Ariel's Island

  Ariel’s Island

  Pat McKee

  Contents

  Our Southern Fried Guarantee

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Share Your Thoughts

  Our Southern Fried Guarantee

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  Ariel’s Island

  Copyright © 2020 by Pat McKee

  Published by Southern Fried Karma, LLC Atlanta, GA www.sfkpress.com

  www.hearthstonepress.com

  Books are available in quantity for promotional or premium use. For information, email pr@sfkmultimedia.com.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval or storage system, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-970137-77-4 eISBN: 978-1-970137-76-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020900109

  Cover design by Olivia M. Croom. Cover art: sea and swimmer © Dudarev Mikhail, eyes courtesy of Pixabay.com. Interior by Jenny Kimura.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  To Donna,

  who makes everything worthwhile.

  “You taught me language, and my profit on’t

  Is I know how to curse.”

  —Caliban. (Shakespeare, William. The Tempest.1.2.437–438).

  One

  There was a body, dressed in a suit and tie, impaled on the fountain in front of the law firm of Strange & Fowler. Pumps recycling water from the basin below were spraying geysers through the corpse twenty feet into the air, the water now red from the blood of the unfortunate and illuminated at the precise point of their apogee by perfectly timed spotlights. The sun was not yet high enough to glint off the upper stories of the building.

  I was an associate at the firm, just trying to get a jump on the eighteen-hour Friday that lay ahead of me when chaos intervened in my otherwise orderly life. A riot of blue lights had hit me in the face as I turned the corner from my condo onto Peachtree Street. Dozens of pinging strobes and a mob of cops, EMT’s, TV cameras, press, and on-lookers prevented me from seeing anything more until I got to the doors of the glass-and-steel tower that housed the firm. After a glance, I ducked inside, not succumbing to the curiosity of the crowd craning to see more. After all, dead bodies in Midtown Atlanta aren’t that rare.

  It didn’t strike me until I walked into the building that he might be one of our own, when I heard indistinct whispers of a familiar name. My eyes darted from one end of the slammed lobby to the other, trying to find someone who might know, and I saw one of the partners; the blood seemed drained from his face as severely as from the corpse in the fountain.

  “Who?”

  “I’m sorry, Paul, it’s Billingsley.”

  “Good God. What—?”

  “Suicide.”

  “No, it can’t . . . he was just . . .”

  “Must have jumped from the observation deck.”

  I turned to grab a passing security guard. I flashed my ID.

  “Yes, Mr. McDaniel.”

  “Can’t you turn off—”

  “We’re trying. Everything’s run by computers. No one can figure out how to turn off the fountain, and the coroner can’t get the body out until we do—afraid he might get electrocuted if anything is shorted out. The body’s been there over an hour.”

  “You can’t let his wife see . . .”

  “Too late. Cop saw his wallet in the water, fished it out, and called her. Poor lady lost it. EMT’s had to sedate her. They just took her away in an ambulance.”

  “Can’t we at least keep his kids from—”

  He shook his head.

  “Every TV camera in the city is out there. His kids are likely watching it broadcast live on the hall monitors at school.”

  “Damn. Damn!”

  Billingsley.

  I had worked with Frank Billingsley for the entire six years I had been at the firm, most of that time on just one case, SyCorAx, Ltd., v. Milano Corporation. SyCorAx came out of nowhere, claimed three key Milano patents, and hired Hector Cabrini—having recently won the largest judgment in state history against an airplane manufacturer—to recover lost profits in the millions and secure intellectual property worth billions. Milano tapped Strange & Fowler, Atlanta’s most prestigious law firm, for its defense. I had started there as an associate, right out of Emory Law, just two weeks before the case was filed.

  Suicide never makes sense to me, but this one made even less sense than others. Just this week Billingsley had given me first-chair responsibility for arguing a discovery motion filed by Cabrini, telling me he planned to leave the office early that day to watch his youngest son pitch his first high-school game. For the entire week before the game, Billingsley was pushing back appointments and client expectations to take the afternoon off—and was beaming the next morning with a count-by-count call of his boy’s innings on his way to a win. This man was in full-throated enjoyment of his life, one of the last people I would expect to take his own.

  The motion he gave me to argue was a low-risk skirmish. Not much more than a training exercise. Not evidence that he was clearing his calendar in anticipation of checking out on us. Billingsley expected we would have to turn over some of the contested business records that SyCorAx demanded, but the documents provided little additional information, so he was initially inclined to concede the motion. Rather than concede, I urged we should deliver the message to SyCorAx and its lawyers that they would get nothing more without a fight. To Billingsley’s wary amusement, I jumped on the opportunity to argue the motion as if it had been one being argued in front of the Supreme Court.

