  Law.com Home Newswire LawJobs CLE Center LawCatalog Our Sites Advertise |
| |
 |
 |
Advertisement: |
||
|
|||
 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
The 7th Annual NYLJ Fiction Writing Contest Finalists
By Nicole Spooner
New York Lawyer
“No, Officer. Don’t know how he got that way. He was sick for a while now. Always coughing up something and leaving it out here. Came home, well, you know what I mean,” Henry dipped his neck into his shoulders and smirked at the two police officers standing over the old man’s body. “Came home, and he was sprawled out like that. Figured someone would call once he started to stink up the place.” “Why didn’t you call? You lived with him, didn’t you?” “I lived next to him, Officer. Not with him. Big difference. We were neighbors only, and like they say, good fences make good neighbors, and as you can see, we ain’t had no fences. So, we weren’t the best of friends,” Henry quipped. “You don’t seem too broken up about this.” “Oh, I am, Officer. I am. I just grieve differently than most.” Henry sat on the concrete in front of his own box and put his hands into his lap. “Apparently. And these pieces of paper are everything he owned?” the officer asked, staring into the old man’s box. Henry glanced into the box. “Yep. He was always scribbling something. Always wondered where he put the paper. He was crazy.” Henry spun circles next to his ear with his index finger. The officer reached into the box and grabbed a few pieces of paper. “Look at this, Mark. They’re just a bunch of different numbers over and over. Wait…there’s some names here too. They ain’t changing. Same names over and over again. This one sure was loony,” the officer snickered. The second officer showed the names to Henry. “Who are these guys? Imaginary friends?” Both officers laughed. “They’re homeless guys who passed away a few years ago. Guy was pretty close to them,” Henry lied. The officers cleared their throats, threw the papers back into the box, and brushed off their palms. “Well…uh….Just stay out of trouble. And like we said, you better hope there’s nothing funny with your story or we’ll be back.” The officers waited until the man’s body was taken away before walking out of the alley. “Enjoy your day, Officers,” Henry sang. Henry didn’t have to look at the pieces of paper to know what was on them. He knew all of the sequences by heart. Every couple of months for the past three years, the man said a new sequence of numbers over and over until Henry remembered it too. This month’s sequence was “nine, three, three, four, two, six, seven.” Henry could say it in his sleep. Some nights, he thought he had. And the names. He had heard the man recite the names at night as he organized the tiny pieces of paper in his cardboard box. “Harold Baker, Jeff Cross, Mike Shent, Chris Lake, Ben Rice, and Taylor McFill. They was all there. Yes.” Henry could still hear the old man reciting the names up to last night. For years, he would repeat the same sequence of names, and Henry would sometimes hear him laughing, but then screaming shortly after. And now, with the black and white photograph in his back pocket and the bag with all that cash hidden in the back of his box, everything made sense to Henry. He remembered the nights that the old man would run into his box with a package in his hand, smiling, and then later Henry would hear him crying, and the sequence would start all over again a few months later. Even that night last April finally made sense. “Listen. Shet up old man! You shet up! You been screaming their names all damn night! Let me get some sleep.” Henry banged on the man’s box. The old man laughed in Henry’s face and pointed his skinny finger at Henry’s fat nose. “Pretty! We eat and I call. Now they pay!” “What is wrong with you? You’re crazy!” Henry grabbed the man’s faded hospital bracelet. “You see?! Crazy! You need to go back there! They shouldn’t have let you out.” The man grew quiet. He curled up into a ball and rocked back and forth. He rattled off a new sequence of numbers and repeated the same sequence of names. “They pay,” he whispered before he closed his eyes, still rocking back and forth. Henry shook his head. He had tried to leave the man so many times, but something within him couldn’t make him pack up and leave. He felt the old man would die without him and although Henry told himself that he didn’t care if in fact he did, he figured that since there was at least one person next to him in this world, he might as well do his best to keep it that way. A few weeks later, Henry finally worked up the nerve to walk to the pay phone on the corner. He stuffed in a quarter and dialed the latest sequence that he had heard the old man utter over and over the