“My wife died of it.”
“Of cancer?”
“Never smoked, but she got it anyway.”
“Oh. Oh shit.”
“So I’m a little crazy on the subject.”
Looking at her sideways, Shenk could see appropriate words and phrases tumbling around in Pileggi’s head, trying to find purchase. She was really very young. Accomplished and composed, but young.
“It’s OK,” he told her. “Everybody goes sometime. How’s that for science?”
She let the half-smoked cigarette go. It tumbled end over end and disappeared into the black of the asphalt below. Shenk smiled faintly, watching it fall.
“And what about you?” he said.
“Sorry?”
“A family, Dr. Pileggi? Do you have parents, or did you emerge fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus?”
“No, no,” she said, as if the question had been serious. “I have a mother. In Indiana. That’s where I’m from.”
“Indiana?”
“Have you been?”
“No. Do they have Jews there? It might be awkward.”
When Pileggi smiled her face was a thousand times less severe; there was a charmingly dorky high school nerd in there still, sharing space with the abrasive adult genius.
He turned half toward her, leaned one elbow on the flimsy steel railing.
“OK. So we were born in Indiana. Is this Bloomington?”
“Indianapolis.”
“Do we have siblings?”
“No.”
“And no husband? No children?” She looked alarmed. Shenk laughed. “OK, just the parents, then.” A beat of silence, Shenk waiting for more, finally giving her a little push—“Let’s do school now,” he said. “Public? Private? Oh wait—Catholic? I bet Catholic.”
But Shenk had misread the moment. He had pushed it too far, and Pileggi had become suspicious.
“What are we doing?” she said. “How is all of this relevant?”
“To tell you the truth, Theresa? Is that OK, I call you Theresa?”
She shrugged, allowing it, and Shenk couldn’t help but feel he had won an enormous concession.
“I need you to be a full human person up there. If you’re on the witness stand just doing a dry recitation, from your article, then I might as well just bring the article. Save myself whatever I’m paying you.” Stop talking about money, Jay. Stop it. For Christ’s sake. “For this to work, they need to trust you, and for them to trust you, they need to like you. With my apologies to Gloria Steinem, you need to be likable. So I am searching out your soul, my friend, so I can see it and make sure the jury sees it, too.”
Pileggi turned this over. Ugly yellow lamplight bouncing off her glasses, protecting her eyes from being seen. The silver Corolla Shenk had seen idling suddenly lurched out into the lane, disappeared down Palms.
Finally: “Well, one thing about my mom. She loves this kind of stuff.”
Shenk felt a trill of happiness, deep in his heart. He leaned closer. “What kind of stuff?”
“Legal stuff. The law. She watches all those shows, you know?”
“Like what? Like Law and Order?”
“Oh yeah. Law and Order, JAG, all of those. She used to love LA Law.”
“Oh, sure. Marilyn loved that one. My wife. We never missed it. Corbin Bernsen. I was never a jealous husband, but my goodness the way Marilyn looked at Corbin Bernsen.”
“I don’t know who that is,” said Pileggi. Shenk moved on.
“She’d dig this, I bet. Right? You being an expert witness and all?”
“Oh, yeah. Yes.”
“You tell her about it?”
“Not yet,” said Pileggi, frowning a little.
“You got to.”
“I will.”
Shenk nodded, smiling softly. There it is, he thought. One thing Shenk knew, one thing he had learned, was that people do things for reasons: They don’t always know them, and they’re not always clear, but the reasons are always down there somewhere. I’m paying her all this damn money, and she’s doing it so her mother can see something in her she can understand. Something to feel proud of.
“And what about your father?”
A long pause. Pileggi studied the darkness of the parking lot, her lips drawn tight. “He’s dead.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Shenk. “Was that when you were young?”
Pileggi paused, and then she said, very quietly, “Not young enough.”
She made this small joke without a smile. And Shenk understood that her air of steadiness, her near-robotic calm, required near-constant maintenance. There was a whole system in there, fortifications and battlements.
