The Associate (14 page)

“They're with me,” Uncle Wally said.

“I figured.”

One of the specialists handed Baxter a bottle of water. He drained it in one long, noisy slurp with water splashing down his chin. “Got any painkillers?” he said desperately. They handed over some pills and another bottle of water. When he had consumed it all, he said, “Where we going this time?”

“Nevada. There's a clinic near Reno, in the mountains, spectacular country.”

“It's not a dude ranch, is it? I can't take another thirty days on a horse. My ass is still raw from the last detox.”

Uncle Wally was still standing at the foot of the bed. He had not moved a step. “No horses this time. It's a different kind of place.”

“Oh, really. I hear they're all the same. Folks here are always talking about their latest rehab. Always comparing notes. Great way to pick up girls in a bar.” He spoke with his eyes closed tightly as the pain rippled through his head.

“No, this is different.”

“How so?”

“It's a bit tougher, and you'll be there longer.”

“Do tell. How long?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Can I just promise to stop drinking right now and skip the whole damned thing?”

“No.”

“And I'm assuming that since you're here and since you're the big chief of this sorry little tribe my participation is not exactly voluntary?”

“Right.”

“Because if I say go to hell, get out of my house, I'm calling the police because the three of you broke in, and that there's no way I'm taking a trip with you--if I say all that, then you'll simply bring up the trust funds. Right?”

“Right.”

The nausea hit like lightning. Baxter bolted from the bed, shedding his sport coat as he stumbled through the door to the bathroom. The vomiting was loud and long and mixed with waves of profanities. He washed his face, looked at his swollen red eyes in the mirror, and admitted that a few days of sobriety was not a bad idea. But he couldn't imagine a whole lifetime with no booze and no drugs.

The trust funds had been established by a great-grandfather who had no idea what he was doing. In the days before private jets and luxury yachts and cocaine and countless other ways to burn the family fortune, the prudent thing to do was to preserve the money for future generations. But Baxter's grandfather had seen the warning signs. He hired the lawyers and changed the trusts so that a board of advisers could exercise a measure of discretion. Some of the money arrived each month and allowed Baxter to survive quite comfortably without working. But the serious money could be turned off like a spigot, and Uncle Wally controlled it with an iron fist.

If Uncle Wally said you were going to rehab, then you were about to dry out.

Baxter stood in the bathroom door, leaning on the facing, and looked at the three. They had not budged. He looked at the specialist nearest to him and said, “You guys here to break my thumbs if I put up a fight?”

“No,” came the reply.

“Let's go, Baxter,” Walter said.

“Do I pack?”

“No.”

“Your jet?”

“Yes.”

“Last time I was allowed to get hammered.”

“The clinic says you can drink all you want on the ride in. The bar is stocked.”

“How long's the flight?”

“Ninety minutes.”

“I'll have to drink fast.”

“I'm sure you can handle that.”

Baxter waved his arms and looked around his bedroom. “What about my place? The bills, the maid, the mail?”

“I'll take care of everything. Let's go.”

Baxter brushed his teeth, combed his hair, changed his shirt, then followed Uncle Wally and the other two outside and into a black van. They rode in silence for a few minutes, but the tension was finally broken by the sounds of Baxter crying in the rear seat.

The Associate

Chapter 13

The bar review course was offered at Fordham University on Sixty-second Street, in a vast lecture hall that was filled with anxious former law students. From 9:30 until 1:30 each weekday, various professors from nearby law schools covered the intricacies of constitutional law, corporations, criminal law, property, evidence, contracts, and many other subjects. Since virtually every person in the room had just finished law school, the material was familiar and easily digested. But the volume was overwhelming. Three years of intense study would be reduced to a nightmare of an exam that ran for sixteen hours over a two-day period. Thirty percent of those taking it for the first time would not pass, and because of this there was little hesitation in forking over the $3,000 for the review course. Scully & Pershing picked up the bill for Kyle and its other new recruits.

The pressure was palpable the first time Kyle walked into the room at Fordham, and it never went away. By the third day he was sitting with a group of friends from Yale, and they soon formed a study group that met every afternoon and often worked into the night.

During three years of law school, they had dreaded the day they would be forced to revisit the murky world of federal taxation or the tedium of the Uniform Commercial Code, but the day was at hand. The bar exam consumed them.

Scully & Pershing was typical in that it forgave the first flunking of the exam, but not the second. Two bad tests, and you're out. A few of the crueler firms had a one-strike policy, and there were a handful of more reasonable firms that would forgive twice if the associate was showing promise on all other fronts. Regardless, the fear of failure boiled just under the surface and often made it difficult to sleep.

