Grave Designs
Authors: Michael A Kahn
Copyright © 2015 by
First E-book Edition 2015
ISBN: 9781464204395 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
For Margi
All nature is but art unknown to thee,
All chance, direction, which thou canst see.
âAlexander Pope
Luck is the residue of design.
âBranch Rickey
This novel, my first, originated thirty years ago as a challenge from my wife. I was a young lawyer in Chicago back then and working long hours on an out-of-town lawsuit. The case involved lots of travel, which translated into lots of paperbacks purchased in airport bookstores.
“How was that one?” Margi would often ask when I pulled the latest dog-eared paperback out of my suitcase.
“Not bad,” I would answer. “But,” I would add, apparently often enough to be irritating, “I think I could write a better book than that.”
One night, after hearing me say that one too many times, Margi responded, in a sweet but somewhat exasperated voice, “Then why don't you write one, Honey, or please shut up.”
I stared at her. “Huh?”
“You keep saying you think you could write a better book. I don't want you to be eighty years old and boring your grandkids with that same claim. Just write one, Sweetie, or please shut up.”
Soâ¦I shut up.
For a long time.
But I did a lot of silent meditation.
Maybe I could write a novel, I told myself. But about what?
Somewhere I'd read that you should write about what you know. Dubious advice, I now realize, but back then it seemed sensible.
So what exactly did I know? Well, I knew the law. I was a junior associate in a big law firm and working on complex antitrust lawsuits involving technical legal issues. While I suppose it's possible that the Sherman Antitrust Act may someday be the theme of the Great American Novelist, I confess that I found little in the way of literary inspiration from the distinction between a “per se” and a “rule of reason” violation under Section 1 of Title 15 of the United States Code.
I did, however, see possibilities in a law firm setting. The clash of giant egos, the nasty office politics, and the bet-the-company lawsuits seemed to offer plenty of opportunity for drama and satire. But, stillâwhat about a storyline?
Mulling it over, I recalled a freelance article I'd written for Chicago Magazine back before law school, back in my elementary-school teacher days in the Chicago Public Schools. Titled “The Big Sleep,” my article explored the fates of all the dead dogs and cats of Chicago. As I had learned in my research, some pets shuffled off their mortal coil only to end up immortally coiled on the end of a couch or before a fireplace, thanks to the skills of the taxidermist. Others were cremated. A disturbingly large number were shipped off to rendering plants and eventually ended up in cans of pet food, thus adding a macabre twist to the old saying about a dog-eat-dog world.
But some of those dearly departed were buried in pet cemeteries. And one of the many intriguing nuggets of information I learned during an afternoon at Chicago pet cemetery was that those burial grounds, unlike their human counterparts, were relatively unregulated. You could bury just about anything in a pet cemetery. No questions asked.
And thus the inspiration for Grave Designs: a powerful senior partner dies, and his law firm discovers a secret codicil to his will establishing a significant trust fund for the care and maintenance of a grave for Canaan at a pet cemetery. The problem? Neither the dead man nor his family ever owned a pet, much less one named Canaan.
There. I had my mystery. And I would ratchet up the tension by having the grave robbed early on.
The next challenge was to find my detective. My initial idea had been to make my protagonist a young male associate in the dead lawyer's law firm, but I had trouble bringing him to life, in part because he was, well, a young male associate in a high-powered law firm and I was a young male associate in a high-powered law firm. Too much overlap, especially if my protagonist was to serve as the first-person narrator.
Stymied, I thought back to some of the mystery novels I'd loved and realized that the detective character was typically someone who'd been part of the mainstreamâsay, a copâbut had, for one of a variety of reasons, stepped out of the mainstream, sometimes voluntarily, other times not.
The next morning, in a crowded courtroom of the Circuit Court of Cook County, while waiting for the clerk to call my motion for hearing, I watched as a crusty old male judge badgered, demeaned, and intimidated a young female attorney, who was clearly shaken and nearly in tears as she left the courtroom.
And that was the moment my protagonist was born. I could see her in my mind's eye. She was not the type to be badgered or demeaned or intimidated by some arrogant male judge. She'd been a rising star at the dead lawyer's law firm, but she'd gotten fed up with the bureaucracies and hierarchies and pretensions of Big Law. To the bewilderment of her colleagues, she'd left the firm to go off on her own. I could even visualize the sign on the door to her law office:
Rachel Gold
Attorney at Law
I wrote the first pages of the novel that night. By the following week, the grave had been robbed, Rachel was on the trail, and I was having fun. Some of the scenes seemed to write themselves. Characters I thought of as mere plot devices came alive, took charge of scenes, and moved the novel in unexpected directions. A high-priced call girl who specialized in senior partners in major law firms reveals to Rachel that she'd identified certain sexual preferences and perversions that seemed to be associated with particular law schools, i.e., Harvard grads tended to be into this kink while Yale grads tended to be afflicted with this problem while U of Chicago grads . . . well, I'll let you hear it directly from her.
As I wrote on, however, what had started as a seemingly minor issue began to metastasize, namely, what had the dead lawyer buried in that grave?
I'll figure it out, I reassured myself when I reached the end of Chapter 5.
It'll come to you soon, I told myself at the end of Chapter 10.
Holy shit! I finally conceded at Chapter 15, and stopped writing.
It took several weeks to figure out what had been buried in that damn grave, and once I figured that out I had to go back and rewrite the first 200 pages of the manuscript. Essentially, I wrote this novel twice. You have the second versionâthe completed oneâin your hands.
So my advice to novice writers is simple: Before you type Chapter 1 at the top of the first page of your manuscript, be sure you know what's in that grave.