He looked at her now and she looked back and held his gaze, and a savage nighttime history was clear in her eyes. A girl who was trapped, a monster seething inside a man. Shenk could see it and he could feel it, and he could see and feel his imperfect witness in a way he had not seen her before, not really seen anyone in a damn long time. Jay was well aware that his specialty was not in seeing people as people, per se, because he tended to see them and slot them into roles, useful or not useful, smart or not smart, client or civilian, friend or foe. But here before his eyes, in the streetlight silence, he was seeing Theresa Pileggi in three dimensions—or even in four, actually, her past trailing luminescent in the air around her. The darkness from which she had emerged made into visible light.
Just being totally honest here, he was still pretty sure she was going to be a terrible witness. But he knew he would never meet another person like her.
“Let’s get back to work,” she said.
“Yes. Yeah. This is good, though.”
“What is?”
“Me learning about you. As I said—now I can put you up there and show the jury you’re an actual human being. With a soul and all.”
As if leery of the accusation, Pileggi pivoted from the topic. “Surely it’s more important that I’m right,” she said. “About this patient. And in that I am a hundred percent confident.”
“Oh, I know,” said Shenk. “Listen, your confidence is great. Your confidence I do not worry about.”
That whole sentence he would turn over, later. Among a few other key moments, decisions, stray phrases, which he would carry with him forever like rocks picked up off a path. Clacking together in his pockets and making holes in the fabric.
“Actually, you know what?” said Jay. “It’s late. I’m gonna let you go, and we can pick this up tomorrow. Is that OK?”
“You’re paying me by the hour,” said Pileggi. “So it’s up to you.”
Affection, like everything else, has complicated chemical origins. It is not an intangible force; it rises from neuronal pathways and chemical combinations and recombinations, forming itself from itself, molecules reaching out to other molecules. Dopamine in the hypothalamus, epinephrine flooding the circuits.
That does not make affection less real, by the way, but more.
Poet’s love is a kind of bullshit, nothing made out of nothing, a figure drawn on the empty air by a tracing finger. But the scientist’s love can be broken down into its component parts, calculated and corrected, expressed in formulae.
Give me the love that can be written on a chalkboard, if you’ve got a chalkboard big enough.
February 5, 2019
“Oh God, Rubie,” Shenk cried out. “Rubie! I been calling.”
“Listen—”
“I thought you were dead.”
“No. Listen.”
Shenk was in the chaos and noise of the hallway, trying to hear, outside Judge Scanlon’s courtroom. A finger jammed in the opposite ear. The line was crackling. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. I’m in Alaska.”
“You’re—what?”
Shenk circled in search of a quiet corner. He crouched by a bench, ignoring the sullen look of a teenager in baggy jeans, down here also, plugging in his phone.
“I’m trying to figure it out, Dad. I’
m following her trail.”
“Ruben, baby—”
“Pileggi was here, here in Alaska, before she came to LA. She came to LA to kill Rich. I was right. He shot her in self-defense.”
Against this baffling tide of information, Shenk stood up and braced himself against the wall. He was the one who was supposed to be in charge. He was supposed to be the lawyer. “Can you prove it?”
“What?”
If Ruben was talking, Jay couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t hear anything. Shenk cursed, walked to the other side of the corridor, searching for a clear signal. He passed a row of people, standing against the wall as if in a police lineup, a snaggletoothed old lady with her arms crossed and her middle-aged daughter, bent over and weeping into her forearms, and here’s the granddaughter, with tattoos up both arms, clutching the handle of a stroller, little baby in there wailing and waving her fists.
Shenk jammed the finger back in his ear to block it out, to block all of it out.
“Ruben?
“Ruben?
“Ruben? Sweetheart? Are you there?”
It all felt like a dream.
The sun had come up that day like every other day in her life, like every other day of her marriage. Beth Keener had been up. She’d watched it rise. Coffee, clothes, the car, all of it vivid and real.
