The Insider

by Reece Hirsch

  Will tried to recall his most recent conversations with Ben. If Ben had been depressed, it had seemed to be the same low-grade depression that afflicted many of his colleagues. Will had never known anyone who had committed suicide, but he supposed that all such deaths must be, to some degree, inexplicable. He probably just didn’t know Ben well enough to recognize his particular unhappiness.

  Will found it difficult to imagine that someone would commit suicide over being passed over for partner, but he certainly understood how career goals could turn into obsessions. Will quickly dismissed the idea of suicide because it did not explain why Ben, or someone else, would have entered his office and swapped access cards with him. That action made sense only if someone wanted to frame him for Ben’s death.

  Besides, Ben couldn’t have been that upset about being passed over for partner because he must have known that he was a long-shot candidate to begin with. Although Ben was a brilliant technician, he was a “service” attorney, advising on the tax aspects of mergers and acquisitions for the clients of corporate rainmakers like Sam Bowen and Richard Grogan. Will knew that Ben had missed out on at least one opportunity to land a client, Carlyle Industries, that would have surely propelled him to partnership. Like most legal careers, Ben’s had probably turned on the outcome of a few critical moments when he had a shot at landing a franchise client, the kind that made careers and generated millions of dollars in billings. A partner’s compensation is based largely on billing credit, and the assignment of billing credit often boils down to a negotiation among attorneys. Although Ben had received the initial call from Carlyle’s CEO, Richard Grogan quickly asserted himself as Carlyle’s primary contact at the firm, giving him leverage to demand most of the billing credit.

  When a client like Carlyle Industries approaches a law firm for representation, it is like a gazelle wandering onto the African savanna within striking distance of a pride of lions. The dominant predators claim the largest portion of the kill. On the Discovery Channel, Richard Grogan would be classified as an apex predator. Richard was at the top of the law firm food chain—he eats others, but no one in his world eats him. Ben Fisher was not an apex predator, which explained why he did not receive credit for his role in bringing in Carlyle Industries and, later, why he did not make partner.

  Will didn’t consider himself much of a predator, either, and so he just felt lucky to have survived the partner selection process at a firm that one former colleague had likened to “a nest of tarantulas.” Counting the three years of law school, he had spent the past nine years working toward the goal, nearly a third of his life. For Will, making partner meant that the financial gamble he had taken in borrowing more than $100,000 to go to law school had officially paid off. It also proved somehow that he was not like George, his father. When Will was young, George, an office supplies salesman, had been physically abusive to both Will and his mother. Now George was long gone and Will was paying for his mother’s care in a nice, but very expensive, assisted-living facility. Making partner meant money, security, prestige, and never having to undergo another annual performance review. In the parlance of the gangster movies that he loved, Will was now a made guy.

  Will wanted to call someone to pass along the good news, but he knew that he couldn’t phone Anne, his mother, the one person in the world who might have taken the most pleasure in his accomplishment. Since the Alzheimer’s had taken hold, the only way to really communicate with her was face-to-face, where he could see the flash of recognition and know that he had reached her. Talking to her over the phone was like trying to crack a safe without being able to listen to the tumblers turning.

  Then there was his ex-girlfriend, Dana Houseman. Dana had made partner a year ago at the San Francisco office of Wickersham and Colbert, a white-shoe New York firm, and she dumped him shortly thereafter. There had been a time about four years ago when he had thought about leaving the law, and he had to admit that the main reason he had stayed was to maintain the necessary qualifications to remain Dana’s boyfriend. When Dana made partner, she had apparently raised the bar another notch, and Will had failed to make the cut.

  He had spent the past year trying to get over Dana by working obsessively, even by the firm’s obsessive standards. Lately, though, it had become more difficult to blot Dana out because her picture kept appearing with alarming regularity in the local papers. She was dating James Pryce, a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office who was the leading candidate to be the next mayor of San Francisco. The society pages never seemed to tire of running photos of the couple at various charity events. Nevertheless, Will knew that if he called Dana, she would meet him for a drink for old times’ sake. The trouble was that he didn’t think he could bear the pitying smile on her face as she reflected on the fact that he had resorted to calling her on his special occasion.

  In any event, Ben’s death and the meeting with Detective Kovach had cast a pall over what would have otherwise been a cause for serious celebration.

  Perhaps it was best if he went out alone. Since there was no one in his life appropriate for sharing the moment, he would either mark it by himself—or find someone new. Will had never successfully picked up a woman in a bar, but that was his mission that night. He could start working on his defense strategy tomorrow—until the cops or a prosecutor made their next move, there was little to respond to.

  Will had to admit that it was an unusual choice for him, but he was in an odd, untethered frame of mind. He felt numb and reckless, like a drunken mourner at a wake. Whether he categorized the evening as mourning or a celebration, it seemed that some combination of alcohol and sex was the most appropriate response. He had overheard a paralegal describing a place called the Whiskey Bar as “very cool, but a little bit of a meat market.” It sounded perfect.

  FOUR

  As he stepped through the doorway of the Whiskey Bar, Will paused for a moment to allow his senses to adjust to the aqueous lighting, the pulsing techno beats, and the din of voices. He felt like a deep-sea diver who had just touched down on the ocean floor.

