Dead Money (10 page)

I staggered down the street in the snow. I tripped on my own front stairs. I laughed out loud. Laughed at myself. It took a clumsy try or two to get the key into the lock.

Shit. Sometimes it felt good to let it go.

I SAT ON THE EDGE
of the bed. I looked at my feet.

Kelly had my feet. A younger, softer version. We liked to sit together and admire each other’s feet. It was one of our special things.

I tried to feel tired. But it wasn’t sleep I needed. It was consolation. I sat at the computer. I cruised some porno sites. Chatted with a cyber whore. Thank the Lord for cable modems. She wore a silver sequined G-string. She had the handcuffs ready. She was my friend. She could give me what I wanted, she said.

It didn’t take too long to find out that it wasn’t true.

Enough of that. I’d get my consolation from the poker site.

I’d been flipping channels one night. I’d come across a poker show. The World Series of Poker. Binion’s Horseshoe. Las Vegas. Guys in shades. Mountains of chips. When the field got down to two, women in bikinis dumping piles of cash on the table.

Right away, I was hooked.

I’d read a bit, when I was young. Don’t open with less than two Jacks. That’s all I remembered. That was draw poker, anyway. Nobody played draw poker anymore. Too much skill. The better players always
won. The lousy player had to win sometimes, to keep him coming back. The ideal game combines the right amount of luck and skill.

Texas hold’em has that balance. I don’t know who thought it up, or how it got the name, but the game is perfect. The strategy is deep enough that very few can play it really well. Long-term, the better player wins. But on any given hand, any given night, the luck is such that anyone can win. Dead money can play the ugliest of hands, bank his whole roll on an inside straight on the river, the last card dealt. And it would happen. He’d fill that straight. Bad beat, the other guy would tell himself, and anyone else at the bar, later, who would listen. It would happen often enough. Dead money could most naturally succumb to the delusion. That feeling of omnipotence that every card shark feeds on.

I sat down, logged on.

I played for hours.

I loved the rhythm of it. The back and forth. The artificial swish of cards being dealt. The click and clack of chips being bet. The site designers did a great, hypnotic job. Most of all I loved the charge you got from winning. The best was when you won with garbage cards. Nothing in the world like a bluff that worked. Two Three off-suit. Pick your spot. Play it like Aces. Watch the suckers fold. Take the pot. Yes.

I started with two hundred dollars. It went up. It went down. At one point I was all in, every cent I had in the pot on a heart flush draw. Five of hearts on the river. Bingo. Back to one-fifty. That was the start of the rush.

I rode the rush, and nothing mattered for a while. I ended up with fifteen hundred dollars. Every night as good as that, and I could quit my day job.

Yes. Now I could sleep.

A THICK MANILA ENVELOPE
sat on my desk. It had come from FitzGibbon. I knew what was in it. Old files. Trust deeds. Wills. Correspondence. Maybe a legal opinion or two. I was supposed to forward it to Kennedy. Normally, I’d call in Judy, tell her to seal it, send it to John. Hand delivery. Private. Confidential. To be opened only by addressee.

That was the right thing to do.

But, I said to myself, pulling the envelope toward me. Wait a minute. Jules is my client. Not his father. Daddy’s just paying the bills. I don’t have any fiduciary duty to him.

Actually, I didn’t know for sure if that was true. But I wasn’t about to look it up. And I wasn’t about to call up Tightass Bob Shumaker, the firm’s resident Ethics Guru, and ask him. Bob’s answer was always the same: if it feels right, it must be wrong.

A peek. A quick look. Who would that hurt? Jules, it might help. Jules was my client. I owed it to him to take a look. It wasn’t just curiosity, prurience. There might, there just might, be something in there that would help Jules. Information: it’s the stuff of litigation. Jesus, it’s the stuff of life itself. Without information, where would we be? Even the sloth, the slug, the amoeba, they operate on information. At a minimum, where the food is. Why was I any different?

