Cheater's Game, Page 3

  “How’s that different from a rich defendant hiring a top lawyer and posting bail while a poor guy stays in jail and gets the public defender?”

  “Point taken.” Kip had been a star on the Biscayne-Tuttle debate team and seldom lost an argument with anyone, including me.

  “Somehow,” I said, “I thought higher education should be a meritocracy, even when so much of society is not.”

  “Wake up, Jake! Survival of the fittest. Capitalism at work. And it does work. Max pays me very well, as my Tesla ought to prove.”

  “I’ve never heard you talk about money and material things like this, Kip. It’s so . . .”

  “Adult?”

  “Avaricious.”

  He regarded me quizzically. “We’ve talked about Q.E.D. before. Don’t you remember?”

  “Nope.”

  “I worked for Max Ringle as a freelancer before I went to Philly, then I started full-time when I came home.”

  “Went to Philly.” “Came home.” Sounds so much better than getting his ass kicked out of college.

  “My business cards say ‘Senior Vice President, Standardized Testing.’”

  “Impressive. Let’s do lunch. Have your girl call my girl.”

  He rolled his eyes. “When I got back to Miami, do you remember my saying how I was upgrading my clients and making a lot more cheddar?”

  “Can’t say that I do.”

  “Max Ringle was the first guy to call me. He said I could make a ton of money with him and I didn’t need a college degree. Bill Gates dropped out of college. So did Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.”

  “Don’t forget Jeffrey Epstein and Ted Bundy.”

  “I knew you’d say something like that.”

  “I’m just surprised that your boss peddles such bullshit. And, frankly, this is all news to me.”

  He paused long enough to measure his words. The P.A. speakers informed us that Dr. Kornspan’s presence was requested in the maternity ward.

  “I’m worried about you, Jake.”

  “Right back at you.”

  “I bet you wish you’d never played football.”

  “No, but I wish I hadn’t blocked that punt with my face mask.” That was true, given my grade-three concussion to go along with two minutes of unconsciousness. True, too, that organized football has become organized brain damage.

  “You met Jimmy Tiger at the house a couple years ago,” Kip said. “Okay, so maybe you forgot him. But I told you about working with Max Ringle. Do you remember my asking your opinion about the Tesla before I bought it?”

  I pointed a finger at him, as if aiming a dagger. “I’d remember the Tesla if we’d talked about it, and I don’t.”

  “You better take some memory tests the next time you’re at the concussion center.”

  “I don’t have drain bamage,” I said, repeating an old joke between the two of us.

  Sure, I’ve been forgetful. So are lots of people my age. In conversations, the name of an actor or a movie or an old teammate slips away. I used to watch Jeopardy with Kip when he was a little kid. The game show places a premium not just on knowledge, but on how quickly you can retrieve that knowledge. Back in the day, my brain synapses fired at Usain Bolt speed. Now, the answer—What is Liechtenstein?—may come to me next Tuesday.

  I can’t say whether my memory lapses are the result of brain disease or the ailment we call life. Either way, I’m not as sharp. Still, there are some things I’m sure I would remember, and I had the distinct impression that Kip was gaming me.

  “What about those trips to Grand Cayman?” I asked. “Did you tell me about them?”

  “I’m a grown man. I don’t need you to baby-sit me.”

  Grown man sounded so discordant.

  I looked him dead on. “Did you get your probation officer’s permission to leave the country?”

  “In the practice of law, do you ever break the rules?”

  “Only the little ones.”

  “When you were in private practice, you’d get guilty people off, but you’re lecturing me about my legal responsibilities.”

  “I didn’t get anybody off, Kip. I just forced the state to prove its case.”

  He laughed. “What a rationalization. And I mean the psychological defense mechanism of making excuses. Not the mathematical process of removing the square root from the denominator of a fraction.”

  “You win, Kip. You’re the smartest guy in the room, and likely the smartest guy in any penitentiary.”

  “Relax, the probation department loves me. I made restitution ahead of schedule.”

