A Conflict of Interest Read online

  “I know you want me to say that I’m sorry, but I can’t. I won’t. I did what I needed to do to keep our family together. You know the way we’re always telling ourselves we’d do anything to protect Charlotte? This is anything. You owed it to Charlotte as well as to me to work harder on our marriage when things got tough. You don’t just … fuck whoever you happen to be working with.”

  “So, that was my punishment for sleeping with Abby once? I lost my career? That seems a bit disproportionate, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t insult me, Alex. It wasn’t the sex. You know that. Even if you’d never slept with her, it would have been the same problem. She was your person, not me. Besides, I don’t really know what proportion means in this context. Desperate times …” She shrugs, leaving unsaid the rest of the quotation, about desperate measures.

  Then she smiles. It’s completely incongruous with the topic at hand. It’s warm and loving.

  “The main reason I can’t be sorry, Alex, is that it worked. At least I think it did. I’m happy. You’re happy. We’re going to have a baby. You have a job that pays enough for us to live well. It’s like Howard said, we just needed to get over that hump.”

  I suspected at the time that it was marriage counselor propaganda, but Howard told us that statistics show most couples endure at least one major crisis in their marriage, something significant enough to cause one or both of them to consider divorce. Those who survive it, he claimed, end up having happier marriages than those who never faced the test in the first place.

  In my mind I can see myself storm out, but I don’t know where I’d go, and after all Elizabeth and I have gone through, and with a baby coming, that doesn’t make the most sense. It’s more than that, though, that keeps me here. Cromwell Altman is all in the past, and my future sits in front of me, her hands on her belly.

  “I love you, Alex,” Elizabeth says, now crying. It’s a heart-breaking sight, my nine-month pregnant wife sobbing about her love for me. “That’s why I forgave you for what you did—because I love you. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to do the same.”

  62

  Another one came for you today,” Elizabeth says the following day, pointing to the foyer. I walk in that direction, stopping by the console table where our mail is deposited. It’s on top of a small pile, as always in a flimsy, nearly transparent envelope. I know what it is even before seeing Ohlig’s name and prisoner ID number in the upper-left corner.

  Since his sentencing, Ohlig has written to me on a weekly basis, sometimes even more than that. The letters are always typed on an old-fashioned typewriter—apparently computers are not standard issue in maximum security—and errors are marked by x’s blackening out the words underneath, often with handwritten words in pencil on the line above. They tend to be dated seven to ten days prior to when they arrive. I assume the delay is a result of the prison’s review process, but I really don’t know for sure.

  The letters are all more or less the same. They usually start out by expressing how sorry he is, telling me that he knows he betrayed my father, and sometimes he includes my mother as another of his victims. In some he recounts anecdotes about my father as a younger man, or about my parents as newlyweds. I’ve always assumed he does this to convey that he has not always been such a destructive force, that there was a time when they all existed together quite happily.

  Then he closes with a plea for my help.

  Elizabeth long ago suggested that I stop reading the letters and just throw them away, but I never do.

  I tear open the envelope, careful not to rip the letter inside, which I’ve done before on more than one occasion. It’s a shorter one, as these letters go.

  Dear Alex:

  I hope this letter finds you and your family well. I read about your new job (we get internet here, but only an hour a week). I don’t know much about your new firm, but I know that they’re lucky to have a lawyer of your XXXXXX caliber. My best wishes for success and happiness with them.

  Last week marked the fourth month of my incarceration. I wish I could report that it’s getting better, but sadly I cannot. Like many inmates, I am trying to put my situation in a larger context, an effort to ascertain why God has chosen this path for me.

  I XXXXXXXX understand why XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX you have not written back to me, but I hope that if I keep writing I will ultimately be able to appeal to what Abraham Lincoln once called the better angels of our nature. I hope it is not presumpXXXious for me to say that I believe I have some understanding of who you are inside, Alex. Not only because of the time we’ve spent together, but also by virtue of all that your mother and father shared with me over the years.

  We all lose our way at times. I did, and I believe your mother did too. As I’ve written before, I cannot begin to fully apologize to you for my actions, but it will not stop me from seeking your forgiveness.

  Once lost, it hardly matters how you came to be there, or even how long you’ve been lost. All that matters is finding your way.

  I believe, Alex, that like me, you have lost your way. You know the right thing for you to do, and yet for some reason you turn away from that path. It is far from my place to judge, and I can only hope that you find your way before the false path leads you to the type of self-destruction that befell me.

  Like all of his letters, it’s signed, “Faithfully, Michael.” Every time my eyes roll past the words, they give me pause. Faithfully. What does such a word mean to a man like Michael Ohlig?

  Whenever I read his letters, I try to picture Ohlig in a cement block cell, banging out another letter on an old typewriter. What must be going through his mind, imprisoned for the rest of his life for a crime that I have long known he didn’t commit?

  63

  A week or so later, while we’re having breakfast, Elizabeth tells me that “something feels funny.” Even though I suspect it’s only nerves, Elizabeth insists that we go to the hospital.

