BLIND JUSTICE

Richard Lancy, the firm’s senior partner, stuck his head through my office door and asked for a private word in deposition room number one.

Deposition rooms had no windows, no phone lines, no teleconferencing equipment. They were practically hermetically sealed. It did not occur to me until much later to wonder why the partners had chosen one.

By the time I got there, Lancy, Berger, and Williams were seated around the table. With broad smiles, they congratulated me once more on the Trust Mutual account and the recent O’Brian ruling. Then Lancy slid a thick file across the table.

“The Morales case,” he said. “You’ll handle it to the exclusion of everything else.”

It was the biggest case Trust Mutual had ever sent us, and the client wanted it handled with care. The Moraleses were a couple who had died tragically in a car accident. The beneficiaries of their life insurance policy were their twin children, both of them seven years old. The policy’s double-indemnity clause, applied to each parent, put the payout at twelve million dollars.

Trust Mutual did not want to pay it.

My job was to prove in court that the accident had been no accident, but a suicide, staged by the Moraleses to leave their children a small fortune. In other words, the client wanted me to prove fraud and keep two orphans from seeing a dime.

“Is there any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Moraleses?” I asked.

“Not that we know of, Xavier, except that they were almost broke before the accident,” Lancy said. “But this is a big one, and Trust Mutual wants you on it. We couldn’t agree more. After all, you’re the insurance loophole master.”

He lit one of his illegally imported Cuban cigars. The stench filled the sealed room, and I started coughing as he went on.

“Work your magic, kid. We’re counting on you. Just get it done.”

He pressed the file into my hands and rose, and the other partners rose with him. At the door, Lancy turned back, smiling.

“Win this one, and I can guarantee a bonus that will make your head spin. Heck, you may even decide to trade the Ferrari for a Lamborghini.” His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper. “One more thing. Keep this case under wraps. We don’t want the more senior attorneys getting jealous. And remember, Mickey is at your disposal.”

Then he shut the door and left me alone with the smoke.

I opened the file. By the time I reached the last page, the firm I had worshipped looked different.

To the historic city of Boston, our old and venerable firm was a palace of justice, a place where fortunes and lives were made and destroyed, and where power and egos soared. For the first time, I saw it for what it was: a brutal world of greed and immorality. Of course the big three had chosen a windowless room. A meeting that demanded this kind of treachery, stealing from helpless children and leaving two orphans indigent, could only happen behind a sealed door.

I felt sick.

There had been countless cases where I had stripped honest people of their sense of security under an insurance policy. But I had never done it without a line of disclaiming fine print or an honest loophole to point to.

The case itself was simple. The Moraleses had taken out a life insurance policy when they married, twenty years earlier, naming each other as beneficiaries. After the twins were born, they added the children, in the unlikely event that both parents died. The policy wasn’t new. The amount of coverage had never changed.

There was no reason to believe they had planned fraud, and I could find nothing within the four corners of the contract to keep those children from collecting. When I finished reviewing the file, the answer was the same: no evidence, no precedent, no court ruling, no statute, no congressional comment that could make a case against the claim.

The men who paid my extravagant salary knew exactly what was in that file. They expected me to do what they wouldn’t do themselves: pull the trigger on two innocent children. They had asked me to fabricate a story, to doctor the evidence, to spin a lie so convoluted that a court would lose its way.

And yet it was my sworn duty to represent my client zealously, whatever the moral cost. I held on to one belief: the law could be bent, but not broken.

My office door opened, and Roxana came in to ask whether I wanted the usual team for the Morales case.

“Roxy, we don’t need a team for this one,” I said. “We need the hit man.”

She understood immediately what I meant. She also knew I had never once used him. She looked at me, puzzled, while I mumbled, “Lancy suggested it.”

“Should I have Mickey called?”

I looked grim, and I nodded.

Mickey, the hit man, was an anonymous dirtbag, perhaps a private detective. No one knew. He was used only as a last resort. The firm had kept him on retainer for years for his uncanny ability to find dirt where none existed, even on the most pious of people. The rumor was that if Mickey had been alive in Christ’s day, he would have dug up enough to convict Jesus himself.