  “A hundred thirty thousand? How?”

  “I got an advance from Max.”

  “So, you owe your boss. Is he charging you vig?”

  Kip laughed and buried his face in both hands. “Vig?” he said with utter delight. “You’ve been representing lowlifes too long, Jake. I’m practically Max’s partner. We’re businessmen.”

  This businessman still seemed like a naive waif to me.

  “Sometimes, Kippers,” I said, “you exhaust me.”

  We were both quiet a moment. If the battle had been with bare knuckles instead of words, this is where we would be stuffing cotton up our bloody noses. I listened to the squeak of rubber soles on the tile floor outside the room. On the P.A. system, a Dr. Emery was required in the ICU. Outside the window, the sun was shining, and a breeze ruffled the fronds on a trio of queen palms.

  “I’m worried about you, Kip. Or did I already say that? ’Cause I’m such a senile old bastard, maybe I forgot.”

  “I’m good, Jake. Really.”

  We had come to an impasse. He’d kept secrets from me, and I’d called him on it. He felt I was invading his personhood, and there was no way to convince him my good intentions outweighed his need for autonomy. So I gave up . . . for now.

  I told Kip to call me whenever he was ready to be discharged. I’d pick him up. He said he would, and I didn’t know whether to believe that, either.

  You raise your child the best you can. You send the child into the world, like launching a toy sailboat in a pond. Except the world is not a placid pond. More often, it is a raging sea, and life a perfect storm of the unexpected crashing head-on into the unbearable. There is no way to prepare the child for such a world because your own personal crises, traumas, and failures are just that, your own. Your child, as you will belatedly learn, is not you.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Money and Secrets and Lies

  Melissa Gold . . .

  Melissa watched the man she loved use a spatula to flip snapper filets on the grill. She could see the weight of the troubles on his handsome, craggy face. He lived for Kip. She knew that if his nephew was hurting, Jake felt twice the pain.

  “Maybe I should have stayed at the hospital overnight,” he said.

  “If you slept in a chair, your back would go into spasms,” she said.

  “I just didn’t like the way it ended today. It’s as if he’s rejected me in favor of his new boss. I just keep wondering how I let him drift away.”

  They were in the backyard of their coral rock house on Kumquat Avenue in Coconut Grove. It was where Jake—with ample help from Granny Lassiter—had raised Kip.

  Jake wore running shorts and a Penn State wrestling T-shirt. He hadn’t been a wrestler, but he made a point of celebrating his alma mater’s numerous national championships. Melissa was barefoot and wearing a sleeveless, flowing cotton dress with a bright print design and a deep V-neck and halter straps. The night was warm and muggy, which in Miami was redundant.

  “When the child becomes an adult,” she said, “there’s a natural separation process from the parents. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong.”

  Jake spooned a mixture of olive oil, garlic, lime juice, and crushed ginger over the snapper filets, and a fragrant smoke whooshed up from the white-hot charcoal. “I get that. He needs to create distance between us to feel grown up.”

  “To be grown up.”

&n
bsp; “Okay. I just worry that he’s gotten too attached to this Doc Ringle, a guy I don’t know but already hate.”

  This was a delicate subject for Melissa. Like Jake, she had never been married. Unlike Jake, she had never raised a child. He welcomed her advice, but she didn’t feel fully competent in giving it.

  “I tried to mark a path for Kip,” Jake said, “without being a snowplow parent. You know, clearing out all the obstacles.”

  “You tried to prepare Kip for the road, not prepare the road for Kip.”

  “Exactly. But maybe I didn’t do enough. Maybe I threw him into a snowdrift and said, ‘Dig yourself out, kiddo.’”

  The horn of the Metrorail train blared from the direction of South Dixie Highway. “That’s not what you did, Jake. You’re a man of integrity with a strong work ethic. You tried to teach him by example.”

  “And look what happened. Expelled from college and now this. I don’t even know what he’s doing, except it involves money and secrets and lies. It’s almost as if Kip wants to flaunt how different he is from me.”

