Secret Sins: (A Standalone) (2 page)

1994

Law offices are snake dens. I learned that at Stanford when I butted up against the old boy network for an internship at Whalen + Mardigian. But I didn’t bitch about the partners inviting the guys to a strip club and pulling interns from the group there, because I had the luxury of my own privilege. I felt bad for the women who didn’t have my smorgasbord of options, but see… that was a feeling. See Chap. 2 - No.5

So I clerked at Thoze & Jensen, a multinational firm with twelve offices in the States and an impressive presence overseas. Tokyo. Frankfurt. Dublin. Johannesburg. Hong Kong. But the firm was still as backward as a third-world country. An impenetrable fortress for anyone outside the Harvard/Princeton/Yale Testosterone Mafia, meaning—women. All women, with or without Ivy League degree. We could clerk and we could be associates, but we’d never partner.

We’d see about that.

They hired me as an associate right out of law school but I had to clerk until I passed the bar. Until then, I got a six-figure salary even though I didn’t need it.

How?

Easy. I brought them a client.

You thought it was going to be some scandal.

It could have been, but when choosing between sugar and vinegar, it’s best to remember vinegar is most effective as a preservative.

I was a clerk until I passed my bar, and despite what you may think, I couldn’t buy that. Nor did I want to. I rented a house in Culver City and covered it in sticky notes. From the table where I kept my keys, (
Strickland v. Washington. Test for ineffective assistance of counsel. Performance objectively unreasonable. Reasonable performance would have gotten a different result
) to the bathroom mirror (
Ford v. Wainwright. No death penalty for mentally deficient
). Even my car had a note stuck to the windshield (
TORTS – Tarasoff v. Regents. Responsibility of psychiatrist to warn potential victims of harm. Responsibility can be litigated with commensurate award for damages.
)

I didn’t have time for men or friends. No one understood me anyway. No one but my family, which was more than enough. I had six sisters and a brother. I was the oldest, and I’m still not telling you my age, or you’ll start doing math in your head instead of paying attention.

I was heading for a meeting with the senior partner on a copyright case I’d just been put on, rushing through the waiting room, which was a shortcut to the conference room, with an armload of depositions and pleadings, rattling hearsay exceptions in my head. There were ten categories, and I always forgot one. I walked across past the white leather couches with my folder, feet silent on the grey carpet.

Excited utterances.

Dying declarations.

Declarations against interest.

Present sense impression.

Present state of mind.

Doing good. Almost there…

Prior inconsistencies.

Public records.

Business records exception.

Ancient documents.

And….

And I beat my brain for the last one.

The man pushed himself off a couch as I was looking in my head for the tenth exception instead of out of my eyes for tall guys in suits.

I was midair, shouting, “Family records!” as if getting backed into reminded me that families couldn’t be trusted to keep a story straight. The folder I was delivering to the conference room went flying. A shoe fell off. I landed on my butt bone with my legs spread as far as the pencil skirt allowed.

“Oh, shit, I’m so sorry!”

I put my knees together and got back up on my elbows to get a look at the clod who had knocked into me.

He was a god. The kind of guy who could model but didn’t because it was too boring. Clean-shaven with brown hair pushed to one side. A bottom lip that had the same fullness as the top. Blue eyes. I had a metaphor for the color tooling around somewhere in the torts and procedures, but it all went blank when he put his hand down to help me up, and I saw a tattoo creep from under his cuff.

I looked at him again.

He looked at me.

“Cinnamon,” he said.

“You can call me Cin.” The words came automatically, as if coded in my myelin.

I took his hand, and he helped me up. My response might have sounded smooth and mature, as though I wasn’t thrown off at all, but it was the opposite. I’d memorized that answer sober, drunk, and dancing. I even said it in my head when someone mentioned the spice. Back when I was a stupid, reckless, wicked girl, it was a calling card.

I got up, not making eye contact with the stares coming from the entire waiting room.

“I’m fine,” I said, acting meek. When all the clients returned to staring at their magazines, I turned to the man who had knocked me down. “You going to stand there and let them trample my case file, Indiana McCaffrey?”

I smiled a little, and he smiled back. Wow. Had I been so unconscious when I met him that I’d thought he was only okay-looking? A close second to Stratford Gilliam? Seriously? How had he matured from twenty into this perfectly-chiseled version of a man?

I bent down to get my papers, and he put his hand on my shoulder.

“Let me be the first to get on my knees,” he said, crouching before I could respond.

I couldn’t believe he remembered me out of the thousands of girls who had thrown themselves at him. I knelt next to him and scooped up papers.

“I go by Drew now,” he whispered. “My middle name.”

“I go by Margie. My real name.”

“I remember.”

“I didn’t expect you to,” I said quietly.