But now, downtown, in the courtroom of the Honorable Judge Scanlon, nothing was clear. The fog that had come over her, off and on for a decade, had swallowed her today almost completely, and whether this was confusion or mercy, she felt on this day like she did not entirely exist. She was beamed in, watching a hologram, or maybe she was the hologram. Inside the dream, watching not people but flickering weird visions from another world.
Like Jay Shenk, staggering in from the hallway, haggard and uncertain, clutching a file against his chest as if it were some thin plate of armor. The file said KEENER on it, in crooked black Sharpie-marker letters, and Beth blinked at it, groping for the meaning of the word.
Then the sheriff’s deputies brought in the man of the hour, all in orange, manacled at hands and feet. All the fury Beth had felt yesterday toward her husband had flared down and was now just an ember, a pilot light in her gut. She looked at him as if from a distance. A thousand miles, a hundred years. It was what it was. What it was always going to be.
Judge Scanlon came in and the world was asked to rise, and Beth rose.
Why had all of it happened, and what would she do? There were all these answers that Beth Keener would never get.
“OK. Good morning.” Judge Scanlon licked her lips, once, and looked quickly around the courtroom, rapid and lizardly, just a quick scan to make sure everybody who was supposed to be there was there. “Everybody ready?”
“I’m actually, uh—no, I’m not. Sorry.”
“That was rhetorical, Mr. Shenk.”
“Yeah, no, I know. Listen, though—”
“Ready, Mr. Thomas?”
Mr. Thomas, the handsome Black prosecutor, was born ready. He rose, nodded, pronounced the State of California ready indeed, and sat again.
“Good. The State is here, the defendant is here.”
Richard was just behind and beside Shenk, staring straight ahead, a statue of a man.
Shenk stood up and cleared his throat and raised one hand, cringing somewhat, as if apologizing in advance for what he was about to say. He was distracted. He didn’t know what had happened to Ruben. Ruben was in Alaska?
“Your Honor.”
“What, Mr. Shenk?” Scanlon’s sour face got sourer still. “What do you need?”
“Well, can I come talk to you for just one sec, before we get going?”
Shenk came out from behind the little table where he had been planted, and the bailiff stepped toward him, alarmed.
“Hey. Whoa. Slow.” Judge Scanlon held up her hands. “You say, ‘Permission to approach the bench.’”
“Permission to approach the bench.”
“Denied.”
Shenk flinched, and Thomas for the State, over at his table, made a low clucking noise that may or may not have been a laugh. They had to know each other well, the judge and the State: Shenk had parachuted into this world they lived in together, and they must think of him as a dilettante, if not an ignoramus, and he wasn’t exactly proving them wrong. Shenk felt utterly lost in this unfamiliar universe of the criminal courts. He couldn’t bend reality to his will in here, couldn’t shape the air around him. He felt like a cursed wizard, stripped of the source of his powers.
Richard Keener stood staring straight ahead, saying nothing, though Jay was sure that behind his silence, his client was enjoying the hell out of his discomfort and disorientation. Could he have killed someone simply for the dark pleasure of seeing Jay Shenk make an ass of himself?
Beth was somewhere in the courtroom, a tattered and spectral figure.
“Judge. Please.” He raised his hand again, and then raised the other one, so he had both in the air, a surrendering bandit. If she wouldn’t let him approach the bench, he’d just have to lob his appeal over the wall. “I’ve had some new information. Or—well, it’s hard to explain.” He cleared his throat. He tried to smile and failed and stopped trying. “I am hoping there’s some mechanism I might exercise, which could postpone today’s sentencing.”
Scanlon scowled. “We’ve been over this.”
“Right, except I’ve got some new information.”
“You said.”
“Your Honor?” Mr. Thomas at the State’s table shot up, already talking. “If the defense has evidence it has not shared—”
“Yes, yes,” said the judge, talking over and around Thomas, who finished his sentence, “—we have the right to examine it,” even as she finished it for him, “you’ll get to see it,” the two of them overlapping, as if the docket was so stuffed in here that everybody had to talk at the same time, in the name of efficiency.
