Not that it mattered. Nobody gave her a second look as she boarded the subway and spread out over a double seat for the fifteen-minute ride. At Harvard Square, a college-aged girl was playing a guitar and singing a folk song on the platform between the outgoing and incoming tracks. Charese could hear her high-pitched, haunting voice cutting through the sound of the train pulling away. The song was eerily hypnotic, a ballad about anger and love and passion. Charese walked over, saw a pretty porcelain-white face framed by dark brown hair. The singer was surrounded by a handful of other passengers, all equally enchanted by the singer and her song.
Charese watched as a middle-aged man in a business suit dropped a twenty-dollar bill into her guitar case and walked slowly away, distant memories of a youthful love flashing in his eyes and flushing his cheeks. Charese moved into the spot he had vacated, listened to a few more songs, then handed the singer a five-dollar bill in exchange for a cassette tape. It was five dollars she couldn’t afford to spend, yet the singer had soothed and comforted her. Adrienne was the singer’s name, or so the cassette said, and she smiled a thank you at Charese as she sang. Charese smiled back, whispered a response. “No, thank you.”
The incident reminded her of the time she and Roberge had watched Tracy Chapman, now at the top of the folk singer charts, sing in that very same subway station a few years earlier. The memory of Roberge angered her, but she was pleased that her anger was directed more at his intrusion into her happy moment than at his act of leaving her. Perhaps she was starting to get over him.
Buoyed by that thought, and humming an Adrienne ballad, Charese walked through the Square and over to Dunster Street. She was a few minutes early, which gave her the opportunity to see Shelby turn the corner from Mt. Auburn Street and make her way toward the restaurant. She counted three male heads swivel as Shelby walked the half block.
Shelby gave a friendly wave, then took Charese’s arm as they walked down half a flight of stairs into the restaurant. Charese immediately noticed that Shelby seemed more at ease than she had in the LAP office with Reese around; she guessed that her theory about Reese coming on to her was probably accurate.
They sat, and Charese studied her further. At the LAP office, Charese had thought Shelby beautiful in a Parisian sort of way. But today, as they made small talk before ordering, Charese perceived Shelby differently. Smiling, animated, relaxed—Charese noticed that Shelby was not just beautiful, she was also cute and engaging. Shining eyes, dimpled cheeks, a playful toss of the head. Charese had known many woman in her life, and had envied a good number of them. Many were beautiful, and many more were engaging, but few of them combined both qualities in quite the way Shelby did. Plus she was smart enough to get into Harvard Law School, and rich enough to pay for it. Simply not fair.
Charese would have been content to sit and study Shelby further, but she could tell that Shelby was eager to discuss the case. “So, what’s up with my case?”
Shelby leaned forward. “Good question. There’s some strange stuff going on.” Shelby paused and played with her straw, then sipped at her Diet Coke. “I’m not sure about any of this, but I feel that I have to tell you what I know. But first, let me give you some background information.”
She took a deep breath. “The way this whole LAP thing works is that there are a few full-time lawyers on staff. Reese is one of them. I think they’re paid by the state and also supported by the big law firms. Anyway, they have a pretty liberal agenda—it’s funny, actually, because often they end up fighting big companies that are represented by the same law firms that support them. But that’s not the point. The point is, most of the law students who work for them also are also pretty liberal. Well, I’m not.” Shelby stopped here, as if this were a confession of some sort, and started playing with her straw again.
Charese shrugged, unable to see the relevance of this revelation. And why should Shelby even care what Charese thought? “I don’t get it. What does that have to do with me or my case?”
“I guess it really doesn’t, I just want you to know where I’m coming from. I’m a raging moderate.” She smiled. “There’s an old expression from the Talmud: ‘Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.’ So many of the welfare programs in this country—the stuff supported by the liberals like Reese Jeffries—just ignore that.”
“Shelby, I’m still lost here.”
