Читать книгу Balling the Jack - Frank Baldwin - Страница 9

ANYONE contemplating law school should have to work as a paralegal and file motions at the State Supreme Court on Center Street. These guys make Kafka’s bureaucrats look like a dance troupe. They have one clerk working the counter here, who I get every time. A real giant, with so much hair on him you can’t see his arms or neck. Ask him to stamp the motion and he grunts. Ask him a question and he glares. You could swap him for a gorilla at the Bronx Zoo and it would be a week before either place knew the difference.

I’m in line here Monday morning, filing another motion for my boss, Carter McGrath. Boy, do I feel like hell. Just once I should try starting the week without a hangover. Carter is an associate at Farrell, Hawthorne, and Donaldson, the firm I work for. Or Fatigue, Heartworm, and Dysentery, as we paralegals call it, which about captures the spirit of the place. The firm’s one of the old guard. Been on the corner of Wall and Water for fifty years. Small by New York standards—six partners, thirty associates—but a real money-maker.

I don’t believe it. Five clerks working the desk and guess who gets Magilla.

“Hi, I’d like to file—”

Wham! I jump back as the stamp comes down like an anvil, barely missing my dart hand.

“Hey. Watch—”

“Next!”

He stares at me with such pure hatred I hurry out the door.

Out on the sidewalk I shake my head. I must have seen too many movies as a kid. Somewhere I got the notion this legal stuff would be a lot of fun. At seventeen, just as it was hitting me that I wasn’t going to play centerfield for the Mets, an alum with his own practice came in and talked to our senior class. He explained the legal process to us. Spoke about discovery, a little on the rules of evidence. Told us how the whole system was designed for the sole aim of arriving at the truth. It sounded beautiful.

Well, I’m twenty-three now and the jig is about up. Fun? Forget it. Serving papers, tracking down cites, summarizing depositions. In a year the only fun I’ve had at the firm was balling one of the secretaries in the conference room. That was a whopper, I’ll grant you, but it was after the Christmas party, and she’s made it clear it won’t happen again.

As I walk back to work from court, the boys in my skull start up the jackhammer again. The better the weekend, the tougher the Monday, they say. I’ll need a lot of coffee to get through this one. I stop in at a bodega for some aspirin. Back outside, I find that by squinting my eyes almost shut I can narrow my vision to a few yards in front of me, and as my feet drag me toward the office I go back in my head to the weekend.

Aisling Chara turned out to be as good as the hype. I still can’t pronounce it, but by the time they slid into a cover of “Deacon Blues” at three in the morning, I was a believer. I’m not ready to call them another Coffin Ships just yet, but I’ll be back next Friday.

From Finn’s, Dave and I hit an after-hours’ joint on Tenth Street that I couldn’t find again if I had to. The last thing I remember is Dave trying to clear my head with a shot of Absolut, sounding urgent.

“Okay, Tom, sit up. This is important. See the babe at the bar?”

I saw two babes, dressed exactly alike. The same hairstyles even, and moving in perfect unison, like synchronized swimmers. Leave it to Dave.

“Which one’s yours?”

“Tom, there’s only one. Now listen. Dinner at her place tomorrow, and Basic Instinct on cable, if I can recite the words to ‘Mandy.’”

“‘Mandy’?”

“Yeah, start to finish. She gave me five minutes. Here, I got a napkin and pen. Let’s go.”

“‘Mandy’? Dave, you should decline on principle.”

“Tom, look at her.”

The twins crossed their legs, smiled and waved. I hit the floor.

On his own Dave couldn’t even come up with the chorus, which at least left him free to throw me into a cab. After eight hours’ sleep we met up again in box seats at Shea. Then it was to The Palm for the best T-bone in Manhattan, a few darts at Adam’s Curse, a tequila tour of the Upper East Side, some more sleep, back to Shea, poker with the guys at Jimmy’s, and finally a nightcap at the Polo Grounds for SportsCenter. I’m down to a hundred bucks, but I had me a weekend.

Now I’m looking at five days before the next furlough. At the steps of the office I take a good breath, shake my head hard and straighten up. Walking through the oak doors the weekend slips away and the lights inside me dim. I’m a suit again.

CARTER CALLS ME into his office straight away to prep me on a new case. This part of the job isn’t so bad. Every case sounds good the first time you hear it, and I can tell by looking at him that he likes this one.

“How was your weekend, Reasons? Did you get laid?”

“No, sir.”

I call all the lawyers sir or ma’am. They like it, think it’s my military upbringing. Actually it just gives me a kick.

“Young guy like you, good build, what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe once I’m a lawyer they’ll come around.”

Carter starts to laugh, stops and squints hard. “Reasons, I can never tell when you’re dicking with me. This wouldn’t be one of those times, would it?”

“No, sir.”

Carter’s not a bad guy. It’s just that he was born with a stick up his ass and nothing’s happened in thirty years to dislodge it. His one goal in life is to make partner, and he thinks the way to do it is to spend a hundred hours a week in the office. He’s probably right. Every case for Carter is a war of attrition—whoever files the most motions wins. That means a lot of shit work for his staff, so he’s not too popular among the paralegals. I get farmed out to him a lot because he doesn’t like working with the girls. He says he likes to swear too much and was raised better than to do it around them. The real reason is he’s afraid he’ll try to fuck one of them. Nobody who wants to make partner in this firm starts down that path. All in all, he’s not so bad. He’ll order in beer if it’s going to be a late night, and wrapping up a big case can mean a long lunch at a titty bar.

“Reasons, we pulled a good one. What does the name Garrett mean to you?”

“Garrett. Wayne. Played third base for the Mets in the seventies. Had a high of sixteen homers in seventy-three.”

