"One of my pieces was sold. A portrait of you."
He sighed. "Rachel-"
"Would it kill you to leave that place? To come home from work at a decent hour?"
"Would it kill me? I don't know. No."
"Then why?"
"Rachel … do you want me home at a decent hour?"
She rolled over toward him again, rested her head on her milky white forearm. "What's that supposed to mean?"
The air conditioning hummed through the vent above them, and he could see her nipples turn erect in the cool draft. He wanted her more than anything, but he felt so much pain because of her. His eyelids drooped, and the cool air felt soothing. His mind fought to stay awake, mulling over ways out of the nightmare. He would have to find a place to dispose of the body, somewhere he could go alone. He thought of the summer house that Rachel's parents had given her, the one they never used. Near Bay Head about two hours away. But it was August, and the town would be crawling with people dying to be near the beach. Somewhere else then.
He said, "Nothing, Rachel. It means nothing. Something came up in that pro bono case, that's why I'm late. I'm sorry-"
"Something always 'comes up' at work." She turned her head, looked blankly up at the ceiling. "Which one was it this time?"
"The Mavros fiasco." He saw her eyes glance at him, but he only said nonchalantly, "It's nothing that would interest you."
She turned on her side, away from him. He counted the vertebrae in her back, just like he'd done hours before with her guest in the kitchen. Watching her body heave under the sheet with a sigh, he could tell that she was uneasy. He grazed the curve of her hip, her spine, and his fingers touched her soft hair. She squirmed away.
"Did you miss me, Rachel?"
"Of course. Now go to sleep. It's late."
He wanted to succumb to the lure of sleep, but his mind kept plotting. He realized that what he wanted most was to confront her, but he didn't trust himself at this moment. He was afraid of his own anger, afraid that he wouldn't know what to say. Tomorrow he would be able to calmly deal with her. He'd think of a way so that she couldn't avoid him or deny what had happened. And if she admitted the affair to him, then he'd confide in her, tell her what he'd done. He imagined that they would protect each other. She would provide him with an alibi because maybe she still loved him. But if she denied the affair, if she continued to lie to him, then he wouldn't know what to do. He kept telling himself that there was still a deep bond between them.
He stared at the ceiling, knowing that she was pretending to be asleep. Underneath his side of the bed, another man's underwear smelled of sex.
11 (10 months ago)
* * *
Micah was at his desk on the forty-second floor, thinking this was the first time in a week he'd go home before 10:00 p.m. and call Ashley before she was in bed asleep. The hours at Sullivan & Adler were nothing like the firms in Lexington. Back home, they'd get in by 9:00 a.m., take a two-hour lunch at noon, then hit Cheapside Bar for Happy Hour at 5:00 p.m. His father used to say that you could calibrate an atomic clock by the blue blazers, khaki pants, and penny loafers congregating at the bar named for the side of the Fayette County courthouse where traders sold the "cheap" slaves in the 1800s.
It was 5:56 p.m. when the phone rang. He had planned on calling it a day at 6:00 p.m. He saw Hannah's extension on caller I.D. and answered, expecting her to thank him for the deposition summary he'd finished for one of her securities fraud cases. He'd taken six hundred pages of a CFO's deposition transcript and boiled it down to ten pages.
"Hi, Micah, it's Hannah. Got your memo this morning. Great job. Can you swing by?"
"Sure."
Micah rode the elevator up to the fiftieth floor. He hustled down the hall and found Hannah's door wide open. She waved him inside with a flick of her cottony towhead hair and a bleached smile. She had red freckles like Ashley's across her nose and cheeks. He sat down in a steel post-modern chair in a small office that smelled like moth balls and felt like a sanitized medical laboratory. Stackable container shelves, rolling letter trays, two wireless mice for each side of the computer, a perfect stack of new legal pads, notes arranged in columns on a corkboard centered over a squeaky clean white birch desk. Everything was right angles and order, including the framed New England Law diploma centered above her head. The only sign that something more than an android inhabited that office was a screensaver of Hannah and her cross-eyed cat dressed up in pointy witches' hats and capes from some past Halloween.