Shelby smiled gently, her turquoise eyes shining at Charese. “Of course you are; I’m not being clear. I guess I’m being a little defensive. People—or at least people in Cambridge—just assume that if you’re not liberal, you must be heartless and selfish and evil. Well, I’m not any of those things. I’m really not. And I need you to believe that. Because if you don’t believe that, you’re probably not going to believe the rest of what I have to tell you.”
Charese stared at Shelby for a few seconds. Shelby’s description of the liberal mentality in Cambridge reminded her of the sanctimonious bible-thumpers she had known in her Georgia childhood. You were either a churchgoer or a devil worshiper, no in-between. She spoke softy. “I’ll believe whatever you have to say, Shelby.”
Shelby put down her straw and grinned—a bright, dazzling smile that reached across the table and lifted the edges of Charese’s lips as well. “Thanks, Charese. That’s nice to hear. Now here’s the story. After we filed your complaint, I got a call from Roberge. Actually, he called for Reese and I happened to pick up the phone. Reese wasn’t there, but since I was familiar with the case I introduced myself and asked him what he wanted. Well, the upshot of the conversation was that he wanted to avoid any publicity because he didn’t want to embarrass his father.”
Charese cut in. “He means he doesn’t want his little country club, blue-blood bride to find out.”
Shelby laughed. “Whatever his reasons, he made what I think is a very good settlement offer. He offered to give you the condo if you drop the case. The only thing is, he insisted on a confidentiality agreement so that there would be no publicity. He hadn’t even hired a lawyer yet because he wanted to keep this as quiet as possible.”
Charese was stunned. She knew the condo—a gift from his parents—was worth more than $200,000. She could sell it and start over again with a nice nest egg. Or just keep it and take in a roommate to help pay the bills. “So what’s the problem?”
“Well, I wrote Reese a memo detailing the conversation before I left that day. When I came back to the office two days later, there was a message for me to see Reese ASAP. I thought he would be happy about the settlement offer, but instead he gave me a twenty minute lecture on how I hadn’t passed the bar exam yet and how it was unethical for me to enter into settlement negotiations without his prior approval, blah, blah, blah. At first I thought he was just angry at me for something else, stuff not related to your case ....”
Charese interrupted. “Yeah, I figured he came on to you.”
Shelby blinked. “Charese, how did you know?”
Charese smiled back at her triumphantly. “Just woman’s intuition. It comes with the hormone treatments!” They laughed, although Charese sensed that Shelby was a bit embarrassed at being so transparent. Not that Shelby seemed threatened by it—in fact, she smiled at Charese with what Charese saw as a new-found respect.
“Anyway, I thought he was just using it as a way to re-inflate his male ego. But he went on for so long, I knew it had to be more than that. When he finally finished his little lecture, I think he expected me just to leave with my tail between my legs. Instead, I acted like nothing had happened and just asked him what he thought about the settlement offer. He turned real red and told me that Krygier had withdrawn the offer.”
Charese slumped a bit in her chair. Shelby continued. “Well, that was a week ago. I hadn’t heard anything about the case since then, and the whole thing just struck me as weird. I mean, the way it works is that I am supposed to negotiate settlements and make case decisions—that’s the whole idea of the cl
inical program. So for Reese to be upset at me seemed totally, well, wrong. Then, yesterday, I got a call from a lawyer at one of the big firms downtown who said he was representing Roberge. He called to say he was preparing an Answer to our Complaint, and that we would have it by the end of the week. He asked me again if we would be willing to settle the case before it became public, because after it became public it would be too late. When I told him I thought Roberge had withdrawn the settlement offer, he totally denied it. He said Reese had called him last week and told him that you had refused to settle, for any amount of money.”
“Me?! I haven’t even spoken to Reese.”
Shelby reached across and took Charese’s hand. “Yeah. I figured.”
