“Victor,” he said finally. “Thanks for waiting. I was talking to my plumber. The money those guys charge, Jesus. What’s up?”
“Good news,” I said. “We got a settlement offer.”
“How much?”
“I met with a fellow named Prescott, the big hitter over at Talbott, Kittredge, who seems to have taken control of the case. We met for over an hour, yelling at each other, but I pushed him up to something great.”
“How much?”
“I got him to give us a hundred and twenty thousand.”
“And how much of that would I get?”
“There are eight of you with equal shares, so after our fee that would be ten thousand each.”
There was a pause where I waited for the congratulations to spill out my side of the receiver.
“Is that all?” he said in his rough, loose voice. “What the fuck’s that, that’s nothing. I put a hundred and twenty-five grand into that piece-of-crap building and all I’m going to get out of it is a measly ten thou? They defrauded the hell out of me. I should be getting more than ten grand there, Victor. I should be getting their balls on a plaque.”
“Lou,” I said quietly, “if they wanted to stonewall and take us to trial, we’d lose.”
“A hundred and twenty-five grand I lost. Did you ever find that accountant who did the numbers in that bullshit prospectus? What’s his name?”
“Stocker,” I said. “Still missing. The FBI is looking for him, too.”
“I bet he’s got stories to tell.”
“Not in time to help us. He’s probably on the beach somewhere in Brazil, doing the samba with dark-skinned women and laughing at us.”
“I hate to think I’m getting taken again here, Victor. Maybe we should just throw the dice and let those bastards fade us, see what the jury comes up with. Did you talk to the other guys?”
“I wanted to talk to you first.”
“Set up a meeting next week,” he said. “We’ll talk about it together. Maybe it will look better to me then. I got to go, the electrician’s on the line and I don’t want to put him on hold.”
“What is it, home improvement week?”
“We bought a house in Radnor. Two point five mil and the thing still needs to be gutted. Go figure. But you know what that’s like, what am I telling you for?”
“Right.”
“I’ll talk to you at the meeting next week.”
“Sure.”
What I hated most about the rich was not their money. I envied them their money, I coveted their money, but I didn’t hate their money. What I hated was the way they pretended it was no big deal.
I went about returning my messages, unfamiliar names and numbers on little pink sheets. They involved bills, each and every one. There was a call from a computer specialist who had fixed the blink in our word processor, one from Little, Brown & Co. about payment for a book Guthrie had ordered before he left, one about a transcript in the Saltz case, which I had ordered but didn’t expect to need any longer. To each I said I would check our records and get back to them and then tossed the pink sheet into the overflowing wastebasket. Vimhoff was supposed to get our offices cleaned twice a week and I realized with a flash of lawyerly insight that the overflowing wastebaskets were my defense to being late with the rent. Constructive eviction. “Clean the damn offices and we’ll pay our rent,” I would say with a bite of indignation. That might work, at least until I tidied up the Saltz settlement. Ellie poked her head into my office and said she was leaving. I played with my time sheets a bit, fluffing up my hours, and waited to tell Derringer the news of our new case. I didn’t have to wait long.
“So how did it go with the snobs at Talbott?” she said when she strode into my office without knocking and sat on a wooden bridge chair across from my desk.
“They threw money at me,” I said.
“No, really.”
Elizabeth Derringer was short and slight, with glossy black hair cut like a helmet around her head. She wore round glasses that made her look very serious, even when she smiled, but if you could see past the glasses and the sharp features you could see the glint of a vicious humor. I had met her in law school, where she had been attending nights while she did social work for the city. Her final year she quit her job to get enough credits to graduate a semester early and that’s when I met her. She was smarter than me, she was smart as hell, and tougher than burned beef, but she ended up with a night school degree and the firms that turned me down didn’t hire from the night schools. They must have figured that if a law student was smart enough to join their firms, she was smart enough to figure out how to find parents who could afford to pay her tuition. But they missed a prize.
“They’re giving us a hundred and twenty thousand to settle Saltz,” I said.
“Golly, we’re rich. And for that dog yet.”
“If it goes through. Saltz doesn’t think it’s enough.”
“Tell him we have bills to pay,” she said.
“I’m setting up a meeting next week to nail it down. What happened with Cooperman?”
“Don’t ask.”
“There’s no way they were going to find him disabled because of a little ringing in his ear,” I said.
“Please, Victor, have some respect for the ill. Tinnitus. And he can’t work if it’s driving him crazy.”
“He’s in demolition.”
“I’ll win the appeal,” she said. “I’ve got those SSI bureaucrats right where I want them.”
Beth was mugged once, in broad daylight, by a crackhead whose courage was stoked by a five dollar hit. He walked up to her, smiled, and then in one quick motion grabbed her purse strap and started to run. Beth held on. Even as the crackhead dragged her down the sidewalk she held on. She was raised in Manayunk, before it was discovered and gentrified. It’s a hilly place, Manayunk, uneven streets, tough kids. She broke her wrist in the fall and scraped her face on the sidewalk, but still she held on. Finally he was the one who let go and ran from this crazed little woman he had dragged half a block, ran straight into a beige Impala with Jesus headlights. The police scraped him off the street. At the preliminary hearing he glowered at her through his bandages, trying to intimidate her out of testifying. She smiled sweetly and buried him.
“I guess I’m not going to convince you to drop the case,” I said.
“Nope.”
“What say we talk about it over a beer and a burger at the Irish Pub.”
“I can’t. I’m going out tonight.”
“On a Friday night?” I asked. “You have a date?”
“It’s not a date, not really. It’s a blind date. A blind date is more an interview with a prospective date, an exchange of resumes, silly chatter designed to test social skills, nothing more.”
“I was going to tell you about the new case I picked up today,” I said, a little jealous that she had someplace, anyplace, to go that night.
She stood up. “Tell me tomorrow, I’m going to be late.”
And then she was gone.
I readied to leave and turned out my office lights and then sat down again in my chair to watch the shifting city light play out across the garbage cans in the alley. I could feel it all about me. It was inescapable, falling cold and hard from stars in the sky, dripping from the leafless trees along the polluted city streets, surging down in waves, swirling like the sea about me. The air melted in thick, heavy drops and the spots on the walls danced maniacally and the order of all things was pointlessness and despair and finally death. Its scent lay fetid in the air, rotten, musked, overpoweringly seductive, like the juice of a strange woman. It played across the sallow face of Winston Osbourne in his calamity, it grew despite the X-rays pumped through my father’s lungs, it lay crouched and silent within my heart and infected everything I touched, my practice, my dreams, my relationships. I wanted to get out so bad, out of this life and its manifest pointlessness. I would do anything to get out, anything at all, anything. I was sick to death with the wanting.