Follow the Money

5


I hadn’t seen my family in more than a month, and I wouldn’t get paid for another week. Since I had been eating on credit and my bank account was hovering just above zero, I figured I could spend the weekend at home, sponge meals off the folks, and try not to think about Steele or the direction my life was headed.

Traffic on the sixty freeway wasn’t bad, and I made good time on my way to Riverside. The air grew warmer as I drove east, away from the ocean and into the desert. Although the smog grew thicker, I kept the windows down and hummed along with the classic rock station as it blasted Eagles and Steve Miller songs from my small, static-filled factory speakers. It was the first time in days I had not been occupied by work, by Steele and prisons and accusations and lies and police reports and murder.

I got off the freeway where I always did and cruised along the street of dilapidated strip malls where I’d spent my teenage years. Then I turned left, off the busy street and down into the neighborhood. The homes were built mostly in the 50s and early 60s as the post-war generation moved east looking for affordable real estate.

My grandparents came west in the 1940s because the army plucked my grandfather from his home town in Wisconsin and replanted him in Los Angeles where he worked as a military supply liaison to an airplane manufacturer. He was glad to avoid going overseas and, when the war ended, he stayed. Having grown accustomed to the sun, he was not eager to return to the hard Wisconsin winters. Jobs were plentiful in post-war LA and my grandfather lived first in a small apartment in Studio City with a courtyard where he and his neighbors barbecued chicken and drank gin and tonics on balmy LA evenings.

Then, once the freeways were built, he bought a home just east of Altadena in the first generation of affordable suburbs made accessible by car. It was the 1950s and everyone had a job, bought a home, had children, sat in an easy chair and read the paper in the evening — back when there were still evening papers — and spent quiet moments marveling to themselves about how wonderful the entire world seemed to be.

Twenty years later, my father was in search of the same life. He found himself a regular job, lived in a massive apartment complex further out in Covina with a centralized swimming pool and neighbors who never spoke to one another, and struggled to save enough to buy a home in an economy where housing prices escalated faster than any normal man could save. Eventually my father moved even further east, to Riverside, to a neighborhood a regular workingman could afford.

Life was still pretty good. There were lemon trees in a backyard large enough to raise four kids, and the streets were mostly cul de sacs. I knew all the kids on the block and my parents knew all the other parents. There were still backyard barbecues, but the parents drank beer, spent Sunday mornings working on the car or watching football, and spent their quiet moments worrying about paying their property taxes and whether they’d ever be able to retire.

And out of that I had managed to have what I remembered as a good childhood. I knew all of the kids for blocks around. I managed to stay out of trouble when my other latchkey friends started raiding their parents’ liquor cabinets and smoking weed behind the 7-11. Landed a scholarship to Pomona. Worked with my dad in the summers — during the biggest housing boom in the country’s history — and opted for a partial scholarship to UCLA Law School over paying full freight at Stanford. Landing the job at K&C had been the next logical step in a long road of hard work and good luck. And now I found myself thinking more and more about reversing the downward trajectory of my family’s fortunes.

I turned into the driveway and saw my little brother, Ben, and a kid I didn’t recognize, running around in the yard with sticks in their hands playing the kind of game nine year olds play when they’re running with sticks. Ben waved but didn’t miss a beat; the game was getting serious. Gory fake death was imminent.

I strolled into the house. It smelled like home always did, the way that no one else’s house ever smelled. I could hear my mother in the kitchen. I could hear a TV on somewhere in the house.

My mom poked her head around the kitchen wall and smiled, rushing to me with her arms splayed wide from her middle aged, pear-shaped body. She wore khaki pants and a blue, short-sleeved blouse. It was a variation on her standard outfit. I thought I noticed more gray in her hair than the last time I was home.

I followed her into the kitchen, sat on a stool, and we made our way through the routine subjects we covered every month when I came home. She moved around the kitchen, fluidly, effortlessly, straightening things, moving piles of papers near the telephone, opening and closing cupboards, putting dishes away, getting dishes out, and talking all the while. I moved from side to side on the stool, my feet up off the floor, resisting the urge to try to spin the seat all the way around.

The sliding glass door opened behind us and my father’s voice filled the room. “Heeeeeeeeey, counselor.” I turned to see him walking toward me with his arms out. I stood. “How’s the big time lawyering going?”

“Ah, you know, it keeps the lights on.”

The old man chuckled and patted me on the shoulder, then went to the fridge and peeked inside, looking for something but finding nothing. My mother told him to wash his hands. He stood and looked at them, turning from palm to knuckles, seeing the grease and dirt, and then went to the sink with a smile on his face.

“Yes dear.” He winked at me. Then he asked, “So what’ve they got you doing over there? What kind of law do they do, anyway?” It was a typical question, despite its having been asked and answered a hundred times.

“They do all kinds of things. They’re a corporate firm, mostly. You know, representing big companies and stuff.” I heard myself say ‘stuff’ and felt like a child. “A lot of mergers and IPOs and then, all of the other things that big companies need — tax, employment, litigation, everything pretty much.”