  In my overly zealous preparation, I found the thing that so many litigators dream of uncovering: a previous statement in one of the hundreds of discovery letters from SyCorAx’s lawyers that acknowledged the relative uselessness of the contested documents and conceded their
retention in exchange for an extension of time to object to one of our requests. It was a gem buried under hundreds of thousands of pages of discovery—forgotten by both them and us as we moved on to other battles—until it popped up on my computer screen. When I told him, Billingsley was delighted, but he had an entirely different approach to how we should use it.

  “All you need to do is call opposing counsel and tell them about this, I’m sure they’ll withdraw the motion.”

  “I’m not so sure. Telling them about this letter will only give SyCorAx’s lawyers an opportunity to prepare for it.”

  “So, your plan is to sandbag opposing counsel?”

  “Sandbag! Hell, it’s their letter. This motion is so frivolous I could make a good case for sanctions against them. Besides, I think it’s more like an ambush. I want to discredit them in front of the judge, make them think twice before filing any more discovery motions—we’ve got to punch back at these guys.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?”

  “Let them make their motion. Let them go on with the judge about how important these documents are to their case. I’m sure when they see me sent to argue instead of you they’ll smell blood and lay it on for the judge. Once they’ve gotten as far out on the limb as they can get, I’ll project their letter on the courtroom monitor with their concession highlighted. Judge Richards will slap them down hard.”

  “Risky. The judge could rule before you have a chance to respond. Judge Richards is notorious for that, particularly in discovery disputes. He hates them.”

  “But then, what have we lost? And we have a good chance to get some momentum moving into trial.”

  For a litigator, Billingsley was unusually risk averse. By the time I had any input in the Milano case, Billingsley had defaulted to a conservative litigation posture of damage control, all but conceding defeat while trying to minimize the monetary loss. It was a strategy that was anathema to the gunslinger courtroom style I had developed in the bit parts I had been given to perform so far, a style grown from a life lived with nothing to lose but everything to gain. As foreign as my approach was to Billingsley, he let me handle the hearing as I had planned.

  My gambit worked so well that the judge not only denied SyCorAx’s motion but excoriated its lawyers for bringing it. Message delivered. Momentum gained.

  That was Wednesday. Thursday morning, after Billingsley finished telling me about his son’s pitching debut, I gave him the results of the hearing. He was surprised but elated, so elated that he called Placido Milano to give him the good news. Placido had been the director of research and development at Milano Corporation and our prime contact with the company through years of litigation. We were fast heading to trial, and Placido needed to hear something positive. At $800 an hour and a thousand-lawyer law firm, he had a right to expect results.

  Brothers Placido and Anthony Milano, who had inherited a controlling interest in the multi-billion-dollar conglomerate from their father, were absorbed in the business of the Milano Corporation, not in defending lawsuits. The Milano’s work schedules and the time difference between Atlanta and the company’s headquarters in Milan made it difficult for anyone in the firm to talk with them, much less meet. Placido and Anthony existed for me as disembodied voices on conference calls at strange hours, and even that was unusual. Both Billingsley and I were surprised when Placido answered the call.

  “Fantastico! Splendido! Paul, I’m delighted your tactic worked. Frank, it’s a great general who knows when to let his lieutenant lead the charge. I am hopeful this portends well for the trial.”

  That was yesterday, when it seemed Billingsley’s life was everything anyone could want. This morning, he was suspended, transfixed, on a grand piece of artwork designed to project the prestige and power of Strange & Fowler. It was too much to comprehend.

  I went to my office shaken and disoriented. The first thing that popped up in my inbox was an email from William Fowler, senior partner of the firm, requesting that I meet with him early Saturday morning. I suspected it was for him to introduce the new partner he had chosen to lead the Milano case. Billingsley’s body hadn’t even been removed before he was being replaced. But Fowler’s reputation was all business; I was surprised he was waiting till Saturday.

  At eight the next morning I was knocking on the door to Fowler’s office. He invited me in. No one else was there.

  Fowler’s office was more a shrine than a workplace, the walls covered in plaques, recognitions, framed front-page newspaper articles, his desk and credenza strewn with mementos of past victories and recent honors. Fowler looked every bit the UVA linebacker he had been decades ago. He wore his full head of white hair longer than one would have expected, and at 72 his jackets fit more tightly than before, but he was still an imposing man. He remained seated when I walked in.

