The Jackpot Read online

  Relax, she told herself. It's just been a few seconds. He's just zoned out.

  "Hi," he said again.

  "Hello," Samantha thought, wondering if she could get to the pepper spray in her purse in time, if she even had the strength to do so.

  "Can you help me?" asked Julius.

  Samantha cocked her head.

  "Sure," she said, her mind barely registering the question. "I'm sorry?" she said, once she had her bearings. "Help you? Help you with what?"

  Julius leaned back, looked up and down the hallway, stepped inside the office. This made Sam's heart race a bit, and her eyes flitted to her phone. She relaxed when he made his way to the empty seat across from her and crumpled into the chair.

  "I'm Julius."

  "Sam."

  "Nice to meet you, ma'am."

  He leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. Clearly, something was eating away at him. Now Sam really hated herself for thinking that Julius had borne her some ill will or malice. She realized he wasn't much older than she was, but the years had been far less kind to the man who emptied the trashcan than to the woman whose trashcan was emptied.

  "I need a lawyer," Julius said. "I think."

  Sam was careful not to advise Julius that she was not a criminal defense lawyer, because, well, that would have seemed a bit presumptuous. Racist, too, and she already felt enough like a Klan member.

  If she was being honest with herself, and well, it was a pretty good day for honesty, the truth was that she really didn't want to be having this discussion with Julius, regardless of his legal needs. Granted, he didn't know her life was in the toilet, but that didn't mean it wasn't in the toilet. She looked across her desk toward the tired-looking man looking at her hopefully.

  Christ, she thought, sighing softly. Isn't that what she liked about being a lawyer in the first place? Helping a guy like Julius?

  "Well, OK," Sam said. "What kind of lawyer are you looking for?"

  "That's the thing," Julius said. "I don't even know."

  "Maybe if you tell me your problem, I can help you figure it out."

  He nodded and settled back in his chair. Meanwhile, Sam was at it again, cycling through the names of criminal defense lawyers that she knew. Good heavens, she needed a racial sensitivity class.

  "You hear about that lottery last night?" Julius asked after a moment.

  "Yeah," Sam said, flipping through her Rolodex. At first, she thought he was simply making conversation. It had been the talk of the firm all week. The secretaries on Sam's floor had pooled their money and purchased a hundred tickets. The only thing they had won was four free tickets for next week's drawing. Samantha herself had bought ten dollars' worth. What a waste.

  "That is one lucky duck," she said. "I didn't catch a single number."

  "Yup."

  A few seconds of silence followed before Sam realized what Julius was telling her, before she realized that he wasn't just making small talk. She looked at him again and saw a man whose wildest dream had split like a mitotic cell into one part joy and one part terror. Julius extracted the plastic baggie from his shoe and set the ticket on her desk, on top of a roll of construction drawings that she had been trying to decipher earlier in the week. They suddenly seemed extremely silly.

  "Hang on one second," she said.

  Sam pulled up the SuperLotto web page on her computer. The numbers were still posted on the site's main page, gaudy and huge.

  5, 9, 16, 17, 43. SuperBall: 24.

  The numbers stamped on Julius' ticket screamed at her.

  "Oh, my God."

  "So you think I need a lawyer?" Julius asked.

  She looked across her desk at the tired janitor, make that ex-janitor, deciding that the man had probably emptied his last trash can. Julius was sitting quietly, chewing a piece of dead skin from his thumb.

  "Yes, Julius, you need a lawyer," Samantha said. "You need ten lawyers."

  "So what do we do now?"

  She wanted to tell him that he'd live happily ever after, while she'd be polishing up her resume, but she resisted the urge. Barely.

  * * *

  When Samantha called, Carter was whiling the evening away on the Internet, alt-tabbing between a pornographic website dedicated to clown sex and a gambling site that had not yet been shut down by the government. It was nearly seven o'clock, and he hadn't heard from Dawn the paralegal. He decided that if she stood him up tonight, he would fire her. Legal fallout be damned!

  "What?" he asked, as if she had interrupted him while presenting oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court.

  "Do you have a second, Carter?" she said.

  He exhaled. He hoped she didn't want to talk about the partnership. God, this was so awkward. He'd been surprised by the decision, but hey, that was above his pay grade. He'd always liked Samantha, thought she was hard-working, but they didn't give partnerships to everyone. Besides, there wasn't anything he could do to help her anyway.

  "Uh, yeah," he said. "Sure."

  "You know Julius?" Sam asked.

  "Who?"

  "The man who cleans your office every night?"

  "What about him?"

  Samantha started talking, but Carter drifted off like a three-year-old drawn to something really shiny. He had discovered online gambling about three years earlier, and despite showing virtually no aptitude for it, he was quite the eager participant. The Redskins were eight-point underdogs against the Giants, whose starting tailback was expected to miss the game after getting arrested that morning for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer. That had to be a lock, right? A ten-thousand gold-star lock! He charged a thousand dollars to his online account and took the points. This was his weekend to make up some losses. Some easy games. And he needed to make up for a recent losing streak. A losing streak that had put him $140,000 in the hole.