The beauty of poker, I mused, the envelope heavy on my desk, is that it’s a game of incomplete information. Like quantum physics. No matter how powerful our computers, our detection methods get, the best we will ever do is predict the probability that a given electron is in any given place at any given time. And poker’s exactly like that. He who divines most consistently the missing pieces of knowledge – the other players’ cards – is the master of the game. The old lady next to you in Vegas. The old lady who lifts her cards to her face each time, like she’s seen in the cowboy movies, giving you a millisecond peek at her hand. Ignore the input? Be a good boy, turn your head away? Lean over to her, whisper a word of warning? ‘Ma’am, please keep your cards on the table. Watch how the others do it … you’re giving your cards away’?

No, you wouldn’t, would you? I didn’t think so. You might stop short of taking her money, if you wanted to be a stickler about it. But you’d keep looking at her cards. For the edge it gave you on the others.

I opened the envelope.

Just a quick peek.

Trust deeds. At least a dozen. Most were old enough to have been typed. High-class bond paper. Ancient paper clips. I paged through them. The usual mumbo jumbo. Whereas. Heretofore. Thus is it said. And the Lord God made it so.

I flipped through the documents. Ah, there it was. The grandpa trust. To Eamon FitzGibbon. Daddy hadn’t entirely disappeared, had he. Twenty million. Jesus. Daddy had been rich as Croesus too. And never
shared a dime with his family before his death? It seemed inconceivable. And to any grandchildren, a cool twenty million too. Vesting at the age of twenty-five. Until then, a modest allowance. Enough for the loft. Not much more. To be administered by Jones & Pogue, Attorneys at Law. Never heard of them.

I put the papers back into the envelope. What had I learned? I asked myself. Nothing I hadn’t already known, really. The amounts involved. A little shocking. But nothing that was going to help Jules stay out of jail.

Shit. Maybe it had been just prurience. Had I risked violating a sacred trust for nothing?

This wouldn’t do.

I opened the envelope again.

Maybe I’d missed something.

Page upon page of ancient legal cant about dead people. Long-gone enough to be meaningless, most of it. And then, near the end, I saw what I had overlooked the first time.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

Somebody had a motive.

KELLY WAS OUT AT THE MOVIES
with her friend Peter. Peter was loud and funny and fat, and Kelly and he were inseparable. I didn’t think that they were anything other than friends. Peter’s predilection for classic films and opera was one reason. Another was that Kelly had never expressed the slightest indication of romantic interest in him. In anyone else for that matter. She was a mysterious thing. On the other hand, I was humble enough to reserve judgment.

I had seen her in the living room before she left. She was standing in front of the mirror, inspecting what I took to be invisible pimples.

I don’t know what you’re looking for, I said. You have the most flawless skin I’ve ever seen.

If by ‘flawless’ you mean ‘pitted and pocked with ugly zits.’

Oh, come on, Kelly. I mean it. You’re gorgeous.

Dad, she said, without turning from the mirror, you’re in denial.

She shouldered her purse. Jack the Pumpkin King on it. Sauntered to the door. Gave me a mischievous wink.

Like I said. A mysterious thing.

After she’d left, the house became a quiet place. Melissa read her self-help books. Fell asleep for a while.

The Wolf’s Lair beckoned. I resisted it. Maybe I could draw Melissa out a bit more. The other night had been encouraging. I cooked a small but tasty meal. She was up to joining me for it. An unexpected if not unalloyed pleasure. We didn’t talk much. When we did, there were many pitfalls to avoid.

I preferred the silences, if the truth be known.

During one of the long barren stretches of the evening I went into the study, closed the door.

My cell phone rang. ‘Private number,’ it said. I ignored the call. I had a rule. If somebody doesn’t want me to know who they are, I don’t want to talk to them.

But there was the phone. In my hand. It seemed lonely. I called Dorita.

Ten o’clock at night? she said. Don’t I ever get a break?

I’d prefer to think, I replied, that a call from me constitutes a welcome relief from your otherwise humdrum existence.

Of course, of course. Nothing to do with escaping from
your
dreary life, I’m sure.

Of course not. Life at home is an endless round of witty discourse and gay parlor games.

I knew that. So what tears you away from the latest raucous game of charades?

I was thinking about FitzGibbon.

You have my sympathy.

