by John Grisham
disappeared from the office, and left Montgomery to inspect the spartan furnishings. The only decoration was a collection of enlarged photos of Indian children on the walls.
Trill was a different person when he returned, stiff and unsmiling and uncooperative. “I’m sorry, Mr. Montgomery,” he said without sitting. “We will not be able to help you.”
“Is she in Brazil?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Bolivia?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Does she even exist?”
“I can’t answer your questions.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Could I speak to your boss or supervisor?”
“Sure.”
“Where is he?”
“In heaven.”
________
AFTER A dinner of thick steaks in mushroom sauce, Josh Stafford and Tip Durban retired to the den, where a fire roared. A different butler, a Mexican in a white jacket and starched jeans, served them very old single-malt Scotch from Mr. Phelan’s cabinet. Cuban cigars were ordered. Pavarotti sang Christmas songs on a distant stereo.
“I have an idea,” Josh said as he watched the fire. “We have to send someone to find Rachel Lane, right?”
Tip was in the midst of a lengthy draw from his cigar, so he only nodded.
“And we can’t just send anyone. It has to be a lawyer; someone who can explain the legal issues. And it has to be someone from our firm because of confidentiality.”
His jaws filled with smoke, Tip kept nodding.
“So who do we send?”
Tip exhaled slowly, through both his mouth and his nose, and smoke boiled across his face and drifted upward. “How long will it take?” he finally asked.
“I don’t know, but it’s not a quick trip. Brazil’s a big country, almost as big as the lower forty-eight. And we’re talking jungles and mountains. These people are so remote they’ve never seen a car.”
“I’m not going.”
“We can hire local guides and such, but it still might take a week or so.”
“Don’t they have cannibals down there?”
“No.”
“Anacondas?”
“Relax, Tip. You’re not going.”
“Thanks.”
“But you see the problem, don’t you? We have sixty lawyers, all busy as hell and swamped with more work than we can possibly do. None of us can suddenly drop everything and go find this woman.”
“Send a paralegal.”
Josh didn’t like that idea. He sipped his Scotch and puffed his cigar and listened to the flames pop in the fireplace. “It has to be a lawyer,” he said, almost to himself.
The butler returned with fresh drinks. He inquired about dessert and coffee, but the guests already had what they wanted.
“What about Nate?” Josh asked when they were alone again.
It was obvious Josh had been thinking about Nate all along, and this slightly irritated Tip. “You kidding?” he said.
“No.”
They pondered the idea of sending Nate for a while, each working past their initial objections and fears. Nate O’Riley was a partner, a twenty-three-year man who was, at the moment, locked away in a rehab unit in the Blue Ridge Mountains west of D.C. In the past ten years, he had been a frequent visitor to rehab facilities, each time drying out, breaking habits, growing closer to a higher power, working on his tan and tennis game, and vowing to kick his addictions once and for all. And while he swore that each crash was the last one, the final descent to rock bottom, each was always followed by an even harder fall. Now, at the age of forty-eight, he was broke, twice divorced, and freshly indicted for income tax evasion. His future was anything but bright.
“He used to be an outdoor type, didn’t he?” Tip asked.
“Oh yeah. Scuba diving, rock climbing, all that crazy stuff. Then the slide began and he did nothing but work.”
The slide had begun in his mid-thirties, at about the time he put together an impressive string of large verdicts against negligent doctors. Nate O’Riley became a star in the medical malpractice game, and also began drinking heavily and using coke. He neglected his family and became obsessive about his addictions—big verdicts, booze, and drugs. He somehow balanced all three, but was always on the edge of disaster. Then he lost a case, and fell off the cliff for the first time. The firm hid him in a designer spa until he was sufficiently dried out, and he made an impressive comeback. The first of several.
“When does he get out?” Tip asked, no longer surprised by the idea and liking it more and more.
“Soon.”
