Key Witness (8 page)

“You’re right, we should.” He paused. “But that’s still not what I’m talking about.”

“Okay,” she said. She massaged his temples. “But let’s put some distance in this. For perspective.”

He shook his head doggedly. “I don’t need perspective to see what’s wrong with this picture.” He took hold of her hands and stood up. “There’s a basic phoniness to all this and I can’t not look at it any longer.”

“Phoniness where? With me, Michaela? I don’t think so, Wyatt. I know that isn’t so.”

“No, not that. It’s about why I’m a lawyer. Why I wanted to practice law in the first place.”

He’d been all fired up as a young man.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
He was going to be Ramsey Clark, William Kunstler. Instead, he had become one of the most important and sought-after corporate lawyers in the country. It was tremendous power and awesome money, but it wasn’t the stuff of his dreams. “I haven’t defended an actual human being in ten years—only corporations. And I’m almost never actually in the courtroom.”

“I thought that was good. You’ve always said you don’t ever want to go to trial with your clients.”

“Because juries hate clients like mine. Nobody feels very sympathetic toward multibillion-dollar corporations.”

“I’m calling the travel agency tomorrow.”

“I could retire tomorrow. We could afford it.”

“Not the way we live now.”

“We don’t have to live the way we live now,” he said. “We could live fine with much less money.”

She turned to him. “You’re too young to retire, you’re decades away from even thinking about it, it’s not an option. Now enough for tonight. I really am tired—come on to bed.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “Quitting isn’t what I want.”

She leaned against his body in relief.

“W
HAT HAPPENED TO THIS
one?” the duty officer inquired. He glanced over his shoulder at the clock on the wall: 3:25, dead of night. A few stragglers were sitting on the benches waiting to be booked, but the main surge of arrests had abated.

“Got shot in the ass.” The arresting officer chortled.

A couple of jail deputies, watching the arrival of the prisoner who was being transported from the local ER, laughed along with the cop. Marvin, still in a hospital gown, his exposed ass wrapped in bandages, grimaced, trying to become invisible.

That’s who he was now—a joke. A chump who ran away from a simple holdup.

The pain was pulsing through his body. “I’m gonna throw up,” he cried out.

“Not on my floor!” the duty officer shouted. “Get him in there,” he bellowed, pointed to a bathroom across the dirty linoleum-covered floor.

Marvin had to get down on his knees and hang his head over the edge of the bowl. The toilet was old and super-funky—the overwhelming smell of human waste invaded his nostrils and made him throw up more, dry heaves.

He was taken through the booking procedures, his personal effects inventoried. Besides the gun, which had been confiscated and would be used as evidence (the fact that it was a stolen, unregistered weapon would be an additional factor against him), there were a few dollars in bills and change, a pack of cigarettes, a driver’s license, and a Swiss Army knife.

When that was done he was examined by a doctor, who checked and rebandaged his wounds and then finally, mercifully, gave him a fifteen milligram shot of morphine.

His entire body relaxed almost instantaneously. This shit was good. His last thought, as they were taking him to the infirmary, where he would stay for a few days until his condition stabilized, was that when he got out of here and started out dealing, he’d have to get ahold of some of this stuff.

T
HE TANK-SIZED DISPOSAL VEHICLE
rumbled slowly down the alley behind the dance bar where Violet and her friends had been partying the night before. The driver set the brake and jumped down from his cab, joining his partner, who was rolling a large orange cart on wheels down the asphalt. The two men (Portuguese, the Portuguese had the monopoly on the city’s waste-disposal contracts) worked opposite sides of the alley, grabbing the garbage cans that were lined up against the building walls, lifting and dumping them into the large orange one, which they wheeled to the back of the truck, where they heaved the entire contents—garbage, trash, whatever—into the open jaws that shut down and crunched everything it was fed into shreds.

The two men covered the block quickly and methodically, twenty 25-gallon garbage cans emptied into the bowels of their truck in less than two minutes.

“Give me a hand over here,” the partner called, wrestling with the last can in the row. “This one’s heavy as a bitch.”

The driver crossed the alley. Each man grabbed a handle and lifted.