Thanks. So anyway, I’ve been thinking. I guess the whole downtown thing must rankle the old man. He’s way into this antidrug crusade. But is that really enough to explain it? I mean, he’s disowned the kid. And he’s only a kid. Why not try to help him? And Daddy’s nose hasn’t always been clean itself, has it? You don’t get to where he is from where he started without cutting a corner or two.

Sure. But that’s a different kind of bad. He can relate to that. If the kid was an embezzler, he might actually be proud. I think it’s more that the kid repudiates everything Dad’s spent his whole life working for. Wealth. Prestige. Club membership.

Yeah, sure. I can see that. Anyway, I’ve got something that might lead somewhere.

Do tell.

But I can only tell you if you promise that it stays right here.

In your bedroom?

I’m in the study. But you know what I mean. Between you and me.

Are you suggesting that you can’t trust me, Rick? I think I’m going to have to reevaluate our relationship.

Sure, sure. We’ll do that later. I just need to make sure you understand. I’m not really supposed to have this information.

Mum’s the word, darling.

Okay. FitzGibbon sent me the trust documents, to pass along to Kennedy.

Yes?

I took a peek.

Bad boy.

I
am
a bad boy. I actually do feel a bit guilty about it. But hey, whatever I have to do for my client, right?

Right. So what did you find?

There are conditions.

Yes?

That have to be fulfilled. Before Jules gets the money.

And?

And one of them is that he not have been convicted of a felony.

My, my.

Exactly my reaction.

So Daddy might have another motive.

It can’t be about the money. He’s got more than he knows what to do with.

Yes, but keeping Jules from it. I wouldn’t put it past the bastard.

Mysterious are the ways of the human heart.

Or bile duct.

Spleen.

Keep me in the loop.

You can count on me, I said.

I WAS PUZZLING
over the last corner of the
Times
crossword, and trying to think of an excuse for missing the monthly partners’ lunch, when the phone rang.

Rick, it’s John.

John?

John Kennedy.

Jack!

Don’t call me Jack. Rick, this is really getting old.

The fun thing about Kennedy was that he really had no sense of humor.

All right, all right, I said. What’s up?

I’ve got something I’ve got to talk to you about.

That would explain the phone call. Talk away.

Not on the phone. Meet me for lunch.

Ouch. Sounds serious.

It is serious. To me.

Okay, Moran’s at one?

One-thirty. I’ve got to check out a few things first.

All right, I said. One-thirty at Moran’s.

Excellent. I had my excuse.

I noodled about til one. There were many important decisions to be made, in many important, high-paying cases. But I wasn’t up to that. My head was fogged up, entangled. I didn’t know which way was up. Which confusing message was worth examining in more detail.

I thought about the trust deed. Who would get the money if Jules didn’t qualify? Would it devolve by operation of law? To FitzGibbon, as the surviving parent? Would he be disqualified himself, having disowned the kid? Damn, law school had been so long ago. I needed some Trusts & Estates advice. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t ask Dorita. Because of the conflict. We were partners in the same firm. My client was her client. I had already compromised her enough by bringing it up at all. Maybe I could pry something out of Kennedy. I doubted it. But it wouldn’t hurt to try.

Moran’s looked the same as it had for eighteen years. The theme was black and green and Irish. The pool table was still small and
warped, the dartboard skewed but ever popular. James behind the bar was cheerful, full of a joke you’d heard before but didn’t mind hearing again. The bar itself was still as long, as dark and as packed with heavy-smoking Guinness-slugging regulars as ever.

The only real difference, I noted with chagrin, was in the visage of the distinguished attorney in the mirror. Much more gray, not only of hair but demeanor. And I wasn’t sure the facial symmetry the new haircut provided was worth the extra freight. $225, style by Jacques, blow-dry included. Oh well. Kelly liked it. That was all that mattered. Give it a smile, I told myself. That’s better. You look five years younger. No? Okay, four. Two? Never mind.

When Kennedy arrived, he insisted that we move to a table. To me this was an affront to James, my second-favorite bartender, and I apologized to him.

James was gracious.

You gentlemen have some business, he insisted. Please, take the corner booth.

Kennedy’s bow tie was black with tiny white dots. Very elegant. I refrained from making a bow tie joke. I saw from his face that the usual banter would be unwelcome. I waited. He played with a small pile of cardboard coasters for a while. I sipped my drink.