Everybody Rise (10 page)

In her postcollege life, her father expected her to support herself, to work in a field he considered worthy, and also to serve the greater good. Evelyn, well aware that social-services jobs would not cover her rent or be prestigious enough to meet with either parent's approval, instead tried, in her first months in New York, to volunteer for a girls' mentoring group. The group had told her that there was a yearlong waiting list for mentors, she would need three professional references, and they'd really prefer someone with more career experience.

She resisted saying any of this aloud; if her father was upset about the credit-card charges, and she needed more money still, she couldn't afford an argument. “So why are you home? Leiberg Channing is allowing teleconferenced trials?” she asked.

“You must be tired from the travel. Let's have a talk in the morning, all right?” he said. He started to leave the kitchen, his used glass still on the counter for someone else to put in the dishwasher.

“If it's the charges, Dad, we might as well talk now.” She frowned at the saltines label, as they were the salt-free kind. “You specifically said it was okay to put certain things on your card. And that's a fraction of what New York costs. Honestly, lunch costs eleven dollars, and that's for, like, a salad in a plastic container. I'll pay you back. It's just, with the job and everything, things are a little intense right now.”

“I think we'll save it all until the morning,” he said. “Good night, honey. Is that a new shirt? It's a nice color on you.” It was a new shirt, and as he left the kitchen and walked upstairs, Evelyn, nibbling around the perimeter of a saltless saltine, thought about how her father always managed to throw in something charming that made him impossible to hate.

*   *   *

The next morning, Evelyn decided to get a coffee in town to fortify herself for the argument with her parents. When she hopped off the final stair and onto the ground floor, she saw two figures to her right in the living room, her mother perusing the driveway from the front window, her father shuffling through a stack of papers.

“Evelyn.” Her mother turned a few degrees from the window and uncrossed her arms, holding them out like Evita on the balcony of the Casa Rosada, which was her signal to Evelyn to approach for a hug. Evelyn obeyed, and mother and daughter embraced by touching forearms and bobbing heads.

“Hi, Mom. You look pretty,” Evelyn said. Her mother, in a gray sweater that was far too heavy for July and a pair of white pants, in fact looked like she had put on weight, and Evelyn was still frustrated with her over the People Like Us slights. After the meandering conversation last night with her father, though, Evelyn figured she would need an ally.

Evelyn waited for instructions, but both her parents were silent. She looked from one to the other. “Well, I was just going to head into town,” she began.

“No, Evelyn, your father”—her mother made the noun heavy with sarcasm—“has something to tell you. Sit down.”

Her father was in one of his preternaturally relaxed poses, draped across a scratchy wool-upholstered armchair, his right ankle balanced on his left thigh. Evelyn tried to get a glimpse of the papers he was looking at so she could be prepared, but her father stacked them and turned them over, setting them on the coffee table. Evelyn sat on a hard wooden chair near the door.

“Well, glad to see you, Evie,” he said, stretching his lips wide. “There's something we need to discuss.”

“Something?” Barbara spat from her post at the window.

“You know about my work, and you know that I care about that work, as do my fellow lawyers.” He pronounced the first syllable of “lawyer” to rhyme with “raw.”

“Our job is to fight on behalf”—and Evelyn could finish the sentence in her head, from the countless times she'd heard her father say it at awards dinners, at parties, to people he had just met—“of people who are too poor or disempowered to have a voice. We've been doing that the best way we know how.”

“Is this about my job?” Evelyn said. “Listen, I know—these people do have a voice, I'm not saying they don't. They're really not as bad as you think. They're—well, Mom knows. They can be really nice. It's not sales, anyway. It's membership, which is a different thing. Membership is more coming in at their level. And it was just four hundred and fifty dollars, which, I know it's not great, but it's—”

“Honey, honey,” Dale interrupted. He looked at Barbara, but Barbara didn't turn. “It's not about your job. It's about my job. When you fight for people, you make life harder for the people in charge, and guess what, the people in charge then try to go after you. The Republicans are out to show plaintiffs' lawyers how much power they have, and the government found someone who's telling them that we've done some illegal things, that we've made some illegal, ah, illegal offers.

