Wrongful Termination

by Mike Farris

“It wasn’t an incident, Mr. Malloy. It was a fuckin’ ambush.”

  “Ms. Napoli, I object to your language,” Szulc said.

  “That’s how she got those scars on her face,” Robin said, ignoring the objection. “Did you know that, Mr. Malloy?”

  Tripp cleared his throat. “I assumed so.”

  “And that’s why she walks with those crutches. Did you know that?”

  “I assumed that, too.”

  “Look at her face, Mr. Malloy.”

  Tripp again glanced at Meg quickly, then looked away.

  “Ugly scars, aren’t they, Mr. Malloy?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Three bullets in the face will do that.”

  “Are you going somewhere with all this?” Szulc asked.

  “Mr. Malloy knows where I’m going, don’t you, Mr. Malloy?”

  Tripp still didn’t answer.

  “And I think you do, too, Mr. Szulc. But give me a few minutes and I can make it clear for those of you who aren’t quite with us, yet. I might even draw you a picture.”

  “Make your point and move on,” Szulc said.

  “Did you know that the description of the car involved in the carjacking with Ms. Kelly matches the car that Ramon Flores was riding in when he tried to carjack me?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think there might be some connection there? Like your calling Ricardo Flores and his calling his grandson before each carjacking?”

  “I don’t like what you’re implying, Counselor,” Szulc said.

  “I don’t care what you like, Mr. Szulc. If you’ve got an objection, then make it. Otherwise, shut up and let me conduct my examination.”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Szulc, I shouldn’t have said that.” She dipped her head in a mock bow. “I apologize.”

  Szulc glared at her and said nothing.

  “Mr. Malloy, do you have an explanation for why your phone records show you placed a call to Mr. Flores on the same morning that Ms. Kelly was carjacked?”

  “Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence,” Szulc said.

  “And do you have an explanation why that very same day, right after your call to him, Mr. Flores placed a call to Ramon Flores’s number?”

  “Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.”

  “No,” Tripp said.

  “Mr. Malloy, did you try to have Meg Kelly killed?”

  “Don’t answer that, Tripp,” Szulc said. He placed his hand on Tripp’s forearm.

  Tripp looked away.

  “Look at her, Mr. Malloy. Look at Meg. Did you try to have her killed?”

  Szulc slammed his fist on the table. “That’s enough, Ms. Napoli.”

  Robin grabbed Meg’s chin and turned the left side of her face toward Tripp. Three ugly scars in a triangular pattern marred her otherwise pretty face.

  “Look at her,” Robin yelled. “Look at her. Look at her face. Look at those scars.”

  All hell seemed to break loose in the conference room. Meg began to cry. The lawyers began to talk at once, yelling to be heard over each other. Steve Szulc jumped to his feet and screamed at Robin across the table. “This deposition is over.”

  Robin ignored them all. “Mr. Malloy, I’m waiting for your answer.”

  “Don’t answer, Tripp,” Szulc said.

  Meg stared at Tripp, her chin still in Robin’s hand, her scars turned toward him. All the color had drained from her face. Tears streamed.

  Robin let go of Meg’s chin, stood, and grabbed her chair by the back. She rolled it around the end of the table, behind the court reporter, right up to Tripp’s chair.

  “Look at her, Mr. Malloy,” Robin screamed.

  Tripp hunched his shoulders, dropped his head, and stared at the floor.

  “No,” Szulc screamed. He pounded his fist repeatedly on the table. “Stop it right now.”

  Robin grabbed Tripp’s chin and jerked his head upward, forcing him to look at Meg, their faces no more than a foot apart. Szulc grabbed Robin’s hand, trying to force her to loosen her grip, but she was too strong for him.

  “Look at her, Mr. Malloy,” Robin screamed. She leaned over, right in his ear. “Look at her.”

  Tripp stared at Meg.

  “Did you do that, Mr. Malloy? Huh? Did you do that to her?”