month before. “Carrington, Craig, and Bickershaft. How may I direct your call?” the receptionist answered. “Yeah. Can I talk to Harold Baker?” Henry exhaled and waited for the receptionist’s response. After a few seconds, the receptionist replied, “I’m sorry, sir, but there is no one here by that name. Is there anyone else that you would like to reach?” Henry slammed the phone down. After about a minute, he picked it up again and stuffed another quarter into the slot. “Sorry ‘bout that. We got disconnected. I want to try a few more names.” “Sure, sir.” Henry rattled off the next four names from the list. To each, the receptionist replied that there was no one there by that name. Henry took a deep breath. “What about Taylor McFill?” Henry rested his elbow on the bottom of the phone booth and his sweaty forehead in the palm of his hand. After about ten seconds, Henry removed the phone from his ear and was about to slam it into the receiver, but then he heard ringing. He shoved the phone back to his ear and drummed his fingers along the bottom of the booth. “Taylor McFill’s office.” “Yeah. Uh. Yes. Can I talk to Taylor McFill, please?” Henry stammered into the phone. “Who may I ask is calling?” the sweet voice on the phone asked. “Uh. This is…It’s…Mike Shent.” Henry liked the sound of the name. “One moment, Mr. Shent.” “I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t call me anymore. That I would come to you…” a rough voice spoke angrily, but calmly into Henry’s ear. “We had a deal, Mike.” Henry almost dropped the phone. “Yeah, Mr. McFill, this isn’t Mike. It’s a…a friend of his and the rest of you guys that did what you did. I want to make a deal,” Henry nervously spoke into the phone. “What? Who the hell is this?” Taylor lowered his voice into the receiver. “Mr. McFill, all I want is…” Henry thought of a number. “$200,000. Cash.” He figured he could live on $300,000 nicely for a while. He could get his life in order, that sort of thing. “Give me the money and no one will ever know what you did.” “Who is this?” “Don’t you worry about who this is,” Henry said, much bolder. “Just have the money and meet me on Friday at 11:30 p.m. sharp in front of Riverbird Park at the Southside entrance. If you don’t, I’m telling the media. Oh, and the President too.” Henry hung up. He made the last two threats like he had heard the old man scream from his box in the middle of the night for years. Henry figured it couldn’t hurt. He punched the keys of the phone with his hands and screamed, “Ooooh weeee!” before half-running, half-walking back down the block. Taylor McFill sat in an armchair across from Mike Shent. “He knows what happened, and he isn’t crazy like Sherman was, asking for petty cash,” Taylor looked into Mike’s small eyes. “I know you told him, Mike. I know it.” “Taylor, I swear I never told anyone anything,” Mike lied. “I don’t know who this guy is. I thought this whole thing would end with Sherman’s death. Besides, why would I tell when I’ve got all this in part because of you?” Mike pointed across the spacious living room in his Greenwich, Connecticut home. “Because you’re weak. Just like Sherman was. Or maybe you think you could somehow get a little more,” Taylor yelled. He slammed his glass down on the table next to his chair and stood. His 6’4” frame towered over Mike and his wheelchair. He reached down and grabbed Mike by the collar. Mike pushed his bony left hand against Taylor’s chest. “Taylor, come on. It wasn’t me.” Taylor tightened his grip on Mike’s shirt. “What’s going on here?” a voice called out from behind Taylor. Taylor released Mike and smoothed his gray Fioravanti suit. “We’re good, Simeon. We’re good.” “I hope so,” Simeon replied. He smiled at both men. “We’ve got tons of work to do, Mr. McFill, so maybe you and Mr. Shent can continue your discussion a little later?” Taylor grabbed his briefcase. “Yes, we can. Good evening, Mike. Simeon, good seeing you again.” Taylor walked through the door. “What was that about, Mr. Shent? It looked like Mr. McFill was going to blow a fuse!” Simeon laughed. “He was just having a bad day, I guess.” Mike looked out of the large window in front of him. Simeon cleared his throat. “Well, I drew up the will and the agreements just the way we discussed.” “I hope you’re right about this,” Mike responded. “Of course I’m right. He’s homeless and destitute, just like his dad was. And he’s probably that way because his father never quite recovered after what happened up there….His father never could provide for him. You just got a diagnosis of a few months, Mr. Shent, and I know that’s difficult. I know. But he’s got the rest of his life, and so far, he’s only had a hard one…I guess in part because of everything that happened…up