A Thousand Pardons (17 page)

He was starving, but when the route to town took him past Meadow Close, he couldn’t resist turning in for a quick look. A few months of neglect weren’t really enough to change the appearance of a house; still, he inhaled sharply when he saw it, dark and clearly uninhabited, sitting in a chaotic brown yard that must have been giving Parnell and their other neighbors fits. The paint job was holding up, and the shutters were open and hung fine, and yet it still managed to look like a place where a disaster had happened. Kids would be daring each other to hit the windows with rocks before long. He had an urge to get out of the car and walk around the back to check on the screened porch. But it was the middle of the day. He pulled into Parnell’s driveway, backed out again facing the other way, and continued into town.

He parked his car on Main Street and walked up and down, peering into familiar shop windows, absorbing the looks of surprise and even horror on the faces of those who still recognized him, which happened maybe half a dozen times. He stopped in to the Polish grocery where he and his daughter had met back in December, and he ordered another one of those cream-filled rolls; hungry as he was, after a month of prison food it was so rich he couldn’t finish it. Then, on his trip down the opposite side of Main Street, in the shade of late afternoon and the corresponding chill, for which he was not appropriately dressed, he passed the hardware store, and the shingle that hung by the stairs running up the side of the two-story building, leading to the Offices (the
“s” was a hilarious touch, Ben thought) of Joseph Bonifacio, Attorney at Law.

“Jacob Marley’s ghost!” Bonifacio said when Ben walked in. It took him a surprisingly long time to stand—he’d had his feet on his desk and was watching something on his computer. “I should have marked my calendar. But honestly I was pretty sure I’d never see you again. Certainly not here in the Valley. Returning to the scene of the crime, eh what?”

“Something like that,” Ben said.

“Well, listen, let’s have a drink to celebrate the end of your sentence. That is, if there’s a bottle of anything around—well, what do you know?” he said, producing a bottle of Jameson from the top drawer of his desk. “What are the chances of that?”

It was about four-thirty, and an hour later—during which time Ben didn’t hear the office phone ring once—the lawyer invited his client over to his house for dinner. There was a real edge to Bonifacio’s aggressive friendliness, an edge Ben thought Joe himself was mostly unaware of. He seemed proud of how small and cluttered and poorly insulated his house was, proud that someone like Ben—just the kind of privileged guy he’d always hated—was brought so low as to have to be grateful even for the tepid, perfunctory dinner put before him by Bonifacio’s resigned and surly wife.

“So how long are you back in town for?” she asked him. “Just picking up some things?”

He struggled to finish chewing a rubbery piece of beef. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really have any plans, to tell the truth. I guess I just came back here to regroup.”

“Regroup for what?” she said skeptically.

“Not sure. I’m thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

“Ginny, let’s not be rude to company,” Bonifacio said. “My client has paid his debt to society. Also his bill, which puts him in rare air around here. So as far as we are concerned, he is washed in the blood of the Lamb.”

Ginny shrugged and began clearing the table. “You’ll have to go
back to work,” she said to Ben without looking at him. “Everybody has to work.”

“Demonstrably untrue,” Bonifacio said.

“All I really know how to do is practice law,” Ben said, “but with a prison record, that might be difficult for me.”

“Anyway,” Ginny said, pointedly on her way to the kitchen, “one lawyer is already plenty for a little town like this.”

Ben and Joe looked at each other, eyebrows up, realizing together what Ginny had been talking about all along: she was worried that Ben was planning to open up his own law office in town and drive her husband out of business. In her mind this was how well-off people behaved, and Ben had to hand it to her—as stereotypes went, it wasn’t a bad one.

“I wouldn’t worry, honey,” Joe said, struggling not to smile. He had been drinking Jameson, however leisurely, for at least three straight hours now. “Ben’s a smart enough guy to know that he’d be better off hanging his shingle in some town where he has less of a preexisting reputation as a scumbag.”

Ben smiled; then, to get off the subject, he said, “Joe, can I ask you something? I drove by my old house earlier today, before I saw you, and it looks very much like no one’s living there. You handled the sale for Helen, right? Is it some kind of absentee owner or something?”

