A Matter of Will Read online

  “Yeah, that’s about an hour away.”

  Will was about to ask where else Sam had lived, but Sam was already on to his next point. “So you’re a man from a hardscrabble river town just south of the Canadian border. Let me guess . . . your mother was a seamstress. And your father . . . I want to say that he’s a ferryboat captain, but that seems too on the nose. I’m going to go with local shopkeeper.”

  Will chuckled. “No, on either count. My mother worked in a clerical job for the college, Northern Central Michigan. My father sold insurance, but he passed when I was still a boy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Eve said, which surprised Will because he hadn’t thought she was listening.

  “Thank you. It was a long time ago.”

  “My father died only a few years ago,” she said. “I’m still not completely over it, to be honest.”

  Will could tell that she was being sincere by the look in her eyes. They were filled with unmistakable sadness.

  “And your mother? Is she alive?” Eve said with a hopefulness in her voice.

  Ironically, Will felt a twinge of sadness that he was going to disappoint Eve with his answer. “No. She passed last year.”

  “Oh, you poor dear,” Eve said as she put her hand on top of his.

  “You live the life you’re given, I guess. It’s not ideal, but others have had much greater hardship, so I really can’t complain.”

  “Well said,” Sam intervened. “How did a boy from Michigan develop an affinity for the Rangers?”

  “My father’s family was originally from upstate New York. He was a huge Ranger fan, and he made me one too.”

  “What took the old man to the hinterlands of northern Michigan?” Sam asked.

  “My mother. She grew up there. Third generation.”

  Sam showed a Cheshire cat grin. “The backstory is now firmly established, and more than a little intriguing. Your old man was clearly a hopeless romantic who followed a woman of unsurpassed beauty to her ancestral home, only to die tragically, leaving behind his namesake to make his own place in this world.”

  The namesake reference surprised Will. He was certain he hadn’t told Sam that his father was also named William.

  “How’d you know that I was named for my father?”

  “You go by Will, not Bill or William. So I’d wager ten to one that your father went by the latter. Am I right about that?”

  Will nodded. He turned to Eve, wondering what she was making of Sam’s display. She smiled in a way that suggested she was sympathetic to Will’s plight. He wondered whether she’d once endured a similar game about her own biography.

  “And now, on to young Will,” Sam said. He rested his chin on a thumb, the other fingers balled into a fist—like he was mimicking the Rodin statue. As Sam studied his subject, the Devils and Rangers retook the ice, but the crowd’s cheering did nothing to disrupt his concentration.

  “You’re too well mannered to be a lawyer and not dressed stylishly enough to be in any type of creative field—no offense. Yet your shoes are shined, which tells me that you work in a place where that type of thing matters.”

  “I’m in wealth management at Maeve Grant,” Will said quickly, for fear that Sam’s guess wouldn’t be flattering.

  Will was accustomed to people being impressed whenever he dropped the Maeve Grant name into conversation. Needless to say, he always omitted that he was still in the broker-training program. He also kept to himself that he was on the verge of being fired.

  Sam acknowledged the name drop with only a slight nod. Then he said, “Wealth management . . . Aren’t we all?”

  “Is that what you do too, Sam?” Will asked.

  “No. I was speaking figuratively, whereas I can only assume that you were being literal.”

  “Leave the poor man alone, Sam,” Eve said. “He’s probably sorry he sat down next to us at all.”

  In truth, Will was not only enjoying himself, but saw serendipity in the encounter. The key to survival at Maeve Grant was bringing in new clients. In the firm’s version of the Hunger Games, trainees who missed their quota for two consecutive quarters were fired. Will stayed late every night, determined not to go home without opening a new account. And yet, even though he worked twice as hard as his fellow trainees, he’d missed his numbers last quarter. This quarter was looking even worse.