“Now, you have sat in the courtroom as I've argued case after case. You have listened to the witnesses, the expert witnesses. You have listened to the judge. You know how the whole process goes. Why did I bring up expert witnesses? Well, we need those witnesses—often doctors—to explain to the jury the effects that some of the drugs can have on our clients.”

“Right,” said Evelyn, wary.

“Do you remember the Oney case, Peg Oney out of Cresheim? Remember her, the Wallen Pharma case?”

“Yes,” Evelyn said. She had been in middle school then, and she and Barbara had traveled to Pennsylvania to watch her father give opening arguments in the case. The lawsuit was over Wallen knowing but not disclosing side effects for one of its drugs. The case was complicated, full of chemistry and drug-development procedures, but her father made it simple. He had started by describing how Peg lost feeling in her fingertips as a result of taking the drug. “Now, fingertips mightn't seem like much,” he said in his thick Carolina accent. “It's not a leg. Not an arm. Not even a hand. But when Peg holds her hand in front of a candle, she doesn't feel warmth. When she goes to pat her dog Scout, she can't feel his fur. When she touches her one-year-old baby's cheek, she doesn't feel his soft skin. Fingertips are just the tips, but fingertips are also the world.” He had made every juror feel just what it was like to be Peg, and then he left the podium, walking close enough to the jury box that the jurors in front could touch him. “Right here, in this courtroom, you people of Pennsylvania get to say today to this huge conglomerate, ‘We've had enough. You don't get to take our senses from us. You don't get to tell us we can't feel warmth, we can't pat our dog, we can't touch our baby. We've been misled enough, we've been fooled enough, we've been lied to enough. It stops here. It stops today.'” It took jurors fewer than three hours to award Peg Oney an enormous sum.

“Peg's injuries, the effect on her body, were complicated,” Dale was saying now as he neatened his stack of papers. “To hold Wallen responsible, we had to have experts tracing exactly what Wallen had tested, exactly what they knew, exactly what the effects were on Peg and the other plaintiffs. You've got to have good experts and we searched high and low for the right ones, a doctor and a chemist, who offered very compelling trial testimony. The award in that case, Evie, was significant for the Oneys. Very significant.”

And for us, Evelyn thought; she remembered overhearing her parents discussing the millions her father had won as his portion in that case, and her mother had hired an interior designer to revamp Sag Neck, from wallpaper to chandeliers, just after that. “So what's the issue?” she said.

“Peg's husband, ex-husband by then, later asked us to look into another pharmaceutical case. I don't think he saw much of the verdict money, and he was angry. He was hurt. He, I now believe, was seeking revenge on Peg, and he chose us for his revenge. He told us at the time that he was doing some pharmaceutical investments and uncovered what he thought were questionable quality-control policies at one of the big firms and came to us with the hopes that we could make a case out of it. We looked into it and filed a case, and it ended up settling fast. The ex-husband apparently was not satisfied, though we'd done our damnedest to help him and his family and his town. When the government came knocking he said that we, that Leiberg Channing, were bribing these experts to give the testimony they gave. The Wallen Pharma case didn't fall within the statute of limitations, but he alleged that these payoffs occurred in his second case. I think he had little more than a single e-mail where we'd talked about paying these experts, which of course is perfectly legal.” Dale leaned back in his chair, as carefree as if he were out tanning on spring break.

“But the government can't make a case out of that,” Evelyn said.

Dale directed a smile toward her mother's back that dropped like an unreturned serve. “That's right. I knew you'd get it. There isn't”—he pronounced it “idn't”—“anything there. The pharmaceutical companies are major donors to the Bush administration, and all these Bush prosecutors with their Ivy League schools want to go after the small fry like me who are helping everyday Americans. But the joke's on them, honey. All they've been able to produce after their big investigation is a single ex-husband of an old client who says that we did something illegal years ago. The Bush administration and the Republicans want nothing more than—”

A thwack of a hand against glass. Barbara, at the window: “Will you stop blaming your problems on a Republican conspiracy?”

