The letter was from the school, and though it had been addressed to Mr. Shenk, Ruben had opened it, maybe because a self-preserving instinct had sensed the danger within. It was dry and informational, simply to inform the Morningstar parent community that beginning in the fall all students would be required to participate in at least one extracurricular or after-school activity. As our records indicate that your child—the name [Ruben] inserted in brackets—is not currently involved in any such programming, we invite you to attend…and then a list of the various fairs and other top-of-the-semester opportunities for kids to find their passions.
Jay was meant to sign the letter and send it back. The school had a fetish for paper signatures, for open and clear and recorded communication. Which just meant Ruben would have to finally explain how, after repeated absences, Ms. Hutchins had expelled him from Classical Poetry Confab. This had happened months ago, and he had never mentioned it. He didn’t know exactly how his dad would react, but all options were bad. Jay might blame himself for Ruben’s repeated absences, which had all occurred when Jay had needed his help with Keener; or Jay might deliver a series of speeches about how much he was spending on tuition, and the least Ruben could do was take full advantage of the opportunity; or (worst of all) Jay could become indignant and charge over to that school and demand this Ms. Hutchins tell him who she thought she was.
So for months now, all through the end of first semester and into spring, whenever Shenk remembered to ask him how the poetry club was going, Ruben had just said great. Going great. Super-fun. He had gone so far, once at dinner, as to mumble through a half-remembered sonnet, making up most of it as he went. Whereas in reality, he’d just been spending that time after school hanging around campus, haunting the school library, reading his way through the Dragonlance books and watching other kids goof around. It was from the library windows that he had watched the fitful courtship of his erstwhile Poetry Confab clubmates Annelise McTier and Willy Dorian, the two of them meeting up at 2:55 to walk into the World Languages building together, in time for club; he bore witness to what was either their first or one of their first kisses, feeling a burning mixture of jealousy and shame before sticking his head back into his book and reading—scowling, furious—until Confab ended and he could go home.
All to avoid the conversation with his father that now was being forced by the stupid letter.
Ruben threw his head back and smushed it into the scratchy back of the sofa. He ran his thumb repeatedly over the turtle’s ridged back, trying to pull apart this clot of distressing feeling. What he hated most of all was the idea of giving his dad a task, pulling him into the small dumb drama of Ruben’s world, handing him this piece of small-ball parenting bullshit to deal with now, of all times, when they were hip-deep in Keener v. Valley Village Hospital Corporation.
The door clicked open. Ruben rested his hand on the roof of the turtle and sat up straight in Marilyn’s gold-trimmed sofa.
“Ruben! Boychild! Rubie, where are you, buddy?”
Jay Shenk entered the room like a change of season, bringing his own wild, enthusiastic weather in with him, pushing the door open with the sole of one brown Oxford, tossing his gym bag in one direction and his briefcase in another, letting his coat drop on the floor behind him, tugging the rubber band out to let the ponytail fall from his hair, grasping his only child by the cheeks and planting a firm kiss on the top of his head.
“I have returned from the distant land of Riverside. This lady, man. You’re never gonna believe this lady.”
“What do you mean?”
And Ruben, who had been ready to spill his guts, whose non-turtle hand had already reached for the letter folded tightly in his pocket, instead settled back in the sofa.
The senior partner of Shenk & Partners had been keeping Ruben well abreast of all developments. Shenk had debriefed Ruben on the various depositions, had replayed for him his interviews with Wesley’s pals, shared the details of the accident, the trip to the hospital, the chaos of surgery. Each night he brought these reports from the front for them to dissect together over dinner, two generals huddled over maps inside the tent.
And now, tonight, he laughingly recounted his trip with Lippy out to Riverside and his impressions of Dr. Pileggi. In the small kitchen, above the sink, there was one window that looked out onto three lemon trees: Marilyn had had them planted just there, in that arrangement, for her husband, who loved lemons, and for herself, who loved the Mediterranean symmetry of lemon trees framed in a kitchen window.
