Chapter 103: No
Kenneth Ferro’s firm has seventeen floors on West Monroe and a conference room called Erie with a table you could land a plane on.
Victor asked me to come at four on the twentieth of January.
Ferro was already sitting there when I walked in.
That was the answer, and I understood it before I sat down, and I sat down anyway.
By then I had not worked in that house for fifty-one days.
Suspended the fifteenth of September. Unpaid from the first of October. Position eliminated the thirtieth of November, with four weeks in a lump.
Since then I had done agency home-care at seventeen dollars an hour.
You can do that without a license, which is the entire reason it pays seventeen dollars an hour.
I had seen Ethan four times, all of them in an exam room in Ravenswood, because Victor brought him on Thursdays and let me stand there.
I put the sleeve on the table and I did it in eight minutes.
The coding sheet. The certified Articles. The second of October. The twentieth of October. The sixth of November lunch. The twentieth of February.
I did not say the word murder and I did not say the word hired.
I said: there is an invoice somewhere and a bank record somewhere and you are the only person alive who can make them come out.
Ferro let me finish, which lawyers do, and then he took it apart in about four minutes, which lawyers also do.
“Ms. Carter, do you know what happens in a contested probate?”
“No.”
“Discovery runs in both directions.”
“If Mr. Blackwood opens his late wife’s estate and issues citations at his mother, then her counsel takes his deposition. Under oath. About his marriage. About where he was. About what he knew and when.”
“He was in Houston.”
“He was in Houston a great deal. That is the point.”
“Gerald Ashworth will spend two days on it, and every word will sit in a public court file any reporter in this city can pull for free.”
He set the pad down.
“And then she will raise the child.”
I looked at Victor. He was looking at the table.
“Raise him how,” I said.
“She will suggest that a father that absent, in a criminal matter and a probate war, might benefit from a neutral fiduciary managing his son’s interests.”
“She will not say it unkindly. She never says anything unkindly.”
“That’s a threat.”
“That is a strategy,” Ferro said. “You are welcome to call it whatever helps.”
Victor spoke then for the first time in fifteen minutes.
“Lily.”
“Yes.”
“Ask me for the thing you actually want.”
So I asked him. I said: get the invoice.
He turned the coding sheet around with one finger and read the line again, although I do not believe he needed to.
“You want me to say out loud, in a filing, with my name on it, that my mother paid a woman to be ready for my wife to die.”
“I want you to ask a bank a question.”
“That is what the question means. Don’t do that. Don’t make it small so I’ll pick it up.”
I did not have an answer to that, because he was right.
“I have known that woman forty-one years,” he said. “She taught me to swim. She sat in a hospital corridor nine hours when I was eleven.”
“I’m not saying she—”
“You are. You are saying it with a photocopy.”
The room did the thing rooms do at that height, where you can hear the ventilation and nothing else.
“Then I’ll say it plainly,” I said. “I don’t know what she did. I know what she paid for, and I know when, and nobody in this room can tell me what the eighty-five thousand dollars bought.”
Ferro said, “That is not a legal standard.”
“I’m aware.”
Victor stood up and went to the window with his back to us, and I watched him take a very long time about something that a braver man would have done in September.
“No,” he said, to the glass.
“Victor.”
“Not no forever.” He turned round. “No today.”
“I am not opening my wife’s estate to attack my mother on a page a housekeeper photocopied. If a pathologist tells me something in February, I will listen. Until then, no.”
I put the sleeve back in my coat.
Ferro said the firm would cover my costs if I was subpoenaed in the criminal matter, which was decent of him and probably Victor’s instruction.
I said no to that as well, and not out of pride.
If they paid for my lawyer, Marina Kessler would ask me on the stand who paid for my lawyer.
I got a legal aid clinic on West 63rd instead. A woman named Simone Adeyemi took my file for nothing on the twenty-sixth.
On my way out of Erie, a paralegal came past me carrying an envelope she had just slit open, and I saw the return address on the flap because I read everything now.
Ashworth Grange & Bell, 111 West Madison.
It had arrived that morning. Nobody had opened it until four fifty.