Dale flipped his palms up to signal that he was being open. “Barbara, we can argue about this all over hell and half of Georgia, but when federal prosecutors can subpoena whatever they like and whoever they like to investigate a firm that is notably hated by their major Republican donors, the connection is not hard to make.”

Evelyn looked to her mother, but Barbara was staring down a squirrel outside. Evelyn turned her head back to her father, who was wearing a bright green polo shirt made of a too-thin jersey material that emphasized his ribby midsection.

“So what's going to happen?” Evelyn said.

Dale propped a leg on the coffee table. “They haven't charged the firm or any of the partners, because the evidence—or what they think passes for evidence—is thin grits and they know they can't get anywhere with it. I—your mother, mostly—thought you should hear about this from us, though.”

“Then why don't you tell her what's actually happening?” Barbara said, spitting out the words. “Or tell her what to say when she's ignored at the Channings' party today. That's right, you didn't mention that part, did you? Why don't you tell your daughter all about how these Republican prosecutors seem to be focusing on you? Not Tommy Channing, not Larry Leiberg? Or tell her what the government's really looking into—that your firm was doing large-scale bribes, giving the experts a cut of the jury verdict or the settlement, so that maybe, just maybe, they might overemphasize what happened to poor Peg Oney, or poor whomever you're representing?” She was talking so fast that her words slammed together, and when she was done, she leaned against the window frame, looking exhausted.

Dale blinked, the pleasant smile on his face not changing. After a minute, he picked up the conversation again. “Well, secret's out, I guess. Because I was the lawyer handling these cases, from what we can put together, it looks like some of the focus may be on me. Let me be clear, the three of us—Larry, Tommy, and myself—all worked together on all the cases.”

“The charges,” Evelyn said quickly, shaking her head. “Valeriya. Valeriya said you've been home since Wednesday. That's not normal for you. God. She meant legal charges. What are they?”

“There's a grand jury. Your father is being investigated by a grand jury,” Barbara said.

Evelyn stood up so fast that the chair's wooden legs shrieked over the floor. “A grand jury? How long have you known about this?”

“Well, this is an ongoing investigation,” Dale said.

“Yes, I understand that. But how long have you known about the grand jury?”

“Months,” Barbara said.

“Barbara, many grand jury investigations go on for months,” Dale said, his voice sharp. “It doesn't mean it's going to go anywhere.”

Evelyn gripped the chair's back. “This doesn't make sense.”

“It doesn't,” Dale said. He'd modulated his voice now, and it was all brown sugar. “I'm sorry we're just springing it on you now, honey. We didn't think it would go anywhere, and we still don't, but the government's been leaking things to the press, and it was bound to get out.”

Barbara turned from the window. “This shouldn't have happened,” she said. Her hand was shaking, but her body was still. “This shouldn't have happened.”

“Well, it did happen. It is happening.” Evelyn was trying to keep her voice even, but it kept modulating unpredictably as though someone else were controlling the volume knob. “It happens that Dale Beegan is being investigated by a grand jury. It happens that maybe you should mention that to your child before several months have gone by. Maybe that would be a good idea.”

“We didn't think it was necessary—” Dale said.

“Well, it was. It was necessary.”

“Evie, don't get all worked up. The investigation seems stalled in its tracks except for this one unemployed fellow making false claims. We thought we'd talk to you about it in person because we knew you were coming down for the party—”

“And what a lovely party it will be!” Barbara cried, ridding herself of the slight Baltimore accent that she sometimes sank into when tired or angry, and plowing into her Sag Neck chatelaine voice, long Katharine Hepburn vowels mixed with the nasality of Ethel Merman. “Now, Evelyn, what do you say, shall we go to the Channings' party in our Fourth dresses and pretend as though nobody knows your father is being investigated for—what would it be? Money laundering? Bribery? Doesn't that sound like a lark? I'm sure Sally Channing will be just delighted to see us there, this trio of Dale Beegan and his wife and daughter, and give us a warm welcome. Sally's friends will be delighted to see us, too, after reading the fascinating newspaper accounts of how the United States government says you've been breaking the law.”