Shenk cracked open a San Pellegrino and poured the whole thing out over ice, cut himself a fat wedge of lemon, and dropped it in with a magician’s unthinking handiwork. Meanwhile Ruben could feel the crinkle of the paper in his pocket, the sharp corner of letterhead stationery.
“Dad?” he said at last. “There’s, uh—something I need to tell you.”
“I think we’ve got it, buddy,” pronounced Shenk happily. “I think it’s fine.”
He hadn’t heard Ruben; either the son had spoken too softly, nervous as he was, or the father was entirely inside his own head.
“Did you figure out what happened?” asked Ruben softly.
“No, I did not,” said Jay. “But I’m close enough.” He wheeled around, his grin as wide now as a sunrise, and counted on his fingers. “I got maybe some bad calls from the EMTs. I got maybe a drinking problem with the surgeon. I got maybe a diagnosis from a brain expert—truly the world’s worst expert witness, to be honest, but nobody has to know that. I don’t even have to put her on the record. Just wave at her existence. I got a lady that’s got a theory.”
Ruben listened, mesmerized as always by his father, by the endless magic of his father’s words.
“Now maybe, maybe we keep working on this, I follow one of these threads and it takes us to the end of the rainbow. On the other hand, when the iron is hot, you don’t miss your chance to strike it. You know who said that?”
“Mom?”
“Goddamn right.”
Shenk set down his drink. He stretched, pulling his hands up over his head, bending one way and then the other. Ruben, half automatically, made the same gesture.
“So you think we’re gonna win?”
“Oh, no. No, son.” Shenk, triumphant. Shenk, all smiles. “We’re going to settle.”
By the time his dad gave him a final smackeroo on the top of his noggin and wandered off to change, and to place the call to John Riggs, Ruben and the ceramic turtle, his confessor, had a plan of their own. Among his occasional duties at Shenk & Partners, after all, was in helping to tame the constantly accumulating correspondence, and if there was one thing he knew how to do, it was forge his father’s signature.
When Ruben actually committed the deed it was later, much later. He set his bedside Casio alarm clock for 2:30 a.m. and accomplished the act properly, furtively, in the dead of night. He never forgot it: the motion of the pen, the feeling in his gut as he did the wicked deed.
Of course none of it would matter.
All this ticky-tacky childhood business? His schoolboy crush on Annelise, his fitful participation in the social life of Morningstar School, his expulsion from the Classical Poetry Confab and his cowardly dodge of the consequences…all were soon to be subsumed. All would serve in retrospect only as a signpost of how simple his life had once been, and how complicated and inexplicable and violent the world could turn out to be.
Soon Ruben’s small boyhood streams of anxiety would be overrun by larger, wilder rushes of adult worry. Soon Ruben would walk into the conference room at Shenk & Partners and find a man waiting for him there, a man with sun-bleached hair and a vacant surfer’s smile, with a sly and challenging gaze, radiating menace and sin.
But somehow, to young Ruben and to Ruben as he grew, it would always feel, all evidence to the contrary, that this was the moment that did it, this decision, to sign his father’s name on a piece of paper, that changed everything—this the ruining moment that toppled the universe.
Pr
obably it wasn’t so, but who can say for sure?
April 11, 2009
The restaurant was nice. You had to give that much to John Riggs, Esq.: the restaurant was really very nice.
Shenk crunched a breadstick. He sipped his sparkling water. He smiled. Shenk was not a classy person, he knew that, but he did consider himself a connoisseur of classiness, and the Beverly Hills lunch spot Riggs had chosen for their chat was classy all day long.
Shenk spread his napkin on his lap and opened the menu, which was only two pages, and not on any kind of embossed or laminated paper, just regular old typewritten paper, because they changed the dishes frequently to reflect seasonal vegetables, and they wanted you to know it. Shenk respected that kind of showmanship; he absolutely did. He also loved seasonal vegetables.