"Great job on that memo," Hannah said with a slight Boston accent. "And nice to meet you in person."
"Thank you. Nice to meet you, too."
"I'm so glad you're on my radar screen. That's one of the good things about being the Senior Associate on the Assignment Committee. I get first dibs on the new Gen Lit talent. But there's a saying at S & A. 'Good work is rewarded with more work.' Sooo . . . guess what?"
"You have more work for me?" Micah clicked his pen, ready to take notes.
"It's not me exactly. I told Stu all about you and gave him your memo. We have a new insurance client that sold vanishing premiums to customers, and some of the customers have brought class actions claiming that the policies are fraudulent."
"I don't know what a vanishing premium is," Micah said. "Sorry."
"It's when a policy holder pays for life insurance for X number of years, and, if there are enough dividends on the policy, then they don't have to pay a premium anymore. The problem is that the customers are alleging that our insurance company set it up so that the premiums never disappear. So the customers are alleging fraud. It's a completely bogus claim."
"Okay, got it. What do you want me to do?"
"Stu wants to meet you, to give you an assignment himself. It's a huge compliment."
"Really?" Micah felt his face flush with anxiety. "He's my partner mentor, but I haven't really met him yet."
"Oh perfect. Who's your senior associate liason?"
"Raphael Bianco."
"Oh," she said as if hearing someone had died. "Be careful. He doesn't have the best reputation, and people around here are very observant of the company you keep."
"Really? He's been here a while, right? Can't be all that bad."
"Trust me. I started with him, and let's just say he's not long for this place."
"Okay. So, anyway, what's the client's name and billing number for Stu's case?"
"I'll e-mail them to you. Why don't you go see Stu first? He likes to set down some ground rules. Then I'll give you what you need to start, yeah?"
"Sounds good."
$ $ $
Stu Greenbaum was listening to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyrie and checking stock quotes on a gigantic computer screen when his secretary led Micah inside. The vast office space dwarfed two desks shoved side by side, covered with picture frames, Sharper Image desk toys, and Redweld folders. Facing a window in the corner, a large telescope on a tripod looked out of place, pointing at a residential high-rise across the street. Micah scanned the rest of the impressive room and saw a large oval mirror on the wall across from Stu's desks. In its reflection, he eventually focused on the partner's thin profile.
Stu was an overly-tan dandy sporting a beige linen suit. His right eye looked odd though, and he dabbed at it with a monogrammed handkerchief like Louis the Fourteenth. The leaking eye and the scent of cologne were suffocating.
Micah coughed quietly. Trying to distract himself, he looked at a Louis Vuitton manpurse and dozens of photographs on the desks. Stu's ginger orange face was in every photo, but one in particular caught Micah's attention. It was of a younger, paler Stu dancing with Gabe Weiss and a beautiful woman, all three whirling and grinning like they had just crawled out of a wine cask at some black tie party. Gabe was on the edge of the photo, and Stu and the woman were cheek-to-cheek, mid-foxtrot.
"Come in," Stu finally said in a quiet voice, still reading the stock ticker, turning down the volume on his computer speakers. The clas
sical music played faintly.
Micah edged closer to the desks to let Stu know that he already was in. "Got any good stock tips?" Micah nodded in the direction of Stu's computer monitor.
"What?" Stu twisted around, looked at Micah, then over his shoulder at the oval mirror. "Of course not."
"Bad joke." Micah leaned down to shake hands. "Micah Grayson. I'm your new associate mentee, sir."
"The joke would have been funny," Stu said, shaking hands, "if I weren't the Chair of the Ethics Committee. They probably told you in Orientation that we don't allow associates to trade stock in our clients. We take insider trading very seriously."
"I didn't mean to-"
"You authored that memo for Hannah." Stu reflexively dabbed at his eye again, turned in his swivel chair back to the computer screen. Micah noticed that the handkerchief was yellowing from whatever the discharge was, and he felt like gagging. "She said you're the new hot kid. Have a chair and write this down."