But Nate had become a serious addict. He could stay clean for months, even years, but he always crashed. The chemicals ravaged his mind and body. His behavior became quite bizarre, and the rumors of his craziness crept through the firm and ultimately spread through the lawyers’ network of gossip.
Almost four months earlier, he had locked himself in a motel room with a bottle of rum and a sack of pills in what many of his colleagues viewed as a suicide attempt.
Josh committed him for the fourth time in ten years.
“It might be good for him,” Tip said. “You know, to get away for a while.”
SEVEN
_____________
ON THE third day after Mr. Phelan’s suicide, Hark Gettys arrived at his office before dawn, already tired but anxious for the day to begin. He’d had a late dinner with Rex Phelan, followed by a couple of hours in a bar, where they fretted over the will and plotted strategy. So his eyes were red and puffy and his head ached, but he was nonetheless moving quickly around the coffeepot.
Hark’s hourly rates varied. In the past year, he’d handled a nasty divorce for as little as two hundred dollars an hour. He quoted three-fifty to every prospective client, which was a bit low for such an ambitious D.C. lawyer, but if he got them in the door at three-fifty, he could certainly pad the billing and earn what he deserved. An Indonesian cement company had paid him four hundred and fifty an hour for a small matter, then tried to stiff him when the bill came. He had settled a wrongful death case in which he earned a third of three hundred and fifty thousand. So he was all over the board when it came to fees.
Hark was a litigator in a forty-lawyer firm, a second-tier outfit with a history of infighting and bickering which had hampered its growth, and he longed to open his own shop. Almost half of his annual billings went for the overhead; the way he figured it, the money belonged in his pocket.
At some point during the sleepless night, he’d made the decision to raise his rate to five hundred an hour, and to make it retroactive a week. He’d worked on nothing but the Phelan matter for the past six days, and now that the old man was dead his crazy family was a lawyer’s dream.
What Hark desperately wanted was a will contest—a long vicious fight with packs of lawyers filing tons of legal crap. A trial would be wonderful, a high-profile battle over one of the largest estates in America, with Hark in the center. Winning it would be nice, but winning wasn’t crucial. He’d make a fortune, and he’d become famous, and that’s what modern lawyering was all about.
At five hundred dollars an hour, sixty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, Hark’s gross annual billings would be one and a half million. The overhead for a new office—rent, secretaries, paralegals—would be half a million at most, and so Hark could clear a million bucks if he left his miserable firm and opened a new one down the street.
Done. He gulped coffee and mentally said good-bye to his cluttered office. He’d bolt with the Phelan file and maybe one or two others. He’d take his secretary and his paralegal, and he’d do it quickly, before the firm laid claim to any of the Phelan fees.
He sat at his desk, his pulse racing with the anticipation of his spanking new venture, and he thought of all the ways he could start a war with Josh Stafford. There was reason to worry. Stafford had been unwilling to reveal the contents of the new will. He had questioned its validity, in light of the
suicide. Hark had been rattled by the change in Stafford’s tone immediately after the suicide. Now, Stafford had left town and refused to return calls.
Oh, how he longed for a fight.
At nine, he met with Libbigail Phelan Jeter and Mary Ross Phelan Jackman, the two daughters from Troy’s first marriage. Rex had arranged the meeting, at Hark’s insistence. Though both women had lawyers at the moment, Hark wanted them as clients. More clients meant more clout at the bargaining table and in the courtroom, and it also meant he could bill each one of them five hundred an hour for the same work.
The meeting was awkward; neither woman trusted Hark because they didn’t trust their brother Rex. TJ had three lawyers of his own, and their mother had another. Why should they join forces when no one else was doing so? With so much money at stake, shouldn’t they keep their own lawyers?
Hark pressed but gained little ground. He was disappointed, but later charged ahead with plans to leave his firm immediately. He could smell the money.
________
LIBBIGAIL PHELAN Jeter had been a rebellious child who disliked Lillian, her mother, and craved the attention of her father, who was seldom at home. She was nine when her parents divorced.