He tilted his head just enough to see me, then he went back to picking up the files. I could see the tiny holes in his ears where he’d let his piercings close up.

“Who could forget you?” he said.

“Oh, please. Flattery only soils the intentions of the flatterer.”

“Where’s that from?” He tapped the stack on the carpet in an attempt to straighten them.

“My head.”

He handed me his stack, and I jammed it into the folder.

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

I swallowed hard. I didn’t have a problem with most of my misspent youth. I’d had fun and finished the job before I completely ruined my life. But I worked in an uptight law firm with a brand made of sedate blues and sharp angles. Former-rock-and-roll-groupie heiress wouldn’t look good on them.

“Miss Drazen?”

It was Ernest Thoze standing by the reception desk, senior partner and my boss ten times over. I could have bought and sold him, but that wasn’t the transaction I had in mind. I wanted to earn his respect.

I glanced at Drew then back at Thoze. Shit.

Thoze the Doze + Drew the Screw = I-Had-No-Rhyme-For-How-Much-I-Didn’t-Want-That.

Thoze tapped his watch.

“Six minutes,” I said. “I got it.”

Thoze nodded and paced off. I was always ten minutes early, and fucktard over here had just given me seven minutes of reorganizing to do.

Fucktard smiled like a rock star. I remembered why I couldn’t keep my eyes off of him or Strat.

“I knew you were meant for big things,” he said.

I turned to face him, getting close enough to hiss. “It’s been real fun reminiscing, but let’s cut it short. I have a meeting. I’m sorry about Strat. That was fucked up. I wish I could have been there for you, but I didn’t know until it was too late.”

I didn’t wait for a response, because seeing him made me
feel
things. Physical things. Emotions. Perceptions. He made me wonder if my hair looked all right or if my skirt showed enough/too much leg.

I paced off to my meeting, listing all the ways people could tell lies of perception.

Excited utterances.

Dying declarations.

Present sense impression.

He must be a client.

Present state of mind.

Prior inconsistencies.

Gotta be a hundred copyright claims after Strat split.

Declarations against interest.

Business record exception.

Just keep cool and don’t give anything away.

Public records.

Ancient documents.

And motherfucking family records.

Boom. I pushed open the glass door to the conference room with finality.

I reorganized all the packets and laid one at each of the six seats with thirty seconds to spare. I opened the blinds that covered the windows looking out into the hall, letting everyone know the room was ready.

Life wasn’t like books, not that I had time to read. But in books, there were fake coincidences and chances that changed fake lives. In real life, things happened because you made them that way. I’d never expected to see Indy again because I wasn’t looking for him, and when I did see him, I assumed he was a client.

When he walked in ahead of Thoze and four other lawyers, plopped his briefcase down at the head of the table and smiled at me, my heart sank.

Not a client.

1982 – Before the night of the Quaalude

It was the era of the deLorean with a car phone the size of a loaf of bread. The era of payphones and beepers. Reagan,
E.T.
,
Rocky III
, poisoned Tylenol, and Love Canal.

I lived all of it and none of it. I looked at the world through a peephole in the front door, outside to inside. Everything was tiny, far away, and in full focus.

My friend Lynn was the lens. She was a card-carrying groupie. She’d gone to Carlton Prep, same as me, and she was, unfortunately, dumb as a box of rocks. The product of two beautiful, stupid people who made a ton of money for being beautiful despite their stupidity.

She was entertaining as hell though. Connected. Older. Fully-sexed. I didn’t want to be her, but I knew I had to go through her stage in life. And she needed me because she had a habit of getting her ass in trouble, and I had a habit of creating ways to get her out of it.

The Breakwater Club used to be stuffy and traditional but had changed to a venue for hip Hollywood parties on weekends. They let you smoke anywhere outdoors, but not inside. Which was annoying, especially on March nights when it could get down to fifty degrees by the beach.

Lynn struck a wooden match, hands shaking. She leaned on a concrete planter and cupped her hands over the flame. The corner of her cigarette lit. She sucked hard to pull the cherry. Behind her, the ocean crashed and the sand darkened close to the waterline.

“So fucking annoying,” she said. “Like second-hand smoke ever killed anyone.”

The guy smoking next to her checked her out with a smart smile. She wore a tube top and a skirt so short that her underwear showed when the wind blew.

I took the lit cigarette from her and pressed the tip to my own, filling my lungs with delicious nicotine. Yoni and Fred were inside.

“Are they both in there?” I asked.

“Yeah. The two of them. The hot ones.”

That would be Strat and Indiana. Vocals and guitar, respectively.

And hot, for sure. Lynn and Yoni had been chasing them around for a week. Lynn had taught me so much about how to get through doors. How to ask person A for a favor because they knew person B.