Chapter 58: Redemption

Monday, Kelly told me that she was going with me to the lawyer’s office, and the way she said it indicated I had better not argue. I still wasn’t sure what Brockport could do for me that Stillwell couldn’t. Everything I had heard from the guys the other day showed that no matter how I got out of this, the County Attorney and the County Council would still demand they get rid of a killer, and I was still probationary.

“Grim, just listen to what he has to say. Daddy says the guy is a magician. Maybe that’s what you need right now.”

“Maybe. It sounds like it, anyway. I have the eerie feeling I’m inside a body bag that is about to be zipped up,” I told her.

Kelly insisted her schedule was flexible enough to come with me and I was glad to have Kelly along. The address was for the Symphony Tower on Peachtree in Midtown. We left after lunch and made sure to get there early, so we didn’t miss the meeting. If they were trying to impress people, they did a good job of it. The Symphony Tower was brand new, forty-one stories of glass. It was kind of an odd design, at least to me, since the first three floors were a retail shopping center, then you had eleven floors of parking between the mall and the office space. Very fancy. We parked in the parking garage and walked around the shopping floors below for a bit before going upstairs.

King&Spalding took up about two-thirds of the building. What in the world could that many lawyers be doing? I probably didn’t want to know. We made our way to the lobby and at the reception desk were pointed to some benches over at the side of the lobby. Somebody would retrieve us. Kelly and I just shrugged and headed to one of the benches. About two minutes later a young man just a year or two older than I was came towards us. “Officer Reaper?”

I stood up. “That’s me. Mister Brockport?”

He smiled. “No, Mister Brockport sent me to get you. Miss O’Connor?” he asked, looking at Kelly.

“Call me Kelly.”

“Kelly. I was asked to make sure to bring you along if you were here. If you and Officer Reaper...”

“Call me Grim,” I said. “Everybody does.”

He eyed me curiously. “The Grim Reaper? Indeed! Well, Grim, Kelly, if you would please follow me, I’ll take you upstairs.” He led us to a bank of elevators, and from there we went to just about the top of the place. I whistled when we were led into a conference room with floor-to-ceiling windows; you could see the entire Atlanta skyline.

I heard a throat being cleared and I turned around, my face red, to find several people seated at a conference table. Our guide said, “Miss O’Connor, Officer Reaper, Anderson Brockport.”

A tall and distinguished looking man in a very, very nice suit came around the conference table. “Thank you, Jenson.”

“Call me when you need me, sir.” Jenson left.

Brockport looked to be about my father’s age, though a little more fit and with a fair bit more hair. Dad was getting pretty thin up on top. Brockport’s hair was wavy and had just the right amount of gray at the temples. The guy defined the word elegance. “Thank you for coming.” He reached out and shook our hands. “Miss O’Connor, I’ve known your father for twenty years or more. I’m glad to finally meet you. You are as lovely as he always bragged.”

Kelly blushed. “Thank you.”

“And Officer Reaper, if you are half the man Seamus claims you are, it will be a privilege to assist you.”

I glanced at Kelly and smiled. “I must have missed that conversation,” I commented to her. I turned back to Brockport. “Most of Mister O’Connor’s conversations with me start with Sassenach barbarian and go downhill from there.”

“Grim!” protested Kelly.

Brockport laughed. “Please have a seat. You already know John Stillwell.” I introduced Stillwell to Kelly, and they shook hands. “And this is Marcy Cavenaugh, of Cavenaugh Steele.” Marcy smiled and reached out to shake hands. She was younger, in her thirties, and very well-dressed. I had worn khakis and a sport coat and was feeling decidedly down-scale.

Kelly and I sat down, and I was surprised when Brockport said, “Now, before we get started, might I trouble you for a dollar?”

“A dollar?”

“Humor me.”

“Okay,” I answered, mystified. I pulled out my wallet and pulled out a dollar and passed it over.

He stuffed it in his pocket. “Thank you. We’ll get you a receipt later. This makes you my client.”

My eyes popped open at that. “You’re my lawyer? I thought Mister Stillwell was my lawyer?” I looked at my union lawyer. “Did I just fire you or something?”

Stillwell smiled. “No, we’re good. This could be interesting.”

Brockport turned to Kelly. “You, too.” Kelly shrugged and forked over a dollar, also. He said, “This just makes everything nice and legal - and privileged. I’ll explain that in a minute.”

“Are you my lawyer, too?” I asked Marcy.

She smiled and shook her head. “No, I’m your publicist. However, since there is no publicist-client privilege - pity - I will be hired through King&Spalding. I’ve worked with Anderson before.”

“My publicist?” I stared at the others, including Kelly. “I’m just a dumbass cop, so somebody better tell me how I am paying for all this!”

Anderson laughed at this. “Officer Reaper, that is something you need to take up with Seamus O’Connor. As he explained it to me, if you lose your job over this, he’s afraid you’ll do something silly, like delay your pending wedding to his daughter. He told me that you’re his best chance at getting his daughter out of his hair.”

“WHAT?” squawked Kelly.

“I’m sure that there will be a quid pro quo from Seamus. You’ve heard of naming rights for stadiums? Maybe something along those lines,” he laughed, glancing at Kelly.

“I swear to Christ I am going to kill him!” my fiancée screamed quietly.

I was biting my lip fiercely to keep from laughing at Kelly. I had never realized Seamus O’Connor had such a refined sense of humor.

“However, that’s for the future. I’ve already talked with John about the status of your case. Do you have anything new?” continued Anderson.

“I’m not sure. Some of the guys came over to the apartment yesterday. The word around the station is that the shooting investigation is almost finished and that I’m going to be cleared.” I outlined what Tim, Brad, and Creighton had told us yesterday.

