Eye of the Beholder (10 page)

“Do you mind?” She holds a small tape recorder near my chest. Without waiting for an answer—they never do—she flips it on and starts with the basics, names and dates.

“You’ve been in private practice for fifteen years,” she says to me. “Shortly after convicting Terry Burgos, you opened your own law firm?”

I say nothing, though I flash that Riley smile that has won women over across the globe.

“And when did Harland Bentley hire you as the lawyer for all of his holdings?” She cocks her head, still holding the recorder near my chin. When I don’t answer, she says, “I just want some basic background here, Paul. We’re running a story on the Almundo indict ment. This is free publicity.”

I nod my head politely and stare at the recorder. “You’re Carolyn Pendry’s daughter, aren’t you?” I ask, making the connection.

She frowns at the non sequitur, especially that one. Apparently, this woman wants to make it on her own, without her anchorwoman mother’s bootstraps. Seems that transcendent beauty runs in the family, but the last time I was within breathing distance of a Pendry I was wiping her dinner off my shoe.

“Running late,” I say. I hand her my card.

Preemptively, she moves to block my path. “Just a few questions, Paul. Background is fine with me. I’ll buy you a drink. C‘mon, one harmless drink after work? ”

She’s trying to recover now, back to the flirtation. It probably works for her most of the time, her looks alone. Why not? If I looked like that, I’d use it, too. A fellow like me has to rely on his winning personality.

“I could mention Burgos,” she says, walking alongside me. Unless I throw her an elbow, or jump in a cab and close the door quickly, it looks like she’s not taking no for an answer. “Never hurts to remind everyone that you convicted the most famous serial killer our city has ever seen.”

That much is true. Almost every potential client I meet gets around to asking about it. Inevitably, I find myself recounting the details, the grizzly murder scene, the flamboyant defense team, the rush of hearing the jury announce that the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors. I leave out the part that, however time-consuming and publicized the case may have been, the prosecution of Terry Burgos was one of the easier cases I handled.

“Speaking of—are you close to the Bentley family?” she asks me. “Ever talk to Natalia? Or Gwendolyn Lake?”

She needs to work on her segues. Why even pretend she’s running a piece on Hector Almundo, when she obviously wants to talk about Burgos and the Bentley family?

“Would you describe Cassie Bentley as a troubled girl? Emotional problems?”

I stop, having reached the end of the courthouse plaza, and face Evelyn. Her hope springs eternal, the recorder poised before my face, as she chews on her lip. She seems to be formulating yet another question, but I’m more interested in the movement of her mouth. Dr. Freud had a point.

Harland Bentley had married Natalia Lake, heiress to the Lake mining fortune. Natalia’s sister, Mia Lake, had lived with her daughter Gwendolyn on the other side of Highland Woods from Natalia and Harland—two enormous mansions, one for each Lake sister, essentially framing the wealthy suburb. Mia Lake died long ago, early eighties or something, leaving Natalia to serve basically as the mother to her niece, Gwendolyn Lake. But these people had something like a billion dollars, all told, so nobody went hungry.

Natalia and Harland divorced shortly after their daughter, Cassie, was murdered by Terry Burgos. Natalia moved over to the other mansion, where her dead sister once lived, and where Gwendolyn Lake, her niece, might still live, for all I know. I never had the pleasure of meeting Gwendolyn, though from what I heard, it wouldn’t have been a pleasure.

I don’t know why Evelyn’s asking about this. But I don’t enjoy cat and mouse, unless I get to be the cat. Or is it the mouse? “Cassie Bentley was a promising young woman whose murder was a tragedy,” I say. “Natalia Lake handled herself with incredible grace and dignity. I wish her, and her niece Gwendolyn, the very best.”

Evelyn is quiet. Didn’t get what she wanted there. What did she expect? I’m a lawyer. I play with words all day.

I give Evelyn a wide smile. “And Senator Almundo is innocent,” I add.

She deflates. I gently take her recorder and slide the cue to the off position. “Evelyn,” I say, “when I cross-examine someone, I like to ask questions in the abstract, out of order, so the witness doesn’t see where I’m going. Then I tie it all together, in my favor, before they have a chance to fix the damage. But we’re not in court, I’m not under oath, and I don’t have to play your game. So do me a favor—say hi to your mother and have a nice day. If you want to play straight with me, you’ve got my number.”

