“Need-to-know basis, babe.” I continued, “And you don’t need to know the specifics of their relationship. We’re lucky we can even tell you who the clients are.”
“Fine. But sometimes this attorney-client privilege stuff goes too far.” She air-parenthesied the words in protest. “Besides, I’m practically family.”
“Don’t let Niles catch you saying that.”
“That I’m family?” She looked hurt.
“That we ought to share privileged information with family,” I corrected. “Because believe me, Sheila never hears word one.”
“Sheila’s only your cousin, Monica. I’m the one who knows all your dirty little secrets,” she teased on her way out the door, oblivious to Jonathan’s eyes sparkling. “And that makes me closer than family.”
Once she was gone, Jonathan swiped my marked-up copy of the Camydia division-of-assets proposal off of my desk. He made himself comfortable on my couch, propped his feet up on the coffee table and started scanning through the notes I had made in the margins.
I seized on the chance to check my e-mail once again. Still no messages from Raj.
“Don’t worry so much, Monica.” Jonathan peered over his memo. “Whatever these dirty little secrets are, I’m sure we can have them taken care of. I know a guy.”
“I don’t have dirty little secrets, Jonathan,” I said, scowling. “I have a…problem. And I don’t think it’s anything Bruno can help me out with.”
Bruno was one of those wannabe Hugh Hefners littered across the California basin who made local news for depressing real estate prices, erecting neon signs and waving freedom of expression banners everywhere he went. His was the first case Jonathan and I worked on together, and when he came to us he was convinced that his eighteen-year-old stripper wife, Claudia’s refusal to keep dancing at his club meant that she was cheating on him. Yes, the strip-club owner was worried that the stripper was cheating on him. In much the same way as a dog owner worries that his dog might be licking itself while he’s away. I, for one, was shocked.
Before breaking the news of the impending divorce to his wife, Bruno came to us to find out how much it would cost him. Although he could have gotten the same advice for a cheaper price from any of our lesser-profiled competitors who catered to the rich, if not-so-famous, Bruno, like so many others who worshipped at the altar of celebrity, needed desperately to believe that his life mattered to the general public, and was therefore worthy of Steel-strength confidentiality.
At one point, after yet another grueling day of poring over his convoluted tax returns, Bruno invited us over to the club for some drinks. Rather than offending the client, I went along to The Cinnamon Lizard for just one drink, and then made my escape on the premise of an early appointment with my personal trainer. Honestly, I hadn’t seen that much purple neon lighting since the weekend I spent in Atlantic City. The next morning Jonathan informed me that our client’s real name was in fact Eugene Bronstein. A good Jewish kid from the tree-lined suburbs of Massachusetts, Eugene had moved to Los Angeles to reinvent himself after the collapse of his career as a stockbroker and the failure of his first marriage to his high-school sweetheart.
Emboldened by all those shots of Jim Beam, Bruno had decided to brag to Jonathan about the sophistication of his entrepreneurial operation. He gave him a personal tour of the two-story building that housed the most popular of his three strip clubs, located just off Sunset Boulevard. Below street level there were two additional floors, containing an X-rated bookstore, private lap-dance suites, bachelor party rooms, six-person showers surrounded by one-way mirrors, peep shows and even a carpentry shop where Bruno’s artisans built and repaired the peep show booths on site. None of these ancillary sources of income, it turns out, had been mentioned anywhere on Bruno’s tax returns.
According to Jonathan, their conversation had turned (as I’m sure that it so often does amidst flying G-strings, plentiful rhinestones and women whose breasts refused to shake when they did) toward religion. Being Jewish himself, and a devout temple-goer, Jonathan knew what he had to do. Somehow, before he arrived at work wearing the same suit and reeking of smoke and other people’s misery the next morning, Jonathan had managed to help a drunken and reluctant Eugene Bronstein see the ungodliness of trying to bilk Claudia out of her share of his empire.
Over the next few weeks, we worked out a private settlement that took good care of Claudia while sparing Bruno the ugliness of having to report anything new to the IRS. Yes, we were in the business of secrets, and the final one that I had to keep in the Bronstein case was the one belonging to Jonathan. It was his opinion that his big-man reputation simply couldn’t withstand the hit of his having convinced someone to do the right thing. And in a way I saw his logic. So I had taken the fall for Jonathan’s conscience, claiming to be the one who had forced Bruno to make an equitable arrangement. And I made a lifelong friend in Claudia Bronstein (the proud new owner of their house in Palm Springs, along with the third largest strip club in Hollywood) in the process.
“I still can’t believe that guy calls himself an entrepreneur,” Jonathan mused from the couch a half hour later.
“Meaning?” I looked up from my books on case law.
“Meaning—” he lowered his voice and glanced at the door to make sure that his pesky sense of morality would remain between the two of us “—in my opinion, a real entrepreneur is someone who makes something from nothing. Like my dad, who used all his savings to build an import business from scratch. He’s the perfect blend of an inventor and a salesman. But with Bruno, it doesn’t apply. He didn’t have to invent or sell anything. People are hardwired to want sex with ridiculously beautiful women, and to be fascinated with depravity, especially in this town. How much of an accomplishment is it when all you’re doing is essentially turning the lights on at the crack store to make it a little easier for the junkies, who were already looking to find it? Sure, he diversified into related businesses, but he never had to sell anything to anyone that they didn’t already want and kind of need.”
In order to keep some semblance of idealism alive within herself, a girl in L.A. has to search for signs of integrity in most men with the resolve of a drug-sniffing dog. Jonathan was one of the good ones, I had long since decided. And my resolution made it so much easier both to work with him and to recognize as a fact how influential in the upper echelons of the local legal community I had no doubt he would one day become.
“Okay. But he’s pretty damn proud of himself. As proud as I’m sure wife number three will be…just as soon as she turns eighteen and decides to apply for a job at his club, that is.”
“That guy doesn’t have much to be proud of.” He half laughed, turning his attention back to his work. “Take it from a junkie.”
three
OKAY, SO IT’S NOT A DIRTY LITTLE SECRET IN THE“NO OFFICER,I have no idea how that horse managed to dress itself up in full bondage gear and climb into a vat of Jell-O” sense of the phrase. But still, my obsession for the horoscope section of the otherwise godawful celebrity rag, Pucker, always made me feel a little dirty.
So in the end it turns out that my father was right. Family is the truest testament to the concept of karma, since they always get so much farther under your skin than anybody else without even trying. And that much irritation can only have been built up over multiple lifetimes. Case in point…Even though I hadn’t spoken to her in a week or more, I was thoroughly resenting my mother’s potential satisfaction at the mere thought of my resorting to the horoscopes for advice before I had even checked my weekly copy of Pucker, which Cassie left for me in a very nondescript-looking envelope on her desk every Friday afternoon. She referred to the magazine as my dirty little secret because she knew that despite my vocally vehement protests to the contrary, no one at the firm would ever believe I wasn’t reading it for the celebrity gossip.
But when you live your life surrounded by celebrities, you quickly find that you have about as much interest in their