Glass House (9 page)

In the winter, the oppressive heat was
replaced by a chill, the fans by a space heater or two, the
numerous windows now closed but frosty at the bottoms. No cicadas,
of course, but the sirens still came like clockwork, building and
wailing and fading.

Megan listened to the fan’s little noises. A
picture of Ben was on the window sill, and she picked it up. It was
the same as the one in her office, the photo that Jeremy Waldoch
stuck his thumb on.

She studied the image and thought they
looked naïve. She and Ben, with South Carolina’s morning sun and a
boat in the background, looked like wet-behind-the-ears-kids who’d
dressed up to play married for the day. For a few years, maybe.

Then someone decided to fly a plane when
they probably shouldn’t have.

Megan had done her time in the county
attorney’s office. She got her trial experience and added a line to
her résumé, then she’d gotten out, getting married and making her
way a little in civil practice. Some more money, a future that was
a bit more polished, and it was coming together.

That’s when Ben got on the plane.

He was her boyfriend in high school first,
followed by a period in college when they went different ways and
eventually didn’t speak. But the relationship rekindled when she
returned for a summer, and he ended up supporting her through law
school. About the time of her jump to the firm, they put off a
wedding for six months and the possibility of kids for a couple
years. She’d earn some extra cash, they’d pad their savings account
for the first time ever, and he could take a class or two if he
wanted. Work toward an MBA he always talked about getting.

She started her new job, the half year
passed, and the wedding and South Carolina honeymoon followed. They
settled into the routine they’d planned, with a few more months
going by as Ben studied and worked. Another few, and he buried his
grandmother. A year, then his mother.

Even with the bumps, it was his time to work
on a career for a while, and he did it full out. Just as the pilot
shouldn’t have flown that day, Benjamin Davis shouldn’t have gotten
on the plane. He should have taken his time and driven. It was only
an hour to Kansas City, and he should have just hopped in a rental
instead of catching the commuter on his connection from
Chicago.

The storm itself wasn’t that bad. The wind
was manageable and the visibility acceptable. Air traffic control
tracked the plane all the way in from KCI, and no one had the
slightest idea there was any real problem until the plane failed to
pull up at the gate.

They found it at the end of the runway. The
pilot had landed short. The gear caught the runway’s lip, and the
plane pitched forward. It snapped in half.

Four other people walked away with bruises
and cuts, but Ben died. Megan never learned exactly what caused it.
The coroner met with her to tell her but she wouldn’t let him, and
the copy of the death certificate she was given was still in a
sealed envelope, tucked away in the attic where Ben once had smiled
his soft smile as he handed her that Sears catalog.

She didn’t cry. Not anymore. For whatever it
was worth, the time in therapy, along with the time away from here,
was enough for her to have gotten past tearing up every time she
saw Ben’s picture. She’d cried herself dry.

They’d never gotten to the bathroom with a
paintbrush, and the room was still key lime. Heavy porcelain
fixtures and chrome accents. A shining medicine cabinet mounted
above the tiny two-handle tap and sink. And a pedestal tub. A
rubber tube was slipped onto the tub’s spigot in case you wanted to
get water onto your head. Because there wasn’t a shower upstairs.
If you wanted that, you had to go to the basement.

The light switch was pushbutton. One button
for off, another one above it for on. Between the switches, a
dime-sized orange bulb glowed so she could find the buttons at
night.

She clicked the bathroom light on and stared
into the mirror, not liking what she saw. When she was in therapy,
the psychiatrist wrote a prescription for Zoloft. The dosage was
calculated out with doctor-like regularity, the refills simply
showing up at the times when Megan was supposed to be out of
pills.

She never was. She took them for a time that
was long enough for her to realize she handled being borderline
depressed better than she handled dizziness and tremors. So she
stopped. The prescription receipts were collected somewhere in the
house, she wasn’t sure where, and the medicine cabinet still held
three bottles. She checked again, opening the cabinet door and
peering in. There they were, one of them almost expired but
all of them full.

Back in the kitchen, Megan retrieved a
bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue from a cabinet and cracked its neck
label. She poured two fingers into a plastic cup, drank one of them
away, and filled it again.

She’d be up for three or four more hours,
and she knew from her own history that she probably wouldn’t finish
the Scotch in that time. Even if she did, there was no one around
to point fingers but herself, and she didn’t think having an
occasional shot of expensive booze was nearly as offensive, or as
weak, as popping a pill that put a cloud in your head.

Megan opened her briefcase and retrieved a
half-read deposition transcript. She stacked it on the box she’d
brought in and retreated to the front porch.

Enough light spilled from the living room
windows that she could read out there, and if she needed it,
another bulb hung from the porch ceiling. But she just sat for a
moment, the house windows like glass eyes behind her, looking out
toward the street and the black walnut trees at the edges of the
lawn.

The traffic was heavy. The cars droned by,
their tires whining on the roadway, their lights blurring red away
from her and white toward her.

Two blocks down, she could see a police car
at the side of the road in front of the ancient elementary school
across the street. The officer had pulled someone over. She could
see him moving from the stopped car back to his cruiser, his shape
outlined in his own headlights and the spinning red and blue from
his roof.

Megan watched for a moment, waiting for him
to run the plate, the driver’s license, the insurance. Make sure he
hadn’t happened to pull another Ted Bundy over on West Sixth Street
in Lawrence.

He appeared again, leaning into the driver’s
window. Pleasantries, hopefully. Three or four seconds, then he
headed back.

She lost him in the thick silhouettes of the
trees. She saw him walk into the lights of his car but then
disappear behind the black walnut at the corner of her lot.