  If something dramatic didn’t happen fast, he’d be out on the street in six weeks. No other New York City firm would touch him after he washed out at Maeve Grant. That meant he would have to leave the city. But for where? He had no family in Cheboygan, or anywhere else for that matter. In short, his very existence depended on bringing in a client that would allow him to make his second-quarter numbers. And now he was sitting next to a man in a finely tailored suit, a $50,000 timepiece on his wrist, accompanied by a woman who could be described only as a trophy wife.

  “Not at all,” Will countered smoothly. “But why don’t you tell me about the two of you. Are you married?”

  This elicited a deep laugh from Sam. Eve, however, only managed a tight smile.

  “Oh no,” Sam said. “Evelyn and I, we’re . . . I don’t think there’s quite a word for what we are, to tell you the truth.”

  “Yuanfen,” Eve said.

  She pronounced it with inflection, as if she was fluent in whatever language she was speaking, which was the last thing that Will had expected from Eve. He had already assumed that she was from somewhere in the sticks and traveled on the currency of her looks. It made him wonder whether there was more to her—and therefore to Sam for being with her—than met the eye.

  “Yes. Very good. Yuanfen.” Sam’s pronunciation was stilted.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak . . . whatever language that was,” Will said.

  “It’s Chinese, and there isn’t an exact English equivalent phrase,” Eve said. “It denotes a relationship that is touched with destiny.”

  Will nodded. He was beginning to think that meeting Sam might be yuanfen too. If he played his cards right, Sam Abaddon could be the answer to his prayers.

  2.

  Gwen Lipton went to law school with every intention of saving the world. She imagined herself at the ACLU defending reproductive rights, or maybe protecting the voting franchise in the Deep South. But then she graded onto the Law Review at Columbia, and law firms started climbing over each other to offer her a $180,000 salary as a first-year associate.

  Her father had spent his entire career at Martin Quinn and strongly encouraged her to follow in his footsteps and pursue a career in the private sector, “at least for a few years.” When she initially demurred, he said, “Think of it as an unpaid internship, except with lots of money. You’re going to have a brand-name law firm on your résumé forever. Public-interest shops are thrilled to have someone with law firm training, but it’s a one-way street because Big Law only hires out of law school or clerkships. After two or three years, you can go save the planet if you find that law firm life isn’t for you.”

  Taylor Beckett was Gwen’s first choice. There were other top-tier law firms in Manhattan—Cromwell Altman, Windsor Taft, Cravath—but Gwen was drawn to Taylor Beckett’s commitment to pro bono work and eschewal of tying bonuses to billable hours. It was the best of both worlds, she thought. She could do well, and also do good.

  She was now entering her third year of this supposed career pit stop. It had been long enough for her to learn that all of her assumptions about Taylor Beckett had turned out to be wrong.

  For starters, she was certainly not doing anything to better mankind. So far, every one of her paying cases had involved a corporation accused of some type of wrongdoing—either by prosecutors or regulators or a rival corporation. The facts were always extremely complicated, involving millions, if not tens of millions, of documents. In her three years, those cases that had ended had been resolved by way of settlement, without any admission of wrongdoing—hundreds of millions of dollars paid as a “cost of doing business.”

&
nbsp; Worse still, the promised pro bono work turned out to be even less fulfilling. Hers involved representing inmates who claimed they had been denied their constitutional rights by prison policies. Her clients were, as a matter of law, always in the wrong. Meaning that all her work did was siphon money away from the correctional facility’s actual operating budget, which might have been used to help inmates but instead was spent on lawyers.

  And despite the rhetoric the firm spouted at recruits, billable hours were still very much used to determine bonuses. The only difference was that, at other firms, lawyers exceeding certain thresholds automatically received preset bonuses, whereas at Taylor Beckett you could work nonstop and still not max out your bonus. Which was not to say that Gwen was complaining about her pay. Last year, her base salary had been $210,000, and she was given a $40,000 bonus on top of that. But the reason that Taylor Beckett could afford to pay her that princely sum was because they charged clients $675 for every hour she worked, and last year she’d worked 2,458 of them. After her two weeks of vacation—she was entitled to four but could take only two due to work demands—that calculated out to be just a shade under fifty hours per week. And that was billable time only. She spent at least another ten hours a week on administrative matters.