  The Whiskey Bar was a new club on Fillmore enjoying its evanescent moment of unassailable hipness. The place was a perfect specimen of the latest trend in postpostmodern clubs: the bizarro hunting lodge theme. The high-ceilinged room was steeped in dark wood paneling and murky, recessed lighting. Faux antlers and animal hides were everywhere. Behind a couch and some low-slung velvet chairs, backlit panels on the wall displayed line drawings of an emu, a water buffalo, a python, and other exotic animals. Somewhere a team of designers and architects had spent a great deal of time formulating some crypto-ironic message that the room was intended to convey, but all he really wanted at the moment was a drink.

  He found a seat at the bar and, after several attempts, managed to hail a bartender and order a beer. On either side of him were rival hunting parties of young men in business suits, each braying at the top of their lungs to be heard above the Thievery Corporation track throbbing over the club’s sound system.

  Going to a club alone usually made Will uncomfortable. But now he was a partner, and that was supposed to change things, right? With bitter irony, he noted that things had changed, all right—now he was both a partner and a murder suspect.

  The group on his left got up and was quickly replaced by a woman with shoulder-length blond hair wearing a cream-colored skirt and violet blouse. Judging by her clothes, Will guessed that she might work in advertising, maybe public relations.

  The woman ordered a pomegranate Cosmopolitan and removed a BlackBerry from her purse, placing it on the bar. The BlackBerry immediately began thrumming excitedly. She picked it up and tilted the screen at various angles, trying to read her messages in the dim light.

  “Is that the new BlackBerry?” Will asked, pointing at the device.

  BlackBerry Girl looked back at him quizzically. She had not understood what he had said, but she took him in with a glance that made Will feel like he had just had one of those full-body MRI scans,
the kind that find more things wrong with you than you ever could have imagined.

  “Is that the new BlackBerry?” Will repeated. The noise level made every statement sound like an exclamation. Even the simplest communications required the concentration of a lip reader.

  “Yeah!” she said.

  Will reached into his suit pocket and pulled out his own BlackBerry. “Ever since I got this thing, I can’t stop checking my e-mail. I’m addicted.”

  “You’re addicted to what?” she shouted back.

  The music seemed to grow louder, or maybe it was just his social anxiety ratcheting up a notch as he watched the tenuous connection unravel. He ran his hand through his hair and forged ahead, already wincing at the obviousness of it all. “My name’s Will! What’s yours?”

  The woman seemed to recognize that she had a rapidly narrowing window of escape. She picked up her BlackBerry again and pointed to it, acting as if she hadn’t heard him, but this time he felt certain that she had.

  “Sorry, but I need to go someplace quiet to make a call. It was nice talking to you!”

  She sipped the last of her drink and slid off the stool. Will didn’t blame her a bit. He gave her points for the effective use of the BlackBerry in her exit strategy.

  Will turned away to order another beer and noticed a woman several stools down the zinc-topped bar regarding him with an amused, knowing smile. She had short, black hair framing a pale face. She had obviously been observing Will’s exchange with BlackBerry Girl. She couldn’t have heard what they were saying, but she probably didn’t need to.

  Will drank another beer and began to relax a bit. During the years of struggling to make partner, he had sometimes entertained the comical notion that making partner would imbue him with new powers, like a budding superhero who had been bitten by a radioactive insect. It appeared that any superpowers that he had gained did not include the ability to pick up women in bars. He began to suspect that his new power might be something disappointingly mundane, like the ability to calculate the tip on a large restaurant tab.

  He turned to survey the room. No one was dancing, but everyone’s movements seemed to twitch to the pulse of the thudding beat. It crept into the earnest nodding of a young man at the bar listening to a girl he was trying to pick up. It insinuated itself into the stride of an attractive woman walking across the room, conscious of the eyes on her.

  Will sipped his beer and, out of simple curiosity, continued to watch the reflection of the dark-haired woman in the mirror behind the bar. She was perhaps five feet four, in her late twenties, dressed in a chocolate-brown, slightly low-cut blouse. Will guessed that she might be a clerk in an expensive clothing store, with her full lips and high cheekbones lending the right note of fashionable exoticism. She finished her drink, then began rummaging in her purse.

  The woman examined the contents of the purse with increasing frustration, then placed it on the bar so that she could excavate its depths. She glanced about the club, as if she were looking for someone. Finally, she called the bartender over and they launched into an extended dialogue, which she punctuated with some pleading hand gestures.

  Will flagged the bartender and told him that he would pay the woman’s bar tab. This was a bold move for him, and a sure sign that four beers had impaired his usually all-too-efficient impulse-control mechanisms.

  When the bartender passed along the message, the woman gave a reluctant smile. She looked down at her purse again, probably deciding whether she should come over and thank him or simply leave and cut her losses.

  After a final appraising look, she stood up from the bar and approached. She sat down on the stool next to him. They leaned in close to one another to be heard, their faces inches apart.

