotion. While I went blank, she, as usual, took the lead.

  'Unless,' she said, 'there's no spark.' I felt, with that, her fingers laid daintily on the meat of my thigh, and then as she held my eye, her palm touched down and her hand skated home. She gave my little business a squeeze which in the scheme of things might best be called affectionate. I had no doubt anymore why she'd wanted a place with tablecloths.

  How to respond? The adrenaline, the shock inspired an elevated mood, a kind of lunacy which in retrospect I attribute to the dizziness of the rare feeling that something significant was at stake. She was, as I have always known, a hell of a gal. And I was vaguely amused by how close this was to what I'd imagined with Krzysinski. But Brushy had the talent of all seductive females, to recognize a guy's fantasies and play along with them, without feeling debased.

  ‘I would say there's a spark,' I told her, still caught up in that fixed look, her green eyes with their clever gleam. 'I would say you'd make a hell of a Boy Scout.'

  'Boy Scout?'

  'Yes, ma'am, cause you keep rubbing that stick, you're gonna get a lot more than a spark.' 'I'm hoping for that.'

  We were eye to eye, nose to nose, but in the dignified air of The Matchbook there would be no embrace. Instead, I turned a bit on the bench, diddled my fingers a little on her knee, then, leaning close like I was about to impart a little joke, slid my hand up her hosiery toward the female zero point, thinly guarded by the layer of panty hose. I looked her square in the eye, gathered the fabric, and gave it a sharp yank so that Brushy actually flinched. But she kept watching me, highly amused, as I found the gap I'd rent and tenderly as I could nuzzled two fingertips against her labia.

  'Is this what we call equal opportunity?' she asked.

  'Maybe. But you see, Brush, I got further than you. It's still a man's world.'

  'Oh,' said Brushy, and lay back a bit, grabbing the tablecloth and tenting it in a casual way over my hand, which was already beneath her napkin. She opened the menu and rested it between her waist and the edge of table, making it more or less a roof, a privacy panel. Then her hips came forward and her knees parted. She lit a cigarette. And took hold of her wine. She faced me, taking her pleasure with a wild gimlet eye, a woman who loved life when it reduced itself to this basis.

  She said, 'I'm not sure I'd agree with that.'

  B. Would You Call This a Success?

  In the room at Dulcimer House things were going pretty well until I took off my shorts. Then Brushy screamed. She covered her mouth with both hands.

  'What's that?' She was pointing at me and it wasn't because she was so impressed.

  'What's what?'

  'That rash.' She steered me to the mirror. There I was with half a boner and a livid band, shaped like a land mass, covering my hip. There was an island extension that broadened as it crossed my circumference and disappeared in the pubic overgrowth. I stared, feeling direly conspired against. Then it hit me.

  'The fucking Russian Bath.' 'Ah hah,' she said.

  She reared back when I moved toward her again. 'It's dermatitis,' I said, 'it's nothing. I didn't even know I had it.' 'That's what they all say.' 'Brushy.'

  'You better see your doctor, Malloy.' 'Brushy, have a heart here.'

  'It's the nineties, Mack.' She stalked naked through the room. She pushed through her clothes and I was afraid she was dressing, but it was only a cigarette she was after. She sat across from me on an overstuffed brocaded chair, smoking, naked as a jaybird with her heel on the fancy fabric, leaking female fluids on the nice furniture. The stick figures do well for clothes racks, but naked, a woman with Brushy's Rubensesque proportions was still a lovely sight. I remained rosy and pointed for action, but I could tell from her posture that I had reached my sexual high point at lunch.

  I lay down on the bed and, feeling I had every right to, began to moan.

  'Mack,' she said, 'don't be like that. You're making me feel bad.'

  'Jeez, I hope so.'

  'It'll just be a few days,' she said. She gave me a doctor's name and said he might even prescribe over the phone. She sounded authoritative, but I stowed all those questions she didn't like me to ask.

