Scott Turow - Pleading Guilty

'Well, she got even,' I repeated. 'What did she have to get even for?' 'Jesus Christ,' I said, 'you really haven't been married, have you? The world went to hell and I went with it. I don't know.'

'You stopped drinking.'

I shrugged. I am seldom as impressed by this feat as other people, who like to think it shows I have something, some element which if not unique is still special to the human condition. Courage. I don't know. But I was aware of the secret and it never left me. I'm still hooked. Now I depend on the pain of not drinking, on the craving, on the denial. Especially the denial. I get up in the morning and it strikes me that I'm not going to drink and I actually wonder why I have to do this to myself, same as I used to think waking from a bender. And inside there's the same little harpy telling me that I deserve it.

I had taken another cigarette and wandered to the big windows. The trail of headlamps and brake lights stippled the strip of highway, and an occasional building window was lit up by the isolated sparks of somebody else's life being squandered in evening toil. Stepping back, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection decaled over the night: the weary warrior, hair gone gray and so much ruddy flesh beneath my chin that I can never button my collar.

'You know,' I said, 'you get divorced, it's like being hit by a truck. You walk around in a fucking fog. You're not even sure you're alive. Maybe the last year, I've realized when I stopped drinking was probably what pushed her out the door.'

Brushy had removed her pumps and crossed her feet on the desktop. With my remark she stopped wiggling her short toes against the orange mesh of her pantyhose and asked what I was talking about.

'Nora liked me better when I drank. She didn't like me much, but she liked me better. I left her alone. She could conduct her international experiment in living. The last thing she wanted was my attention. They have a word for this now. What is it?'

'"Co-dependent".'

'There you go.' I smiled, but we were both rendered silent. It hadn't taken Brushy many guesses. As usual, the mess in my life was its own dead end.

I sat down on her sofa, black leather trimmed with metal rails. It was twenty-first-century decorating in here, 'high-tech', so that the place had the warmth of a hospital operating room. Every partner furnishes as he or she likes, inasmuch as our offices are otherwise the same, three walls of union Sheetrock and a glamour view, all plate glass framed by piers of stressed concrete. We have been here in the TN Needle, a forty-four-story stiletto looming prominently against Center City and the prairie landscape, since it opened six years ago, keeping cozy with our biggest client. Our phones and electronic mail intersect with TN's; half our lawyers have stationery of the General Counsel, Jake Eiger, so they can dash off letters in his name. Visitors to the building often say they cannot tell where TN ends and Gage amp; Griswell starts, which is just how we like it.

'So you're really going to do this, look for Bert?'

'The Big Three didn't think I had a choice. We all know my story. I'm too old to learn to do something else, too greedy to give up the money I make, and too burnt out to deserve it. So I take on Mission Impossible and buy myself a job.'

'That sounds like the kind of deal somebody could forget about. Have you thought of that?'

I had, but it was humiliating as hell to think it was so obvious. I just shrugged.

'Besides,' I said, 'the cops'll probably find Bert before me.'

She became rigid at the mention of the police. I took some time to tell her the rest of the story, about Jorge, the lightweight, and his three mean friends.

'Are you telling me the cops know about this? The money?'

'No chance. It's gone out of our escrow account and we haven't heard word one from them. It's not that.' 'Then what?'

I shook my head sadly. I didn't have a clue. 'Actually,' I said, 'from the drift I got, I think they've been asking about Kam Roberts.' 'I'm lost,' she said. 'Me too.'

'Well, I don't understand why you're willing to do this,' Brushy told me. 'Didn't you say he'd shoot you?'

'I was negotiating. I'll fend him off. I'll tell him I didn't believe it, I took it on to defend his honor.'

'Do you believe it?'

I raised my hands: who knows? Who ever knows? I spent a moment with the wonder of it all. What is it really, this life? You're shoulder to shoulder with a guy eight hours a day, try cases with him, go to lunch, sit in the back row and make wisecracks at partners' meetings, stand beside him in the men's room and watch him shake his thing, and what the hell do you know? Zippity-do. You haven't got a clue about the inner regions. You don't know what he regards as dirty thoughts or the place he dreams of as a haven. You don't know if he constantly feels close to the Great Spirit or if anxiety is always nibbling inside him like some famished rat. Really — what is this? You never know with people, I thought, another phrase I picked up on the street and have been repeating to myself for twenty years. I repeated it to Brushy now.

'I can't accept it,' she said. 'This is so calculating. And Bert's impulsive. If you told me he'd signed up to be an astronaut last week and was already halfway to the moon, that would sound more like him.'

'We'll see. I figure if I actually track him down, I'll always have a great alternative to turning him in or bringing him back.'

She stared, green eyes hopped up with all her wily curiosity. 'And what alternative is that?'

'Bert and I can split the money right down the middle.' I put out the cigarette and winked. I said to her again, 'Attorney-client.'

A. His Apartment

My partner Bert Kamin is not an everyday-type guy. Angular and swarthy, with a substantial athletic build and long dark hair, he looks good enough, but there is something wild in his eye. Until she passed away, five or six years ago, Bert — former combat ace, trial shark, hotshot gambler and hoodlum hanger-on — lived with his mother, a demanding old witch by the name of Mabel. He didn't have a shortcoming she failed to mention. Slothful. Irresponsible. Ungrateful. Mean. She'd let him have it, and Bert, with his macho jaw set, tough talk, and chewing gum, just sat there.

The man left after this thirty-five-year mortar assault is a sort of heaping dark mystery, one of those vague paranoiacs who defends his odd habits in the name of individuality. Food's one of his specialties. He is sure America is out to poison him. He subscribes to a dozen obscure health newsletters — 'Vitamin B Update' and 'The Soluble Fiber Wellness Letter' — and he is regularly reading books by goofballs just like him which convince him that something new should not be ingested. I have unwillingly absorbed his opinions over many meals. He lives in mortal fear of tap water, which he figures has everything deadly in it — fluoride, chlorine, and lead — and will drink nothing from the city pipes; over the protests of the Committee, he's even had one of those big green bottled water coolers installed in his office. He won't eat cheese ('junk food'), sausage ('nitrites'), chicken ('DES'), or milk (he still worries about strontium 90). On the other hand, he believes that cholesterol is an AMA-sponsored fiction and has no brief against red meat. And he never ate green vegetables. He will tell you they are overrated, but in fact, he just never got to like them as a kid.

I was feeling Bert's presence pretty strongly now, all his screwball intensity, as I stood outside his place. It was about eleven and I'd decided to check out his digs on my way home. Last time I looked, break and enter was still a crime and I figured I'd just keep this visit to myself.