"Yes, sir." Micah sat, legal pad on his lap, and nervously clicked his pen.
"Three rules when you work for me," the back of Stu's head said.
Micah sat up tall, began to take notes, sensing that this was going to be a part of S & A's Decalogue of legal commandments.
"Number one," Stu continued, "any brief or memo that you write for me should be on Crane bond paper. No cheap copy paper. Ever."
"No copy paper. No problem."
"Two. Hannah is my proxy. Do what she says. If you have any questions, call her. Don't waste my time."
"Don't waste your time." Micah looked up from his notepad, wondering why he repeated the partner's words. "Yes, sir."
"Three. You will work hard. If you don't like it, there are a hundred kids out of law school who would love your job. Especially in this economy."
Micah nodded at the threat, feeling his molars clash in his head.
Stu said, "Tell Hannah I want you to do the document review in the vanishing premium case and also another document review for Von Grunwald instead of her. Going through client files is the most sensitive thing you can do as counsel. Hannah said you're up to it and that I can trust you. She'll call if I need anything else."
Micah stood, looked at the back of Stu's head, and let himself out.
$ $ $
"Congratulations, Micah," Hannah's voice came sickly sweet through the phone. "Stu must be very impressed if he trusts you with Von Grunwald. It has subsidiaries with hundred million dollar lawsuits against them, and we're in a discovery quagmire right now. We're up against a court-ordered deadline to produce documents in one week. Backburner the insurance case and focus on Von Grunwald. Have you ever done document review before? It's fun."
"Yeah, I've done one."
Hannah paused on the phone. "You haven't done document review, have you?"
"I have, just not this big."
"It's simple. I'll send you the key to the case room where all the docs and electronic files are. First, read the complaint and the document requests to see what the other side wants. Second, pull docs that are outside the scope of the requests and label them 'irrelevant.' Third, check the contact memo in the file and generate a list of our client's in-house counsel."
"I've done doc review before."
"Right. So if any of the docs even mention one of those attorneys' names, pull it from the boxes and set it aside as 'attorney-client privileged.'"
"But it's not necessarily privileged just because a lawyer's copied."
"Just pull anything that mentions a lawyer or looks like work product, and I'll decide later. I always do a second review, standard S & A operating procedure. Then we'll do a privilege log listing all the privileged docs. Got it? Great!" He heard her snap her fingers. "Oops, almost forgot. Before you Bates stamp the responsive documents, go through and pull any Hot Docs that I may need to show the client."
"Hot Docs? You mean like smoking guns?"
"Right. Anything we absolutely have to give to the other side because it's relevant and not privileged, but it could be damaging for the client. Questions?"
"Got it, thanks." Micah hung up before she got another word out.
He tracked down and unlocked a windowless case room on twenty-seven, the Gen Lit paralegal floor. The stale room was stacked floor-to-ceiling with twelve columns of brown banker's boxes. He pulled up a folding chair, flipped open one box, and sighed. It was stuffed with data CDs and photocopies of memos, notes, financial reports, board minutes, spreadsheets.
"Fun." He looked at his watch. 7:20 p.m.
A voice from the paging system crackled through a speaker in the ceiling. Micah thought he'd heard his name being paged for the first time. He listened to the woman's voice repeating, "Micah Grayson, 4-5-1-1, Micah Grayson, 4-5-1-1."
Micah snatched a phone from the top of a filing cabinet and dialed the extension.
"This is Raphael."
"Hey, Raph, you paging me?"
"Mikey, what's up? I couldn't find you. You busy?"
Micah looked around the fluorescent room full of boxes. "Nope."
"Wanna help me with something on the Mavros case?"
"Hell yes."
"Excellent. I'm working on the complaint, and Gabe thinks the defense may argue that Carlos was a 'public figure.' The elements of defamation are different if he is. I think there are cases that say a person may be a public figure if he 'thrusts himself into the public spotlight.' I can think of better things to thrust myself into, dude, but . . ."