  She didn’t know exactly what had happened at Penn. Out of embarrassment, Kip had asked Jake not to go into details. He honored that commitment, and she honored the private relationship between the two of them. Then, as if Jake had been reading her mind, he said, “I should never have promised Kip confidentiality.”

  “It’s your lawyer-client training. You just turned it into the uncle-nephew privilege.”

  “Yeah, but the fiancé-fiancée relationship should trump that. We can’t have secrets from each other. I’m going to ask Kip to release me from the promise.”

  “Whatever you two decide is fine with me.”

  He cocked his head and looked at her without saying a word.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’re the best, Mel. You don’t Wisconsin me.”

  “Hah, you mean badger. I know all about the Big 10.”

  Ten minutes later, they were inside the house at the kitchen table. In July, only alligators in nearby canals and the neighborhood peacocks dined al fresco, sometimes the former on the latter. Jake spooned a salsa of mango, pineapple, and papaya over the snapper, and Melissa served a green salad.

  “Oh, shit,” Jake groaned, frowning. “I’m a lousy mate, a horrible fiancé.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “All I’m doing is talking about my problems and Kip’s problems. I’ve totally neglected you. I’m sorry.”

  She smiled and took a bite of the snapper, tangy with the tropical salsa. At least he recognized what he was doing. Acknowledged it. Apologized for it.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I knew you’d get around to me.”

  “So how the hell was your day? What’s new in the world of neurons and synapses?”

  Now was the time, she supposed. A decision had to be made. A joint decision. Her future was their future. The conversation would be about marriage and career, or in a word, life. Why, she wondered, was she nervous about it? Here was the man who returned her love as no one else ever had.

  “Do you remember I told you we applied for a grant from N.I.H. to expand our clinical trials?”

  “Sure, I do. Are you saying you got it? They’re gonna fund you?”

  “More than that. They want to take our program in-house and expand it. The C.T.E. research, the diagnostics, the clinical trials of new drugs. And get this, with a budget eight times what we requested.”

  “Wow! Fabulous. I’m so proud of you.” His look was so wide-eyed with pleasure that it made her smile right back at him.

  “They’re already doing brain injury research in their institute for neurological disorders,” she said. “We’d become a new division as soon as Congress funds it.”

  “This is amazing. We should celebrate. Champagne? Key lime pie? Both?”

  He was so excited his face resembled that of a little boy, she thought. She’d seen pictures of him at twelve years old, holding up a fish he’d caught with a bamboo pole. Same thing now. Only his excitement was for her.

  Before she moved to Miami to be with Jake and run the University of Miami Concussion Project, Melissa directed an early study of deceased football players in which 20 of 24 autopsies were positive for the disease. Then she pioneered neuroimaging of the brains of living ex-players—Jake included—in an effort at early detection.

  “It’s all you, Mel,” he kept going. “You’re gonna bust this disease wide open and cure it.”

  “Maybe, with the N.I.H. staff and time and money and some luck. Like football, there’s a team involved.”

  He rooted around in the refrigerator, found a bottle of Dom Pérignon in the back. “Don’t be so modest. They’re going to name it the Gold Vaccine. You’re gonna get the Nobel Prize, and I’ll put on a tux, and we’ll get a free trip to Sweden. Not only that, tonight we’re gonna have great sex. Off-the-charts sex!”

  She didn’t smile at that, and he said, “What? Did I say something wrong?”

  She couldn’t delay any longer. “I’m a finalist to be executive director of the program.”

  “Of course you are. And you’ll get it. So, let’s celebrate and . . . oh.” A frown crossed his face like a storm cloud scudding across the sun. “The job isn’t in Miami, is it?”

  “Bethesda, Maryland. So, assuming I get the position, we need to talk about what to do and come to a joint decision.”

  “Okay. Well. Let me see. I need to process this.” Little vertical lines scrunched on his forehead as he tore the foil off the top of the champagne bottle and removed the little wire cage. “Okay, I’ve got it.”