After I finished, Brockport looked at Stillwell, who said, “That’s basically what I’ve heard. The word I got is that the shooting report will be issued either late tomorrow or sometime Wednesday.”

Marcy spoke up. “Wednesday would be better. It gives me another twenty-four hours to build our response.”

“Our response?”

“Officer Reaper...”

“Hey, everybody, call me Grim,” I said.

She looked at me curiously. “Ummm, no. The Grim Reaper ... it might be very humorous as a nickname in the Army or on the police force, but it’s too negative for what we’re looking for. We are looking for something more professional. It needs to be Officer Reaper in all our communications,” she told the others. They just nodded. “Graham, until we get you through this, you are Graham Reaper, understand?”

I nodded and said, “Okay.”

“Anyway, what we need to do is to quickly build up your reputation in the eyes of the people who will be determining your future. We have two avenues to do this. First is to accent your positives, your local history, your military service, your defending the good people of Matucket from the scourge of drugs and illegal immigrant gangsters.” I grimaced a touch at that, remembering the guys in the service I knew who had been illegals or related to illegals. Guys like Montoya and Santiago. She was still going. “The negatives are related to the process you are in, how the Review Board is structured, their history of throwing officers under the bus, the likelihood of local politicians to do the same.”

“How am I going to do all that?”

Marcy smiled. “You’re not. That’s my job.” She turned to John Stillwell. “The Citizen’s Oversight and Review Board ... they’re really that biased? Are there records we can access?”

“They’re really that biased, but it’s more than that. They are primarily Democrats in a mostly Republican county, and this is going to become a real political football. I have absolutely no doubt they will recommend that Grim be fired and prosecuted for violating the civil rights of the Salvadorans, probably for racial profiling or something similar. As for the records, those are all public documents. They’re probably on file down at the county courthouse, or maybe with the DOJ.”

“Profiling!” I protested. “They were speeding in a school zone!”

“Forget it, Grim. It’s not important. Let it slide,” he replied.

“Christ!” I muttered.

Marcy took over the conversation at that point, quizzing me on my personal history, my life in Matucket both before and after my time in the Army, and on my Army service. When Kelly mentioned I had been on the 2002 Georgia State Championship football team, she began taking notes and asking for names of other players and other people who might know me. She also had me sign waivers for all sorts of things, so that people could investigate my history. We needed to ‘build a story’ she kept repeating.

One of the things that I was told was that I needed to keep my mouth shut about the new law firm and publicity agency. John Stillwell was to be my public face at all times. If anybody caught wind that I had hired a high-end Atlanta law firm and a publicity agent, I would look like mud. Stillwell was on board with all this, which surprised me. I would have thought he would be pitching a fit about being pushed aside, but then it came out that he was double-dipping on this. In addition to whatever he was getting from my union, he was also collecting from King&Spalding as a ‘consultant.’

Eventually Kelly and I escaped and were escorted out of the offices, which were still surprisingly busy despite the late hour. Kelly simply commented, “For what these types of law firms charge, they’d better be open late.”

“Oh?”

“I was talking to my father the other day. He told me that King&Spalding is one of the top law firms in the nation, and that they won’t even talk to somebody unless the bill has six digits involved. He told me that he’s been involved with them since back when we were kids, and he was in charge of the Matucket National Bank. That guy, Anderson Brockport, is one of their senior partners.”

I was thinking about what she meant by six digits and then it hit me. They expected this to cost at least $100,000. “Holy Christ! A hundred grand?”

“Probably more.”

I glanced at her mid-section. “Did he also say when we have to start providing naming rights on the new stadium?”

“GRIM!” she squawked, punching me in the arm.

“I mean, I’m in favor of new stadiums as much as the next sports fan, but I wasn’t planning on starting construction this summer, you know.”

Kelly continued squawking and protesting. “No, we are not starting construction anytime soon! I swear, I am going to kill my father! I have never been so embarrassed in my life!”

“You sure about that? I remember one time where we were upstairs in your bedroom, and he came home early...”

“GRIM!” Then she started giggling. “Naming rights? Good Lord!”

“It’s a good thing that my family has a tradition of reusing family names with the boys. A lot of us have names of fathers and grandfathers and uncles. Take me. I was named with the middle names of both my grandfathers. We can name the first stadium the John Seamus Stadium.”

“Make it the John Seamus Memorial Stadium, because if I don’t kill him, Mom will!”

“Just wait until this is all over. You kill him now, who’s going to pay the lawyers?”

Since we were already in Atlanta, we went to a restaurant, a Thai place in Midtown that Kelly had heard of. We discussed what was happening; it all seemed to me like I had stepped into The Twilight Zone. Kelly also teased me about what would happen if our first stadium was a girl stadium, and I reiterated the universally held belief in my family that female chromosomes were explicitly banned. The odds of a daughter ranked right up there with my being named Pope. After that we drove home and practiced stadium construction for a bit.

I stayed at home the next day and Kelly went back to UGA. She only had a few more days before graduation, which was that Saturday, May 10. She was now in the process of packing up her things from the apartment and slowly moving them back home. Some would go to her parents’ house in East Matucket, but some were coming back to the apartment. I offered my assistance and she drafted me for a couple of days during the week.

Meanwhile, unseen by me, but reported to me by John Stillwell and Anderson Brockport, a veritable army of legal associates descended on Matucket surreptitiously. Like honeybees out searching for juicy and delicious pollen, they headed to the county courthouse, the county clerk’s office, Matucket High, and anywhere else they could think of to find things to help me and hurt the people who wanted me dead and buried. Stillwell told me it was quite fascinating, in a legal sense; me, I wasn’t so thrilled. It felt like my life was swirling around the toilet bowl.