I’ve been lost in my notes, and Manny still isn’t back when the waiter drops the food on the table. I twist around, and I see that the bathroom door is wide open.
I jump out of my chair and run like a maniac to the street.
I’m just in time to see Manny Rodriguez hop into a cab and roar away up Tenth Avenue. He finger-waves out the back window at me.
Chapter 49. Loco
THERE’S A GRAY, pebbly beach on the bay side of East Hampton where on Sunday afternoons the Dominicans, Ecuadorians, and Costa Ricans play volleyball. During the week, they put in seventy hours mowing lawns, clipping hedges, and skimming pools. At night they cram into ranch houses that look normal from the street but have been partitioned into thirty cubes. By Sunday afternoon, they’re ready to explode.
These games are wild. You got drinking, gambling, salsa, and all kinds of over-the-top Latin drama. Every three minutes or so two brown bantamweights are being pulled apart. Five minutes later they’re patting each other on the back. Another five minutes, they’re swinging again.
I’m taking in this Latin soap opera from a peeling green bench fifty yards above the fray.
It’s six fifteen, and as always, I’m early.
It’s no accident. This is part of the gig, the required display of fealty and respect. Which is fine with me. It gives me time to light my cigar and watch the sailboats tack for home at the Devon Yacht Club.
I should cut back. The Davidoff torpedo is my third this week. But what’s life without a vice? What’s life with a vice? Did you know Freud smoked half a dozen cigars a day? He also died of mouth cancer, which I like to think was poetic payback for telling the world that all every guy wants to do is kill his father and boff his mom. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t need to know that.
Speaking of authority figures, a drumroll please, because here comes mine-BW-and he’s right on time, eleven minutes late.
With his three-hundred-dollar Helmut Lang jeans, torn and faded just right, and his God-knows-how-expensive light-blue cashmere hoodie and week-old growth, he’s looking more like a goddamn weekender every day. But who’s got the stones to tell him? Not me, bro, and they call me Loco for a reason.
“What’s up?” asks BW, but not in the convivial way most people use it. Out of BW’s mouth, it sounds more like “what’s your problem?” or “so what’s your problem now?” But this time it’s not just my problem, it’s our problem, which pisses him off ten times more.
“Apparently, we had company,” I say. “Out behind Wilson ’s house.”
“Oh, yeah? Who told you that?”
“Lindgren.”
“That sucks.” For all his peccadilloes, BW has an impressive ability to cut to the chase.
Down in the sand, a drunk volleyballer is pointing at a ball mark and screaming bloody murder in either Spanish or Portuguese.
“What should I do now, boss?”
“Whatever you think is best.”
“Whatever I think is best, BW?”
“And let me know when you’ve done it.”
Then, like a puff of smoke from an overpriced cigar, BW’s gone, and it’s just me, the night, and the salsa.
Chapter 50. Loco
WHATEVER I THINK is best, huh? I think I get BW’s point, which means another trip to Brooklyn and another shitty, shitty, bang, bang.
Like his compadres out in the Hamptons, Manny Rodriguez works way too hard. It’s three in the morning, and I’ve been parked across the street from Manny’s apartment since eleven, and everyone in Bed-Stuy is asleep but him. Is it that immigrant work ethic or is something boiling in their blood? Quien sabe, ay?
Wait just a second-here comes Manny. Just in time, because my stomach couldn’t take any more bad coffee tonight.
Even now, our boy is still hopped up, bouncing to the music pumping through his headphones.
If you ask me, nothing’s ruined the city more than headphones and iPods and computers. It used to be New York offered the kind of random interaction you couldn’t get anywhere else. You never knew when you might have a moment with the beautiful girl waiting next to you for the light to change.
Or maybe you’d say something to a guy, not a gay thing, just two people traveling through this world acknowledging each other’s existence. Now everyone walks around obliviously listening to their own little music downloaded from their own little computers. It’s lonely, brother.
Plus, it’s dangerous. You step off the curb and don’t hear the crosstown bus till you’re under it, and you certainly don’t hear the Chinese guy pedaling around the corner on his greasy bike.
Well, now you can add the sad cautionary tale of Manny Rodriguez. He’s so caught up in his own tunes he doesn’t hear me walk up behind him and pull out my gun. He doesn’t sense anything’s the slightest bit amiss until a bullet is crashing through the back of his skull and boring into his brain. The poor guy doesn’t know he’s been murdered until he’s dead.
Chapter 51. Kate
THE BLUEBACK LAYING out the formal complaint against Randall Kane hits my desk at Walmark, Reid and Blundell around 2:30 p.m. I shut my door and clear my calendar for the rest of the day.
I’m well aware that this choice assignment is not based entirely on my skill as a litigator. For the high-powered CEO charged with crossing the line, walking into court with a female lawyer is pretty much textbook. And I don’t have a problem with that. There are still so many more disadvantages than advantages to being a woman, career-wise, that in those rare instances where it plays in your favor, I believe in going with the flow.
Once I read the language at the top of the complaint, I’m confident this is something we can win not only in court but in the media. It’s sprinkled with phrases like “hostile work environment,” which usually refers to off-color jokes and pages of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues pinned to cubicle walls.
Then I read the affidavit from the first of Randall Kane’s alleged victims. She’s a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three who spent nine years as Kane’s executive secretary. In her written statement, sworn under oath and the penalty of perjury, she describes how on more than thirty occasions, she repelled Kane’s physical and verbal sexual advances, and how when she finally quit and filed a complaint, he used all the corporate resources at his disposal to destroy her life.
By the time I finish reading the complaint, I realize that Randy Kane’s problems aren’t going away with a scary letter or pretrial motion. And there are eleven other women whose sworn testimonies are essentially identical, right down to the phone call they receive from Kane’s corporate lackey telling them they’ll never work again if they keep this up. Three of the women recorded the calls.
I close the file on my desk and ponder the East River. Kane apparently isn’t just an unfaithful husband. He’s a scumbag and possibly a serial rapist who just happens to be worth a billion dollars. He deserves to pay a high price for his actions, and if I help him avoid it, I’m no different from that in-house lackey of his making obscenely threatening phone calls.
For a decade I’ve punched all the right tickets, from Law Review at Columbia to two years prosecuting white-collar crime for the DA’s southern circuit, and after three and a half years at Walmark, Reid and Blundell, I’ve got senior partner in my sights.
You know how many female senior partners there are or have been at Walmark, Reid and Blundell? None.
So why am I walking down the corridor to Tony Reid’s corner office?