  I quieted eventually. Soon I was back to being myself, primarily sad, staring at the classy ceiling here at the Dulcimer House, where the plaster decorations around the light fixture radiated off in various whitish doodles. We had been here once before, of course - with similar success.

  I had felt it was a mistake to start, checking into the same hotel - the same amiable stroll over here, a little frozen up with anticipation and propriety, trying, within hailing distance of the office, to look like anything but two people going to fuck; the same kind of sycophantic desk clerk; the same sort of room with heavy furnishings, a bit too dated to be tasteful. One more failure to connect. I felt rather imprisoned by the cycles in my life.

  'I got drunk two nights ago, Brush,' I said suddenly. 'What do you think of that?'

  'Not much,' she said. I didn't think she meant she had no opinion. When I cranked my head around to see her in the chair, still naked, still smoking, I could tell from her level expression that this hadn't been a thunderbolt. 'You looked pretty awful yesterday,' she said. She asked if I had enjoyed it.

  'Not particularly,' I answered. 'But I can't seem to get the taste out of my mouth.'

  'Do you think you're going to do it again?'

  'Nope,' I told her, and then, feeling almost as tough as she is, added, 'I might.'

  I lay there feeling all the weight of my big fat body, this belly like a medicine ball, these saddlebags of fat that ride my back above the hipbones.

  'Oh, don't you get sick of it?' I asked. 'Another Irish lawyer. Another Irish drunk. I'm so tired of being myself -of fucking things up the way I do. It's a tiredness not lost in sleep and only worse on waking. I can't help thinking how great it would be to start new. A really clean slate. It's the only thing left that excites me.'

  'It makes me sad when you talk like that,' she said. 'It doesn't become you. You're just asking for someone to tell you that you're really okay.'

  'No, I'm not. I wouldn't believe it.'

  'You're a good man, Malloy. And a good lawyer too.'

  'No,' I said, 'no. Wrong on both fronts. To tell you the truth, Brush, I don't really think I'm cut out for the law anymore. Books and bills and briefs. It's a black-and-white life and I'm a guy who loves color.'

  'Come on, Mack. You're one of the best lawyers there. When you do it.'

  I made a sound.

  'In the old days, you were there all the time. You had to enjoy some of it.'

  When I drank, I worked like a demon, billed twenty-two, twenty-four hundred hours a year. I was in the office until eight and in the bars until midnight - then back in the Needle at eight the next morning. Lucinda used to bring Bufferin with my coffee. When I set about changing my life at AA, that was another of the habits I broke. I went home at six - saw the wife, the kid. And was divorced inside a year. It doesn't take Joyce Brothers to figure out what that proves.

  'The truth?' I asked. 'I don't even remember. I don't remember what it was like to be busy. I don't remember where I stood at the firm before Jake decided I was a useless piece of dung.'

  'What are you talking about? Are you grumping because he doesn't send yo
u work right now? Believe me, Mack, you have a great future with that client. Krzysinski respects you. Give that time. It'll work out.'

  Krzysinski again. I mulled on that, then set her straight.

  'Look, Brush, there is no future. Jake stopped sending me work because he knows it's his ass if anybody at G & G drops the ball and he figures I'm a guy who can't catch a pop fly.'

  'That's not so.'

  'Yes, it is,' I said. 'And he's probably right. I mean, I liked trying cases. Getting up in front of a jury. Waving my hands around. Seeing if I could make them love me. But nobody's sure I can handle the stress anymore and stay sober. Including me. Without that, I don't like it all. I'm just hooked on the money.'

