An Invisible Client Read online

  I inhaled deeply. “How long does he have?”

  “I don’t know. Not long.”

  I nodded. “Thanks for your time.”

  I rose to leave, and Olivia followed me out. When we reached the corridor, she shook her head. “He’s passing the buck. If one person in this whole process really took a stand and fought for Joel, they’d get him an organ.”

  “Do you know if a woman is being attacked or beaten, it’s actually better to have one person see it than thirty? That’s because if there’s thirty people that see it, everyone will think someone else will help. If it’s only one person, they can’t think that way and will likely help. That happened in a rape case in New York. People are set up to pass the buck. I don’t blame the doctor.”

  “Well, that’s not depressing or anything.” She sighed. “So, what now?”

  “I wanna do something really quick. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  I stood outside Joel’s room for a second and wondered whether I really should go in there. The case wasn’t good, and Walcott was probably the top defense litigation firm in the state. Bob could bury us with money and paperwork and have us tied up in court for the next decade. I touched the doorknob but didn’t turn it. Then I looked down both directions of the corridor, turned the knob, and went inside.

  Joel was watching television. His mother wasn’t there. He smiled when he saw me.

  “Hi, Noah.”

  I stood at the foot of his hospital bed. “Hey.” I glanced up at the television. A cartoon was playing. “What you watching?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see the name. What’re you doin’ here?”

  “Just came to check up on you. Where’s your mom?”

  “She went home to get some more clothes.” He tried to sit up and grimaced with pain.

  “Let me help.”

  I took him gently under the arms and lifted him higher onto his pillows. He was as light as a blanket. I could feel his bones through his flesh, and the feeling lingered on my hands after I let him go. I pulled up a chair and sat down next to him, staring up at the television.

  “I like your name. Noah Byron. It’s cool.”

  I grinned. “Byron’s not my given name. I changed it as soon as I turned eighteen.”

  “Why?”

  I considered how to phrase my answer. “My dad wasn’t as nice as your dad. So I didn’t want to carry his name. The second I turned eighteen, I went to court and changed it.”

  “Why did you choose Byron?”

  “After a poet, Lord Byron. One of my favorites.” I smiled at the memory. “I don’t think I’ve read poetry for twenty years.”

  He thought for a while. “I like it even more since you chose it. It’s like you picked your own name. Like you picked who you are.”

  “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  He swallowed and reached for a cup of water on the table next to him. I handed it to him.

  “Thanks.” He drank, then held the cup in his fingers. “My mama said there’s a lotta money that we might get if you win your case. I don’t care about the money. I just want enough so my mama doesn’t have to work anymore. She works at a factory in West Valley for a bad man. She quit so she could be with me, but she’ll have to go back. He makes her cry sometimes, but she says she didn’t go to college and can’t get another job. That’s why she says I have to go to college, so I don’t have to work for bad men.” He took another sip, as though the effort of speaking had dehydrated him. “Can you do that? Can you make it so my mama doesn’t have to go back to him?”

  I stared at him. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  He smiled widely. “I knew you were a good man. That’s what my mama said about you. That you were a good man God sent here to help us.”

  I almost chuckled. He completely believed that. Instead, I stood up and looked at the jersey on the wall.

  “I never got on the Jumbotron,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. I really wanted to make silly faces.”

  “Well, maybe when you get out of here with all your money, you can take your mama there and both be on the Jumbotron.”

  He smiled. “You really think so?”

  “I promise you, buddy, you’ll get there.”

  His entire mood lifted and the smile on his face seemed contagious. “I’ll see ya, Joel.”

  “Noah?” he said as I was walking out.

  “Yeah?”

  “If you wanted to come over tomorrow, we’re gonna have ice cream. My mama’s bringing me ice cream from Farr West. It’s the best ice cream. Will you come?”

  I nodded. “Sure. I’ll come.”

  11

  The next day, around noon, I was researching cyanide and its effects on the human body when my phone buzzed. I told Jessica to take a message, whoever it was, but she said it was an attorney I knew named Jeppson. I always took Jepp’s calls.

  “Noah, it’s Jepp. How are ya?”

  “Good, man. What’re you up to?”

  “Oh, just finishing up an arbitration. I just wanted to talk to you really quick about something. Bob Walcott called me.”

  I stopped looking at the computer and leaned back in the chair. “What’d he want?”

  “He said you’re considering something really stupid and asked if I wouldn’t talk some sense into you.”

  Jepp was an old law school professor of mine, and he’d been one of the first people to refer clients to Byron, Val & Keller. His word was gold with me. I wondered how Bob would know something like that.

  “He said that? Those exact words?”

  “More or less.”

  “Why would he care? His firm makes thirty times what we make. He has nothing to be scared of from me.”

  “Well, he’s taking this one kinda personal. He says if you bring a suit and lose, he’s going to petition the Bar for sanctions. Maybe even a suspension for bringing a frivolous suit.”