That one was planted when Ben was born.
She’d heard the story a hundred times. There was a call from the
hospital, it was a boy, and Ben’s grandfather – always no more
than a second fiddle in the house – went out right away and
bought a tree for the corner. Planted it that day, watered it every
other till he was gone.

It was thirty-eight now, big and thick
enough to block part of the street from her view.

Tapping a finger on the unopened transcript
on her lap, the Johnnie Walker in her other hand, Megan kept
thinking a few things, in a rotation that would have been alarming
if she hadn’t been too consumed by her work, and already slightly
tipsy by the booze, to notice it.

A week for a deposition. A month for a
trial. Thirty-eight years for that tree.

It hardly seemed fair.

Marketing

Deposition Preparation

These are the ground rules for a deposition.
Almost invariably, they are stated up front, as though they’re
sacred, as much a mandated part of the attorney’s introduction as
his or her name. And they rarely vary.

You answer out loud. You do not shake your
head when you mean to say no, and you do not nod your head when you
mean to say yes. The court reporter will be taking your testimony
down by transcription, and it’s hard to catch nods and shakes and
show what they may have meant to somebody who’s reading the words
later.

You tell the truth. The oath you’re given is
the same as the oath you get in a courtroom. It carries the same
obligations. It carries the same penalties if you don’t tell the
truth.

If you don’t understand a question, you
should ask to have it repeated or rephrased. You have a right to
understand the questions you’re being asked. But if you don’t ask
to have a question repeated or rephrased, you’ll be held to have
understood the question as asked.

Those are the ground rules.

“You understand them?” Megan said.

She sat on one side of the table, Jeremy
Waldoch on the other. She had a stack of paper at her elbow –
documents produced in the case, some excerpts of depositions, what
have you. They were facedown so Waldoch couldn’t see what would be
coming and work to anticipate questions she might ask.

The conference room they were in was small,
and the table that separated them was designed to seat no more than
six people. Megan had arranged to have the air conditioning shut
off in the room. It wasn’t hot, but the closed-off space was
already stuffy, and it was going to get worse.

With a couple of people in a small room for
two or three hours, it starts to feel like too much time in the
lockers at the local gym. Skin gets clammy, temples and armpits a
little damp, clothes a bit too clingy. With six, it gets
overwhelming.

Megan wanted Waldoch uncomfortable.
Depositions were stressful enough that discomfort was virtually
unavoidable, but some attorneys went further than that – they
intentionally set up in small rooms, they called in videographers
with hot lights that were strung above the witness, they made sure
that the people at the table were as close to each other as
possible. All that, in an effort to make a witness want to spill
everything and get it done with.

“I understand the rules,” Waldoch
answered.

“Now understand mine.”

“We’ve been over that before.” And they had.
Waldoch was deposed in the first case Megan handled for him. She
went on anyway.

“You listen to the question, Jeremy,” she
said. “You listen to
each
question, and you listen to it
carefully. You wait before you answer, at least two or three
seconds. That’ll give you time –”

“Time to form my answer and time for you to
object, yes,” Waldoch interrupted in his precise manner.

“My way,” Megan responded. “You agreed to do
it the way I say, and if I want to go through this again to remind
you how to act in that room, we’ll do that.”

Waldoch stared back at her, silent. The look
was either perturbed or amused, it was impossible to tell which.
She watched as the gaze first studied and then drifted away from
her, over to the window. The blinds were slatted open, and he could
look out over the town, where the world was spring-sunny and not at
all stuffy.

“Your way,” he said.

“I get the chance to object,” she continued.
“You take a moment to listen to the question and figure it out, and
I speak up if I want to. If I think you need a clue in the answer,
I may just offer one in my objection, so listen to that, too. If
you hear an objection from me that points out you’ve already
answered a question, you damn well better chime in that you think
you’ve already answered that question. You hear me say a question
is vague and the witness should answer only if he understands it
and knows what the attorney wants, you better ask for a rephrase.
Clear enough?”

“Your way,” Waldoch repeated.

“And after you answer the question as it’s
stated, you shut up. You give your answer, and you don’t give
anything else. You do
not
get into a chat with an opposing
attorney in a deposition.”

“Of course not.” Waldoch said it like the
statement was self-apparent.

“I’m serious about that,” Megan warned. She
was waiting for her client to show some sign that he registered the
importance of what she was telling him. Waiting even for him to
look away from the window. She couldn’t tell if he was
concentrating or not, and she didn’t like not knowing.

“You can’t screw around,” she said. “Not
with me, and not with Paul McCallum against you in this case. He
will fuck you over in a deposition.”

That word brought his attention back to
her.

“Natalie handled him fine,” Waldoch said.
“I’m more than sure you will, too.”

“She may have handled him fine, all right.
But you still fired her.”

Waldoch didn’t respond. He rolled his chair
back and stood. He stepped to the window and stayed there for a
moment, studying the trees and traffic, the buildings, the
air –
something
 out there – before he closed
the shade. He twisted the clear plastic rod at the side until the
slats tightened and blocked the view.

Sitting back down, he smoothed the legs of
his perfect suit. He pulled a little at the lapels on the jacket,
tightening it against his broad shoulders. He crossed his hands in
his lap. And he looked again at Megan.

“I’m all ears,” he said.

They worked through questions for an hour
after that. Following the typical trend of real depositions, the
dry run she was putting him through was tedious at first –
attorneys tend toward banal topics at the beginning. Addresses and
families, education and employment histories. An attorney wants a
witness to get used to simply talking, so the witness keeps doing
it later on, when the questions really count.

That stretch was meaningless, and throughout
it they covered little that had any substance. She ran through the
questions and Waldoch answered them flatly. She let him stray on
occasion, watching and listening as he meandered in two or three
answers. Then she broke from the artificiality of the
pseudo-deposition to offer up alternative ways of answering.