  I felt bruised, lying there, pounding myself with the truth. But I knew I was on the mark. Money was worse than booze or cocaine. God, it could just go in the sweet rush of spending. You start visiting the tailor, buy the Beemer, maybe pick up a little country house, find a club or two not picky enough to keep you out. Next thing you know, two sixty-eight before taxes, and you're looking in the button drawer for coins to pay your bridge tolls. Not to mention being a drunk who used to arrive home routinely, pulling my pockets inside out under the light of my front porch, wondering, sort of abstractly, where it was all those twenties went. (As well as my house keys, which on one occasion I eventually realized I'd thrown into the tin cup of some beggar.) Now I had an ex with a nice German car and a house in the country and God to thank that I paid alimony and had something to show for the money I made.

  'We all are,' she said. 'Hooked. To some extent. It's part of the life.'

  'No,' I said. You meant what you told Pagnucci. You love it. You love G & G. You'd work there for free.'

  She made a face, but I had her nailed and she knew it.

  'What is it?' I asked. 'Seriously. I never got it. To me, you know, all these lawsuits, it's my robber baron's better than your robber baron. What do you get off on? The law?'

  'The law. Sure.' She nodded, mostly to herself. 'I mean, all this right and wrong. It's nifty.' '"Nifty"?'

  She came over and lay beside me, belly down. She had those bandy legs and her bad skin, but she looked awfully good to me, a perky little derriere. I patted her rear and she smiled. The flag was unfurling again, but I knew it was no use. Besides, she had her mind on the law now, and that, as I'd told her, was really the love of her life.

  'It's the whole thing,' she said, 'all of it. Money. The work. The world. You know how it is when you're a child, you want to live in a fairy tale, you want to play house with Snow White, and I mean, here I am, hanging out with all of these people I read about in the Journal and the business pages of the Tribune.' Brushy, Wash, Martin, all of them, they kept track of the movements of big-time corporate America - financings, acquisitions, promotions - avid as soap opera fans, gobbling up the Journal and the local business press every morning with a hunger I felt only for the sports page.

  'Like Krzysinski.'

  She darted a warning look at me but answered straight.

  'Like Krzysinski. And they like me, these people. And I like them. I mean, I think about what a mess I was when I got here. I was the only female lawyer in Litigation and I was scared to death. Remember?'

  'Couldn't forget.' She had been on fire in the self-consuming fashion of the sun. Brushy knew she was a woman in a man's world - just ahead of the female gold rush to law school - and she confronted her prospects with a combustive emotional mix of hell-bent determination and ravaging anxiety. She was the only girl in a family of five, born plug in the middle, and her situation here matched something that had faced her at home, some yes-and-no game she was always playing with herself. She'd do something brilliant, then come to one of her confidants - me or somebody else - and explain, with utmost sincerity, how it had all been accidental and would never be repeated, how she felt doomed by the expectations created by her own success. It was exhausting - and painful - just to listen to her, but even then I felt drawn to her, the way certain free molecules always react. I shared, I suppose, all these alternate moods, the brashness, the fear, the inclination to first blame myself.

  'And now. All these people - they need me. I did this piece of takeover litigation for Nautical Paper a couple of years ago. My father worked there for a while, you know decades ago, but after we'd won the case I got this note from Dwayne Gandolph, the CEO, thanking me for the great work I'd done. It made me dizzy. Like inhaling Benzedrine. I brought it to my folks' home and we all passed it around the dinner table and looked at it. The entire family was impressed with me - I was impressed with me.'

  I understood what she was saying, perhaps more than she did, that her membership in this world was too hard-won not to be valued, too much a symbol to her to be understood as anything else. But she was smiling at herself for the moment. Gosh, she was great. We both thought so. I admired her enormously, the distances she'd dragged herself and her baggage. I gave her a smooch and we lay there necking for maybe ten minutes, two grown-ups, both of them naked in the daylight in a goddamn hotel room, just kissing and touching hands. I held her awhile, then she told me we had to go. There was G & G, the office, work to do.

  We both laughed when she poked her fist through the hole in her panty hose. She put them on anyway and asked how I was doing finding Bert.

  'I'm not going to find him,' I said. She went quizzical and I told her what I hadn't yet said to anyone else - that I thought Bert was dead.

