“No. No. I mean now?”
I know what he means, but knowing Nick I figure the question is rhetorical. I have seen him do this in front of juries for money, lots of it, pleading a client’s case, boring holes through them with those beady little eyes over a smile you know is not being driven by humor.
When Nick asks a question like “How can you be sure the sky isn’t green?” he is never looking for an answer. What he wants is the surrender of your rational thought process. Once he has you questioning your own logic, it’s a simple act of illusion before he has you buying into the fable his client is going to spin on the stand.
In this case it’s an exercise in absolution by silence from another lawyer. Even if I haven’t done it recently with a twenty-six-year-old, Nick can comfort himself with the thought that I would like to.
“So Margaret has to go hire herself this prince of darkness,” he says, “some fucking divorce lawyer out of L.A. to stake me to an anthill. Hey, do I complain?”
The fact that he is doing so now doesn’t slow him down.
“No. I just pay the tab and figure this is the price of moving on with my life.”
If the dark circles under his eyes are an indication, getting on with life would appear to be killing him. Nick’s face is a declining graph of sleep deprivation. Whether he’s working too hard to meet the alimony payments or playing too hard at night with Dana, I can’t be sure. One or the other, or both, are killing him.
“If you had an itch like this,” he says “wouldn’t you scratch it? Any guy with a normal sex drive…” He continues talking as if I’m not here.
Nick suspects I have had my own dalliances, perhaps in a former life before becoming widowed, though I have never shared any of this with him. It’s the reason he calls me from time to time. I’m cheaper than his therapist, and he can more easily ignore whatever I tell him since I have no training in the occult. Being outside the loop of his partnership, I am a safe shoulder to cry on.
As he sits across the desk from me, his brown eyes look like they belong behind wire mesh in the dog pound. There are basset-hound bags under each.
Dana, the new Mrs. Rush, is sleek and blond, four inches taller than Nick. She has the fresh look of a model on her way to becoming a movie star. And unless I have completely lost my judgment of character, she knows how to climb the rungs of life. I have met her three times, and on each occasion she parted with looks that made me wonder if she wasn’t trying to come on to me. But then, I suspect with Dana most men might foster this illusion, feeding it regularly, in hopes that it might grow into reality.
Dana possesses a kind of style that screams TROPHY. Tall and tan with a smile that glows like a nuclear reactor, she can stoke the coals that fire most male egos with a single fleeting glance across a crowded room. And for all you know she might be looking at the clock on the wall behind you, worried that she is late for an appointment to have her nails done.
The first time Nick met her was at a political fund-raiser. He left his brains on the table along with the tip and began doing his thinking with his dick. He hired her to decorate his office and the rest is history. He has been on this particular treadmill now for almost two years and is beginning to show serious signs of wear.
“You would scratch it. Right?”
“What?” I look at him.
“This itch? Tell me you would,” he says, “otherwise I’m gonna start thinking you misplaced your libido.”
I give him an expression that is noncommittal.
“Fine, then tell me you wouldn’t scratch it.”
“She’s your wife,” I tell him. “I wouldn’t scratch it.”
“But if she wasn’t my wife?”
“I don’t think I have your stamina.”
He laughs. “The secret is to pace yourself.”
“You’ll have to show me sometime.”
“Yeah, well. I admit it can be a problem.” He looks at me. Wrinkles an eyebrow. Wrinkles on wrinkles. “All the same, if you gotta go, what better way?”
It’s the kind of expression you could get from Nick just before he told you what your fee was going to be-and always up front. Nick has made a religion out of tracing the source of his clients’ money to make sure that it will not be confiscated by the government as the fruits of some illicit deal.
“She wants me to quit,” he says.
This catches my attention and Nick notices.
“Not the practice,” he says, “just the heavier criminal stuff. So I’m getting it from both ends. Screwed over by the firm and Dana putting pressure.” He grabs a bottle of antacid tablets from the desk, unscrews the cap, pours some into his hand without counting, and slings them into his mouth, chewing and swallowing, then follows it with something in his coffee cup.
By the time he swallows and comes up for air, he’s back ragging on Dana. “She’s angry that they haven’t come through on their promises. She wants me to talk to Tolt. Press him to get the big civil cases. Like he’s gonna turn these over to me. He hates my ass.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“There must be a reason?”
“Hey, you know me. Even-tempered. Easy-goin’. I get along with everybody. I’m learning how to climb the corporate rungs. You may not believe it, but I’m becoming discreet, diplomatic, political,” he says.
“Lose your knife in somebody’s back, did you?”
“There you go again. This dog’s tryin’ to learn new tricks and you keep running me down.”
“No, I know this dog. He may be calling it a bush but he’s trying to pee on my leg.”
“How can you say that? There’s talk that some of the partners want to put me on the management committee.”
“I take it these are some of the partners whose pictures are on the walls out there in reception with brackets around the dates under their names?”
“I’m serious,” he says.
“I know you’re serious. It’s their mental state I’m worried about. If they’re serious, they’re in the grips of dementia.”
“You think so?”
“Nick, putting you on any committee would be an act of anarchy. The only administrative position for which you’re qualified is emperor, and that would only work in hell and then only if there were bars on the windows.”
He laughs. “Well, they’re thinking about it. Tolt’s the only one standing in the way. From what I hear, half the partners in the firm are ready to walk.” He says it with a little glee as if burning his own place of employment to the ground is his ultimate objective. Nick gets off on blood, especially if it’s somebody else’s.
“Don’t say you heard it here, but they’re pissed at him.” He’s talking about Tolt. “Rumor is there will be no year-end bonuses. He wants to plough everything into a new branch office in Chicago. They’re already overextended. That’s what happens when you grow too fast,” he says. “I stay here long enough and Tolt starts doing some creative accounting, I might pick him up as a client.”
Nick is having fantasies. Adam Tolt is the firm’s managing partner, for all intents the CEO, Yahweh, the higher power of what is now Nick’s universe. He chairs a management committee, but according to anyone who knows Tolt, he’s the man who makes the decisions. He is on a dozen corporate boards, two of the companies that make up Dow-Jones.
“So what did you tell Dana?”
“I told her I’m working on it. Have a little patience. Everything comes to those who wait.”
“Is that something else your father told you?”
“Read it on some guy’s toe tag at the morgue. He was sitting on the tracks when a train hit him, and all they could find was his foot.”
I know the story to be true. Coroner’s bedside manner.
“Besides, I’ve got a few irons in the fire.”
“What?”
“Can’t talk about them right now.” With Nick, it’s always the big mystery. The next major coup in his life.
