Personal injuries (34 page)

"Are you my lawyer?" he asked from there. It was the right question, not so much for focusing both of us on the pragmatic issues, but because the fragile look that accompanied it redeemed him somewhat. Robbie was an eternal beacon of need, like those dead stars which, even imploded, continue emitting a radio signal through space. But his baddog truckling made it seem that he actually cared about what I would answer, and not simply because it would represent a monumental inconvenience to him if I withdrew. I realized what had been implicit from the start: he had come to me not out of regard for my courtroom oratory or my connections but out of personal respect. I seldom thought of myself as an example, or of the valor of what I tried to do every day. I whisked him out the door with a backward wave and no answer, but I'd already settled the matter with myself. I was his lawyer. In the better sense of the word.

NEAR 2 A.M. the lobby buzzer had roused her, a honking duck in her dreams.

"This is your Uncle Peter," rasped a voice distorted by the intercom. Ùncle Peter' was the Project code word, a fail-safe i.d. for times of trouble. It was McManis who showed up at Evon's door. He was too proper to step any farther into the apartment. He just leaned back against the steel jamb.

"It's about Robbie," Jim told her. Her first thought was that he was dead. And he was, as far as she was concerned, once she heard the story.

"I was wrong," McManis said before he left. He was wearing a light suit spotted with rain. "I always said that Mort was the most dangerous person to the Project. Which was foolish. We knew where the risk was from the start and we forgot. Heck, that's why you're here. We knew he was a con. And he conned us anyway."

"Played us," said Evon. It was more impulse than humor, but Jim responded with his mild smile.

"There's never a bottom with these people. It's like facing mirrors. You just go down and down." McManis instructed her to skip the morning pickup, just go to the office, so she'd be at hand when they started to sort things out.

Around 9 a.m., Robbie appeared at the opening to her cubicle. His tie knot was already wrung down six inches below his open collar. He wanted to talk.

"I don't think so, Robbie."

"Look, I'm sorry. I want to say that." He was too weakened to raise his hands; he simply opened his palms at his side. "It was the past to me. A mistake in the past." She propelled her chair to the credenza behind her and, waiting for him to leave, hovered over a phone-book-sized printout of hospital charges she'd been abstracting. But what was the reason for that? she thought suddenly. A case she didn't care about, clients who weren't really hers. The months, the time, the work, the hope for something of value-the staggering size of what had probably been destroyed, of what was being wrenched away from her, brought a whirling moment of desperation and, as ever, shame. He took a step closer.

"Don't be a jerk," she told him.

"A bigger jerk, you mean."

"You couldn't be a bigger jerk, Robbie. You're maxed. You busted the meter." The cover occurred to her remotely, whatever it was worth now. They were out in the open here. Yet it fit. Lovers' tiff. If she wanted, she could throw something at him. Instead, when he tried to speak to her again, she stuck a finger in each ear.

In time, she felt his shadow move off her. She sat still, contending with her rage. Once lit, it could incinerate everything else, including normally reliable means of restraint. She tried to sit in this chair. be in this place, step aside, but it was useless. In a minute, she was tearing down the corridor.

"What
matters
to you?"

He looked up abjectly from his chrome-armed desk chair. "Did you hear what I asked?"

"Yeah, I heard." He motioned to close the door. She slammed it.

"Then what's the answer? "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean. What counts. With you? I can't figure it out. I really can't."

"Shit, what counts with you? Getting merit badges from the Bureau? You think your bullshit's better than my bullshit?"

"No way, bub. I want an answer. What matters to you? Can you even tell me? Or is it just whatever play you can work. That's it, isn't it? So you can look down on us poor morons when we buy it?"

"Is that what you think?"

"Yes, Robbie. Yes, that's what I think." "Well then, that's what you think."

"Don't you blow me off. Don't you dare. Tell me what matters to you, goddamn it!" In his face, she could actually detect a fluttering aspect of fear. He had no idea how far down she'd drive him. Nor, in truth, did she.

"Can you tell me?"

"I don't know. Probably."

"Then I want to hear it."

His jaw rotated.

