The Deception Page 5

  Cut the bullshit! Sheridan felt like saying. Your victim’s a teenage whore; she’s a druggie. She was flunking out of school even before the Ellison encounter. But he kept that to himself. This was not a case to try. This was a case to plea-bargain. He said nothing and counted to six.

  “Okay.” He sighed. “I’d like to save the Commonwealth a lot of expense and time. I know that I’ve got a tough case, and you’re a top-notch adversary, Shirley. I’ve checked around.”

  A slight smile crept into the corners of Shirley Grant’s lips.

  “But, of course, it’s your girl’s word against my client’s,” Sheridan said gently. “My client has no record, not even a parking ticket.”

  “What do you have in mind?” she said.

  Sheridan met Sheldon Cohen, the Martinez family’s lawyer, out in the corridor, by the water fountain.

  He came right to the point. “Sheldon, Shirley Grant might be willing to entertain a reduced charge, providing we can work things out.”

  Sheldon Cohen, short, curly black hair, Tom Dewey mustache, bent down to the water fountain and pretended to drink.

  “Mr. Martinez wants five hundred thousand dollars.”

  He looked up at Sheridan, birdlike, his hand still on the bubbler nozzle.

  “Sheldon”—Sheridan’s voice was controlled—“if I have to try this case, win or lose, even if my kid goes away, I’ll make a damn good fee. You’ll wind up with nothing. We have to finalize this now or never. Say I get you sixty thou. You get twenty; your client gets forty—nontaxable. More money than Martinez will see in a lifetime.”

  “I’m incensed!” Cohen bolted upright from the water fountain. “You’re a racist, Sheridan, and you’re playing a racist card!” He bent down and pretended to take another drink at the bubbler. Again he looked up at Sheridan. “Make it a hundred and we got a deal.”

  Sheridan nodded. It took some doing. Buckley would probably walk DeVelieu because of a pinch on his baby’s bottom. Sheridan would walk Ellison for a hundred thousand. He’d later tell Judy that it was an expensive piece of ass.

  At first, the prosecutor wanted no deal less than indecent assault, a felony conviction with six months’ jail time and two years’ probation. Sheridan insisted on simple assault, a misdemeanor, stating that with a felony conviction, his client would be unable to join the Marine Corps. When the plea bargaining seemed on the verge of collapse, Sheldon Cohen, sensing the $100,000, together with his fee, was in danger of evaporating, promptly joined the negotiations.

  “Look,” he said to the assistant district attorney, “my client stands to lose a hundred grand if this Ellison kid is sent away. Sheridan and I have an agreement contingent on scaling this down to a misdemeanor.”

  “I’m not interested in your agreement,” Shirley Grant said curtly. “I’m here to prosecute this defendant for raping a minor. If we have to try this case, I’m going to have eight or nine blacks on the jury. They’re not going to cater to a privileged preppy by the name of Todd Thayer Ellison—the Third, no less!”

  “Listen”—Cohen’s voice rose an octave—“my client goes along with a misdemeanor, my client’s father goes along, and I go along. And when you come right down to it, my girl has a helluva background. It could get messy. There were no blood tests fingering the Ellison kid as the father. And she may develop some memory loss, like she can’t identify the defendant.”

  “That would be obstruction of justice!” The prosecutor’s voice still snarled, but with a hint of resignation.

  “You’re damned right!” Cohen bristled. “Justice is a hundred grand in my client’s pocket, and you’re the one who’s obstructing it!”

  “And don’t forget the Marine Corps,” Sheridan interjected.

  Finally, after a few calls to her superior, the prosecutor agreed, wearied from the barrage and not entirely sure that her teenage complainant could hack it on the witness stand.

  “And what is it with the Marine Corps?” Grant’s snappish voice now had a tinge of humor. “There must be a war on that I don’t know about. You’re the fifth attorney this month who’s said that his kid was headed for Parris Island.”

  Sheridan was seated in the courthouse coffee shop, scribbling a few last-minute corrections on a trial brief, when a bookish-looking young man toting a briefcase approached his table.

  “Mr. Sheridan,” he said diffidently, “mind if I sit down? My name is Ted Marden. You left a message for me. I’m with MacAllister, Choate & Pierce.”