  'How could Bert be dead?' she asked. 'Who has the money?' It required only an instant, I noted, for her to reach the question that had come to me after a week.

  'It's an interesting window of opportunity, isn't it?'

  She had sat down in the chair again, half-dressed and posed against the fancy brocade. I loved looking at her.

  'You mean,' she said, 'if somebody knew Bert was dead, they could blame it on him?'

  'That's what I mean.' I was off the bed, stepping into my trousers. 'But they'd have to know,' I said. 'They couldn't be guessing. If Bert shows up again, they'd look pretty bad.'

  'Well, how would they be sure?' I looked at her.

  'You mean someone killed him? From the firm? You don't believe that.'

  I didn't, in fact. There was logic to it, but little sense. I told her that.

  'These are just theories, right? Bert being dead? All of it?' She wanted more than my reassurance. She was being her true self, relentless, beating the idea to death like a snake.

  'Those are theories,' I told her, 'but listen to this.' I told her then about my meetings yesterday, first with Jake, then with the Committee. This time I caught her off guard. She sat far forward, her mouth formed in a small perfect o. She was too distressed to feign valiance.

  'Never,' she said finally. 'They'll never agree to something like that. That kind of cover-up. They have too much character.'

  'Wash?' I asked. 'Pagnucci?'

  'Martin?' she responded. Brushy's reverence for Martin was even greater than mine. 'You'll see,' she said. 'They'll do the right thing.'

  I shrugged. She could be right, and even if she wasn't, she was improved by thinking the best of her partners. But she could see she hadn't really persuaded me.

  'And Jake,' she said, 'my God, how sleazy. What's wrong with him?'

  'You just don't know Jake. If you'd grown up with him, you'd see another side.'

  'Meaning?'

  'I could tell you stories.' I fumbled in her purse for a cigarette. I was tempted to tell her about the bar exam, but realized on second thought that she'd think less of me than Jake.

  'You don't trust him, right? That's what you're suggesting. He wasn't brought up to be trustworthy?'

  'I know him. That's all.'

  In the green chair, she was stilled by disquiet.

  'You don't like Jake, do you? I mean, all that palling around with him. That's bull, isn't it?'

  'Who wouldn't like Jake? Rich, good-looking, charming. Everyone likes Jake.'

  'You've got a chip on yo
ur shoulder about Jake. It's obvious.'

  'All right. I have a chip on my shoulder about a lot of things.'

  'Don't wait for me to say you're wrong.'

  'I'm bitter and petty, right?' She could tell what I was thinking: I'd heard the tune before, someone else had sung the words, another chanteuse.

  'I would never say petty. Look, Mack, he's lucky. In life, some people are lucky. You can't sit around despising good fortune.'

  'Jake is a coward. He's never had the balls to face what he should have. And I let him make me a coward with him. That's the part that frosts me.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'Jake.' I looked at her hard. I could feel myself turning mean, Bess Malloy's son, and she saw it too. She stepped into her pumps and fixed the clasp on her purse. She'd been warned off.

  'This is attorney-client, right?' she finally asked. 'All of this. About Jake saying not to tell?' She wasn't being humorous. She meant that the communication was privileged. That she was forbidden to repeat it, to TN or anyone else, and thus that BAD could never criticize her for failing to come forward, as, ethically, each of us was obliged to do.

  'That's right, Brushy, you're covered. There's no shit on your shoes.'

  'That's not what I meant.'

  'Yes, it is,' I said, and she did not bother to answer back. A certain familiar melancholy attacked me midline, spreading from the heart. Ain't life grand? Every man for himself. I sank down on the bed, on the heavy embroidered spread which we'd never removed, and couldn't quite look at her.

  Eventually she sat beside me.

  ‘I don't want you to tell me any more about this. It makes me feel weird. And confused. It's too close to home. And I don't know what to do. How to react.' She touched my hand. 'I'm not perfect either, you know.'