The Darlings (12 page)

Outside the car, the light was fading to black. Night had set in. A few cars passed on his right, but the traffic was thin and the city felt empty. Carter restarted the engine. He would go get Ines. He would drive to Long Island. He would figure it out from there. Minute to minute, as his crew coach used to say. Take each minute as it comes.

Carter managed to get the car down to Sixty-fourth Street without incident. A parking spot was open just in front of the apartment. Ordinarily, he would have considered this lucky, a good sign. When the doorman came to open the car door, Carter rolled down his window and said, “Please let Mrs. Darling know I'm here.”

The doorman nodded. “She's been waiting for you,” he said neutrally, a statement of fact and not a judgment. Still, Carter wanted to say something in his own defense; what kind of man leaves his wife sitting in the lobby on Thanksgiving eve? As he was turning off the engine, Ines emerged carrying two suitcases. Bacall trotted behind her wearing a charcoal-gray cable-knit sweater. His leash was looped loosely around Ines's forearm. Ines was bundled in a shearling coat and her leggings were tucked into Hermes riding boots, the kind with a silver buckle gleaming at the calf.

Though Ines was, as always, impeccable, Carter could see that she had heard. Her face was pinched with worry. Ines looked ten years older when she was worried; her forehead creased with sharp lines that even Botox couldn't erase.
Jesus. She really needs to eat something
, he thought as she approached the car. The tendons in her neck would have been visible were it not for her scarf, and her thighs were mercilessly thin. She moved purposefully, without a wave or a smile.

As he watched his wife stride from the lobby, Carter had the soul-deadening thought that everything was ending. He sat on his hands and tried to breathe deeply as Ines and the doorman put the suitcases in the trunk,
thock thock thock
, and she slid into the passenger seat. It was unlike him not to help her, but he found himself unable to move. Ines didn't say hello, but simply reached over and kissed him hard on the cheek. The air between them felt stiff and cold. For almost an hour, they sat in the parked car with the seat heaters on and a compact disc of opera playing quietly on repeat. As they talked, the windshield began to steam up. Eventually, Carter started the car again and they began the long drive to the country.

That night he dreamt of the first time he had her. He could feel her under his rib cage, her chest heaving against his, her legs spiraled tight around him as though no amount of contact between them would ever suffice. She was still wearing the tailored, tweedy skirt of her suit, pushed up around her hips. His hands covered her body, sliding up it and then down again, over and over, unable to find a single flaw or imperfection. She covered her mouth with her hand when she came, stifling a scream.

God, it had been incredible.

Though he always enjoyed her—
and Christ, did he enjoy her
—no night would ever be like that first night. Years of flirtation, at first harmless, then casual, then overt, then desperate, had built up like pressure in a steam pipe. They had had a few near misses; once, he had drunkenly leaned in to kiss her but she had turned away at the last moment, so his lips just grazed her cheek. Another time, they arranged to meet for a drink at a hotel bar (there was really no reason she would agree to this, he knew, if she didn't want him; but still she made him so nervous he couldn't quite be sure) but after only ten minutes or so, an acquaintance of hers walked in and she panicked, leaving him with a flimsy excuse about a phone call and the overwhelming feeling that he was a terrible person for pushing things as far as he had. But he couldn't help himself . . . When he was with her, he felt understood. She genuinely cared about his work, she wanted his opinions on real things . . . she made him feel as important and powerful and interesting and dynamic as he did when he was at the office. And then he would go home to Ines, who would be fretting about something so inane and trivial that it was almost laughable. So when finally, finally he had her, panting and sweating and pulling at her earlobe with his teeth, her high-heeled pumps abandoned in the sprint to the bed, that incredible voice of hers moaning how much she wanted him, how desperate she had been for him all along, the rush was unimaginable.

Though it had happened nine years ago, he still dreamt about it. Though he had never told a soul this (not even her), it was the reason he kept that stupid hotel ashtray on his desk at work. He had taken it from the room, not as some sort of juvenile trophy, but simply as a physical reminder that such a magnificent, raw night had actually occurred at all.

“
Well
,” she said, when they were done, “
that
was sex.” She laughed, a throaty, full laugh.

“That was more than sex.”