  “That asshole! I haven’t even filed the suit yet, and he’s threatening to suspend me?”

  “He’s got a lotta connections up there, Noah. If he says an attorney should go before a disciplinary council, they’ll probably give it to him.”

  Sometimes, probably just to seem busy, the Bar would look for ways to disbar people. They would conduct stings on attorneys and disbar them the first chance they got. That never happened to the big-name attorneys at the big firms. It was always the little man who got screwed: the working man.

  “He’s hiding something. Something he’s scared I’m going to find.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’s old. This is a new, up-and-coming company, and they want him on it personally. Maybe he just doesn’t feel like trying cases anymore.”

  I took a deep breath. Ultimately, I had no control over what Bob did or didn’t do.

  “Listen,” Jepp said, “I’m going to calm him down. Let him know it’s just business. I got connections at the Bar, too. I don’t think anything will come of it, but I thought I’d relay the message that this is a sensitive one for him.”

  I couldn’t understand why. At $400 million in revenue, Pharma-K wasn’t even Walcott’s biggest client.

  “Well, lemme know if you hear anything else.”

  “I will. You take care of yourself, Noah.”

  I stared at the walls for a good five minutes after that, trying to understand why Bob would care so much about this one case. In reality, Pharma-K could pay us off with what would be considered pennies in relation to their revenue and have us sign a nondisclosure agreement so we could never release details about the case or the settlement. This was about more than trying to avoid the bad press from a lawsuit. I was close to something Bob was frightened of.

  Raimi poked his head in. “Meeting.”

  I checked my watch. It was time for our weekly case meeting, where the attorneys ga
ve updates on the major cases the firm was handling. At work meetings, there was a fine line between getting on the same page and just masturbating in a conference room for two hours. Our meetings seemed to cross into the latter territory more often than not.

  I hiked over to the conference room, where I found pastries and silver water pitchers with glasses, not paper cups. I sat down at the head of the conference table and leaned back in my seat. Once everyone was seated, the Commandant shouted, “All right, quit your jawin’. Marty, you start.”

  Marty went into the details of an airline case he was handling. A small plane had gone down over Venezuela while carrying two Americans, both our clients. We suspected there had been a malfunction with the engine, and Marty began discussing the conversation he’d had with our engineers, who would be called as experts in the case.

  I zoned out until I spotted Olivia in the corner. She smiled at me, and I grinned. Then I rested my cheek on my palm and listened for the next hour as we went around the table and everyone talked about cases no one else cared about. That was the masturbation part.

  Finally, it came to me.

  “Noah,” Marty said, “what’s going on with the Pharma Killer case? We taking it?”

  Another attorney, a senior associate with a haircut like an anchorman’s, said, “I heard we were handling that. That’s awesome.”

  I stared at him, and he swallowed and looked away.

  “Still looking into it. Waiting for a report from KGB.”

  The anchorman said, “That guy kinda gives me the creeps.”

  Marty responded, “He’s the best investigator I’ve ever seen. And he’s exclusively for partner use. I don’t want his time taken up by dog bites and rear-end accidents. He’s on our big stuff.” He looked at me. “Anything else, Noah?”

  I shook my head, and they moved on to the next attorney.

  The meeting lasted two and a half hours, and I didn’t feel like we accomplished much. I rose and was about to leave when the Commandant said, “You have a call with Nyer the Denier in fifteen minutes.”

  “Shit. Now? I was gonna go to the gym.”

  “Three-hundred-thousand-dollar case. Get to it and get that money, Mister. Now.”

  Sometimes, I wondered why the Commandant’s name wasn’t on the wall. I headed to my office and waited for the call. Roger Nyer was one of the worst insurance adjusters to deal with. He was known as Nyer the Denier because his policy was to outright reject any claim and then negotiate only when he saw the attorneys were serious about pursuing it. This case was a simple car accident where the driver at fault had been drunk, and my client was disabled to the point that she couldn’t work. It should’ve been settled months ago, but instead, Nyer had dragged it out for a year.

  Jessica poked her head in. “Noah, Ms. Whiting is on the phone. She said something about waiting for you before they have the ice cream?”

  “Oh, right. That. Tell them I can’t make it.”

  “Will do.”

  I put my feet on the desk and waited for Nyer to call. He never called on time. He had to establish control as quickly as possible, and making a person wait was one of the easiest ways to do that. So I opened Twitter and began flipping through some of the accounts I followed: Ferrari, a few success accounts, and a couple of personal injury ones. It bored me, so I stared out my windows and thought about Tia.

  I had known she would move on at some point, but I hadn’t expected marriage, even though that was a perfectly logical step for her to take. It’d been three years since the divorce, and she had a right to find happiness.

  I wasn’t so much bothered that she was having sex with another man—I’d slept with many women since the divorce. Love was something else. Love was the little things. Holding her when her grandmother died and she cried in my arms. Making dinner together. Lying on the grass at the park and watching the clouds. Love was giving our cat a bath that he hated. Sex and dating didn’t bother me. What bothered me was that she would do the little things with him now. The little things that, somehow, we had stopped doing. And by the time we realized our relationship was broken, it was too late.

