A. Your Investigator Gets Interrupted
If Bert Kamin was dead, then who had the money?
This question struck me suddenly as I stood before a mirror at Dr Goodbody's, where I'd come to clean up before heading on to the office. A shower and shave had not done much for my condition. I still had the shadowy look of some creep on a wanted poster and my headache made me recollect those cavemen who used to open vents in their skulls. I phoned Lucinda to say where I was, asking her to make the calls to cancel and replace my credit cards. Then I found a lonesome corner in the locker room to figure things out. Who had the money? Martin had said that the banker he talked to in Pico had hinted that the account where the checks went was Bert's. But that was hardly authoritative.
A refuge, even a phony one, is where you find it, and I was irritated when the attendant told me I had a call. One of the things I hate worst about the world of business at the end of the century is this instant-access crap: faxes and mobile phones and all those eager-beaver, happy delivery people from fucking Federal Excess. Competition in the big-bucks world has made privacy a thing of the past. I expected Martin, Mr Impatience, who likes to call you with his latest brilliant idea on a case from some airplane at eleven o'clock at night as he's bounding off to Bangladesh. But it wasn't him.
'Mack?' Jake Eiger spoke. 'I'd like to see you ASAP.'
'Sure. Let me get hold of Martin or Wash.'
'Better the two of us,' said Jake. 'Why don't you come up here? I want to give you heads-up on something. About our situation.' He cleared his throat in a vaguely meaningful way, so I suspected at once what was coming. The powers-that-be at TN had reviewed this fiasco — Bert and the money — and concluded there was a certain large law firm they could do without. Cancel the search party and pack your bags. I was going to get to give my partners the news as a 'leak'.
It had been some time since Jake and I had sat down man-to-man. They became uncomfortable meetings after my divorce from his cousin — and Jake's decision to stop directing TN cases to me. We never speak about either subject. The unmentionable, in fact, is more or less the bedrock of our relationship.
As usual, a long story. Jake was not an especially good student; I've always suspected he got into law school on his father's pull. He's bright enough — downright wily at times — but he has trouble putting thoughts on paper. A whiz at multiple choice but gridlock when he was writing essays. His own term was 'cryptophobic', but I think in today's lingo we'd say learning-disabled.
I had been at BAD about a year when Jake invited me to lunch. I thought it was some kind of family obligation — one of Nora's aunts hopping his keester about buy Mack a meal and give him some advice, maybe he'll amount to something. But I could tell he was uneasy. We were at some snazzy rooftop place and Jake squinted in the sun. The wind flapped the fringe of the umbrella overhead.
'Nice view,' he said.
We both were drinking. He was unhappy too. Jake's handsomeness has always had room only for boyish easiness. The worry was like a painted sign.
'So,' I asked, 'what?' There had to be something. We did not have a real social relationship.
'Bar exam,' he said.
I didn't understand at first. I thought it was one of those clever, stylish remarks he made that was beyond me, rich-kid talk. He was just starting his third year at G amp; G, Wash's favorite flunky, three years out of law school, with one year spent clerking for a judge, and the bar ordinarily would have been long behind him. I ordered lunch. You could see Trappers Park from there and we talked awhile about the team.
'I should get out there,' Jake said. 'Haven't had much chance.'
'Busy? Lots of deals?'
'Bar exam,' he said again. 'I just took it for the third time.' And he looked from the distance to me, the level sincere agonized way he probably took in the ladies he wanted to lay. I did not need a guidebook to know I was being compromised.
'Three strikes and you're out,' he said. Three failures and you had to wait five years to take the test again. I knew the rules. I was one of the guys who made them. 'The firm has to fire me,' he said. 'My old man'll die. Die.' His career as a lawyer would, practically speaking, be over, but no doubt for Jake his father would be the worst part.
While I was growing up, Jake's dad was a colleague of Toots's in the City Council and a considerable figure. Invested with the medieval powers typically exerted by a councilman in DuSable, Eiger
Sitting there in the ward office, which looked like a basement rec room decorated with maps and political posters from past campaigns and four of those clunky old-style telephones, big and black and heavy enough to be murder weapons, absorbing most of the space on his desk, Councilman Eiger assured me that my police application would get every consideration. You had to love him, a man so richly endowed with power and so generous about its use. He was the kind of pol you could understand, whose lines of loyalty were long inscribed and well known: first himself, then his family, then his friends. He was not against law or principle. They were just not operative elements. I was a cadet in a previously selected entering class at the Academy within three weeks. Now his son was sitting in front of me, and even though Jake denied his father was aware of anything, the message was the same. I owed. I owed the family. You knew his old man would see it just that way.
I made my one and only stab at rectitude.
'Jake, I think we ought to talk about something else.'
'Sure.' He looked into his drink. 'I took the test last week. There was a question — I fouled up so badly — a civil-procedure question, you know, revising a divorce decree, and I wrote this ream about matrimonial law.' He shook his head. Poor old handsome Jake was about to cry. And then he did. A grown man almost, sobbing like a kid into his gin and tonic. 'Hey, you know, I'm sorry.' He straightened himself up. We ate in absolute silence for about ten minutes, then he said he was sorry again and walked away from the table.
One of the peculiar things you learn in life is that what makes Great Institutions great is the stuff people attach to them, not their actual operation, which is often purely prosaic. The scoring of the bar exam was like that. We sent the bluebooks out to ten graders around the state, one for each question. The booklets came back UPS, thousands of stacks, piled up no more ceremoniously than rubbish. The secretaries sorted them for days, then added each individual's totals, and the staff attorneys checked the arithmetic. Those were the results. Seventy passed, 69 failed. Jake was at 66 when I found his stack on another assistant administrator's desk the night I decided to go hunting for it. The guy who graded Jake's civil-procedure answer had given Jake three out of a possible ten. A 3 and an 8 of course can look a lot alike, even if you don't have a gift for forgery. I wasn't taking any risk; no one would ever know. Not counting me, of course.
Still, you wonder, why'd I do it? Not because of Jake, God knows, not even because my old man and my ma'd have been ashamed to think I wouldn't look after a friend. No, I suppose I was thinking of Woodhull and his minion, who confused ethics with ego, those judgmental prigs, my colleagues, one more team I didn't want to play on, one more group I would not allow to claim my soul. Same reason I did it to Pigeyes, then lied, unwilling to play for either side.
Jake took me out to lunch the week after the results were mailed. He was pleased as a puppy. He slobbered all over me and I wouldn't say a thing. I congratulated him when he told me that he passed. I shook his hand.
'You think I'm going to forget this, but I won't,' he said.