Kyle found himself taking long walks around the city, at all hours, to break the monotony and clear his head. The walks were informative, and at times fascinating. He learned the streets, the subways, the bus system, the rules of the sidewalks. He knew which coffee shops stayed open all night and which bakeries had warm baguettes at 5:00 a.m. He found a wonderful old bookstore in the Village and resumed his rabid new interest in spy and espionage novels.

After three weeks in the city, he finally found a suitable apartment. At daybreak one morning, he was sitting on a stool in the window of a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, sipping a double espresso and reading the Times, when he saw two men wrestle a sofa out of a door across the street. The men were obviously not professional movers, and they showed little patience with the sofa. They practically threw it into the back of a van, then disappeared through the door. A few minutes later they were back with a bulky leather chair that received the same treatment. The men were in a hurry, and the move did not appear to be a happy one. The door was next to a health food store, and two floors above it a sign in a window advertised an apartment available for a sublet. Kyle quickly crossed the street, stopped one of the men, then followed him upstairs for a look around. The apartment was one of four on the third floor. It had three small rooms and a narrow kitchen, and as he talked to the man, Steve

somebody, he learned that Steve had the lease but was leaving town in a hurry. They shook hands on an eight-month sub at $2,500 per. That afternoon, they met again at the apartment to sign the paperwork and transfer the keys.

Kyle thanked Charles and Charles, reloaded his meager assets in his Jeep, and drove twenty minutes uptown to the corner of Seventh and West Twenty-sixth. His first purchase was a well-used bed and night table from a flea market. His second was a fifty-inch flat-screen television. There was no urgency in furnishing or decorating. Kyle doubted he would live there beyond the eight months and could not imagine having guests. It was an adequate place to start, then he would find something nicer.

Before leaving for West Virginia, he carefully set the traps. He cut several four-inch pieces of brown sewing thread, and with a dab of Vaseline stuck the threads to the bottoms of three interior doors. Standing and looking down, he could barely see the thread against the oak stain, but if anyone entered the apartment and opened the doors, they would leave a trail by displacing the threads. Along one wall in the den he had stacked textbooks, notebooks, files for this and that, generally useless stuff that he wasn't ready to part with. It was a haphazard pile, but Kyle arranged everything in careful order and photographed it all with a digital camera. Anyone looking through it would be tempted to toss things back into the collection, and if that happened, Kyle would know it. He informed his new neighbor, an elderly lady from Thailand, that he would be gone for four days and was not expecting any visitors. If she heard anything, call the cops. She agreed, but Kyle was not at all confident she understood a word he said.

His counterintelligence tactics were rudimentary, but the basics often worked just fine, according to the spy novels.

THE NEW RIVER runs through the Allegheny Mountains in southern West Virginia. It's fast in some places, slower in others, but on any stretch of it the scenery is beautiful. With Class IV rapids in some areas, it has long been a favorite of serious kayakers. And with miles and miles of slower water, it attracts thousands of rafters each year. Because of its popularity, there are several established outfitters. Kyle had found one near the town of Beckley.

They met there at a motel the first night. Joey, Kyle, and four other Beta brothers. They drank two cases of beer to celebrate the Fourth of July, and woke up with hangovers. Kyle, of course, stayed with diet soda and woke up pondering the mysteries of the bankruptcy code. One look at his five friends and he was proud of his sobriety.

Their guide was a rather rustic local named Clem, and Clem had a few rules for the twenty-four-foot rubber raft that was his livelihood. Helmets and life vests were mandatory. No smoking, period. No drinking was allowed in the “boat” while it was moving down the river. When it stopped, for lunch or for the night, they could drink all they wanted. Clem counted ten cases of beer and realized what he was facing. The first morning was uneventful. The sun was hot, and the crew was subdued, even suffering. By late afternoon, they were splashing water and began jumping in. By 5:00 p.m., they were parched, and Clem found a sandbar to settle into for the first night. After a couple of beers each, and one for Clem himself, they pitched four tents and set up camp. Clem cooked T-bones on a grill, and after dinner the crew ventured off to explore.

Kyle and Joey followed the river for half a mile, and when they were certain they could not be seen, they sat on a log with their feet in the backwater. “Let's have it,” Joey said, cutting to the chase.

For weeks, even months, Kyle had struggled with the conversation they were about to have. He loathed the idea of upsetting his friend's life, but he had decided that he had no choice but to tell the story. All of it. He justified his decision by convincing himself that he

would certainly want to know if things were reversed. If Joey had been the first to see the video and knew of its dangers, he, Kyle, would want to know. But the bigger reason, and one that made him feel selfish, was that Kyle needed help. He had worked on a rough draft of a plan, and it was more than he could handle himself, especially with Bennie lurking in the shadows. The plan could easily lead nowhere, and it could just as easily lead to something dangerous. It could be aborted at any time. It could also be rejected outright by Joey Bernardo. The first step involved Elaine Keenan.