  “That wasn’t much processing.”

  “It’s easy. If they make the offer, you can’t turn it down. This is your life’s work.”

  “Life’s work. But not my life. My personal life is just as important, more important, really. You’re more important, Jake. They can always get someone else to direct the program. I can do discrete pieces of the research like I’ve always done.”

  “They want you! They think you’re the best person in the country, maybe the world.”

  She tried not to show just how irritated she was with him. When she had said, ‘You’re more important, Jake,’ that was his cue. How did he miss it? He was supposed to respond in kind and say how much she meant to him. But he didn’t. Meaning what? Did he want her to be a thousand miles away? Was this the easy way out for a man who really didn’t want to be married? Who had never been married.

  She crossed her arms and leveled her gaze at the man she loved. “Jake Lassiter, tell me whether you want to marry me and intend to marry me.”

  “Yes and yes.”

  “And how do you propose we do this with me so far away?”

  “Didn’t I say it? Wasn’t I clear?”

  “No and no. The last time we discussed it, you said you didn’t want to be a burden to me.”

  “I think I said I didn’t want you to be a young widow or spend the best years of your life caring for me as I drool into my oatmeal.”

  “Why? Do you think there any guarantees? Do you think young, healthy people don’t face obstacles? And it’s my choice whether I take on the risks of your future health.”

  “And I just said ‘yes’ and ‘yes.’”

  He twisted the champagne bottle slowly while holding the cork motionless. “Obviously, I’m moving to Bethesda with you. I want to spend my life with you. Oh, my offer of great sex tonight still stands.”

  She exhaled a long, happy sigh. She knew this would be a significant disruption to his life. Except for four years away at college—okay, five years—Jake had always lived in South Florida. That he so readily chose to be with her, despite the complications, reminded her why she fell in love with him.

  “Great, you big blockhead. Do we have to be finished in time for SportsCenter?”

  “No way, Doc. Our bed is SportsCenter.”

  Pop, went the champagne cork.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Seductive Law
yer and the Senile Judge

  “Is it my fault I’m irresistible to women?” Bert Kincaid asked.

  I stayed quiet. I’ve practiced law long enough to know when to give a witness enough rope to hog-tie, if not hang, himself.

  “Is it a crime to be a romantic?” he continued. “To wonder wistfully if this is the woman of my dreams, my one and only?”

  If we were on Broadway, this is where Kincaid would have broken into song. But we were in the chambers of Judge Erwin Gridley in the mildewed old limestone monstrosity known as the Miami-Dade Courthouse.

  It was the morning after Kip’s accident. At 8 a.m., I had called Gloria Sanchez, who told me Kip was doing well and would be released in the afternoon. I felt myself exhale a long breath of relief. Gloria would remind Kip to call me when he was ready to leave. Meanwhile, in court, I had the unhappy duty of trying to punch the ticket of a fellow lawyer. At Melissa's suggestion, I had given up my stressful private practice for the nine-to-five job of a Florida Bar prosecutor.

  “Is it a crime to woo a woman, or perhaps a few, simply because there is an ‘Esquire’ after my name?” Kincaid asked.

  “Is he charged with a crime, Jake?” A confused Judge Gridley peered at me, fish-eyed, through his trifocals.

  “No, Your Honor. This is a license revocation proceeding, and Mr. Kincaid is representing himself.”

  “That’s what I thought!” The judge signaled a “T” with both hands. “Time out, ya’ll. Don’t be jumping offsides, Mr. Kincaid, and keep your feet inbounds.”

  The mishmash of football jargon stemmed from Judge Gridley’s past as a college football official. For several decades, he spent weekdays in court, dispensing erroneous rulings, and Saturdays on the field, missing even the most egregious holding calls. Now semi-retired, he was sitting as a senior judge on Florida Bar disciplinary cases. Conveniently, judges were called “referees” in Bar proceedings. Doubtless, Judge Gridley took the assignment thinking he’d be wearing a striped shirt and tooting a whistle.