A Case of Redemption (4 page)

So money didn't matter to me, either. Of course, that didn't mean it didn't matter to Nina.

“So you'll do it without payment?”

“Yes,” she said, with a conviction I couldn't help but admire. “There'll be money down the road, I assume, and even if there's not, this isn't about getting paid for me. It's about making sure an innocent man doesn't go to jail for the rest of his life.”

I was tempted to say that I thought she had a better chance of getting paid than that L.D. was innocent, or that he'd be acquitted, for that matter, but I didn't. From the look in Nina's eyes, I knew it would have been like telling a child there was no Santa Claus.

“He tell you anything else I should know?” Nina asked.

“As a matter of fact, he told me he has a daughter. Did you know that?”

“I did,” she said. “I thought telling you that might be laying it on too thick.”

“But you made sure to tell him to mention it,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said, and then flashed that smile of hers.

After we got aboveground, we stopped off at an Italian restaurant near my apartment. It was really not much more than a glorified pizza place, but it served individual pies, which came in handy when you were always dining alone.

When the waitress came over to take our order, Nina answered quickly—a salad of some sort—but I deliberated slightly longer, wondering if it was too early to order a drink. I decided that these days it was never too early, and asked for the fungi pizza and a scotch.

I thought I saw a subtle frown from Nina, but perhaps it was my imagination.

When the waitress left, I started rattling off the pros and cons of taking on the case. It wasn't long before Nina cut me off.

“C'mon, Dan. What's it going to be? Yes or no?”

Before I had a chance to answer, the waitress returned with our drinks, and without hesitation I took a deep mouthful. As the scotch rolled down my throat, I let my mind wander to what it would be like if I said yes, visualizing my standing on the courthouse steps addressing hordes of reporters, and then delivering closing arguments before a packed courtroom.

“Dan?” Nina said, pulling me out of my daydream.

My hand had begun to quiver, which was why Nina had called my name. I reached for the scotch to steady myself.

Nina leaned across the table. Her emerald-green eyes locked on to mine. I stared into the flecks of brown and blue, which reminded me of a flame, the way closer inspection reveals a myriad of colors.

In a soft, reassuring voice, Nina said, “I really believe that he's innocent. And it's not just going back and forth over the evidence. It's a little bit like religion. We could talk all day long about whether this miracle or that actually happened, but at the end of it, it's just a matter of faith. I have that kind of faith in him, and so I'm willing to do whatever I can to help him.”

“I wish I felt that way,” I said in a quiet voice, as much to myself as to Nina. “Not just about our prospective client, but about . . . anything. Maybe there's just some genetic defect in my DNA with regard to matters of faith.”

Nina's expression told me that she understood my comment was a reference to my wife and daughter. “You have to let yourself believe before you can believe,” she said. “Sometimes, in a leap of faith, the leap's got to come first, and then the faith follows.”

I was considering the metaphor, actually envisioning myself leaping from one cliff to another, not unlike the way the Road Runner
and Wile E. Coyote did in the cartoons. And then I thought of L.D.'s daughter. In my mind, she had her father's dimples and warm smile. She likely wore dresses, I thought to myself, because all five-year-old girls favored them over pants. At least Alexa did.

Had, anyway.

I drained the last of my drink. Then with a fluid motion, I signaled to the waitress for a refill.

When my eyes reconnected with Nina's, her look of disappointment was unmistakable.

“Do you mind if I'm totally honest with you, Dan?”

“You mean you've been lying to me until now?” I said, trying to sound lighthearted, knowing full well that was not where she was heading.

“I've been honest, but now I'm going to get personal. I think you need him as much as he needs you.”

“How do you figure that?”

“I've only been around you for . . . what, four hours? And this must be the sixth scotch I've seen you down. If you don't do something to put yourself on a different course, you're going to be stuck on this one, and I think you know that continuing in that direction is going to end very badly.”

I knew this, of course. In fact, I'd been saying the same thing to myself for more than a year. At the same time, there was a part of me that reveled in the downward spiral, in the morbid fascination of contemplating the depths to which I could actually fall.