  We arrive at about ten and have a new daughter a half hour later. The doctor later tells us that it had been an emergency situation—the umbilical cord had prolapsed, and to add good measure, the baby had managed to wrap the cord around her neck, cutting off her oxygen supply.

  “I probably don’t see a situation like this more than once a decade,” our doctor told us. “You have a miracle baby here. If you hadn’t come to the hospital when you did, she wouldn’t have survived.”

  With Charlotte, Elizabeth and I had an agreement not to settle finally on a name until after her arrival. Elizabeth was more new-agey than me about it, saying she wanted to make sure that the name we were selecting would fit the actual person, as opposed to the abstract notion of a baby. I told her that I couldn’t imagine what made a newborn look more like an Amanda or a Natalie, but if it made her feel better to wait, that was fine with me. In actuality, we had decided on Charlotte Emily within a few weeks after Elizabeth’s ultrasound revealed we would be having a girl, and after Charlotte’s arrival, Elizabeth confirmed the name fit her sufficiently for us to put it on her birth certificate.

  Elizabeth and I had a harder time selecting a name this time around. We knew we’d be having a second daughter, and Elizabeth again requested that we remain open-minded about a name until the baby actually arrived. Early on in the process, Elizabeth suggested we name the baby after my mother, but I demurred. One Barbara Miller was enough for my lifetime, I told her. I hesitated a little longer about paying some type of homage to my father, but ultimately concluded that the next generation should start without any connection to the failings of those who preceded them.

  The name we had tentatively settled upon was Julia. However, last night Elizabeth told me that she had been thinking about a new name, but wasn’t prepared to share it with me just yet.

  As Elizabeth lay in bed holding our newborn daughter at her breast, I ask her if our baby is a Julia.

  “I was wondering if you might consider a different name.”

  “Depend
s on what it is, I suppose.”

  “I’d been thinking about it for a while, and then after what the doctor said….”

  “You want to name her Miracle Baby?”

  Elizabeth laughs. “Not exactly. How do you feel about the name Hope?”

  “Hope,” I repeat. “I like it.” I touch our daughter’s soft hair. “But that might be too much responsibility for a brand new baby to handle.”

  “She won’t be hope for us, Alex,” Elizabeth says, reaching over to take my hand. “We’re going to be whatever we’re going to be. But I’d like her to remind us both that great things are possible, even when they look the worst.”

  I take a deep breath, letting Elizabeth’s sentiment wash over me. “Since it was your idea, I think you should be the first person to call your daughter by her name,” I say.

  “Welcome to our family, Hope,” Elizabeth says, and kisses our newborn daughter’s head.

  64

  Entering a prison is a sobering experience. Until you’ve done it, you simply cannot imagine how powerful the sound of a metal door locking can be.

  I arrive at the Florida State Prison on a particularly humid day, despite the fact that it’s late November. It’s nearly a year to the day after my mother’s death.

  FSP, or Raiford, as it is sometimes called, is probably the most famous prison in Florida, partly because of the Lynyrd Skynard song about an escapee, but also because it was the last home of serial killer Ted Bundy. It’s actually a prison within a prison, situated at the center of several other correctional facilities and housing approximately 1,400 of Florida’s most dangerous convicts.

  The woman in front of me in line is a paralegal from a local law firm. From what I can overhear, she’s there to have the firm’s incarcerated client sign some papers. The guard behind what I assume to be bulletproof glass tells the legal assistant that she can’t go in.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she says in a heavy southern drawl, “you just can’t go into a maximum security facility wearing that.”

  “I dress like this for work,” the paralegal says.

  “This isn’t work, honey. This is you going into a facility with over a thousand men inside who don’t see many women. Call your office and ask them to send someone else, or come back wearing a sweater. If I can see any part of your bra through your shirt, you don’t make it through the gate.”

  The paralegal steps out of line and looks at me like she’s in an Orwellian state, but I can see the guard’s point. It’s precisely because the inhabitants of this institution refused to abide by the dictates of a civilized society that they must now reside in a place that imposes different standards.

  “My name is Alex Miller,” I tell the guard, slipping my driver’s license through the small slot. “I’m here to see Michael Ohlig. I’m an attorney.”

  “From New York?” she says, looking at my license.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say. “I sent paperwork over earlier in the week about my visit.”

  “This a legal visit?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I lie. Prison visitations are recorded, the exception being attorney conferences.

  “You don’t have any firearms on you, do you, Mr. Miller?”

  She’s serious, and so I don’t make light of the question. “No, ma’am.”

  The large metal door buzzes and automatically slides open. After I step through I see that another door of equal size remains locked before me. Its buzzer doesn’t begin to sound until after the first door has already locked, at which time the second door begins to open, permitting me to enter the prison.

  Once Ohlig was sentenced to live the rest of his life in this facility, Clint Broden called me in a final effort to have me come to Ohlig’s rescue. Broden told me some of the horrors Ohlig would experience at Raiford—sodomy, intolerable living conditions, gang domination. I maintained the same predisposition I had in his office, refusing to acknowledge that Michael Ohlig wasn’t getting precisely what he deserved.