Joey listened in rapt silence to Kyle's detailed replaying of the initial encounter with a man known as Bennie. He was sufficiently stunned by the existence of the video. He was thoroughly bewildered by the blackmail. He was terrified by the thought of some forgotten girl accusing him of rape and producing the evidence to back it up.

Kyle unloaded everything but the background on the lawsuit. He had not yet passed the bar and received a license to practice, but he had signed a contract with Scully & Pershing and felt an ethical obligation to protect firm business. This was silly in light of what he would be forced to do, but for the moment his career was unblemished and he felt rather ethical.

Joey's first reaction was a halfhearted attempt to deny any contact with Elaine, but Kyle waved him off. “You're on the video,” Kyle said as sympathetically as possible. “You're having sex with a girl who's probably floating in and out of consciousness. In our apartment. Baxter goes first, then you. And I saw it on a twelve-inch laptop screen. If it's ever seen in court, it'll be on a big screen, a massive one. It'll be like sitting in the cinema with the images and sounds enhanced so that everybody there, especially the jurors, will have no doubt that it's you. I'm sorry, Joey, but you're there.”

“Totally nude?”

“Not a stitch. Do you remember it?”

“It was five years ago, Kyle. I've worked hard to forget it.”

“But you do remember?”

With great reluctance, Joey said, “Yeah, sure, but there was no rape. Hell, the sex was her idea.”

“That's not real clear on the video.”

“Well, the video is missing several important details. First, when the cops showed up that night, we scattered. Baxter and I ran next door and ducked into Thelo's apartment where there was a smaller and quieter party. Elaine was there, bombed as usual and having a good time. We hung around for a few minutes, waited for the cops to clear out, then Elaine tells me she wants to leave, wants to go back to our place for a ”session,“ as she liked to call it. With Baxter and me. That's the way she was, Kyle, always on the prowl. She was the easiest lay at Duquesne. Everybody knew it. She was very cute and very easy.”

“I remember well.”

“I never saw a girl so promiscuous and so aggressive. That's why we were stunned when she cried rape.”

“And it's why the police lost interest.”

“Exactly. And there's something else, another little detail not on the video. The night before the party, you and Alan and some others went to a Pirates game, right?”

“Yes.”

“Elaine was in the apartment, which was nothing new. And we had a three-way. Me, Baxter, and Elaine. Twenty-four hours later, same apartment, same guys, same everything, she passes out, wakes up, decides she was raped.”

“I don't remember this.”

“It was no big deal until she cried rape. Baxter and I talked about it and decided to keep it quiet because she might claim we raped her twice. So we buried it. When the police started squeezing us, we finally told them. That's when they packed up and went home. Case closed. No rape.”

A small turtle stopped swimming by a log and seemed to stare at them. They stared back, and for a long time nothing was said.

“Do Baxter and Alan know about this?” Joey finally asked.

“No, not yet. It was hard enough telling you.”

“Thanks for nothing.”

“I'm sorry. I need a friend.”

“To do what?”

“I don't know. Right now I just need someone to talk to.”

“What do these guys want from you?”

“It's very simple. The scheme is to plant me as a spy in my law firm, where I can extract all sorts of secrets that the other side can use to win a big lawsuit.”

“Simple enough. What happens if you get caught?”

“Disbarred, indicted, convicted, sentenced to five years in prison--state, not federal.”

“Is that all?”

“Bankrupted, humiliated, it's a long list.”

“You need more than friends.”

The turtle crawled onto the sand and disappeared into the roots of a dead tree. “We'd better get back,” Kyle said.

“We gotta talk some more. Let me think about this.”

“We'll sneak away later.”

They followed the river to the campsite. The sun had dropped below the mountains, and night was approaching quickly. Clem stoked the coals and added wood to the fire. The crew gathered around and opened beers, and the chatter began. Kyle asked if anyone had heard from Baxter. There was a rumor the family had locked him away in a high-security rehab unit, but this had not been confirmed. No one had heard from him in three weeks. They told Baxter stories for far too long.

Joey was notably quiet, obviously preoccupied. “You got girl trouble?” Clem asked at one point.

“Naw, just sleepy, that's all.”

By 9:30 they were all sleepy. The beer and sun and red meat finally caught up with them. When Clem finished his third long joke in a row with a lame punch line, they were all ready for their sleeping bags. Kyle and Joey shared a tent, and as they were arranging two rather thin air mattresses, Clem yelled across the campsite, “Be sure and check for snakes.” Then he laughed, and they assumed it was another attempt at humor. Ten minutes later they heard him snore. The sound of the river soon put them all to sleep.

At 3:20 a.m., Kyle checked his watch and saw the time. After three rough weeks of bar review, his nights were erratic. The fact that he was essentially sleeping on the ground didn't help matters.

“You awake?” Joey whispered.

“Yes. I assume you are too.”

“I can't sleep. Let's go talk.”