“No. Well, yes, in the sense that the absentee owner is your ex-wife. The sale fell through, although it took months to declare it dead because Helen kept giving these deadbeats extra time. It’s still technically on the market. Not a great moment for real estate around here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Are you kidding me?” Ben said loudly. “What the hell is she living on?”

Joe shrugged, as the ice from the bottom of his glass hit his teeth again.

Ben returned to the house on Meadow Close the next morning. First he looked through the intact porch screen while standing on the back lawn; then, on a whim, he tried his key in the front door lock. It still worked. All the furniture was gone, and the rooms smelled of moisture
and what was probably mice. He stood in the center of each empty room. He opened all the windows and then, before leaving, shut and locked them again.

It felt strange, after that, to go sit on his bed in the motel room. He held his phone in his hand and reflected that it—a cellphone—was probably the closest thing in his life to a home right now, the object most linked to his sense of identity and with the longest association to his past.
Whats a good time to call u
? he texted Sara, and she did not reply. Then it occurred to him that she might have thought he was still in jail upstate, but when he texted to let her know he was out now, she wrote back
yes I know I can count
. She did not ask him where he was.

Two nights later Bonifacio called him when he was watching TV in the motel room and said, “Listen, I have a proposition for you. You’re a trusts and estates guy, right? Or were. Anyway, I just caught a probate case that is a real bear.”

“Who died?” Ben asked.

“You know the Feldmans, who live on Colonial Ave.? Husband was a commodities trader?” Ben did know them, a little; he saw Jay Feldman ten times a week back in the early years, when he used to take the train. “Well, he died of a heart attack while jogging, if you please, and the weird thing is the Feldmans were like two days from finalizing their divorce when it happened. Anyway, it’s a mess, and I was wondering how you’d feel about coming in for a week or two to help me sort it out. If you’re not doing anything.”

Bonifacio was loving this a little too much, Ben thought; but he agreed to it anyway. For a week, he sat in a folding chair with his feet on Joe’s windowsill and helped him craft a brief on the angry widow’s behalf that was bound to blow the mind of whatever hack rural circuit-court judge caught the case. The bottle of Jameson usually came out of the drawer around four o’clock. Ben understood that it was tied in some way to the difficulty Bonifacio had not with his work but with going home. At the tail end of the Friday before his court appearance on behalf of Mrs. Feldman, Bonifacio brought up with Ben the question of money.

“It’ll have to be under the table,” Bonifacio said. “I hope that’s not
going to cause you any problems. I can offer you two grand. I know you’re worth much more, but I mean, look around you.” He waved with the glass in his hand to indicate the tiny lamplit office, the sun already descending behind the muddy train station across the road. “It’s all I’ve got.”

The proper thing for Bonifacio to do, Ben knew, was to offer him instead a cut of the eventual settlement; but he didn’t care to pursue it. He had something else on his mind.

“Keep it,” Ben said. “I was happy to help out. You did plenty for me, so it’s good to give back.”

“I did do good for you, didn’t I?” Bonifacio said. “I mean, I couldn’t keep you out of jail, I am sorry about that, but you were able to hold on to a fair amount of money in the end, considering you were getting prosecuted and sued and divorced at the same time.”

Ben raised his glass in salute. “Very true,” he said. “Which is why I don’t need your lousy two grand.”

Bonifacio laughed. “Have it your way,” he said. “Regardless, you were the best little assistant I’ve ever had around here.”

Really, it was like he kept digging around until he stumbled on the remark that would make you want to slap him in the face. That seemed to be what he wanted. No wonder he didn’t appear to have other friends in town. Ben drained his glass and held it out cheerfully for a refill.

“You make a better lawyer than a boss,” he said. “And you’re still the only advocate I’ve got. Which brings us to new business. I have a job for you.”