  “Oh, yes, please sit down. Like a cup of coffee?”

  “No thanks. I happened to be in Judge Davis’s session—I’m the next case out—and I watched your presentation. Got to hand it to you—rape scaled down to copping a feel. Like to borrow that legal wand of yours.”

  “Oh, there’s a lot more to it,” Sheridan said. “If we didn’t have plea bargaining, the criminal justice system would collapse. Case dockets would be jammed. There are only so many trial judges to go around.”

  Sheridan took another sip of coffee. He knew that Marden was Dr. Sexton’s psychiatric patient and had been in attendance when Donna DiTullio jumped. He’d work into it slowly.

  “What kind of case do you have, Ted?” He’d again try the first-name tack.

  “Oh, it’s a restraining order. We represent Northeast Fisheries Corporation on a breach of contract with a Canadian conglomerate. Seems the Canadians have three tugs in Boston Harbor, and we’re seeking injunctive relief, preventing them from sailing. It’s sort of complicated.”

  “Sounds like something I’d shy away from. Bet there’s a lot of law involved.”

  “There is. International treaties and that sort of stuff. But the meter’s running, as old man MacAllister likes to say. I must have ninety thousand dollars’ worth of billable hours right here.” Marden patted his shiny grained leather briefcase.

  “I envy you guys with the big fees,” Sheridan said.

  “Sometimes I envy you, Mr. Sheridan. I mean, your type of practice. My firm runs me ragged. I’m a junior partner, really—they bill me out at three hundred and fifty an hour and pay me a fraction of what I bill. Several months ago, I was working twenty-hour days seven days a week, flying all over the country, living out of a suitcase. I had a complete breakdown.”

  “I know,” Sheridan said, sensing an opening.

  “You know?”

  “That’s why I put in a call to you, Ted. I represent Donna DiTullio.”

  Suddenly, Marden seemed to stiffen. “How did you get my name?” he asked guardedly.

  “I understand you and Janet Phillips, the Channel Three girl, were in a group therapy session some hour or so before Donna DiTullio jumped.” Sheridan sidestepped a direct answer.

  “I’m not so sure I should be talking to you.” Marden’s early affability suddenly vanished. “Obviously, you intend to sue everyone in sight—you guys usually do.”

  “No, just St. Anne’s and the members of the staff who were in attendance. And, like you, I’m duty-bound to investigate—see every witness and get every scrap of evidence that’s relative to my case. I already have a call in to Phillips. She’s agreed to see me.”

  “Well, what do you want from me? I’m not so sure I can help you.…” Marden was still defensive.

  “I’ve already seen a psychiatrist who says it was gross negligence to hold a group therapy session up there at the Atrium, especially when three weeks before, my client had tried to do herself in.”

  Ted Marden was still on guard. “Look, I don’t want to get involved. My law firm isn’t going to appreciate this one bit. There are subtle ways they can get rid of someone. I know of a few cases.”

  “I can’t make any guarantees, Ted, but for the present, everything will be confidential. What I’d like to know is what was said at the group meeting.”

  “How is Donna DiTullio doing?” Marden’s voice softened.

  “Not good. She’s in a coma. She may not make it.”

  Marden shook his head. “I guess it
would be a blessing,” he said. His eyes misted. “I don’t think I can help you too much, Mr. Sheridan.”

  “Call me Dan. That’s okay. Just give me a rundown of what went on for the fifty minutes before the break—who said what, who went where, what you observed, how Donna DiTullio reacted. Any red flags that she was upset and might jump?”

  “Well, let me give it to you as best I can,” Marden began slowly.

  Dan listened—no notes. But the content of what Marden related would be instantly recorded as soon as their meeting was over.

  The gist was that no one suspected that the DiTullio girl would jump. The session was an open discussion of each patient’s suicidal ideation. There wasn’t a hint that Donna would self-destruct.

  “Okay, Ted, I’m sorry to have troubled you. I hope your motion for injunctive relief is acted upon favorably.”

  “Listen, Dan.” Marden’s voice suddenly lowered. “Maybe I can help you. Maybe you can help me.

  “I’ve busted my ass for three years. MacAllister, Choate & Pierce are paying me peanuts, dangling the carrot of partnership to keep me running. Every case I get on my own—no matter if I just write a will—I have to kick the entire fee into the firm.…”

  “How can I be of assistance?” It was Sheridan’s turn to be guarded.