  At a second checkpoint, a guard tells me I’ll need to be accompanied before I’m permitted to proceed further, and he reaches for the phone to call for my escort. Once my guide arrives, he leads me through three more sets of double-locking doors until I’m finally deposited in the visiting center of the maximum security part of the prison. There it looks like what I’ve seen on television, banks of chairs against glass windows with telephones on either end.

  “Which one?” I ask the guard.

  “For an attorney visit, you’re given more privacy. It’s a separate room.”

  He walks me around the corner and leads me to a three-by-three room, furnished with only a single metal chair. On the other side of the glass is a similar-sized space with a similar-looking metal chair. My side smells like a high school gym locker room. I can only imagine the stench on the other side.

  I wait for twenty minutes until I hear the clank as the door on the opposite side of the glass begins to open. A prisoner walks in and the door locks behind him. For a moment I think the guard has made a mistake by putting the wrong man in this room.

  Michael Ohlig has aged considerably since the last time I saw him on the day of his conviction. He’s thinner, so much so that where he once had a certain power to his presence, he could now be described as drawn, almost gaunt, much the way a cancer patient looks during chemotherapy. His hair is sparser too, and cut shorter, not much longer than a crew cut. He smiles at me, but it comes out crooked, like a barbell that’s too heavy, as if he can’t summon the strength to balance it.

  Ohlig’s legs are shackled and his hands cuffed behind him. “Knees,” calls out a deep voice from a man I can’t see who’s outside the closed door. Ohlig kneels, placing his handcuffed arms behind him and onto the ledge in front of a small metal door. The window slides open and two thick, hairy hands reach in with a key, unlocking the handcuffs. Ohlig quietly says thank you, a whisper really, and the window is slammed shut.

  I’ve already reached over to grab the black receiver on my side of the glass from its holster, but Ohlig hasn’t yet followed suit. Instead, he stares at me without movement. I wonder about the reason for this delay, but no explanation comes to me. Then he removes the phone on his side and takes some time wiping it down on the sleeve of his orange jumpsuit.

  “You don’t want to know the kind of stuff that ends up on these phones,” he says to me as his opening line.

  “Hello, Michael.” I know better than to ask him how he’s doing, having made that mistake once with an incarcerated client. “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “I hope so.” His voice is hoarse, even beyond the distortion of the phone.

  It has been nearly a year since I took the Scary Lady in to be reframed. When I picked it up from the framer, the man behind the counter handed me a white envelope. My name was written on the front, and it was taped closed.

  “Are you Alex?” the man in the frame store asked.

  I nodded.

  “This was in the backing,” he said to me. “Sometimes people put things in frames for safekeeping—usually it’s a description of the artwork or a reminder of where it was purchased, but some people have been known to put real valuables in there, like a deed or even cash.”

  I studied the envelope. “Did you open it?”

  “It’s sealed,” he said, which meant that he probably had. That was one explanation for why it was taped closed. The frame store guy likely opened it thinking the Holy Grail was inside. When he recognized what it was, he must have realized he had to turn it over, and taped it shut. Then again, perhaps he’s an honest man and didn’t open it at all.

  “Thank you,” I told him, taking the envelope and placing it in my coat pocket.

  “Aren’t you curious what it is?” he asked.

  “I know what it is,” I told him.

  I read the note twice in the park across the street from the frame shop, and then each day thereafter for about two weeks. But I haven’t read it for nearly a year—not when I met with Clint Br
oden that first time, nor when I repeatedly swore under oath that my mother didn’t take her own life, nor on the day Michael Ohlig was convicted of her murder.

  Last night I opened it again.

  I suppose I wasn’t too surprised that my mother’s suicide note didn’t contain any apologies. That wasn’t her way. The closest she came was to ask me not to let her decision to end her life deprive me of my own happiness.

  She wrote that after Michael Ohlig she would never love again, and without love there was no reason to live. Somewhere buried within a paragraph of rambling sentences was the phrase: “I’ve reached the conclusion that my life is better finished now, on my own terms”—as if her life was like a good meal that, upon completing, she was now free to be excused from.

  In another part of her letter she claimed it was at Ohlig’s insistence that she confronted my father about her affair, and she could no longer live with the guilt of what that had wrought. She asked that I understand and wrote that it was her dying wish that I not do anything to interfere with her plan.

  Knowing my mother, I wasn’t shocked at her plan for revenge. As she said in the note, since it was Ohlig’s fault she was going to end her life, she might as well take him down with her.

  At first I regarded the note with almost Talmudic reverence, trying to parse the meaning behind the selection of every word, the nuance of each sentiment. Soon enough, however, I realized that even the most carefully drafted parts were not constructed with such fine attention to detail, and therefore my efforts to see more than the plain meaning were fruitless.

  My mother’s note left no doubt that her affair with Ohlig began shortly after they first met at the Central Park tennis courts, and continued, off and on, for the next thirty-six years. Even my father’s meeting Ohlig at that bookstore, the one that supposedly triggered their reunion, was not a chance encounter.