When she was fourteen, Lillian shipped her away to boarding school. Troy disapproved of boarding schools, as if he knew something about child-rearing, and throughout high school he made an uncharacteristic effort to keep in touch with her. He often told her she was his favorite. She was certainly the brightest.
But he missed her graduation and forgot to send a gift. In the summer before college, she dreamed of ways to hurt him. She fled to Berkeley, ostensibly to study medieval Irish poetry, but in fact she planned to study very little, if at all. Troy hated the idea of her attending college anywhere in California, especially on such a radical campus. Vietnam was ending. The students had won and it was time to celebrate.
She slipped easily into the culture of drugs and casual sex. She lived in a three-story house with a group of students of all races, sexes, and sexual preferences. The combinations changed weekly, as did the numbers. They called themselves a commune, but there was no structure or rules. Money was no problem because most came from wealthy families. Libbigail was known simply as a rich kid from Connecticut. At the time, Troy was worth only a hundred million or so.
With a sense of adventure, she moved along the drug chain until heroin seized her. Her supplier was a jazz drummer named Tino, who had somehow taken up residence in the commune. Tino was in his late thirties, a high school dropout from Memphis, and no one knew exactly how or when he became a member of their group. No one cared.
Libbigail cleaned herself up enough to travel East for her twenty-first birthday, a glorious day for all Phelan children because that was when the old man bestowed The Gift. Troy didn’t believe in trusts for his children. If they weren’t stable by the age of twenty-one, then why string them along? Trusts required trustees and lawyers and constant fights with the beneficiaries, who resented having their money doled out by accountants. Give them the money, Troy reasoned, let ’em sink or swim.
Most Phelans drowned quickly.
Troy skipped her birthday. He was somewhere in Asia on business. By then he was well into his second marriage, with Janie. Rocky and Geena were little kids, and he’d lost whatever interest he had in his first family.
Libbigail didn’t miss him. The lawyers completed the arrangements for The Gift, and she laid up with Tino in a swanky Manhattan hotel for a week, stoned.
Her money lasted for almost five years, a stretch of time that included two husbands, numerous live-ins, two arrests, three lengthy lockdowns in detox units, and a car wreck that almost took her left leg.
Her current husband was an ex-biker she’d met in rehab. He weighed 320 pounds and had a gray frizzy beard that fell to his chest. He went by the name of Spike, and he had actually evolved into a decent sort. He built cabinets in a shop behind their modest home in the Baltimore suburb of Lutherville.
________
LIBBIGAIL’S LAWYER was a rumpled fellow named Wally Bright, and she went straight to his office after leaving Hark’s. She made a full report of everything Hark had said. Wally was a small-timer who advertised quickie divorces on bus benches in the Bethesda area. He’d handled one of Libbigail’s divorces and waited a year before he was paid for it. But he’d been patient with her. She was, after all, a Phelan. She would be his ticket to the fat fees he’d never quite been able to command.
In her presence, Wally called Hark Gettys and started a vicious phone fight that raged for fifteen minutes. He stomped around behind his desk, arms flailing, screaming obscenities into the phone. “I will kill for my client!” he raged at one point, and Libbigail was most impressed.
When he finished, he walked her gently to the door and kissed her on the cheek. He stroked her and patted her and fussed over her. He gave her the attention she had craved all her life. She was not a bad-looking woman; a bit heavy and showing the effects of a hard life, but Wally had seen much worse. Wally had slept with much worse. Given the right moment, Wally might make a move.
EIGHT
_____________
NATE’S LITTLE mountain was covered with six inches of new snow when he was awakened by the stirring sounds of Chopin piped through his walls. Last week it had been Mozart. The week before, he couldn’t remember. Vivaldi had been in his recent past, but so much of it was a haze.
As he had done every morning for almost four months, Nate walked to his window and gazed at the Shenandoah Valley spread before him, three thousand feet below. It too was covered with white, and he remembered that it was almost Christmas.
