Scott Turow - Pleading Guilty

'The Committee?'

Brushy warmed to my account. The Big Three tend to be tight-vested and most of my partners relish any chance to peek behind the curtains. Brushy savored each detail until she suddenly grasped the problem.

'Just like that? Five million, six?' Her small mouth hanging open, Brushy looked dimly toward the future — the lawsuits, the recriminations. Her investment in the law firm was in jeopardy. 'How could he do that to us?'

'There are no victims,' I told her. She didn't get it. 'Cop talk,' I said, 'it's a thing we'd say. Guy walks down a dark street alone in the wrong neighborhood and gets mugged. Some shmo cries a river cause he lost a hundred-thousand bucks hoping some con artist could make a car run on potato chips. People get what they're asking for. There are no victims.'

She looked at me with concern. Brushy sat here tonight in a trim suit and a blouse with a big orange bow. Her short hair was cut close, a little butch, and showed off two or three prominent acne scars that pitted her left cheek, like the dimples of the moon. Her teenaged years had to have been tough.

'It's a saying,' I said.

'Meaning what? Here?'

Shrugging, I went to the pencil drawer in the gunmetal credenza behind her to find a cigarette. We both sneak butts. Gage amp; Griswell is now a smoke-free environment, but we sit in Brushy's office or mine with the door closed. From the drawer I also removed a little makeup mirror, which I asked to borrow. Brushy couldn't have cared less. She was chewing on her thumb, still wrought up with the prospect of disaster.

'Should you be telling me this?' Brushy asked. She always had a better sense than me for the value of a confidence.

'Probably not,' I admitted. 'Call it attorney-client.' Privileged, I meant. Forever secret. Another of those witless jokes lawyers make about the law. Brushy wasn't really my lawyer here; I wasn't really her client. 'Besides, I need to ask you something about Bert.'

She was still pondering the situation. She said again she couldn't believe it.

'It's a nice idea, n 'est-ce pas! Fill your pocket with some new IDs and several million dollars and jet off to be someone else for the rest of your life.' I made a sound. 'It gives me the shivers just to think of it.'

'What kind of new IDs?' she asked.

'Oh, he seems to be using some screwy alias. You ever hear him call himself Kam Roberts for any reason — even just kidding around?'

Never. I told her a little about my visit to the Russian Bath, watching these guys built like refrigerators flail each other with oak branches and soap.

'Weird,' she said.

'That's how it struck me. Here's the thing, Brush. These birds around there seem to think Bert has gone off with some man. He ever mention anyone named Archie?'

'Nope.' She eyed me through the smoke. She already knew I was up to something.

'It made me think, you know. It's been years since I saw Bert with a woman.' When Bert got here more than a decade ago, he was still squiring Doreen, his high-school honey, to firm functions. He'd made vague promises to marry this woman, a sweet schoolteacher, and in the years she waited she turned into a kind of sports-bar bimbo, with a drinking problem like mine and skirts the size of handkerchiefs and blonde hair so ravaged by chemicals that it stuck out from her head like raffia. One day at lunch Bert announced she was marrying her principal. No further comment. Ever. And no replacement.

Always live to nuance, Brushy had perked up. 'Are you asking what I think?'

'You mean something dirty and indiscreet? Right. I'm not asking you to speculate. I just thought you might be able to contribute pertinent information.' I sort of scratched my ear lamely but it wasn't fooling her a bit. Pugnacious, you would call her look. She's not big — short, broad, and but for tireless health-club hours tending to the stout — but her jaw was set meanly.

'Who are you now? The Public Health Service?'

'Spare me the details. Yes or no will do to start.'

'No.'

I wasn't sure she was answering. Brushy is touchy about personal lives, since hers is always the subject of sniggering. Every office deserves a Brushy, a stalwartly single, sexually predatory female. She subscribes to a feminism of her own vision, which seems to be inspired by piracy on the high seas, regarding it as an achievement to board every passing male ship. She does not recognize any common boundary: marital status, age, social class. When she decides on a man, either for the position he occupies, the promise he radiates, or the good looks that stimulate other females to mere fancy, she is unambiguous in making her desires known. Over the years she has been seen in the company of judges and politicians, journalists, opponents, guys from the file room, a couple of former jurors — and many of her partners, including, should you be wondering, for one fitful afternoon, me. Big and good-looking, Bert had undoubtedly fallen within the circled sights of Brushy's up-periscope.

'It's not prurient interest, Brush. It's professional. Just give me a wink. I need your opinion: Is it he's or she's when Bert dances the hokey-pokey?'

'I don't believe you,' she said and looked off with a sour scowl. In her pursuits, Brushy, in her own way, is discreet. She generally wouldn't talk under torture, and her advances, while relentless, always recognize the proprieties of the workplace. But for her sexual follies, Brushy still pays a heavy price. Her commitment to appetites that most of us are busy trying to suppress leads folks to regard her as odd, even dangerous; other females are often downright hostile. And among her peers, the younger partners, the men and women who started together as associates and survived those years together — the giddy all-nighters in the library, the one thousand carry-in meals — Brushy is on the outs anyway. They envy her advancement in the firm, and when they gather privately for gossip, it's often about her.

She is, in her own way, alone here, a fact which I suppose has drawn us together. Our one misfiring encounter is never a topic. After Nora, my volcano seems more or less extinct, and we both know that afternoon belongs to my wackiest period — right after my sister, Elaine, had died and I had stopped drinking, just when the recognition that my wife was busy with other sexual pursuits was beginning to assume the form of what we might call an idea, sort of the way all that swirling gas and dust in the remote regions of the cosmos starts to zero in on being a planet. For Brush and me our interlude served its purpose, nonetheless. In the aftermath, we became good pals, schmoozing, smoking, and playing racquetball once a week. On court, she is as vicious as a mink.

'How's the Loathsome Child?' Brushy asked. She eyed me in strict warning. We both knew she'd changed the subject.

'Living up to his name,' I assured her. Lyle was Nora's and my only kid, and his insular ways as a little boy had led me to refer to him with what I thought was tenderness as the Lonesome Child. When adolescence set in, however, the consonants migrated.

'What's the latest?'

'Oh, please. Let me count the ways. I find muddy footprints on the sofa. Dried soda pop on the kitchen floor. He comes home at 4:00 a.m. and rings the doorbell because he forgot the keys. The PDR doesn't list half the drugs he takes. Nineteen years old. And he doesn't flush the toilet.'

At that last item, Brushy made a face. 'Isn't it time for him to grow up? Doesn't that happen with children?'

'Not so as you'd notice with Lyle. I'll tell you, whatever you saved me on alimony, Brushy, she got even with that shrink. All that crap about how an adolescent male was too vulnerable to be without his father in these circumstances.'

Brushy said what she always said: the first custody fight she'd seen where the dispute was over who had to take the child.