And besides all that, there was Legally Dead to consider, too. If he was innocent, didn't he deserve someone whose skills were a bit sharper? Someone who was truly up for the kind of fight that a high-stakes murder case requires?

“Nina, all posturing aside, I haven't been in a courtroom in a year and a half, and this is going to be a very big case. I just don't know if I'm up to it.”

“The client certainly thinks you are. Isn't that what matters?”

I chuckled, not sure if she was truly that naive. “The client,” I said, “doesn't know anything about how I've spent the last eighteen months. He doesn't know what's been going on in my head. Christ, he doesn't even know that I don't have a job.”

“Consider this, then, another instance of faith,” she said softly. “I believe you can do this. Look, he already had Marcus Jackson in his corner, and you saw how he felt about that. I don't have any doubt that your skills in the courtroom will still be there. Plenty of top-flight trial lawyers go years between trials, so that's hardly an excuse, Dan.” She looked at me hard, and then continued, “Let's make a rule, just between us, that we'll try to be honest with each other. I get that you're scared about doing this, about pulling your life together and rejoining the living. That's what's really holding you back. This idea that maybe you're not good enough anymore? That's not even worthy of discussion, because you know as well as I do that it's just not true. So, the question for you, Dan, is whether you want to change your life. If the answer to that is yes, then you really have no excuse, because this case is the best hope for you to do that. But if the answer is no, then you've got no reason to give it even this much consideration.”

Even though I knew it was empty, I reached for my glass of scotch, a Pavlovian response to pain I knew all too well. I sucked on an ice cube and spit it back into the glass. The very act reinforced Nina's point that my current course was not going to end well.

I read this book once about an elite section of the navy SEALs that's deployed only to rescue other navy SEALs lost at sea during hurricanes. The SEALs parachute into the ocean from above the storm. As they fall, the SEALs can't differentiate between the rain-soaked air and the ocean. The only way a SEAL knows he's even hit the water is when he stops descending.

This is the most apt metaphor for grief that I know.

It actually sometimes feels as if I'm falling, with that same weightless, untethered sensation. Like with the navy SEALs, all my hopes
are pinned to the belief that one of these days I'll realize that I've stopped descending, and then, maybe, I'll be able to rise again.

“Do you really think that taking on Legally Dead offers a happier ending for me?” I asked.

“How could it not? You'll be saving his life, and you'll be giving your own a sense of purpose.”

And that was really the heart of it, wasn't it? If taking on the case could stop my descent, how could I possibly decline?

T
hey say that you're never more yourself than when you grieve. I suppose that's why I've mainly mourned alone.

Even when Sarah and Alexa were alive, I was never much of a people person. I'm not comfortable with the superficiality of small talk, and the last thing I wanted to do after they were both gone was to share my grief with others. Maybe this is unfair, but it felt as if general interest in what happened to me was only a thin veneer away from voyeurism, and I wanted no part in allowing people who had never been touched by tragedy to experience it vicariously through my suffering.

But I think about them, and how they died, all the time.

The jury had acquitted Darrius Macy two days earlier, and Sarah thought that meant I might now take a little time off and spend it with her and Alexa at our summer home in East Hampton. She did not understand when I told her that I couldn't.

“This is ridiculous, Dan. You've been working nonstop on the Macy case for months,” Sarah said. “Now that it's finally over, and especially given that you
won
, the firm should at least let you have a few days off to spend with your family. The place won't collapse without you.”

“You grossly overestimate the familial concerns of the partnership,” I replied, only to see a stare down that told me this was a far more serious issue than my comment suggested. “I'm sorry, but I just can't. I have clients besides Macy. Do you know how many phone calls and emails I have to return? Besides, I've blocked out two weeks in August for us to be away.”

“Oh, come on. You think I haven't heard this song before? By August you'll be neck-deep in some other crisis, and we'll be lucky if we get you for Labor Day weekend.”