"It's love. Okay? It's the people I love. That's what counts. My friends. My family. A lot of my clients. That's all. Everybody else? They can take a leap. Everything else? It's just that crap floating in the sea. Flotsam and jetsam. The rest of life is just people doing things to other people for their own good. Except for love."

She closed her eyes, so angry she felt as if she might fly apart.

"Is that why you did this? For love? Is that why you walked through that door every day, where it says 'Attorney-at-Law' right under your name, and didn't just fall down from shame?"

"I don't know. I guess that was part of it. There were people I didn't want to disappoint. Christ, what are we talking about? Not writing a twenty-page paper? It's not homicide. I didn't try to hurt anybody. Just the opposite. For twenty years, I've been doing my job, caring about people and winning their cases."

"That's a play, Robbie. You wanted it for yourself. You wanted the job, the status, the money. But you hadn't earned any of it, and you took it anyway. just like a thief. And because of that you've screwed over anybody who didn't have the good sense to wonder if you were lying when you said à,' ànd,' `the.' How do you keep yourself from seeing that? Look what you've done to Mort. Or to those clients you say you love. My God, think about the poor Rickmaiers-that little girl you cried about when she lost her mom? What'll you say to her, Robbie, if somebody sues her to get back that great big settlement check you handed that family last week? How'd you just forget about stuff like that? For twenty years?"

"I don't know. I did it. I knew it, but I didn't think about it. I kind of forgave myself, or put it away, I don't know. I don't know how I lived with it. I lie, okay? I lie all the time. You think I really kissed Shaheen Conroe? I never got closer to her than clomping around in the chorus. That car I drive you around in? It's an S500, thirty grand less than the S6. I owned it a week when I saw Neucriss breezing down Marshall Avenue in the 600. Suddenly I felt like such a river-bottom turd that I went back and paid some stock boy five hundred bucks to replace the plate on the trunk lid and the steering wheel so it looks just like a 600. But it's not."

The car! She actually groaned.

"I'm a weak, fucked-up person. What can I say? I never told you I made sense to myself." He had another quotation from theater life handy for trouble: "'Ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do."'

Even in anger, she had to give him that much. For months she'd had an intuition, a vision almost, of a steaming jungle, full of hairy-barked trees and thick vines, teeming wildlife in all forms, and rank greenish waters that bubbled with stinking hot gases venting from inside the earth. That was the great primal wilderness that lay at the center of Robert Simon Feaver. Sitting in his tall leather chair, backed by the dramatic shapes of the city, he continued to seek mercy from her assault.

"Did I ever tell you when I knew I was in love with Rainy?" he asked. She looked at him coldly, unwilling to be entertained, but it did not deter him.

"Funny story, actually. Very funny story." He chortled once to prove that was true. "I was taking her to a hockey game. And she got hung up. I can't remember why. She was late and she was, you know, upset. These were great seats. Third row. Right behind the glass. She was like falling all over herself. And I said one of those things I say. Ì heard they're starting late tonight. No, no, really. The Red Wings' plane was late.' I can't imagine what I was gonna say when she saw they were in the middle of the second period. But I said it. 'No. No, really. They're late.' And like I could see this smile, half a smile, and this thing behind her eyes. She got it. That I wanted it to be true. I mean, she got me, really. Not it. But just that I believed it myself. Right then. And it was okay with her. That's when I was in love."

"Fuck you," she answered. "That's the whole problem. You think the world owes you that. You want everybody to give you a big goddamned hug, when you oughta be feeling terrible guilt, Robbie, or at least a little regret. And I don't understand how you let yourself off so easy. How do you do that? Every blasted day? How do you not level, even with yourself? How do you look people in the eye, knowing they think you're something you're not? How do you get out of bed every morning to do that? I don't understand."

"
You
don't?" His look remained bleak; he was not being underhanded or snide. He was startled only by the lapse of some fellowship he thought they shared. But when she took his meaning, the ignition of anger nearly lifted her off the floor. She eyed the scalloped silver letter opener on his desk, which she used to open the mail every morning, with half a mind to cut his treacherous tongue from his throat.

Instead, she flew from the office. She did not say a word to him for the rest of the day, or the day after. She spent as much time as she could around McManis's, but Amari, with little to do, got on her nerves referring to Robbie as often as he could as `the pussbag.'