“What was it then?” She teased. She was playing with him, but he wasn't in the mood to play. She flipped over on her stomach so that she could look at him. “Oh, God,” she said suddenly, frowning. “You aren't crying?”

“I think I'm in love with you,” he said.

“Don't start with that.”

“I'm serious. You're brilliant and beautiful and funny and poised . . . but there's something else. I've just never felt like this before. I mean, Christ, I just cheated on my wife. I don't take that lightly, you know. I swear, this has never—”

“You don't have to say that.”

“I know, but I just need you to understand this.” He sat up, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. It was humiliating, talking like this . . . humiliating but also strangely cleansing, liberating, sensational . . . he couldn't seem to stop it . . . “Honestly, I think I would do anything for you.”

She nodded slowly. He was gripped with the fear that she would burst out laughing—it would be so easy to do right now—but instead she just lay her head gently on his thigh.

“I'm not asking for anything,” she said.

“I know you aren't. But I would. I just . . . I just want you to know that.”

“Just spend time with me,” she said. “When you can. Let's keep this simple.”

Always, when she said this the dream would end. Then Carter would lie awake with his thoughts. The unbearable heaviness of having stayed married to the wrong person was most acute, he found, late at night. Some nights, he thought it might kill him. But his regrets would always lift when the sun began to rise, and the day would seem new again. Over time he had learned how to lie still and to wait for that.

WEDNESDAY, 5:03 P.M.

T
he thing about Champion & Gilmore, the white-shoe law firm where Merrill worked, was that everything was always in order. Founded in 1884 by Lorillard Champion and Harrison Gilmore IV, C&G, as it was called on Wall Street, had long been known as a WASPy firm that represented other WASPy firms, the JPMorgans and Lazard Freres and Rothschilds of the world, and employed mostly WASPy lawyers who, like Merrill Darling, had fancy academic pedigrees and appropriate-sounding surnames.

Though the work at C&G was—like at any law firm—often stressful, combative, and emotionally fraught, the office was always pin-drop quiet. Clients exited the elevator bank into a soothing, sun-filled reception area with white carpets and walls. The conference rooms were immaculate and had sweeping views of midtown Manhattan. On clear days especially, Merrill found it hard to focus when she was seated facing one of the conference room windows. The city rolled out before her, impossibly dense, silent, magnificent in scale. Only the flow of traffic on the grid below, and the sweep of the clouds overhead, reminded her that what she was looking at was real.

Merrill was currently spending much of her time in Conference Room C, which, for the foreseeable future, had been converted into a workroom for the attorneys staffed on the Gerard case. Elsa Gerard, the firm's client, was a portfolio manager at Vonn Capital. Elsa had become something of a celebrity in the hedge fund world. She had started at Vonn in 1985 as the executive assistant to Mark Vonn, the fund's CEO. She was twenty-two years old and a newly minted graduate of St. John's University in Queens, New York. After putting herself through business school at night, she persuaded Vonn to take her on as an analyst. She worked her way up slowly and eventually became one of Vonn's star portfolio managers. Despite her success, Elsa had never made apologies for her humble beginnings, and she had never tried to fit in with the industry establishment. In fact, she seemed to take pleasure in standing out. Her suits were now designer (she favored Versace and Dolce and Gabbana), but they were just as tight, just as short, and just as loud as they had been when she had first started at Vonn. Her hair was still the same bottle blond. (“All T and A,” as one rival manager had crassly put it in an e-mail that had “somehow” ended up in the hands of the press). Unquestionably, Elsa had once been a knockout. At forty-seven, she looked a little brash and worn, but there was still a sexiness about her that was undeniable.

Predictably, Elsa Gerard was a polarizing personality. She seemed to inspire either reverence or hatred (sometimes at the same time) wherever she went; rarely did someone meet Elsa and not have something to say about her. Regular adjectives and labels didn't seem to suffice; in the past few months, Merrill had heard Elsa described as a genius, a slut, a fame whore, a rock star, a rising star, a prima donna, a role model, a liar, and the future of Wall Street. Unfortunately, she had also been called a criminal. Elsa had been implicated as a member of what the press had dubbed “the Ring”: a sophisticated group of hedge fund managers, consultants, lawyers, and pharmaceutical industry executives who allegedly conspired to exchange and trade on inside information. Six indictments had been issued, and everyone knew that more were to come. Elsa, who had not yet been indicted, vehemently denied any connection to the Ring, but refused to say much more in her own defense.