  Tripp squeezed his eyes shut. He opened his mouth to speak, and the room suddenly fell silent. Everybody listened as Tripp spoke softly.

  “I decline to answer and assert my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

  “Mr. Malloy, did you try to have me killed?” Robin asked, her own voice now softer.

  “I decline to answer and assert my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

  A subdued Steve Szulc stood. “Ms. Napoli, I think this deposition is over.”

  “Yes, Mr. Szulc,” Robin said. “I suspect it is.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  I had stayed away from the office during the deposition. I assumed I would be fed a sanitized version from my partners, given my conduct in aiding and abetting the enemy. I wanted to hear the truth first, so I planned to head over to Robin’s that evening. In fact, I was en route when Robin called and headed me off, asking to meet me at Jeffrey’s east Dallas apartment, instead.

  When I got there, she was waiting in the parking lot. She looked grim, maybe even a little frightened.

  “How’s Meg?” I asked.

  “She’s worn out. She was asleep when I left her. One of my investigators is sitting out front in his car until we get there.”

  “So what’s the deal here?”

  “I had a phone message from Jeffrey telling me the computer shut him down. He figures maybe someone flagged the account after I had my friend at Fort Hood try to get in, and it shut down when he started messing with it. If that’s the case, someone knows we’re looking.”

  “So what’s he say?”

  “That’s why we’re here,” she said. “He’s not answering his phone, and that’s not like him. Fifteen minutes away from his computer and he starts gasping for air.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Robin led the way up the stairwell out front then down a long passageway to the rear of the complex, where she stopped in front of a corner unit. I stood at her shoulder while she knocked. We waited, but there was no answer. She knocked again then I tried the door. It was unlocked.

  Stepping in front of her, I opened the door and eased my bulk inside. She followed close behind, cell phone out, finger on the 9-1-1 speed dial key.

  The apartment reminded me of what my temporary apartment had looked like right after I separated from Alyssa. Sparse, sterile—unlived in. The only signs of life were computer magazines stacked in a corner and an open package of graham crackers on the coffee table.

  We crossed the living area and entered a short hallway that led to the bedroom. And that’s where we found him.

  Robin hit the speed dial.

  *

  The police arrived within five minutes while we waited outside, not wanting to disturb what was obviously a crime scene. After giving our statements, we sat in my Cherokee, reminiscent of the night Robin had been attacked, and tried to sort everything out.

  “At least we know it wasn’t Tripp,” Robin said. “He was with me all day.”

  “Yeah, but someone else is cleaning up his mess.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Go home and stay with Meg. I’ve got a little visiting to do.”

  *

  I had never been to Tripp’s house and really didn’t want to be there that day, but I had a message to deliver. I parked in front then crossed the yard. A large rock patio curved around the entry, which flanked a huge wooden door. Stained glass graced its center. Light from inside sparkled, refracted by the glass. I rang the doorbell and waited.

  Janie, Tripp’s wife, answered the door. An elegant woman, she wore a velour jogging suit
. A silk scarf around her bald head, along with pale, gaunt features, marked her as a cancer patient. I was shocked at her appearance. The last I had heard, she was in remission, but that was obviously no longer the case.

  “Bay, I didn’t know you were coming by,” she said. “How nice to see you.”

  “Janie. How are you feeling?”

  “This is one of my better days.” She smiled, and just for an instant she was again the Highland Park society wife I remembered.

  “Is Tripp in?”

  “I think he’s in his study. Come on in.”

  When I entered, I found myself standing in a large foyer with polished oak floors. An antique coatrack with ornate mirrors graced one wall, a matching antique library table on the other. Above my head, a crystal chandelier hung precariously low, suspended from a two-story ceiling by fifteen feet of chain and cord. Ahead, and to my right, a grand staircase ascended to the second floor. Thick carpet ran down the middle, leaving polished oak exposed on either side. The hand-carved banister attested to its own luxury by the care with which it had been carved and polished. I could see how it might be painful to Tripp to give this up.