ANEW KOREAN-MADE ECONOMY CAR got a “Satisfactory” rating from Consumer Reports, whereupon the Crisis Management team assembled as immediately and instinctively as a team of superheroes; but then most of their subsequent time and ingenuity was spent moving ninja-like through the immense trivialities of the various social networks, countering complaints, planting favorable remarks. The question of whether the client might instead address the crisis by building safer cars was a nonstarter. Helen understood that once you got out of
the realm in which your clients were individuals with whom you sat down face to face, your power diminished, and your thinking had to change; still, though, even their most detailed and intense strategies often seemed to her like confoundingly small potatoes.

A company that made artificial knees hired Malloy the week an FDA report was released suggesting that the knees were failing far more quickly than predicted and that the resulting complications had contributed to one death. The two orthopedic surgeons who had invented the device, which, having enriched them beyond the dreams of avarice, was now poised to ruin them, were turning on each other. One insisted almost dementedly that the device was working exactly as intended and that, since any response to the charges only gave them further credence, they should be ignored. The other, whose lawyer seemed to have all but moved in with him, said that silence equaled guilt, but that there was a way, in these matters, to apologize without actually admitting anything, a way that only lawyers understood.

“This is what happens when people’s attorneys get involved,” Arturo said at the Fishtank meeting where this new business was introduced. “They specialize in selfish thinking. So what does he suggest we ask people to believe about these failing knees?”

“Acts of God,” Shelley said, “was I believe the phrase he wanted us to use.”

Arturo snorted. “There are no acts of God anymore,” he said. “Americans believe in negligence. Helen, what do you think?”

This was a question Helen had never yet heard in the weeks of her employ. “I’m sorry?” she said.

“About the notion of the non-apology apology. You’re supposed to be the apology expert. This is the word from on high, anyway.”

Everyone turned to look at her. “Well, it has to be sincere,” she said, reddening. “It has to be sincere and thorough. If it gives off the whiff of having been vetted by a lawyer, to me that’s worse than saying nothing at all.”

“But it will kill them,” one of the other group members said. “If they get up there and say hey, our bad, our knees don’t work the way we thought they would, no way they stay in business, at least not with this product.”

“So, Helen, you’re suggesting we counsel our client to embrace their failure?” Arturo said.

Helen, unused to being asked to justify her instincts, faltered, and there was an awkward pause.

“I can sort of see it, actually,” Arturo said at last. “If you want to be resurrected, you have to be dead.”

The following Wednesday, Helen was gathering her things to leave for home and maybe make Sara a decent dinner for once when Arturo popped up unprecedentedly in her office doorway, his hand on the shoulder of a miserable-looking Ashok. “We’re looking for the sorry maven?” Arturo said brightly. Poor Ashok, on a cold streak as it was, had been battling all week with a roomful of unsmiling dogmatists who handled in-house PR for Pepsi. New York’s city council, they were reliably informed, was about to reintroduce a bill to establish a so-called sin tax on sodas, which, even if it didn’t significantly harm their sales, would lump them in with cigarettes and gambling and open a sort of moral door that everyone agreed should stay shut if at all possible. Such was their panic that Ashok’s mild proposal, at a meeting that morning up at PepsiCo headquarters in Purchase, of a “two-pronged approach”—one prong of which was admitting that it was theoretically possible for a person to drink too much Pepsi—had led to their demand that he be fired.

“I’d like you to go up there tomorrow,” Arturo said. He was composed and smiling, but the expression on Ashok’s face hinted at a recent closed-door reaming. “The two of you, though I think it’s better if you do all the talking. Mr. Malloy tells me you’re good at apologizing, so let’s see those mad skills in action, okay?”

He didn’t have that last bit quite right, of course, but Helen saw that Ashok’s job might be in the balance, and so she said okay. The next day she sat at a conference table across from six people in suits; their designated spokesperson was, refreshingly, female, though whether that might make Helen’s own task easier or harder, she had no clue.

“Obviously we have to get on an attack footing as quickly as possible,” the woman said. She looked about twenty-two, except for her taut corporate hairstyle, which was forty or forty-five. “We should paint this
as the work of an out-of-control government. In that folder I brought you”—she reached over and tapped it—“are some polling numbers on various key phrases. ‘Nanny state’ is second highest but also shows the highest increase since the last time we polled. We’ll want to hit that one hard.”