The Mourning Sexton by Michael Baron Read Free Book Online Page B

He never felt more alive than inside a courtroom in the middle of a trial.
    He understood that side of himself. Not back then, but he'd had time to mull it over. He'd had time to realize that the drive that made him a success had also destroyed him. He now understood that as his duties as managing partner began cutting into his litigation time, he'd started looking for those highs elsewhere. But there was a crucial difference between life inside and outside the courtroom—a difference he failed to grasp at the time. The rush he'd sought within the controlled environment of a courtroom was far riskier to seek outside. During trial, that shot of adrenaline helped him carve up a hostile witness with icy precision. Outside the courtroom, it pushed him ever closer to the edge, from after-hours quickies with young paralegals on his office couch to forty-eight-hour gambling marathons in Vegas to his final night of infamy—a night that shifted into high gear as he staggered off the
Casino Queen
at two in the morning with six grand in his pocket and six shots of Jack Daniel's in his bloodstream. First stop was a strip club on the east side, where he had two more bourbons and a lap dance from a red-haired Cuban girl named Juanita. Standing outside the club, the world around him slightly off kilter, he'd flagged a cab and told the driver to cruise the streets of East St. Louis for some action. The sequence of events got fuzzy from that point until he awoke later that day. It wasn't the first time events had gotten fuzzy, but it's one thing to awaken in a canopied bed in a suite at the Bellagio with the sated glow of a big night at the craps table topped by a session with an A-list call girl. It's another to awaken facedown in your own vomit on the frayed carpet of a hot-sheets motel room while a streetwalker named LaTavia is on her back on the bed with a crack pipe and drug paraphernalia scattered on the mattress, her naked body already in the early stage of rigor mortis.
    The life he'd constructed since his release from prison was designed to steer him clear of anything that might resurrect the old David Hirsch.
    Hirsch pressed his forehead against the icy window. He could feel the change within him. Nothing dramatic, of course. He wasn't about to rise from the basement laboratory table, yank off the electrical cords, lurch through the forest toward the sleeping villagers. But he could feel a change nevertheless.
    After a moment, he turned away from the darkness.
    As he undressed for bed, he forced himself to forget about Jack Bellows and the lawsuit and to focus instead on tomorrow's details. He'd already made the necessary calls to confirm the morning
minyan
. He'd already skimmed through the client files in preparation for the creditors committee meetings that started at ten A . M .
    He turned on the reading light and lifted
The Guermantes Way
off the nightstand. For the past few months, he'd been reading Marcel Proust's masterwork. He opened the book, glad to return to the fashionable salon of the Guermantes and leave, at least for the night, the wage-earner plans and wrongful death action and general wreckage of his life. But even as he rejoined his narrator among the snobs and the wits and the hypocrites and the phonies of Parisian society at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, he found himself remembering similar evenings at his own country club, at a time almost as distant and a place almost as nasty as the salon of the Guermantes.

CHAPTER 6

    T he other lawyers arrived without the Jack the Ripper fanfare.
    Counsel for the air-bag manufacturer entered silently. No press release and no hype. Just a one-sentence entry of appearance stating: “Now come Bruce A. Conroy and Elizabeth Ann Purcell of the law firm of Egger & Thomas and hereby enter their appearance as counsel for Defendant OLM, Inc.” Hirsch received his copy of the court filing in the next day's mail. He'd heard of Egger & Thomas. It was an insurance defense firm that