As the week wore on, with the status of the Project still in doubt while they hashed things over in D.C., her anger somehow subsided to gloom. It was like being trapped in a pastepot. She couldn't get out, and seemed to exhaust herself with the inevitable effort. Although it was supposed to be for her own safety, she'd come to hate being under constant surveillance. She felt exposed and somehow less secure. On Thursday, the super, buffing the brass mailboxes, reported that a man had been asking about her and a number of the other tenants on the third floor. In alarm, she'd beeped Amari, but Joe's guy had been watching and ran the plate. A local-a Kindle County cop, on the dick squad, presumably working a lead. The pointlessness of her fear seemed only too typical of where things were. It was all screwed up, everything. Her. And Feaver. Everything. She walked on the streets and felt solemnly unmoved by the tulips with their bright faces popping up in the spring air.

CHAPTER 29

MY PLAN TO SAVE PETROS-AND ROBBIE - required him to withdraw at once from practice. He would never again see clients, go to court, or sign documents. There was no other alternative. Even if we could somehow wangle Robbie's law degree, BAD, Bar Admissions and Discipline, would never license someone whom they'd inevitably discover had been illegally masquerading as a lawyer for the last twenty years.

Accounting to Dinnerstein for Robbie's changed status would require a pretty fancy story, but whatever we cooked up, Mort was virtually certain to keep the news about Bobbie secret so that opponents did not attempt to take advantage of him while he was scrambling to hire another courtroom lawyer to replace Feaver. In the meantime, Bobbie could still pass money to Crowthers, through Judith McQueevey, and to Gillian Sullivan, who was about to resume the bench and was still owed for her favorable ruling in the case transferred to Skolnick. More important, Robbie could remain a player in whatever endgame Stan aimed at Kosic and Tuohey. That in turn would give me the leverage I needed to bargain. Robbie was all but certain to end up in the penitentiary; my goal now was to minimize his time.

Most of my negotiations with Stan were conducted during our resumed morning trots in Warz Park. Neither winter darkness nor anything short of a blizzard deterred Stan from running, but I had taken a few months off until the weather eased. Now I met him there several times to talk things through. Although UCORC threatened for a week not to allow the Project to go on, they were in too deep, with too much money expended and too much crime uncovered, simply to throw everything aside. Ultimately, Stan and I agreed that the government would no longer promise Robbie probation. Instead, they would advise the sentencing judge of all relevant matters-Robbie's extraordinary cooperation and the full range of his misfeasance, including his unlicensed law practice-and let the judge impose whatever sentence the court found appropriate. My best guess, when the whole story came out, assuming there were some significant convictions, was that Robbie would do about two years inside. The restitution order relating to Feaver's unlawful practice might be staggering, but most judges would let the financial issues fall out in the inevitable morass of civil law suits for fraud that the insurance companies would file. Even with all that resolved between us, Stan needed D.C. to sign off.

"We accept," he finally advised me one morning in the middle of May. "But there's one more condition you're not going to like." Somehow, Sennett finished six miles every morning looking a picture of order. He had perfect equipment-neopropylene shorts and a sleeveless jersey, footgear the size of snowshoes, and a water bottle in a holster at the small of his back. His wiry Mediterranean hair was unmussed and his sweat always seemed to evaporate. His cheeks were already razored clean. Now he gave me his elevated look, chin ascendant, attempting to appear impregnable in the face of my expected complaints.

He had many excuses for what he proposed. Every prosecution, he said, even Skolnick and Crowthers, was in danger. The government could probably beat back the inevitable defense motions blaming them for Robbie's fraud, but the chances had grown significantly that a jury might just flush the cases out of disgust with Feaver. The future of Petros, therefore, rested more than ever on justifying the government's deal with this devil by demonstrating the widest ranging success in uncovering corruption. Yet they'd already lost Malatesta, and Feaver was done going to court on the contrived cases, since that wouldn't square with his pose with Dinnerstein. Instead, Sennett had a plan for a new matter, a fictitious motion to reopen one of our old cases, a motion in which Robbie's role, in essence, would be not as a lawyer but as a defendant under attack.