We'd been having this fight for more than a decade now, and Sarah was right that I had been engaged in a constant exercise of moving the goalposts. The first few years, I told her that seventy-hour weeks were like boot camp for young associates, with the billable-hour benchmarks used to weed people out. After that, the recession made midyear associates expendable, and so the long hours were necessary for survival. Then I was in the homestretch, and if I wanted to make partner I had to show that nothing was more important in my life than the firm. The case I was working on when I made partner, a huge antitrust matter, didn't suddenly stop once my title had changed, and so I continued to churn out the same hours for the next two years. That case morphed seamlessly to the next, and then the next, and then, ultimately, to Darrius Macy.

The year Sarah and Alexa died, I was on pace to bill more than three thousand hours. That translated to, on average, sixty hours a week, which, in turn, meant that I was in the office more like seventy, when you counted lunch and the time I couldn't charge to any client. Or, put in the terms that mattered to Sarah, I was at the office about twelve hours a day, Monday through Friday, and about ten hours over the weekend.

The last time I spoke to Sarah, she was at the beach, which made the cell phone reception less than ideal. For the first time all week, however, she sounded happy. Every prior call had been tense. She had gone to the beach on Wednesday, without me, and the fact that she was there and I was in the city was the obvious source of her discontent. But I promised her that I'd be coming that afternoon, and that was seemingly enough to change Sarah's mood.

“Alexa was so funny today,” Sarah said, laughing into the phone. “She's spent the better part of the day jumping into the waves and then running back to the blanket to look at her feet. I finally asked
her what she was doing, and she told me, ‘You said that I should be careful of something under my toe.' ”

“Mommy,
Mommy
!” I heard Alexa exclaim.

“Alexa, please wait a moment. Can't you see that Mommy is on the phone? I'm talking to Daddy.”

“Look at these shells I found!” Alexa said, oblivious to what Sarah had just told her. “Which one is your favorite?”

“They're all beautiful, sweetie. Do you want to tell your father about them?”

“No,” Alexa said. I couldn't help but smirk.

“Then tell him that you love him.”

“
I love you, Daddy!
” Alexa screamed this into the phone, as if she believed she had to raise her voice to be heard because I was so far away.

An hour later, Sarah pulled out of the beach parking lot, and at the next intersection a black Escalade ran the light and plowed into our car.

Based on the wreckage, the paramedics presumed both Sarah and Alexa died on impact, even though they were wearing seat belts. The Escalade's driver was found twenty-five feet from his car, almost completely decapitated.

I was sitting in my office, stuck on a conference call with no end in sight, when my assistant came in and told me that someone from the East Hampton police was on the line, and that it was urgent. Nearly everything that followed is a blur. Just people dressed in black and platitudes about tragedy and God's plan, whatever that was.

One thing that I distinctly recall from that period is my first day back at the office after the funerals. After making an appointment with his assistant, I walked into the office of Taylor Beckett's managing partner, Benjamin Ethan, closed the door behind me, and told him that I was going to resign my partnership.

Ethan looked at me like I was completely insane. The only reason a partner ever voluntarily left Taylor Beckett was to run for statewide
office or to accept a presidential appointment. Bereavement was just something you eventually got over.

“There's no need for that, Daniel,” Ethan said in his smooth baritone. “Of course, I cannot begin to understand what you are going through, but I do understand what it is like to be under tremendous strain. What we do here is counsel people under that type of pressure. And even though you have not asked me for my counsel, I'm going to give it to you anyway.” He smiled. “Free of charge, of course.”

Although he's not yet sixty, Benjamin Ethan always seemed to me to be a man of an entirely different era. He wears bow ties and calls everyone by his full given name, and everyone calls him Benjamin. Sometimes clients call him Ben, and to Ethan's credit he never corrects them, or opposing counsel would drop his name to boost their credibility with me—
tell Ben Ethan I said hello
—but the effort to demonstrate familiarity only proved they didn't actually know him very well. In this case, his formality required that I give my assent before he provided me with the unsolicited advice he was offering.