With her lawyers, Elsa was candid. Though he was married, she and Mark were lovers. Occasionally, he had given her instructions to buy or sell a particular stock, and she had done so without questioning him, both because he was her boss and also because she was in love with him. It had never occurred to her that Mark was instructing her to trade on the basis of information that he had obtained illegally. It had also never occurred to her that when the time came, he would sell her up the river.

Criminal or victim: Even Elsa's lawyers were split. An internal debate now raged at C&G as to whether Elsa's story held water. Half the team thought she should just plead guilty and cut a deal; she was simply too smart to have been used by Mark Vonn, no matter what their relationship. The other half of the team either believed her or at least thought that a jury might. As of yet, no one had found any evidence of a connection between Elsa and any member of the Ring. Mark Vonn, however, had a personal relationship with a high-level executive at OctMedical, the stock that Elsa had purchased just days before the company had unveiled a revolutionary new diabetes drug.

Merrill had been tasked with overseeing the document review process for the case. “Doc review” (as it was known in-house) was a necessary but tedious process, reading through every single e-mail sent or received by a particular group of hedge fund employees over a seven-year period before turning them over to the SEC. This was part of the pretrial litigation process known as “discovery.” Of course, before C&G turned anything over to the SEC, they were painstakingly reviewed themselves. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, attorneys took shifts clicking through CDs of e-mails. After reading an e-mail, the attorney would label it with the appropriate tag. A Responsive tag meant that the e-mail was “responsive” to the SEC's subpoena request and therefore needed to be turned over; Privileged meant that the e-mail contained information that could be withheld from the SEC on the basis of client privilege; Hot meant that the e-mail contained information that could be potentially harmful to the client if turned over; and Second Review was used if the contract attorney wasn't sure how to categorize the e-mail. Merrill's job was to review all the e-mails labeled Hot and Second Review. The work was exceedingly monotonous but terrifyingly crucial. If an incriminating (or exonerating) e-mail somehow slipped through the doc review unnoticed, it could cost C&G the case.

For this case, the document review was so large in scope that a team of contract attorneys had been brought in to complete it. Contract attorneys were not permanent employees of C&G but rather attorneys who were paid by the hour (on contract) to work on specific cases or transactions. On-staff attorneys saw them as cheap reinforcement labor, not unlike the army reserves. Though some of them were quite experienced, the Gerard case contract attorneys had been sternly advised that if they had even a flicker of a doubt on any given e-mail, they were to bring it to the attention of one of the other midlevel attorneys immediately. Of course, the midlevel attorneys had plenty of work of their own, and most of them weren't all that keen on being regularly pestered by the contract attorneys. Merrill, however, was always happy to help. Unlike most associates, who treated them with mild derision and occasional downright hostility, Merrill was unfailingly polite to the contract attorneys, appreciative of their work, and respectful of their time. She often stayed late to pitch in when they had fallen behind, even though she hardly had the capacity to do so. Everyone on the Gerard case was overworked and overwhelmed. The associates were barely sleeping and the partners seemed short-fused and increasingly unreasonable. Underlying everything was a current of unspoken desperation that was picking up speed as the case progressed.

Merrill happened to like Elsa, and had thrown herself headlong into the case with an almost fanatical zeal. She was crass, sure. God, Ines would absolutely hate her. But she had fought her way to the top without help from anybody. And she seemed honest—if anything, maybe a bit too honest—a real “what you see is what you get” kind of woman. From Merrill's perspective, the guys on the team were too quick to judge her based on her appearance. This really got under Merrill's skin; wasn't Elsa Gerard, just like anyone else, innocent until proven guilty? Didn't she deserve to be believed, especially by her lawyers?

Today had been a big day for the Gerard team. Elsa's former assistant had given a very favorable deposition, and the team seemed charged with new energy. Merrill tried to muster enthusiasm, but inside she was numb. Everything that had happened since she had heard the news about Morty had simply gone by in a blur. By 4 p.m., she had decided it was better to just go home. She had put on her coat, but couldn't seem to find the energy to leave.