  Janie and I chatted as she led me into the house. She obviously knew nothing about my quarrel with her husband—she didn’t know I was the enemy—and I wasn’t going to bring it up. That was one more worry she didn’t need.

  We entered a great room that looked about half the length of a football field. Artwork of every style covered the paneled walls. As in the foyer, polished oak floors stretched the length of the room, covered by a series of Persian rugs. On the outer wall, at about the twenty-yard line, a rock-faced fireplace climbed the wall. A pitiful fire burned in it, badly in need of more wood and a little stoking.

  I followed Janie to the far end of the room, where we entered a wide hallway. There we encountered Berber carpet instead of the signature hardwood floors we had left behind. At the end of the hallway we reached a closed door. Janie opened it without invitation and I followed her inside.

  Floor-to-ceiling, built-in bookcases lined both walls, leading to the focal point opposite the door. A fire crackled in a small fireplace in the corner while a visibly drunk Tripp sat at his desk, his back to a huge window, an open laptop on the desk in front of him. His hair was uncombed. He wore wrinkled clothes, and his eyes were rimmed with red. A bruise on his cheek resembled knuckle prints, but not mine. An empty whiskey bottle sat on the desk next to a half-full glass. From elsewhere in the house, I heard sounds of a television, the noise of canned laughter.

  “Tripp,” Janie said in an almost reverential tone, “Bay wants to see you.”

  I sat in a chair across from Tripp. He ignored me, looking instead at his wife. Janie closed the door on her way out, leaving the two of us alone.

  I pointed to the bruise on his cheek. “Who else did you piss off?”

  He rubbed the bruise gently then shook his head. He closed the laptop, took it off the desk, and put it in a drawer.

  “Is that how you get your assignments? E-mail? A special website on the Internet? Some secret signal?”

  He said nothing, just stared at me.

  “How does it work?” I asked. “I haven’t figured that part out yet. You dummy up bills to cover your trips on assignments…then what? Why don’t the clients complain?”

  “Bill Patterson did. Or have you forgotten about that?”

  “But why don’t the rest of them?”

  “Because I do a damn good job for them.”

  I met his gaze evenly, hoping to see some sign of humanity. Instead, his eyes were a passageway to perdition.

  “You kill people.”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “Who kills people.”

  “You can’t prove that.”

  “I hear confession’s good for the soul.”

  He grabbed the glass from the desk, emptied it down his throat, then set it back down. “Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that you’re right. What makes you think I’d ever tell you anything?”

  “It’s all going to be out in the open now, anyway.”

  “Then, again assuming you’re right, what makes you think I’ll live long enough to say anything?”

  I studied Tripp’s face as I would that of a witness in a courtroom. He glared at me, his eyes unable to focus in his stupor.

  “What do you want, Muckleroy?”

  “Guilt will just about eat you alive, won’t it, Tripp? That and fear. Not knowing what the police know. Not knowing what they’ve been told.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Drinking won’t make it go away.”

  “Why are you doing this to me, Muckleroy?”

  “You did it to yourself.”

  “You’re the one who should feel guilty, not me,” he said. “I’m not the one trying to destroy my own law firm. I’m not the one trying to put my partners in prison.”

  Tripp gripped the whiskey glass tightly then suddenly threw it at me. I leaned to one side, and it flew harmlessly past, bouncing off the carpet and skidding to the door.

  “I can’t go to prison, Muckleroy. I’ve got a family. Two kids in high school, one in college. A wife. They depend on me.” He paused, choking on emotion. “What’s gonna happen to Janie? Who’s going to take care of her?”

  I didn’t have a good answer, but that didn’t excuse what Tripp had done.

  “Just who the hell gave you the right to be so judgmental?” he asked. “You’re not God, Muckleroy. It’s not up to you to decide who’s right and who’s wrong. You and your holier-than-thou, sanctimonious bullshit can go straight to hell.”

