A Conflict of Interest

  A CONFLICT OF INTEREST

  Gallery Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Adam Mitzner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Gallery Books hardcover edition May 2011

  GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Renata Di Biase

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-4391-5751-0

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9644-1 (ebook)

  To my daughters, Rebecca and Emily

  Content

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  PART 4

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  PART 5

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  PART 6

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  PART 7

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the middle of the journey of our lives

  I found myself in a dark wood where

  the straight road had been lost sight of.

  —DANTE

  PROLOGUE

  The first time I set eyes on Michael Ohlig I was beside my father’s casket and he was standing toward the back of a group of mourners comprised almost entirely of my father’s extended family. Ohlig was a good half foot taller than everyone else, and unlike my paternal relatives, his head was covered with his own hair, a shade of silver usually reserved for much younger men anchoring the evening news. He wore it a little long, almost to the base of his collar, just enough to say that he fancied himself a nonconformist. I likely wouldn’t have noticed him at all if he hadn’t seemed so out of place. To be blunt about it, he looked too good to be associated with that crowd.

  Ohlig was twice my father’s closest friend—at the beginning and the end of his adult life. As far as I know, he was my father’s only friend, the thirty-some year gap in their contact seemingly occupied only by my mother and his hardware store.

  The story I heard growing up was that Ohlig and my father were playing tennis at the courts in Central Park on the same day my mother was on a good Samaritan mission to keep a girlfriend company on the train from Queens to Manhattan, so her friend could watch her boyfriend play. My parents disagreed about which one of them approached the other, but the one part that never varied in either of their renditions was that it was love at first sight. They were married less than six months later, and I arrived in November the following year.

  I don’t know why it never seemed odd to me that, in all the subsequent retellings, my parents provided little detail about Ohlig. I never knew what he did for a living or whether he was married or had children. If I had ever been told how he and my father came to be friends, or why they lost touch, it went in one ear and out the other. For me, he just seemed like a historical figure, no different from Caesar or John F. Kennedy; someone who I took on faith had actually existed, but who had no relevance to my life. Even when my father shared with me the coincidence of running into Ohlig at a bookstore shortly after my parents moved to their retirement community in Florida, and that he was now living in a neighboring town, I had little curiosity about Ohlig’s life.

  Three times Ohlig poured a shovel full of dirt on my father’s casket, fulfilling the ritualistic last act of a Jewish burial. Each motion was deliberate, as if his movements were intentionally drawn out to prolong his time to say good-bye. But it was the powerful way he approached the shovel, and the force with which he yanked it from the dirt, that most caught my eye, stating unequivocally that he was not someone to challenge.

  Watching this I had no inkling that Michael Ohlig would become the central thread in all that followed. Even now I can hardly fathom how it came to be that a man who had never been anything more than a minor character in the story of my life would come to dominate its plot.

  Perhaps stranger still, Michael Ohlig would undoubtedly say the same thing about me.

  Part 1

  1

  Like my best closing arguments, my eulogy is short, as I think all eulogies should be, especially when delivered in the hot Florida sun to people past retirement age. I can sometimes spend a week crafting a presentation to a jury, but I didn’t put pen to paper about my father until last night. The words came to me easily, however, a sign that I’d been composing my father’s legacy, at least as seen through my eyes, for years.

  As I knew she would, my mother smiles approvingly when I mention that my father was a man who had few close friends, and that while she had tried several times to get him to befriend the husbands of her friends, it was usually without success. “I remember one time,” I tell the thirty or so mourners gathered in front of the gravesite, “my mother said he must be one of those unique individuals who didn’t need anyone else. A complete unit unto himself was the phrase she used. My dad was not a man prone to displays of affection, but his eyes got moist and he wrapped both his hands around hers. Very softly, as if he didn’t even want me to hear, he told her that it wasn’t that he didn’t need anyone; he just didn’t need anyone but her.”

  My father died three days ago. He was sixty-seven and had never been sick a day in his life. For a man of small stature, he was freakishly strong, and while the ability to toss around boxes filled with
air-conditioner units as if they contained nothing more than Styrofoam peanuts is not a contra-indicator for coronary disease, it made the shock of his death that much greater.