  Or as her friends put it, she worked all the time.

  A week earlier, a headhunter had called. They called about once a month on average, and more than weekly in January and February, after year-end bonuses had been paid and for many associates the prospect of putting in another year like the last one was at its most daunting. Usually Gwen said a quick “no thank you,” but this time she stayed on the line long enough to hear about a job that paid “in the low six figures” but was strictly nine to six, with no weekend work.

  “I think I’m not ready to make a move just yet,” Gwen said after hearing the spiel.

  “Okay, but don’t wait too long,” the headhunter replied. “You’re at your most marketable right now. You’ve got Taylor Beckett on your résumé, and you’ve stuck it out long enough that employers will know it was your choice to leave. But you’re not going to be seeing much in the next few years there that you haven’t already seen. Meanwhile, you’ll be working longer hours each year, and it really ratchets up in those last two or three before the partnership vote. With no guarantee that you’re going to make partner, of course. In fact, as I’m sure you know, the odds are very much stacked against you.”

  The headhunter’s warning sounded to Gwen a lot like her mother’s concerns that if she didn’t start paying attention to dating, she’d wake up at thirty-five, all the men her age would be dating twenty-seven-year-olds, and she’d be forced to marry some forty-five-year-old divorced man with kids, or a Peter Pan who all of a sudden decided he needed to reproduce in order to maintain the family name.

  In both cases, Gwen wondered if they were right.

  After all, it was 9:00 p.m. on Valentine’s Day and she was in the office. She had been invited to a friend’s Galentine’s Day party—a gathering that was supposed to be an evening of female empowerment but that Gwen suspected would degenerate soon enough into the attendees bemoaning their failures to find men—but she’d had to cancel at the last minute to finish a brief. It was not due until late the following week, but the partner in charge had just this morning demanded to see it first thing tomorrow.

  Even worse than the last-minute artificial deadline was that her phone started ringing, and the caller ID told her it was George Graham, the assigning partner at the firm. A less-welcome caller than Graham Gwen could not imagine. He only ever spoke to her for one reason: to give her more work.

  “Hi, George.”

  “I call bearing gifts, Gwen.”

  Gwen braced for the reveal. George wasn’t empowered to give out bonuses, so more work was hardly cause for celebration.

  “You’re being assigned to Toolan.”

  The Toolan case was the hottest criminal case in the country. It involved the A-list movie director Jasper Toolan, who was accused of murdering his wife after engaging in a torrid on-set affair with his leading lady, Hannah Templeton. Prior to being ensnared in scandal, Hannah had been considered America’s sweetheart, thanks to her television role as a high school sleuth, which lasted until she was nearly thirty. Beautiful Agony was to be Toolan’s masterpiece—and the vehicle to transform Hannah’s squeaky-clean image so she could snag adult parts.

  The movie released at Cannes and earned the coveted Palme d’Or award, although Toolan’s arrest had put an end to any wider distribution, at least for the moment. As for Hannah Templeton, her real-life role as someone who led a man to commit murder—allegedly, as the press was always careful to note—certainly erased anyone’s thoughts of her as a doe-eyed ingenue.

  The head of Taylor Beckett’s litigation department, Benjamin Ethan, had already been defending Toolan for nearly a year, through a plethora of pretrial motions and various delaying tactics that were standard operating procedure for defense counsel when a client was out on bail. Now, with trial less than six months away, Ethan must have decided he needed reinforcements beyond the ten-person team he already had working on the case.

  Gwen understood why Graham would think he was bestowing a great gift—the Toolan case was high profile, a rare chance to engage in criminal law, as opposed to the Fortune 100 v. Fortune 100 contract disputes that Taylor Beckett usually handled. There was a strong likelihood that it would go to trial, which was a rarity at the firm because nearly every case ended in a settlement. There was also the opportunity for face time with the firm’s undisputed superstar, Benjamin Ethan.