there. Leaving him this money shows that you are giving when no one would expect you to. Besides, you’re always giving money to those less fortunate. That’s the mark of a great man.” Mike sighed. “You’re right.” He signed the documents and closed his eyes. His thin chest moved up and down and his stump of a leg twitched a little before he put his left hand, the only one he had, over it to steady it. Simeon fetched Mike his Wednesday evening tea like he had for the past three years. Only this time, the young Trusts and Estates attorney added something extra. Mike sipped the tea slowly and eventually slumped into his wheelchair. “Hey, Henry.” Henry turned slowly. “Oh….It’s you, Jerry. What are you doing here?” Henry smiled nervously and stopped pacing back and forth. “Sign this paper. It’s just part of another application to help you get housing.” Simeon handed the paper to Henry. Henry grabbed the paper and stuffed it into his jacket’s torn side pocket without looking at it. “I’ll sign it later, Jerry. I’m actually waiting for someone…a lady friend,” Henry grinned, his big eyes darting back and forth behind Simeon. Simeon looked at Henry’s stained, ripped clothes and smiled. “I need this paper for the application that I’m sending in tomorrow morning so you probably need to sign it now.” Henry sighed loudly and scratched his huge belly. He looked at the neon clock on the building across from Riverbird park – 11:15 p.m. “Man oh man, you sure pick bad times, Jerry.” Henry pulled the paper out of his pocket and quickly signed next to the “X,” without reading anything as usual. He handed the paper back to Simeon. “All right, man, great seeing you. Let’s catch up tomorrow or something. I’m going to uh, relieve myself before she comes and…I kinda want some privacy,” Henry said, headed back towards the shadows. Simeon looked down at the will that Henry had just signed and smiled. “Okay. See you tomorrow.” Henry walked towards the bushes and heard Simeon’s laughter behind him. “Do-gooders,” Henry mumbled as he shook his head. He peeked out of the darkness and breathed a sigh of relief as the man he believed to be his friend walked back up the block. Taylor McFill made his way to the Southside of Riverbird Park at 11:30 p.m. He stood at the entrance and smelled Henry before he saw him. Henry waited for ten minutes before he walked out of the shadows and grabbed the briefcase out of Taylor’s hands. “Thanks, Mr. McFill. It better be all here,” Henry muttered almost under his breath, opening the briefcase. “Who the hell are you? And who told you about what happened out there?” Taylor stared at Henry’s back. Henry snapped the briefcase shut. “What does it matter? You won’t have to see my face again after tonight.” Truth was, Henry had no idea what happened “out there” or anywhere else. He had finally put it together that the old man was blackmailing the men whose names were on those pieces of papers. He was blackmailing them with something big. So big, Henry figured, that five of the six had paid that crazy old man $100,000. All of the old man’s grumblings about them paying and him eating finally made sense to Henry. And the photograph with those guys in uniform with some faces crossed out and the old man’s inscription with names on the back made even more sense. Henry himself had never been in a war but he knew that it sometimes made people walk on the edge of crazy, and he figured crazy was what happened to the old man. Whatever they did had driven him mad. And he got mad enough or sane enough, depending on how you looked at, to blackmail them. Henry began to half-run away from Taylor, anxious to touch and count the money in the briefcase. “Not so fast,” Taylor growled. “Get over here.” Henry turned to see Taylor behind him with a gun pointed at his head. He dropped the briefcase and then picked it up again in his clammy hands. “Look, man. I just want the money. I swear. I don’t know nothing,” Henry half-whispered. Taylor grabbed Henry by his shirt and pushed him in front of him. “Walk!” he yelled, shoving the barrel of the gun against Henry’s fat neck. They walked through the dark, deserted park until they arrived at a small opening. “Are you going to tell me who you are or are you going to die nameless?” Taylor demanded. Henry dropped to his knees and begged for his life. He couldn’t think straight enough to even remember his own name. He told Taylor that it was all a huge misunderstanding and that he just wanted to go back home. “Please, please let me go. I don’t know nothing!” Henry cried. “Have it your way,” Taylor raised the gun and pointed it at Henry’s face. Taylor turned his face away from the blood splatter. He watched as Henry fell to the ground on top of the briefcase. “Drop