I bid her adieu and leave her at the corner of the plaza. She calls out to me, “I’ll play straight, then,” but now she’s incurred penalties for lack of courtesy. I’ll return her phone call one of these days, but not this week.

 

 

I GET BACK TO my office just before three. I take a moment to savor the stenciled name SHAKER, RILEY & FLEMMING at the elevator bank of the building, or the same name in extruded gold lettering, set off against a marbled wall, over the receptionist’s head when I step off the elevator into our suite. The reception area is finely manicured, complete with cushy sofas and a mock courtroom to the side that reminds clients that we are preeminent trial lawyers. Best decision we made, that courtroom, when we moved into this space. Clients eat it up. Almost every case ends in settlement these days, but every client wants a warrior just in case.

I say hello to the receptionist but I’ve forgotten her name. That’s the downside. Time was, we were a handful of lawyers, Judge Shaker and I getting the firm started, with one prized client—Harland Bentley—and six hungry lawyers, chasing after business and trying as many cases as we could. We ate pizza every Wednesday night, while we looked anxiously over revenue projections and talked eagerly about new clients and upcoming trials, and which weekend we were all going to come in to put a new coat of paint on the walls. We drank scotch every Friday night before heading home. We even had a hoops team in the bar association league.

Now we’re over a hundred attorneys in these beautiful surroundings, paying princely sums to associates out of the finest law schools, churning cases with the best of them. I passed a conference room the other day and realized that I didn’t know the name of a single one of the young lawyers in there.

I say hello to a couple of young associates, each of them female, young, and attractive. Both of them ask me how I’m doing, and I answer, innocuously enough, “Fighting the good fight.” They both laugh, and I’m on my way. Pop quiz: Attractive young female associates laugh at your jokes because (a) they find you attractive, too, (b) they find you incisive and brilliant, or (c) you sign their paychecks?

“You missed the personnel meeting. Again.”

That’s why I like my assistant, Betty, who gives me no quarter, and who doesn’t even look up as I pass her cubicle. She’s learned the sound of my gait, or she has a hidden camera or something; she always knows when I’m approaching.

“I had an arraignment,” I explain.

“You have the four o‘clock with Mr. Otis.”

Right. He’s the chief financial officer of a Fortune 500 company who’s now under investigation by both the SEC and the U.S. attorney for fudging books after the company restated its earnings for the third quarter of 2003. It will be a delicate dance, this meeting, thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, a federal law that more or less eviscerates the attorney-client privilege for corporate officers. Basically, if a CFO, CEO, or anyone else with an important title with multiple letters, talks to an attorney about funky recordkeeping, that attorney might have to turn him into the feds or risk criminal liability himself. And the Communists—I mean, the American Bar Association—actually endorsed this idea, which is when I canceled my membership.

I need to look over some information before the meeting. Other work, including a brief that has to be filed tomorrow for one of Harland Bentley’s companies, is piled high on my desk. The message light is blinking on the elaborate contraption known as my phone. But I’ve been meaning to procrastinate for a while now; it’s time I got around to it. So I go to the mail. Most of it is bills or requests for money from one source or another. This one, in a plain white envelope and handwritten, looks like something personal. When I shake it, a single piece of paper, folded twice, falls out, containing these words in printed handwriting:

“Another satisfied customer,” I say to the empty room. I fold the paper back up and slide it into a desk drawer. I was once a former prosecutor, both federal and then local, so it’s not unheard of for me to get some fan mail from inmates who have me to thank for their surroundings. Usually, they threaten to liberate some part of my anatomy. Occasionally-this usually happens with some of the gangbangers I took down as a fed—they have found God and want to know if I have, too. Once I even wrote back, saying I never lost Him to begin with.

I pull the envelope out of the wastebasket. Local postmark. Mailed from here in the city. Reminds me of some of the mail we used to get when we prosecuted Burgos—freakish, fire-and-brimstone stuff that usually made us laugh but occasionally creeped us out.