  “I have an automobile accident case. You handle auto cases, Mr. Sheridan?”

  “Never saw an auto case I didn’t like,” Dan paraphrased Will Rogers.

  “Well, my aunt Alice got whacked by an eight-wheeler on the Mass Pike. There’s plenty of insurance coverage. She’s at Mass General with a fractured hip, five broken ribs, a ruptured spleen, and a subdural hemorrhage. Good injuries, as you guys would say. Been there over a month. She’s a schoolteacher. The truck driver was drunk. The way I figure it, with punitive damages, it could go for a million, even a million and a half.”

  Sheridan shook his head. “Is she going to make it?”

  “Aunt Alice will make it,” Marden said. “She’s a crusty old broad, a real complainer. That was even before her injuries. What I’m trying to say is … would you take the case on, Mr. Sheridan?”

  To Sheridan, it was a windfall, a lawyer’s dream.

  “Certainly,” Dan said. “We’ll get cracking on it. Send over your file.”

  “I’d rather hand-deliver it. Don’t want the firm to know I’m involved.” Marden permitted himself a small smile. “Can we split the fee fifty-fifty?”

  “Sure,” Sheridan said. They shook hands. “Fifty-fifty.”

  “And when the case is settled, send the referral fee to my home in Brookline.”

  Sheridan could almost lip-synch the next line.

  “I don’t want to trouble the partners,” Marden said.

  Sheridan watched young Marden depart. He stuffed his brief into his battered trial bag. A soft smile played around his face. It had been a pretty good day.

  5Sheridan wasn’t a proper Bostonian; he was too much of a rebel to fit the mold. But he did love the city. Not a place he preferred in winter, when the streets were mired with gray slush and trees looked bare and arthritic. Yet on a bright summer day, with the scent of the sea in the air, there was no place he’d rather be.

  Sometimes he’d walk from his office to take in a late-afternoon game at the Red Sox’s turn-of-the-century bandbox, known as Fenway Park. Even strolling through the Common was an adventure of sorts. He’d stop to listen to some sidewalk orator, dodge skateboarders and people on Rollerblades, watch buskers and three-card monte players, vying to separate tourists from their dollars.

  On the picturesque arched bridge in the Public Garden, he’d pause to watch the swan boats, which were crowded with children doing lazy eights in the willow-laced lagoon.

  He loved the animated bustle of Boylston Street, and he enjoyed checking out the young models as they browsed in tony boutiques in Back Bay.

  But it was the architectural jumble of Boston that intrigued him most—the downtown, with its five-star hotels and gleaming skyscrapers, interspaced with the Boston of another age, a nineteenth-century town of red brick, gas lamps, and cobblestone streets. On a foggy evening, you could almost expect to see a horse-drawn carriage.

  As he headed up Beacon Street en route to his meeting with Sheila O’Brien at an outdoor café just off Louisburg Square, he thought of his grandfather Eamon, who had crossed the Atlantic along with thirty thousand other Irish immigrants, many of whom were later crammed into ugly row houses at the bottom of the wrong side of Beacon Hill.

  “We were stable boys and hod carriers for the Brahmins—when they’d give us a job, that is,” his grandfather would ruminate. And Sheridan knew the history, how James Michael Curley masterfully cobbled the Irish into a political force, finally ousting the Cabots and Lodges from City Hall.

  “Vote early and often,” Curley would exhort his constituency. And more than a few votes were conjured up from the grave.

  Sheridan met Sheila a little after five and they were escorted to a landscaped cloister in a garden where it was claimed that Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Daniel Webster, and John F. Kennedy had often dined over the years. Sheila, a former FBI agent and Fordham Law grad, was prepping for the Massachusetts Bar exam and serving her apprenticeship with a high-profile State Street law firm.

  “What’s happening over at Dewey, Screwum & Howe?” Sheridan peered over his menu at his companion. She pushed a strand of sandy blond hair back from her forehead and suppressed a laugh. But her china blue eyes smiled, crinkling at the corners.