CHAPTER 14
[October 25, 1989]
Shelby slept late the next day, a rare luxury. She rolled out of bed at ten, threw on a robe and brushed her teeth, then opened the apartment door and grabbed the Boston Herald sitting on the stoop outside. Her friends teased her for reading the tabloid-style Herald instead of the Globe, but she found it a welcome counterbalance to the dry prose of her law studies. Besides, it did an equally good job on local news, and for national and international news, she read the Times. She folded the paper under her arm and carried it to the kitchen table.
The headline on page 3 almost knocked Shelby right off her chair:
Drag Queen Sues Real Estate Heir
Wants Krygier Son to Pay for Sex Change Operation
A picture of Charese standing next to Roberge’s father, his arm around both Charese and Roberge, took up a quarter of the page. The picture was taken at the senior Krygier’s sixtieth birthday party the previous summer. The two Krygiers were dressed as upstanding citizens of Boston. Charese was dressed as a woman. Shelby recognized the picture as one of the group that Charese gave to Reese.
Shelby quickly read through the rest of the story. It quoted liberally from the Complaint Shelby authored, recounting Charese’s twelve-year relationship with Roberge, Roberge’s request that she have a sex change operation and become his “wife,” and Charese’s subsequent pre-operation hormone treatments. It also recounted the recent announcement that Roberge would be marrying Megan French, quoting from the engagement announcement the Globe published a few weeks earlier. The story even contained a reaction from Reese, who questioned whether this was just another example of a wealthy property-owning family taking advantage of the less fortunate members of society. And in its most inflammatory paragraph, the article quoted unnamed sources who claimed Roberge had hidden the nature of the relationship from his father because he knew his father was “violently homophobic,” so much so that the senior Krygier was once heard to say that Hitler had been right to attempt to exterminate European homosexuals. The Krygier family had no comment on the story, other than to deny that Wesley Krygier would ever condone the extermination of any group of people.
Shelby read the article a second time, then headed for the shower. She let the water run over her body for twenty minutes, trying to process the story and understand its ramifications for Charese. A few things were obvious. First, Reese had purposely leaked the story to embarrass the Krygier family—they were prominent in Boston social circles, and a picture of the senior Krygier with his arm around a drag queen would not play well with the afternoon tea crowd. Even worse, the Krygier family’s reputation would surely suffer as questions were raised regarding Wesley Krygier’s judgment and character—he had been duped by his son and, even worse, apparently was a closet homophobe and perhaps even a Hitler apologist. Second, Reese leaked the story now because he knew that if he waited, Charese would insist on settling the case, a settlement that would include a confidentiality stipulation. Third, Reese kept Shelby in the dark so that she wouldn’t interfere with his plans. And fourth, now that the Krygiers had taken the publicity hit, there was less incentive for them to settle Charese’s lawsuit.
Shelby dried herself off, then poured a second cup of coffee. She still wondered whether it had been wise to return to law school after her family’s death. The whole process of watching the drunk driver work the system for an acquittal had disgusted her. A team of high-priced lawyers simply paraded a chorus of high-priced experts in front a jury, while a pair of overworked and under-funded district attorneys valiantly fought, and lost, the good fight. It wasn’t so much that a conviction would have brought back her family, but at least it would have ensured that Mr. Martini wouldn’t climb back into a car and destroy someone else’s life. In the end, she had returned to law school because she couldn’t rebut the argument that the best way to change the system was to work from within it.
But was the system even worth saving? Not with lawyers like Reese Jeffries running around sacrificing clients at the alter of self-promotion. She shook her head—maybe Barry wasn’t so bad after all. Sure, he was nothing more than a hired gun. But at least he didn’t turn around and use that gun to shoot his own client in the back.
* * *
Hours before Shelby had even rolled out of bed, Reese Jeffries purchased five copies of the Herald at the corner convenience store and treated himself to a second chocolate croissant. He had single-handedly dealt a crippling blow to Wesley Krygier’s reputation, and, by extension, to Krygier’s personal crusade to repeal rent control in Boston. Krygier was currently the primary financial backer of, and the figurehead for, the repeal efforts, and he had been making headway recently in the political arena by contributing heavily in local political contests. Now he would become the subject of ridicule—from the conservative groups because of his son’s lifestyle, from the liberals because of his apparent homophobia, and from both because he couldn’t even tell that the “woman” he had welcomed so openly into his family circle had balls, not boobs.