“Merrill, could you take a look at something?” A timid voice stirred Merrill from her thoughts. She sat facing the window, staring out into the darkening night sky. She had no idea how long she had been sitting like that, just staring. “Oh, I'm sorry,” the voice continued. “Are you on your way out?”

Merrill swiveled her chair around. In her doorway was Amy, a diminutive redhead who always looked vaguely nervous to be speaking at all. Amy was one of the hardest working contract attorneys on the Gerard team, and Merrill went out of her way to help and encourage her.

Merrill mustered a smile. “Hey, Amy. Come on in.”

Amy hesitated. “It's just—are you sure you weren't on your way out? I can ask John or Mike instead.”

Merrill shook her head. “Really, I wasn't. I mean, I was going to eventually, but this is more important.” She gestured for Amy to come into her office. “So what's up?”

“I think . . . I think I found something in Elsa's trash.”

“Her trash?”

“Her deleted e-mails. We had them pulled off the server. I've been reviewing them since yesterday.”

Merrill felt her stomach clench. “Okay . . . is it bad?” She knew from the look on Amy's face that it was.

“Umm . . .”

“Let me see it.”

Amy proffered a thin sheaf of paper, which she had secured with a binder clip. It appeared to be a long e-mail chain between Elsa and Mark Vonn. “If you start from the back . . . I've highlighted the parts that I think are, uh, relevant.” Merrill was already reading. As her eyes skimmed the page, the knot in her stomach grew and grew until it was so large she could feel it pushing on her throat. For a moment, she thought she might throw up. She closed her eyes and pressed her palms against the chill surface of her desk. They were damp even though the offices were kept at a cool 68 degrees.

“Are you all right?” Amy's voice sounded far away. Merrill felt as though she were at the bottom of a swimming pool and Amy was shouting at her from above the surface . . . the words seemed garbled from where she was . . .

“Merrill?” Amy said, this time clear as a bell. Merrill looked up. Amy was standing in front of the desk, leaning in toward her. Her watery blue eyes were filled with concern.

Merrill snapped back in her chair. “I'm so sorry,” she said, her face flushed with embarrassment. “I just . . . honestly, I'm just not feeling all that well today.” She put her hand against her forehead and realized she was sweating.

“You, uh, you don't look that great. Maybe you should go home?”

Merrill bit down hard on her bottom lip. She had never—not once—taken a sick day. And now, of all times . . . “You know, I think I need to.” She handed Amy back the e-mails. “Listen, you were right about these. They need to get seen right away. Take them to Phil. If he's not there or he tells you to wait, tell him it's urgent. I'm going to send him an e-mail, actually I'm going to send all the partners an e-mail, telling them what you found.”

Amy nodded frenetically. Her red curls bounced against her shoulders. “Okay. Don't worry Merrill, I'll take care of it. Really, please go home. You don't look well. This is totally, totally under control.”

Merrill offered her a weak smile. “Thanks, Amy. You did a great job.”

“Well . . . I don't know. I'm not sure anyone's going to be all that psyched to see these.”

“Don't worry about that. Just take it to Phil.”

Amy was already halfway out the door. Before she closed it, she spun on her heel. She paused, hesitating. Then she said, “It's sort of disappointing, isn't it?”

“What's that?”

“Well . . . I liked Elsa. I dunno. I wanted to believe her.” Amy shrugged, her face shrinking into an embarrassed smile.

“I know,” Merrill said sympathetically. “Me, too.”

“Do you think she'll have to plea?”

“I don't know. Maybe. I honestly don't know.”

“She shouldn't have put this into an e-mail.” Amy shook her head disbelievingly. “You really never can tell with anyone, can you?”

“Well. Don't give up so fast.” Merrill smiled, but it was a thin smile. “See what Phil has to say.”

“Okay. Go home and lie down. I'll keep you posted.”

After Amy shut the door, Merrill stood, her mind racing. She threw a few files in her bag and headed for the door. She reached for her coat, but the hook on the back of the door was empty. With her free hand, Merrill patted her side. She had been wearing it the whole time.