  But Gwen was excited for an entirely different reason. Earlier in the year, Ethan had given an internal presentation about the case. He was careful not to divulge any information that was not yet publicly known, but he was clear on one point: he had no doubt that Jasper Toolan was innocent of the charges.

  “And I’m not using the lawyer dodge that I think he has a triable case. Or that the evidence does not establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” Ethan said. “I mean it the way regular people mean it. He. Did. Not. Kill. His. Wife.”

  Gwen had made her peace about representing corporate bad actors—the tax frauds, the air polluters, the ones who exploited their employees. But for the first time in her legal career, she could actually now ply her craft in furtherance of the cause of justice. Representing a man wrongly accused was the noblest calling the law had to offer.

  “Thank you, George. That sounds great,” Gwen said.

  And she meant it. Perhaps being assigned to the Toolan case was a gift after all.

  3.

  After the game, Sam insisted that Will join them for dinner. Will had expected Eve to suggest that a night other than Valentine’s Day might be preferable, but she assented with a smile, although Will couldn’t be sure whether the expression conveyed her consent or the resignation that her objection would not have mattered to Sam.

  Their destination, according to Sam, was “a steakhouse around the corner.” On further inquiry, Will learned they were heading to Wolfgang’s, which was located at Thirty-Third Street and Park Avenue, four avenues away from the Garden. It would have taken about twenty minutes to get there by foot, although Eve’s stilettos made it obvious walking wasn’t in the cards. Will had assumed a taxi ride was in his future, but it turned out that his new friends had a Lincoln Navigator, complete with driver, waiting out front.

  Wolfgang’s was located in what looked like a subway station, even though it was at street level. The ceilings were vaulted and tiled in blue and white.

  “For my money,” Sam said, “this is the best hunk of beef in the five boroughs. Now, some people will tell you it’s Luger’s, but this place was started by their head waiter, a guy named Wolfgang Zweiner, and he does it better than they do. Not to mention that you don’t have to hike out to Brooklyn for the privilege.”

  It was past ten, but the restaurant was full, the bar area standing room only. The populatio
n skewed heavily male, nearly every one of them in a suit.

  Will wondered when the kitchen closed and if they’d even be seated given the late hour. That concern vanished the moment Sam was embraced like a long-lost brother by a man he called Wolfgang.

  “You picked quite the night to show up without a reservation,” Wolfgang said. “And you’re a party of three?” he added, looking over at Eve and Will.

  “We just came from the Garden,” Sam said by way of explanation. “Our friend here had the misfortune of underestimating the power of the Devils to emerge victorious, so we took pity on him. He’s hoping to drown his sorrows in a magnificent piece of your dry-aged beef and some superior juice of the grape.”

  Wolfgang was a dapper man, outfitted in a dark navy suit with a red silk pocket square the exact same hue as his tie. His mustache was a shade grayer than the hair that still remained on his head.

  “For anyone else, Sam, there’d be no room at the inn. But for you, my good friend, allow me to find a nice table.”

  Not more than a minute later, Wolfgang set them up at a quiet four-top in the corner, far away from the kitchen and the noise of the bar area. A bottle of champagne in a silver ice bucket was already chilling beside it. Sam popped the cork like a man who’d done it countless times. After pouring for Will and Eve, he filled his own flute.

  Holding his glass aloft, he said, “Now what’s the line from Casablanca again . . . ? Oh yes, ‘to the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’”

  “Cheers to that,” Will said, touching his glass first to Sam’s and then to Eve’s.

  Eve smiled, and Will got another glimpse of the greenest eyes he’d ever seen. Once again, he couldn’t believe Sam had chosen to spend the night in his company when he could have been alone with Eve.

  The waiter rushed over. “Mr. Abaddon, so nice to see you again. I see that you’re enjoying the champagne, compliments of Mr. Zweiner, but would you also like to see the wine list?”