It was Shenk who’d reached out and suggested the get-together, but he’d allowed John Riggs to choose the venue. Tomasso’s for Fish, located a few blocks from the gold-and-glass office building in which Telemacher, Goldenstein plied their sorcerous arts, was a seafood mecca with fifty-dollar swordfish and high-back chairs and very bright lights so you could see how good-looking and expensively dressed were your fellow diners. White-clad waiters hustled from table to table, bending low with their pepper grinders and gracious smiles and endless iced-tea refills. From their back-corner banquette, Shenk had a clear sightline on a young TV star with five-day stubble and a carefully curated trucker hat. The hat, paired with an artfully distressed sleeveless T-shirt, was a bid for attention disguised as a bid for anonymity.
It was definitely Riggs’s turf, but Shenk considered the whole world to be his turf. There was no restaurant or club or corner of the city where he could not find a way to feel at home. Seated across from Riggs, eating on Riggs’s dime, he nevertheless wore the relaxed expression of host: “Well, listen,” he said, around a mouthful of delicious complimentary breadsticks, “thanks so much for coming.”
Riggs sipped his water. Their waiter, an older man with an undertaker’s fine attention to detail, took their orders and collected the menus and rushed away. Shenk, always a fan of people who were good at their jobs, watched him go admiringly.
“Swordfish, huh?” said Shenk to Riggs when the waiter was gone. “I don’t do bones, myself, with fish. Tiny bones.”
Riggs murmured something noncommittal and sipped his water. Shenk opened his mouth to make another comment about swordfish and Riggs said, “What is it you wanted to discuss?”
Shenk sighed. He would have done small talk forever. For years. Shenk loved small talk. But what the hell.
“Well. Here is the nub of it.” He tossed his tie over his shoulder with a jaunty pirate swoop, billowed his napkin out across his lap. “I think we can both agree that this case is not going to make it all the way to trial.”
“Oh?” Riggs’s pudding face shifted into a moue of surprise. “Can we?”
“I think we can, yes. For one thing, Cates will knock our heads together like Moe and Curly if we don’t find a way to settle. Right? So—hey, don’t look now, but I think Jay-Z is here. I said don’t look.”
Riggs hadn’t looked. He kept his eyes steady on Shenk, his face a poker player’s ungiving mask.
“Number two is the matter of cost. As you were so eager to inform the judge, whatever this kid’s got is one of a kind. I believe the Latin term is sui generis?” Shenk gave a provocative shrug. “And whatever else that means, it means that once we start calling experts to sort it out, it’s gonna get expensive fast for your friends over at Wellbridge Insurance Group. Yes? No?” He studied Riggs’s face for reaction, and, getting none, he sighed. “Anyhow.”
Shenk held up a finger, took a sip of his seltzer. The truth, of course, was that it was his own finances that concerned him. He would never share this anxiety with John Riggs, any more than he would have shared it with Ruben, but the sooner he could get this thing in the rearview mirror the better, given the steadily increasing toll Keener was taking on his pocketbook. He was paying extra hours to Darla in the office; he had paid a small fortune to Ira Liptack in the fruitless effort to find a decent expert; he was paying a soulless forensic CPA named Joanie Capra to draw up a lifetime care plan; he was filling up the tank of the Prius three times a week schlepping to depositions. His document costs alone, all that photocopying, was gonna run him into the tens of thousands. This was all before the lost-opportunity cost, all the cases he wasn’t taking in the meantime.
And if they nosed closer to trial? If he had to fork out for an expert like Theresa Pileggi—or, even better, an expert who could actually do the job? Forget about it.
He crunched another breadstick and wagged the stump end at opposing counsel.
“The other thing, about my victim, with this sui generis condition of his, is that a jury is going to find him rather compelling. Can we stipulate that?” Shenk waited, but Riggs said nothing. “I’m in the jury, and I hear about this kid? I see video of this kid—which, by the way, I’ve got plenty of video—well, look, I don’t want to give money to this kid’s family. I want to throw it at them. I want to dump it on their heads from a bucket. Right?”
Riggs adjusted his napkin in his lap.
“And listen, I like your doctor—Catanzaro, right?—he seems like a stand-up fella, maybe he likes his wine, but anyway, I showed the CT scan to seven different hotshot neurosurgeons, and they all agreed that your guy was crazy to cut the kid open. They say the prudent course was to put in the EVD, let the hematoma resolve itself.”