Both of my parents gave me that look I was getting used to seeing. They stared back as though nothing I’d just said meant anything to them. “So you’re going to court?” my mother finally asked, in a tone that assumed that was in fact what I was doing.

“Well, I can’t go because I’m not licensed yet, but yeah, sure, they have litigators. But a lot of their lawyers never go to court, they’re deal lawyers, they do transactions and stuff.” There I was with ‘stuff’ again. I tried to imagine how Jim Carver would describe the firm.

“So what do they do?” My father’s eyebrows furrowed. The notion of lawyers who made a living without ever even going to court seemed inherently suspicious.

“Well, you know, when one company buys another or they sell stock, there are a lot of documents that have to be drafted. They draft all that. It’s a lot of paperwork.”

“Sounds boring,” he said. My mother nodded her head in the background.

“Yeah, I haven’t been doing much of that. I’ve been doing mostly litigation.”

“Cool. What kind of cases?” We’d finally found some common ground. I took my feet off the stool and placed them flat on the floor. My mother took some meat from the refrigerator, placed it in a pan on the stove, and began chopping an onion.

I described the Steele case. I was getting used to employing generic terms: Steele became a “powerful executive,” his wife was a “wealthy woman from back east,” I described the evidence loosely — the 911 calls, the missing murder weapon, the blood samples, the lack of intrusion. It sounded cagey, but I knew I couldn’t say too much. Although I knew how silly the secrecy was. I realized that confidentiality had real meaning in the supper clubs, yacht clubs, and racquet clubs of America where the guy sitting next to you really could be a lawyer for the other side or a business competitor of your client, but standing in the kitchen at 1436 Hilldale Street, Riverside, California, there was a zero percent chance of anyone doing anything with this information.

When I was finished, the sound of ground beef frying filled the kitchen along with the smell of chopped onion and garlic. The electric can opener hummed as it sliced the lids from cans of tomato sauce, and my father had opened the fridge again, retrieving two beers and handing one to me. I watched him gripping the can as he opened it. The muscles on his forearms rippled each time his thick fingers moved.

They were the arms that worked for a living in a way I never would: lifting boxes of tile onto a truck; strapping them down; driving the truck to a job site where they would unload it and haul it and cut it with large steel saws; and then spread it out on floors, mixing mortar and grout and installing the tile in fancy homes and offices that my father would never live or work in. They were arms that got scratched and cut and bruised as a matter of course. They were also arms that folded across a chest at the end of the day when my father could step back and look at what he’d done that day, seeing it there right in front of him — progression toward something real, tangible, finite, and immediately recognizable by everyone as something accomplished through a man’s labor and skill. What did I have at the end of each day? Nothing but abstractions.

I opened my beer and took a sip.

My father shook his head as he spoke. “I don’t get it. I mean, they convicted the guy. He appealed and lost. What more is there to say?”

My feet were back up on the stool. I was unsure what to say. I rotated the seat from side to side and took another drink. “Yeah, well, it doesn’t look like his lawyer investigated everything he should have.” Even I didn’t believe that. “And that’s just it, everyone’s entitled to a proper defense or else you can’t be sure that the system is working right.”

“Yeah, but doesn’t sound like there’s any other evidence. Hell, it seems like this guy got his shot and now he’s trying to get another.” My father took another swallow. “Figures, rich executives like that, they think they can buy their way out of everything. Then he’ll get off and it’ll be Double Jeopardy if they go after him again.”

“Well, that’s not exactly right,” I countered. “If we win, it only means the process that convicted him was faulty, not that he was innocent. So it’s not the same as an acquittal.” I could hear Carver’s words echoing in my head, and I tried to mimic them, to capture their self-assured authority. It was only much later that I realized how petty and pretentious I sounded. “Double Jeopardy only comes into play if you’re actually acquitted of the crime.”

Before anyone could point out what an ass I was being, my seventeen year old brother, Rick, walked into the kitchen. He paused for a second to observe his father and older brother drinking beers at the kitchen counter while his mother cooked in the background. He only managed to utter a “Hey” before grabbing a sack of potato chips from the pantry. He stuffed a handful of Ruffles into his mouth, studied us all for a second more and, realizing nothing of interest was going to happen, quietly turned and disappeared back down the hall to his room and the incessant chatter of his television.

“Kid eats almost nothing but pizza,” my father mumbled and shook his head, smiling at me. “He makes ‘em, delivers ‘em, and eats ‘em.” He finished his beer and squeezed the empty can, crushing it in his powerful hands. “It’s amazing he doesn’t weigh five hundred pounds. Ten thousand calories a day and he stays skinny as a rail.”

My old man looked at me as if we should obviously share the same bewilderment. Then he turned and reached into the fridge for two more and handed one to me. I remained on my stool, my feet up and rotating the seat from side to side, occupying some strange generational space between Rick and my old man. Not quite either of them, and unsure of myself, I took the beer as my father walked by me back toward the sliding glass door and the backyard beyond.

