Stephen Cannell - At First Sight

So Evelyn and I went back into the holding cell where they had her and sat on metal chairs, talking through the bars. The place smelled of vomit and disinfectant. I had a flashback from my short jail term in Hawaii. I won't bore you with that misadventure here, except to say that I know my daughter had no idea what she was signing up for.

"Honey, you've gotta tell the truth," Evelyn said. She never calls Melissa honey, and I could see the metal in our daughter's face shifting light as she frowned.

"Melissa, believe me, you don't wanna go to jail on this drug bust," I said.

"You oughta know, right, Dad?" she shot back.

"Melissa, don't do this. You're going to ruin your life," I pleaded. "Would you two mind getting out of here? I can't listen to any more of this shit. You both ruined my life years ago."

An hour later, Evelyn and I were back in our three-milliondollar French Regency Beverly Hills home on Elm. We were in our overdecorated foyer fighting about what to do about Melissa. As always, we ended up with recriminations.

"It's because she hates you," Evelyn said. "You're such a hypocrite, telling her you never used drugs, then she finds out you did half a year in Hawaii for dealing hash." Forgetting to mention that she was the one who'd busted me to Melissa.

"She's punishing both of us for her feelings of emotional abandonment," I said, bringing two semesters of junior college abnormal psychology into play. "You haven't done a good job of raising her. You made a lot of mistakes."

"You've made the mistakes, buddy," Evelyn snapped. "I've always been there for her. I've been busting my ass!" I wondered if getting butt-fucked by Mickey D could technically be described as busting ass. Maybe.

We argued for almost an hour, did a nice two-out-of-three falls, while Melissa sat it out in a detention cell in Sylmar Juvie.

The next morning, I hired the best lawyer that money I didn't have could buy. He was a balding, skeletal guy with a Talmudic beard named Jube Shiver. I got him from one of my dot-com account managers whose younger sister had a drug history.

"Can you get her out?" I asked our new liar for hire, worried about what might happen to her in jail… visions of lesbian rape hovering at the edge of my every thought.

"I'll have her out by noon," he said with the confidence of a gunfighter cracking the knuckles on his shooting hand. "But the bigger problem is, what happens when this comes to trial. Her association with this biker isn't going to be helpful."

"But the biker is the one who got her into this. All that crystal isn't hers-it's his. She's taking the blame for him. Aren't you listening to me?"

"She confessed," Jube Shiver said, dismissing my argument with a wave of a freckled hand, leaning back in an office littered with B'nai B'rith awards and team pictures of the North Hollywood Little League Pirates. He steepled his fingers under his Talmudic beard, which was graying theatrically at the edges, and studied me like I had just tracked dog shit into his office. I was beginning to take an intense dislike to our new Jewish attorney.

"I know she confessed. That's because he threatened her," I said. "It's under duress."

"It's not duress unless the police force it. Let me lawyer the case. You just give me her personal background, answer my questions when I ask, and sign the checks."

He lost the whole Talmudic thing with that one sentence. Then he made some notes and nodded as I told him everything I thought would be helpful. I left out the bad stuff like all the cocaine we'd found in her purse and under her jewelry box; all the money and the portable electronic equipment she'd stolen from us and fenced to feed her habit.

I drove off an hour later with dark visions of Melissa heading to The Big House.

When I got back to the office, there was a message from my CFO. I went down the hall to see him. He told me he'd scared up an angel in New York who wanted to meet with me in the Big Apple tomorrow. This angel was a Wall Street arbitrageur who was interested in buying out my interest in our sinking dot-com.

"I've got this problem right now with Melissa," I told him.

My CFO, whose name is Martin Worth, frowned and shook his head. There were endless plays on both our names at the company. My favorite being-"At Best, he's Worthless:' Shit like that.

"This may be our last shot:" Martin said stoically.

Why did it always come down to these "no-choice" kinds of choices?

Melissa, or the business?

Nothing simple… nothing easy.

Melissa… or years of my life down the drain with nothing to show for it?

So of course I went to New York. I had no choice.

Biggest mistake of my life.

I took the red-eye.

The weather in New York was dismal. A bone-chilling sleet washed the city, falling from a gunmetal sky.

My Jamaican taxi driver couldn't speak American English. He spoke some kind of indecipherable island patois where every sentence either began or ended with "mon." This angry asshole sat in the front seat of his paint-chipped yellow cab, looking back at me through dirty braids, his Rasta beads clicking ominously every time he moved his head. He made me repeat the address three times, laying the groundwork for getting lost later-conning me, trying to drive up the fare. I hate all these immigrants. I'm tired of my tax dollars going to support a bunch of lazy border jumpers.

"Huh? Whatchu tellin, mon?" he asked.

"Financial District, downtown." I handed him the slip of paper with the address on it. We were outside the American Airlines terminal at JFK.

"Huh? What be dat district, mon? Where dat be at?" Who did he think he was kidding? He drives a cab in New York and can't find the Financial District? Then he got on the radio and pretended to get instructions from a dispatcher with a Middle Eastern accent. Urban terrorists, both of them.

I hate New York. I don't get the vibe here. Since September 11th, it's gotten even worse. They all act as if the Big Apple is the new center of the moral universe. Of course, I'm from Southern California and the only things that got knocked down in L. A. on 9/11 were some IRA accounts, so I'm probably the wrong guy to listen to.

My Jamaican cabbie managed to find the address in downtown Manhattan after giving me a fucking tour of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. The cab fare was a mind-boggling $85.50. See what I'm saying? Thieves, all of them.

The man I was going to see was named Walter Lily. The Lily Fund basically bought assets low and sold high, which was another way of saying they acquired sick companies. Walter Lily had a reputation on Wall Street as a "grave dancer," a man who profited from other men's misfortunes. But I was more or less down to my last few lifelines, so I had no choice. I had to pursue it.

The Lily Building was one of those New York addresses that looks like it was squeezed in as an afterthought, probably when some holdout finally sold his hotdog stand and made his postage stamp of ground available to the hovering killers in the New York real-estate cabal. The building sat on only about an eighth of a city block. The architecture was expensive, turn-of-the-century stone and brick to the second floor, where more cost-effective steel and glass took over and went up for fifty stories. Like nobody on the streets would ever look up and spot it.

I rode the elevator to the top floor. My heart was pounding, and my hands sweating. I clutched the handle of my briefcase, which was full of carefully fabricated numbers and spreadsheets that my CFO, Martin Worth, had supplied.

I was meeting with Mr. Lily himself. He had insisted that I come alone. His appointment secretary explained that he liked his meetings one-on-one. I was told he had allowed fifteen minutes for our little chat.