  Sheridan knew Sheila O’Brien was too good to be true—creamy skin, a young thirty, perky face and personality. As young Buckley described her, she had the face of an angel and a body like mortal sin. Despite the disparity in age, Judy Corwin was all for the arrangement. Sheila had taken Dan out of his moodiness and away from his one-night stands. Five years earlier, he had lost his wife and only child, an eight-year-old son, in an automobile accident. He was devastated and became emotionally aloof, fearful of any continuing involvement. Then Sheila O’Brien came onto the scene. For Dan Sheridan, she was a lifesaver. Judy had been with Dan since he first hung out his shingle fifteen years ago and had stuck with him during the hard times following the death of his family. She’d been witness to a driven, take-no-prisoners Dan Sheridan, a man with an obsession to win at all costs—whether it be handball, the law, or poker. Not that Dan would ever relent, but even young Buckley knew that as of late, Sheridan was mellowing. He had even let Buckley win a few hands.

  And sitting opposite him was the reason for it all: Sheila O’Brien.

  But Judy Corwin knew that Dan was vulnerable. If Sheila suddenly walked—Judy had the Jewish-mother instinct—tough Dan Sheridan would crumple like a house built of matchwood.

  Right now, as Sheila parried his mild obscenity, Sheridan was secure, controlled. Just as she was about to reply, she fingered her engagement ring. It was Sheridan’s ultimate hedge against rejection.

  “Good news, Dan. The senior partner, Mr. Cranston, had me in the office today, offered me a junior partnership at—would you believe this?—seventy-five to start?”

  “Hundred?” Dan picked up the menu and studied it.

  “Thousand, Dan, thousand.”

  “You said you’d think it over.” Dan’s eyes remained glued to the menu.

  “Sure.” She reached over and pulled Dan’s menu down. “I’m waiting for a better offer.”

  Sheridan sidestepped, clicking his fingers at a passing waiter. “This is a classy place, Sheila. Even the hamburgers have French names.”

  The black-tuxedoed waiter nodded, then scribbled the order on a small pad. “Deux boeuf haché and deux Bud Lights,” he repeated in a fractured South Boston Irish version of French.

  Dan and Sheila held hands for a long moment.

  “Had a pretty good day today, Sheila. We walked Ellison and DeVelieu.”

  Sheila smiled and shook her head. “Now we can afford that June wedding.” She held up her h
and, spread her fingers, and studied her diamond.

  Sheridan brushed some imaginary bread crumbs from the table. “Sheila, we walked them. I didn’t say we got paid. But seriously …”

  Sheridan knew he had booted it. The word seriously—it was uttered beyond recall. There were several seconds of silence. He rushed into the breach.

  “Got a new case—malpractice. Your guys over at Roper, Cranston, Peabody & Weld will probably end up defending it.”

  “Oh?” Sheila covered up Sheridan’s lapse. “Against Mass General or Beth Israel?”

  “No, against St. Anne’s.”

  “St. Anne’s. That’s Mr. Finnerty’s account.”

  “I know. I’ve already dictated the complaint. I’m serving the hospital, members of the staff, and of course the cardinal. It’s going to be kind of sticky. I may wind up being excommunicated.” He gave a slight chuckle. “Do you think …” Sheila looked at him.

  “No, don’t quit yet. If your firm gets the case, and I think they will … well, you know.”

  Sheila said nothing. Any iota of impropriety—even if unfounded— would be suspect. Conflict of interest, the bane of any law firm—of any legal practitioner. And the bar overseers hovered like scavenging vultures. If Finnerty’s firm took the case, she would have to resign. She was perturbed. She’d worked so hard to get where she was. For the next several moments, neither spoke. They nibbled at their burgers and sipped their beers. But the silence was disquieting. Dan sensed that Sheila was upset.

  Suddenly, she brightened.

  “We all set for tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow night?” Dan was about to take a healthy bite from his hamburger, but his hand stopped just short of his mouth.

  “The Andrew Lloyd Webber show. I sold my soul for those tickets.”

  “Oh.” Sheridan tried to manufacture some nonchalance. Somehow, he knew that his great day was coming to a frayed end. “My aunt—you remember Aunt Ginny—has this great friend, a little old nun, Sister of Charity.… I gave the tickets away.” He bit into his burger. He didn’t lie easily, especially to Sheila O’Brien.