the gun!” a voice shouted behind Taylor. “What?” Taylor whipped around just in time to have the bullet pierce his chest. He lost his balance and fell to the ground. The fallen leaves crumpled softly under his weight. The officers ran towards Taylor and felt for a pulse. “Stupid guy. Told him to drop the gun and he wouldn’t. Why does everyone have to be a cowboy?” the officer shook his head. Simeon stayed with the small crowd of on-lookers that had gathered until the officers bagged up both bodies and took them away. Simeon patted Henry’s will in his left pocket and walked swiftly out of the park. Six months later, Simeon slid on his shades as he walked onto the deck of his yacht. He looked back at the island that he had purchased and the mansion that sat on top of it. He remembered why he got into law in the first place – it was a thinking man’s game, and those types of games always produced lots of money for the winner. His friends who were corporate and litigation associates would tell him how they constantly had to work and always remarked on how easy Simeon had it. But they didn’t know how hard Simeon thought, how hard he strategized. They didn’t know how brilliant a T&E fourth year associate had to be to convince Taylor McFill, managing partner at one of the city’s largest firms, to change the remainderman of his trust for Mike to a newly-formed single-member LLC, which eventually funneled back to Simeon, or how masterful he had to be to convince an ex-veteran multi-millionaire with half a body to leave millions of dollars to the supposed son of a man who had eaten parts of him. Three and a half years before, Mike Shent had confided in Simeon in his study with the curtains drawn, after being assured of attorney-client privilege. “You know I was in the Army,” Mike began. Simeon nodded in agreement. “Well, it was about 30 years ago, in the winter of 1975. There were seven of us. Heard a report about some soldiers stranded in the mountains doing an air strike, and my platoon volunteered to go look for them. We didn’t really go for them though….We went for the diamonds. We heard rumors around base that those guys were really transporting diamonds that they took from some Angolan leader, and their plane went down. And we just wanted a little of that money. Just a little. “Finally found them. They were way off their coordinates. Dug the plane out a little and saw them. They were in bad shape…trapped in the plane, half under the snow. They were so happy to see us though. They just kept smiling.” Mike inhaled. “Taylor McFill went in first and we brought them out of the plane one by one. We found the diamonds hidden in the plane and couldn’t stop staring at how big and pretty they were.” Mike lowered his eyes. “When they were all out of the plane, smiling and laughing because they thought they had been saved, Taylor started shooting at them and the rest of us just followed. We shot at their faces, their stomachs, everything. We didn’t stop shooting until Chris slipped on somebody’s gut. There was blood everywhere. I can still smell it sometimes…even now. We…we buried them in the snow like garbage.” Mike looked up at Simeon for his reaction. Simeon let his jaw fall open. Mike continued, “And I don’t know if it was God or just the freezing cold, but we got back to our plane and the stupid bird wouldn’t start…wouldn’t turn over. Our radios wouldn’t work either. And after a couple of weeks up there and no help in sight, we all lost it a little. Well, a lot. They ended up shooting Pete, went to basic training with him…and ate him…right there in the snow.” Simeon closed his eyes in horror. “And me, I didn’t get these injuries from a grenade, like I told you before.” Mike let out a nervous laugh. “They thought I had died from the cold because I wasn’t moving…I was probably on the brink of death…but I woke up screaming, right after they carved off my leg….I was screaming without making a sound. But I guess they finally saw my eyes….My eyes screamed out loud. And that made them stop. It was like their hearts starting beating again right then,” Mike’s voice cracked. “We were only up there about ten more minutes before the rescue chopper finally found us. Longest ten minutes of my life….” Mike smiled to himself. “But those diamonds that I saved were worth millions on the black market. And Taylor got me money from so many vet organizations saying that I got hurt when the plane went down. I guess that’s partly true.” Mike attempted to smile. “Plus, he set me up with a trust fund with money from his own multi-million income and,” Mike lowered his voice although there was no one else there besides him and Simeon, “money from his partners, that they don’t even know that they’re giving to