Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

That guy had turned out to be a find. If Ben still had a job himself, he would have hired Bonifacio in a heartbeat. Like most good litigators Ben had known, Bonifacio was a killer, a misanthrope, with the vengeful air of a man whose embarrassing delusions about the goodness of people had long ago been destroyed. Or maybe it was just that he knew how to hire a good PI, but in any event he had managed to turn up so much dirt about Cornelia Hewitt — including, delightfully, an affidavit that down at Duke she had slept with one of her professors — that they were able to settle the suit for what amounted, when compared to the nightmare scenarios of just a few months earlier, to pennies on the dollar. So Ben would still have some money left after all. The real financial winner in the end, though, was Bonifacio himself, who had even let slip to Ben, with a provocatory slyness, that he and his wife had briefly looked into buying Ben’s old house when Helen first put it on the market.

But the criminal case, though manipulable, wasn’t so easily closed. The sexual assault charge was, as Bonifacio had predicted, dropped before it could be dismissed, which indicated mercifully that there would be no trial, but also that there was some bargaining going on. Ben had little idea from day to day where things stood, or when the resolution might come. When the first of February passed — when he had been at Parnell’s cabin on the lake, with nothing to do, for two full months, and the lake was finally frozen over, and he had read every ridiculous Tom Clancy and James Patterson book in the place, and it was dark and bone-cold even inside his car during the half hours he spent texting back and forth with Sara while she sat watching TV in her new apartment, before abruptly signing off mom here gotta go —he returned a call from Bonifacio and learned that even the best plea deal his lawyer could negotiate was going to have to include some token jail time.

“Twenty-eight days,” Bonifacio said. “The DA says he can’t go any lower. It’s a high-profile case, and DWI is just such a political thing these days. Frankly, if you think about the position we were in three or four months ago, it isn’t half bad.”

Ben, though he felt oddly calm, was shaking. He turned the heat up another notch with his free hand. “It’s a good deal, I know,” he said. “Nice work on your part.”

“Well, I went to high school with the guy,” Bonifacio said.

“I assume you’ll let Helen know?”

“Don’t assume it,” Bonifacio said coolly. “I represent you separately now, at least until you revisit the custody issue, which nobody seems quite ready to do yet. Apart from that, the only mandatory disclosures are financial. The money left over from escrow covers child support until, I don’t know, the summer I think. I’ll tell her where you are if she asks me where you are. Otherwise, it’s not my place.”

“Has she ever asked you where I am?”

“Not to date. She knows you’re out there somewhere.”

Wow, Ben thought. Good for her. “Does she know I’ve been in touch with Sara?”

“Ooh,” said Bonifacio. “Not smart. In fact I think I’m going to have to pretend you didn’t tell me that. Anyway, I haven’t actually seen Helen in months. Of course, I haven’t seen you in even longer. My biggest clients! We’re all just voices in each other’s ears now.”

Ben would do his time at a minimum-security facility in a town called Mineville, north of Albany; Bonifacio had never been there himself, but he’d been assured it was the cushiest prison in the eastern part of the state. In ten days Ben would drive himself to the courthouse in Poughkeepsie, where he would surrender, make a brief court appearance to accept the plea formally and to allocute to his crimes, and then a couple of sheriff’s deputies would drive him about four hours north to jail. Ben knew full well how all of this worked, but he let his lawyer go on explaining it anyway. Then he went inside, bought a shrink-wrapped roast beef sandwich and a can of beer, and drove back out to the cabin.

He was a pariah, a dead soul, and he was unsure how any of the various purgatories he was living through was ultimately going to return him to the world. He had gone from a life dominated by routine and obligation to a life wherein each day was almost perfectly vacant, and yet, when those pointless days began to count down from five, he felt the onset of panic at their ending. It kept him from sleeping more than about an hour at a time. He wasn’t scared of prison, exactly. From what he knew of these places, this one wouldn’t be that much different from Stages, only with plainer food and fewer meetings. The last days in the cabin came and went, seeming unfairly short, even though he had no way to pass them but to sit inside with his feet near the baseboard heater and stare out at the empty lake. He thought about making a run for it. He thought about trying to get some Ambien prescribed to him, but he did not know a doctor or even a single soul in this area beyond the fat kid behind the Mobil counter. Something kept him from calling Parnell and asking for this second, negligible favor. He did call Bonifacio to ask if the prison in Mineville allowed inmates the use of their phones: the answer was no, but they were allowed limited access to the Internet each day via the prison’s own server. So he could still email Sara. The emails would be coming from a different IP address now; maybe she’d wonder about that, or maybe she wouldn’t even notice it.

He decided that his fear was a function of simple instinct and that there was nothing to be done about it. On his last morning in the cabin he was awake at dawn, stripping the bed and sweeping up with a broom he’d found. Through the window, as the light slid over the frozen lake, he could see that there was someone out there, maybe a hundred yards offshore, sitting in front of a hole in the ice. The thermometer on the porch read nine degrees. Man, Ben thought. For what? He drank a cup of instant coffee while staring at the guy, who did not move; then he rinsed out the cup, put the key to the cabin on the lintel over the front door, and drove off to meet the authorities.

CRISIS MANAGEMENT was what she had learned to call it, but Helen’s sense of her own particular niche in the world of public relations — in the realm, as Harvey had taught her to think of it, of public storytelling — didn’t get much more sophisticated than that. She had no idea how to draw attention to her own achievements, or how to leverage the exposure (such as when the Times mentioned her in a sidebar after Bratkowski was censured by the city council) that sometimes came her way as an accidental but still natural consequence of her success. She didn’t know how to find new clients — she just said yes or no to those who approached her, and in fact she didn’t yet feel she had the luxury of saying no to anyone. She didn’t know how, or else just lacked the aggression, to be the first one to cold-call whenever something went publicly wrong: a schoolteacher who was dating a student, a hair salon that burned a client’s skin, a charity whose books were cooked. Her business model, and Mona’s, was basically to pick up the phone when it rang. It was no way to get rich, that was for sure. It was a formula for getting by, and that’s what they were all doing, with no sort of plan or even provision for the future, and with no one in her life who might offer her advice.

She did have some sense of what her skills were, even if they seemed less like skills than like instincts. She got powerful men to apologize. Maybe women too, though she was a bit curious about that one herself since she’d never yet taken on a female client. The thing was, she seemed able to do it without even trying that hard. She got them to confess because they didn’t seem to want to lie to her. Once this threshold had been crossed, it was a relatively simple matter to stand nearby while they confessed to the world at large via a TV camera or a microphone, though Helen frequently had the sensation that even in that broadcast moment the camera and the mike were still somehow basically surrogates or fetishes, material symbols of herself.