Reese was also sure that his own stature in the tenants’ rights community would skyrocket. The group had been trying to damage Krygier for years, without success. Reese pictured himself arriving at Friday’s tenant rally in Cambridge, people reaching to shake his hand, to pat his back, to whisper congratulations in his ear. He indulged in a third croissant.
CHAPTER 15
[November 7, 1989]
Bruce, too, had seen the newspaper story. He had cut it out and kept it, and was in the middle of re-reading it when his office phone rang one evening almost two weeks later.
The digital display identified the caller: Bertram Puck. Bruce quickly picked up the handset. “Good afternoon, Mr. Puck.” The rest of the world might view 6:30 as evening, but at the firm 6:30 was still afternoon.
“Come to my office.”
Bruce scooped up a clean legal pad and a pen and walked down the hall to the senior partner’s corner office. Puck’s door was open; Bruce knocked and waited until Puck motioned him in with an impatient wave.
Bruce surveyed the office as Puck, a file open on the desk in front of him, typed on a computer keyboard. He was surprised to see the computer in Puck’s office—none of the other partners and only a few associates besides Bruce had requested their own computer terminals. Other than the computer, the office was decorated in a style that Bruce labeled “Traditional Shipwreck”—prints of old naval battles and schooners being thrown against the rocks, pieces of driftwood mounted and displayed, a ship’s clock on the wall, a navigational map of the coast of Boston circa 1800, an antique spyglass on the window sill. Bertram Puck, Sr. had practiced maritime law, Bruce knew, so the motif seemed appropriate enough; every time there was a shipwreck, old Bertram stood to profit from the ensuing legal work.
Bertram, Jr.—actually, there were few people left at the firm who even remembered there was a Bertram, Sr.—motioned for Bruce to sit, but did not raise his head from his work to look at the young attorney. Few of the partners actually looked at the younger associates. It was almost as if the partners reminded each other at their weekly meetings not to make eye contact with a young associate, lest the associate mistakenly take it as some sign of equality.
Bruce studied the partner. Puck w
as misnamed—he looked more like a hockey stick than a disk of black rubber. He was tall and angular, and his head was perpetually angled forward as if from a lifelong effort to hide his face from an intruding world. His expression was rigid, his complexion rutted and knotty, his nose and mouth straight and hard. Even his closely cropped hair protruded splinter-like from the crown of his head. Only his eyes seemed animate, but even they were a shade of steel blue that Bruce had only seen once before, and then in a newborn wolf puppy.
Bruce continued to observe Puck as Puck continued to type—rather adeptly—on his computer keyboard. His clothes were timeless, as they had been every time Bruce saw him: heavy wool Brooks Brothers suit, speckled with flakes of dandruff; oxford shirt; blue and red tie; wing tips. Watching Puck hunched over his computer conjured up a vision of some character from a Dickens novel in possession of a futuristic device that made simple the act of stealing from widows and orphans.
Fittingly, many at the firm viewed Puck as some sort of modern-day Dickensian villain. A senior associate, who worked primarily on Puck’s cases during his tenure at the firm, recently came up for partnership vote. He was rejected, despite stellar work habits and glowing yearly reviews. The scuttlebutt was that Puck was concerned that some of his clients were contacting the associate directly, and that Puck blocked the partnership election to prevent the possible loss of control of his client base. Even at a cutthroat firm like Stoak, Puck & Beal, it was considered extremely bad form to string an associate along for eight years with expectations of partnership and then to vote him down. And when the very partner who profited from the associate’s 80-hour work weeks and skillful legal representation cast the deciding vote ... well, Bruce could understand why none of the other associates wanted to work for Puck.
[Boston Law 01.0] Unlawful Deeds Page 8