  After the funeral, a few people accompany us back to my parents’ house, which is located in a gated retirement community in Boynton Beach, Florida, about ten minutes from Palm Beach. Boynton Beach is littered with these communities, and the developers who build them must believe all elderly people secretly want to be Italian, because each project is named for someplace in Italy—Roman Gardens, Florenza Court, Venetian Islands. My parents’ development is called Venezia Castle III, which means somewhere, probably within five square miles, there must exist two other “castles.”

  The house is much smaller than the home I grew up in, which was by no means large, and anyone with an eye for construction can see the corners that were cut—the hollow doors, the lack of molding and the cheap fixtures. In New York City real estate parlance it would be called “charmless.” Despite all this, my mother has never made any secret that she prefers this place to the home where we all lived in East Carlisle, a New Jersey suburb about an hour outside of New York City. I’ve always thought that it’s the newness she finds so appealing. In fact, other than family photographs, my mother made a point of not bringing anything from our East Carlisle house with her to Boynton.

  Right before my parents moved, my mother offered all of their accumulated possessions to Elizabeth and me. We declined—already having too much furniture for our small apartment—with one exception. I asked for a framed Picasso poster. It’s more of a sketch than anything else, with assorted primary colors running in jagged lines from the middle of the subject’s forehead down to the base of her nose.

  When I was a child, the Picasso poster was the only thing I could see from my bedroom when the door was opened the usual crack to let some light in when I went to sleep. Truth be told, it frightened me then, so much so that I used to call it the Scary Lady.

  My father bought the poster for four dollars the year my parents were married because he thought the woman depicted looked like my mother. I’m not sure my mother was ever flattered by the comparison, and she would have easily parted with it, but my father overruled her, claiming a sentimental attachment. The Scary Lady now hangs in their entry hall, the first thing you see upon entering, still surrounded by its original silver frame and bright blue matte, which is completely at odds with the color scheme of the rest of the house.

  “Your father thought the world of you,” my aunt Joan says to me while she’s spreading what looks like vegetable cream cheese on a sesame bagel. “He was just so proud of everything you had accomplished.” She offers a somewhat pained smile. “How is your mother handling all of this?”

  “Okay, I guess. I’m not sure the enormity of it has kicked in for her yet.”

  Joan nods and looks to the floor. “When Sam died, it took a long time for me to feel like myself again. But, as they say, it gets easier. Not better, just easier.”

  It’s my turn to nod and look away. Sam was my father’s older brother, and his only sibling. He died twenty years ago, maybe more.

  “And you?” Joan asks. “How are you dealing with everything?”

  “Good,” I say with a wan smile that by now I’ve perfected as the response to this query.

  “Elizabeth looks great,” Joan adds, nodding across the room in the direction of my wife, who is busy with her own bagel and another group of family friends. “And how’s that little girl of yours?”

  “Great.” This I say with a real smile, my involuntarily reflex whenever my daughter is the topic of discussion. “Charlotte’s just wonderful.”

  “How old is she now?”

  “She turned five last month. We didn’t bring her down because we didn’t think a funeral was something she’d understand.”

  Joan doesn’t offer any insight into the fragility of the psyche of a five-year-old girl, but her face takes on a mask that suggests she’s thinking about something even more frightening than a funeral would be to Charlotte. “Alex, there’s actually something I wanted to—”

  “Alex,” my mother interrupts. “I’m sorry, Joan,” she says, “I need to borrow my son for a moment.”

  Joan curls her lip. There’s never been any love lost between her and my mother, on either side of the equation. Still, Joan knows enough not to challenge her sister-in-law with regard to my time, and so she says only, “We’ll talk later.”

  My mother is almost twelve years my father’s junior, and because of this disparity, I long suspected that she would not only survive him, but that when he died she’d still be young enough to have a second act, an opportunity to live a different life. When I tried to imagine what that other life would look like, I always believed it would be built around another man—someone very different from my father.

  All of this is not to say that I ever doubted my mother’s love for my father, but my parents certainly made an unlikely pair. Part of that was physical—she towered over him by a good three inches, and when she wore heels, which was not infrequently, she could be a head taller. But it was also because she was at least three points higher on the looks meter, and that spread was increasing as they aged.