“Jesus, somebody must’ve dumped a load of bricks in this one,” the driver groused. “Wait a second, save your back. I’ll pull the truck down so we can dump it right in.”

He drove down the alley a hundred feet and parked right next to the can that was particularly heavy. He climbed down; each man grabbed a handle.

“One, two, three.” They lifted the heavy metal can to the lip of the opening, tilted up the bottom, and emptied the contents into the belly of the disposal truck. The driver returned to the cab and started the mechanism that mashed and chewed and crunched everything into a tight, compact mass.

The jaws started closing. The last load of garbage began rolling down the slope of the truck inside, turning and folding on itself.

“Hey! Stop the motor!” The second man sprinted to the door of the cab. “Stop it. There’s something in there! Open it back up.”

The driver hit the grinding gears. The back door reopened, the jaws lifted. The driver got out of the cab again and joined his partner at the back of their truck.

They looked inside. All they could see was one foot and ankle. The rest of the body was buried under a load of trash.

“Oh, Jesus!”

They reached in and brushed the trash to the sides, clearing off enough so the body could be seen. A woman. Black. She was wearing a dress, but most of it had been ripped away, exposing her. She was a big woman, and when she was alive she had been attractive.

T
HE SIXTEEN SENIOR PARTNERS
who made up the firm’s executive committee sat around a large oval table in their conference, room. Twelve were men, four women. Two were African Americans, one was Latino, the rest white. A quarter were Jewish. An unremarkable assortment demographically, but all very powerful, capable, important lawyers.

It was the beginning of the workday. Coffee and pastries were available at a side buffet.

There were 168 lawyers in Wyatt’s firm: Waskie, Turner, Liebman, Schultz, Carter, & Matthews. These sixteen owned the firm. One was a former secretary of commerce. Two others had been deputy attorneys general.

Wyatt was the youngest partner and newest who had his name on the door. He got the distinction four years ago, when as lead attorney overseeing hundreds of other lawyers he had won the first billion-dollar case in the firm’s history.

Over the past five years Wyatt had become the most important lawyer in the firm. He had brought in more money than any other partner. He was the lead attorney in all of the huge antitrust cases the firm handled, where the profits or damages could run into hundreds of millions of dollars, and the fees into tens of millions. If for any reason he were to leave, their revenues could drop as much as twenty-five percent, which would be catastrophic. That knowledge gave him extraordinary power; he was extremely cautious about how he used it.

Ben Turner, at eighty-one the only founding partner still active, sat at the head of the table. He ran these meetings and he was brisk about it. Information was exchanged, cases were discussed—the progress of ongoing work, and the decisions about what new cases should be accepted. Generally, if a partner had something he or she wanted to take on it was a done deal, unless there was a conflict with an existing case or client; most of their work came from clients who had long-standing, ongoing arrangements with the firm.

“Let’s get on with it, ladies and gentlemen,” Turner said. “We haven’t all gotten together in one room since Mr. Matthews and his crack team won the Larchmont case, which is going to help make this the most profitable year this firm has ever had, not to mention the future work it will bring. Congratulations, big boy,” he said, turning to Wyatt, who was seated a few chairs down the table.

Sitting next to Wyatt, Darryl Davis, the firm’s top criminal-defense litigator, offered his huge palm. Wyatt high-fived him. Wyatt had brought Darryl into the upper echelons of the firm, the first African American to achieve that status. Darryl, four years younger than Wyatt, was terrific in the courtroom, spellbinding in front of a jury. Other members of the firm would come and observe during his summations. Despite Darryl’s individual brilliance, however, criminal defense was the smallest division at Waskie, Turner. Darryl was the only prominent attorney in it.

Turner called the meeting to order and in less than half an hour he’d covered all the bases. “Any new business before we go back to work?”

“I do,” Darryl spoke up. “I talked to Lucien Walcott at the Public Defender’s office last week about our ongoing pro bono commitment. We’ve had two probationary people, Morris Estead and Lucille Walton, doing this for the past twelve months. They’ve finished their apprenticeship with him and will be coming in as associate members of the firm, so we’re going to have to assign two new people to that program. I’ve been interviewing applicants but so far I’ve only come up with one. She had a full scholarship to Michigan Law, clerked for Justice Stevens a couple terms back. I’d like to start her next month. She’ll be working out of the PD’s office and the firm will be picking up her salary, our normal SOP.”