  It occurred to him that Sam was still on the other line.

  "I'm sorry. Were you waiting for me to say something?" he asked.

  "Yes, Carter," she said, "I was telling you about your new client, Julius. He's sitting here with me now."

  "Who the hell is Julius?"

  "The guy who cleans this floor."

  "Samantha, what are you talking about?" Carter asked, moving onto the line for the Colts-Chiefs game. "Who's the client?"

  "Julius. He's your new client," she said. "Look, forget it. I'll be right down."

  She hung up.

  Crap.

  Well, at least she didn't want to talk about the partnership. He'd listen to anything she had to say, as long as she didn't ask him to try to convince the Executive Committee to change its mind. He thought that would be like trying to convince a cruise missile to change its mind about its target.

  When he heard the whispers of conversation outside his doorway, he minimized the PartyClowns.com website and pretended to read some discovery in the Kornheiser medical malpractice case. Samantha entered first, with Julius trailing behind her. She waved him toward one of the guest chairs and closed the door behind him. Carter tried to guess what he'd been charged with. Murder? Shit, that would be kind of exciting, notwithstanding the fact that Carter had not practiced criminal law a day in his life. He hadn't been in court in years!

  "This is Julius Wheeler," Sam said. "Julius, this is Carter Pierce. He's a partner with the firm, and he's my boss. He's a fantastic lawyer."

  "Pleased to meet you," Julius said, nodding at Carter.

  "So you're in some trouble, huh?" Carter asked. "Happens to the best of us."

  The three of them sat silently for a few moments, as Carter wondered how the hell Julius was going to pay his legal fees. He carefully eyed Julius, who was checking out the trappings of his office. He loved it when people looked impressed by the office.

  "Here's the thing," Samantha said. "Julius won the lottery last night. The big one."

  Carter's thick eyebrows rocked upward, like two caterpillars jumping.

  "How much?"

  "You don't k
now?" she asked.

  "I don't really follow it."

  Samantha coughed lightly into her hand and glanced over at Julius, and Carter knew that she was about to blow his mind with her answer.

  "Four hundred and fifteen million."

  "Four hundred million."

  "Four hundred and fifteen million," Samantha corrected him.

  "How many people splitting the jackpot?"

  Samantha nodded her head.

  "He won the whole thing? The whole fucking thing?"

  "Yes."

  He turned to Julius. "And you came to us."

  "I don't know too many lawyers," Julius said.

  "I find that hard to believe," Carter said, laughing.

  No one else laughed, so Carter decided to keep the conversation moving.

  "So where is it?" asked Carter.

  "Where's what?" replied Julius.

  "The Holy Grail. The hell do you think I'm talking about?"

  "Oh. Sorry."

  Julius, apparently nonplussed by the outburst, handed the ticket to Carter, who studied it as if it were one of the Dead Sea scrolls.

  "Julius, can you give us a moment?" Carter asked.

  Julius glanced over at Samantha, who smiled and nodded at him.

  "Sure," said Julius. He got up and stepped out into the corridor.

  "You've confirmed these are the winning numbers?" Carter asked Samantha when they were alone.

  "You really think I didn't check them first?" Samantha snapped.

  Carter let her snide comment go. Given the events of the day, he figured she had earned the right toss around a little sass.

  "OK, so you've checked," he said. "Do you want a raise?"

  "That is hilarious, Carter."

  "Oh," he said, feeling a stripe of embarrassment. "Sorry about that. Anyway, he's going to be our client," Carter said, his eyes wide with manic excitement. "I'll call Smyth tonight. Hell, maybe they'll change their minds about you!"

  He immediately regretted the comment. Carter would have bet his life on the fact that they would never make Samantha partner now that they'd voted on it. That would be akin to admitting they were wrong, and the Executive Committee of Willett & Hall was never wrong about anything.

  "You think they might change their minds?" Sam asked hopefully.

  "Sure, absolutely!"

  That was a good answer, because he was absolutely sure that he thought that they might change their minds.

  "So what do we do for this guy?" asked Carter, changing the subject as quickly as he could.

  "What do you mean?" Sam asked.

  "I thought you'd already checked on all this," Carter said. "What does he want to do with the money?"

  "He just came to me a half-hour ago," she said. "And I have some other things on my mind."

  "Jesus Christ," he said. "You still work here, don't you?"

  "For now."

  "Look, this isn't hard. Just go talk to him, tell him he needs to figure out what to do with the money. Big picture stuff. First, family. Then retirement, charity, that kind of thing. Then his wish list. Thug like that probably has a list a mile long, been dreaming about this his whole pathetic life. Probably wants to start a record label. Once he figures that out, I can start talking about how to help him."

  "Fine," she said. "I'll take care of him for now."

  Samantha got up and left the room.

  * * *

  Four hundred and fifteen million dollars.

  Four hundred and fifteen million dollars.

  Four hundred and fifteen million dollars.