He would be out in time for Christmas. They—his doctors and Josh Stafford—had promised him that much. He thought about Christmas and became saddened by it. There had been some pleasant ones in the not too distant past, when the kids were small and life was stable. But the kids were gone now, either grown or taken away by their mothers, and the last thing Nate wanted was another Christmas in a bar with other miserable drunks singing carols and pretending all was merry.
The valley was white and still, a few cars moving like ants far away.
He was supposed to meditate for ten minutes, either in prayer or with the yoga they’d tried to teach him at Walnut Hill. Instead he did sit-ups, then went for a swim.
Breakfast was black coffee and a muffin, which he took with Sergio, his counselor/therapist/guru. And for the past four months, Sergio had also been his best friend. He knew everything about the miserable life of Nate O’Riley.
“You have a guest today,” Sergio said.
“Who?”
“Mr. Stafford.”
“Wonderful.”
Any contact with the outside was welcome, primarily because it was so restricted. Josh had visited once a month. Two other friends from the firm had made the three-hour drive from D.C., but they were busy and Nate understood.
Television was prohibited at Walnut Hill because of the beer ads and because so many of the shows and movies glorified drinking, even drugs. Most popular magazines were kept away for the same reasons. It didn’t matter to Nate. After four months, he didn’t care what was happening at the Capitol or on Wall Street or in the Middle East.
“When?” he asked.
“Late morning.”
“After my workout?”
“Of course.”
Nothing interfered with the workout, a two-hour orgy of sweat and grunting and yelling with a sadistic personal trainer, a sharply toned female Nate secretly adored.
He was resting in his suite, eating a blood orange and watching the valley again, when Josh arrived.
“You look great,” Josh said. “How much weight have you lost?”
“Fourteen pounds,” Nate said, patting his flat stomach.
“Very lean. Maybe I should spend some time here.”
“I highly recommend it. The food is completely fat-free, taste-free, prepared by a chef with an accent. The portions cov
er half a saucer, couple of bites and you’re done. Lunch and dinner take about seven minutes if you chew slowly.”
“For a thousand bucks a day you expect great food.”
“Did you bring me some cookies or something, Josh? Some Chips Ahoy or Oreos? Surely you hid something in your briefcase.”
“Sorry, Nate. I’m clean.”
“Some Doritos or M&M’s?”
“Sorry.”
Nate took a bite of his orange. They were sitting next to each other, enjoying the view. Minutes passed.
“How you doing?” Josh asked.
“I need to get out of here, Josh. I’m becoming a robot.”
“Your doc says another week or so.”
“Great. Then what?”
“We’ll see.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’ll see.”
“Come on, Josh.”
“We’ll take our time, and see what happens.”
“Can I come back to the firm, Josh? Talk to me.”
“Not so fast, Nate. You have enemies.”
“Who doesn’t? But hell, it’s your firm. Those guys will go along with whatever you say.”
“You have a couple of problems.”
“I have a thousand problems. But you can’t kick me out.”
“The bankruptcy we can work through. The indictment is not so easy.”
No, it was not so easy, and Nate couldn’t simply dismiss it. From 1992 to 1995, he had failed to report about sixty thousand dollars in other income.
He tossed the orange peel in a wastebasket, and said, “So what am I supposed to do? Sit around the house all day?”
“If you’re lucky.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Josh had to be delicate. His friend was emerging from a black hole. Shocks and surprises had to be avoided.
“Do you think I’m going to prison?” Nate asked.
“Troy Phelan died,” Josh said, and it took Nate a second to change course.
“Oh, Mr. Phelan,” he said.
Nate had had his own little wing in the firm. It was at the end of a long hallway, on the sixth floor, and he and another lawyer and three paralegals and a half-dozen secretaries worked on suing doctors and cared little about the rest of the firm. He certainly knew who Troy Phelan was, but he’d never touched his legal work. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“So you haven’t heard?”
“I hear nothing here. When did he die?”
“Four days ago. Jumped from a window.”
“Without a parachute?”
“Bingo.”