  My phone buzzed, and Jessica said Nyer was on the line, twenty-five minutes late.

  I answered. “Hey, Roger. How are ya?”

  “Fine. I’m calling about—”

  “Before you get into it, let’s just agree not to jerk each other off, Roger. We’re both professionals who have done this too many times to count. I’m going to start high, and you’re going to start low. We’re gonna haggle for an hour and probably not reach any agreement. Let’s save that—I’m not in the mood today. You tell me the highest amount you’re willing to offer, and I’ll tell you the lowest we’re willing to take. Let’s see if they overlap at all.”

  Silence on the other end.

  “Roger?”

  “I’m here. Who would go first?”

  He was smart, this Roger. “I don’t know. You have no reason to trust me, and I have no reason to trust you. What if we both say it at the same time?”

  “That’s childish.”

  “It would save us both an hour, Roger, and probably an arbitration. Let’s just try it.”

  “Fine. We’ll try.”

  “Okay, on the count of three, we both give the figure. At the same time, okay? On three.”

  “Fine.”

  “One . . . two . . . three—blah.”

  “Two fifty. Shit! You fucker!”

  I laughed. “Two fifty it is, Roger. Draft it up.”

  “You’re a damn—”

  “I know, I know. Draft it up and send it over with the check. Have a good one.”

  I hung up. He would never trust me again, of course, but it wasn’t as though we’d had a good relationship before.

  I rose to get a few other things done around the office, my mood lifted, and my ex effectively fell out of my mind with the thought that I had just made eighty-three thousand dollars.

  12

  That afternoon, I handled a preliminary hearing on a criminal case: a stockbroker accused of market manipulation, which he’d confessed to on video. It was a hopeless case that we would eventually have to deal on, but for now, I wanted to put on a show for the client. Marty was supposed to cover it for me since I was still technically out of the office for the Bethany Chicken trial, but I wanted to be in court again and told him I’d do it myself.

  After that was a mediation that went nowhere, then I reviewed some demand letters to insurance companies that my paralegals had drafted. The letters were just summaries of the injuries our clients suffered and the amounts we were asking for. After the demands were received, we would talk to the adjusters, and almost all the cases would end there.

  By nightfall, I was actually exhausted from work. That didn’t happen often. As I was preparing to leave, I heard women arguing in the hall. Then Rebecca Whiting stormed into my office. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and looked like she’d been crying.

  Jessica, trailing behind her, said, “You can’t just go in there.”

  “How could you do that?” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You told him you would come by the hospital and have ice cream with him.”

  “I got busy. Did they not tell you?”

  “Oh, they told me.” She folded her arms. “Mr. Byron, I know how much you’re helping us, and I’m very appreciative—more than I could ever tell you. But no one makes a promise to my son and then breaks it. His father used to do that to him all the time, and I would have to be the one to deal with the heartbreak. Joel can’t take it now. He doesn’t have the strength.”

  “Rebecca, no offense, but he barely knows me. Why would he care if I came by for ice cream?”

  She sighed. “You’ve never had children, have you?” She turned and stormed out of the office, leaving me staring at Jessica.
r />   I was halfway home when I pulled to a stop sign and didn’t start moving again. To the east was the hospital, and to the north was my home. I stared up at the lights of the hospital until a horn blared behind me and snapped me out of my thoughts. I started north, then I swerved and went east.

  I’d visited a lot of hospitals in my day. In fact, when the law firm first opened, I often hired law clerks to hang out in the cafeterias or walk the halls and listen to conversations. At any hint that someone had been in an accident, our man or woman would strike up a conversation with them. Eventually, the conversation would turn to lawyers, and our name would come up. My clerk would also just happen to slip one of my cards to the injured.

  That tactic was strictly prohibited by the Utah State Bar because of some ancient rule that in-person solicitation should be banned because lawyers had some sort of Jedi mind trick that could fool vulnerable people into signing up with us. Third parties working for us were also banned from participating. It was bullshit. The insurance companies had people at hospitals within twenty-four hours to settle big injury suits, knowing full well that the injured people couldn’t have talked to a personal injury lawyer by that time. I had a feeling money from the defense side had helped institute that ridiculous rule. I had a moral obligation not to follow it.

  For the first year Byron, Val & Keller was in business, we didn’t have money for law clerks, so I was the one at the hospitals. I’d been to every damn hospital in the state and ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner at each. I would sit in the cafeteria and listen to the crying. A lot of crying happened in the cafeterias late at night. People would come down with their husbands or wives for a snack, and the pain would just hit them. Sometimes, I could see the change in their faces—the moment when they realized that might be one of the last times they saw the most important person in their life. I heard people’s most intimate conversations. When someone thought a loved one wasn’t going to make it, they laid all the cards on the table.