  On what my parents always referred to as a “baker’s rack” is one of the last pictures they took together. It’s a photo I shot at Charlotte’s birthday party, which was a little more than a month ago. They’re both smiling broadly, but people who don’t know them would likely assume they are father and daughter, except for the fact that it would be hard to imagine my father having such a beautiful daughter.

  My mother drags me by the arm over to the living room sofa. “Alex, this is Michael Ohlig,” she says when we’ve arrived.

  Ohlig stands and extends his arm. I can’t help but look down at his hand, recalling how firmly he grasped the shovel at the cemetery. Peeking out from his sleeve is a very expensive watch. It isn’t flashy, not one of those clunky platinum time pieces crusted in diamonds that seemingly every one of my investment banker clients sports. It has a simple black leather band and a white chronograph face. I might not have thought it cost more than a few hundred dollars if I hadn’t recently read an article in the New York Times about complications, the term used by aficionados to describe watches of this type, which combine several functions within a single casing. This watch, or at least one very similar, was pictured in the article, and so I know it’s more expensive than a sports car.

  “It’s very nice to meet you,” I say. “I’ve heard a lot about you over the years.”

  “I bet it’s not half as much as I’ve heard about you,” he says.

  Ohlig’s voice fits the man perfectly. Strong, without any sense of doubt or fear, but also conveying breeziness, as if Michael Ohlig is a man who doesn’t sweat the small stuff.

  The woman sitting beside him doesn’t get up to take part in the introductions, but Ohlig gestures toward the couch and says, “This is my wife, Pamela.”

  Pamela Ohlig is the kind of woman a rich, well-preserved silver-haired man in his sixties would marry later in life, which is to say that she’s my age, or at most a few years older, certainly under forty, very attractive and a little cheap looking. There’s a lot that seems just a quarter too much—the blondeness of her hair, the tightness of her clothes, the size of the jewels she wears.

  “Yes, I’m sorry,” my mother says. “Pamela, thank you so much for coming today.”

  “My pleasure,” she says, and then looks as if she thought better of being pleased to be at my father’s funeral.

  My mother doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, she turns back toward Ohlig and says, “Michael, Alex is a criminal defense attorney at Cromwell Altman in New York City.”

  “So your father told me. Many times, in fact. If I remember what he said, it’s the best law firm in the world, and you are the youngest partner in its ten-thousand-year history.”

  I smile a bit sheepishly at the joke. My father did have a tendency to brag
about my accomplishments.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” Ohlig says. “It’s one of the many things I loved about your dad, the way he loved you so. So tell me, how do you like it at Cromwell Altman?”

  Like most people, I suppose, I’ve answered the question—how do you like work?—so many times that my response sounds like a prepared speech. “The cases are always pretty interesting,” I say, reciting my lines; “very high stakes, and the people at the firm are some of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered anywhere. Of course, if you asked my wife, she might give you a different answer. I think her usual quote is that the place is sucking out my soul.”

  My quip elicits the polite laughter of people who don’t know me well enough to determine how much truth it contains. We go on to talk a few more minutes about nothing of substance—the astronomical price of real estate in New York City, the Florida humidity in August. At a conversational pause, my mother excuses herself to meet a new arrival, and when she’s out of earshot, Ohlig turns to his wife and says, “Would you mind, dear, if I take a few moments to discuss something with Alex privately?”

  “Of course,” she says. “It was very nice meeting you, Alex,” she adds as her husband leads me away.

  “Do you mind if we go outside for a moment?” Ohlig asks, stretching his arm toward the front door as if to lead me.

  My mother’s postage-size front lawn has a view of a man-made canal that is narrower than a New York City side street. Without irony, she called this a “water view” when she first described the property to me.

  I wait for Ohlig to tell me what I imagine is going to be some anecdote about my father that might not be suitable to be shared in front of his wife. Instead, what he says is completely unexpected.

  “I’m afraid I find myself in a bit of legal trouble and need the help of a first-rate criminal defense lawyer.”

  He says this without the slightest trace of guilt. I’m not surprised he doesn’t admit any wrongdoing; virtually none of my clients do, at least not before I learn of the evidence that leaves little room for doubt. But Ohlig doesn’t proclaim his innocence either, and that is surprising.