My secretary, Betty, walks into my office. “Are you talking to yourself in here?”

“Are you the new evil emerging?” I respond.

She gives me a look, closer to disapproving than curious.

“God’s answer is near,” I tell her. She picks up my coffee, sniffs it, then rolls her eyes and leaves the office.

 

 

LEO STANDS OUTSIDE the building that houses Paul Riley’s law firm. He uses a moist towelette he got at a fried chicken joint to wipe down the envelope one last time. Then he drops it in the mailbox and walks away.

P
aul RILEY,” I say to the man at the long table in front of the Canary Room. He looks up my name on a list, checks it, then finds my name tag and hands it to me. The premade tags are done well, even if they’re annoying stickers, with my name on top in a fancy font and my law firm’s name beneath. When you’re toasting the governor at no less than five grand a pop, you get fancy name tags. Score one for the little guys.

Joel Lightner, next to me, gives his name and spells it, because he’s an unannounced guest. He’s my date for the night, before we go grab a steak and a martini or five. Joel is a former cop, the one who worked the Burgos case with me, and who used that case as a launching pad to a very successful private investigation business, of which I am his best customer. Joel didn’t want to come at all, not being dressed in a tuxedo like me and most of the attendees, but I wrangled a little bit of time out of him.

“Twenty minutes,” he says, holding me to my promise as we walk into the ballroom on the mezzanine level of the Maritime Club. The place is white walls and dark oak, with a thirty-foot ceiling that is slowly accumulating cigar smoke. I wave to someone I know and Joel points to the long bar along the side wall. “Twenty minutes,” he reminds me. “And she isn’t gonna be here.”

“I’m not looking for her,” I argue, but already he’s mocking me with a wave of the hand. Dare I protest too much, I plow into the herd of penguin suits, the insincere, hearty banter, the mingling of the powerful and hungry. I join some people I know, a couple of the power corporate lawyers in the city and some CEOs. It’s a fine way to press the flesh, get your faces in front of people again, and let them know to call you if they need anything. What I really want to say is
Call me if you get indicted,
because it’s still the work I prefer—the criminal stuff—but, more and more, my practice is devolving into civil litigation, with loads of paper exchanges and written motions and pretrial depositions that run up the bill very nicely, thank you very little, but are boring as hell.

I’m just into my first martini, courtesy of a traveling waitress, when I see Harland Bentley in a small circle of people and shaking hands with Governor Langdon Trotter.

Now, there’s a power couple. A second-term governor being groomed for national office and the richest man in the city, one of the wealthiest in the nation. Harland Bentley’s personal worth is estimated at something just shy of one and a half billion dollars, with holdings in hotels and real estate and industrial equipment and financial services corporations—all of them bearing his name. A client that any lawyer would kill to service.

On Harland’s arm is his latest piece of eye candy, tall and leggy in an evening gown, with a sculpted face and a mane of blond hair that cascades down her back. I would call her the “flavor of the month,” but that would be giving Harland too much credit for longevity. I think he has a turnstile in his bedroom at this point.

As I walk up, Harland Bentley puts his hand on the governor’s back and subtly positions him so that he’s facing me. “Governor,” he says, “you know that I have the best lawyer in the country, don’t you?”

I shake the governor’s hand with a smile. Governor Trotter is a big, strong guy, the photogenic hunter type, with an ever-present tan that offsets silver hair and blue eyes. And a grip that would make a bear wilt. “Great to see you, Paul,” he says warmly. He was always good at that personal thing, like you were the only person in the room. Then to Harland he says in that organ-toned voice, “I may try to steal him away from you yet, Harland.” The small group around the governor laughs appropriately, though they probably aren’t sure they get it.

Harland Bentley is no less impressive but not in a physical sense. He is of average height, maybe five-ten on a good day, with a trim, unremarkable build and a tight haircut that may be showing the beginnings of male-pattern baldness. But the guy just oozes power—from his ten-thousand-dollar suits to his intense stare to the delicate, precise way he speaks, which isn’t often—that’s why the people in the small group are more concerned with Harland than the governor. Harland introduces me to his date, Jennifer, who offers me a manicured hand and tells me she works in public relations. Yeah, I’ll bet she does.