  The number flashed in Carter's head like a giant electronic sign on the Vegas strip. Julius Wheeler would never know this, but Carter Pierce was as flabbergasted by the figure as Julius was, and Carter was in the top one-tenth of one percent of American wage earners. It had been a punch in the stomach, and it had taken all of his considerable skills as a stone-faced litigator to hide his mind-blowing shock. Carter would have been less surprised had Julius announced that he was his illegitimate son.

  Four hundred and fifteen million dollars, and he had held it in his hands.

  He poured a tumbler of scotch and took a long drink, hoping it would calm his jangled nerves. It didn't. In between pulls, the heavy glass simply trembled in his hand. He actually felt a little bit sick to his stomach. Here he was, one of the most successful attorneys in America, and he was falling behind on his bills like some unemployed factory worker.

  To make it worse, he was going to have to work for this loser, this junkie who'd beaten the longest of odds, this pathetic nigger – there, he thought, that's what Julius was – who was never going to have to worry about money again and would live a lifestyle that even Carter Livingston Pierce could only dream about. And Carter had no doubt that Julius would never worry about money again. Clearly, he had shown plenty of foresight in seeking counsel rather than cashing in and dumping a hundred million bucks into an interest-free checking account.

  A knock at the door startled him, breaking him from the hate-spawned trance that Julius' good fortune had dropped on him like a heavy curtain. He looked up and saw Dawn Robertson standing in the doorway. He chuckled to himself. In the hubbub surrounding the ticket, he'd forgotten all about his planned rendezvous with the saucy young paralegal.

  Dawn was twenty-three years old and had been working for Carter for eighteen months. She was tan and brunette and ran marathons and wanted to become an uber-lawyer. As it turned out, he decided Dawn wasn't really that good a paralegal, and he didn't think she showed much potential as an attorney. He didn't really have anyone to blame but himself. He had hired her over a dozen other far more qualified candidates, but she had looked so good in her interview suit, he couldn't remember much about the other candidates. On the plus side, she was extremely adventurous sexually, and that alone warranted her continued employment long after he stopped depending on her work as a paralegal.

  Their affair had started one night about six months earlier, while they were preparing the final draft of a brief in support of a motion for summary judgment in a breach of contract lawsuit. The pair had broken for dinner at a sushi bar near the office. He had suggested a little sake with the salmon rolls, just to take the edge off a long day. It was after hours. The rules could be loosened a bit. He remembered her showing some reluctance when the first drinks were poured, but he thought now that had just been part of the act. She had been pursuing him all along.

  The first drink had been followed by another, and then another, and then still another. By eight o'clock, they were feeding each other. By nine, they were in a room at the Jefferson Hotel, naked and entwined in a rather complex sexual position that Carter had never even heard of, let alone attempted. She left at eleven, promising him that he had no idea what he was in for. Half of him was terrified of her; the other half told the first half to shut the hell up as this was what he'd had dreamed of since his first hard-on three decades earlier.

  And so it had gone on from there. At the office, he was incredibly discreet in his dealings with her. Whenever she was in his office, the door stayed open. They never left the office together. But when they rendezvoused at her apartment two nights a week (never the same two nights, lest someone detect a pattern), all discretion was set aside. He had heard of women with insatiable sexual appetites, but had never actually encountered one. He sure as hell had not married one.

  Nothing was off-limits. Porn, toys, food, drugs – they all played significant roles in their sex life. A week ago, he had engaged in his first threesome, when Stacy, Dawn's college roommate, happened to be in town for a conference. That had not been as much fun in reality as it seemed in theory. Two nights ago, she had mentioned something about an orgy with a few friends she met online. Did she expect him to have sex with some dude? He was having nightmares about it. He had to bring her under control.

  "You're late," he said, tapping the face of his watch.

  She laughed out loud, which sent a spike of heat up Carter's back. He
didn't like it when people laughed at something he said if he didn't understand why they were laughing.

  "I'm late alright," she said. "I am definitely late."

  What the hell was she babbling about? Carter wondered.

  "What the hell are you babbling about?" he asked.

  "I am late, Carter," Dawn said, her voice turning icy. "I'm late, and I feel nauseous a lot, especially in the morning. Ginger ale? Saltines? Are you getting me?"

  He looked at her blankly, and then suddenly, Carter was getting Dawn, he was really getting her, and his insides felt gooey. A Washington & Lee University paperweight on the corner of his desk caught his eye, and he reached out for it while Dawn continued talking. He really couldn't make out much of what she was saying, as if she had instantly transformed into one of the adults from the Peanuts cartoons.

  The paperweight felt good and solid in his hand. It was one of those things you could count on in life. It always did what it was supposed to do. Right now, he wished someone would bash him unconscious with it.

  "Carter!"

  He snapped back to the present.

  "What?"

  "I need to know what you think about all this."

  "Wait a minute," he said. "You sure I'm the one you should be discussing this with?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "I don't see you every night," he said. "We use condoms. I don't know who else you've been with."

  "You asshole."

  "Hey!" he barked. "I am still your supervisor."

  Immediately, he regretted saying it. He pictured himself sitting in her lawyer's office a year from now, giving a deposition in her sexual harassment lawsuit against him and being asked if he had uttered that very line. That short sentence might end up costing him six figures.