  “You’re not God either, Tripp. You don’t decide who lives and who dies. You don’t decide who stays and who goes. You don’t decide whose lives get ruined.”

  He laughed, the sound a drunken guffaw. “Hell, we all decided, Muckleroy.”

  I flopped back in my chair, stunned. He continued to stare at me, his face etched with anguish.

  “Then you’ll have to live with it, Tripp. God forgive you, because I can’t.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  That night, Robin went to a meeting with another client, leaving Meg and me alone in her house. We sat in the den, Meg dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, in a rocking chair, and me on the couch. I listened without asking questions as Meg told her story of Tripp’s deposition earlier that day. And she told it with relish, unable to keep a lopsided smile off her face.

  When she finished, we sat silently for a few minutes, digesting all that had happened. Meg rocked slowly.

  At last she said, “Do you really think Tripp tried to have me killed?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  She nodded, rocking ever so slightly. The thought sobered us both.

  “You know,” she said, tears forming in her eyes, “I wouldn’t have done anything any differently if I could do it over. Even if I’d known this was all going to happen.”

  “I know you wouldn’t. It’s one of the things I like about you…integrity.”

  She smiled, her eyes glistening. “What’s going to happen to the firm?”

  “My guess is they’ll try to pin everything on Tripp.”

  She paused, still rocking. She had a way of talking without ever saying how she really felt. I wanted to know, just as I wanted her to know how I felt. But I was too afraid to say anything.

  “The vote on you is Thursday night, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you heard how people are going to vote?”

  I shook my head. “I still think I have the women on my side. Some of my closer friends…and I really don’t have many anymore…are with me, but that only gives me about twenty percent for sure.”

  Meg got up. Dragging her bad leg behind her, she shuffled to the couch. She put her arms around me and pulled me close.

  “I used to have a lot of friends at the firm,” I said, “but over the years so many of them have left. Then you left.
”

  “I haven’t gone anywhere.”

  “Sometimes you seem a little distant.”

  She shook her head. “I come from a family that’s not real good about talking about our feelings, so it doesn’t come easy for me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

  I held her eyes with mine. Hers had filled with tears. Had I heard right?

  “What?”

  “I love you,” she said.

  My heart melted. “I love you, too,” I said. “I have for a long time.”

  “You have?”

  I nodded.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I was afraid I’d scare you off.”

  “Oh, my God, Bay. It’s what I’ve been wanting to hear for what seems like forever.”

  “I did tell you while you were in your coma.”

  “I couldn’t hear you then.”

  “But you can hear me now, can’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I like the way it sounds.”

  She smiled, then took her arm from around my shoulders and turned her back to me. “Now that we’ve got that settled, how about one of your famous backrubs? I’ve missed those.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  If I never attended another partners’ meeting, it would still be too soon. Of course, the possibility existed that, after Thursday night, I would never attend another one at Black West.

  The annual partner election was always one of the few meetings with nearly one hundred percent attendance. Partners arranged their schedules around the meeting, knowing that it took a seventy-five percent vote to make an associate a new partner. If a partner was absent, that was tantamount to a “no” vote. Even if a vote on a particular night was unanimous in favor of a particular associate, if less than seventy-five percent of the ownership was present, the associate would fail to become a new partner.

  As an added attraction, this year’s meeting offered the bonus of trying to kick me out. In my years with the firm, we had taken such a vote once, four years earlier. That was the only time it had happened in the firm’s fifty-seven-year history. It involved a successful vote to expel a partner who was indicted for stealing client funds from a trust. When that partner refused to voluntarily withdraw, the partners voted to expel him. What amazed me then was that twenty percent opposed his expulsion. In hindsight, I wondered if the real amazement should have been that no more than twenty percent opposed expulsion. I figured that put those who opposed expulsion then squarely opposite me in the vote Thursday night. Anyone who would vote to keep a partner who had been indicted would surely vote to expel a partner who had blown the whistle on criminal acts. Apparently it was worse to expose misconduct than to engage in it.