Chapter 117: Remember Differently
The offer reached me secondhand, as most things about Grant did now.
Dale called at noon on Friday, and Dale does not call unless the building is on fire or someone is shopping for matches.
They got to him, he said. Garrett's lawyers. Yesterday. Two of them, good suits, a hotel conference room, like a job interview for a job nobody posts.
Dale knew the suits. Everyone in that town knew the suits.
He had drunk with the suits. He had lost to the suits.
What did they want? I asked, as if I did not know.
Him, Dale said. On the stand, their way. Bitter, believable, freshly shaved. The wounded ex-husband, saying the trust was your revenge with a letterhead.
And what did they offer?
A future, Dale said. That was the actual word. They said the fund has friends. Media friends. They said they could fix his story. Rehabilitate him. Make him whole in this town again.
They were careful, he added. Nothing written. Nothing you could hold. It is all tone, Nora. Tone and teeth.
They promised to un-ruin my ex-husband if he would help ruin me.
I sat down with that for a minute.
It was almost elegant. Two damaged men, one stage, the old story told by its most believable liar.
I had to admire the casting. That is what scared me.
What did he say? I asked.
He said he would think about it, Dale said. Then he hung up and called me, and we talked for an hour.
And I will tell you, Nora, I have known Grant for twenty years, and I have never heard him this deliberate.
Not defeated. Thinking. The dangerous kind.
I pictured him in his apartment kitchen, phone in hand, the old hunger and the new arithmetic at war.
Two years of honest work, and one phone call offering to buy the old him back.
The old him was cheaper. That is the thing about old selves. They discount.
Then what? I said.
Then he asked me a question I am still thinking about, Dale said. He asked whether doing it would be perjury, or just politics.
What did you tell him?
I told him it depends whether he planned to lie, Dale said. And he said, that is what scares me. They did not ask me to lie.
They asked me to remember differently.
Remember differently.
The whole case in two words. That was what Halden Crest's money bought. Not witnesses. Revisions.
He will take it, I said, and I hated that I said it.
Because some part of me still priced him at his worst.
Maybe, Dale said. Or maybe you finally taught him what reading is for.
Two years ago I would have bet the firm on him signing, he said.
He trailed off.
Now he reads things, he said.
We hung up, and I called Adaeze first, because clean cases are built out of phone logs too.
Write it all down, she said. Times, names, every word Dale used. Then do nothing.
Doing nothing is the hardest preparation there is.
So I did nothing. It took everything.
Then I carried it to Owen, who was barred from the case and buried in it anyway.
He listened with his lawyer face on, the one that files things while you are still speaking.
They will close him Monday, Owen said. Men like that always close on Mondays. More pressure, less weekend to think in.
He was wrong.
They called Saturday morning.
I know because at nine ten, Owen's phone lit up on our counter, and his eyebrows did the thing they do at surprises in depositions.
He answered. He listened for a moment.
Owen listened to the end.
Then he looked at me, and his surprise was unmistakable.
It is Grant, he said, his hand over the phone.
And he is not calling for himself.