Riggs furrowed his brow, made something approximating a facial expression. “I have experts who will say otherwise.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Shenk’s grin widened. “But I also got a professor at Riverside says it’s a dead cinch Catanzaro crossed two wires in Wesley’s cerebral cortex.” Shenk was bluffing his way through Pileggi’s theory here, but what the hell? He’d also invented six of the seven hotshot neurosurgeons.
Riggs frowned. “I don’t see how that can be proven.”
“Listen, this is my point!” said Shenk cheerfully. “You put your guys up, I put my guys up, the jury doesn’t know what to think! The safe move for both of us, I would think, is to find a nice middle ground together. Today. Ah! Good! Our food!”
Shenk rubbed his hands together at the sight of his massive crab salad. Riggs, for a long moment, and with solemn dignity, palpated his swordfish in search of bones. “You have, I presume, a number in mind.”
Shenk grinned. “As it happens, I do.”
Jay had, once or twice in his career, actually done the whole movie-lawyer business of writing a figure on a napkin, sliding it facedown across the table. He did not peg Riggs for the kind of lawyer to participate in that tradition.
“Four point five,” he said, and Riggs said “No.”
Just like that. Riggs batted away the offer like a Wiffle ball. Then he set to slicing his fish into morsels, as if to make his food so small he wouldn’t have to taste it.
“I don’t know how this works in Beverly Hills,” said Shenk, “but where I come from, the song is played—offer, counteroffer, offer, counteroffer—till everyone sings together in the chorus.”
“My clients are blameless in this matter.”
“Oh!” said Shenk. “They are? Why didn’t you say so?”
Shenk held up a finger again, and then pulled a small bit of shell from the tip of his tongue, deposited it primly on the rim of his plate.
“I understand how outraged the hospital must feel to be dealing with all this, with them being entirely blameless. But see, my clients, they have a boy who’s been turned into a lump of clay.”
Riggs’s hands moved, conceding the sad reality, as Shenk went further. “But who, at the same time, and this is the interesting part, is not dead. Who shows every sign of living a long life, as they say, although obviously not a long and full life. We’re talking about a young man who had tremendous potential. His test scores were tremendous. His grades were off the charts. All signs pointing to co
llege, probably to grad school, and on from there to a richly rewarding career. Maybe a lawyer? Or then again maybe something respectable.” Shenk paused, smiled, plunged forward. “And he was an athlete too, apparently a heck of an athlete. A wrestler, I think? And he played guitar. Just a lot going on. A lot that was lost.”
Riggs stopped chewing and stared dyspeptically at Shenk. He was beginning to sense the argument Shenk was marshaling here.
One of the problems with doing malpractice law in the great State of California was that the most one could recover for pain and suffering was $250,000, which was—in the grand scheme of things—not a whole heck of a lot, especially after your lawyer takes his (well-deserved!) cut. But what you can add to that, what indeed you have to add, if you’re going to make the numbers work, is a claim for medical costs: pain and suffering plus whatever it’s gonna cost to keep him stable in the precarious state to which your client’s malfeasance has consigned him. That’s what Shenk was paying Joanie Capra to figure out. But he was also paying a clever devil named Smithy Greene—God, what a payroll he had going on this thing—to work up a lost-earnings memo, to put all of Wesley Keener’s possible futures into a handsome binder full of charts, determine what each might earn him, take the average of all those hypotheticals, and add it to the balance due from Valley Village for having cut short all the potential paths. Of course, a claim for economic damages was pretty ballsy, when you’re talking about a fourteen-year-old child. But that was Shenk for you. That was Shenk in a nutshell.
Riggs took a bite of his fish.
“So,” said Shenk, “having said all of that, I think you’ll agree, and I think your clients will too, if you ask them, that if we were to go down to four point one million dollars, that would be a very generous concession.”
“No.”
“No. No what?”
“No. We will not be settling.”
“Why not?”
“I already told you. You can dance around your lack of a case, if you’d like, and you can even claim economic damages for a minor child, but it is our intention to put this matter before a jury.”
The Quiet Boy Page 14