“C’mon,” he said, “help me out with this damned boat.” I slid from the stool and followed him through the door, caught in some netherworld between childhood and manhood.

There was a detached two-car garage at the rear of the backyard. Next to the garage was a paved parking space where the boat sat on its trailer, and had sat almost without interruption for the last nine of ten years since he’d bought it. The purchase was a hard won concession from my mother, who swore, correctly, that it would never get used. But my father was determined to buy it and convinced her that it would permit them to do more family things together. I always imagined the boat represented something more to him. Though it was small and used, it showed in some minor way that he was a success in the world, that through his hard work he’d been able to buy a home, raise his children, and still have enough left over for what amounted to an expensive and frivolous toy.

The first summer he had it, he was determined to demonstrate that the boat was a great idea. He would pack everyone up in the Suburban and tow the boat up to Lake Arrowhead or Big Bear, where he would drag us kids around the lake on inner tubes and try to get my mother up on skis. At least a dozen times that summer I saw my father standing at the wheel, shouting directions to an unfortunate child being dragged behind, all the while steering and drinking beer and slowly turning red and pink in the afternoon sun.

For my father, and men like him — men who worked and still lived a pseudo-1950s life with a wife who stayed home and raised the children — this was how they knew they were making it. This was the good life. In the evenings they would trek back to the house — sometimes a two and a half hour drive on busy weekend nights — and collapse with exhaustion, hunger, and mild sun stroke.

But after the first summer the boat was used less and less frequently until sometimes in the late autumn I would hear my father mention to a friend how he hadn’t been able to “get the boat out” that summer. Now, every other summer or so, he would try to start it, become upset when the engine failed to even turn over, and begin repairs, swearing that he was going to “get it back in shape” and “hit the water again” that summer. This was apparently one of those years.

Oily parts were scattered across the concrete. The massive outboard, with its sheet metal skin removed, looked like a bionic seahorse mounted face first to the back of the boat. Among the parts were wrenches and screw drivers, sockets and tiny piles of bolts and screws placed carefully, out of the way, in an effort to avoid loss.

“At first I thought it was a fuel problem, but I checked the line, and I’m getting plenty,” my father said as he stared at the boat and raised his eyebrows. “I dunno. It’s just not working.” He got down on one knee and immediately began to play with the linkage to the carburetor.

He asked me what else I was working on and I described the few other small projects I had, but ultimately returned to the Steele case. We talked some more about it. I handed my dad tools and watched him move around the motor, assured and confident that he could fix it, exuding strength and mechanical prowess. After answering his questions about the case and trying to explain the writ of habeas corpus and the concept of ineffective assistance of counsel, he poked his head out from behind the motor, a smudge of grease on his furrowed forehead, and said, again, “Sounds to me like he’s guilty.”

“Well, you’re not the first one to say that.”

“Do you like that kind of work?”

“Well, yeah, it can be a lot of fun. I mean, there’s a lot of investigation, and I’ll probably get to write a draft of the motion.”

“Yeah, but when you’re done, I mean, does it make you happy? You’ve got to do what you feel good doing. I mean, you’ve always got to stop and ask yourself what you’re working for. What your work is doing for you.” He pointed with his index finger and went back to turning his wrench on the nut while I held the top of the bolt, keeping it from spinning.

“Look, someday you’ll be old like me and all you’ll have to look back on is what you’ve done over the years. You hope it adds up to something you feel good about.” The wrench slipped and he caught his knuckle on the motor frame. “Shit!” He stuck his oily knuckle in his mouth. “Damnit, that hurt.” He shook his hand with the fingers loose and then opened and closed his fist several times, his forearms rippling with each flex.

“Anyway,” he continued, “like I said, you gotta do something you’re proud of. If you’re not, why do it at all?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. What choice did I have? I had to have a job. I was lucky to get the one I got. I had student loans, rent. I had always wanted to do other things, but now I was just doing what I was being paid to do. It wasn’t like I went out looking for Steele. I just stood there and smiled at my old man. He smiled back and said, “Why don’t you jump up in there and crank this thing over a couple times? See what we’ve got.”

I climbed into the boat and turned the key. Nothing. I turned it again. Still nothing. My father gave me a ready-when-you-are look. “I’m turning it.” I said.

“Really? Shit.”

My father bent back over the motor and removed the distributor cap. “Turn it again,” he hollered. I did and nothing happened. It was completely dead. I peered down at my father, waiting for instructions. He stood among the tools and parts, his clothes stained with the oil and gas that had dripped from the motor. He looked up at me with a puzzled look.

“I’m just not getting any spark.” He said, holding the distributor cap up with a greasy hand, as though it might mean something to me. “I mean, I’ve got power, just no spark.” He lamented, looking to the side at the worn and discolored hull and then down at his callused, dirty hands. I stood there, my hand on the key, waiting for directions, feeling the exact opposite.