Dead Money (15 page)

In short, a major client was expected.

Warwick’s solo presence was not an unalloyed pleasure. Small talk was out of the question. I decided to use our happy little time together to press for a bonus for Vinnie Price.

This is not the time, Warwick responded testily. They’ll be here
any minute. And in any case I would prefer it if you stuck to the procedures.

Before I could launch into a tirade about the vacuous and petty nature of the bureaucratic procedures in question, there was a knock on the door. Patricia, our mouselike receptionist, peered in.

A Mr. FitzGibbon and a Mr. FitzGibbon for you, sir, she said, addressing only Warwick.

Send them in, Warwick directed, ignoring a golden opportunity to make fun of Patricia’s simplicity. Not something I’d have overlooked, were I running the firm. A brace of FitzGibbons? I would have asked. A matched pair?

Moments later FitzGibbon père entered the room, full of red-faced bluster and bonhomie. The real FitzGibbon. The paradigm.

Immediately following came the pale reflection.

I’d like you to meet my son Ramon, FitzGibbon said, with just the hint of a smile.

Pleased to meet you, I said, extending my hand to Mr. Security.

I’m sorry Raul couldn’t be here too, said FitzGibbon to Warwick. Other business.

Warwick nodded.

A deeply understanding nod.

Ramon took my hand with obvious reluctance. The touch was brief. His grip was wet and weak. I noticed a handkerchief peeking out from his right jacket sleeve. A germophobe, I guessed. I watched to see if he tried surreptitiously to unsleeve the handkerchief and wipe his hand. But I was distracted by Warwick. He was busily seating the guests, pouring the wine and passing the hors d’oeuvres with a grandly false air of festivity. If the handkerchief was unsleeved, I didn’t see it.

Moments later, FitzGibbon’s in-house counsel arrived. Marvin Threadgill, Esq. A tiny, well-appointed fellow. Polite to a fault. Good at what he did.

It was hard not to dislike him.

There followed an hour or so of back and forth. Threadgill and Warwick talked about investments. Projects. Tax shelters. Other business matters that I knew less about than I let on.

FitzGibbon looked as bored as I felt.

I did my best to participate. From time to time Warwick would call in a tax associate. A securities lawyer. To explain an arcane point or two.

They would stand uncomfortably during their audience, eyeing the food and wine. Feeling diminished. Until Warwick was through with them, which he indicated with an extra-loud
‘o-kay
then’ that never failed to send them scuttling from the room.

I was about to fake an attack of gout when we finally got to the reason I was there.

I’ve got to take a call from the Governor, said Warwick to FitzGibbon. I thought Rick could take a moment to give you the update on Jules, nodding at me and sidling for the door.

No, no, said FitzGibbon, Charles, please. The Governor can wait a minute or two.

FitzGibbon winked at me. Warwick sat back down, with an almost imperceptible grimace.

There was much I could have said, but the presence of Ramon made me uncomfortable. I could argue that FitzGibbon was our client, for attorney-client privilege purposes, since he was paying the bills. But Ramon unquestionably was not our client. Anything I said, then, was not protected. The cops, the ADA, a judge could ask, if they knew to do so, any question they liked about what was said in that room.

And I certainly wasn’t about to ask Ramon to leave. FitzGibbon and he seemed joined at the hip. So I felt obliged to give the sanitized version. Which was probably the wiser course in any event.

There’s not that much to tell you, at this point, I said. Clearly they’re convinced that he did it. He hasn’t been charged yet, but it seems like that will happen any day. I sounded out the ADA. They don’t seem interested in a plea. But Jules isn’t either. He continues to insist that he’s innocent. Fortunately, there’s no physical evidence or eyewitnesses to tie him to it. But the circumstances certainly are suggestive. I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be easy. We have our work cut out for us.

There was silence from the FitzGibbon side of the table. I thought I saw a slightly ironic smile on FitzGibbon’s face. But it could have been the teeth. Ramon kept looking around the room. For assassins, I presumed.

Warwick felt obliged to fill the silence. Well, Rick, he said, a little too cheerfully, why don’t you tell Eamon the progress you’re making in your investigation?