“Not quite. Try Garrett, Winston. CEO of Pyramid Publishing. On the board at the Met. Net worth of about twenty million.”

“Wow. Who’s he suing?”

“He’s not suing anybody. His wife is.”

“His wife, sir?”

“Regina Garrett. Big socialite. Always popping up in the paper. A month ago she threw a cocktail party to honor some French designer. Small party, but top-shelf. Real A-list crowd. Had the thing catered by Prego’s, a little Italian outfit. They do appetizers, cheese and crackers, that kind of thing. Well, an hour into the party, six people come down with food poisoning. Not serious, no one kicked the bucket, but apparently a real mess. People losing it out both ends, some not making it to the bathroom. You get the picture.”

“Yes, sir. What caused the poisoning?”

“They traced it to the bean dip. It seems the caterer mixed together two seasonings, cilantro and pegrini. They’re okay by themselves, but combine ’em and the effect on the human digestive system is explosive. Vomiting, diarrhea, the works. Now you and me, maybe we get steamed, demand our money back, that’s the end of it. But to these society types, this kind of thing is the Hindenburg. Their good name, social standing, all that on the line. And I take it this Regina Garrett is no lamb to start with. She wants a hundred thousand dollars to cover her anguish and the damage to her reputation, and a letter of apology sent to each of the guests. What do you think?”

“I don’t know, sir. It sounds a little lightweight to me.”

“That’s because, Reasons, you don’t see the larger picture. This isn’t just about some bad bean dip. Mr. Garrett’s company, Pyramid, is the third-largest publishing house in the city. They probably do five million dollars in legal fees a year. We shine on this one, he’s indicated he’ll steer some of that our way. Now what do you think?”

I think it’s crossed over from lightweight to bullshit.

“I think it sounds like a winner, sir.”

“Good. We depose Prego in half an hour. Mrs. Garrett we do at noon. I want you to sit in on both of them.”

“Yes, sir.”

GIUSEPPE PREGO WALKS into the conference room looking like a man with two weeks to live. The moment I see him I know we’re working the wrong side of this case. He keeps turning his hat in his hands, patting his head with a kerchief. He looks at both lawyers with worry but with deep trust, his whole manner suggesting that some huge mistake has occurred, but he, Giuseppe Prego, is now here to talk to the good people involved and set the matter straight. I like him off the bat. In a deep accent he tells his side of the story.

His American dream started when he opened a twenty-four-hour deli in Gramercy Park in 1970. He and his wife worked round the clock, every day but Christmas. In the eighties they began catering small parties for friends and built a solid reputation for gourmet appetizers. They impressed a few upscale clients with their distinctive hors d’oeuvres and found a profitable niche working just the kind of intimate affair thrown by Regina Garrett. The way Prego tells it he made the bean dip for the party, all right, but not with pegrini.

“You must understand. I work with food twenty-five years. Anybody who work with food know you can’t mix cilantro and pegrini. Never.

“That night, I deliver the hors d’oeuvres myself. I show them all to Mrs. Garrett in the kitchen. She say fine, fine, except the bean dip. She say it not look ‘friendly’ enough. I want to say, ‘Friendly’? What is ‘friendly’? This is cilantro bean dip. People will not talk to it, they will eat it. I want to say this but I don’t, of course. I say, ‘Mrs. Garrett, you want it to look friendly, you put some parsley on top, just a little, the green on the black look nice—you know, friendly.’ I ask her you want me to do it but she say no, she will do it. So I leave, go back to my store. Then later she call up yelling about people sick and about pegrini. I say, ‘Pegrini, what pegrini?’ She hang up and then two days later a lawyer come into my store with papers. Twenty-five years in the same store and I never get papers from a lawyer.”

He says his niece Rosa will back him up. She stayed to work the party and saw Mrs. Garrett dumping a green seasoning into the bean dip before sending her out with the tray.

When he finishes, Prego stands and shakes the hand of everyone in the room. His lawyer, the stenographer, even me and Carter. He looks hugely relieved, dabbing at his face again as he leaves. I’d bet two weeks’ salary the man hasn’t told a lie in his life.

REGINA GARRETT STROLLS in at twelve-fifteen for her noon deposition. One look at her and it’s clear why her hubby kicked all that ass in the business world. If she waited at home for me, I’d stay in the office too. For old Winston’s sake I hope he has something going on the side.

She shows up for the session in a fur, perches her ninety-five pounds on a chair and looks all of us up and down. If her features were a little softer she’d look just like the Grinch. The tanning rooms have left her a light orange and her last lift pulled the skin over her cheeks and eyes tighter than a drum. She smokes one filtered cigarette after another. I keep waiting for a poodle to jump in her lap.

To me she seems exactly the kind of woman who would destroy anyone before she’d slip one rung on the social ladder. As she speaks, her eyes slide around the room.

Mrs. Garrett says she served everything as she received it. Prego delivered the hors d’oeuvres about 5 P.M. and stayed to put the final touches on the bean dip. He sprinkled a seasoning over the top of it and she asked what it was. He said it was pegrini.

“The name jogged something in my memory, some cautionary note about its safety, the way it reacted with other spices, something. I raised the question with Mr. Prego but he waved it off. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘You can never have enough pegrini. It goes with everything.’ Well, not being a chef myself, of course, I took his word for it. He came well recommended, after all. I felt a little uneasy, but I put the dip on Rose’s tray and sent it out into the crowd. And then … oh, it hurts even to think of it, but you know the rest. As soon as people were taken ill I knew my suspicions were right. I called Mr. Prego immediately and confronted him and he—why, the man denied everything. Denied he had added any pegrini at all. And the names he called me! My word. I know I’m under oath, but I’d just as soon not repeat them. Anyway, that’s just how it happened.”

And I’m a Choctaw Indian.