Laura Dave: The Last Thing He Told Me

Nicholas reaches for the brown box on his desk, a smoke box. He opens the lid and takes out a cigarette.

“I won’t ask if you want one. Disgusting habit, I know. But I started smoking when I was a teenager, there wasn’t much else to do in the town I came from. And I started smoking again in prison, same issue,” he says. “Haven’t been able to kick it since. When my wife was still with us, I’d try. Got those nicotine patches. Have you seen those? They help if you have the discipline, but I don’t pretend to anymore. Not since I lost my wife… What’s the point? Charlie gives me grief about it, but there isn’t much he can do. I figure I’m an old man. Something else will get me first.”

He puts the cigarette to his mouth, silver lighter in hand.

“I’d like to tell you a little story, if you’ll indulge me,” he says. “Have you heard of Harris Gray?”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

He lights up, takes a long inhale.

“No, of course not. Why would you have? He introduced me to my former employers,” he says. “He was twenty-one when I first met him and very low on the totem pole. If he had been any more senior, the gentlemen at the head of the organization would have called in one of their in-house lawyers to help him out and I wouldn’t be sitting across from you now. But he wasn’t. And so I was called in to defend him by the city of Austin. Random assignment sent to the public defender’s office on a night I was working late. Harris was caught with some OxyContin. Not a ton, but enough. He was charged with intent to distribute. Which, needless to say, was his intent.” He takes another drag. “My point is, I did my job, maybe a little too well. Usually Harris gets locked up for a period of time, thirty-six months, maybe seventy-two in front of the wrong judge. But I got him off.”

“How did you do that?” I ask.

“The way you do anything well,” he says. “I paid attention. And the prosecutor didn’t expect that. He was sloppy. He didn’t disclose some of the exculpatory evidence, so I got the case dismissed. And Harris went free. After that, his employers asked to meet me. They were impressed. They wanted to tell me so. And they wanted me to do it again for other members of their organization who found themselves in trouble.”

I don’t know what he expects me to say, but he looks at me, perhaps just to make sure I’m listening.

“These gentlemen at the head of Harris’s organization decided I showed the kind of prowess that was integral to keeping their workforce… working. So they flew me and my wife to South Florida on a private plane. I had never flown first class before, let alone on a private plane. But they flew me there on their plane and put us up in a waterfront hotel suite with our own butler and made me a business proposition, one that felt difficult to say no to.” He pauses. “I’m not quite sure why I mention the plane or the oceanfront butler. Maybe to suggest to you I was more than slightly out of my depth with my employers. Not that I’m saying that I didn’t have a choice in working for them. I believe you always have a choice. And the choice I made was to defend people who, by law, deserve a proper defense. There’s honor in that. I never lied to my family about it. I spared them some of the details, but they knew the general picture and they knew I didn’t cross any lines. I did my job. I took care of my family. At the end of the day, it’s not all that different from working for a tobacco company,” he says. “The same moral calculation needs to be made.”

“Except I wouldn’t work for a tobacco company either,” I say.

“Well, we don’t all have the luxury of your strict moral code,” he says.

There’s an edge to how he says this. I’m taking a chance, arguing with him, except it occurs to me that this may be precisely why he is walking me through his history, the version of it he wants me to see. To test me. To test whether I’m going to do exactly that—argue, engage. This has to be why he presented his story this way—this is the first test. He wants to see whether I’ll blindly let him spin in order to ingratiate myself to him or whether I’ll be human.

“It’s not that my moral code is so strict, but it seems to me that your employers are causing all sorts of harm and you knew that,” I say. “And you still chose to help them.”

“Oh, is that the distinction?” he says. “Do no harm? What about the harm you do when you rip a child from her family right after she loses her mother? What about the harm you do when you deprive that child of knowing everyone who could have reminded her of her mother? Everyone who loved her?”

That stops me. And I understand it now. Nicholas didn’t run me through his story to present himself in a better light or to see if I’d engage with him. He told me so I’d lead him here, exactly to this place, where he could put his fury out there. He wanted to wound me with it. He wanted to wound me with the harm Owen caused—with the price of what he chose to do.

“I think it’s his hypocrisy that I find the most staggering,” he says. “Considering that Ethan knew exactly what I was doing and what I wasn’t doing for my employers. He knew more than my own children. In part because he knew about encryption and computers. In part because he and I became close and I let him in. Let’s just say he helped me do certain things. That’s how he was able to cause the trouble that he did.”

I don’t know how to argue with that. I don’t know how to argue with Nicholas about any of this. This is how he sees himself, as a family man, as a wronged man. And he sees Owen as the man who wronged him, which makes Owen just as guilty as he is. I can’t argue with something so intrinsic to his understanding of himself. So I decide not to. I decide to go another way.

“I don’t think you’re wrong about that,” I say.

“No?” he says.

“The one thing I know about my husband is that he would do anything for his family. And that’s who you were to him, so I imagine he was quite involved with whatever you asked him to be involved with.” I pause. “Until he decided he couldn’t be anymore.”

“I’d already been working for my employer for a long time when Ethan came into my daughter’s life,” he says. “For other clients too, mind you. I continued to fight for people you’d approve of, I still work for those clients, though I’m sure you’re less interested in my good deeds.”

I don’t say anything. He isn’t looking for me to say anything. He is looking to make his point, which is when he starts to get there.

“Ethan blamed me for what happened to Kate. He blamed the men I worked for when they had nothing to do with it. She was working for a Texas Supreme Court judge, a very influential Texas Supreme Court judge? Did you know that?”

I nod. “I did.”

“Did you know this judge had shifted the Texas court sharply to the left and was imminently set to cast the deciding vote against a large energy corporation, the second largest in the country? If you want to talk about real criminals, these gentlemen were dispelling highly toxic chemicals into the atmosphere at a clip that could make your eyes swell shut.”

He watches me.

“My point is that this judge, Kate’s boss, was writing a majority opinion against the corporation. It would lead to sweeping reform and cost the energy corporation close to six billion dollars in improved conservation efforts. And the day after my daughter was killed, the judge came home to a bullet in his mailbox. What does that sound like to you? A coincidence? Or a warning shot?”

“I don’t know enough,” I say.

“Well, Ethan decided he knew enough. He couldn’t be reasoned with that the men I had spent two decades protecting wouldn’t do that to my daughter. That I knew these men and they had their own code of honor. That wasn’t how they did things. Even their most nefarious colleagues didn’t do things like that unprompted. But Ethan didn’t want to believe it. He just wanted to blame me. And he wanted to punish me. As if I wasn’t punished enough.” He pauses. “There is nothing worse than losing your child. Nothing. Especially when you are someone who lives his life for his family.”