FitzGibbon nodded absently.

I’m looking at a few things, I said. But frankly, I don’t want to raise
expectations, or mislead you in any way. So I’d prefer to save the details for when I have something more concrete to tell you.

Warwick gave me a dark look. He’d given me my opening to impress FitzGibbon with how diligent and skilled I was. I’d dropped the ball. I could just hear him afterwards: Rick, he’d say, you have to pay more attention to the dynamic in the room. They were looking to hear something from you. That man pays the firm a great deal of money. He expects exemplary service. Blah, blah, blah.

That had not been my take on FitzGibbon. I had read things in his face. Boredom, mostly. Vacuity. But the desire for some self-serving blather about the great job I was doing wasn’t one of them. And anyway, I didn’t care. I had a job to do, damn it, and I was going to do it right.

We escorted our esteemed guests to the elevator, executed the obligatory round of hearty handshakes, which Ramon deftly managed to avoid.

I went to my office. I looked at the pile of message slips. The blinking message light.

I ignored them.

WHEN I GOT HOME
, I was treated to an unexpected sight. Melissa and Dr. Hans Steiglitz were seated together on the sofa. He was holding her hand. Her eyes were red. He was speaking earnestly to her in a low voice.

When I came in, he looked up.

Mr. Redman, he said in his mellifluous way, smoothly getting up and striding toward me, his hand outstretched.

I took it, reluctantly. I noted the silk hankie in his breast jacket pocket. Worse yet, that it matched his tie.

Rick, he said,
sotto voce
, putting around my shoulder an unwelcome arm that perfectly complemented the uninvited use of my first name. Would you mind giving us a couple of minutes alone? I just need to wrap this up. Just a second or two.

Wrap
what
up? What kind of nerve does it take to ask a man to leave his own living room so that you can be alone with his wife?

Steiglitz kind of nerve, I concluded.

I saw Kelly in the doorway to the dining room, frantically signaling
for me to join her. Without saying a word to Steiglitz, I peeled his tentacle off me and went to her.

What’s this all about? I asked.

Shh, she said, closing the door behind us. It’s all right. I mean it’s not all right. But it’s okay. I called him.

You called him?

I found Mom with a bottle, she said. Right after I got home. She was trying to hide it under the kitchen sink, and I couldn’t believe it, I thought she was doing so well, and it was three-quarters empty, and I don’t think the dog drank it. I could smell it on her, and see it on her face. You know.

I knew.

I called you right away, Daddy, she said, tears appearing in her eyes, but they said you were in some important meeting. I didn’t know what to do. I called Dr. Steiglitz. She kept asking for him.

Kelly could see from the look on my face, bewildered and angry, that her explanation was not assuaging me.

Since when do famously successful shrinks make house calls? I asked.

I don’t know, Daddy. I guess maybe they do. I just called him to ask him what I should do. Should I take her to the hospital? What should I say to her? Should I be angry at her? I was so confused. And he said, ‘I’ll be right there.’

The tears were streaming down her face. I was too angry to pay attention.

Since when do shrinks make house calls? I repeated, looking at the door to the living room.

I was in a rage. I should have been grateful, I suppose, that this famous doctor was there, giving my wife hands-on personal treatment at the first hint of a relapse. But something about him, about his silky manner, about the way Melissa shrank and groveled in his presence, gave me the creeps.

I went back to the living room, prepared to tell him to get the hell out of my house.

Steiglitz got up and most unctuously excused himself. Had to go. Needed at the hospital. So sorry to disturb.

As we reached the front door, he said in a whisper, I’ll call you tomorrow with a report. For now, I’d suggest she not be left alone.

Slick enough to anticipate me. Slick enough not to touch me, this
time. No handshake. No tentacle over the shoulder. Just got the hell out of there.

Smart bastard. I might have hit him in the nose.

I turned to Melissa. She was huddled in the corner of the sofa, knees to her chest, arms around her knees. Cheeks streaked with mascara.

Melissa, I said.

She stared straight ahead at the wall.

All the angry energy left me. An unutterable weariness descended.

Let Steiglitz deal. Let that scumbag deal. More power to him.