  “Paul, you’ve done a fine job in the Milano case. I was particularly impressed with your aggressive strategy in the hearing this week. Frank told me about it before . . . well, before he passed. I’ve spoken with Placido and Anthony. We want you to take over the case as lead attorney.”

  Our eyes remained locked for a couple of seconds in silence—I was waiting for Fowler to say something else, like . . . “and Rem Smythe from corporate will be the partner in charge.” Fowler was no doubt waiting for me to acknowledge his announcement. When it struck me that there wasn’t going to be anything else, I could do little more than stammer.

  “Sir, yes, Sir . . . of course . . . Mr. Fowler, thank you for the opportunity.” Even though I had worked for years alongside him, I couldn’t yet bring myself to address him by anything but “Sir” and refer to him in any way other than “Mr. Fowler.”

  There was more silence. I was thinking there had to be something else, but Fowler was ready to move on.

  “Well, Paul, I think you have a lot to do. I don’t want to take any more of your time.”

  That was it. In the next weeks I took the case in the opposite direction from where Billingsley was heading, convincing Placido and Anthony we could win the trial outright. By then many of my colleagues—and more than a few of the wags who wrote for the Fulton County Legal Register, the daily gossip sheet that masqueraded as the official organ of the Atlanta legal community—had pegged my chances of winning the case at almost nil. “Paul McDaniel: Strange & Fowler’s New Golden Boy, or Firm Fall Guy?” read Monday’s headline after my promotion to lead counsel. The ensuing article opined that my lofty position with an elite law firm at the tender age of thirty had more to do with the firm’s desire to have someone expendable to blame for what looked to be an unavoidable debacle rather than it had to do with any expression of confidence in my legal ability.

  Some even suggested Billingsley’s suicide was his final effort to avoid being tagged with a disastrous loss. “Billingsley knew the Milano case was such a dog,” the gossip allowed, “that he killed himself before he lost the trial, rather than face Fowler after the verdict came in.”

  Worse, the stock market agreed. Shares of Milano Corporation that had traded at over one-hundred dollars prior to the litigation had plummeted by twenty-five percent after the suit had been filed. Now, with the trial looming and Billingsley dead, shares were selling for the equivalent of a sub-sandwich combo meal, and I was looking more and more like the story’s fall guy. But by this point I was committed. Either the Milano case was going to be my career-making victory, or I was going down in defeat, having thrown every part of myself into the effort.

  Maybe that was what Billingsley was thinking. Maybe that was how Billingsley felt in those last seconds, those seconds before he jumped: that he had given all he had to give.

  Two

  “Mr. McDaniel, the Supreme Court just gutted your defense. The decision in Halo Electronics came out this morning. Looks to me like there’s nothing left of your case other than deciding how much money your client owes SyCorAx.” The Honorable Judge Thomas Rich
ards of the Northern District of Georgia glared over the rims of his glasses at me, only glancing at my opposing counsel. Moments before, Cabrini had entered the chambers glad-handing puzzled clerks and interns and hailing bemused assistants, already taking a victory lap while I sat grim, awaiting the judge. I had been lead defense counsel for Milano for less than a month, and it now looked as though the case was over before I had had a chance to file my first brief. What little momentum I had gained from the discovery skirmish had vanished.

  Judge Richards had summoned us on two hours’ notice to his magisterial chambers atop the Atlanta federal courthouse for an unusual Friday-afternoon meeting. Seldom did he allow business to interfere with his weekly outing to the Wolf Creek Trap and Skeet Club. But this afternoon he was seated at his desk. The desk looked like it had once belonged to a Renaissance Florentine Prince, and the regal impression Judge Richards cultivated was reinforced by the city skyline displayed behind him—the gold dome of the Georgia capitol, the glass and steel towers of Midtown, the glitz of Buckhead in the distance. Judge Richards’ glare intensified, his scowl deepened, his displeasure at the disruption to the order and pace of his calendar evident. He was only getting started on me.

  “My usual practice would be to invite a Motion for Summary Judgment from the Plaintiff, but since trial is scheduled for two weeks from Monday, we don’t have time for that. I believe it is best for all parties involved to allow you and Mr. Cabrini an opportunity to discuss settlement.” Judge Richards motioned to his courtroom deputy who, like a half-dozen other minions, fluttered about the room awaiting the slightest opportunity to be of assistance to His Honor.

  “Mrs. Ortiz, when is the next available trial date if we have to go forward with this case?” She displayed a hard copy calendar in front of the judge, pointing, commenting in tones meant only for him.