As for you, dear reader, I hope you have fun trying to figure that out along the way.
As for me, all I can say is, “Thank you, Margi.”
Oh, yes, and one more thing: Margi had dared me to write a book, not a series. And that is exactly what I thought I had accomplished when I typed THE END on the last page of the manuscript.
Thus my surprise a year later when my agent, Maria Carvainis, called to tell me that she had just received a good offer for the next two books in the series.
“What series?” I asked.
“The Rachel Gold series, Mike. You can't just walk away from Rachel and Benny. They have plenty more mysteries to solve.”
Turns out Maria was right. Nevertheless, the book in your hands was written as a stand-alone novel with absolutely no thought of ever returning to any of those characters. But as I've since learned, there was far more buried in that grave than I had ever imagined.
There were, of course, at least two of him. There usually are.
There was first the public Graham Anderson Marshall III. Choate, Barrett College, Yale Law School. Tall, trim, square-jawed, salt-and-pepper hair, piercing blue eyes. Captain in the United States Marines. Two years in South Korea. Three years in the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. An Undersecretary of State during the Ford Administration. Now the senior antitrust partner at Abbott & Windsor, the third oldest and second largest law firm in Chicago. A trustee of Barrett College and a member of the boards of directors of eleven corporations and two charitable foundations. A decent tennis player, an excellent squash player, and a legendary practical joker. (Marshall was the reputed mastermind of the 1950's heist of the Sirena statue from Barrett College.) A home in Kenilworth: oak trees, two-car garage (a BMW and a Country Squire), swimming pool, sauna off the master bathroom. A summer place perched on a gentle green slope overlooking Lake Geneva. Married to the former Julia Emerson Harrison (Chatham Hall, Smith College). Two children: a daughter at Mount Holyoke, a son (also Choate, Barrett College, and Yale Law) at Sullivan & Cromwell.
In sum, a powerful corporate lawyer in his prime, with clients from the first two columns of the Fortune 500, each of whom paid Abbott & Windsor $350 for every hour of Marshall's time. “The best bargain in town,” according to the general counsel of a large Chicago steel company on whose behalf Marshall had appeared in the United States Supreme Court just six days before he died.
According to the obituaries in the Chicago newspapers and
the
New York Times,
the public Graham Anderson Marshall suffered a massive coronary occlusion at approximately 10:15 p.m. on July 11 “while working on an appellate brief in the LaSalle Street offices of Abbott & Windsor.” He was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, “where efforts to revive him were unsuccessful.” The public Graham Anderson Marshall was pronounced dead of apparent heart failure at 11:07 p.m.
A heart attack is not an unusual way for a fifty-two-year-old partner in a major law firm to die. But those on duty at the emergency entrance of Northwestern Memorial Hospital will not soon forget the manner in which one of Chicago's most powerful attorneys filed his penultimate appearance.
Which brings us to the private Graham Anderson Marshall, also pronounced dead of heart failure at 11:07 p.m. on that same sweaty July evening. The orderly who met the ambulance had yanked open the back door, peered inside, and straightened up with a leer.
“My, my. What have we here?” he said, his face flashing crimson from the revolving ambulance light. “Looks to me like ol' Jack Coostow here had hisself too much of that fine mermaid pussy.”
The dead lawyer was wearing an orange skin-diving suit, unsnapped at the crotch. A pale thread of semen trailed from the tip of his penis. A black flipper covered one foot; the other foot was bare.
The missing flipper still lay on the Oriental rug in the living room of a condominium on the eighteenth floor of Shore Drive Tower. Cindi Reynolds owned that condominium, and the private Graham Anderson Marshall visited her on alternate Wednesday nights to indulge his devotion to rubber and his preference for fellatio. Ms. Reynolds was lovely, leggy, and lissome. A typical evening of her time cost $900 ($1,100 with videotape) and generally included violations of several municipal ordinances and the commission of at least two of Illinois's infamous crimes against nature, one of which she was performing on Graham Anderson Marshall at the moment his heart gave out.
Although students of contract law might argue that Marshall did not receive the full benefit of his bargain that evening, no one could fault Ms. Reynolds's efforts to mitigate consequential damages. Her first telephone call was to the hospital. Her second call was to the managing partner of Abbott & Windsor, who promptly brought into play the forces necessary to ensure that the private Graham Anderson Marshall would be silently and safely interred long before the morning editions went to press.
The public Graham Anderson Marshall was buried four days later, with propriety and restraint, in a well-kept Lake Forest cemetery. The upper reaches of the corporate, legal, and political hierarchies of Chicago were well represented at the graveside ceremony. By the time the first clods of dirt clattered down onto the ebony coffin, the private Graham Anderson Marshall had disappeared without a trace. Well, almost without trace: the
Tribune's
obituary did quote the chairman of the Antitrust Law Section of the American Bar Association, who praised Marshall as “one of our era's most accomplished and dedicated practitioners of the oral skills.”
What follows in these pages, however, is an account of neither the public nor the private Graham Anderson Marshall. The former is profiled in the October issue of
The American Lawyer,
the latter was captured briefly on a videotape that Ms. Reynolds prudently erased after the paramedics carried Marshall out of her condominium on a stretcher.
Instead, what follows here concerns a third Graham Anderson Marshallâor at least the possibility of a third Graham Anderson Marshall. Unfortunately, the trail was already months, possibly years cold when Graham Anderson Marshall died. Footprints had faded, broken twigs had decayed to dust, flattened bushes had grown full again. The evidence is, at best, circumstantial.
Whether this third Graham Anderson Marshall existed, and for how long, are ultimately questions of fact about which reasonable men and women might differ.