I slunk out of the room, went upstairs. Turned on the computer. Logged on. Anything. Anything to get me away from this.

Kelly appeared in the doorway.

Daddy, she said, what’s going on?

Nothing’s going on.

Okay, she said, with a hint of anger. Be like that.

She left. She closed the door quietly.

She knew. She knew I needed to know she was angry at me. And she knew I needed to be left alone. And she knew how to make both happen at the same time.

But something broke in me that night. The last tie to Melissa. The last thread of hope. That I could be the one to bring her back to life. That we could once again see life through shared eccentric glasses, and laugh.

THE MORNING WAS DRAB
. I was confused. Disturbed.

When I’m confused and disturbed, I call Sheila. Well. When I’m even more confused and disturbed than usual, I call Sheila.

I called Sheila.

She answered the phone. I was taken aback. This was a rare and pleasant event. I didn’t have to sit through her minutes-long voice mail message, reciting the triage of telephone numbers: in an emergency, call… in case of urgent need, call …Subtle distinctions, but apparently understood by her clientele.

Don’t tell me, Sheila, I said. Your ten o’clock didn’t show up?

You are correct, she said.

Coke? I asked. Barbiturates? Compulsive masturbation? Run-of-the-mill alcoholic?

Silence.

I’ll be right over.

I grabbed a cab. It smelled of ginger and anise.

I told Sheila about the night before. Steiglitz. Melissa. Weirdness. How I’d allowed myself to be overcome instead by what strangely felt like jealousy. And how embarrassing it was, to feel that way. About a doctor, however oleaginous, who not only was there to help my wife recover, but was doing so on his own time. Who had demonstrated again and again, if one sat back and took the more objective view, that he, and only he, of all the people who had treated her, could put his finger on the pulse of her addiction. Could actually get a reaction from her.

Yes, said Sheila, but is that so hard to understand? You’ve failed her, in your eyes. He hasn’t. Yet, at least. It’s hard to face. You resent him. You hate him for being the man you can’t feel yourself to be.

She may have been right. But I wasn’t ready to talk about how much of a man I couldn’t feel myself to be.

I wanted to talk about good and evil.

Shrinks hate that topic. Hovering behind the notion of good and evil is the death of their profession. If we all went back to confession, they’d have nothing to do.

So we segued into the shrink-authorized version: Why was I so obsessed with it? Why was I so obsessed with whether or not I was a ‘good’ person? What the hell was wrong with me anyway? (That’ll be two hundred dollars, please.)

One could put it down to the usual claptrap about the affectionless childhood - if nobody loved me I must have been bad. And I haven’t gotten any better. So I must still be bad. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to prove otherwise. To my long-dead parents.

And that was probably true.

But what did it buy you?

Or it could be that the tattered shreds of whatever conscience (superego, please) I had left were desperately trying to dam the flood of narcissism that threatened to engulf me.

But what was that, other than a different way of saying the same thing?

Narcissism is widely misunderstood, Sheila said. Most people think
of it as overweening self-regard. Love of one’s own reflection. But that’s not it at all. Narcissism is, in fact, a form – perhaps the very definition – of self-loathing.

Narcissus drowned himself, didn’t he? I asked.

Exactly.

I recalled a passage from Norman Mailer’s biography of Picasso. Mailer – himself no stranger to the notion of self-regard – explained, as I recalled, that the narcissist simply regards nobody’s feelings as paramount to his own.

It’s that simple.

It’s the midway point, I said, between the saint and the psychopath. The one who doesn’t credit others with any feelings at all. And the common wisdom has it backwards there, too, doesn’t it? Most people think of the psychopath as unfeeling. In fact, the opposite is true. The psychopath has raging feelings, insatiable desires. It’s the rest of us who are emotional ciphers, in his mind. What was it that Ted Bundy said, with a shrug? There’s a million brown-haired girls out there in the world; who’s going to miss another one or two?

Or three dozen.

And it’s the fear, I’m guessing, of descending to that state that drives a certain type of borderline narcissist, like me, to his obsession with ‘goodness.’

Which notion Sheila deftly used to steer me off the abstract plane.

That might explain all the strong women, she said.

How is that connected?