me.” Mike brought his voice back up. “The other guys gave me some of their diamond money too since nobody wants me going to the President to make them return the bronze hearts that they got for surviving up there or telling the news stations that we murdered the Carter 8, that’s what those guys were called on the news back then, and they didn’t freeze to death in the avalanche like we said.” Mike looked down into his lap. “Most of us were kids; only Sherman and Ben were men really. Sherman might have told - he was kind of soft - but he went crazy soon after we were rescued. Couldn’t take it, I guess. But, who could blame us for what we did? I mean, we were just kids.” Simeon thanked Mike for trusting him with such precious information. He reaffirmed his attorney-client relationship with Mike and told him that he would do anything, making house calls whenever Mike wanted, whatever, for his client. And from the moment Mike’s disclosure left his lips, Simeon Lion’s mind began to turn on how this information could make him rich. A couple of days after Mike’s revelation, Simeon found Sherman Hyster outside of Alley # 203, after he overheard whispered conversations between Mike and Taylor about Sherman getting out of the mental hospital even crazier, getting sick, and blackmailing a couple of the guys. “He wants $20,000 from each of them, a thousand for each day that we were up in the mountains,” he heard Taylor whisper. The guys knew that Sherman really wouldn’t say anything to anyone about what had happened. They were paying only because guilt had built up in each of their hearts, and they wanted to believe that their payment to Sherman was some sort of atonement for their sins. Simeon knew that sort of truth was a heavy load to bear. Simeon approached Sherman and tried talking to him, reasoning with him, but he couldn’t get through to that crazy, old man. Then Sherman got so sick that he couldn’t leave the alley for weeks on end. Simeon grew exasperated in the three years that followed. He had almost given up hope altogether until he saw Henry digging through Sherman’s black bag and then leaning back on his palms smiling, with Sherman lying dead on the concrete next to Henry’s feet. And Simeon knew he had someone he could work with. He befriended the greedy, round, old man with petty cash while he poked through the trash in the park the next day. He eventually had Henry sign several documents saying that they were for different things – finding an apartment, job applications, whatever - just so that he could get Henry’s signature on paper and so that everyone would think that he actually cared about Henry Smith. He ran around town with Henry a couple of days a week, holding doors for him and wiping the dirt from his hands after each meal in the well-lit diner in which they ate weekly. When Simeon learned on that Wednesday that Taylor was being blackmailed and realized that it was Henry doing the blackmailing, he knew that Henry had gotten way over his head. So Simeon altered his plan of killing Henry himself. After making the frantic phone call to 911 at 11:30 p.m. that Friday, reporting two men acting suspiciously in the park, Simeon stood in the back of the park and watched Henry die. He hadn’t planned on Taylor dying too, but Simeon figured that it was probably his lucky day. When Mike’s will was read, and everyone’s brow half-raised to the Henry Smith bequest, well, Simeon smirked. And later, after poor old Henry Smith was gunned down by an overstressed, overworked lawyer, for no good reason, Simeon revealed that Henry had somehow planned ahead enough to leave everything he owned, which Henry thought was going to be nothing, to Simeon. No one was surprised. After all, they were such good friends. In all, Simeon inherited 250 million dollars. He quit the firm the very next day. He walked out of there, richer than all of the partners, without doing half as much work. And he had lived up to the oath he had taken as a lawyer – he had become a counselor in the truest sense of the word. He counseled his client to give money to a man who he believed to be the son of the man who had half-eaten him, and he had counseled two men, who didn’t even trust the sun, which was known to rise and fall every single day, to instead put their trust in him. Simeon laughed out loud, looked up to the heavens above, and stretched out his arms. He yelled to no one in particular in perfect staccato, “They say doctors play God; let them have their fun. Lawyers do things that even God is too scared to do.” He smiled from the inside-out. He removed his shades and squinted his eyes, still aimed at the heavens. “Top that,” he taunted.
|
|
|
Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
| |||
|
