Steve Martini - The arraignment

Nicks office is on seven, the bottom floor of Rocker, Dusha and DeWine, better known to the legal set as RDD. It is the largest law firm in town, with more than three hundred lawyers and offices in four cities.

Nick has been here only two years and already he has a corner office and two young associates assigned to him. Like a minilaw firm within a firm.

His office has been sharply decorated by Dana, the new Mrs. Rush. Her touch is on everything, from the Persian carpets and artistic earthen vases that adorn the alcoves behind his leather-tufted chair to the gold stud in his right nostril.

Nick may have a new sassy-looking wife, but he is the same man Ive known for more than ten years. A cigarette dangles from his lower lip as he talks, dropping ash on the expensive leather blotter of his desk. Nick may not look the part, but people tend to listen to him when he talks.

He sweeps the ash away with the back of his hand and examines the burn mark on the new leather.

If she sees that, shell kill me, he says. Hes talking about Dana. He tongues a little saliva on his finger and tries to fix it.

I have to smoke here. Dana doesnt like it at the house. She says it leaves a smell on the furniture and her clothes. I dont smell it. But then, my smellers gone.

He takes a good drag from the cigarette and immediately has a coughing jag.

First one of the day. He says it between fits of trying to catch his breath, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Shes right. He holds the cigarette out looking at it, then puts it back in his mouth. This shitll kill you. Thatll teach me to marry an interior decorator.

He says nothing about the fact that hes older than his wife by twenty years. He looks at me to see if I am offering any sympathy. That particular bank is closed at the moment.

My own practice, Madriani and Hinds, is small, no rival to RDD. My partner Harry Hinds and I staked out a quiet bungalow office lost in the foliage of a courtyard across from the Hotel Del Coronado two years ago. Looking for a cooler climate and a fresh start, we had relocated the practice from Capital City on the financial wings of a large judgment in a civil case. Since then Coronado and the environs around that city have become home for me and my fifteen-year-old daughter, Sarah. Sarah has no mother.

Nikki died of cancer several years ago.

What takes me to Rocker, Dusha today is a phone call from a friend. Nick is in his fifties. Prime earning years for a trial lawyer. Old enough to have judgment and young enough to do the heavy lifting in court. He considers the move to Rocker, Dusha to have been a good one. Im not sure I agree. To look at him, Nick has aged ten years in the last twelve months.

The firm recruited him with assurances that they would move him into civil litigation. Instead, he has been buried in white-collar crime. Along with business bankruptcies, it is one of the growth sectors of the law, both areas being driven by the aroma of corporate book-cooking that took place in the last decade. The me generation of the 1960s is not faring well.

Nicks corporate criminal skills have been honed over more than two decades, first in the U.S. attorneys office, then in his own solo practice before coming here.

There are rumors that Nick has been recruited elsewhere but has chosen to stay with Rocker, Dusha. I suspect if you chase these rumors down, you will find Nick residing under the rock from which they crept.

What the firm wanted was somebody to pick up the respectable businessman who occasionally slips and falls through the cracks, your friendly financial adviser who decides hed rather invest you in his new yacht than in the bonds he told you about and then prints his own securities so youll have something to put in your safe. To Nick, this doesnt even qualify as crime.

They were supposed to groom me for the civil side, but as you can see it hasnt happened. He points to the files on the floor lining one wall three feet high.

They cant bring filing cabinets in fast enough. Weve generated more revenue in the last two months than any other division. I told em I need help. They tell me to work my people harder. If I could bill a fifty-hour day Id do it. Chamber of commerce crap, he calls it. Consumer fraud. Junior league crime. They should have to give you a plastic ring and a special decoding button before they charge you with any of this shit. I swear, half the stuff in those files I didnt know was illegal until I came to work here.

Why dont you leave? You could probably write your own ticket.

Too much invested. Two years. Id have to start all over someplace else. Too old for that. Ive got a wife who wants me to wear argyle silk socks to court and sue insurance companies so she can tell her friends over dinner that her husbands a corporate lawyer and not have to lie. I know you think Im out of my mind for being here. Getting divorced, getting remarried.

I didnt say anything.

Your silence is deafening, he says.

Im not your therapist.

I know that. He tells me when I fuck up.

OK, so maybe I made some stupid moves. Stupid is the word that comes to mind, isnt it? He assesses my expression one more time, then adds, OK, theres no maybe about it. But its done. Over. How do you un-ring a bell? The personal side of life for me is cooked. But the law practice, the career, thats a work in progress.

This is more optimism than Ive seen in Nick in a while, on any front. Hes the kind of lawyer who thrives on a full caseload.

I wish you were my therapist, he says. You ought to see this guy. I go to him once a week. Its like going to the dentist to have my brain drilled without Novocain. I tell him Im feeling pretty good, Id like to move on with my life. He tells me I need to find closure with Margaret now that the divorce is over. I tell him I got all the closure I needed when her lawyer drove a pike up my ass in the support hearing, you know, the alimony. If that wasnt enough, she took every dime I had. I tell him Ive got plenty of closure, I could sell him closure. Then he says, catch this, he says I need to deal with Margaret to get over my feelings of guilt. I tell him I have no feelings of guilt. He tells me I should, that if I dont I must have problems empathizing. And for this he hits me for a hundred-and-a-half an hour.

Stop going to see him.

He looks at me through cigarette smoke, gives me a face, something you might see from De Niro. Then Id probably feel guilty, he says. My old man used to say pain is good for the soul. I know, that makes as much sense as my joining this fucking firm.

But you make your bed and you sleep in it. And if it happens to be next to a twenty-six-year-old woman with an incredible ass, what can I say? He laughs. The price Nick pays for lust.

He looks at me over the top of his cheaters, half-lenses for reading. He is wearing a three-thousand-dollar suit but has dandruff on his shoulders and cigarette ash on his tie along with a wrinkled tan forehead that ends in baldness he is trying to hide under dying wisps of black hair.

People grow apart. Call it a midlife crisis. Call it a second childhood. Call it what you want. I got an itch. So I scratched it.

This is how he describes a two-week binge in the Caribbean with Dana. And this wasnt the first itch for Nick.

He took Dana from Nevis to St. Lucia, then down to Belize and back to the Bahamas, half a jump ahead of the investigator Margaret hired to track him down.

What Dana told her employer I dont know. Maybe she took vacation time or figured she had her hook set far enough into Nick that she could quit.

The investigator caught up with them in Nassau. All the while Nick was supposed to be at a trial lawyers seminar in New Orleans, paid for by the firm.