  “Thank you,” she said, with what sounded like a Russian accent. “My friend she walked out on me without paying for her drinks. And she’d been sitting here for hours! I only had twenty dollars in my purse. Do you know how much you just agreed to pay?”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  “Thirty-five dollars. See, that’s what happens when you agree to buy a Russian’s drinks. It can get very expensive. Let me at least give you ten.”

  “No, no, it’s fine. You looked like you could use some help.”

  “So is that what you do? Go around helping women in distress?”

  “No, not usually.”

  “So you made an exception in my case?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Hmm,” she said with mock suspicion.

  “My name’s Will Connelly.”

  “Katya Belyshev.”

  Will took a moment to study Katya. Her dark brown blouse accentuated her Eastern European pallor. She brushed her long fingernails against a charm bracelet that she jingled on her wrist, the only indication that she might be uneasy. The silver bracelet’s charms were in the shapes of Cyrillic letters.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “I’m a receptionist at a securities firm.”

  “Oh? Which one?”

  “Not one of the big ones. You’ve probably never heard of it—Equilon Securities.”

  “No, I haven’t.” To avert a lull in the conversation, he added, “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “You want to buy me another drink? But okay. Stoli martini. Two olives.”

  “Is your friend coming back? I noticed you’ve been sitting alone over there by yourself for a while.”

  “Were you spying on me?”

  “No . . . Well, maybe just a little bit. Sorry, old habit from the cold war.”

  “Funny. You are a funny guy, Will.” She nodded, appreciating the joke rather than laughing at it, like a professional comic.

  Will ordered, and they sat at the bar struggling to hear one another as the music enveloped them. When Will was in his early twenties, he had spent many nights in clubs like this one. Now he wasn’t sure whether it was his hearing that had deteriorated or simply his tolerance for crowds, loud music, and people who drink mojitos, but he knew that he needed to find a better place to talk.

  Finally, Katya stood and said, “Follow me.”

  Will trailed Katya up some stairs to a loft in the back of the club. The room, which was arranged with deep sofas, was quieter, out of the crossfire of the club’s speakers. On each sofa were young couples groping one another.

  Katya pointed to a couch in the corner. “You wanted a quiet place, right?” On the next couch, a man with a shark fin of spiked-up blond hair was fondling his girlfriend’s breasts underneath her glittering chemise. Glancing at the couple, Katya added, “It is not required, you know.”

  Will burst out with a nervous laugh, and they settled on the couch.

  He took a swallow of his Johnnie Walker Black and exhaled. “How long have you been in the U.S.?” His eyes fell on the outline of Katya’s breasts beneath her blouse, and he forced them away, not wanting to be caught staring.

  “About two years.”

  “Your English is very good.” He glanced again.

  “Thank you. I started learning when I worked for U.S. company in Russia.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “A town called Kharkiv, which is in Ukraine.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Kharkiv is a farming town. I have a friend who lives in Fresno and it is a little like that. Just take away movie theaters, shops, and most of the things that make life bearable . . . then add some more crime.”

  “I don’t even like our version of Fresno. Is that why you came to the U.S.?”

  “Partly. I also want to go into business for myself some day. Run a restaurant. In Russia, that is not possible. To start a business over there, you must deal with avtoritet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It is organized crime, but very out in the open. It’s hard enough for a man to start a legitimate business in Russia today, but it is almost impossible for a woman. A woman does not get the necessary respect. And if you don’t get respect, you can’t
buy the produce and supplies to run a restaurant. You can’t even hire dishwashers.” Katya took a long sip of her martini.

  “That must not be easy, picking up and moving to the U.S.”

  “No, not easy. I was working as office manager for a U.S. oil company. They agreed to hire me for their San Francisco office if I paid my own travel expenses. It took two years, but I saved the money and got my visa.”

  “How did you end up at the securities firm?”

  “I left the oil company for an office manager job at an Internet company called CatsPajamas.com.”

  “What did they sell?”

  “What else? Pajamas for the cats.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really.” She giggled. “They sold women’s clothing. The company went bankrupt after about six months when the bubble burst, and I ended up at Equilon. Familiar story, eh?”

  “The last part is certainly familiar. But it looks like you landed on your feet.”

  “Yes, I landed on my feet,” she said, appreciating the American expression. “No place else to land.”

  “You’d never go back to Russia?”

  “It is my home, but no, I think I will never go back.”

  “So how did you wind up working at a securities firm?”

  “Things were hard for me after CPJ went out of business. My stock options were worthless. Too many people looking for work in the city. Very scary. I was afraid I was going to get evicted from my apartment, not have money for groceries. I called everyone I knew from Russia who was over here. Finally, I found out that my second cousin Irina was living in Brighton Beach. Irina knew someone in San Francisco who knew this guy Yuri. Yuri helped me get the receptionist job at Equilon. Being a receptionist is a step down from my last job, but it is only temporary.”

  Will sipped his drink, searching for something encouraging to say about her job search that didn’t sound patronizing.

  “So now you know everything about me and I know nothing about you,” Katya said. “What about you? What do you do?”

  “I’m an attorney,” Will said, somewhat reluctantly. Will knew from experience that things could take a turn for the worse at this point.