Shenk watched the two of them, helpless, like he was watching a tennis match, until Scanlon pointed at him—“So? What is it?”—and he had to concede that there was no new evidence, not really. “It’s just that there may be something on the way.”
“What sort of something?”
“I have an investigator in the field, Your Honor, and you see I’ve lost contact with him.” He held up his phone to the judge, as if the fact that Ruben wasn’t on it, right now talking to him, proved his point.
“Your Honor.” Thomas, his indignation pulling him up out of his chair again, even as Judge Scanlon waved him impatiently back down: sit, sit, it’s not necessary.
“Mr. Shenk. Your job today is to provide the court with any mitigating factors we might consider in sentencing Mr. Keener. Not to present new evidence. And definitely not to raise the possibility of evidence that you haven’t seen, and which may or may not exist.”
“Yeah, no, I know. But, see, my son—”
“Your son?”
“Yeah, he’s…my son is also my investigator. And vice versa. And, see, he, uh—he was going to—I think he said Alaska—but I haven’t been able to reach him…but his, uh, what he was thinking was…” Shenk had wandered into a bramble. It would be useless to say anything about Ruben’s theory, about self-defense, until he could make the whole presentation, all together, when Ruben came back.
In the corner of his eye, Mr. Thomas for the State of California was looking down, studying his hands.
“Honestly, Your Honor.” Shenk blinked helplessly up at Judge Scanlon. “I would only ask for a brief delay.”
Scanlon hissed. “Does your client want this delay?”
Shenk shot a quick look at Richard Keener. The prisoner waited a moment, and then without looking at Shenk he shook his head.
“For the record, please,” said Scanlon.
“Let’s go,” said Rich. “Let’s fucking get to it.”
Mr. Thomas smiled at his hands. Judge Scanlon made a low, frosty chuckle.
“Let the record reflect that the defendant would like to
fucking get to it.”
Twenty minutes later, it was over.
Shenk came out of the courtroom and headed for the elevator bank. All he wanted was to get out onto Hill Street so he could try calling Ruben again. What the hell had happened to the kid? If anything had happened to him—
Someone took his arm.
“Jay?”
Beth’s hair was a wild mess. She looked colorless and confused. She looked like a drawing of herself, faint pencil lines, half-erased.
“What now?” she said.
“What do you mean?” said Shenk. He didn’t feel like having this conversation. He couldn’t bear it. “He was sentenced to death. He goes to prison. Eventually, he’ll be executed.” He rubbed his forehead with his palm. “I don’t know when. A long time from now. I don’t know. Who knows?”
He looked up, and Beth was blinking back at him.
“But…”
“But what?”
“Can we appeal?”
“Beth? He pled guilty. I told you there was nothing I could do, and guess what, I was right. OK? Now are you satisfied?”
“No,” said Beth. Very quietly. Almost inaudible in the chaotic noise of the hallway. “No.”
“Well, look,” said Shenk, and jammed his hands in his pockets, and turned to go. “You wanna explore more options, knock yourself out. But you’re gonna need to get another lawyer.”
April 8, 2010
Ruben had presumed all along that he’d get to attend every day of the trial, but Shenk at the last minute had changed his mind. No doubt he’d heard Marilyn in his ear reminding him that this was April, for heaven’s sake, and you’re not gonna yank the kid out of school in the middle of the semester. Finally Ruben and Jay and the memory of Marilyn had come to an accommodation, and Ruben had been permitted to choose three days, over the course of the trial, as long as it wouldn’t mean missing any tests or anything.
As a minor child he was not permitted to sit at the plaintiff’s table, but he set up right behind it, attached to but not officially of the Shenk & Partners delegation, in his white dress shirt and navy blazer with gold buttons, a notepad balanced on his lap. In the morning Jay would be presenting a man named Dr. Douglas Cudley, a pudgy workhorse of a hired gun, whom he had contracted at a bargain-basement price to give the jury an Idiot’s Guide to CT scans. The afternoon would be given over to the main event: the appearance of Dr. Catanzaro.
The Quiet Boy Page 30