“It’s your division, Darryl,” Turner said. “What about the other intern we’ve committed to?”

Waskie, Turner had an ongoing commitment to supply two lawyers a year to the Public Defender’s office, which was how they worked off their obligation to do pro bono defense work, a burden undertaken by most of the large law firms in the city.

“Haven’t found one yet,” Darryl said. “We’re not known as a criminal-defense firm, so we don’t get the cream of that crop.”

“I’ll take the job.”

It wasn’t the way Wyatt had planned to make his announcement, but it would have to do.

A couple of the other partners sitting around him turned to look at him, not believing what they’d heard. Darryl grinned broadly at Wyatt. “What a trooper. Anything for the firm. It’s okay, big fella, I’ll come up with someone. I think we need you right where you are.”

Turner got up from his chair. “That wraps it up.”

“I’ll take the job. I want it.”

It took a moment for what Wyatt had said to sink in. Then everyone turned to look at him, fifteen heads moving in disbelieving unison.

“I want to do criminal defense.” He looked at Turner. “I’m serious, Ben.”

Turner stared at him in disbelief. “What’s this all about, Wyatt?”

“I intended to tell you that I was going to take a leave of absence from the firm, starting right away.”

“What …” Turner paused, collecting his thoughts. “I don’t get it,” he said. “You just won the biggest money case in this firm’s history. Your bonus is going to be over three million dollars off that one case alone. You can’t be serious about walking away.”

“Maybe this is the time to walk away—while I am on top.”

Turner came around the table so that he and Wyatt were face-to-face. “There’s no delicate way of putting this, Wyatt, so I won’t try to. This firm needs you.” He paused. “What’s the matter, Wyatt?”

Wyatt took a deep breath. “I’m volunteering for this public-defense work, Ben, because if I don’t do something different in my life, right now, I won’t have a choice.”

“Where is this coming from?” Turner asked.

“I don’t know, Ben. I just won a case against the government of the United States, and I’m not convinced right now that justice was served by my winning. And I’m not happy about that.”

“What on God’s earth are you talking about? Justice is subjective, Wyatt. Juries decide what justice is. You handled the case brilliantly from start to finish. What do you think it was, a fluke?”

“I know it wasn’t a fluke. That’s the problem! Some poor innocent schmucks are going to be ruined because I won that case. I’m a million-dollar lawyer going up against a seventy-five-thousand-dollar lawyer. It’s David versus Goliath. And nobody likes Goliath.”

Turner put a fatherly hand on Wyatt’s shoulder. “I understand you,” he sympathized. “I’ve been in the same position myself. You work like mad on a case that goes on forever, it’s finally over, and there’s this incredible letdown.”

Wyatt was silent.

“You need a vacation,” Turner continued. “Away from the office, away from all of it. Go to Tahiti with Moira, lie in the sun, drink mai tais and look at beautiful women.”

That’s what he’d envisioned, initially, when he had started thinking this way. Not Tahiti, that wasn’t his style. More like a lot of fly-fishing, golf, sleeping in late. Reading fiction, going around the country and hitting the great jazz clubs.

He wanted to do all those things; and he would, someday. But that wasn’t the answer to this problem.

“No.” He turned and faced his partners. “I’m burned out, and a fancy vacation won’t cure what I need. I want a moratorium from defending huge multinational conglomerates. I need to look at the law in a different way, a fresh perspective.”

Turner looked at him. “What
do
you want to do?”

“I want to practice criminal defense. For poor people who need a good lawyer, not some kid fresh out of law school.” He turned and faced his partners, who were slack-jawed, staring at him. “I want to work the right side of the street for a while, or I won’t be able to live with myself.”

Turner shook his head in frustration. “You’re not some wild-eyed idealist who’s going to change the world, Wyatt. We don’t change the world. No one does. It’s one of those things you learn as you get older. And our clients are big, yes—small fry can’t afford us, that’s the way life goes.”