Micah laughed.
". . . can you research whether Carlos is arguably a quote-unquote public figure? And can you find some recent New York state cases to make sure I have the law right?"
"You bet, Raph."
Micah locked the case room and went back to his office on forty-two. He pulled the legal research on defamation he'd done for Raphael before and read over the summary again. Defamation is a false statement published without authorization or privilege to a third party. In the Mavros case, the false charges of sexual assault were defamatory per se because they accused Carlos of misconduct in his charity work and exposed him to public contempt. The lawyer for the victims and the tabloid got themselves on the hook when they repeated the false charges publicly. With defamation per se like that, the complaint wouldn't have to allege damages.
The main defense was "truth or substantial truth." Defendants would often argue that what they said about a plaintiff was basically true, and so they couldn't be sued for their honesty. But in Carlos' case, one of the women admitted they were lying.
Micah logged onto Westlaw and searched through New York cases. A "public figure" had to allege that the defendant published the defamatory statements with "actual malice," meaning a reckless disregard for the truth. Just because Carlos was the brother of a very public figure, did that make Carlos a public figure, too? Or maybe Carlos would be considered a public figure because he operated a shelter for runaways and homeless mothers and spoke out at his church for immigrant and minority rights?
After two hours, Micah didn't find much to support the argument that a relative of a famous person would be deemed a public figure. He printed out several cases and wrote down a general rule from them. The essential element underlying the category of public figures is that the publicized person has taken an affirmative step to attract public attention. In other words, the person has thrust himself into the limelight. Raphael was right about the law. If Carlos had actually thrust himself into the public eye, the easiest way to find out was to search for his name in news articles on Lexis-Nexis.
Micah found hundreds of blurbs about corporate disputes involving Carlos' brother, "reclusive billionaire" Nick "Nine Zero" Mavros, who actually was worth ten zeroes now. He pored over the summaries for anything he could find about the less-famous Carlos. His eyes began to glaze over until he spotted a headline about "One Love For All." The two-year old article described a non-profit charity operated by Carlos from his foundation and church in Manhattan. The non-denominational congregat
ion "accepted all members with open arms and open hearts." The One Love For All part was an outreach program for abused women, single mothers, and runaways. Carlos was quoted in the article as saying that renovation of the women's shelter building was "nearly complete." His vision for One Love For All included a learning annex to help members earn their GEDs and find jobs.
The plan for the shelter included a large communal dorm room with a dozen bunk beds, a small kitchenette, and rainbow-mural walls for the runaways. The article had photos of two larger rooms, each with a queen bed, a crib, and a laundry room for abused women and single moms. The story concluded with: One Love For All is Carlos' effort to give support, counseling, and spiritual guidance to those who need a second chance. One Love For All was made possible through the generous support of Apollon Industries and individual private donations.
Micah still wondered why there weren't more articles about the two women allegedly assaulted at the shelter? He kept searching for any ink, good or bad. He found another article titled, "Rainbow Of Hope Or Harassment?" When he clicked the link, the screen read, Sorry, page not found. This data is no longer available. Another story, "Alleged Sex Abuse At One Love For All," ended up being a similar dead link.
He printed out the article on the construction of the shelter at One Love For All, and gave up on Lexis-Nexis. He resorted to a Google search, trying "Nick Mavros" and getting 35,000 matching results. He retyped a new query, "Carlos Mavros." Only seventeen matching results.
The title of the first article was "Liberal Men of Faith." A bio piece on Carlos and several other local community leaders. Carlos was described as a divinity scholar who grew up intending to become a priest. After several years of education, he founded his own non-denominational church "for immigrants, minorities, gays, and any other victims of social injustice" while criticizing traditional religious institutions for their lack of progress on third-world labor exploitation, racism, sex education, and birth control. The article had a photo of Carlos, a good-looking man, and noted that he gave himself a salary of only twenty-four thousand dollars a year and spent every Saturday helping homeless mothers find housing.
PLUMMET: A Novel Page 8
